“At first, yes. But for the first time in my life something broke my train of thought. When I looked over at you all I wanted to do was to make sure that if… if the worst happened then you would suffer as little as possible. I couldn’t bear the idea of you going through an instant of fear that you didn’t have to.”
“And you,” said Tilly, finally turning to look at him, “you weren’t frightened?”
“I don’t get that type of frightened, I suppose.”
“You’re telling me that you never get afraid of anything?”
“No, just that immediate sort, that self-preservation thing. I’m just wired differently.”
“So, what does frighten you then?”
“I’ll tell you since you ask,” said Sparke, his voice still flat calm. “The idea of not having you in my life is the most terrifying thing I can imagine. I am genuinely terrified that I have done something, or not done something, that means you don’t want to be with me. Maybe it’s because I always put my toothbrush in the same place, or because I unpack exactly the same way, or maybe it’s because my first marriage wasn’t very romantic. I don’t know what it is, but I really get the feeling that whatever you might have felt for me has gone. Every time you speak to me I wonder if you are about to tell me that we are over. That frightens me.”
Tilly looked at Sparke wordlessly until the barman placed their drinks on the bar. She picked up her French Martini and took a deep drink. She placed the glass back on the paper napkin on the bar.
“Peter, you’re a wee bit strange,” she said.
“Never said I wasn’t, but that’s what you get. I’m not available in other options. If you don’t want this version of me then you should tell me now.”
She picked up her glass and drained it, then ran her hands through her hair. “Peter, I’m exhausted. I think I’m more afraid now than I was in the plane. I need to sleep.”
Sparke looked at her face. There were shadows under her eyes and her fingers trembled slightly. The sight of her fear was like a physical pain for him. He tried to think of what people are supposed to say in situations like this, but nothing in his life had prepared him for moments like this. Tilly began to turn away, and as she did the dim light from behind the bar caught her face showing two bright tear tracks on her cheeks. He spoke before he knew what he was saying.
“I love you, Tilly,” he said.
She turned back to him and rubbed her face with the heels of both hands and nodded.
“Good, that’s good,” she said. “I love you too. Let’s go to bed. I’m whacked.”
Cup
“It is not much to look at,” said Whitehead. “But we never make any boasts for its aesthetic value.”
“If I knew what I was looking at I would be able to give you my opinion,” said Salvatore. “What is it?”
The Grand Master of the Order of Lazarus took a few steps towards the alcove in the far wall of the small chapel room. “It is called the Chalice of St Senga of Sidon. She was the daughter of a rich merchant. She was travelling with her father to the coast and saw, for the first time in her sheltered life, a group of lepers. Her father’s men drove the lepers away from the spring to prevent them from drinking from it. His daughter, perfect in her innocence and complete in her charity, took her own cup and filled it to bring water to the lepers. The lepers who drank from the cup were cured of their curse.”
“This cup cures leprosy?” said Salvatore.
“No, nothing does,” said Whitehead. “It is just a story, but sometimes we choose to believe it.”
Salvatore looked at the cup. It was red-brown glazed pottery, as broad as an ale cup and covered in black figures of stylized men in armor. It looked nothing like the rough cups that the local Arabs used.
“Is this the type of cup from this region?” he said.
“It is Greek, and you know it is,” said Whitehead. “We guard this thing for the idea of it, not because we think it came from the hand of some lovely young woman who gave water to lepers. But the cup is not what you are here for. Your Grand Master wants to know if we will hold here, you have seen the preparations we have made, you can tell him that we will hold this bastion until we are all dead and that we will take many of them with us. We know there is no retreat, we will not be hammering on the door to save our lives when the time comes.”
“You seem sure that the city will fall.”
“The Mason says so,” said Whitehead.
“And you, you have no path of retreat?”
“Retreat to what?” said Whitehead.
Salvatore nodded in silence. If he was in the shoes of the Lazerines he would want the same. He looked at Whitehead and said, “Then I can wish you nothing more than a good death.”
“A good death is the best thing you can wish for us,” said Whitehead, laughing softly. “I can see why the Mason chose you.”
Salvatore looked again at the leper’s cup, then bowed and left Whitehead to make his report.
As was his habit, the Old Guardian kept Salvatore waiting before being allowed into the presence of the Templar Grand Master. The normal silence of the inner sanctum of the castle was now constantly broken by the sounds of the Arab bombardment.
The Grand Master, when he finally summoned Salvatore, barely listened to his report about the preparations of the leper knights in their rat-trap of a bastion. Eventually he dismissed him with a wave of his hand and turned back to the pile of letters on the table before him.
Free now of any immediate duty, Salvatore headed down into the bowels of the castle to his cold, perpetually wet lair where Dimitrios waited, working quietly on a machine which he had absolutely no belief in.
“There is nothing more I can do,” said Dimitrios. “ I think the weights are right now.”
“If there is nothing more for you to do there is nothing more that can be done,” said Salvatore unbuckling his sword belt. “I would say that the world holds no greater experts in such machines as you and I.”
Dimitrios shrugged. He walked over to the edge of the stone slipway where the squat copper dome sat as Salvatore stripped off his chain mail and underclothes.
“This time,” said Salvatore, “this time we will make it work perfectly.”
Dimitrios pulled a rope bearing an iron hook down from the gloom above their heads and threaded it into an eye on the top of the dome. The two men hauled on the ropes and the dome lifted from the ground and swung out over the water.
“Go gently, go steady and don’t do anything too stupid,” said Dimitrios.
Salvatore sat on the wet stone edge and slipped into the back water, oblivious to the rush of cold in his excitement.
“Ready,” he said, edging under the dome. Chains rattled as Dimitrios slowly dropped the dome into the water over the figure of Salvatore until he was trapped within. Dimitrios continued to lower.
In the top of the device burned a small lamp which cast a weak, yellow light against the beaten copper surface. Salvatore’s world became reduced to a tiny bubble of metal, scratched and dented by Dimitrios’s hammer.
Lead weights around the edges held the lip of the dome as it dipped beneath the surface, and the trapped air, trying to escape the increase in pressure, pushed upwards making the whole structure unstable. Salvatore resisted the impulse to try and steady the dome as every previous attempt had caused the device to flip on its side often crashing against his side as it spun. He let the weights along the bottom lip of the dome and the trapped air fight against each other until they found an uneasy balance, a fulcrum where the two forces negated each other.
Salvatore bent his knees and dropped into the cold water. He groped around on the base of the water channel until he found the hook and chain he was searching for. He lifted it clear of the water and strained to heave it up to its place. The extra weight pulled the dome lower still until it was almost totally submerged, the lip barely a foot from the stone bedding of the water channel.
Salvatore peered around at the seams,
coated and sealed with wax and sheep fat. There was no sign of water. He tapped the side of the dome three times and he heard a clanging as Dimitrios disengaged the hook.
The flooring of the water channel had been laid for the small craft used by the caste’s nobility more than three centuries earlier, a time of luxury when men used good stone flagging for the base of a watergate. It sloped sharply from the point where Dimitrios had lowered the dome.
With great care Salvatore placed his hands on two wooden handles fixed to the inside of the dome and pushed. Measuring each step carefully, Salvatore gently pulled the unstable device forward.
It moved like a huge, overfilled wine goatskin, wobbling and bouncing, each step adding to the unbalanced sway.
Salvatore had learned to pause when the sway became too violent. Once it reached a certain point there was no way to stop it.
As he stood in the freezing water, waiting for the device to find its balance again, he looked at the water level. When he started the water had been flush with the lip of the dome, now, as always, the water had crept up so that it was now two or three fingers higher. Salvatore paused and watched as the device resettled.
Now that’s an interesting thing, he thought.
Should old acquaintance be forgot?
The coffee cup stood frozen halfway to Sparke’s lip as he looked into the eyes of a man he had never expected to see anywhere, let alone in the lobby café of the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman.
The two men looked at each other for a moment without speaking.
Except for the pale yellow linen suit and spectacles, Professor Laszlo looked exactly the same as when Sparke had last seen him. He was a slight man with narrow shoulders, wiry rather than thin. His hair was slicked back so that it looked like the pelt of some aquatic mammal.
“Hello,” said Sparke cautiously. “Last time I saw you, you were being dragged away by Swiss Customs Guards for trafficking in smuggled artifacts.”
“No, no, not at all,” said the man with an air of patience which you would expect to hear from a diligent kindergarten teacher. “I was arrested for importing artifacts without a license, not the same thing. Smugglers hide things in false compartments of suitcases and other such flamboyant nonsense. I used FedEx, I just neglected to complete the necessary documentation. It was largely an administrative error.”
“Of course it was,” said Sparke. He was unsurprised by the easy answer. His experience of Laszlo was that there was nothing he could not explain. Sparke found it hard to imagine a man being arrested, but having so little outward evidence of the experience. “You’re wearing glasses,” he said after a pause.
“The Swiss prison system has exemplary health care provision. I was only in their care for two months, but they took care of me as if I was one of their own.”
“So, what are you doing in Amman?” said Sparke, sipping his coffee.
“Again, curtesy of our Swiss friends. They were kind enough to arrange for my travel once my short stay was over.”
“You were deported to Jordan? I never knew you were Jordanian.”
“I have a Jordanian passport. My mother’s family is from here, but we lived much of our lives in Europe.”
Sparke nodded and placed the empty cup on the table between them. “Well, this has been lovely catching up, but now I am going upstairs. I’d be grateful if you could be kind enough go away and never speak to me ever again. Cheerio,” he said standing up.
“I know why you’re here, Mr. Sparke,” said Laszlo, without moving.
Sparke turned and looked at the smaller man. There was no reason for him to possibly want to talk to this man. He had helped the Swiss authorities put him behind bars, absolutely no reason to trust him and every reason in the world to head back up to Tilly’s room where she would still be sleeping. There was no logical reason why he should speak to Laszlo and many why he should not.
“Assuming you do know why I am here, why would that matter to me?” said Sparke, still standing.
“Because you and your associate are on a fool’s errand and you will waste your time and the television company’s money unless you have some expert local guidance.”
Sparke smiled and said, “All right, I’m curious. Just before I walk away and leave you, I’ll listen for two minutes. Why do you think we’re here?”
“Ha, that’s too easy,” said Laszlo. “Your colleague and, what is the term? paramour, Professor Pink, leaves a trail around her that a blind man could follow. Does she have any idea that people can read what she writes on her little blog or on her social media? Why do people do that?”
“You read her social media posts?” said Sparke.
“I have to,” said Laszlo indignantly, “since you basically don’t exist online. How else am I to know what you are doing?” He spoke as though Sparke had failed to understand some basic rule of life.
For a long moment, Sparke thought of how nice it would be to go upstairs to Tilly’s room, climb back into bed and forget ever meeting Laszlo. But Tilly would still be there for a while, there really was no harm in listening to Laszlo and it was almost a relief to find himself engaged in something as harmless as listening to a mad obsessive in a hotel foyer at seven in the morning. Besides, Sparke would need to find out what was driving Laszlo to take such an interest in him if he wanted to stop it happening in the future.
“I give in,” said Sparke. “Why on earth would you want to know what am I doing in my life?”
“How else could I help you?” said Laszlo.
“Help me with what?”
“Help you on this silly little escapade you are on of course.”
Sparke sat down and waved to the waiter to bring him another coffee. “The stage is yours, Professor Laszlo. By the way, is that your real name?”
Laszlo ignored Sparke and leaned forward in his seat, folding his hands over his knees.
“According to the website of Professor Pink’s organization, she is taking part in, what they laughingly call, a ‘significant field trip’ to the Middle East. The cretin who wrote this nonsense seems sure that it will be the source of ‘exciting updates’ in the future. I’m not certain that I know what an ‘exciting update’ is, but it probably means more internet drivel. At the same time her media sponsor, the execrable Maryam Drysdale-Behier, is announcing a television new series which is, and I quote, ‘sure to captivate the imagination of anyone interested in the rise and fall of the mysterious Templar knights’. I understand that there are millions of such people. It seemed a reasonable assumption that your Professor Pink was helping churn out yet another piece of childish entertainment by chopping history into hamburger meat for the under-educated. Stop me if I go wrong anywhere, please.”
Sparke sipped his second cup of coffee, aware that he should be angry at the slurs Laszlo was heaping on Tilly’s reputation, but even more aware that Laszlo would probably enjoy the experience. He put his cup down. “That’s it?”
“No, of course not. Professor Pink not only let her organization tell the world what she was up to, she also posted on Facebook that she was in London heading out to Amman yesterday. There are only four hotels in Amman that Westerners choose to stay in, so I called them all and found out where you would be. As to the reason for this excursion, I have to make a few simple but logical assumptions. First there is no television glory in simply retelling the story of the Templars, even television viewers want more than that, so there has to be some sort of discovery theme to the project. Second, the most obvious Templar topic that could justify a trip to the Middle East is the most garish of all the legends of that organization, and that is the Silver Scroll. What else is there that gives a patina of respectability which a bona fide archaeologist and historian would require?”
“And you can help in some way?”
“I know I can make the probability of your failure significantly less.”
Sparke smiled and stood up again, “Well this has been very entertaining but I’m leaving you now. Please don’t
try to contact me again or I’ll ask the hotel people to throw you out. There is no way that anyone is going to pay you for any help you might give. Surely that must be obvious to you?”
Laszlo stood up sharply. He was a head shorter than Sparke but wiry, and for a moment Sparke thought he was going to punch him.
“What makes you so sure that I am here peddling my services? You think you know me so well?”
“Why else would you be here?” said Sparke.
“You are being obtuse. This is my fault for over-estimating you. I am here to offer my help. Despite your coarse behavior last time we met, I felt that I might have some slight debt to you. Moreover, I also wanted to help someone whom I thought deserved it. You see, I thought you were different.
“Look around you, Mr. Sparke, and you will see that the world is full of plodding fools who only look for evidence that supports their existing prejudices and expectations. Virtually no one ever tries to see the world with open eyes and tries to actively uncover things that could be genuinely challenging. I thought that you were one of those exceptions and that made you someone worthy of help and support. I was wrong. Good day.”
Laszlo spun on his heel and strode across the hotel lobby, his heels clicking on the marble floor leaving Sparke alone wondering for the thousandth time in his life what made people behave the way they did.
Cracked
Like an old brown tooth the outer wall of the Accursed Tower cracked and then split. The Arab tunnels under the foundations and the repeated blows by their heavy missiles were more than the stones could take.
The structure went from a massive, solid fortification to a pile of loose stone blocks balanced on each other, then to a cascade of collapsing rubble.
Terror washed over the Christian defenders as the sound of the collapse was greeted moments later by a roar from the Saracen camp.
The first uncoordinated Arab attack was beaten off in desperate hand to hand combat. The breach had come sooner than anyone expected and Saracen preparations were not in place for the assault. The end, though, was inevitable.
The Templar Scroll: Book six in the series Page 16