The Templar Heresy

32

‘What?’ Bronson asked.

‘I think that could be it,’ Angela said, quickly jotting down a series of letters. She turned back to her laptop, accessed a website and typed rapidly. Then she nodded in apparent satisfaction.

‘What?’ Bronson asked again.

Angela pointed to one of the words in the latest version of the inscription that they had produced.

‘See this word here?’ she asked, and Bronson nodded. ‘Frequency analysis suggests that the word is “siruf”, and that’s not a word in Latin that I know. In fact, it’s not a word that any of the online Latin dictionaries recognize. But if you reverse the letters it turns into “furis”.’

‘I’m none the wiser,’ Bronson said.

‘No, but you are better informed, my dear. “Furis” might not be a Latin word that you’ve ever encountered, but I know what it means. It’s the Latin for “thief”. And look at this’ — she pointed at another sequence of letters — ‘that is “sirotpecretni”, which again is not a Latin word, and it doesn’t even look like Latin. But write it backwards and you get “interceptoris”. “Interceptor” is now an English word with an entirely different meaning. But originally it was a Latin word, and it meant a usurper. I think the person who prepared this inscription used Atbash with a code word or words added to the alphabet to make decryption more difficult and then as a final refinement he reversed the ciphertext in its entirety, writing every word backwards. In fact,’ she added, ‘I probably should have guessed that that was a possibility, just because we’re talking about an inscription.’

‘Why?’

‘Because most people are right-handed, and if you’re carving something on a piece of stone you’ll naturally hold the chisel in your left hand and the hammer in your right. If you do that, your left hand obscures what you’ve just carved if you work from left to right, but not if you work from right to left. This is why we believe that some languages, like Hebrew, run from right to left because most of the early examples were inscriptions of various sorts. The language got established by being carved in that way, and nobody ever bothered changing it to run in the opposite direction.’

Their coffee grew cold as they reversed the inscription, transcribing it letter by letter, Angela reading out each one in reverse sequence while Bronson wrote out the text.

‘There don’t seem to be any breaks between these words,’ he said. ‘Or if there are, you’re not telling me where one word ends and another one starts.’

‘That’s because as far as I can see there are no breaks in the inscription and I’ve seen nothing like an interpunct anywhere in the text, which is more or less what I expected.’

This time it was Bronson’s turn to look puzzled.

‘An interpunct was a small dot or occasionally a tiny triangle that was used in ancient and classical Latin script to separate words,’ Angela explained. ‘But it fell out of use round about AD 200, and after that Latin was written in what was known as scripta continua — basically, continuous script without any spaces — for about the next half a millennium. After that, the custom of inserting spaces between words was used.’

‘But if you think this inscription is mediaeval, wouldn’t you expect to find spaces?’

‘If this were a regular inscription or piece of Latin text written on parchment, then I would absolutely agree with you. But this inscription looks to me as if it was a copy of a piece of earlier text and, more importantly, we know it was encrypted. If the scribe or mason who produced it had included spaces to separate the words, that would have made deciphering it easier, which would have defeated the object of the exercise.’

Deciphering the Latin was the first step. Once they’d completed that, or at least the first part of the text, because the section written below a faint but a distinct line that ran across the middle of the inscription defied all her efforts, Angela spent another fifteen minutes or so using an online Latin — English dictionary to translate the text. Then she sat back in her seat, read through what she’d written, and glanced at Bronson.

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘And what does it say, obviously?’ Bronson asked.

‘Oh. Well, not as much as I was hoping, frankly, and certainly not what I was expecting. And that lower part of the inscription still appears to be complete gobble-degook, so I guess that will need some other code words or something, maybe even a different decryption method, before we can read what it says. The section I have translated seems to be a condemnation of some unnamed man. It refers to him as “the thief” and “the usurper” — the two words, oddly enough, that I first recognized in the text when we realized how it had been encrypted — but his identity is never confirmed. It’s almost as if the author would have expected anybody reading it to know precisely who he was talking about. A bit like Christianity today, I suppose, where a church could be referred to as the “house of the lord”, and nobody would be in any doubt which particular lord was meant.’

‘That would be a reference in a positive sense,’ Bronson pointed out, ‘but from what you’ve said this is definitely a negative reference, maybe something to do with the forces of evil, with the Devil, perhaps. After all, in most religions if you accept the existence of God, logically you must also accept the existence of God’s counterpart, the Devil. Without the threat of going to Hell, how could the priests persuade their flock to do what the Church wanted them to do? Could that be it?’

Angela shook her head.

‘That’s a good suggestion,’ she replied, ‘but it doesn’t really work with this text. This doesn’t read like a threat of eternal damnation or anything of that sort, it’s more a sort of lament, really. It’s as if it refers to a member of the Church — or of a particular religion, in this case — who has taken something and used it for his own purposes, though it doesn’t say what was taken or how it was used. But there is a reference right here’ — she pointed to a sentence towards the end of the translated inscription — ‘to an object, or rather objects, of some sort that the writer refers to as the “hoard” or “cluster”.

‘The problem is that almost every Latin word has a number of different but related meanings, and although it’s generally considered to be a precise language, there are obviously different ways of interpreting any piece of text, and especially one that’s at least half a millennium old. There may well have been different meanings ascribed to particular words at the time when it was written, meanings that may never have been recognized by scholars and researchers. We know, for example, that this word — acervus — had multiple meanings. It usually referred to a large quantity of something, hence the translation as a “cluster” or a “hoard”, but it could also mean a funeral pile or even a treasure of some sort.’

‘That sounds more interesting,’ Bronson said. ‘The idea of treasure always raises my interest level. So the short version is that the text might be referring to a cluster of something, or even a hidden treasure, but you have no idea what, although it is whatever this usurper stole.’

Angela shook her head. ‘Not exactly, no. The first part of the inscription refers to this thief or usurper, but unless I’m reading it wrongly the cluster or treasure is something different, something that justified the claims being made. A kind of positive proof that the unnamed man was a thief. Some object that would prove the case against him, if you see what I mean.’

‘But it doesn’t say what it was? Or who he was?’

‘No. Though it does give a hint that this cluster of objects had been secreted somewhere. As I said, each word has more than one possible meaning and interpretation but the relevant section reads something like “within the chamber under the lost temple where the objects were deeply hidden there the key will endure for eternity”. The phrase that’s least subject to different interpretations is “deeply hidden”, but the basic meaning seems clear enough. Something — something of considerable importance to the author of this text — was buried in some kind of underground chamber.’

‘But what about this key that’s being referred to? What do you think that is? A key for a chest or something like that?’

Again, Angela shook her head.

‘I think it’s simpler than that,’ she said. ‘An iron or bronze key intended to open a lock couldn’t really be described as something that would endure for eternity, because eventually it would rust or corrode. I think this piece of text is telling us that we need to find this chamber and that when we do there’ll be some kind of a carving or inscription that will act as a key to decipher the rest of the inscription, the bit that we haven’t cracked so far. That could easily be described as a key that would last for ever.’

‘So what you’re saying is that this somewhat bizarre inscription that was hidden in a temple buried under the sands of Iraq is actually trying to send us off on some kind of a treasure hunt? I’m assuming, obviously, that these objects, this anonymous cluster of things, will have some kind of a value even today, that it is treasure of a sort.’

‘You might be right,’ Angela said, ‘but equally these hidden objects could simply have been valuable documents of some sort, priceless half a millennium ago but essentially worthless now. On the other hand, I suppose it is just about possible that when — or rather if — we manage to follow this trail to the end we might find ourselves looking at something with very real value. The question, really, is whether or not the trail is worth following. Are we going to find ourselves in more danger if we do embark on this hunt than if we just walk away and try to hide?’

Bronson didn’t respond for a couple seconds, then he nodded.

‘Two things,’ he said. ‘First, I don’t think any document or something of that sort would be sufficiently valuable for the clues to its location to be carved on to the wall of an underground temple. To me, that just doesn’t make sense. I think whatever the inscription refers to has to be something of real tangible value.’

‘And the second thing?’

‘It’s pretty obvious that those men are on the hunt as well, and after what happened in Iraq and Milan I have no doubt at all that they will never give up. For whatever reason, the knowledge contained in that inscription is so important to them that they’ve decided that anyone who finds out about it has to die, and what they know has to die with them. I think that even if we walk away from all this, we’ll be in exactly the same danger as we would be if we carried on looking. In fact, it might even be more dangerous, because we’ll be more static targets if we go back to Britain. My vote is that we carry on, keep following the trail and try to stay one step ahead.’

‘Very inspiring,’ Angela said with a slight smile. ‘But the obvious problem is that right now I have no idea at all where we should start our search. Have you?’

‘No,’ Bronson admitted, and looked down again at the sheet of paper on which Angela had written the deciphered and translated text. ‘This chamber,’ he said after a few moments. ‘You’re sure it must be somewhere underground?’

Angela pointed at another part of the translated text.

‘As certain as I can be, yes. The Latin word used is hypogeum, and the Latin adjective hypogeus specifically means “underground”, so I think we’re looking for some sort of room that lies underneath a temple.’

When she said those last few words, a distant memory stirred somewhere in Bronson’s brain, and he leaned across to the keyboard of Angela’s laptop.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘I just had an idea.’

He input a four-word search string into the browser and pressed the enter key as they both stared at the screen. He clicked on the top entry.

‘There you are,’ he said when the page had loaded. ‘I think that’s probably somewhere near the place that the line in the inscription is talking about, the Minheret Hakotel, if that’s how you pronounce the Hebrew: the Western Wall Tunnel in Jerusalem that leads to the Hall of the Hasmoneans. That’s probably the most obvious location that could be referred to as the hall under the lost temple. It’s arguably the most famous temple that doesn’t actually exist any more anywhere in the world, and has been since about the start of the second millennium. If we’re going to keep following this trail, our next stop has to be Israel. And there’s something else,’ he added, scrolling down to look at the rest of the information.

‘What?’ Angela asked.

‘The other thing that might be relevant is that the most famous — or notorious — residents of that vanished temple weren’t the Jews who built it or the Muslims who’ve occupied the site for the last fifteen hundred years, but the Knights Templar. They took their name from the alleged location of the Temple of Solomon on the Temple Mount, and according to legend they spent the first few years they were in Jerusalem excavating the chambers and passageways that lay within the Mount. And of course the Templars were more or less contemporary with the inscription, if your dating of it is anything like accurate. So maybe what we’re looking for has got less to do with the Marsh Arabs of Iraq than with the best-known of all the Western Christian mediaeval military orders.

‘And that,’ he added, ‘brings an entirely new possibility into the mix.’