The Templar Heresy

50

Almost two hours after they’d started, Angela finally put down the piece of paper she’d been working on. The writing on it followed a series of wandering lines, the text marked by numerous crossings-out but it did, finally, make some kind of sense.

‘Is that it?’ Bronson asked.

‘Pretty much, yes,’ Angela replied. ‘There are still one or two words that are a bit ambiguous in translation, but I think it’s more or less right. There’s no point in reading out the first section of the text, because it’s nothing more than a condemnation of the actions of Yeshua bar Yahosef bar Yaqub, Jesus Christ, the usurper. There was obviously no love lost there. It’s the next bit that’s interesting. Confusing, but interesting.’

‘So confuse and interest me at the same time,’ Bronson said. ‘I’m all ears.’

‘Right. The next section makes a reference to the “brotherhood”. That’s not an exact translation, but it’s as close as I can get. I have the feeling that the Latin word probably had a slightly different meaning at that time, and might well have been rather more specific. But in my opinion the precise meaning is made clear in the very next section, because it states that the members of the brotherhood wear the “splayed cross”, and you know as well as I do what that’s likely to refer to.’

‘The best-known symbol of the Knights Templar,’ Bronson replied. ‘The croix pattée. They wore it from 1147 right up until the day that the order was purged and dissolved.’

‘Exactly. So what we have here is an explicit reference to the Knights Templar, and he then goes on to describe the movement of an object, or perhaps more likely a number of objects. I’ll come back to that later, because there’s another reference that I don’t quite understand. But the route or path that these objects followed is perfectly clear, as long as we can identify the various waypoints. The places where the hoard spent various periods of time.’

She glanced at Bronson to make sure that he was still following, which he was.

‘There’s no information about where the hoard originated, only its movement once it began its travels, I suppose you could say. And that trail leads from “the castle that fell” to “the fortress above the waves”. Hopefully, with your knowledge of Templar activities in the Holy Land, you’ll be able to identify those two locations, though I’m not sure that it matters too much even if you can’t, because I already know where the third place was on the route.’

‘Those two are pretty easy,’ Bronson replied. ‘There were a number of castles and fortifications that were captured by the enemy at various times during the Crusades and the period when the Knights Templar were operating in this area. But putting those two references together almost certainly means that the first castle referred to was the one at Acre. And we know that because pretty much the night before that castle fell to the Mamluks, the treasurer of the order was instructed by the Marshall, a man named Pierre de Sevry, to take the Templar treasure and as many non-combatants as he could fit into his ship, and make his escape north up the coast to Sidon.

‘And the point about that, I suppose, is that the fortification at Sidon was known as the “Sea Castle”, because it occupied almost the entire land area of a small island just off the mainland and was linked to it by a narrow causeway. If you were going to describe that castle in just a few words, calling it the “fortress above the waves” would be about as accurate a description as you could hope for. So the hoard — and from what I know of Templar history that almost certainly means the order’s treasure in Outremer, the land beyond the sea — went from Acre to Sidon. And we even know where it went next, because the Templar Treasurer, a man named Tibauld de Gaudin, got back on his ship a short time after he’d arrived at Sidon, and set sail for Cyprus, intending to raise reinforcements.

‘Acre was already lost. De Gaudin would have known that because the Mamluk army that was encircling the city was so huge that even if he had managed to summon ten thousand knights, not even that number would have been enough to make a difference. The next logical target for the Mamluks would probably have been Sidon. Because it was essentially an island fortress approachable only along a narrow causeway, and which might have been able to withstand a prolonged siege, perhaps it was de Gaudin’s intention to make a stand there. Maybe he thought that if he could reinforce the garrison at Sidon, the Templars could keep a toehold in the Holy Land and eventually regroup and retake Jerusalem. But that never happened and he was never able to produce any reinforcements at all. Not that long afterwards the Sidon Sea Castle was attacked by the Mamluk army and fell quite quickly because the defenders were hopelessly outnumbered, and that pretty much marked the end of the crusades and the Templar presence there. There were some abortive attempts to re-establish the order at a place called Ruad, but they never came to anything much.’

Angela nodded and traced the remainder of the line on the piece of paper with the tip of her finger.

‘This doesn’t use the proper name Cyprus, or any proper name, in fact, but it does refer to the hoard being transferred to “the island of copper”, and in antiquity Cyprus was famous as a good source of copper, so that seems fairly clear. The historical record that you know about and this translation are in accord with each other, at least so far. What are you smiling about?’ she added.

‘I was just thinking that on this occasion we might be on the trail of something big, something worthwhile. The Templar treasure of Outremer was never found, was it? Certainly there was no suggestion that it was left in the cellars of the castle at Acre, and de Gaudin’s voyage to the Sidon Sea Castle and on to Cyprus is well documented. He was the Treasurer of the order and the obvious man to be entrusted with the wealth of the Templars, and although most experts believe the treasure was carried off to Cyprus, it then simply vanishes from the historical record. This translation of that obscure inscription, as far as I know, is the only documented reference that might possibly show where it ended up.’

‘So what was this hoard?’ Angela asked. ‘Gold bullion or something?’

‘It would have been a mixture of a lot of different stuff — most likely gold and silver as bullion or coinage, as well as jewellery of various types. Most of it would have been owned by the Templars, but there would also have been valuables deposited by other people, either for safe keeping or as collateral. The order basically conceived the banking system that we still use today, so a businessman could deposit funds in, say, the Paris Preceptory, receive a coded letter of credit in exchange and take that to the Templar castle at Acre or wherever and withdraw the same funds less a handling charge, so he could travel perfectly safely on his journey, knowing that he could never be robbed. In fact, really, the Templar assets were less a treasure in the conventional sense than simply their working capital. And the other things they would have held were lots of land deeds, because many of their assets were immovable property — castles, houses, farms and estates scattered throughout Europe.’

Angela nodded and turned her attention back to the sheet of paper in front of her.

‘Right,’ she said, ‘the next bit is slightly ambiguous. In fact, I can read what it says but I’m not sure that I know what it means. This next phrase translates as “there was safety in separation”, which perhaps suggests that the treasure was divided into two or more smaller units. But I’m not actually sure that that’s what it means, because there’s another reference here to the “truth”, just like there was in the first part of the inscription, and the way it’s written could mean that the treasure went one way and this “truth”, whatever it is, went somewhere different.’

She paused for a moment and reread the translation of the decrypted text.

‘I don’t know if I’m reading more into this than is actually there, but the emphasis seems to be that the hoard — presumably the assets of the Knights Templar order in the Holy Land, as you said — is of less importance to the writer, and to the Templars, than the “truth”. The text is describing the route the two separate things took from the castle at Acre, but the object the Templars really wanted to save was this “truth”, and the treasure was almost of secondary importance, just along for the ride, as it were.’

‘So does it say where either object ended up?’

‘Yes, but only in the vaguest terms. In fact, although that earlier section describes the separation, the following sentence states that they both ended up in the same place, in “the land from whence came the nine”, which I presume means France, as that’s where the first Knights Templar originated from. But the text doesn’t say where the objects finished up in France, and that’s a very big country. It also doesn’t state that both the treasure and the truth ended up in the same place in France, and because of that phrase about “separation” I suppose you could reasonably assume that they were taken to different destinations.’

‘So that’s it,’ Bronson said, sounding bitter. ‘After all this, all that inscription is actually saying is what we could have probably guessed anyway, that the Templar treasure was sent from Acre to Sidon and then on to Cyprus, and from there it was taken to France when the position of the order in the Holy Land finally became completely untenable. Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Templars, had accompanied Tibauld de Gaudin in his flight from Acre, and took over from him when the Treasurer died on the island. Most investigators have always assumed that, when de Molay returned to France with the remnants of the order, the treasure went with him, probably to the Paris Preceptory.’

Angela nodded, and Bronson noticed a slight smile playing over her lips.

‘What?’ he demanded. ‘There’s something else?’

‘I said the text doesn’t tell us where in France either object ended up, but there is one other phrase that I do not understand but which seems to be suggested as able to supply the answer to at least a part of the puzzle.’

She picked up her pencil, turned over the sheet of paper and wrote out a new phrase on it, and then drew a circle around it.

Bronson stared at it for a moment.

Angela had written:

‘I don’t know about you,’ Bronson said, irritation evident in his voice, ‘but I’m getting a bit fed up with this. Every time we seem to get close to the answer, we get handed another riddle that doesn’t make sense. Is that accurate? And what the hell does it mean?’

‘It’s as accurate as I can get it, and I have no idea. But I’m going to find out.’

‘I presume that’s the number sixty-two,’ Bronson said, pointing at the ‘LXII’ notation.

‘Yes. But I don’t know its significance.’

Angela woke up her laptop, opened the web browser and began typing while Bronson continued staring at the cryptic clue.

‘“Mont Real” is French, of course,’ he said, after a few moments, ‘or probably, anyway, but “Krak” isn’t. I think it usually means a castle, like “Krak de Chevaliers”.’

‘You’re right,’ Angela replied. ‘I don’t know the root of the word, but it does mean a castle. And now I do know where the writer was talking about.’

She turned the computer round so that Bronson could see the screen.

On it was the image of a more or less conical hilltop, similar terrain distantly visible behind it. But the hilltop was far from barren, being dominated by the impressive ruins of a castle, the grey-brown stone walls seeming almost to grow straight out of the bedrock.

‘That,’ Angela said, ‘is Shobak Castle, and it’s nowhere near France. It’s in Jordan, not far from the old Nabatean city of Petra.’

‘I’ve never heard of it,’ Bronson said. ‘And we were looking for a place called Krak de Mont Real.’

‘That was its old name,’ Angela replied. ‘Krak de Mont Real or Krak de Montreal. It was never a Templar stronghold, according to this, but it was a Crusader castle. It was built in 1115 by King Baldwin I of Jerusalem, and it was the first of a whole bunch of fortifications he put up to guard the road between Damascus and Egypt. It withstood several sieges, but was finally conquered in 1189 and largely dismantled. When the Mamluks had finished driving the Templars out of the Holy Land in the fourteenth century, this was one of the places that they occupied and restored.’

Bronson nodded.

‘That must raise a bit of a question mark,’ he said. ‘If what you’ve just found out is correct, then during the time of the Templars the castle must only have been a ruin. So if that were the case, why would whoever authored that inscription have left anything in the building? And if they did, surely the Mamluks would have found whatever it was when they took over the place a century or so later?’

‘Good points, but I have a feeling that neither the Mamluks nor anybody else would necessarily recognize the importance or even the meaning of what was in the castle. Let’s face it, without having foreknowledge of the inscription from the temple in Iraq, neither of us would have even given that carving of the letters and the face of the bearded man that we found in the Western Wall Tunnel so much as a second glance. We would just have assumed it was a piece of well-carved graffiti. My guess is that whatever was left at Shobak Castle is the same kind of thing. A carving or something of the sort that would be completely meaningless to anyone who hadn’t already deciphered the other clues. And at least this time the author of the inscription is pretty much telling us where to look. I’m sure that the number sixty-two will mean something when we get to the castle.’

‘So you’ve made up your mind already?’ Bronson asked.

‘Not necessarily, but having come this far it seems to me to be stupid not to take that one last step. What do you think? What do you want to do?’

‘I’ll follow you, Angela, as I always do. Don’t worry about that. But if we get absolutely nowhere at this castle, then maybe we should rethink what we do next, because I get the feeling we’re being played with, sent from one place to another while we decipher and follow some pretty obscure clues. Really, this is worth doing only because we might have a one per cent chance of tracking down the lost treasure of the Templars, but the last bit that you deciphered suggests to me that maybe we’re not following the trail of the treasure but the trail of the “truth”, and I have a shrewd suspicion that that might not be an iron-bound box full of bullion but something completely different.’

‘So do you want carry on? Yes?’

‘Yes, at least for the moment.’

Bronson took his mobile phone out of his pocket.

‘Tell me again where this Shobak Castle is,’ he said.

Angela referred back to the webpage.

‘It’s in Jordan,’ she confirmed, ‘and it’s roughly one hundred miles north-east of Aqaba, which is down on the coast, next to Eilat in Israel.’

Bronson found it on the mapping app and zoomed in so that he could see the individual roads.

‘Is it way out in the bundu, or is there a town close by?’

‘There’s a reasonable-sized town called Wadi Musa, which is also on the way to Petra, and there’s what looks like a village with the same name — Shobak — fairly close to the castle.’

‘Got it,’ Bronson said. ‘In fact, in a straight line, it’s only about a hundred miles from where we’re sitting right now. We could drive it in two or three hours.’

Angela looked suddenly doubtful.

‘I wonder how easy it is to get across the border into Jordan?’ she mused.

‘We’ll tackle that when we have to,’ Bronson said confidently. ‘In the meantime, let’s get everything packed and then we can see about hiring a car.’

‘And you want to do this today?’

‘The longer we spend in one place, the more chance there is of being tracked down, so I’m very happy to keep on the move. We probably won’t get to Shobak today, but I’m sure we can find somewhere to stay in Jordan, maybe in Wadi Musa, and if we stick to doing everything with cash, we’ll be a lot more difficult for anyone to find.’

Fifteen minutes later, they were ready to go. Bronson settled the bill in cash, and obtained the name and address of a car hire company that allowed its vehicles to be taken out of Israel.

Then they stepped out into the street and started walking.