The Babylon Rite

by Tom Knox

  Her eyes ran along the shelves, assessing the pottery of screaming bats, hunched demons, Moche with their limbs removed, Moche women having sex with the dead, or sex with animals. Nina moved down the aisle, examining the pottery of Moche people who deliberately skeletonized their faces.

  The questions thronged. How did these last pots relate to the pottery showing sex with corpses and skeletons? More importantly: how did these pots relate to the death of her boss from Toronto, of her lover? How and why was the horror of Moche culture being re-enacted in the grubby streets of modern Peru? And maybe even in Scotland?

  Jess sat down on a bench in the darkened chambers of the Moche rooms of the Museo Larco and went over what she knew.

  She didn’t doubt that necrophilia actually took place in Moche society, there was too much ceramic and textile evidence for this. People had sex with the dead, and probably quite frequently, judging by the abundance of art dedicated to the theme. But equally some of the pots that showed people with skull-like faces raping women were probably representations of men who had slashed their own faces to look like skulls, cutting off their own lips and noses and slicing off the flesh from the cheeks, men who were maybe allowed to take women at will.

  Imagine a society like that. People with no lips and noses and faces, wandering around, like living screaming skulls. Smiling, eating, having brutal and coercive sex. How did these skull-men avoid infection? How long did they live with these terrible wounds exposed? Weeks, months, years?

  A tourist was gazing at one of the sex pots. A backpacker. Twenty-one or twenty-two. American maybe. And giggling. The backpacker turned to his friend. ‘Jesus, sweetheart, look at this – the guy is getting an enema. Gross!’

  The girlfriend was apparently around the corner, behind a glass pottery cabinet. Jess heard her young voice. ‘Can we go, Todd? This stuff is just … ewww.’

  They drifted away. Jess felt the helplessness weighing her down. She walked out into the patio once more. What a waste it all was, what a terrible waste. All that digging, all that thinking, all those horrific yet exciting discoveries, all those moments of terror or exultation: it had all been for nothing. The TUMP site was closed. Dan was dead. The police were scared, and shutting all the doors. And still the killers were out there. Were they coming after Jess?

  She sighed and looked at the dog. The hairless dog with the sad, sad eyes, so similar to Aztec dogs. As she gazed, she remembered the men in the pyramid. Their accents.

  The way they said the word ulluchu.

  Accent. Aztecs. The Aztecs. Ulluchu. Accent.

  Ulluchu was a pretty strange word. Oo-ll-oo-choo.

  And yet there was one other word which was just like it, from a different culture a thousand years later, four thousand miles away. In Pre-Columbian Mexico.

  The Aztec word.

  Ololiúqiu. And ulluchu.

  They were one and the same.

  40

  Tomar, Portugal

  The grandiose castle and church of medieval Tomar loomed above the small, surrounding town, like the great wooden effigy of a saint held aloft by humble peasant hands.

  Nina and Adam sat sipping bad Portuguese coffee in an inconspicuous corner of the cobbled main square. The palm trees rustled in the December wind, a few shops were already selling lurid, clownish costumes for Carnival alongside Christmas treats: festive pumpkin fritters, broas de mel. Adam startled himself with the realization: it was Christmas Eve. He had lost track of time, like a lonely child at a fairground, bewildered by the fleeing colours. Was he going to ring his dad for Christmas? No, he hadn’t spoken to him in three years, not since they had last come to blows, when Adam was defending his mother.

  He wondered how his mother put up with it all, now he wasn’t there to protect her. His father had never actually hit his mother; but he certainly bullied her, and in the end Adam had found it too much. The urge to protect had made him eventually intervene in one of his parents’ rows, and so he and his father had fought. And yet, now he considered it, maybe his mother was at fault as well: she tolerated it, passive-aggressively. Maybe they both liked it.

  You can’t choose your parents, but you can choose not to be like them.

  What effect had this all had on Adam? He often wondered. Maybe he was drawn to vulnerable women, women he really could protect. Like Alicia. Except he hadn’t protected her, not in the end.

  And what about Nina? She was different to Alicia, much stronger, much more defiant; yet she also had that protectable quality that he found so desirable. And so troubling. He looked her way. She was anxiously scrutinizing an old woman, at the next table.

  ‘I don’t think the Camorra recruit elderly widows,’ Adam said, sipping his scorched black coffee.

  ‘Ach. Who knows who they recruit? There’s something wrong here. I don’t like it. Everyone is staring at us.’

  ‘Everyone is drunk. It’s lunchtime on Christmas Eve.’

  She stared at him. ‘Jesus. Is it really?’

  He could see the hollowness in her eyes, the void where her family should be: yet all killed at their own hands. And now it was Christmas.

  Quickly he tried to fill the gap. ‘Shall we go over it again? The American link. You said you had questions.’

  ‘Did I?’ Her moist gaze was vastly regretful. ‘OK, then, Ad. Tell me.’ The pigeons warbled on their churchly sill: beneath the rose window of São João Baptista.

  ‘I remembered what your, uh, dad said. At Rosslyn. He referred to the Norse serpents carved on the Prentice Pillar. We know there is a strong link between the early Templars and the Scottish court.’ Adam opened his notebook. ‘In 1128 the cousin of St Bernard of Clairvaux, and Hugues de Payens, the founder of the Templar Order, met King David in Scotland, and established one of Europe’s first Templar preceptories, in Scotland. Payens had been on the First Crusade with Henri St Clair, Second Baron of Roslin.’

  ‘Are you going to rehearse all that Holy Blood Da Vinci stuff? Sinclairs sailing to Los Angeles in a coracle—’

  He doodled viciously in his notebook. ‘The St Clairs did have Norse links. The Sinclair lineage dates back to a Viking raider called Hrolf the Ganger, who invaded Normandy in the tenth century. This is all recorded in the Norse sagas. But even without the Sinclairs we know the medieval Scots court had strong Norse connections. The Scots royals intermarried with Viking aristocracy, with the kings of Orkney, and with the Lord of the Isles …’

  ‘Adam. We are on the run from people who killed my family. Hurry up.’

  ‘The graves are also crucial. Those strange little slots. We have seen them in two Templar preceptories – Penhill in Yorkshire, now Trevejo in Spain. As your father says in the book, there are scarcely any others known in Western Europe. Apart from Heysham in Lancashire, England, in the graveyard of Saint Patrick’s church. And I’ve checked this place. Historians know those graves at Saint Patrick in Heysham are Viking – used for interring skeletons, temporarily. So that’s it, Nina: we now see unusual Norse cultural practices were adopted by the Templars.’

  Nina tucked a stray lock of black hair behind a small white ear. Somehow nervous and beautiful at the same time. ‘That doesn’t prove much.’

  ‘Why did the Templars go to Scotland so early in the Order’s history? For what? The Scottish court was hardly rich, and it was at the ends of the earth, as far away from the Holy Land as you can get. What were those first Templars after?’

  ‘The big dark secret?’

  ‘Exactly: this secret technique, this warlike trance, that would make the knights brave and fearless. We know the Templars’ first forays into battle were faltering, and uncertain: they were just a tiny band of men. Two guys on a donkey, the icon of the Templars, the icon we see in Rosslyn. But some Scottish knight with Viking forebears, perhaps a Sinclair, must have told Hugues Payens a secret, on the First Crusade: a way to bind his brethren together, to attract new recruits, something attractively occult and mysterious, the Babylon rite, the group hypnosis, a way to in
culcate sexualized blood lust. And this something was itself a technique the Scots had learned from the Vikings. The Vikings were wild fighters, madly bloodthirsty, like the Templars. And so the Vikings knew the trance, and they got it—’

  ‘From America.’ Nina nodded, unhappily. ‘I do get it, Adam. The Vikings were in America in …’

  ‘In the tenth and eleventh centuries they had several settlements in Newfoundland where they met the natives.’

  ‘That’s still a fucking long way from seventh-century Peru. Tenth-century Newfoundland?’ Nina finished her tiny cup of coffee, and stared at the silt at the bottom. Her expression was morbid.

  The pigeons chattered. Adam sighed. Christmas Eve, and here they were, a long way from anywhere, many miles from home. But maybe there was no home any more. Maybe they were exiled from everything, for ever. So they had to focus on the present because the past was too horrific and the future too frightening.

  Adam sprinted through the rest of his argument. ‘Some cultural practices were shared across pre-Columbian South and North America: human sacrifice, pyramid building, styles of mural painting, for a start. This is a fact. It happens. Look at Indo-European languages, sharing similarities from the Punjab to Portugal. So it’s quite possible the Babylon rite made its way from Peru, where it began, then into Mexico, then further north, even to the east coast of Canada.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Nina, standing, abruptly. ‘The castle will shut soon and I want to get out of here tomorrow.’

  He dropped a few euros in the saucer and hastened after her. Small, determined, fierce and vulnerable, she was striding up the medieval stone steps of glorious Tomar. The path led through the cypresses and pines of the wooded rise, and led to a car park and a scratchy kiosk, where a woman with a faint moustache took their money, and gazed at them with a curious squint.

  A little gate opened. They stepped through. The contrast with the humdrum car park and ticket booth, with the citadel itself was quite stunning.

  The Templar church and castle of Tomar were as ‘monumentally stupendous’ as Archibald McLintock promised in his gazetteer. It was also eerily empty: they were the only tourists, because everyone else was already preparing for Christmas. The vastness of the churches and gardens and battlements and cloisters obliged them to whisper; Adam didn’t know why.

  Together and quickly they explored the dormitories and ambulatories, the monastic kitchens and Renaissance chapterhouse. Then they climbed high steps to the mighty and battlemented walls.

  The views of the town below were contemptuously lofty. Another Templar flag rippled, arrogant and proud, in the stiff, chilly breeze. Nina said, ‘It’s so bloody big.’

  ‘This is where the Templars survived longest in Europe; in fact they never went away,’ Adam said, quoting his own research. ‘They survived because the Portuguese king protected them, and refused to reduce them. Eventually the Portuguese Templars evolved into the Order of Christ. So this Templar citadel became the global headquarters – of the Order of Christ.’

  ‘But what was my dad looking for here? He spent a day here, or at least an afternoon.’

  ‘Pretty sure he didn’t come for the view. Quick. Let’s go down.’

  A claustrophobic stone staircase led them down to the third cloister. The cloister of the washing. The claustro de lavagem. Again they were the only people here. A few Templar gravestones were propped against the delicate marble pillars; in the central patio a crudely carved fountain fluted water into the Christmas air.

  The old knightly graves had pentagrams on them.

  Nina said, very quietly. ‘The Order of Christ, I did them in history, at S Level. The Age of the Explorers. The Order bred all the great Portuguese explorers, right? Like Henry the Navigator. The guys who went to Africa and South America. It’s another link with the Americas. But the wrong way round. I don’t … Wait.’ The whisper was loud. ‘Someone’s following us.’

  Adam looked behind. It was a man in a blue uniform. Emerging from behind a door, and staring in their direction. He relaxed, slightly. ‘Nina, they are about to close early, it’s Christmas Eve. That’s just a guard, waiting for us to go.’

  She shrugged, impatient and frustrated, and walked into the next cloister, the claustro de cimeterio. There were more odd, propped gravestones here, with more silent yet eloquent pentagrams carved on them.

  Pentagrams, thought Adam, buttoning his coat tighter against the cold. How did pentagrams fit in? And the Grail? Those mysteries were still unsolved. And did he really believe his own Viking theory? It was possible, but it was also very tenuous, and it needed more evidence. There was still so much missing.

  They had one more place to visit. Nina rejoined him and they paced to a stone staircase, and quickly climbed the helix of weathered cream marble into a spectacularly vivid and perfectly circular chapel, with a gilded ceiling raised on delicate pillars – a ceiling almost impossibly high above their heads.

  ‘Why’s it so tall?’

  Adam consulted the little guidebook. ‘The Templars used to take communion here on horseback.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes. Apparently. The knights would ride straight in and take mass on their stallions. And it’s round because it is modelled on the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and maybe Solomon’s temple.’

  Nina gazed up at the smoky distant colours of the ceiling. The whole chapel was ornately painted and silvered. Gold and sombre scarlets framed her black, black hair. ‘They really were nuts, weren’t they? Militant ravers. Murderous hippies. Taking communion on horseback. No wonder people suspected they were odd. This and the Babylon rite. Jesus.’ She paused. Then said, quite calmly, ‘Adam, I don’t buy our own theory. I don’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because. Look at this. Look at this place.’ She gestured at the spectacular ceiling of the circular chapel. ‘This is stunning: this isn’t fake.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t believe the Templars were pagan. There is no real evidence for it, yet there is enormous evidence that they were sincerely, even militantly Christian. They built churches everywhere. They were famously devout. They kissed the cross before going into battle. Yet we’re trying to claim they were secret Satanists with a sexy cat fetish? Pfft. It doesn’t pan out. It doesn’t make sense. Just disnae make any sense at all.’

  Her words died away with a faint echo. Adam sighed, deeply. If she was right, they were nowhere closer to solving the problem.

  A secret that gets you killed. The Babylon rite. They’d come halfway across Europe and they were still lost in the ominous dark.

  Nina was sitting on a bench, disconsolate. Adam turned and looked at the exquisite decoration of the pilasters, feeling as if he had nothing else to do. Vegetal motifs adorned every square centimetre: stone vines and painted garlands wove around stone men, snaking into their mouths, and out of their eyes. Just as with the Green Men in the Temple in London. Here were figures and faces intoxicated with the vines of life, spewing the tendrils, eating the greenery.

  A memory returned, unwarranted. You’ve got to eat your greens. A man raping Hannah. Or, even worse, not raping her.

  ‘Bom dia.’

  Adam jumped, the adrenalin thumped. But it was just the guard, again; the official was keen to usher them out and go home for a Portuguese Christmas, for the consoada, the reunion of the family.

  Hastily, they retreated to a bar in the old town by the ancient Tomar synagogue, a bar of drunks, of people on their own, people with no consoada, people like Nina and Adam.

  Nina drank too much and talked about memories of her family. Playing chess with her dad when she was a little girl, playing footie with Hannah by the river in the little Borders town where they grew up. And as she drank more of the cheap vinho tinto, the night got darker and the bar noisier, and the lonely men stared at Nina, and ogled her white skin and her low top and short denim skirt with black tights, and her lips and teeth got more and more stained from the dark Douro wine, an
d her words became more and more slurred and Scottish. Brae. Birl. Skitie. Drookit.

  And Adam sat there thinking how much she reminded him of Alicia, beautiful and drinking and funny and risky, and how much he couldn’t go there, not again, not ever again.

  She stopped talking and gazed distantly at Adam in the blur of the fuzzy night and the tawdry skirl of Brazilian pop music. ‘Aren’t you ever going to try and fuck me?’

  He stared her way. Embarrassed. And aroused. She was drunk and he could understand why she was drunk: the total horror of her recent experiences, the loss of her father and sister. He would be drunk every day in that situation. But this, here and now, was wrong.

  ‘I mean. Am I doing something wrong? Giving out the wrong signals? Don’t ya even want to kiss me at all?’

  He said nothing because he was at a total loss. What should he say?

  ‘Fuck this, then, I’ll find someone else.’

  She stood, quite swayingly drunk. Then she went to the door of the bar and pushed it. And she was gone.

  For a few minutes he remained, riven by indecision. He should go after her. But he didn’t trust himself not to take advantage. He did want her. He’d been captured by her beauty that first time he saw her: the ravenly hair, the slender elusiveness. He wanted her more than he had wanted any woman since Alicia, maybe even more than Alicia. But if he touched her once he would never stop touching her. And if she tried to kiss him he would be unable to resist her red lips and her white skin, the colours of Christmas itself, of berries in the snow—

  But what if she was in trouble? She was drunk, and he had to look after her. They had to look out for each other, they were still being hunted. She could be in trouble now.

  As soon as he stepped outside the bar into the freezing old alley, by the ancient old synagogue, he saw her in the shadows. And the man holding her against a wall.