The Templar Salvation (2010)

by Raymond Khoury

  It was a lot to take in.

  “Be realistic, brother,” Miguel sighed. “What can three men do against a king and a pope? They’d have us up on those stakes before we managed to utter a single word.”

  “Not if we have it,” Conrad said. “Not if we play it right. Look, it brought them to their knees before. Nine men built a small empire with it. We can do the same. We can rebuild what we had and continue their work.”

  He studied his fellow knights. They were different now. Older, for one. It had been almost twenty years since they had all fought together at Acre. Older, heavier, slowed by the spoils of an unfettered life. He felt a flutter of doubt and wondered if he believed his own words. What he was asking of them was a tall order, a huge sacrifice for something that carried a far-from-certain outcome.

  “We can stay here, turn our backs on our past and live out our lives like this,” he told them. “Or we can remember our vows. Our mission. We can remember all those who gave their lives for our cause and try to ensure that they didn’t die in vain. I say there is no choice here. We have to try.” He reached down and grabbed one of the broadswords. “These swords could have ended up in the hands of any trader in the land. But they didn’t. They found me. They found us. We can’t ignore that. Our brothers are calling out to us from their graves. Tell me you’re not going to turn a deaf ear to their pleas.”

  He looked at Hector. The Frenchman held his gaze for a long moment, then nodded slowly. Conrad nodded back, then turned to Miguel. The Spaniard glanced at Hector, then shook his head with a slight chortle before giving them a nod that was dripping with reluctance.

  THEY RODE OUT FOUR DAYS LATER: Conrad, his two brother-knights, Mehmet and his son, along with four other men that the trader had drafted in as muscle.

  Much to the trader’s curiosity, Conrad wasn’t on horseback. Unlike Hector and Miguel, who were, he was driving an old and rickety open-top, horse-drawn wagon.

  “You never said anything about a wagon,” the trader told him. “This is going to slow us down.”

  “Which has implications on our agreed price, is that it?”

  The trader gave him a toothy, mock-offended smile. “Have I ever been anything less than fair?”

  “You’re a pillar of virtue,” Conrad said. “Now name your new price and let’s get moving.”

  They were soon riding out of the city, heading toward the rising sun. A day later, they left Byzantine territory and crossed into land that was now controlled by the various beys.

  Enemy territory.

  Following the trader’s advice, the knights were dressed in a similar fashion to their escorts: simple dark robes and tunics, linen dolmans and sashes. Their faces were partially hidden under their turbans, and their belts carried scimitars, not swords.

  The ruse worked.

  Along with Mehmet’s verbal skills, it got them safely past a couple of bands of wandering Ghazis, and after eight days of hard riding, they reached the Sari Han, a huge, wide, and low stone edifice with no openings in its outer walls apart from a richly decorated entrance portal.

  Once they were inside, finding the monastery proved more challenging. None of the caravaneers, or the han’s manager, seemed to know of its existence. They rode on and tried a few more caravanserais, without success. Days drifted by without any hint of promise until their persistence finally paid off when they came across a priest from a local Cappadocian rock church who knew of the monastery.

  Despite his vague directions, and several steep crags and dizzying ravines later, they eventually found it: the small cluster of rooms, nestling in the base of a rock face, tucked away from the rest of the world.

  Conrad asked Mehmet to join him for a closer look. They left their horses and the wagon with the others and crept up a small ridge, where they took up position behind a large rock, close enough to be able to identify the monks as they ventured in and out of the hermitage.

  Mehmet soon spotted one of the monks who’d sold him the swords.

  The rest, Conrad needed to do alone.

  They rejoined the others. Conrad recovered his horse and led it up to the monastery, on his own.

  He was still making his way up the rock-strewn incline when two young acolytes came out, alerted by his struggling horse’s whinnies and the clatter of its hooves. By the time he made it up to the hermitage, its entire population was outside, watching him curiously and in silence. Then the abbot, a withered old man by the name of Father Nicodemus, came out and studied him cautiously before inviting him inside.

  They sat in the refectory, surrounded by a half dozen other monks. After accepting a drink of water, Conrad didn’t waste too much time on any idle banter beyond telling them his name—his real one—and saying he had come from Constantinople, despite the fact that the monks were eager to hear news of the city’s current state.

  “I’m not here by accident, Father,” he told the abbot.

  “Oh?”

  “I’m here because of something you sold not long ago.”

  “Sold? And what would that be?”

  “Some swords.” He paused, eyeing the priest, studying every wrinkle around the man’s eyes and at the edge of his mouth before adding, “Templar swords.”

  The word visibly rattled the monk. It wasn’t hard for Conrad to catch the tells—the blinks, the dry lips, the fidgety fingers, the adjustments of position. The monks had spent most of their lives in seclusion, cut off from any kind of social interaction. They weren’t well versed in the art of deception. Why the monk was rattled, though, wasn’t as obvious.

  “You do know what swords I’m talking about, correct?”

  The monk hesitated, then stammered out a reply. “Yes, I do.”

  “I need to know how you came across them.”

  The monk said nothing for a long second, processing the request, his expression somewhat defensive. An uncomfortable smile crawled out of the corners of his mouth. “Why is that, may I ask?”

  Conrad’s face remained hard, his eyes unforgiving. “They belonged to brothers of mine.”

  “Brothers?”

  Conrad drew his broadsword slowly and laid it down on the table in front of the abbot. He tapped his finger at the engraving at the top of its blade.

  The abbot leaned in for a closer look.

  Conrad was indicating the splayed cross.

  “Templar knights,” Conrad told him. “Like myself.”

  The creases in the abbot’s brow multiplied.

  “How did they end up in your possession?” Conrad asked.

  “I … I’m not sure. They’re very old, you know. They’ve been sitting in one of the storerooms for ages. It’s just that with the cold and the drought, we couldn’t feed ourselves anymore. We needed to sell something. And, as you can see, there isn’t much else that we can sell.”

  Conrad really didn’t like the feeling he was getting from the old monk. “And you don’t know how they got here?”

  The monk shook his head. “They’ve been here for a long, long time. From before my time.”

  Conrad nodded, mulling it slowly, making it clear he wasn’t satisfied with the answer and consciously stretching his host’s discomfort. “You keep a chronicle here, do you not?” he finally asked.

  The question seemed to surprise the abbot. “Of course. Why?”

  “I’d like to look at it.”

  The abbot’s blinking intensified. “Our chronicles are … they’re private documents. I’m sure you understand.”

  “I do,” Conrad said without smiling. “But I still need to see them. Brothers of mine went missing. Their trail ends here, with these swords. In your monastery. I’m sure you understand.”

  The monk’s eyes were nipping away and back to Conrad’s face. He couldn’t hold the knight’s gaze.

  “I need to see the entries from the year of our Lord 1203 onwards,” Conrad added. “That’s when they went missing. And I imagine that the day their swords and the rest of their weapons came to be in this place
would be an event that would have certainly merited a mention in your records. And yet you’re telling me no one here has read of such a thing?” He surveyed the tight expressions of the other monks in the room. They were mostly young and slim, with gaunt faces and pale skin. They were also uniformly staring at him with mouths clasped shut, a few of them giving him slight shakes of the head.

  “No one?” Conrad asked again. “Not even your chronicler? Who is the chronicler here?”

  One of the monks hesitated, then raised a meek hand and shuffled forward by a step.

  Conrad asked, “You don’t know of this event?”

  The man shook his head. “I do not.”

  Conrad turned his attention back to the abbot. “It seems we have some reading to do.”

  The abbot took in a deep breath, then nodded. He ordered the chronicler to take Conrad to see the books. “I’ll join you in the scriptorium,” he told the knight. “You look tired and pale, Brother Conrad. I’m sure you could use some nourishment after your long journey.”

  Conrad followed the chronicler into the large, windowless hall. Large candelabras laden with dozens of candles illuminated its desks and its book-lined shelves. The chronicler padded over to a far shelf, studied the spines of the leather-bound codices on it, then pulled out two volumes and carried them back. He set them down on a large, tilted desk and invited Conrad to study them.

  Conrad took a seat at the table and started scouring the entries for the right date. He knew that Everard and his men had left Tortosa at the beginning of summer that year. He was still wading carefully through the brittle vellum pages when the abbot reappeared with his entourage of young acolytes. In one hand, the monk was a carrying a plate that had some cheese and a chunk of bread loaf on it. In the other, he held a cup.

  He placed them on a flat board that extended from the side of the desk. “It’s not much, but I’m afraid it’s all I can offer you,” the abbot said.

  Conrad watched him do it. Oddly, the abbot’s hands were trembling, causing the cup to do a little dance before settling down on the board. “It’s plenty,” Conrad said, a crease forming in his brow. “You have my gratitude, Father.”

  He picked off a small corner of the bread and popped it in his mouth, then raised the cup. It was filled with a hot, golden-yellow liquid. Conrad brought it close and took a sniff of it. It wasn’t a smell he was familiar with.

  “Aniseed,” the abbot said. “We grow it here. When the frost and the drought permit it.”

  Conrad shrugged and brought the cup to his mouth.

  As its hot edge touched his lips, his eyes settled on the abbot’s gaze, and an alarm went off somewhere in the dungeons of his brain. Something was wrong. The man’s interest was too intense and all his little tells had accelerated.

  Conrad’s mind lined up what he knew. And in that instant, he thought the unthinkable.

  It’s not possible, he thought. They can’t be hiding that.

  And yet it was there. A loud siren blaring away inside his ears. Years of dealing with treachery in the Holy Land had sharpened his senses and taught him to expect betrayal at every corner, and living incognito in a foreign land had only heightened those senses even more. Senses that were now warning him that the unthinkable would actually explain a lot.

  He kept the cup poised at his lips and, without taking a sip from it, studied the abbot’s face.

  He pushed it away a bit, clear from his mouth.

  “You know,” he told the abbot, “you seem rather pale yourself. Perhaps you need this more than I do.” He extended his hand, presenting him with the cup.

  “No, no, I’m perfectly content,” the abbot said as he pulled back slightly. “Please. We’ll eat when the day’s work is finished.”

  Conrad didn’t blink. He leaned in and pushed the cup closer to the abbot while placing his other hand very clearly on the hilt of a large dagger he had on his belt. “I insist,” he said.

  He kept the cup there, hovering inches from the priest’s face. Tiny tremors broke out across the old man’s face, ruffling up the edges of his mouth, his nostrils, his eyelids.

  “Take it,” Conrad ordered.

  The man did so, his hand shivering.

  “Drink,” Conrad hissed.

  The abbot’s hand was quaking noticeably now, almost causing the drink to spill out of the cup as it slowly crept closer to his mouth. It reached his lips. He held it there for a moment, his hand shaking even more, his eyes ablaze with fear and darting from the cup to Conrad and back.

  “Drink it, Father,” Conrad pushed, his tone calm but potent.

  The monk closed his eyes and looked like he was about to take a sip from the cup, then he stopped abruptly and let go of it. It fell from his hands and shattered against the stone floor.

  Conrad’s eyes bored into the monk as he pulled his dagger out slowly and laid it out on the table. “Now, how about you tell me how those swords really ended up here?”

  “WE’LLBEFINE,” Conrad told the trader as he handed him the small pouch. “We can handle it from here.”

  Mehmet took a quick glance at the gold pieces inside the pouch, then pulled its ties tight and tucked it under his belt. “It’s a long way back to Constantinople. These are dangerous lands. Plenty of Ghazis out there.”

  “We’ll be fine,” he repeated. “We’re not going back there.”

  “Oh?”

  Conrad just nodded and struck out his hand, his expression clearly signaling that he wouldn’t be saying much more about that. The portly trader frowned, then took his hand and shook it grudgingly.

  “Safe travels then,” the trader told him.

  “And to you.”

  He stood with Hector and Miguel and watched as the Turks rode off. Conrad had no illusions about what was probably going on in the trader’s mind. They had paid him a small fortune to guide them to this place, and they had brought a wagon with them. A wagon to carry something. Something that had to have great value if it was worth the risk and the cost.

  Something the trader would instinctively covet.

  “I’m guessing you found something,” Hector told him.

  “That I did,” Conrad said, keeping watch as the six riders disappeared down the mountain. His mouth broadened with the hint of a cheeky grin. “That I did.”

  FATHER NICODEMUS SAT at the chronicler’s worktable and felt increasingly nauseous with every line he wrote. The weight of his burden was clouding his mind, turning the selection of each word into a herculean effort. Still, he had to do it. There was no road back. Not from this.

  We should have burnt it, he thought. We should have burnt it all, long ago. He’d thought about it many times over the years, wondered about doing it, even coming close on a couple of occasions. But like his predecessors, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Like all his predecessors, he didn’t dare do it for fear of transgressing and bringing upon himself a wrath not of this Earth.

  He felt the heavy gaze of his gathered acolytes upon him, but he couldn’t look up and face them. He just concentrated on the sheets of vellum under his eyes and tried to keep his hand steady as it moved the quill across it.

  I have failed my Church, he wrote. I have failed our Church and our Lord and from that failure, there is no possible redemption. I fear that the knight Conrad and his fellow Templars have sealed our fate. They now roam the land, headed to Corycus and from there to shores unknown, laden with the devil’s handiwork, written in his hand using poison drawn from the pits of hell, its accursed existence a devastating threat to the rock upon which our world is founded. I would not presume to seek forgiveness or mercy for our failure. All I can offer is this simple act to save our heavenly father from the burden of tending to our miserable souls.

  He gave the sheets another read, his eyes tired and watery. When he was finished, he set the quill down beside them and only then did he dare look up at the monks before him. They were all staring at him in silence, their faces more gaunt and pale than ever, their lips and fin
gers quavering.

  In front of each of them was a simple terracotta cup.

  The abbot cast his eyes across them, meeting each of their gazes with his own forlorn stare. Then he gave them a collective nod and raised his cup to his lips.

  Each of them raised his own.

  He nodded again.

  Chapter 13

  VATICAN CITY

  PRESENT DAY

  A heavy silence smothered the room. Tess glanced around, her eyes surveying the faces about her as she tried to gauge whether or not to keep going. Cardinal Brugnone and the prefect of the archives, Monsignor Bescondi, seemed particularly disturbed by what she’d related. Which was understandable. For men of the cloth, the idea of monks—not warrior monks like the Templars, but gentle, highly pious men who’d retreated from society to devote their lives to prayer and study—the idea of such monks resorting to murder, no matter the reason, was unfathomable.

  Reilly also looked puzzled by what was in the monk’s confession. “So the first group of Templars had something that the monks were prepared to kill them for? And then, a hundred years later, three Templars pick up the trail of their missing buddies, show up at the monastery, and take back what was theirs, leaving that group of monks so freaked out about it that they kill themselves?”

  “That’s what the abbot’s letter says,” Tess confirmed.

  “The impostor who came here with Agent Reilly,” Tilden asked. “Who was he?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “Sharafi didn’t know who he was either. You see, after Sharafi found the confession, he felt he’d stumbled onto something big. He couldn’t help but want to look into it some more, but at the same time, it disturbed him. Deeply. I mean, remember what the monk wrote. ‘The devil’s handiwork, written in his hand using poison drawn from the pits of hell, its accursed existence a devastating threat to the rock upon which our world is founded.’ Maybe this was something that shouldn’t be found. Still, Sharafi couldn’t resist it—but he knew he had to be careful. He knew that something like this could be dangerous. Even more so, perhaps, if it fell into the wrong hands. So he sneaked the letter out of the archives—he stole it, basically—and he just worked on it quietly in his spare time, hoping to figure out what happened to those Templars and what they took with them. He spent a lot of time in the library, looking for more clues. The Sufi traveler hadn’t written about the confession he’d hidden in his journal; he hadn’t left anything behind that said where he’d found it or what he’d done after he’d found it. Sharafi thought he must have been as spooked by it as he was. Still, the Sufi’s journal described his travels in the area, which was a starting point, although Sharafi knew that a lot of the names of places and natural landmarks the traveler used had changed many times over the centuries. So Sharafi had a look in the area the Sufi had roamed, the area around Mount Argaeus, which is now called something else, asking around, trying to find the remains of the monastery. He also looked into any material on the Templars that he could find. But he kept hitting walls. The area he was looking in is sparsely populated, and he couldn’t find the monastery—not that he really expected to find anything there, not after all this time. He couldn’t find any mention of Conrad either, not in any of the Templar records he had access to. He was ready to give up when a couple of months ago, this guy came up to him outside the university, in Istanbul. He knew all about Sharafi’s find. He told Sharafi he wanted him to find the writings that the monk had talked about. And he threatened him and his family.”