by K. T. Tomb
Kako laughed at Richard until his sides hurt. “Have you never heard of a volcano?”
“Yes, I have read about them. I have never seen one. Where is the volcano?” Richard asked, startled.
“The entire mountain is the volcano, but do not worry, it is sleeping like a babe. For now,” Kako teased and urged his camel past the kings, so he could go first.
When they broke their fast for the midday meal, it was mutually decided that the mountain was becoming too steep for the animals. And so, the animals were hobbled in the last grassy area where tiny wild goats with long hair leaped from rock to rock. The quest continued, on foot. Of course, Richard hated walking anywhere. Kings rode.
Walking became quite hazardous, with even these elite, surefooted fighting men losing their balance and slipping. To stabilize the stretcher, two more of Saladin’s men walked beside the old warrior and helped share the load.
As they climbed, the temperature dropped on the mountain and a fierce rain came. There was no shelter here upon the bald areas of the mountain, and they had, hours ago, passed above the tree line. Their only company was rocks and the occasional shrub. Lightning blasted near them in columns of wide blue light that struck the ground with jagged bolts and left scorch marks.
“Yes, Lord, I am obedient, and I am bringing our friend Saladin into your presence,” Richard said softly.
They all worried that they would be struck by lightning, but none were.
The men pushed forward, heads bowed under the fury of the mountain storm. Another hour later, sodden leather boots splashing forward, the storm cleared, leaving the men to walk through a thick mist that shrouded them in quiet reflection.
As the rocks dripped, Richard felt as if he had been transported into another world, perhaps a fairy world, for this strange mountain of rocks and rain and mist, this strange mountain that hid the Holy Grail, was so unlike anything that he had ever encountered.
It was here on the mountain, with the withering body of the great Saladin next to him, that he wondered if he were still dreaming, or even if any of this were real.
Perhaps I lay feverish and dying somewhere, he thought, with an arrow bolt in me, and these are my terrible hallucinations.
But the cold upon the mountain stung him to the bones and he knew this to be real and not a hallucination. Already, his elbows and knees were chafed and bloodied, due to multiple falls that no one could avoid, for there was nothing one could do when the ground beneath one gave way under the obsidian and shale. No wonder those villagers called Ararat “the mountain of pain.”
And I have a feeling, the worst is yet to come, Richard thought.
Richard feared that they had lost the dove during the storm, but the moment the clouds and fog cleared; there it was again, a shiny, pure white bird soaring against the gray backdrop of sky.
As they climbed higher, with the dove circling them, the group stopped to eat some of their meager provisions. Near them was a small running brook seemingly bubbling up from the earth, and one of Saladin’s men, who had lived at the base of the mountains as a boy, advised them that they were now at Jacob’s Well. Through Kako’s translation, this soldier then told them the story of Jacob and his search for the Holy Grail, and of God granting him, instead, a view of the Holy Grail, and a tiny splinter from it.
“The Grail is wood?” asked Kako.
“It would seem so,” the man replied.
“I thought it would be gold,” Richard said, puzzled.
“A king would think that,” the man said.
Richard shook his head and listened to the story.
“The well,” said the man, “was God’s answer to Jacob’s prayer to quench his great thirst.”
Richard asked the man, as they drank from the cool spring and as the sun shone on them once again through a part in the clouds, “How many men have seen the Holy Grail?”
“My father claimed to have seen the Holy Grail, as did my grandfather before him. Those of us who lived at the base of Ararat have heard stories of the Holy Grail all our lives; indeed, our culture is centered around the Holy Grail. To us, even though we are of Islam, seeing the Holy Grail was a rite of passage from boyhood into manhood.”
“What happened to your grandfather?” Richard asked through the little boy, Kako, their intrepid interpreter who seemed to know every dialect they had crossed.
“My grandfather was suddenly stricken and died before I could be taken up to see the Holy Grail. It was one of my greatest regrets…not seeing the Holy Grail, but instead, feeling, somehow, that I had not fully grown into a man. It is a legacy to be passed down from father to son, the sighting of the Holy Grail. And now, I will finish what I once thought was lost, with all of you with me. Enemies and comrades. The Grail is for all.”
“Then every man in your village has seen the Holy Grail?” asked Richard.
“We are a small village, and no, not every man has seen the Holy Grail. It is a private thing going there, and not every man knows the way, and there is death awaiting us on Ararat at every turn and every slip of shale. The legend, and what it means to each man, must be passed down from generation to generation. In my family, the way to it has been lost, as has happened in other families.”
“How did you lose the way?” Richard asked.
“Allah fights your God on this mountain, and landslides and avalanches are the result. The trail comes and goes. The way there is never the same, and the signs are never the same. For my grandfather, it was an eagle leading him, not a white dove.”
“Interesting,” Richard said, “different men seek different paths to the Grail.”
“I see you begin to understand, my friend,” Saladin whispered from his litter.
The dove had disappeared while the troops had gathered about Jacob’s Well. Saladin’s soldiers advised them all to pray and then cast a stone on a small pile of rocks near Jacob’s Well, out of respect for Jacob’s own faith in God, and as a token, perhaps even a key, into the heart of Ararat, to the Holy Grail itself.
As the men gathered together their gear to continue, the dove appeared again, and Richard knew that the dove was from God, but he was apprehensive, for in his dream, he was not on a mountain, but in a dark passageway.
Richard did not know what was to become of his and Saladin’s men. He did know that his feet were hurting. He did not have the calluses of the common man upon his feet. He had soft feet and they were not happy with being on foot.
As evening fell, the group found themselves high up Mount Ararat, but the peak itself loomed still higher. It had been but a day’s climb, and Saladin’s warriors advised that it was rumored to be a three-day climb up Ararat and to the Holy Grail.
“Must we reach the peak?” asked one of Richard’s Templars.
His answer: “The Holy Grail is not at the peak, but near a deep valley. That is all I know.”
The troops stopped and made camp on a relatively flat plain on the side of the mountain of pain. Great cold gusts of wind came at this time, making even the strongest of them whimper with discomfort. It was like knives hitting their faces, and Saladin’s men pulled their wool burnooses over their faces. Richard and his men had no such protection from the onslaught of the biting wind.
As Richard sat before a big fire built from wood that should not have been there, as they were far above the treeline—another sign, perhaps—he and his men huddled on one side and Saladin and his men on the other. Richard wondered again about the true meaning of this expedition... and drifted to sleep with his blistered feet, thousands of feet up the great Ararat.
Chapter Eight
In the morning, the dove was gone and Richard was at a loss for what to do next.
Silently, he was angry at God for leading them all this way and then deserting him, but once again, he consulted with the dying Saladin and found courage in the old man’s wisdom.
In a breathy voice, the older man said: “Allah, whom you call God, is always with us. I can see his sign in all that we
do. Be receptive, Richard, do not be blind to the nature of His ways. Sometimes, signs and portents are subtle.”
“I hope that you are correct,” Richard responded. “It is the only thing that makes sense in all this.”
A day passed upon their campsite. Richard did not dare venture out upon the mountain without the guidance of God, for on this day, snow began to fall, and Richard knew the snow would cover the many fissures and cracks upon Ararat; this snowfall would become a deadly trap for those walking over them.
The baying of wolves could be heard, and twice, they came across the tracks of the great bears of the mountains. One of his men had even spotted, lower upon the mountain, the stiff remains of a colorful snake, which they had been warned by the villagers to avoid, due to the instantaneous death that would result from the snake’s poison.
Night came and with it, not only a deadly chill, but deadly news. And loss.
Two of Richard’s men had ventured lower on the mountain to gather fuel for the fire; only one returned to share their harrowing story.
“Gabriel slipped off the edge of a cliff, only to disappear in the foggy mist that hovered within a seemingly bottomless gorge. I almost fell myself. It was a simple task of gathering firewood and Gabriel had been whistling a song. I was playing, too, at echoes of my singing. We peeked out on the edge of the cliff and made our way around a huge mound. A great rumbling was suddenly heard, and looking up, we saw great packs of ice flowing down the side of the mountain.
“Gabriel was the first to make it around the mound, and thus, was exposed to the avalanche. He was struck with great force and hurled many, many feet in the air, screaming, only to fall along with the snow and ice over the side of the cliff. I was sheltered by the huge mound, a snow-covered boulder the size of a small home, and was struck by the ice, but not enough to cause me to lose my balance.”
Indeed, his face was lacerated and bruised.
The Templars and Muslims had been warned by those in the village to not make undue noise upon the mountain of pain, as sometimes, only a cough or sneeze could cause the precariously placed ice and snow to lose its hold.
“Apparently, you two missed the translation of the villagers’ warnings. There is to be no singing. No whistling. No shouting. This mountain should not even know we are here,” Richard said.
He had to turn away his grieving face that he had lost two more men, Templars at that. It was a travesty.
Suffice it to say, there was little fuel for this particularly cold night, as the snow had come just that day. Above them, perhaps two thousand more feet, there was perpetual snow covering the mountain—a glacier. But halfway up the mountain, at the point where the small group now camped, snow and hail fell with blind white fury. Where the sun was shining one moment, clouds would gather in the next, bringing with them a furious storm.
It was enough to make them all miserable, and some became sick. They did not have the proper clothing for the extreme cold and they stifled their coughs as much as possible, to avoid dislodging any ice and snow slides above them. The cold did not help Saladin, and now, he seemed to be almost at the point of death. Indeed, his feet were blue. It looked as if Saladin was not long for this world.
Richard did not know what to feel. On the one hand, he welcomed the death of Europe’s greatest foe, but on the other, he knew he was on a mission to redeem his soul in the eyes of God.
Richard respected the irony of the situation: on the one hand he had killed, some would say murdered, twenty thousand of Saladin’s own; but on the other hand, he was on a deadly quest to save the man himself. It was a fitting punishment for the King of England, he realized.
Since coming to Asia Minor, Richard had also come to doubt his own religion, seeing for the first time in his life those who would kill and die for their own Muslim religion; a religion vastly different than Richard’s own.
He was not a man set in his ways, and though he was King of England, he did not always insist that his ways were superior; and, most of all, he was not stubborn and egotistical like other kings he knew. He had listened attentively to the sage advice of the Master of the Order of the Knights Templar himself, Robert de Sable. Perhaps that was why he’d had such success thus far in the Crusades, capturing Cyprus, Acre and Ascalon.
Robert de Sable had accompanied Richard to the Holy Land as a councilor of war. And Richard had listened attentively and usually acted on the advice of either de Sable or his other high-ranking Templars, who together formed a sort of war council. Therefore, Richard was indeed receptive to the thought that maybe they were not just and right in the Crusades, and that maybe Saladin and his men were just as right themselves, or maybe even more so.
Of course, Richard would let no one hear such thoughts except for Gustave, his personal priest, who was now headed to Jerusalem, by his own decision. He had lost a chance to see the Holy Grail himself, but was determined to make some sort of pilgrimage to be able to tell the Pope that he had done something unique.
In Richard’s last conversation with him, it did not matter to Gustave that there was a plague in Jerusalem or that he might be persecuted, for he was convinced that it would make his journey even more interesting. Jerusalem was the holiest of holy cities and he felt that fact would protect him, a holy man, from succumbing to plague or persecution. Perhaps if Richard made it back there alive, he could tell Gustave all he had learned and seen and felt. And then Gustave would share his experiences.
He longed for his friend.
As it stood, Richard was months of travel away from Jerusalem, and from its plague. He knew that God did not want him to go there. So, as much as he longed to see the city, even if he didn’t conquer it, he obeyed God’s command.
The wind suddenly picked up, blowing fiercely, harder than Richard had ever felt wind blow before. It was trying, seemingly, to uproot the camp from their moorings upon the side of the great mountain. After many long minutes, the wind subsided. Richard, panicked and with his heart thumping in his chest, eased his grip on the provisions and blankets surrounding him.
His mind turned back to his personal problem. His spiritual problem.
What will it prove to me if I do see the Holy Grail? That God is real? Do I doubt that God is real? No. I have seen His very explicit signs the last few days, perhaps my faith in Him, is even stronger now than ever, especially after my dream. Can one have faith in God but still doubt his religion?
Richard knew that this was the heart of his problem—he had often wrestled with the conceptual differences between faith and religion.
And then, Richard realized, as the pressure of sleep came over him, that he could not know how the finding of the Holy Grail would affect him and his faith until the Holy Grail was actually found. He advised himself to wait and see before making rash decisions.
Richard missed the company of Gustave, his friend and confidant, and he wondered if they would ever meet again. He grew weary of talking to himself in his head. He should not have let Gustave beg off on this trip to Ararat.
He needed his friend, now more than ever.
Chapter Nine
In the morning, upon breaking their fast with long, hard loaves of bread, a specialty baked by the simple folks at the base of the mountain, the sign that Richard had been waiting for finally appeared.
The clouds still clustered thickly in a roiling gray mass, except for a short break in their density. Here, the sunlight came pouringthrough, seemingly funneled out, compressed into a knife-sharp beam of light that seemed to point. And this beam of light shone above them, landing somewhere on the side of the mountain.
Richard, excited, told his men and Saladin’s to gather their things and prepare to break camp and move out. The others, upon seeing the light, chattered among themselves, and Richard knew his men had rarely seen the glory of God revealed in such breathtaking splendor.
Nor had he.
Richard was anxious to start moving, but forced himself to calm down as the others dawdled and collected thei
r things. At last, they gathered the aged Saladin on his litter and covered him with as many garments as they could spare, cloaks taken from dead soldiers and piled upon the dying leader, who gasped in the frigid air under the weight of the cloaks. He was that weak that it was a major decision whether to expose him to cold or to make him bear the weight of many cloaks.
Though the dark gray clouds roiled in among them, like a boiling beef stew in an iron cauldron, the shaft of light that pointed to mountainside never wavered. Richard’s heart beat wildly in his chest. Something miraculous was happening, and he smiled with a joy that he had never before felt. The very hand of God was shining that light for them to tell them where to go and he knew it.
Still, deep inside, he was a little nervous. Rarely, he knew, had anyone on the face of the Earth witnessed such overt miracles. This made him nervous, seeing the supernatural, firsthand. It was one thing to read about it in a holy book, or to hear stories of such wonders from priests and pilgrims, but it was quite another altogether to be in the middle of such things and the intended recipient of…the Holy Grail. It was God’s promise and he allowed himself to think of it over and over as he struggled up the slopes.
King Richard the Lionheart wanted to find wherever the beam of light ended because there above them, wherever the beam of light from the sky met the ground, would lay the prize.
After a time, he gathered his composure, and, indeed, he gave it much thought that God was drawing them higher and higher on the mountain to reap the reward of this entire Crusade, and do it in cooperation with the enemy.
His excitement would crest when he had the Grail in his hands. In England’s hands. Oh, what a triumph that would be, to bring home the Holy Grail from the Crusades. It would change history and no one, not even his brother, would dare try to wrest his kingdom from him.
Chapter Ten
The climb was treacherous and painful.
The snow drove like needles into his skin, and his feet, like everyone else’s, turned blue in the agonizing cold. After climbing another thousand feet, with the huge sheets of glacial ice still another thousand or so feet above their heads, the beam of light focused more brightly on a barren rock face. Richard and his men pulled closer to the dark rocky face of the mountain. The wind once again picking up as they neared the place where the beam showed them the way.