Now, if I am right, there should be an altar somewhere ahead of us.”
On the point of asking how de Montbard could possibly know that, St. Clair bit back his question and was bleakly unsurprised when they found the promised altar within twenty paces. Despite his lingering disappointment over the clay jars, however, this newest discovery immediately set his pulse hammering again, for it was hardly the kind of altar he had been expecting, and its sheer bulk humbled him. It was immense, unlike any altar he had seen before, larger by far than any altar in any Christian church or basilica that he had visited.
It came into view slowly, seeming to solidify out of the surrounding darkness as they came closer to it, and they heard the footsteps approaching from behind them as Hugh de Payens caught up to them, bringing new light to add to their own. He said nothing to either of them, all his attention reserved for the altar that towered above them, and for a time the three men stood silent, their eyes scanning the planes and highlights of its cliff-like heights. They had approached it from the side, and it was clear from the outset that the top of its sacrificial table could be reached only by means of a broad, high flight of shallow steps that descended from its rear, the bottom-most steps only dimly visible from where they stood. Its frontal surface, stretching left of them, plain and un-adorned as it seemed at first sight, revealed itself on closer inspection as being intricately carved and shaped, Complicities
669
and covered with thousands upon thousands of tiny carved glyphs.
“And there it is,” Montbard whispered. “Exactly as our records described it. The Lore is accurate. The Order is founded on truth.”
“It’s …” St. Clair swallowed, the sounds as he tried to moisten his suddenly dry mouth clearly audible to the others. “This place is not Jewish at all. It cannot be. They abhor graven images.”
De Montbard tilted his head back to gaze upward.
“It’s Egyptian.” A long pause ensued, and then he added, “Everything that is now Jewish came out of Egypt in the beginning, brought out by Moses and his Israelites after centuries of slavery. Our own Lore tells us that. The changes came later, as changes always do, but in the beginning, at the very start of it, it was all Egyptian. And we are looking at the proof of that. This place is ancient beyond imagining, my friends. Moses never returned here to their promised land, but his sons and grandchildren may have stood right here, where we are today, looking up there just like us. We have found the proof of our Order’s tenets.”
“You sound as though you doubted that until now.”
St. Clair’s attempt at raillery fell flat, the challenge in his words lost in the fact that he, too, spoke in a hushed whisper.
“Not for a moment,” Montbard replied in the same tone. “What I meant to say was that our Order is founded upon
demonstrable
proof with this discovery.”
“So be it. I believe you. But what
have
we found?”
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“Knowledge, Brother Stephen. And an altar that is not what it appears to be.”
“Someone else is coming,” Stephen said. They could see another light in the distance. “Is there anything we are not permitted to know? Any sacred secrets?”
It was de Payens who answered this time. “All of these things are secrets, Stephen, and all of them are sacred.
Ah, Goff, I thought that might be you. Look at what we have found. André believes our search is at an end.”
“I confess, I am impressed. It is huge. What is it?”
Godfrey St. Omer was craning his neck to look up at the altar.
“It’s an altar, Godfrey,” de Montbard answered. “The Lore said it would be here.”
“Did it, by God? Then it must be here for a purpose.
Is it hollow? Can we get into it?”
De Montbard shrugged, although St. Omer did not see the gesture. “I don’t know. It is too soon to tell. We will explore it later.”
“Hmm. What about all those jars back there? What’s in them?”
“The treasure we have been looking for.”
That got St. Omer’s attention. He turned his head sharply to look at de Payens, making no attempt to hide his skepticism. “Those things hold the
treasure
?”
His friend nodded. “De Montbard thinks they do …
But he also thinks his altar is not what it appears to be, and that has me curious. Come.”
He led them around to the left, to the front of the altar, until it reared vertically above them, the projecting Complicities
671
shelf of its table forming a straight-edged ceiling above their flickering torches, and St. Clair leaned back on his heels to stare up at it.
“It must be the height of four tall men,” he said, then hesitated. “What’s that up there, that large pattern on the stone? Is it a cross? Here, step back and hold up your torches.”
The light from their combined torches revealed a shallow incision high in the stone, the shape of a cross with a loop at its upper end.
“It is a cross,” St. Omer said, his voice filled with surprise. “Is this then a Christian place?”
Again it was André de Montbard who provided the answer. “It is not a cross, my friend, it is an ankh.”
“A what?”
“An ankh.”
“Then I did hear you correctly. An ankh, is it? What’s an ankh? Is it something Jewish, some Hebrew symbol of religious significance? I thought the Jews abhorred graven images.”
“That is true. Stephen made the same point, just before you arrived. They do.” De Montbard’s voice was reflective, almost musing, and his neck was still craned backward as he gazed up at the ankh above their heads.
“The ankh is a symbol of religious significance, but it is not Jewish, Goff, it is Egyptian, a symbol of life and prosperity, not merely in this world but in the next, the after-world.”
St. Omer was staring at Montbard, his brows creased in a frown. “But we are in King Solomon’s Temple here.
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Are you saying that the ancient Hebrews subscribed to Egyptian beliefs?”
“Well, first of all, we are not in the Temple of Solomon. We must be close by it, perhaps even beneath it, but we are not
in
it. This place is far too large to be the temple. We know that was very small.” He flicked a sideways glance at de Payens, and then his eyes dropped to scan the ground at their feet. “And why should the ancient Hebrews
not
have subscribed to Egyptian beliefs? They lived there for hundreds of years. It is more than possible that they admired elements, at least, of what the Egyptians believed. But that is no concern of ours for the moment. What concerns us is this other ankh.”
He held his torch low now, pointing at the floor, and they looked down to see a second ankh, not quite as large as the one above them but far more deeply incised into the stone on which Montbard was standing. Before any of them could say anything, he dropped to one knee and waved to St. Clair to do the same, facing him. “Here,” he said, “feel what’s in here.” He dug the fingers of one hand into his end of the cross-arm of the ankh and tried to pry out the dust and dirt that had filled the gap between the outline of the carved figure and the surrounding flagstone, but although some of the material came away, the remainder was too tightly packed. Montbard stopped and looked at St. Clair, who had achieved the same result on his side.
“Would you be surprised to know that what you are holding is a handle?”
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673
St. Clair shrugged. “I would not have thought it, but if you say it is, then I believe you.”
De Montbard nodded, then looked around him at the torches they were holding. “How are these torches doing? How many fresh ones have we left?”
St. Omer did a quick tally. “Six that I can see. The others are in various stages of strength.”
“Damn! Damnation and perdition. I should have anticipated this.”
No one knew what he was talking about, and they all looked blankly at one another until St. Clair asked, “Anticipated what?”
“We are losing the light … the torches. We are about to be plunged back into darkness, and we need far more illumination than we have if we are to complete this task and uncover the remaining treasures.”
“But we have more torches up above, plenty of them.”
“No, we have some, but nowhere near close to as many as we will need. That’s why I think it better to stop now and lay in supplies
before
we find something exciting and are forced to abandon it in darkness.” He looked at his three listeners, his eyes shifting from face to face, and he could barely contain his glee.
“This is a great day, my friends. We have found what we sought, what our Lore told us was here, and if we find no more than the jars, we will have found enough to justify the existence of our ancient Order. But I would suggest we need to return to the surface and tell the others what we have found. They deserve to know, as much as 674
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we do. After that, we will need to gather as much fuel as we can find, for banishing this darkness, and while we are doing that, we should also be purchasing oil lamps, as many as we can obtain, and large, fat candles that can burn for hours on end. If we are to work down here for the length of time I am beginning to think might be necessary, then we are going to need as much light as we can manufacture by any and all means. So we had better climb back out of here and set to work, for the sooner we gather what we need, the sooner we can come back and finish our task.”
NINE
It took a full week of hard work, collecting wagon-loads of wood—always in scarce supply in Palestine—before the monks, impatient with what they saw as yet another frustrating impediment to their success, had assembled enough fuel and torches to enable them to go back to work exploring the chamber, but it could have taken much longer had not Montdidier remembered hearing a report, several months earlier, of a wildfire that had destroyed a large olive grove a few days’
journey to the southeast. A train of five rented wagons, accompanied by a strong escort of sergeants, was sent out in search of the grove and, by one means or another, they managed to bring back four complete wagonloads of heavy, charred tree trunks, suitable for splitting and making into torches. Every candle maker in Jerusalem had been bought out of stock by then, and an entire barrel of 675
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pitch, purchased from one of the Arab traders, had been set in place below ground, and the monks began immediately making torches that would burn long and cleanly.
St. Clair was happy enough to find himself uninvolved in the search for fuel that week; de Payens, mindful that the younger knight had returned from patrol and gone straight to work on the underground explorations, granted him a three-day rest period, completely free of duties. St.
Clair spent much of the first day simply lying around in slothful bliss, enjoying the sheer simplicity of doing nothing, but it was not in his nature to remain idle for long, and the following morning, after attending to the few allocated chores he had, he set out with the package that he had promised to deliver to Hassan the horse trader from his cousin and namesake, Hassan the Shi’a warrior. He had felt no urgency about the task until then, and undertook it when he did simply for diversion, because he knew that the trader would not yet have returned to the city.
Even before he left the stable precincts that morning, however, Stephen became aware that something unusual was afoot, because the streets were crowded and he could hear the hubbub even from a distance. None of the sergeants on guard was able to tell him what was happening, but it was clear the mood of the throng below was festive, and so he slung his sword belt comfortably over his shoulders, out of the way and yet easily reachable, and struck out for the marketplace beyond the walls, where Hassan’s horse stalls were located. He had an inbred distrust of exposing himself needlessly to the dangers of be-
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ing a Frankish knight alone in a close-packed crowd of potential enemies, but the mood of the crowd seemed benign, and he felt reasonably sure that his heavy, mailed hauberk would protect him against the kind of sneak attack that would involve nothing heavier, in such circumstances, than a sly knife. He entered the flow of bodies and was quickly hemmed in on every side, the press growing thicker as he began to approach the city walls, and by the time the enormous wooden gates came into view over the heads of the people around him, he was barely making any progress at all.
Finally, no more than thirty paces from the gates, he could go no farther. The huge, wooden barriers were closed, which was unheard of at this time of day when there was no attack expected, and now he saw that the crowd ahead of him was being held in check by a line of the King’s Guard, who had linked arms and were facing into the crowd, their backs to the empty street. He began to push his way forward to the front, ignoring the com-plaints of the people he displaced, many of whom turned to see who was pushing and then bit back their angry protests at the sight of the towering, blue-eyed
ferenghi
in the mailed coat. Before he could reach any of the guards to ask what was going on, however, there came a blare of trumpets, and the massive gates began to swing open, the noise of their ponderous groaning quickly drowned out by the excited shouts of the people around him, and the tension on the faces of the guards increased visibly as they hunched even harder against the pushing of the crowd. Knowing then that questions were pointless, 678
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St. Clair gave up the struggle to advance and simply stood there, looking over the heads of the people in front of him and waiting to see what would develop.
He could not have been better positioned to witness the arrival in Jerusalem of a truly magnificent cavalcade of newcomers, most of them fitting his concept of what he and his fellow veterans called damsels, in that they were fresh faced and obviously unweathered by the desert climate, their clothing, weapons, and accoutrements new and shining with bright, unfaded colors and heraldic devices he had never seen before. Three score of these bright-eyed warriors rode at the head of the procession, in fifteen ranks of four abreast, preceded by a tight, magnificently burnished and caparisoned formation of twelve of King Baldwin’s senior commanders, mounted on the King’s finest horses. The newcomers were followed by a group of musicians, drummers and trumpeters, marching to the cadence of a quartet of drums, and after those came the royal party, all aglitter with gilt and jewels and embroidered surcoats. King Baldwin himself sat on a throne mounted on an elaborately decorated bier sur-mounting three long poles, carried by four men to a pole, twelve in front and twelve behind, and as he passed by, royal servants walking beside his bier threw sweetmeats and honey cakes to the watching throng. And then, riding directly behind the King, on a well-sprung, flat-bottomed wagon drawn by a team of four stocky, well-matched, solid-looking blacks, came the Patriarch Archbishop, seated comfortably on his Bishop’s Seat, re-