Tilly took out her phone and peered at the screen for a few moments. "I am due to go to Paris next week for that conference," she said. "No reason why I can´t do my preparation here rather than in Edinburgh."
"Great, settled then. All those pancakes made me hungry. Fancy finding some breakfast?"
They turned left and walked out of the park and into the town.
"We can go and see that salt mine if you like," said Sparke.
"You certainly have a way with women," smiled Tilly, putting her phone back into her bag. The quiet of the park was abruptly broken by the sound of the first few bars of Wagner’s "Ride of the Valkyries". It took Sparke a moment to realize that it was his own phone. Incoming calls were rare for him, and this ringtone had been reserved for calls coming from one specific person. Sparke glanced at Tilly and lifted the phone to his ear.
"Hello, Karin," he said.
"Peter, you are well?" Karin´s soft Bavarian accent acted like a time machine for Sparke. It took an effort for him to remember that they no longer worked together.
"Very well, thanks" he said. "And you?"
"We have not spoken for a long time."
"Indeed. Is there any special reason for this call, or is it purely social?"
"Well, since you ask, your name came up in conversation yesterday. I had a call from our mutual friend in the Swiss Federal Emergency Response Organization. He speaks very highly of you."
"You had a call from a Swiss government official on a Saturday? Must have been urgent."
"Not urgent," said Karin, "but important. It seems that they are having a major project to review how Swiss responders work with international organizations. They feel they have room for improvement and want some expert external expertise. It seems that you were involved in a local incident yesterday, so they thought of you."
"Flattering, but why call you? They know I don´t work with your firm anymore."
"That´s exactly why they called. You know, of course, that we have a long-standing contract with them?"
"I remember signing it."
"They want to make sure that if they approach you, we will not raise any objections. Our Swiss friends are very careful about contracts. It is not a major thing. They will have a two-day conference in the mountains and they want to invite you."
"And how do you feel about that?"
"We are very relaxed about it. If you feel that you can do it, and that it will not hurt the relationship our company has with them, we will be supportive."
"Ah, you want to make sure that I don´t say nasty things about the company?"
"That´s not what I was thinking, but now that you raise it, we are keen to keep the relationship with them on a stable basis."
"You have nothing to worry about," said Sparke. "I have no interest in bad mouthing a company I did so much to help create."
"Bad mouthing?" said Karin.
"It means insulting. I promise I won´t say anything rude about you." Sparke thought for a moment. "Will you want me to sign some sort of agreement? I don´t want to annoy Dieter from Compliance."
"That shouldn´t be necessary," said Karin briskly, "but I will ask him when I see him next."
"When you see him next? I thought Dieter and you were getting married?"
"We have decided not to move ahead with that. It was a mutual decision."
Suddenly, Sparke felt like a petulant idiot. His departure from the firm had been sudden and shocking, a bigger shock than even his divorce some years earlier, and it was still raw for him.
"Karin, I´m sorry," he said.
"You were not to know. We haven't told many people yet. But how are you, I mean really, are you still running around exploring with your professor friend from Scotland?"
"Tilly?" said Sparke. "Yes, in fact she is here with me now."
"Oh," said Karin, softly.
Locals
The bodies were frozen into a single, solid mass. Frost coated their beards and hair. The blood that had flowed from their wounds had turned into hard, crimson ice. Each body faced the same way, feet towards the doorway. Salvatore walked round the mound of corpses and peered at them, looking for any indications as to who they might have been and how they had died.
Dead men don´t bleed for long but the trails of their blood ran vertically from their wounds, so they had been killed only moments before being stacked in this room like firewood. Near the pile of bodies, at the entrance to the smaller room, was a thick, nearly black pool of frozen blood. This is where the killing had been done, the men had been butchered, then piled neatly as the last of their lifeblood had drained from them.
He crouched down to look at the bodies. There was nothing that might show who these men were. Their outer clothing had been stripped from them and whatever items they had brought to this small castle had been removed. The men he could see on the top of the pile had their hands bound behind them. Each man seemed only to have a single wound. Their throats were slit deeply and cleanly, obviously by a hand practiced in killing with a blade. Salvatore had seen many wounded men and it was clear that each cut had been made with a single blow, the edges clean and straight.
There were over a dozen bodies, some had well-groomed beards, all looked fit and healthy and of fighting age. He left the corpses and explored the rest of the building.
It took him only a few minutes and he knew that he would find nothing. Anyone who would take the horse feed from the castle stables and rip the boots from dead men's feet would not leave anything of interest or value lying around. The kitchen was stripped down the firewood for the ovens. There was a water pump, but no bucket.
It was only when he walked along the low passageway along the fort wall that faced directly towards the valley that he stopped. Two small windows punctured the outer wall, bringing light and providing a panoramic view over the valley below. Against this wall, above knee height, was a stone bench into which three holes had been cut, each a little more than a foot wide. These were the latrines for the castle garrison. The waste would drop straight down the cliff face to the valley. Salvatore stopped as he passed the last latrine. The first two had been empty, but this last one was partly blocked by a large piece of fabric frozen to the stone.
With the tip of his sword, he flicked the cloth out of the hole. It was frozen solid and streaked with human waste. It was not a rag. It was the emblem of the Duke of Savoy, the flag that had once flown from the highest point of the castle, now dumped in the lowest place that could be found in the building. In a fort that had been stripped of every usable item, this had been discarded.
Salvatore walked back to the front gate, mounted his horse and began the descent to his men in the valley.
The Templar troop had made good use of the rest time. The horses were standing by the water´s edge, the men taking the chance to eat some dry bread.
On the other side of the stream, Salvatore saw the figure of a peasant digging at a drainage ditch with a long shovel, repairing damage from the winter frost and getting ready for the spring melt-waters. Ignoring his own men, Salvatore rode through the stream to where the peasant stood.
A hundred paces behind the man stood a solid stone farmhouse. From here, the castle and the road leading to it were clearly visible. In a high, quiet valley like this it would be impossible for anyone in that building not to have seen what had been happening on the hillside above.
Salvatore reigned in his horse and looked down at the man. He continued to dig at the ditch, ignoring the appearance of the mounted knight who now stood a few yards from him. He was no different from a million other peasant workers across the continent. His heavy clothes had faded from whatever color they had once had into a muddy palate of brown and grey. The late winter cold had forced him to don layers of woolen garments until he resembled an armored man-at-arms.
His clothes were unremarkable, but on his feet he wore good, heavy leather boots, dull now, but still holding some of the polish of a cavalryman. Around his waist there was a broad yell
ow leather belt showing the marks of where a sword scabbard had been stitched, but obviously recently removed.
There was little chance, Salvatore knew, that the man could speak Latin, but many peasants who lived near main roads in this part of Europe could speak pidgin-Frankish.
"Understand me, what I say?" said Salvatore.
The peasant paused in his digging and looked up, but said nothing. He made no attempt to show any sign of respect or deference to Salvatore. No hand reached to his brow to show the universal nodding salute to a social superior. After a lengthy pause, he nodded once towards Salvatore.
"Castle," said Salvatore, gesturing up the hill behind him. "Fight?"
The peasant shifted his weight, leaning against the shovel. He shrugged his shoulders. "Castle," he said. "Strangers."
"Strangers?" said Salvatore.
The peasant nodded, pointing west along the valley towards where the lowlands of Savoy and France lay. "From outside."
"Who killed them?" said Salvatore.
The man shrugged again.
"The castle. Which king, which lord?" said Salvatore.
Again the man shrugged. "Outsiders."
Salvatore leaned down from his saddle and asked the man, "Who is king here, who is lord?"
"King? Lord?" said the man. "No kings here, no lords." He nodded up towards the castle, unable to hide a faint smile. "No soldiers now."
Salvatore turned his horse and rode back to the troop, saying, "Henk, take one man and ride into Sion. Present our compliments to the captain of the guard, or whoever looks to be in charge, and get the lay of the land. Tell the priory that we will be grateful for their hospitality. We'll be there before sundown."
Henk nodded once, turned towards one of his fellow sergeants and issued a few words of command. Then the pair of them mounted and trotted along the valley towards the small city of Sion, hidden by a bend in the road. Once they were gone, Salvatore had the remainder of his troop mount up and then took them along the narrow, high road along the hillside where a chain of small villages clung to the steep slopes. The cold air was still, without the slightest breeze, but the silence was broken by a strange, echoing call from high above them, a single human voice producing a long, ululating cry a little like a Muslim call to prayer.
At each village Salvatore asked the same questions; who was the lord here, who was the king, where were the soldiers? In each village the answer, given in shrugs and single word answers. Whoever claimed lordship of these lands had no soldiers on the ground to carry out his will. Apart from the castle occupied by frozen corpses he had seen that morning, he saw two other fortified positions; a lookout tower and a toll-house, both empty and open to the cold.
As the valley became broader and more flat, the villages on the hillside increased in size. In the growing spring sunshine, the gates were all open and people were scattered around the countryside, mending the winter´s damage to roads and walls, and gathering the first green shoots of spring nettles and dandelion to augment their larders, nearly bare now after the winter. Salvatore spun in his saddle as, again, he heard the strange sound of a single human voice echoing along the walls of the valley. People in the fields turned for a moment, glancing at the line of Templars, then turned back to their work.
Below them, on the floor of the valley, the Templars could now see Sion. It stood on a low rise above flat farmlands, well walled and defended by several watchtowers at the corners and over the road approaches and the river. A few hundred yards downstream, on a steeper, tighter hillock, was the castle. Unlike the other fortifications they had seen, this was clearly occupied; banners flew from the staffs, mounted men could be seen arriving in good order and timber scaffolding was visible at several places.
Salvatore had been given few details of what to expect in this valley, but the castle was a surprise. A large village sat between the Templars and Sion, where the high road dropped down the hillside and joined the main road. The Templars walked their horses through the rough wall and dismounted in the square on front of the church. The roofs of the buildings were still heavy with snow, but the horse trough was unfrozen. Salvatore looked to his troop.
"We are less than an hour from Sion,” he said. "Shields and whites."
At this the men began to untie their heavy black and white war shields from their pack horses and unfold their white Templar surcoats, pulling them over the dark woolen habits they normally wore for traveling. The pennant they rode behind marked them out immediately as Templars, but Salvatore knew the impact of a troop of knights dressed for war. He left them to their preparations and walked around the side of the church to where he knew the house of the priest would be found. The door opened before he reached it.
"Welcome, my good Brother," said the priest with an open smile. "We are rarely honored by a visit from your order. I have called for hot wine for you and your men. Can we offer you the hospitality of our church?"
The priest was young, with a keen, intelligent face and spoke excellent Latin.
"The wine will be welcome," said Salvatore, "but we will not trouble you more. We will be heading for Sion once the horses are rested and watered."
A woman appeared at the door behind the priest, followed by a kitchen boy bearing a heavy, steaming jug and a tray of wooden cups. Salvatore took a cup and the warm, spiced wine flowed through him. He exhaled a steamy cloud of breath into the cold air.
"You have come over the pass," said the priest. "You are the first travelers to come down the valley this season."
Salvatore nodded, then said, "We passed a guard tower high in the valley. It sits on a spur on the north side."
"Yes, there is a castle there. The people call it the Hawk´s Point."
"I saw the garrison. They had been slaughtered and the castle stripped to the stone."
The priest crossed himself. "The Duke´s men. They make themselves obnoxious to the people here."
"Do you know what happened to them?" said Salvatore. "Priests hear everything, I think."
The priest took a sudden interest in his wine cup.
"We have no business with the Duke," said Salvatore. "The Order has no alliance with him, nor interest in his squabbles."
"If you had," said the Priest, "you would have had little chance of making it through the valley alive. The Duke claims lordship of this valley, but his men command no more than the ground their boots cover. He left a garrison here when the winter came. There was never any chance that they would see spring."
"The castle is well appointed, a dozen men could hold it for a year, but they were overcome and butchered like hogs. How can farmers manage to do such things against trained men?"
The priest looked at Salvatore for a moment, obviously weighing up his answer. He opened his mouth to speak but was halted by the sound of another of those long, wavering cries, a long toneless tune from somewhere in the hills behind them. Unlike the other cries, this one brought the people around him to immediate action.
Every man and woman in the village square bolted towards the main gate. The kitchen boy placed the heavy wine jug on the ground and ran towards a narrow staircase built into the walls that encircled the town. Even the priest turned and walked briskly after his flock.
Salvatore waved his men to stay where they were and followed the kitchen boy up to the top of the wall.
The villagers in the fields had dropped their tools and were sprinting headlong back towards the gate, literally running for their lives.
Departures
"Well," said Tilly, "your ex-girlfriend just happened to call you up and let you know that she was single again, eh?"
"That´s not what happened. She called me about some conference they want me to take part in. The fact that she and Dieter from Compliance have split up came up in the conversation, mainly through me being a thoughtless clown."
"Right, that´s dead right," said Tilly, nodding. "She definitely had no intention of letting you know that she was suddenly available."
"Serio
usly," said Sparke, "do you think so?"
"Is a pig's arse pork? Of course she did."
Sparke thought for a moment. His relationship with Karin had never actually come to anything and just at the point where he had thought there might be a future with her, she had announced her engagement to Dieter of the company´s Compliance Department, a man renowned for having a fixed smile and an even more fixed sense of certainty that everything he said was correct.
"It makes no difference," he said. "It was never going to happen. Anyway, how come you´re such an expert on romance?"
"Expert on romance avoidance more like," she said. "The man hasn't been born who could put up with me."
"Really? You must have some appalling personal habits I don´t know about."
"More than you might imagine,” she said. "The thing is, the only men who dare come near me are toxic creeps. Decent blokes treat me like Kryptonite. Anyway, never mind that. What´s this conference you´re going to?"
"The conference? Oh, it´s only a strategy thing about how the Swiss authorities might be able to work more closely with international organizations. I think they´re only asking me along to be polite, you know, after the thing in the tunnel."
"Yes, the thing in the tunnel," said Tilly. "Not something I´m going to forget in a hurry." Tilly gazed out over the cold blue surface of Lake Geneva, obviously lost in thought.
"What about your plans," said Sparke, hoping to recover the good mood they had been sharing. "I mean you’re off to Paris soon, right, for your history conference."
"Hmm, yes, it should be good. If the rumors are right, Professor Annecy might be announcing a pretty interesting find concerning the Templars and your theory about the Swiss connection."
"Will you ask him about Dr. Laszlo´s Prague Parchment? If there is any truth to it at all then Professor Annecy will have heard of it at least."
"Always worth asking," said Tilly. "Now, how about that breakfast?"
***
The Templar Tower: Peter Sparke Book Five Page 15