CHAPTER ONE
The Scholar
As unusual days go, Michael Langbein had seen more than his fair share, but this particular Spring day had capped off a full week of unusual days, every one of which would have skipped even Olympic-rank amateur status and moved directly to take spots in the pantheon of indisputable move-over-Michael-Jordan professional unusual days.
On Monday, he had rolled out of bed and made his way to the front stoop to retrieve the morning paper, only to discover that one-quarter of page three had been neatly clipped out. Sneaking a look at his neighbor’s paper, he not only discovered that they had been struck by the same vandal, but was then accused of attempting to steal the paper, which resulted in a flurry of protestations and a thwack on the head with an umbrella.
As the day progressed, Michael discovered that the letter-shaped hole in his morning read was not an isolated incident—every paper in every newsstand and coffee shop between his apartment and the University was missing at least a portion of one page: page three in the German papers, page seven in the British ones, page twelve in the French, page twenty-three in the American, and page one of the Ontario Daily Sun, which was waiting in the mail drop at his office, and which he imported because his daughter occasionally worked for them as a freelance photographer. He hoped the article clipped had not been one of hers—it had been more than ten years since they’d spoken, and he looked forward to the slight if incomplete contact keeping up on her professional work afforded him.
On Tuesday, twenty-eight students from various schools at the University of Vienna (where Michael was the visiting Professor of Ancient Literature and Historical Studies) were discovered experimenting with trepanning, which is to say they were drilling holes in their skulls. Apparently, someone had put the notion in their heads (among other things) that the ancient belief of unlocking one’s consciousness by poking holes in themselves would somehow be a valid study aid. The faculty disagreed, as did the authorities, who arrested the lot of them—then had to release all twenty-eight after no specific law could be found which forbade the grisly practice.
Immediately thereafter, the newly-freed trepanners threw an impromptu parade celebrating students’ rights, during which some seventy-odd other students, not wanting to miss out on what was apparently becoming the Hot New Thing, promptly drilled holes in their own heads.
On Wednesday, thirteen bodies were found at various points throughout the University, victims of apparently unsuccessful attempts at trepanning.
On Thursday, purely by accident, an assistant administrator for the faculty of the Economic and Information Science school was discovered in the act of pounding a thin steel bar into the skull of a co-ed who had been jogging to class. The quite irate and foamingly mad staffer was apprehended, during which it was revealed he had always harbored aspirations of being a serial killer, and had found in the students’ recent fascination with trepanning the perfect opportunity to broaden his horizons. Pending the outcome of the formal investigation, he was suspended with pay.
On Friday, two of the department heads of the school of Catholic Theology suddenly found themselves in trances and channeling the spirits of twenty-thousand year-old Mages claiming to have lived in Atlantis. They set to arguing, whereupon one of the Mages departed from his possessee and promptly took up residence in the Vice-Rector who oversaw the school of Protestant Theology. The Vice-Rector/Mage then declared open hostilities against the Catholics, and for a few tense hours it seemed as if the whole campus would self-destruct, until a third Atlantean Mage possessed one of the Social Sciences professors and threatened to bring in the Mormons, which brought the entire conflict to a halt in a matter of minutes.
On Saturday morning, every item in Michael’s apartment shifted a sixteenth of an inch to the left, and he spent the rest of the day dusting and moving everything back.
On Sunday, every item in his apartment shifted to the right, and he suspected that rather than a mirror image of the previous day’s event, it was more likely that the first incident had merely reversed itself. The tracks in the dust revealed the first movement, which he had not seen; the second time he witnessed it while in the act of replacing a teacup in its saucer. The resultant spill caused a large stain to form on his pile carpeting, that when viewed from the front door looked like a cow, or a large dog with a gland condition.
On impulse, Michael decided to phone his estranged daughter, only to discover after a very brief and characteristically tense conversation with her grandmother, that she had suddenly chosen to move to the United States. Michael hurled the telephone through the window and went to bed.
Now, here it was Monday again, and apparently (if in a much less conspicuous fashion) it seemed the weirdness of the last week was going into overtime. The day’s classes had gone without incident, but arriving home he found in the study at his apartment, sitting patiently among the off-white overgrowth of paper foliage on his cluttered desk, a small, plum-colored envelope, addressed simply to Professor Michael Langbein, no other writing evident, no return address. Michael set down his overstuffed briefcase just behind the open door and pocketed his keys, then picked up the stationery intruder. He turned it over in his hands, and slid a fingernail inside the flap, tearing along the edge. Inside was a simple notecard of the same paper as the envelope, folded once. He opened it and began to read the brief message within:
Professor Langbein -
A matter of the utmost importance, both academic and historical, would benefit greatly from your advice and counsel. If you would be so kind as to attend my performance this evening (ticket enclosed), I will afterwards present to you the situation at hand, at which point you may take your leave at your pleasure.
It was signed with an indecipherable scrawl, and neither the notecard nor the envelope bore any other identifying marks. Michael chuckled and tossed it aside, then took a look at the ticket. It was a common orange concessions ticket—the kind sold in rolls of five hundred to be passed out at charity functions for raffles of items that no one would actually exchange money for if it weren’t for charity. On the backside were scribbled the words Rutland & Burlington’s—Monday, 8:30.
He knew the place—a nightclub just a few blocks away that had become quite popular among the students. However, he had much more serious matters to attend to, and there was little time to spare for entertaining a mysterious invitation which was in all likelihood a ruse for a sales pitch selling timeshares in Switzerland.
On the desk underneath the plum envelope was a thin letter on very expensive stationery which bore the University’s seal and the office address of the Rector. Michael sighed and flopped down in the battered overstuffed chair facing the windows as he fingered the letter. Thin letters from universities never meant good news. If you were an applying student, you hoped for a thick admissions packet; a thin letter always began, “We thank you for your application, but …” followed by a number of sugared lies designed to make you believe that another school will find you a great prize —notwithstanding the fact that a few lines earlier you’d been told you were gum on the bottom of their shoes. A thin letter to a faculty member was usually only one of two things: a paycheck, which this wasn’t, as payday had been last Thursday; or some form of bad news which no one had wanted to tell him directly, but which was too insubstantial to be handled by a mid-level committee.
Michael scratched his nose with the envelope for a moment, then ripped open one side and unfolded the letter.
Dear Professor Langbein,
While we have greatly appreciated your contributions to the curriculums of the University, we regret to inform you …
The remainder of the letter outlined a proposed meeting with the Rector, two Vice-Rectors, the Administrative Director, and three faculty members of the school’s representative Senate, during which he was to present his case for continuing the funding of his department—Michael did a double-take, there: he was to argue not just for his own job, but for the future of the whole of the department.
Ah, me, thought Michael. I should’ve listened to my mother and become an accountant.
* * *
Michael Langbein was tall, the sort of tall that could be called lanky without making it come across like an insult, and was muscular enough that no one would call him lanky to his face no matter how it was taken. He had a pleasant, clean-shaven face, a thick shock of curly brown hair, and a propensity for going everywhere on a bicycle. Considering he could do a two-hundred-mile round trip in a day and still have time for a leisurely dinner and attend a lecture after, no one made fun of him for that, either.
For the better part of his professional career, he had been teaching philosophy in high schools, but as fulfilling as that was personally, it didn’t compare to the kind of give and take he got at a teaching college, or the chance for field work or publishing he got at the University of Vienna. The official title—which he made up on the spot when they asked him which department he was applying to, which didn’t actually exist yet—was Visiting Professor of Ancient Literature and Historical Studies, but no one ever called him that. Michael never had a great love of formality; most of his students called him by his first name; the ones he was closer to, “Long-legs.”
The University, the oldest in the German-speaking world, was composed of eight Faculties which were broken down into one-hundred and seventy-two departments, and the reason that the proposed meeting involved several more administrative officials than would normally be consulted in a departmental review was that with the exception of the Natural Sciences and Medical schools, Michael had in three years managed to outspend and out-requisition every other department in the entire institution.
The department of Ancient Literature and Historical Studies (named by default) tended to concentrate the use of its budgets towards the acquisition of manuscripts—very, very, old manuscripts; not merely old and brittle Victorian novels that looked as if they’d been bought at Christie’s auction house in a rash of bidding type manuscripts, but rather those found through research and field work that made Indiana Jones look like a slacker type manuscripts—most of which were in the vein of Noah’s to-do list or zoning plans for the tower of Babel, which of course had to be smuggled (exported) out of countries governed under martial law and at a cost approaching the annual budget of a decent-sized third-world country.
The main problem with acquisitions of this type is that they fell under the heading of Basic research, which would be fine if they hadn’t been acquired for sums approaching the mid-seven figures; at best, they would be explainable as subject-specific research, but the budget constraints for that were even worse. To actually support his argument for continued funding, Michael would have to at the very least demonstrate that the purchases were going to be used as aids to Applied research, or even better, that they could be utilized by another department in Transdisciplinary research. Unfortunately, he had no idea how he was going to do either of those things.
Michael had been receiving warnings and cautionary notes regarding his playing fast and loose with the University’s filthy lucre, everything short of formal reprimands, but he supposed that the apple which finally upset the cart was probably the Æthelbert Document.
* * *
Æthelbert was the West Saxon King of England for the first half of the seventh decade of the ninth century, following the rule of his equally aesthetically-name-challenged father Æthelbald, and his grandfather, Æthelwulf (sadly, as is often the case with unfortunately named children, Æthelbert felt the need to inflict the patriarcally-passed torture on his own son, whom he named Æthelred. Æthelred, however, would have none of that, and in defiance of family tradition named his son Alfred).
What Michael had begun referring to as the Æthelbert Document was actually a roll of vellum made from sheepskin, which had been discovered in the ruins of a mosque in Cyprus. From what the archaeological team supervising the excavation had been able to surmise, the document had been taken to the island approximately three centuries after Æthelbert, just a few years prior to the Third Crusade. What was difficult for historians to accept, particularly the British ones, was that according to fragments of other documents at the site and correlating historical data, the document was left on Cyprus deliberately, and by no less a luminary than Richard the Lionheart.
The reason for the outrage among the scholars was established at a symposium in Vienna Michael had hosted, soon after the discovery and his subsequent purchase of the document. The translation revealed it to be concerned with the lineage and biographical details of a quasi-historical figure who was quite literally the archetype of English royalty: Arthur Pendragon—King Arthur of Camelot. Needless to say, it was less than flattering. According to the document’s author (who was unidentified, but revealed information allowing it to be dated to the mid-ninth century, hence the nom-de-plume the Æthelbert Document) Pendragon did gather a collection of men to Camelot, but his purposes for doing so were less than chivalrous and more than a little unsavory. It also described a far different relationship with the knight historically known as Lancelot DuLac. The document further describes someone who could be interpreted as the much-romanticized Guinevere, but considering the next passage in the narrative described the knights roasting and eating her, she really didn’t enter much into the discussion.
The fact that Richard tried to hide it far from England’s shores supports the document as authentic—the Lionheart was a historian himself, and would not have destroyed such a work, especially if he believed it to be true; he also could not let it remain within reach of any scholars, especially if he believed it to be true. Thus, he abandoned the document on Cyprus, which he had captured as a stronghold against the Muslims, and then negotiated a right of passage to Jerusalem along a narrow coastal strip—which eliminated the need for any English, scholars or otherwise, to ever want to go to Cyprus.
Were it merely for the long-post-mortem slander directed at a cherished cultural myth, the British scholars could have possibly forgiven Michael for bringing it to the attention of the world; but it was the fact that he had done the proper thing and consulted them privately first, that they could not bear to countenance.
They had rejected the document as a fraud, without bothering to test it chemically, examine the site report, or even do a complete translation.
Michael then took it to a group of scholars in Denmark who could have cared less who was sharing King Arthur’s bed, and they ran a chemical analysis, picked through three separate site reports, and ordered a full translation—after which they declared it to be genuine.
The British were furious, as were, by association, the French.
Turkey and Greece, who jointly governed Cyprus, demanded the extradition of whomever had smuggled the document off of the island, until it was revealed that a minor Turkish Government official had actually authorized the export papers in exchange for three minutes alone in a broom closet with one of the female assistant archaeologists.
In America, Turner Classic Movies re-released the film version of Lerner and Lowe’s Camelot as Arthur and Lance, and the videocassette promptly outsold Titanic and all four Star Wars films combined; although a minor scandal was caused when the producers of those films contested the sales figures, and it was discovered that ninety percent of the tapes had been bought up and destroyed by representatives of British Parliament and the Prince of Wales.
And in Vienna, there was a tremendous explosion—the sound of the top of the University’s Administrative Director’s head blowing off when the total expense receipts for the whole debacle arrived from the Department of Ancient Literature and Historical Studies. All told, the balance of underwriting an eight-month archaeological dig in Cyprus, arranging not-strictly-legal export papers, commandeering a Danish chemical laboratory for three weeks, and hosting a full-blown international symposium came to approximately three million and twelve dollars—the twelve, because the British had returned the document to Vienna by mail, postage due.
There were official pronouncements and apologies and all of those diplomatic things which are done whenever it is demanded they be done, but the end result of all of the hullabaloo was that the University of Vienna had in its possession a very expensive, probably wholly authentic, completely scandalous document, which had already become a great embarrassment to the one culture which could mitigate the costs by legitimizing it as an object of study.
During the symposium, the Æthelbert Document had been secured in a strongbox in the University Library’s restricted section. Sometime in the month since, the key was lost, and last week, the box itself disappeared. Thus, the letter Michael had received was not, to be honest, that much of a surprise.
* * *
It was the completion of a broad circle of years that the object which may have ended up becoming Michael’s personal Hindenburg was named for a Saxon king; he had been born in Saxony, in the city of Dresden. He liked to believe that his city was the center of the universe, although just about anyone who lived there and was over the age of thirty would admit that Dresden’s long gone golden age was early in the eighteenth century, when Saxony also ruled most of Poland. True, there were many treasures: treasures artistic and treasures architectural; but then again, the same could be said of Budapest, Prague, and half a dozen other cities in that region of Europe. Once, as a young man, he had hiked the length of the Elbe River to the Atlantic, and had come to the conclusion that there truly was no better place to extend his roots than in Dresden. But that was before Vienna. That was before Elena.
They had met and fallen in love when his family first relocated to Vienna, but his academic career had beckoned, and Michael was trundled off to Oxford. He exchanged letters with her for a time, but her replies eventually began to decrease to a mere trickle, then ceased altogether. When he had managed to return to Vienna, he found her married; not long after his return, she also became pregnant.
Michael saw the chance to reclaim the lost track of his life the night Elena’s daughter was born—that same evening, Elena’s husband vanished from Vienna, unaccountably, untraceably, gone. Some months later, Michael Langbein married Elena Strugatski.
The two moved briefly to Oxford, so Michael could finish his education, then returned one final time to Vienna, where he began teaching high school philosophy courses. When they had saved enough money, Michael and Elena moved into a three-hundred-year-old villa in the picturesque woods on the northern outskirts of Vienna. Nothing was ever seen of Elena’s first husband, although Michael suspected he may have communicated infrequently with his daughter via letters sent to her through her grandparents, who had accepted Michael only grudgingly.
Michael’s own parents, who had never condoned the marriage, died only a few years after the union, and for a few years, Michael, Elena, and Elena’s daughter, whom they named Meredith, lived a very rich life, all of which would’ve made an excellent story if it had ended there, which it didn’t. The richness began to tarnish one night before Meredith left for college at Oxford, on a scholarship her father had helped her to attain.
She had gone to visit her grandparents, to say her good-byes, but when she returned just minutes before midnight, the only goodbye she said that night was to Michael, and it was said with a cold, angry look in her eyes, and the fact that she had chosen not to speak to him—a covenant she had kept in all the years since. Even last year, when after a long, arduous struggle with pneumonia, Elena died, Meredith didn’t speak to him—the trip from Oxford took long enough that she missed the funeral. And although Michael later discovered that she had chosen to return to Vienna, and had in fact already begun her career as a photojournalist, she never once returned to the villa, or sought him out at the University. Several months after Elena’s passing, he cleared out the home he had so loved and returned to the city proper.
The apartment in the heart of Vienna just north of the University was a spectacular find, with not much less space than the villa, but for Michael, it was much larger, for there were fewer ghosts.
* * *
Traveling abroad had a great appeal for Michael, and the very real option of just dropping his trousers and showing the University the sunny side of his personality was greatly tempting. Leaving the University of Vienna meant no curriculums, no justification, no budgets; none of the necessary irritations that had a great deal to do with the business of teaching and practically nothing to do with teaching itself. It also would probably mean the end of his career as a respected academic, given that a wide swath of his credibility came from his University letterhead, and after the Æthelbert Document fiasco, employable only by a research lab in Denmark and the Greek State Department.
It was more than his reputation which kept him in Vienna, however—he believed that there were some places to which one’s heart belonged, and that those places formed bonds stronger than fear, stronger than love, stronger even than death. Other than Vienna, the only place where he had felt even a stirring of emotion that strongly was in Bayreuth, during his annual pilgrimage to the festival there.
There was also the issue of the acquisitions he had made during his time at the University—if the school’s officials were lax enough to allow a three-million-dollar document, in their possession less than a month, to vanish, then the rest of the collection had all the assurances of a hen in a fox house (although he suspected that the disappearance of the Æthelbert Document would likely coincide with the receipt of a substantial donation to the University by an unnamed British benefactor whose check bore a Royal seal). If nothing else, the range, scope, and unabashed quality of the books and documents Michael had amassed was enough to guarantee him a footnote in every research journal published for the next fifty years.
The United States knew of at least three preliminary copies of the Declaration of Independence, but only Michael Langbein had discovered the parchment, annotated by Thomas Jefferson, which outlined the well-known document, and appeared to have been written by a Dutchman living with Iroquois Indians in the sixteenth century. That was the transaction which convinced the University of Vienna to fund the department of Ancient Literature and Historical Studies—the sum paid by the United States to ‘reacquire’ the thin paper made from beaten tree bark was sufficiently large enough for the school to build the entire Central Library for Physics.
In the three years of Michael’s professorship, that had been the only divestment; everything else had remained in the library.
There was an early copy of the Magna Carta—presumably the only one which advocated the invasion of Egypt as a basic right of the English Barons. This was probably just an effort on the part of King John to placate the gentry and maintain his hold on the country, but it didn’t survive into the final version, which he had no intention of implementing anyway, which is why the Barons invited King Louis VII of France to boot John from the throne. Michael thought that if the version he’d found had been kept, then perhaps the entire sordid history of bad British cooking might have been avoided.
About eighteen months ago, he found a parchment written by a previously unknown student of the philosopher Parmenides, in which he proffered an early version of what would eventually be known to the world as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Since the viewpoint of this student, whose name was Thiassus, brought a heretofore unexpected layer of comprehension to Parmenides’ argument that reality must necessarily be changeless and uniform in contrast to the shifting diversity of the everyday world of appearances, the older man had him executed. Had Thiassus lived only a few years more until the rise of the atomists, the application of his methods of thinking to theirs could have accelerated the advent of Cosmology by two thousand years.
If those documents could be considered the main body of Michael’s collection, the item which was both the head and heart had to be the Uppsala Dance.
Named after a loosely connected and very significant document called the Uppsala Codex, the Uppsala Dance was the smallest, most expensive, and most studied item in all of Michael’s trove. A scrap of parchment not six inches across and eight inches long, the Dance—called so because it employed a form of poetry which had become popular in twelfth-century Iceland—consisted of six sets of four lines of minutely scumbled text, the content of which had been seen in only three other documents known to exist. The one Michael had the greatest access to was known as the Uppsala Codex. Written on parchment sometime during the first few decades of the fourteenth century, the Codex was one of the more important manuscripts of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, which was significant for two reasons: one, the Edda was considered to be the refining account of the mythologies of the Icelandic, Norse, and Germanic peoples; and two, it was the nearly-all-consuming passion of Michael Langbein.
The reason he had better access to the Codex as opposed to the other two existing documents was that he hadn’t actually tried to touch it before he had his academic credentials and a formal invitation. It was sheer luck that when he came across the Dance he recognized it as being in the same hand as the Codex; unfortunately, the amateur archaeologist (read: smuggler) who presented it to him for sale was educated, and knew as well as Michael just what it was he had.
It took less than a heartbeat for Michael to agree to the transaction, a few seconds more to sign the check, and several days, even with assistance from colleagues at the University of Reykjavik, to explain to the University of Vienna’s Administrative Director why he paid six point two million dollars for bad poetry on a tattered sheet of parchment the size of a Kleenex.
The significance was in the form as much as the content. A dance was a four-line improvisation using everyday words set to a loose rhythm, in which all metrical rules and disciplines were utterly disregarded. Sturluson hated dance poetry, and even went so far as to compose a section in the Edda which carefully specified the proper use of poetic forms, along with a warning that if those forms were set aside and fell into disuse, then much of the historical writings and the people’s understanding of their own mythologies would be lost.
The inclusion (or adaptation) of material from the Prose Edda in the Uppsala Dance could be interpreted only when it was discovered at what point it was written—if it was written at the same time as the Codex, then it would represent a significant shift in how Sturluson was actually perceived not far removed from his own time. If it was written before or after, then it could simply be dismissed as the efforts of another poetical wanna-be—except for the fact that the writing on both the Dance and the Codex were identical, and further, that chemical analysis revealed them to be written on identically-made and similarly-dated parchment.
Michael had fully expected, even with the astronomical cost, that the discovery of the Uppsala Dance would be the catalyst for permanently establishing his department at the University, but less than a week after he found it at the beginning of the school year, the University signed an employment contract with a mathematics prodigy who was not yet even old enough to drink, and as they had been looking for a reason to garner press attention for their new Central Library for Physics, the new professor became the glamour boy of the moment and Michael, with his seven-figure Kleenex, was quickly forgotten.
* * *
That was several months ago, and the overall conditions regarding his future had not brightened. Michael was committed to teaching through the end of the school year, and had hoped to get both Summer sessions as well, so he could better afford the trip to Bayreuth in August, but before he could take a step in any direction, he had to decide where he was going. Abroad, he could pursue his research freely, but he would lose the resources of an institution backing him, and although he had traveled often, he had never been without some sort of permanent place to return to. In Vienna, he was settled if not entirely happy, and he loved his work.
Michael sighed and slumped deeper into the chair. There were too many good reasons, too many motivations to want to stay to risk blowing a tenure position—and if he wanted to stay long enough to be considered for tenure at all, then he had better make certain there was a department in which to teach, and the best opportunity to make his case for that was at the meeting requested by the Rector. He picked up the letter and scanned it quickly for the scheduled time, then let out a loud groan. The meeting had been set for this afternoon—four hours ago.
The view from the battered old chair was his favorite—a sweeping panorama of the city and the Vienna hills, and over to the far right, a glimpse of the Danube. He crumpled up the letter from the University and flung it against the glass.
Eventually, he got tired of drumming his fingers and stewing in his own juices, and looked at the desk where the plum-colored invitation and orange ticket still lay. He decided.
Snatching up a jacket and the invitation, Michael opened the door and left before he could change his mind.
***