Elysium

Chapter 10: Doppelgängers

"Who'd have thought the girl was a spy for the Templars, eh?"

The remark came from Nikos Dimitriadis. We were on the hill side, and a rock escarpment covered us as we peeked out to look down at the gate of the monastery, and beyond it, the road diving into the forest. The only road out of the monastery. The Templars were grouped on both sides of the road, moving on, to form a gradually tightening siege around the monastery.

"Yeah, who'd have?" I remarked, without expecting an answer. I still felt, up here, the scent of the white roses of the monastery gardens.

"You were right, Nick", said Max. "There are some twenty or thirty of them."

Lower on the road, we also saw the black car of the Palatines. Two of the black-clad Palatine knights standing near it, at a distance from the Templars. Seen from the mountain slope, it started looking like a chess game, with black and white pieces on the board. Yet in this game, they both seemed to be playing against us. Only the rose-growing brown monks were our friends.

"No chance we could slip through the siege and back to the road somewhere lower", said Roland. "Except perhaps in night-time."

Therefore, it made sense to keep climbing the narrow path that snaked up the slope of the mountain. That had been the abbot's advice, too. There was fog floating on the slopes, which helped us further. We wore brown, hooded monk gowns, which we had borrowed from the monastery, in case the Templars had binoculars or other devices to watch the path ascending the mountain from the monastery.

Brother Kiivas had suggested, moreover, that we'd shave our heads bald in order to look more like monks on their pilgrimage. In most days, a few monks would climb to the chapel high on the mountain slope. An observer would not be surprised to see such climbers. However, both Max and Roland had been horrified at the thought. They could not think of themselves bald. Therefore we just pulled the hoods over our heads – after all, that's how the monks walked, too – and we wandered to the foggy slope with an unhurried pace, only the most necessary items in our small backpacks.

We were five now. Brynhilde had reappeared with us, and it turned out she had participated Nikos's reconnaissance trip to find out the number and positions of our adversaries. Chairo and Vixen stayed in the monastery. The abbot had assured us they would be safe there, and the Templars weren't interested in them. In an emergency, they could keep hiding there for a long time. Once Chairo would recover, the young couple would return to Professor Itikain. We would somehow reconnect. One day. When all this would be over, and the world would be a better place.

*   *   *

We walked. Hours passed. If someone had set forth for following us from the monastery or from the chain of siege, we did not observe it, although at times we stopped in good positions where we could have ambushed any potential pursuers. Such places were plentiful, as the mountain's terrain was filled with sharp precipices and narrow gorges, where the path disappeared for hundreds of metres, only to re-emerge on another side of the slope.

The path, however, was one and only. It kept climbing higher. Black swifts were screaming in the sky and whooshing past the slope. When we were sure nobody was following us, Brynhilde and Nikos started picking a faster pace. Max and Roland had no problem staying with them, whereas I was lagging behind with my limping leg. I thought it would be hard to get lost from this path, so I didn't make an issue of it. Sooner or later they would have a break and wait for me to catch up.

Having walked for some time in my slow-paced solitude, I saw a figure standing by the path, leaning his knee to a large boulder and holding his hands on his belt, so that the open monk's gown descended on both sides behind him. He smiled benignly and waited patiently, as I climbed towards him. Once I was closer, he waved his hand to me, as if I hadn't seen him already.