The Templar Legion

4

The rowboat-sized fishing craft burbled across the immense, glassy expanse of Lake Tana, powered by the oldest and smallest outboard motor Holliday had ever seen. According to Rafi, it was a 1939 Evinrude one-and-a-half-horsepower Mate. Somehow it had found its way to Ethiopia and into the hands of the Halebo family, who had cared for it meticulously ever since. Halebo Iskinder, the current owner and head of the family, had rented the boat and the motor to Rafi only after a rigorous test to prove that he knew how to handle such a delicate and marvelous device. The noise it made was like somebody rattling marbles around in a tin can, but it was remarkably speedy.

“I’m surprised they let you dig here,” said Holliday, lifting his voice over the engine’s racket. Clouds of blue-white exhaust followed in their wake. “Between Communists, Orthodox Christians and Muslims, I always figured Ethiopia as being pretty anti-Semitic.”

“Israel was always the monkey wrench in the gears,” said Rafi, sitting at the tiller. “In the eighties the U.S. saw Ethiopia as either going over to the Communists or heading toward radical Islam. Somalia, Eritrea and the Sudan on three sides and Yemen on the other side of the Red Sea. There were ‘Cuban observers’ everywhere. It was a hot spot that needed cooling down, so we always provided the democratic Christians with arms and anything else they needed. Then we took fifteen thousand Beta Jews off their hands in Operation Solomon. It’s like a marriage of convenience-no real love involved but it works for everyone concerned. Anyway, they didn’t let me dig here.”

“You went in without government approval?” Holliday said. “That’s not like you.”

“Well, I didn’t actually ‘dig,’” the archaeologist replied. “It was more like. . uh, poking around.”

“Now, there’s a scientific term.” Peggy snorted.

As they approached the island Peggy started taking pictures from the bow with her Nikon digital.

“The big island on your right is Tana Kirkos; the little one on the left, which is where we’re going, is Daset T’qit, which literally means just that in Amharic: small island.” He pointed to the bigger of the two. “Tana Kirkos was supposedly the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant for a time,” he added.

“No more arks, please,” said Holliday. He’d had more than enough of them with the late Sister Meg and her viperous mother.

“Any poisonous snakes or insects?” Peggy asked.

“Dozens,” said Rafi, “which is why you’re wearing long trousers tucked into high boots. Everything from spitting cobras to green mambas, scorpions, centipedes and the occasional Nile crocodile. There’re a few dangerous plants, so don’t eat any berries or anything.”

“For the love of Pete, Rafi, why do you always tell me this stuff when it’s too late to back out?” Peggy complained.

“So you won’t back out,” explained Rafi, smiling broadly.

They came up on the small island and Rafi backed off on the throttle. They slowed, slipping through the dark, placid waters. The island was completely covered by dense foliage rising right up from the edge of the water. There were shrubs, vines, trees and just plain jungle. The only sign of civilization was the cut-stone ruins of some sort of dock and what appeared to be a watchtower behind it.

“Looks like the set for an Indiana Jones movie,” said Peggy. “I’m expecting to see Harrison Ford waving his hat and cracking his whip any second now.”

“Nobody’s lived on Daset T’qit in a very long time, if ever,” said Rafi as he cut the tiny motor and drifted toward the dock.

“Why did you choose this place?” Holliday said.

“I didn’t,” said Rafi, using the tiller to guide the old boat between the stone arms of the dock. Holliday could see worn steps carved into the stone that went right down into the water. “I was doing research on the Ethiopian Beta Jews and their original settlements at Tana Kirkos, the bigger island. I just casually asked about Daset T’qit in passing, and one of my translators got really spooked, went white as a sheet. He told me the place was taboo and that its nickname was Maqabr Aswad Muslim-the Tomb of the Black Muslim.”

“This gets us back to Ragnar Skull Splitter and his Arab friend, doesn’t it?” Holliday asked.

“That’s right,” said Rafi. “Abdul al-Rahman.”

“But I thought you said this was Roche-Guillaume’s tomb,” said Holliday.

“It is.” Rafi grinned. Peggy looped the rope in the bow around a rock peg that looked as though it had been there for a thousand years. She stepped out of the boat onto the steps and trotted up to the top of the dock. Holliday and Rafi followed her up to the narrow stone pier at the head of the stairway.

“It’s beautiful!” Peggy said. “It’s like one of the paintings by that French guy. . the customs clerk. . ”

“Rousseau,” said Holliday. She was right; the solid mass of foliage in front of them was as detailed and exotic as one of the famous artist’s strange and wonderful jungle scenes. There was every shade of green, from forest shadow to vivid lime, celadon and emerald, pinks and reds and bright yellows. Smooth leaves and serrated, big and small, vines that curled up and around larger trees and huge gnarled roots dragging up from the rich black earth like the groping fingers of buried giants. The only thing missing were the gazing lions and the naked women. He could hear the chittering of monkeys high above them and the shrieking calls of angry birds.

There was something sinister here as well, so real that Holliday found himself wishing he had some sort of weapon with him. From his arrival in Vietnam barely six months after his eighteenth birthday to tours in Afghanistan and Somalia, he’d been in some dangerous places in his life, but this was different. Somehow he knew that stepping into that forest would be like stepping off the edge of the world and that once within it he might never find his way out again. Holliday suddenly remembered a quote from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness he’d memorized in high school but hadn’t understood until now: “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

More than once he’d been in locations where he sensed and somehow almost felt the past and present occupying the same space and time: the Rue de Rivoli in Paris, where you could almost hear the echoing boot heels of the SS troops marching on parade each noon of the occupation. The killing fields of Antietam in Maryland, where you could still hear the screams of the twenty-two thousand men who were struck down there, still taste the cloying grit of gunpowder in the air. Or a quiet little forest in Picardy in the north of France called Belleau Wood whose dark, rich soil was fertilized with the blood of ten thousand U.S. Marines and an uncounted number of their German adversaries.

Holliday felt it here more than he’d ever done before. He knew without a doubt that this place would somehow take them all into a world of madness, into the deep, true heart of darkness, beating like some monstrous drum. He shivered, even though it was stunningly hot. He tried to shake off the feeling, but it still lingered faintly. Every nerve in his body was screaming, Run.

“Watch out for the monkeys,” warned Rafi. “They tend to hurl their feces at you.”

“Lovely,” said Peggy. “Poisonous snakes and poopthrowing monkeys.”

They stepped into the forest.

Within a few feet it was obvious that they were on some kind of well-worn trail. Vines and boughs had been slashed, and recently by the looks of it. The trail was also littered with half-chewed bits of bark and rotting, partially eaten fruit.

“The monkeys aren’t fussy eaters, I see,” said Peggy.

“Who’s your gardener?” Holliday asked. “This trail’s man-made.” He was getting unpleasant flashes of the Viet Cong jungle trails around Bu Prang.

“Maybe it’s the ghost of the Lost Templar.” Peggy laughed.

“Nothing so spooky,” said Rafi, who was leading the way. “Halebo Iskinder comes out every few weeks and keeps it clear.”

“I thought it was haunted,” Peggy said.

“The money I pay Iskinder isn’t,” Rafi said. “Besides, Iskinder likes having a secret from the other ferrymen on the lake.”

“What secret?” Peggy asked.

“That,” said Rafi as they stepped out into a small natural clearing.

Under the protective overhanging branches of a single baobab tree there was a windowless stone building that looked very much like a small chapel or a large mausoleum. The structure was built of the same brown basalt as the Coptic monasteries and churches scattered along the shores of Lake Tana. The arched door was made of dark wood with broad strap hinges. Above the door, worn with time but still clearly visible, was a heraldic crest: a lion, rampant, looking right on a field of seven stripes.

Peggy lifted her camera immediately and took a half dozen shots. “Indiana Jones and the Tomb of the Lost Templar.”

“Doesn’t it ever start to bug you?” Holliday asked, raising an eyebrow. “All the Indiana Jones stuff?”

“I’m used to it,” said Rafi. “Water off a duck’s back by now. At least she doesn’t ask me to wear a fedora and carry a bullwhip. It’s just Peggy being Peggy.”

They approached the building.

“When I arrived the door was sealed with pitch,” explained Rafi, pointing to the thick, black, tarry substance that still could be seen around the edges of the arched doorway.

“It was sealed?” Holliday asked, running his hands over the wood surface. It was ironwood of some kind, extremely hard and very old.

“Hermetically,” answered Rafi.

“How’s that possible?” Holliday asked. “The door’s solid but there had to be some air exchange through the stones or the floor.”

“Let me show you,” said Rafi. He leaned hard against the door and pushed. It didn’t budge. Holliday put his shoulder to it as well and the door grudgingly opened, a long lance of sunlight spearing dramatically into the room and illuminating the object in the middle of the floor.

It was a stone sarcophagus, eight feet long and four feet wide and made of huge slabs of polished black basalt. The sides of the sarcophagus were carved with extraordinary scenes: what was surely a Viking ship being attacked by crocodiles, men in Roman tunics marching, their standard held high, and laboring slaves, backs bent with the weight of heavy baskets, their legs shackled to one another. The top of the sarcophagus was slightly more conventional, showing the stone effigy of a knight in chain mail, gripping his sword in both hands. The sword’s blade was entwined with a snake and at the knight’s feet a baboon slept, curled into the fetal position. On the knight’s free arm was a stone shield carved with the familiar Templar cross inlaid in a darker basalt. The sarcophagus was resting on the backs of six crouching lions made of the same black stone as the cross.

“The tomb of Julian de la Roche-Guillaume, I presume,” said Holliday, his voice suddenly a bit breathless. He went to the sarcophagus and let his fingers trail the length of the old warrior’s sword, a sword in stone not much different from the one in Damascus steel he’d found hidden in his uncle’s home in Fredonia, New York, and which had started him on his long Templar adventure-a world within a world and plots within plots, stretching up through the centuries until today.

“More than that,” said Rafi. He turned away from the huge stone coffin and went to the far wall. For the first time Holliday noticed that the walls had been covered with tarpaulins that hung on lines and rings like shower curtains. With no pause for dramatic effect Rafi pulled the dull green cloth aside.

Peggy’s eyes went wide.

“Holy crap,” she whispered, awestruck.