The Templar Succession

by Mario Reading

  For my nephew, Ole Rummel

  ‘…and what I do shall be done by all men in the years unborn. Yes, they shall talk together across the wide spaces of the earth, and the lover shall hear her lover’s voice although great seas roll between them. Nor perchance will it stop at this; perchance in future time men shall hold converse with the denizens of the stars, and even with the dead who have passed into silence and the darkness.’

  She and Allan, Henry Rider Haggard

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  FIFTY-TWO

  FIFTY-THREE

  FIFTY-FOUR

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FIFTY-SIX

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  FIFTY-NINE

  SIXTY

  SIXTY-ONE

  SIXTY-TWO

  SIXTY-THREE

  SIXTY-FOUR

  SIXTY-FIVE

  SIXTY-SIX

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  SIXTY-NINE

  SEVENTY

  SEVENTY-ONE

  SEVENTY-TWO

  SEVENTY-THREE

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  SEVENTY-SIX

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  SEVENTY-NINE

  EIGHTY

  EIGHTY-ONE

  EPILOGUE

  ONE

  Katohija, Kosovo

  2 September 1998

  The first Lumnije Dardan heard of the event that would shape the rest of her life was the sound of her mother’s raised voice.

  But Jeta Dardan never raised her voice. She was a placid woman, content with her lot, happily married to Burim Dardan, associate professor of politics at Pristina University, and just now taking a well-earned rest at their country cottage in the village of Katohija, a few kilometres north of Pejē, with her husband and her two children, Azem, just turned eighteen, and Lumnije, sixteen and a half.

  The next thing Lumnije heard was the crackle of heavy tyres.

  ‘It is the Serb police,’ she said to herself. ‘They are returning.’

  The Serb police had visited them three times already that summer. They had behaved themselves, for the most part, limiting their aggression to shouting and ordering people to register – Serbs on one side, Albanian Muslims on the other – together with a little minor theft. Chickens, mainly, and the occasional lamb. Always from the Albanians and never from their fellow Serbs. But rumours were rife of more extreme outrages in other parts of the country. And the minority Albanians were understandably cautious. There was a long history of ethnic hatred between the Albanians and their Serbian neighbours.

  Lumnije and her family were Albanian Muslims. The last time the police had come they had ordered any Serbians to paint a large S onto the door of their houses, to differentiate themselves from their non-Christian neighbours. There had been an active discussion amongst the villagers as to whether everybody ought to paint the S onto their doors as a form of protest at this infringement of their liberties by the authorities. It was finally decided, however, that no harm could come from obeying the new law, so the situation had been allowed to lapse into abeyance. The S on every other house was hardly noticed any more.

  Lumnije could hear her mother shouting louder now, her voice interspersed with those of other women, and the raucous, baritone cries of angry and frightened men. She began to run. This was the first time the Serb police had come when the men, too, were resident in the village – her brother Azem on leave from his university studies, and her father, given the political situation, on an enforced sabbatical from his professorial duties. Maybe the Serbs were threatening him? Or angry about something one of the villagers had done? Or Azem was mouthing off to the police in the way young men with pent-up political opinions occasionally do?

  Lumnije burst into the village square, her hair flowing behind her, her dress flattening against the front of her thighs. It was to be the last time in her life that she was ever able to view anything as remotely normal.

  The big trucks she had heard earlier were just pulling up, but paramilitaries on foot, and heavily armed, had infiltrated the village first. Paramilitaries, not policemen.

  The soldiers were splitting the men from the women and herding them into two groups. Lumnije was just in time to see her brother and her father being dragged away from her mother, who was shrieking and screaming, her face afire, her cheeks awash with tears.

  Lumnije stopped in her tracks. No one had ever dared treat her family with disrespect.

  Now Lumnije added her voice to the screaming and wailing of the women. She ran to her mother’s side. A soldier hurried her on her way with a glancing blow from his boot. Lumnije sprawled on the ground, her dress hoicked up, her underwear showing. The soldiers jeered. Lumnije began to retch.

  The officer in charge of the soldiers ordered all ethnic Serbs to return to their houses. This they did, hurrying away without backward glances, abandoning their neighbours with every appearance of relief.

  Lumnije looked for her father and her brother amongst the men, but she could not see them.

  The Captain of the soldiers took a piece of paper out of his pocket. He consulted it for a moment, then called out her father’s name in a loud voice. The Captain towered by more than a head over his nearby men. His face was square. He had a massive jaw below an unexpectedly feminine nose. He was dressed entirely in camouflage fatigues. A red beret surmounted by a cap badge decorated with a Greek cross was tipped casually over one eye. The man’s face was criss-crossed with charcoal stripes and white chalk, giving him an otherworldly, almost animalistic appearance. Even his webbing was camouflaged. To Lumnije, the man seemed like an alien, transposed by error onto the familiar ground of her childhood.

  Lumnije’s father stepped forward. As the most notable individual amongst the Albanian population of the village, it was natural that he should be called first. He began to protest on behalf of the non-Serb villagers. Lumnije knew the tone he was using well. It was her father’s public voice. His professional voice, the voice he used beyond the confines of the home.

  The Captain unbuckled his holster and raised his pistol. At just this moment, their f
amily dog, Peta, ran in from the periphery of the group, where he had been circling and barking, and leapt into her father’s arms. It was his party trick. The thing he knew would always gain him attention and, if he was absurdly lucky, a treat.

  The Captain’s shot took Peta behind the head. He and her father both fell to the ground. Peta was dead, her father still alive. One of the Serb soldiers ran over and slit her father’s throat with his knife. Then four more soldiers took his body up, dragged it to a nearby Albanian house, threw it inside and followed its passage in with two grenades.

  ‘Three times,’ said the Captain to the howling women. ‘We have killed this filth three times.’

  It was then that the machine guns opened up. Lumnije sat, cradled in her mother’s arms, and watched as the men fell to the ground like scythed corn. Her brother tried to run towards them, shouting for his mother, but he was killed before he took two paces. Any woman who tried to move towards the men was struck down with a rifle butt or, if she was young and pretty, slapped to the ground by a soldier’s hand.

  Later, as the women watched, still wailing and weeping, a bulldozer was brought into the village and the bodies of the men were raised up on the hoist and dumped into an empty truck bed.

  It was at this point, watching the bulldozer manhandling the bodies of her husband and son, that Lumnije’s mother broke. She ran at the Captain, screaming her husband’s name. The Captain shot her. It was done so swiftly, and with such contemptuous dispatch, that, for a moment, Lumnije did not realize her mother, too, was dead.

  One of the soldiers dragged Lumnije to her feet and pushed her towards a small group of young women that was being gathered together at the edge of the village. Lumnije knew them all. Each girl was weeping and shrieking, just like her. Some had covered their heads with kerchieves and scarves in a bid to make themselves less noticeable to the soldiers. Others were too deeply lost in shock even for that. Some of the girls were unable to stay on their feet. When they were raised up they fell down again, like rag dolls. Finally, their friends held them, fearing that the soldiers would lose patience and kill them.

  When the clearing of the men was complete, the girls were loaded onto a covered truck. There were only young women left. The older women and the children had been herded towards the edge of the village and told to leave for Albania. If any turned back, they were warned once and then shot. The bodies of those who disobeyed were loaded onto the same truck that was carrying the dead men.

  Two kilometres out of the village, at an abandoned quarry, there was a snarl-up. The truck containing the young women stopped. Lumnije, her hands shaking, lifted the tarpaulin to see where they were being taken. She saw the truck containing the dead men tipping its contents into a shallow trench. She thought she saw her father and her brother tumbling with the others. She could not see her mother, although she knew she was with them. As she watched, the Serbs threw cornhusks onto the piled-up bodies and lit them. Soon, great plumes of smoke rose into the air. The heat from the fire became so intense that the rubberized tarpaulin of the truck she was sitting in began to smoke.

  The truck lurched forwards. Lumnije hugged the girl beside her. The girl hugged her back. The two young women remained that way, clasped in each other’s arms, for the remainder of the two-hour journey.

  TWO

  It was the Captain himself who came for her in the isolated room in which she was being held. For some time now, Lumnije had been hearing the screams of her friends and other young women she did not know as the soldiers raped them next door. As a result, she had retreated far inside herself to a place nobody could touch. A dark place, of shadows and mist and the shortages of winter. A place which bore no resemblance to the substance of her normal dreams.

  ‘You. Come with me.’

  Lumnije followed the Captain. It was the first time she had been outside the room in thirty-six hours. She had been having her period, and this had saved her from the initial free-for-all that had occurred a few minutes after their arrival in what the soldier who brought her food insisted on calling the ‘rape house’. Now it was her turn.

  As she walked through the main rooms of the house she saw naked girls walking around in a daze – many with dried blood down their legs, over their breasts, on the inside of their thighs. Some were being made to clean with mops and brooms and besoms. Others were lying on the floor as if dead. There were Serb soldiers sprawled everywhere, drinking rakia and beer and smoking Domacica. As she walked behind the Captain the soldiers called out to her, and made foul movements with their hands. Lumnije thought the Captain would hand her over to them, but he continued walking and she followed him. What else could she do?

  He took her to a private room in the back of the house and told her to undress and lie on the bed.

  ‘I am a virgin,’ she said.

  ‘You are all virgins,’ he said. ‘That is the point of this.’

  ‘I do not understand,’ she said.

  ‘You do not need to understand. You are not a human being. You are an Albanian. You were born a whore. I am merely here to remind you of this. Has your period ended?’

  Lumnije nodded.

  ‘Then you stay here sixteen days. I’ve decided to make you exclusively mine. I don’t like sharing. Half these morons that I command are diseased, and they will pass this on to the girls. For my part, I draw the line at catching the clap. I am their Captain. So what I say goes. You must remain in this room at all times. You will not mingle with the other girls. And you will keep yourself clean. Do you understand me? From now on, when I come in, you are at my complete disposal. If you fight, I give you to my soldiers. If you cry, I give you to my soldiers. If you try to talk to me when I do not wish to be spoken to, I give you to my soldiers. Do you understand me?’

  Lumnije nodded again, although she had not understood half of what he had said.

  When the first rape was over, she sat on the bed in the corner of the room and wept in mourning for her virginity. No husband could possibly want her now. An Albanian bride needed to enter her marriage intact. No man in his right mind would wish to father children by a woman who had been soiled by a Serb. From here on in she would be considered ‘touched’. Impure. What had been done to her could never be undone. Her few remaining relatives would turn away from her in shame. Lumnije rocked to and fro, clutching her groin in an effort to minimize the pain of the Captain’s intrusion.

  Later, when the pain began to ebb away, she thought about her father and her brother and her mother, but her memories of them were now overlaid by the horror of their recent deaths. This became her pattern of thought over the next few days – first regret, then realization, finally despair. Outside, she could hear the screams of the other girls as they were taken by whoever felt the urge. But she, for whatever reason – perhaps the Captain’s morbid fear of infection by what he had mysteriously termed ‘the clap’ – was secured from the soldiers inside this room. She was the Captain’s property. As clearly his as if she had been marked by a brand.

  ‘You are lucky,’ said the Captain one day.

  ‘I am lucky?’ said Lumnije.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Captain. ‘You could be with those other ones. Instead you are safely in here with me.’

  Lumnije curled up on the bed and hid her head inside her hands. She could feel the Captain watching her. Could feel his eyes travelling over her body.

  Lumnije hated her body. Hated her femaleness. Hated the way her hair fell across her face. The way her breasts stood up. She wished she might obliterate all that made her desirable to men, but she knew that was an impossible dream.

  So the Captain came back. Sometimes he would be drunk. At these times he used soft words when he was raping her. But the soft words did not help. They only made it worse. She wanted her father’s words. Her brother’s kisses. Not this man’s. She wanted her mother’s arms round her – to smell the starch in her apron – the dough on h
er hands from the bread she was baking. Not this man’s hands, which were rough, and intrusive, and cold as grave ice.

  ‘Why sixteen days?’ she asked him once.

  ‘So you get pregnant,’ he said. ‘Have a Serb baby.’

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘I do not know why. Why is there always a why? Think yourself lucky. Have I mistreated you?’

  Lumnije stayed silent.

  ‘You fucking Albanians have no idea,’ the Captain said. He sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘You know how many I have killed these last six months?’

  Lumnije shook her head.

  He held out his hand. He pointed to the palm with his other hand. ‘Imagine that is full of rice. That is how many I have killed. And still there are more of you. Like locusts. Like ants.’ He raised his hand as if to hit her.

  Lumnije turned towards the wall. She waited a long time. Eventually she heard him get up and walk to the door. He stood there watching her.

  She did not turn round.

  Finally, without a word, he left.

  THREE

  On the fourteenth day of her incarceration Lumnije tried to commit suicide. She tore up the bedsheets and knotted them into ropes. Then she tied the ropes together and attached them to the light bracket. She made a rough noose and placed it round her neck. Then she stood on the bed and jumped off.

  Her weight brought the light bracket down. She lay on the floor and looked up at the hole left in the ceiling.

  One of the soldiers came in, attracted by the noise. He looked at her lying there, and then at the trailing light. He dragged her to her feet by the rope, and for one moment Lumnije thought that he would take her out into the main room and give her to his brothers. But he contented himself with beating her about the arms and shoulders with his belt. She was the Captain’s woman. More would have been inappropriate.

  He unknotted the rope from round her neck and left her lying on the bed. Five minutes later, the Captain came in and beat her some more.

  ‘Will you try this again? If so, you are of no more value to me, and I give you to my men now. Take your clothes off.’