Labyrinth (62 page)

Against the red cloak, the small white sheepskin package, the size of a book, was burning. The hands that held it were no longer there. They had been reduced to bone and spitting fat and blackened flesh.

There was nothing left, he knew it.

For Guilhem, everything was silent now. There was no more noise, no more pain, nothing but a clear white expanse. The mountain had gone, the sky and the smoke and the screaming had gone. Hope had gone.

Now, his legs could no longer hold him. Guilhem fell to his knees as despair claimed him.

CHAPTER 73

Sabarthes Mountains

FRIDAY 8 JULY 2OO5

The stench brought him to his senses. A mixture of ammonia, goat droppings, unwashed bedding and cold, cooked meat. It stuck in his throat and made the inside of his nose burn, like smelling salts held too close.

Will was lying on a rough cot, not much more than a bench, fixed to the wall of the hut. He maneuvered himself into a sitting position and leaned back against the stone wall. The sharp edges stuck into his arms, which were still tied behind his back.

He felt he’d done four rounds in the boxing ring. He was bruised from head to toe where he’d been thrown against the side of the boot on the journey. His temple was throbbing where Francois-Baptiste had struck him with the gun. He could feel the bruise beneath the skin, hard and angry, and the blood around the wound.

He didn’t know what time it was or what day it was. Friday still?

It had been dawn when they left Chartres, maybe as early as five o’clock. When they had got him out of the car it had been afternoon, hot and the sun still bright. He twisted his neck to try to see his watch, but the movement made him feel sick.

Will waited until the nausea had passed. Then he opened his eyes and tried to get his bearings. He appeared to be in some sort of shepherd’s hut. There were bars on the small window, no bigger than the size of a book. In the far corner there was a built-in shelf, like some sort of table, and a stool. In the grate alongside there were the remains of a long-dead fire, grey ash and black shavings of wood or paper. A heavy metal cooking pot hung on a stick across the fireplace. Will could see cold fat coagulated around the rim.

Will let himself fall back on the hard mattress, feeling the rough blanket on his battered skin, and wondered where Alice was now.

Outside, there was the sound of footsteps, then a key in a padlock. Will heard the metallic chink of chain being dropped on the ground, then the arthritic creak of the door being pulled open and a voice he half-recognised.

“
C’est l’heure
.” Time to go.

Shelagh was conscious of the air on her bare arms and legs and the sensation of being moved from one place to another.

She identified Paul Authie’s voice somewhere in the murmur of sound as she was transported from the farmhouse. Then the distinctive feeling of underground air on her skin, chill and slightly damp, the ground sloping down. Both the men who had held her captive were there. She’d got accustomed to the smell of them. Aftershave, cheap cigarettes, a threatening maleness that made her muscles contract.

They had tied her legs again and her arms behind her back, pulling at the bones in her shoulders. One eye was swollen shut. The combination of lack of food and light and the drugs they gave her to keep her quiet meant that her head was spinning, but she knew where she was.

Authie had brought her back to the cave. She felt the change in atmosphere as they emerged from the tunnel into the chamber, felt the tension in his legs as he carried her down the steps to the sunken area where she’d found Alice unconscious on the ground.

Shelagh registered that there was a light burning somewhere, on the Altar perhaps. The man carrying her stopped. They had walked right to the back of the chamber, past the limits she’d gone before. He swung her down off his shoulders, a dead weight, and dropped her. She sensed pain in her side as she hit the ground, but could no longer feel anything.

She didn’t understand why he hadn’t killed her already.

He had his hands under her arms now and was dragging her along the ground. Grit, stones, sharp fragments of rock, cut into the soles of her and her exposed ankles. She was aware of the sensation of her bound hands being tied to something metal and cold, a ring or hoop sunk into the ground.

Assuming she was still unconscious, the men were talking in low voices.

“How many charges have you set?”

“Four.”

“To go off at what time?”

“Just after ten. He’s going to do it himself.” Shelagh could hear the smile in the man’s voice. “Get his hands dirty for once. One press of the button and
boom!
The whole lot will go.”

“I still can’t see why we had to drag her all the way up here,” he complained. “Much easier to leave the bitch at the farm.”

“He doesn’t want her identified. In a few hours’ time, half this mountain’s going to come down. She’ll be buried under half a tonne of rock.”

Finally, fear gave Shelagh the strength to fight. She pulled against her bonds and tried to stand, but she was too weak and her legs wouldn’t hold her. She thought she heard a laugh as she sank back down to the ground, but she couldn’t be sure. She wasn’t certain now what was real and what was only happening inside her head.

“Aren’t we supposed to stay with her?”

The other man laughed. “What’s she going to do? Get up and walk out of here? I mean, Christ! Look at her!”

The light started to fade.

Shelagh heard the men’s footsteps getting fainter and fainter, until there was nothing but silence and darkness.

CHAPTER 74

“I want to know the truth,” Alice repeated. “I want to know how the labyrinth and the Grail are connected,
if
they are connected.”

The truth of the Grail,“ he said. He fixed her with a look. ”Tell me,
Madomaisela
, what do you know about the Grail?“

“The usual sort of stuff, I suppose,” she said, assuming he didn’t really want her to answer seriously.

“No, truly. I am interested to hear what you have discovered.”

Alice shifted awkwardly in her chair. “I suppose I held to the standard idea that it was a chalice which contained within it an elixir that gave the gift of everlasting life.”

Alice broke off and looked self-consciously at Baillard.

“A gift?” he asked, shaking his head. “No, not a gift.” He sighed. “And where do you think these stories come from in the first place?”

“The Bible, I suppose. Or possibly the Dead Sea Scrolls. Perhaps from some other early Christian writing, I’m not sure. I’ve never really thought about it in those terms before.”

Audric nodded. “It is a common misconception. In fact, the first versions of the story you talk about originate from the twelfth century, although there are obvious similarities with themes in classical and Celtic literature. And in medieval France in particular.”

The memory of the map she’d found at the library in Toulouse suddenly came into her mind.

“Like the labyrinth.”

He smiled, but said nothing. “In the last quarter of the twelfth century lived a poet called Chretien de Troyes. His first patron was Marie, one of daughters of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was married to the Count of Champagne. After she died in 1181, one of Marie’s cousins, Philip of Alsacee, Count of Flanders, became his patron.

“Chretien was immensely popular in his day. He’d made his reputation translating classic stories from Latin and Greek, before he turned his skill to composing a sequence of chivalric stories about the knights you will know as Lancelot, Gawain and Perceval. These allegorical writings gave birth to a tide of stories of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.” He paused. “The Perceval story-
Li contes del graal
- is the earliest extant narrative of the Holy Grail.”

“But…” Alice started to protest. She frowned. “Surely he can’t have made the story up? Not something like that. It can’t have appeared out of thin air.”

Again, the same half-smile appeared on Audric’s face.

“When challenged to name his source, Chretien claimed that he had acquired the story of the Grail from a book given to him by his patron, Philip. Indeed, it is to Philip that the story of the Grail is dedicated. Sadly, Philip died at the siege of Acre in 1191 during the Third Crusade. As a result, the poem was never finished.”

“What happened to Chretien?”

“There is no record of him after Philip’s death. He just disappeared.”

“Isn’t that odd, if he was so famous?”

“It is possible his death went unrecorded,” said Baillard slowly.

Alice looked sharply at him. “But you don’t think so?”

Audric did not answer. “Despite Chretien’s decision not to complete his story, all the same, the story of the Holy Grail took on a life of its own. There were direct adaptations from Old French into Middle Dutch and Old Welsh. A few years later, another poet, Wolfram von Eschenbach, wrote a rather burlesque version,
Parzival
, around the year 1200. He claimed he was not following Chretien’s version but another story by an unknown author.”

Alice was thinking hard. “How does Chretien actually describe the Grail?”

“He is vague. He presents it as some sort of dish, rather than a chalice, like the medieval Latin
gradalis
, from which comes the Old French
gradal
or
graal
. Eschenbach is more explicit. His Grail -
gral
- is a stone.”

“So where does the idea come from that the Holy Grail is the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper?”

Audric pressed his fingers together. “Another writer, a man called Robert de Boron. He wrote a verse poem,
Joseph d’Arimathie
, some time between Chretien’s
Percevaland
1199. De Boron not only has the Grail as a vessel - the chalice of the Last Supper, which he refers to as the
san greal
- but he also fills it with the blood taken from the Cross. In modern French the
sang real
, the ”true“ or ”royal“ blood.”

He stopped and looked up at Alice.

“For the guardians of the Labyrinth Trilogy, this linguistic confusion
san greal
and
sang real
- was a convenient concealment.”

“But the Holy Grail is a myth,” she said stubbornly. “It cannot be true.”

The
Holy Grail
is a myth, certainly,“ he said, holding her gaze. ”An attractive fable. If you look closely, you will see that all these stories are embellishments of the same theme. The medieval Christian concept of sacrifice and quest, leading to redemption and salvation. The
Holy
Grail, in Christian terms, was spiritual, a symbolic representation of eternal life rather than something to be taken as a literal truth. That through the sacrifice of Christ and the grace of God, humankind would live forever.“ He smiled. ”But that such a thing as the Grail exists is beyond doubt. That is the truth contained within the pages of the Labyrinth Trilogy. It is this that the Grail guardians, the
Noublesso de los Seres
, gave their lives to keep secret.“

Alice was shaking her head in disbelief. “You’re saying that the Grail is not a Christian concept at all. That all these myths and legends are built on a… a misunderstanding.”

“A subterfuge rather than a misunderstanding.”

“But for two thousand years the debate has been about the existence of the
Holy
Grail. If now it is revealed not only that such a thing as the Grail legends are true but…” Alice broke off. She found it hard to believe what she was saying. “It is not a Christian relic at all, I can’t even begin to imagine…‘

The Grail is an elixir that has the power both to heal and significantly prolong life. But for a purpose. It was discovered some four thousand ago in Ancient Egypt. And those who developed it and became aware of its power realised that the secret had to be kept safe from those who would use it for their own benefit as opposed to the benefit of others. The sacred knowledge was recorded in hieroglyphs on three separate sheets of papyrus. One gave the precise layout of the Grail chamber, the labyrinth itself; one listed the ingredients required for the elixir to be prepared, the third the incantation to effect the transformation of the elixir into the Grail. They buried them in the caves outside the ancient Avaris.“

“Egypt,” she said quickly. “When I was doing some research, trying to understand what I had seen here, I noticed how often Egypt came up.”

Audric nodded. “The papyri are written in classical hieroglyphs - the word itself means ”God’s words“ or ”divine speech“. As the great civilization fell into dust and decay, the ability to read the hieroglyphs was lost. The knowledge contained in the papyri was preserved, handed guardian to guardian, over the generations. The ability to speak the incantation or summon the Grail was lost.

“This turn of events was without design, but it, in turn, added an additional layer of secrecy,” he continued. “In the ninth century of the Christian era, an Arab alchemist, Abu Bakr Ahmad Ibn Wahshiyah, decoded the secret of the hieroglyphs. Fortunately, Harif, the
Navigataire
, became aware of the danger and was able to confound his attempts to share his knowledge. In those days, centres of learning were few and communication between peoples slow and unreliable. After that, the papyri were smuggled to Jerusalem and concealed there within underground chambers on the Plains of Sepal.

“From the 800s to the 1800s, no one made significant progress in deciphering hieroglyphs. No one. Their meaning was only elucidated when Napoleon’s scientific and military expedition to North Africa in 1799 uncovered a detailed inscription in the sacred language of hieroglyphs, in everyday demotic Egyptian of the time and Ancient Greek. You have heard of the Rosetta Stone?”

Alice nodded.

“From that point, we feared it was only a matter of time. A Frenchman, Jean-Francois Champollion, became obsessed with breaking the code. In 1822, he succeeded. The wonders of the ancients, their magic, their spells, everything from funerary inscriptions to the
Book of the Dead
, all suddenly could be read.” He paused. “Now, the fact that two books of the Labyrinth Trilogy were in the hands of those who would misuse it became a cause for fear and concern.”