The Templar Salvation (2010) (36 page)

“I told you these lands weren’t safe,” the trader chortled. “You should have listened to me.”

Conrad sat up and spat some blood out, hitting the son’s boots. Qassem pulled his leg back and was about to launch a kick at the knight’s face when his father’s shout stilled him.

“Stop,” Mehmet ordered. “I need him awake.” He scowled at his son for a moment, then turned his attention at something up the canyon and smiled contentedly.

Conrad followed his gaze. The archers had climbed down from their ambush positions and were bringing the wagon back.

The trader waved them over. “So this is how you treat your partners?” he told Conrad. “You call on me to help you with all your little swindles, then when a big deal shows up, you decide to keep it to yourself and brush me away like some pustular servant?”

“This doesn’t concern you,” Conrad hissed back.

“If it’s worth something, it concerns me,” the trader replied as he stepped away to examine the packhorses’ cargo. “And I have a feeling it’s worth quite a lot.”

He climbed onto the body of the wagon and nodded to the men. They loosened the clasp around the first of the chests and opened it up.

The trader looked inside it, then turned to Conrad, his face crinkled with confusion. “What is this?”

“It doesn’t concern you,” the knight repeated.

Mehmet blurted out some orders while waving his hands manically, clearly displeased. His men moved furiously, unlocking and opening the other two chests.

His expression only darkened further as he looked inside each one.

He jumped off the wagon, stormed over to Conrad, and shoved him back onto the ground with a vicious flick of his leg. He then drew a dagger from under his belt and dropped down to face him, pulling the knight’s hair to yank his head back and pushing the dagger’s blade right up against his neck. “What is the meaning of this travesty?” he rasped. “What kind of a treasure is this?”

“It’s of no value to you.”

Mehmet pushed the blade harder. “Tell me what these are. Tell me why you wanted them this badly.”

“Go to hell,” the knight replied and lunged up like an uncoiled spring, shoving the trader’s dagger away with one hand while landing a crushing blow from his metal hand with the other.

The trader shrieked as he flew off him and hit the ground, an airborne rivulet of blood trailing out of his mouth and nose. Conrad threw himself after him, but Qassem jumped in and pulled him off his father before he and his hired hands pummeled Conrad into subservience.

Barely conscious, Conrad looked on helplessly through veiled vision as the trader’s son, dagger in hand, came in for what looked like the final blow. He braced himself for it, but it wasn’t what he expected. Qassem didn’t gut him or slit his throat. Instead, he bent down and set one knee firmly against Conrad’s chest to hold him in place, then used the blade to cut the leather straps of Conrad’s copper prosthesis and yank it off. He held it up, gloating, staring at it like some kind of prize scalp before holding it up proudly to the others.

The trader pushed himself to his feet and faltered before steadying himself against his son, spitting blood, his eyes bloodshot with rage. “You always were a stubborn bastard, weren’t you?”

Qassem held his dagger up and hunched down over Conrad. “I’ll make the infidel talk.”

The trader shot his arm out and stopped his son. “No,” he said, still glaring down at the fallen knight. “I don’t trust what he’d tell us. Besides, we don’t need him. What’s in these trunks is clearly of great value. And I’m sure we can find someone in Konya who can tell that it is.”

“What about him?” Qassem asked.

The trader frowned and looked around, casting his eye about the deserted canyon. It was quiet, apart from the groans of the fallen horse. The sun had risen well clear of the canyon’s walls and was now beating down on them with all its mid-summer might.

Conrad saw the trader glance up at the sky. Three griffon vultures were circling high above them, attracted by the dead and the dying. He watched as the trader then dropped his gaze to the bloodied horse, turned to his son, and managed what was clearly a painful half grin.

He pictured the fate that now awaited him, and wished that an arrow had found him too.

THE HEAT WAS STIFLING, and it wasn’t just because of the sun.

It was because of the horse.

The one he’d been sewn into.

They’d taken Hector’s dying horse and sliced it open, pulled most of its innards out, then stuffed Conrad inside it, back to front, before suturing it shut around him. They had him on his back, with his head sticking out of what had been the animal’s anus. His arms and legs were also protruding, out of holes they’d cut into the stallion’s hide, and except for the stump of his left arm, his limbs were securely tied to wooden stakes that had been driven into the hard ground.

They’d left him like that, crucified against the canyon floor, before trotting off with the horses and the wagon and everything they’d been carrying.

It was unbearably hot in there. Worse than the heat, though, was the smell. And the insects. Putrescent flesh and gelling blood littered the ground around him, rotting in the sun. With the trader and his men still in view and receding down the canyon, flies and wasps were already swarming over him and over his dead brethren’s corpses, feasting on the abundance of spoils, buzzing and landing and nibbling away at the open cuts on his lips and across the rest of his face.

That would just be the start of it.

The real agony would come courtesy of the three vultures that were hovering overhead. They’d swoop in, sink their claws into the horse’s carcass and tear away at it with their sharp beaks. Eventually, they’d break through the horse’s skin and start feasting on Conrad’s body, morsel by morsel, pulling the flesh off him before moving on to his internal organs.

He knew death wouldn’t come quickly.

He’d heard of this form of scaphism before—the name was derived from the Greek word,
skaphe
, which meant “vessels,” as the original method involved sealing the victim inside back-to-back, canoe-like rowboats. Some victims were covered with honey and made to drink milk and honey until they could no longer hold their bowels, then they were set afloat on stagnant ponds—hence the boats. The feces made sure the insects showed up. Other victims were left under the sun, in a hollowed-out tree or an animal’s carcass. Conrad had heard how the Turks and the Persians were fond of scaphism, heard how horrific the remains looked when they were ultimately found, but he’d never witnessed it himself. In a way, he was lucky the buzzards were there. In areas where there were only insects to feed on the victim, death could take days. Conrad had heard of a Greek priest who had survived them breeding inside him along with gangrene fermenting across his body for seventeen days before his body finally gave in.

It was a particularly vile way to die, he thought as he stared up at the circling vultures, knowing they wouldn’t be circling much longer.

They didn’t.

Two of them came down in quick succession and landed heavily on the horse, with the third settling for the Spanish knight’s corpse. They began tearing away at the exposed flesh, their beaks and claws working in a ravenous frenzy, like they hadn’t eaten for weeks. Conrad spasmed left and right to try to shake them off, but his frantic moves were strictly limited by his ties and he didn’t make any impression on the birds. They just ignored him and kept on digging away, ripping and pulling and chewing and flinging bits of flesh off the carcass and splattering Conrad with dripping wet morsels. Then the one closest to his head spun around, eyed him for a beat, and dove its beak in for a taste. Conrad flicked his head from side of side and yelled fiercely, but the buzzard knew what it was doing and kept going, undeterred. Conrad buried his head as far into the carcass as he could, but he couldn’t get in far enough, and he was staring straight into the bird’s wide-open beak as it darted in for a bite, when something thudded into it and slammed it clear off him, too fast for him to see what it was, too sudden for his dulled senses to process what had happened.

He heard the predator’s wings do a little death-swat against the ground, out of view, behind the carcass. The second vulture didn’t flinch. It just sidestepped across the horse’s hide to take its dead friend’s place, but something slammed into it too and flung it to the ground, this time closer to Conrad, giving him a clear view of what had happened:

The vulture had an arrow through it.

He spun his head around, his heart pumping wildly, his senses frazzled, straining to see who was there, wondering who had saved his life—and he saw her, sprinting over to him, a crossbow in her hands.

Maysoon.

Elation crackled through him.

He watched her charging in and saw her let go of her crossbow and pull out a big dagger just as he felt a sudden beating of air around him and something bristly brush up against his face. The third vulture thudded heavily on his chest, its claws biting into the horse hide, and just as it dove in for a taste, Maysoon was already in midair, pouncing onto it like a panther, grabbing its neck with one hand and slitting it open with the other.

She tossed the vulture aside and turned to face him, breathing heavily, her face dripping with sweat, her eyes fierce with determination. She swatted the air a few times to disperse the swarm of insects, then bent down and cut the ties off his hand and feet before getting to work on freeing him from his gruesome coffin.

He watched her slicing away at the sutures. Her eyes found his and she held his gaze without blinking as her hands kept moving, working expertly, her face locked in concentration. In his groggy, dehydrated state, he still couldn’t quite believe she was actually there, couldn’t believe he was still alive, even as she helped him out of the carcass and onto his feet.

He just stood there, hunched, breathing hard, dripping with blood and guts, staring at her with a mix of awe and confusion. “How … What are you doing here?”

The edge of her mouth curled upward with a cheeky grin. “Saving your life.”

He shook his head, still bewildered. “Besides that.” He smiled. It hurt his bruised lips. “How did you get here?”

“I followed you. You, my brother, my father. I followed you all the way from Constantinople.”

His thoughts were taking a moment longer than normal to formulate themselves. “Why?”

“I heard them talking. They suspected you were after something big. They had a feeling you wouldn’t be splitting it with them. So they decided they’d take it all for themselves. I wanted to warn you, but I couldn’t get away. You know how they are with me.”

“But they’re … your father? Your brother?”

She shrugged. “They’re bad men. I knew you wouldn’t give up whatever it was you were after without a fight. I knew what they’d do to you to take it.”

“So you followed them … for me?”

She kept her eyes firmly locked on his, and nodded. “You would have done the same for me, wouldn’t you?”

The simple honesty of her reply sank in with startling clarity. Of course, he would have. He didn’t doubt that for a second. There was an unspoken connection between them, an attraction that had built up over weeks and months of frustrating encounters. He was well aware of that. But for her to risk her life like this was beyond anything he’d imagined.

She handed him a leather wineskin. “You need water. Drink.”

He uncorked it and took a long chug from it.

“What’s this all about?” she asked as she watched him. “What did you want from that monastery?”

He handed it back to her, studied her for a beat, then led her to some shade under an outcropping in the canyon wall and told her everything.

From the very beginning.

The whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The origin of the Order. What the Keepers set out to do. How it all went well. How it all went wrong. Everard and his men in Constantinople. The defeat at Acre. The disappearance of the Falcon Temple. The lost years in Cyprus. The king of France’s move against the Order. Friday the thirteenth. His rebirth in Constantinople. Meeting her. The swords. The monastery. The texts. The ambush.

It was the least she deserved.

Throughout, she listened intently, not interrupting more than a couple of times, for some clarification. And when he was done, they just sat there in silence for a long moment, she letting the information sink in, he assessing his current situation and trying to decide what his next move should be.

She watched him rub the stump of his forearm and nodded to indicate it. “Did they take it?”

He nodded back. “Yes.”

She watched him silently for a long second, then said, “I know what you’re thinking.”

He exhaled heavily. “I have to try and get it back.”

“There’s six of them and two of us.”