The Templar Legion

26

After standing at the foot of the cliff and then going through the foliage-threaded netting, Holliday could immediately see the genius of how the Pale Strangers had laid out their settlement. More than a settlement, actually-from what Holliday could see it looked very much like a small city.

At least half of the valley floor-well camouflaged by the high canopy of the trees and assemblages of woven mats of twigs and plants hung at varying levels in the trees-was made up of at minimum fifty kraals, circular enclosures made from bamboo rammed into high mud-and-earthen walls, topped by heavy bamboo palisades a dozen feet tall.

At the entrances to the enclosures there was a heavy ladder that could be drawn up the berm, making it impossible to get in. There appeared to be small holes higher up in the palisades, and Holliday had no doubt that there were battlements up there, ready for Limbani’s warriors and their blowpipes.

Each of the enclosures had a central pole from which large triangles of fabric could unfold, covering the enclosure completely when it started to rain. Holliday recognized the design from the covering of the forum in Rome, and that stood to reason as well, since the lost legion was sure to have had engineers within the ranks.

“As I am sure you have already ascertained, the fabric roofs over each enclosure are of Roman origin,” Limbani said in the lead.

“But not the compounds themselves,” said Holliday.

“No, those are native, although the stone ones from Great Zimbabwe are roughly the same pattern.”

“It’s ingenious. Each compound is alone but at some point touches its neighbor. Any enemies have to fight down here on the low ground and what is, in fact, a garden maze. Easy to get lost, easy to bunch up if you were trying to take the place.”

“Better yet, if one compound is breached the occupants simply flee into the next,” Limbani said.

“The castle-within-a-castle design of a Templar fortress,” murmured Holliday.

As they made their way through the extraordinary maze they even saw tall canopy trees growing up out of several of the circular compounds, and in other places on the pathway more trees had been left in place. With that kind of attention to detail and the hundreds of hanging latticework shields, the whole place would be invisible from only a few hundred feet. From a surveillance satellite, the compound wouldn’t be seen at all.

“How many people live in each compound?” Holliday asked, following Limbani.

“It is difficult to say,” explained the doctor, half turning as they made their way through the serpentine maze, “since many different things are done within them, weaving, tanning, making fishing line and nets for the birds. One is given over to keeping bees. There is a whole compound merely for the making of blowguns and their darts, and yet another for the various poisons that are used, both plant toxins and animal. The plant toxin we use most often is concentrated ricin from the coating of simple castor beans. The animal toxins are usually concentrated venom from the gaboon viper or the boomslang. Sometimes we use the fat-tailed scorpion, Androctonus australis.”

“Fatal?”

“Invariably.” Limbani nodded. “My abilities in medicine have gone a long way toward improving the toxicity of their weaponry.”

“But why so aggressive?” Holliday asked. “There can’t be much in the way of real predators here.”

“You’re quite right,” Dr. Limbani answered. “For thousands of years they have been left alone in the jungle, to live their lives as they please, to fulfill their destinies as their gods see fit. But that is changing now. Those days are swiftly coming to an end. Kolingba is the first of his kind; he will not be the last unless we do something about it. We must do it, Colonel, and that time is coming sooner than you think. It is only a matter of days now.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“You think Mutwakil Osman is my only spy? There are a few others of my tribe who are friends to the Umufo omhloshana.”

“What can you do about someone like Kolingba? If he decided to go after this place it would be all over within a day. He has helicopters, rocket launchers, machine guns. You wouldn’t stand a chance. It would be suicide to fight those men.”

“And it would be genocide not to,” said Limbani calmly.

“You’ve got no defense against their kind of weapons,” argued Holliday.

“Think of your history, Colonel.”

“What kind of history?”

“Your specialty, as I understand it from Professor Wanounou. Military history.”

“All right. It’s simple: you’re outnumbered, you’re outgunned, and if laid siege to, you’d starve. It’s no contest.”

“Did you fight in Vietnam, Colonel?”

“Two tours when I was eighteen and nineteen. Exactly three hundred and sixty-five wet-behind-the-ears days, boots on the ground, and all three hundred and sixty-five have haunted me ever since. Not my favorite war, Doctor. Teenagers shouldn’t be killing people. It does bad things to their brains; believe me.”

“Then you know something about fighting in jungles.”

“Some.” Holliday nodded, a bitter, distant look in his eye.

“Helicopters are limited to some surveillance-the forest canopy sees to that,” answered Limbani. “Rocket launchers and any other forms of artillery are useless in the jungle. Tanks and other armored vehicles are equally useless; wouldn’t you agree?”

“For the most part.”

“Even laser-guided and infrared sighting devices are useless, day or night. During the day there’s too much interference and at night there’s so much return of heat from the ground to the air a person wearing night-vision goggles would be blinded. The West has invariably used weapons ill suited for unfamiliar terrains-the Abrams tank was meant for traveling three abreast on a European autobahn, and so was the Soviet T-90. Air transport to places like Afghanistan or Bosnia is a waste of time, and sand gets in the bearings when they fight in the deserts of Iraq. ”

“In Afghanistan, Americans forgot everything they learned about guerrilla fighting in Vietnam, and the Russians forgot the lessons they learned in their revolutions. Have you noticed that no foreign power has ever prosecuted a successful war on African soil against Africans-only against each other? Here warfare is reduced to its simplest and most terrible-two warriors, one against the other, where often it is the simplest weapon, least affected by terrain and the elements, that wins the day. With that kind of scenario, Colonel Holliday, we will not lose.”

“A proud speech, Dr. Limbani,” said Holliday. “But are you willing to bet your people’s lives on rhetoric?”

“Life is a bet, Colonel Holliday, but sometimes the odds can be evened. Follow me.”

He began to climb up one of the ladders laid down on the sloped berm around one of the palisades surrounding what appeared to be a larger-than-average compound close to the center of the maze. He reached the top of the mound of earth, bending over a little to catch his breath. Looking directly ahead, Holliday could see an indentation in the palisade: a doorway, perhaps.

“Skalle-odelle!” Limbani called out loudly.

“What language is that?” Holliday asked.

“They have sacred words; those are two of them. Their day-to-day language is an ancient Malinke dialect from Sogolon’s time.”

“It sounds Danish or Norwegian,” said Peggy.

“Ragnar Skull Splitter,” said Rafi softly. “Skalle-odelle, perhaps?” The archaeologist looked at Holliday. “It would make sense if this is where Julian de la Roche-Guillaume wound up-and we’ve proved by now that it is. It would also explain the clothing worn by the Pale Strangers: a good imitation of what the average Egyptian workingman wore eight hundred years ago-a simple linen kilt. If Ragnar and his men actually came down the Nile it would have been reasonable for them to adopt a similar form of dress.”

Limbani laughed. “You impress me, Wanounou; most archaeologists don’t make interpretive leaps of thought like that.”

“Rafi’s not your ordinary archaeologist,” said Peggy, smiling. “He’s more the ‘seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before’ type.”

A few feet in front of them a seven-foot-wide section of the palisade lifted like an old-fashioned portcullis on a castle. Beyond the opening was an enclosed passage at least twelve feet high and made of solid planks on both sides and above. At regular intervals in the tunnel-like enclosure were small circular openings, each one a little larger than the diameter of the blowguns used by the Pale Strangers. The artificial tunnel was twenty feet long and ended in a second gate as solid as the walls and the roof.

“Ingenious!” Holliday said. “A barbican gatehouse, complete with meurtrieres.”

“Murder holes?” Limbani said as they made their way along the enclosed corridor. “They had names for such things?”

“They’ve always had names for such things,” said Holliday dryly. “That particular one is a French invention, if memory serves.”

As the entrance behind them clattered shut, the gates in front of them swung open and they stepped out into the open compound within three palisades. A half dozen plank-cut Indian longhouse buildings were arranged in a semicircle at the outer edge of the compound, each one with a totemlike “figurehead” jutting out from the center beam of the sloping roof. One of them was identical to the rooster-shaped mask Holliday had seen Jerimiah Salamango, the “Christ’s destroyer,” wearing.

“Those are Viking longhouses!” Rafi whispered, his voice full of excitement. “This really is some kind of lost world.”

Women and children were moving from longhouse to longhouse while very young children, naked except for loincloths, played in the dirt, chasing one another around amid the buildings. A dozen or so adolescents, male and female, were seated cross-legged in a line a hundred feet or so away from a series of narrow plank targets painted with rough bull’s-eyes, the center marker white, the outer marker bright yellow.

Each of the young people had a blowgun in his or her lap and a woven, tubular quiver for darts slung bandolier-style across his or her chest. The boys were naked from the waist up while the girls wore simple cloth bands wound tightly over their breasts.

They were silent, their expressions serious, almost meditative. To Holliday it looked as though they were doing breathing exercises of some kind. An adult stood behind them, his long blowgun held like a stave. A broad X was drawn across his face in black. His eyes were an intense gemlike blue and, remarkably, his long, braided hair was as blond as corn silk.

“The yellow-haired one is called umculisi, a teacher. His students are ibuso-sha, young warriors. At the moment they are practicing the breathing of la Sarbacana.”

“Doesn’t sound very African to me,” said Peggy.

“It’s not,” Limbani said quietly. “When Julian de la Roche-Guillaume left the Holy Land he traveled to the deeper East, perhaps even as far as Tibet, where he received the teachings of Drogon Chogyal Phagpa, the emperor who was also spiritual adviser to Kublai Khan. ”

“He returned to France briefly, establishing a small secret school for the study of what he referred to as Sarbacana, the joining of breath, mind and sight. It was apparently ‘reinvented’ by a French quasi-mystic guru in the nineteen seventies but it is clearly the same art.”

“This is beginning to get very weird,” muttered Peggy. “The Templar and his solid-gold tomb were strange enough, but now we’re in Tibet with Kublai Khan. Next thing you know we’ll have Olivia Newton-John singing ‘Xanadu.’ ”

“We’re talking martial art?” Holliday said, ignoring his cousin.

“Indeed,” said Limbani.

“You really think this Sarbacana breathing can stand up to an AK-47?”

Limbani nodded to the blond man with the X across his face.

“Impumphuthe,” said the blond man quietly. All of the young people reached into a small pocket sewn inside the waistband of their tunics and withdrew a strip of cloth, which they then handed to the person beside them. Each student in turn blindfolded his neighbor.

“Would you like to check the blindfolds?” Limbani said.

“I’ll take your word for it,” said Holliday. “This is no circus act.”

Limbani nodded to the blond man again.

“Lungisela,” said the blond man.

Each of the blindfolded students took a four-inch-long dart from his quiver and slid it into his blowgun. They then raised the blowguns to their lips.

“In battle, of course, the tip of each dart would be dipped in a fatal neurotoxin,” Limbani explained. “Once upon a time the darts were made from iron, but we have found that aluminum nails ground to razor sharpness are a satisfactory and less labor-intensive substitute.” He nodded to the blond man again.

“Dubulela,” murmured the blond man.

There was a brief, rattling sigh, like raindrops on a metal roof, followed by a perfectly ordered series of thumps as the blowgun darts found their targets. Holliday stared, impressed. The students had fired in distinct, even sequence, blindfolded, and each of them had hit the stark white bull’s-eye of his target dead center.

“Everyone, male or female, in this valley can do what you’ve just seen, some better and faster in the daylight or in the dark. There are four thousand people here, Colonel. They are the last of their kind and each one of them is willing to die for their freedom. How does that stand up to an AK-47?”

“I wouldn’t like to give odds,” said Holliday. “Too close to call.”

“Will you stand with us, Colonel? We could use the help and advice of a real soldier.”

Holliday didn’t hesitate. It had been a long time since he’d had something worth fighting for.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll stand with you. We all will.”