The Sword of the Templars

8

Driving Peggy’s rental, they crossed the border at Niagara Falls and turned northeast, roughly following the shore of Lake Ontario under cloudless summer skies, reaching the city of Toronto ninety minutes later. Neither Peggy nor Holliday had ever been there, and both were surprised at the city’s size. In fact Toronto was the fifth-largest metropolitan area in North America, with a population of something over six million, spread out along twenty-nine miles of Lake Ontario and occupying 229 square miles of territory that had once belonged to the Algonquin Indians.

To Peggy Blackstock and Doc Holliday it looked like a cleaner version of Chicago, with a modern subway system rather than the antiquated El train. There was an enormous, soaring concrete structure on the waterfront that reminded Holliday of the Seattle Space Needle on steroids and a domed stadium that Peggy thought looked like a gigantic vanilla cupcake. They booked into the Park Hyatt two blocks from the center of the city, the intersection of Bloor and Yonge where east became west and uptown became down.

The hotel was directly across Bloor Street from the pseudo-Norman pile of the Royal Ontario Museum, complete with turrets and a grand columned entrance that made it look more like a courthouse than a place of learning. Recently some museum committee in its infinite wisdom had decided that the building needed to be modernized, and an architect had been hired. The result was a giant glass and steel, sharply pointed crystalline extension that looked like some science-fiction starship that had fallen to earth and fused itself to the old building.

Kitty-corner to the hotel was another large building of the same vintage but with more columns. Like a lot of the property in the city center the building was part of the University of Toronto. The top floor was home to the university’s Centre for Medieval Studies, a rabbit warren of offices that might have come out of a novel by Charles Dickens, all dust and echoing corridors and creaking wooden floors.

Steven Braintree’s office fit the profile of a Medieval History professor: stacks of books, files, and papers on every flat surface, sagging bookcases, overflowing files, cabinets, and cardboard boxes on the floor, and a dying aspidistra plant on the radiator with a single wilting purple flower straining toward the narrow grimy window. Braintree himself was something else again. He looked to be in his mid-thirties with shoulder-length dark hair, dark intelligent eyes behind a pair of fashionable Prada glasses. He was dressed in jeans and a white T covered by an expensive-looking short sleeve, green silk shirt.

Braintree had only known Uncle Henry by reputation and a few telephone calls before their meeting in March, but he was shocked by the news of his death. According to Braintree, Henry had never discussed an actual sword on his visit in the spring, but he had seemed quite intrigued when Braintree told him of some recent discoveries in the Vatican Archives that suggested there was a complex encoding system that had first been used during the early Crusades that involved “common decryptors.” The decryptors were usually well-known passages of scripture that were common to both the sender and the receiver of the coded message. The encryptors were usually variations on the Ancient Greek “skytale” system.

The skytale was a baton or wand of a particular length and diameter on which a strip of parchment would be wound, like paper on a roll. The message, sometimes in plaintext and sometimes numerically or alphabetically shifted, would be written out along the length of the baton. When it was unwound it would be incomprehensible gibberish and would only make sense again if it was wrapped around another, identical skytale. What the documents in the Vatican had described was a combination of this method, the Caesar Shift. Thriller fans might recognize it as the same “book” code in Ken Follett’s spy novel The Key to Rebecca.

“The gold wire wrapping on the hilt of a sword,” Holliday said with a nod.

Braintree smiled broadly, then clapped his hands together.

“Exactly!” the young man said. “That was your uncle’s hypothesis. If you somehow marked the length of wire at the appropriate points to coincide with the text on a common document, the wire would take the place of the parchment wrapped around the skytale. Even if the sword fell into the wrong hands it would be useless unless you knew the key! How did you figure it out?”

Holliday reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out the coil of gold wire that had been wrapped around the steel tang. He handed it to Braintree. The young man tipped his glasses up onto his forehead and examined the wire closely, running his thumb and forefinger down its length.

“Bumps,” he murmured. “Like little beads.”

“Gold solder,” agreed Holliday. “Unevenly spaced, but repeating. A total of seventy-eight beads as you call them.”

“Not a very complex message,” said Peggy.

“The beads aren’t the message.” Braintree smiled. “They’re like the rotors on the German Enigma machine from the Second World War. If you lay the beads on the wire along the key text it will give you the appropriate transpositions to use.”

“I’m lost,” said Peggy, frowning.

“I think I see it,” said Holliday. “If you repeat the spaces between the beads throughout the text, that will give you the message.”

“That’s it,” nodded Braintree.

“I’m still lost,” muttered Peggy.

The professor shrugged.

“It doesn’t really matter unless you’ve got the key.” He paused. “Where’s the sword now?” he asked. “You didn’t bring it with you by any chance, did you?”

“Not the kind of thing you want to carry across borders these days,” said Holliday. “It’s safely tucked away.” In fact they’d taken the sword to Miss Branch, who’d tucked the weapon away in the university’s security vault.

“Too bad,” said Braintree, “I would have loved to have seen it.”

Peggy reached into her bag and took out a handful of digital prints she’d made of the sword. Braintree looked at each of them carefully.

“An arming sword,” the professor said, nodding. “Early thirteenth century if the Templar seal is any indication.” He looked up at Holliday. “You’re sure it’s authentic?”

“I might be fooled by a good reproduction,” he said, “but not Uncle Henry. Besides, who would go to all the trouble?”

“If it’s real it would be worth an enormous amount of money. I’ve got a few rivals across the road at the Royal Ontario Museum who’d probably sell their own mothers to get a sword like that in their collection. It would be worth faking just for the financial reward let alone anything else.”

“Grandpa wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble over a fake,” said Peggy.

“The inscription is a little bit over the top though, don’t you think? Alberic in Pelerin? Do you know the provenance? Whose collection was it in?”

“Adolf Hitler’s,” said Holliday flatly, enjoying the startled expression on the Canadian professor’s face.

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

Braintree looked through the pictures again, then nodded slowly.

“It makes sense, historically. Hitler was intrigued by all that pseudo-scientific garbage Nietzschean stuff about the Aryan race. Blood and Soil, the Ring of the Nibelungen. Valkyries. Dwarf swordsmiths, Templars, Masonic rituals. He would have loved it.” Braintree gave a short, sour laugh. “Who knows, maybe he thought it was Tirfing.”

“What’s that?” Peggy asked.

“The sword of Odin,” said Braintree. “If you like Wagnerian opera.”

Peggy snorted. “Only what I heard on the soundtrack of Apocalypse Now,” she answered.

“Then again…” mused the professor. “Maybe it’s not that Alberic at all.”

“There’s more than one?” Peggy said.

“Yes, actually,” said Braintree. He got up from behind his desk and began going through piles of books stacked up on the floor. Not finding what he wanted, he moved to the bookcases that lined one wall, humming to himself and occasionally pulling a book halfway out to examine it.

“Aha!” he said at last. “Got you.”

“Who?” Holliday asked.

“Him,” said Braintree, handing him the thick hardcover book. Holliday read the title: The Templar Saint, Alberic of Cоteaux and the Rise of the Cistercian Order. He looked below the title. The author was somebody named Sir Derek Carr-Harris with a lot of letters after his name, including “D. Litt. Oxon” and “KCBE.” A knight commander of the British Empire, one better than Paul McCartney, and a doctorate from Oxford, to boot. Impressive. And the name was vaguely familiar, as well.

“You think this is the Alberic inscribed on the sword?”

“It would make sense, especially since the word ‘fecit’ in Latin can mean ‘made for’ as well as ‘made by.’ ”

“Made for Alberic in Pelerin,” said Peggy.

“It could easily be a play on words,” suggested Braintree, taking the book back from Holliday and flipping through it to the index. “The message was intended for Alberic, and the sword was manufactured in Pelerin for the express purpose of getting the message to him, probably at the monastery in Cоteaux.”

“Where’s that?” Peggy asked.

“France,” replied Braintree. “Just south of Dijon.” He nodded to himself, running his finger down a page in the index then stopping. “Here it is,” he said, a note of triumph in his voice. He went back to his desk and picked up one of Peggy’s photographs. He glanced at it, then handed the picture to Holliday. It was a close-up of the chops on the tang of the sword and the inscription.

“De laudibus novae militiae, addressed to Hugues de Payens, first Grand Master of the Templars and Prior of Jerusalem.”

“I don’t understand,” said Holliday.

“The initials D.L.N.M. De Laudibus Novae Militiae. It was a famous letter written to Payens, the founder of the Templar Order. It’s the code key.” He paused. “And there’s one more thing, the clincher.”

“What?” Holliday asked, feeling a surge of excitement as faint clues from the past began drifting up to the present day like whispering ghosts as the mystery was unraveled.

“Bees,” said Braintree, pointing to the stamped design in the photograph. “In France Alberic of Cоteaux is the patron saint of bees and beekeepers.”

Peggy picked the book up off the professor’s desk.

“I know this name,” she said, thinking hard. Finally she got it. “The photograph in Grandpa Henry’s office. The one taken in Cairo or Alexandria in 1941. One of the men in the photograph was Derek Carr-Harris.”

“Who went to Oxford,” said Holliday, staring at the cover of the book in her hand.

“Who wrote down the directions to his country house in Leominster on the Old Members invitation,” finished Peggy, grinning.

Braintree looked confused.

“Did I miss something?”