The Templar Inheritance (4 page)

‘There is more writing.’ Nalan glanced at the sheet of vellum in her hand. Her tone brooked no argument.

‘What are you talking about? There is no more writing.’

‘Yes. Between the lines. There is. Look.’ Nalan handed the torch and the manuscript to Hart. ‘Maybe he has written it in – how do you call it? Urine.’ Her face went blank for a moment, as if something inside her had been switched off. ‘My mother and my father and some of their companions used to do the same here in the prison to communicate with each other. Some used urine. Some used semen or other bodily fluids. All of these things work. At least to some extent. And providing they are not checked too closely by the guards. If you heat the paper or the cloth later on with a match, or hold it up to the candlelight or against a strong bulb, the words will appear as if by magic. Hold the torch beneath the letter, John. You will see that what I am saying is true.’

Hart upended the torch and shone it through the parchment. For a moment he refused to believe what his eyes were telling him. There were words, exactly as Nalan had said – dozens of words, maybe even hundreds of them – squeezed between each line of the text, and travelling up either side of the vellum sheet. They were a fraction of the size of the visible writing. But they were clearly legible in the light emanating from the torch. The only possible conclusion was that they had been written with a pin or a finely sharpened quill, using some natural substance that would not reveal itself in daylight.

Hart looked at Nalan in consternation. ‘Why did I not see this before?’

‘Did you translate the text yourself?’

Hart shook his head. ‘No. I don’t know old German. A lady, nearly ninety years of age, who grew up with this language, translated it for me.’ He gave a rueful laugh. ‘A lady with cataracts that are so bad that she had to translate the manuscript through a magnifying glass. Even then she could hardly see it.’

‘But you looked at the letter yourself afterwards? You inspected it closely?’

Hart cast Nalan a look of terminal embarrassment. ‘No. Not that closely. Once I had the translation safely in my hand I put the letter back in this envelope and left it there. I don’t know why I still carry it around with me.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Actually, I do know. It’s because I feel connected to the man who wrote it. That my relationship with him, despite the nine centuries that separate us, is still unresolved. That he let me down in some way. Let his family down.’

‘Then you must take this letter back to your old lady and you must get her to translate these hidden words for you. Then, maybe, you can achieve a resolution.’

‘You are forgetting one thing,’ said Hart.

‘No. I’m not.’ Nalan glanced towards the open hatch above her. ‘No. I am forgetting nothing.’

EIGHT

Hart climbed out of the tank ninety minutes later. There had been no further gunfire in the streets during that time, and no sounds from inside the compound. No sign, either, of the expected assault on the museum by the Kurdish army. It was as though everyone involved in the incursion had negotiated a truce and fallen asleep.

It was Hart’s intention to find a spot where there was a good telephone signal and phone his ex-girlfriend, Amira, in England. She would then contact the Kurdish authorities, via the newspaper she worked for and the Foreign Office, to explain his and Nalan’s whereabouts and ensure that they weren’t shot at if they ventured out into the street. It was a good plan, and Nalan had gone along with it to the extent of agreeing to stay inside the tank until he called her and told her it was safe.

Hart stood for a moment by the side of the tank, listening. He held the AK47 flat against his flank, barrel downwards.
One part of him felt frighteningly vulnerable, as if he was already being measured for a coffin by a distant sniper using a night sight. Or being targeted by an invisibly hovering drone which would see him only as an unidentifiable orange heat spot emerging, gun in hand, from the dubious protection of the tank. The other, more rational part of his mind, sensed that the gunmen were dead – had to be. That the last suicide charge, followed by gunfire, had been their Armageddon. But then why no Kurdish army? What was everyone waiting for?

Hart moved towards the statue of the six blindfolded figures. He checked his phone. Yes. A good signal finally. He had one bar left on his battery indicator.

He put the rifle down and flicked to his last call. It was then that he saw the movement out of the corner of his eye.

He froze, the phone halfway to his ear, the number already on automatic dial.

A man stood with his back to Hart, about ten yards from the grille, partially protected by Rebwar’s rickety guard post. He was clearly visible in the moonlight. The man bent down to pick something up. As Hart watched, he repeated the motion.

Hart felt with frantic fingers for the Power Off button on his phone, but he was too late. Amira’s number began to ring.

The man straightened up and turned towards the noise, which, though faint, echoed spectrally throughout the silent courtyard. Hart now saw that the man was wearing a suicide vest, already partially packed with explosives.

Hart looked down at the AK47 lying on the ground beside him. He felt unnaturally calm – fatalistic, even – as if a
power greater than himself was controlling events, and that whatever would be, would be.

He dropped to one knee, let go of his phone, and swept the gun up and into the firing position. He was only vaguely aware of a woman’s voice calling out behind him, and of the man in front of him conducting his very own series of movements, eerily paralleling his own, as though they were both part of some mirror act in a 1930s music hall.

Hart fired first. The barrel of the AK47 swung up, and Hart saw chunks of concrete shear off the wall above the gunman’s head. Hart held the barrel down and fired again. He was still reeling from the unexpected recoil from the abbreviated stock. Part of his mind was idly wondering whether, if he hit the man, he wouldn’t simply explode. And was the belt packed with plastic explosive or with ‘Mother of Satan’ TATP? If the latter was the case, they would be dead in less than a millisecond. With plastic explosive they might have an outside chance of survival. And would the bomber have a dead man’s switch?

Something tapped Hart on the shoulder and he lurched backwards. It was Nalan.

‘Where is he?’ said Hart, his face numb with shock.

‘Don’t worry. He is dead.’

Hart stumbled forwards. He looked down at the man in his suicide vest.

The vest was hanging open. Some of its explosive sleeves were still empty.

Hart realized that by a miracle he had somehow managed
to shoot the man through the heart. His white kurta was saturated with blood.

‘I killed him.’

‘Yes. He would have killed you. Me. Others maybe.’

‘Yes. I understand that.’

Hart stood for a long time looking down at the body.

He hardly noticed when Nalan put the ringing telephone back into his hand.

NINE

Schloss Hartelius Lake Tegernsee, Bavaria

15 MAY 1198

When Johannes von Hartelius had been released from his Templar vows after saving the Holy Lance from the Saleph River, the Holy Roman Emperor’s youngest son, Frederick VI of Swabia, had decided, in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the German crusaders, that Hartelius must immediately marry. How, otherwise, could a man formerly committed to poverty and chastity start a dynasty? A dynasty that would undertake to be Guardians of the Holy Lance of Longinus in perpetuity?

The bride chosen for the twenty-one-year-old Hartelius had been Adelaïde von Kronach, a fifteen-year-old fellow Bavarian from Upper Franconia, of impeccable pedigree and even more impeccable dowry, who had been destined for the court of the Queen of Jerusalem. Eight years into their
Muntehe
marriage Adelaïde had already given Hartelius four children – Grimwald, who would inherit the title Baron St Quirinus – Paulina, Agathe and Ingrid. Their fifth child was a breech birth.

As the result of a freakishly late snowstorm, the physician called upon to oversee Adelaïde’s lying-in from outside the actual confines of her bedroom, as was the custom amongst aristocratic families, found himself and his retinue stranded across the lake from Schloss Hartelius, in Tegernsee Abbey. An inexperienced midwife and a wet nurse he had sent on ahead of him were the only people on hand to help with the birth. The midwife had never dealt with a breech birth before, and when the jet bowl and the birth girdle and the amber and coral amulets and the parchment lozenges all failed to alleviate the mother’s agony, she panicked. The child suffocated. Adelaïde needed the body to be cut out of her, but no one present was capable of doing it.

The news of Adelaïde von Hartelius’s death in childbirth travelled swiftly around Bavaria, where anyone with an aristocratic title, or who pertained to aristocratic privilege, was related to everyone else. Outside Bavaria the news travelled a little more slowly.

It was more than three months after Adelaïde’s death, therefore, that a messenger arrived at Schloss Hartelius with orders that the newly bereaved Baron Sanct Quirinus must present himself at Mainz, in his capacity as Hereditary Guardian of the Holy Lance, in good time for Philip of Swabia’s coronation.

Hartelius, who had been expecting neither the call to duty nor the royal messenger, said the first thing that came into his mind. ‘Philip of Swabia? But he is the brother of the dead king. I thought the new king would be Frederick’s son,
little Frederick? Has something happened to him?’

The messenger responded more sharply than his nominal role might at first have suggested. ‘A three-year-old king of the Germans would be an impossibility, sir, as you yourself must know. A fragmented kingdom needs a forceful ruler, or it will disintegrate.’

Hartelius was well aware that any man bearing a message from the court would, in addition to his courier duties, be tasked with spying on him and monitoring his first reaction to the news that the rightful young king of the Germans had just been ousted from that position by his uncle. It behoved him to tread carefully, therefore. ‘Yes. Of course. What you say is perfectly true. Perfectly true. We are out of touch here. Little more than rustics, if truth be told. I spoke without thinking.’

He set off for Mainz via Bavarian Swabia the very next day, and delivered his four children to Adelaïde’s parents en route. Adelaïde’s father, Hugo von Kronach, was a bloody-minded despot with only one redeeming characteristic – that he placed his family before everything. Blessedly, Hartelius knew that von Kronach would have little to do with the children himself, being obsessed by hunting and hawking and skirmishing with his neighbours, the von Ebblings.

The well-being of his children would fall to Adelaïde’s mother, Hilda von Kronach, and to Adelaïde’s two as yet unmarried younger sisters, Else and Maria. Hartelius was satisfied that the children would, therefore, in accordance with his late wife’s dying wishes, be in the best possible hands in this difficult time. For he suspected that something was
being held in store for him, there being no precedent for a man of his minor aristocratic standing to be called upon to attend a coronation. His great-uncle, a former Abbot of Tegernsee, had been the last man of any note in the Hartelius family, and he was long since dead.

Three days after his arrival in Mainz, Hartelius was consequently astonished to find himself placed a mere two steps behind the new king – and, far more significantly, on his right – during the coronation at the newly renovated Romanesque Cathedral. At one point during the ceremony, just after the sacred oil had been combed into Philip’s hair, Hartelius was required to recite a Latin motto and brandish the Holy Lance, which had been tricked up with a seven-foot-long wooden haft for the occasion. Hartelius, still bewildered by his abrupt rise to royal notice, performed his duties admirably.

The bishop then reeled off a long, carefully worded peroration which placed the newly crowned King Philip in direct line of descent, via Constantine, Justinian, Charles Martel, Charlemagne, Henry the Fowler and Frederick Barbarossa, to the military guardians of Christ’s legacy on earth. The only possible explanation for this bellicose religious symbolism was that a new crusade was in the offing, and that the nobility were being prepared for their part in it.

It came as no surprise to Hartelius, therefore, when he was called into the office of the king’s chamberlain a scant two days after the ceremony. It was a considerable shock, however, when he realized that he was once again to be in the presence of
the king himself, but this time in a private capacity. Hartelius instantly assumed that now he was widowed – but with the significant advantage of already possessing the heir necessary to secure the position of Hereditary Guardian of the Holy Lance beyond his death – he would be required to retake his Templar oath and become a soldier of Christ once again, with all that entailed in terms of celibacy, constancy and penury. A new crusade needed soldiers, and he was nothing if not that. The thought that his four children were secured at Schloss Kronach with their grandmother and aunts afforded him some comfort in the circumstances, and he began to inure himself to the thought that he would have to hand over a significant proportion of their mother’s dowry to the Templars when he rejoined their ranks.

In the event the twenty-two-year-old king had a very different task for him to perform – one that required no such financial sacrifice.

‘Margrave Adalfuns von Drachenhertz, military governor of Carinthia. You have heard of him, of course?’

‘Our war leader. Yes, sire. A mighty warrior.’ And one of the kingdom’s most troublesome barons, Hartelius might have added, endlessly fomenting nuisance and discord in a constant bid for more power.

‘The margrave is to lead the next crusade to free Jerusalem and the Holy Land. In my stead. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes, sire.’

‘For I am needed here. To counter incursions from Sicily and suchlike.’ The last part of the king’s speech was almost mumbled.

Hartelius knew just why the king was mumbling. It was unprecedented for a monarch not to take the lead when a new crusade was in the offing. Hartelius kept his expression neutral, however, and his stance dignified but submissive. It didn’t do to antagonize guilt-stricken monarchs if one wished to keep one’s head. It was becoming clearer to him by the minute that the king’s main intention must be for von Drachenhertz to stay on in the Holy Land – preferably below ground.

‘I am giving von Drachenhertz my sister, Agnes, youngest daughter of my father, Frederick Barbarossa, as his wife. And I am sending him the Holy Lance as a further sign of my accord with the aims of the crusade. These two symbols will surely be enough to convince our English and French allies of the seriousness of our intent. I am needed here.’

‘Of course, sire.’

‘You will escort my sister to the Holy Land, Hartelius. You will hand her over to von Drachenhertz, together with her dowry, which is absurdly significant. But we need to keep the man sweet, don’t we, Missingau?’

The king looked at his chamberlain. The chamberlain looked at Hartelius. Hartelius pretended that he was not in the room.

This king will never last, he thought to himself. This king is doomed. When I think of a giant like Frederick Barbarossa compared to this man, his son, my soul shrinks inside its capsule.

‘Are you clear on what we are asking of you, Hartelius?’

‘Yes, sire. Only . . .’ Something was eating at the outer edges
of Hartelius’s consciousness. ‘May I assume that the king’s sister is a somewhat unwilling party to this undertaking?’

The king and Missingau looked at each other. Then both men turned towards Hartelius. The king shrugged, motioned to Missingau with his chin, and departed. Missingau waited until all the king’s guards had vacated the room.

‘What an absurd suggestion. The king’s sister knows nothing of the king’s plan, so how can she be against it? She lives in a nunnery. She intends to take the white. But she is far too valuable politically to palm off on God. Do you understand me, Hartelius?’

Hartelius gave no sign that he was shocked by Missingau’s derogatory tone. In certain circles, a statement such as the one that had just issued from Missingau’s mouth would be considered blasphemy, punishable by death. Hartelius suspected that Missingau felt himself safe from all attack. Certainly by a nonentity such as Hartelius.

‘You wish me to abduct her then?’

‘Abduct? Abduct? Such a misused word. No. Not abduct.’ The chamberlain smiled. It was the smile of the crocodile in the presence of the stork. ‘We simply don’t expect you to take no for an answer.’