Knights of the Black and White (49 page)

St. Clair shook his head, and Warmund sighed and spoke more slowly, enunciating each point clearly and emphasizing each one with a raised finger.

“I am telling you, as Patriarch Archbishop of Jerusalem, that I detect no sin in you, Brother Stephen. You have done nothing to incur guilt. These events are beyond your control. They are inflicted upon you without your volition, and therefore you are innocent of intent, and innocent of sin.

“I believe that much of the pain you are feeling is caused by your belief that you are sinning in these matters, so hear me clearly now in this, my son: you are not.

Believe that, and it is my sincere belief that these dreams will pass from your awareness. Not at first, you must understand, and not quickly, but slowly and surely they will fade. Pray to God for sustenance and guidance, and place yourself in His hands. He will not abandon you. Now go in peace and remember me to Brother Hugh.”

THREE

“Brother Hugh, Brother Stephen is back.”

Payn de Montdidier hesitated, seeing the incomprehension in his superior’s eyes, then added, “Brother Stephen. You asked me to let you know when he returned, from his meeting with the Patriarch.”

“The Patriarch?” Hugh de Payens continued to look befuddled, but then, as he pronounced the words, his face cleared. “Ah, Brother Stephen, yes, of course. Have him come to me at once, if you will, Brother Payn.” As the other swung away in obedience, de Payens returned to the document over which he had been poring, his pointing fingertip once again tracing the lines on the ancient chart.

That morning, shortly after Stephen St. Clair’s departure for the Patriarch’s palace, the word they had all been 471

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anticipating for years had finally arrived. But it had not come from Anjou. It had come from the ground beneath their feet, where against all odds, the two brothers working the early-morning shift in the tunnels had broken through into an older tunnel that ran above and slightly to the left of the one in which they had been working.

The breakthrough had been accidental, signaled only by a sudden rift in the roof of the tunnel. The roof of that tunnel had, for years, been solid stone, yet now there was a hole, through which a stream of debris and dust was falling. As soon as the initial fall had abated, the monks had gone forward, with great care, to investigate, and it became immediately obvious that they had encountered something beyond their experience.

Hugh had no doubt that they had found one of the very tunnels shown on the map he was now scrutinizing, one of a series of charts carefully copied from the ancient original in the Order’s archives. The tunnels it depicted were of unimaginable antiquity, dug deep beneath the Temple Mount itself in the days following the flight of the Hebrews from Egypt.

By sheer coincidence, Hugh himself had been the first person Gondemare and Geoffrey Bissot had seen when they came bursting from the tunnel entrance full of the news of their discovery and as stunned as he was by the unimaginable magnitude of what their find signified. He had nonetheless retained sufficient presence of mind to rein in their enthusiasm quickly, before their exuberance could endanger any of the secrecy the brothers had worked so hard to maintain. The two monks had been Confessions

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abashed and slightly chastened by his warnings to be cautious, but their eagerness had been irrepressible, and so he had sent them back to work temporarily, until he could have the opportunity to assemble the brethren for the announcement of their tidings.

He had not yet had time to do that. He had not yet had time even to settle the turmoil in his own breast, for this discovery was the first sign they had encountered, in eight years of solid, grindingly brutal labor, that there might, in truth, be substance to the legendary Lore they were pursuing, and a solid core of facts underlying all their hopes and endeavors. His first act, after sending the monks back to work in the tunnel, had been to retrieve the old map from the case in which it was stored and to check it against the direction in which they had been digging for the previous five months. They had sunk their primary shaft vertically for eighty-six feet, by Montbard’s calculations, and then, relying on the most careful mathematical analysis of which they were capable—and two of the brethren were highly capable in that field—they had established a sound method of directional digging, striking northeastward at a depth they had gauged likely to lead them to intercept another tunnel. None of them, Hugh was secretly convinced, had expected anything to come of it, for everyone knew that the odds against such an intersection were great enough to defy calculation. It was nothing short of madness to think that they could dig vertically, then horizontally, and actually find another excavation dug thousands of years before.

Yet that was exactly what they had done.

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A noise from behind him made him turn quickly enough to surprise St. Clair, who had just entered. The younger monk drew himself up and bowed his head slightly. “You sent for me, Brother Hugh.”

“I did, Stephen, I did. How went your interview with the Patriarch?”

St. Clair nodded, his face somber. “Well enough, I think. He does not believe me possessed.”

“I knew that. I told you so myself, did I not? What did he say to you?”

“Not much. He listened closely while I told him everything you had bidden me tell him, and then he made me tell the whole tale again, interrupting me this time with many questions, some of them very strange and seemingly lacking in logic.”

“Such as what?”

St. Clair huffed a deep, sharp sigh. “The colors in my dreams held great interest for him, although I had scarce been aware of any colors.”

“Colors?”

“Aye, he was insistent that I think of those, and as I did, they came back to me … strange colors I could scarce describe … yellows and purples and reds. Then, when I had finally remembered them, he lost interest in them, it seemed to me. Finally he told me to put my faith in God, who would not abandon me, and he said he believes that much of my torment comes from my own belief that I have sinned sorely. He attempted to convince me that I could not have sinned, since I had no intent to sin. But I’ve seen too many knights standing over Confessions

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butchered bodies that they had not meant to kill in the beginning to believe in that. A killing is a killing. A sin is a sin.”

“I see. Did he say no more?”

“Only that I should pray, and that the torment, whatever is causing it, will recede eventually.”

“So he believes you should return to your patrol duties?”

The look that St. Clair shot back at him was filled with cynicism. “Did you expect otherwise, Master Hugh? I draw four patrols to every other brother’s one. Of course he would want me to return to my patrol duties, but he did not say so.”

De Payens grunted, deep in his chest, and bit back the impulse to chastise the younger monk for his angry tone, reminding himself that St. Clair had been under great strain recently. Instead, he walked away, scratching with one finger at a sudden itch in his ear. “I don’t think I want you to return to patrol duties. Not yet, not for a while.” He turned back and waved an open hand towards the table and the chairs beside it. “Sit you down.”

As St. Clair moved slowly to obey, de Payens continued. “I believe it might not be in your best interests at this time to be too much out there in the world you have so recently sworn to forsake, and so I intend to keep you walled in here for a time, away from the world of ordinary men. I have work for those young muscles of yours—work that your elder brethren will be glad to see you undertake.” A wide, kindly smile took any sting from his words, and he sat down on the other side of the table.

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“We have had great news this day, Stephen, news that justifies everything we have been doing since we came here. Gondemare and Bissot broke into a tunnel this morning. I have not seen it yet, and none of the others know it has even happened—I’ll be telling them all as soon as you and I are finished here. It is, of course, an ancient excavation, and it appears to have been filled in deliberately. Gondemare and Bissot both agree on that.

The passageway is filled with rubble. That means it is likely to be one of the tunnels sealed and filled in by Titus’s legionaries after the capture of Jerusalem. That was a thousand years and more ago, Stephen, eleven hundred and fifty years, in fact. Think of that. It defies comprehension.” He sat quietly for a time, trying in his own mind to grasp that time span.

“The work will be easier from now on, but it will still be arduous. We will no longer be piercing solid rock with every hammer blow, but we will now be faced with removing far more detritus, far more quickly than we have been required to in the past. You wish to ask me something?”

“What about—? How will we know where we are down there? I remember hearing you say once, long ago, that there are scores, perhaps hundreds, of passages down there.”

“Mathematics.” De Payens smiled. “Our first task will be to find an intersection with another tunnel. Our tunnel has done its work, and from now on it will function only as an adit to the workings. Once we find that new intersection, we will be able to work out where we are on Confessions

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this map. It may take us a long time, perhaps even more years, but at least we know now that we are within reach of our goal, and that the goal is real. So, will you be content to work beneath the ground for a while, away from the sunlight?”

St. Clair nodded, his face devoid of expression. “I will, Master Hugh.”

FOUR

Over the course of the ensuing weeks and months, they found that there were areas within the newly discovered network of tunnels where the air was better, purer, than it was in others, and this appeared to depend upon the undulations of the tunnels themselves, for they were by no means regular.

Sometimes one branch would stretch levelly for scores of paces and then, for no discernible reason, the grade would tilt up or down for a distance, sometimes returning to the original level, sometimes not. Montdidier had been the first to remark that the air always seemed thicker and more foul at the bottom of these variances than it ever did at the top. In saying that, he had stirred up con-troversy, for there was little else down there to capture the attention of his brethren, but after months of arguing 478

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back and forth and pro and contra his observation, a consensus had formed, accepting his opinion.

Stephen had been in one of the sweet-air regions the previous week, and he knew that he might not have seen what he found there in another spot, for one of the main advantages of the sweet-air zones was that the light of their lanterns and candles always seemed brighter in such places, as though the very flames themselves rejoiced in the clean air. He had been working smoothly that day, shoveling rubble into the small, wheeled carts they had built to haul away the detritus. As he filled up each cart, he would pull on the rope attached to it, and whoever was working behind him at that point would pull the filled cart away, then push an empty one back up to him.

Perhaps twenty or thirty paces distant now, to the rear of where they were digging, there was a lateral split in the tunnel, a shift formed by some upheaval in the earth that had taken place since the tunnel was dug, and one side of the split fell away into a deep crevasse. It was less dangerous than it appeared to be at first glance, for the rift was barely more than a stride across, but it seemed endlessly deep, for a stone dropped into it produced no sound of impact beneath, and the tunnelers had been tipping all their refuse into it now for months.

The space where he had been working that day was narrower than usual, and St. Clair had been stooped over, alone at the end of the tunnel, when he thought he saw a metallic glint among the stone fragments ahead of him. Curious, he had picked up the nearby lamp and stepped forward, and the glint grew stronger, reflecting 480

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the light. He had found a jewel, a translucent blue stone, teardrop-shaped and almost as large as the pad of his thumb, its narrow end clasped in a silver loop that was clearly designed to hold a chain. He had held the bauble up to his light to examine it, and found himself smiling at the beauty of it, its color and its texture, smooth and cool to the touch, and then he had dropped it into his scrip and taken up his shovel again, his lamp safely returned to where it had been. It was far from being the first treasure they had unearthed since finding the tunnels. They had found more than a score already, including several magnificent pieces of jewelry and a number of copper, silver, and even gold coins bearing the likenesses of several Caesars, predominantly Augustus and Tiberius, although a few were of Nero.

Now, a week later and twenty paces farther down the tunnel, the wall ahead of him subsided slightly as he pulled out yet another shovelful of small stones and dust, and he found himself looking at a gap between the top of the dirt wall and the tunnel roof. Within moments he had clambered up and crawled carefully, sheltering his candle flame, into one of the infrequent stretches of tunnel that had not been filled with dirt. He had barely entered the place, however, when his candle began to gutter and its flame shrank to a fraction of its normal size, indicating that the air in there was foul, and so he struggled out again.

He had barely escaped, and with only his head and shoulders projecting from the narrow crawl space, he choked on the acrid smoke from the candle’s smoldering Confessions

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wick and was shaken by how close he had come to losing consciousness. He sprawled face down on the slope of the rubble and sucked air into his lungs in great, whooping gulps until he felt strong enough to struggle forward and slide free. Then, after rolling onto his back at the base of the pile, he sat up and pushed himself on his heels to where he could prop himself against the wall and look up at the narrow gap near the roof.