The Sword of the Templars

20

“I hate this, I hate this, I hate this,” muttered Peggy as they descended. The staircase was impossibly narrow, the stone treads dangerously smooth. The only light was the narrow puddle of illumination from Wanounou’s flashlight. The air was close, heavy with the sharp scent of mold, mildew, and dissolving limestone. As they went downward step by step their shoulders brushed against the smooth rock walls.

The deeper they got the narrower the staircase seemed to get; Peggy could almost feel the enormous weight of the stone pressing in all around her. She was breathing quickly, trying to fill her lungs and failing. It felt as though she was suffocating.

“This was a really, really bad idea,” she said.

“You can always go back,” said Holliday from behind her, grinning in the near pitch dark. Wanounou led the way with the flashlight, crowbar in his other hand, while Holliday brought up the rear, carrying the geologist’s hammer and the second flashlight. Peggy was sandwiched between them, which made things even more claustrophobic.

“Go back? How am I supposed to do that? There’s no way to turn around, and anyway, you’re blocking the way. Besides, if I was up top I’d be worrying about you guys too much.”

“So nice to feel wanted,” laughed Wanounou.

“How far have we gone?” Peggy asked, her voice urgent.

“ A hundred and fifty-one steps,” said Holliday. “I’ve been counting.” He did a quick calculation. “About ten inches between the steps… I’d say about a hundred and twenty-five feet.”

“Thirty-eight meters, if it makes you feel any better,” said Wanounou, looking back over his shoulder and grinning.

“Shut up, both of you,” she snarled in the dark. “Or I’ll scream, I really will.”

“She gets aggressive when she’s scared,” commented Holliday to Wanounou.

“I picked up on that,” answered the professor.

“Shut. Up!” Peggy barked.

“Relax,” soothed Holliday. “It can’t be much farther.”

“Why do you say that?” Peggy argued. “For all you know this is the stairway to Hell. It could go on forever.” She was almost panting now, her throat constricted, the dank cobbled walls pressing in, entombing her. In another second she really was going to scream.

“I can see the bottom,” called Wanounou. Suddenly he disappeared, and Peggy could hear the damp gravel crunch of his footsteps. A few seconds later she reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped out into a narrow, barrel-vaulted tunnel. It was barely wider than the stairs. The floor was covered in a thick layer of rotted, broken limestone that felt like small, damp bones beneath her feet. She shuddered. In some ways it was worse than the stairway.

Holliday stepped out behind her. Wanounou shone the flashlight ahead, illuminating the way. Silently they made their way along the tunnel, the floor gently sloping downward.

“We’re going deeper,” commented Holliday.

“Thanks for mentioning it,” said Peggy acidly.

“I wonder what this place was. Some Middle Ages version of a priest hole?” Holliday asked.

“What’s a priest hole?” Peggy asked. “Or should I ask?”

“During Elizabethan times Catholic families and churches had priest holes, hiding places and tunnels they could escape to if pursuivants came after them-priest hunters,” explained Wanounou. “Sort of like the Nazis and the Jews.”

“You history types have far too much information crammed into your heads,” said Peggy. “Sometimes it’s scary.”

The beam of the flashlight suddenly widened as they came into a large chamber hewn out of the bare rock. The ceiling overhead was at least twenty feet high, dripping with frozen limestone “straws,” like delicate icicles. The walls were rough stone. Unlike the tunnel, the floor was set with large, quarried paving stones. There was a litter of what appeared to be broken pieces of old flowerpots that had been swept back against the walls. At the far end of the chamber was an immense doorway, the door constructed of studded iron, heavily encrusted with rust and dripping lime. An iron bar was fitted across it, held in iron brackets. Wanounou bent down and picked up a shard from the floor, examining it under the flashlight beam.

“Terra-cotta,” he said. “From the curve I’d say a five-liter container. Wine or olive oil. Even water perhaps, although five liters is a little small; the terra-cotta kept it cool.” He ran the flashlight beam around the room. “There’s nothing else here.”

“It’s chilly enough already,” said Peggy, her eyes traveling nervously around the cavernous room. She was right; it was cool, ten or fifteen degrees lower than it had been on the surface.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” said Holliday.

“What doesn’t?” Wanounou said, picking up another chunk of pottery.

“That staircase we came down was never used to transport jugs of wine or oil or anything else for that matter; the steps are far too narrow.”

“So?” Peggy said.

“So whatever was stored here wasn’t removed up the stairs and into the chapel,” said Wanounou, nodding his agreement. “Which means it had to have been brought in from somewhere else.”

“And that in turn means there has to be another entrance,” completed Holliday.

“Does that mean we have to go through that big door over there?” Peggy asked.

“Afraid so,” said Holliday.

“I thought you might say that,” she sighed.

They approached the door. It was enormous, at least five feet across and close to fifteen feet high. There was no sign of hinges.

“Pins in the bottom and the top,” said Holliday. “A pivot door.”

“Let’s get the bar off,” said Wanounou.

He hammered at the brackets with the curved end of the crowbar, knocking off most of the rust welding the iron bar to its supports. The rest he dug out with the chisel end. When he was done all three of them lifted the iron bar away from the door and laid it on the paving-stone floor. Their hands and clothes were stained with streaks of rust.

Wanounou hauled on the immense latch, but the door didn’t budge. He fitted the chisel end of the crowbar into the narrow crack between the door and wall, then he and Holliday heaved. For a moment nothing happened, but then there was a shrieking sound and the entire door moved a few inches toward them, grinding over the stone floor.

“Anybody got any WD-40?” Peggy cracked.

Holliday and the professor rested for a second, then repeated the process. By the third time they’d opened the door a full eighteen inches-enough to squeeze by.

“Nobody’s been through that door in about a thousand years,” said Holliday. “Who goes first?”

“You do,” said Wanounou with a melodramatic sweeping gesture of his arm. “This whole thing was your idea after all.”

“Just as long as there’s no snakes,” said Peggy. “Are there any snakes in Israel?”

“Sure,” said Wanounou. “Cleopatra and the asp, remember?”

“Any underground?”

“Just the blind worm snake.”

“What are they like?”

“A blind snake that looks like a worm.”

“Very funny.”

“They’re about ten inches long, black, and highly polished. And they’re not poisonous.”

“Anything else?”

“There’s a species of albino scorpion.”

“Blind snakes and albino scorpions… Great.”

“I’m going through,” said Holliday. “Anybody coming along?”

Switching on the other flashlight, he turned sideways and squeezed through the opening, disappearing into the darkness beyond. Peggy went next, with Wanounou following her.

The passageway beyond the door was entirely different from the one that had led from the staircase to the storage chamber. Here the walls were raw native rock rather than dressed and quarried stone. The floor was rough, unworked limestone, and the roof, instead of being a plain barrel vault, was a soaring crevasse, its peak lost somewhere in the gloom. They were in fact now walking along an enormous crack in the earth created by some cataclysmic earthquake millennia before. When they spoke their voices echoed from the ragged stone.

“ ‘With dead Saladin’s echoing voice it calls us into battle once again,’ ” said Holliday, quoting from the message from the sword and swinging the flashlight around, lighting up the passage. Shadows jumped and flared in the moving beam like flitting bats.

“Doc, you’re getting spooky again,” Peggy warned.

“Sorry.”

“The passage is splitting,” called out Wanounou in the lead.

Ahead of them the passage split in two, the left fork narrower, the roof a lowered flat slab at about room height. The right fork was wider than the one they stood in, an extension of the same soaring crack in the earth. Holliday and Peggy joined the professor.

“Which way?” Holliday asked.

“It’s a toss-up,” answered Wanounou. “It’s not as though they put up a sign.”

“Just like the highways,” laughed Holliday.

“I say we go right,” said Peggy firmly. “Actually I’d like to just get the hell out of here, but that would mean going back up that stupid staircase and I don’t think I could deal with that right now, so I say we go right. Maybe they’ll have a Starbucks at the other end.”

Wanounou looked at Holliday. “Well?”

Holliday shrugged. “Suits me.”

They went to the right, where the passage was wide enough to let them walk three abreast. They walked on for another hundred yards, and then the passage suddenly opened up again, the roof soaring above their heads. The sound of falling water thundered.

“Incredible,” breathed Peggy as the light from both men’s flashlights played over the way ahead. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”