by Alex Scarrow
Cabot looked around at the softly stirring ears of barley. They rustled and whispered among themselves as they waited in silence for … for what? Lady Rebecca had said ‘the future’.
Days yet to be.
To visit one of those … it was a concept he could barely get his mind around. A day simply is. And then after the day has ended, it merely was, complete with whatever one remembered of the day in question. To walk into what was yet to be …
He shook his head at the impossibility of it. Perhaps this lady and her friends were afflicted by some madness. He’d come across holy men in Jerusalem who made claim of things just as impossible and nonsensical as this.
‘My lady, perhaps it would be best if we return to the grounds of the priory?’
She shook her head. ‘I am detecting tachyons, Cabot. It appears the message has already been received.’
Tack-ee-ons? Another one of their strange words that he could only ponder the meaning of. He looked around the field, not sure what a tack-ee-on was, or what he should do if one were to approach him.
A fresh breeze stirred the barley, sending a gentle wave across the ears of grain.
‘The portal is coming,’ said Becks.
Cabot’s gaze flitted from one direction to the next. All he could see was the field they were standing in, the edge of the nearby woods and a thin smudge of smoke rising from the priory just over the brow of the hillside. Then all of a sudden he felt a strong buffeting wind, cool against his cheek.
A dozen yards ahead, above the chest-high sea of swaying barley, he could just make out the outline of a shimmering, undulating dome. Within it, he saw swirling dark details that flickered and twisted like the reflection in a disturbed pool of water. ‘What devilry is this!’ his voice croaked hoarsely.
‘It is a time portal,’ said Becks matter-of-factly. She started towards it. ‘Follow me, please.’
But Cabot remained rooted to the spot. Suddenly terrified of this thing that had no place being here in their field. He saw darkness in the middle of it, shapes he couldn’t understand, demon-like shapes that seemed to be waving malevolently to him, beckoning him on.
This can be of no good, he cautioned himself. He glanced at Lady Rebecca and for a moment wondered if his more devout brothers in the priory had been right all along, that there were demons and devils and a dark place beneath the earth they stood on whither tainted souls were taken down and doomed to burn in torment for an eternity.
Becks turned and saw he hadn’t yet moved. ‘Now!’ she barked at him.
Cabot shook his head. ‘’Tis … ’tis an evil work!’
She pushed her way impatiently through the stalks and grabbed his arm roughly. ‘We are wasting time. The portal can only remain open for a limited period on one charge.’
‘No!’ He tried to wriggle free of her grasp. ‘No! Please!’ But her hand had closed around his lower arm like a vice. She began to wrestle him forward towards the churning darkness.
‘Oh, Lord forgive my sins!’ Cabot began to bellow, trying his best to dig his heels into the soft dry soil. ‘I renounce all evil! I renounce the Devil and his minions!’
Cabot threw a punch at her face. It landed firmly on her cheek, leaving a graze and a welt that was sure to turn into a dark purple bruise within the hour. Her eyebrows knitted disapprovingly.
‘Please do not do that again.’ With both hands she grasped his monk’s habit and lifted him up off the ground. His arms and legs began to flail frantically.
‘Ye are a demon!’ he screamed down at her face. His feet in sandals kicking her stomach, her thighs. ‘I knew it!’
She staggered forward, just about managing to keep her balance as he squirmed, kicked and punched in her grasp.
‘No! Please! Have mercy on –!’
CHAPTER 71
1194, Nottingham Castle, Nottingham
‘WHAT!’ roared John.
Liam looked at Bob, standing beside him. A quick warning glance to him to be ready for anything. There was no knowing how John was going to react to the news.
‘I said it’s gone, Sire. Lady Rebecca took it last night.’
The skin on John’s face raced through several shades of crimson anger, then it drained to a pallid grey. ‘Good God! She was a traitor! She was a spy of Richard’s! She was –’
‘No,’ Liam interrupted him. ‘No, she is nothing to do with Richard, Sire.’
John’s anger was already spent, gone in a moment, leaving him quivering and looking lost.
‘She …’ John’s jaw worked silently. ‘She … But I thought we were … in love.’ He looked slowly up at Liam and he could see tears filling the man’s hooded eyes. ‘But, do you say she was taking me for a … for a fool?’
Liam couldn’t deny that bit. Yes, she had been using him.
‘Lady Rebecca has taken it to a safe place,’ said Liam. The fluttering of nerves in his own voice had gone. John didn’t look like a tyrant about to order his head be cut off. Liam had expected a torrent of abuse, a face full of royal spittle. Instead, John looked all of a sudden like a child, abandoned, frightened and lonely.
‘She told me to … to be strong,’ he said quietly, a tear rolling down his cheek into the wispy bristles of his beard. ‘For her … you know? I would have been.’ He swiped at his cheek with a sleeve. ‘For her, you understand? For her … I would have stood up to Richard.’
Liam looked over John’s slumped shoulders at the arched alcove and the balcony beyond. In the heat-shimmering distance beyond the walls of Nottingham, he could see the endless rows of multicoloured tents and marquees of Richard’s assembled army, the sturdy lumber A-frames of half a dozen catapults, being swarmed around and finished by carpenters. Like ants at this distance.
‘I have to surrender to him,’ whispered John. ‘I have to capitulate. The longer I leave it … the angrier he will get! He will –’
‘No!’ said Liam.
John looked up at him sharply, a flash of irritation in his eyes at Liam’s insubordinate interruption.
‘Listen, Sire … if you do surrender while you have no Grail, you have nothing to bargain with!’ Liam didn’t need to finish that thought for John. By the look in John’s red-rimmed eyes, he knew exactly what that meant for him.
‘But, if you stall …’ Liam continued.
‘Stall?’ A word John was unfamiliar with.
‘If you wait. Let Richard think you have it … maybe even threaten to destroy it if he attempts to attack –’
‘Destroy it?’ John’s eyes looked like they’d glimpsed the very bowels of Hell. ‘Can you imagine, Sheriff – can you imagine what he would do to me? If I … If I were to …’
‘Would he dare risk that, though?’ Liam cocked an eyebrow. ‘Really? After all that he’s done to get hold of it, would he risk you putting a candle to it?’
John swallowed nervously. ‘He … he would know I daren’t.’
Liam looked at the man, trembling and pale. Perhaps he would at that.
‘You still have to be strong, Sire. You have to arrange a meeting with him. You have to tell him we have it here – and, unless his army disbands, you will burn it yourself.’
Bob opened his mouth to say something. Liam knew what it was: a warning about time contamination. The way history was supposed to go, Richard’s siege was successful and John surrendered to his older brother. Liam patted his good arm to hush him. John didn’t need to hear that right now, that he was destined to surrender.
‘Buy us a little time, Sire,’ said Liam. ‘Meet with him … convince him that you will destroy it if he attempts to attack us.’
John stroked his chin obsessively, the faint tremor of a nervous tic in his quivering jaw. Liam wondered if the poor man could convince anyone of anything right now.
‘Lady Rebecca will be back, I assure you. She’ll be back with the Grail.’
I hope.
‘And then you can arrange a truce, Sire. You’ll have something you can use to bargain with.’
CHAPTER 72
2001, New York
Sébastien Cabot kept his eyes firmly clenched shut, not daring to get his first glimpse of the underworld and the Devil’s workings. Through his closed lids he could sense it was a dark place. His ears picked out sounds he’d never heard before, soft beeps and hums that could only be the devices of evil stirring, ready to tear his mortal soul apart.
‘And who’s this?’ a female voice echoed. He sensed they were standing in some cave, perhaps on a ledge that overlooked an infinite cavern filled with a squirming sea of tormented souls below, burning in agony, prodded, stabbed and tortured by demons wandering among them.
‘Cabot.’ He recognized Lady Rebecca’s voice in reply.
‘Cabot? Like – like in the message? The same guy?’
‘Affirmative. He is here to help.’
Cabot slowly opened his clenched-shut eyes. He first saw his sandalled feet on a hard pockmarked and stained stone floor. And as he looked up he saw Lady Rebecca and three other strangely dressed people staring at him with curiosity. No demons. No fire. No tormented souls.
One of them stepped forward. A young woman. She had long frizzy hair and pale freckled skin. On her face were two ovals of glass that glinted reflection from a bright bar of light above him that fizzed and flickered slightly.
‘Hey, pleased to meet you,’ she said, extending a hand towards him. ‘I’m Maddy.’
Cabot’s dry mouth opened and closed without producing anything. Finally, he managed to say something. ‘This … this place? ’Tis not … Hell?’
The frizzy-haired girl shrugged and smiled in a friendly way. ‘Guess it’s a matter of opinion really.’
Some time later – Cabot, still lost in a state of numb shock, had no idea how long: perhaps an hour, a day, perhaps only a few minutes later – he found himself and these curious strangers sitting around a long wooden table on padded chairs. He held a cup full of a warm and bitter brown drink. The other girl in this place, dark-skinned like a Turk and wearing black clothes splashed with a lurid orange and pink design of some sort – she’d been introduced as Sal – had told him the drink was called Koff-eeee as she’d pressed it into his hands.
‘… has a section in it that is marked by four corner markers,’ Lady Rebecca was saying. ‘In these margin illuminations. Here, here, here and here.’
The man with them – called Adam – hunkered over the table beside Lady Rebecca and examined the Treyarch Confession more closely.
‘My God, I think she may be right!’ he said. ‘They’ve got to be grille markers.’
Maddy joined them slumped over the table. She pushed her glasses up her nose. ‘Show me.’
‘See?’ said Adam. ‘Like corners, embedded subtly into the illustration’s pattern?’
‘Yeah – oh man, yeah, I see it!’
Adam looked at them. ‘Basically this is the blueprint … instructions on how to make a cardan grille to decode that,’ he said, pointing to the small wooden box containing the Grail.
‘It is this passage of text,’ continued Becks, spreading her hands across the Treyarch, ‘that is being indicated. But it is in a language we do not have data for. An extinct form of Gaelic. Cabot,’ she said, pointing at him, ‘has knowledge of this language.’
All eyes suddenly rested on him. He put down the mug of hot liquid on the table and spread his hands apologetically. ‘I … uh … I know but a little of it,’ he said. ‘I served the order alongside another Templar, Irish, a man who came from Dún Garbháin.’
Maddy cocked a finger, inviting him to lean over. ‘Well, come on and take a closer look, Mr Cabot. See what you can figure out.’
Cabot pulled himself up out of his chair and joined them over the document, rolled out and spread flat along the table and almost as long. A steadily burning light in a small wire cage dangled from the arched brick roof just above them. He wondered what made it glow so steadily. It was certainly no flame.
He turned his attention to the elaborate curls and flourishes of handwriting before him. By contrast to the feeble flickering candlelight the priory’s monks worked to after dark, this steady light let him see as if the table was standing outside in a field in the middle of a bright summer’s day.
‘This,’ he began, moving a leathery old finger along the first lines of text, ‘this I believe ’tis a form of Irish Gaelic.’ His finger traced the words, his lips moving in silence for a while.
‘I tell ye, ’tis hard to read, but … I think this first line is a prayer of silence. Be thy true a servant, or perchance that reads … to help?’ Cabot growled with frustration. ‘Seek ye not in … matters of truth of … or ’tis some other meaning. Take not matters of light … Achh! My Gaelic is too poor to read this.’
‘What do you think that’s supposed to mean?’ asked Sal. ‘Matters of truth?’
Maddy shrugged. ‘Just a bunch of weird voodoo crock.’ She looked at Cabot. ‘Is there some hidden meaning in there that we’re supposed to get? Like … is it cryptic or something?’
He shook his head. ‘’Tis as close as I can understand it. The rest is beyond me.’
They stared at the swirls and strokes of letters, a meaningless jumble of accented and contorted Latin letters.
‘Maybe it’s not actually meant to mean anything,’ said Adam. The others looked at him. ‘Maybe it’s not the words themselves that are the clue, but how they’re written? Cabot?’
The old man shrugged. He studied it in silence for a while. ‘My knowledge is poor, ye understand? ’Tis been a long while …’ He hesitated a moment.
‘What?’ asked Maddy. ‘What is it?’
He shook his head. ‘’Tis poorly written. This man, Treyarch, was clearly no scribe.’
‘What do you mean?’
Cabot pointed to one of the words in the sentence he’d loosely translated. ‘This letter is wrong. ’Tis written upside down.’
Adam hunched closer to it, his nose almost touching the yellowed parchment. ‘I wonder …’ he whispered to himself.
‘Wonder what? Adam?’
He looked up at them. ‘You got a decent digital camera?’
‘I’ve got my iPhone,’ replied Maddy.
‘What’s that?’
Of course, she smiled. 2001 … they’re still a twinkle in the eye of some Apple designer.
‘It’s just my cell, it’s got a built-in camera.’ She went over to the computer desk and returned with it a moment later.
‘Get a decent image of all of the text between these corner markers,’ said Adam.
She climbed up on to one of the armchairs to get a good bird’s-eye view of the scroll, then snapped several images. ‘What now?’
‘Photoshop,’ said Adam, pointing back towards the bank of computer monitors.
A minute later and Maddy had downloaded the four images she’d taken of the Confession on to one of the computers and they were looking at them within the image-editing software. Cabot’s eyes were comically round with wonder as he stared at the dozen glowing monitors.
‘So,’ said Adam, clicking on a dropdown menu. ‘I’m going to lighten these images up a little.’ He selected the clearest of the four images, and tweaked its brightness. The rich yellow of the parchment became a lighter vanilla, and the black ink became a deep blue.
‘Thing is,’ continued Adam, ‘when using a grille, you place it down on the blank parchment with the windows already cut out, and then you write each letter of your message on the little windows of parchment you can see. Then, when you’re done, you let the ink dry first before removing the grille, so you don’t smudge it. That would give the game away, right? Only certain letters being smudged?’
The others nodded. Made sense.
‘So, what you have then is a page of isolated letters … you write the rest of some meaningless or innocent-sounding message that incorporates those letters.’
He clicked on a menu and pulled another dropdown of editing options. ‘But quite often, in between these
two stages, you might be writing with a different pot of ink.’
‘It’s the same colour,’ said Maddy, pointing at the image on-screen. ‘It’s black … well, dark blue now you’ve lightened it.’
‘Every pot of ink is slightly different. You made your own ink back then.’
Cabot nodded. ‘This is right.’
‘It’s home-made ink, not factory made. Every time you make it, it’s ever so slightly different. To our eyes, yes, it’s all black ink, but in Photoshop, just one variation of the RGB value …’
‘RGB?’
‘Red, Green, Blue – essentially, tone … hue,’ said Adam, ‘and we can separate it out. Exaggerate it enough to see.’ Adam zoomed in close on the writing, then selected another menu option producing a slide bar. The mouse cursor dragged the slide marker and moved it slowly along the horizontal bar. The image started shifting tone, the paper easing from vanilla to amber to pink. And the ink sliding from a deep blue to a deep green to a deep ochre.
‘Oh my God,’ whispered Maddy.
The upside-down letter that Cabot had identified was a slightly yellower ochre than the rest.
‘Zoom out,’ she said quickly. Adam did so, pulling out until the whole of the captured section of text was on the screen. Among the page, several hundred characters stood out distinctly from the rest – as distinct as minstrels at a banquet.
CHAPTER 73
1194, Nottingham
John struggled with great difficulty to keep the trembling to a minimum. He knew his nervous tic must be showing: that slight jerk of his head now and then, the impulsive stroking of his chin. No way of hiding that. But the rest of him was hidden beneath flowing robes. Richard would know he was terrified of him, but the other barons, earls and dukes were only going to see him from afar.
His sheriff, the very strange Liam of Connor, and his even stranger squire, Bob, walked with him along the dusty track leading out through the gates of Nottingham towards the small burgundy-coloured tent erected on its own in the middle of no man’s land.
