BERNWARD’S MONASTERY: THE CHAPELKaisho and Myoko were battered but alive. For the next few minutes, they tended their own injuries and Father Emil’s . . . but when they tried to do the same for me, I refused their coddling. I wasn’t badly hurt, and I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting still while someone painted my cuts with iodine.Instead, I went outside to steady myself in the cold night air . . . and to listen for any sound from whoever triggered the bomb. The murderer couldn’t be far off—radio detonators seldom have much range—but I heard nothing: just the wind. I pictured the killers sitting in a car in the nearby forest. The instant the bomb was set off, they must have raced away into the blackness.Cowards.I stood there for several more minutes. Just breathing. Looking at the stars. Making no noise. Thinking of a time when Reuben and I got kicked out of the National Diet Library in Tokyo for laughing too loudly at an inept translation of the Pnakotic Manuscripts. And another time we were trying to decipher a set of Mayan inscriptions, when Reuben—the idiot!—read them aloud and summoned a swarm of locusts into my study.
