by Simon Toyne
A breeze tumbled down the narrow street bringing warm air and a smell of food, which reminded her how hungry she was. She drifted upwards, drawn to the stall from which the tempting aromas had come. It sold flat breads and dips, another reminder of how the city had sucked up different influences over the centuries. For all the bloody history that had swirled around the Citadel, and all the religious wars that had been waged in its shadow, all that now remained of those lost empires were the solid staples of architecture and good food.
Liv fished a banknote out of the petty cash envelope and exchanged it for a triangular piece of bread, studded with seeds, and a tub of baba ghanoush. She scooped up the thick paste and shovelled it into her mouth. It was smoky and garlicky, a mixture of toasted sesame oil, roasted aubergine, and cumin with some other spices dancing around in the background. It was the most delicious thing she had ever eaten. She dipped the bread back in the pot, and had just loaded it up again when her phone rang in her pocket. She stuffed the bread in her mouth and reached for it.
‘Hello,’ she said through a mouthful of food.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Rawls yelled down the phone. Liv groaned inwardly. She’d turned her phone on when she’d left the newspaper offices so the Ruinologist could contact her; she’d forgotten all about Rawls.
‘I’m worried sick over here,’ he hollered. ‘I just saw you on CNN getting bundled into the back of a police cruiser. What the hell’s going on over there?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Liv replied through a mouthful of food. ‘I’m fine.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So why didn’t you call me? I told the girl at the office to get you to call me.’
‘Must’ve slipped her mind. She seemed a little ditzy.’
‘So tell me what’s going on.’
This was exactly the conversation she’d hoped to avoid. ‘I’m just trying to find out what happened to my brother,’ she said. ‘I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.’
‘You sound out of breath.’
‘I am out of breath. I’m walking quickly up a really steep hill.’
‘Oh right. Well you still shouldn’t be wheezing that way. You need to look after yourself. You should quit smoking.’
Liv realized that, despite the high-stress situation she found herself in, she hadn’t craved a cigarette in hours. ‘I think I have,’ she said.
‘Good. That’s good. Listen, I need you to do one thing for me.’ Here it was. She’d known he couldn’t be calling out of overwhelming concern for her wellbeing. ‘Write down this number,’ he said.
‘Hold on.’ She grabbed her pen and scribbled the number on her hand.
‘Who’s this?’ she asked.
‘It’s that traffic cop you watched give birth to twins the other night.’
‘Bonnie?’
‘Yeah, Bonnie. Listen I know this is a real bad time, but I need that story to run this weekend. I still got a hole in the Lifestyle section, so I need you to call her up and smooth the way for someone else to pick up the story, OK?’
‘I’ll call her right now. Anything else?’
‘No, that’s it. Just you be careful – and take lots of notes.’ Liv smiled.
‘I’m always careful,’ she said. Then she hung up.
Rawls snapped his phone shut and closed his front door. He was late for a fundraiser over at City Hall and wanted to meet the guy everyone was tipping as the next mayor. It always paid to get close to the incoming king.
He slid behind the wheel of his Mustang, absolutely nothing to do with his midlife crisis, and was about to turn the key in the ignition when he heard the tap on the window. He turned and saw the wide muzzle of a gun pointing at him. The man who held it motioned for him to wind the window down. He was wearing some kind of red windcheater and had a beard that looked wrong on his young, thin face.
Rawls held his hands up and did as he was told. When the window was halfway down a large bottle of mineral water was pushed through the gap. ‘Hold this,’ the gunman said. Rawls took it. ‘What do you want?’ He noticed the fumy smell clinging to the plastic bottle and realized it didn’t contain water at all.
‘I want your silence,’ the man replied, and fired a piece of burning magnesium from the flare gun, through the bottle of turpentine and into Rawls Baker’s chest.
Chapter 91
Bonnie’s answer-phone kicked in just as Liv passed through the large stone arch leading to the square by the public church. Listening to the small-town voice politely asking her to leave a message whilst being confronted with the massive Gothic splendour of the church was a surreal experience.
‘Hey, Bonnie,’ she said, drifting across the square along with the hordes of tourists. ‘This is Liv Adamsen – from the New Jersey Inquirer. Listen, I hope everything’s going great with you and Myron and the twins, and I’m really, really sorry to spring this on you, but I’ve had to leave town for a few days. We love your story, though, so someone else will be calling you real soon to pick right up where I left off. I know they still want to get you into the weekend edition, if that’s OK. Listen, I’ll call you when I’m back in town. Take care.’ She hung up and passed through the second archway.
She emerged from the shadow, squinted up into the brightness – and stopped. There in front of her, rising up like a wall of darkness, was the Citadel. Seeing it this close was both terrifying and awe inspiring. Liv’s eyes lifted to the summit then dropped slowly down, following the path of her brother’s fall. As her gaze reached the bottom she saw a large crowd of people gathered next to a low stone wall. One of them, a woman with long blonde hair and a long dress, was holding her arms out by her sides. The sight sent ice spiders scuttling across Liv’s skin. For one awful moment she thought the ghost of her brother was standing there. The crowds of tourists bumped her as they pushed past, nudging her closer to the group, until she began to see a blaze of colour at the centre of the crowd. It was a sea of flowers, laid there by strangers and looking now as if they had seeped up through the broken flagstones and bloomed in silent tribute to the man who had cracked them. Liv’s eyes moved across them, reading hidden meanings in their colours and forms: yellow daffodils for respect, dark crimson roses for mourning, rosemary for remembrance, and snowdrops for hope. Cards stuck out here and there like the sails of boats half-sunk in a shallow sea. Liv picked one up and felt a cold finger run down her spine when she saw what was on it. There were two words ‘Mala Martyr’, and above them, filling the uppermost part of the card, was a large ‘T’.
‘Miss Adamsen?’
Liv whipped her head round, instinctively leaning away from the voice as her eyes sought the source of it.
Standing over her was a stylish woman in her fifties wearing a charcoal grey pinstripe suit a few shades darker than her precisely cut hair. She switched her gaze from Liv to the flowers stretching out on the ground behind her, then back again.
‘Dr Anata?’ Liv asked, rising up to greet her. The woman smiled and held out her hand. Liv shook it. ‘But how did you know it was me?’
‘I’ve just come from a television news studio,’ the woman said, leaning in conspiratorially. ‘And you, my dear, are very much breaking news.’
Liv glanced nervously across at the crowd. Their attention was currently split between the mountain and the spectacle of the silent woman holding her arms out. No one was looking at her.
‘Shall we go somewhere a little quieter?’ Dr Anata suggested, gesturing further along the embankment to where a small army of plastic tables spilled out from several cafés.
Liv looked back at the shrine marking the place where her brother had died, then nodded, and followed Miriam as she led her away.
The van pulled up by the wall of the old town close to the southern gate. Cornelius glanced at the screen. The arrow remained steady, pointing to a spot by the dry moat on the old embankment. The girl hadn’t moved for the last few minutes.
He slipped out of the passenger sea
t and held the door open. Kutlar closed the electronic notebook, handed it to Cornelius and slid stiffly across the seat to join him on the pavement. The drop down to the ground was not high but the moment his foot connected with the street it felt as if someone had shot him in the leg again. He gritted his teeth against the pain, determined not to appear weak; felt the sweat beading up beneath his shirt. He held on to the door to steady himself, his head drooping forward as he forced his leg to straighten. In his peripheral vision he could see Cornelius’s boots pointing in his direction. Waiting. There was no way he could do this on his own.
Kutlar reached into his pocket and pulled out the bottle of pills he had been denying himself for the last few hours, unscrewed the top and tipped a few gel capsules into his damp palm. The label said he was supposed to take one every four hours. He threw two into his mouth, nearly gagging as he dry swallowed them down.
He looked up and past Cornelius towards the Southern gate. She was somewhere in the old town. And as he was the only one who knew what she looked like, and bikes were the only things allowed up the steep, ancient streets, they were going to have to walk. He stuffed the pills back in his pocket, let go of the van and started limping towards the ticket booths by the entrance. His leg was already numb by the time he was halfway there.
Chapter 92
The café was heaving, even though it was set back from the embankment and away from the main drag. It was slightly less popular than the other cafés as it had no clear view of the Citadel, but Liv could still feel its presence all the way through the stone building that blocked it out. It was like a shadow made solid, or a storm coming. She sat opposite the Ruinologist, away from the crowds and facing the wall, while a brisk young waiter in a white apron and black waistcoat took their orders. He tore off the order chit and trapped it beneath the ashtray.
‘So,’ Miriam said as soon as he was out of earshot, ‘how can I help?’
Liv placed her notebook on the table. The card she’d picked up was still in her hand. She turned it over and re-read the words:
T
MALA
MARTYR
‘How about telling me what this means,’ she said, sliding it across the table.
‘All right,’ Miriam said. ‘But first you must tell me something.’ She pointed at the T. ‘You said you’d seen marks on your brother’s body. Was this one of them?’
Liv flipped to the first page of her notebook and turned the pad round to reveal the rough drawing she’d made of Samuel’s body. ‘It was branded on his arm,’ she said.
Miriam stared down at the network of scars, transfixed by their savage beauty. She quickly closed the notebook as the waiter reappeared and placed their drinks on the paper tablecloth. ‘It’s called the Tau,’ she said, the moment he scurried off again. ‘It’s a very powerful and ancient symbol, as old as this land which took its name.’
Liv frowned, not following how the word ‘Tau’ could become ‘Turkey’.
‘I’m talking about the land upon which the Citadel stands,’ Dr Anata said, sensing her confusion. She nodded towards the distant peaks, just visible between the buildings, their jagged outlines like teeth against the sky. ‘The kingdom of the Tau.’
Liv followed her gaze, remembering the map in her guidebook and the mountain range that curled around the city and stretched across the country like a spine. ‘The Taurus mountains,’ she said, the first syllable now heavy with new meaning.
Dr Anata nodded. ‘In order for you to properly understand the importance of the Tau, and what it means to this place, you need to know a little history.’ She leaned forward, steepling her long, silver-ringed fingers above the pristine white of the paper tablecloth. ‘The first records of human life in this region describe a struggle between two warring tribes, each seeking dominance over the land. One was called the Yahweh. They lived in caves halfway up a mountain, and were believed to protect a sacred relic that gave them great power. Even in those prehistoric times other tribes revered, or at least feared them so much that they made pilgrimages to the mountain, bringing offerings of food and livestock to the gods they believed lived here.
‘In time a town grew up, prospering from the pilgrims who came to the mountain to give offerings and partake of the miraculous waters that flowed from the ground and was said to bestow good health and long life on all who drank them. A public church emerged to look after the temporal interests of the Citadel, and to preach the word of God passed down from the mountain in written form. In these scriptures the name of God was written as YHWH, which translates as Jehovah or Yahweh – the same name as their tribe. It described how the world was made and how men came to populate it. Anyone who questioned this official version was branded a heretic and hunted down by ruthless warrior-priests riding under a banner bearing the symbol of the Citadel’s divine authority.’ She pointed at the sign of the T. ‘The Tau. The one true cross. The symbol of the relic that had first given them power over others. The symbol of the Sacrament.’
Cornelius stopped just short of the great stone archway leading into the public square and flipped open the notebook to check the signal. His arrow had moved closer, but the girl’s pointed to the same spot.
He glanced back down the steep street towards Kutlar. He was about twenty feet behind, struggling stiff-legged up the hill, the front of his shirt wet with sweat, each halting step the same rhythmical cousin of the one that preceded it: the bad leg slowly swinging forward, landing gently on the ground, the good leg hopping quickly forward to put as little weight on it as possible.
Cornelius planned to shoot him with the silenced gun in his pocket once he’d identified the girl, then prop him on one of the benches lining the embankment. It would hopefully shock the girl into obedience so she would walk down the hill on her own, though he also had a syringe full of Haldol in his pocket if necessary. He watched Kutlar’s metronomic progression towards him. Waited until he had almost caught up, then glanced back down at the screen. The girl still hadn’t moved. He closed the notebook, tucked it into his pocket and headed into the shadow of the arch.
Chapter 93
Liv looked at the T-symbol – the Tau. She’d read a lot about the Sacrament on the flight over, never dreaming it would somehow be connected to her brother’s death.
‘The fact your brother had this mark on his arm means he had knowledge of the Sacrament,’ the Ruinologist continued. ‘He may have been trying to share it.’
Liv remembered what Arkadian had said: Solve the mystery of the Sacrament, solve the mystery of Samuel’s death. She looked up at Dr Anata. ‘You must have come to your own conclusions about what the Sacrament might be,’ she said.
The Ruinologist shook her head. ‘Whenever I feel I’m about to grasp it, it always eludes me. I can tell you what it isn’t. It’s not the cross of Christ, as some people believe. Compared to the religious order inside that mountain, Christ is a relative newcomer. So it isn’t His crown of thorns either, or the spear that pierced His side, or the Holy Grail He drank from. These are all myths perpetuated by the Citadel over the years as diversions to obscure the Sacrament’s true identity.’
‘Then how do we know there’s anything there at all?’ Liv said. ‘If no one’s ever seen it.’
‘You can’t build the world’s biggest religion on just a rumour.’
‘Can’t you? Think about it. You’ve got these two prehistoric tribes fighting it out. To get the upper hand, one holes up in this mountain and claims it’s got some divine weapon. Maybe there’s a drought or an eclipse and they claim they did it. People start believing they have power and treat the tribe like gods. They like it, so they keep up the bluff. So long as no one finds out there’s nothing there, the bluff still works. Wind forward thousands of years and people still believe it, only now a massive religion has been built on it.’ She thought of Samuel walking away from her. Telling her he wanted to get closer to God. ‘And if my brother found that out, discovered after everything he’d been through that the one thi
ng keeping him going, his faith, was actually built on – nothing . . .’
Miriam saw the tears in Liv’s eyes. ‘But there is something there,’ she said. ‘Something with power.’ She picked up her bottle of water and looked at the picture on the label. ‘Let me ask you this . . .’ She poured water into her glass and her silver rings clinked against the bottle. ‘What do you want from life? What do we all want? We want health, happiness, a long life, right? Same now as it ever was. The most ancient of our ancestors, the ones who first made fire and sharpened sticks to protect themselves against the wild beasts, they wanted exactly the same things: and the mountain existed even then, and so did the holy men within it. And those simple tribesfolk, who just wanted to live a little bit longer and not get sick, they worshipped those people, not because of some clever rumour, but because the people in the mountain lived a long, long time, and disease did not touch them. Tell me, when you think of God, what image comes to mind?’
Liv shrugged. ‘A man with a long white beard.’
‘Where do you think that image comes from?’ She turned the bottle round and pointed to the picture of the Citadel on the label. ‘The earliest man looked up at this mountain and saw occasional glimpses of the gods who lived there; men with long hair and long white beards. Old, old men in a time when you were lucky to live past thirty.