Quest

by Richard Ben Sapir

  Hawkins put the ballpoint tip on the paper, and the pen did not move.

  “Anything. Draw anything,” said Rawson.

  The pen rose and then came down hard on the paper, stabbing and stabbing and stabbing, until Rawson took the pen out of the poor man’s hand.

  “Hawkins,” Rawson said, trying to make eye contact with the man, lowering himself almost to a squat. “Look at me. Listen. You may not be able to allow yourself to understand this now, but you were not at fault. You were given bad orders in a strange situation for which no one trained you or prepared you.”

  “I didn’t have to stab someone.”

  “Oh, yes you did. And worse. It was not your mistake.”

  “Don’t try to help, please,” said the man, turning his head away.

  Rawson left, thinking there were now two victims from the New York incident. He didn’t intend to become the third. When he went off, he would know what he was really looking for. He suspected but was not certain that the Crown should not be that concerned over just a cellar, even one with great gems, even the Tilbury. But he didn’t know.

  If Witt-Dawlings could issue hysterical and contradictory orders for this Elizabeth, Rawson was certain no one did for the first Elizabeth. She was a great monarch in a treacherous time. If she had commissioned a cellar with gems in it and then locked it up, there had to have been a reason. There had to be good cause why the cellar was not royally brandished on some state occasion to add to the appearance of her power. It was Elizabeth I who had decided to hide something in the first place, he was sure. And this was confirmed when some quick research turned up little more than a few sentences in old, outdated schoolbooks. There were no pictures of the Tilbury. No royal decrees about the Tilbury. All those gems and all that gold, locked away like some blemish under the heavy makeup of a castle.

  Four hundred years away from human sight, and supposedly still there, according to the cover story. Why did England want everyone to believe they had never lost it?

  “I do think you are wasting your time, Captain. No one is allowed into that section of the Round Tower. That’s where the Tilbury Cellar is,” said the deputy governor of Windsor Castle.

  He had met Rawson at the Norman Gate and escorted him past the quartz-white heathstone walls of the castle. It rose 165 feet over the Thames, dominating the river and the great valley beneath it. He brought Rawson to a small drawing room, too busy with Louis XIV chairs, and portraits in massive gilded frames, and a rug so bare and worn, Rawson knew it had to have some ancient and royal history. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have covered a hallway in Liverpool.

  The phone on the lap-sized desk was just plain old, a big black clunker of a phone.

  “I am sure if you reach Anthony Witt-Dawlings he will authorize access,” said Rawson.

  “I would be most surprised,” said the deputy governor, a man in a plain gray suit, with a plain grayish face, and very neat white hair. The hands were blue-veined. He lifted the heavy receiver and asked an operator simply for “Sir Anthony.”

  When he hung up, he said, “I’m sorry, there must be some misunderstanding, Captain. Sir Anthony can’t recall you.”

  “Excuse me,” said Rawson and grabbed the receiver and asked for Sir Anthony.

  “You can’t do that, Captain,” said the deputy governor.

  “Just did,” said Rawson. “Hello, Sir Anthony, Harry Rawson here.”

  “What are you doing? What on earth are you doing?” came Sir Anthony’s voice. He was blazing.

  “Going about the Queen’s business,” said Rawson.

  “Why aren’t you in New York City? What are you doing there? You were supposed to be discreet. You’re dragging our name into things. We were promised someone who was discreet, Captain.”

  “Dragging the Queen’s name into Windsor Castle, Sir Anthony?”

  “Your name with it, Rawson.”

  “I am here. If you are not going to at least give me access in Windsor, I really can’t go on.”

  “You gave your word.”

  “Let’s strike this bargain, Sir Anthony. You give me one remotely logical reason why I should be denied access to special sections of the Round Tower and I will be on a Concorde to New York City before dusk.”

  “Because no one is to know anything is amiss.”

  “Well, good. Why?”

  Sir Anthony paused. Finally, he said: “There will be someone for you tomorrow at the Round Tower. I am most disappointed in you. Most disappointed that you would bargain in Windsor itself.”

  Rawson thought otherwise. It was a most proper place to bargain. When knights pledged themselves to their sovereigns, there were always obligations on both sides. If the Queen’s secretary refused relevant information, Harry Rawson would refuse to do the Queen’s bidding, and what a wonderful place to do it in, Windsor Castle, the most royal of all castles in England, first built by William the Conqueror because legend had said this was where King Arthur and the Round Table had met. But more properly built because it controlled the Thames River and was a day’s foot march to London for its garrison. There were reasons for things, and just because Sir Anthony considered tradition some irrational form of holy worship didn’t mean that Harry Rawson, who knew better, had to support it. Sir Anthony had gotten someone steeped in history because he really didn’t understand history. What he really wanted was someone steeped in myth, and oblivious to history.

  Rawson was met at the cruel hour of 8:00 A.M. by an elderly sergeant major who took him into the massive three-story Round Tower and then gave him a set of old iron keys to an iron-studded oak door that was blackened with age.

  “I’ll be here, sir, when you get out,” said the sergeant major.

  The door was heavy, and swinging it open felt like wrenching a boulder. The sergeant major not only didn’t help, he didn’t even bother to look. Apparently, he had lived at Windsor a while. Passageways, unexplained visitors, and tradition were like the weather to him.

  Rawson tried to adjust his eyes, to see something. The passageway was dark as a stone womb, without a single wire promising some switch somewhere to modern lighting installed as a convenience in later ages. Luckily, Rawson had carried a little pocketknife and penlight since he was twelve, when his governess thought it was a good idea that he always be prepared for the little nuisances in life.

  The massive heathstone blocks dressed almost a thousand years before were dark gray under his small beam, unrefreshed by the rains that made the exterior of Windsor sparkle almost quartz-white-new with each downpour. The stones were dank from the nearby well of the tower, now boarded over, so Rawson had read, but vital for early defense. No castle or city built without access to water ever survived a siege. The dark, narrow passage felt as though it were closing in on him. The leather of his feet on stone made a soft shuffle like an old man, and he realized he walked this way because he was stooped. He was over six feet and this passage was built for the normal height of a knight, five foot five. It smelled like the moist warren of underearth, and his elbows could touch the sides so that he not only stooped but tended to walk sideways. His light hit a metal gate ahead of him. He ran the penlight up and down both sides and did not see a keyhole large enough for anything the sergeant major back in the light of the twentieth century had given him.

  So he gave the gate a good shove with his shoulder and felt something gritty smash into his eyes. He could not blink it free. Carefully, he wiped his eyes with a handkerchief and then shone the light on the cloth. Orangish streaks stained the white linen. Rust. The gate had been rusted through.

  Rawson stepped over the gate, crushing some of the weak fragments of iron underfoot. To his right was a small stone room, with wood petrified black and iron parts rusted orange and decayed. It looked like a small printing press, with some of the pieces obviously removed. They lay in a mound to the right. It was not, of course, a printing press. Such a thing wasn’t in use in England then.

  But the rising central bar of the platform
told Rawson it was a thing totally appropriate for its age. They called it a “scavenger’s daughter” back then. You placed the person over the bar and then folded him back until his spine snapped, an old torture device probably left unused once the area was designated for the Tilbury.

  But why hide such a glory in a torture chamber? Rawson pressed on until his light hit a stone wall. There was only one entrance to this passage. The Round Tower was Windsor’s castle keep, which meant it was the last redoubt if the castle were falling. It had no entrance on any ground level but would force attackers to mount narrow stairs on the side. It had the thickest walls of any part of Windsor, and in this safest stone hole of this safest tower, with only one entrance, Elizabeth had placed the Tilbury.

  Harry Rawson was standing in what had once been the absolutely safest place in England. His light hit a round gold fog, glistening back at him. It was knee-high and horizontal, on a black rock pedestal, probably basalt.

  The pedestal was set into the center of a five-by-five-foot room, on the same side of the passage as the scavenger’s daughter. Rawson flashed his beam back down the passage. There were only two rooms in the passage.

  He stepped into the room, lowering himself to a knee. The golden haze on the basalt block was unmistakable, like the imprint of a round yellow pan, a foot and a half in diameter. On this part, they hadn’t deceived him. Something gold probably did sit here for four hundred years. Gold in contact with another substance for centuries transferred molecules. Here was its four-hundred-year golden fingerprint. They weren’t lying.

  And what would they do with the Tilbury if Rawson should recover it? Put it back here? Was that what a captain in Her Majesty’s Royal Argyle Sutherlanders was supposed to devote his life to, pouring in his painfully learned skills and, if need be, his blood?

  He shone his light on the walls. It was a small cell, probably previously used to keep those to be tortured. A cell with a black basalt block in the middle. The block did not seem set into the floor but placed on it. Small chisel marks bit neatly into the heathstone floor at its base, like some irregular border.

  Rawson felt something sharp cut through the tweed of his slacks where he knelt. He lifted the knee and duck-waddled backward.

  He shone the light down in front of him to see what had caused the pain. Of course. The heathstone floor had been cut there. He had been kneeling with all the pressure of his body on one point, and that point held chiseled stone words.

  This belongs to England forever. I leave it to sovereign and subject alike, that England should rule free and strong—Elizabeth R.

  It was a royal request that just might explain why different royal houses had left such a valuable piece untouched, specifically Charles II, who had to flee the country. There was not an unbroken line between the Elizabeths, but much turmoil, including the beheading of one monarch.

  Rawson read the words again and then shone the light back to the irregular border beneath the basalt. It wasn’t a border. Those had to be letters also, the bottoms of letters, hidden under the basalt pedestal.

  He leaned forward and rammed the basalt block with his shoulder at a low point, like some rugby player in scrum. The block moved only three inches. His shoulder throbbed. Basalt, as it always had been, was stronger than flesh and bone. Rawson hit it again with the other shoulder. He got another three inches and could see there was still more writing, so he offered up his poor left shoulder for another blow and, with searing pain, got it back to where there was space above a carved line: the top of the inscription.

  The square space was paler where the basalt had protected it from centuries of air. It was Latin, but the quotation, which Rawson translated to himself, was not from Rome.

  You shall reign over all things, whatsoever the air touches.

  “No,” bellowed Rawson in the little cell and almost hit his head standing up. “No. It couldn’t be. It has to be.” He almost laughed. He almost danced. He almost cried and shouted hosannahs to the close hard walls. But all he said was “no,” again here in this logically safest place in all Elizabethan England.

  He had read a hidden sentence every educated person would have recognized in Elizabeth’s age. It had come from a Bavarian minnesinger, Wolfram von Eschenbach. But he was only one of scores of poets who wrote about this.

  It was the very thing of Arthurian myths, of Galahad and Lancelot and that great quest in search of it. There were as many tales, it seemed, as there were societies in Europe: the French and German and Celtic versions; the supposition that a follower, Joseph of Arimathea, had brought it to Glastonbury in England, where it was later lost; the rumor that it had originally come to Southern France, a tale that had prompted the German Gestapo during World War II to sweep those provinces in search of it. But then Hitler always was an absurd romantic, a mass murderer who ached for legitimacy.

  It was more than just the most important Christian relic. It had been elevated to a level of salvation only accorded Christ Himself. It was the great myth of the Middle Ages and for centuries thereafter.

  No wonder they covered the inscription with a basalt block. No wonder each monarch left its container, the Tilbury, for the next. No wonder even George VI in modern times would be concerned only about the loss of the Tilbury in the Cheltham train robbery.

  You shall reign over all things, whatsoever the air touches.

  The words were meaningless today. But every learned person who would naturally speak Latin, as the Bavarian naturally composed in it, would understand the translation, where it had come from and what it meant.

  It was von Eschenbach in Parzival, meaningless to most people today but instantly recognizable to the successors of Elizabeth I. That’s how they knew, and that’s why they left it for England.

  Bent over, his eyes tearing from iron rust, his shoulders aching from his body battle with the basalt block, his head aching from the strain of following a penlight down a narrow stone passage in the deepest safe place of England’s most royal castle, Harry Rawson of the Queen’s Argyle Sutherlanders, a proud and noble regiment, of Eton and Sandhurst, son of Lord Rawson, whose ancestor had carried a pike with William the Conqueror, for which he earned a goodly patch of Saxon land and a minor knighthood, understood it all. He knew a lifetime was the least he could devote to this search, and he knew that what the Tilbury Cellar hid was perhaps the only object in the sixteenth century that could inspire a despairing monarch to brace her nation with her new fierce soul against the greatest fleet ever assembled, a fleet so vast that it would give its name to every large battle fleet thereafter. The Armada.

  WINCHESTER, ENGLAND, 1588

  Her Most High, Mighty, and Magnificent Empress Elizabeth, by the Grace of God Queen of England, France, Ireland, and Virginia, Defender of the Faith, refused her normal summer duties, despite pleas from her closest lords.

  Now more than ever, she was needed to make her routine summer sojourns to her lords, spending time in their manors, reaffirming their loyalty and her sovereignty.

  The Spanish empire had assembled more than ninety galleons, full galleons cannoned and manned to the portholes, and half again as many smaller ships. An enormous war fleet never before seen in a world where a nation would consider itself well equipped to have five galleons in its war fleet. It was the Armada and it was coming against England and her Queen to punish them for “their reformist heresy and insolence.”

  There was hardly a subject who did not understand punishment in a time when people were boiled alive in pitch, pulled apart by plough horses driven in opposite directions, bent backward until the spine cracked, and brought to painful death as “was torture itself to Christian ears to hear it.”

  And against this vengeful behemoth was a small English fleet, some of it little more than pirates who had been raiding Spanish wealth in the Americas and even sacking a city or two along the Spanish coast, further infuriating Phillip II, His Most Catholic Majesty of Spain. And worse, many of the lords and soldiers of England needed to repel S
pain were themselves Catholics who warily watched the more radical Protestants gaining strength.

  If ever a land needed an active monarch to hold it together it was fair England. And Elizabeth had not moved from Winchester while the army that stood between London and the Channel languished near the salt marshes of Tilbury field.

  And Her Most High, Mighty, and Magnificent Empress Elizabeth, by the Grace of God Queen of England, France, Ireland, and Virginia, Defender of the Faith, danced with young ladies in her residence at Winchester and drank the light wines of the countryside, and played with her handsomest lords as though, some said, she was determined to enjoy her last days. Even if it were not so, the rumors of such folly did enough damage to demand they be refuted in the person of Elizabeth herself.

  Thus, when the Duke de Cota, Luis y Gonzalez y Gonzalez y Cota, arrived in Plymouth on a small bark requesting sanctuary and an audience with the Queen, the last thing any of her Protestant lords wanted was for her to be exposed to some deceitful compromise in her weakened state. This had to be a trick to get to her alone with de Cota, known to be among the most virulently intolerant of Papists, his very name the symbol of what Protestants would suffer should Spain triumph.

  It did not matter that a British privateer had verified that no less than seven Spanish ships of the line had been chasing this de Cota. It did not matter that he swore he was not even Catholic anymore or that he had a jeweled chalice for Her Majesty.

  Such was the state of England looking at the doom gathering in the Spanish ports that many thought this was all some Spanish trick for Phillip II to sneak the Duke de Cota into Elizabeth’s chambers and there personally break her will, which, in these dreadful summer months, too many lords feared could happen to their Virgin Queen.

  But as in other times of crisis, courage, dressed as cold reason, prevailed among Englishmen at Plymouth Harbor.

  “The Spanish think themselves above such base endeavors as the use of spies. They not only do not know the mind of Her Majesty, I doubt from their last message they even care,” said one lord who had counseled Her Majesty. “But if they did, it would not be for the likes of the Duke de Cota to swindle a hidden plea for surrender. He is more the measure of the man who would be sent to crucify our pathetic Protestant remnants should we lose.”