The sight gave him a prickle of hope. Would not a city as ancient as this slowly build over the well through the centuries? Did this widening of the shaft not mean that perhaps there would be room to stand around the pool at its bottom?
“Thomas!”
“Yes, Katherine,” he grunted. It took great effort to breathe normally, let alone speak.
“At the side of this wall. Rungs!”
Thomas grinned in relief. She had spoken true. A ladder of horizontal iron bars was imbedded into the stone walls of the shaft. At one time, this well was meant for more than rope and bucket.
The rope began to swing.
“Katherine!” Thomas yelped. “This is no time for play!”
“If we … reach the … rungs,” she said, “no person above … who seeks to … draw water … will pull against … our weight.”
It felt dangerous to be swaying at this dizzying speed an unknown distance from the bottom, but Thomas knew Katherine’s logic was correct.
He began to sway in unison.
Moments later, Sir William managed to grasp a rung. He steadied the rope for Thomas and Katherine. Then Sir William yanked hard to test the iron bar. It did not move.
“Dare we hope this fortune holds?” he asked. He did not wait for a reply, but released the rope.
Katherine had reached a lower rung. She, too, relinquished the rope and began to climb downward.
With Sir William’s feet about to step onto Thomas’s head, there was no choice. Thomas took the rung in front of him and began to feel below for another that would hold the weight of his own feet.
It took less than five minutes to reach the ground, which indeed was a small beach circling the pool of water. And after that, through a cool and dank passageway so low they had to walk bent forward like waddling geese, it took another five minutes to reach a pile of rubble that blocked further movement. Yet from the first moment inside the passage that led away from the wide pool at the bottom of the well shaft, Thomas knew it was the most joyful walk that he had undertaken. Step by cramped step, he felt like singing because of the distant white light that grew larger as they approached. Sunlight! Sunlight and the sound of birds.
They stopped at the rubble that blocked them.
Thomas fell forward and kissed the rocks, which brought forth laughter from Katherine. Sir William caught his enthusiasm and clenched his fist in a victory salute.
“The gamble reaped great profit!” Thomas said when he stood again. “I’ll not mind shredding my hands to clear these rocks, for outside are the hills and mountains.”
Thomas went to the top of the pile of rubble and threw some rocks backward. The opening at the top increased only slightly.
“It’s—”
“Not another—”
Sir William and Katherine stopped themselves, for they had begun to berate Thomas in the same breath.
The result was the same. Thomas stopped.
Sir William bowed gravely. “After you, m’lady,” he said to Katherine.
Katherine smiled. Thomas knew he would never tire of watching that gentle smile.
“I was saying it’s time I received an explanation.”
“Explanation?” Thomas asked.
She nodded. “We were about to leave the city. Until Sir William turned back and whispered for me to follow. Then he lit the tails of those donkeys and told me to descend the well. For all I knew, you had both taken leave of your senses.”
“Yet you descended,” Thomas marveled. “Without protest.”
She turned grave eyes upon him. “What is trust untried? Sir William I have always trusted. And only now, in Jerusalem, have I pledged trust to you. With trust, there is acceptance. So I obeyed.”
She spread her hands. “But now …”
“Gihon Spring,” Thomas explained. “Sir William reminded me of another battle fought in Jerusalem. King David himself, those hundreds upon hundreds of years ago, won this city by sending men up the shaft of the Gihon Spring.”
“You did not know for certain the passage still remained,” Katherine said.
“No, but we had little choice. And we were led to the most ancient well in Jerusalem.”
Katherine nodded slow agreement, then reached upward for Thomas to help her to the top of the pile of rubble.
“Not another stone, please,” Sir William said. “That is what I had been about to say.”
“We cannot remain here,” Thomas said.
“Of course not. Yet why should we expose ourselves in the light of day to flee in the heat? Tonight, while the city sleeps, we shall depart from here. By morning, we will be far enough away to purchase horses, perhaps in Bethlehem.”
Sir William turned his hands so that his palms were face up. “Feel this air. Cool and comfortable. We can rest here in safety and sleep until nightfall.” He flashed a grin from a dirt-smudged face. “The treasure we seek has lain undiscovered for nearly thirteen centuries. One day more matters little, does it not?”
Thirty
By midnight, they had cleared enough rubble to crawl through to escape. Behind them, the eastern city walls. Outlined against the moonlight were the silhouettes of sentry soldiers atop those walls. Although the soldiers were barely in crossbow range, Thomas, Katherine, and Sir William stayed low and crept from tree to tree as they moved directly away from the city; the moonlight was strong enough to cast shadows, and detection of their presence was too much of a possibility.
Thomas hardly dared whisper until long after they had straightened and begun to walk in long, hurried strides. They were now among a grove of olive trees, widely spaced in the dry soil. The leaves glittered silver from the moon, and the hills beyond were solid black against the sky and stars and scattered ghostly clouds.
“Water?” he croaked.
Though they’d filled their skins at the well, even with the relative coolness of dark, their supplies were dwindling fast.
“Our waterskins are almost empty,” Katherine said. “Does the scroll I carry have locations of springs nearby?”
Thomas pictured in his mind the maps he had pored over with scholars in Jerusalem. “We must turn south,” he finally said, “cross the plains, and then climb into the hills of Bethlehem. That will be our nearest water. It is a journey that will last until dawn.”
“We shall seek horses there too,” Sir William said. “While it would be prudent to continue to appear as common travelers and use donkeys, we must cast caution aside. Speed is of the utmost importance.”
“Yet horses tire more easily,” Katherine countered. “Speed matters little if it cannot be sustained under pursuit.”
A slight breeze swirled so that the shadows of the trees swayed and bounced patterns of dancers across the hard-packed ground.
“Gold is one thing we do have,” Katherine mused. “Could we not purchase three or four horses each, so that when one becomes tired of the weight of its rider, we saddle another?”
Sir William clapped Katherine on her right shoulder. “Superb, my friend. We could be on a ship for England within the month.”
And then? Thomas was lost in thoughts. What might happen in England? There were only the three of them.
But no …
There could be a fourth.
The words again rose in his mind, the words that had haunted Thomas all these weeks, the first words Sir William had spoken upon their reunion here in the Holy Land.
Sir William had yet to tell him of his father. They had hours of travel ahead, travel in the isolation of night. Thomas would be glad to fill those hours with conversation. And with questions.
They slipped among the shadows, using the receding outline of the city to give them their bearings as they moved south. Thomas waited several minutes, then spoke again.
“Sir William,” he began, “yesterday you informed me of a self-evident truth: Lord Baldwin was not, as he claimed, my father.”
“Lord Baldwin.” Sir William spat. “He hid among the Immortals for years, cl
aiming to be one of us. He meant to deceive you too. If not for your test, we might never have known.”
Katherine slipped beside Thomas as they walked. Without speaking, she took his hand and intertwined her fingers with his. The simplicity of her gesture—a quiet gift of love as they descended as fugitives through the hillside fields—touched him so deeply that his throat tightened. He did not trust himself to speak.
Sir William repeated himself. “Thomas, did you not hear me? You have solved one mystery. It was Lord Baldwin and Waleran who were responsible for the fall of Magnus before your birth—the fall that sent all of us into exile here in the Holy Land.”
Thomas nodded. Katherine squeezed his hand, a slight pressure of her awareness of how she affected him.
“But my father …” Thomas finally found his voice.
“What was that?” Sir William said sharply.
“Who is my—”
“No. I thought I heard movement.”
They froze. Thomas and Sir William placed their right hands upon the hilts of their swords. Yet only shadows sifted and teased their eyes, and only the sigh of the breeze greeted them.
Sir William relaxed. He began to walk forward again.
This time, Thomas sought Katherine’s hand. He caught a gleam of her teeth in the moonlight as she smiled.
“Who is your father?” Sir William repeated. “Tell me first what you know of your childhood and the Immortals, then I shall reveal what of the rest he has permitted me.”
“I am an Immortal,” Thomas said. Quiet satisfaction filled his voice to call himself such.
“Yes,” Katherine whispered. “You are. For so long we could not trust you. Sarah’s death …”
“My mother died before I was old enough to truly understand Immortals and Druids and their age-old battle,” Thomas said. “I set out to conquer Magnus with the knowledge I had been given—that I was an Immortal and that Magnus was mine to reclaim—unaware of the hidden Druid masters of that castle and kingdom. And, for the last year, I have felt as a pawn between both the Druids and Immortals.”
Sir William stopped.
“Thomas, we had no choice.”
“I know,” Thomas replied, almost weary. “You could not know whether the Druids had discovered me in the monastery and converted me.”
“There is more,” Katherine said. “More and terrible things. Sir William only just informed me what the Druids truly intend as they expand their power across England.”
Thirty-One
Sir William began to walk again. Thomas and Katherine followed. “It is a horror that sorrows me to repeat,” Sir William said, now moving briskly as if to attempting to dispel anger. His dark shadow seemed to flow across the rocky ground in front of them.
“Thomas, you know full well that the Druids have begun to conquer in the most insidious way possible, by posing as Priests of the Holy Grail, by proclaiming false miracles to sway all the people.”
“Yes,” Thomas said. Few memories were closer than those of how he had fled in exile because of the Druid priests.
“This is the same question I asked of Katherine.” The knight paused. “How long until the priests of the Roman church are powerless and the Priests of the Holy Grail have conquered?”
Thomas understood instantly. “The entire structure of a country is then threatened! If the people no longer believe in the authority of Rome, the king and all his noblemen will face rebellion!”
“To be replaced by the chosen of the Druid priests,” Katherine finished for him. “But there is more at stake.”
Now Sir William was clenching his fists, and he walked so quickly that Thomas and Katherine struggled to keep pace with him.
The knight almost hissed his anger. “Thomas, your education and training has given you the history of mankind. You know that hundreds of years have passed, dark ages when knowledge was scarce and all people were held in chains by ignorance. Only now has the light begun to appear. Advances in medicine and science are upon us and, through the written word, are shared from man to man, country to country. Mankind now begins to advance!”
Sir William stopped again, the passion of his words too much to let him walk. “Thomas, I have thought of this so many times that I have the words memorized! Listen to me! It is possible that the day will arrive when fair laws protect every man, when abundance of food and medicine lets a common man live to be even fifty years of age! When all can receive the pleasure you and I do from books! When leaders of men must respond to the will of the people! This day may someday arrive, even if it takes generations after you and I have left this earth. A day when such abundance and ease of living causes nations to exist in peace.”
Thomas felt wonder to see this war-hardened warrior so transformed.
“If the Druids conquer and begin to rule,” Sir William said, “they will bar the people from knowledge for centuries more, for their own power is derived from the ignorance of the people.”
“This is the cause we fight,” Thomas said, ambivalent with both joy at understanding the battle and dread at the enormity of the stakes.
“Yes,” Sir William said. “Merlin himself founded Magnus in the age of King Arthur for this cause. An unseen battle that has raged between Immortals and Druids for eight centuries. And you hold the final secrets to the battle.”
“I do?”
“Together, when we return to England, this secret can be unlocked, just as surely as we shall find the treasure shown on the scroll Katherine carries. With both, we will have the chance to overcome the odds.”
“But what of my father?”
Before Sir William could reply, shadows detached themselves from beneath the trees to glide and surround them.
The shadows became men with curved swords that gleamed in the moonlight.
“Only fools travel at night,” came the hoarse whisper. “Fools who pay for their mistakes with blood.”
Thirty-Two
The knight reacted without hesitation. He drew his sword and lashed outward in a single movement so quickly that two men dropped to clutch their arms with shrieks of agony before any other bandit moved in the darkness.
Then, three men swarmed the knight, swords flashing downward in the moonlight.
Sir William danced tight circles. He struck outward with a fury of steel against steel that sent sparks in all directions and, incredibly, managed to fend off the three.
Thomas, almost mesmerized by the knight’s skillful swordplay, nearly paid for that fascination with his life. Had the moon been behind a cloud, he would not have caught the glint of movement at his side. But the silvery flash saved him, and the shine of steel gave him barely enough warning to dodge backward as a great curved sword slashed downward.
The point of that sword ripped through his sleeve, and Thomas spun again, knowing the bandit would strike again soon.
A vicious horizontal swing. Thomas sucked in his stomach, bending forward to pull his lower body away from the arc of the sword. Again, the swish of fabric as his cloak parted to razor-sharp steel.
Another vicious swing. This one less close, for Thomas had adjusted to the rough terrain and moved with the nimbleness of desperation.
Another attacker joined.
Thomas ducked, then sprinted to a tree. He struggled to free his own sword, but was hampered by his ripped cloak.
Both attackers stayed in pursuit.
Thomas edged around the tree, using it to protect his back as he fought to clear his sword.
Where is Katherine? How many bandits? Is Sir William still alive? Thomas’s thoughts scrambled as he did. We must survive! Duck this sword!
Thomas felt the pluck of air as the sword whooshed over his head.
A thud as the sword bit into the olive tree.
The bandit grunted at impact and yanked at his sword to pull it free. Thomas took advantage. While the bandit had both arms extended to grip the sword, Thomas kicked upward with all his strength. His foot buried itself in the softness of the bandit’
s stomach and sent him retching.
No time to relax!
Another swoosh as the second bandit swung across. The sword bounced off the tree.
And still, Thomas noted grimly, the clank of sword against swords echoed through the night air. Sir William lives. Where is Katherine?
Thomas stepped away from another slash and still fought to clear his own sword.
The distraction was a deadly mistake.
Thomas stumbled.
He recovered with a quick half step, but the off-balance movement threw his right foot into the arch of a root that curled above the hard ground. He frantically tried to pull free, and a bolt of tearing pain from his ankle forced him to grunt.
Another frantic pull, despite the pain.
Nothing.
And the curved sword was now raised high. A snarling grin from the bandit as he savored the certain death he was about to inflict upon Thomas.
“Halt!”
Katherine’s voice, clear and strong, carried through the trees.
“Halt! Listen to my words!”
The sword above faltered and did not descend. Farther away, the clank of swords ended.
Thomas flicked his eyes away from the upraised sword and glanced at the bandit’s face. It mirrored surprise.
A woman’s voice. It has shocked them all into curiosity.
As if proving his guess right, the bandits craned their heads in all directions, trying to locate her voice.
“Here, in the tree,” Katherine called. A shifting cloud broke away from the moon, and suddenly her silhouette was easy to see against the light. She stood balanced on a thick branch, far from the ground.
Thomas grinned. Katherine had found safety during the melee.
His grin died at her next words.
“I promise you far greater treasure than the mere coins we carry! I carry a scroll that leads to great wealth,” Katherine called again. Her voice remained easy to hear above the quickening breeze. To confirm her words, she waved the narrow tube of rolled parchment.
With the attention so focused on Katherine, Thomas considered making a move for his sword but decided against it. Katherine had managed to bring a temporary truce. He would trust she had reason to reveal the scroll. Besides, he noted more shadows moving among the trees. There were now at least a dozen bandits, with more joining every minute. Any fight now would most surely be lost.
Blades of Valor Page 12
