The Secret of Excalibur_A Novel

by Andy McDermott

  “You could say that,” Nina answered. “Although your approach of bonding over a Monty Python movie was definitely more like how I’d expected to meet someone. You said you met your wife at college?”

  “Ex-wife.” Mitchell indicated his empty ring finger.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” He looked away at the crackling fire. “It was one of those two-careers-on-different-paths things—it happens. And we didn’t have a huge amount in common. You and Eddie aren’t the only ones with very different backgrounds. So …” A shrug. “There weren’t really any bad feelings, it just didn’t work out. We’ve both moved on.”

  “Still, I’m sorry,” Nina said again. She turned to Chase, to see that he was already looking at her. “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said after a moment.

  “Things turned out okay in the end,” Mitchell said, noting the exchange but not remarking on it. “She went into law, and I got my doctorate.”

  “You’re a Ph.D.?” Nina asked, surprised and impressed. “What field?”

  “High-energy physics. Thought I might as well put my experience on a nuke boat to good use. And it eventually brought me into DARPA’s earth energy experiments.”

  Nina was still highly dubious about the entire concept, but decided not to voice her doubts again. “I gotta admit, Dr. Mitchell,” she said instead, “you’re a lot more dashing than the average physicist.”

  Mitchell beamed, a megawatt movie-star smile. “Dashing, huh? I like that. And I have to say, Dr. Wilde, you’re definitely one of my top-three favorite archaeologists.”

  “And who are the other two?”

  “Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, of course!”

  “And am I above or below Lara?”

  He smiled again. “Definitely above.”

  “A-hem!” Chase fake-coughed loudly enough to attract even the attention of the camels. “So, Jack, get us the map, will you? I want to check where we’re going tomorrow.” With a playful look at Nina, Mitchell stood and went to one of the tents. The moment he was out of earshot, Chase poked Nina in the side. “Oi!”

  “What?”

  “Pack that in!”

  “Pack what in?”

  “Bloody flirting!”

  Nina couldn’t really deny it. Instead, she grinned. “What’s the matter, Eddie? Jealous?”

  Chase didn’t return the smile. “What, of him? Don’t be daft. It’s just that he’s a bit of a pretty boy.”

  “Oh, you think so too? I’ll tell him you said that.”

  “No you bloody won’t!”

  Mitchell returned with the map. “We’re about here,” he said, indicating a point on the southern Syrian border. “Kafashta is … here.”

  Chase looked more closely. “Maybe eighteen or nineteen miles north. If we set off at dawn, it should only take us about three hours to get there.” He studied the map for a little longer, then sat up. “In that case, we should grab a bite and then get some rest.” He faced Nina, eyeing her suggestively. “See if you can do anything new now that the camel’s stretched your legs.”

  Nina wasn’t impressed. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “Like what?”

  “There are only two tents.”

  “Two tents, four people, two to a tent. Seems fine to me.” The others regarded him silently, waiting for the other shoe to drop. “What?”

  “Two men, two women, only one couple,” Nina reminded him. “I’ll be sharing with Karima.”

  “Wait, you mean I’ve got to share with ’im?” cried Chase, pointing at Mitchell.

  “I’m also thrilled,” Mitchell sighed.

  “Buggeration and fuckery!” Chase paused, realizing what he’d just said. “And no, that’s not a suggestion!”

  TEN

  Syria

  Though the desert landscape was indistinguishable from that of Jordan, it somehow seemed indefinably more hostile, menacing, now that they had crossed into Syria. Nina surveyed the horizon as best she could from her rocking mount as the group headed northward, fearing the appearance of a Syrian patrol.

  But nobody approached over the stony dunes. They were truly in the wastelands, the nearest town of any size many miles away. The camels padded on through the sands for an hour, two, nothing breaking the monotony of their surroundings, until …

  “That’s it,” Mitchell announced, pointing at the unassuming blocky structures rising from the shimmering haze ahead. “Kafashta.”

  “Doesn’t look like much,” Nina observed. If not for the presence of a mosque, easily identifiable by its single minaret standing tall above everything around it, she could easily have imagined it as something from a Western, missing only a nameless gunslinger in a poncho.

  “So what’s the plan?” said Chase. The village was barely more than a couple of streets intersecting at a square, run-down houses hunched around it. The mosque was by far the largest and best-maintained building, but even it was fighting a losing battle against time and weather, sporting a rickety platform of scaffolding around the top of the minaret where a wall was being repaired.

  “I’ll speak to the imam,” said Karima. “You’ll need his permission to go into the mosque, but there are over two hours before the next call to prayer, so hopefully he’ll allow it.”

  They dismounted and tethered the camels, then walked along the short street to the mosque. Karima went through the gates. Nina looked around. The village was so quiet it almost felt abandoned. Remove the telephone poles, she thought, and Kafashta would look little different from how it had in the time of the Crusades.

  The sound of raised voices within the mosque caught her attention. “Ay up,” said Chase, opening his leather jacket wider for quicker access to his gun. “Trouble.”

  Karima reappeared, looking angry, followed by a young man with a rather feeble attempt at a beard. He yelled at her in Arabic, robes flapping as he gesticulated. His outrage grew when he saw the three Westerners.

  “A slight problem,” Karima informed them thinly. “The imam doesn’t want anyone from ‘the Great Satan’—his exact words—in his mosque.”

  “This is the imam?” said Nina, surprised. The young man, still ranting, seemed to be barely twenty.

  “No, he is not the imam,” said a new voice. A much older man, probably sixty but with the sun-hardened wrinkles of his face adding a good decade more to his appearance, padded toward them across the mosque’s inner courtyard. He drew heavily on the stub of a cigarette before flicking it out onto the street. The younger man glared at him in disgust. “He would like to be, he thinks he is, but he is not. Not yet. I am the imam of this magnificent place of worship,” he said, sarcasm clear in his voice. “My name is Mahmoud al-Sabban, and this boy,” he jerked a dismissive thumb, “is Rami Hanif, recently arrived from Damascus to drive me to an early grave with his maddening book-learned piety so he can have my job!”

  “Your English is very good, sir,” Nina said politely.

  Al-Sabban smiled crookedly. “Thank you. I taught myself, Berlitz tapes. I have been here for over thirty years, and I already knew every word of the holy Koran—I needed new ways to fill the time.” He regarded his visitors with amusement. “So, you are from the Great Satan?”

  “I’m not from the Great Satan,” Chase objected. “I’m from the Little Satan.”

  Al-Sabban examined him more closely. “You do not look Israeli.”

  “Israeli? No, I’m British.”

  “Israel is the Little Satan, my friend,” al-Sabban told him with a mocking laugh. “Britain is, hah, an imp at most.” Ignoring Chase’s peeved expression, he waved them inside. “But that does not matter. Come in, come in.”

  Hanif shouted at the imam, but Al-Sabban dismissively waved him away. Lips quivering, the younger man whirled and stalked across the courtyard into the depths of the mosque. “Children!” al-Sabban spat. “No respect. And a poor scholar too—the Koran tells us to welcome all strangers as friends. Even strangers from the G
reat Satan.” He chuckled. “So, what brings you to my mosque?”

  • • •

  The imam had a private room, an office-cum-study with a copy of the Koran open on a desk, at the rear of the mosque. The low-ceilinged space smelled strongly of coffee and nicotine, the narrow windows tinged with yellow. Used to the smoke-free establishments of New York, Nina couldn’t help coughing as al-Sabban lit up his third cigarette in a row. “I thought the Koran was against smoking,” she said hopefully.

  “There is some dispute among scholars,” al-Sabban replied, taking a long draw before carefully blowing out a smoke ring. “And as a scholar myself, I say … it is fine.” He leaned back in his threadbare chair. “Yes, I know the item you have told me about. I will let you see it. For a …” He reached over to close the Koran as if shielding it from what he was about to say. “Donation.”

  “We’re willing to pay, of course,” said Mitchell. “Will dollars be okay?”

  “I would have preferred euros, as dollars have been devalued recently—every refugee from Iraq comes with an armful of dollars! But they will do, I suppose. For a good price.”

  Mitchell nodded. “We were hoping to do more than just look at the piece, sir—we actually came here to buy it.”

  “Then the price will have to be excellent!” He carefully stubbed out the cigarette, balancing it on the side of his ashtray for later, and stood. “Come with me.”

  Al-Sabban led them through the mosque to its central prayer hall. “Parts of this building are over eight hundred years old,” he said. “Unfortunately, it shows.” He indicated the base of the minaret at the corner of the hall. A pile of loose bricks lay at the bottom of a ladder, beside a wooden pallet attached to a dangling rope. “At least there is one good thing about having Rami here. I can make him climb the ladder to call for prayers!”

  “It’s impressive,” Nina told him. Although the mosque as a whole was shabby, the decorations on the prayer hall’s ceiling were mostly intact, needing only proper cleaning to restore their beauty.

  “You think?” said al-Sabban, shooting her a look of incredulity. “If I could, I would flatten the whole place and build something that was not falling apart!” He came to a stop at the prayer hall’s southern end. An ornately decorated arched recess was set into the wall: the mihrab, indicating the direction of Mecca, toward which the faithful would pray. Beside it was a small flight of wooden steps leading up to a pulpit—the minbar, from which the imam delivered his sermon.

  The sides of the steps were paneled, but al-Sabban crouched and fiddled with what at first seemed to be a piece of painted ornamentation, before it moved with a click. He swung open a small door, shifting around so the others could see inside. “Down here,” he said, tapping on a flagstone, “is where the relics are kept.” He straightened, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “We need tools to open it. I will get them, and bring lights. Wait here. Although, Mr. Mitchell, this would be a good time for you to fetch your donation!”

  “Well, that was easy,” Chase observed once the imam had left.

  “At least we know the Russians didn’t beat us to it,” said Nina. “How much money do you think he’ll want?”

  “Unless he’s insanely greedy, I’ve got enough to cover it,” Mitchell said.

  Karima wasn’t happy. “I can’t believe an imam would openly take a bribe like that. No wonder they want to replace him, if that’s how he behaves.” She narrowed her dark eyes. “Allah will judge him.”

  Mitchell shrugged, turning to go back to the camels. “The important thing is that he’s willing to help us.”

  He returned with a messenger bag a few minutes later. Al-Sabban reappeared soon after, carrying a rusty crowbar, a lantern and a pocket flashlight. “Here,” the imam said, pointing to a spot on one side of the flagstone, where a small gap was visible. “One of you, open it.”

  Everyone looked at Chase. “Oh, like that, is it?” he complained, taking the crowbar. “Eddie the packhorse.”

  “I was thinking more Eddie the strongman,” Nina reassured him, patting his arm. Chase slid the end of the crowbar into the gap and pulled it back. The flagstone rose a couple of inches with a dry rasp, enough for Mitchell to get his fingers underneath to lift it. The two men quickly moved the stone aside.

  Al-Sabban pointed his light down the hole, revealing a low cellar beneath the floor. “I keep the few treasures of the mosque down there,” he said. “They may not be much, but being here for over thirty years has taught me that there are always men who want to steal them. Dr. Wilde, you come down with me. The rest of you, wait here.”

  Chase’s reluctance to let Nina go without him was clear, but he stood by as first al-Sabban, then Nina, lowered themselves into the cellar. “Watch yourself,” he told her.

  “I’ll be fine,” said Nina. “See you soon.” She switched on the lantern and ducked into the low passage.

  The cellar was more extensive than she had expected, a central corridor with chambers on each side. The ceiling was barely five feet high, the arched entrances to each side room lower still. Al-Sabban hunched down ahead of her, kicking up dust with each step as the circle of his flashlight beam swept back and forth. “Down here.”

  She followed him to a chamber near the cellar’s far end. It was occupied by battered cardboard boxes and old wooden planks stacked haphazardly against one wall. Al-Sabban carefully lifted the planks aside to reveal another box behind them, a metal chest that from the faded stenciling on its side Nina guessed had once been used to hold ammunition. He blew cobwebs from the handle, then opened it.

  “This is the blade that Muhammad Yawar used to kill the leader of the infidels,” he said, reaching into the box. Whatever the mosque’s other treasures were, they were apparently hidden elsewhere in the cellar, as the metal case was empty except for the length of steel he carefully withdrew.

  Nina brought the lantern closer. It was definitely part of a sword, almost three feet long, but jagged and broken at each end, missing both the tip and the hilt. Although grubby, the metal still appeared in good condition.

  It was not plain, though: patterns had been inscribed along its length, just as she had seen on the stained-glass window in Peter’s tomb. Could they really hold the clues that Rust had believed would lead to Excalibur?

  “May I hold it?” she asked.

  Al-Sabban nodded. Nina put down the lantern, then he handed it to her. Turning it to pick out the inscriptions in the lantern’s glow, Nina saw a faint line of text in Latin: ARTURUS REX. “King Arthur …” she whispered.

  In any other circumstances, that would have immediately convinced her that the sword was a fake: it was extremely unlikely that Arthur would have inscribed a name tag on his own sword. But in this case, she was actually searching for a fake, created by the monks of Glastonbury Abbey to convince their king that he had been given the real thing. The nobility of the twelfth century were far more wealthy and ostentatious than their counterparts from six hundred years earlier, and would have expected their symbols of power to be just as showy. “Pimp my sword …”

  “What?” asked al-Sabban.

  “Sorry, just thinking out loud.” Her gaze moved on to the other markings scored into the metal. Most seemed to be purely decorative, florid loops and curls, but there was also a repeated symbol: a labyrinth, a tightly wound path contained within a circle. Unlike a maze, there was only one route from the outside to the center. Along the path were dots marking particular points. The number and position of the dots varied on each symbol, but there was no readily apparent pattern.

  Nina turned the sword over, finding more of the same markings. She associated the symbol of the labyrinth with Greek mythology, the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur, but it also appeared in other cultures, the particular form of this one nagging at her memory. It had appeared somewhere among her cram studies of Arthurian legend …

  Sudden shouting broke her reverie and she looked around, startled. “Rami!” cried al-Sabban, annoyed. The commotion w
as coming from the prayer hall. “Wait here, I will deal with him.”

  Above, Chase and Mitchell stood helplessly as Hanif, more angry than ever, screeched at them in Arabic. Karima tried to speak, but barely got a few words out before being shouted down. “Guess we really pissed him off this time,” Chase muttered.

  Al-Sabban’s head popped up through the hole like a gopher. “Rami!” he snapped, beginning a vocal exchange with the younger imam. He finally managed to shout Hanif into silence, then clambered out of the cellar entrance. “He is angry because you two are in the prayer hall,” he told Chase and Mitchell, “and also because you are with her.” He indicated Karima, then a curtain at the other end of the room that could be drawn to divide the prayer hall into two sections. “Men and women are kept apart during prayer. He thinks you are insulting Islam by being here like this.”

  Hanif began shouting again, and al-Sabban listened before irritably conceding some point. “It seems I will only be able to shut him up if you wait in the courtyard.”

  “What about Nina?” Chase asked.

  “She is fine. She is engrossed,” said the imam. He shook his head, then started for the door. “Come, wait outside. Mr. Mitchell, this may be a good time to talk about your donation.” He eyed Mitchell’s bag.

  Hanif followed the group, waiting in the prayer hall’s doorway like a guard dog as al-Sabban led Chase, Mitchell and Karima to a small pool in the courtyard. Chase blinked in the sunlight; the cool of the mosque’s interior made returning to the desert heat all the more jarring. Over the gurgle of water from the fountain he heard a car coming along the street outside, the first sign of life in the village.

  “So how big a donation were you thinking, Mr. al-Sabban?” Mitchell asked.

  Al-Sabban made a show of considering the question. “I was thinking of … something in the region of … ten thousand dollars?”

  “Done,” said Mitchell, holding out his hand. Somewhat startled, al-Sabban hesitantly shook it. Mitchell then opened the bag and laid out several bundles of banknotes on a low wall before the imam. Karima looked on disapprovingly, but Chase simply smirked. Al-Sabban had clearly expected to haggle, thinking ten grand was an amount well out of reach, whereas Mitchell had been willing to pay more—probably a lot more.