The Mayan Codex

9

Madame Mastigou sat with her pen poised over a sheet of finely milled Florentine writing paper and waited for the Countess to break her silence.

There was a palpable sense of expectation in the hermetically sealed assembly room. This was the first time in five years that all the Countess’s adopted children had been brought together in one place, and Madame Mastigou could sense the tension behind her employer’s otherwise frozen countenance.

The butler, Milouins, had been delegated for guard duty outside the hidden door in the library, and one of the footmen was acting as outrider in the salon, ensuring that no one could make their way through the household’s cordon sanitaire unannounced. Inside the secret chamber the Countess stood at the head of the table, with her children, in strictly descending order of seniority, taking up the remaining seats to her right and left.

They ranged in age from a mature twenty-seven, in the case of Lamia de Bale, the oldest girl, to around eighteen, In the case of Oni de Bale, the youngest male – a virtual giant, nearly seven feet tall, with the trademark red eyes and unpigmented skin of the true albino.

Abiger and Vaulderie, being the oldest males present, and therefore in legal receipt of the countcy and viscountcy through agnatic primogeniture, had been allocated the two senior seats, despite being two years their sister’s junior. At the very end of the table, a chair had been left empty. In front of it lay a sword, a signet ring, and a velvet brocade sash in memory of their brother, Rocha.

To the clinically detached eye it would soon have become apparent that each of the Countess’s adopted children was graced with some defining mark or characteristic that separated them from the herd.

The oldest girl, Lamia, had a prominent strawberry birthmark that spread across half of her face – seen from one side, she was beautiful, whilst from the other side her beauty was disguised by what, at first glance, appeared to be a piece of blood-soaked surgical gauze. Her younger sister, Athame, was dwarfish in stature, with tiny hands and feet. Berith, the young man sitting below her, had a harelip. Rudra de Bale limped as the result of an untreated club foot, and Aldinach de Bale was a natural hermaphrodite, something which only manifested itself in the marked delicacy of some of his movements – in reality there were times when it suited him to dress as a woman, and other times as a man.

Further down the line came Alastor de Bale, who suffered from cachexia, a wasting disease that made his near neighbour, Asson de Bale, appear even larger than his 22-stone frame would normally warrant. The 21-year-old Dakini de Bale had preternaturally long hair, which framed a face that seemed frozen in a sort of malevolent rictus, and her twenty-year-old sister, Nawal de Bale, suffered from hirsutism, which gave her the visage of an animal.

Each of the thirteen children had been told, since earliest childhood, that they had been marked out in this way by God as a sign of His especial grace. As a result they each bore their affliction not as an affliction, but more as a mark of special selection. The Countess had also explained to them that, thanks to the prevalence of a certain sort of guilty sentimentality in much of the twenty-first century’s increasingly decadent populace, they might even be able to use their afflictions to divert suspicion from themselves – and out towards innocent parties – in the event of a crisis.

Glancing about the room, the Countess could barely disguise her satisfaction. It was at her direct instigation that her husband had resuscitated the almost moribund Corpus Maleficus. The first time he had described the cabal to her – and his family’s inextricable link to its aims over a history spanning nearly eight hundred years – had been just a few days before their marriage. The Count had sounded almost apologetic, as if he had been forced to summon up a hoary old skeleton from the family vaults in order to forestall his future wife learning about it from other, less well-intentioned, sources.

The Countess – the accustomed recipient, since early childhood, of the complete attention of her extended family thanks to her position as sole inheritrix of both her father’s and his distaff relatives’ extensive fortunes – had realized its glorious potential at once. She could feel herself moving, inchmeal, from one non-carnal embrace to another, infinitely more preferable one. Before this moment she had merely sensed, thanks to her father’s subtle hints, that she would be investing in something more than simply a name with her fortune, but she hadn’t realized exactly what she was buying into. Now she knew for certain. ‘You can’t let something like this just die.’

Her elderly fiance had smiled. ‘How can one resuscitate a skeleton? The outer body and epidermis began to expire alongside the final vestiges of the age-old aristocratic order after the disasters of the Great War. The inner body, along with its vital organs, finally perished alongside my manhood, on Monday the third of June 1940, during the German bombardment of Paris. Do you remember Jean Renoir’s film, La Grande Illusion? The characters played by Pierre Fresnay and Erich von Stroheim? The Old Guard aristocrats recognizing each other, and realizing that they had both reached the end of their usefulness? Well Renoir was right. We are tired and irrelevant.’

The Countess had turned on him, revealing for the very first time the inner fire that drove her. ‘Von Stroheim was not an aristocrat, but the son of a Jewish hat-maker. Fresnay’s father was a Huguenot, and therefore a hater of Catholics. And Renoir’s father was a hack painter who depicted his women as if they were made out of marzipan. Who are such people to tell you that your class is doomed?’ She turned on him. ‘I won’t have it. A man doesn’t need a functioning member to be a man. An institution doesn’t need the sanction of the State to give it weight. The flower of France’s chivalric tradition should not need the permission of its inferiors to celebrate its past achievements and prepare its future triumphs.’

The Count had continued smiling. ‘Future triumphs? For reasons that are entirely beyond my control, it seems that I am to be the last in my line. More than a thousand years of history will die with me, my dear. Where are these future triumphs you speak of going to come from?’

And so she had told him – told him of her plans to adopt a new generation of soldiers for the de Bale cause. Told him of the true extent of her fortune, and what they could both achieve with it. And gradually his face had started to light up. His expression to change. ‘You really think this is possible? I am an old man.’

‘But I am not. I shall represent you. Represent our family. Fight for our status as hereditary peers of France.’

‘Why? Why should you do this?’

She had hesitated for some little time, almost as if she had no answer to his question. Then she had turned to him, taken his hand, and placed it above her heart. ‘Because it is my destiny.’

It was only later, and well into their marriage, that the Countess had realized just how elegantly the Count had steered her towards exactly the conclusion he himself had so fervently desired.