Tom Knox: The Babylon rite

He let the notion hang in the air like the fading vibrations of a tolling bell, then trotted through the rest of the story: the Templars’ rise and supremacy; the twenty thousand knightly members at the very peak of the Order’s strength; the great, Europe-wide power and wealth of the ‘world’s first multinational’. And then, of course, the dramatic downfall, after two proud centuries, when the French king, coveting the Templars’ money, and envying their lands and status, crushed them with a wave of violent arrests and ferocious torture, beginning on one fateful night.

The guide flashed a florid smile: ‘What was the date of that medieval Gotterdammerung, that Kristallnacht of kingly revenge? Friday the 13th, 1307. Yes, Friday the 13th! ’

Adam repressed a laugh. The guide was a walking store of cliches. But entertaining, nonetheless. If he’d been here for the fun of it, he’d have been happy to sit here and listen some more. But he had just seen something pretty interesting.

‘Jason…’ He nudged his friend, who was trying to get a decent shot of the Prentice Pillar.

‘What?’

‘Isn’t that Archibald McLintock?’

‘What?’

‘The old guy, sitting in the pew by the Master Pillar. It’s Archibald McLintock.’

‘And he is?’

‘Maybe the most famous writer on the Knights Templar alive. Wrote a good book about Rosslyn too. Proper sceptic. You never heard of him?’

‘Dude, you do the research, you’re the hack. I have to worry about lenses.’

‘Very true. You lazy bastard. OK, I suggest we go and interview him. He might give me some good quotes, we could get a picture too.’

Advancing on the older man, Adam extended a hand. ‘Adam Blackwood. The Guardian? We’ve actually met before.’

Archibald McLintock had sandy-grey hair and a demeanour of quiet, satisfied knowledge. Remaining seated, he accepted Adam’s handshake with a vague, distracted grasp.

An odd silence intervened. Adam wondered how to begin; but at last the Scotsman said, ‘Afraid I don’t recall our meeting. So sorry.’ His expression melted into a distant smile. ‘Ah. Wait. Yes, yes. You interviewed me, about the Crusades? The Spear of Destiny?’

‘Yes. That’s right, a few years back. It was just a light-hearted article.’

‘Good good. And now you are writing about the Chapel of Rosslyn?’

‘Well, yes,’ Adam shrugged, mildly embarrassed. ‘We’re kind of doing another fun piece about all the… y’know… all the Dan Brown and Freemasons stuff. Templars hiding in the crypt. How Rosslyn has become so famous for its myths.’

‘And you want another quote from me?’

‘Do you mind?’ Adam flushed, painfully aware he was disturbing a serious academic with all this fatuous, astrological absurdity. ‘It’s just that you famously debunked all this rubbish. Didn’t you? What was that thing you said? “The Chapel of Rosslyn bears no more resemblance to the Temple of Solomon than my local farmer’s cowshed is modelled on the stately pleasure dome of Xanadu.”’

Another long silence. The tourists whispered and bustled. Adam waited for McLintock to answer. But he just smiled. And then he said, very quietly. ‘Did I write that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hm! A little piquant. But why not? Yes, I’ll give you a quote.’ Abruptly, Archibald McLintock stood up and Adam recalled with a start that the old man might be ageing but he was notably tall. Fully an inch taller than Adam, who was six foot two.

‘Here’s your quote, young man. I was wrong. ’

‘Sorry?’ Adam was distracted: making sure his digicorder was switched on. ‘Wrong about… what?’

The historian smiled. ‘Remember what Umberto Eco said about the Templars?’

Adam struggled to recall. ‘Ah yes! “When a man talks about the Templars you know he is going mad,” You mean that one?’

‘No. Mr Blackwood. The other quote. “The Templars are connected to everything.”’

A pause. ‘You’re saying… you mean…?’

‘I was wrong. Wrong about the whole thing. There really is a connection. The pentagrams. The pillars. The Templar initiations. It’s all here, Mr Blackwood, it’s all true, it’s more strange than you could ever realize. Rosslyn Chapel really is the key.’ McLintock was laughing so loudly now that some tourists were nervously looking over. ‘Can you believe it? The stature of this irony? The key to everything was here all along!’

Adam was perplexed. Was McLintock drunk? ‘But you debunked all this — you said it was crap, you’re famous for it!’

McLintock waved a dismissive hand and began to make his way down the medieval aisle. ‘Just look around and you will see what I didn’t see. Goodbye.’

Adam watched as the historian walked to the door and disappeared into the drizzly light beyond. The journalist gazed for a full minute as the door shut, and the tourists thronged the nave and the aisles. And then he looked up, to the ancient roof of the Collegiate Chapel of St Michael in Roslin, where a hundred Green Men stared back at him, their faces carved by medieval stonemasons, into perpetual and sarcastic grins.

Rosslyn Chapel, Midlothian

‘OK, I’m done. Got it all.’ Jason stood and stretched. ‘The upside-down angel thingy, Mary Magdalene by the fire extinguisher. And a cute Swedish girl bending over the tomb of the Earl of Orkney. Short skirt. Plaid. You all right?’

‘Yes…’

Jason theatrically slapped his own head. ‘Sorry. Ah. I didn’t get a shot of your old guy — what was his name?’

‘Archie McLintock. Professor McLintock.’

‘So,’ Jason capped his lens. ‘He give you any good quotes?’

Adam said nothing. He was wrapped in confusion.

The silence between the two men was a stark contrast to the hubbub of tourists coming into the building: yet another tour guide was escorting a dozen Japanese sightseers into the nave and pointing out the Templar sword on the grave of William Sinclair, ‘identical, they say, to the Templar swords inscribed on Templar tombs in the great Templar citadel of Tomar!’

‘Hey?’ said Jason, waving a hand in front of Adam as if testing his friend’s blindness. ‘What is it?’

‘Like I said. Just something… a remark of his.’

‘Okayyy. Tell me in monosyllables?’

Adam stared hard at the carving of the Norse serpents at the foot of the Prentice Pillar, and there, on the architrave joining the pillar the famous inscribed sentence. Forte est vinum fortior est rex fortiores sunt mulieres super omnia vincit veritas: ‘Wine is strong, a king is stronger, women are stronger still, but truth conquers all.’

Truth conquers all.

It was all true?

‘Well…’ Adam exhaled. ‘He admitted, or rather confessed, that he had been wrong all along. That it was all true. The Templar connections. Rosslyn really is the key, the key to everything. The key to history. That’s what he said.’

Zipping up his light meter in one of the many pockets of his jacket, Jason gazed laconically at Adam. ‘Finally gone gaga then. Doollally tap. Too much tainted porridge.’

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Yet he sounded sane I… I just don’t know.’

‘Mate. Let’s get a beer. What’s that shit they drink up here? Heavy. A pint of heavy.’

‘Just a half for me.’

Jason smiled. ‘Naturally.’

They walked with a mutual sense of relief out of the overcrowded, overwarmed confines of Rosslyn Chapel into the honestly dreary Scottish weather. For one last second Adam turned and looked at the church, landed in its green lawn, a greystone time machine. The gargoyles and the pinnacles disturbingly leered at him. A chime, an echoic buzz, a painful memory resonating.