Labyrinth

CHAPTER 25

Toulouse

Alice woke with a splitting headache. For a moment, she had no idea where she was. She squinted out of the corner of her eye at the empty bottle standing on the bedside table. Serves you right.

She rolled on to her side and grabbled at her watch.

Ten forty-five.

Alice groaned and fell back on the pillow. Her mouth was as stale as a pub ashtray and her tongue was coated with the sour remains of the whisky.

I need aspirin. Water.

Alice staggered to the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror. She looked as bad as she felt. Her forehead was a mottled kaleidoscope of green, purple and yellow bruises. She had dark rings under her eyes. There was a faint recollection of dreaming of woods, winter branches brittle with frost. The labyrinth reproduced on a piece of yellow material? She couldn’t remember.

Her journey from Foix last night was something of a blur too. She couldn’t even quite remember what had made her head for Toulouse rather than Carcassonne, which would have been the more obvious choice. Alice groaned. Foix, Carcassonne, Toulouse. There was no way she was going anywhere until she felt better. She lay back on her bed and waited for the painkillers to kick in.

Twenty minutes later, she was still delicate but the thudding behind her eyes had diminished to a dull ache. She stood under the steaming shower until the water ran cold. Her thoughts went back to Shelagh and the rest of the team. She wondered what they were all doing right now. Usually, the team went up to the site at eight o’clock and stayed up there till it got dark. They lived and breathed the excavation. She couldn’t imagine how any of them were going to cope without their routine.

Wrapped in the hotel’s tiny, threadbare towel, Alice checked her phone for messages. Still nothing. Last night, she’d felt depressed about it, now she was pissed off. More than once during their ten-year friendship, Shelagh had withdrawn into resentful silences that had lasted weeks. Each time, it had been down to Alice to sort things out and she realized she resented it.

Let her make the running this time.

Alice riffled through her makeup bag until she found an old tube of concealer, rarely used, with which she covered up the worst of the bruising. Then she added eyeliner and a touch of lipstick. She finger dried her hair. Finally, she chose her most comfortable skirt and new blue halter top, packed everything else, then went down to check out before she headed off to explore Toulouse.

She still felt bad, but it was nothing that fresh air and a serious shot of caffeine wouldn’t fix.

Having put her bags in the car, Alice decided she would simply walk and see where she ended up. The air conditioning in her hire car wasn’t great, so her plan was to wait until the temperature dropped before setting off for Carcassonne.

As she passed beneath the dappled shade of the plane trees and looked at the clothes and perfumes displayed in the shop windows, she started to feel more herself. She was embarrassed by the way she’d behaved last night. Totally paranoid, total overreaction. This morning, the idea that someone was after her seemed absurd. Her fingers went to the telephone number in her pocket. You didn’t imagine him though.

Alice pushed the thought away. She was going to be positive, look forward. Make the most of being in Toulouse.

She meandered through the alleys and passages of the old town, letting her feet guide her. The ornate pink stone and brick facades of the buildings were elegant and discreet. The names on the street signs and fountains and monuments proclaimed Toulouse’s long and glorious history. Military leaders, medieval saints, eighteenth-century poets, twentieth-century freedom fighters, the city’s noble past from Roman times to the present.

Alice went into the cathedral of Saint-Etienne, partly to get out of the sun. She enjoyed the tranquility and peace of cathedrals and churches, a legacy of sightseeing with her parents when she was a child, and she spent a pleasant half-hour wandering around, half reading the signs on the walls and looking at the stained glass.

Realizing she was starting to feel hungry, Alice decided to finish with the cloisters, then go and find somewhere to have lunch. She hadn’t taken more than a few steps when she heard a child crying. She turned to look, but there was no one there. Feeling vaguely uneasy, she carried on walking.

The sobbing seemed to be growing louder. Now she could hear someone whispering. A man’s voice, close by, hissing in her ears.

“Heretique, heretique…”

Alice spun round. “Hello? Allo? II y a quelqu’un?”

There was nobody there. Like a malicious whisper, the word repeated itself over and over inside her head. Heretique, heretique.

She clasped her hands over her ears. On the pillars and gray stone walls, faces seemed to be appearing. Tortured mouths, twisted hands reaching out for help, oozing from every hidden corner.

Then Alice caught a glimpse of someone ahead, nearly out of sight. A woman in a long green dress and a red cloak, moving in and out of the shadows. In her hand, she carried a wicker basket. Alice called out to attract her attention just as three men, monks, stepped out from behind the pillar. The woman shouted as they grabbed hold of her. The woman was struggling as the monks started to drag her away.

Alice tried to attract their attention, but no sound came from her mouth. Only the woman herself seemed to hear, for she turned round and looked straight into Alice’s eyes. Now the monks had encircled the woman. They stretched their voluminous arms out wide above her like black wings.

“Leave her alone,” Alice cried, starting to run toward them. But the farther she went, the more distant the figures became, until finally they disappeared altogether. It was as if they had melted into the walls of the cloister itself.

Bewildered, Alice ran her hands over the stone. She turned to the left and right, seeking an explanation, but the space was completely empty. At last, panic took over. She ran toward the exit to the street, expecting to see the black robed men behind her, chasing her, swooping down on her.

Outside, everything was as it had been before.

It’s okay. You’re okay. Breathing heavily, Alice slumped back against the wall. As she got herself under control, she realized the emotion she was feeling was not terror any more, but grief. She had no need of a history book to tell her something terrible had happened in this place. There was an atmosphere of suffering, scars that could not be hidden by concrete or stone. The ghosts told their own story. When she put a hand up to her face, she found she was crying.

As soon as her legs were strong enough to carry her, she headed back toward the center of town. She was determined to put as much space between herself and Saint-Etienne as she could. She couldn’t account for what was happening to her, but she wasn’t going to give in.

Reassured by the normal, everyday life going on all around her, Alice found herself in a small, pedestrian square. In the top right-hand corner there was a brasserie with a cyclamen-pink awning and rows of gleaming silver chairs and round tables laid out on the pavement.

Alice got the only remaining table and ordered straight away, making a concerted effort to relax. She knocked back a couple of glasses of water, then leaned back in her chair and tried to enjoy the touch of the sun on her face. She poured herself a glass of rose, added a few ice cubes, and took a mouthful. It wasn’t like her to be so easily freaked out.

But then you’re not in such great emotional shape.

All year she’d been living fiat out. She’d split up with her long-term boyfriend. The relationship had been dying on its feet for years and it was a relief to be on her own, but it was no less painful for that. Her pride was battered and her heart was bruised. To forget about him, she’d worked too hard and played too hard, anything to not brood about where things had gone wrong. Two weeks in the south of France was supposed to recharge her batteries. Get her back on an even keel.

Alice pulled a face. Some holiday.

The arrival of the waiter put paid to any further self-analysis. The omelet was perfect, yellow and runny on the inside, with generous chunks of mushroom and plenty of parsley. Alice ate with a fierce concentration. Only when she was mopping up the last threads of olive oil with her bread, did she start to turn her mind to how she was going to spend the rest of the afternoon.

By the time the coffee came, Alice knew.

The Bibliotheque de Toulouse was a large, square stone building. Alice flashed her British Library Readers’ Room pass at a bored and inattentive assistant at the desk, which got her in. After getting lost on the stairs a few times, she found herself in the extensive general history section. On either side of the central aisle were long, polished wooden desks with a spine of reading lamps running along the center of the tables. Few of the seats were occupied at this time on a hot, July afternoon.

At the far end, spanning the width of the room, was what Alice was looking for: a row of computer terminals. Alice registered at the reception desk, was given a password and allocated a workstation.

As soon as she was connected, Alice typed the word “labyrinth” in the box on the search engine. The green loading bar at the bottom of the screen filled up quickly. Rather than relying on her own memory, she was confident she’d find a match for her labyrinth somewhere among all the hundreds of sites. It was so obvious she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it earlier.

Straight away, the differences between a traditional labyrinth and her memory of the image carved on the cave wall and ring were obvious. A classical labyrinth was made up of intricately connected concentric circles leading in ever-decreasing circles to the center, whereas she was pretty sure the one in the Pic de Soularac had been a combination of dead ends and straight lines which doubled back on themselves, leading nowhere. It was more like a maze.

The true ancient origins of the labyrinth symbol and mythologies associated with it were complex and difficult to trace. The earliest designs were thought to be more than three thousand years old. Labyrinth symbols had been discovered carved in wood, rock, tile or stone, as well as in woven designs or constructed into the natural environment as turf or garden labyrinths.

The first labyrinths in Europe dated from the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age, from 1200 to 500 B.C., and were discovered around the early trading centers of the Mediterranean. Carvings dated between 900 and 500 B.C. had been found at Val Camonica in northern Italy and Pontevedra in Galicia, and in the top northwestern corner of Spain at Cabo Fisterra Finisterre. Alice looked hard at the illustration. It was more reminiscent of what she’d seen in the cave than anything else so far. She tilted her head to one side. Close, but not a match.

It made sense that the symbol would have traveled from the east with the merchants and traders from Egypt and the outer reaches of the Roman Empire, adapted and changed by its interaction with other cultures. It also made sense that the labyrinth, evidently a pre-Christian symbol, should have been hijacked by the Christian church. Both the Byzantine and the Roman Church were guilty of absorbing much older symbols and myths into their religious orthodoxy.

Several sites were dedicated to the most famous labyrinth of them all: Knossos, on the island of Crete where, according to legend, the mythical Minotaur, half-man, half-bull, had been imprisoned. Alice skipped them, instinct telling her that line of research would take her nowhere. The only point worth noting was that Minoan labyrinthine designs had been excavated at the site of the ancient city of Avaris in Egypt, dating back to 1550 B.C., as well as found in temples at Kom Ombo in Egypt and Seville.

Alice filed the information at the back of her mind.

From the twelfth and thirteenth centuries onward, the labyrinth symbol was appearing regularly in hand-copied medieval manuscripts that circulated around the monasteries and courts of Europe, with scribes embellishing and developing illustrations, creating their own trademark designs.

By the early medieval period, a mathematically perfect eleven-circuit, twelve-wall, four-axis labyrinth had become the most popular form of all. She looked at a reproduction of the carving of a labyrinth on the wall of the thirteenth-century church of St. Pantaleon in Arcera, northern Spain and another, slightly earlier, from the cathedral of Lucca in Tuscany. She clicked on a map showing the occurrence of labyrinths in European churches, chapels and cathedrals.

That’s extraordinary.

Alice could hardly believe her eyes. There were more labyrinths in France than in the whole of Italy, Belgium, Germany, Spain, England and Ireland put together: Amiens, St. Quentin, Arras, St. Omer, Caen and Bayeux in northern France; Poitiers, Orleans, Sens and Auxerre in the center; Toulouse and Mirepoix in the southwest; the list went on and on.

The most famous pavement labyrinth of all was in northern France, set in the center of the nave of the first-and most impressive-of the Gothic medieval cathedrals, Chartres.

Alice smacked her hand on the table, causing several disapproving heads to pop up around her. Of course. How stupid could she be? Chartres was twinned with her hometown of Chichester, on the English south coast. In fact, her first visit abroad had been on a school trip to Chartres when she was eleven. She had vague memories of it raining all the time and standing huddled in a raincoat, cold and damp, beneath imposing stone pillars and vaults. But she had no recollection of the labyrinth.

There was no labyrinth in Chichester Cathedral, but the city was also twinned with Ravenna in Italy. Alice ran her finger across the screen until she’d found what she was looking for. Laid into the marble floor of the church of San Vitale in Ravenna was a labyrinth. According to the caption it was only a quarter of the size of the labyrinth in Chartres and dated to a much earlier period in history, perhaps as far back as the fifth century a.d., but was there all the same.

Alice finished cutting and pasting the text she wanted into a text document and hit Print. Once it was going, she typed “Cathedral Chartres France” into the search box.

Although there had been some sort of structure on the site as far back as the eighth century, she discovered the current cathedral in Chartres dated from the thirteenth century. Ever since then, esoteric beliefs and theories had attached themselves to the building. There were rumors that within its vaulting roof and elaborate stone pillars was concealed a secret of great significance. Despite the strenuous efforts of the Catholic Church, these legends and myths endured.

No one knew on whose orders the labyrinth had been built or for what purpose.

Alice selected the paragraphs she needed, and then exited.

The last page finished printing and the machine fell silent. All around people were beginning to pack up. The sour-faced receptionist caught her eye and tapped her watch.

Alice nodded and gathered her papers, then joined the line at the counter waiting to check out. The queue moved slowly. Shafts of late-afternoon sunlight fell through the high windows in Jacob’s ladders, making the particles of dust dance in the beams.

The woman in front of Alice had an armful of books to check out and seemed to have a query about each one. She let her mind focus on the worry that had been bugging her all afternoon. Was it likely that in all the hundreds of images she’d looked at, in all the hundreds and thousands of words, there hadn’t been a single exact match for the stone labyrinth at the Re de Soularac?

Possible, but not likely.

The man behind her was standing too close, like someone on a tube train trying to read the newspaper over her shoulder. Alice turned and glared at him. He took a step back. His face was vaguely familiar.

“Oui, merci,” she said, as she got to the desk and paid for the printing she’d done. Nearly thirty sheets in all.

As she emerged on to the steps of the library the bells of Saint-Etienne were striking seven. She’d been in there longer than she realized.

Keen to be on her way now, Alice hurried back to where she’d parked the car on the far side of the river. She was so caught up in her thoughts that she didn’t notice the man from the queue following her along the river walkway, keeping a safe distance. And she didn’t notice him take a phone from his pocket and make a call as she pulled out into the slow-moving traffic.