The Last Secret Of The Temple (22 page)

Layla crossed the paved courtyard in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, pausing briefly to take in the double-arched entrance with its slim marble flanking pillars, straight and sinuous as saplings, before passing through into the gloomy, cavernous interior. A trio of elderly women were kneeling in front of the Stone of Unction, crossing themselves and bending forward to kiss the stone's grainy pink surface; to her right, a flight of stone steps led upwards into a gilded, softly lit chapel, the traditional site of Christ's crucifixion. From deep within the bowels of the building came the echo of chanting, the latter clashing and merging with a hymn being sung elsewhere in the church so that the entire interior seemed to throb with a low cacophony of sound. A group of Armenian oblates bustled past, led by a priest in a long cloak and pointed hood.

For a moment she hovered just inside the entrance, eyes adjusting to the murky half-light, nostrils absorbing the pervasive musky odour of incense, then turned to the left and walked into the vast domed Rotunda that dominated the western end of the church. A young Greek Orthodox priest was sweeping the floor. Layla approached him and asked where she might find Father Sergius, the contact Tom Roberts had given her the previous night.

'He food,' said the priest in pidgin English, making an eating motion with his hand. 'Coming ten hour.'

'Tonight?'

The priest furrowed his brow, confused, then suddenly smiled.

'No ten hour. Ten . . .'

'Minutes?'

'Yes, yes. Minute. Ten minute.'

Layla thanked him and, leaving him to his sweeping, wandered across to one of the massive granite columns that bore the Rotunda's dome, sitting down on a bench beside it. In front of her rose the Aedicule, the gaudy, icon-filled shrine that marked the place of Christ's burial. Behind it the Katholicon, the Greek Orthodox choir that dominated the central portion of the building, stretched away eastwards, hemmed in on either side by a gloomy honeycomb of corridors and galleries and doorways and shrines, their masonry blackened and smoothed by centuries of candle-smoke and devotional touching.

She gazed around for a while, taking in the ponderous, jumbled architecture, the crowds of tourists and pilgrims, then opened her bag and removed her notepad, flicking through it until she came to the notes she had scribbled down the previous night.

Her search of the internet had thrown up several thousand web-page matches for the name William de Relincourt, most of which had nothing to do with the man she was interested in. A trawl through some of the hundred or so that did had revealed that, while he was the subject of a great deal of imaginative speculation, hard facts about de Relincourt were few and far between. What little
was
known – all that was known, indeed – appeared to come from two brief passages in medieval chronicles, both translated and reproduced on a number of the websites.

The shorter of these, from William of Tyre's
Historia Rerum in Partibus Transntarinis Gestarum (The History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea),
written some time around 1170, recorded how 'After they had conquered the city the Crusaders found the church (of the Holy Sepulchre) too small, and they added to it a sturdy, high building. At the start William de Relincourt had this work, until he fell into dispute with King Baldwin and suffered a grievous fate. A bell tower was also built.' The second passage, longer and more detailed than the first, appeared in a work called
Massaoth Schel Rabbi Benjamin (The Itinerary of Rabbi Benjamin),
the author a Jew from the Spanish city of Tudela who had visited the Holy Land in 1169 as part of a ten-year journey around the Mediterranean and the Near East:

A story is also told about the Frenchman Gillom of Relincar, who built that church known to the Christians as Holy Sepulchre. In the course of that great work, it is said, at a time when trenches were being dug for the laying-in of stones, as is common practice in such things, this Gillom found a secret place in which was concealed a treasure of very great power and beauty, unlike any treasure that was known before. Being of a wise disposition, and by no means approving of the treatment of the Jews, he spoke nothing of this thing, but rather hid it away, for such was its nature it would have aroused much greed and envy among the Christians. News of it came nonetheless to King Badouin who ordered that it should be given over. And when this Gillom refused his eyes were put out and he was cast into a deep well, where he died only after four days, for he was a man strong both of body and spirit. Few know of this thing, which was told to me by Simon the Jew, who had it from his grandfather.

Around these two passages a whole thicket of theory and supposition had sprung up, some of it relatively innocuous, most downright absurd. One website, for instance, which opened to a fanfare of Gregorian chants, claimed that William had discovered the mummified body of Christ, thereby undermining the entire Christian doctrine of the Resurrection. Another, decorated with mysterious-looking astrological symbols and entitled Sacred Guardians of the Cosmic Portal, had argued in all seriousness that de Relincourt had stumbled across some sort of intergalactic doorway that allowed him to access higher dimensions of space and time, thereby joining an exclusive club of time-travelling initiates that included Moses, Tutankhamun, Confucius and King Arthur. There had been plenty more in the same vein, linking de Relincourt with everything from Freemasons to the Holy Grail, the Knights Templar to the Bermuda Triangle. So far as Layla could make out, however, no realistic explanation had ever been put forward as to precisely what the two passages meant, nor had any independent evidence ever come to light either to corroborate the authenticity of the story they were telling or to confirm that someone named William de Relincourt had ever actually existed.

The whole thing seemed flimsy in the extreme. Yet despite this paucity of hard evidence, despite the niggling doubts in the back of her mind that she was being led on some elaborate wild-goose chase, the more she had read the more hooked she had found herself becoming. Even with her limited knowledge of things medieval she realized that if the photocopy she had been sent was of a genuine letter – and it remained a big 'if – then the original must be an extremely important and valuable historical document, proving not only that de Relincourt was a real person, but that he
had
found some unnamed treasure beneath the church.

What had really whetted her journalistic appetite, however, and continued to whet it, was not so much the prospect of shedding light on some nine-hundred-year-old mystery, intriguing as that was, but rather the connection between that mystery and current events.
I
am in possession of information that could prove invaluable to this man in his struggle against the Zionist oppressor. .
.
The information of which I speak is intimately connected with the enclosed document.
How could the story of William de Relincourt help a man like al-Mulatham? Why should a medieval legend be of any relevance to contemporary Palestine? What was the link between past and present? These were the questions that were occupying her mind now, spinning round and round inside her head like the sparks from a Catherine wheel. It was something important. She could feel it. Something big. But she needed more information. More facts. More pieces of the jigsaw.

'He here now.'

She looked up. The young Greek Orthodox priest was standing over her, still holding his broom.

'Father Sergius,' he said. 'He come.'

He pointed over her shoulder into the Katholicon, where an enormously fat man in black robes, his grey hair tied into a pony tail behind his head, was arranging a ladder in the angle between a wall and a pillar. Layla thanked the priest and, standing, set off across the choir towards the man, passing beneath a cartwheel-sized brass chandelier and coming up to him just as he clambered onto the first rung of the ladder.

'Father Sergius?'

He looked down at her.

'My name's Layla al-Madani. I'm a journalist. A friend of mine suggested you might be able to help me with a story I'm researching.'

The priest gazed at her for a moment, eyes bright, then stepped back down onto the paved floor. He had a jovial, pumpkin-like face, heavily creased and half-covered with a bushy grey beard. Beneath his robes, she noticed, he was wearing socks, sandals and baggy purple trousers.

'Apparently you know everything there is to know about the history of this church,' she added.

He smiled. 'Your friend gives me more credit than I deserve. No-one knows everything there is to know about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I've been here for thirty years and I haven't even scratched the surface. It can be an extremely . . . challenging place.'

His voice was deep and resonant, his English fluent. He smelt faintly sweet, either from aftershave or the scent of incense on his robes.

'What is it you wish to know?' he asked.

'I'm trying to find out about someone called William de Relincourt.'

His smile broadened and, reaching up, he stroked his beard thoughtfully, running his fingers through the wiry grey fronds of hair.

'William de Relincourt, eh? And why would you want to know about him, I wonder?'

Layla shrugged. 'It's just a story I'm researching. Mysteries of Jerusalem. A colour piece.'

'Not your usual sort of article.'

He noticed the puzzled look on her face and started chuckling.

'Oh, I know who you are, Ms al-Madani. We're not that cut off from the world here. I've read a lot of your articles over the years. Very . . . forthright. You don't let the Israelis get away with anything. I can't recall you ever showing much interest in medieval history, though.'

'It's just a one-off,' she said, not wanting to give away too much information, trying to keep things vague. 'I'll get back to Israel-bashing as soon as it's done.'

The priest's chuckling redoubled, his eyes bright with knowing amusement, as if he was well aware that she wasn't giving him the full story but wasn't overly perturbed by the fact.

'In that case,' he said, lowering his hand from his beard and resting it on his protuberant belly, 'we must help you get your article finished as soon as possible. We can't have the Israelis getting complacent, can we? Mind you, I shall require something from you in return.'

'That being?'

'To hold my ladder for me while I try and get rid of these damned birds.'

He nodded upwards to where a pair of white pigeons were fluttering around, banging themselves repeatedly against the windows set high in the walls of the church.

'I need to get one open,' he explained. 'Let them out. Otherwise they shit all over the tourists.'

As if to confirm his words, a large, paint-like glob descended from on high, spattering onto the brass chandelier. Father Sergius tutted and, turning, clambered back onto his ladder.

'Make sure you hold it steady,' he said. 'It sometimes slips.'

She stepped forward and anchored the ladder with her foot while he started climbing, moving with surprising agility for a man his size and weight. Four rungs up he leant over and grasped a long wooden pole that was leaning against the wall, clutching it in one hand while using the other to steady himself as he continued upwards, his billowing robes affording Layla a clear view of his pantaloon-clad legs and backside. A group of tourists wandered in, forming a circle around the
omphalos,
the ornately carved marble basin in the middle of the floor that according to Greek tradition marked the centre-point of the world.

'He attracts all sorts of unlikely people, you know,' called Father Sergius as he reached the top of the ladder. 'William de Relincourt. Last year we had some Italian scientist who wanted to go over the entire church with a . . . what are those things called for measuring radiation?'

'Geiger counter?'

'Exactly. He was convinced William had uncovered the remains of an alien spaceship and that it was still buried underneath the floor somewhere. Complete madman.'

He started raising the pole, grasping a ledge with his left hand while straining upwards towards the nearest window three metres above him.

'And then there's some American group who think he found a doorway into another world.'

'The Sacred Guardians of the Cosmic Portal,' Layla said with a smile.

'You've heard of them?'

'I saw their website.'

'Crazy. Absolutely crazy. We've even got an old Jewish guy who comes in every day because he thinks de Relincourt found the Ten Commandments or something. Only Jew I've ever seen in here. Stands outside the Aedicule praying like it's the Wailing Wall, poor old fool. Every day.'

He was almost at full stretch now, wobbling precariously on the second-from-top rung, prodding at the catch of the window with the pole, trying to get it open. Three times the pole slipped before he finally managed to wedge it directly beneath the catch, forcing the window outwards and open, in the process leaning so far back that Layla had the uncomfortable feeling he was going to fall directly on top of her. He somehow managed to steady himself and, clutching the ledge, waited until the pigeons had located the window and flown out. As soon as they had gone he raised the pole again and, using a hook attached to its end, pulled the window shut and clambered back down to earth, breathing heavily.

'We need to get a bigger ladder,' he puffed, laying his pole on the floor and brushing down his robes. 'I keep telling them. But then the Catholics say we don't need one and the Syrians say we can't afford it and the Armenians and Copts can't agree on whether it should be a wooden ladder or a metal one, so nothing ever gets done. Believe me, compared to some of the people in this place the de Relincourt lot are models of reason and good sense. Tea?'

She declined his offer and, leaving the pole and ladder, the two of them wandered back into the Rotunda. Two women, one elderly, the other young, both dressed in black, were kneeling inside the cramped interior of the Aedicule, holding candles and praying. The young Greek priest had disappeared.