The Martyr's Curse (5 page)

On his way out, Ben noticed the chessboard on a table in the shadows.

‘I find that it quietens the mind,’ the old man said. When Ben looked surprised that such things were allowed in the monastery, the prior explained that since the death of the very ancient monk who had been his chess partner, he’d had nobody to play against but himself.

‘It’s a win for white in four moves, maybe five,’ Ben said, gazing at the board.

‘You play? Good. Then when you visit me each week, we shall play together.’

Ben’s cell was more spacious than he’d expected. It was on two floors, with its own carpentry workshop and even a little walled garden outside. He began to understand that a Carthusian monk’s lifestyle of solitary contemplation required just a little elbow room to prevent him from going mad. He had the minimum of simple pine furniture, a small desk at which to read and eat, his bunk, and a lectern for praying on bended knees, where a member of the order would spend much of his day. A small, shuttered window in his main living space overlooked the mountainside and the forested valley below. With the coming of spring, he planted some seeds in his garden and watched the green shoots grow each day. He took some of the prior’s ‘little tonic’ each day, too, after his morning exercises and again at night before bed. It seemed to be working for him. Whether it was that, or the fact that he’d stopped drinking for the first time in his adult life, combined with the simple diet of wholesome home-grown food, goat’s milk and pure spring water, he’d never felt so healthy and full of vitality.

That spring, a new duty he added to his daily routine was helping the monks brew their beer, which they stored in kegs in a vault beneath the monastery and sold to make a little money for the place’s upkeep. A few months ago, it might have bothered him to have been around the beer. Now, he was barely tempted by it.

Besides, he enjoyed the company. He was getting to know them all better now. With the onset of the warmer weather, more time was spent in the neatly tended gardens and the surrounding wildflower meadows where the long-horned cattle roamed and grazed. Away from the monastery buildings, Ben discovered that the rule of silence was far less strictly observed. The monks would sit clustered together on benches during their downtime in the spring sunshine, enjoying the Alpine views, their wrap-around shades and Aviator Ray-Bans a strange contrast to their robes as they shared animated discussions and laughed and joked together, like regular guys.

Now and then a jet plane would fly over, tracking across the pure blue sky above the mountains. It was becoming strange to imagine that there was a whole other world still out there.

This place grew on you, for sure.

Chapter Five

It was just after dawn on a late May morning, and Ben was finishing up the day’s first punishing bout of exercises before going about his duties, when there was an unexpected knock at the door of his cell. He quickly shrugged on his robe, opened the door and saw that his visitor was the Father Master of Novices.

Père Jacques pulled back the hood of his habit to reveal his tonsured scalp, and spoke in his usual hushed, benevolent tone. ‘I have come to ask a service from you, Benoît.’

Ben was getting used to being called that. ‘Whatever I can do, Father.’

In as few words as possible, the monk explained that it was about the beer. Ben already knew that once every few months the store of monastic ale, that had been ageing in barrels in the cellar deep beneath the monastery, needed to be brought up and loaded on the prehistoric flatbed truck that was the monks’ only motor vehicle. He also knew that it was the job of Frère Patrice, one of the lay brothers, to don everyday clothing and drive the laden truck down the winding mountain road into Briançon. There, it was passed on to the wholesaler’s agent who handled the distribution of the quality brew across France. It was a useful source of revenue for the monastery, as well as a proud centuries-old tradition.

But, as the Father Master of Novices explained with a frown, Frère Patrice had twisted his ankle badly a few days earlier after tripping down the refectory steps, and was unable to fulfil his duty today. Would Benoît agree to take his place?

Ben said that he’d be delighted to help in any way he could. He felt pleased and honoured that he’d been asked. It meant that he was trusted. It meant he was starting to be considered one of the community.

Before anything else could happen, though, first the beer barrels had to be brought up from the cellars. Like everything else here, that had to be done the old-fashioned way, which meant the hard way: at least eight hours’ worth of tough physical labour carrying and rolling each forty-gallon iron-banded oak barrel separately all the way up from the bowels of the monastery, to be loaded on the truck ready to be taken down the mountain first thing the following morning, in time for the rendezvous with the distributor in Briançon.

Ben welcomed the task. Soon afterwards, he joined a small gang of lay brothers assigned to cellar duty. Their names were Gilles, Marc and Olivier. After brief, solemn greetings they got started.

Ben had never visited this part of the monastery before, deep below the main buildings. Olivier led the way with a lantern down endless twisting, steeply descending passages. Their steps left a line of prints in the dust as they walked. The little light the swaying lantern threw off glistened against the condensation that trickled from the mildewed stone walls, and every sound echoed deep in the shadows. Ben ran his fingers along the damp rock and could feel the tool marks where this space had been carved out of the solid heart of the mountain a thousand years ago, a feat of unimaginable difficulty. The further they descended, the more it felt like going down into a mineshaft, and he wondered how the hell they were meant to drag the beer barrels all the way up to ground level. It seemed like the kind of punitive exercise the army would delight in inflicting on raw recruits.

He soon found out the answer. A system of ropes and pulleys had been in use for about the last five hundred years – pretty newfangled technology so far as the monks were concerned – to carry the barrels up from the murky cellar. Quite how not installing some proper electric lighting down there was supposed to bring them closer to God, Ben didn’t know and didn’t ask. At least the rope and tackle system helped them avoid the very real possibility of meeting Him all too soon by being crushed to death while hauling their load up the steep, narrow stone steps in the semi-darkness. But to shift them from the cellar’s iron-studded oak doors all the way to the former stable near the main gate where the truck was housed, it was going to be a simple, old-fashioned muscle job. Whatever the monastery earned in the way of revenue from this, Ben and the gang were going to earn it on their behalf today.

After four hours of sweaty work, they’d managed to shift more than half the barrels up to ground level, and the lay brothers looked more than ready for a break. It was agreed that they’d take half an hour to rest their tired arms and backs, then meet up again here to finish the job.

While the others went off to nap, or pray, or however they saw fit to spend the next thirty minutes, Ben wandered the underground passages. He used the flickering lantern to light his way, marvelling at how few people must have been here over the course of so many centuries. Some of the passages went down even deeper; he reckoned he must be a hundred and fifty feet or more below the monastery. The floor was thick with the dust of ages.

He supposed these might have been escape tunnels for the monks during turbulent periods in history, or hiding places in which they could take refuge from marauding enemies. Nobody of a claustrophobic nature would have wanted to venture down here, especially as some of the carved-out stone channels weren’t much more than child-sized. At just a shade under six foot, Ben had to bend right down to be able to explore them. He’d always been fascinated by secret passages, ancient tunnels, hidden places. Maybe Freud would have said he was subconsciously looking for somewhere to escape from the world, hide from life. Maybe Ben would have told the old boy where to shove his psychoanalytic theories.

Just as he was thinking he should start making his way back, Ben saw tracks in the dust. Moments later, he noticed a strange pale glow up ahead, shining on the rough rock wall like the kind of natural phosphorescence he’d seen in caves in the Middle East. He paused, mystified, then curiosity drew him towards the light.

Suddenly the narrow walls seemed to fall away and the echo of his footsteps sounded much deeper. Ben realised that the tunnel had opened up into an underground cavern. Its sides and ceiling were too angular to be natural. He raised the lantern to spread its reach and peered around him, fascinated and wondering what this place was, or had once been.

But he was even more fascinated by the strange glow, which he now realised was shining from the mouth of a secondary passage to the left that led away from the opened-out chamber. Looking down, he saw that the tracks in the dust were leading that way. He followed, having to bow his head in the constricted passage. After a few yards, he found himself advancing on the source of the strange light.

It wasn’t any kind of natural phosphorescence, but very much man-made: a small illuminated rectangle surrounded by a halo of light. It was moving slightly as the person holding it sat crouched against the rock wall, hunched over the tiny screen.

As Ben edged closer, he heard a gasp and the light darted away and went out. He shone the lantern, and instantly recognised the startled face that was gaping at him from the darkness.

‘Roby?’

‘Oh – it’s you, Benoît. You frightened me.’ Their voices reverberated inside the tunnel.

‘What are you doing down here?’ Ben asked. He already knew the answer, and what the novice had whipped out of sight to hide in his robe. ‘Where did you get the mobile phone from, Roby?’

Roby hung his head in embarrassment. ‘I – I – you won’t—’

‘Tell?’ Ben smiled and shook his head. ‘Of course I wouldn’t.’

‘Thierry gave it me,’ Roby said, referring to another of the younger lay brothers whom Ben didn’t know so well. ‘You can go on the internet with it.’

Even here, the lures of modern life managed to curl their tentacles around the impressionable. ‘And you were scared someone would catch you with it,’ Ben said gently. ‘It’s okay, kid. Your secret’s safe with me. Just try to stay off the porn sites. They’re bad for your soul. And I don’t think Père Antoine would be too impressed.’

Roby looked penitent.

‘So this is your little refuge?’ Ben asked, smiling.

Roby nodded. ‘Nobody ever comes down here.’

‘I understand. Just be thankful it was me who caught you and not the Father Master of Novices. Now come on, I think you’d better get back before they miss you.’

Roby reluctantly followed him out of the narrow tunnel. At its mouth, Ben turned again to examine the cavern. ‘What is this place?’ he asked, raising the lantern.

‘Dunno. Maybe they used to keep things in it.’

Ben stepped over to the wall and ran his hand along it, wiping away dust and cobwebs. It was the same thick, craggy stone with countless pick and chisel marks made by the miners, probably monks themselves, who’d carved this space out of solid rock at a time when crusading Christian armies were fighting – and mostly losing – in the Holy Land. He followed the wall, shining the lantern to look for engraved Latin script or anything else that could explain what the place had once been.

He didn’t find any, but he did find something else. The cavern had once been bigger, until at some point, a long, long time ago, a section of it had been bricked up. How big a section was anybody’s guess.

‘I wonder why they did that?’ Ben muttered.

Roby just shrugged absently. He seemed more interested in the clandestine mobile phone he was fingering inside the pocket of his robe.

Ben ran his hand across the dusty brickwork. It looked centuries old, but the mortar had been carefully applied and was still solid. Finding a lump of rock on the ground, he used it to tap against the wall. It made a hollow sound.

‘Something’s behind here,’ he said, mostly to himself. For all he knew, it stretched out cathedral-sized behind that wall. Had part of the chamber become unstable and needed shoring up? Or perhaps the walled-up section marked the mouth of another passage leading deeper into the mountain, perhaps even all the way through to the outside, like a true escape tunnel? If that were the case, it could have been walled up to prevent anyone making their way in from the other end. But then, the monastery was hardly built like an impregnable fortress. If an invading force had wanted to take it, they wouldn’t have had too much trouble breaking down the main gates. They wouldn’t have needed to mess about with tunnels.

Just one of those mysteries of the ancient past. He wasn’t going to learn much by staring at a wall and it was time for him to go back and get on with moving the rest of the beer barrels up from the cellar. The others could be there already, waiting for him.

Ben tossed the lump of rock away. Some unconscious part of his mind expected it to hit the stone floor with an echoing thump. It didn’t. Instead, it landed with a brittle, crackling
crunch
that caught Ben’s ear and made him frown. Strange.

And familiar. He’d heard that sound before. It didn’t have pleasant associations.

Ben lowered the lantern and saw what the rock had landed on. He crouched down and examined it. Then picked it up and gazed at it.

It was the shattered remains of a human skull.

Chapter Six

That evening before church, Ben sat by candlelight in Père Antoine’s cell. The chess pieces cast flickering shadows across the board as the two of them faced each other, both deeply involved. Their weekly game had become a welcome part of Ben’s routine and he’d felt himself grow closer to the prior, even if the old monk had turned out to be a fiendish player and nearly always beat him. Ben’s black army was in serious trouble again, and he was damned if he could think of a way to thwart those white bishops ganging up on his queen. He pulled her back out of immediate danger, exposing his remaining rook to enemy forces. Nothing he could do to prevent the sacrifice. War is hell.