by James Becker
Robin looked at Mallory.
“There could still be some danger,” he admitted. “We have the original parchment, but those Italians had your computer for long enough to copy the information on it, so the leader of the group could have it on a memory stick in his pocket or have even sent it to his bosses. Of course, they’ll have to decipher it, just like us, and until they do they’ll have no idea where to look.”
“So, should we carry on? Continue this quest, I suppose you could call it.”
Mallory nodded. “I think so, yes, just keeping our eyes open for these men in black. Apart from anything else, if there’s even the slightest chance of finding any part of the Templar treasure, I’d be happy to take a few risks, because the reward could be literally incalculable. My vote, if this discussion is going to be in any way democratic, is that we forge on and see exactly where the trail leads us. What do you think?”
“Oddly enough,” Robin replied, “I agree. Selling antiquarian books is not what you might describe as a high-risk occupation. In fact, it is quite startlingly boring almost all the time, and I’ve tended to get my kicks not exactly on Route 66, but on the track or in the dojo. It actually makes a pleasant change to be doing something so completely different. And, as you said, the potential reward makes taking the odd risk definitely worthwhile.”
She stood up and held out her hand.
“We’re kind of partners already,” she said, “but let’s make it semiofficial. I want to see this through to the end, with you. Equal risk, equal reward.”
Mallory stood up as well and took her hand in a firm grip.
“Sounds like a plan,” he said. “Fifty-fifty. You and me against the world, and especially against any more gun-toting Italians who turn up to try to ruin our day.
“I suppose it’s worth saying that I was wrong about one thing,” Mallory added, sitting down. “It looks like this trail is going to take us quite a long way away from France. In fact, I think the first place we have to go is Acre.”
But half an hour later he changed his mind.
“I’m wrong,” he said, leaning back from the desk where he had been alternating between bending over the written translation of the parchment text and staring at information he had culled from the Internet on the screen on his laptop. “I don’t think tramping round Acre would help us very much.”
“But we know the treasure was there,” Robin pointed out, “because contemporary accounts show that Pierre de Sevry specifically ordered Tibauld to escape with it by sea. And we also know that he followed those orders, because the next place he turned up was at Sidon, the nearest Templar stronghold to Acre. So why wouldn’t going to Acre be helpful? It’s the start of the trail.”
“Just because of what happened after the ship left. Within a matter of days or even hours—there’s some dispute about the timing—the Mamluk army attacked the Templar fortress, and at the same time the miners who had tunneled under the foundations of the fort set fire to the piles of wood and other flammable materials they’d stacked in those tunnels. At the height of the battle for the fortress, the foundations gave way and most of the walls collapsed, killing both the attackers and the defenders, and when the dust had settled—literally—the Mamluks overran it and destroyed everything that was left.”
Robin nodded. “I see what you mean. So if Tibauld had left any kind of clue or message anywhere in the fortress, and the parchment suggests that he did leave markers to allow somebody to follow the trail, it would almost certainly have been completely obliterated by the time the Mamluk army moved on to its next target. And I suppose the other side of the coin is that it’s difficult to think of any good reason why he would have left anything there anyway. He was about to escape the coming massacre in a ship full of women and children and a few chests full of coins and bullion, and when he left the jetty behind the Templar castle that night, he could have had no idea where he was going to end up or what was going to become of the Knights Templar in the Holy Land. It must have been a really depressing voyage to make in those circumstances.”
“So I suppose Sidon would have been the first place Tibauld could have left the treasure of the order or some indication where he was going to hide it,” Mallory said. “Or more accurately, at the Sidon Sea Castle, which is where the Templars had taken refuge, and where Tibauld first made landfall with his strange mixed cargo.”
Robin nodded again. “And that presumably is a castle at Sidon itself, is it? In the city, I mean.”
“Not exactly.”
Mallory opened the search box on his browser again and typed in “Sidon Sea Castle.” A lot of results were listed, but he clicked on the first entry from Wikipedia.
“This is as good as anything else,” he said, and pointed at the images on the screen. “Sidon is in Lebanon, and it’s almost certainly Phoenician in origin, and has probably been occupied since about four thousand BC. When the Templars arrived in the area and decided to use Sidon as one of their bases, they soon realized that the city was far too big to be properly defended by such a relatively small number of knights, so they decided to do a bit of lateral thinking, I suppose you could call it, and they moved their base offshore.
“A very short distance off the coast at Sidon was a small island connected to the mainland by a narrow causeway less than a hundred yards long. When the Templars arrived, all that was on the island were the ruins of a former temple to the Phoenician version of Heracles or Hercules, a mythical figure named Melkart, though it was possible that it had been of much greater importance centuries earlier, perhaps even being the location of a royal palace. The Templars were interested in its strategic value and took it over, building a fortress that covered the entire land area. That gave them a formidable castle that could easily be defended from attack by sea, though that wasn’t a common method of assault in those days, while the narrow causeway prevented any large-scale assault from the mainland. It could be defended by quite a small number of determined men, and the Templars were nothing if not determined.
“When Tibauld de Gaudin arrived, he was the most senior Templar knight at Sidon and no doubt the other Templars looked to him to provide leadership and guidance, but as we know that didn’t happen. He disembarked the passengers from his ship and very shortly afterward he set sail to Cyprus, with the laudable intention of raising reinforcements, creating a new Templar army that would sweep back from Cyprus and once and for all rid the Holy Land of the infidels that infested it.”
“And he failed.”
“Exactly. He completely failed to raise reinforcements, probably because just about every fighting man he approached would have realized that the Mamluks were essentially invulnerable, just because of their vast numbers, and to volunteer to fight against them was simply suicidal. Not even mercenary soldiers were interested, no matter what sums of money Tibauld offered them. That, incidentally, is another reason why it’s certain the treasure was taken to Cyprus, because if Tibauld de Gaudin hadn’t had the funds, he couldn’t have even begun approaching any mercenaries. Don’t forget, all Knights Templar took a vow of poverty when they joined the order, so Tibauld would have had almost no money of his own. For him to try to recruit mercenary soldiers, he would have had to use Templar assets.”
Robin nodded in slow agreement, then shook her head. “Hang on a minute. If it’s certain that Tibauld de Gaudin did take the Templar treasure to Cyprus, is there any real point in going to Sidon, to this castle? We already know there’ll be nothing to find there.”
Mallory gestured at the decrypted and translated Latin text.
“You could be right, but I think it’s possible that there might be,” he said. “Just look at this sentence in the text that we’ve just deciphered. ‘The burden conveyed from the Tower of the Flies of Ekron to rest at the fortress on the water.’ Ekron was an ancient biblical city believed to be ruled by Baal-zebub, the Lord of the Flies, and for a time the Crusaders
believed Acre was Ekron, hence the name of the tower. It was an important defensive fort on a tiny island at the entrance to the protected harbor at Acre, and would have been the last point that Tibauld de Gaudin’s ship would have passed as he left the harbor that night. And the fortress on the water has to mean the Sidon Sea Castle.”
“So that means whatever Tibauld was carrying on board the ship was taken to Sidon,” Robin said, “but then he sailed to Cyprus, didn’t he? Why would he have left anything at Sidon?”
“We know he went on to Cyprus. That’s in the historical record, but this parchment confirms it, talking about the ‘island of copper.’ Nobody knows where the name ‘Cyprus’ came from, but in antiquity the island was known to be such a good source of copper that in Classical Latin the metal was referred to as aes Cyprium, or ‘metal of Cyprus,’ which was later shortened to cuprum, and hence copper. The probability is that Tibauld knew Cyprus quite well, because he’d been in the area, around the eastern Mediterranean, for some time. And I think that’s important because of this reference.”
Mallory pointed at the next translated sentence.
“‘And in that place he marked that place,’” he read out.
“The Latin word is locus,” Robin said. “It’s got several different meanings, but ‘place’ is as good as any.”
“I know, and as it stands that sentence doesn’t make too much sense. But pick a couple of alternative meanings and it does. ‘And in that location he marked the spot,’ for example. I wonder if Tibauld knew before he set out from the Sidon Sea Castle where he was going to land on the island, and also where he’d find a safe hiding place for the treasure he had been entrusted with. So I think that sentence means he left some kind of mark or message at Sidon, a statement of his intentions, if you like. That might just have been a precaution, a way of telling the other members of the Knights Templar where the assets were going to be deposited, so that if some accident befell him after he’d arrived on Cyprus, the treasure wouldn’t be lost forever.”
“Couldn’t he just have told someone what he was going to do with it?” Robin asked.
“He could have, certainly, but he would have known that the Mamluk army was probably already marching toward Sidon. And after seeing what had happened at Acre, I don’t think Tibauld would have been happy to entrust his secret to any one Templar, or even to a number of them, because of the very real danger that they would be slaughtered in the battle that was going to take place at Sidon within a few days or weeks. If he was going to provide any information about his intentions, the only safe way to do so would be to create something concrete, something that would endure for centuries, like a carving. It would also have to be meaningless to the Mamluks and only make sense to a fellow Templar, which would be quite a difficult trick to pull off.
“That’s just a theory, mind you, and I could be completely wrong, but the way the text talks about a trail suggests that there might be clues left on the ground, as it were, that we can follow.”
“So now we have to go to Lebanon?” Robin asked.
“I think we should, yes, and just hope if Tibauld did leave any kind of clue in the Sea Castle that it’s still there, because the place was pretty badly knocked about after he left Sidon.”
Mallory used the touch pad to move the cursor to open a new browser window and entered another term in the search box. “Anyway, I think the first thing we have to do is work out how to get to Lebanon. We want a route that’s quick and easy, and that probably means hopping on a plane, so I’ll just do a quick search and see what’s available.”
While Mallory checked flights from various French airports to the eastern Mediterranean, Robin looked again at the text they had finally translated.
“I think you’re right about following a trail,” she said, “because that is the way this passage reads. But I just wonder how easy it will be to spot any clues Tibauld left behind him over seven hundred years ago, far less work out what they mean.”
“That will be the real trick,” Mallory replied, “and all we can do is hope that we’re smart enough to see a hidden meaning in what other people have dismissed as unimportant over the centuries.”
54
Sidon, Lebanon
Traveling to Sidon didn’t prove to be as difficult as Mallory had been expecting. They drove to Paris Orly and took a flight direct to Beirut, landing at the airport that lay just to the south of the city. Once there, they hired a car and drove the relatively short distance—about twenty miles—down the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon to Sidon.
“I’m actually rather enjoying this,” Robin said, leaning back in her seat and looking through the side window of the car at the sparkling blue waters of the Mediterranean as Mallory steered the hired Renault south. “I just wish we had the time to stop and lie on the beach for a week or so, and let all our troubles just waft away. But I can’t stop thinking about the problems still waiting for us back in Devon, festering away quietly in the background.”
“And they’re probably getting worse as well,” Mallory said. “I’m quite sure that the pointed hat brigade will be getting more and more irritated with every day that passes when they can’t haul you into the nearest police station and give you the third degree about what happened in your apartment. When you do eventually go back and face them—because obviously we can’t keep doing this forever, running around looking for lost treasures—I still think your best plan is to simply deny all knowledge of what happened. Tell them you walked out of your apartment to meet your new boyfriend and, quite unexpectedly for you, he turned out to be a kind of white knight who whisked you off for a prolonged dirty weekend that turned into a week spent bouncing around the eastern Mediterranean.”
Robin smiled at him.
“I don’t really see you as a white knight,” she said, “and we haven’t had any kind of dirty weekend. But you’re probably right. The obvious objection to that scenario is my failure to go and talk to the police once I knew that those three men had been killed in my apartment. I suppose I could say that I thought it was Betty having a joke with me, trying to spoil my fun, but I really don’t know if they would believe that.”
“I don’t think that it really matters whether they believe it or not. What they can’t prove is that you were there when the murders took place, because you weren’t. The old triumvirate in law enforcement, and especially for murder, is means, motive, and opportunity, and of those the only one that really fits you is opportunity, simply because you own the property. Means is a bit of a gray area because it will be clear to the police that the men—or at least two of them—were armed when they arrived, and so they could argue that you seized one of their pistols and shot the three of them. But that still leaves motive. You didn’t know those three men, and you certainly didn’t have any valid reason for wanting them dead, so it’s difficult to see how they could mount a successful prosecution against you for their murders. Apart from anything else, I don’t think any reasonably fair-minded jury would believe that tiny little you would be able to overpower three hefty men armed with pistols and then shoot them, with or without your martial arts skills.
“In fact,” Mallory continued, “if my reading of what happened after we made our getaway is correct, I’m the one who needs to be worried. That last Italian could dump the murder weapon in my car so that the police will find it when they recover the vehicle. I suppose with hindsight it probably was a good idea to report the car stolen, because at least that will muddy the waters. If the vehicle wasn’t in my possession, then I couldn’t have placed the murder weapon in it. But I still think I’m going to need a flock of high-priced lawyers back in Britain if I’m going to be able to talk my way out of this.”
“Then let’s hope there really is some kind of treasure at the end of this, because then you’ll be able to afford the best legal brains money can buy,” Robin said.
They drove on in silence for a few more
minutes, and then Mallory pointed ahead.
“There it is,” he said, gesturing toward an old gray stone fortification, much of it in ruins, located just off the coast on their right-hand side, on the northern edge of Sidon. It was approached by a stone causeway that linked the small island to the mainland.
“It looks as if it’s suffered a bit over the years,” Robin remarked.
“It has,” Mallory confirmed. “After Tibauld left to sail to Cyprus, the remaining Templars here prepared to defend the castle against the Mamluks, but they almost certainly knew from the start that they were doomed. And they were right. The enormous Mamluk army, fresh from their overwhelming victory at the siege of Acre, arrived at Sidon and quickly overwhelmed the defenders of the castle. The few members of the order who managed to survive the battle escaped by sea and made their way to Tortosa, but it quickly became apparent that there were simply too few of them there to make the slightest difference, and that for the garrison to remain would simply be suicidal.
“The Knights Templar weren’t scared of dying in battle—in fact, they welcomed it—but they were also very aware of military tactics, and they would have known that if they stayed in Tortosa to face the oncoming Mamluk army, they would all die. If that happened, there would be even fewer Christian knights in the Holy Land able to combat the menace of the infidels, and throwing away their lives to no purpose would only serve to weaken their cause.”
“So they left, presumably,” Robin said.
“They left. Both Tortosa and the one other remaining mainland Templar castle in the Holy Land, Athlit, were abandoned that same year, before the Mamluks were able to lay siege to either of them. But the Templars did make a kind of last stand on the fortress island of Ruad. That’s located a couple of miles off the coast of Tortosa, today’s Tartus in Syria, a few miles north of Tripoli. In fact, in 1300 Jacques de Molay, who was by then the Templar grand master, took part in a complicated and ultimately unsuccessful plan involving not only his own order but also the Knights Hospitaller and the Teutonic Knights, supposed to be supported by a large force of Mongol warriors that conspicuously failed to materialize. The idea was to use Ruad as a bridgehead to attack and recover Tortosa, but all they actually managed to achieve was to launch a few raids on the mainland, seize a handful of prisoners, and engage in a bit of plunder. Because the Mongol army was delayed by bad weather, they didn’t have a sufficiently large force to even attempt to engage the Mamluks. And after a certain amount of deliberation, most of the combined forces withdrew and returned to Cyprus, leaving behind a small garrison on Ruad.
