The Templar Archive (17 page)

Lucerne, Switzerland

“The biggest problem we have, I guess,” Robin said, “is knowing where the hell we should start looking. I mean, Switzerland isn’t a huge country, but it’s certainly big enough to hide any number of wooden chests or whatever the Templars used as a repository for their archive.”

“That’s going to be the problem,” Mallory said, “because the clues we found in that translation of the last section of the text on the parchment seem to me to be pretty vague.”

It was late morning the following day, and they were sitting at an outside table in a pavement café near the center of Lucerne, virtually on the banks of the lake, trying to plan their next move.

They’d bought their tickets at Orly the previous evening, and both had maintained full awareness of their surroundings all the time they were at the airport. That hadn’t been easy, because the departures hall was heaving,
full of people and with queues almost everywhere and for everything. Even getting a couple of cups of bad French coffee and some snacks had taken Mallory over a quarter of an hour. But they’d seen nobody who looked like the men in the car that had followed them, and not one of the horde of people had seemed to be paying them the slightest attention. Not even, in fact, the clerk who sold them their tickets, who was casual to the point of indifference.

They’d taken the evening easyJet flight from Paris Orly to Geneva entirely without incident. It had landed on time just before ten, and then Mallory had hired a car to drive them into the heart of the country, where they hoped to find what they were looking for. They’d stayed off the fast roads and instead had followed the west bank of Lac Leman, stopping after driving only about four miles in a town called Versoix, because it was getting late. They’d taken a room in a small motel rather than a hotel and had had a fairly comfortable night, reasonably certain that nobody had managed to follow them.

That morning, they’d continued driving northeast toward the center of Switzerland. They didn’t know if they were in precisely the right area in Lucerne, but they did know that the canton of Schwyz lay on the eastern side of Lake Lucerne. And if, as they both now believed, the peasants of that region had been helped by members of the Knights Templar order in the fourteenth century, it was at least possible that the Templar Archive—assuming it still existed—might well have been concealed somewhere in that canton. In any case, it was arguably
the best place to start looking, to try to follow the sparse and cryptic clues they’d managed to decode.

“In fact,” Mallory added, “just remind me exactly what the translation said about the location we need to find.”

Robin pulled a sheet of paper out of her laptop bag and unfolded it.

“As you said,” she began, “what it tells us is a long way from being specific, and it will only make sense, in my opinion, once we’ve identified the correct location. Finding the right valley isn’t going to be easy, and identifying the actual hiding place will probably be a whole lot more difficult. Right, these are the clues, such as they are. The first sentence says ‘seek where the serpent roars, his mouth agape.’ Then the second sentence states ‘beyond the moving wall, the door awaits,’ and the last phrase is much shorter. That just translates as ‘the guardian beckons.’”

“That’s all as clear as mud,” Mallory said. “They certainly haven’t made it easy, have they? I know I asked you before, but are you happy with the translations? There aren’t any ambiguities or alternative meanings for the Latin words?”

“Not really, no. I’ve got no doubt that the man who wrote this was being deliberately obtuse, just so he could provide an extra layer of protection for the archive. Deciphering the encrypted text was obviously just the first stage. He was then expecting whoever did that to have to use their brains to work out what those three clues meant. But the reference to the confederate of Schwyz earlier in the text is clear enough, so we do have some kind of starting
point. Well, perhaps less a starting point than a starting area, because the present canton is quite big.”

“I agree,” Mallory said. “That name wouldn’t have been mentioned unless it was a direct reference. And you still think that if we can find the right approximate area, we can make some kind of sense out of those clues?”

Robin nodded. “I certainly hope so, but I think so, yes. I’ve got a couple of ideas about the first one, anyway, and I also think that we shouldn’t necessarily try to follow them in the order they appeared in the text. It seems to me as if the last clue, the one about the guardian, is more than likely telling us where we should start looking, the general area, I mean, rather than anything else. Though I might be wrong, obviously.”

“So, where exactly do we start?”

Robin didn’t reply for a moment, just opened the side pocket of her computer bag once again and took out a map of Switzerland. While Mallory moved the coffee cups and plates to one side to clear a space, she unfolded the map, laid it flat, and then pointed at the western end of Lake Lucerne.

“We’re here,” she said, “pretty much on the western shore of the lake. Schwyz is over here, at the eastern end of the same body of water. Looking at the detail on the map, it’s obvious that the area we’re interested in is very mountainous. The contour lines are very close together over most of the canton, which means steep slopes, high peaks, and deep valleys. There are lots of these straight lines marked on the map, and each one of those is a ski lift of some sort, running up the mountains from the lower
areas and base stations to the top of the ski runs. And a lot of the roads just zigzag up the hills and then sort of stop, presumably in the car parks used by skiers in the winter and walkers in the summer. We’re lucky that it’s summer at the moment, because I think this search would be impossible in the winter, with the whole area covered in snow.

“So I think we should just drive around the lake, get ourselves into the Schwyz canton, and find a hotel for a couple of nights. Once we’re settled, we should try to find a better map than this one, a proper topographical chart covering the whole area that we’re interested in, and see if we can identify any of the features that those obtuse clues seem to me to be suggesting. If we manage that, then we can get out there and start checking on the valleys that seem most likely.”

“You definitely think it will be hidden in a valley, then?” Mallory asked.

“In my opinion. That’s probably the most likely. In a valley there are likely to be caves and gullies carved out by the waterfalls. I haven’t looked at the geology of this part of the world, the way you did with the mountains of Cyprus, but I have a strong suspicion that the most likely location for the archive is hidden in a cave somewhere. Where it won’t be is in the strong room of some castle or building, because that would have been too obvious a hiding place, and over the seven hundred years or so since the archive was hidden, someone would almost certainly have stumbled across it.

“The chests we found on Cyprus had been hidden in a cave, and that location worked well enough for the
Knights Templar there. So I think they probably did the same thing all over again here in the mountains: they found a natural hiding place underground somewhere, probably modified it so it was big enough to hold everything they needed to conceal, and then made pretty certain that nobody would ever find it by accident. Just like on Cyprus, even when we find the right specific location—assuming that we manage to do that—it won’t be a matter of just walking into a cave and picking up a few wooden boxes. They’ll be far from obvious, and we might well have to dig them out of the ground or pull down a rock wall to get access to them.”

Mallory nodded.

“Right. Well, we’re certainly not going to achieve anything by sitting here looking at the view,” he said, “so let’s saddle up and get out of here.”

There was obviously no direct route over to the east, because the lake was in the way, and although it probably wasn’t the fastest way to reach their destination, Mallory and Robin decided to follow the road that ran along the northern shore of the lake, at least for the first part of the journey. They drove over the bridge by the railway station, then swung right onto Haldenstrasse, paralleling the Nationalquai and the lakeshore as they headed east. Mallory stayed on the same road, which changed its name to the Seeburgstrasse when it turned southeast. In the vicinity of Meggen, the road continued northeast, again following the shore of the Luzernersee, but rather than stay beside the water, at Küssnacht Mallory continued straight on to pick up the faster A4 at Immensee. This road took them along
the southern shore of the Zugersee, another large lake, past Oberath and Goldau, and then on to Schwyz itself.

They found a hotel that suited their purposes fairly near the center of the small town, booked a room, and then set out to explore their surroundings and, more important, to find a map. That took rather longer than either of them had expected, because almost every bookshop they went into only had a stock of modern tourist maps, colorful folded pages that listed restaurants, bars, hotels, car parks, ski lifts, and local attractions, the kind of information that would be invaluable to a tourist but completely useless and irrelevant as far as they were concerned. But they did eventually track down a topographical chart that covered the entire canton, as well as sections of the neighboring divisions.

“It’s not quite as good as a British ordnance survey map,” Mallory said as they stepped out of the shop, “but hopefully it’ll have enough detail on it for what we need.”

They walked a few paces down the road, and then he suddenly stopped.

“What is it?” Robin asked.

“Something I noticed in the window,” Mallory said, and retraced his steps.

They stood outside the shop, looking at the books on display, and after a moment he pointed at a slim volume on one side of the window.

“I don’t speak German,” he said, “but that looks interesting. The one with the picture of a mounted knight on the cover. I wonder if that’s just a novel or something about the Templars, or something else.”

“It’s not a novel, and it’s not about the Templars, or not specifically about them,” Robin said firmly. “The title is ‘The Legend of the White Knights’ and according to the subtitle it tells the true story of the Battle of Morgarten. It’s written by some German author named Fritz Gruber that I’ve never heard of. He’s probably a local and that book’s most likely the result of his hobby and personal research, because it has that unmistakable look of a self-published volume.”

“You speak German?” Mallory sounded astonished.

“Not exactly. As a part of my spent—as opposed to misspent—youth, I studied French, Spanish, and German, but I frankly can’t really pretend to be able to speak any of them well enough to be understood unless it’s just a matter of booking a room or ordering a meal in a hotel or restaurant. But I remember enough of the vocabulary of all three languages to be able to read a bit in each one of them.”

“I’ll buy the book, then,” Mallory said.

“Do you really think you’ll find a clue to the location of the Templar Archive in a cheap book some local amateur historian has knocked up?” Robin sounded scornful. “You’ll probably find all that’s in it is just a slightly modified rehash of the entry for the battle in Wikipedia.”

“You could be right, but I still think it’s worth getting. I’ve done a lot of genealogical research, as I told you, and I’ve found local histories of particular districts, usually written by somebody who’s lived in the place their entire life, really helpful. They know the area far better than any stranger coming in can hope to match, and often they’ve
got a passionate interest in what they’re talking about. And books like that always end up being privately printed because the only people who buy them are tourists or locals with a bit of an interest in the subject matter. No commercial publisher would ever contemplate releasing a book like that because it would have such a limited potential market.”

A couple of minutes later, Mallory walked out of the bookshop, tucking his new purchase into the bag that already held the map.

“You won’t even have to flex your German reading muscles,” he said. “There were three versions of the book in the shop. The original was written in German, but the author has also produced versions in French and English. How good the translation is, I’ve got no idea, but it’ll be easier to read even a bad translation than to try understanding the original German text.”

“I hear what you say,” Robin said, “but I’m still not sure it’ll be too much help. After all, we already know when and where the battle took place and what happened when the opposing sides met. What we’re really interested in is what probably took place a few years later, once the Knights Templar—assuming that the story is true and that the local peasants were helped by a handful of White Knights—had established themselves in the area. Anyway, all information is valuable, so let’s hope the author discusses more in the book than just the battle itself.”

On their way back to the hotel they passed a street sign pointing toward the Kantonsbibliothek Schwyz, and again Mallory paused.

“That must be the local library,” he said. “Before we
get too deeply involved in anything else, it might be a good idea to see if they have any ancient records there that might help us.”

Fortunately the librarian spoke reasonable English, but when Mallory explained that they were looking for any information that might be relevant to events that took place in the canton in the first couple of decades of the fourteenth century, and particularly to the Battle of Morgarten, she shook her head emphatically.

“I think I can save you some time there, Herr Mallory,” she said. “We do have quite extensive records here, but not that many relevant to that period. But there is a shortcut. One of our local residents has always been interested in the early history of the canton, and he did a lot of research, most of it in the archives of this very building. And then he wrote a book about the battle, which you can find in almost any of the bookshops in town.”