Templar's Quest

54

Mont de la Lune, The Languedoc

1415 hours

Down the rabbit hole Sir Prancelot merrily traipsed.

‘Although the bastard should have been more wary than merry,’ Cædmon grumbled, accidentally bashing the crown of his head against the low-slung stone ceiling. Holding his rucksack in one hand and the torch in the other, he compressed his tall frame in an uncomfortable stoop-shouldered twist, the constrictive corridor designed for a knight of shorter stature.

He’d trekked approximately one hundred and fifty feet when the corridor abruptly switched directions, veering ninety degrees to the left. At which point the passageway gradually sloped downward. When he was a doctoral candidate at Oxford, he’d tramped through catacombs and medieval crypts, but he’d never navigated anything as strangely surreal as this. Whether by design or accident, the passageway put him in mind of a hewn birth canal.

Which, in turn, incited an existential unease, Cædmon’s heart beating noticeably faster.

He estimated that he’d traversed another hundred feet when the passageway unexpectedly ended. Bewildered, he awkwardly turned around, aiming his torch in the opposite direction. The golden beam struck an aperture, approximately two feet in diameter, near the ceiling.

Committed to following the trail to its terminus, he peered inside the hole which opened into a long tunnel. Satisfied that the shaft was wide enough for him to engineer through, he shoved his rucksack and torch into the hole. Hefting himself into the chute, he proceeded by slithering centipede-like, pushing with his feet as he dragged his body forward with his hands.

Nearly twenty minutes had lapsed at a maddeningly sluggish pace when Cædmon belatedly realized that there was no room to turn around. If the tunnel didn’t expand sufficiently further down the line, he’d have to make a backward egress. A tortuous prospect.

‘Although that might be a moot point,’ he muttered as the balls of his shoulders scraped against the rough stone, the tunnel suddenly tapering.

Unable to move – either forward or backward – he drew in a ragged breath.

I’m plugged tight as a cork in a bottle.

Biting back a yelp of pain, he pulled his elbows together, squeezing his shoulders towards his chest. Awkwardly contorted, he shimmied through the narrow orifice, relieved when it widened to its former diameter.

In dire need of a drink, he opened his rucksack and retrieved a water bottle. Having begun the day with three full bottles, he was down to his last litre. Gracelessly tipping his head – and banging it against the top of the shaft – he took a measured sip. As he returned the bottle to the rucksack, the beam on his torch flickered twice. The only warning he had before the light went out, plunging the tunnel into a stultifying darkness.

Unable to see anything, he swiped his hand from side to side, searching for the malfunctioning torch. Snatching hold of it, he pushed the ON switch. When that produced no result, he banged the torch against the palm of his hand.

‘Shite!’

Discouraged by the latest setback, he conceded that the venture was proving a mental and physical challenge; the thought of squirming backward, in the dark, was too daunting to contemplate at the moment.

Exhausted, he squirmed on to his back, pulling the rucksack under his head. A makeshift pillow. The phrase ‘silent as the grave’ took on a whole new meaning as Cædmon folded his arms across his chest and closed his eyes.

I’m interred in a damned stone coffin in a remote mountain. And no one knows that I am even here.

‘Not to worry. “The maid is not dead, but sleepeth”,’ he whispered, envisioning his red-haired mother eternally resting in a satin-lined casket. ‘ “Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.” ’

The same dust that closed Juliana Howe’s eyes two years ago.

Christ.

Because his mother died in childbirth, grief had never been part of that equation. Which might be why he was so ill-equipped to handle the emotional tumult that erupted in the wake of Juliana’s death. It was as though his chest cavity had been pried open, his heart flayed and the organ left to hang in long bloody strips.

In the months that followed, the raw grief mutated into a numbed apathy. An improvement, some might claim. Cædmon wasn’t so sure. At least with the former, you knew that you had a heart. Never quite certain with the latter.

So many milestones, so many mistakes, he thought, unable to shut off the memories that flashed in frantic succession: Holding a white lily at his mother’s grave. ‘Say a prayer, Cædmon. The poor woman martyred herself to bring you into the world.’ No prayers for Juliana. What was the point? And no lilies. Hate lilies. Long-stemmed white roses instead. Damn. Pricked my thumb. And now I’ve stained my shirt. Jules would be amused. She loved to laugh. Or was that sweet Kate? Such a lovely sight perched in an oriel window seat at Queen’s College. ‘There wasn’t anything quite as beautiful as when the setting sun tinted your centuries-old window a rich shade of tangerine.’ Yes, yes, quite true. The sun never sets on the British Empire. Or the Kingdom of Heaven, for that matter. Since ‘I cannot bend Heaven, I shall move Hell.’ Oh, sod Virgil. Time spent with the devil takes its toll. And now Lucifer wants his bloody stone back!

Chilled to the bone, Cædmon shivered. A heavy weight suddenly pressed against his chest, as though the granite shaft was cinching around him. In fact, his heart muscle was so painfully constricted, he wondered if he might be on the verge of a full-blown heart attack.

Suppose this is the close of business, eh?

For the last two years he’d heard the rapacious lion panting at his backside. Only a matter of time before the beast caught up with him.

‘You had it coming, old boy.’

Did I? Maybe so. In that case, now I lay me down to sleep …

… forever and a day.