Ethan Gage Collection # 1

by William Dietrich

  A tunnel leading downward was not hard to find. In one corner on the inside of the temple there was a crater in the rubble, as if someone had dug in search of treasure, and at the bottom were rough boards weighted down with rocks. “Here it is then!” Ned quietly exulted. We threw the boards aside and found a set of sandstone stairs leading downward. Using dry brush to make crude torches, we lit one with steel and flint and descended. Yet we were soon disappointed. After thirty steps the staircase ended abruptly at what appeared to be a well, its sides of smooth sandstone. I took a rock and dropped it. Long seconds passed, and then there was a splash. I could hear water running below.

  “An old well,” I said. “The Bedouin closed it up so their goats and children wouldn’t fall in.”

  Disappointed, we went back outside to explore the perimeter but found nothing of interest. Out in front, old pillars holding nothing up lined an abandoned causeway. More heaps of broken masonry marked ancient buildings, long collapsed. All looked picked over, pottery fragments everywhere. I’ll tell you what history is: broken shards and forgotten bones; a million inhabitants thinking their moment is the most important, all turned to dust. From the cliffs around, caves were mute mouths. Weary, we sat.

  “Looks like your theory didn’t work, guv’nor,” Ned said, dispirited.

  “Not yet, Ned. Not yet.”

  “Where’s the ghosts, then?” He peered about.

  “Keeping their own counsel, I hope. Do you believe in them?’

  “Aye, I’ve seen ’em. Lost shipmates stalk the deck on the darkest watches. Other wraiths, from wrecks unknown, call from passing swells. It gives a sailor a chill, it does. There was a baby that died in a rooming house I rented in Portsmouth, and we used to hear the cries when…”

  “This is Satan’s talk,” Mohammad interrupted. “It’s wrong to dwell on the dead.”

  “Yes, let’s think of our purpose, lads. We need a way down. If there’s one thing that goes with treasure hunting, it’s grubbing in the earth.”

  “We should get miner’s wages, we should,” Ned agreed.

  “In the morning, Silano is going to enter a temple where that lightning beam struck and either find something or not. I’ve bet not. But we need to find it ourselves and be well on our way before then.”

  “And what of the woman?” Ned asked. “Are you givin’ her up, guv’nor?”

  “She’s supposed to steal away and meet us.”

  “Ah, you gambled on her, too? Now, women are bad bets.”

  I shrugged. “Life is nothing but gambles.”

  “I like the sound of the river,” Mohammad remarked, to change the subject. He viewed gambling as Satan’s device too, I knew. “You seldom hear it in the desert.”

  We listened. Indeed, there was a stream running down a channel next to the causeway, chuckling as it splashed.

  “It’s that storm. This place is parched like a bone most days, I figure,” Ned said.

  “I wonder where the water goes,” Mohammad added. “We’re in a bowl.”

  I stood. Where indeed? The desert drinks its fill. Suddenly excited, I clambered down the temple’s broken stairs to the causeway and crossed it to the temporary stream, sparkling now in the starlight. It ran west toward the mountains and…there! Disappeared.

  An old pillar lay like a chopped tree trunk across the river course, and under it the river abruptly ended. On one side a babbling brook, on the other dry sand and cobbles. I slid into the cool water, feeling it rush against my calves, and peered under the column. There was a horizontal crack in the earth like a sleepy giant’s eyelid, and into this the water poured. I could hear the echo. Not a giant’s eye, but its mouth. Drinks its fill.

  “I think I’ve found our hole!” I shouted up to the others.

  Ned jumped down beside me. “Slip into that crack, guv’nor, and you might be flushed to hell.”

  Indeed. Yet what if by some miracle I’d guessed right, and this was a clue to where the Templars had really hidden their Jerusalem secret? It felt right. I backed out from under the pillar and looked about. This was the only pillar that had fallen into the stream course. What were the chances it would have rolled precisely to where a cavern led downward? A cavern, moreover, that made its presence known only after a big thunderstorm?

  I followed the column’s trunklike length up the slope opposite from the temple. It had sheered off its base as if in an earthquake, its lower remnant jutting like a broken tooth. Intriguingly, the foundation platform seemed freer of debris than the surrounding landscape. Someone—centuries ago, now?—had cleared this: perhaps after setting aside their coat of medieval chain mail and a white tunic with a red cross.

  “Ned, help me dig. Mohammad, get more brush for torches.”

  He groaned. “Again, guv’nor?”

  “Treasure, remember?”

  Soon we’d revealed a platform of worn marble under the column base. For just a moment I could visualize what this city must have been like in its heyday, the columns forming a shady arcade on either side of the central causeway, crammed with colorful shops and taverns, clean water gushing down to blue fountains, and tasseled camels from Arabia, humps laden with trade goods, swaying in stately march. There would be banners, trumpets, and gardens of fruit trees…

  There! A pattern on the marble. Carved triangles jutted from the pillar’s square base. There were actually two layers of paving, I realized, one an inch higher and overlapping the other. It made this pattern:

  “Look for a symbol on this stonework,” I told my companions.

  “Like a Masonic sign of compass and square.”

  We hunted. “Clean as a virgin’s breast,” Ned declared.

  Well, the Templars were warrior-monks, not stonemasons. “No cross? No sword? No sefiroth?”

  “Effendi, it’s just a broken pillar.”

  “No, there’s something here. Some way down to flower and faith, like the poem said. It’s a locked door, and the key is…it’s a square with a square. Four corners and four corners? That’s eight. A sacred number? It’s in the Fibonacci sequence.”

  The other two looked at me, blank.

  “But two triangles too, three and three. Six. That isn’t. Together they make fourteen, and that isn’t either. Damn! Am I entirely off course?” I felt I was trying too hard. I needed Monge, or Astiza.

  “If you could overlap the triangles, effendi, it would make the Jewish star.”

  Of course. Was it as simple as that? “Ned, help pull this column base. Let’s see if the triangles on this floor slide over each other.”

  “What?” Once more he looked at if I were a lunatic.

  “Pull! Like you did on the altar beneath Jerusalem!”

  Looking as if he was confirming his own damnation, the sailor joined me. By myself I don’t think I would have budged the frozen stonework, but Ned’s muscles bulged until they cracked. Mohammad helped too. Grudgingly, the base of the fallen pillar indeed began to move, the marble beginning to overlap. As the triangles crossed, they increasingly began to form the pattern of the Star of David.

  “Pull, Ned, pull!”

  “You’re going to bring another lightning bolt, guv’nor.”

  But we didn’t. The more the triangles overlapped, the smoother they slid. When they formed the star there was a click and the pillar base suddenly swung free, rotating out of the way on a single pin at its corner. The whole assembly had become weightless. As the base did so the six-sided star began to sink into the earth.

  We gaped.

  “Jump, jump, before it gets away from us!” I sprang and landed on the descending paving. After a moment’s hesitation Ned and Mohammad did too, the Arab holding crude torches. We could hear the creak of ancient gears as we settled into the earth.

  “We’re going to hell,” Mohammad moaned.

  “No, men. The book and treasure!”

  The sound of water was louder now, echoing into whatever subterranean chamber we were descending. We sank down a star-shaped shaft, our
platform the six-sided star, and then it jerked and settled on the bottom. I looked up. We were in a well, far too high to climb out of. I could see only a few stars.

  “How do we get back up?” Ned asked reasonably.

  “Hmmm. I wonder if we should have left one of us on top? Well, too late now, lads. The book will tell us how to get out.” I said it with more confidence than I felt.

  A low horizontal passage led off from our peculiar shaft toward the sound of water. We crouched and followed it. In roughly the length of the fallen pillar above, we came to a cavern. There was a roar of water.

  “Let’s light a torch,” I said. “Just one—we may need the others.”

  Yellow light flared. I gasped. The stream from the thunderstorm was spilling down from the slit I’d observed above, the desert drinking its fill. But that wasn’t what caught my eye. The cavern we’d come to was man-made and shaped like a horn, or funnel, narrowing as it went down. Around its periphery a ledge wound, just wide enough for a man. We were clustered at its top. The ledge spiraled as it descended, and its pattern reminded me of the nautilus shell Jomard had shown me at the Great Pyramid, the one inspired by the Fibonacci sequence.

  For the flower and faith. At the funnel’s bottom, the water was a swirling, turbulent pool.

  “Whirlpool,” Ned muttered. “Not the kind of thing you get back out of.”

  “No, it’s another symbol, Ned. The universe is made of numbers somehow, and the Templars, or the people who built this city, were trying to memorialize it in stone. Just like the Egyptians. This is what the book is about, I’m guessing.”

  “Underground places built by madmen?”

  “What’s behind the everyday world we see.”

  He shook his head. “It’s a sewer, guv’nor.”

  “No. A portal.” And faith.

  “Blimey, how did I get mixed up with you!”

  “Indeed, we are in an evil place, effendi.”

  “No, this is a holy place. You two can wait here. I’m betting they wouldn’t build all this if there wasn’t something down there. Would they?”

  They looked at me as if I belonged in an asylum, which wasn’t far wrong. We were all crazy as loons, looking for a shortcut to happiness. But I knew I’d figured out the puzzle, that the mad Templars and their lightning had put their secret here, not where Silano was, and that if Astiza met us as promised I’d finally have it all—knowledge, treasure, and a woman. Well, two women, but that would be sorted out in due course. Again, I was gripped with guilt about Miriam, combined with sweet memory of her body and no little apprehension about her hurt. It’s odd what one thinks about in tight times.

  I lit another torch and descended, creeping down the spiral track like a careful snail. My compatriots stayed above, looking down on me. When I got to where the fall of water hit the pitch-black pool, my torch sputtered in the mist. How deep was this well? Too deep to retrieve whatever the Templars threw down here? For I’d no doubt they’d dropped their Jerusalem treasure down this funnel, trusting that surviving members would someday come back and reconstitute their order.

  I gathered my courage. The water, as I said, was utterly dark, swirling like a drain, with green scum floating on its surface like curds. Its smell was musty as a coffin. But we couldn’t get out the way we’d come, could we? So, setting my torch to one side where it promptly went out—my only light now was the dim torch of Ned and Mohammad above—I took a breath, prayed to all the gods I could think of, and plunged.

  The water was chilly, but not shocking. I fell through ink. Soft, fibrous mats of algae brushed me as I fell, the slime of centuries. There may have been swimming things as well, white and pulpy in the dark—I imagined them, whether or not they were there—but I just kicked straight down, groping. I had two minutes to find what we sought, or drown.

  The current started to hurry me. I began to panic, because it was increasingly apparent that fighting back upward would cost more time and breath than I had. I could not retreat, and I was being swept down and forward.

  I noticed a peculiar glow. It came from ahead, not bright, but welcome enough after long seconds of utter blackness. I saw a bottom and it was reassuringly white, like a bottom of clean sand. Then I saw the true source of the paleness and almost swallowed water. The bottom was not sand, but bone.

  I’d seen the frieze of skulls at the Templar chamber under Jerusalem, but this was a hundred times worse, an ossuary of the damned. Real skulls this time, pale and dim but recognizable enough, in gruesome tangle with arms, legs, and ribs. It was a reef of bone, bleached white, teeth as long as forefingers, sockets as blank as a grave. The whole was wrapped in fuzzed chain and chunks of stone.

  This had been a sacrificial well or execution chamber.

  The current swept me over this boneyard, pulling me toward a growing light. Was I hallucinating as my brain starved of air? No, it was real light, and I passed out of a short tunnel and saw it even brighter above me. While the current wanted to pull me on to wherever the river went, I kicked furiously upward.

  I burst out of water with my last shrieking breath. Those bones! I spied and thrashed for a shelf of sandstone, grabbed, kicked, and flopped up out of the water like a played-out fish. For a while I just lay, gasping. Finally I got breath enough to sit up and look about. I was at the bottom of a sandstone shaft or well. High above, far out of reach, was the source of dim light. The underground stream I’d escaped ran past the shelf of rock and poured into another underwater tunnel. I shuddered. Might there be still more bones downstream, to be joined by mine?

  I looked up to study the pale, silvery light of moon and stars. I couldn’t see the sky so I surmised something was reflecting the night sky downward. The illumination was very dim, but it was light enough to see that the walls of the shaft were smooth, without crevice or foothold and too far apart to span with my body. There was no chance of climbing out. And what else?

  Men watching.

  Dripping, I rose slowly to my feet and turned about in this dim chamber. I was surrounded by men, I realized, huge brooding ones in medieval armor. They were helmeted, bearded, and had kite-shaped shields grounded at their armored feet. Except they weren’t real men but sandstone statues, carved from the shaft walls to form a circle of eternal sentries: Templars. Perhaps they were representations of past grand masters. They were more than life-size, a good nine feet, and their gaze was grim. Yet there was something comforting about these companions as well, who would never let down their guard and yet stood back against the walls of the rock chamber as if they expected what they guarded was someday to be found.

  And what was that? A stone sarcophagus, I saw, but not a lidless one like I’d seen in the king’s chamber of the Great Pyramid. This was in the style of European churches, its lid the sculpted figure of a European knight. The sarcophagus was of limestone, and the Templar, I guessed, was perhaps that first one: Montbard, uncle of Saint Bernard. A guardian for all eternity.

  The lid was heavy, and at first seemed firmly set it place. But when I gave it a hard enough shove it shifted slightly, with a scraping sound. Dust sifted from its edges. Straining, I pushed and pushed, until I had it ajar and could lower an edge onto the ground. Then I peered inside. A box inside a box.

  The coffin was made of acacia wood, remarkably preserved. While opening it gave me pause, I’d come too far. I jerked open the lid. Inside was a skeleton of a man, not terrifying but instead looking small and naked in this ultimate exposure. His flesh had long since decayed away to bone and his clothes were wisps. His warrior’s sword was a narrow, rusty tendril of its former might. But one skeletal hand gripped a marvel not corroded at all, but as bright and intricately decorated as the day it was forged. It was a golden cylinder, fat as an arrow quiver and long as a scroll. Its exterior was a riot of mythic figures, of bulls, hawks, fish, scarabs, and creatures so strange and unworldly that I’m at a loss to describe them, so different were they from anything I’d seen before. There were grooves and arabesque s
crollwork, stars and geometric shapes, and the gold was so smooth and intricate that my fingertips stroked its sensuousness. The metal seemed warm. It was a life’s fortune in weight, and priceless in design.

  The Book of Thoth must be inside. But when I pulled to lift it away, the skeleton pulled back!

  I was so startled I let go and the cylinder shifted slightly, settling deeper into the bones. Then I realized I’d simply been surprised by the object’s weight. I lifted again and the cylinder came free like an anchor stone, supple, slick, and heavy. No lightning flashed. No thunder pealed. Without having realized I’d held it, I let loose pent-up breath. It was simply me in the gloom, holding what men had reportedly sought, fought, and died for over five thousand years. Was this, too, cursed? Of would it be my guidebook to a better world?

  And how to open it?

  As I studied the cylinder more carefully, recognition dawned. I’d seen some of these symbols before. Not all, but some had been on the ceiling at the Temple of Dendara, and others on the calendar device I’d studied in the hold of L’Orient before the French flagship blew up in the Battle of the Nile. There was a circle atop a line, just as on the calendar, and all the others: animals, stars, a pyramid, and Taurus the bull, the zodiacal age in which the Great Pyramid had been built. And not just a pyramid, but a small representation of a pillared temple. The cylinder, I saw, was jointed so that one could twist and align symbols, not unlike the circles of the calendar. So once more I tried what I knew: bull, five-sided star, and the symbol of the summer solstice, just as I’d done on the ship. But that was not enough, so I added pyramid and temple.

  Perhaps I was smart. Perhaps I was lucky. Perhaps there were a hundred combinations that would open the cylinder. All I know is there was a click and it divided between pyramid and temple, like a sausage cut in two. And when I pulled the golden halves apart, what I expected was inside: a scroll, the ancient form of the book.