by Alex Scarrow
He scraped the last of the coins up and threw them out into the crowd.
‘Money for the poor!’ he shouted.
CHAPTER 67
1194, Nottingham Castle, Nottingham
The first thing Liam registered as he and Bob stepped through the velvet drapes into the keep’s main hall was Becks. She was standing by the arch that led out on to a wooden balcony, poised in a ridiculously-not-her demure and ladylike pose, long embroidered linens and lace fluttering glamorously from her in the breeze.
‘Salutations, Liam. J’espere que vous allez bien?’
Liam bit his lip, resisting an inappropriate urge to giggle. Instead he tipped a polite nod at her. ‘Greetings, Lady Rebecca.’
She switched to English. ‘Greetings to you also.’
John stepped into view from the balcony. He smiled, genuinely pleased to see Liam. ‘Ahhh! My sheriff! ’Tis the man of the hour!’ He stepped forward to greet him. ‘I am indebted to you. I truly am! I arrived here earlier today to, would you believe, to cheers — actually, cheers from the peasants!’
Liam bowed. ‘They are loyal to you, Sire.’
‘Indeed, but I suspect it has been your common touch as sheriff that has earned me their affection, hmmm?’ John’s face adopted a mock-serious expression. His thick brows knotted. ‘I noticed your rather flamboyant entry to the marketplace just now. Congratulations for making your way through Richard’s lines outside … but, I must ask, is it customary now to hurl handfuls of royal revenue at the people to gain entry?’
‘Ahh, yes, that … Well, err … I — we, umm — ’
John’s frown faded and he waved the question away. ‘It matters not to me any more. Now he is back home, it is Richard’s money you were throwing anyway. Not mine.’ He stepped closer to Liam. He could see there was something far more pressing on John’s mind than mere coin. ‘Now … Please, please, you must tell me,’ he said more quietly. ‘I … I need to know — ’
Liam quickly nodded, saving the man any more anguish. ‘“Yes” is the answer, Sire. I have it. We have the Grail.’
John sagged with relief, his breath puffing out in a barely suppressed gasp. ‘Oh, thank the Lord! Thank the Lord!’ He settled down heavily into a wooden chair, robbed of the strength to remain standing. ‘I cannot tell you how … how vexed — how … how so very worried I have been!’
Becks stepped into the room and stood beside him. Liam noticed the graceful way she moved and the way she gently caressed his brow. No longer the swagger of a tomboy, no longer another Bob in a girl-suit. She was all grace and elegance.
Now that’s very weird so it is.
He smiled, proud of what she seemed to have learned over the last few months, her ability to adapt so convincingly. Not so long ago she’d barely managed to pass herself off as an American high-school student. Now here she was, quite believable as a medieval lady of noble blood.
‘Calm yourself, my lord,’ she cooed softly. ‘Did I not say my friend Liam would retrieve it for you?’
John nodded and smiled. ‘Yes, my dear … yes, so you did. I should never have doubted you.’
‘Bob helped, of course,’ said Liam, shrugging. ‘Actually he did most of the hard work.’
Bob emerged from behind the drapes and nodded politely at John and Becks.
‘Good God!’ said John, his eyes suddenly as round as pickled eggs. ‘This man needs a physician!’
Bob looked down at the ragged, shredded stump of his left arm, dangling shreds of tattered skin and the rounded white nub of a bone. ‘The wound is no longer bleeding. It is not life threatening.’
‘Your arm is GONE, man! You should be attended to immediately!’ gasped John. He got up from his chair and led Bob back towards the drapes. He called out for one of the guards standing outside to take Bob to the garrison’s apothecary. ‘And be double quick about it, fool! The man needs it bound!’
He returned, pale-faced and shuddering. ‘Ughh! I … have a poor stomach for such things.’ He puffed his cheeks queasily. ‘Oh, quite horrible … All that … gristle and — and …’ He reached for a cup of wine and drained it, then wiped his mouth. ‘Now, to matters of importance.’ He pointed to the balcony. ‘I should waste not another moment. We must surrender the town immediately!’
‘What?’
John nodded his head vigorously. ‘Indeed, yes! I have what he wants!’ John looked at Liam. ‘Where is it, by the way?’
Liam nodded down at the box in his arms. ‘Right here.’
John glanced down at it. ‘And it is safe? Complete? Undamaged?’ He had little interest in opening the box and inspecting the parchment itself. Holy relics and Templar superstitions were his brother’s obsession, not his.
‘It is fine.’
‘Good. Then there’s no need for this battle to take place. No need for bloodshed today. I shall arrange a parlay with him at once!’
Becks leaned down, speaking in soft soothing tones to him and gently stroking his forehead. ‘That is a bad idea. The Grail is all that you have to bargain with. You must hold on to it. Tu dois es courageaux et fort, mon cher.’
Liam was again impressed with how much her AI had picked up, how convincing she sounded and looked.
‘I am tired, my dear lady,’ muttered John, closing his eyes. ‘Tired of fearing him. Fearing his return … I want this to be over with, so I can rest — ’
‘And it will be. Soon,’ she cooed, ‘soon. But you must be strong. Be strong for me.’
He opened his eyes. ‘For you?’
She nodded. ‘You must be strong and make your brother wait.’ Becks glanced towards the archway and balcony. From afar the sound of carpenters at work echoed across the walls of Nottingham. ‘Let him build his siege weapons, let him waste time and then you should parlay.’
John closed his eyes as she caressed his forehead.
‘You should rest, my lord, there’s time for that and you have slept little.’
John nodded. ‘I am so very tired.’
Becks glanced up at Liam. ‘Rest now, my dear. Take some more wine. And I shall go and arrange supper for you and the sheriff.’
She stood up and discreetly beckoned Liam to follow her out of the hall.
CHAPTER 68
1194, Nottingham Castle, Nottingham
‘Jay-zus, Becks!’ whispered Liam. ‘You were completely convincing back there. Does John … is he in love with you or something?’
She shrugged. ‘He has developed an infatuation for me. I have attempted to analyse why this is so and have no valid conclusions to make. He has said he finds “my unladylike fortitude bewitching”. The important factor is that this is useful leverage, which can be applied if needed.’
She hushed as a castle servant passed them in the small dark hallway. She beckoned Liam to follow her until she found a low wooden door on their left and stepped inside. They were in a small pantry; it was empty, save for several shelves laden with clay pots of preserves.
Liam reached out and grabbed her arms. ‘It’s good to see you again, Becks! Me and Bob were becoming worried about you, so we were.’
‘I have been in no danger,’ she replied calmly, with a hint of a smile for him. But then it was gone. More pressing matters to attend to. ‘John does not have the will or the courage to stand up to Richard. But my history database shows this siege does take place. That John does make a stand against him. Nottingham holds out for a week.’
‘That needs to happen, then, right? To ensure history is back to where it was?’
She nodded.
‘What about the Grail?’ said Liam. ‘Richard isn’t meant to get his hands on it, is he?’
‘There is no information on that in my files. This would indicate — ’
‘That the Grail vanished. Ended up getting lost.’
‘Affirmative.’ She cocked her head, considering a suggestion. ‘We could destroy it.’
Liam shook his head. ‘No — no, I think there’s much more than we thought in there. Not j
ust this word Pandora … there’s some sort of prophecy about the future.’
‘Prophecy?’
Liam told her everything he could remember Locke telling him. He told her about the robot he came back with, about the Templars who’d sent him. He talked uninterrupted for what seemed like ages. Finally, describing Bob chasing Locke off into the woods and retrieving the box. She now knew everything he did.
‘Then there may be strategically important information we can retrieve by decoding this document,’ she said calmly, gazing at the wooden box in Liam’s hands.
‘Exactly … and the only way to do it is using this grille thing out there, in King Richard’s possession.’
She shook her head.
‘What?’
‘I believe there is another factor involved.’
Liam frowned. This was already confusing enough for him. ‘What are you talking about?’
She reached under the layers of her gown, fumbling awkwardly for a few moments before pulling out a scroll of parchment. It was flattened and creased. He didn’t dare ask where that had been wedged.
‘This is a document known as the Treyarch Confession,’ she said. ‘This is an account of the discovery of a scroll dating back to — ’
‘Bible times?’ cut in Liam. He remembered Cabot’s description of it months ago.
‘Affirmative.’
‘Where did you get it?’
‘That is irrelevant information. I have scanned the text of this and analysed the content.’
‘And?’
‘I calculate a fifty-seven per cent probability that the Treyarch Confession is the correct key for decoding the Grail.’
‘What?’ He looked at the creased and tattered parchment in her hands. ‘That’s the key?’
‘Fifty-seven per cent probability that it is. Correct.’
‘So what’s King Richard got then?’
‘A piece of worn leather with holes cut into it.’
‘Why? What makes you think that this is the real thing?’
She carefully unrolled the parchment until finally it was spread almost two yards along the stone floor. She pointed to illustrations in the margins on both sides of the text. ‘These decorative illustrations are common for the time. Typically they mirror the theme or message of the text. Observe,’ she said, moving her finger down one margin. ‘These illustrations are just simple geometric patterns. They have no discernible symbolism or meaning.’
‘They’re there just to make it look nice?’
‘Correct.’
Liam noted the patterns were intermittent; a dense and intricate block of cross-hatching and swirls about two inches high and wide, located every ten or eleven inches down the margin on either side.
‘The patterns are identical,’ Becks said. Liam looked more closely. Yes, they were. Line for line, curl for curl — the same ornate pattern.
Becks’s finger moved down the scroll and finally stopped. ‘Except these four.’ She pointed them out, two on each side. Liam struggled to see the difference by the guttering candlelight. His eyes strained as he studied them, again comparing lines and curves.
‘Look very closely,’ said Becks, pointing to a faint pen-stroke amid the pattern. The slightest hint of a minute cruciform easily lost amid the confusion of elaborate ink swirls. She pointed to another of the four. Again, the hint of a cross in a different location within the pattern. And then the other two. ‘The cross appears only in these four blocks of pattern.’
He looked at her. ‘So?’
Her brows knotted momentarily, perhaps a flickering learned gesture of impatience. ‘Each cross could indicate a corner.’
He looked back down at the parchment. She was, of course, right. ‘Four corners …?’
‘Four corners of a box.’
He looked back down again.
She continued. ‘I calculate with reasonable probability that this is an instruction on how to build a cardan grille to decode the Grail. The corners of the template would line up with the four crosses.’ She pointed at the handwritten text that would be framed by all four markers. ‘And some of the letters of the text within the template area should be identifiable as “window candidates”.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You would mark where the letter was on the template, and cut out a small square of the template around it, thus creating a window.’
‘Ahh! I see,’ Liam grinned. ‘And you cut out all these little windows, and then you lay out this template on the rolled-out Grail and …’
‘Correct.’ She nodded. ‘Making sure you line the template up with similar corner markers. And the letters you see through the windows that you have cut out, spell the hidden message.’
‘That’s — that’s genius, that is! You could be right!’ He got up off his haunches and started to look around for something they could use. ‘We could make our own grille right here! Right now!’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘We can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘We do not know which letters are the window candidates.’
Liam’s excitement vanished with a sigh. He’d assumed she’d already identified which were the ones.
‘On several occasions this document switches from Old English to another language. As you can see, it does so within the area marked out by the crosses.’ She pointed out the change of language to him. ‘I do not have this language file in my database. We have to presume there would be clues within this text to identify which letters are the window candidates.’
Liam scratched at his chin. ‘Would Bob know this language?’
‘No. We had the same files downloaded before the mission.’
Liam looked at it; he recognized some of the letters from the alphabet, but there were others that were totally alien to him. ‘Well … this is no good.’ He slumped back down again on the cold stone floor.
‘Suggestion.’
‘What?’
She began to roll the Treyarch Confession up carefully. Finally, gathered up, it disappeared again under the folds of her long dress.
‘Oh, hang on,’ said Liam, realizing what she was thinking.
‘You can’t take it to Kirklees, Becks! We’re surrounded by Richard’s army. It could end up falling into Richard’s hands.’
Becks reached for the candle flickering on the floor between them. ‘Then the alternative is that we burn both documents. Before Nottingham falls to King Richard. What is your decision, Liam O’Connor?’
CHAPTER 69
1194, Nottingham
Becks managed to pick her way through the picket lines of soldiers. Not too difficult. The few men on guard duty were too busy discussing how they were going to spend their share of the spoils once Nottingham had fallen. Rumour was, King Richard was going to turn a blind eye to any looting or pillaging in the immediate aftermath, just as if this was a siege taking place in the corner of some foreign country.
Towards the rear of the camp she found the assembled carts of the baggage train and, tethered nearby in a temporarily erected corral, the horses. She picked one, untied it, led it quietly out and was cantering away up the track towards the nearby forests before the mead-soaked old boy dozing instead of watching over the animals registered they’d become restless and that one of them had in fact gone missing.
The canter became a carefree gallop along the dirt track leading up to the brow of the hill overlooking Nottingham. She took the north-east route through the forest, partially following Liam’s directions, partially relying on the precise coordinates in her head.
Liam had warned her to be wary of bandits, but the forest presented no threats to her; the shabby band of villains Liam had mentioned, Locke’s people, had either disbanded and gone home or disappeared deeper into the woods in an attempt to evade any punitive raids Richard might decide to unleash.
Through several hours of night she covered winding miles of nothing more than the hissing of trees stirred by a lively breeze and hooting birds until fi
nally, just as her silicon mind indicated she would, she caught sight of the dark and low form of the outbuildings of the priory.
Sebastien Cabot was awake in an instant. His soldier’s instinct to reach for the dagger hidden under his straw mattress kicked in, only to be stopped by the lightning-quick grasp of a firm hand round his wrist.
From the slither of moonlight stealing through the narrow window into his bare room he could see just the dark outline of someone leaning over him. ‘Who — who is …?’ he blustered, his voice still thick with sleep.
‘This is Lady Rebecca,’ she whispered.
Cabot struggled to sit up. The wooden frame beneath his mattress creaked. ‘Good grief! What are ye doing here? The other monks — ’
Her hand smothered his mouth and pushed his head down heavily against the mattress with a soft thud. ‘Be quiet and listen!’ Her hand remained clamped over his lips until he finally nodded. She lifted her hand and he sucked in a much-needed breath.
‘I have obtained the Grail document,’ she said without any preamble.
‘WHAT? MY GO-!’ His voice bounced off the stone walls of his room.
Her hand clamped his mouth firmly again. Above the back of her slender hand and the bulbous end of his florid pockmarked nose, she noted the wide rolling whites of his eyes. For a moment she considered how expressive human eyes could be; just those alone seemed to be able to communicate a whole language of emotions. Cabot, for example, right now appeared to be communicating an emotion akin to profound shock. She made a note to try rolling her eyes like that sometime.
‘I also have the Treyarch Confession,’ she added, her hand remaining over his mouth as he grunted and struggled. ‘I will need your assistance in translating a section of the Treyarch Confession.’ She waited a few moments for that request to settle in and for Cabot to stop making that muffled mewling noise beneath her firmly clamped palm. When she was sure he wasn’t going to blurt out loudly again, she slowly lifted her hand. ‘Will you assist?’
Cabot gasped for air again, sucking in breath through his mouth. After a few seconds he managed to talk in a hoarse whisper. ‘Ye … ye have them both?’
