The Crusader's gold jh-2

by David Gibbins

  “The Crusades were hardly a glorious episode, even if the intention was righteous to begin with,” Costas muttered. “I can’t imagine the sack of Constantinople was quite what the Pope had in mind.”

  “You’d be surprised,” O’Connor said. “The papacy has always had to resist being drawn too far into the secular world, losing sight of the spiritual plane that bonds together all Christians. By the time of the Fourth Crusade the Vatican had developed a real problem with the Eastern Church, schismatics whom they regarded as heretics. It became a feud, and like all feuds led the antagonists to lose reason. Some apologists for the sack of Constantinople even twisted it into God’s actual purpose for the Crusade, punishment for deviating from the true path.”

  “The feeling was reciprocated,” Jeremy added. “The Byzantine eyewitness Niketas Choniates called the Crusaders the forerunners of Antichrist, chief agents of his anticipated ungodly deeds.”

  “The Holy See has always faced temptation from the dark side,” O’Connor continued. “Those who struggle against the devil can so easily end up doing the devil’s work. The Crusades were the ultimate challenge of the Middle Ages, and we did not always overcome. Monstrous tendencies have exploded into history in our moments of weakness. There are those among us who feel we owe a debt for failing to stem the greatest evil of all, the Nazi Holocaust.”

  “So Reksys’ death has nothing to do with the menorah,” Jack said.

  O’Connor paused, then stood. “I fear I may have misled you. His death has everything to do with the menorah. Please bear with me.”

  There was another knock at the door, and O’Connor ushered Maria back in. She sat down, fingering her cellphone. “I’ve got news from Hereford,” she said, looking serious. “Fantastic news. My team from the Oxford Institute has finished excavating the manuscripts from the sealed-up stairway. It’s amazing, the greatest trove of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts ever discovered. It’s like finding the Roman library in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, and it’s going to be just as much work putting the pieces all together again.” She glanced at Jeremy, who was leaning forward in rapt attention. “Unless you’re in a hurry to return to the States, there’s going to be a full-time job looking after all this.”

  “Yes, please,” Jeremy said.

  “So why the glum face?” Costas said.

  “It’s what else they found.” Maria suddenly sounded tense. “Right at the bottom of the stairwell, buried under all the paper and vellum. A skeleton of a man, a tall man, dressed in a monk’s cassock. Hundreds of years old, medieval. His limbs were askew as if he’d been thrown there. And the back of his skull was shattered.”

  There was a stunned silence, and O’Connor paced towards the reproduction of the Mappa Mundi on his wall before turning to face them. “It is as I suspected. In the spring of 1299, Richard of Holdingham, mapmaker, came to this very place, to the isle of Iona. He was accompanying his ailing master, Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, on his final journey. Afterwards Richard went south to Hereford, to oversee the completion of the map he had started fifteen years before. There were errors in the inscriptions he wanted to correct. He had left an exemplar, a sketch for the Hereford monks to work from, and the illuminator had not been very literate. And now we know from his own personal exemplar, the one Jeremy and Maria found, that he wanted to add more, that he had a secret addition he wanted to make in the left-hand corner of the map, where the monks later added the inscription naming him as mapmaker.” O’Connor stopped in front of the fireplace, deep in thought. “We know he spent his final night at Bishop Swinfield’s palace at Bromyard and that he walked the final road to Hereford in the guise of a pilgrim. After that he vanished from history. The corrections were never made. He was never heard of again.”

  “You think he was murdered?” Maria said shakily.

  “I have no doubt of it.”

  “I felt so close to him,” Maria whispered, her voice shaking with emotion and her hands gripping her chair. “I’ve studied him all my life, and I’ve never felt as close to him as I did that evening in the cathedral. It was almost like he was there.”

  “A murder?” Costas looked dumbfounded. “And what was this guy doing on Iona? Can someone tell me what’s going on here?”

  “Yes,” said O’Connor, pulling open a drawer. “Listen to me.”

  A few minutes later O’Connor sat back in his chair and let the others study the maps he had just been showing them. Rolled out over the desk was a large-scale map of northern Britain, and beside it he had placed a plan of the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066. On the large map he had traced a line from the Yorkshire coast near Stamford Bridge up to the northern tip of Scotland and down the west coast to the island of Mull.

  “So Harald Hardrada came here to Iona after the battle.” Jack’s mind was reeling as he struggled to comprehend what O’Connor had just been telling them. He lowered himself back into his chair, and the others followed suit.

  “He must have been in a hell of a state,” Costas said. “Bad enough for the English soldiers who fought him to assume he was dead on the battlefield.”

  “It was a miracle he survived the journey,” O’Connor replied. “He was well looked after. There were about thirty of his warriors altogether, almost all of them grievously wounded, many former Varangian Guards. They were rowed in the two longships by loyal retainers. Some died on the way, some here on Iona.”

  The pieces were beginning to fall together in Jack’s mind. “When Harald finally left Iona to sail west, there was a contingent left behind, loyal followers to await the return of their king.”

  O’Connor looked at him shrewdly and nodded. “They called themselves a felag,” he said. “An ancient Norse term for a fellowship, a secret society.”

  “And who were the felag?” Jack asked.

  “At first they were a few of Harald’s companions, wounded survivors of Stamford Bridge who came with him to the holy isle but elected to stay behind when their king sailed west. They were younger men, warriors Harald had nurtured since his Varangian days, men who still had ambition and fire within them to carry on the cause. They may have included several of Harald’s own sons. Quickly they accrued others around them, never more than twenty in number. Their sworn intent was to keep the flame burning for the return of their king, to do all in their power to ensure that a true Viking once again ruled in England.”

  “Not very realistic after 1066,” Jack said.

  “They hated the Normans and their French Plantagenet successors. Within a few generations the cause of the felag had become the cause of the English. Remember, there was plenty of Viking blood already in England, among those who called themselves Anglo-Saxon. The Viking king Cnut had ruled England in the time of Harald’s youth, and there were huge swathes of the country where Viking raids had led to settlement and intermarriage: in East Anglia, in Northumbria, up here in the western isles. So it was natural that the English, once the enemy of Harald’s Vikings at Stamford Bridge, should unite with them in common cause against the Normans.”

  “They can’t realistically have expected Harald’s return.”

  O’Connor shook his head. “It became a mystical underpinning, a binding force that made the felag one of the most successful secret societies of the Middle Ages. Those few original companions had sworn secrecy to their king, that they would never reveal his survival or his passage west, for fear that the Normans would try to follow or take reprisals. After a few generations, when the return of the king in this life became impossible, they began to look forward to joining Harald at the great Battle of Ragnarok, the final showdown in Norse mythology between good and evil. They would once again stand shoulder to shoulder with their liege, wielding battle-axes alongside him, vanquishing their foes and spreading fear as they had done in the glory days of the Varangians. Their sacred mantra, the oath that bound them in fellowship, became hann til ragnaroks, Old Norse for ‘until Ragnarok,’ until we meet at the end of time.”

  “S
o the name Harald Hardrada passed into history.”

  “Not quite.” O’Connor reached out to his bookcase and handed a volume over to Jack. “Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae, History of the King of England. A medieval bestseller, mostly fictional.”

  “And?”

  “The book responsible for the romantic legend of King Arthur.”

  “Good God,” Jack murmured. “Of course. The once and future king.”

  “Geoffrey was one of the felag, a couple of generations after Harald had gone. They were sworn never to mention the name of their king, but by the middle of the twelfth century the felag had begun to make inroads into English society. In the face of Norman oppression it became expedient to spread the fantasy of an ancient British king, a heroic leader who would one day return to free his people. Peel off the romantic fiction and you’ve got some hard facts.”

  “For King Arthur, read Harald Hardrada,” Jack murmured. “For the Knights of the Round Table, read the Varangian Guard.”

  “It’s what you said about Atlantis,” Costas added. “Behind every myth there’s some reality.”

  “Yes, but people had been debating the Atlantis myth for ages,” Jack replied. “This one’s a bolt from the blue.” He turned to O’Connor. “So the felag wasn’t all just mystical?”

  “By no means. By espousing the English cause they easily gained adherents, and as the generations passed the felag came to represent the great and the good among those who claimed Anglo-Saxon and Viking roots. They had little hope of infiltrating the Norman aristocracy, so by the time the last of the original Varangians had died, most of the felag were churchmen, pagans in disguise. The Church was the one area where Englishmen of Anglo-Saxon and Viking blood could still wield power, and the felag used it to their utmost advantage. By the end of the twelfth century their influence reached as far as Rome, and the membership included churchmen in Europe with English connections. Jacobus de Voragine, Richard of Holdingham’s master and one of the senior clergymen in Italy, was the bastard child of an English mother who claimed descent from King Cnut. On several occasions there were even members among the College of Cardinals in the Vatican.”

  “So Richard of Holdingham was one of the felag,” Maria said, her voice subdued.

  “He was the last of the true felag, of the continuous line from Hardrada.”

  “True felag?”

  O’Connor paused, clearly troubled. “Early on there was a schism. You can compare it to the struggle in the Church we’ve just been talking about, against the temptation of the devil. We don’t know when it happened or who it was, but it was someone who had seen the menorah with his own eyes, one of the original companions who had chosen to stay behind. A Judas in the midst of the felag. The menorah had already been a secret symbol of kingship to Harald himself, worth far more to his prestige than its weight in gold, and after his departure it became elevated even further as a symbol of the felag, another part of the ritual that bound them together. But where some saw sacred cause, others saw gold. It attracted avarice, greed.”

  “Like the Holy Grail,” Costas suggested. “To some a mystical quest, an allegory for some great revelation about Christianity. To others a golden cup.”

  “Exactly. To those who could not resist, the search for Harald’s treasure became paramount, an obsession. Secretly they set up their own fellowship, their own felag, with the sole intent of finding the menorah. Those who remained true sensed the malignant force in their midst. Precious knowledge of Harald’s voyage had returned from over the western ocean, knowledge they were able to conceal from those who would use it with ill intent. The knowledge was only ever entrusted to one man, who would pass it on to the next appointed man, master to apprentice, as long as the line could be sustained.”

  “I’m beginning to understand,” Jack said slowly. “Jacobus de Voragine, Richard of Holdingham.”

  O’Connor nodded. “They were the last. Somehow the line had survived for over a hundred years following its greatest crisis, in 1170. In that year Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered by followers of King Henry II in his own cathedral. Becket’s ascendancy had been the time of greatest power for the true felag, and his death was the beginning of the end.”

  “Thomas Becket was a member of the felag?” Jack exclaimed in astonishment.

  “And the holder of the knowledge,” O’Connor said. “The knights who hacked him down were not only seeking vengeance for Henry II.”

  “Did they get what they wanted?”

  “He refused to reveal any secrets, and in their rage they murdered him. They were reviled in England and joined the Third Crusade, ostensibly to seek absolution for their crime. They became known as the Knights of the Blooded Hand, for all these men had scars across their palms where they had cut themselves to form a blood pact. Their quest had gained its own mystique, its own rituals, though their allegiance to the cause of Harald Hadrada was a sham. They began to seek the other Jewish treasure, the treasure that Harald had left behind when he escaped from Byzantium with his Varangian companions. The golden table from the Jewish Temple, the Table of the Shewbread.”

  “But that was in Constantinople.”

  O’Connor nodded. “The knights were all butchered before they could get there, by Saladin and his Muslim warriors before the walls of Jerusalem. But another one did get to Constantinople, a generation later, in 1204.”

  “That’s the date of the Fourth Crusade,” Costas said. “What we’ve been looking for in the Golden Horn. The chain and everything.”

  It was suddenly cold in the cell-like room, a chill breeze seeping through a crack in the window. Jack’s mind was racing. “Hang on. The sack of Constantinople. That was Baldwin of Flanders. Are you saying…”

  “He was the one. As a young man Baldwin had been to Rome and had seen the Arch of Titus in the Forum. The arch had become a place of pilgrimage for the felag, a sacred shrine. Richard of Holdingham undoubtedly went there. They not only saw the image of the menorah, but also the other treasures being carried by the Roman soldiers. They knew what the golden table looked like. Baldwin didn’t divert the Crusade to Constantinople by accident, just to do the Venetians’ dirty work. But others, those of the true felag, knew Baldwin’s intent, and got there in secret before him. There were still Varangians in the imperial guard at Constantinople, men for whom the name of Hardrada was hallowed, a legend from the glory days. They were persuaded to take the remaining treasure and sink it at a secret location in the harbour before the Crusaders arrived. All of the Varangians died in the siege, and the location was lost.”

  “Eureka,” Costas murmured. “Not bad for us. Maybe Maurice Heibermeyer’s got something to look forward to in the Golden Horn after all.”

  “By the time of the Fourth Crusade, the schism in the felag had turned into an all-out blood feud,” O’Connor continued. “Retribution was sought for the murder of Thomas Becket, and the cycle began. Even those who still held the cause true lost sight of their nobility, and lived in fear of their lives. Like many secret societies they turned in on themselves, began to self-destruct. Richard of Holdingham must have known he was a marked man once he returned from Iona, once he had torched his master’s body in the longboat in the hallowed felag ritual, sending him off to Valhalla at the very spot where their king had set sail. Their enemies knew that Jacobus must have passed on the knowledge to Richard before he died. There was no apprentice for Richard. His last act was to have been his record on the Mappa Mundi, his assignation of their secret to the future, to be discovered and deciphered by someone when the darkness had passed. And with the murder of Richard the line came to an end.”

  “Do you think he relented in his final moments, when he faced death in the Chained Library?” Jack asked.

  Maria looked at him, her face full of emotion. “He had the spirit of Thomas Becket beside him. He must have known he was going to die whatever he did. I believe he was strong to the end. Fortunately his attacker must have fail
ed to recognise the exemplar of the map for what it was, or maybe Richard had time to conceal it in the library in the moments before he was confronted.”

  “He could never have guessed it would be more than seven hundred years,” Jack murmured.

  “And I fear the darkness is still with us,” O’Connor said.

  “Fine.” Costas was fingering the ring, and held it up between them with the symbol of the menorah clearly visible. He pointed with his other hand at the swastika on the dagger. “And now to the really big question. How do we get from the medieval murder mystery to these bad guys in the twenty-first century?”

  13

  Jack sat enraptured in the book-lined room of the old abbey, amazed at what he was hearing. Thoughts crowded in on his mind, and he struggled to separate them out. He had known they were on the trail of Hardrada since the revelation of the map, that an extraordinary thread tied their discovery in the Golden Horn of Istanbul with the longship in the ice off Greenland, but he could never have guessed that the holy isle of Iona was another link in the chain. And now O’Connor was telling another story, one which moved beyond the thrill of discovery to a world of darkness and danger.

  “With the end of the Crusades and the rise of the Ottoman Empire, any hope of finding the remaining treasure in Constantinople seemed lost,” O’Connor continued. “To the west, all contact with Greenland was severed, and the promised land discovered by the Vikings was forgotten. By the time of the European voyages of discovery in the late fifteenth century, the last of the Knights of the Blooded Hand was long dead. Yet the myth endured, passed from father to son in the greatest of secrecy, by descendants of the felag across Europe and eventually in America. By the nineteenth century, all who received the story thought it fantasy, no more historical than the stories of King Arthur and the Round Table, and held on to their pledge only to sustain a romantic legend. Then it somehow reached the ears of a mad Austrian inventor obsessed with World Ice Theory.”