The Sword of Moses

by Dominic Selwood

  Not after Saxby.

  “I’m sure you’ll understand,” she countered, “I need some convincing that Saxby was not following your orders.” She paused. “Maybe you found out MI6 had alerted the German authorities and aborted your plans for this evening?”

  De Molay’s expression changed for a moment. There was a brief flicker of pain, then it was gone. “Dr Curzon. The Order I’m so honoured to lead was born in a different age, when ethnic and religious bigotry were second nature to all. Despite the famous crusader name my family bequeathed me, in my view the crusades were fruitless wars that achieved very little. When the crusades started, the Holy Land was Islamic, and so it was when the knights left in defeat after two hundred years of pointless bloodshed. Ironically, they arrived home in Europe to face the greatest battle of their history, against the king of France and the pope, who massacred them more comprehensively than any Saracen army ever did. It was a fiasco from start to finish.”

  She could see the sadness in his eyes. “But the medieval Templars were in a position to learn more quickly than most. When not under orders from the pope to fight, the Templars made many friends in the East. Some learned Arabic, avidly sucking up new knowledge—medicine, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy. Did you know some of the Templar knights used to let Muslims in to pray in their military headquarters, the Temple of Solomon, which for the centuries before the knights arrived had been the sacred al-Aqsa mosque?”

  Ava did not answer.

  She looked at him, unblinking.

  “The medieval Templars were brave and noble and hungry for new experiences in a world that was not,” he continued. “And that will always be their tragedy. It was a brutal age. Knights were vicious thugs who would sooner have raped and killed a lady than rescued her. The Templars changed that. They strove to be different—vowing themselves to protect women, children, and the vulnerable. They invented chivalry. But, like so many who are ahead of their time, they were sacrificed on the pyres of jealousy and ambition.”

  He paused, inhaling the cold air. “So you ask what we stand for? We long ago rejected our original calling and severed all ties with the Church that betrayed us to the hot irons and flames. But do not mistake me—we are still combattants. We remain soldiers of the spirit—but we fight now for a world where there can be no more crusades. We stand for everything that Saxby despised. We still take our ancient vow to protect Jerusalem, but we understand it very differently now. For us, Jerusalem is a state of mind—an ideal of harmony worth dying for, not an earthly place.”

  As his eyes met hers, she could see in them a deep iron resolve, but also a fleeting sadness, a wounded dignity.

  Was it another ruse?

  She continued to watch him carefully.

  Was he playing a role? Like Saxby?

  She had learned many years ago that people could mask their expressions, but she had heard a genuine and sincere sadness and weariness in his voice—and that was altogether harder to fake.

  She slowly lowered the gun. “So what now?” She tucked it back into the sash. “You heard what happened to the Ark?”

  He nodded. “Max will look after Major Ferguson. Meanwhile, I cannot change the past, but there’s something I should like to do for you, if you’ll permit me.”

  He picked up a small canvas bag on the floor beside him, and passed it to her. “I believe these are your clothes. One of my men found them. You may like to make yourself more comfortable, and then we can go. I have a helicopter ready outside.”

  “Where are we going?” Ava asked. “I’ve had enough surprises for one night.”

  De Molay smiled. “If you’ll allow an old man a small indulgence,” his eyes twinkled for the first time, “I shall leave you to find out when we get there. But I have a particularly strong feeling you’re going to like it very much.”

  DAY TWELVE

  ——————— ◆ ———————

  111

  Saint-Christophe de Montsaunès

  Saint-Gaudens

  Comminges

  Haute-Garonne

  The Republic of France

  Despite the engine noise, Ava slept soundly in the helicopter.

  She had stayed awake long enough for De Molay to take off, but had fallen asleep as soon as the triangular outline of Wewelsburg Castle had receded into the distance beneath them.

  When she awoke, De Molay had already brought them down in a grassy field on a sunny hillside, and was now standing outside the chopper holding small thick square china cups of espresso coffee and a plate with several hot croissants.

  “I take it we’re in France, then?” Ava smiled, picking up a croissant gratefully and enjoying it with the restorative bitter coffee.

  “There’s a very obliging café owner just over there.” He pointed to a small village visible beyond the field.

  She looked at the laminated map beside De Molay’s chair in the cockpit, and saw that it was showing an area just north of the Pyrenees mountain range, where France joined Spain. A circle and coordinates were marked in black china pencil almost exactly halfway between the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts.

  As she finished the croissant and swallowed the last of the fortifying coffee, De Molay indicated a way across the field.

  “It may not look it,” he informed her as they started walking, “but in medieval times, this area was one of the main highways into Spain for merchants and pilgrims.” He paused. “And one of the main routes into France for attacking armies.”

  Ava could feel the soft grass under her shoes. After the last twenty-four hours, it was a welcome reminder of the pleasanter things in life.

  “In the 700s,” he continued, “a Muslim army from Islamic Spain fought its way through here as far into France as Poitiers, where Charles the Hammer defeated it, and sent the attackers back over the Pyrenees. For the next seven hundred years, the people of southern Europe feared another Islamic invasion from Spain. Periodically, their worst nightmares came true. In the 900s, Europe’s most powerful abbot was abducted by Muslims while crossing the Alps. And in the late 1100s, the great French coastal city of Toulon was sacked and razed to the ground by Muslim raiders from Mallorca. They were unsettled times.”

  He looked around the calm quiet countryside. “It’s hard to imagine, but this area was on the very front line of defence against what everyone believed to be a permanent existential Islamic threat.”

  Ava looked around. It did seem hard to believe. It was just a sleepy slice of rural France.

  Up ahead, the village started at the edge of the field with a picturesque mix of old stone farm buildings and residential houses in varying states of repair.

  It looked completely normal—typical of rural southern Europe.

  Except for one thing.

  Dominating the view was the unmistakable rounded end of a twelfth-century Romanesque church.

  The medieval building was tall and solidly built out of light stone and pale thin red brick. It was an unremarkable size for a church in a medieval town or city. But for a rural hamlet, it was colossal.

  Ava followed De Molay down the tree-lined north side of the church and round to its front.

  “You'll be pleased to know we've recovered the Lance of St Longinus,” De Molay noted, as he led the way. “We’ll make the necessary arrangements to return it to the Hofburg museum in Vienna. They’ll compare it with their version. If it is indeed the real one, I’m sure they’ll quietly make the switch. Publicity around such an object is in no one’s interest.”

  Ava nodded. She had not had time to even think about the lance.

  As she rounded the front of the church, she could instantly see from the distinctive architecture that it dated from the late 1100s—a period when the crusades in the Holy Land and the religious battles of the reconquista in Spain presented two of the most active fronts in the war between Christianity and Islam.

  From the unusual thickness of the walls and the small size of the few windows, it had clearly bee
n built by military engineers—more a castle than a church.

  The west front was dominated by a wide flat pointed tower with space for a peal of five bells—only four of which were hung. It loomed over the bare front’s only feature—a small central rose window. Otherwise, the west wall was stark and plain, evoking the cold impregnability of a castle’s keep rather than the heavenly vision of saints and angels usually adorning churches of the period.

  The only concession to decoration was around the narrow doorway, which was flanked by a pair of delicately carved stone columns and capitals—now smoothed by nine hundred years of sun, rain, and snow.

  To Ava’s surprise, the first of the carvings on the capitals to catch her eye was a grisly scene of a man being crucified in agony upside down.

  Momentarily stunned, she could not conceive why a medieval church would feature such blatant Satanic imagery. Nor why De Molay would have brought her there.

  But as she looked at two other scenes beside it—a man being decapitated with a sword and another being stoned, she realized it was just a series showing the deaths of the early martyrs. She had forgotten that Saint Peter, the first pope, had been crucified by the Emperor Nero on an upside-down cross.

  “Built by the Templars?” she asked De Molay, who was standing behind her. But she already knew the answer.

  He nodded, “This church is all that remains of the once-powerful Templar commandery of Montsaunès. The other buildings—the castle, living quarters, prison, ovens, stables, and the rest have all been lost over the years.”

  Pulling a large iron key out of his pocket, he turned the ancient lock with a loud click, and swung the heavy wooden doors open.

  Passing under the entranceway’s three arches, she was amused to see a carnival of fifty-two tiny medieval heads running around the underside of the outer arch, welcoming her in. They started on the left as normal human faces, then comically turned increasingly grotesque towards the right—their features transformed into pigs, monsters, and demons with bulging eyes and protruding tongues.

  Ava had concluded a long time ago that no one could say medieval sculptors did not have a rich sense of humour.

  Entering the church’s cool interior, she could not help but notice the immense thickness of the walls. Unlike more delicate churches, this one was built as an uncompromising stone cocoon for the knights to shelter in when they took off their mail and pieces of plate body armour, swapping one defensive shell for another.

  As she walked slowly down the ancient stone steps to floor level, the first thing to hit her was the typical smell of a French country church—incense, flowers, and a base note of mustiness.

  Her eyes were at first unaccustomed to the internal gloom, and it took them a moment to recover from the bright light outside.

  Behind her, she could hear De Molay pulling the wooden doors shut, locking them from the inside.

  As her eyes adjusted to the light, she gasped.

  Almost every inch of the pale stone walls was covered in medieval frescos. But they were very far from the usual holy scenes drawn from the lives of Christ, the Virgin, the apostles, and the saints.

  She turned to De Molay, her eyes wide with amazement. “Why have I never heard of this place? It’s extraordinary.”

  He shook his head. “It’s a bit off the beaten track these days.”

  Ava simply could not believe her eyes.

  She had seen some strangely decorated buildings before, but nothing that could remotely compare with this. “Well, it finally lays to rest the question of whether the Templars were into esoteric practices,” she murmured, unable to take her eyes off the mesmerizing frescoes.

  It was not the colours. They were simple enough—white, black, and red-ochre.

  It was the designs.

  The whole barrel of the entire white ceiling vault was spangled with small black eight-pointed stars—hundreds of them, laid out in neat offset rows, creating a photographic negative of an ordered night sky.

  That was odd enough—not exactly normal church decoration. But not nearly as strange as what was mixed in with the stars in seemingly random and irregular places—large circles filled with an infinite variety of geometric patterns, as if drawn with the plastic gears of an oversize spirograph stencil set.

  Ava had never seen anything like it. She had no idea whether the circles represented some planetary alignment wheeling around the night sky, a coded celestial map, a mystical exercise in the Kabbalah, or one of a thousand other possibilities.

  On the main walls there were a few ordinary scenes—arcades with figures, and even a vision of Hell with a demon and cauldron. But other than those, they were completely covered in an array of bizarre square and diamond chequerboards.

  And surrounding it all, in bands, borders, and random places, were hundreds more of the strange spirograph circles, rolling around the church, placed by some indefinable logic.

  Some were filled with petals, others with crosses. Some were black, others white. They covered the interior of the church, seemingly haphazardly, although as she gazed more closely, she noticed that some motifs were very subtly repeated, suggesting there was an unseen thread somehow connecting it all.

  Wherever she looked, she was confronted by the odd and inexplicable.

  Immediately above her, the ceiling had two stylized Templar battle banners—the black and white Bauçeant—but they were wrapped into geometric patterns following some unknown numerological sequence.

  Turning, she could see beside the rose window a centaur and a number of strange cross-hatched grids.

  Were they some kind of calendar system?

  She simply could not tell.

  Was the centaur supposed to be Sagittarius?

  If so, where were the other zodiac symbols?

  She stared around numbly.

  She was not used to being so utterly confounded. If someone at the museum brought her a collection of Egyptian hieroglyphs or a fragment of a cuneiform stele, she could decipher them more quickly than most people. But as she looked around the Templar church, she could not make sense of a single one of the strange outlandish symbols.

  She shook her head in astonishment. She was inside a painted codebook every bit as baffling as the Voynich manuscript.

  “What does it all mean?” she turned to De Molay breathlessly. “It’s a code, isn’t it?”

  He smiled. “Believe it or not, the church frescoes are not what I brought you here to see.”

  Ava could feel her pulse start to quicken.

  There was more?

  But she was too intrigued by the incomprehensible symbols to let it go. “These are original twelfth-century frescoes. And I have never seen anything so blatantly cryptic. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.” She was unable to keep the excitement off her face. “What do they mean?”

  De Molay exhaled slowly. “It has baffled all experts over the centuries,” he shrugged. “They say they have no clue. They classify it as ‘unknown’ esoteric decoration.”

  “But you know, don’t you?” she pushed him. “You know exactly what it means. For a hundred and fifty years Templar knights in their white robes, and sergeants in their black ones, came in here and prayed and chanted eight monastic offices a day. This was the most important building in their universe. They gazed upon these decorations hour after hour, day after day. But instead of deciding to be surrounded by paintings of biblical scenes and saints, they choose all this.” She waved an arm to indicate the inexplicable paintings. “You can’t tell me these designs don’t have a crucially important meaning.”

  A rueful smile played around the corner of his lips. “Dr Curzon, I have been uncommonly open with you, and you therefore already know a great deal about the Templars that others do not. And I’m about to show you even more.” He paused. “But some things, and these decorations are among them, will have to remain a mystery to you.” He started walking down the nave “Please, this way.”

  She follow
ed him down the stone-floored aisle, through the carved rail separating off the sanctuary, and up to the medieval high altar filling the inside of the large round apse she had seen from the field.

  The altar itself was an imposing slab of ancient grey stone. It was carved to resemble a Roman sarcophagus, with a row of seven austere saints and bishops in rounded archways adorning the front.

  “Jerusalem was lost to Saladin in the year 1187,” he said, gazing up at the seven candles arranged up the stepped sides of the high altar top.

  “Around the time this church was built,” she nodded.

  “When Jerusalem fell, the Templars lost their headquarters—the al-Aqsa mosque, or Temple of Solomon, as they called it, because it lay on the site of Solomon’s ancient temple. They managed to save their treasures, but needed somewhere to keep them. They knew the Holy Land was no longer secure, and they did not want to put everything into the large London or Paris Temples, where there were far too many watchful and greedy eyes around.”

  “So they used places like this?” Ava asked. “Fortified commanderies in out-of-the-way locations?”

  He did not reply, but instead reached down and took hold of the stony face of the carved bishop in the arcade on the far left of the altar.

  He pulled it upwards.

  With a loud click, the whole head lifted a few inches, temporarily decapitating the carved clergyman.

  A panel in the altar, the width of the three end figures, swung open.

  Ava was prepared for many things, but not what she saw in the large hollow cavity dug out underneath the altar.

  She felt lightheaded.

  It couldn’t be.

  She blinked to see if the image in front of her eyes would change.

  But it did not.

  She stared at De Molay in disbelief, bewildered.

  “I saw it destroyed,” she whispered in a daze, staring into the space under the altar, where the Ark of the Covenant was resting—gleaming and glowing in the mellow morning sunlight.