The Sacred Scroll (25 page)

‘What happened then?’ Dandolo cut in.

‘When?’

‘After you lost your helmet,’ prompted the doge.

‘I got them in the end. Then I looked round. There must have been fifty corpses in the square. The only men still standing were my own. I led them in a cheer, raising my seax, dripping blood, above my head. Then I wiped it and sheathed it, shoved my fingers through my beard to untangle it, wring some of the blood from it, shook myself. So much for Zara, I thought.’

The rest was easy, though how Dandolo got the French to do it was a mystery whose secret was fully known only to Frid, and knowing it did not mean that the Norseman understood it. Leporo, for himself, kept his counsel.

The women, the children and those too old to have fought, and the surviving warriors of the city, were pulled out of the looted churches and the cellars and wherever else they’d been hiding, brought down to the beach and corralled in pens constructed of tightly woven withies. There were a thousand of them, and it took a day and a night to slaughter them. The Crusaders and the Venetians did it with spears. Then they threw brushwood over the bodies, seasoned it with naphtha and set fire to the makeshift pyres. Black smoke rose. The fires didn’t burn out until Sunday evening, and the stench was appalling. By then, Zara, that vile, treacherous bitch of a city, was theirs, and most of it was intact.

But it wasn’t over.

‘They’ve done
what
?’ Dandolo snarled at Leporo. Three days had elapsed since the victory.

‘It wasn’t the fault of our men. The French started it.’

They were standing in the reception hall of the governor’s mansion in the south-east quarter of the city, Dandolo’s interrupted morning meal spread out on a table under one of the windows overlooking the harbour.

‘The Pilgrims think they’ve got a raw deal.’

‘So they started fighting
us
?’

‘Some of the men only. Their leaders are putting down the insurrection.’

‘Send for them,’ Dandolo growled. ‘I turn my back for one
night
, and this happens!’

Baldwin and Boniface, shamefaced, arrived an hour later. Everyone had been billeted according to his rank, and patrols had been sent out to scour the hills to the north for young men and women suitable for the purpose to which they were to be put, in repairing the walls and servicing the men of the Fourth Crusade. Everything had seemed calm. The plan to overwinter in Zara and in the meantime assess and divide the spoils had been agreed. But then fighting had broken out between some of the French and the Venetians over loot from the principal church, and it had spread to the streets.

‘Frid’s been out there too, and it’s dying down now,’ said Boniface.

Dandolo was aghast. Why had there been this disobedience? Had the tablet failed him? Had he lost concentration? It was a shock to discover that to exert his will over this army of what he was beginning to think of as his slaves, he could not relax for one moment.

He clutched the tablet tighter. It seemed to nestle in his hand of its own volition, as if it were a living thing. Did he really have power over it, or had he gone too far – was it beginning to have power over him?

He shook the notion off. It was preposterous. He was in control, and he alone.

‘But that’s armies for you – especially ones made up of nations that won’t agree,’ Geoffrey de Villehardouin said to Leporo later, when the fighting had died down and the two men were alone together.

‘I saw little of it,’ said the monk. ‘What happened?’ During the brief skirmish between the allies, Leporo had been cloistered with Dandolo in the mansion, making an audit of the city’s assets.

‘Baldwin and Boniface set about restoring the peace almost as soon as the trouble broke out. But as soon as they managed to put a stop to it in one quarter, it broke out in another. Three hundred men have died needlessly. And that in fighting which took place on a single night!’

‘May God preserve us!’

‘It’s over now. The ringleaders on both sides have been arrested.’

‘That much I do know.’

‘And do you know what punishment will be meted out to them?’

‘There are fifteen main troublemakers. The doge in his wisdom had determined that their punishment be exemplary. He has ordered them taken to the shore at dawn, and crucified.’

Geoffrey breathed hard. But he said nothing more than ‘Let us pray to God that our internal conflict is now over for good, and that we can go forward on the great enterprise we have before us with renewed vigour in the spring.’

‘There’s enough work to do to keep the men busy until then,’ said Leporo. ‘We have to rebuild the damage done in taking this place.’

‘And rest. And divide what we have gained. Then we will have our fleet fully paid for.’

Leporo smiled. Dandolo and he had calculated that, dividing the spoils fifty-fifty, the Crusaders’ share was still not enough to cover their outstanding debt. They would still be in the power of Venice, and they could not rebel.

‘Let us pray that it is so,’ he said.

Paris, the Present

Ben Duff, the psychologist in charge of Su-Lin’s treatment, met Marlow in the entrance hall of the special flat they’d placed her in.

The secure apartment INTERSEC maintained was round the corner from HQ, in the rue Pernelle. The glass in the windows was bulletproof. The front door was made of battleship-grade steel. A rear entrance was concealed in the kitchen, and the door to a panic-room set into a wall of the entrance hall was similarly disguised. The place had been designed and modified in the days when INTERSEC still had a grown-up budget.

‘It’s going slowly, but not badly,’ Duff told him. ‘I’d have been happy with progress like this if it’d happened a month from now. And we’ve had a breakthrough since we last talked. Overnight, in fact.’

‘Good.’ Marlow kept the irritation out of his voice. ‘Slowly’ was not what he wanted to hear, and he was preoccupied with the conversation he’d just had with Sir Richard. The INTERSEC top brass were drumming their fingers.

‘There are some aspects that’ll need looking at further, but I think we’re on the right track.’

‘I need to talk to her alone.’

Duff looked doubtful. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘I must be in attendance at this stage.’

‘Give me half an hour.’

‘Ten minutes. And only if I decide it’s appropriate.’

But Marlow was impatient to interview the woman without a third party present. He needed to be alone with her to understand her.

Dr de Montferrat lay on a chaise longue by the shaded window in the living-room. She stirred when the men came in and sat up on its edge, swinging her long legs round with unconscious elegance. INTERSEC had organized a new wardrobe for her, most of which she liked, and now she looked very different from the lost tourist Geoffrey Goldberg had rescued outside his shop in Jerusalem. She was dressed in a close-fitting charcoal silk roll-neck, a matching cashmere suit and black patent-leather shoes with low heels, which increased her height by a couple of centimetres. She’d eaten about half the light meals they’d given her, but she’d put on a little weight since she’d been found, and from Duff’s notes Marlow had seen that she weighed 45kg.

‘Light for her height,’ Duff had told him. ‘Could be malnourishment while she was out there.’

She had a boyish figure; narrow shoulders, neat, perfectly porportioned breasts, slim hips; and her straight black hair was just long enough to frame a pale face which, if you didn’t know anything about her ancestry, you’d have found hard to attach a nationality to. The almond eyes were dark brown, and she had high cheekbones, but her lips were full and generous and her chin strong; her
nose was delicate and – Tennyson’s words came to Marlow’s mind – ‘tip-tilted, like a flower’.

She seemed glad to see the two men, and Marlow noticed that Duff had hit it off with her. An easygoing man whom she found easy to handle, he guessed.

She looked as if a train of thought had been disturbed by their arrival, though she must have been expecting them.

‘It’s good to see you,’ she said. A light voice, attractive. She put as much feeling into her voice as she could. She liked the look of the tall, slightly dishevelled policeman with the dark, troubled eyes who accompanied her doctor.

The apartment was spacious, the walls painted in light colours; the furniture was modern and finished in white or cream. But the inner courtyards it looked on to on one side crowded out daylight, and most of the lamps were on.

She gestured them to chairs. ‘Something to drink?’ she asked. ‘Lemon tea?’

‘Jack wants to hear your news,’ said Duff. ‘And no lemon tea, thanks.’

She looked at Marlow; he too shook his head.

‘What news there is,’ she said to Duff. Her English accent was virtually faultless. Only variations in inflection and faultless grammar betrayed the fact that she was not a native. ‘Where shall I begin?’

‘Tell him about the dream,’ said Duff.

De Montferrat thought for a moment. ‘I was a little girl again. When I woke up, I wondered where I was. I wondered how I had got here. I seemed to have passed weeks of my life in complete darkness. But it all seemed so real.’

‘Ben mentioned that a long blackout period would have been part of your condition,’ said Marlow. He glanced at his watch, hoping this dream story would lead to something concrete.

She smiled at him shyly, giving him the full benefit of her eyes. ‘I was playing in a garden. Then I went inside and looked at the aquarium I’d been given by my parents a couple of years earlier for my birthday. The pretty gleaming fish under the lights. The sunken castle, the pirate shipwreck. The fronds of the water plants moving in the ripples made by the air bubbles.’ Her tone was unemotional. ‘I thought that I was tired of the fish. I switched the aquarium off. Then days seemed to pass. I went out, I played with my friends. They were all boys. They all admired me. I forgot about the aquarium. Later, I looked at it again. Dark and empty. Some fish had risen, dead, to the surface. I scooped them out and threw them away. I supposed a few might still have been alive in there, somewhere.’

Marlow wondered if this was a true memory. Few people are capable of such unconscious cruelty, but they do exist.

‘Is that the end?’

‘Almost. I didn’t think about the fish any more. I went out to play again. There was a pretty garden, and a view over fields and open countryside, with trees, but this time I was alone. All the boys had gone …When I woke up, I was confused. But I know that I questioned my surroundings – these surroundings – for the first time. I was aware of them. And I was aware of myself. I knew who I was.’

‘And your memory?’

She struggled to find the words. Duff came to her
rescue. ‘There are still significant gaps,’ he said. ‘No recognition of your parents, for example, is there?’

‘I only know they are both dead. I know I grew up in Italy, mostly. But when you showed me photographs of my parents they might as well have been strangers. I have only your word for it that they are the people you tell me they are.’ She paused. ‘All I have of my childhood is that dream, and it doesn’t feel real at all now.’

‘What about recent memories?’ asked Marlow, ignoring a warning look from Duff.

‘I do remember my work at Venice. I remember all I was taught. I remember all my training. And I remember the Dandolo Project.’

Marlow locked on to that. ‘When did these memories come back?’ he asked Duff crisply.

‘Less than an hour ago,’ said Duff. ‘I needed that time to confirm.’

‘But when I talked to you earlier, Dr de Montferrat –’ he started, then interrupted himself. ‘When did you have the dream you told me about?’

‘Last night. But everything was still misty this morning. I was frightened that what seemed to be coming back to me was just an illusion. I wanted to wait. I needed to talk to Ben first …’

She was becoming agitated. Duff put a restraining hand on her arm. She calmed down quickly, but he left his hand there.

‘Would you have any objection if we talked alone for a while?’ Marlow asked her.

Her eyes widened a fraction. ‘No. Not at all.’ But she turned her gaze to Duff.

‘OK,’ he agreed reluctantly, frowning at Marlow before turning back to Su-Lin. ‘Relax. Don’t forget what I told you before Jack arrived – you have to be patient with these things. I think we’ve turned a big corner today. But healing takes time; it can’t be hurried.’

She gave him a sad smile.

After the door had closed behind him, she leaned back on the chaise longue, and her dark eyes met Marlow’s. ‘What do you want to know?’ she said.

‘What you haven’t told Duff.’

She looked surprised. ‘I have kept nothing from him.’

‘What happened after the dig? What happened to the others – Adkins and Taylor?’

Now she seemed furtive, scared. ‘I don’t know. I would have told Ben.’

‘Something happened. Something bad. Try to think. Try to remember.’

‘I can’t! It’s horrible!’

‘What’s horrible? Tell me.’

He looked at her. She’d sunk back again. She was breathing heavily, holding him with her eyes, but he could read nothing in their depths.

He waited. Then he said carefully, ‘Let’s start with the Project. How did you become involved with it?’

‘You must have checked that. You probably know better than I do.’

‘I’d like to hear it from you.’

She looked thoughtful, questioning herself, but said, ‘I will help you as much as I can. You must be patient with me.’

‘Think, then. The lives of your colleagues depend on it.’

‘I know.’

‘What did you find – can you remember that?’ he tried, more gently.

‘If I could remember, I’d tell you.’

‘Where were you when it happened? In the lab? In the hotel?’

‘I don’t know!’

‘Maybe the lab?’ Marlow knew that was the more likely place. Harder to get people out of a busy hotel than a quiet university department. It would have happened late in the day … early evening, when the archaeologists would have been packing up for the day.