by C. M. Palov
Overhead the clouds bumped and collided, fusing together and releasing a cold drizzle on their uncovered heads. The light sprinkling soaked MacFarlane’s gray hair, the spiky tufts clinging to his head like a skullcap. Seen in profile, he resembled a fierce Celtic warrior come to life. Although Caedmon suspected the reality was far worse than anything produced by that warlike race of men.
“Yeah, boy! We got it!” Braxton jubilantly shouted.
Sanchez heaved himself out of the hole and rushed over to one of the canvas equipment bags, retrieving a length of rope. He tossed the coiled length at his digging partner.
Edie slipped her hand into his. “I can’t believe it . . . they actually found it,” she whispered.
As Sanchez and Braxton pulled their find to the surface, Caedmon held his breath, about to set his gaze on the most sought-after relic in the history of mankind.
It could have been mine, he jealously thought. Had I but played the game differently.
After several loud grunts and a muttered curse, the box was hauled out of the hole.
Its appearance was met with a stunned silence.
“I don’t think it’s made of gold,” Edie said, garnering a damning glare from Stanford MacFarlane.
“No, it isn’t made of gold,” Caedmon concurred. “A lesser metal. Bronze perhaps. Difficult to say what’s under all the grime.” Moreover, the box was secured on the outside with a large lock for which there was no key.
Braxton ran the back of his hand over his dirt-smudged brow, still panting from his labors. “Maybe the Ark is inside.”
“Open it,” MacFarlane ordered.
With one strong-armed swing of the pickax, the behemoth broke the lock.
His jaw tightly clenched, his gaze resolute, MacFarlane threw back the lid. Everyone stared wide-eyed at the uncovered treasure trove.
Everyone save for Stanford MacFarlane.
“What are those?” MacFarlane pointed an accusing finger at the golden objects that filled the box.
Extending a hand, Caedmon lifted a finely wrought candle-stick out of the chest. Next, he examined a bejeweled gold chalice.
“These are the altar vessels from the destroyed church,” he said, running his hand over an exquisitely fashioned paten. “No doubt the nuns had advance warning that the king’s men were en route to the priory. I imagine they hid these vessels so they wouldn’t be confiscated.” He gestured to the gold objects. “Not exactly a king’s ransom, I admit, but still valuable. You should have no problem finding a buyer for—”
“I’m not interested in earthly profit,” MacFarlane interjected. “My reward will come in the next life.” Turning his head, he pointedly set his gaze upon Edie. Then, like an Old Testament patriarch of old, he very quietly and calmly said, “Kill her.”
The order of execution given, the behemoth raised his pickax.
Caedmon lurched forward.
But anticipating the move, Harliss and Sanchez seized hold of him, barring him from intervening.
“No!” he shouted, violently struggling to free himself.
Not like this! God in heaven, not like this!
CHAPTER 67
“Last night you gave me sixteen hours to find the Ark of the Covenant! I have forty minutes left!” Caedmon yelled, twisting and straining to free himself from his burly captors.
MacFarlane stared at him as he considered the appeal put before him—Michelangelo’s stern-faced Moses come to life.
“Colonel MacFarlane, I know you to be a man of your word,” Edie husked, her eyes flooded with tears, every limb in her body quivering with fright. “Please give Caedmon a chance. Without him, you’ll never find the Ark.”
Pondering it later, Caedmon decided that it was this last caveat that held sway, Edie having cannily played upon MacFarlane’s obsession. Specifically, his fear of never obtaining the object of what was fast proving a most unnatural desire.
Mollified, MacFarlane curtly nodded. “You have exactly forty minutes. If you don’t want to see Miss Miller’s head split open like a Fourth of July watermelon, you will find the Ark of the Covenant.” He dismissively glanced at the gleaming altar vessels in the still-open trunk. “I’m not interested in digging up any more golden trinkets.”
With a stay of execution issued, Braxton lowered the pickax. Glancing at Edie, Caedmon battled a strong desire to bend over and retch.
It’d been close. With one mighty swing, the behemoth would have punched a gaping hole right through her skull.
“I’ll find your bloody gold box,” he muttered, glancing at his watch, the countdown having already begun.
Christ. Forty minutes to find something that had been buried long centuries ago.
The clock ticking away like a blasted gong, he ignored the stricken expression still plastered on Edie’s face. With precious few minutes left, they had to stay focused on the task at hand. To that end, he slowly turned full circle, studying the wintry landscape that surrounded the cloister. Leafless trees. Dead grass. The pillaged walls of the chapel.
There was something here that he wasn’t seeing. But what?
In the distance he heard a loud honking sound. A swan searching for its mate.
Bloody hell.
“Swans and geese,” he murmured, wondering if the answer to Philippa’s riddle could really be so simple. Hoping to curry favor, he turned to MacFarlane. “In the medieval lexicon, the two words are interchangeable, one and the same. And if you’ll recall, there were two geese depicted in the Canterbury window, symbolizing the fact that swans and geese mate for life.”
The older man’s brow furrowed. “I’m not following.”
“The name of this place is Swanley. In the Middle English of the fourteenth century, a ley was a meadowland.”
“I got the clue!” Edie exclaimed, realizing the significance of the place name. “The word Swanley would roughly translate as ‘swan meadow.’ Meaning that we need to start searching for a meadow. Or some swans. Or maybe even both.”
The furrow in MacFarlane’s forehead deepened. “What kind of bullshit are you trying to pull? Swans swim on the water. They don’t flap around on a grassy field,” he bristled, gesturing to the surrounding dell.
“I will be the first to admit that it’s a nonsensical word combination. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that it is highly significant. In the quatrains, Philippa referred to herself as the ‘trusted goose.’ At Canterbury, we discovered a stained glass window in which the Ark of the Covenant was depicted along with two geese in a basket. Now we find ourselves here at Swanley. Trust me. It does mean something.” He turned to Harliss, the keeper of the GPS navigation device. “Is there a lake or pond in the near vicinity?”
Given the go-ahead from his commander, the muscle-bound lackey consulted his handheld device. “Yeah, I got a body of water about two hundred meters east of here.”
“Then I suggest we proceed to said location with all due haste.”
When no objection was raised, he motioned to Harliss to lead the way. Sanchez remained behind at the cloister to pack up the equipment. Braxton, the pickax jauntily swung over his left shoulder, a powerful Desert Eagle pistol clutched in his right hand, pulled up the rear.
As they trooped toward the new destination, bare branches rustled in the damp breeze. Whispering. Warning.
“Please tell me that I’ve got more than thirtysome minutes to live,” Edie said in a lowered voice, furtively glancing at MacFarlane.
“You need to firm up,” he answered in an equally hushed tone, not wanting her to dwell upon that very narrow allotment of time. He knew from experience that it was best to deal with variables that one could command rather than obsess on something beyond one’s grasp.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I need to stand tall. Or stand my ground. Or some silly cliché.” Though she appeared outwardly composed, Caedmon detected an underlying note of panic in her voice.
Worried that Edie might succumb to her fear, he reached over and squeezed her hand. “A
n opening will present itself. It always does. And when that happens, we must seize the moment. No time for second-guessing, right?”
The pep talk having taken hold, she nodded her head, a vengeful gleam in her brown eyes. Caedmon suspected that she, too, entertained a gruesome fantasy that involved a certain behemoth and a very sharp pickax.
A few moments later they arrived at a fish pond that he estimated to be a good ten acres in size. Toward the center of the pond was a spit of land. The swan meadow. In the middle of the small isle, a simple stone cross had been erected. It appeared to have taken root long centuries ago.
“This is looking really, really good,” Edie said, clearly relieved at seeing the cross. “The fish pond would certainly have come under Philippa’s domain as the priory cellaress. Do you think she had the cross placed in the middle of the island as a signpost?”
Caedmon shook his head, disavowing her of the notion. “I suspect the cross was erected before the construction of the priory. However, Philippa would certainly have recognized its significance. As with the Ark of the Covenant, the cross is a point of direct communication between heaven and earth.” He cast a quick sideways glance at MacFarlane, the older man intently staring at the lone cross. As though it were some sort of mystical beacon.
He’d made his case. Thank God.
“It could very well be that before the priory was built, this site was used as a religious shrine,” he continued. Then, gesturing to the surprisingly clear, glassy surface of the pond, he said, “Undoubtedly the fish pond is fed by a natural spring. Such springs were often dedicated to a local saint.”
“Making this a holy site, right?”
Caedmon nodded. “And that would have made the isle a fitting place for Philippa of Canterbury to hide the most sacred relic in all of Christendom.” He gestured to a quartet of small skiffs moored to the nearby bank. “I doubt the local anglers will mind if we make use of their vessels. That said, we should set sail. Groups of two, I think.”
MacFarlane walked over and inspected the small rowboats bobbing on the water. “Gunnery Sergeant, I want you to row across with the woman. Harliss, you wait for Sanchez to arrive with the equipment. Aisquith and I will take the lead.” Orders given, he untied one of the boats, brusquely gesturing for Caedmon to precede him into the vessel.
“Hopefully the old girl is seaworthy,” Caedmon muttered as he took hold of the oars and began the laborious business of rowing toward the isle.
MacFarlane made no reply, his unblinking gaze set upon the limestone Lorelei that stood sentry in the middle of the isle.
For the next several minutes the only sound shared between them was the creak and groan of wood oars repeatedly slicing through the chill water and the occasional honking of the resident swans. The rain had stopped and wispy tendrils of white vapor hovered over the surface of the water, wrapping the pond in a cloying embrace.
No sooner did the prow of the boat butt against the small isle than MacFarlane disembarked, the older man hurriedly sloshing through the calf-high water that lapped the grassy shoreline. Clearly impatient, he motioned for Caedmon to secure the fishing boat to a clump of nearby bushes. A few moments later, Edie and the behemoth docked beside them. Together the four of them made their way to the cross.
Well aware that he had only eighteen minutes left on the clock, Caedmon fingered the worn stone. If a clue had been carved into the cross, the rain gods and wind zephyrs had long since made certain of its erasure.
Undeterred, he walked around to the backside of the cross. As he did, he detected a rigid, nonpliable surface beneath his right wellie. Curious, he sank to his knees, shoving aside the overgrown grass.
“What are you doing?” MacFarlane hissed, hunkering beside him.
“There’s something embedded in the ground. I think it’s a. . . . yes, a plaque of some sort. Do you have a handkerchief or a piece of cloth? I need to wipe clean the surface.”
MacFarlane gestured to the behemoth, wordlessly ordering him to remove the black knit cap that he wore on his head.
Cap in hand, Caedmon began to vigorously rub at what looked to be a bronze plaque some ten inches square, with years of dirt accumulated on the incised surface. As he worked, a shadow fell over him. Glancing up, he saw Edie hovering over his right shoulder, an anxious look on her face. She knew, as did he, that her life still hung in the balance. That the decision as to whether she lived or died could very well hinge on the strangely placed bronze plaque. Fear being a powerful motivator, Caedmon rubbed that much harder.
It took several minutes of determined polishing to reveal a single line of Latin script.
As he stared at the plaque, Caedmon’s heart thudded against his breastbone, utterly staggered by that solitary line of Latin. Like a man who’d just seen a ghost flit past.
“Hic amicitur archa cederis,” he murmured, as though it were a magical incantation.
“What does it mean?” MacFarlane demanded, shouldering him out of the way so that he could examine the plaque.
Caedmon took several deep breaths, collecting himself. “It reads, ‘Here is hidden the Ark of the Covenant.’”
CHAPTER 68
“The corpus delicti is about to be uncovered. But not by me,” Caedmon murmured, standing close enough to Edie that she could feel his body heat. That and his complete and utter anguish at not being the one to uncover the Ark of the Covenant.
She sidled closer to him, a cold breeze setting her teeth to clattering.
Standing a few feet from where Braxton and Sanchez swung and shoveled in unison, they could see that the excavation was already well under way, the stone cross upended in the frenzy that ensued after Caedmon translated the bronze plaque. Believing the inscribed plaque to be no different from a giant X inscribed on a treasure map, MacFarlane’s men hadn’t bothered with running a ground scan, clearly of the consensus that the Ark of the Covenant was buried beneath the cross.
“Incredible to think that it’s been nearly seven hundred years since someone last set eyes on the Ark of the Covenant,” she remarked, if for no other reason than to keep her terror at bay. According to her watch, there were six minutes left to find the Ark. “I now know how Galen of Godmersham felt when he found the Ark on the Plain of Esdraelon.”
“If you’ll recall, he had to fight two other knights to the death for possession of the relic.” Like her, Caedmon intently stared at the deepening hole. “However, if it means coming away with our lives, I will gladly forfeit all claim to the prize.”
“Somehow, I don’t think you have much say in it. Which still leaves the matter of battling the terrible trio.” Having had to endure several minutes of fear-inducing threats when Braxton rowed her over to the isle, the man a blunt instrument in search of a victim, she was acutely aware of the fact that they were outgunned and outnumbered. “I’m not much of a military tactician, but I’m guessing that being out here literally in the middle of nowhere is not to our advantage. Even if we could sneak over and untie a boat, there’s no way we can row to shore fast enough.” At least not fast enough to elude the bullets that would fly from multiple weapons all being fired simultaneously.
“Like you, I fear that Philippa’s fish pond will become a watery grave should we attempt to escape.”
“So, where does that leave us?”
“In a very dire strait,” Caedmon quietly replied, not one for sugarcoating the truth.
Out of the corner of her eye, Edie noticed that MacFarlane had carefully removed several items from the canvas equipment bag that Sanchez had hauled to the isle. Unzipping what appeared to be a waterproof garment bag, he took out a long, flowing white robe and some sort of striped apron. Unconcerned that he had two avid onlookers, he unbuttoned and removed his rain slicker. Raising his arms, he pulled the robe over the top of his cargo pants and military-style sweater. Over that, he donned the apron, belting it at the waist.
Attired in the strange-looking garb, he next opened a padded container from which he removed a gem
-studded item that Edie instantly recognized.
She nudged Caedmon in the ribs. “Look, it’s the Stones of Fire.”
With an air of rehearsed solemnity, Stanford MacFarlane donned the gold breastplate.
“What in the world is he doing?” she whispered out of the corner of her mouth, suddenly wondering if, in addition to being dangerous, their adversary might well be deranged.
“Unless I am greatly mistaken, he’s preparing to view the Ark of the Covenant. Which is why he’s attired in the garb traditionally worn by a Hebrew high priest.”
Edie squinted her eyes, the breastplate not quite as she remembered it. “It looks as though MacFarlane had the twelve stones reset in a new gold setting. Maybe it won’t work and he’ll get blasted to the fire pits of hell. Just like the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
“According to the Bible, it was the twelve stones, not the gold breastplate, that afforded the high priest the necessary protection to interact with the Ark.”
MacFarlane, wearing what could only be called a patronizing sneer, approached them.
“Steadfast faith and the Stones of Fire will ensure my safety,” he announced, evidently having overheard Caedmon’s last remark. “For just as the Ark was constructed per God’s specific instructions to Moses, so, too, the Stones of Fire. As you undoubtedly know, the twelve stones of the holy breastplate were God’s gift to Moses, the first guardian of the Ark.”
“Implying that you have appointed yourself as the new guardian of the Ark,” Caedmon replied.
“I am the ordained guardian of the Ark.”
“Mmmm . . . how very interesting.” Folding his arms over his chest, Caedmon mirthlessly smiled; Edie sensed that he was about to hurl the only weapon left to him—his superior intellect. “Were you aware of the fact that the Stones of Fire once belonged to Lucifer?”
MacFarlane’s eyes narrowed, his angry expression nearly comical.