“It’s strong, but the hole is very small. Bring one of those torches down here and give me some light.” He lowered himself farther, taking his weight on his hands and moving his legs back until he could lie on his belly, then he thrust his fingers into the small hole. The other two men moved back to give him room, although St.
Omer held the torch carefully out and down at arm’s length to provide the light he had been asked for.
St. Clair inched forward until his face was ludicrously close to the wall, and then he shook his head and rolled away. “The air’s blowing upward, but where could it be coming from? This tunnel wall is solid stone, so what we have found must be some kind of a crack in the rock. It makes no sense.” He looked around, then pushed himself back up to his feet and crossed to the pile of tools, where he selected a long pry bar of solid steel and returned to attack the tiny air vent, trying to enlarge it.
Moments later, the wedge-shaped point of the bar broke through, enlarging the hole considerably, and once the penetration had begun it progressed swiftly until the opening was the size of a man’s head. It had begun with the chink at the base of the wall, but as St. Clair kept chipping and picking away at it, the cavity proved to be more in the floor than in the wall, and at one point, prizing at a jagged edge that gave way more suddenly than expected, he staggered and lost his grip on the bar, and it disappeared into the blackness of the hole. All three men 660
KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK AND WHITE
stood motionless, listening to the silence until the clanging echo of the bar’s landing came up to them. None of them needed to point out to the others that it had fallen a long way.
Shortly after that, they tied one of their torches to a length of rope and lowered it into the darkness below, but it showed them nothing other than an apparently vast blackness; and watching the flame flicker and eventually burn out far below—the rope was more than twenty paces long—St. Clair shivered, feeling apprehension crawling between his shoulder blades.
They would not appreciate the reality of what had happened until long afterwards, when logic and exploration had made it clear beyond any doubt, but there, at the beginning of it all, the three men were completely at a loss for understanding of what they had found. It was St. Omer who would eventually arrive at the analogy that explained it to all of them, comparing the chamber below—for it was a vast, square chamber that they had found—and the tunnel in which they stood to a cube and a tube. The cylindrical tube of the tunnel had touched precisely on one of the upper corners of the chamber, closely enough to break through at that single point and create the hole that became the conduit for the air from the chamber beneath. Had the tunnel been dug as little as a hand’s breadth to the right of where it was, the discovery would never have been made and the presence of the chamber underneath might never have been suspected. But the contact was made, the flow of air was Complicities
661
noted, and therein some men thought afterwards to see the Hand of God.
None of the three men present that afternoon had a single thought in his mind of God or divine intervention.
They were nonplussed and unsure of what to do next, and as they stood there, gazing down into the hole in the floor, their last remaining torch began to flicker towards oblivion, its fuel depleted.
“Whatever we do next, it is going to require thought and planning,” de Payens growled, “and we are going to need the others down here. Come, we’ll return later, once we have decided what we should do.”
They returned to the surface, replenishing their torches as they went, and the climb up through the excavations was a silent one, each of the three men involved with his own thoughts on what they had found. As soon as they regained the stables, de Payens called all the brothers to attend a Gathering. St. Agnan and Payn de Montdidier had been on the point of riding out at the head of their scheduled patrol, but the sergeant messenger caught them in time, and they came to the Gathering room with everyone else, wondering what was afoot.
De Payens cut to the essence of his summons as soon as the outer door was securely locked and guarded, once again by Geoffrey Bissot, whose duties as guard of the Gatherings seemed to occur on every occasion when something new and important had to be discussed.
Hugh began by acknowledging St. Agnan and Montdidier, and the fact that their projected patrol would take 662
KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK AND WHITE
them out of the city for the following eight days, but he assured them that by the time they returned, God willing, there would be much for them to do. He instructed St.
Agnan to have his men stand down for the night but be prepared for an early departure the following morning.
They waited, muttering among themselves, while St.
Agnan hurried off to find someone to carry that word to his senior patrol sergeant, and as soon as he returned, de Payens proceeded to describe St. Clair’s discovery and the reflection and reexamination that had led to it. Now, de Payens concluded, thanks to that, and to the accident of the pry bar falling into the abyss, they knew there was
something
, some vast, empty space, beneath the floor of the tunnel in which they had been working at the time of St. Clair’s near-suffocation, and he required all of them to abandon whatever they were working on in the tunnels immediately and to pool their labor and resources to exploit the new discovery and find out just where, if anywhere, it led.
It was approaching time for the evening meal by then, and they adjourned their formal Gathering but remained in the room behind closed doors, joined now by Bissot, where they could talk freely about the discovery and plan their work for the coming days.
They had accumulated a considerable amount of equipment over their years of excavation, and there was no shortage of blocks, pulleys, ropes, and hoisting tackle at hand, and by the next morning the tunnel lengths to the right and left of the opening from the day before were lined with materials to be used in the new excavation.
Complicities
663
But the task facing them was a daunting and disturbing one. They had been told that an enormous space lay beneath them, yet none among them was able to imagine what was there. They knew absolutely nothing, and they were afraid to let their imaginations run away with them.
All that they knew, and the realization was a chastening and worrisome one, was that everything they dislodged beneath their feet fell away into nothingness, dropping silently into a black abyss for a long way before shattering against the rocks or whatever else lay directly underneath. Accordingly, after one single near-disaster when Montdidier almost fell into the pit, every man who worked at enlarging the cavity did so wearing a safety harness, with ropes securely attached to an overhead anchoring tripod. It was only after many hours of work by alternating two-man shifts that someone noticed—and no one could remember afterwards who had remarked upon it first—that the hole at their feet was distinctly tri-angular, converging in a deep V-shape, and that what were apparently walls stretched down and away on each side from what could only be a ceiling.
It soon became obvious that they were looking down into a man-made structure. They had tried several times to illuminate the space beneath, throwing half a score of lit torches down into the blackness, but only half of those had survived the fall, and they lay guttering on the surface below, revealing nothing, until they burned themselves out. Even those torches lowered on a rope showed nothing of what was beneath, and the men had grown 664
KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK AND WHITE
bored with looking at them even before they guttered and died out. But the mere fact that they could feel the rush of clean air, and that the torches had burned out naturally, proved that the air down there was breath-able, and once they had accepted that they were looking down into a chamber of some description, they agreed that someone ought to go down there and have a look at whatever there was to see. St. Clair, as the youngest among them, and also the one who had made the discovery, was the first to be lowered, in a large basket suspended from a hoist, clutching a newly lit torch in one hand and fingering the dagger at his waist with the other, while he gazed about him, dropping lower and lower into the blackness with an elbow hooked around one of the basket’s supporting ropes.
The first thing he discovered, mere moments after leaving the surface above, was that he was in fact in the corner of a room, for his basket swung into the juncture of the walls, and when he brought up his torch to look at them, he saw that they were a dull black, coated with a pitch-like substance so that they absorbed light and radiated none.
He shouted that information up to his companions, and then concentrated on looking about him, breathing deeply and trying not to give in to the feeling that he was being stifled and that the blackness surrounding him was growing ever heavier and more dense as they lowered him deeper and deeper. His mind focused suddenly on the fact that his sword, which was seldom far from his hand, now lay far above him, on the bed in his sleeping Complicities
665
cell, where he had thrown it before coming down into the tunnels, and although logic told him he would have no need of it here, he felt defenseless nonetheless, and aware of the puniness of the dagger at his waist.
He became aware, quite unexpectedly, that the basket had reached the floor of the enormous chamber, but so gently had it touched down that only the cessation of movement told him he was resting on a solid surface. He held the torch as high as he could above his head, peering into the surrounding gloom, but he could see nothing at all.
“I’m down,” he called to the watchers above. “Un-loading now.” He reached down and grasped one of the dry torches piled about his legs, then swung his right leg carefully over the edge of the basket and stepped out. He lit the fresh torch from the one he was holding and stooped close to the ground, waving both lights back and forth to see what he could see.
The floor was level, and paved in square stone slabs, each a good long pace to a side, and there was a thin coating of dust on the stones, far less than one might have expected, he thought, until he remembered the steady current of cool air that had been blowing around him since the start of his descent. He stooped lower, looking for a hole in or between the flagstones, something into which he would be able to tuck one of the torches, but there was nothing to be seen, not the slightest crack or unevenness into which he might insert a dagger point. He straightened up again and turned slowly in a complete revolution, peering into the blackness all 666
KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK AND WHITE
around and waving his torches widely in the hope of catching a reflection of some kind from whatever might be there beyond his sight.
Finally, he took a deep breath and stood with his back to the angle of the corner, taking his bearings as well as he was able. When he felt confident that he could maintain a course by following the edges of the flagstones under his feet, he began to walk slowly forward diagonally, stepping from corner to corner, stone by stone, into the chamber, holding one torch low to light his way across the floor and the other high to show him anything that might be seen, while he counted his steps aloud. Then he stopped and glanced up, his eye attracted by movement up there in the corner behind him, and he made out the shape of one of his companions being lowered to join him, another torch flickering in his hand as he sank downward. St. Clair had not been aware of the basket being raised again, his attention had been so tightly focused upon what he was doing. He turned back to his task and kept walking, the cadence of his counting unbroken.
He had reached thirty when he saw the first dim outline of a different shape on the floor ahead of him and he stopped, raising both torches high to give himself as much light as possible. As he did so, he heard a soft step at his back, and André de Montbard spoke into his ear.
“What is it? You see something?”
St. Clair made no attempt to answer, knowing Montbard could see for himself. Instead, he crouched slightly lower and took another step forward, and then another as Montbard drew abreast of him on his left.
Complicities
667
“Something there.”
Again St. Clair offered no response other than to continue to advance until he could see what was in front of him. It appeared to be a jar, or an urn of some kind, and it was merely the closest of an entire array, all uniform in shape and size. He walked until he stood in a wide gap between two ranks of the things, and he could see files of them stretching away from him, disappearing into the gloom ahead. He counted eight on each side, and could see at least ten more parallel ranks of them, eight to a side, with a wide aisle stretching between them.
“They are jars, plain clay jars.” He went closer, until he could see the tops of them. “And they’re sealed, with some kind of wax, I think … They are all sealed. Sealed
jars
?” He looked at de Montbard and raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Jars of
what
? What’s in them?
And why so many of them?” He reached out a hand towards the nearest one, as though to grasp it and tilt it, but before he could touch it de Montbard caught his sleeve, restraining him gently.
“Careful, Stephen. They could be full of oil, or even wine, but if they are what I believe they might be, then we have found what we came looking for, my friend. We have found our treasure.”
“Treasure?” St. Clair’s voice was strained, his disappointment almost tangible. “This is the treasure we’ve been seeking for so long? In clay
pots
?”
“Clay pots, true, but ask yourself what they might contain, Stephen. Ask yourself, too, how long it might have been since anyone but we set foot in this chamber.
668
KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK AND WHITE
And ask yourself then why these jars should have been laid out so carefully here on this floor and then left there.