She scowled at him, then, grudgingly, she took it. “This could take a while,” she said, giving the small tool a sardonic glance.
“Not necessarily. You’ve got an able assistant just dying to help you out,” Zahed smiled. He turned to the Byzantinist and opened his palm out in an inviting gesture. Abdulkerim nodded and joined Tess.
They got down on their knees and stared at the ground as the inevitability of their task settled in, then they got to work.
TESS USED THE PICK to loosen the top layer of soil, which was dry and compacted. Abdulkerim cleared the clumps of dried mud she was breaking off, chucking them into a pile away from the wall. It didn’t take that long for them to clear an area around six feet square, then Tess started to dig deeper.
The pick struck stone—nothing too big, just a bowling ball-sized rock. She cleared the soil around it and Abdulkerim helped her pull it out. There were other rocks tucked in around it, and more underneath, two tightly packed layers of them blanketing whatever was buried below.
“These rocks weren’t here naturally,” Tess said. “Look at how they’re arranged. Someone put them there.” She hesitated, then added, “To keep wild animals from getting at the bodies.”
Zahed nodded. “Good. Then the bones should still be in one place.”
He gave her a look that prodded her on, and she got back to work, prying the stones loose and handing them to Abdulkerim, who would then throw them clear behind them. They worked in tandem, moving in parallel, and got a good rhythm going until something interrupted the flow.
A look, from the Turk—a questioning, worried look.
He’d noticed the bomb belt and its padlock under Tess’s loose shirt.
She flashed him an intense, staying look, with a barely perceptible shake of the head, signaling him not to ask about it and unsure about whether or not their captor had spotted the Turk’s reaction. If he had noticed it, he didn’t say anything. She saw Abdulkerim’s jawbone tighten as he gave her a tiny nod back before carrying on.
Before long, the rocks were gone and her pick was biting into loose soil again, less than two feet from the surface. And then the first bone appeared. A femur. Smaller bones, phalanges from what appeared to be a left hand, lay scattered around it.
She was using her fingers now, clearing the soil carefully.
The rest of the skeleton soon came into view.
Its bones were a sickly brown, infused with the earth it had been lying in for centuries. And even though the soil of the region didn’t suffer from high acidity, Tess hadn’t expected to find much else. There wasn’t a lot that could survive seven hundred years of burial. Armies of maggots and worms would see to that. Her fingers stumbled upon some copper-alloy buckles, the only remnants of a belt and some boots whose leather had long been eaten away, but she saw nothing else. It wasn’t immediately obvious whether she was staring at the remains of a man or a woman, but judging from the length and the girth of the main leg and arm bones, she thought it was more than likely that it had been a man.
“There’s nothing here to tell us who this was,” she remarked as she stood up and wiped her forehead with her sleeve. She was exhausted, the arduous effort having drained what little strength she’d had left after the sleepless night at the mountain stakeout. Adding to her discomfort, the bomb belt had been straining against her ribs and digging into her with every move, bruising the edge of her rib cage, but she knew there wasn’t anything she could do about that.
The Iranian stood next to her, eyeing the remains. He checked his watch, then said, “Okay, good work. Let’s keep going.”
Tess shook her head with disdain and despair, and drank some water from the canteen Abdulkerim had given her. Then she got back down on her knees and kept going.
An hour or so later, she and the Byzantinist had uncovered the remains of one more corpse.
One more—not two.
Tess dug small exploratory holes on either side of the communal grave, but came up blank. There were no layers of rocks there either, confirming that no one else had been buried there, not close to the two skeletons anyway.
Which meant the trail wasn’t dead.
Which also meant her ordeal wasn’t over.
She got up, drenched in sweat, and leaned back against the rock face, taking in deep breaths to slow her heart rate down. Abdulkerim rummaged in his backpack and shared the last of his honey cakes with her. She chewed on the soft, gooey pastry slowly, relishing the taste, feeling their effect suffuse her body, and tried to give her mind a break from wondering what their find meant.
“Two bodies, not three … And yet, there are three names on the grave,” the Iranian announced, clearly pleased with the outcome. “Which raises so many questions, wouldn’t you say?”
He fixed her with a curious, slightly amused gaze.
She was too worn out to play games—but she had to try something. She replied, “Such as, which two are they, right? Well, hey, you want to play CSI and come up with an answer for that one, be my guest.”
He kept staring at her with the same bemused smirk on his face. “Really, Tess? That’s the best you can do?”
Abdulkerim spoke up, stepping in to defend Tess. “They’re seven-hundred-year-old skeletons. How can we possibly know who they were?”
The Iranian gave her a “come, now” dubious look. “Tess?”
He said it like he knew already. A spasm of dread shot through Tess as she considered the consequences of being found out—again.
She relented, wondering how much Jed had told the Iranian. “I don’t think either of these is Conrad.”
“Why not?” Abdulkerim asked.
She looked at the Iranian. He nodded his approval. “These skeletons … they’re complete. Both of them.”
The Byzantinist seemed lost. “And … ?”
“Conrad was hurt at the battle of Acre. Badly.” A sense of doom flooded her face, her spirits drowning at the thought of not finding closure in the grave she’d just opened up. “This isn’t him.”
Chapter 37
CAPPADOCIA
MAY 1310
They spent the first night in a narrow valley down the mountain from the monastery, camped out around a tall, rectangular rock that had crosses and other markings chiseled into it. They rode out early the next morning, spread out from one another with Hector riding point, Conrad farther back in the heavily laden wagon, and Miguel trailing far behind to watch their backs, all three of them acutely aware of the dangers they might encounter and keen to get to the relatively safer territory farther south as quickly as possible.
Conrad still wasn’t sure what their best move would be. It had all happened too fast, and it wasn’t something that he’d ever thought he’d be doing. He had some important decisions to make. The first of which was where to stash their consignment. Once that was settled, he’d need to figure out how to go about using it to get the pope to release his brethren and rescind the charges against their Order.
He thought of taking the consignment to France. The pope, a Frenchman, was now based there, in Avignon. Conrad’s imprisoned brothers were also in France, as was their nemesis, King Philip. Any approach to the pope and any monitoring of its results would need to happen there. But France was dangerous. The king’s seneschals were everywhere. It would be difficult to travel around with a conspicuous cargo in tow, and Conrad didn’t know whom he could still trust there. The other option was Cyprus. He had friends there, and there was little Frankish presence on the island. They could hide their trove there, he could leave Hector and Miguel in place to guard it and venture alone to France to make his play. Either way, they had to get to a port first, the one they’d landed in when they’d left Cyprus: Corycus. Heading there made sense in another way: Once they got across the Taurus Mountains, they’d be in the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia, which was Christian territory.
The problem was, the going was slow. The old wagon was lumbering along, its twin horses straining from the heavy load under its ca
nvas cover. Harder still was that the knights had to avoid the easy route. The last thing they wanted was to meet up with some roaming Ghazi warriors, which meant they needed to keep away from any well-trodden trails. Instead, they were trudging up rocky, less stable terrain and cutting through dense forests, which was delaying their progress even more.
By the end of the next day, they’d reached a wide plain that stretched all the way to the distant mountain range they needed to cross. The open ground ahead of them provided little in terms of cover, which made Conrad uncomfortable. His only other choice was just as unattractive: the long, narrow canyons that snaked across the plain, cut into the flatlands as if gouged out by a set of gargantuan claws. Given the load they were carrying and their lack of chain mail and battle weaponry, coming across a horde of bandits in one of the canyons would lead to a certain defeat. The odds of encountering one, though, had to be less likely than being spotted out in the open. After a short debate, they opted to take the canyon route and camped out on a ridge at the mouth of the one they thought would be their best bet, using some unusual rock spires for cover.
Their reasoning was sound—except that the threat came from elsewhere.
The first arrows struck the next morning, a couple of hours after they had set off. Hector was on point, leading the small convoy through the twists and turns of the canyon, when one of the bolts slammed into his chest, far enough under his right shoulder to cut into his lung. Two others buried themselves into his horse, one of them hitting it in its foreleg and causing its leg to collapse under it. Hector hung on as his mare neighed in agony and came down in a messy cloud of blood and dust.
Conrad spotted two archers at the top of the canyon, ahead of them, and pulled hard on the reins of his steed to spin it around, anticipating what was coming up behind them and hoping he was wrong.
He was right.
Four riders were charging at them, riders that he recognized.
The trader, his son, and two of the men they’d brought with them.
He felt a flush of acid in the pit of his stomach. He knew the trader was greedy, but they’d been careful about covering their tracks and had Miguel making sure they hadn’t been followed.
Clearly, they hadn’t been careful enough.
Twenty years earlier, in the heat of battle, Conrad wouldn’t have bat-ted an eyelid about engaging them. With a helmet and chain mail, a lance, broadsword, and mace, and a well-shielded horse, any Templar knight would have thought nothing of taking on four enemy fighters.
This was different.
This wasn’t twenty years ago. It was now. After Acre.
After the defeat that had cost him his hand.
He’d lost it in the heat of battle to a Mameluke scimitar, sheared right off at the wrist, a clean cut that came close to costing him his life. He had never experienced pain like what he felt when the infirmarer had fought to sear his wound shut with a red-hot blade. He’d lost a bucketload of blood, and as he and his surviving brethren sailed away from the fallen city, he hovered at the precipice of death for days on end, until a gust of life somehow found him and dragged him back from it. During his long recovery in Cyprus, he tried to find some comfort in the fact that it had been his left hand and not the hand with which he held his sword, but that didn’t cheer him much. He knew he would never be the formidable warrior he had once been. Then he found a talented Cypriot blacksmith who said he could help and made him a copper prosthesis, a false hand that fit snugly onto the stump of his forearm with leather straps to hold it in place. It was beautifully crafted and had five fixed fingers that were a reasonable rendition of what he had lost and were fixed in a bent position that allowed him to do certain key tasks such as holding on to his horse’s reins, lifting a jug of water, carrying a shield, or punching the jaw off anyone who crossed him.
Still, given his handicap, he knew the odds weren’t favoring him and Miguel. The odds shrank to four-to-one an instant later when another arrow thudded into the Spaniard’s back and threw him off his horse.
Conrad drew his scimitar and struggled to control his rearing horse as Mehmet and his men thundered in. The two hired riders were at full gallop and streaked past him, one on either side, right up against the wagon. He whipped his blade across in a wide, upward arc and caught one of them across the face, opening up a wide gash under the man’s ear and flinging a wake of blood through the air behind it, but the other rider cut him in the thigh as he threw himself onto him and knocked him off his perch.
He fell heavily to the ground, his arms breaking the fall but losing the scimitar in the process. He pushed himself to his feet, surveying the situation through hazy eyes. All three of them were now down: Hector, trapped under his wounded horse, blood gurgling out of his mouth, gasping for breath; Miguel, back on his feet now, but staggering like a drunkard from his injury; and Conrad, limping now, blood flooding down his leg, straightening up in time to see the trader and his son riding in for the kill.
Qassem was bearing down on him, fast. Conrad’s eyes scanned the ground around him, looking for something, anything he could use as a weapon. There was nothing within reach, no time to think of anything fancy. His body reacted instinctively and he just leapt up at the Turk as he blew past, leading with his metal hand and letting it take the brunt of the blade’s strike while grabbing the man’s belt with the other hand and pulling him off his horse.
They fell in a heap of flesh and bone and a frenzy of elbows and fists, but it was a fight Conrad knew he’d lose. A kick to the gash in his thigh sent a shock of pain through him and brought him to his knees. An elbow to the cheekbone floored him. He squirmed on the hot canyon bed, a metallic taste of blood back in his mouth, a sensory blast to a long-gone era, one that had also ended in defeat.
He looked up. The trader had dismounted and was sauntering over to join his son, who loomed proudly over his vanquished opponent. Behind them, Conrad saw Miguel, lying dead at the feet of the two riders who had rushed him, and, farther away, he saw the prone body of Hector.
“I told you these lands weren’t safe,” the trader chortled. “You should have listened to me.”
Conrad sat up and spat some blood out, hitting the son’s boots. Qassem pulled his leg back and was about to launch a kick at the knight’s face when his father’s shout stilled him.
“Stop,” Mehmet ordered. “I need him awake.” He scowled at his son for a moment, then turned his attention at something up the canyon and smiled contentedly.
Conrad followed his gaze. The archers had climbed down from their ambush positions and were bringing the wagon back.
The trader waved them over. “So this is how you treat your partners?” he told Conrad. “You call on me to help you with all your little swindles, then when a big deal shows up, you decide to keep it to yourself and brush me away like some pustular servant?”
“This doesn’t concern you,” Conrad hissed back.
“If it’s worth something, it concerns me,” the trader replied as he stepped away to examine the packhorses’ cargo. “And I have a feeling it’s worth quite a lot.”
He climbed onto the body of the wagon and nodded to the men. They loosened the clasp around the first of the chests and opened it up.
The trader looked inside it, then turned to Conrad, his face crinkled with confusion. “What is this?”
“It doesn’t concern you,” the knight repeated.
Mehmet blurted out some orders while waving his hands manically, clearly displeased. His men moved furiously, unlocking and opening the other two chests.
His expression only darkened further as he looked inside each one.
He jumped off the wagon, stormed over to Conrad, and shoved him back onto the ground with a vicious flick of his leg. He then drew a dagger from under his belt and dropped down to face him, pulling the knight’s hair to yank his head back and pushing the dagger’s blade right up against his neck. “What is the meaning of this travesty?” he rasped. “What kind of a treasure is this?”
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“It’s of no value to you.”
Mehmet pushed the blade harder. “Tell me what these are. Tell me why you wanted them this badly.”
“Go to hell,” the knight replied and lunged up like an uncoiled spring, shoving the trader’s dagger away with one hand while landing a crushing blow from his metal hand with the other.
The trader shrieked as he flew off him and hit the ground, an airborne rivulet of blood trailing out of his mouth and nose. Conrad threw himself after him, but Qassem jumped in and pulled him off his father before he and his hired hands pummeled Conrad into subservience.
Barely conscious, Conrad looked on helplessly through veiled vision as the trader’s son, dagger in hand, came in for what looked like the final blow. He braced himself for it, but it wasn’t what he expected. Qassem didn’t gut him or slit his throat. Instead, he bent down and set one knee firmly against Conrad’s chest to hold him in place, then used the blade to cut the leather straps of Conrad’s copper prosthesis and yank it off. He held it up, gloating, staring at it like some kind of prize scalp before holding it up proudly to the others.
The trader pushed himself to his feet and faltered before steadying himself against his son, spitting blood, his eyes bloodshot with rage. “You always were a stubborn bastard, weren’t you?”
Qassem held his dagger up and hunched down over Conrad. “I’ll make the infidel talk.”
The trader shot his arm out and stopped his son. “No,” he said, still glaring down at the fallen knight. “I don’t trust what he’d tell us. Besides, we don’t need him. What’s in these trunks is clearly of great value. And I’m sure we can find someone in Konya who can tell that it is.”
“What about him?” Qassem asked.
The trader frowned and looked around, casting his eye about the deserted canyon. It was quiet, apart from the groans of the fallen horse. The sun had risen well clear of the canyon’s walls and was now beating down on them with all its mid-summer might.
Conrad saw the trader glance up at the sky. Three griffon vultures were circling high above them, attracted by the dead and the dying. He watched as the trader then dropped his gaze to the bloodied horse, turned to his son, and managed what was clearly a painful half grin.