The Babylon Rite (29 page)

Two great conquistadors, from just one tiny Templar town?

Was that really mere coincidence?

‘There it is, the castle,’ said Nina.

The ruined Templar castle of Trevejo was perched on the loftiest outcrop high above the village, which itself stared down from the Sierra de Gata on the roads into Portugal. It was a good site to build a castle if you wanted to watch the passes, or check any Muslim attacks.

For a few moments they stood on the silent precipice, just outside the castle, gazing down at the roads which snaked through the green, hilly pinewoods. There was a Templar flag flying from the keep of the castle: the red cross pattee on a field of white. The silence all around was imperious. Just the wistful flicking of the flag in the wind, and an eagle mewing in the distance, as it circled above the wintered emptiness.

Then they descended, picking their way through the perilous rocks, until they reached the Templar church, a few hundred metres beneath the castle on a ledge.

‘My God.’

Adam didn’t have to ask what had surprised her. Graves. Tiny little slots of graves, human-shaped slots in hard stone.
Just like the graves at Penhill
.

Adam took some brisk and anxious photos. Then they retreated quickly down the stone road, past the raddled houses, to the stoneflagged plaza of Trevejo, and they climbed in the car and Nina drove down the winding road, as Adam furiously searched the net on his phone.

At last he sat back and said, ‘This is it. The connection. With America.
This is how it all links.
’

Hairless dogs.

That was one thing that united ancient Mexican culture with ancient Peruvian culture. What else?

Jess was sitting in the sunlit courtyards of the Museo Larco, enjoying some rare Limeno sunshine, taking a few minutes to relax herself, as best she could, after all the violence and grotesqueries of the last week. She’d been in Lima for three days, and this was the first day she had summoned the courage to leave her hotel room.

So here she was. The Museo Larco, the greatest collection of ancient north Peruvian art in the world; if she hadn’t been terrified for her life this might have been a nice afternoon jaunt, a chance to chill out in this pretty colonial palazzo, with its orange trees and fountains, and the gardens haunted by the strange, black, friendly, stray dogs,
descendants
of the hairless dogs once eaten by Aztecs and Inca and Moche alike.

A thought nagged at her. But what was it? Not the possibility of her illness;
something different, very different
. But the thought eluded her. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, trying to meditate away the stress and tension.

When she opened her eyes again the little dog was just a few metres distant, gazing right at her, his sad head cocked imploringly, his hairless tail whipping. A Museo Larco security guard lazily clapped his hand, chasing the dog out of the courtyard, and into the street.

Jess rose and walked into the dark twinkling rooms of the museum. Her stride was purposive: she ignored the magnificent imperial Chimu goldwork, the warrior priest’s diadems from the Apogee Epoch, the sacred spondylus shell bottles, and went straight to the Moche collection.

Her eyes ran along the shelves, assessing the pottery of screaming bats, hunched demons, Moche with their limbs removed, Moche women having sex with the dead, or sex with animals. Nina moved down the aisle, examining the pottery of Moche people who deliberately skeletonized their faces.

The questions thronged. How did these last pots relate to the pottery showing sex with corpses and skeletons? More importantly: how did these pots relate to the death of her boss from Toronto,
of her lover
? How and why was the horror of Moche culture being re-enacted in the grubby streets of modern Peru? And maybe even in Scotland?

Jess sat down on a bench in the darkened chambers of the Moche rooms of the Museo Larco and went over what she knew.

She didn’t doubt that necrophilia actually took place in Moche society, there was too much ceramic and textile evidence for this. People had sex with the dead, and probably quite frequently, judging by the abundance of art dedicated to the theme. But equally some of the pots that showed people with skull-like faces raping women were probably representations of men who had slashed their own faces to look like skulls, cutting off their own lips and noses and slicing off the flesh from the cheeks, men who were maybe allowed to take women at will.

Imagine a society like that. People with no lips and noses and faces, wandering around, like living screaming skulls. Smiling, eating, having brutal and coercive sex. How did these skull-men avoid infection? How long did they live with these terrible wounds exposed? Weeks, months, years?

A tourist was gazing at one of the sex pots. A backpacker. Twenty-one or twenty-two. American maybe. And giggling. The backpacker turned to his friend. ‘Jesus, sweetheart, look at this – the guy is getting an enema. Gross!’

The girlfriend was apparently around the corner, behind a glass pottery cabinet. Jess heard her young voice. ‘Can we go, Todd? This stuff is just …
ewww
.’

They drifted away. Jess felt the helplessness weighing her down. She walked out into the patio once more. What a waste it all was, what a terrible waste. All that digging, all that thinking, all those horrific yet exciting discoveries, all those moments of terror or exultation: it had all been for nothing. The TUMP site was closed. Dan was dead. The police were scared, and shutting all the doors. And still the killers were out there. Were they coming after Jess?

She sighed and looked at the dog. The hairless dog with the sad, sad eyes, so similar to Aztec dogs. As she gazed, she remembered the men in the pyramid. Their accents.

The way they said the word
ulluchu
.

Accent. Aztecs. The Aztecs. Ulluchu. Accent.

Ulluchu
was a pretty strange word.
Oo-ll-oo-choo
.

And yet there was one other word which was just like it, from a different culture a thousand years later, four thousand miles away. In Pre-Columbian Mexico.

The Aztec word.

Ololiúqiu
. And
ulluchu
.

They were one and the same.

The grandiose castle and church of medieval Tomar loomed above the small, surrounding town, like the great wooden effigy of a saint held aloft by humble peasant hands.

Nina and Adam sat sipping bad Portuguese coffee in an inconspicuous corner of the cobbled main square. The palm trees rustled in the December wind, a few shops were already selling lurid, clownish costumes for Carnival alongside Christmas treats: festive pumpkin fritters,
broas de mel
. Adam startled himself with the realization: it was Christmas Eve. He had lost track of time, like a lonely child at a fairground, bewildered by the fleeing colours. Was he going to ring his dad for Christmas? No, he hadn’t spoken to him in three years, not since they had last come to blows, when Adam was defending his mother.

He wondered how his mother put up with it all, now he wasn’t there to protect her. His father had never actually
hit
his mother; but he certainly bullied her, and in the end Adam had found it too much. The urge to protect had made him eventually intervene in one of his parents’ rows, and so he and his father had fought. And yet, now he considered it, maybe his mother was at fault as well: she tolerated it, passive-aggressively. Maybe they both liked it.

You can’t choose your parents, but you can choose not to be like them.

What effect had this all had on Adam? He often wondered. Maybe he was drawn to vulnerable women, women he really could protect. Like Alicia. Except he hadn’t protected her, not in the end.

And what about Nina? She was different to Alicia, much stronger, much more defiant; yet she also had that protectable quality that he found so desirable. And so troubling. He looked her way. She was anxiously scrutinizing an old woman, at the next table.

‘I don’t think the Camorra recruit elderly widows,’ Adam said, sipping his scorched black coffee.

‘Ach. Who
knows
who they recruit? There’s something wrong here. I don’t like it. Everyone is staring at us.’

‘Everyone is drunk. It’s lunchtime on Christmas Eve.’

She stared at him. ‘Jesus. Is it really?’

He could see the hollowness in her eyes, the void where her family should be: yet
all killed at their own hands
. And now it was Christmas.

Quickly he tried to fill the gap. ‘Shall we go over it again? The American link. You said you had questions.’

‘Did I?’ Her moist gaze was vastly regretful. ‘OK, then, Ad. Tell me.’ The pigeons warbled on their churchly sill: beneath the rose window of São João Baptista.

‘I remembered what your, uh, dad said. At Rosslyn. He referred to the Norse serpents carved on the Prentice Pillar. We know there is a strong link between the early Templars and the Scottish court.’ Adam opened his notebook. ‘In 1128 the cousin of St Bernard of Clairvaux, and Hugues de Payens, the founder of the Templar Order, met King David in Scotland, and established one of Europe’s first Templar preceptories, in Scotland. Payens had been on the First Crusade with Henri St Clair, Second Baron of Roslin.’

‘Are you going to rehearse all that Holy Blood Da Vinci stuff? Sinclairs sailing to Los Angeles in a coracle—’

He doodled viciously in his notebook. ‘The St Clairs
did
have Norse links. The Sinclair lineage dates back to a Viking raider called Hrolf the Ganger, who invaded Normandy in the tenth century. This is all recorded in the Norse sagas. But even without the Sinclairs we know the medieval Scots court had strong Norse connections. The Scots royals intermarried with Viking aristocracy, with the kings of Orkney, and with the Lord of the Isles …’

‘Adam. We are on the run from people
who killed my family
. Hurry up.’

‘The graves are also crucial. Those strange little slots. We have seen them in two Templar preceptories – Penhill in Yorkshire, now Trevejo in Spain. As your father says in the book, there are scarcely any others known in Western Europe. Apart from Heysham in Lancashire, England, in the graveyard of Saint Patrick’s church. And I’ve
checked this place
. Historians know those graves at Saint Patrick in Heysham are
Viking
– used for interring skeletons, temporarily. So that’s it, Nina: we now see unusual Norse cultural practices were adopted by the Templars.’

Nina tucked a stray lock of black hair behind a small white ear. Somehow nervous and beautiful at the same time. ‘That doesn’t prove much.’

‘Why did the Templars go to Scotland so early in the Order’s history? For what? The Scottish court was hardly rich, and it was at the ends of the earth, as far away from the Holy Land as you can get. What were those first Templars after?’

‘The big dark secret?’

‘Exactly: this secret technique, this warlike trance, that would make the knights brave and fearless. We know the Templars’ first forays into battle were faltering, and uncertain: they were just a tiny band of men. Two guys on a donkey, the icon of the Templars, the icon we see in Rosslyn. But some Scottish knight with Viking forebears, perhaps a Sinclair, must have told Hugues Payens a secret, on the First Crusade: a way to bind his brethren together, to attract new recruits, something attractively occult and mysterious, the Babylon rite, the group hypnosis, a way to inculcate sexualized blood lust. And this something was itself a technique the Scots had learned from the Vikings. The Vikings were wild fighters, madly bloodthirsty, like the Templars. And so the Vikings knew the trance, and they got it—’

‘From America.’ Nina nodded, unhappily. ‘I do get it, Adam. The Vikings were in America in …’

‘In the tenth and eleventh centuries they had several settlements in Newfoundland
where they met the natives
.’

‘That’s still a fucking long way from seventh-century Peru. Tenth-century Newfoundland?’ Nina finished her tiny cup of coffee, and stared at the silt at the bottom. Her expression was morbid.

The pigeons chattered. Adam sighed.
Christmas Eve
, and here they were, a long way from anywhere, many miles from home. But maybe there
was
no home any more. Maybe they were exiled from everything, for ever. So they had to focus on the present because the past was too horrific and the future too frightening.

Adam sprinted through the rest of his argument. ‘Some cultural practices were shared across pre-Columbian South and North America: human sacrifice, pyramid building, styles of mural painting, for a start. This is a fact. It happens. Look at Indo-European languages, sharing similarities from the Punjab to Portugal. So it’s quite possible the Babylon rite made its way from Peru, where it began, then into Mexico, then further north, even to the east coast of Canada.’

‘Come on,’ said Nina, standing, abruptly. ‘The castle will shut soon and I want to get out of here tomorrow.’

He dropped a few euros in the saucer and hastened after her. Small, determined, fierce and vulnerable, she was striding up the medieval stone steps of glorious Tomar. The path led through the cypresses and pines of the wooded rise, and led to a car park and a scratchy kiosk, where a woman with a faint moustache took their money, and gazed at them with a curious squint.

A little gate opened. They stepped through. The contrast with the humdrum car park and ticket booth, with the citadel itself was quite stunning.

The Templar church and castle of Tomar were as ‘monumentally stupendous’ as Archibald McLintock promised in his gazetteer. It was also eerily empty: they were the only tourists, because everyone else was already preparing for Christmas. The vastness of the churches and gardens and battlements and cloisters obliged them to whisper; Adam didn’t know why.

Together and quickly they explored the dormitories and ambulatories, the monastic kitchens and Renaissance chapterhouse. Then they climbed high steps to the mighty and battlemented walls.