Ethan Gage Collection # 1

by William Dietrich

  The sailors went white and kept as far from Miriam as they could.

  If there was any advantage to the long slog through thigh-deep water, it was that it took some starch out of the panting sailors. They weren’t used to close places or land work, and only their assumption of ancient coin kept them from balking entirely. To keep them wheezing, I suggested to Tentwhistle that Ned and Tom help carry Jericho’s bag of mortar.

  “Why don’t we all just carry a hod of bloody bricks while we’re at it?” Ned complained. But he plodded on like a mule, all of us wading in a cocoon of lantern light. I paused once to listen while the others pushed ahead, darkness growing as they receded. There—was that the echo of a clang, of a padlock being broken far behind? Yet at such a distance it was hardly more audible than the drop of a pin, and I heard nothing else. At length I gave up and hurried to catch the others.

  Finally there was the sound of running water and the tunnel began lowering toward the water surface. Soon we’d be crawling.

  “We are nearing the natural spring,” Farhi said. “Legend says that somewhere above is the navel of Jerusalem.”

  “I think we’re in the bloody arse, meself,” Little Tom muttered.

  We hunted with our lanterns until we indeed found a dark slit overhead, tight as a purser’s pocket. I wouldn’t have guessed it led anywhere, but once we’d boosted each other up it opened and a passage angled back toward the main city, dry this time. We crawled over boulders fallen from the ceiling, Miriam more agile than any of us. There was another mouse hole and the woman led the way, Big Ned cursing as he barely squeezed through, pushing the sack of mortar. He was covered in a sweaty sheen. Then the tunnel became regular again, man-made. It led upward at a steady slope, its ceiling only a foot above our heads and its diameter too narrow for two men to easily pass. Ned kept bumping his crown and cursing.

  “Legend has it that this passage was built just wide enough for a shield,” Farhi said. “A single man could hold it against an army of invaders. We’re on the right path.”

  As we advanced the air grew stale and the lanterns dimmer. I had no idea how far we’d come or what time it was. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have been told we’d walked, waded and crawled back to Paris. Finally we came to dressed stone, not cave walls. “Herod’s wall,” Jericho murmured. “We’re passing under it, and thus under the Temple Mount platform itself, far above.”

  We pressed on, and once more I heard water ahead. Suddenly our passageway ended in a large cave barely bridged by our feeble light. Jericho had me hold his lantern while he cautiously lowered himself into a pool below. “It’s all right, only chest deep and clean,” he announced. “We’ve found the cisterns. Be as quiet as you can.”

  At the other side the tunnel went on. We came to a second cistern and then a third, each about ten yards across. “In a wetter season all these passages would be underwater,” Jericho said.

  Finally the passageway led upward again to a dry cavern, and at last our path abruptly ended. The ceiling was higher because of a cave-in of stone that half-filled the chamber, raising its floor as well. Beyond, we could see the top of an arched doorway made of stone. Trouble was, its door was gone and the opening had been entirely filled with mortared stone blocks, our way plugged.

  “Bloody hell, it’s all for nothing then,” Ned wheezed.

  “Is it?” Jericho said. “What’s behind this wall that its builders didn’t want us to get to?”

  “Or let out,” Miriam added.

  “We needs a keg of powder,” the sailor said, throwing down the mortar.

  “No, quiet is the key,” said Farhi. “You must dig through before dawn prayers.”

  “And seal it back up,” Miriam put in.

  “Bollocks,” said Ned.

  I tried to focus the oaf. “Lost time is never found again, old Ben would say.”

  “And men that cheats at cards should give back what they wrongfully took, Big Ned says.” He squinted at me. “There better be something on the other side of that wall, guv’nor, or I’ll empty you by shaking from the ankles.” But despite his bluster he and Little Tom finally pitched in, the eight of us forming a chain, passing loose rock to make a trench to the base of the blocked arch. It took two hours of backbreaking work to push enough rubble aside to see the entrance whole. A broad underground gate was stoppered like a bottle by different-colored limestone.

  “It made sense to seal it,” Tentwhistle offered. “This could be an entry point for enemy armies.”

  “The ancient Jews built the arch,” Farhi guessed, “and Arabs, Crusaders, or Templars bricked it up. Some earthquake brought down the ceiling, and it’s been forgotten ever since, except for legend.”

  Jericho wearily hefted a bar. “Let’s get to it, then.”

  The first stone is always the hardest. We didn’t dare pound and break, so we chiseled out mortar and put Ned on one side and Jericho on the other to pry. Their muscles bulged, the block slid out like a stuck, stubborn drawer, and finally they caught its fall and set it quietly as a slipper. Farhi kept looking at the ceiling as if he could somehow see the reaction of Muslim guards far above us.

  I bent to the puff of stale air that came out our hole. Blackness. So we worked on adjacent stones, cracking their mortar and leveraging them one by one. Finally the hole was big enough to crawl through.

  “Jericho and I will scout,” I said. “You sailors stand guard. If there’s anything here, we’ll bring it to you.”

  “Bloody ’ell with that!” Big Ned protested.

  “I’m afraid I must agree with my subordinate,” Tentwhistle said crisply. “We are on a naval mission, gentlemen, and like it or not, we’re all agents of the Crown. By the same token, any property taken belongs to the Crown for later distribution under the prize laws. Your contributions will be fully taken into account, of course.”

  “We’re not in your navy anymore,” Jericho objected.

  “But you’re in the pay of Sir Sidney Smith, are you not?” Tentwhistle said. “And Gage is his agent as well. Which means that we go through this hole together, in the name of king and country, or not at all.”

  I put my hand on my rifle barrel, which I’d leaned against the cave wall. “You were sent as underground labor, not a prize crew,” I tried.

  “And you, sir, were sent to Jerusalem as the Crown’s agent, not a private treasure hunter.” His hand went to his pistol, as did that of Ensign Potts. Ned and Tom grasped the hilt of their cutlasses. Jericho raised his pry bar like a spear.

  We quivered like rival dogs in a butcher shop.

  “Stop!” Farhi hissed. “Are you insane? Start a fight down here and we’ll have every Muslim in Jerusalem waiting for us! We can’t afford to quarrel.”

  We hesitated, then lowered our hands. He was right. I sighed. “So which of you wants to go first? There were snakes and crocodiles behind every hole in Egypt.”

  Uneasy silence. “Sounds like you’re the one with experience, guv’nor.”

  So I wriggled through the hole, waited a moment to make sure nothing was biting me, and then pulled through a lantern to lift.

  I started. Skulls grinned back at me.

  They weren’t real skulls, just sculpture. Still, it was disquieting to see a carved row of skulls and crossbones running like a molding around the junction of walls and ceiling. I’d seen nothing like that in Egypt. The others were crawling in behind me, and as they spied the morbid frieze the sailors’ exclamations ranged from “Jesus!” to a more anticipatory “Pirate treasure!”

  Farhi had a more prosaic explanation. “Not pirates, gentlemen. A Templar style, that skeletal molding. You knew, Mr. Gage, that the skull and crossbones dates back at least to the Poor Knights?”

  “I’ve seen it in connection with Masonic rites as well. And in church graveyards.”

  “Mortality occupies us all, doesn’t it?”

  The skulls decorated a corridor, and we passed down it to a larger room. There I saw other decorations that I assum
ed had originated with Masons as well. The floor was paved with marble tile in the familiar black-and-white checkerboard of the Dionysian architects, except down the center was a curious pattern. Black tiles zigzagged against white to make a slashing symbol, like an enormous lightning bolt. Odd. Why lightning?

  The entrance we’d come through was flanked on this side by two enormous pillars, one black and one white.

  In alcoves on either side were two statues of what looked like the Virgin, one alabaster and the other ebony: The white and black Virgins. Mary the Mother and Mary Magdalene? Or the Virgin Mary and ancient Isis, goddess of the Sirian star?

  “All things are dual,” Miriam murmured.

  The roof was a vaulted barrel, rather plain, but sturdy enough to hold up the Herodian platform somewhere above. At the far end was a stone altar, with a dark alcove beyond. The rest of the room was barren. It had the scale of a dining hall, and perhaps the knights had feasted here when they weren’t busy tunneling into the earth in search of Solomon’s hoard. Other than that, it was disappointingly empty.

  We walked across the room, fifty paces in length. Mounted on the face of the altar was a double plaque. On one side was a crude drawing of a domed church. On the other, two knights were mounted on a single horse.

  “The Templar seal!” Farhi exclaimed. “This confirms they built this. See, there’s the Dome of the Rock, just like the mosque above us, symbolizing the site of Solomon’s Temple, origin of the Templar name. And two knights on a single horse? Some believe it was a sign of their voluntary poverty.”

  “Others contend that it means the two are aspects of the one,” Miriam said. “Male and female. Forward and backward. Night and day.”

  “There’s bloody nothing here,” Big Ned interjected, looking around.

  “An astute observation,” Tentwhistle said. “It appears we’ve gone to a lot of labor for nothing, Mr. Gage.”

  “Except the Crown’s business,” I shot back sourly.

  “Aye, the American has given us the business all right,” Little Tom muttered.

  “But look at this, then!” Ensign Potts called. He’d gone over to examine the White Madonna. “A servant’s door, maybe? Or a secret passageway!”

  We clustered around. The ensign had pushed on the Madonna’s outstretched hand, raised as if in blessing, and she had pivoted. When she did so, stone had slid away behind her to reveal a winding circular stair, with an opening so narrow you had to squeeze sideways to enter it. It climbed steeply upward.

  “That would go to the Temple platform above,” Farhi said. “Communication with the old Templar quarters, in El-Aqsa Mosque. It’s probably blocked, but we must be quieter than ever. Sound would carry up that like a chimney.”

  “Who cares what they ’ear,” Ned said. “There’s nothing down here anyway.”

  “You’re on Muslim holy ground, fool, and sacred Jewish soil as well. If either group hears us they’ll bind us, circumcise us, torture us for trespassing, and then tear us limb from limb.”

  “Ah.”

  “Let’s try the Black Madonna as well,” Miriam said.

  So we went to the opposite side of the room, but this time no matter how hard Potts pushed on the arm, the statue didn’t move. Miriam’s dualism didn’t seem in effect. We stood, frustrated.

  “Where’s the Temple treasure, Farhi?” I asked.

  “Did I not warn that the Templars got here before you?”

  “But this chamber looks European, like something they built, not something they discovered. Why would they construct this? It’s a laborious way to get a dining hall.”

  “No windows down here,” Potts observed.

  “So this was for ceremonies,” Miriam reasoned. “But the real business, the research, must have been in another chamber. There must be another door.”

  “The walls are blank and solid,” her brother said.

  I remembered my experience at Dendara in Egypt and glanced at the floor. The black-and-white tiles formed diagonals that radiated out from the altar. “I think Big Ned should push on this stone table here,” I said. “Hard!”

  At first nothing happened. Then Jericho joined him, and finally Little Tom, Potts, and me, all of us grunting. Finally there was a scrape and the altar began to rotate on a pivot set at one corner. As it slid sideways across the floor, a hole was revealed underneath. Stairs led down into darkness.

  “This is more like it, then,” Ned said, panting.

  We descended, crowding into an anteroom below the main chamber. At its end was a great iron door, red and black with rust. It was marked by ten brass disks the size of dinner plates, green with age. There was one disk at the top, then two rows of three each descending. Between them but lower was a vertical column of three more. In the center of each was a latch.

  “Ten doorknobs?” Tentwhistle asked.

  “Or ten locks,” Jericho said. “Each of these latches might turn a bar into this jamb of iron.” He tried one handle but it didn’t move. “We’ve no tools to dent this.”

  “Which means that maybe it ain’t been opened and ain’t been robbed,” Ned reasoned, more shrewdly than I would have given him credit for. “That’s good news, it seems to me. The guv’nor may have found something after all. What would you have that’s so precious that you’d put a door like this in front of it, eh, and down at the bottom of a rabbit hole to boot?”

  “Ten locks? There are no keyholes,” I pointed out.

  And as Jericho and Ned pulled and pushed on the massive door, it didn’t quiver. “It’s frozen in place,” the blacksmith said. “Maybe it’s not a door after all.”

  “And time is growing short,” Farhi warned. “It will be dawn on the platform above, and Muslims will be coming to pray. If we start pounding on that iron, someone is bound to hear us.”

  “Wait,” I said, remembering the mystery of the medallion in Egypt.

  “It’s a pattern, don’t you think? Ten discs, shaped like the sun…ten is a sacred number. This meant something to the Templars, I’m guessing.”

  “But what?”

  “Sefiroth,” Miriam said slowly. “It’s the tree.”

  “A tree?”

  Farhi suddenly stepped back. “Yes, yes, I see it now! The Etz Hayim, the Tree of Life!”

  “The kabbalah,” Miriam confirmed. “Jewish mysticism and numerology.”

  “The Knights Templar were Jews?”

  “Certainly not, but ecumenical when it came to searching for ancient secrets,” Farhi reasoned. “They’d have studied the Jewish texts for clues for where to dig in the mount. Muslim too, and any other. They would have been interested in all symbols aiding their quest for knowledge. This is the pattern of the ten sefiroth, with keter, the crown, at the top, and then binah, intuition, opposite chokhmah, wisdom—and so on.”

  “Greatness, mercy, strength, glory, victory, majesty, foundation, and sovereignty, or kingdom,” Miriam recited. “All aspects of a God that is beyond understanding. We cannot grasp him, but only these manifestations of his being.”

  “But what does it mean on this door?”

  “It’s a puzzle, I think,” Farhi said. He had brought his lantern closer. “Yes, I can see the Jewish names engraved in Hebrew. Chesed, tiferet, netzach…”

  “The Egyptians believed words were magic,” I remembered. “That reciting them could summon a god or powers…”

  Big Ned crossed himself. “By our Lord, heathen blasphemy! These knights of yours adopted the works of the Jew? No wonder they were burned at the stake!”

  “They didn’t adopt, they used,” Jericho said patiently. “Here in Jerusalem we respect other faiths, even when we quarrel with them. The Templars meant something by this. Perhaps the latches are to be turned in the correct succession.”

  “The crown first,” I offered. “Keter there, at the top.”

  “I’ll try it.” Yet that latch budged no more than the others.

  “Wait, think,” Farhi said. “If we make a mistake perhaps none will work.�
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  “Or we’ll trigger some trap,” I said, remembering the descending stone monoliths that almost pinned me in the pyramid. “This might be a test to keep out the unworthy.”

  “What would a Templar choose first?” Farhi asked. “Victory? They were warriors. Glory? They found fame. Wisdom? If the treasure were a book. Intuition?”

  “Thought,” Miriam said. “Thought, like Thoth, like the book Ethan is seeking.”

  “Thought?”

  “If you draw lines from disc to disc they intersect here in the center,” she pointed. “Does not that center represent to the kabbalistic Jews the unknowable mind of God? Is not that center thought itself? Essence? What we Christians might call soul?”

  “You’re right,” Farhi said, “but there is no latch there.”

  “Yes, the only place without a latch is the heart.” She traced lines from the ten disks to this central point. “But here is a small engraved circle.” And before anyone could stop her, she took the pry bar she had poked Little Tom with and rammed the end of the barrel against the iron at precisely that point. There was a dull, echoing boom that made us all jump. Then the engraved circle sank, there was a click, and suddenly all ten latches on all ten brass disks began to turn in unison.

  “Get ready!” I raised my rifle. Tentwhistle and Potts held up their naval pistols. Ned and Tom unsheathed their cutlasses.

  “We’re all going to be rich,” Ned breathed.

  When the latches stopped turning Jericho gave a shove and, with a grinding rattle, the great door pivoted inward and down like a drawbridge, its top held by chains, ponderously lowering until it landed with a soft whump on a floor of dust beyond. A gray puff flew upward, momentarily obscuring what lie beyond, and then we saw the door had bridged a crevice in the floor. The chasm extended downward into blackness.

  “Some fundamental fault in the earth,” Farhi guessed, peering down. “This has been a sacred mountain since time began, a rock that addresses heaven, but perhaps it has roots to the underworld as well.”

  “All things are dual,” Miriam said again.

  Cool air wafted upward from the stone crevasse. All of us were uneasy, and I for one remembered that pit of hell in the pyramid. Our greed made us step across anyway.