The Sword of the Templars (30 page)

“So what’s the plan?” Peggy asked, starting on her second cinnamon roll. “Get some spades and start digging up the beach?”

“Caves,” said Holliday. He sipped his
chávena quente
—black coffee, very strong. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“Are there any caves in the Azores?”

“Lots of them,” said Holliday. “The islands are all volcanic; there are lava tubes everywhere.”

“So how do we figure out where to look?”

“Logic,” Holliday answered. “Most of the caves here are famous; they even had a convention of cave explorers here once or so the guide book says.”

“Ergo?”

“Ergo we find the caves that no one’s ever explored before, which means going to Corvo, the smallest of the islands and the most remote.” Holliday smiled. “Not to mention the fact that Corvo is also known as ‘
Pequeno Rocha
,’ the ‘Little Rock.’ ”

“So how do we get to this little rock of yours?”

“There’s a plane you can take, but I’d rather see it from the sea the way Roger de Flor must have. We need a boat.”

29

The Azores are a volcanic archipelago of nine major islands in the North Atlantic a thousand miles from Lisbon and twelve hundred miles from St. John’s, Newfoundland. During the age of New World exploration between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, the string of islands provided a perfect way station for ships heading west or returning to Europe on the easterly trade winds. There are three major population centers on the islands: Ponta Delgada on the island of Săo Miguel, Angra do Heroísmo on the island of Terceira, and Horta on the island of Faial. There has been volcanic activity in the Azores as recently as a hundred years ago.

The westernmost island in the group is Corvo, barely six and a half square miles in size. There is one small village on the island, Vila Nova do Campo, with a population of approximately three hundred people. Corvo, the Little Rock, is essentially nothing more than a collapsed volcanic cone or “caldera.” The island’s only occupation is farming. Half of the time the island is shrouded in fog, the caldera hidden by low-lying clouds. The northernmost end of the island, hammered by an unrelenting Atlantic, is a ring of surf-shattered cliffs rising up the steep slopes of the old volcano.

There is one guesthouse with seven rooms, one restaurant, one bar, and an open-air barbecue which shares a small walled-in pasture with a motley, ill-tempered herd of goats. Corvo is fifteen nautical miles from Flores, its immediate neighbor, and a hundred and thirty-five miles from Horta, the nearest town of any size.

On the afternoon of their first full day in the Azores Holliday and Peggy took the short-hop commuter flight from Ponta Delgada to Faial and went searching for a boat to take them to Corvo the following morning.

Horta turned out to be a hilly little town of fifteen thousand built around two small bays that make up the port and divided by yet another volcanic crater. There is a sports bar, some appropriately charming restaurants and craft shops, and the occasional second-level cruise ship snuggled up to the fairly modern concrete pier and breakwater.

The most notable visitor to Horta was Mark Twain, who stayed there briefly in the early stages of his long journey to Jerusalem in 1867. Setting foot in the town he was immediately assaulted by a throng of barefoot beggar children who haunted his every step for the next two days. He never came back.

The boat, when they found it, was an old Chris-Craft 38’ Commander from the sixties, and looked eerily like the raggedy vessel piloted by Humphrey Bogart in the movie version of Ernest Hemingway’s
To Have and Have Not
. It smelled of fish and beer, needed a paint job and was named the
San Pedro
.

Her owner and captain was a man named Manuel Rivero Tavares. Tavares smelled like the boat and looked like a bowling ball with a two-day growth of stubble, but by all reports he was the best and most knowledgeable charter-boat captain in Horta.

“Why you want to go to Corvo?” Tavares asked. “No food there, no hootchie-hootchie nightclub with Michael Jackson. No nothing. Not even no fish.” According to the men drinking in Peter’s Sports Bar in town, Capitano Tavares was the finest white marlin fisherman in all of the Azores.

“We don’t want food or hootchie-hootchie night-clubs, and we don’t want Michael Jackson,” said Holliday. “We want to see it from the ocean the way the old explorers did.”

“Old explorers are dead,” replied Capitano Tavares. “All of them.”

“I know that,” said Holliday. “How much to take us to Corvo?”

“If you are not liking hootchie-hootchie and not liking fishing what will we talk about? A long way to Corvo. One hundred thirty-five nautical miles. Seven, eight hours to get there, seven, eight hours to get back. Long time.” The captain didn’t look happy.

“We don’t have to talk about anything,” sighed Holliday. “How much?”

“Manuel Tavares likes to talk,” said the captain, frowning.

“How much?”

“A thousand euro.”

“Five hundred.”

“Seven hundred and fifty.”

“Seven hundred.”

“You will pay the gasoline?”

“Yes.”

“Beer?”

“Yes.”

“Seven hundred twenty-five. I cook you an’ your little sister-girlie nice fish stew.”

“Deal.”

Two hours later, stocked with food and a case of the captain’s favorite Sagres Branca beer, they motored slowly out of the port, turning around the long breakwater then swinging sharply around the remains of the old volcano before heading west along the rugged coastline of the island, bearing a little north into the open sea, heading toward Corvo.

Peggy had taken Holliday’s Bradt guide and was sunning herself on the forward deck while Holliday sat beside Capitano Tavares in the companion chair on the flybridge high above the main deck of the boat. The
San Pedro
was doing a steady eighteen knots, muscling easily through the gentle swell. The sea was dark blue, almost a steely black. A few petrels whirled and dipped in their wake, but except for the birds they were alone on the ocean.

Far ahead on the distant horizon Holliday could see a broadening line of dark clouds gathering. They were heading into a storm. It occurred to him that the weather had been absolutely perfect ever since he’d left West Point. The closest thing to a problem had been the fog approaching Friedrichshafen. From the looks of the sky ahead, that was about to change.

“Storm coming,” commented Holliday.

Tavares took the bottle of beer out of its polystyrene holder in front of him and sucked on the neck for a few seconds. He gave a little belch and put the bottle back in its holder.

“Long time yet,” he said. “Manuel Tavares knows these things.” He turned and smiled. He poked himself in the eye. “Captain Jack Sparrow has no need to worry, yes?” He laughed at his own joke. “That Johnny Depp, he’s a funny guy, no?” He laughed again. “What kind of name is that—Depp? Something you put in the hair to make it shiny, yes? Depp! Ha!”

“You know Corvo?” Holliday asked.

“Do I know Corvo! Of course! I was born there! Corvo is one cattle, a big fat brown one with udders like Scotland bag flutes. Lying down in the grass. Looking out at the ocean, chewing grass. Waiting for the milk. That is Corvo. Maybe one goat, as well.”

“Are there any stories of treasure?” Holliday asked.

“Sure! Sure!” nodded Tavares. “Moby Dick!”

“The whale?”

“Yes, of course. It was written in the book about Corvo. The courage of her men. ‘Call me Ishmael,’ yes? There was a statue. A man with a finger pointing west to Boston, the Holy Virgin. A whaler. Who knows? A statue and a pot of gold coins. Very old. Phoenicia, yes? You know it?”

“You’re kidding, right?” Holliday said.

Phoenicia was the ancient name for Canaan. Phoenician coins had been found in the old foundations of Castle Pelerin. It was too much of a coincidence. Myths turned to reality, legend to fact, like Schliemann discovering Troy.

“No! No! True, swear to God! Coins. Found in fifteenth century by a priest named Gao, I think. Ponta do Marco, the very edge of the world! I will take you there!”

Bless you, Uncle Henry,
Holliday thought. Somehow he’d managed to make the right choice; the odyssey continued.

The weather worsened with each passing hour. The dark smudge of clouds staining the western horizon became a black, roiled wall of thunderclouds, their flattened undersides stretched out like hammered anvils blocking out the sun and the blue sky. Peggy came in from her sunbathing, then Holliday and finally the captain climbed down from the flybridge. All three of them huddled in the protection of the lower helm overhang as the blustering wind blew up the waves into a frothing mass of spume-tossed peaks and valleys. The
San Pedro
continued to hammer forward, the old fiberglass hull crashing through the heaving swell, forcing itself along the line Manuel Rivero Tavares had decreed.

It began to rain. The drops fell in sheets as one gale after another roared over them. Peggy finally disappeared into the forward cabin while Holliday remained with Tavares at the helm.

“How long will it last?” Holliday yelled into the Portuguese captain’s ear.

“At least through the night, perhaps longer,” he answered. “There is no point in making for Corvo; the harbor at Flores is a better choice.”

“You’re the captain,” said Holliday. “Whatever you say.”

Tavares nodded and spun the wheel. They turned a little further west, away from their goal. An hour later Flores came in sight, and an hour after that the
San Pedro
reached the tiny harbor of Santa Cruz das Flores, a single concrete pier in the lee of a tiny village huddled at the base of a battery of rugged hills.

The buildings of the village were rough lava stone mortared together and topped with the standard Portuguese style terra-cotta tiles. They found a restaurant in the town square and had a meal of octopus stewed in wine, rabbit stew, and fresh-baked bread and creamery butter.

After the meal Tavares disappeared for a few minutes, returning with an elderly man in tow whom he introduced as Dr. Emilio Silva. Dr. Silva wore enormous rubber boots, a completely transparent raincoat, and what appeared to be a very old-fashioned military uniform underneath.

He smoked a long, fuming clay pipe and appeared to be heading toward a hundred years of age, his face a wrinkled map of a long, arduous life. His eyes were clear, however, and when he spoke his voice, though as wispy and cracked as his face, was firm and coherent. According to Tavares the doctor had lived in the islands all of his life, and anyone or anything he didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing.

He told the story of the statue and the coins, again with Tavares as his translator. The man’s name was Damien de Goes, not Gao as Tavares had thought, and the statue had been of a bareheaded “Moorish” man—presumably black or at least swarthy—wearing a cape and seated on a horse, his right arm raised and pointing to the west. At his feet there had been a cauldron or kettle containing a hoard of treasure including five bronze and two gold coins from Cyrene in North Africa and from the Phoenician colony of Carthage, now modern Tunisia. Remarkably detailed for a myth or an old wives’ tale.

As the old man recounted the story, Holliday remembered an old map he’d once seen in a museum drawn by the Pizzigano brothers, a team of cartographers working in the early 1300’s—long before the Azores had actually been discovered and almost two hundred years before Columbus.

The Pizzigano brothers, illustrating an ancient Phoenician myth, showed a man on horseback at the edge of their map, just about where the Azores would be located. The man was pointing westward, and a medallion at his feet warned that anyone venturing further would be swallowed up in “The Sea of Fog and Darkness”—not a bad description of the North Atlantic when it was in bad humor.

Interestingly the same “sea of fog and darkness” term had once been used by a Moorish Muslim cartographer in Spain named Khashkhash ibn Saeed ibn Aswad to describe a voyage made in the ninth century—a full five hundred years before Columbus. Even the name of the place where the statue had been found on the island of Corvo rang true: Ponta do Marco—the boundary marker—go no further. X marks the spot.

“He says,” said Tavares, continuing to translate, “that there is a man on Corvo who we should see if we have any more questions.” He turned to the old man again.
“Como o senhor te chama?”
What is his name?

“Rodrigues,”
said the old man clearly, his yellow teeth clamped around the stem of the long clay pipe.
“Helder Rodrigues. Clerigo.”

“A priest,” said Tavares. “He says the man you should see is a priest.”

30

Capitano Tavares ferried them across to Corvo the following morning. The day was moody, the skies full of broken clouds that scudded low on the horizon over a choppy, restless sea. The
San Pedro
slapped the small waves sullenly, the movement jarring. Corvo was visible from the time they rounded the breakwater at Santa Cruz das Flores. It stood like a massive cupcake, one side slumped in the pan, a single volcanic cone worn by a million years of winds and storms, shouldering its way through the eons, the fire that had created it long since cooled, the steep slopes covered with a thick carpet of greenery, its giant cliffs like the massive bow of an ancient ship.

Barely fifteen miles separated Flores from its smaller sister; the voyage in the
San Pedro
lasted barely forty minutes. The town of Corvo clung to the sloped, southernmost portion of the island, a scattering of red-tile-roofed houses wedged in around a straight concrete pier with no breakwater.

Instead of docking, Tavares guided the old Chris-Craft north, following the steep coastline away from the town.

“Where are we going?” Peggy asked as the town receded in their wake.

“Around the island. A few minutes only. I show you Ponta do Marco. End of the world.”

They continued northward, the coast steepening to dark, plunging cliffs of volcanic basalt, the sea breaking in huge shuddering waves at the bottom. There was no middle ground, not even a rocky beach. There was the sea, and then there was the land, an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, one trying to wear down the other in a never-ending battle that had already lasted millions of years.