The Babylon rite

1307

The squalor and stench would have been indescribable, Adam decided. Dozens and dozens of men locked in here for years.

‘Et voici un dessin, satirique, du Pape, et ici Saint Michel, a droit.’

The terrors of the knights would have been intense. Waiting in here, ragged and half-starved, half-crazed even, fearful of the jingle of the gaoler’s key, wondering if their turn had come to be taken for the torturing. To have their feet burned with hot irons, to be put to the rack.

To be persuaded to slash your own face into ribbons.

He glanced anxiously behind him at the big old wooden door where Nina was gazing closely at some of the medieval graffiti. Like a botanist inspecting an orchid. Then she turned and asked the guide a question, in French. Adam didn’t understand any of it, though he tried to overhear. He heard the name McLintock.

The corpulent guide nodded, and answered. Nina frowned and nodded and then she looked at the graffiti. There was something in this conversation, something significant, maybe something worrying.

Frustrated, he turned to scrutinize the graffiti. All the interior walls of Domme castle were covered with it. His reading of McLintock’s book had told him the graffiti had been carved into the stone by the Templars — with their teeth: their own rotten, fallen-out teeth. Because they had no knives, no metal tools. To carve symbols in stone with your teeth meant real, determined purpose. The graffiti assuredly, therefore, meant something.

But what? To Adam the graffiti just looked like random scribblings, inane doodles, squares and runes, grail bearers and cartoon popes, all of them surprisingly coarse, but then maybe that was to be expected.

Etched with human teeth.

His mind drifted back to Temple Bruer. More brutal and strange graffiti, in another cold and threatening place. The fear lurked, and stirred. He wanted to get going. Always keep moving, that was their mutual agreement. Their pursuers still had the notebooks. Once they realized that his and Nina’s protective custody in Britain was a sham, just a paragraph in the press — and that could happen at any time — they would come after them. Fast and ruthless.

Gesturing vividly, he gained Nina’s attention, made a car-steering motion with two hands. She acknowledged, and swivelled, and raised a finger: one more minute.

Nina used the minute to converse with the guide. The fat Frenchwoman tutted and sighed, she was evidently keen to escort them all out of the chilly dungeon that was Domme castle, probably so she could hurry home to a nice hot lunch. But she dawdled at Nina’s insistence, answering her questions.

The dialogue was quick, and intense. Nina’s white face seemed paler than ever. Shocked? Then the guide shrugged as if to say, I know nothing else. And they were led from the building.

As they walked quickly to the car, parked beyond the town walls, he gave in to his frustrations. ‘So, what was all that about? What did she say? The guide?’

‘She recognized me.’

‘You? Jesus!’

‘Not in that way. She recognized my accent, and my name. And she remembered Dad’s visit.’

Adam opened the car door and slid inside. She did the same. He buckled his belt. Trying to calm the jitters. ‘How could she remember your dad, out of thousands of tourists?’

‘Because my Dad spent three whole days examining the graffiti. And he was obviously a scholar and he asked the guide lots of questions.’

The diesel engine rumbled as Adam urgently turned the key, and they drove fast, away from Domme. The D783. East.

‘OK. What did he want to see?’

‘The guide recalled him asking about certain images.’ Nina was writing in Adam’s notebook as she spoke. Adam notched up another gear, driving even faster, and listening to her words. ‘He was particularly interested in all the images of the Grail. And that odd one with the woman carrying the long cup or the yard arm thing.’

Adam had seen that. ‘An alembic? Yes. Isn’t that what they call it? Kind of a long-necked vase?’

‘We know the Templars had associations with the Grail,’ she said, ‘but I don’t understand.’

Adam braked, abruptly, at a junction. ‘Nina? The map. Which way? I’ve no idea where I am.’

She reached for the atlas. ‘Drulhe. Drulhe… it’s barely visible. Totally remote.’ Her finger rested on a page. ‘Take the D801 to Gourgatel, we have to cross the autoroute, the A20.’

‘How far? How long?’

She pouted, pensively, held the atlas up, to get the best of the frail winter light. ‘Two hours. Three, maybe?’

He scrutinized the sky. They had just enough time to get to Drulhe today and see it in daylight. But only if they drove very fast.

As they drove, in tense and mordant silence, he thought of the sense of remoteness he’d felt at Temple Bruer, lost on blasted Lincoln Heath. So many Templar preceptories were hidden away, Penhill too. Why? What were they hiding? What did they do there, in their Babylon rites? Something to do with sex? Something brutal and pagan, related to the Green Men? Something with a Grail? But why the buried skeletons?

The answer was out there, in the ether. Adam felt like he was dialling an old shortwave radio. Picking up stray voices, snatches of foreign tongues, a jaunt of hissing music, and then glimpses of English: a phrase or two, glimpses of something that made some kind of sense.

And then it was gone and the message fuzzed out like a radio station lost on the motorway, and Nina said, ‘No, Adam. South at Foissac, the D45. Adam!’

He squealed the car right, noisily. He was driving way too fast now, making locals scowl and gesticulate, as their rented diesel Renault raced through each pretty stone village with its little boucheries and stooped old women, scowling on street corners by La Maison de la Presse, all those yellow signs with a scarlet quill.

It began to drizzle as they reached Drulhe, which was utterly and defeatingly lost in the undulating green hills of Aveyron. They parked by the church. Nina fetched her father’s book from the back seat.

There was virtually nothing in Drulhe. A sign at the church door, in four languages, admitted as much: Once part of extensive Templar properties in Aveyron, Drulhe church was very significantly rebuilt in the nineteenth century, and almost no traces remain of the knightly presence. Today the church is part of the Route of Milk…

The Route of Milk? Some desperate and failing tourist gimmick. This place was so devoid of interest they’d had to invent some useless ruse to get people to come here and save depopulating rural southern France from terminal decline. But, then, why did Nina’s father come here, when there were so many more important Templar properties a few hours down the autoroute, like Saint Eulalie and Couvertoirade?

Yet Archie McLintock had brusquely ignored them on his long odyssey across Europe, and he came to drear little Drulhe.

That was it. Adam turned to Nina. ‘He came here.’

‘Aye. I know-’

‘No, Nina, he came here. He didn’t go to Chinon, or to Saint Eulalie, or to any of the really notable Templar sites. La Rochelle. Sergeac.’ He didn’t care if he was getting the pronunciation wrong. He grabbed the book rudely from Nina’s hands. ‘What does your father say about Drulhe in the book? Look! Nothing at all. It’s so insignificant he doesn’t even mention it. Whatever traces of the Templar there are here, he must, at first, have decided they were so unimportant that when he wrote the book, he didn’t mention the place. But then when he was putting together his theory — he came back here, not anywhere else.’

She took the book back, clutched it to her chest.

Adam pointed at the glass-fronted sign by the church door, spattered by the hesitant rain. ‘Look at what the sign says. “There are virtually no signs of the knightly presence”. What does that mean, Nina? That there is something here, some scant trace. And therefore whatever it is must be totally crucial. Because your dad drove through the endless bloody hills of Aveyron to get here, not anywhere else. Come on!’

They went inside the church.

And it was empty of the knightly presence.

The entire church was devoid of signs. It was yet another typically disappointing French church interior, almost rebuilt during the nineteenth century, scoured of accumulated meaning by the Revolution and French secularism.

‘Outside, then,’ she said.

She was right. Whatever they sought had to be an exterior feature: like the door of Temple Church in London.

The winter daylight was almost gone; the drizzle had hardened into solid rain. Everything was telling them to give up, there is nothing here, the knightly presence is undetectable. Drenched by the wet, they crept around the dull grey church. A man watched them from a parked car.

Panic and fear were irrepressible but Adam repressed them, convincing himself: why shouldn’t this man watch them, out of sheer curiosity? What they were doing was bizarre, inching around an Aveyronnais church in the pouring rain, in frigid December, in a deserted village, looking at Victorian guttering as if it was the Ark of the fucking Covenant ‘Adam!’ She reached for his hand, pointed. ‘Up there.’

It was the tiniest slab of medieval stonework. Just a metre long, yellow and old, and inset into the nineteenth-century bricks. And into the stone the Templars or their masons had carved several symbols.

The stone was so high up that Adam could barely see what was inscribed on it. He swore at his lack of binoculars. He looked again. It took him a few seconds to visually compute. On the right was some complex symbol. Squares in circles? He had no idea what that was. The middle symbol could have been a Grail, or maybe not. But the symbol on the far left was much more easily interpreted.

It was a pentagram. An angular, five-pointed star.

Nina was writing in the book, trying to shield its pages from the rain with her arm as she did so. Adam was thinking as hard as he had ever thought, and furiously searching the net on his phone.

A pentagram, a pentacle, a pentagram. What did that symbolize?

The wounds of Christ.

The five senses, the symbol of health. The key of Solomon. Maybe the elements.

And the devil. The pentagram symbolized the devil.