The Templar Salvation (2010)

  The bishop’s fingers started twitching greedily. “If you were ever to find it,” he said, “I would be very, very interested in acquiring it for our cathedral.”

  Conrad inclined his head casually. “As would many of my clients. But I’m not sure I’d ever want to part with it. Not when the image of our Lord himself is imprinted on it.”

  The old priest’s lips were quivering visibly now, his wrinkled fingers beseeching the air between them. “Please. You must promise. Let me know when you have it. I’ll pay handsomely.”

  Conrad reached out and brought the man’s withered forearms back down on the table. “Let’s conclude this matter first, shall we? The rest we can talk about, when the time comes.”

  The bishop studied him for a beat, then smiled, a thin-lipped, rotted-toothed smile that was a fair match for the bones he was buying. They agreed on a time when they would meet up again for the exchange, then the old man got up and walked off.

  Conrad cracked a satisfied grin as he packed up the bones and hollered out an order for a pitcher of beer. He took in the bustle out in the tavern’s main room. Merchants, aristocrats, common folk, and whores, wheeling and dealing and getting drunk in a raucous blur of pidgin Italian—the lingua franca of the Galata district—and laughter.

  Quite a change from the austerity of his previous life, as a warrior-monk of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon—the Templars.

  He smiled. The city had been good to him.

  It had taken him in and allowed him to create a new life for himself, which hadn’t been easy. Not after all the setbacks and disasters that had befallen him and his brethren, not after they’d all been turned into hunted men. But things were going well for him now. His reputation was growing with every sale. And he particularly enjoyed the fact that he was prospering at the expense of those who had brought about the demise of his Order, fleecing those whose ilk had caused him to end up in Constantinople.

  If they only knew, he thought with great relish.

  Like his adoptive city, Conrad was rising from the dregs of a Vatican-bred calamity. His troubles had begun with the defeat at Acre in 1291, almost two decades earlier, a disastrous battle that ended with Conrad, his fellow Templars, and the rest of the crusaders losing the last major Christian stronghold in the Holy Land, and resulted in the mass arrests of 1307, which the King of France and the pope had orchestrated to take down the Order. The Queen of Cities had suffered its own catastrophic upheaval around a hundred years earlier, when the pope’s army had raped and pillaged it in 1204 after besieging it for close to a year. Blood had flowed, ankle-deep, down the streets. Great fires had ravaged it for days on end, wiping out a third of its buildings. Anything that was left standing had been looted and ransacked beyond recognition. In the aftermath, anyone who could afford to do so had moved away. Once the world’s marketplace and the proud home of God’s emperor on Earth, the New Rome had been turned into a city of ruins.

  Its conquerors hadn’t had much joy in ruling over it. Its first Latin emperor, Baldwin, was captured by the Bulgarians during a skirmish near Adrianople less than a year into his reign. They chopped his arms and legs off and dumped him in a ravine, where he was said to have survived for three whole days. His successors didn’t fare much better. They only managed to hang on to the city for five decades before their infighting and incompetence brought their reign to a humiliating end.

  The Byzantine emperor who retook the city in 1261, Michael VIII, saw himself as a new Constantine and set about restoring it to its former glory. Palaces and churches were refurbished, streets repaired, hospitals and schools founded. But reality soon put a cap on these ambitions. For one thing, money was tight. The Byzantine Empire wasn’t much of an empire anymore. It was much smaller than it had been, effectively no more than a minor Greek state, which meant that its rulers were only receiving a fraction of the tax and customs revenues they had previously enjoyed. Worse, its eastern flanks were under constant attack. Bands of nomadic Turks were further chipping away at the fractured and shrunken empire. Fleeing refugees from the beleaguered provinces, penniless and desperate, were now crowding the city, living in squalor in overcrowded shantytowns and across its rubbish dumps, further straining its economy. A harsh winter had only made matters worse, a late frost wiping out large tracts of crop-land and exacerbating the food shortages.

  The chaos and the turmoil suited Conrad. He needed the anonymity that a city in flux could offer. And there was good money to be made if you knew where to find it: the pockets of gullible, visiting clerics from the churches and cathedrals of the wealthy West.

  Constantinople may have been stripped of anything of value a hundred years earlier, but it was still an Aladdin’s cave of holy relics. Hundreds of them were believed to be scattered around the city, tucked away in its many churches and monasteries, waiting to be pilfered and sold. They were of great value to the priests of Western Europe. A cathedral, a church, or a priory far from the Holy Land would gain tremendously in stature—and, hence, in contributions—once it housed a major relic originating from those distant shores. The faithful wouldn’t have to embark on long and expensive pilgrimages and travel across land and sea to see, and perhaps even touch, the bone of a martyr or a splinter from the True Cross. Which was why many clerics came to Constantinople, in search of a trophy they could take back to their home church. Some paid good money, others schemed and stole—whatever it took to secure their prize.

  Conrad was there to help.

  Even if, far more often than not, the prize wasn’t exactly what he claimed it to be.

  Like any parlor trick, it was, he knew, all in the presentation. Invest in the right packaging, get the backstory right, and buyers would be lining up for a shard of the Crown of Thorns or a fragment from the robe of the Virgin Mary.

  “Another satisfied customer?” the tavern keeper asked as he brought over a fresh pitcher of beer.

  “Is there any other kind?”

  “Bless you, my son,” the barkeep chuckled. He set the pitcher on the table and nodded toward the back of the bar. “There’s someone waiting for you out back. A Turk. Said his name was Qassem. Said you’d know who he was.”

  Conrad poured himself a glass and downed it in one chug, then set it down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Out back? Now?”

  The barkeep nodded.

  Conrad shrugged, then pushed the reliquary toward him. “Look after this for me until I get back, will you?”

  He found the man waiting by a stack of empty barrels outside the rear entrance to the tavern. He’d met Qassem and his father shortly after arriving in the city a little over a year ago. He’d taken an instant dislike to Qassem, a brooding, muscular young man in his early twenties whose eyes lacked any trace of warmth. The father, Mehmet, was a different story. A tub of fat, hairy flesh, he was a dumpling of a man with a wide forehead, bulging eyes, and a short, thick neck. He was also a consummate trader, one who could sell you something then buy it right back from you at half price and make you feel like he was doing you a favor.

  He also had access to whatever Conrad needed to pull off his scams, and he didn’t ask too many questions.

  “My father has something he thinks you might be interested in,” Qassem told him.

  “I’ll fetch my horse,” Conrad replied, not knowing that the young Turk’s mundane announcement was about to upend his life.

  HE RECOGNIZED THE BROADSWORDS IMMEDIATELY.

  There were six of them, sheathed in their leather scabbards, laid out on a wooden table in Mehmet’s small shop. Alongside them were other weapons that only confirmed Conrad’s startling realization: four crossbows, a couple of dozen composite horn bows, and an assortment of daggers and bread knives.

  Weapons with which he was very familiar.

  The broadswords were what interested him most. Though modest in appearance, they were formidable tools of warfare. Brutally efficient, expertly fabricated, perfectly balanced, but with no
ne of the gaudy ornamentation commonly found on the grips and pommels of the swords of the nobility. A Templar’s sword was not an ostentatious display of wealth, nor could it be—the warrior-knights lived under vows of strict poverty. It was a weapon of war, pure and simple. A comfortable cruciform hilt crowning a pattern-welded blade, designed to carve through the flesh and bone of any enemy as well as through any chain mail that aspired to protect it.

  The swords did, however, have one small distinguishing feature, barely noticeable, but definitely there: the initials of the sword’s owner, on either side of a small splayed cross—the croix pattee used by the Order—the lot engraved on the upper section of the blade, just below the cross guard.

  Initials that Conrad also instantly recognized.

  An avalanche of images and feelings rolled over him.

  “Where did you get these?”

  Mehmet studied him with undisguised curiosity, then his doughy face relaxed into a satisfied grin. “So you like my little collection?”

  Conrad tried to keep a lid on the disturbance bubbling inside him, but he knew that the Turkish trader wasn’t easily fooled. “I’ll take the whole lot off you at the price you ask, but I need to know where you found them.”

  The Turk eyed him with added curiosity, then asked, “Why?”

  “That’s my business. Do you want to sell them or not?”

  The trader pursed his lips and rubbed his chin with his puffy fingers, then relented. “I bought them from some monks. We came across them at a caravanserai three weeks ago.”

  “Where?”

  “East of here, about a week’s ride away.”

  “Where?” Conrad pressed.

  “In Cappadocia. Near the city of Venessa,” the trader added, somewhat grudgingly.

  Conrad nodded, deep in thought, his mind already racing ahead. He and his two fellow knights had slipped through the surreal landscape of that region on their way to Constantinople. They’d skirted around several caravanserais, huge trading posts that were dotted along the silk road, built by Seljuk sultans and grandees to encourage and protect the traders who worked the camel trails between Europe and Persia and farther on to China.

  “Is that where their monastery is?”

  “No. All they said was that it was up in the mountains somewhere,” the trader said. “They were scrounging around for food supplies, selling whatever they could. They’ve got a drought out there that’s killed off anything the frost didn’t.” He chuckled. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter where it is. You can’t possibly be thinking of going there.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s dangerous territory, especially for a Frank like you. You’d be crossing half a dozen different beyliks to get there and risk coming across ten times as many bands of Ghazis along the way.”

  Conrad knew he was right. Since the fall of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, the entire region east of Constantinople had broken up into a tapestry of independent beyliks, emirates ruled by beys. The beys’ armies were heaving with mercenary Ghazis, warriors of the faith who were hungry for either victory or for what they referred to as “the honey of martyrdom,” with no particular preference either way. They were fierce fighters and kept a tight grip on the lands they controlled. It had been hard enough for him and his brethren to sneak through it unnoticed. It would be an entirely different proposition this time around: out in the open, asking around, trying to locate a monastery that probably didn’t want to be found.

  “We, on the other hand, would have much less trouble getting through,” the trader suggested, settling back, his smug smile multiplying the folds that buttressed his chin. “And it wouldn’t be too difficult to disguise you and bring you along as one of us.”

  Conrad eyed the wily trader. The man had sniffed something of value, that much was obvious.

  He’d deal with that when the time came. First things first.

  “How much?”

  “It all depends on what you’re after,” the trader said.

  “A chat.”

  It was evidently not what the trader was hoping to hear. Then again, Conrad didn’t imagine he really expected him to tell him the whole truth.

  The trader shrugged. “In that case, double the price of these fine items,” he said as he waved his meaty arm across the array of swords and knives. “Each way.”

  It was, in the words of the old priest, an outrageous price. But the fake bones would more than cover it.

  Besides, it was for a worthy cause.

  The worthiest of them all.

  “I’ll let you know,” Conrad said.

  Mehmet gave him a contented smile and a small, theatrical bow. “I’m at your service, my friend.”

  They stuffed the swords and knives into a sack of coarse cloth, which Conrad tied to the pommel of his saddle. He was just trotting away from the store when he came across her.

  Qassem’s sister, Maysoon. Heading back to her father’s shop.

  Seeing her threw him into instant disarray.

  After all the years of strict celibacy in the fortresses of the Holy Land, he’d become reasonably comfortable around women now that he was living among them. But something about her made his heart gallop. By any standard, she was staggeringly alluring. A tall, graceful young woman with blistering turquoise eyes, flawless honey-colored skin, and a cascade of luscious curves that hinted teasingly from under her dark, flowing robe, she was impossible to ignore.

  As she sauntered toward him, he pulled on the reins, slowing his stallion right down to just shy of stopping in its tracks, trying to extend the moment as long as possible. Their eyes met. It wasn’t the first time they had, and, as before, she didn’t turn away. She just kept an enigmatic gaze locked on him, igniting a bonfire of turmoil within him. In the half dozen times he’d seen her, they hadn’t exchanged more than a few polite pleasantries. Her father or her brother was inevitably there, his presence hastening her retreat. Qassem’s body language, in particular, projected a fiercely possessive attitude toward her, one that she heeded in silence. Conrad had noticed some bruising around one of her eyes and by the edge of her mouth on one occasion, but he hadn’t had the opportunity to find out what had caused them. He was never alone with her, never able to really engage her the way he wanted. He knew this encounter wouldn’t be any different, given that they were still within sight of the shop. All he could do was give her a slight nod of acknowledgment and watch helplessly as she glided by, her eyes challenging his as long as they could before tearing away and breezing past.

  He resisted turning to watch her drift away, and nudged his horse into a canter. As he rode on, he couldn’t think about anything else. He’d faced this inner conflict before and still hadn’t figured out how to handle it. Up until recently, his entire adult life had been about sacrifice. He had gifted himself to a strict monastic Order and vowed to obey its Rule without hesitation. Like any monk, he’d committed himself to a rigidly regulated life stripped of any kind of possessions, wife, or family. As a warrior-monk, he had to contend with the added burden of quite possibly having his life cut short by a scimitar or an arrow. That sacrifice had already cost him dearly, as he’d left a part of himself on the blood-soaked soil of Acre, a part he would never get back.

  But this was all of the past.

  The Order was no more.

  He was a civilian now, free from the extreme constraints of his previous life. And yet he still felt caught between both worlds, still found it hard to fully embrace his newfound freedom.

  It had been hard enough before he met her.

  Thinking about her now, he remembered a particular Templar Rule, one that forbade knights from hunting of any kind—except for lions. An odd rule, given that no lions roamed the lands where Templars lived and fought. Early on, Conrad had been taught that it was an allusion to its scriptural symbolism: “Your adversary, the devil, roams as a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.” He knew it referred to the struggle between man and the beast of desire, a conflict that all
knights constantly strove to overcome.

  He wasn’t sure he’d be able to overcome it much longer.

  Which caused him even more turmoil, now that the past he thought he’d left behind had reached out and grabbed him by the throat.

  He had work to do.

  “IT’S OVER, CONRAD,” Hector of Montfort told him. “You know what those bastards have done in Paris. For all we know, the others have been put to the torch as well by now.”

  They sat cross-legged under a blanket of stars, around a small fire in a room of a dilapidated old mansion that had lost its roof and its owners decades ago. Three former brothers-in-arms, three rugged men who had escaped an unjust arrest warrant and were now reinventing themselves in a foreign land.

  Conrad, Hector, and Miguel of Tortosa.

  The news they’d heard a few weeks earlier had been devastating. In February, well over six hundred of their brethren who had been arrested in France had changed their minds and recanted their earlier confessions. They’d decided to defend their Order against the king’s outlandish accusations. A brave move, but an ill-fated one: By denying their previous confessions, they became lapsed heretics, which carried the penalty of death by burning. That May, fifty-four of them had been burned at the stake in Paris. Other Templars suffered the same fate elsewhere across France.

  Hundreds of others now awaited their turn.

  “We have to try and save them,” Conrad insisted. “We have to try and save our Order.”

  “There’s nothing to save, Conrad,” Miguel countered, tossing one of the broadswords back into the pile of scabbards and knives that Conrad had shown them. “Ever since Acre and the loss of the Falcon Temple, our Order has been dead and buried.”

  “Then we have to bring it back to life,” Conrad said, his face blazing with fervor. “Listen to me. If we can recover what Everard and his men lost, we can do it.”

  Hector glanced at Miguel. They both looked weary, clearly still reeling from what Conrad had told them when he’d showed them the weapons earlier that evening. As one of the master and commander’s favorites, Conrad had been invited into the small circle of knights who knew the Order’s real history. He had been privy to what Everard of Tyre and his men had been sent out to do back in 1203. Hector and Miguel hadn’t. They hadn’t been aware of the secrets of the Order. Not until this night.