The Rosetta Key (12 page)

“There’s bloody nothing here,” Big Ned interjected, looking around.

“An astute observation,” Tentwhistle said. “It appears we’ve gone to a lot of labor for nothing, Mr. Gage.”

“Except the Crown’s business,” I shot back sourly.

“Aye, the American has given us the business all right,” Little Tom muttered.

“But look at this, then!” Ensign Potts called. He’d gone over to examine the White Madonna. “A servant’s door, maybe? Or a secret passageway!”

We clustered around. The ensign had pushed on the Madonna’s outstretched hand, raised as if in blessing, and she had pivoted. When she did so, stone had slid away behind her to reveal a winding circular stair, with an opening so narrow you had to squeeze sideways to enter it. It climbed steeply upward.

“That would go to the Temple platform above,” Farhi said. “Communication with the old Templar quarters, in El-Aqsa Mosque. It’s probably blocked, but we must be quieter than ever. Sound would carry up that like a chimney.”

“Who cares what they ’ear,” Ned said. “There’s nothing down here anyway.”

“You’re on Muslim holy ground, fool, and sacred Jewish soil as well. If either group hears us they’ll bind us, circumcise us, torture us for trespassing, and then tear us limb from limb.”

“Ah.”

“Let’s try the Black Madonna as well,” Miriam said.

So we went to the opposite side of the room, but this time no matter how hard Potts pushed on the arm, the statue didn’t move. Miriam’s dualism didn’t seem in effect. We stood, frustrated.

“Where’s the Temple treasure, Farhi?” I asked.

“Did I not warn that the Templars got here before you?”

“But this chamber looks European, like something they built, not something they discovered. Why would they construct this? It’s a laborious way to get a dining hall.”

“No windows down here,” Potts observed.

“So this was for ceremonies,” Miriam reasoned. “But the real business, the research, must have been in another chamber. There must be another door.”

“The walls are blank and solid,” her brother said.

I remembered my experience at Dendara in Egypt and glanced at the floor. The black-and-white tiles formed diagonals that radiated out from the altar. “I think Big Ned should push on this stone table here,” I said. “Hard!”

At first nothing happened. Then Jericho joined him, and finally Little Tom, Potts, and me, all of us grunting. Finally there was a scrape and the altar began to rotate on a pivot set at one corner. As it slid sideways across the floor, a hole was revealed underneath. Stairs led down into darkness.

“This is more like it, then,” Ned said, panting.

We descended, crowding into an anteroom below the main chamber. At its end was a great iron door, red and black with rust. It was marked by ten brass disks the size of dinner plates, green with age. There was one disk at the top, then two rows of three each descending. Between them but lower was a vertical column of three more. In the center of each was a latch.

“Ten doorknobs?” Tentwhistle asked.

“Or ten locks,” Jericho said. “Each of these latches might turn a bar into this jamb of iron.” He tried one handle but it didn’t move. “We’ve no tools to dent
this
.”

“Which means that maybe it ain’t been opened and ain’t been robbed,” Ned reasoned, more shrewdly than I would have given him credit for. “That’s good news, it seems to me. The guv’nor may have found something after all. What would you have that’s so precious that you’d put a door like this in front of it, eh, and down at the bottom of a rabbit hole to boot?”

“Ten locks? There are no keyholes,” I pointed out.

And as Jericho and Ned pulled and pushed on the massive door, it didn’t quiver. “It’s frozen in place,” the blacksmith said. “Maybe it’s not a door after all.”

“And time is growing short,” Farhi warned. “It will be dawn on the platform above, and Muslims will be coming to pray. If we start pounding on that iron, someone is bound to hear us.”

“Wait,” I said, remembering the mystery of the medallion in Egypt.

“It’s a pattern, don’t you think? Ten discs, shaped like the sun… ten is a sacred number. This meant something to the Templars, I’m guessing.”

“But what?”

“Sefiroth,”
Miriam said slowly. “It’s the tree.”

“A tree?”

Farhi suddenly stepped back. “Yes, yes, I see it now! The Etz Hayim, the Tree of Life!”

“The kabbalah,” Miriam confirmed. “Jewish mysticism and numerology.”

“The Knights Templar were
Jews
?”

“Certainly not, but ecumenical when it came to searching for ancient secrets,” Farhi reasoned. “They’d have studied the Jewish texts for clues for where to dig in the mount. Muslim too, and any other. They would have been interested in all symbols aiding their quest for knowledge. This is the pattern of the ten
sefiroth
, with
keter
, the crown, at the top, and then
binah
, intuition, opposite
chokhmah
, wisdom — and so on.”

“Greatness, mercy, strength, glory, victory, majesty, foundation, and sovereignty, or kingdom,” Miriam recited. “All aspects of a God that is beyond understanding. We cannot grasp him, but only these manifestations of his being.”

“But what does it mean on this door?”

“It’s a puzzle, I think,” Farhi said. He had brought his lantern closer. “Yes, I can see the Jewish names engraved in Hebrew.
Chesed
,
tiferet
,
netzach
…”

“The Egyptians believed words were magic,” I remembered. “That reciting them could summon a god or powers…”

Big Ned crossed himself. “By our Lord, heathen blasphemy! These knights of yours adopted the works of the Jew? No wonder they were burned at the stake!”

“They didn’t adopt, they used,” Jericho said patiently. “Here in Jerusalem we respect other faiths, even when we quarrel with them. The Templars meant something by this. Perhaps the latches are to be turned in the correct succession.”

“The crown first,” I offered. “
Keter
there, at the top.”

“I’ll try it.” Yet that latch budged no more than the others.

“Wait, think,” Farhi said. “If we make a mistake perhaps none will work.”

“Or we’ll trigger some trap,” I said, remembering the descending stone monoliths that almost pinned me in the pyramid. “This might be a test to keep out the unworthy.”

“What would a Templar choose first?” Farhi asked. “Victory? They were warriors. Glory? They found fame. Wisdom? If the treasure were a book. Intuition?”

“Thought,” Miriam said. “Thought, like Thoth, like the book Ethan is seeking.”

“Thought?”

“If you draw lines from disc to disc they intersect here in the center,” she pointed. “Does not that center represent to the kabbalistic Jews the unknowable mind of God? Is not that center thought itself? Essence? What we Christians might call soul?”

“You’re right,” Farhi said, “but there is no latch there.”

“Yes, the only place without a latch is the heart.” She traced lines from the ten disks to this central point. “But here is a small engraved circle.” And before anyone could stop her, she took the pry bar she had poked Little Tom with and rammed the end of the barrel against the iron at precisely that point. There was a dull, echoing boom that made us all jump. Then the engraved circle sank, there was a click, and suddenly all ten latches on all ten brass disks began to turn in unison.

“Get ready!” I raised my rifle. Tentwhistle and Potts held up their naval pistols. Ned and Tom unsheathed their cutlasses.

“We’re all going to be rich,” Ned breathed.

When the latches stopped turning Jericho gave a shove and, with a grinding rattle, the great door pivoted inward and down like a drawbridge, its top held by chains, ponderously lowering until it landed with a soft whump on a floor of dust beyond. A gray puff flew upward, momentarily obscuring what lie beyond, and then we saw the door had bridged a crevice in the floor. The chasm extended downward into blackness.

“Some fundamental fault in the earth,” Farhi guessed, peering down. “This has been a sacred mountain since time began, a rock that addresses heaven, but perhaps it has roots to the underworld as well.”

“All things are dual,” Miriam said again.

Cool air wafted upward from the stone crevasse. All of us were uneasy, and I for one remembered that pit of hell in the pyramid. Our greed made us step across anyway.

This chamber was much smaller than the Templar hall above, not much bigger than a drawing room, with a low, domed ceiling. The dome was painted with a riot of stars, zodiacal signs, and weird creatures from some primordial time, a swirl of symbolism that reminded me of the ceiling I’d seen in Egypt at Dendara. At its apex was a seemingly gilded orb that likely represented the sun. In the center of the room was a waist-high stone pedestal, like the base for a statue or a display stand, but it was empty. The walls bore writing in an alphabet I’d never seen before, neither Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, nor Latin. It was different than what I’d seen in Egypt, too. Many characters were geometrical in shape, squares and triangles and circles, but others were twisting worms or tiny mazes. Wood and brass chests were heaped around the room’s periphery, dry and corroded from age. And inside them there was…

Nothing.

Again, I was reminded of the Great Pyramid, where the book’s depository was empty. Cruelty upon cruelty. First the book gone, then Astiza, and now this joke….

“Bloody hell!” It was Ned and Tom, kicking at the chests. Ned hurled one against the stone wall, a great crash turning it into a spray of splinters. “There’s nothing here! It’s all been robbed!”

Robbed, retrieved, or removed. If there had ever been treasure here — and I suspected there had been — it was long gone: taken by the Templars to Europe, perhaps, or hidden elsewhere when their leaders went to the stake. Maybe it had gone missing since the Jews were enslaved by Nebuchadnezzar.

“Silence, you fools!” Farhi pleaded. “Do you have to break things so Muslim guards can hear? This Temple Mount is a sieve of caves and passages!” He turned on Tentwhistle. “Are English sailors’
brains
of oak, too?”

The lieutenant flushed.

“What do the walls say?” I asked, looking at the curious characters.

No one answered, because not even Farhi knew. But then Miriam, who’d been counting, pointed at a small ledge where walls and dome joined. There were sconces sculpted out of the stone, as if to hold candles or oil lamps.

“Farhi, count them,” she said.

The mutilated banker did so. “Seventy-two,” he said slowly. “Like the seventy-two names of God.”

Jericho went closer. “There’s oil dripping into them,” he said with wonder. “How could that be, after so many years?”

“It’s a mechanism triggered by the door,” Miriam suggested.

“We’re to light them,” I said with sudden conviction. “Light them to understand.” This was Templar magic, I guessed, some way to illuminate the mystery we’d discovered. And so Jericho lit a scrap of trunk wood with the wick of his lantern, and touched the oil in the nearest sconce. It lit, and then a tendril of flame moved along an oily channel to light the next one.

One by one they flared to life, igniting in a chain around the circle of the dome, until what had been dim was now a place pulsing with light and shadow. Nor was this all. The dome had stone ribs reaching upward to its apex, I saw, and in each rib was a groove. Now these grooves began to glow from the heat or light below, an eerie purple color similar to what I’d seen in electrical experiments with vacuumed tubes of glass.

“Lucifer’s den,” Little Tom breathed.

At the dome’s highest point, a sunlike orb I thought had been merely gilded began to glow as well. And from it issued a beam of purple light, like the gleam I’d conjured from electricity at Christmas, which fell straight back down to the pedestal in the room’s center.

Where a book or scroll might have been kept, to be read.

Jericho and Miriam were crossing themselves.

There was a hole in the pedestal’s center, I saw, which would have been blocked had a book or scroll rested there. Without them, the light from above could shine through….

And then there was a grinding squeal, like a rusted wheel turning. The sailors stopped and listened. I looked at the ceiling for signs of collapse.

“It’s the Black Virgin!” Ensign Potts shouted from the stairs leading back into the Templar meeting room. “She’s turning!”

W
e ran back upstairs to the statue as if to witness a miracle. The arm that had been immobile before was now pivoting, the Black Madonna turning with it, and a door similar to one behind the White Madonna was opening. When the statue stopped, she seemed to be pointing to the newly opened door.

“By the saints,” Ned declared. “It’s got to be the treasure!”

Potts had his pistol out and ducked in first, climbing a steep, winding passageway.

“Wait!” I cried. If the weird display of light had somehow triggered this opening, it was only because the book was missing from the pedestal, allowing the beam to penetrate that hole. So was the pedestal hole some kind of key that led to more treasure — or a Templar alarm, set off when the book was gone? “We don’t know what this means!”

But all four sailors were charging up the passageway, and Jericho and I reluctantly followed, Miriam and Farhi bringing up the rear. The stairway’s rough-hewn walls reminded me of the workmanship of the water tunnel from the Pool of Siloam: it was old, far older than the Templars. Did it date from Solomon’s time, or even Abraham’s? The tunnel climbed, spiraling, and then it ended at a stone slab with a great iron ring in it. “Pull, Ned!” Tentwhistle commanded. “Pull like the devil and let’s finish this business! It’s almost dawn!”

The sailor did so, and as he slowly hauled the portal open I noticed the far side of the door was uneven rock. This latest door would seem, from its other side, to merely be part of the wall of a cave. Had people above ever known this passage existed?

“Where the bloody hell are we?” Potts asked.