Knights of the Black and White (34 page)

“I accept that,” de Payens said. “But if you are correct, and we are standing there, we are … permit me …”

He bent forward and placed his thumb on the point St.

Agnan had selected, then stretched his hand to lay the point of his middle finger in the center of what was indicated on the drawing as being the main body of the temple. He held it there, his entire hand stretched widely, and stared at the distance involved, pursing his lips in thought before he continued. “I would say we are at least three score of long paces—strides might even be a better word in fact—three score of strides removed from the outer wall of the temple proper, where we wish to be.

And that makes no consideration for our being above ground, while our target is deep below ground.”

“Well, what of that?” St. Agnan sounded genuinely 318

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perplexed. “We knew from the outset we would have to excavate. That was explicit in our instructions.”

No one else said anything, but it was evident from the faces of several of the others, from the way their eyes shifted uncomfortably from St. Agnan to de Payens, that some of them agreed with St. Agnan. Only St. Omer, Montdidier, and de Montbard kept their faces blank, and it was St. Omer who spoke next.

“What Hugh is saying, Archibald, is that the King’s palace is directly at our backs, so that the only direction in which we can dig our tunnel is straight down, and then sideways, until we can turn again and strike towards the temple foundations. And the space between us and our target is filled by the Temple Mount. Filled completely by it. If we are to dig a passage underground from here to where we wish to be, it will have to be through solid bedrock, all the way. That will take years, and we have no tools, nor are we engineers.”

St. Agnan’s ears flushed red as the truth of St. Omer’s words sank home to him, but André de Montbard stood staring down at the drawing, tapping one finger thoughtfully against the spot the big knight had indicated.

“St. Agnan might be wrong,” he mused. “We may be misreading what is here, but even so, there’s no doubting that we are standing on a rock. We need to find out more about this place. We need to know where to dig, and how to proceed. So where will we find more information on that kind of thing?”

There was silence for a time until St. Omer spoke up again, making a wry face. “You are not going to like this, Monks of the Mount

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André, but the answer to that question lies within our own archives, at home, where someone clearly should have done more searching than they did before sending you out here. Our Order has more accurate information about Jerusalem and its temple in its archives than any other source anywhere. What happened here in these very precincts is our history, after all, and our ancestors took their records with them when they left, holding them safe against theft, pollution, and destruction. No one—no person, no organization, no entity anywhere—possesses better or more accurate information on this topic than our Order does.” He looked about him at his friends and companions. “I should not need to remind anyone here of that, since that is why we are here, after all, and faced with this task.”

“But we are
here
and the information we require is back
there
,” de Payens murmured. “We can retrieve it, but that will take time, perhaps too much time. So what are we to do in the meantime? De Montbard, have you any thoughts on that?”

“Aye, I have,” the other answered. “Two things. The first is to examine all the other documents I brought with me. I have not even looked at them, for Count Hugh told me to deliver them to you privily, and in person, but I know there is no shortage of material. The only thing I actually saw was this chart, because the Count himself was proud of its workmanship and showed it to me before I left—you saw that it is enclosed with several other drawings in its own container. For all I know, the remainder of those documents might contain all the information that 320

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we need, because the Count was fully aware of what had been asked of you and what you would be obliged to do about it.” He half turned and indicated the case that he had opened to find the drawing they had been studying.

Its lid gaped open, revealing a thick leather wallet underlying the long cylinder that had contained the drawing of the temple and several other, smaller charts. “I suspect now that every sheet of parchment, every document and every drawing in that wallet, will have a direct bearing on what we are discussing.”

De Payens, who had been gazing at the package like everyone else, nodded. “You may be right. We’ll go through them all carefully, as soon as we have finished here. But you said there were two things we could do.

What’s the other one?”

“Verify or disprove St. Agnan’s suspicions about the layout of the map, because if he is correct, the treasure we are looking for could lie beneath the foundations of the palace itself … under the mosque.” He ignored de Payens’s sharp intake of breath and carried on, muttering in a low voice as though speaking to himself. “If that be the case, our task could be less time consuming. Not less arduous—we would still be tunneling through stone—but we might have less far to travel. Still requiring years of work, perhaps, but fewer of them …” He looked up, his voice reverting to its normal tone. “We need to find another, more recent map of the city and locate the temple site on that. Then we can compare the two and find out exactly what we have in this drawing. Where would we find such a thing?”

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“I doubt that there is one.” Every eye in the place turned to look at Payn Montdidier, who had not spoken since withdrawing his objection to their new name. He smiled, nervously, and held up his hands. “If there is,” he continued, “then there are but two places it could be, and neither of those is desirable from our viewpoint: either the King might have one in his palace, or the Patriarch Archbishop might have one in his residence. No one else would ever have a need for such a thing, and were we even to ask about it, we would probably fall under suspicion of plotting something before the request was fully uttered. But if you want me to, I’ll ask some questions next time I go to the Archbishop’s residence. I have befriended one of the senior clerics there, and if I give it enough thought beforehand, I might be able to find a way of asking him a question like that casually, as though in passing, without arousing his suspicions.”

“Good, Crusty. Do that,” de Payens said, then turned to Godfrey St. Omer. “How went your patrol, Godfrey?

Anything of interest to report?”

St. Omer stood up to deliver his report formally, but he spoke his opening words for effect. “Aye, Master de Payens. We saved the life of the King’s wife today, Queen Morfia, and she thanked us most warmly.” Having ensured that every man there hung on his every word, he went on to describe the patrol in meticulous detail, omitting nothing.

It had become customary for each patrol leader to report in person to the brethren upon his return to the stables on the Mount, and to answer any questions that 322

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anyone might want to ask, because in the earliest days following their formation, when their patrol activities were new and unanticipated by the brigand bands, every sortie had been different and worth studying, and everyone had been highly aware that a lesson learned from one patrol might be of vital importance to a later one. As time passed, however, and brigands grew less and less aggressive in the face of what had rapidly become certain pursuit and punishment, only those patrols that yielded something extraordinary ever occasioned close questioning. The name of Queen Morfia caused a stir on first mention, but once it became clear that nothing serious had happened to her in the course of the attack, the knights quickly lost interest in her. Everyone was acutely aware that the most important business of the day concerned the documents that André de Montbard had brought to them from overseas.

The meeting was adjourned as soon as St. Omer completed his report, the documents were laid out for study, and before the shadows of that afternoon had lengthened into evening, de Payens, St. Omer, and de Montbard, the only three of the brethren who could read with any kind of ease or fluency, had discovered that they had no need of finding a contemporary map of Jerusalem. Almost all of the information they needed was provided, in some form, in the documents from the Seneschal. Hugh of Champagne, in a letter to de Payens written in his own hand, explained how he understood exactly the difficulties that Hugh and his companions would face in carrying out the task assigned to them, and how he had gone to great Monks of the Mount

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lengths to supply them with painstakingly accurate copies of every document he could find that had a bearing on the temple in Jerusalem and the site of the treasure for which they were to search. These copies, he reminded de Payens, were themselves made from copies of copies, for the originals were of such great antiquity that they were preserved and protected with great care, hermetically sealed against air and dampness lest they rot or fade or be otherwise corrupted. The copies, however, were as perfect as the expertise of his best clerics could make them, and each had been closely scrutinized to ensure that it matched its original in every detail. He had enclosed two copies of each item, one in the original script in which the information had been set down, and another in the common Latin into which the documents had all been translated after their arrival in ancient Gaul, a full millennium earlier.

By the end of the following few days, the three knights had catalogued and cross-referenced every single item of information in the Count’s dispatches, and they had established, beyond dispute, that their target lay, at least partially, beneath the foundations of the al-Aqsa Mosque. A minimum distance of sixty paces separated them, they estimated, from their objective in the bowels of the ancient temple, and much of that distance involved bedrock. The lower levels of the Temple Mount itself, they had learned from their reading, were riddled with networks and mazes of tunnels dug over the millennia, but all access to those tunnels appeared to have been confined to the inner precincts of the temple. Only people 324

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inside the temple had been able to enter the tunnels, and the temple had been destroyed, its subterranean interior demolished and filled in a thousand years earlier by the Jewish priests themselves, in order to defeat and frustrate Titus’s rapacious legions. The new diggers knew that while it was at least conceivable that they might intersect an ancient tunnel in the course of their excavations, and be faced thereafter with merely clearing out the debris that had accumulated since the tunnels were last used, the odds against such an occurrence were incalculable.

Hugh de Payens put the entire situation into words for the other knights at their next official Gathering, while the sergeant brothers were in the city, celebrating a local feast day.

“The situation with the temple—our distance from it—is as we suspected. We are a long way removed from where we wish to be. But there are other, additional considerations that, together with everything else, will make all our lives more interesting in the future. We have been poring over the information sent us by the Seneschal, and we can tell you several things with absolute certainty, based upon what we have discovered in the documents he has supplied.

“Prime among those is that the treasure we are looking for is there. We have no doubt of that, and we are confident that we know exactly where it is.

“Unfortunately, the task of finding it, or, more accurately, the task of
reaching
it in the first place, threatens to be a labor worthy of Hercules. The rock beneath the temple foundations is honeycombed with passages and Monks of the Mount

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tunnels, but there are no known entrances to any of them and we have no way of reaching them by what anyone would think of as normal means. You all know we cannot simply go outside and start digging beside the palace walls, and so we have to dig straight down, through the solid stone of the mountain, from here in our own quarters, these stables.” He paused to allow his listeners to absorb that, then added, “We estimate that we will have to dig as far as thirty paces—one hundred feet—straight down, then angle straight inward from there, beneath the foundations of the palace behind us, which we believe are also the foundations of the earliest temple, Solomon’s Temple … perhaps an additional fifty to sixty feet.

It will take years, but with luck and strong security, we can do it.”

“What d’you mean, security?” Sir Geoffrey Bissot’s voice was a low rumble of sound, and de Payens looked at him and smiled.

“Protection, brother. We will have safeguards to ensure that no one from outside will ever come close enough to suspect that we are digging tunnels.”

“How will you do that, especially in the beginning?

Digging through hard rock with chisels and steel mauls makes a deal of noise. And who do you mean when you say no one
from outside
? Mean you from outside our commune here, or from outside our Order? Because if that last is what you mean, then I agree with Brother de Montbard—our own sergeants will probably be the undoing of all our plans. These are not stupid men, Hugh, and if you think you can gull them into being unaware 326

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for years of what we are about, you are deceiving yourself gravely.”

“Suicidally so, in fact,” de Payens concurred, nodding his head. “But that is not what I am saying at all. We could not disguise the fact that we are digging in the rock, not from our own men. But we could suggest a feasible purpose for our digging, without telling them everything about what we are doing. Say, for example, that we are digging out a subterranean monastery—cells from the living rock—as a penitential exercise to God’s glory. We will have excellent reasons for our excavations, I promise you, reasons sound enough to be accepted instantly by our sergeant brethren. But when I spoke of people from outside, I meant exactly that—people from outside our little commune here in these stables. We are an order of monks, or we will be in the fullness of time, and that means we will have removed ourselves from the world. And so the world will have no cause, and no encouragement, to impose itself upon us or our affairs. No one will bother us, and no one will intrude upon our privacy and solitude. As for the noise of steel on steel at the outset, that will be transitory. It will continue for as long as the work continues, but it will fade beyond hearing as the shaft sinks deeper below the level of the floors.”