EIGHT

“Well, what did you learn from that?” It was eight days later, and Hugh de Payens’s face was unreadable, but there was no doubting his curiosity, and across from him, Godfrey St. Omer was leaning forward, his eyes intent on St. Clair, who shrugged, the beginnings of a smile tugging at his lips.

“Nothing that I can prove, Brethren. Not yet, at least. I came here directly from stabling my horse, leaving Rossal to dismiss the men and complete the patrol, my first duty being to report to you on our progress and condition. Now that I have done so, I am free, I presume, to tend to my own affairs for a while. As soon as I leave here and remove this armor, therefore, I intend to go underground and investigate my suspicions. After that, I will be able to answer your question.”

The two senior brothers exchanged glances, and de Payens inclined his head. “So be it, then. Our business here is concluded, but I think I am safe in saying that Brother Godfrey here is as curious as I am about your tidings. Would it displease you if I asked you to take us with you when you go down into the tunnels?”

It was only a very short time later when the three men passed the vertical rift in the tunnel floor where the tunnelers had been disposing of their detritus for many months, and less than a hundred paces beyond that, St. Clair hesitated and stopped, holding his flaming torch high as he gazed about him, looking back the way they had come and then turning to stare down the passageway that stretched into darkness ahead of them.

“This should be the place,” he said at length. “It should be, but it looks nothing like what I remember. There was a wall of rubble here, filling the passageway completely, last time I was here. I climbed over it and squeezed through the opening at the top, then almost suffocated on the other side and barely made it back out. That’s when I collapsed against the wall and felt the fresh air. There has been a lot of work down here since then, to clear the debris away, but in the doing of that, the few reference points I had have been removed, too. The spot where I lay and felt the draft could be anywhere from where I’m standing up to a score of paces in either direction.” He looked around again and then waved his hand towards the passageway stretching ahead of them. “The only thing I know with certainty is that I was lying with my feet pointing down that way, towards the blockage, so the draft came from somewhere along this wall here, on the left.”

“Taper,” St. Omer said. “We need a taper, or a candle, and a long handle.” He glanced from one to the other of his listeners and shrugged. “Alternatively, you could get down on your hands and knees and crawl the length of the passage, feeling for the draft, but it strikes me that it would be easier to tie a lit taper to the end of a long stick of some kind, or even a sword, and walk along the wall with it. If there’s still a current of air blowing through, it will affect the flame.”

“No tapers down here,” St. Clair responded. “But we have oil lamps and mattocks, so we should be able to achieve the same effect. I’ll attach a lamp to the blade of a mattock. We’ll have to be careful not to tilt the lamp and spill the oil. There are some old tools over here, against the wall. Now, then …”

It took no more than a few minutes to attach a lamp to the end of a mattock shaft, and when they had it firmly bound there, they lit the wick with one of their torches. The lamp burned slowly, its bare wick generating much sooty smoke, but that was an advantage, and they found the vent in the wall almost as soon as they began to search for it. The lamp’s flame guttered quickly, blown sideways with surprising strength and sending black, greasy smoke swirling fitfully across the passageway. St. Clair looked at his two companions from beneath raised eyebrows, then brought the open flame back to the same spot, holding it this time in a stream of air so strong and steady that it set the lamp’s flame fluttering audibly. He knelt quickly then, setting the lamp aside and reaching out with his bare hands to feel the flow of cool air from the base of the wall.

“It’s strong, but the hole is very small. Bring one of those torches down here and give me some light.” He lowered himself farther, taking his weight on his hands and moving his legs back until he could lie on his belly, then he thrust his fingers into the small hole. The other two men moved back to give him room, although St. Omer held the torch carefully out and down at arm’s length to provide the light he had been asked for.

St. Clair inched forward until his face was ludicrously close to the wall, and then he shook his head and rolled away. “The air’s blowing upward, but where could it be coming from? This tunnel wall is solid stone, so what we have found must be some kind of a crack in the rock. It makes no sense.” He looked around, then pushed himself back up to his feet and crossed to the pile of tools, where he selected a long pry bar of solid steel and returned to attack the tiny air vent, trying to enlarge it. Moments later, the wedge-shaped point of the bar broke through, enlarging the hole considerably, and once the penetration had begun it progressed swiftly until the opening was the size of a man’s head. It had begun with the chink at the base of the wall, but as St. Clair kept chipping and picking away at it, the cavity proved to be more in the floor than in the wall, and at one point, prizing at a jagged edge that gave way more suddenly than expected, he staggered and lost his grip on the bar, and it disappeared into the blackness of the hole. All three men stood motionless, listening to the silence until the clanging echo of the bar’s landing came up to them. None of them needed to point out to the others that it had fallen a long way.

Shortly after that, they tied one of their torches to a length of rope and lowered it into the darkness below, but it showed them nothing other than an apparently vast blackness, and watching the flame flicker and eventually burn out far below—the rope was more than twenty paces long—St. Clair shivered, feeling apprehension crawling between his shoulder blades.

They would not appreciate the reality of what had happened until long afterwards, when logic and exploration had made it clear beyond any doubt, but there, at the beginning of it all, the three men were completely at a loss for understanding of what they had found. It was St. Omer who would eventually arrive at the analogy that explained it to all of them, comparing the chamber below—for it was a vast, square chamber that they had found—and the tunnel in which they stood to a cube and a tube. The cylindrical tube of the tunnel had touched precisely on one of the upper corners of the chamber, closely enough to break through at that single point and create the hole that became the conduit for the air from the chamber beneath. Had the tunnel been dug as little as a hand’s breadth to the right of where it was, the discovery would never have been made and the presence of the chamber underneath might never have been suspected. But the contact was made, the flow of air was noted, and therein some men thought afterwards to see the Hand of God.

None of the three men present that afternoon had a single thought in his mind of God or divine intervention. They were nonplussed and unsure of what to do next, and as they stood there, gazing down into the hole in the floor, their last remaining torch began to flicker towards oblivion, its fuel depleted.

“Whatever we do next, it is going to require thought, and planning,” de Payens growled, “and we are going to need the others down here. Come, we’ll return later, once we have decided what we should do.”

They returned to the surface, replenishing their torches as they went, and the climb up through the excavations was a silent one, each of the three men involved with his own thoughts on what they had found. As soon as they regained the stables, de Payens called all the brothers to attend a Gathering. St. Agnan and Payn de Montdidier had been on the point of riding out at the head of their scheduled patrol, but the sergeant messenger caught them in time and they came to the Gathering room with everyone else, wondering what was afoot.

De Payens cut to the essence of his summons as soon as the outer door was securely locked and guarded, once again by Geoffrey Bissot, whose duties as guard of the Gatherings seemed to occur on every occasion when something new and important had to be discussed. Hugh began by acknowledging St. Agnan and Montdidier, and the fact that their projected patrol would take them out of the city for the following eight days, but he assured them that by the time they returned, God willing, there would be much for them to do. He instructed St. Agnan to have his men stand down for the night but be prepared for an early departure the following morning.

They waited, muttering among themselves, while St. Agnan hurried off to find someone to carry that word to his senior patrol sergeant, and as soon as he returned, de Payens proceeded to describe St. Clair’s discovery and the reflection and re-examination that had led to it. Now, de Payens concluded, thanks to that, and to the accident of the pry bar falling into the abyss, they knew there was something, some vast, empty space, beneath the floor of the tunnel in which they had been working at the time of St. Clair’s near-suffocation, and he required all of them to abandon whatever they were working on in the tunnels immediately and to pool their labor and resources, to exploit the new discovery and find out just where, if anywhere, it led.

It was approaching time for the evening meal by then, and they adjourned their formal Gathering but remained in the room behind closed doors, joined now by Bissot, where they could talk freely about the discovery and plan their work for the coming days.

They had accumulated a considerable amount of equipment over their years of excavation, and there was no shortage of blocks, pulleys, ropes, and hoisting tackle at hand, and by the next morning the tunnel lengths to right and left of the opening from the day before were lined with materials to be used in the new excavation. But the task facing them was a daunting and disturbing one. They had been told that an enormous space lay beneath them, yet none among them was able to imagine what was there. They knew absolutely nothing, and they were afraid to let their imaginations run away with them.

All that they knew, and the realization was a chastening and worrisome one, was that everything they dislodged beneath their feet fell away into nothingness, dropping silently into a black abyss for a long way before shattering against the rocks, or whatever else, lay directly underneath. Accordingly, after one single near-disaster when Montdidier almost fell into the pit, every man who worked at enlarging the cavity did so wearing a safety harness, with ropes securely attached to an overhead anchoring tripod. It was only after many hours of work by alternating two-man shifts that someone noticed—and no one could remember afterwards who had remarked upon it first—that the hole at their feet was distinctly triangular, converging in a deep V-shape, and that what were apparently walls stretched down and away on each side from what could only be a ceiling.

It soon became obvious that they were looking down into a man-made structure. They had tried several times to illuminate the space beneath, throwing half a score of lit torches down into the blackness, but only half of those had survived the fall, and they lay guttering on the surface below, revealing nothing, until they burned themselves out. Even those torches lowered on a rope showed nothing of what was beneath, and the men had grown bored with looking at them even before they guttered and died out. But the mere fact that they could feel the rush of clean air, and that the torches had burned out naturally, proved that the air down there was breathable, and once they had accepted that they were looking down into a chamber of some description, they agreed that someone ought to go down there and have a look at whatever there was to see. St. Clair, as the youngest among them, and also the one who had made the discovery, was the first to be lowered, in a large basket suspended from a hoist, clutching a newly lit torch in one hand and fingering the dagger at his waist with the other, while he gazed about him, dropping lower and lower into the blackness with an elbow hooked around one of the basket’s supporting ropes.

The first thing he discovered, mere moments after leaving the surface above, was that he was in fact in the corner of a room, for his basket swung into the juncture of the walls, and when he brought up his torch to look at them, he saw that they were a dull black, coated with a pitch-like substance so that they absorbed light and radiated none.

He shouted that information up to his companions, and then concentrated on looking about him, breathing deeply and trying not to give in to the feeling that he was being stifled and that the blackness surrounding him was growing ever heavier and more dense as they lowered him deeper and deeper. His mind focused suddenly on the fact that his sword, which was seldom far from his hand, now lay far above him, on the bed in his sleeping cell where he had thrown it before coming down into the tunnels, and although logic told him he would have no need of it here, he felt defenseless none the less, and aware of the puniness of the dagger at his waist.

He became aware, quite unexpectedly, that the basket had reached the floor of the enormous chamber, but so gently had it touched down that only the cessation of movement told him he was resting on a solid surface. He held the torch as high as he could above his head, peering into the surrounding gloom, but he could see nothing at all.

“I’m down,” he called to the watchers above. “Unloading now.” He reached down and grasped one of the dry torches piled about his legs, then swung his right leg carefully over the edge of the basket and stepped out. He lit the fresh torch from the one he was holding and stooped close to the ground, waving both lights back and forth to see what he could see.

The floor was level, and paved in square stone slabs, each a good long pace to a side, and there was a thin coating of dust on the stones, far less than one might have expected, he thought, until he remembered the steady current of cool air that had been blowing around him since the start of his descent. He stooped lower, looking for a hole in or between the flagstones, something into which he would be able to tuck one of the torches, but there was nothing to be seen, not the slightest crack or unevenness into which he might insert a dagger point. He straightened up again and turned slowly in a complete revolution, peering into the blackness all around and waving his torches widely in the hope of catching a reflection of some kind from whatever might be there beyond his sight.

Finally, he took a deep breath and stood with his back to the angle of the corner, taking his bearings as well as he was able. When he felt confident that he could maintain a course by following the edges of the flagstones under his feet, he began to walk slowly forward diagonally, stepping from corner to corner, stone by stone, into the chamber, holding one torch low to light his way across the floor and the other high to show him anything that might be seen, while he counted his steps aloud. Then he stopped and glanced up, his eye attracted by movement up there in the corner behind him, and he made out the shape of one of his companions being lowered to join him, another torch flickering in his hand as he sank downward. St. Clair had not been aware of the basket being raised again, his attention had been so tightly focused upon what he was doing. He turned back to his task and kept walking, the cadence of his counting unbroken.

He had reached thirty when he saw the first dim outline of a different shape on the floor ahead of him and he stopped, raising both torches high to give himself as much light as possible. As he did so, he heard a soft step at his back, and André de Montbard spoke into his ear.

“What is it? You see something?”

St. Clair made no attempt to answer, knowing Montbard could see for himself. Instead, he crouched slightly lower and took another step forward, and then another as Montbard drew abreast of him on his left.

“Something there.”

Again St. Clair offered no response other than to continue to advance until he could see what was in front of him. It appeared to be a jar, or an urn of some kind, and it was merely the closest of an entire array, all uniform in shape and size. He walked until he stood in a wide gap between two ranks of the things, and he could see files of them stretching away from him, disappearing into the gloom ahead. He counted eight on each side, and could see at least ten more parallel ranks of them, eight to a side, with a wide aisle stretching between them.

“They are jars, plain clay jars.” He went closer, until he could see the tops of them. “And they’re sealed, with some kind of wax, I think … They are all sealed. Sealed jars?” He looked at de Montbard and raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Jars of what? What’s in them? And why so many of them?” He reached out a hand towards the nearest one, as though to grasp it and tilt it, but before he could touch it de Montbard caught his sleeve, restraining him gently.

“Careful, Stephen. They could be full of oil, or even wine, but if they are what I believe they might be, then we have found what we came looking for, my friend. We have found our treasure.”

“Treasure?” St. Clair’s voice was strained, his disappointment almost tangible. “This is the treasure we’ve been seeking for so long? In clay pots?”

“Clay pots, true, but ask yourself what they might contain, Stephen. Ask yourself, too, how long it might have been since anyone but we set foot in this chamber. And ask yourself then why these jars should have been laid out so carefully here on this floor and then left there. Now, if I am right, there should be an altar somewhere ahead of us.”

On the point of asking how de Montbard could possibly know that, St. Clair bit back his question and was bleakly unsurprised when they found the promised altar within twenty paces. Despite his lingering disappointment over the clay jars, however, this newest discovery immediately set his pulse hammering again, for it was hardly the kind of altar he had been expecting, and its sheer bulk humbled him. It was immense, unlike any altar he had seen before, larger by far than any altar in any Christian church or basilica that he had visited.

It came into view slowly, seeming to solidify out of the surrounding darkness as they came closer to it, and they heard the footsteps approaching from behind them as Hugh de Payens caught up to them, bringing new light to add to their own. He said nothing to either of them, all his attention reserved for the altar that towered above them, and for a time the three men stood silent, their eyes scanning the planes and highlights of its cliff-like heights. They had approached it from the side, and it was clear from the outset that the top of its sacrificial table could be reached only by means of a broad, high flight of shallow steps that descended from its rear, the bottom-most steps only dimly visible from where they stood. Its frontal surface, stretching left of them, plain and unadorned as it seemed at first sight, revealed itself on closer inspection as being intricately carved and shaped, and covered with thousands upon thousands of tiny carved glyphs.

“And there it is,” Montbard whispered. “Exactly as our records described it. The Lore is accurate. The Order is founded on truth.”

“It’s …” St. Clair swallowed, the sounds as he tried to moisten his suddenly dry mouth clearly audible to the others. “This place is not Jewish at all. It cannot be. They abhor graven images.”

De Montbard tilted his head back to gaze upward. “It’s Egyptian.” A long pause ensued, and then he added, “Everything that is now Jewish came out of Egypt in the beginning, brought out by Moses and his Israelites after centuries of slavery. Our own Lore tells us that. The changes came later, as changes always do, but in the beginning, at the very start of it, it was all Egyptian. And we are looking at the proof of that. This place is ancient beyond imagining, my friends. Moses never returned here to their promised land, but his sons and grandchildren may have stood right here, where we are today, looking up there just like us. We have found the proof of our Order’s tenets.”

“You sound as though you doubted that until now.” St. Clair’s attempt at raillery fell flat, the challenge in his words lost in the fact that he, too, spoke in a hushed whisper.

“Not for a moment,” Montbard replied in the same tone. “What I meant to say was that our Order is founded upon demonstrable proof with this discovery.”

“So be it. I believe you. But what have we found?”

“Knowledge, Brother Stephen. And an altar that is not what it appears to be.”

“Someone else is coming,” Stephen said. They could see another light in the distance. “Is there anything we are not permitted to know? Any sacred secrets?”

It was de Payens who answered this time. “All of these things are secrets, Stephen, and all of them are sacred. Ah, Goff, I thought that might be you. Look at what we have found. André believes our search is at an end.”

“I confess, I am impressed. It is huge. What is it?” Godfrey St. Omer was craning his neck to look up at the altar.

“It’s an altar, Godfrey,” de Montbard answered. “The Lore said it would be here.”

“Did it, by God? Then it must be here for a purpose. Is it hollow? Can we get into it?”

De Montbard shrugged, although St. Omer did not see the gesture. “I don’t know. It is too soon to tell. We will explore it later.”

“Hmm. What about all those jars back there? What’s in them?”

“The treasure we have been looking for.”

That got St. Omer’s attention. He turned his head sharply to look at de Payens, making no attempt to hide his skepticism. “Those things hold the treasure?”

His friend nodded. “De Montbard thinks they do … But he also thinks his altar is not what it appears to be, and that has me curious. Come.”

He led them around to the left, to the front of the altar, until it reared vertically above them, the projecting shelf of its table forming a straight-edged ceiling above their flickering torches, and St. Clair leaned back on his heels to stare up at it.

“It must be the height of four tall men,” he said, then hesitated. “What’s that up there, that large pattern on the stone? Is it a cross? Here, step back and hold up your torches.”

The light from their combined torches revealed a shallow incision high in the stone, the shape of a cross with a loop at its upper end.

“It is a cross,” St. Omer said, his voice filled with surprise. “Is this then a Christian place?”

Again it was André de Montbard who provided the answer. “It is not a cross, my friend, it is an ankh.”

“A what?”

“An ankh.”

“Then I did hear you correctly. An ankh, is it? What’s an ankh, is it something Jewish, some Hebrew symbol of religious significance? I thought the Jews abhorred graven images.”

“That is true. Stephen made the same point, just before you arrived. They do.” De Montbard’s voice was reflective, almost musing, and his neck was still craned backward as he gazed up at the ankh above their heads. “The ankh is a symbol of religious significance, but it is not Jewish, Goff, it is Egyptian, a symbol of life and prosperity, not merely in this world but in the next, the afterworld.”

St. Omer was staring at Montbard, his brows creased in a frown. “But we are in King Solomon’s Temple here. Are you saying that the ancient Hebrews subscribed to Egyptian beliefs?”

“Well, first of all, we are not in the Temple of Solomon. We must be close by it, perhaps even beneath it, but we are not in it. This place is far too large to be the temple. We know that was very small.” He flicked a sideways glance at de Payens, and then his eyes dropped to scan the ground at their feet. “And why should the ancient Hebrews not have subscribed to Egyptian beliefs? They lived there for hundreds of years. It is more than possible that they admired elements, at least, of what the Egyptians believed. But that is no concern of ours for the moment. What concerns us is this other ankh.”

He held his torch low now, pointing at the floor, and they looked down to see a second ankh, not quite as large as the one above them but far more deeply incised into the stone on which Montbard was standing. Before any of them could say anything, he dropped to one knee and waved to St. Clair to do the same, facing him. “Here,” he said, “feel what’s in here.” He dug the fingers of one hand into his end of the cross-arm of the ankh and tried to pry out the dust and dirt that had filled the gap between the outline of the carved figure and the surrounding flagstone, but although some of the material came away, the remainder was too tightly packed. Montbard stopped and looked at St. Clair, who had achieved the same result on his side.

“Would you be surprised to know that what you are holding is a handle?”

St. Clair shrugged. “I would not have thought it, but if you say it is, then I believe you.”

De Montbard nodded, then looked around him at the torches they were holding. “How are these torches doing? How many fresh ones have we left?”

St. Omer did a quick tally. “Six that I can see. The others are in various stages of strength.”

“Damn! Damnation and perdition. I should have anticipated this.”

No one knew what he was talking about, and they all looked blankly at one another until St. Clair asked, “Anticipated what?”

“We are losing the light … the torches. We are about to be plunged back into darkness, and we need far more illumination than we have if we are to complete this task and uncover the remaining treasures.”

“But we have more torches up above, plenty of them.”

“No, we have some, but nowhere near close to as many as we will need. That’s why I think it better to stop now and lay in supplies before we find something exciting and are forced to abandon it in darkness.” He looked at his three listeners, his eyes shifting from face to face, and he could barely contain his glee.

“This is a great day, my friends. We have found what we sought, what our Lore told us was here, and if we find no more than the jars, we will have found enough to justify the existence of our ancient Order. But I would suggest we need to return to the surface and tell the others what we have found. They deserve to know, as much as we do. After that, we will need to gather as much fuel as we can find, for banishing this darkness, and while we are doing that, we should also be purchasing oil lamps, as many as we can obtain, and large, fat candles that can burn for hours on end. If we are to work down here for the length of time I am beginning to think might be necessary, then we are going to need as much light as we can manufacture by any and all means. So we had better climb back out of here and set to work, for the sooner we gather what we need, the sooner we can come back and finish our task.”

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