The Babylon rite

38

Rodez, France

They slept in an Ibis hotel off the autoroute in Rodez. And then it became a kind of blur as they raced the freeways of France, careering down the Autoroutes du Sud. Sometimes it rained, sometimes it didn’t — sometimes there were sudden gashes of vivid blue in the steely winter sky. Then they stopped for diesel. Twitching. Nervous. There were Garfield cartoons plastered on the petrol dispensers.

And onwards. Etape de trucks. Piquenique spot. Toilettes. Two hundred kilometres whirred past. Nina asked him about his childhood to pass the hours and kill the tension. He gave her the precis: boozy brawling father, fragile intelligent mother, a decent school. Then journalism school. Then fistfights with his drunken father, which had left them estranged. Then Sydney. University. Parties. Alicia. And then Alicia dead. The only woman he had ever loved.

Nina was silent, Adam asked, ‘Have you ever been in love?’

The question was intrusive, but it didn’t seem to matter any more; they were so deep into this, together, there was no need for concealment.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Yes, when I was twenty. For a year or two. It scared me.’

‘How?’

‘Because it’s a kind of death, isn’t it?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Love.’ Her voice was soft, and resigned. ‘You lose a bit of yourself, in the other, so it’s a kind of dying. It’s frightening.’

‘But that’s the point,’ said Adam. ‘Without it, we are atomized, whole but alone…’

He paused. The word alone was too much, Adam immediately realized. Nina was alone. She had lost her father, and now her sister. At once he wanted to say sorry, but that, he thought, might compound his error, so he said nothing. Nina was quiet: lost in her grief, probably. He glanced along the autoroute.

The sign said L’Espagne. Spain.

The afternoon was already dwindling, the dark clouds over the Pyrenees were a grey blanket threatening to drench. Suddenly, she said, ‘Do you want to hear about my suicide?’

Adam shrugged his awkwardness. Antonio Ritter had mentioned this: her suicide attempt a year ago. Obviously Ritter had been researching them. Adam had not mentioned it since. ‘Well — uh — Nina — only if you want to.’

Nina stared ahead. ‘I want to. I want to talk. Stops me thinking. About Hannah.’

‘OK.’

‘It was just the once, it was… I’m not sure how serious it was. I took some pills — it was right at the edge of my breakdown. In the worst part, the blackest place. I was drinking and drugging and… y’know. Despair. So I popped some wee helpers and someone found me and my stomach was pumped. And there it fucking is and I will never ever do anything like that again. Because it is so incredibly selfish, now I see what the possibility of my father’s killing himself has done to me. It’s the most selfish act. You have to fight on, even if you can’t. The best way out is always through. Robert Frost.’

Her speech concluded, she sat back and looked at the atlas.

Adam wondered if he should take the chance, and talk about Hannah’s ‘suicide’. Nina had refused to believe this when the police had told her. Maybe he could approach it obliquely, now she had truly opened up. It might be cruel, but maybe he had no choice.

‘Nina. Do you believe what the police say, about… Hannah being in some kind of cult?’

Her reply was unfazed, but unbelieving. ‘Ach, no.’

‘You sure? How can you be sure?’

‘Just am. She was not that kind of girl. Just not. A swinger? Sex parties? No, not Hannah. She was pure vanilla. A sweetheart.’

Adam glanced across the gear well. Her eyes were wet and shining, staring at the dark mountains ahead.

‘So what connects her to the other suicides? You know what, um, what Mark Ibsen said?’

‘I don’t know. I do know the police are not infallible!’ Her voice was cracked. ‘A sex-and-death cult? In London? Including my dad? Linked to Peru? How much sense does that make, Ad?’

‘It makes sense given that it is the only explanation that covers all the bases… all the many…’ He swallowed the awkwardness like a tiny fishbone. ‘Like the… you know…’

‘The fact my sister wanted to be raped? Aye. By a psycho. Thank you. Thank you so very fucking much.’

Her bitterness and anger filled the entire car. Perhaps, Adam felt, this was necessary. Let it all out.

It was dark now, and silent, and so he could hear her quiet, half-suppressed sobs and so he said nothing. He turned on the radio as they ascended the Pyrenees; the cold air of the mountains surrounded them, even colder than the frigid Aveyron hills.

The tense and waiting silence lasted an hour. Adam was just beginning to think about places to stop, another little hotel, a pension in the hills, somewhere near the frontier, discreet, when she spoke. ‘Let’s just drive through the night.’

‘What?’

‘Let’s just get into fucking Spain. The next place my dad visited was Sierra de Gata. That’s almost two days away, right across Spain, in Extremadura near Portugal. A thousand miles. We need to keep going.’

They were up in the high mountains now, off the motorway, and driving through some large but grimy Pyrenean town. His headlights picked out posters and adverts, a sign for Monsieur Bricolage. Christmas decorations swung dangerously back and forth, above the roads, in the wind. Joyeux Noel.

‘But…’

‘Wasn’t that the agreement — keep moving?’

He saw the logic; he nodded and yawned as he drove. The sky was high and black. Stars glittered down, the moon shone placidly on the concrete warehouses of Carrefour. The countryside returned. And with it the scent of a hard, cold, tangy mountain night. Adam inhaled, deeply, trying to keep himself awake, and not entirely succeeding.

‘Let me drive Adam, you must be knacked.’

He was grateful for the offer; on a little meander of the mountain road he pulled up, and they swapped seats. She drove on, not as fast as him but he didn’t mind. He wanted to sleep. He was exhausted and glad they were leaving France.

The border was barely there; a few flags fluttered in the ski centres and villages, on either side. The blue and red and white of France, then the red and gold of Spain, with its royal crest. The red and gold of blood and sand.

They were soon descending through long steep cold moonlit valleys. At last Adam slept, properly and for several hours.

When he woke up it had all changed. The mountains had gone, the green valleys had disappeared. The scenery was brown and flat and ugly: the lower Navarre, the sere and sullen Spanish interior. They drank cafes con leche in a noisy Spanish motorway service station with fatted hams hanging from the ceiling and truck drivers in thick coats watching a recorded Real Madrid football match on a crap TV and downing tiny glasses of alcohol with their morning cortados.

The immensity of inland Spain devoured them. This time Nina slept as he drove the dusty windswept regions. Navarre, Rioja, Castile — they were heading south into wilder, truer Spain. The first glimpse of mountains, far away, broke the horizon; a welcome sight after the brown and endless Castilian plateau. But still far away.

As evening fell they arrived in a town which was only half built, surrounded by white, hollow, unfinished concrete apartment blocks stretching into the cold semi-desert where no one lived, the abortions of a property bust.

They drove a couple of kilometres and found a turning to a motorway hotel, another Ibis: same soap, same unsatisfactory narrow pillows in their rooms. Supper was a few average tapas and cheap Rioja in an almost deserted hotel bar where they talked about the Templars, not just because it was central to their pursuit but because it allowed them not to talk directly about what had happened.

Nina finished one saucer of patatas bravas, and napkinned the hot tomato sauce from her lips. ‘So we know the Templars allegedly had a Babylon rite. Some of the medieval chroniclers actually called it this — “a Babylonian rite or ritual”. Referring to the, y’know, whole gay sex thing. The initiation ritual.’

‘Yes. The phrase was pejorative, hinting at the homosexual acts. So, what we need to know is, where did this initiation ritual come from, and what did it comprise? Possibly some pagan gods; that seems likely. And they must have got it from Peru, the Moche. There must be a link. Otherwise your dad would not have gone there.’

‘And this pagan ritual must have hypnotized them, or put them in a trance…’

Adam looked at her. ‘And of course this Templar rite must have been the same ritual, or very similar, to that enacted by the kids in London. The suicides?’

‘Yep.’ She drank half of her glass of wine. The barman was staring at them with definite interest as he counted the day’s meagre takings. There was just one other customer, playing the fruit machine, fruitlessly. The pings and electronic whistles filled the bar.

‘By the way the ritual also explains the-’ she stabbed at the last chunk of fried chorizo, glistening with oil, ‘-the violence and courage of the Templars.’

‘Sorry?’

‘We know they were famously brave, right? A few of them on the battlefield could turn a whole battle in favour of the Christians, even if they were totally outnumbered.’ She reached for her bag and brought out Archibald McLintock’s Guide. ‘Listen, my dad says in the intro, “In the early years of the Latin East, the Templars quickly developed a fearsome reputation as the best-trained soldiers the Franks possessed, showing an almost suicidal bravery at times. This reached an apogee under the Mastership of Gerard de Ridefort, who died during a reckless attack at Acre.”’ Her eyes met his.

‘An almost suicidal bravery…?’ He swallowed the very last of his Rioja. ‘Yes. If they were aroused to a homoerotic frenzy by these rituals, then they would have yearned for pain and violence, even to the point of death.’

‘So the only question is what the actual ritual was, what they believed, what exactly they worshipped. And of course how this hypnosis worked. Still quite a big list.’ She sighed.

Adam was writing, and nodding. Then he closed his notebook. Nina stood up. They kissed formally, even chastely, like brother and sister. The kiss was somehow too chaste: a new awkwardness. And then they went to their separate rooms. Adam took with him another bottle of Leclerc Rioja, and drank half of it in his room, watching a Spanish lottery show on the cheap Korean TV, as he waited for sleep. For the inevitable dreams about Alicia, wandering around a school, looking for him, naked. He’d been having this dream for a week. Every single night.

The dream was cruel because sometimes the school turned into a white pristine spaceship and still he couldn’t talk to her, and then he realized why he couldn’t talk to her: because she was outside the spaceship, beyond the thick glass, she was outside and floating, against the stars, floating away and smiling. And he was inside, trapped.

And then at 4 a.m. he woke, startled, horrified, panting. Horrified by what? A frightening noise: a rat? Something scratching at the door? Someone trying to break in? The man with the gun going to slice out his heart? Adam’s pulse was frenzied and erratic. He reached for the light, then went to the door. Outside, an Ibis corridor carpeted with Ibis carpets stretched down to the Ibis fire door. He heard a door slamming downstairs. He sat on the bed for an hour, staring at nothing. And then realized what the dream meant. It was something Alicia had said once: that we are all, all mortal humans, like astronauts, heading on a mission into deep space, heading for the stars: every day we live, we are all on a journey to a place we do not know, on a mission from which we can never return. Sailing for the edge of the world. Goodbye.

Adam felt like crying. Alicia. But instead he slept again.

In the morning a scratchy sun was cold, trapped behind the glazing of thin wintry clouds. The tawny Spanish plains stretched to a horizon of pylons. Then those far, tempting mountains.

Adam’s mind was more focussed. Perhaps interpreting the dream had helped. He said, firmly, ‘America.’

Nina frowned. ‘What?

‘America! That’s still the other big mystery. How did the Templars get all this stuff from South America, from the Moche, from Peru? Columbus didn’t reach Hispaniola till, what, 1489? The Templars were long defunct before by then. How did this ritual, this sacred trance, get from Peru to Europe, before Columbus?’

Nina shrugged, inertly. She looked as if she had been crying again, in the night. Adam pursued his own thoughts.

By the afternoon the sulking, ugly plains had at last given way to those prettier, if chilly, hills, and to murmurous wind-bitten pine forests. Here was their destination, a village called Trevejo. They parked and disembarked.

The wind was cutting as they walked through the humble streets, staring in perplexity at the low stone hovels, made from field boulders. These incredibly mean, almost Neolithic thoroughfares apparently led to the Templar church and castle.

The Templars built here in hilly Trevejo, Adam knew from his research, because it was the frontier of the Reconquista, when Spain and Portugal were wrested back from the Moor. The castle was built during another violent Templar crusade against the heathen.

As they walked, he thought of that effigy in Templar church: the knight still clutching his sword, eight hundred years later. Ready to fight for Christ, entranced by the violence of his trade.

He already knew about Extremadura: he’d been here on holiday years before. This land was notably poor today, just as it had always been. This was Extremadura, literally the Land of Extremity, a place of impoverishment and drought and burning sun, yet rich in men and valour.

Extremadura, the lost realm of Spain, was the womb of warriors. This was where Habsburg eagles soared over bleak little villages, which somehow bred men who conquered entire empires. Pizarro. Valdivia. Alvarado. Cortes. All of them came from here. Together, these men had defeated the mighty Aztec and the imperial Inca, together these men from poor, provincial sun-lashed Extremadura had vanquished two continents, discovered new deserts and jungles, and sailed the entire Amazon for the very first time.

Adam mused. He thought very, very hard as they walked to the castle.

Extremadura was also the last refuge of the Spanish Templars. A small town south of here — Jerez de los Caballeros — Jerez of the Knights — was a town once owned by the Templars, and it was the place the Templars had made their final stand against the kings of Spain: one tower of the Templar castle was still known as the Bloody Tower, because this was where the cornered Templars threw themselves off the battlements, hurling themselves to their deaths, rather than be captured.

And tiny little Jerez de los Cabelleros also produced two great conquistadors all by itself: Hernando de Soto, who travelled with Pizarro to Peru, and who became governor of Cuba, and who died near the Mississippi searching for some legendary gold in Florida; and Vasco Nunez de Balboa, the first European to cross the Americas, the first European to see the Pacific from the American coast, another man obsessed with gold.

Two great conquistadors, from just one tiny Templar town?

Was that really mere coincidence?

‘There it is, the castle,’ said Nina.

The ruined Templar castle of Trevejo was perched on the loftiest outcrop high above the village, which itself stared down from the Sierra de Gata on the roads into Portugal. It was a good site to build a castle if you wanted to watch the passes, or check any Muslim attacks.

For a few moments they stood on the silent precipice, just outside the castle, gazing down at the roads which snaked through the green, hilly pinewoods. There was a Templar flag flying from the keep of the castle: the red cross pattee on a field of white. The silence all around was imperious. Just the wistful flicking of the flag in the wind, and an eagle mewing in the distance, as it circled above the wintered emptiness.

Then they descended, picking their way through the perilous rocks, until they reached the Templar church, a few hundred metres beneath the castle on a ledge.

‘My God.’

Adam didn’t have to ask what had surprised her. Graves. Tiny little slots of graves, human-shaped slots in hard stone. Just like the graves at Penhill.

Adam took some brisk and anxious photos. Then they retreated quickly down the stone road, past the raddled houses, to the stoneflagged plaza of Trevejo, and they climbed in the car and Nina drove down the winding road, as Adam furiously searched the net on his phone.

At last he sat back and said, ‘This is it. The connection. With America. This is how it all links. ’