The Sanctuary (12 page)
Authors: Raymond Khoury
The old man’s thoughts seemed to drift back to a painful time, to the winter when he’d lost his wife and his friends. His years had seemed bleak ever since.
“What was in the book?” Sebastian asked.
The old man looked at him, then, with a vehement glow in his eyes, he simply whispered, “Life.”
ISAAC’S REVELATION wrestled Sebastian’s mind and pinned it mercilessly to the ground for days. He could think of nothing else. He couldn’t sleep. He drifted through his work inattentively. Food and drink lost its taste.
He knew his life would never be the same.
He finally managed to find an opening in his duty roster when his absence wouldn’t raise suspicions and traveled to the hills outside Tomar. He knew Isaac’s land well. It had been seized since the old man had been incarcerated, its vineyards left to rot untended while the Inquisition’s court schemed its way to its inevitable verdict.
Sebastian rode out to the hillock Isaac had painstakingly described. He reached it as the last of the day’s light clung obstinately to the darkening sky. The blossoming olive tree was easy to find.
The tree of sorrow,
Isaac had called it. In another place, at another time, it would have been the opposite, Sebastian thought.
He dismounted and took twenty paces towards the setting sun. The stone outcropping was there, exactly where Isaac said it would be. Sebastian’s nerves throbbed with anticipation as he knelt down and, using a small dagger, started to dig into the dry soil.
Within moments, the blade struck the box.
His hands dug into the ground, feverishly clearing the soil around the small chest before lifting it out carefully, as if it would crumble under his grasp. It was a simple metal box, perhaps three hands wide and two hands deep. A sudden flurry of crows took flight farther down the hill, cawing as they circled overhead before disappearing into the valley beyond. Sebastian glanced around, making sure he was alone, then, his skin tingling with excitement, he pried the box open.
In it, as Isaac had described, were two items.
A pouch, wrapped protectively in an oiled leather skin.
And a small, wooden box.
Sebastian put the box down and
unwrapped
the skin, exposing the book and its tooled cover.
He stared at it, his eyes drinking in the curious, mesmerizing symbol on its tooled cover. He opened it. The first pages were made of smooth, strong, and burnished paper. They were filled with beautiful, richly rendered, full-length illustrations of the human body and of its inner workings. Numerous labels of writing swamped them. Other pages were covered with careful and precise Naskhi script, in black ink, with elaborate rubrications throughout. He tore his attention away from the pages and turned it over and saw what Isaac had spoken of. The back cover of the book was missing. Its torn binding indicated that some of its last pages were also lost. The last couple of pages that remained were shriveled and rough, the ink washed away long ago and leaving behind nothing more than an intelligible, bluish smearing.
With a burning ache in his heart, Sebastian understood.
A key part of the book was missing. At least, that was what Isaac and Sebastian’s parents had hoped, once the flaw had revealed itself: that the missing pages would hold the secret, the key to overcoming it. But they couldn’t be sure. The flaw was, perhaps, insurmountable. Perhaps there was no cure. In which case the book was of great danger, and the whole venture was doomed to failure.
He put the book down and picked up the small box. It also had the symbol carved into its lid. Hesitantly, he unhooked its copper clasp and opened it.
The box’s contents were still there.
And on that lonely hill, Sebastian knew what his destiny would be.
He would continue their work.
He would try to overcome the flaw.
Even though doing that, he knew, would place his life at great risk.
TRACING THE BOOK’S ORIGIN wasn’t easy. Sebastian’s father and Isaac had worked on it for years. The most they’d been able to ascertain was that the book was part of several crates of codices and scrolls that had made their way to Tomar after the fall of
Acre
in 1291.
The texts had been collected by the Templars during their forays into the
Holy Land
, when the knights were known to have explored the mysticism and knowledge of their Muslim enemies, long before the order had been suspended by Pope Clement V in 1312. Following the arrests of the Templars in France, their possessions across Europe were ordered to be transferred to the Knights of the Order of St. John of the Hospital—the Hospitallers. Provincial councils, however, were allowed to judge the Templars locally, and in Spain, the Tarragonese Council, led by Archbishop Rocaberti, a friend of the Templar warrior-monks, convened and decreed the innocence of the Catalan-Aragonese Templars, as well as those of Mallorca and of the Kingdom of Valencia. The order would be dissolved, but the brethren would be allowed to remain in their monasteries and to collect a pension for life.
James II, the king of Aragon, who didn’t want the Templars’ riches to end up in the coffers of the increasingly powerful Hospitallers, created a new order, the Order of Montesa, and effectively folded the old Templar order into it. The members of the new order, now known as
montesinos
, would submit to the rule of the established Order of Calatrava, which was also
Cistercian
and followed similar ordinances to those of the Templars. They would keep their belongings, and they would protect the kingdom from the Granada Muslims, the last remnants of Islam in the
Iberian Peninsula
.
In
Portugal
, the king, Dinis, hadn’t forgotten the Templars’ great contribution in defeating the Moors. He cunningly championed the order’s legacy. After calmly confiscating all their belongings, he waited for Clement V’s successor to be voted in, then convinced the new pope to allow the creation of a new order that he would name, simply, the Order of Christ. The Templar order basically just changed its name. The Castilian-Portuguese Templars weren’t even interrogated, much less tried. They simply became members of the new order, also accepted to follow the rule of the Order of Calatrava, and carried on unscathed.
The
Portugal
and remained so under the new order. A towering edifice of startling architectural beauty that has lost none of its splendor, it was famous throughout the peninsula for its elaborate Gothic, Romanesque, and Manueline carvings and motifs and for
its
distinctively Templar round church, where many of the Templar masters were buried. Over the years, a convent and cloisters had also been added, and it became known as the Convento de Cristo.
Isaac had told Sebastian that the Templar records showed that the chest that had housed the damaged codex had come from the
Levant
. Further detail of its provenance was hard to pin down, as Portuguese Templar documentation was difficult to unearth. A concerted effort had been made to bury any written evidence that the Templars had brazenly morphed into the Order of Christ. The Portuguese Templars—and, eventually, the Order of Christ—had also absorbed most of their French brethren who had managed to escape King Philip the Fair’s persecution. Their distinctly French surnames had to be cloaked to avoid potential challenges from the
Vatican
.
Still, there were crypts and libraries that Sebastian’s father and Isaac hadn’t been able to access. Sebastian, on the other hand, as an officer of the Inquisition, could. And so the young man began, with great care and discretion, to explore the hidden archives of the Church, in the hope of learning more about the codex’s clouded origin.
He spent hours at the archives of Torre de Tumbo in
Lisbon
. He visited the old Templar churches and castles at Longroiva and Pombal, wading through ancient records of donations, concessions, disputes, and codes of law, searching for clues that would either elucidate the contents of the missing pages or tell him where he might find another copy of the book. He rode out to the
He found nothing.
He kept Isaac informed of his movements, but the old man was getting progressively worse. An infection had settled into his lungs, and Sebastian knew he would not survive the winter. But his inquiries caught the attention of his superiors.
He was soon summoned to appear before the grand inquisitor. Francisco Pedroso knew of the young man’s visits to the dying Marrano and had heard of his inquiries across the land. Sebastian excused his trips as the overzealous pursuit of heretic texts, making sure he didn’t taint anyone with his actions. He also shrugged off his visits to Isaac’s chamber as the final, vain attempts to save the man’s soul.
Through bloodless, aged lips, the sinister priest told Sebastian that God kept a close eye on all of his subjects, and he reminded the young man that speaking on behalf of victims was regarded as more criminal than the accused.
Sebastian knew that his efforts in
Portugal
had come to an end. From here on, he would be watched. Any misstep could lead to the dungeons. And with the death of Isaac that winter, he realized there was nothing left for him in the land of his birth.
His parents’ legacy, and Isaac’s, had to be safeguarded. More than that, their work needed to be completed, their promise fulfilled.
On a brisk spring morning, Sebastian guided his solitary horse across the Ponte Velha and into the eucalyptus forests of the surrounding mountains. He was headed for
Spain
and to the Templar commanderies at Tortosa, Miravet, Monzón, Gardeny, and Peniscola. If need be, he would continue his search at the very seat of learning and translation, in
Toledo
.
And when those inquiries would yield little result, he would follow the trail of the snake-eater back to its source, across the Mediterranean, by way of Constantinople, and all the way to the very heart of the old world and to the veiled secrets it sheltered.
T
he wailing dawn prayer call from a nearby mosque seeped in through every pore of the concrete-block wall of the interview room and yanked Mia out of her sleep.
She checked her watch groggily and frowned. She’d only just managed to overcome the discomfort of her bedding—two prickly blankets that she’d folded up and laid out on the tiled floor—and block out the noisy racket of the call-outs and bookings that rocked the station throughout the night.
Things brightened up marginally a couple of hours later, when a lone cop with a pleasant demeanor appeared at the interview room’s door bearing a fresh bottle of water and a piping hot
man’oushi
—a thin, pizza-like pastry topped with a rich mix of thyme, sesame seeds, and olive oil. In an act of supreme courage, she asked to use the toilet again, knowing full well that a second visit to the station’s facilities and their medieval vileness might require years of therapy—and quite possibly some antibiotics—to overcome. She was brought back to her makeshift cell and locked in for several galling hours, which she spent pacing around and trying to rein in her darkest thoughts, until, around lunchtime, the door creaked open and ushered in hope in the form of Jim Corben.
He introduced himself as one of the embassy’s economic counselors, and asked if she was alright. The ferret and Inspector Platitude were with him, but she could immediately tell that a completely different set of dynamics was at play here. Corben had presence, and the detectives were very much aware of it. His posture, his handshake, the firm tone of his voice, the confident eye contact—two different species of man, she thought when comparing him to Baumhoff, and that was before she got into the gaping physical chasm that separated the two embassy men. Baumhoff was totally outclassed on that front—porcine, balding, pasty-skinned fifty something versus trim, cropped-haired, slightly tanned, and midthirties. Her impressions were also unreservedly tainted by the fact that just after asking
her
if she was alright, Corben had uttered the magic words that cut right through her despair and almost brought tears to her eyes, six little words that she’d never forget.
“I’m here to get you out.”
It took a second or two for the bliss of it to sink in. Then he took charge and ushered her out the door. The detectives didn’t object or say a word, even though she hadn’t yet given a formal statement. Corben had obviously laid down a higher law, and they simply stood aside and watched her go. She followed Corben, in a daze, through the back of the police station, out a back entrance, and into the brightness of the sun-soaked outside world without so much as a form to fill out or a release to sign.