‘A fool like me?’
‘Oh yes. A fool like you.’ Elwand laughed.
‘But what if you don’t come back?’
Elwand looked Hart directly in the eye. ‘Then, my friend, you are in big trouble.’
FORTY
Hart eased himself up and over the stone. Elwand slid the slack through his hands. To Hart’s eyes, there appeared to be an awful lot of slack.
Elwand braced his legs against the rock face and nodded to Hart.
‘Are you sure?’ said Hart.
Elwand nodded. ‘Big advantage for you. If you fall, I don’t fit through hole. I stick. You hang.’
‘But the rope could slide out through your hands.’
‘Might do. Might not. This up to God.’
‘Great.’ Hart levered himself steadily backwards until he was ready to take up the abseiling position. He could feel his sphincter tightening and his throat clenching. He wanted to mewl like a baby. ‘Can you feel me? The weight of me?’
‘I have your weight. Now you start. I cannot keep hold too long.’
Hart began to abseil. At first he could hear the rope sliding through Elwand’s gloves. Later all he could hear was his own attenuated breathing echoing back from the circle of the rocks surrounding him and the slap of his desert boots against the sides of the chimney.
Each jump bought him maybe five feet. At first, he didn’t dare look down. Didn’t dare give himself any perspective on his situation. He took on the role of the ostrich – or of a baby playing hide-and-seek under the covers of a bed. He knew what was happening, but didn’t dare acknowledge it. If the rope broke, or if Elwand’s hands slipped, he’d better hope he died outright. Because the alternative didn’t bear thinking about.
Five minutes into his endless swinging, he stopped for a rest. He knew he daren’t take too long, because Elwand was carrying the full weight of his body. For the first time Hart really looked around himself. The light was better now, and he could make out much of the detail of the rock surrounding him. There were fissures, yes, but they were interspersed on the way down with long flat slabs which only a man equipped with pitons and a hammer could hope to conquer. The truth was that once you were down there, in Solomon’s Prison, you were down there for good, unless someone chose to pull you back up again. Hart had never seen anything like the place. It was terrible.
He recommenced the abseiling motion, and very soon he could see the ground approaching. The base of the extinct volcano measured perhaps fifty yards across. In other words the whole thing was in the form of an inverted cone – wider at the top than at the bottom. Thirty feet from the ground a broad lip shot out – an overhang really – that would have made it doubly impossible for prisoners to escape. The prison, although entirely natural and not man-made, was supremely fit for purpose. A genius could not have designed it better. An evil genius.
The equation was a simple one. You drop a man down here and you begin to destroy him psychologically. Inevitably, during his first day, when he knows he is at the height of his strength, he strives to get out. Finds he can’t. Then, as each day passes, he becomes weaker and there is less chance that he will be able to summon the strength of will or of body to climb. It was the most perfect torture imaginable. It worked on every level. The surroundings were so extreme that there was no room for hope. As Hart felt his feet strike hard ground, he wondered how long any prisoner would have been able to withstand the horror or the loneliness. The uncertainty of wondering whether he would be fed or given drink. The uncertainty of everything.
He untied the rope from around his waist and gave it three firm yanks. The rope snaked back towards the surface. Hart switched on the torch. He soon decided, though, that he ought to conserve the batteries in case of emergency, and trust to his eyes in the burgeoning daylight. The sky seemed awfully bright up above him, but it was still very dark indeed down where he was. The contrast sent a chill directly into his soul.
He began by making a tour round the periphery of his temporary prison, hoping against hope that there might be some artificial shelter under the lee of the overhang. But there was none. The only thing breaking the flatness of the base area was a large rock positioned a little off-centre, with a mass of smaller rocks around it. It didn’t take Hart long to work out that the rock matched nothing else that he could see, either geologically or topographically. The only possible reason, then, for its presence, was that it had been toppled down from the lip of the volcano for some obscure purpose. Maybe to frighten the inmates?
He looked up again. Was that Elwand’s arm he could see briefly against the skyline? As he peered upwards, trying to discern exactly what he had seen, the truth about the single rock came home to him.
It had been sent down against the rains. The motive behind it had to be purely diabolical. Water would naturally stream into the vent during a great storm, and there would be little or no drainage to let it out again – a fact attested to by the paucity of vegetation. So the place would slowly fill up like an old-fashioned wide-mouthed milk bottle under a steadily dripping tap. When the water got too high, the only way for anyone to survive would be to clamber onto the rock. Send too many prisoners down here, and it would be man against man. An interested observer, high up on the lip and anchored by a rope, say, could entertain himself for hours watching his enemies fighting it out amongst themselves for who would be king of the rock castle when the waters finally overtopped a man’s head. Later, when the waters did finally subside, the losers in the struggle would be left as mute witnesses, slowly rotting and poisoning the victors’ air. Hart shook his head. The place was demoniacal.
He found his first bones fifteen minutes into his search, tight up against the side of the chimney, under the overhang. After that he found nothing but bones. One entire corner was rich with them. They lay scattered amongst the rocks and lichen like the remains of a great battle people had long ago forgotten the name of.
At first he avoided them with his feet as a mark of respect, but, later that day, when he had turned nothing up – no possible hiding place for the Copper Scroll – he found himself kicking them aside in a desperate attempt to unlock the key of the place and discover what his ancestor, Johannes von Hartelius, had been thinking of in using it.
Elwand had been true to his word and had sent him down a basket of food and water some twenty or so minutes after his initial climb. Hart had been briefly tempted to tie himself back onto the rope and shout up to Elwand to haul him up beyond the lip to where he could begin over-arming himself towards normality again. But he didn’t. Was it shame, in that he had started all this – drawn all these people into what only he wanted to do – and that he dared not be the one who capitulated to fear? He hardly knew any more.
He spent the next thirty minutes picturing a nightmare scenario in which Elwand concealed the rope, and then hurried back down the slope to his car. The scenario continued with Elwand driving to the next checkpoint, where he would be stopped and found to have infringed some esoteric Iranian law. He would be taken to the local town and locked up. And Hart would have to eke out the water and food Elwand had sent down to him for as long as it took for Elwand to talk himself free.
How long would he last down here? A week? Hardly. He’d heard somewhere, possibly during the Hostile Environment and Emergency First Aid Training – or HEFAT as it was known – that he’d been obliged to undergo as a photojournalist, about the 3-3-3 survival rule of thumb. Three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food. Now, down here, he didn’t believe a word of it. He suspected he’d be delusional and gabbling way before the last part occurred. He decided to go easy on the water nonetheless. This wasn’t the rainy season. If things went badly wrong he couldn’t count on nature to protect him.
Fool. Bloody fool. What was he doing dwelling on this when he should be looking for the scroll?
Hart divided the prison area into four segments. The bone segment. The vegetation segment. The rocky segment. And the
cleared segment. He decided to inspect each segment as diligently as he could, and then take a break. He worked out that if he spent around two hours on each, he might reasonably use the time before Elwand came back to the best of his ability, and miss nothing.
He was wrong. Each segment took him considerably less than two hours. It soon became clear to him that there was nowhere – simply nowhere – that anything resembling the Copper Scroll could be hidden.
The few piles of rocks he encountered were easily undone. The ground was bone-hard and unyielding. You’d have needed a pickaxe to make a mark in it, and what would have been the point? A worse place to hide anything could scarcely be imagined.
Hart stretched out on the central rock, making the most of the thin rays of sunshine that descended into the chasm. He might as well admit it. Von Hartelius had intended his secret writing to be discovered by his captors. He’d wanted to send them on a wretched wild goose chase into Persia. He’d probably never even seen Solomon’s Prison – only heard of it – and in his desperation for somewhere apparently logical to have hidden the scroll, he’d chosen that. What a bloody fool he’d been ever to have thought that a thousand-year-old message from the dead would automatically tell the truth. People lied in the past just as they did in the present.
Hart ate most of the contents of the basket of food Elwand had sent him, drank thirty per cent of his remaining water, and went to sleep.
FORTY-ONE
It was after dark when the rope snaked down again. Hart had almost given up any expectation of its coming by that time. He had never in his life spent so much time in such a god-forsaken place. It was enough to drive a man mad.
In reality, of course, he had always had a fair degree of certainty of being able to return to the surface – call it ninety-eight per cent, give or take fifty per cent for nerves and the anxieties of solitude. The men sent down here as a punishment would have had none. It was not the sort of place you would temporarily send a man. This place was an end point. As categorical as execution. As explicit as surgical murder.
Hart was silent as Elwand opened the boot of the car. He lay himself inside as though entombed. The climb back up had been far harder and more taxing than even he had imagined. Elwand had attached the rope directly round the rock, this time, as an anchor. Hart alone was to be responsible for pulling himself up, hand over hand, foot by agonizing foot. This they had agreed beforehand. When Hart was about a hundred feet up, he had managed to jam his feet into a crevice and take a brief, panic-stricken rest. Elwand had taken up the slack at that point and retied the rope around the rock. After that he did this every hundred feet or so as a sort of primitive safety device.
When Hart was close to the lip he had temporarily lost control of his footing and dropped thirty feet, dangling out in space, the rope biting into his armpits and crotch and threatening to overset him. Elwand had shouted down to him. Hart had tried to swing back into the side again, but couldn’t get the motion working. Later he discovered that Elwand had eased himself out along the rock and had begun the fresh swinging motion himself, from up above him. If Elwand had fallen then, they would both have died. The difference between life and death was decided by that thin a membrane.
Hart remembered Elwand’s face as he breasted the lip of the prison. It was like looking into the eyes of a dead man. Hart supposed his were the same.
Neither of them had said a word to each other on the walk down the slope. Hart had carried his silence forwards into the boot of the car.
The rocking of the car was a comfort at first. Hart lay curled up against the rope, in the foetal position, and tried to close his mind to his own uselessness. But little by little the despair leached through. He almost wanted them to catch him. For the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to throw open the boot of the car and punish him for this crazy exercise in vainglory he had embarked upon without sufficient thought or planning. Who could he now expect to guide him back through the mountains to Iraq? He was a Jonah. No one would come near him any more. He might as well present himself at the nearest security post and speed up the inevitable.
He was surprised, therefore, about two hours into the trip, to hear a mass of traffic around him when there should have been none. Where was Elwand taking him? Because it certainly wasn’t back up the mountain towards Ronas and Bemo’s village. The quality of the road noise was completely different here. The sound the tyres made on the asphalt was steadier, smoother, as though they were entering a town. At one point, when the car was forced to slow down, he heard people’s voices passing close beside him. And these were not guards. These were civilians. He was sure of it.
The car rocked to a halt. Hart waited. The boot was opened and he was blinded by artificial light. He reached out an arm and Elwand helped him struggle out onto what passed for dry land again. He was outside a house, in a courtyard, in what appeared to be the outskirts of a town.
‘Hurry now. No one must see you.’
Hart stumbled up the stairs ahead of him and through a half-opened door.
‘Where are we?’
‘Bukan.’
‘Bukan?’ Hart tried to summon up a mental map of Iran in his head, but failed. ‘What are we doing in Bukan?’
‘Nalan. She wish to see you. I bring. She come later.’
Hart felt his anxiety close down on him. He could feel his breathing return to normal. He was out of Solomon’s Prison. He was not dead. He was not in an Iranian jail. He would see Nalan soon.
He stopped just inside the door and turned to Elwand. He bowed his head and saluted as deeply as he knew how. ‘Thank you, Elwand. Thank you for all of this. And thank you for saving my life today.’
Elwand ducked his head, almost as a child might do when marked out for unexpected praise in a classroom. ‘We are lucky. God is on our side today.’ Elwand raised his right hand and touched Hart lightly on the shoulder. ‘You brave man. You mad man. You crazy man.’ He laughed. ‘I never do this again. Never. Not for any money. Not for anyone. God help me.’ He looked up at the ceiling and crossed himself. ‘Never.’
Hart laughed with Elwand, and as he did so, he felt all his remaining anxiety rush away from him like water from a fractured dam.
Elwand put on his serious face again. ‘Now, Britannia, you wash. Fresh clothes. Leave beard. Then we eat.’
‘And Nalan?’
‘Later, I say. She will come later. We need talk. Many things have changed. Please be welcome in my grandfather’s house.’
FORTY-TWO
Nalan sat across from Hart at the kitchen table. Around them sat Elwand and five other males of assorted ages and sizes. Three of them were in Kurdish dress, the other two in what passed for Western dress in Iran – short-sleeved shirts and razor-creased trousers. All had glasses of tea in front of them, served by Elwand’s grandmother, who wore a long-sleeved dress in green, with a cardigan over the top, and an off-white hooded snood about her head, tied in place with a red and black tribal bandanna.
Elwand’s grandmother firmly refused to sit with the men, but Nalan had no such reservations. It interested Hart that the men seemed to accord Nalan a respect out of all proportion to her age, her sex and her status. Hart imagined this was because of what she and her parents had endured at the hands of the Iraqi Mukhabarat. It was akin to the respect offered in Europe, say, to someone known to have survived Auschwitz.
Nalan spoke in English first, for Hart’s benefit, and then translated what she had said into Kurdish. First off, after saying how sorry she was that he had not been able to find the Copper Scroll he had been looking for, she introduced Hart to the remainder of her male cousins.
‘Elwand you know. This young one here is Bahoz. This Saman. This Zinar. This Navda. This Elind. All six are my uncle’s sons.’
Hart almost said ‘what a busy man’ out of sheer embarrassment. Looking at the young men around him, he was forced to acknowledge that, despite their shared intimacies at Pank, he really didn’t know anything about Nalan at all. ‘The brot
her of your father?’
‘Yes. My uncle and aunt brought me up, as I told you when we were hiding in the tank in As Sulaymaniyah. So I do not consider these men my cousins. They are my brothers. Three live in Iran.’ She pointed to Elwand, Navda and Elind. ‘Three in Iraq.’ She waved towards the others. ‘This is normal for Kurdish people. During the Iran/Iraq War we supported Iran against Saddam. This is why he was so angry against us. Why he tried to destroy the Kurds with genocide. Why he used chemicals against Halabja in 1988. Five thousand chemical martyrs dead. Ten thousand injured. Our people are still dying of the effects of the chemicals to this day. Halabja is near As Sulaymaniyah, John. In Halabja the Iranians were innocent, and Chemical Ali and Saddam Hussein were guilty. In As Sulaymaniyah the Iraqis were innocent and the Iranians were guilty. This is why life is so complicated for the Kurdish people.’
‘And Hassif?’
Nalan bowed her head. ‘I talked to him again. On the telephone. This is why I have brought you here. To tell you, before you go back to Iraq, that he hates you very much.’
‘Me?’ Hart rocked back in his chair. ‘Why should he hate me?’
‘Please. Be patient. I will explain.’ Nalan looked at her cousins. ‘Things are not as I once thought them. They are more complicated. I thought Hassif was a civilian. That I could lure him in and that my brothers could seal the trap against him. That we would obtain qesas this way.’
‘Qesas?’
‘The right to retaliation. This is a legal right in Iran. You are offered the alternative between diyeh – which is blood money – or qesas.’
‘Ah. The lex talionis.’
‘What is this?’
The Templar Inheritance Page 19