The Lazarus Vault

by Tom Harper

  Nye Stanton died trying to get it back.

  She felt Doug’s hand on her arm, tugging her away. She thought of her mother: her long, lonely years because her husband had thrown his life away. For what?

  Swallowing her anguish, she closed the bag and slid it across the floor to Joost, who hooked it over his shoulder. She ached like a mother surrendering her child.

  ‘So where do you find your clue?’ Joost asked.

  Concentrate. It helped take the pain away. She looked at the knights’ effigies.

  ‘They don’t open,’ Joost informed her. ‘I tried. In case there was treasure inside, right?’

  She felt dizzy. She leaned on one of the columns for balance. The massy stone reminded her again of the Monsalvat vault.

  Where’s the most valuable place in a church?

  Towards the back of the chapel, the mud floor sloped upwards. Ellie supposed there must be a dais underneath where the altar had once stood. She walked on to it and knelt. Damp seeped into her jeans. She dug her hands into the mud, feeling it ooze around her skin.

  On her right middle finger, something shifted. Blanchard’s ring – she’d worn it so long now she’d forgotten she still had it on. She took her hand out of the mud, slid off the ring and shoved it in her pocket.

  ‘Did you find something?’ Doug asked.

  She plunged her hand back in the mud. ‘Not yet.’

  Halfway down to her elbow, she felt something smooth and solid. She dug in with both hands, scraping like a dog. Doug joined her. Soon they’d excavated a small hole in the silt, down to the old church floor. Through the film of mud that caked the stones, she saw faint lines, like a diagram or a map.

  ‘There’s some sort of picture under here.’

  They redoubled their efforts, scooping away mud to reveal the ghostly outline beneath. Eventually, they’d cleared a hole about a metre square. Joost brought a water bottle and splashed it over the stones. The tide carried away the last residue of mud, revealing the underlying mosaic as clear as the day it was laid.

  They all stared. It looked like a knot, but with straight lines and sharply geometric corners that radiated out like the points of a star or a crown. There was a symmetry to it, almost mathematical, as if it plotted some unknown equation.

  ‘It’s a labyrinth,’ said Doug. ‘On mazy paths … This must be it.’

  ‘But it isn’t a maze,’ Ellie objected. ‘There’s no path. The lines criss-cross each other all over the place.’

  She knelt in the mud and tried to scrape the edges of the mosaic clean. She took a nail file out of her bag and scratched at the stone, feeling for any sort of crack or lip she might lift.

  A shadow fell over her. Joost held the camera pointed at the floor, his face screwed up as he stared at its screen.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Documenting the site. This is art, right? It’s valuable.’ Joost edged around to get a better angle. ‘We’re in France. If the politicians don’t care that Talhouett fucked the environment, maybe they care about the culture.’

  Scratching it to pieces with a nail file isn’t going to look too great on TV. Ignoring the camera, Ellie kept prying at the stones. They wouldn’t budge. The mosaic tiles were almost seamless.

  ‘Maybe there?’ Still filming, Joost pointed to the middle of the design where the lines made a blocky cross. ‘X marks the spot, right?’

  But try as she might, she couldn’t get them loose. She was concentrating so hard she didn’t hear the throb of engines, not until Joost grabbed the collar of her coat and pulled her up. He dragged her to the glassless window. On the far side of the lake, a black 4x4 and two red pickup trucks jolted down a track between the trees.

  ‘Did you bring them here?’

  Ellie was trembling so hard she barely managed to speak. ‘They want to kill us.’

  The absolute terror in her voice dispelled any doubts Joost might have had. He let her go. On the far edge of the lakebed, the vehicles pulled up at the top of the slope. Half a dozen men jumped out: they surveyed the wasteland below, then began sliding down the embankment towards the mudflat.

  ‘Are those guns they’re carrying?’

  ‘I told you, what they’re doing here is very illegal.’ Joost stuffed the camera into the backpack and slung the rifle over his shoulder. ‘If they get caught, it costs hundreds of millions of euros. You think your life is worth more to them?’

  ‘What about the mosaic?’ Doug scrabbled on the floor, desperate. ‘We haven’t found anything yet.’

  ‘You want to be around when they get here? Be my guest.’

  Ellie peered out the window again. The guards were still stuck on the shore, tentatively testing the mud to see if it would hold them. They’d come down on the far side of the lake from the stepping stones: it would take them a while to work their way round.

  ‘Is there another way to get here?’

  ‘Not unless they have a helicopter.’

  From somewhere unseen, a low tremor disturbed the air. It echoed around the bowl of the lake like gunfire. Ellie stared at Joost.

  ‘I hope you were joking.’

  A small helicopter in Talhouett colours swept over the ridge and touched down next to the cars. Two men clambered on to the skids.

  ‘Now what?’

  In the corner, Joost was fumbling something out of his bag. It looked like a pistol, though with an absurdly wide barrel, like something out of a cartoon. He tucked it into his waistband.

  ‘Excuse me, but I think we should get the fuck out of here.’ He ran to the walls and made a stirrup with his hands. ‘Through the window. They see us if we go out the door.’

  Doug took a last look at the mosaic. Ellie didn’t wait. She put her foot in Joost’s hands and let him lift her up to the sill. She squeezed through the narrow Norman window and dropped down on to the rock. Doug followed a moment later, pausing in the gap to help Joost after him.

  The church blocked their view, but the sounds told their own story. Ellie could hear the pitch of the rotors rise as the machine lifted off; the whomp-whomp of the blades as it flew low over the lakebed towards them. It seemed impossible that she could outrun it, but she knew she had to try.

  The stepping stones seemed further apart than before and more treacherous: each time she put a foot down, she thought it would skid out under her and pitch her into the mud. She looked back, to check that Joost was still with them.

  Joost hadn’t come. He was crouching behind the church wall, fiddling with his outsize pistol. Ellie hesitated. The helicopter noise was all around them now, almost on top of her. But Joost still had the backpack.

  A wall of air hit her as the helicopter came up over the church. It almost knocked her flat on the ground. One of the men perched on the skids saw her and aimed his rifle. She put up her hands. I surrender.

  But they hadn’t seen Joost. Tight against the wall, almost directly below the hovering aircraft, he was invisible to them. The helicopter banked, looking for a place to set down. Joost stepped out from his cover.

  A bright light whooshed out of his hands, straight into the helicopter. The cockpit lit up like a supernova. Time seemed to slow down. The helicopter thrashed the air like a dying bird, then plunged to the earth.

  Hypnotised by the dying aircraft, Ellie didn’t see what hit her. All she felt was the impact – the next thing she knew she was flat on her back. Wet mud sucked her in; it seeped up her back; it trickled in her ear. The ground shook. A bright light seared the sky and a crashing roar enveloped her. Hot breath blew against her.

  Then Doug was over her, reaching down, putting an arm under her back and hauling her up. Joost was there too. Behind him, a pillar of flames and black smoke seethed out of the shell of the church. The Normans had built to last, but even they couldn’t withstand that impact. The old walls, eroded by their long immersion, collapsed. The fire swallowed them, belching out the fragments it couldn’t digest in a series of secondary explosions. A piece of rock the size of
a fist flew past Ellie’s head, inches wide. A smaller one grazed her face.

  She crawled forward, bounding from stone to stone like an animal. Debris peppered her back. Shielding her face with her arm, she glanced over her shoulder. Through the smoke, she saw the men from the cars had come down to the shore. Light flashed from the muzzles of their guns.

  ‘Don’t shit yourself!’ Joost called. ‘From this range, they’re shooting wild!’

  More shots came. Not far away, Ellie saw the bullets cutting plumes of mud out of the lakebed.

  ‘Keep moving.’

  They leaped off the final stone and staggered up the incline to the trees. Ellie’s lungs ached; blood was pounding in her ears. She thought she heard a car up the hill to her right, but she carried on regardless. Joost’s hand on her shoulder spun her round.

  ‘Our car’s that way!’ she shouted.

  ‘So are the bad guys.’ Joost slipped off the backpack and gave it to Doug. ‘This is too goddam heavy. I need my arms free for shooting, OK?’

  ‘How are we getting out of here?’ Ellie had been so fixated on crossing the lake, she’d forgotten about the fence.

  But Joost was already heading through the trees. She followed blindly, hoping he knew where he was going. A car door slammed in the distance; a minute later a volley of submachine-gun fire ripped through the forest. Branches snapped; lumps of wood erupted from the dead trees.

  Joost slid to the ground in a narrow defile, in the shadow of a fallen tree trunk. He aimed the rifle and squeezed off two shots. The gunfire stopped for a moment, then came back with renewed ferocity. Several bullets hit the tree trunk, but didn’t get through.

  ‘I think there’s only two of them,’ Joost announced. ‘You said you have a car?’

  ‘We left it in the woods on the other side of the road.’

  He jerked his head back. ‘Two hundred metres that way, you find a tree with a red ribbon tied on it. Behind it there is a hole in the fence. Get your car: I meet you there. The camera’s in the bag. If anything happens to me, you send those pictures to the Green Knights, OK? They know what to do.’

  ‘What about the men with guns?’

  ‘I take care of them.’ Joost fished in the pockets of his flak jacket and pulled out a glass beer bottle filled with clear liquid, a cotton handkerchief and a cigarette lighter. He opened the bottle and poured some of the fluid over the handkerchief, then stuffed it in the bottle’s mouth. Ellie smelled petrol.

  ‘What sort of environmentalist are you?’

  ‘A pissed-off one.’

  He flicked the lighter. Flames flared up from the rag in the bottle. He got to his feet, crouched like a quarterback and threw.

  The bottle hit a tree trunk and shattered over a pile of brushwood. The dead forest lit up like a tinderbox: flames raced through the dry grass and pine needles, spreading in every direction.

  ‘There goes my carbon footprint,’ said Joost. He aimed the rifle through the flames.

  Only afterwards did Ellie realise she’d heard the shots before he pulled the trigger. At the time, all she felt was a surge of confusion, a sense that the order of the world had broken down. A second later she saw why.

  Joost reeled backwards. Blood bloomed from three holes punched in his chest. The gun fell to the ground, and Joost fell with it, sprawling into the undergrowth. He hadn’t thrown his firebomb far: already, the flames were licking back towards him.

  Doug stared, hypnotised. Ellie pulled him away.

  ‘We’ll be next if we don’t get out of here.’

  They ran up the hill to the fence. They found the tree, a plastic red ribbon hanging limp from the branch, and behind it a small segment of fence which came away when they tugged. They crawled through, sprinted across the road and into the forest on the far side. Ellie found herself scampering like a hunted animal, bounding through the woods on all fours as she tried to keep low. Smoke began to drift across the road.

  She saw a flash of silver ahead and changed course. There was the car – undisturbed and unguarded. She almost wrenched the door off its hinges. Doug reversed on to the road, changed gears and floored the accelerator. The smell of burning rubber was lost among the smoke of a far greater inferno building behind them.

  XLII

  London, 1143

  OUR BOAT GLIDES up the Thames. Around Woolwich bend we see London like a blot on the horizon. A white stone tower guards its approach, looming over the whole city. It dwarfs everything. Cranes and scaffolds around it show tributary defences still under construction.

  ‘The city’s well protected,’ I say.

  Hugh, standing by the bow wrapped in a dark cloak, grunts. ‘The tower isn’t there to defend the city. It’s there to dominate it. Even the colour is foreign – the Normans brought white stone across the sea from Caen to build it.’ He grunts. ‘Literally, putting our land under theirs.’

  We’ve travelled together for six weeks now, but the facts I know about Hugh would barely fill eight syllables of verse. He’s English. His family must have made some compromise with the Normans, or he wouldn’t be a knight, but every so often I glimpse the hatred he has for them. I don’t know if he counts me as a Norman. He has so many other reasons to hate me, it’s hard to tell.

  It’s almost eight years since I was last in England. Back then, the country was in its springtime – ripe fields, safe roads, handsome towns and well-loved King Henry. Now, winter has fallen. Civil war has split the country open, and the wound is festering. King Henry died without a son: his nephew, Stephen, seized the crown, but Henry’s daughter, the Empress Maud, contests it. They’ve been trading blows, gaining and losing territory, these past four years.

  As we travel upriver every town we pass has its gates barred and fires set in the watchtowers. Occasionally, we see strange mounds erupting from the flat landscape, the mottes where castles have been thrown up and thrown down again during the war. Some still show the scorch marks: blackened lumps, bruises on the body of the country. Severed heads, in various degrees of decomposition, shrivel on spikes along the riverfront.

  London looks as if it’s preparing for a siege. So many ships crowd its wharves that we need three hours just to reach our mooring. The sheriff’s men ask us hard questions when we land – even the barrel of wine we give them doesn’t deter them. But they don’t find the false bottom in our hull, the mail shirts, shields, swords and spears that give the boat its ballast.

  We find lodgings at an inn on West Chepe. Hugh takes a room on the first floor, across from the mouth of an alley, and pays the innkeeper handsomely to have it to ourselves. He draws two stools up by the window – hour after hour, we sit there and watch, listening to the drinking, gambling and fighting which drifts through the floorboards. London is a city of constant noise and motion – like Troyes at fairtime, but every day and magnified a hundredfold. The smiths and pewterers and carpenters and masons hammer their metal, wood and stone; the hawkers shout in the markets to be heard over the smiths; and the merchants shout to be heard above the rest.

  Down the alley, according to the clerk in Troyes, is the house where Lazar’s debts are settled. I want to go and see it, but Hugh’s worried I’ll be recognised. Two of his men, Beric and Anselm, go and report that the building is locked and shuttered. They pass by twice a day to see if anyone arrives, while I stay confined to the inn, watching men pass beneath the grimy window, trying to make out the features beneath hats, scarves and collars. Even our meals get taken in the room.

  Hours stretch into days. One afternoon I ask Hugh, ‘What did Malegant steal?’

  I’ve been working up my courage for the last hour to say it. I expect him to tell me to shut up. He stays silent so long I think he’s decided to ignore me. At last he says, ‘There are things in this world we can’t understand.’

  ‘You mean you won’t tell me?’

  He frowns. ‘I mean you won’t understand it.’

  He stretches out his legs. ‘There are objects in this world which have power
s we can manufacture. A bucket has the power to draw water. An axe cuts wood. But there are other things we can’t explain. The way a single seed contains an entire tree, or a woman’s belly produces a life.’

  I pick a lump of eel out of the grail-dish on the table and feel it slither down my throat. I lick the salt juice off my fingers and remember the first time I met Ada. She was carrying a dish like this that night.

  ‘You’re speaking in riddles.’

  ‘Because I don’t understand it myself.’

  ‘Then why try so hard to get these objects back?’

  ‘Because I know what they can do, even if I can’t explain it. Their powers are terrifying.’

  ‘Have you seen them?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Can you tell me what they look like?’

  ‘Commonplace. They could be any of the objects in this room. But they have powers …’

  He’s beginning to irritate me. ‘What sort of powers?’

  He waves his hand out the window. ‘Look at England. Ten years ago, this was the happiest country in Christendom. Now it’s a wasteland. That’s the sort of power Malegant stole.’

  And then I see him.

  It’s a Friday afternoon in late January and Hugh’s gone out: I’m sitting on my own. A man comes up the alley and stands there a moment, sniffing the air like a pointer. A beaver-fur hat covers his face, but he’s too cautious. He looks up, alert to danger from any direction, and as his gaze passes over the inn I see him full on. A grey face wrapped in furs, a single eye scanning the street.

  I stifle the urge to draw back. He can’t possibly see me in the dark window, but he might notice the movement. He stands there another moment, then eases forward into the crowds.

  I rush out of the room, down the stairs and into the street. The sun’s almost disappeared, but I can just glimpse the crown of his hat weaving through the throng. He turns right towards the river, along a street that stinks of fish. Fish guts clog the gutters; fallen scales make the cobbles slippery. Half-dead fish flop and flounder in crates stacked by the fishmongers’ doors.