The Sacred Scroll

by Anton Gill

  ‘Who the hell are they?’ Dandolo’s captain of the guard yelled. ‘Desert pirates? There should be none on this road! The Templars have cleared it.’

  ‘Don’t think we can rely on the help of a Templar patrol,’ replied Dandolo, seizing a javelin. The archers had reined in a short distance away and were even now taking aim, but they were close enough to be within the throwing range of a strong man, and Dandolo was still that. He took careful aim himself, allowing for the dim and deceptive light of the moon, and hurled his javelin, watching it arc in the air and seeing it land deep in the neck of his target, where it joined his upper chest. The woollen folds of the man’s garment were no protection in the face of the heavy blade of the Venetian’s descending weapon.

  The man leaned slowly forward on to his mount’s crupper before toppling to the pale-grey sand, on which a dark stain quickly appeared as he clawed futilely at the ground in a last vain attempt to rise.

  Encouraged by this, the Venetian bodyguard let fly a volley of javelins as the black-clad swordsmen rode in for another assault. Many of the spears found homes, burying themselves in horses’ flanks or attackers’ thighs and torsos, and taking five more men out of the skirmish at one stroke.

  The defenders cheered, but the attackers remained eerily silent. They regrouped, once again riding around the corral to encircle it, and taking care to remain outside javelin range. The archers fitted arrows to their short bows and drew them, firing a volley which killed two of the mules and three of the bodyguard, the black-fletched arrows falling like rain from the sky and jabbing into unprotected eyes and necks, their shafts glittering in the silver light. The stricken mules kicked at the heavens as they shrieked like banshees in their death agony, while grooms strove to hold down the rearing and screaming survivors, taut reins cutting into their hands and drawing blood.

  Another deathly volley followed fast, before the defenders had time to react, most of the hissing arrows digging into the sand this time but several still biting into human and animal flesh. Two of the mules broke loose and galloped away, dragging their wounded handlers across the desert behind them until they were lost to sight, swallowed up by the darkness.

  Dandolo had had enough. He moved swiftly to his nervous horse, which stood by the baggage in the centre of the ring, and mounted it, drawing his own sword. He jumped his horse over the backs of the remaining mules, which had been drawn in to form a tighter circle, and rode straight at the man who seemed to be the attackers’ leader. The masked figure whirled a flail menacingly round his head, looking for a place to bury its spiked ball, either in the Venetian’s thigh or in his horse’s neck, but Dandolo crouched low in the saddle to avoid its arc and, coming up fast and close, drew his sword up high just as the flail swung past his head, and brought it down with all his strength into the man’s body, cleaving it on the right side so that the whole of the torso, from neck to waist, was split open.

  The sword wouldn’t loosen from where it had bitten into the pelvis, and Dandolo was pulled from his horse, bringing his opponent down with him. They rolled together on the sand, but the man in black, whom Dandolo feared still had enough strength left in him to get a grip on his neck, started to twitch and throw his remaining good arm around in a frantic effort to regain equilibrium. Dandolo kicked himself free and clambered to his feet, watching as the man, whose right side was now all but torn free of the rest of his body, writhed on the ground beside him.

  He could hear the fight continuing behind him but seemed oblivious to it, and to all danger of getting a lance or an arrow in his own unarmoured back. After what seemed an eternity, he swung round in time to see the black riders making off towards the south, leaving a scattered mess of dead and dying men and horses behind them.

  The corral broke up and the surviving Italians, in shock, began to take stock.

  The captain of the guard came up fast. He took Dandolo by the shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Winded, but I’ll live,’ replied Dandolo grimly.

  ‘What shall we do? Go after them?’

  ‘No. We’ve stung them badly enough. They won’t be back tonight.’ But he thought: They’ll try again. We must travel day and night until we reach Acre, whatever happens. It was too far to go back to Jerusalem and seek Almaric’s aid. Besides, if the attackers were who he thought they were, such a move would be a vain one.

  He bent over his assailant, whose convulsions had now reduced to a few agonized spasms, and, holding what remained of his upper body steady with his boot, taking care to get a good foothold so as not to slip on the blood, he unravelled the woollen headdress which covered his face.

  In the moonlight, the almond-white visage of Brother Thomas glared up at him, the black eyes crazy with hatred. But as Dandolo watched, the eyes glazed, the irises turned upwards and disappeared under the lids, and all expression went out of the face. Suddenly it looked almost peaceful.

  ‘What were they after?’ asked the captain of the guard.

  Dandolo gave him a look. ‘I have no idea,’ he said.

  ‘What shall we do? Shall we bury them?’

  Dandolo laughed at that and, remounting his horse, turned it north and rode on.

  20

  Istanbul, the Present

  It was mid-morning when Detective-Major Haki arrived back and ushered them into his office. One table and an area around it had been cleared, and on the tabletop lay a series of neatly arranged folders.

  ‘This is everything we’ve been able to collect,’ Haki said. ‘Together with the latest material sent to you from Professor Lopez in New York. Material he’s been able to glean from Yale and Venice, I imagine. Of course, that stuff’s in your encrypt on the computer, but I’ve transferred it to my laptop – if I can find it –’ Here, he broke off to rummage on his desk among papers under which his MacBook Air had easily become buried. ‘That’s the trouble with such a discreet little thing,’ he grumbled. ‘Mind you, I can remember the days when computers were the size of suitcases. Doesn’t seem that long ago, either.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ said Marlow, wondering how much of Haki’s behaviour was an act. Had the detective-major attempted to decipher Leon’s material? But the urgency of the situation left him no time to reflect on that.

  Haki said, ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ going over to his desk and busying himself with other paperwork. He had no intention of leaving the room.

  Marlow had to trust him. He picked up Haki’s laptop and flipped it open. Quickly accessing Leon’s material, he confirmed that it contained indications and confirmations of what the hard-copy material transferred electronically from Yale and Venice contained, together with a gloss and some preliminary observations of Leon’s own. He committed it all to memory, and deleted it from the laptop. He knew from its own built-in safety measures that the encryption was intact – no one else had attempted to access it.

  The hard-copy material in the folders showed details of the open tomb, as it had been when Adkins, Taylor and de Montferrat disappeared. There were some general photographs, which showed an underground chamber lined with some kind of hardwood which had survived down the centuries, though the painted scenes – presumably from the late doge’s life – had long since peeled and faded. There were the remains of what looked like flags bearing coats of arms lying on a stamped-earth floor. The bronze coffin lay on a low stone plinth. Its lid had been removed and the corpse within was visible, clad in a faded brocade robe, so stiff that it had retained its shape after the body it encased had shrunk, for the body, as far as Marlow and Graves could judge from the photographs, had withered, rather than rotted, away.

  The next folder contained detailed photographs.

  ‘I see Adkins, Taylor and de Montferrat were careful to leave artefacts and items of jewellery in place,’ said Graves.

  ‘No doubt prior to removal to the Topkapi Museum. They were accompanied and supervised by Turkish colleagues at all times,’ said Marlow.

  ‘The site was placed under heav
y guard as soon as the excavation began,’ said Haki from his desk.

  They studied the photos, scanning them for any clue which would answer the question of why Brad Adkins and his team had vanished. There was nothing obvious. Something they had taken with them then? Or which had been taken from them?

  ‘What the hell did they find?’ asked Marlow.

  ‘Something that someone else was after?’

  ‘That much is clear. And who wanted it?’

  ‘We can’t hold the press off this much longer. And the families are getting more and more anxious. We’re running out of excuses to give them.’

  Marlow turned back to the photographs again. They showed the corpse in detail. Gold and ruby rings hung loose on shrivelled fingers to which the traces of purple gloves still hung. The face, the only other part of the body clearly visible, was a shrunken ball, almost a skull, covered with a thin layer of deeply tanned skin, its nose reduced to two oval holes, the mouth a gaping hole and the eyes vacant sockets. Six photographs showed details of the face, especially of the skin around the eyes, where burn-scars were still faintly discernible. And there were photographs, in a third folder, of the hands.

  ‘Look at the right hand,’ Marlow said, after studying one photo intently and handing it to Graves. ‘What do you see?’

  She looked hard. ‘It looks like a claw.’

  Marlow handed her another picture. ‘And look at this one, of the left.’

  Graves gazed down at the high-density colour photograph, and compared it with the first. She laid them side by side on the table. The left hand, or what was left of it, was open, as if relaxed in sleep, the long fingers bent, but with nothing of the agony in them which characterized the fingers of the doge’s other hand. ‘Maybe he had arthritis,’ she suggested.

  The right hand looked as if it had belonged to someone in a torment of pain.

  ‘That’s not arthritis,’ said Marlow.

  He had seen a hand like that once before, in London. It had belonged to a former East German double-agent who had managed to escape from the Stasi, but not before he had been badly tortured by them. He’d talk of that with Lopez, who’d been with him at the time.

  All the fingers of that man’s right hand had been systematically broken. Marlow looked across at the detective-major. ‘I need to see the remains personally,’ he said. ‘Something’s been missed. Find it and we find them.’ He was thinking, Even the faintest clue, an impression in the soil, something left behind by Adkins, Taylor or de Montserrat – something which to anyone else would seem unimportant and which a photographer, however thorough, might have missed or discounted.

  Haki picked up the telephone and made three calls in quick succession. He seemed to be passing from one office to another until he got the official he needed to get the permission he sought, for with each call his tone became more peremptory, more impatient. But the whole process took fewer than five minutes, and by the end of them a smile was back on his lips again.

  ‘We’ll take my car,’ he said.

  The interior of the Church of St Irina was plain and bare, but the force of the worship that had taken place there down the eighteen centuries of its existence, almost until very recent times, struck Marlow like a mallet. It was closed to tourists and surrounded by a military guard.

  The place was empty except for two bored young soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs, who stood near a large oblong hole in the ground on the south-east aisle. It was cold inside the church, and the two men obviously hated the posting.

  Everything in the tomb was in place, and only plastic sheeting covered the artefacts and the body inside to protect them from dust. Above it wooden poles supported a corrugated-iron roof. Between the poles, more plastic sheeting was stretched. Haki led the way, pulling aside two sheets and descending gingerly into the pit by a short stairway attached to one side. The three of them stood over the body, and Marlow bent forward, looking keenly at the corpse’s right hand.

  There was no doubt about it. Someone, at some time well after Dandolo’s death, had been here and broken all the fingers and the thumb.

  ‘Why do that?’ asked Haki, his voice hushed.

  Marlow stood back and answered briefly. ‘To prise them apart,’ he said. He glanced at Graves. ‘Seen enough?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then let’s get back and see what other treats Leon has in store for us.’

  Haki’s mobile rang and he spoke into it briefly.

  ‘There’s something else,’ put in Haki. ‘It’s expected back from our own lab – any time now.’

  21

  Year of Our Lord 1171

  I need a better man to captain my bodyguard, thought Dandolo once safely back at Chios, remembering the battle on the sand. But there’d be time enough to arrange that.

  He congratulated himself on having been able to second-guess the Templars’ duplicity, and on having kept the nature of the transfer of money secret from all but Leporo. He also congratulated himself on having kept the secret of how to open and close the lock to the casket even from the monk, but he had the knack of it himself, practising with the box empty – the tablet itself, wrapped in a silk handkerchief, securely tucked into a sleeve of his gown.

  Both the box and the key, each made of iron, were the work of a master locksmith, who must have worked for Adhemar, for they were old, but not that old, perhaps seventy years or so.

  The inscription on the key made no sense to Dandolo – it appeared to be a series of numbers, in a script which may have been Aramaic.

  As for the writing on the box, that was in Latin, in a code so simple that it took him less than a day, on the voyage from Acre to Chios, to decipher. The sense of what was written was another matter: it told of a dark eagle descending on the earth, its talons outstretched. Nothing could prevent the onslaught of the eagle, the script ran, unless … But the end of the riddle was missing.

  Once he had mastered the lock, Dandolo took to leaving the box shut but empty. The key and the tablet he kept with him at all times. He couldn’t carry the box about with him everywhere he went, but he found he was uncomfortable if the tablet wasn’t permanently under his hand. Besides, the locked box provided a useful decoy, and no one, he knew, and nothing, could open it without the key. It was so skilfully made and fitted together that no crowbar could force it. He was sure that not even the grey exploding powder they said the Chinese made could dent it.

  As he’d foreseen, the embassy to Constantinople had become mired in futile negotiations. Doge Vitale needed him to join the other Venetians there, and see what, if anything, could be salvaged. And there was a hidden agenda: Vitale needed Dandolo to set up a spy ring. Venice would have been mad not to seize such an opportunity to take stock of the real might of this potential adversary. Vitale hadn’t ruled Venice wisely and well for fifteen years not to have learned a trick or two: he knew that before he launched such an operation he needed to lull the Greeks – already convinced of their own intellectual superiority over the Venetians – into a sense of security. The moment they thought they could trust the legation, the time would come to betray that trust.

  Dandolo wasn’t sorry to be leaving Chios again so soon. The winter of 1171 had given way to the spring of 1172. Now, the weather was hot and humid and, though it was contained for the moment, the plague had broken out on one ship during Dandolo’s absence in the Holy Land. In daily increasing numbers, men broke into heavy sweats, before the telltale blisters appeared in their groins and under their armpits. After that, death came within days.

  The ship had been towed to a place apart from the rest of the fleet, and the crew quarantined, but things didn’t look good, and the long wait was clearly preying on the nerves of the Venetian task-force. Dandolo toyed with the idea of having the ship burned, with its crew in it, but dismissed it. He calculated that such a measure would serve only to undermine morale within the fleet more, and morale was already at a low ebb.

  A new voyage, then. Dandolo prepared for it by hav
ing his most resplendent robes placed in his trunks – he knew what suckers the Greeks in Constantinople were for pomp, though he doubted if the finest show Venice could make would go far in impressing them. Oh, the riches of that city!

  There were three days’ sailing ahead of him. The sea was calm throughout, glittering gold under the sun during the day and silver under the moon at night. The winds were balmy and cool, and more often than not in their favour. Dandolo spent the time closeted with Leporo, going over their papers, and what new plans and offers they could bring to the negotiating table in the Palace of Boucoleon.

  Here, perhaps, their first chance would come. There was no doubting the power the tablet had, if only he knew how to harness and use that power. But that knowledge would come. In the meantime, Dandolo considered how best to play Vitale and the Greeks off against one another. With the right planning, and Vitale discredited, there would be only one man to step into the breach.

  ‘Your star is rising,’ Leporo said, reading his thoughts.

  Dandolo, immersed in his thoughts, did not answer. If he showed himself too proud, too soon, all might founder.

  They arrived on the morning of the fourth day.

  22

  Dandolo’s party found the Venetian legation quartered in the vacated mansion of a rich compatriot who had lived in Constantinople for half his life. To reach it, they had passed through streets paved with white marble flagstones. Everywhere in this quarter the houses’ façades were faced with the same white marble.

  The city looked as if it were on permanent holiday. Gold and silver were everywhere in evidence, from the threads of the women’s dresses to the decoration of the staffs even men of quite modest rank carried. The colours of the garments worn, and of the awnings over shops and restaurants and even the studios of the craftsmen, were yellow and green and purple, and the city appeared to be in the grip of a great energy – everywhere, people were engaged in their activities, from doing business to having fun, with an intensity which staggered the more restrained Venetians.