“I’m telling you the truth,” Tess added. “Please. You’ve got to trust me.”
The seconds stretched interminably, then a verdict seemed to scrape through with the thinnest of majorities, and the woman grudgingly said, “Come with me,” before turning and heading down the side alley.
The shop was a small, detached, stone structure, two stories high—the shop itself and the apartment above. Tess and Reilly followed the old woman past a freestanding flight of stairs that led up to the shopkeeper’s living quarters and stopped outside an old oak door at the back of the building. After some fussing with some keys, the old woman snapped its lock open and led them inside.
They followed her through a small hallway and into a larger room, where the woman switched on a floor-mounted lamp. They were standing in a living room that had a set of French doors giving onto some kind of backyard. It was also cluttered with the memorabilia of a long, full life. Overcrowded shelves strained under the weight of books, picture frames, and vases. A couch and two armchairs were arrayed around a low coffee table and were barely visible under a camouflage of kilim throws and needlepoint cushions, while the walls were a patchwork of small paintings and old black-and-white family photos.
“I’ll make some coffee,” the old woman grumbled. “I know I’m going to need it.”
She padded out of the room. Moments later, the audible fumblings of a pot and a tap were quickly followed by the sound of a struck match and the soft hiss of a gas burner. Tess edged across to take a closer look at the framed photographs. She recognized younger versions of their reluctant hostess alongside various people, records of another era. A couple of dozen frames into the slide show, she stopped in front of one that reached out from the wall and grabbed her by the throat. It showed a young girl standing alongside an older man, a proud father-and-daughter pose. Behind them was a large wooden contraption from a bygone age, a semiautomatic loom of some kind.
A loom used to manufacture cloth.
A piece of machinery used by a draper.
“That’s my mother, and her father,” the old woman said as she returned from the kitchen with a small tray and settled down on the couch. “It was our family business for as long as anyone can remember.”
Tess’s skin was twitching. “What happened?”
“My grandfather lost all his money. He spent it all on a modern loom that was supposed to come from England, but the middleman he bought it from took all his money and disappeared.” She poured thick coffee into small, shot-sized cups and gestured for Tess and Reilly to join her. “He died heartbroken not long after that. My grandmother had to do something to make a living. She knew how to fire clay, it was her father’s business. And this”—she waved her hands around her—”is the result.”
“You sell some beautiful things,” Tess remarked with a smile as she sat down on the couch by the woman. Reilly joined them, settling into the armchair and putting the rucksack down by his feet.
The old woman casually waved away Tess’s comment. “We take pride in what we do, whatever it is. It’s not worth doing otherwise.” She took a sip from her coffee, decided it was too hot, and set it back down. She sat quietly for a moment, then let out a long sigh and raised her eyes to Tess. “So tell me … who are you, exactly? And how did you end up here, in this lost corner of the world, with these old books you’re carrying?”
Tess glanced at Reilly, unsure about what to say. A moment ago, she was seething with indignation, thinking the old woman was out to steal the codices. And yet here they were now, comfortably ensconced in the woman’s living room, sipping coffee and having a courteous little chat.
Reilly nodded her a go-ahead, mirroring her own feelings.
So she told her. Everything. The whole story, from Sharafi’s appearance in Jordan to the shoot-out in the underground city, although she skirted around the gorier parts of it, not wanting to shock her host. Throughout, the old woman listened intently, surprise and fear playing on her face, her eyes roaming Tess’s face and glancing away to Reilly every now and then, only asking for additional clarification a time or two. By the end of it, her hands were shivering. And once Tess was done, she sat quietly for a long moment, working the story over in silence, clearly racked by indecision and worry.
Tess hesitated to wade in. After giving her what she felt was enough time to process it all, she asked, “Why did your granddaughter follow us to our hotel? You asked her to, didn’t you?”
It seemed like the woman didn’t hear her. She just kept staring into her coffee cup, lost in thought, back in the grips of some momentous struggle. After another lengthy deliberation, her words came out slow and soft.
“They didn’t know what to do with them, you know,” she told Tess, barely able to look at her. “We’ve never known what to do with them.” She shut her eyes with remorse, then turned to face Tess. It was as if she’d just crossed a line from from which there was no return.
Tess stared at her blankly for a second, making sure she’d heard her right, then a searing charge of elation burst out of her heart and swept through her. “You have them? You have the other books?” She was now on the very edge of the couch, every pore in her body brimming with anticipation.
The old woman studied her, then nodded slowly.
“How many?”
“Many.” She was surprisingly casual about it, as if she were confirming the most trivial of comments. “The woman, Maysoon. She brought them here, for safekeeping. After Conrad died.”
Tess couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Her face felt like it was on fire. Her eyes flicked across to Reilly and were met with a broad, supportive grin. She turned back to the old woman. “So Conrad did have a woman with him?”
“They met in Constantinople, where they both lived.”
“She was a Sufi?” Reilly asked.
“Yes.”
Tess asked, “So what happened to them? Conrad did die in Zelve, didn’t he?”
Chapter 56
CAPPADOCIA
MAY 1310
The villagers received them with a warm, if tentative, welcome. Conrad and Maysoon found the small settlement in a narrow canyon, tucked away from the outside world, a cluster of rock cones set around a church that had been carved into a cliff face. Their arrival was an unusual occurrence. The villagers didn’t get many visitors and were wary of them at first. Still, they brought with them news of the outside world and a sense of event that was rarely seen in the isolated, canyon-based community, and the locals soon relaxed. The priest who tended the rock church also ended up grudgingly giving them his approval, despite his obvious wariness at the sight of a knight of the Cross traveling with a heathen companion. The fact that Conrad had fought to free the Holy Land and lost his hand doing so forced the man to overcome some of his prejudice. Maysoon also helped win him over when, much to his surprise, she quoted lines of scripture that she had learned as a child while studying tolerance under her Sufi master.
The local midwife who doubled as the town’s physician helped Conrad splint and dress Maysoon’s wrist, and they were offered food and drink. By nightfall, the two of them were huddled together by a window high in a carved-out cone of rock whose sole occupier had recently passed away, watching the sky above the rim of the canyon run the gamut of imaginable pinks and purples before settling into a crisp, uniform blackness.
Conrad hadn’t said much all evening, and he hadn’t said a word for the last half hour. Every breath he exhaled was swirling with despair.
Maysoon pulled back from his chest and scrutinized his face.
“What is it?” she asked.
He didn’t answer or meet her eyes at first, seemingly lost in his melancholy. After a long moment, he said, “This. What I’m doing. It’s pointless.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s pointless. Hector, Miguel … they’re gone. God knows what’s waiting for me in Cyprus.” He sighed heavily. “I can’t do this alone.”
“You’re not alone.
”
He looked at her, and his face brightened a touch. “You’ve been magnificent. But it’s still pointless. Even together, we can’t do this. I was a fool to think I’d ever be able to make a difference.”
She edged closer. “No, you weren’t. You were right to go after it, you were right to find those books and get them back. But if you can’t achieve what you set out to do … it doesn’t mean you still can’t change the world.”
“What do you mean?”
“You wanted to use these writings, this knowledge, the same way it’s been used for the last couple of hundred years. You wanted to blackmail the pope with it and get him to free your friends and reinstate your Order. Which is a noble goal, of course. You had to try and make that happen. But if you’d succeeded … the knowledge in these books would have stayed locked away and hidden from the rest of the world.”
Conrad’s face crinkled with confusion. “Keeping it secret was why the popes gave us anything we wanted. It’s what allowed us to build up our strength and our standing while waiting for the right time to share it all with everyone out there.”
“Was there ever going to be a right time? Or is it always the right time?” She shook her head. “People have kept these texts hidden for a thousand years. You and the Templars who came before you have been using them as a weapon for centuries, and if Hector and Miguel were still alive, you’d still be trying to use them that way. Maybe the time has come to look at things differently. Maybe it’s time you started thinking about how to bring these writings to light instead of keeping them locked away.”
“It’s not possible,” Conrad countered. “Not now. Not when the pope is as strong as he is. Look at what happened to the Cathars. The Vatican has inquisitors everywhere. Nothing heretical can ever be allowed to make itself heard.”
“There’s always a way. Look at Rumi. His preachings were all about love and looking inside ourselves for enlightenment. His words would have been considered blasphemous by any conservative cleric, but they caught the heart of the sultan himself, who invited him to live and preach in his capital and became his protector.”
“I’m not a preacher.”
She smiled. “No, but maybe it’s time you started thinking like one.” She drew nearer and kissed him before slipping her tunic off her shoulders. “But not in every sense of the word.”
THEY SPENT THE NEXT DAYS working the wheat fields with the villagers by day and debating their options by night. How to transport the texts was still a central problem. They only had one horse to their name, and—not that they had the means to pay for it—there was only one open wagon in the settlement, one the villagers couldn’t do without.
Conrad couldn’t see a way out of their quandary, and with each passing day, his anger and frustration grew. The thought of his brethren rotting away in French jails and his impotence at doing anything to help them was eating away at him. A week earlier, he believed he could make a difference. All that had changed with the ambush in the canyon.
Then on the morning of the ninth day, everything changed again when half a dozen pairs of hooves and a familiar voice echoed through the village.
“Maysoon,” the man bellowed. “Conrad. Show yourselves if you don’t want every man, woman, and child in this village to perish.”
Conrad hurried to the window, closely followed by Maysoon. They looked out to see her Qassem and the two surviving hired hands trotting slowly down the central alley of the cone houses. Her brother had a woman with him, sitting side-saddle on his horse. He held a dagger to her throat. They recognized her from the fields. She was the sister of the midwife who had tended to Maysoon’s wrist.
“How did they know it was us?” Maysoon asked.
“The woman,” Conrad said, indicating the hostage with a nod. “She knows our names.”
“But how did they find us?”
“Greed and revenge,” he said. “There are no better motivators.”
“What are we going we do?”
Conrad glared at the three men, men who had killed his friends, men who had scuttled his plans and sealed his brethren’s fate.
Men who had to pay.
“End this,” he replied. He then leaned out and shouted, “Let the woman go. I’m coming out.”
Qassem looked up, saw Conrad, and said nothing. He just threw the woman to the ground and glared at him.
Conrad spotted his prosthetic hand, dangling from the side of the Turk’s saddle. It only made him angrier. He pulled back from the window and strode across to a wall niche and reached for his scimitar.
“You’re not going down there alone,” Maysoon told him, finding her crossbow, but as she grabbed it, her wrist gave way under its weight. She winced with pain as the crossbow clattered to the floor.
“No,” he flared. “Not with your wrist like that. I need you to stay here. This is my fight.”
“I want to help,” she insisted.
“You’ve done more than enough, more than I ever had the right to ask for,” he said, his eyes burning with determination. “I need to do this alone.”
His tone made it clear he wasn’t open to negotiation.
She breathed long and hard, then nodded grudgingly.
He picked up the crossbow, set it down in the niche, and picked up her dagger. “Help me with this,” he said, placing it against his left forearm. “Tie it to my arm.”
“Conrad …”
“Do it, please.”
She found some leather straps and used them to attach the dagger’s handle to the stump of his left arm.
“Tighter,” he said.
She tightened the straps to a solid, tourniquet-level pinch. The blade was now an extension of his arm.
He picked up the scimitar with his right hand. Felt his veins swell with fury. Looked at her. Moved in and swept her up in a long, feverish kiss.
And stepped out into the sun.
“Where’s my whore of a sister?” Qassem barked.
“Inside,” Conrad replied, sidestepping, moving into wider, open ground. “But you’ll need to get through me first.”
Qassem’s eyes flattened to narrow slits, and he smiled. “That was my plan.”
The Turk nodded to his men. The two riders drew their scimitars, spurred their mounts, and charged.
Conrad watched them hurtle toward him, side by side, and put himself into a defensive crouch, knees bent, shoulders tight, the blade of his sword held straight up in front of his face. Old instincts flared back to life and slowed down time, putting every detail of his approaching opponents into hard focus, allowing him time to read them and plan his blows with deadly accuracy. He spotted a vulnerability in the stance of the rider to his left, who was right-handed, and decided to take him out first. With the riders less than ten yards away, he charged them, bolting at an angle, beelining for the man to his left. The move startled his opponents, who had to yank on their horses’ reins viciously to adjust course. Conrad timed it perfectly and got right up to the horseman to his left before the one to his right could correct course fast enough. His target was also struggling to control his mount, opening him up to Conrad’s blade that struck him across his midsection and sliced right through his side. The Turk flinched sideways and fell off his mount. Just as he hit the ground, Conrad was on him and finished him off with a dagger to the heart.
The second rider pulled his horse around and, angered by the knight’s counterattack, came storming back. Conrad didn’t move. He stood his ground, giving his mind the time it needed to find an opening in the man’s reckless charge, coiling his muscles for the next assault.
He saw it and made his move, darting sideways, putting the dead Turk’s body between himself and the horseman to confuse his advance. The rider made the same mistake his crony had and allowed Conrad to get onto the wrong side of his blade, giving the knight the advantage of going for his undefended flank. Conrad let his sword rip, swinging with ferocious strength and opening up a wide gash right through the man’s thigh, virtually c
hopping it off. The rider instinctively pulled on his reins, shocked by the sight of his exposed muscle and flesh. Conrad didn’t give him any breathing space. He charged after him and was on him before the rider even realized he was there, striking him from the right, ripping his back open before shoving him off his saddle and finishing him off with another blow.
And that’s when the bolt struck his shoulder.
It rammed into him from behind with a violent, silent impact.
Conrad staggered forward a couple of steps under the momentum of the hit, then turned around, heavy-footed. Qassem had dismounted. He was standing by his horse, staring at Conrad, the spent crossbow in his hand. He threw it to the ground, drew his scimitar, and strode toward Conrad, his brow gnarled in an infernal scowl.
Conrad knew it was bad. It had hit him in the right shoulder. His good arm. His only good one. The one he needed to work the sword. The arrow was lodged firmly in his shoulder blade, unleashing a cascade of pain with the slightest movement of his right arm.
A cascade he would have to ignore if he was going to defend himself.
Qassem didn’t break step, his eyes locked on Conrad, his sword held low to his side. Then his stride turned to a trot, then a sprint, and with a loud howl, he raised his sword and, with a running leap, brought it crashing down onto Conrad.
Conrad lunged sideways, putting his body out of reach and blocking the blow with his own sword. The blades clanged heavily into each other, the strike reverberating through Conrad and shooting a spasm of white-hot pain across his shoulder. He felt his knees buckle, but he couldn’t let them fail him now, couldn’t let the pain cripple him. Qassem spun around and swung again, his blade flying through a full loop before crashing back down against Conrad’s sword.
The third strike flung the scimitar out of Conrad’s hand, his fingers unable to ignore the agony in his shoulder.
Qassem stood still, breathing in deep snorts, and smiled. His eyes dropped to the dagger strapped to Conrad’s forearm and his smile turned into a mocking grin.
The Templar Salvation (2010) ts-2 Page 38
