The Templar Inheritance (21 page)

As Hart watched, lost in his own sense of high dudgeon, four of Nalan’s cousins bore down on the leering Hassif. They took Hassif’s arms and legs and pinioned him to a flat rock. Hassif began to scream. One of the other men walked behind Hassif’s head. The man felt about in the pockets of his baggy
shirwal
trousers and brought out a black leather box, about the size of a large book. He opened the box and took out a syringe. Hassif shrieked some more.

Hart tried to rock himself sideways and onto his knees, but someone was pinning him down with their foot. The gag in Hart’s mouth was tight and getting tighter. He tried to signal Nalan with his eyes, but she refused to look at him. All her concentration was on Hassif.

The man with the syringe threw something silver to one of Nalan’s cousins – Hart could no longer remember exactly who was who any more, but it might have been Elind. Elind placed the object in Hassif’s mouth and began to screw it open. Hart realized that it was a mouth clamp. The sort of thing that might once have been used for dentistry, or as a prelude to take out someone’s tonsils and adenoids. Hassif ululated through the opened aperture.

The first man now indicated to the others that they should support Hassif’s head. When this was done, he sat himself astride Hassif’s chest, aimed the syringe inside his mouth, and injected him a number of times. Then he waited.

Hart closed his eyes. Were they intending to torture Hassif? Punish him in some way by extracting his teeth? Was this some weird sort of Kurdish blood revenge? Then what were they going to do with him? He could feel the bile rising in his throat.

The man sitting astride Hassif’s chest bent forwards again. This time he was holding a scalpel in his right hand. Hart could see Hassif’s feet drumming on the ground.

The man made a series of quick movements, and then stood up. He was holding something bloody in his hand. He moved towards the lip of the volcano and tossed it into the void.

The dental gag was unscrewed and Hassif was dragged to his feet. His hands were untied. His knees immediately gave way, but four men were supporting him now and he remained on his feet. His mouth was rimmed with blood.

Elwand tied the end of the dangling rope about Hassif’s waist. Hassif began to kick and fight. He was making gagging noises, but no real sound was emerging from his mouth. No human sound, anyway. Hart realized that it was Hassif’s tongue they had cut out. The man who had done the cutting shook a jar of pills in front of Hassif’s face. When he was sure that Hassif had registered the fact of the pills, he shoved them into Hassif’s pocket with a flourish.

Hassif was manhandled to the edge of Solomon’s Prison and held there, looking down. Nalan approached him. Hart expected her to say something to Hassif, but all she did was spit in his face. The men surrounding him levered him over
the rock ledge and took up his weight on the rope. Then they began lowering him. It took four of them to do it.

Nalan watched the action of the rope with a frozen expression on her face.

Hart shook his head and looked up at the man who was pinioning him. The man seated him upright again and left him to his own devices. But he did not untie him, nor did he take out the gag.

Elwand circled his hand when he saw that Hassif had reached the bottom. He pointed to the tension of the rope against the crowbar and twanged it with his finger.

The man who had cut out Hassif’s tongue handed Nalan the scalpel. Nalan crawled to the mouth of the hole and began sawing at the rope.

Hart threw himself forwards, but it was a pointless gesture. All he succeeded in doing was to ensure that he was even further from standing up without someone’s help.

The rope parted and fell into the abyss. The crowbar clattered to the ground. The swish the rope made as it looped into the void merely added to the unholy silence left after its landing. Elwand picked up the crowbar and turned to go.

The man guarding Hart reached down and untied his gag. Then he freed him from his bonds.

The other men were all starting down the hillside as if nothing had happened. Nalan followed them.

Hart hurried to the lip of the volcano. Despite his vertigo, he managed to ease himself as close to the edge as was humanly possible. He stared down.

Hassif was standing on the ‘king of the castle’ rock eight hundred feet below. He was alternately waving his arms and holding on to his face. No sound came from him. No sound carried up the dead vent of the volcano.

Hart realized that Nalan and her tribe had devised, in their own eyes, the most perfect punishment imaginable for a man with whom they shared a blood feud. They had not killed him. They had even anaesthetized him during the surgery to his tongue, and given him further analgesics to deaden the pain afterwards. But they had condemned him to eternal silence. No water. No food. No possibility of ever calling for help. Even if people visited the site, which they only did on occasion, they would not be able to see him unless they risked their lives by leaning far out over the precipice. And who, bar a maniac, would ever do that?

What had Hart remembered while he had been down there? The 3-3-3 survival rule of thumb. Three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food.

He looked one final time at the man standing on the king-of-the-castle stone and then slid his way back from the lip and followed the others silently down the hillside.

FORTY-SEVEN

Hart was silent in the boot of the car going back to Ronas and Bemo’s village. He had been given some water in a plastic bottle, and this he drank to prevent a recurrence of the coughing fit that had nearly given him away the last time.

He could make out the back of Elwand’s head again round the broken back seat, but he couldn’t tell if anyone else was in the car with him. Only when Nalan spoke, about twenty minutes into their journey, did Hart realize that she was sitting ahead of him in the passenger seat.

At the village he waited patiently for Elwand to open the boot. When his way was clear, he clambered out. He could smell his own stench mixed with that of whoever had originally owned the Kurdish clothes that he had been wearing for three days now.

He glanced across at Nalan. She was watching him, a sad smile on her face.

Hart walked across to the well and spooned up some water. He rinsed his face and scrubbed his teeth with his fingers. Then he drank some more.

When he straightened up he realized that Elwand had left the two of them alone and was talking to the head man. He was gesticulating up the mountain, and the head man was smiling and nodding his head.

Hart walked back towards Nalan. ‘He won’t be dead, you know. Not yet. There is still time.’

‘No, there is not.’

‘He will already have suffered a nightmare beyond your imagining.’

Nalan shook her head. ‘No. Not beyond my imagining. He made my mother and father suffer a far worse nightmare, and for far longer. My own nightmare was nothing in comparison to theirs. What we have done is only just.’

Hart fixed her eyes with his. ‘What? Cutting out his tongue? Abandoning him to die of thirst in the most godforsaken place on earth?’

‘Yes. This is just.’

Hart shook his head. ‘I cannot accept that.’

Nalan touched him on the arm, very lightly. ‘This is because you have never suffered, John. Not in any real sense. You have lived surrounded by your cocoon of comfort, and you have taken pictures of the suffering of others. History afforded you the luck to be born in a peaceful country. Amongst your own people. If you had been born here, or in Iraq, you would have been a different man.’

‘A man whom you might have married?’

Nalan hesitated. But only for a moment. ‘Yes.’

‘But you will not marry me now.’

‘No.’ She touched his cheek with her hand. ‘But you always knew this. I always told you this.’

‘Yes. But I didn’t believe it.’

‘That is your problem, John. You do not believe.’

Hart drew in his breath. He could see Elwand and the head man approaching. ‘The man you are going to marry. He was one of those on the mountain, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes. He is the doctor.’

Hart threw his head back. ‘The doctor? You call that a doctor? A man who cuts out people’s tongues? I suppose you’d call a man a doctor who conducts amputations on thieves?’

‘No. I would not.’

‘Then how is this different?’

‘If you do not know, I cannot tell you.’ Nalan stepped back a pace. ‘Goodbye, John. Elwand has arranged for you to pass back beyond the mountains. Now he is going to drive me to Bukan.’

‘And I suppose you won’t be there to greet me when I arrive in Iraq? No more passionate nights at Pank?’

‘That is not worthy of you.’

Hart shook his head. He felt sick to his soul. ‘Tell me something. One last thing. Before Elwand gets here. Why did you give me that night? Why did you risk everything to be with me?’

Nalan cocked her head to one side, so that her hair fell heavily onto her right shoulder. ‘But I thought this was obvious. Because I love you.’

‘Because you love me? But what about your husband-to-be?’

She tucked her hair back inside her scarf. ‘There is no question of love for me with him. But respect? He has all of that from me. He has protected his family and his kinsmen. He has acted on my behalf in the punishment of the man who shamed my parents. I owe this man everything.’

‘And you owe me nothing?’

‘Only love, John. Only love. But that is my curse, and I shall have to live with it.’ She touched her heart with her hand. ‘Go back home. Find a woman of your own race to be with. Then think of me in quiet moments, when you are alone, just as I shall think of you. And do not grieve for me. As the poet Rumi says, anything you lose comes around again in another form. You will dance for ever in my breast, where no one but I can see you.’

FORTY-EIGHT

The Lebanon Mountains

EARLY AUTUMN 1198

On the evening of the third day of their trek through the mountains, Hartelius and the princess returned early from their customary walk. The princess had been feeling unwell, and Hartelius had recognized this, from previous experience, as the customary affliction women experience during the early stages of their pregnancy. He had insisted that Elfriede return with him to their lean-to, and he soon had her comfortably snuggled in beside him, sipping a herb tea made from lemon and ginger that her handmaiden had brought her. Before long they were talking quietly together, with much caressing of hair and face, their eyes never leaving each other, their bodies touching along their entire length beneath the talismanic fur blanket Elfriede had brought with her all the way from the Rupertsberg Convent, and which she had possessed ever since she was a child.

It was then that the Amir’s Sufi master, the Shaykh al-Akbar, also known as Al Akbariyya or Ibn Arabi, chose to
approach them. The Shaykh was dressed for the first time in his
khirqa
, or Sufi mantle, which was multicoloured, with many patches, and made of a mixture of ram’s wool and goat hair. It most resembled a shepherd’s cloak, and bore no embroidery of any sort, being of the utmost simplicity in design. Above this the Sufi wore a turban, with one end hanging loose down the front of his clothing. He gave both Hartelius and the princess a deep salute above the eyes, which they immediately returned.

Hartelius could see his thirteen remaining Templars watching their unlikely new grouping with interest. This was hardly surprising, since Hartelius had explained to his men, three days before, that the Shaykh had immediately recognized the unknown language in which their birthright, the Copper Scroll, was principally written, as being that of the Yazidis of Lalish, and therefore a variant of Kurdish – but that the Shaykh had refused to discuss the matter further due to the conflict of interest the scroll posed for him. As it was common knowledge amongst Templar Knights that generations of their Order’s scholars had been trying, and failing, to decipher this part of the written scroll for the past seventy years, the Shaykh’s extraordinary revelation had come as a shock to them all.

The Shaykh, for his part, once he had vouchsafed this momentous information to Hartelius, had chosen to keep himself to himself, a fact noted and resented by the men, some of whom had even advocated taking the Sufi by force and torturing the truth out of him. Hartelius had felt obliged,
not for the first time, to explain the unwritten laws of hospitality to his men.

When things were at their bleakest, with his men seemingly prepared to mutiny over the matter, Luitpold von Szellen, at rising forty years of age the oldest and most respected Knight Templar under his command, had, to Hartelius’s relief, come out into the open with his backing for his commander’s position. The Shaykh’s reappearance now, and the depth of his salute towards Hartelius and the princess after three days spent ignoring everybody, came as something of a surprise.

‘Let me tell you about the Yazidis,’ the Shaykh said, squatting on his haunches and picking through the fire with a stick.

Hartelius sat back, astonished at the Shaykh’s seemingly innate ability to read his mind. ‘The Yazidis. Yes. The princess and I were just discussing them. I would obviously appreciate any further insights you may feel able to give me.’ Hartelius hesitated, still a little unsure about the Shaykh’s unlikely change of mind. ‘Their true location, for instance, which I personally believe to be somewhere along the Southern Silk Road near Mosul, in Upper Mesopotamia. Which is at least twenty days’ ride from here. If I am not mistaken, that is, for the map I possess of the Silk Route is an old one, and somewhat misused.’

The Shaykh flapped his hand. ‘You are intending to travel there, are you not? To leave your princess behind with me, her handmaiden, and two of your knights, and take the remainder
of your Templar Knights with you? This is why you are resting your horses here. Is this not so?’

Hartelius sat back on his haunches. He gave the princess a guilty look and then nodded. For how could he do otherwise? Everything the Shaykh said was true. ‘How can you possibly know this?’

The Shaykh shrugged. The vestige of a smile, part hidden by his beard, played across his features. ‘A man who keeps himself to himself is eventually ignored by everybody. Then he may hear things that others wish to keep secret. Voices carry in these mountains, Commander. I have been listening to you and your men very closely over the past few days. I know, for instance, that you have argued many times to save my life. That those two. . .’ he pointed across to Klarwein and Nedermann ‘. . . would have taken and tortured me to give up any further information about the scroll I might carry in my head.’

‘I would never have allowed this. You are my guest.’

‘I know, Commander. I know.’ The Sufi was smiling broadly now. ‘Still. It is true what I say.’

The two men watched each other across the fire. The princess took Hartelius’s hand in hers. Hartelius could feel the intensity of the look that she gave him, but he found that, despite all his efforts, he could not turn his gaze away from the Sufi.

‘I have rarely in my life seen so great a love as you and the princess show to each other,’ said the Shaykh, inclining his head towards the princess. ‘And I have never known my pupil, the Amir, to love a man as he loves you.’ This time
the Shaykh’s eyes focused on Hartelius alone. ‘You are much loved of God to be so loved in this life.’

Hartelius bowed his head. ‘I know it.’

The Shaykh smiled an even broader smile. ‘But do you acknowledge it?’

Hartelius glanced to his right, where the princess was watching him, her eyes sparkling with anticipation. For Hartelius never spoke openly of his personal beliefs – or only in the most general terms, when he was telling her of his Templar upbringing and its extraordinary strictures, perhaps, and comparing them to what she had experienced at the Rupertsberg Convent. Or merely in jest.

‘I do. Yes. Each day I thank God for the princess, and the child of ours she bears. For the love I bear her and for the love she bears me. And each day I thank God for the Amir, and the love he bears me, and the love I bear him.’

‘And you are overwhelmed?’

‘Yes. The emotions that I feel when I thank God, and do not ask for his favour, overwhelm me.’

The Sufi bent forwards, as if he was listening to the meaning behind the meaning of Hartelius’s words. He grasped Hartelius’s free hand between both of his and held it, just as the princess was doing. ‘And you do not ask for His favour? That is interesting. And hardly Christian.’

Hartelius closed his eyes. He felt an extraordinary surge of energy pass through him, as if both the Shaykh and the princess were somehow meeting in him through the simple touch of their hands. He suspected that what he was about
to say might be construed as blasphemy in some quarters. He lowered his voice so that his men might not hear him – or, at the very least, not be entirely certain of what he said.

‘What is Christian and what is Muslim? There is, and can be, only God. When I was drowning in the Saleph River – when I was trying to rescue the princess’s father – I had a vision.’ Hartelius caught himself mid-stride. ‘No. It was a presence rather than a vision. Well. . .’ He shook his head dazedly. ‘I do not rightly know what to call it.’

‘Yes, you do.’

Hartelius let out his breath. ‘Yes, I do. It was a direct experience of God. From that moment onwards, everything in my life, everything I did, was focused directly on Him.’

‘To the exclusion of all dogma? To the exclusion, even, of your own faith?’

Hartelius no longer even cared who might be listening to him. He was overwhelmed by the need to describe what he felt. To describe it for the very first time, and out loud. ‘To the exclusion of everything but God.’

‘And what is God?’

Hartelius smiled. ‘God is everything. We are all within God as He is within us.’

‘And you love God?’

‘Totally.’

‘And you came to this love yourself? Not through any human vessel?’

‘I did not come to this love through any volition of my own. Nor through any human vessel. It just is.’

The Sufi remained silent for a long time. Hartelius, too, stared into the fire, as though its energy might feed his emotional exhaustion. He was profoundly aware of the princess beside him – of her stare – but he could not bring himself to raise his head. He had opened his innermost heart to a stranger. Why had he done this? And in front of his men? But it could not have been otherwise.

‘Give me the scroll.’ The Shaykh held out his hand.

Hartelius rose to his feet. He walked towards his saddle bags. He felt inside one of the satchels and returned with a package wrapped in sheepskin. He handed it to the Shaykh. He could hear murmuring from his men, but he ignored them.

The Shaykh offered him another salute. ‘Thank you. Thank you for your faith, Baron von Hartelius. I shall translate these and then return them to you.’

Hartelius was fleetingly tempted to ask, ‘Why? Why will you translate them for us?’ But he did not. He sat down beside the princess and laid his head in her lap. He lay like this for a long time, with his eyes closed.

When he awoke it was to his Templars telling him that the Shaykh had gone.