The Crusader's gold jh-2

by David Gibbins

  “Just as the Vikings were beginning to explore west, to the British Isles and beyond, they were also going east,” Jack explained. “From as early as the eighth-century AD Scandinavian traders were penetrating the rivers of central and eastern Europe, from the Vistula on the Baltic to the Dnieper on the Black Sea. They were seeking untold wealth, the fabled treasures of the Orient, a hunt for silver and precious stones that took them to Central Asia and deep into the world of Islam. Eventually they founded the Viking kingdom of Rus, the origin of modern Russia. From their stronghold at Kiev they were within striking distance of the place they called Michelgard, the Great City, a perilous journey down the Dnieper but the key to riches beyond their dreams.”

  “That’s how they got to Constantinople?” Costas said.

  Jack smiled. “It’s true. If you don’t believe it, you only have to look at Viking treasure hoards discovered in their Scandinavian homeland, full of Arab silver coins which the Vikings acquired in exchange for furs and slaves and amber.”

  Jack could see Costas looking dubiously at the distance between Norway and present-day Istanbul. “If you still need convincing, take a look at this.” Jack handed him a black-and-white photograph showing a polished marble railing, its surface covered with ancient graffiti. “Those linear symbols on the edge? They’re runes, Viking letters, probably eleventh century. They’re too worn to decipher completely, but a name can be made out: ‘Halfdan was here,’ or something like that. Any guesses where it is? Thousands of tourists pass within touching distance of it every year. It’s in an alcove high above the nave of Hagia Sofia, in the heart of ancient Constantinople. Halfdan was almost certainly one of the Varangian bodyguard, and given the date, he could even have been one of Harald Hardrada’s men.”

  As he finished speaking, a thudding noise from the east that had been increasing in volume became a reverberating clatter, and a Lynx helicopter appeared out of the clouds, descending towards the helipad near the shoreline.

  “I’ll take your word for it.” Costas grinned and handed back the photograph. “Right now I think we need to greet our guests.”

  A few minutes later the two men stood at the edge of the helipad as the twin Rolls-Royce Gem turboshafts powered down and the main rotor of the Lynx shuddered to a halt. The first figure to step out of the passenger compartment was a strikingly attractive woman wearing a leather jacket and jeans, her long brown hair swept back into a loose bun. Maria de Montijo was one of Jack’s oldest friends, part of a close-knit group including Maurice Hiebermeyer and Efram Jacobovich who had first met as students at Cambridge. Maria and Jack had helped each other through difficult times and had forged a close bond. He had involved her in the Golden Horn project from the outset, and it made sense that he was the first person she would call with news of the astonishing discovery in Hereford Cathedral.

  Maria’s dark Spanish features creased into a smile as she embraced Jack and Costas in turn. “Jack, you’ve met Jeremy, my American graduate student.” The tall young man who loped behind Maria swept his blond hair from his face and proffered his hand. They had met several weeks earlier when Jack had visited the Institute of Medieval Studies in Oxford to have a translation made of the newly discovered Topkapi manuscript, the eyewitness account of the Crusader siege of Constantinople that contained the crucial position-fix for the chain across the harbour. Jack had been impressed by Jeremy’s facility with the medieval Greek, and had no reason to doubt Maria’s enthusiastic judgement of his potential.

  “How long have you been out of the States?” Costas asked amiably.

  “Three years.” Jeremy peered down at the shorter man through his glasses. “I’ve got a fellowship waiting for me at Princeton, but I just don’t seem to be able to get away from this place.”

  “I know the problem,” Costas said. “I keep trying, but every time I do he finds some reason to keep me here.” He jerked his head towards Jack and grinned. “Luckily, working for an international outfit means I’m not trapped in English drizzle all year long.”

  “Gentlemen, allow me to introduce Father Patrick O’Connor.” Maria gestured towards the helicopter, and they turned to watch the figure being helped down by the pilot. In startling contrast to the flight suit and helmet of the crewman, he was wearing the distinctive black cassock of a Jesuit priest and was carrying two battered leather briefcases.

  After nodding to the pilot, he strode confidently across the helipad, dropped his cases on the tarmac and shook Jack’s hand firmly. “Dr. Howard. Delighted to meet you at last. Maria’s told me all about you, and of course I’ve seen you on TV following your remarkable discoveries last year.”

  Jack eyed the other man keenly. The accent had a hint of Irish brogue, but could as easily have been Boston. He guessed that O’Connor was a youthful fifty-five, his remaining hair grey and cropped close but with the weathered face and fit body of a man who had not spent his entire life in the cloisters.

  “Maria tells me you have a PhD in early Church history,” Jack said.

  “Trinity College, Dublin, then Heidelberg,” O’Connor replied. “Then I found my vocation. Twenty years in Central America, mainly Mexico, doing what we Jesuits do best, building schools, ministering to the sick, trying to bring humanity to places where there’s sometimes hardly any left at all.”

  “And then you found academia again.”

  O’Connor nodded. “Five years ago. I’d done my tour of duty and applied for a vacancy in the Vatican library. To my delight they offered me a tailor-made position in the Antiquities Department, as inspector of early buildings and archaeology. My remit covers everything in Rome under Vatican control up to the time of the Renaissance, with plenty of time for my own research. I was in Oxford to hear Maria’s seminar on Richard of Holdingham and the Mappa Mundi, one of my special areas of interest. I believe I may have something to offer.”

  “That’s the reason we’re here now,” Jack said. “Let’s get down to business.”

  After a quick coffee on the patio, Jack led them into his office. Almost the entire length of the old drawing room was occupied by a massive wooden table, its gnarled oak surface made from timbers reputedly salvaged from the ships that had brought the Norman invaders to England. Every time Jack sat at the table he felt the power of his own ancestry, as if his forebears who had plotted wars and voyages of discovery from this very table were keeping him ghostly company and egging him on. Now, instead of nautical dividers and parchment charts, the table was covered with the instruments of twenty-first-century exploration, computer workstations and communications consoles. To these Maria added a large black manila folder, which she laid at one end of the table. At the other end Jack raised a video screen linked to a laptop he had opened up beside the folder.

  Costas arrived breathlessly after a rushed visit to the engineering complex, and Jack closed the door behind him and dimmed the lights. Maria and O’Connor sat down at the end of the table, with Jeremy on one side and Jack and Costas on the other.

  “There was something I didn’t tell you on the phone, the reason why I wanted to show you this in person.” Maria spoke slowly, her hands laid flat on the closed manila folder. “Father O’Connor was in Oxford when I arrived from Hereford the night before last, and I took him immediately into my confidence. He is the world’s leading authority on what you’re about to see.”

  Just as Maria was about to raise the cover of the folder, O’Connor put his hand on hers. “What we discuss here must remain secret,” he said quietly. “The time may come when this story will be headline news, but until then even the slightest leak could jeopardize everything. And I’m not just talking about archaeology. Lives are at stake here, perhaps countless lives.”

  He released his grip and looked at the others, who all nodded in turn. Maria glanced at him again and then lifted the cover, folding it back to reveal a protective sheet of tissue paper over a hard white board. She slid away the paper and they saw the image that had transfixed her in the lost chamber of the cat
hedral the day before. Costas let out a low whistle as he and Jack stood up and craned over for a better view. The vellum, about three feet square, had been rolled out and pressed under a transparent polyurethane sheet. Even after seven hundred years in the dusty cathedral chamber the ink was still dark and clearly preserved the outline of the map.

  “Fantastic,” Jack murmured. “I haven’t seen the Mappa Mundi for ages, but this is all familiar. You can clearly make out the T-shape of the Mediterranean and Red Sea dividing the continents, with Asia at the top and Jerusalem in the centre. And Europe and Africa are even labelled correctly.”

  O’Connor nodded. “I’ve no doubt this is Richard of Holdingham’s exemplar. His sketch made in Lincoln and then copied and embellished by the illuminator in Hereford. Now look at the lower left corner.”

  Jack had already seen the delicate lines of text and drawing Maria was pointing at, but had wanted to take in the whole map first. Now he peered closely at the image beyond the western rim of the world, an image so different from the dedication inscribed in this place on the finished map.

  “My God, they really are runes,” he said excitedly. “I’m a little rusty, but this must be it.” He pointed at the smaller of the two inscriptions and glanced at Jeremy, who nodded and recited from memory.

  “Harald Sigurdsson our King with his thole-companions reached these parts with the treasure of Michelgard. Here they feast with Thor in Valhalla and await the final battle of Ragnarok.”

  “Ragnarok is the mythical battle at the end of time, when the warriors in Valhalla will seek final glory,” Maria said. “The second inscription and the drawing are virtually identical to the Vinland Map, showing the coastline discovered by Leif Eiriksson beyond Greenland around the year AD 1000. Sigurdsson was the family name of Harald Hardrada. The implication is that Hardrada and his companions reached America a generation or two after the first Vikings blazed the trail.”

  “With the treasure of Michelgard, of Constantinople,” Jack murmured excitedly. “That’s why we’re here. I only wish I knew what he’d taken. It’s hardly likely to have been a shipload of classical bronzes.”

  “Look closely at those runes,” O’Connor said. “Then you’ll see the real reason we’re here.”

  Jack scanned the text from the bottom up, from the clearer ink of the lower lines to the more faded inscription above. The symbols seemed to be a standard version of the futhark, the Norse runic alphabet named for its first six letters. He could see nothing exceptional until he came to the faded symbol at the beginning, a symbol that had been drawn slightly larger, like the first letter of an illuminated manuscript.

  He took the magnifying glass offered by Jeremy and leaned over to peer closer. “That’s definitely an odd one,” he said. “It looks like the futhark symbol for the letter F, with the arms angled up on the right side, only here it’s got three arms instead of two and it’s repeated symmetrically on the other side.”

  Jeremy shook his head impatiently. “Forget runes for a moment. Think outside the box.”

  Jack looked up and stared at Jeremy without expression and then looked down again. Suddenly his mouth opened and he nearly dropped the magnifying glass. “The menorah.”

  “It was Jeremy who first noticed it,” Maria said after a silence. “I was completely wrapped up in that extraordinary map.”

  “An understandable distraction,” Costas said, smiling at her.

  “My father’s ancestors were Sephardic Jews,” she replied quietly. “Expelled from Spain by the Christian king not so long after your Crusaders were trying to save the Holy Land. One of the great ironies of history.”

  Jack slowly sat back, his face a picture of stunned incomprehension. O’Connor pulled the laptop towards him and loaded a CD into the drive. “Forgive me for jumping in,” he said, “but if we’re talking about the menorah, we need to know something of its history. It so happens that the mystery of the lost Jewish treasure of the Temple is another special passion of mine.”

  4

  Moments later a spectacular vision of ancient Rome appeared on the screen at the far end of the table. In the foreground a perfectly proportioned marble arch towered several stories high, its eroded surface embellished with relief carvings. Jack, Costas, Maria and Jeremy could make out trophies, banners, laurel wreaths and winged victories standing on globes. In the background loomed the vast tiered facade of the Colosseum.

  “The most enduring legacy of the Flavian dynasty of emperors, Vespasian and his sons, Titus and Domitian,” Father O’Connor said. “The Arch of Titus straddles the Sacred Way in the centre of Rome. The Colosseum was financed on the spoils of the Jewish War and inaugurated by Titus in AD 80. It was built next to the Colossus of Nero, a monstrous gilt-bronze statue that gave the amphitheatre its name.”

  “But not until the medieval period,” Jeremy interjected. “The name Colosseum first appears in the Venerable Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum in the eighth century AD.” He looked sheepishly at the group. “Another of our finds from the Hereford library.”

  “The Jewish War,” Costas said. “Another excuse for rape and pillage on a colossal scale?”

  “It was pretty ghastly, even by Roman standards,” O’Connor replied. “Probably a greater proportion of the Jewish population was annihilated in the war of AD 66 to 70 than during the Nazi Holocaust, either killed in battle or put to the sword in an orgy of retribution that lasted for another three years. But the story’s more complex than you might think. The Jewish state had enjoyed an unusual degree of autonomy under Rome, and there were close links with the emperors. King Herod Agrippa of Judaea was educated in Rome and was a friend of the emperor Claudius. A generation later the Jewish historian Josephus became a confidant of Vespasian, having switched sides to Rome during the rebellion. He has a bad reputation because the Jews never forgave him, but his writings are invaluable as the only eyewitness account of the war and the triumph in Rome in AD 71.”

  “And the arch?” asked Costas.

  “Built on the site of an earlier arch, exactly the spot where the triumphal procession would have first become visible to the huge crowd waiting in the Forum.” O’Connor tapped a key and zoomed in to an inscription on the attic of the arch. “Senatus Populusque Romanus,” he read. “The Senate and the People of Rome, to Divine Titus, son of the Divine Vespasian, Vespasian Augustus. This shows that the arch was dedicated by the emperor Domitian, who succeeded his brother Titus in AD 81. With a few notorious exceptions, like Nero, the title Divine was bestowed on emperors only after they’d died. The sculpture on the ceiling of the passageway even shows the apotheosis of Titus, riding heavenwards on the back of a great eagle.”

  “The triumph was a family affair,” Jack added, his composure now close to normal again after the shock of seeing the menorah symbol. “According to tradition, Vespasian was the main celebrant as emperor at the time, but the Roman Senate voted a double triumph to acknowledge Titus as victorious general. Domitian was enhancing his own prestige by honouring the glorious achievements of his brother and father.”

  O’Connor scrolled though a succession of views, each one bringing them closer to the arch as if he were walking them along the Sacred Way from the Colosseum. Through the passageway under the arch they could make out the heart of ancient Rome, the jumble of ruins in the old Forum with its shattered columns, vestiges of law courts and temples and the stark brick walls of the Senate House. Beyond the Forum lay the Capitoline Hill, where the foundations of the Temple of Jupiter lay buried under the medieval palace built by Michelangelo and the extravagant Vittorio Emanuele Monument which dominated Rome’s modern skyline.

  “And now the incredible part,” O’Connor enthused. “This is where ancient history really comes alive for me, even more than in the arena of the Colosseum. Standing under the arch it’s as if those few moments at dawn two thousand years ago are endlessly re-enacted, imprinted in the marble. You can sense the exaltation of the victors, the pent-up frenzy of the crowd
, the terror of the condemned. You can hear the drum beat, feel the pounding vibration of the procession. It never fails to send a shiver up my spine.”

  He stopped at an image of an eroded relief panel. “On the wall of the passageway through the arch on the right-hand side, facing the Forum,” he explained, “you can see Titus in a quadriga, a four-horse chariot, led by the goddess Roma. The priests behind him are carrying long axes, fasces, which they’ll use to sacrifice bullocks on the steps of the Temple of Jupiter.”

  He tapped the key again. “And this is on the left-hand side.”

  O’Connor sat back as they absorbed the scene. It was fragmentary and worn, but the central portion was clear enough. It was one of the masterpieces of Roman relief sculpture. On the right-hand side was a triumphal arch in three-quarters view, with two quadrigas on top. In the background were placards borne aloft like standards, with blank spaces where there had once been painted inscriptions naming cities and peoples defeated in the war. Below them was the image which for almost two thousand years had fuelled the ardour of a people determined to rebuild their holiest temple, and of their enemies sworn to do all in their power to prevent that happening. It showed a procession of tunic-clad soldiers crowned with victory wreaths carrying two biers, each supporting an ornate object hefted high for all to see. On the right heading towards the arch was a table decorated with trumpets, the great altar of the Jewish Temple. On the left in the foreground was an extraordinary but unmistakable shape, a tapering column with three arms on each side curving upwards in concentric semicircles, each arm terminating at the same level and capped with an elaborate finial shaped like a lamp.

  Costas let out a low whistle. “That’s some candlestick.”

  “The menorah.” O’Connor spoke with barely suppressed excitement. “The most revered symbol of Judaism, placed immediately in front of the sanctuary in the Temple. The menorah represents the light of God, and harks back to the ancient symbol of the seven-branched Tree of Life. The Temple menorah was one of the most sacred treasures of the Jewish people, second only to the Ark of the Covenant.”