The Sacred Scroll (18 page)

Dandolo knew there was no need to convince his council what to do. His good eye glittered as he dismissed Leporo and, to the monk’s irritation, drew his bodyguard, Frid, into secret conference. They were cloistered together for a long time.

‘It’s time to put our plan into operation,’ said Dandolo.

Frid’s loyalty to Dandolo had not wavered once in the thirty years he had been in his service. Indeed, after the death of his wife, Margareta, of the water-sickness, one year after their arrival in Venice, in 1172 – the year of the fall of Doge Vitale after his disastrous expedition against Constantinople – which was swiftly followed by the death of their infant son, Frid’s loyalty had increased to a dependency. Dandolo became his only family, and he thought no more of returning to the Northlands than he would of flying to the moon.

But Frid was a Viking, and hadn’t forgotten the expertise of his ancestors. He knew the art of building ocean-going ships.

Over the years, Dandolo had gradually let him into the secret of his great plan. Together, they had developed it.

It had needed enormous patience, and that they both possessed, the more so since, after nearly three decades of study, and fighting off encroaching Death with a will of iron, the doge had emerged triumphantly from his
study one spring day in the last year of the last century, his left eye glittering madly.

Dandolo had at last unlocked the secret hidden in the mysterious tablet, the great secret he had always been convinced it held. It gave him the key to exercise the greatest art of all. All he had wanted was the occasion. And, now, as if God had placed it in his lap, in the shape of this crusading army of boorish Franks, he had the means of using this art and the vehicle, to make himself the Master of the Earth.

‘We will build them their fleet, and they will pay for it. But it will be our fleet,’ Dandolo breathed when they were alone in his study.

‘They are going to demand a big fleet – far bigger than they need,’ said Frid.

‘Exactly,’ replied Dandolo, with the ghost of a smile.

Frid went to a locked chest, opened it, and from it drew a number of rolls of paper. The designs.

For a long time they went over them together.

‘Ships such as the world has never seen before,’ breathed the doge.

‘People will know.’

‘I will mask their minds,’ said Dandolo. ‘I will mask the minds even of the shipbuilders, and they shall do what I desire, without question.’

‘The power and the glory will be yours,’ said Frid.

Dandolo looked at him sharply. ‘No. It’s for the glory of Venice!’

At the end of the time the doge had set, the envoys were summoned again to confront the council.

‘We have duly debated your request,’ the doge began. ‘And by the grace of the city, we have agreed to assent to it. You, for your part, must determine that you accept our terms and can bear the cost our work will incur.’

The ambassadors exchanged glances – again it seemed as though they were incapable of doing other than the doge suggested.

Conon de Béthune and Geoffrey de Villehardouin, though they looked at each other, found no trace of disquiet in their minds. They read nothing but quiet accord and triumph in each other’s eyes.

The doge signalled to the Cistercian monk Leporo, who was always at his side. The man of God stood, unrolled a parchment which was handed him by a herald, cleared his throat, and began to read: ‘We undertake to build freighters to carry 4,500 horses and 9,000 squires; other ships will be constructed for 4,500 knights and 20,000 sergeants of infantry. The contract we offer will include nine months’ worth of rations for the men and fodder for the animals. Our price’ – the monk paused here, impressively – ‘is 89,500 new Venetian grossi.’

This was a huge sum, but the envoys nodded their assent immediately.

‘Moreover –’ the monk was about to continue, but Dandolo himself took over, rising and grasping the wooden rail in front of his throne with his left hand.

‘Moreover,’ he declared, his voice trembling with emotion, ‘we shall abide by this covenant: that for a twelvemonth after we have sailed on this great mission from Venice, we shall ourselves act in the service of this holy war and in the service of the God who holds His shielding hand over it. For the love of this God, we ourselves shall supply a further fifty armed galleys at our own cost to the fleet, with only this proviso: that all spoils of war shall be divided between you and us, half and half, resulting from whatever our successes by land or sea may be.’

‘We agree,’ replied Conon. Geoffrey de Villehardouin looked at him, a last dying flicker of doubt in his mind. But when he tried to recapture that doubt and focus on it, it vanished like a dream.

To give polish to the solemnity of the occasion, Venice held a High Mass in the cathedral of San Marco, to which the great and the good of the city thronged.

Looking back on it later, Geoffrey de Villehardouin still marvelled at it.

After the elevation of the Host, he remembered, the six French envoys appeared before the high altar and knelt, unable to hide their emotion, in front of the citizenry of Venice. Their tears flowed, and soon the doge, and all the people assembled there, wept too, filled, as many said later, with the Mystery of the Holy Spirit, and a profound sense of the justice of the enterprise in which they were about to partake.

At the very moment when feelings were running highest, Dandolo climbed the steps to the pulpit and looked out over the shining crowd which filled every corner of the church, whose mosaics dazzled in the light of ten thousand candles.

Mastering himself, the doge, gripping the pulpit’s edge with his left hand, fixed the envoys with his strange eyes and declaimed to his subjects: ‘Citizens of Venice! Witness the honour God has paid you in inspiring the finest nation in the world to forsake all other peoples and all other matters of worldly trade and commerce, and choose us to join with them in such a high enterprise as the very
deliverance of Our Lord Himself from the yoke of the Saracen.’

The formalities over, Leporo met the Frenchmen in a private office, where they went over the fine details of the voyage to Egypt. Once this had been settled, the doge, who, the envoys gathered, had been busy at his prayers, joined them.

‘And what are we to say of the date for our gathering here for embarkation?’ Geoffrey asked.

Dandolo had already made his mind up on the matter. ‘We have a fleet to build, and you have an army to muster,’ he said. ‘It is now Friday 9 March,’ he said. ‘The Feast of St Antony. Easter Sunday will be in sixteen days …’ He calculated for a moment.

‘We all need time,’ he continued. ‘I believe that we should set the date for the Feast of St John next year. Let that be the date by which we are all foregathered here, and in readiness.’

Once again, the ambassadors from France found themselves unhesitatingly assenting.

Dandolo smiled. ‘And now it only remains for the business of the charters based on our agreements before God to be drawn up and signed.’

‘There is also the matter of the down payment, too,’ said Leporo, smiling too.

‘A mere detail,’ added the doge. ‘I know you have not brought such a large amount as the agreed sum of 5,000 grossi with you, as the generosity and extent of the gifts you have brought us would not have permitted of it in your baggage train. But rest assured that we have banks able and willing to extend the amount to you as a loan on the most advantageous terms.’

Borrowing from us in order to pay us
, thought Leporo, proud of the plan, which had been his contribution.
And the interest which falls on top will benefit our Holy St Benedict, patron of my Order.

Two days later, Geoffrey, Conon and the rest put their signatures or made their marks on the documents of agreement, which their attendant secretaries, members of the Order of the White Monks, had read through to them.

Now, they were preparing to depart. But, as he handed the envoys their copies of the charters, heavy with seals and ribbons, the old doge suddenly fell to his knees.

‘Let me swear once again, by the Holy Gospels and by the body of our own patron saint, Mark, that I shall carry out faithfully all conditions set down in these weighty agreements.’ He groped his faltering left hand in the direction of the envoys, but Geoffrey could have sworn that once again he saw the man’s left eye glow red.

Conon stooped to grasp the hand. He felt a grip of frozen iron.

‘And let me enjoin you to honour your side of the bargain too,’ Dandolo rasped in a voice of high emotion.

‘We so swear,
Altissima
,’ Conon replied.

Visibly reassured, allowing himself to be aided by Conon, the doge got to his feet, one hand straying to a large, ruby-studded crucifix he wore over his robe.

Conon was surprised to find tears in his own eyes, and saw that his fellows were weeping too.

But they were tears of joy.

‘We will send letters of this matter to Pope Innocent,’ he said.

‘And so will we,’ said Leporo, as Dandolo, apparently made frail by his feelings, was led away on the arm of his giant bodyguard.

The next day, the Frenchmen took their leave.

Alone at the balcony of his study, Dandolo watched them depart. His vision went in and out of focus. He shook himself and squinted. He had fought off Death to live this long, in order to achieve his purpose.

He had fought off the decaying sight of the eye, which Leporo had saved by bribing the executioner at Constantinople all those years ago, long enough to crack the code of the tablet. It had taken the most secret scholarship to do it, and one elderly Armenian Christian, in particular, to aid him. The Armenian had been versed in ancient Chaldean rites, and had proved himself invaluable, but was now dead – a tragic drowning.

He prayed fervently to God to let him live another few years, let his remaining sight not fade for another few years, and he would have his heart’s desire.

His thoughts turned to Constantinople.

I am returning, Great City, he thought. I shall not see you again, not with these eyes; but I am coming back. And I will have your glories burned out of you until nothing remains of them but charcoal and hissing water. I will burn out your great, golden, pampered eye, and leave nothing but ashes there.

Berlin, the Present

A sharp wind blew down Unter den Linden from the east. It was six o’clock in the morning and from the picture window of his office on the fifth floor of the MAXTEL building, Rolf Adler watched a sheet of newspaper skeetering along the deserted pavement until the wind lifted it and banged it high up against the trunk of one of the lime trees which lined the street, where it flapped vainly like the wings of a wounded bird. It was warm in the office, and the lighting was soft, in sharp contrast to the neon-lit outer room where three secretaries were already bent over their computers or on the telephone, waking up troubled administrators at the universities of both Venice and Yale.

Adler usually took four hours of deep, untroubled sleep – these nights, alone more often than not, since he found sex less and less interesting, and women increasingly boring.

He hadn’t slept any longer since his teens. That was in the days when, instead of waking either in his Berlin penthouse on the top floor of the MAXTEL building here on Unter den Linden, or in his mansion in the hills above St-Tropez, or in his London, Paris or New York apartments, he’d woken to cold darkness in a corrugated-iron
shack, or in the mean little house of his brutal childhood in Cottbus.
Get up early to get ahead
, his father had admonished him, between bouts of knocking back bottles of supermarket schnapps and thrashing his nervous little mother black and blue.

The previous night’s sleep had been irritatingly fitful, but now, dressed in what he liked to think of as his armour – a 5000€ Billis & Dunn charcoal-grey suit with a crisp, white Egyptian-cotton shirt and a dark, discreetly patterned tie by Elizabeth Miranda – he considered the day’s work.

He liked this moment of quiet, though this particular morning he was feeling anything but calm. But he also liked to take care of his investments, and that included his non-profit-making ones.

Something had gone seriously wrong with the Dandolo Project. And that project carried a lot more weight than mere philanthropy.

He leaned across the black surface of his desk and touched a key on a screen set into its surface. Seconds later, a thin blonde, her hair loosely gathered in a black velvet bow, entered the room. She was in late middle-age, once pretty, but now getting scrawny in her attempts to fight off the years with remorseless dieting. Timid, dark-brown eyes. A nervous, evasive manner. But completely trustworthy.

He’d stopped sleeping with her years ago, when he’d noticed that the games were getting a little rough even for her to take, and besides, her husband had beaten her when he’d noticed the deep scratches on her back; but Adler hadn’t fired her.

Such dog-like devotion was a rare commodity; it was the one strength in all her weakness.

His tone was even. ‘What is going on, Frau Müller?’

‘We’ve just been on to the dean’s office at Venice.’

‘Yes?’

‘He wasn’t very happy about –’

Adler stepped forward and stood close to her. She flinched, expecting a blow, but none came.

‘I don’t give a fuck about his feelings, Frau Müller,’ he said quietly. ‘What have you actually achieved?’

‘He’s sending over all the information they have immediately.’

‘That’s better. Yale?’

‘We’ve been putting pressure on them for days. But our people there have reported progress at last. Apparently there’s been an embargo –’

‘Yes, yes, I know all about that.’ Adler tuned back to the window testily. Frau Müller had already ensured that the MAXPHIL executives on the East Coast had made it clear to the academics processing Dandolo Project material at both universities that they wouldn’t just be losing funding if they didn’t comply to the letter with what their benefactor required of them. A near-tragic accident suffered by the six-year-old son of one of them – the little boy had narrowly escaped death when he’d fallen foul of a savage guard-dog which had inexplicably slipped its chain and found its way into the family’s garden – had been enough to shake things up there. With luck, however, and the right hospital care, he should be able to walk again quite soon.