The Sacred Scroll (12 page)

He remained silent.

‘It was made a time long before the arrival of Our Lord Christ on this sorry earth,’ Odo continued. ‘No one knows exactly when. Nor where.’

‘How did it come to be in your care?’

Odo stole a look at Thomas. It was strange, but it seemed as if he were asking permission to answer. ‘It has been in the possession of our Order for many years. It was bequeathed to us by the heirs of Bishop Adhemar of le Puy. They say he discovered and acquired it in Alexandria shortly before his death, after the success of the very first crusade against the Fatimids and the Seljuks, when we drove them back out of the Holy Places. The tablet is referred to in Adhemar’s letters. He calls it the Sacred Scroll. Perhaps he thought it was a printing-block, and tried to use it to print its meaning out on parchment. But we do not know.’

Dandolo knew of Adhemar. The bishop had been one of the main instigators of the crusade which had ended so successfully at the close of the previous century. A man of extraordinary power and influence. It was said that, had he come earlier into prominence, the Holy Places would have been won and held for ever. The story of how he rallied one hundred scared and disoriented men against five thousand Saracens on the plains below Masyaf, and routed the enemy completely, had passed into legend. Some told that the Saviour Himself had descended from heaven to come to his aid. Others – in quiet voices – spoke of demons.

‘Why did he bequeath it to you?’ The question was out almost before he had articulated it in his mind, but Dandolo corrected himself immediately; he had been too direct. ‘I mean, did he intend to redeem it?’

Odo hesitated before replying. ‘What you say is true. He believed a powerful force for good lay in this modest
piece of clay. But it was his descendants who gave it to us for … safekeeping. Our correspondence with them, decades after the bishop’s descent into madness, indicated that they felt it needed to be kept … secure.’

Odo’s hand went out to the tablet, took it and placed it back in its box, closing the lid and reaching for the key. ‘Perhaps we are, after all, being hasty,’ he said. ‘We cannot say that it is a Christian relic. It will not redound to the glory of Venice. A poor thing, in fact. We may have other –’

‘But it plays a role, a key role, in our Christian heritage,’ said Thomas suddenly.

‘Adhemar mentioned something in his letters,’ Odo said. ‘We cannot fathom it. He refers to the Book of Revelation. “When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.” You know the piece. It covers the eighth to the tenth chapters of the book.’

Dandolo knew it. He looked again at the tablet, and thought of the seven angels and what the blasts from their trumpets summoned forth. A hellish hail of fire and blood; destruction of the seas and the life in them; a blazing star poisoning all fresh water; the wreckage of the heavens; and the further horror which the last three trumpets invoked.
Woe, woe, woe, to those who dwell on earth, at the blasts of the other trumpets …

It was as if a voice from the centre of earth were reciting the words to Dandolo:
… he was given the key of the shaft of the bottomless pit … and from the shaft smoke rose like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft. Then from the smoke came locusts on
the earth, and they were given power like the power of scorpions of the earth; they were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any green growth or any tree, but only those of mankind who have not the seal of God upon their foreheads; they were allowed to torture them for five months, but not to kill them, and their torture was like the torture of a scorpion, when it stings a man. And in those days men will seek death and will not find it; they will long to die, and death will fly from them …

Dandolo thought of the locusts, the demons with human faces and long, flowing women’s hair but with teeth like a lion’s and their bodies scaled like armour, and he thought of the Four Horsemen released next by the blast of the sixth angel’s trumpet; and of the terrible silence of the seventh angel, whose trumpet’s sound he still awaited, but would hear at the very last.

Dandolo stared at Odo. ‘What does it mean?’ he asked.

‘We cannot fathom it,’ replied Odo. ‘But we know that the bishop believed that this thing has the power to give man a force which man himself should not have. A force which man cannot control.’

Dandolo’s rational mind dismissed it, but despite himself he was fascinated and – was it the right word? – awed.

He pulled himself together. Were they trying to pull
more
wool over his eyes? But the faces of both Odo and Thomas were deeply serious.

‘That is why we have kept this thing a closely guarded secret for so long,’ continued Odo. ‘But – and I make no secret of this – we need cash now if we are going to keep the Holy Places secure. And if we ever lost control here, we would not wish this thing to fall into the hands of the Saracens. In Egypt, the power of Saladin grows by the day.’

‘There is another story’ – Brother Thomas spoke slowly – ‘which you should know of.’ He looked across at his master, who, after a moment, nodded his assent.

‘It is said,’ began Thomas, ‘and Bishop Adhemar believed it, that it was with this tablet that the Dark One tempted Our Lord in the wilderness.’

The Templar paused while the Italians listened attentively. At length he continued: ‘Matthew, Mark and Luke
describe the temptations of Christ; Matthew and Luke in detail. That He should make bread out of stones to feed Himself; that He should hurl Himself from the pinnacle of a temple, trusting to the angels to bear Him up and save Him, and that He should have dominion over all the nations of the earth in return for His allegiance to the Dark One himself. Matthew makes this the last temptation of Christ.’ Thomas paused again. ‘And Christ refused:
It is written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve
. He would not touch the tablet Satan offered him, the tablet which would give him ultimate power. Because He knew that if He could not convince people of His doctrines by His own power and persuasion, they would be worth nothing. There is no short-cut to Grace.’

‘By using this tablet? The Devil himself made it?’

‘That is his thumbprint on the reverse,’ said Thomas simply. ‘We believe that if the symbols written on this piece of clay could be properly deciphered and interpreted, the man who had that knowledge would hold the key to the ability to move nations.’

‘Then it
could
be used for great good.’

Thomas looked at Dandolo severely. ‘Never would that come to pass, if an ordinary mortal controlled it.’

And Adhemar ended mad, thought Dandolo, looking at the tablet, and seeing the characters written on it glow red once more.

Then the vision passed. He realized that the Grand Master and the monk were watching him expectantly.

He measured his words. ‘I humbly acknowledge the wisdom of your decision that such a thing
should be kept as safe and as secret as is humanly possible, and that it should be kept out of the hands of the Saracens at all costs,’ he said. ‘If the mantle of such a responsibility should fall on the shoulders of Venice, then I am the last man to turn away from it. If, at the same time, I may be of some material service to the brave and noble Order of the Knights Templar, the greatest bastion of our Faith in the East, then the privilege and the honour is doubled.’

‘And what price do you put on this privilege?’ asked Odo, after leaving a polite pause to mark the gravity of what all present knew to be a purely political speech.

Dandolo didn’t look at Leporo when he replied, without hesitation, ‘Fifteen thousand Venetian florins.’ The calculation seemed to have taken place without him. It was three-quarters of what he had with him. And he already knew that if they pushed the price above 20,000, he’d give them letters of credit to match the amount. An expensive punt, but the money he’d brought with him came from his private coffers. He had to have the scroll, as Adhemar had called it. Whatever it cost. He’d deal with the doge and the Venetian Council later, and get the money back from them. He knew damned well that Doge Vitale’s expedition against Constantinople would founder, and the doge would then need every friend he could get. All Dandolo needed was patience, and time. In time he would achieve his ends, he knew that now.

An hour later, the Templars had settled for 25,000. A fantastic amount, which caused Leporo to look at Dandolo askance when the four men stood up and shook hands.

The tablet was returned to its box, the casket locked, its key retied to it, and handed over to Leporo, who stowed it in his satchel with extreme care. Now, at last, Odo rang a bell on his desk and offered the Italians food and drink. It was eleven in the morning, and the sun was reaching its zenith. The Venetian party turned down an invitation to stay the night and set off on the return journey to Acre. Dandolo, quietly triumphant, as something deep within him, something he could not identify, was stirred, was eager to return to Chios now, and as there was a full moon, he elected to travel through the night. They would leave Jerusalem late in the afternoon.

Before they ate, Dandolo told Leporo to ensure that their men drank no wine before travelling, a necessary precaution, since the Templars, surprisingly, had tried to ply them with the stuff. The Venetians stayed with light beer – water was not to be trusted: it contained disease.

In the event, they were wise to do so.

The attack came at three in the morning, when the Venetian caravan was already some kilometres into the desert
north of Jerusalem. The attackers came from the eastern hills, the moon behind them, riding horses and wearing black robes. Their headdresses covered their faces, leaving only their eyes visible.

Dandolo was glad they did not find him unprepared. His men, on a signal arranged in advance, quickly drew their pack animals into a circle which formed a living wall. All their valuables and provisions for the journey to the port were placed within it, and the bodyguard, twenty men only, but armed to the teeth with lances, javelins, swords, axes and bows, took up their positions behind the nervous mules. The horsemen numbered about forty, and first circled the corralled Venetians, taken aback that their attack had been anticipated.

But they were not put off. Ten of them rode in hard, wielding longswords and flails, hacking at the bucking and kicking mules where they could, but failing to reach the group sheltered behind them. Then they withdrew and let their bowmen take over.

‘Who the hell are they?’ Dandolo’s captain of the guard yelled. ‘Desert pirates? There should be none on this road! The Templars have cleared it.’

‘Don’t think we can rely on the help of a Templar patrol,’ replied Dandolo, seizing a javelin. The archers had reined in a short distance away and were even now taking aim, but they were close enough to be within the throwing range of a strong man, and Dandolo was still that. He took careful aim himself, allowing for the dim and deceptive light of the moon, and hurled his javelin, watching it arc in the air and seeing it land deep in the neck of his target, where it joined his upper chest. The woollen folds
of the man’s garment were no protection in the face of the heavy blade of the Venetian’s descending weapon.

The man leaned slowly forward on to his mount’s crupper before toppling to the pale-grey sand, on which a dark stain quickly appeared as he clawed futilely at the ground in a last vain attempt to rise.

Encouraged by this, the Venetian bodyguard let fly a volley of javelins as the black-clad swordsmen rode in for another assault. Many of the spears found homes, burying themselves in horses’ flanks or attackers’ thighs and torsos, and taking five more men out of the skirmish at one stroke.

The defenders cheered, but the attackers remained eerily silent. They regrouped, once again riding around the corral to encircle it, and taking care to remain outside javelin range. The archers fitted arrows to their short bows and drew them, firing a volley which killed two of the mules and three of the bodyguard, the black-fletched arrows falling like rain from the sky and jabbing into unprotected eyes and necks, their shafts glittering in the silver light. The stricken mules kicked at the heavens as they shrieked like banshees in their death agony, while grooms strove to hold down the rearing and screaming survivors, taut reins cutting into their hands and drawing blood.

Another deathly volley followed fast, before the defenders had time to react, most of the hissing arrows digging into the sand this time but several still biting into human and animal flesh. Two of the mules broke loose and galloped away, dragging their wounded handlers across the desert behind them until they were lost to sight, swallowed up by the darkness.

Dandolo had had enough. He moved swiftly to his nervous horse, which stood by the baggage in the centre of the ring, and mounted it, drawing his own sword. He jumped his horse over the backs of the remaining mules, which had been drawn in to form a tighter circle, and rode straight at the man who seemed to be the attackers’ leader. The masked figure whirled a flail menacingly round his head, looking for a place to bury its spiked ball, either in the Venetian’s thigh or in his horse’s neck, but Dandolo crouched low in the saddle to avoid its arc and, coming up fast and close, drew his sword up high just as the flail swung past his head, and brought it down with all his strength into the man’s body, cleaving it on the right side so that the whole of the torso, from neck to waist, was split open.

The sword wouldn’t loosen from where it had bitten into the pelvis, and Dandolo was pulled from his horse, bringing his opponent down with him. They rolled together on the sand, but the man in black, whom Dandolo feared still had enough strength left in him to get a grip on his neck, started to twitch and throw his remaining good arm around in a frantic effort to regain equilibrium. Dandolo kicked himself free and clambered to his feet, watching as the man, whose right side was now all but torn free of the rest of his body, writhed on the ground beside him.