The Secret of Excalibur (12 page)

‘If I say no, can I get off ?’ The saddle was actually more padded than Nina had expected, but its width forced her legs uncomfortably wide. Chase gave her the reins; she took them in one hand while keeping the other firmly clenched round the raised front of the saddle. ‘So what do I do now -
aaah!
’ she cried as Chase barked a command and slapped the camel’s rump, and she found herself being pitched back and forth as it clambered to its feet. ‘Whoa, I’m slipping!’

‘Squeeze your legs tighter,’ Mitchell suggested.

‘I can’t, they’re open so wide it feels like I’m being split in half - and don’t you even
think
about coming out with some horrible innuendo!’ she warned Chase.

‘Would I?’ said Chase, clapping a hand to his chest in feigned offence as he walked back to his own waiting camel. ‘She says that every night,’ he added in a stage whisper as he hopped on to the saddle.

‘Eddie, I am
so
going to kill you!’

‘You’ll have to catch me first! Heya!’ He tugged the reins, and his camel set off at a trot. Nina’s animal followed suit, bouncing her on the saddle with every step.

‘
Eddie-ee-ee-ee-ee!
’

The last faint red glow on the western skyline had faded, the diamond shimmering of starlight taking its place overhead. The four camels were kneeling again, lined up near the small campfire opposite a pair of collapsible tents, grunting and mumbling to each other in contented camelese as Karima fed them.

Mitchell, sitting beside Nina at the fire, glanced over at Karima. ‘So, Eddie, just how many women do you have stashed away around the world ready to help you out? First Mitzi, now Karima . . .’

Chase, on Nina’s other side, shrugged. ‘A few.’

‘More than a few,’ said Nina. She began counting on her fingers. ‘Let’s see, there’s Shala, Maria, TD, Mitzi, Karima . . . and those are just the ones I’ve met!’

Chase shrugged again, smirking. ‘What can I say? Women can’t resist me.’ He put an arm round Nina’s shoulders and pulled her to him. ‘And that’s
before
they experience the thrill of the Chase. If you know what I mean.’ He leered at her.

‘
Everyone
knows what you mean, Eddie,’ Nina chided, pushing him away. ‘All the time.’

‘Tchah!’

‘Yeah, subtlety and the army never really mix, whatever country you’re from. No offence,’ Mitchell added with a grin as Chase glowered at him. He turned to Nina. ‘So what about you? You got dozens of hunks all over the world waiting for your call?’

She shook her head. ‘Afraid not.’

‘Good,’ Mitchell said quietly, smiling again. ‘But you’re not jealous of Eddie’s ladyfriends, I take it.’

‘No, I’m used to it by now. I know that Eddie’s got a past - even if he never tells me about any of it,’ she said pointedly. Chase grunted. ‘But after everything we’ve been through, I know I can trust him.’

‘You’ve been through quite a lot, from what I’ve heard. Saving New York, finding the Tomb of Hercules, discovering Atlantis . . .’

‘I know! I’m sometimes amazed we’re both still alive. But it’s how we met.’

‘Ah,’ said Mitchell, nodding knowingly.

Chase regarded him suspiciously. ‘“Ah”? “Ah” what?’

‘Just that, well, considering how different you are, I wondered how you’d got together. But I guess that sharing a really intense experience is one way to break the ice, huh?’

‘You could say that,’ Nina answered. ‘Although your approach of bonding over a Monty Python movie was definitely more like how I’d
expected
to meet someone. You said you met your wife at college?’

‘Ex-wife.’ Mitchell indicated his empty ring finger.

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay.’ He looked away, at the crackling fire. ‘It was one of those two-careers-on-different-paths things - it happens. And we didn’t have a huge amount in common. You and Eddie aren’t the only ones with very different backgrounds. So . . .’ A shrug. ‘There weren’t really any bad feelings, it just didn’t work out. We’ve both moved on.’

‘Still, I’m sorry,’ Nina said again. She turned to Chase, to see that he was already looking at her. ‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ he said after a moment.

‘Things turned out okay in the end,’ Mitchell said, noting the exchange but not remarking on it. ‘She went into law, and I got my doctorate.’

‘You’re a PhD?’ Nina asked, surprised and impressed. ‘What field?’

‘High-energy physics. Thought I might as well put my experience on a nuke boat to good use. And it eventually brought me into DARPA’s earth energy experiments.’

Nina was still highly dubious about the entire concept, but decided not to voice her doubts again. ‘I gotta admit,
Doctor
Mitchell,’ she said instead, ‘you’re a lot more dashing than the average physicist.’

Mitchell beamed, a megawatt movie-star smile. ‘Dashing, huh? I like that. And I have to say,
Doctor
Wilde, you’re definitely in my top three favourite archaeologists.’

‘And who are the other two?’

‘Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, of course!’

‘And am I above or below Lara?’

He smiled again. ‘Definitely above.’

‘A-
hem
!’ Chase fake-coughed loudly enough to attract even the attention of the camels. ‘So, Jack, get us the map, will you? I want to check where we’re going tomorrow.’ With a playful look at Nina, Mitchell stood and went to one of the tents. The moment he was out of earshot, Chase poked Nina in the side. ‘Oi!’

‘What?’

‘Pack that in!’

‘Pack what in?’

‘Bloody flirting!’

Nina couldn’t really deny it. Instead, she grinned. ‘What’s the matter, Eddie? Jealous?’

Chase didn’t return the smile. ‘What, of
him
? Don’t be daft. It’s just that he’s a bit of a pretty boy.’

‘Oh, you think so too? I’ll tell him you said that.’

‘No you bloody won’t!’

Mitchell returned with the map. ‘We’re about here,’ he said, indicating a point on the southern Syrian border. ‘Kafashta is . . . here.’

Chase looked more closely. ‘Maybe eighteen or nineteen miles north. If we set off at dawn, it should only take us about three hours to get there.’ He studied the map for a little longer, then sat up. ‘In that case, we should grab a bite and then get some kip.’ He faced Nina, eyeing her suggestively. ‘See if you can do anything new now that camel’s stretched your legs.’

Nina wasn’t impressed. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’

‘Like what?’

‘There are only two tents.’

‘Two tents, four people, two to a tent. Seems fine to me.’ The others regarded him silently, waiting for the penny to drop. ‘What?’

‘Two men, two women, only
one
couple,’ Nina reminded him. ‘I’ll be sharing with Karima.’

‘Wait, you mean I’ve got to share with
’im
?’ cried Chase, pointing at Mitchell.

‘I’m also thrilled,’ Mitchell sighed.

‘Buggeration and fuckery!’ Chase paused, realising what he’d just said. ‘And no, that’s
not
a suggestion!’

10

Syria

T
hough the desert landscape was indistinguishable from that of Jordan, it somehow seemed indefinably more hostile, menacing, now they had crossed into Syria. Nina surveyed the horizons as best she could from her rocking mount as the group headed northwards, fearing the appearance of a patrol.

But nobody approached over the stony dunes. They were truly in the wastelands, the nearest town of any size many miles away. The camels padded on through the sands for an hour, two, nothing breaking the monotony of their surroundings, until . . .

‘That’s it,’ Mitchell announced, pointing at the unassuming blocky structures rising from the shimmering haze ahead. ‘Kafashta.’

‘Doesn’t look like much,’ Nina observed. If not for the presence of a mosque, easily identifiable by its single minaret standing tall above everything around it, she could easily have imagined it as something from a Western, missing only a nameless gunslinger in a poncho.

‘So what’s the plan?’ said Chase. The village was barely more than a couple of streets intersecting at a square, rundown houses hunched around it. The mosque was by far the largest and best-maintained building, but even it was fighting a losing battle against time and weather, sporting a rickety platform of scaffolding round the top of the minaret where a wall was being repaired.

‘I’ll speak to the imam,’ said Karima. ‘You’ll need his permission to go into the mosque, but there are over two hours before the next call to prayer, so hopefully he’ll allow it.’

They dismounted and tethered the camels, then walked along the short street to the mosque. Karima went through the gates. Nina looked round. The village was so quiet it almost felt abandoned. Remove the telephone poles, she thought, and Kafashta would look little different from how it had in the time of the Crusades.

The sound of raised voices within the mosque caught her attention. ‘Ay up,’ said Chase, opening his leather jacket wider for quicker access to his gun. ‘Trouble.’

Karima reappeared, looking angry, followed by a young man with a rather feeble attempt at a beard. He yelled at her in Arabic, robes flapping as he gesticulated. His outrage grew when he saw the three Westerners.

‘A slight problem,’ Karima informed them thinly. ‘The imam doesn’t want anyone from “the Great Satan” - his exact words - in his mosque.’

‘
This
is the imam?’ said Nina, surprised. The young man, still ranting, seemed to be barely twenty.

‘No, he is not the imam,’ said a new voice. A much older man, probably sixty but with the sun-hardened wrinkles of his face adding a good decade more to his appearance, padded towards them across the mosque’s inner courtyard. He drew heavily on the stub of a cigarette before flicking it out on to the street. The younger man glared at him in disgust. ‘He would like to be, he thinks he is, but he is not. Not yet. I am the imam of this
magnificent
place of worship,’ he said, sarcasm clear in his voice. ‘My name is Mahmoud al-Sabban, and this
boy
,’ he jerked a dismissive thumb, ‘is Rami Hanif, recently arrived from Damascus to drive me to an early grave with his maddening book-learned piety so he can have my job!’

‘Your English is very good, sir,’ Nina said politely.

Al-Sabban smiled crookedly. ‘Thank you. I taught myself, Berlitz tapes. I have been here for over thirty years, and I already know every word of the holy Koran - I needed new ways to fill the time.’ He regarded his visitors with amusement. ‘So, you are from the Great Satan?’

‘
I’m
not from the Great Satan,’ Chase objected. ‘I’m from the
Little
Satan.’

Al-Sabban examined him more closely. ‘You do not look Israeli.’

‘Israeli? No, I’m British.’

‘
Israel
is the Little Satan, my friend,’ al-Sabban told him with a mocking laugh. ‘Britain is, hah, an imp at most.’ Ignoring Chase’s peeved expression, he waved them inside. ‘But that does not matter. Come in, come in.’

Hanif shouted at the imam, but Al-Sabban dismissively waved him away. Lips quivering, the younger man whirled and stalked across the courtyard into the depths of the mosque. ‘Children!’ al-Sabban spat. ‘No respect. And a poor scholar too - the Koran tells us to welcome all strangers as friends. Even strangers from the Great Satan.’ He chuckled. ‘So, what brings you to my mosque?’

The imam had a private room, an office-cum-study with a copy of the Koran open on a desk, at the rear of the mosque. The low-ceilinged space smelled strongly of coffee and nicotine, the narrow windows tinged with yellow. Used to the smoke-free establishments of New York, Nina couldn’t help coughing as al-Sabban lit up his third cigarette in a row. ‘I thought the Koran was against smoking,’ she said hopefully.

‘There is some dispute among scholars,’ al-Sabban replied, taking a long draw before carefully blowing out a smoke ring. ‘And as a scholar myself, I say . . . it is fine.’ He leaned back in his threadbare chair. ‘Yes, I know the item you have told me about. I will let you see it. For a . . .’ He reached over to close the Koran as if shielding it from what he was about to say. ‘
Donation
.’

‘We’re willing to pay, of course,’ said Mitchell. ‘Will dollars be okay?’

‘I would have preferred euros, as dollars have been devalued recently - every refugee from Iraq comes with an armful of dollars! But they will do, I suppose. For a good price.’

Mitchell nodded. ‘We were hoping to do more than just look at the piece, sir - we actually came here to buy it.’

‘Then the price will have to be excellent!’ He carefully stubbed out the cigarette, balancing it on the side of his ashtray for later, and stood. ‘Come with me.’

Al-Sabban led them through the mosque to its central prayer hall. ‘Parts of this building are over eight hundred years old,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, it shows.’ He indicated the base of the minaret at the corner of the hall. A pile of loose bricks lay at the bottom of a ladder, beside a wooden pallet attached to a dangling rope. ‘At least there is one good thing about having Rami here. I can make
him
climb the ladder to call for prayers!’

‘It’s impressive,’ Nina told him. Although the mosque as a whole was shabby, the decorations on the prayer hall’s ceiling were mostly intact, needing only proper cleaning to restore their beauty.

‘You think?’ said al-Sabban, shooting her a look of incredulity. ‘If I could, I would flatten the whole place and build something that was not falling apart!’ He came to a stop at the prayer hall’s southern end. An ornately decorated arched recess was set into the wall: the
mihrab
, indicating the direction of Mecca, towards which the faithful would pray. Beside it was a small flight of wooden steps leading up to a pulpit - the
minbar
, from which the imam delivered his sermon.

The sides of the steps were panelled, but al-Sabban crouched and fiddled with what at first seemed to be a piece of painted ornamentation, before it moved with a click. He swung open a small door, shifting round so the others could see inside. ‘Down here,’ he said, tapping on a flagstone, ‘is where the relics are kept.’ He straightened, stroking his beard thoughtfully. ‘We need tools to open it. I will get them, and bring lights. Wait here. Although, Mr Mitchell, this would be a good time for you to fetch your donation!’

‘Well, that was easy,’ Chase observed once the imam had left.

‘At least we know the Russians didn’t beat us to it,’ said Nina. ‘How much money do you think he’ll want?’

‘Unless he’s insanely greedy, I’ve got enough to cover it,’ Mitchell said.

Karima wasn’t happy. ‘I can’t believe an imam would openly take a bribe like that. No wonder they want to replace him, if that’s how he behaves.’ She narrowed her dark eyes. ‘Allah will judge him.’

Mitchell shrugged, turning to go back to the camels. ‘The important thing is that he’s willing to help us.’

He returned with a messenger bag a few minutes later. Al-Sabban reappeared soon after, carrying a rusty crowbar, a lantern and a pocket torch. ‘Here,’ the imam said, pointing to a spot on one side of the flagstone, where a small gap was visible. ‘One of you, open it.’

Everyone looked at Chase. ‘Oh, like that, is it?’ he complained, taking the crowbar. ‘Eddie the packhorse.’

‘I was thinking more Eddie the strongman,’ Nina reassured him, patting his arm. Chase slid the end of the crowbar into the gap and pulled it back. The flagstone rose a couple of inches with a dry rasp, enough for Mitchell to get his fingers underneath to lift it. The two men quickly moved the stone aside.

Al-Sabban pointed his torch down the hole, revealing a low cellar beneath the floor. ‘I keep the few treasures of the mosque down there,’ he said. ‘They may not be much, but being here for over thirty years has taught me that there are always men who want to steal them. Dr Wilde, you come down with me. The rest of you, wait here.’

Chase’s reluctance to let Nina go without him was clear, but he stood by as first al-Sabban, then Nina, lowered themselves into the cellar. ‘Watch yourself,’ he told her.

‘I’ll be fine,’ said Nina. ‘See you soon.’ She switched on the lantern and ducked into the low passage.

The cellar was more extensive than she had expected, a central corridor with chambers on each side. The ceiling was barely five feet high, the arched entrances to each side room lower still. Al-Sabban hunched down ahead of her, kicking up dust with each step as the circle of his torch beam swept back and forth. ‘Down here.’

She followed him to a chamber near the cellar’s far end. It was occupied by battered cardboard boxes and old wooden planks stacked haphazardly against one wall. Al-Sabban carefully lifted the planks aside to reveal another box behind them, a metal chest that from the faded stencilling on its side Nina guessed had once been used to hold ammunition. He blew cobwebs from the handle, then opened it.

‘This is the blade that Muhammad Yawar used to kill the leader of the infidels,’ he said, reaching into the box. Whatever the mosque’s other treasures were, they were apparently hidden elsewhere in the cellar, as the metal case was empty except for the length of steel he carefully withdrew.

Nina brought the lantern closer. It was definitely part of a sword, almost three feet long, but jagged and broken at each end, missing both the tip and the hilt. Although grubby, the metal still appeared in good condition.

It was not plain, though: patterns had been inscribed along its length, just as she had seen on the stained-glass window in Peter’s tomb. Could they really hold the clues that Rust had believed would lead to Excalibur?

‘May I hold it?’ she asked.

Al-Sabban nodded. Nina put down the lantern, then he handed it to her. Turning it to pick out the inscriptions in the lantern’s glow, Nina saw a faint line of text in Latin: ARTURUS REX. ‘King Arthur . . .’ she whispered.

In any other circumstances, that would have immediately convinced her the sword was a fake: it was extremely unlikely that Arthur would have inscribed a nametag on his own sword. But in this case, she was actually searching for a fake, created by the monks of Glastonbury Abbey to convince their king that he had been given the real thing. The nobility of the twelfth century were far more wealthy and ostentatious than their counterparts from six hundred years earlier, and would have expected their symbols of power to be just as showy. ‘Pimp my sword . . .’

‘What?’ asked al-Sabban.

‘Sorry, just thinking out loud.’ Her gaze moved on to the other markings scored into the metal. Most seemed to be purely decorative, florid loops and curls, but there was also a repeated symbol: a labyrinth, a tightly wound path contained within a circle. Unlike a maze, there was only one route from the outside to the centre. Along the path were dots marking particular points. The number and position of the dots varied on each symbol, but there was no readily apparent pattern.

Nina turned the sword over, finding more of the same markings. She associated the symbol of the labyrinth with Greek mythology, the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur, but it also appeared in other cultures, the particular form of this one nagging at her memory. It had appeared somewhere amongst her cram studies of Arthurian legend . . .

Sudden shouting broke her reverie and she looked round, startled. ‘Rami!’ cried al-Sabban, annoyed. The commotion was coming from the prayer hall. ‘Wait here, I will deal with him.’

Above, Chase and Mitchell stood helplessly as Hanif, more angry than ever, screeched at them in Arabic. Karima tried to speak, but barely got a few words out before being shouted down. ‘Guess we
really
pissed him off this time,’ Chase muttered.

Al-Sabban’s head popped up through the hole like a gopher. ‘Rami!’ he snapped, beginning a vocal exchange with the younger imam. He finally managed to shout Hanif into silence, then clambered out of the cellar entrance. ‘He is angry because you two are in the prayer hall,’ he told Chase and Mitchell, ‘and also because you are with her.’ He indicated a curtain at the other end of the room that could be drawn to divide the prayer hall into two sections. ‘Men and women are kept apart during prayer. He thinks you are insulting Islam by being here like this.’

Hanif began shouting again, and al-Sabban listened before irritably conceding some point. ‘It seems I will only be able to shut him up if you wait in the courtyard.’

‘What about Nina?’ Chase asked.

‘She is fine. She is
engrossed
,’ said the imam. He shook his head, then started for the door. ‘Come, wait outside. Mr Mitchell, this may be a good time to talk about your donation.’ He eyed Mitchell’s bag.

Hanif followed the group, waiting in the prayer hall’s doorway like a guard dog as al-Sabban led Chase, Mitchell and Karima to a small pool in the courtyard. Chase blinked in the sunlight; the cool of the mosque’s interior made returning to the desert heat all the more jarring. Over the gurgle of water from the fountain he heard a car coming along the street outside, the first sign of life in the village.