The Sword of the Templars t-1

by Paul Christopher

  The buildings of the village were rough lava stone mortared together and topped with the standard Portuguese style terra-cotta tiles. They found a restaurant in the town square and had a meal of octopus stewed in wine, rabbit stew, and fresh-baked bread and creamery butter.

  After the meal Tavares disappeared for a few minutes, returning with an elderly man in tow whom he introduced as Dr. Emilio Silva. Dr. Silva wore enormous rubber boots, a completely transparent raincoat, and what appeared to be a very old-fashioned military uniform underneath.

  He smoked a long, fuming clay pipe and appeared to be heading toward a hundred years of age, his face a wrinkled map of a long, arduous life. His eyes were clear, however, and when he spoke his voice, though as wispy and cracked as his face, was firm and coherent. According to Tavares the doctor had lived in the islands all of his life, and anyone or anything he didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing.

  He told the story of the statue and the coins, again with Tavares as his translator. The man’s name was Damien de Goes, not Gao as Tavares had thought, and the statue had been of a bareheaded “Moorish” man-presumably black or at least swarthy-wearing a cape and seated on a horse, his right arm raised and pointing to the west. At his feet there had been a cauldron or kettle containing a hoard of treasure including five bronze and two gold coins from Cyrene in North Africa and from the Phoenician colony of Carthage, now modern Tunisia. Remarkably detailed for a myth or an old wives’ tale.

  As the old man recounted the story, Holliday remembered an old map he’d once seen in a museum drawn by the Pizzigano brothers, a team of cartographers working in the early 1300’s-long before the Azores had actually been discovered and almost two hundred years before Columbus.

  The Pizzigano brothers, illustrating an ancient Phoenician myth, showed a man on horseback at the edge of their map, just about where the Azores would be located. The man was pointing westward, and a medallion at his feet warned that anyone venturing further would be swallowed up in “The Sea of Fog and Darkness”-not a bad description of the North Atlantic when it was in bad humor.

  Interestingly the same “sea of fog and darkness” term had once been used by a Moorish Muslim cartographer in Spain named Khashkhash ibn Saeed ibn Aswad to describe a voyage made in the ninth century-a full five hundred years before Columbus. Even the name of the place where the statue had been found on the island of Corvo rang true: Ponta do Marco-the boundary marker-go no further. X marks the spot.

  “He says,” said Tavares, continuing to translate, “that there is a man on Corvo who we should see if we have any more questions.” He turned to the old man again. “Como o senhor te chama?” What is his name?

  “Rodrigues,” said the old man clearly, his yellow teeth clamped around the stem of the long clay pipe. “Helder Rodrigues. Clerigo.”

  “A priest,” said Tavares. “He says the man you should see is a priest.”

  30

  Capitano Tavares ferried them across to Corvo the following morning. The day was moody, the skies full of broken clouds that scudded low on the horizon over a choppy, restless sea. The San Pedro slapped the small waves sullenly, the movement jarring. Corvo was visible from the time they rounded the breakwater at Santa Cruz das Flores. It stood like a massive cupcake, one side slumped in the pan, a single volcanic cone worn by a million years of winds and storms, shouldering its way through the eons, the fire that had created it long since cooled, the steep slopes covered with a thick carpet of greenery, its giant cliffs like the massive bow of an ancient ship.

  Barely fifteen miles separated Flores from its smaller sister; the voyage in the San Pedro lasted barely forty minutes. The town of Corvo clung to the sloped, southernmost portion of the island, a scattering of red-tile-roofed houses wedged in around a straight concrete pier with no breakwater.

  Instead of docking, Tavares guided the old Chris-Craft north, following the steep coastline away from the town.

  “Where are we going?” Peggy asked as the town receded in their wake.

  “Around the island. A few minutes only. I show you Ponta do Marco. End of the world.”

  They continued northward, the coast steepening to dark, plunging cliffs of volcanic basalt, the sea breaking in huge shuddering waves at the bottom. There was no middle ground, not even a rocky beach. There was the sea, and then there was the land, an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, one trying to wear down the other in a never-ending battle that had already lasted millions of years.

  Holliday thought about the sword and the man who might have carried it. Was this his destination? Was this lonely island in the middle of an even lone lier sea the final resting place of the great treasure that had been hidden since the time of Christ beneath the Temple of Solomon in the holy city of Jerusalem? Or had it all been nothing more than a story, a fancy like King Arthur and his sword, Excalibur?

  Standing there, feet braced against the rocking of the boat, it occurred to Holliday that perhaps it didn’t matter. The sword, the story behind it, and the long journey were enough to have changed and molded events and men’s lives across two thousand years, and a story told that long and with that effect had to have some meaning behind it. Arthur and Excalibur may well have been nothing but childish myth, but it was a myth that had moved millions and changed lives.

  “You’ve got that thousand-mile-stare expression on your face, Doc,” said Peggy, standing at his side. She smiled fondly at him. “Looking into history again?”

  “Something like that,” he nodded.

  Tavares spun the wheel, and the San Pedro heeled over slightly as they turned around a rocky headland. He pointed.

  “There!” he said. “Ponta do Marco. The end of the world!”

  They were at the northernmost tip of the island. The caldera of the old volcano rose like a jagged green wall, slightly terraced into narrow overlapping ledges that ran directly down into the crashing sea. The heights of the caldera were shrouded in gray rags of cloud and mist.

  Standing in front of this looming wall were three black slabs of rock, each one lower than the first, their spires sharp and splintered like giant flakes of obsidian. The three formations each stood separate from the others, the caldera cliff rising like spidery stone fingers clawing up from the sea. The base of the spires was hidden in deep shadow and skirts of rising foam, but for a second Holliday thought he saw a darker patch that might have been the narrow entrance to a cavern.

  “The statue stood at the top of the black pillar!” Tavares yelled, pointing upward. Holliday stared.

  The foot of the three bony fingers was a froth of crashing surf that threw up enormous curtains of foaming spray, the sound like echoing thunderclaps. Tavares was right; it did look just like the end of the world. Beyond it there was nothing but empty sea. The captain threw the throttles into neutral.

  The engines surged and whined and the San Pedro bobbed unhappily on the rolling chop racing under her hull to throw itself onto the great black rocks directly in front of them a few hundred yards away. Peggy was starting to look a little green.

  “I thought I saw the mouth of a cave!” Holliday yelled, raising his voice over the booming surf.

  “Perhaps!” Tavares shrugged. “No one has ever landed here! There is no beach, only the cliffs!” He shook his head. “A dangerous place. The home of the great beast god, Adamastor!”

  Holliday hadn’t heard that name in years. Once, when he was no more than a child, Uncle Henry had told him a bedtime story from memory that had scared him out of his wits. He could still hear his uncle’s rich voice, rolling out of the darkness of his bedroom like the surf upon this broken shore:

  “Even as I spoke, an immense shape

  Materialized in the night air,

  Grotesque and of enormous stature

  With heavy jowls, and an unkempt beard,

  Scowling from shrunken, hollow eyes,

  Its complexion earthy and pale,

  Its hair grizzled and matted with clay,

  Its m
outh coal black, teeth yellow with

  decay-Adamastor!”

  It was the kind of thing that would have given Edgar Allan Poe food for thought. Much later Holliday had learned that Henry’s tale was from the epic Portuguese poem The Lusiads, which contained the famous threat: “Defy me not for I am that vast, secret promontory you Portuguese call the Cape of Storms…”

  He stared at the black spires and the foaming surf, trying to see in his mind’s eye a Templar ship and its precious cargo. Had it somehow managed to find a safe landfall here? If that were true it wasn’t hard to imagine that no other ship had followed for the last eight hundred years. The sword’s secret would have been safe in the protection of these bleak, stone monsters and the pounding sea.

  “Bastante,” said Tavares. Enough. He engaged the big twin diesels and pushed the throttles forward, spinning the wheel and turning away from the rocky headland. A few minutes later and they rounded the island onto the lee side. Almost instantly the sea calmed, and the wind died as they chugged their way along the opposite coastline. The cliffs here were less precipitous, the slopes of the caldera thick with clover.

  The further south they went the easier the slopes became, and eventually Holliday could see Tavares’s fat brown cows in the little fields, legs tucked beneath them, staring blankly out to the ragged, uneasy sea. Less than half an hour later they rounded the south cape and came in sight of the little village once again. More storm clouds were gathering as Tavares guided the San Pedro toward the wharf.

  “I radioed ahead last night,” said the heavyset captain. “My cousin Sebastian will rent you his motorcycle. Only twenty euro plus gas. He is waiting on the dock. He will give you directions to find this priest, Rodrigues.”

  “You’ll wait for us?”

  “I’ll be here until an hour before sunset. Then I go back to Flores for the night. I do not like the look of this weather.”

  “All right,” agreed Holliday.

  Sebastian Brigada, Tavares’s cousin, was a man in his thirties, tall, dark-haired with a big caterpillar mustache and caterpillar eyebrows. He smoked a pipe, wore an old tweed cap and giant rubber boots. As promised he was waiting for them on the dock with his motorcycle, a rickety old Casal with a square gas tank, almost no instruments, and a homemade bullet-nose sidecar fitted with its own windscreen and two skinny bicycle tires on a fragile-looking axle.

  “No way,” said Peggy, looking at the sidecar. “You expect me to ride in that?”

  “Not much choice.” Holliday shrugged. “It’s the only game in town.” He dug into his wallet and handed Sebastian Brigada a twenty-euro note. Brigada nodded his thanks and handed over the bike. As it turned out the directions to Rodrigues’s house were simple enough since there was only one road and one turnoff. You either followed the branch that led to the rim of the old crater or the branch that took you down to the crater floor. Rodrigues lived in a cottage at the end of the branch leading to the crater floor.

  Holliday thanked Tavares’s cousin once again and climbed onto the bike. Peggy eased herself into the sidecar and sat down. Brigada showed Holliday how to switch on the engine, and a few moments later they were chattering off down the island’s single paved road, tiny pocket-handkerchief fields on either side, divided at irregular intervals by dry stone walls that looked as old as time. Ahead of them the sweeping slope of the volcano rose up into the sullen mist. A few big shearwater gulls rode the air currents like shifting ghosts, and a few of Tavares’s fat brown cows lounged in the heather, but except for that the landscape was silent and empty. There seemed to be no people and no houses anywhere, and there was no traffic on the unmarked one-lane road at all.

  “Pretty spooky,” commented Peggy over the clattering of the old motorcycle. “Hound of the Baskervilles time.”

  She was right, thought Holliday: the whole island had the sinister, primordial tension of a place like Dart-moor. Man had no business in a place like this; it was a land of bad dreams and banshees. He shivered. An old wives’ tale-somebody walking over his grave.

  They followed the road upward for another mile. Finally they reached a crossroads, one section of the road rising away into the fog on their right, the other fork dropping away on their left. Holliday braked, and they came to a stop. There was a plain sign pointing down the lower road that said simply CALDEIRГO-the crater.

  “Why would a priest live out here in the middle of nowhere?” Peggy asked from the sidecar.

  “Only one way to find out,” answered Holliday. He put the bike in gear, eased off on the brake and opened the throttle. They turned down the road leading to the crater. Five minutes later Holliday slowed and stopped again as they climbed a final hill. There, below them, almost a thousand feet deep, lay the bottom of the crater, a gigantic punchbowl amphitheatre at least two miles across, the walls rising, green and steeply sloping, on three sides. At the very bottom of the crater were two small lakes, and between them on a connecting strip of pasture they could see a small cottage surrounded by a stone wall. The priest’s house.

  Suddenly, out of the rags and tatters of fog and cloud there was an alien sound: the steady drumming beat of an aircraft engine. A few seconds later Holliday and Peggy spotted the source of the noise-a big Cessna Caravan flying low over the caldera, looping south almost directly overhead.

  The colors of the aircraft’s livery were green and red, not the simple blue on white of SATA airline; not a scheduled flight-a charter. Holliday looked up uneasily as the airplane droned off into the distance. He tried to shake off the feeling of apprehension; the flight was probably just a group of tourists on a day-tripper outing to the little island. He dropped the motorcycle into gear with a bone-jarring clank, and they headed down into the crater, engine coughing and rattling as they went.

  The cottage was small and typically Portuguese: whitewashed lava stone and mortar, gently sloping roof of terra-cotta tiles, shuttered windows bracketing a sun-worn door of bleached planking. A man stood in the doorway, watching them approach, one hand up, shading his eyes.

  He was very tall, at least six five and slightly stooped. His shoulders were as broad as a stevedore’s, and he was barrel-chested with heavy arms and massive, stoneworker’s hands. His face was square, the eyes deep-set with dark rings around them. He was clean-shaven, the dark stubble flecked with gray. His hair was thick and white as snow. The man was wearing faded twill trousers and a rough cotton shirt, faded and thin. He wore sandals on his feet. At a guess he was in his early sixties and clearly very fit.

  Holliday braked, and the old motorcycle ground to a halt on the dark gravel path in front of the cottage. He climbed out of the saddle, and Peggy levered herself out of the sidecar. The tall man in the doorway smiled and stepped forward, his hand extended. He spoke.

  “Doctor Holliday, Miss Blackstock. I’ve been expecting you. Welcome to my home. My name is Helder Rodrigues.”

  31

  “You know who we are?” Peggy asked, surprised.

  “Of course,” said the tall, stooped man. “Very little goes on in Corvo that I am not privy to.”

  “You said you were expecting us,” said Holliday.

  “Yes, for some time now,” nodded Rodrigues. When he spoke it was without accent, the voice cultured and educated. The white-haired man might live in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, but it was clear that in his time he had traveled the world.

  He stepped aside and gestured.

  “Please, come in,” he said. “I was just making coffee for us.”

  They stepped inside. The interior of the cottage was plainly furnished. An open fireplace stood at one end of the single room, and an old-fashioned trundle bed was fitted into the wall opposite. A very old-looking double-barreled shotgun hung on pegs above the fireplace. In front of the hearth was a large, oval braided rug, the once-bright twisted rags faded to soft pastels. There was a plain wooden table in the middle of the room with four chairs around it. Kitchen things were arranged on a counter under one window and a small
desk and a shelf of books beneath the other.

  There were a few electrical fixtures, but most of the lights seemed to be glass-chimneyed, oil-fed hurricane lanterns. Holliday hadn’t seen any electrical wires on the road so the cottage had to be powered with a generator. There was no television and no obvious telephone anywhere. A very old-looking dark brown Bakelite radio sat on the windowsill.

  Rodrigues indicated that they should sit down, and then busied himself finding cups and pouring coffee from the old enameled pot hanging over the coals in the open fireplace.

  “Expecting us for some time?” Holliday said. “How’s that, Father Rodrigues?”

  “Not Father, Doctor Holliday, not for many years. Just call me Helder.”

  “Why a Dutch name like Helder?” Peggy asked.

  The big man shrugged.

  “The Dutch and the Portuguese were both great sea-faring nations in times gone by. A Dutch ship in a Portuguese port, a Portuguese ship in a Dutch port. Who knows how the world entangles itself?” He laughed. “Den Helder is a small village in North Holland, that I know. I believe the name comes from the word ‘Helledore,’ which means ‘the Gates of Hell.’ ”

  “Interesting,” said Holliday. “But it still doesn’t answer the question of why you’ve been expecting us for some time. I didn’t even know where Corvo was until a few days ago.”

  “You don’t need to know where you’re going to get there,” said Rodrigues obscurely with a soft smile. “I knew you would get here eventually because I knew the kind of man you were.”

  “And how did you know that?” Holliday asked.

  “Because I knew what kind of man your uncle was.”

  “You knew Grandpa?” Peggy asked.

  “I knew him quite well,” said Rodrigues. “I read him while I was at Cambridge studying Classical Archaeology. I met him later in Madrid, which is where we became friends. We ran into each other regularly over the years. Cairo, Athens, Berlin, even Washington.”