She laughed a
hearty laugh. ‘The truth! This has to be lived . . . it is a living thing . . .
So . . . when did you become a writer?’
Her eyes were
narrowed and in that heavy gaze I felt her waiting, anticipating my words.
‘Only a few
years ago,’ I told her. ‘
I
was
many
things before that
.’
She nodded her
head almost imperceptibly. ‘Like I thought . . . in another life you died a
violent death.’
Now it was my
turn to laugh. She, on the other hand, became all the more serious. ‘Have you
been up there yet?’ she said, inferring the castle.
I told her that
I had.
‘I never go
there . . . it is too tall, and those walls! A fall from that parapet would
kill you in an instant.’
She reached into
a pocket of her embroidered apron and from it I saw her pull out cards. ‘Come
outside and sit, the sun is warm.’ She closed one eye. ‘If the truth is what
you are after then perhaps I can help you . . . I know one or two things.’
I was about to
give some excuse when she interrupted me with a hand. ‘First I must consult the
cards.’
To tell the
truth, the last thing I wanted was to find myself held up in conversation with
an old woman. I thought of the myriad of notes I had to sort through, the
emails waiting for me in my room, but something in her tone, her manner,
intrigued me and I found myself following her out into the day. When we were
both seated with the sun slanting over us, she began to shuffle her cards and
one after another laid them down, the seventh card crowning the others. Her
fingers were long, elegant and nervous, her nails tidy and clean. She brushed a
wisp of grey hair from her faded blue eyes and said, ‘I pick out seven from the
Major Arcana of twenty-two cards . . . The knights used cards, did you know
that?’
She turned over
the first and placed it face up on the table. ‘Judgement,’ she said. ‘The angel
blows a trumpet... and there are people coming from their graves... after every
death there is a rebirth...you will salvage something buried a long time.’
She turned over
the second card. ‘Strength,’ she said. ‘A woman opens the mouth of the lion,
above her the symbol of infinity . . . This means there is something lying in
the depths of your consciousness in that part of life that is dead, and you
have to master your will to know it, you must have courage, without it there is
nothing.’
She turned over
the third card and paused a long time; a grave look descended over the greying
eyebrows, the high cheek¬bones and the pursed lips. ‘The Moon . . . this card
recalls the past, what has been – you are a hunter of history, but beware
of the wolf, he wishes to lead you to false memories; beware of the dog, he
shall dazzle you with illusionary traps – they are hidden enemies. To
escape them you must travel the path between two towers, between the coldness
of your thoughts and the hardness of your will. These two things can only
become three through love, when the moon joins with the sun . . . Do you know
what this symbol is?’
I told her it
was the symbol of the Grail.
She stared at me
a long time, too long. ‘It is not what they think, you know,’ she said. ‘It is
a cup when the spirit enters the cavity of the head, an emerald when it enters
the heart, and a diamond when it reaches the bones . . . It is not a bloodline
as they like to think of it nowadays! How blind they are to think it the kingly
blood of a mortal made god when it is nothing if not the blood of a god made
mortal!’
She nodded at
this and returned to the fourth card. ‘Ah . . . the Star,’ she hissed. ‘The
woman gathers knowledge, one foot in the universal pool, the other on the
earth. This is the divine virgin who brings you to what you seek in the right
places. The knowledge turned wisdom that becomes love . . . you must become a
philosopher . . . a lover of wisdom . . .’ she said to me.
She turned the
fifth card over. ‘The World, understanding . . . you shall succeed if your heart
is pure, if it has been transformed . . .’ She gazed upwards at a hawk
describing circles high over the lime trees. ‘“The eye of the hawk sees all
things from above . . . its gaze is open, shut, perfect . . . it sees the folly
of men . . .” Do you recognise it?’
Those words were
familiar to me. ‘Egyptian?’
She nodded
slightly. When she turned the next card over, it was upside down. ‘The Chariot
. . . well, well . . . I had expected it . . . obstacles and dangers . . .’
The last and
seventh card was before her. She held it to her breast and spoke reverently.
‘This is the most important card of all of them. The other cards are subject to
the seventh.’ She set it down. ‘Oh!’ she gasped. ‘The Hierophant! The ancient
mysteries of Egypt! Only a son of the widow can know the secrets. Do you know
who the widow is?’ But she didn’t wait for my answer. ‘Isis! The widow is Isis
. . . the soul! She mourns for her groom Osiris, the spirit . . . She hides
beneath her veil all knowledge. She is one and the same as the divine mother,
the Sophia of the Greeks.’ She pointed a finger at me. ‘You must be cautious,
there is a price to be paid for lifting her veil . . .’
She sat back
then and her face softened and tears welled in her eyes. ‘Well . . . you have
taken a long
time,
I have waited while the world has
gone to ruin. What has kept you?’
For some reason
this sudden familiarity didn’t seem out of place and I found myself telling her
that I lived a very long distance away, that I was married and had children.
Responsibilities, I told her, had prevented me from coming to the castle sooner.
‘Children?’ She
raised a brow. ‘Ah well, well . . .’ She gave a chuckle. ‘How different
everything is!’ A number of tourists passed, talking brightly, taking photos of
the portal. She sat forward and spoke quietly. ‘You know the world has been
asking questions, and it began to stir my remembering some months ago, that is
how I knew you would come.’ She bent an ear as if she were listening to
something inaudible and picked up the cards. ‘He waits . . . see there?’ She was
pointing through the portal. ‘Do you see how you have kept us? He tells me he
is not concerned that we have met . . . that is a good sign, but we must hurry.
‘At first it
will seem disordered,’ she said, ‘but don’t worry, that is natural if you want
to know everything at once. You have to look in many diverse places; like the
cards, each has its own knowing to tell, but each one alone can never reveal
the whole
truth
. For that you must look at all
the cards together, do you follow? Oh never mind . . . at the end you will see
everything as a whole, and all that you have come to see will be made plain to
you – the truth!’
There was a
promise in her voice and a weaving of something familiar in it. If I hadn’t
known it before, I knew it now – I had to stay and listen to what she had
to tell me.
‘Not many knew
about the underground chapel,’ she began, ‘the Kultraum as they call it
nowadays. Have you seen it?’
I told her that
it had left me with mixed feelings.
‘Well, that is
because this castle has suffered a terrible history since the slaughter of the
knights . . . from one owner to another . . . some evil, some good . . . but
none of them found it, only later did the old man come across the underground
chapel, by accident.’
I asked her if
she meant the curator, Anton Keller.
She nodded,
losing her patience. ‘Yes, who else? He found it, but he did not find what is
hidden in it.’ She was smiling now. ‘That is the secret . . .’
I asked her how
she knew this secret.
She shrugged her
shoulders. ‘You must have faith . . . Do you have faith?’
‘A writer has to
have faith in stories,’ I said.
‘Good, then I
will tell you mine and you will listen . . . It was hidden long ago, that
night, when the men were asleep on their pallets, there . . .’ she gestured to
the castle, ‘shortly before chapter, when the seneschal took himself through
those bitter corridors to the courtyard flooded with moonlight. He wasn’t to
know that it would be the night they would come, the imperial soldiers, through
the secret passage inside the well . . . He didn’t know it and so he took
himself to the underground chapel and told no one, since no one could know
where he would hide it.
The
knight
Templar set down his candle, removed the grille in
the stone pavement, let down the rope ladder that led down into the chapel and
made his difficult descent one rung at a time. His bones made a stiffness in
his back when he landed on the stone flooring beside the bowl . . . Do you know
the bowl?’
‘The stone bowl
of water set into the floor of the chapel?’ I asked her.
‘What else? The
tourists put coins in it now, for good luck, but once, in those waters, were
reflected visions . . . but you must not interrupt me . . . Now, where was I?
Oh, yes . . . the knight pulled the ladder and it came down . . . he would not
need it now. He stood paused, taking in a difficult breath, for you see the
pain in his side, the pain that came from his heart, had seized the fingers of
his left hand in a stronghold of spasms. He was dying, he knew it, and there
was little time to do what had to be done. Bent and pain-ridden, he took
himself through the darkness lit by a meagre light to the altar in the south.
He placed the candle at the foot of the little effigy of Christ; it made
shadows over the Vesica Pisces carved into the altar’s stone face. He traced
the grooves with his fingers – the bladder of the fish, the womb of God,
beneath it the twin circles of duality. Raising his eyes he saw only vaguely
what lay inscribed with pigment on the domed ceiling; and despite the chill,
the damp cold that sunk to the bones, the symbols filled him with warmth. It
occurred to him now that his strange Egyptian dreams of the great sarcophagus
of stone, the dreams of the small flickering flame, had been a prediction of
this end. But he had little time to think on it for he was once more struck by
the pain that yawned in his chest and left him gasping for air. He made a grunt
and gathered the forces that lay unspent in his soul and in his spirit. He must
keep from dying long enough to lay the seal to rest, before that part of him
that was wedded to evil made a move to prevent it.’
‘The seal?’ I
asked her.
‘Shh . . .
Listen . . . Kneeling on one knee and holding on to the altar, he took into his
lungs an in-sweep of breath, and it was as his mind was returned to itself and
he prepared to pray that he realised, by the chill in the air, that it had
come, and that he was no longer alone with the darkness . . .’
The old woman
made a gasp and blinked the sun from her eyes, as if waking from a nightmare.
On her face a dull and anxious expression. ‘Oh Lord!’ she said, shaking her
head. ‘I am an old wasted woman. I have started at the end. No . . . no! If it
is to make sense to you we must begin at the beginning of the end. Only then
will the truth be revealed . . . Come closer . . . écoutes . . .’ she said.
And I listened.
I
t was near dawn when the
armies of Al Ashraf came again at the double walls of Montmusard. In the half-light,
where the ramparts met the sea, the Templars beheld the mantle of torches
spread across the hem of the sky and the rolling of mangonels and catapults
questing for the city of Acre. It was a scene spurned by heaven and
earth which
journeyed toward no end but stretched on
forever.
The three men,
crouched beside the wall, observed the figures of their companions from the
Hospital who stood some distance away near the tower of their castle, shouting
something and waving their arms through the storm of ash and arrows and smoke.
‘What is it?’
Marcus said.
‘I do not
understand it,’ said Jacques, ‘there is too much smoke to see.’ The tall
Templar called Etienne squinted. ‘Sappers,’ he told them. ‘They come again to
mine the wall! They wish us to pound them . . .’
‘Those engineers
are like rabbits,’ Marcus shouted back, above the chanting of the Mameluks. ‘At
every moment there are new ones coming to make holes and we are run out of
stones! What are we to throw down to pound them, Etienne – our own carcasses?’
Jacques went to
the apertures and put an arrow to his bow. He waited for movement below and
drove the last of his shafts through the wide grates. There was a cry from
below.
The men waited.
Overhead a multitude of arrows tipped with torches made a path towards the
roofs and stables and burst into flames. Some came down over the wall and
pierced the flesh of those wretched victims whose terror-filled screams were
wedded to the din coming from the Saracens. Below, the city was a maze of
fires, since there were none to tend them as all men were upon the wall, and
what was left, the old, the women and children, had long since headed for the
quays or were shut up in their houses waiting for death.