Paul Christopher: The Sword of the Templars

Standing there, feet braced against the rocking of the boat, it occurred to Holliday that perhaps it didn’t matter. The sword, the story behind it, and the long journey were enough to have changed and molded events and men’s lives across two thousand years, and a story told that long and with that effect had to have some meaning behind it. Arthur and Excalibur may well have been nothing but childish myth, but it was a myth that had moved millions and changed lives.

“You’ve got that thousand-mile-stare expression on your face, Doc,” said Peggy, standing at his side. She smiled fondly at him. “Looking into history again?”

“Something like that,” he nodded.

Tavares spun the wheel, and the San Pedro heeled over slightly as they turned around a rocky headland. He pointed.

“There!” he said. “Ponta do Marco. The end of the world!”

They were at the northernmost tip of the island. The caldera of the old volcano rose like a jagged green wall, slightly terraced into narrow overlapping ledges that ran directly down into the crashing sea. The heights of the caldera were shrouded in gray rags of cloud and mist.

Standing in front of this looming wall were three black slabs of rock, each one lower than the first, their spires sharp and splintered like giant flakes of obsidian. The three formations each stood separate from the others, the caldera cliff rising like spidery stone fingers clawing up from the sea. The base of the spires was hidden in deep shadow and skirts of rising foam, but for a second Holliday thought he saw a darker patch that might have been the narrow entrance to a cavern.

“The statue stood at the top of the black pillar!” Tavares yelled, pointing upward. Holliday stared.

The foot of the three bony fingers was a froth of crashing surf that threw up enormous curtains of foaming spray, the sound like echoing thunderclaps. Tavares was right; it did look just like the end of the world. Beyond it there was nothing but empty sea. The captain threw the throttles into neutral.

The engines surged and whined and the San Pedro bobbed unhappily on the rolling chop racing under her hull to throw itself onto the great black rocks directly in front of them a few hundred yards away. Peggy was starting to look a little green.

“I thought I saw the mouth of a cave!” Holliday yelled, raising his voice over the booming surf.

“Perhaps!” Tavares shrugged. “No one has ever landed here! There is no beach, only the cliffs!” He shook his head. “A dangerous place. The home of the great beast god, Adamastor!”

Holliday hadn’t heard that name in years. Once, when he was no more than a child, Uncle Henry had told him a bedtime story from memory that had scared him out of his wits. He could still hear his uncle’s rich voice, rolling out of the darkness of his bedroom like the surf upon this broken shore:

“Even as I spoke, an immense shape

Materialized in the night air,

Grotesque and of enormous stature

With heavy jowls, and an unkempt beard,

Scowling from shrunken, hollow eyes,

Its complexion earthy and pale,

Its hair grizzled and matted with clay,

Its mouth coal black, teeth yellow with

decay-Adamastor!”

It was the kind of thing that would have given Edgar Allan Poe food for thought. Much later Holliday had learned that Henry’s tale was from the epic Portuguese poem The Lusiads, which contained the famous threat: “Defy me not for I am that vast, secret promontory you Portuguese call the Cape of Storms…”

He stared at the black spires and the foaming surf, trying to see in his mind’s eye a Templar ship and its precious cargo. Had it somehow managed to find a safe landfall here? If that were true it wasn’t hard to imagine that no other ship had followed for the last eight hundred years. The sword’s secret would have been safe in the protection of these bleak, stone monsters and the pounding sea.

“Bastante,” said Tavares. Enough. He engaged the big twin diesels and pushed the throttles forward, spinning the wheel and turning away from the rocky headland. A few minutes later and they rounded the island onto the lee side. Almost instantly the sea calmed, and the wind died as they chugged their way along the opposite coastline. The cliffs here were less precipitous, the slopes of the caldera thick with clover.

The further south they went the easier the slopes became, and eventually Holliday could see Tavares’s fat brown cows in the little fields, legs tucked beneath them, staring blankly out to the ragged, uneasy sea. Less than half an hour later they rounded the south cape and came in sight of the little village once again. More storm clouds were gathering as Tavares guided the San Pedro toward the wharf.

“I radioed ahead last night,” said the heavyset captain. “My cousin Sebastian will rent you his motorcycle. Only twenty euro plus gas. He is waiting on the dock. He will give you directions to find this priest, Rodrigues.”

“You’ll wait for us?”

“I’ll be here until an hour before sunset. Then I go back to Flores for the night. I do not like the look of this weather.”

“All right,” agreed Holliday.

Sebastian Brigada, Tavares’s cousin, was a man in his thirties, tall, dark-haired with a big caterpillar mustache and caterpillar eyebrows. He smoked a pipe, wore an old tweed cap and giant rubber boots. As promised he was waiting for them on the dock with his motorcycle, a rickety old Casal with a square gas tank, almost no instruments, and a homemade bullet-nose sidecar fitted with its own windscreen and two skinny bicycle tires on a fragile-looking axle.

“No way,” said Peggy, looking at the sidecar. “You expect me to ride in that?”

“Not much choice.” Holliday shrugged. “It’s the only game in town.” He dug into his wallet and handed Sebastian Brigada a twenty-euro note. Brigada nodded his thanks and handed over the bike. As it turned out the directions to Rodrigues’s house were simple enough since there was only one road and one turnoff. You either followed the branch that led to the rim of the old crater or the branch that took you down to the crater floor. Rodrigues lived in a cottage at the end of the branch leading to the crater floor.

Holliday thanked Tavares’s cousin once again and climbed onto the bike. Peggy eased herself into the sidecar and sat down. Brigada showed Holliday how to switch on the engine, and a few moments later they were chattering off down the island’s single paved road, tiny pocket-handkerchief fields on either side, divided at irregular intervals by dry stone walls that looked as old as time. Ahead of them the sweeping slope of the volcano rose up into the sullen mist. A few big shearwater gulls rode the air currents like shifting ghosts, and a few of Tavares’s fat brown cows lounged in the heather, but except for that the landscape was silent and empty. There seemed to be no people and no houses anywhere, and there was no traffic on the unmarked one-lane road at all.

“Pretty spooky,” commented Peggy over the clattering of the old motorcycle. “Hound of the Baskervilles time.”

She was right, thought Holliday: the whole island had the sinister, primordial tension of a place like Dart-moor. Man had no business in a place like this; it was a land of bad dreams and banshees. He shivered. An old wives’ tale-somebody walking over his grave.

They followed the road upward for another mile. Finally they reached a crossroads, one section of the road rising away into the fog on their right, the other fork dropping away on their left. Holliday braked, and they came to a stop. There was a plain sign pointing down the lower road that said simply CALDEIRГO-the crater.

“Why would a priest live out here in the middle of nowhere?” Peggy asked from the sidecar.