The Seven Magical Jewels of Ireland

by Robert Adams

  At no time when he had been able to get away from his mundane duties and come up to this suite had the elder one been able to find all twelve of the occupants within its confines. Even now, as he puttered about, giving the appearance of being busily employed at lighting tapers and lamps against the encroaching dusk, there still were two missing—one man and one woman.

  But still, this was the largest number he ever before had found within the rooms at once, and so, pressed as he was for time, he decided to act. Perhaps he and the younger one could find a way and a time and a place to project the missing two back. For now, however, he could be certain that these ten, at least, would shortly be back when and where they belonged. Smiling, he bowed his way out of the suite, took a few paces down the hallway, and activated the projector.

  Simon Delahayle was of gentle birth, though a younger son of a younger son. He had been as well reared as his family's modest means had allowed, had fostered for a few years at the hall of a more prosperous distant, but noble, relative, then had gone overseas with a scion of that noble house and soldiered a few years in foreign lands. The scion he had helped to attend had been slain, but Simon had lucked onto a wealthy knight, and the proceeds from that ransom had seen him back home in Sussexshire with a fine small farm, a wife, children, a couple of good horses to ride, a decent sword, and the respect of all his neighbors, both great and small.

  Because of his long-ago but still unforgotten foreign military exploits and experiences, it had seemed but natural that the earl should have sent a galloper directly to his door, urging him to raise a troop of horse and join with the earl's own force to go to the aid of the young king and the regent in London.

  Captain Delahayle's troop had become a part of Monteleone's Horse and, with that elite unit, had raided deep into lands loyal to the Usurper, Arthur Tudor, harrying the rebel army, burning standing crops and painfully gathered supplies, running off horses and cattle, slaughtering swine and sheep, and otherwise creating havoc until that fateful day when they had ridden into the jaws of a trap set and sprung by the wily, Satan-tutored Arthur.

  Stripped of his arms, armor, boots, and everything else of any value, Simon had been left for dead on the stricken field whereon Monteleone's Horse had been virtually exterminated and brave Monteleone himself had been slain.

  Somehow, Simon must have staggered off that field and into a place of hiding, but he could not remember doing so. Indeed, he could recall nothing until a good three years after that battle, when he regained his memories of his previous life. That he had neither starved nor frozen, betimes, could be attributed to the fact that he had been delivered in a very poor condition by the folk who found him to a small country monastery. The monks had nursed him and cared for him and shared their own frugal sustenance with him for years, white the civil war and crusades raged all about them and their tiny haven of refuge.

  With the cessation of general fighting, last year, Simon had left the monastery and had tramped the roads as a sturdy beggar and itinerant farmhand, slowly working his way back east and south, bound for Sussex and home. On a particular rainy, windy night in southern Yorkshire, in need of shelter from the elements, he chanced across an ancient, untended, unkempt graveyard.

  Being of a bent unusual for his time, Simon had no fear of the dead or of the ground wherein they moldered. He had right often slept in graveyards, and the only time he had been in fear in one was when an elderly sexton had loosed a crossbow at him, then set his dog at him. The quarrel had scored a clean miss, and though the hound had bitten Simon, he had strangled the beast and borne the body with him, dressed it when at a safe distance and feasted well for a couple of days on fat dog. He'd also rough-dressed the skin and sold it to a tanner in a nearby town. He still wore the dog's upper and lower fangs strung about his neck and impressed those who asked by asserting them the fangs of wolves—one from each one he had slain with his stout cudgel and his long, heavy-bladed all-purpose knife.

  Pushing through the high weeds and the brambles, cursing under his breath at the profusion of briers that pulled at his foot wrappings and tattered breeches, Simon made his way through the outer ranks of weathered headstones and cracked crosses—some of them so old as to be of Danish or even Celtic design—until he came to what he thought to have glimpsed in the dimness, a stone-built tomb wherein he might spend this coming night dry and safe from biting winds.

  Once there had been a grille to protect the door—the rust-stained rectangles left by the hinges still marred the stonework—but grill and hinges were long since gone, probably stripped off in daylight by roving ironmongers. But the arms of a noble house still were carven over the door, though so far gone in erosion as to be indecipherable to Simon's eyes. The iron bolts, too, had been torn from off the doors, and those doors now were held closed by only a half-dozen head-sized chunks of rock, which Simon shoved or lifted aside.

  The odors which came to him when he gaped open those doors were not those associated with death and decay, but those of caves, of places long denied sunlight. Surely this was a very old tomb indeed, he thought, as he paused with his head inside, waiting for his vision to adjust to the darkness of the interior.

  The inside dimensions of the aged tomb were about what he had had reason to expect—twelve broad, stone steps led downward into a flagged chamber some eight feet across and ten or twelve long. Each side wall was pierced by four tiers of four openings, each wide and high enough to slide in a coffin, and a few of the coffins still were in place, but all that were were of wood and scattered bits and pieces of ancient bones littered the flags.

  It was an old story. In these lawless years, with no lord about to periodically inspect the tomb of his ancestors or place men to guard it, it had of course been stripped and plundered, probably many times over. The grave goods had gone first, of course, then the leaden coffins and the metal fittings from the wooden ones. None of the loot was of any use to the long dead. Living men and women must eat to stay alive, and scrap metal brought money. Simon had himself sold bronze hinges and nails and decorations torn from off a coffin in a tomb where he had slept up north.

  Gathering up a handful of splintered wood, mostly by feel, he took flint, steel, and tinder from his belt pouch and soon had a small, cheery fire ablaze on the steps. By its light, he found bigger pieces of wood to feed it and propped himself against the lowest step warming his back and wishing he had something to eat and drink in this comfortable nighttime bivouac.

  In an effort to take his mind off the ferocious growling of his empty stomach, Simon got up and began to explore. He would, in any case, need more pieces of coffin wood to keep the fire going throughout the night, and mayhap the looters who had come before him had missed a bauble or two in the evident haste of their depredations. Leaving his cudgel on the steps below the fire, he took hold of a coffin at about head level and began to worry it out of its deep niche in the wall of the tomb.

  As he struggled with the weight and bulk of the box, he thought to himself that it seemed very sound for a coffin of the venerable age it gave the appearance of being. He might well have to go out and fetch back a heavy chunk of stone to help him break up this one for fire fuel. Finally, he had pulled the entire length—only about five feet, so probably the last couch of a woman or a good-sized child—out of the niche, deliberately allowing the far end to slam hard upon the floor in hopes of weakening the fabric. To his very great surprise, there was a metallic clanging when the coffin end hit the flagstones, and a flaming splinter brought over from the fire for closer examination showed no slightest damage to any portion of the casket.

  There was no catch nor handles nor even visible hinges to the thing. An intricately rendered set of arms done in what looked to be a bronze with a very high tin content was affixed to the lid, but the arms told him nothing as to the patronymic of the corpse within. He could not recall ever having seen their like.

  After a solid half hour of beating on the top of the coffin with one of the big stones that had
been used to hold shut the door of this tomb, he had a quantity of stone dust and shards, but the wood—whatever devilish kind it was, the grain and color were completely unfamiliar to him—had only been scuffed here and there. When he had replenished the fire with pieces of those coffins smashed by his predecessors, he sat on a step below it to think out the matter.

  A heavy stone powered by all his strength did no visible damage to that supposedly ancient wooden coffin, when it should have quickly been smashed to splinters by such abuse. Why? The point of his knife would not penetrate the seam at any point on either end or either side. Again, why? There were no handles, no catch, no hinges to be seen, and he, who had seen full many a coffin, had never seen one so constructed no matter how highborn the personage it had been made to hold. Why and why and why?

  There were far too many unanswered and unanswerable questions to be housed in some simple ancient tomb crouched amongst the briers and brambles of a country graveyard. Could it be . . . ?

  Everyone knew how kings and high noblemen sometimes hid away treasures in odd places, sometimes marking them with a seal that it would have been death to break, if you were unlucky enough to get caught at it or apprehended soon afterward. Could this strange, unnaturally strong coffin be such a repository? Was that bronze design affixed to the lid actually the seal of some royal house, ancient or modern? No way but to examine it with greater care.

  Maneuvering the long box about, he dragged it to the foot of the steps, as close to the firelight as he could get it. He knelt on the far side of the thing, so as not to get into his own light, his cudgel close to hand giving him a small measure of peace of mind. When he had scraped off the worst of the oxidation from the lid decoration or whatever it was, he sheathed his big knife and began to rub at the arms with a wetted sleeve. With the encrusted dust off, the arms, while still unfamiliar to him, were clearly not those of any royal house that had reigned in England for the last century or more.

  Peering very closely, he noted what seemed to be a staggered line or regular pattern of depressions, each some inch or less across; scraping at one of these with a filthy fingernail, Simon shattered and dislodged a plug of dusty dirt, beneath which a something glittered in the firelight. He immediately thought of inset gemstones, and the air hissed between his teeth. Feverishly, he cleared out every one of the depressions he could discern, ten in all, it developed.

  But when he took a splinter from the fire and bent far over to gaze, his hopes were partially dashed, for no gems were at the bottoms of the shallow holes, rather disks of silver that looked to be roughly a little smaller than the tips of his thick fingers. Absently, he fitted all eight fingers and two thumbs into the holes and began to feel and press to see if there existed an easy way to get the silver disks out, for he had already ascertained that any attempt to pry up the bronze decoration would most likely give him only a broken knife blade to show for his troubles.

  Simon experienced a brief moment of atavistic terror when, with no sound of warning, the lid of the coffin began to slowly rise toward him. Scooting backward on his knees, he grasped his oaken cudgel and prepared to fight whatever demon he had chanced to loose. But when once the lid had risen to the perpendicular, it and the coffin simply sat there, and, gingerly, he edged around to where he could gaze within it.

  "God's Holy Blood!" Simon swore, gaspingly.

  "No, indeed, Bass." said the archbishop, "I did not send word for you to ride up here, nor do I employ any Father John Nash. Who accompanied him?"

  Bass wrinkled his forehead, "Why, some half-dozen of your own horse guards, Hal. None that I knew by sight, but they were all wearing your livery and seemed to know me of old."

  The old man regarded the square of vellum unrolled on the table before him. "It's my signature, all right, but that's not to be wondered at, for I sign scores of documents for my secretary and scribes, sometimes just blank sheets even. As for the seals, they're kept in the escriborium, ready to hand when needed. I think I detect the stench of Roman rottenness in this matter. But why, in God's name, would they want you up here? Can you think of a good reason to go to such lengths as this must have entailed, Bass? I can't, just of the minute."

  "Have you perchance been in recent attendance upon the king?"

  "No, Hal." Bass shook his head slowly. "I've not seen Arthur or even been up the Thames since before the fleet set sail for Gijon-port. Why? You think there's some bearing on this phony message business?"

  The archbishop shrugged. "Who's to say what strange schemes move through the convoluted minds of madmen. And I am every day more firmly convinced that old Abdul is either mad or fast becoming so; many of his actions over the last few years have simply not been those of a rational man."

  "Well, be that as it may, you're here now. You don't intend to ride back south immediately, do you?"

  "Why, yes, I had thought that I would, Hal. There's still a lot to do getting my squadron and ships and all ready for the trip to Ireland, you know. Why?" Then a sudden thought struck him and he grimaced and demanded, "Oh, no, Hal, you don't want me to ride up to Strathtyne again, so soon, do you?"

  Chuckling, the old man reached across the breadth of the table and patted Bass's hand. "No, no, my friend, nothing so traumatic as that, this time around. There's nothing now left at Whyffler Hall, save memories of the long, long ago . . . I hope. Though what Dr. Stone told you as she lay dying still worries me from time to time. But there is nothing to be done that I have not done already."

  "No, I wanted you to stay here for a few days to meet and talk with a most remarkable man, one of those who was projected here at Hexham. I think he will be most valuable to me, and he might just prove helpful to you, as well, in Ireland. His name is Rupen Ademian. He is a twentieth-century American of Armenian antecedents and Syrian birth. He fought as an officer in two of the mid-century wars, worked in an artillery-ammunition factory, dealt for many years in armaments of war, is a natural and gifted linguist, and owns a true host of other, widely varied talents."

  "Besides, if you stay up here for a few days, you might be able to persuade Krystal to accompany you on back down to Norwich, or at least talk her around to giving over this feud with Captain Webster. She is most wroth at him since he seduced one of her ladies."

  "Wer ist das?" demanded Rupen, standing well back from the door, grasping a cocked Welrod pistol leveled at the center of that door. He had more modern weapons of heavier caliber and larger magazine capacity, but the OSS assassination piece had the advantage of being completely silenced and the custom 7.65mm loads he had in this one were far more deadly than the off-the-shelf variety of such ammunition.

  "Ich bin Herr Kobra, mein Herr Ademian," came the reply in an accented German.

  Standing well to the side, Rupen unlocked the door, then took three rapid steps back before saying, "Herein, Herr Kobra, langsamer, bitte."

  Slowly, the door swung inward to disclose not one but two men, both neatly attired in business suits of American cut, one bearing an attaché case of flashy ostrich hide. Seeing their hands to be empty of weapons and none of the four anywhere near to the flat bulges that his trained eye could identify as concealed pistols, Rupen looked up at the faces . . . and almost discharged the light-triggered Welrod in pure shock!

  "As I live and breathe," gasped Rupen in consternation, "it's Seraphino Mineo! What the hell are you doing in Hamburg?"

  With one of his fleeting near-smiles, the stocky man switched to Sicilian Italian to say, "Mostly, following you, honored sir. That and selecting a convenient place to set up a meeting between you and this gentleman. He wishes to conduct some business with you."

  Willing to at least listen to the proposal of almost anyone, Rupen waved his guests to seats, but remained cautiously standing himself. The strange man presently produced some documents which identified him as one Karl Olwen Torgeson, an employee of the Department of Defense of the United States of America.

  "Okay," said Rupen casually, "what does DOD want with me, t
his time? Or do you really represent DOD, Mr. Torgeson? If I'm wrong, I'm sorry, but I've been at this game a long time and I think I sniff something very spooky about you and this whole setup. If General Macey or whoever had wanted to see me, he would have simply contacted my firm and they would have had a coded message to that effect in my hands far quicker and easier than the shenanigans you went through took."

  "So until you convince me you do represent who you say you do, I consider this meeting to be at an end, and if you don't get out of this suite damned quick, I'll shoot your ass!"

  Torgeson sat stock-still, stunned, his mouth open and moving but no sounds issuing from it. Mineo, his own face its usual blank, just nodded slowly.

  "I told you all," he said in English. "I told you you couldn't put nothing over on Mr. Ademian here—he's sharp as a shiv, he is! You damn CIA boys with all your college degrees make me sick sometimes, honest to God you do. Youse seems to think ain't nobody but you got brains or knows how to use 'em. Well, you learned this time!"

  Torgeson's mouth snapped shut and he paled, a tic starting up under one eye. "Dammit, Mineo, you had no right to reveal . . . to speak of the . . . be warned, our superiors will assuredly hear of this unforgivable breach of security!"

  Mineo shrugged. "I'll get piles on my piles and lay awake every night worryin' 'bout it, you shithead. Besides, Mr. Ademian knowed what you really was without me tellin' him. Cain't you see that, or are you really as fuckin' dumb as you act and look? I hadn't thought that was possible."

  "The Central Intelligence Agency?" queried Rupen, a little doubtfully. "But Mr. Mineo, I had thought . . . at least we were told years back when we . . . ahhh, employed you briefly, that you were a . . . that you were connected to another, entirely different group, a civilian organization, shall we say."

  "Oh sure, Mr. Ademian," said Mineo. "I'm mobbed up, have been mosta my life, even before I come to the States. But my family, they's working with these here boys on some things for two-three years, now. That's how I come inta this here. And when I told 'em I knows you personal, like, they flew me over here to interduce Torgeson here to you."