The Templar Inheritance (12 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

‘This Copper Scroll the tyrant speaks of,’ said the Amir. ‘It is the one you Templars believe holds the secrets of King Solomon, is it not?’

Hartelius hesitated. But now was not the time to hold back. He and the Amir were alone. Or at least as alone as they would ever be, given the plethora of attendants who catered to the Amir’s every whim. ‘Yes. The princess’s brother stole it from us. He was sending it secretly with her, under cover of the Holy Lance, so that von Drachenhertz could use it to drum up support for a new Crusade.’ Hartelius shrugged. ‘I am telling you nothing you don’t suspect already.’

The Amir allowed one of his servants to slide on his chainmail. ‘I will never understand this obsession you Christians have with meaningless relics.’

Hartelius sighed – for he, too, despite his Guardianship of the Holy Lance, instinctively mistrusted relics. ‘They are simply a means to an end. They carry messages the way
banners carry epiphanies. And your people are the masters of banners.’

‘This is true.’ The Amir eased the chainmail down over his shoulders and belted it across his hips. ‘And you have translated all these secrets? You have them at your fingertips?’ The Amir drew on his gauntlets, his eyes still fixed on Hartelius. ‘Perhaps your people are, even now, preparing to build your new Temple in Jerusalem, Hartelius, over the dead bodies of their enemies?’

Hartelius grimaced. ‘Truthfully? No. More than half the scroll remains to be translated. It is written in a language no one understands. Our scholars have been trying to decipher it for seventy years. Only when this is done will its secrets be revealed and the Temple started.’

The Amir nodded, as if he had been expecting Hartelius’s answer. ‘Then you must show it to my Sufi master.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because he speaks every language known to man. If anyone can read it, he can.’

‘And he would help us? Even though we are his enemies?’

The Amir smiled. ‘He is Sufi. As am I. As, I suspect, are you, although you do not know it yet. We Sufis do not conform to what we are expected to conform to. There are greater things to adhere to in this world than meaningless dogma. Greater passions to be driven by than fear.’ The Amir closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, as though he were savouring something only he had immediate access to. ‘There is only one truth. And that is God. All else is
meaningless. You believe that too, don’t you, Hartelius? I am not talking to the air?’

Hartelius gave a brief nod of the head. But he could not quite bring himself to speak – to bring the whole thing out into the open by placing his mouth upon it. The Knight Templar priests who had been responsible for his education had done their work well. Hell was a very real place to Hartelius – and the quickest way to get there, in his opinion, was to betray the dictates of the religion one happened to be born into, even if one did not fully concur with certain of its finer points.

Hartelius watched as the Amir completed his preparations, his face clearly reflecting his reservations about his friend’s intended course of action. ‘So you really intend to attack? Even though you are massively outnumbered?’

‘There is no alternative.’

‘You will be slaughtered.’

‘That is the will of Allah.’

‘You will be slaughtered because of us.’

‘No. The tyrant von Drachenhertz has been seeking an excuse to tame us for years. Now he has found one. It is nothing to do with you. This is between him and me.’

‘Have you thought about what we shall do with the princess during the fight?’

The Amir refused to meet Hartelius’s gaze. ‘You and your men are not going to be fighting alongside us, Hartelius. My Saracens would never accept such a thing, despite their utter dedication and loyalty to me. I am therefore sending you and your Templars over the mountains with a guide who
knows every defile, every canyon, and every pass. A few well-equipped men may travel where an army may not. My Sufi master I am sending with you also. The death of such a man in a meaningless battle would be a tragedy not to be borne.’

‘I will not leave you now. This is an impossible thing that you ask of me.’

‘You will leave me because I ask it of you as a friend. The sacrifice of myself and my men is purposeless unless it be in the interests of the laws of hospitality. I gave you and the princess my word that you would be protected. The monster expects his answer tomorrow morning at dawn. He shall have it tonight, while his camp is asleep. I gave my word to no one. It is he who has chosen to bar my way into my own country. We will hew through them like the wind.’

‘You know that will not be so.’

‘But that is the way it will be written. There are worse ways to die. And tonight there is no moon. And the Franks will be blinded by their campfires. We have a better chance than you are crediting us with.’

‘Still. I should come with you. I can understand your reservations about my men. But I could fight in disguise. No one would need to know.’

‘Your place is with the princess, not with me.’ The Amir touched Hartelius lightly on the arm. ‘We will meet again, my friend, if it is written.’ He grinned. ‘And please remember this. Your stallion still has my mares to cover. That was your solemn promise to me. It is therefore of him and him alone that I am thinking in this matter. I am counting on you to
fulfil your part of our bargain by keeping him safe for my girls. You understand me, Hartelius? What happens to you is entirely coincidental as far as I am concerned.’

Hartelius laughed. He knew that he could not counter the Amir’s arguments. If their situations were reversed he would have done exactly the same thing. The laws of hospitality were paramount in both of their cultures. Once bread had been broken and oaths taken, there was no possibility of retrogression.

‘So,’ said the Amir. ‘It is settled then. We will meet in the Chouf. Failing that, we will meet in Paradise.’

‘Paradise is shared then?’

‘There is only one God, Hartelius. We both believe that. Only a rogue or a fool would expect Him to choose sides at this stage of the proceedings.’

TWENTY-SIX

The Amir ordered his men to cover their horses’ hooves with fragments of blanket. The same was to be done with the horses’ muzzles, so that they would not cry out or call to each other. Then each man was to coat his face and hands with a paste made of sand, palm oil and charcoal, so that no light would reflect off them.

Night was falling by the time they were finished with their preparations. The Amir led his Saracens wide of the plain and down along the curve of the seashore, so that they would be approaching the margrave’s camp in a different direction from the one expected.

Earlier, while it was still daylight, he had had one of his men secretly map the ridges and contours of the land. This man was tasked with leading the Amir’s force through the darkness, under cover of the sea’s hiss.

The Amir rode in the van, a few feet behind his lead scout. He wore a white covering on his back, as did all his men. In
the darkness the white shone out against the black of their fighting clothes, giving each of them a clear view of the man in front as they rode in single file.

One of the Amir’s scouts had also done a head count of the margrave’s men using an abacus, with the results of his readings recreated on a sand table for all to see. It appeared that there were close on eleven hundred soldiers pitted against them. Not all were knights, however. Some were bowmen. Others were pikemen. These last would surely have trouble in the darkness. They could be discounted, therefore, leaving the odds at about six to one.

But the element of surprise would be on the Amir’s side. He would need luck, and the absolute silence of his horses. Added to which there would a period, while his men surged through the camp, where they would be lit up by the margrave’s campfires, and would thus be vulnerable. This was their Achilles’ heel. The success or failure of the Amir’s plan would rest on what happened during this period of the engagement.

The lead scout reined his horse back so that the Amir might approach parallel to him, ensuring that neither man would reveal the white markers on their back to any advance guard. The scout leaned across and touched the Amir’s right arm three times, just below the elbow joint. The Amir nodded in the darkness and tapped the man once in return on the right sleeve with his crop.

He eased his horse into an amble. He counted off a hundred paces in his head and then turned the amble into a trot. He counted out another one hundred paces, and now he was
able to see the margrave’s campfires in a horseshoe curve curling away from the sea, aiming in the direction of where the margrave thought the Amir’s most likely line of attack might be.

The Amir felt his heart quicken in his chest. One part of him wanted to seek out the margrave personally and kill him – to punish him for all the horrors he had perpetrated on those of the Amir’s people who had had the misfortune to come under his thumb. But another part of him knew that a wise fighter understood when to fight and when to pass up a fight that would bring him no immediate benefit.

He eased his mount into a canter. He counted to fifty in his head and moved into a gallop. If only he had his late stallion, Antar, beneath him. Or one of Antar’s progeny. He could hear the thudding of his horse’s hooves in the sand. The whisking and thumping of those following behind him. How could the margrave be so stupid as to mount no guards on the sea side of his camp? The man had the strategic sense of an imbecile.

The Amir sensed, rather than felt, the first fall of arrows beside him. He raised his shield and moved it back and forth in front of him, exactly the way his master-at-arms had trained him as a youth – only in this manner, he knew, could one be certain that any arrows that struck the shield would bounce harmlessly off it.

His Saracens began to whoop behind him. The Amir, too, joined in. There was no virtue in silence any more. The more noise the better. Fear was a major factor in victory. Panic was a powerful weapon.

‘Unfurl the banners.’

The Amir’s bannermen unfurled their great white banners and let them sweep out behind them in the wind of their passing.

This is it, thought the Amir. This is what it feels like to be alive.

It was only when the margrave’s men threw off the simmering wooden covers of their hidden bonfires and flamed them with dried brushwood soaked in alcohol that the Amir realized that he and his men were riding straight into a trap.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Hartelius twisted in his saddle and cast a sidelong glance down the valley towards the margrave’s camp. He could see the pinpricks of the margrave’s bonfires dotting the distant sand like emerging stars. He turned back and headed up the defile. The prospect of other men fighting his battles for him made him feel physically ill.

The Amir’s scout was leading the way fifty feet ahead, with von Szellen, Klarwein and Moberg behind him. The remainder of Hartelius’s Templars were bringing up the rear, immediately behind Hartelius, the princess, the princess’s handmaiden and Ibn Arabi, the Amir’s Sufi master, who was also known as Shaykh al-Akbar, or Al Akbariyya.

Hartelius, on first meeting the Sufi, had been astonished at the man’s relative youth. How could a man of a mere forty summers be the master of anything? Most of the priests Hartelius knew were nearer sixty than forty. That was the one major advantage of the priesthood over
soldiering, surely? You had a middling fair chance of surviving into old age.

Still, he had finally done what the Amir had suggested and shown the man the contents of the Copper Scroll.

‘The Amir said you could speak every language known to man. Can you speak this?’

Ibn Arabi had laughed. ‘I can speak Arabic, Berber, Farsi, Spanish, something that passes for German, and a little Catalan. This language you show me is none of these.’

‘Do you know what it is?’ Hartelius could feel his stomach churn with bitterness. Of course there had never been the remotest chance that this man might unlock the secrets of the Copper Scroll. How could there possibly be, given that a dozen scholars had slaved over the conundrum for seventy years and had seen no daylight? ‘Do you have any idea at all of what language this might be written in?’

Ibn Arabi had run his oil lamp back and forth across the manuscript. For a moment Hartelius had feared that he might be about to burn it, or to attempt to damage it in some way, but the Sufi had no such intention. ‘This is a great treasure. You realize this?’

‘Yes. It is the greatest treasure we Templars possess.’

Ibn Arabi had watched Hartelius for some time. ‘If you succeed in having this translated, with or without my help, will you promise me that the truths contained within it will be used for the greater good of everyone? Not just for the Christians that happen to possess it?’

Hartelius had sighed. ‘I can promise you no such thing. And I would be a liar if I said I could. The Copper Scroll does not
belong to me. I am its temporary guardian through a quirk of fate, that is all, just as I am the guardian of the Holy Lance through a similar happenstance. Anything I discover about the scroll will be handed back to the masters of my Order. That is my gage. It is they who will decide on its future. I will have nothing to do with it.’

‘Then I cannot help you.’

‘I never expected that you would.’ Hartelius took back the scroll. ‘But you know, don’t you? I can see by your face. You know what language this is written in.’

‘I know, yes.’

Hartelius swallowed back his pride. ‘The Amir said that you would help me if you could. He said that you Sufis do not conform to what you are expected to conform to. That there are greater things to adhere to in this world than meaningless dogma. Greater passions to be driven by than fear.’

‘What else did the Amir say?’

‘He said that I am Sufi too. But that I do not know it yet. He said that there is only one truth, and that truth is God. All else is meaningless.’

‘And are you Sufi?’

‘I am nothing. I am a soldier.’

Ibn Arabi smiled. ‘Do you love truth?’

‘What is truth? How can I love something I do not understand?’

Ibn Arabi closed his eyes. ‘You place me in an impossible position. You realize that?’

‘If you tell me so.’

‘Impossible, because I am both master and servant at the same time. And because I believe that the servant of whom I am master has shown more wisdom in this than I have.’

‘How so?’

‘The Amir understands men’s hearts. He loves you. Therefore he understands your heart. All loves are a bridge to divine love. Yet those who have not had a taste of it do not know.’ Ibn Arabi sighed. He pointed to the Copper Scroll with the tip of his little finger. ‘I will say this once and once only. Go seek out the Yazidis in Lalish. They may be able to help you. For I most assuredly cannot.’