The Crusader's gold jh-2

by David Gibbins

  “It’s your career on the line,” she said. “Anything less than an Augustinian Bible and you’ll be doing the seminar single-handed.”

  “It’s better than that. Far better.” As they approached she could see his face was streaked with sweat despite the chill of the room. He heaved one of the blocks aside and withdrew out of sight into the wall. “Follow me.”

  Moments later Maria was squeezed in beside him, her wavy brown hair and leather jacket covered with dust. Any irritation she may have felt instantly evaporated when she saw what lay before them. The workmen had broken through into a three-foot-wide space within the massive exterior wall of the cathedral. From Maria’s hunched position she could see they were squatting above a ruined spiral staircase, a relic of some previous building phase, which had long ago been blocked off. Three steps below them the well of the staircase was clogged with debris, jumbled chunks that looked like eroded sandstone covered with a pall of red dust. With her body bent double Maria sidled down for a closer look, the spotlight angled directly behind her head.

  “Es estupendo.” The words of her native Spanish came out involuntarily as she stared open-mouthed in disbelief.

  “See what I mean?” Jeremy slid down eagerly beside her. “It’s like Aladdin’s cave.”

  The debris was not discarded masonry, as she’d assumed, but a great mass of brown and yellowed parchment, some compacted like papier-mache but much of it well preserved with letters still plainly visible.

  “It looks like a clean-out of the library,” Jeremy said. “Torn fragments, books damaged beyond repair. It’s all handwritten manuscript, and none of it looks later than the thirteenth century. The architectural historian reckons this staircase became redundant and was sealed up some time before the completion of the north transept in the fourteenth century.”

  Maria shifted sideways and pointed to the spot where her head had obscured the centre in shadow. She was suddenly trembling with excitement.

  “Look,” she exclaimed. “It isn’t all fragments. There’s an intact folio volume.”

  Jeremy reached over with his longer arms and carefully extracted the leather-bound book from its bedding of parchment fragments. While he held it Maria gently blew off the dust and opened the hoary brown cover.

  “Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum.”

  She read out the words slowly, her mind reeling in astonishment. “The Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. And in Latin, which means one of the original copies. Ninth, maybe eighth century.”

  Jeremy peeled off a sheaf of parchment that had become stuck to the back of the volume. With the musty leaves balanced on his hands he began humming quietly to himself, his eyes darting to and fro across the writing. Maria watched bemusedly as he suddenly became silent.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Incredible,” he whispered. “A twelfth-century continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It mentions King Henry II and King John. It must be the latest document anywhere in Old English, the language the Normans tried so hard to suppress. It clinches my thesis once and for all, that the Anglo-Saxon tradition was kept alive in the secret scriptoria of the cathedrals well into the medieval period. If this doesn’t get me my doctorate, nothing will.”

  Maria surveyed the scene in front of them, noting several more intact volumes poking out where they had removed the Bede.

  “This was more than just a clean-out,” she asserted quietly. “It’s always been a mystery why these two seminal works of Anglo-Saxon history were missing from the Hereford library, in a collection with liturgical manuscripts going back to the eighth century. It may have been an overzealous librarian keeping up with the times, making space for more recent works. But it may have been more than that, a deliberate culling of works of Anglo-Saxon history from the library, an attempt to conceal anything the Norman aristocracy saw as subversive.”

  She carefully closed the book and cradled it in her arms, at the same time looking with concern at the fragments of parchment which had broken off and crumbled where Jeremy had extracted the volume from its resting place.

  “We’ll take the Bede and those pages of the Chronicle,” she instructed. “But everything else must remain in situ and the entrance resealed until we can assemble a full conservation team. We can’t afford to expose any more parchment to air.” She peered again at Jeremy, who was cleaning his glasses with a serious look on his face. “And I forgive you.” She grinned. “You may just have stumbled on the greatest treasure trove of early English history ever discovered.”

  As they swivelled round to go, Jeremy caught sight of an anomalous shape protruding from the sea of parchment fragments. It was one end of a wound scroll, something that might be even older than the bound manuscript volumes. Unable to restrain himself, he leaned back to extract it just as Maria was beginning to crawl out.

  He cleared his throat suggestively and Maria looked back towards the bright tungsten light. She saw his guilty expression and then the metre-long scroll perched on top of the Chronicle pages.

  “We must leave it,” she said sharply.

  “Not if you still want to do that seminar this evening.”

  Maria’s curiosity was piqued and she crawled back towards him. Jeremy had unravelled about ten centimetres of the scroll and was holding it so she could see. The radius of a large inscribed circle was visible, and within it she could make out faint forms that looked like outline drawings and tightly written inscriptions.

  She knew what she was looking at even before she reached him. In her own doctoral thesis a decade earlier she had argued that the Hereford Mappa Mundi was a copy, the work of a remarkable artist but not a scholar. It was the only way to account for its most glaring error, the word AFFRICA written across Europe and EUROPA across Africa. The Bishop of Hereford had commissioned the map from Richard of Holdingham, who had prepared a blueprint in his home cathedral of Lincoln, but the final version had been completed in his absence by an artisan at Hereford skilled in calligraphy and illumination but not very literate or accurate. His ignorance was revealed in the finer detail, from small licences he had taken for aesthetic purposes at the expense of credibility to peculiarities in the spelling and geography.

  Now to her astonishment she knew she was looking at the sketch prepared by Richard himself, the cartographer and monk whose vision of the world had fascinated her since her student days. She stared with reverence at the precise, confident hand which had created captions all over the map. Just below Jeremy’s left hand were the faded letters EUROPA, correctly placed over France and Italy. Beside his right hand where he had pulled the scroll open was the elongated form of the British Isles, with Hereford and Lincoln prominently displayed.

  As Jeremy moved the fingers of his right hand to the edge of the parchment she noticed something odd.

  “My God,” she breathed. “The exergue. It’s missing.”

  The elaborate decoration which filled the space between the orb of the world and the square edges of the parchment on the finished Mappa Mundi had clearly been the creation of the artisan alone, a place for decorative features of less interest to Richard, embellishments which could have been tailored to the whim of the cathedral authorities. It explained the bizarre parade of images, from huntsmen and clerics to references to the Roman emperors, which the artisan must have drawn together haphazardly from other maps and manuscripts he had seen.

  In the corner Maria saw that the dedication she had so painstakingly cleaned on the Mappa Mundi was also missing, so it too must have been the work of the artisan rather than the master himself. Richard must have visited the cathedral to discuss the commission but had clearly not been present at the dedication. It solved the mystery of how the misnamed continents had been allowed to remain, mistakes Richard would surely never have countenanced. She felt a pang of disappointment as she looked at the blank space, a sense that Richard was no longer so securely in her grasp, that he had stepped back into the shadowlands of the past.


  As Jeremy shifted slightly, she realised that the mottled brown and yellow of the parchment where the dedication should have been held a defined shape.

  “Angle it towards the light,” she said. “There’s something here.”

  The faded image of a drawing came into view. It was another landmass, an irregular image not much larger than the British Isles wedged into the corner of the parchment.

  “It’s beyond the outer ocean surrounding the world, so it can’t be part of the map,” she said. “It must be Richard’s sketch for one of the continents. Look, you can see where he used his knife to scrape away the ink to try to erase it.”

  Jeremy was craning his head over for a better view, his lank blond forelock hanging directly in front of Maria’s face.

  “I’m not so sure,” he murmured. “It’s somehow vaguely familiar, but not from the Mappa Mundi. Perhaps if I saw it the right way up I might get a better…”

  As his words trailed off they both looked up at each other in astonishment.

  “The Vinland Map,” Maria whispered.

  With her heart racing, she pulled out her magnifying glass and began scrutinising the lines. Only a few weeks earlier they had attended a conference at Yale University on the latest dating evidence for the famous Vinland Map, a drawing now thought to have been a forgery but based on a lost map that pre-dated Columbus by some fifty years, a map which showed a shoreline said to have been discovered by the Vikings centuries earlier to the west of Greenland.

  “It’s incredible,” she exclaimed. “It’s exactly the same. There’s the river leading to the lake and the large inlet lower down. And the legend looks identical, in medieval Latin.”

  With the magnifying glass the faint smudge at the top became legible: Vinlanda Insula a Byarno repa et Leipho socijs.

  “Island of Vinland,” Jeremy murmured. “Discovered by Bjarni and Leif in company.”

  “It proves the authenticity of the image on the Vinland Map beyond doubt!” Maria was flushed with excitement. “But if this is truly the hand of Richard of Holdingham, then it dates more than two centuries earlier than the Vinland Map. You can forget early English history for a while. You may just have discovered the oldest known depiction of North America.”

  They stared at each other in amazement. The Mappa Mundi and this sketch dated from the thirteenth century, almost three centuries before the first European voyages of discovery to the New World, hundreds of years before the first maps of the American shoreline were thought to have been drawn.

  “There’s more writing farther down.”

  Maria had been focussed on the upper part of the depiction and had failed to register a second faint inscription beyond the drawing. She moved her magnifying glass a few inches lower.

  “This definitely isn’t on the Vinland Map,” she said. “It’s in the Roman alphabet, but it isn’t Latin or French. It looks like Old Norse.”

  She passed Jeremy the glass and took the map to hold it for him, tacitly acknowledging his greater expertise in the language of the Vikings.

  “There’s a curious rune here,” he murmured. “It’s set at the beginning of the inscription like the illuminated letter of a medieval text. A single stem with branches on either side, angled up. It looks symmetrical. Five, maybe seven branches altogether, including the stem. Very odd.”

  “Can you make out anything else?”

  “Harald Sigurdsson.” He paused and looked up. “That’s Harald Hardrada, Harald Hard-Ruler, king of Norway. Killed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in his attempt to take the English throne in 1066, only weeks before the Norman Conquest.”

  “It’s not possible,” Maria whispered incredulously. “Go on.”

  “Harald Sigurdsson our King with his thole-companions reached these parts with the treasure of Michelgard,” he slowly translated. “Here they feast with Thor in Valhalla and await the final battle of Ragnarok.”

  He looked up and eyed Maria with disbelief.

  “Isn’t Michelgard the Viking name for Constantinople?”

  For a moment she was too stunned to speak. Then she let the scroll roll up and passed it over.

  “Guard this with your life. Don’t breathe a word of it to anyone.” She picked up the Bede and scrambled hurriedly towards the wall, extracting her cellphone as she went. Just as she was about to crouch through, Jeremy called out excitedly.

  “That rune,” he said. “I knew I’d seen it somewhere before. It’s not a rune at all. I can’t work out why on earth it should be here, but there’s only one thing it can be. It’s the symbol of the Jewish menorah.”

  3

  It’s incredible,” Jack Said. “I knew harald Hardrada and the Vikings had been in Constantinople, but I never dreamt he’d been across the Atlantic. It puts Christopher Columbus in the shade once and for all.”

  “You’ve lost me already,” Costas replied. “Vikings in Constantinople?”

  Jack took a gulp of his coffee and stood up. “Wait here.”

  The two men had been in England for less than an hour, having taken a dawn flight from Turkey direct to the Royal Naval Air Station at Culdrose and transferring by Lynx helicopter to the campus of the International Maritime University nearby. Costas had scheduled his return to England several days before, knowing that once the sub-bottom excavator in the Golden Horn was fully operational, he would be needed to provide technical backup for another IMU field project off the coast of Greenland. For Jack the decision had come only the previous evening, following the extraordinary phone call from his friend Maria de Montijo in Hereford. He had summoned an emergency meeting of the excavation staff and had asked Maurice Hiebermeyer to take over the archaeological supervision on Sea Venture, knowing that his friend would be delighted to accept a role well beyond his usual remit in the deserts of Egypt.

  “You’d better make it quick.” Costas extracted a cellphone from his oil-spattered overalls and checked a text message. “They’re due in any time now.”

  Jack nodded and made his way from the patio where they had been sitting to the open door of his office. He paused to look back over the broad sweep of Carrick Roads, the sinuous estuary which led out from the tip of Cornwall towards the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. From here generations of his ancestors had set sail to shape the destiny of England and make their fortune. Howards had fought with Drake against the Spanish Armada and under Nelson at Trafalgar, had brought back the riches of the Indies and had mapped the farthest reaches of the oceans.

  Jack felt a surge of certainty as he surveyed the scene, knowing that he was maintaining a family tradition that stretched back a thousand years to before the Norman conquest of England. It was Jack’s father who had decided to donate the Cornwall estate to the fledgling International Maritime University, but IMU had been Jack’s dream and he had seen it to fruition. With generous financial backing from Efram Jacobovich, an old friend who had become a software tycoon, the mansion and outbuildings had been transformed into a state-of-the-art research facility that rivalled the world’s best oceanographic institutes. Beside the estuary the old shipyard had been expanded into a sprawling engineering complex, complete with a dry dock facility for the IMU research vessels as well as an experimental tank for submersibles research. On a wooded hill adjoining the complex was the elegant neoclassical building of the Howard Gallery, one of the foremost private collections of art in the world and also a venue for travelling exhibits from the IMU Maritime Museum at Carthage in the Mediterranean. Only a few weeks earlier Jack had inaugurated one of their most stunning exhibits yet, a dazzling display of finds from the Bronze Age Minoan shipwreck they had excavated the previous year. A banner advertisement showing the golden disc and the magnificent bull’s-head sculpture from the wreck adorned the wall facing Jack as he entered his office, a former sixteenth-century drawing room which was now the hub of IMU research and exploration worldwide.

  A few moments later he was back outside with a map of Europe which he unrolled and pinned down
on the patio table using their coffee mugs. Costas drew his chair up as Jack swept his hand from Scandinavia to the Black Sea.

  “The Byzantines called them Varangians,” Jack said. “Tall, blond, terrifying barbarians from the north who served as mercenaries in the Byzantine emperor’s legendary Varangian Guard, the successor of the Praetorian Guard of ancient Rome. In Hardrada’s day the Varangian Guard were mainly Vikings, Norse warriors from Scandinavia whose behaviour fully justified their reputation. They pillaged and burned their way around the Mediterranean, thinly disguised as standard-bearers for the Christian emperor but in reality pagan heroes who returned to their homelands in the north full of tales of bloodlust and booty. By the time they were wiped out by the Crusaders during the Sack of Constantinople in 1204, many of the Guard were English, descendants of Anglo-Saxon warriors who had fled England following the Battle of Hastings in 1066 when William of Normandy defeated King Harold of England.”

  “You mean the other Harold?” Costas queried.

  Jack nodded. “There was Viking blood in all the contestants to the English throne in 1066. The Normans were north-men, descendants of Vikings who had settled in France the century before. King Harold of England’s Anglo-Saxon ancestors were themselves migrants from Denmark and northern Germany. But the only thoroughbred Viking among the contestants in 1066 was Harald Hardrada, King of Norway. He was the most feared of them all, and had learned his trade decades earlier as chief of the Varangian Guard in Constantinople.”

  Costas measured the distance with his hand and shook his head. “That’s over two thousand miles from Norway.”