by James Becker
“There’s no guarantee that it is the way out of here,” Mallory said, “but I can’t think of any other reason for it being here. And the tunnel was obviously either constructed or modified by the Templars or by somebody else because I can see chisel marks on both sides of the opening.”
“So, do we go down it right now, or do you want to look at the chests first?”
“The chests are the end of the trail we’ve been following, so I definitely want to see what’s inside them. Then we can decide if whatever’s in there is worth coming back for, once we’ve got ourselves out of here. And there’s still that smaller chest to look at,” he added, pointing at the one chest they hadn’t shifted because it wasn’t directly in front of the cave opening, but over to one side of it.
“We could probably take that one with us,” Robin suggested. “It’s small enough that we could carry it between us.”
They walked over to the larger chests and stopped in front of one of them.
“What we don’t do,” Mallory said, looking at it, “is just open the lid. Remember what happened on Cyprus. There may well be a booby trap or something built into it.”
They each took one end of the box and moved it clear of the wall so that they could walk all around it. It was about four feet long, three feet deep, and the same in height. Plain and undecorated iron bands reinforced both the lid and the base, and there did not appear to be a lock to secure it, only a kind of over-center catch held in place by a rusty bolt.
“No lock,” Mallory said. “Maybe these chests were in constant use when the Templars were active, documents being removed, inspected, and replaced all the time, and having a lock worked by a key would just have slowed everything down.”
“Perhaps their security was where the chests were stored,” Robin suggested. “If they were in an inner chamber of the Templar preceptory or commandery, nobody except the Templars themselves would have had access to them, so they might have thought that a lock was simply superfluous.”
Mallory bent down in front of the chest and carefully slid the bolt to one side, then freed the catch. While Robin moved a few feet away for safety, he moved behind the chest, reached over it to grasp the catch, and then lifted the lid.
Almost disappointingly nothing else happened. Unlike the chests they had already discovered in the cave on Cyprus, there was no brutal antitheft mechanism built into the lid. Mallory stepped back around to the front of the chest. Robin joined him and they both looked inside the box.
It was almost full of documents of various sorts. They could see parchments, some folded, others rolled and probably originally secured with leather ties, a couple of slim codices, a large number of papyrus scrolls, and even a handful of documents written on paper. Robin pointed them out to Mallory.
“They’re made of paper?” he asked. “I thought that was a later invention and didn’t reach Europe until about the fifteenth century. Gutenberg and the Bible and all that.”
“No, paper is much, much older than that. It was probably invented in China in the early part of the third century and the discovery slowly migrated west along the Silk Road, but by the late twelfth century we know there was at least one paper mill working in France and another one in Spain. Obviously parchment was still the most popular medium for writing because it was so readily available, but the use of paper became more common once the industry was established because it was a lot cheaper to produce. Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, paper mills started to appear all over the place, usually outside the larger towns. This was because they were so noisy and smelly—the water-powered trip-hammers beating the pulp created quite a din—that medieval law usually required them to be located outside the city limits.”
“You know a lot about paper,” Mallory pointed out.
“Old books, my dear. I buy them and I sell them and they’re made of paper, so of course I know about it. It’s the biggest part of my business. Now let’s see what we’ve got in here.”
While Mallory held his flashlight steady, Robin picked up a piece of folded parchment and opened it. The material was still quite supple, so presumably the conditions and environment in the cave were conducive to its preservation.
“It’s written in Latin, obviously,” Robin said, her eyes tracing the first few lines of the document.
Mallory leaned closer to her to see it better. The ink on the parchment was somewhat faded, but the text was still perfectly readable.
“It’s part of a short-term loan arrangement, by the looks of it,” Robin said, studying the text. “This states that a man named Anselm of Paris deposited a quantity of jewelry and other assets at the Paris preceptory—there’s a list of the various items here with their assessed values—in March 1275 and received a cash sum in return. He completed some kind of business transaction, which isn’t specified in this document, presumably because the Templars weren’t interested in what he did with the money because they had the assets to cover the loan. Anselm then reclaimed the assets just over two months later. The Templars charged him a fee, so he repaid more than he’d borrowed, and that was the end of the transaction.”
“So it’s basically a record of a completed transaction,” Mallory said. “Just a document to keep their records straight.”
“Pretty much, yes,” Robin replied, picking up another piece of parchment. She looked at it for a few seconds, then nodded. “This is another one, another completed transaction that’s quite similar, though the amount of money lent by the Templars to this man was a lot less.”
A third and a fourth record revealed information that was very similar, assets being deposited in exchange for ready cash, sometimes for gold, and those assets then being recovered by the individual involved at a later date, with a fee charged for the loan. The documents were certainly interesting from a historical perspective, but as each referred to an ancient completed transaction, they had no other value and certainly no relevance to the present day.
“Interesting, but not valuable,” Robin said, replacing the last piece of parchment they’d looked at. “Unless you’re a Templar researcher or medieval historian, of course.”
They quickly examined the contents of the other five large chests, picking three or four documents from each of them for Robin to examine. But each piece of parchment, paper, or vellum she looked at contained broadly the same kind of information: the record of some kind of completed transaction, the deposition of assets in exchange for cash, followed sometime later by the recovery of those same assets, or the deposit of funds in one Templar preceptory or commandery and the issue of equivalent funds, less the Templars’ equivalent of a bank charge, in another establishment, sometimes in a different country.
“Just like a bank draft or a bearer bond,” Robin commented. “A way for a businessman to deposit the money he needed for some kind of deal in one place so that he could travel the roads in safety because he was carrying nothing of any value, and then draw out the funds at his destination.”
“But these have no value today, obviously. I was hoping we’d find some of the records of the land grants and deeds that we know the Templars were given by new recruits and people who supported the order. But I think we should take some of them with us, just in case there’s anything on them that we’ve missed. And they’re interesting historical records in any case.”
Mallory opened up his rucksack and stuffed as many of the ancient deeds into it as it would take.
“So that just leaves the smallest box,” Robin said. “Maybe what’s in that will be more interesting.”
Mallory lifted up the final box—it was heavier than it looked, but not too weighty for him to manage—and placed it on top of one of the larger chests. For a few moments, he and Robin just looked at it; then Mallory stretched out his hand and attempted to lift the catch that held the lid shut. Unlike the other chests, this catch was slotted into a large and quite ornate lock on the f
ront of the box, and as soon as he tried to free it, he knew it was locked.
“That’s a bit of a bugger,” he said, “but I have got a few tools in my bag that might shift it.”
He fished around in his rucksack and pulled out a plastic box containing a number of slim black steel tools, each shaped somewhat like a flattened letter S.
“What are those?” Robin asked. “Lock picks?”
“No. They’re double-ended Allen keys,” Mallory replied, “but you’re right: they do look like lock picks, and they work in a very similar fashion.”
He shone his flashlight at the fairly large keyhole, selected one of the smaller Allen keys, and began probing the lock, trying to deduce which pieces of metal the tool was touching were the tumblers, and which were the wards.
“It feels like a fairly simple lock,” he said, “and the key was probably a basic design.” He put down the tool he’d been using and chose a larger key to insert into the keyhole. “Let’s see if this does it.”
He turned the Allen key around and slid the end into the lock, then rotated it gently. When the end made contact, he tried turning it, but it wouldn’t move.
“Probably hitting one of the wards,” he said, almost to himself.
He moved it very slightly, felt the end of the key slip off one piece of metal, and tried again. This time, he managed about a quarter of a turn before it stopped, and no matter what he did, it wouldn’t turn any farther.
“I think it needs a smaller one,” he said, selected an appropriate size, and inserted it into the ancient lock.
This time, the Allen key turned easily through a quarter turn and then, after a slight hesitation, continued to turn. There was a distinct click as the key completed the turn.
“It’s open, I think,” he said.
“Now be careful. I’ve got used to having you around.”
With a glance at Robin, Mallory stepped back from the chest, took out his crowbar, placed the curved end of it under the catch, and twisted his wrist. The catch popped open with a complete absence of drama or unexpected events.
“Stand well back,” Mallory said.
He moved around the chest until he was standing behind it. Then he changed his grip on the crowbar so that he was holding it by the point, reached over the chest and hooked the curved end under the front of the lid, and slowly lifted it. The lid moved slowly, the hinges protesting audibly at being disturbed after over half a millennium of stasis.
Then there was a sudden thump and the chest rocked backward.
* * *
On the other side of the rock pile, the mass of stones completely muffling the sound of their voices, the three Italians were standing in a group and staring at the section of the rock pile that they could see.
It was obvious that the narrow entrance to the tunnel had stopped any of the bigger rocks from entering it, which in turn meant that the tunnel itself remained passable. All of the larger boulders had smashed into the walls of the cavern beside the entrance, forming an untidy pile.
“It’s not completely blocked,” Toscanelli said, sounding pleased. “There’s a gap over to the right that I can see,” he added, shining his flashlight beam that way. “If we can shift half a dozen of those rocks, we should be able to climb up the stones and get into the cavern that way.”
Mario looked doubtful.
“They’re big,” he said, “and we have no tools with us.”
“No, but we do have those planks of wood. We can use them as levers to move the stones. You and Salvatori go and grab a couple of them while I try to climb up that slope and see how high I can get.”
Minutes later, they’d worked out a potential route over and through the rock pile, and had already started levering away at some of the stones that blocked their path.
* * *
Mallory released the lid and he and Robin walked around to the front of the chest to see what had happened.
What they saw was almost a repeat of the antitheft mechanism built into the chests they’d found on Cyprus. Except that this mechanism was a lot simpler, though identical in concept and operation.
Projecting from the gap below the partially open lid were two double-edged steel blades, each well over a foot long. They had obviously been forced out of the chest by a powerful spring when the opening of the lid released whatever mechanism had held them in check over the centuries. The blades were long enough that if somebody had been standing at a normal distance in front of the chest when it was opened, he would have suffered two very serious, perhaps even fatal, stabbing wounds to the abdomen.
“Whatever you think of the Templars,” Robin said, looking at the two blades, “you can’t deny that their engineering was first-rate. Lethal, but first-rate.”
Mallory extended the crowbar again, positioned the end of it under the edge of the lid, and lifted it to open the chest fully. The two blades and the mechanism that had driven them were clearly visible as he did so, attached to the underside of the lid of the box.
“Hopefully there aren’t any other nasty surprises lurking inside,” Robin said.
“Probably not. It’s not that big a chest, and there really isn’t room for another device like that one.”
“I was thinking more about poison on the documents inside it, that kind of thing.”
“I doubt it,” Mallory said, looking at the collection of pieces of parchment revealed by opening the lid of the chest, “because whatever these papers are, they’re records that would be handled by members of the order and perhaps by other people as well. I think poisoning them would have made that far too difficult. And, even if they had been, a medieval poison probably wouldn’t be dangerous today. But maybe we should wear gloves, just in case.”
He pulled a packet of latex gloves out of his rucksack, and they each pulled on a pair. Then he reached into the chest, pulled out the document that lay on top of the pile inside, and handed it to Robin.
“So, what have we got this time?” he asked, then turned round to stare back into the cavern, where he’d just heard the sound of a rock falling.
“What was that?” Robin demanded.
“Probably just a stone settling in the rock pile.”
“As long as it’s not those bloody Italians tunneling their way out.”
“Look at the size of the pile,” Mallory said. “I think it’ll take days or weeks to get through that lot.”
Robin stared back into the cavern for a few moments, then unfolded the parchment and looked at the first few lines of the Latin text.
“I’m not going to bother translating it,” she said, “but I can tell you that this is a land grant made by a nobleman and it relates to a large piece of property in France. Obviously we would need to do a bit of research to find out exactly where the land is, but according to the first section of this grant, it was in the vicinity of the Templars’ Paris preceptory. And that, as you told me the other day, was pretty much in the center of the city.”
She unfolded the final section of the parchment and looked at the last few lines, mentally translating the Latin as she did so.
“So presumably this French noble gave the property to the Templars when he joined the order?” Mallory asked.
“Yes, but there is a kind of caveat. In 1204 he handed over control and ownership of the property and the farms and buildings that were on it to the Knights Templar in perpetuity, but there’s another sentence here that is interesting. He specifically gave the land also to the then grand master, Phillipe de Plessis, and to his descendants—I suppose the modern expression would be his ‘heirs and assignees,’ something like that—in the event that the Templar order ever ceased to exist. I suppose that was a kind of belt-and-braces provision, but what’s really interesting is this short Latin phrase, prout moris est. That translates as ‘according to custom’ or ‘as is usual,’ something like that. That suggests that giving
assets both to the Knights Templar and to a named individual within the order was the normal procedure. In this case, logically that provision should have been exercised when the Knights Templar were purged and the order dissolved. And that’s very interesting.”
“It is,” Mallory agreed, “because if Phillipe de Plessis had any children—and a lot of the Templars were married and had families before they took their vows and joined the order—that could mean that some French family actually has a genuine legal title to a significant part of the French capital. That document you’re holding could potentially be worth billions of euros.”
“And that’s just the first one,” Robin agreed. “This stuff is explosive, if this document is any indication of what else is in that chest.”
“Right,” Mallory said. “That is what we were hoping to find, so let’s find our way out of here.”
He carefully reset the antitheft mechanism, because carrying the chest with the blades extended was far too dangerous in case either of them stumbled, and secured the lid and used his Allen keys to relock it.
The escape tunnel they had uncovered by removing the larger chests was too narrow and low to allow them to walk side by side, so Robin led the way, Mallory following a few feet behind her and carrying the chest.
The tunnel ran fairly straight for perhaps a hundred yards, the slope gradually increasing, then turned somewhat abruptly to the left and widened significantly.
“I think this is probably a natural fissure in the rock that the Templars just opened up,” Robin suggested, taking hold of the handle on one side of the chest to help Mallory with the weight. “Cutting this tunnel out of the rock would have been far too much work otherwise.”
“You’re probably right. And there’s something else. Have you noticed the air? It seems to be fresh, not musty, which is what you’d expect if this tunnel was sealed. There must be a way out of it somewhere ahead of us.”
