David Gibbins - The Crusader's gold

“So Richard of Holdingham was one of the felag,” Maria said, her voice subdued.

“He was the last of the true felag, of the continuous line from Hardrada.”

“True felag?”

O’Connor paused, clearly troubled. “Early on there was a schism. You can compare it to the struggle in the Church we’ve just been talking about, against the temptation of the devil. We don’t know when it happened or who it was, but it was someone who had seen the menorah with his own eyes, one of the original companions who had chosen to stay behind. A Judas in the midst of the felag. The menorah had already been a secret symbol of kingship to Harald himself, worth far more to his prestige than its weight in gold, and after his departure it became elevated even further as a symbol of the felag, another part of the ritual that bound them together. But where some saw sacred cause, others saw gold. It attracted avarice, greed.”

“Like the Holy Grail,” Costas suggested. “To some a mystical quest, an allegory for some great revelation about Christianity. To others a golden cup.”

“Exactly. To those who could not resist, the search for Harald’s treasure became paramount, an obsession. Secretly they set up their own fellowship, their own felag, with the sole intent of finding the menorah. Those who remained true sensed the malignant force in their midst. Precious knowledge of Harald’s voyage had returned from over the western ocean, knowledge they were able to conceal from those who would use it with ill intent. The knowledge was only ever entrusted to one man, who would pass it on to the next appointed man, master to apprentice, as long as the line could be sustained.”

“I’m beginning to understand,” Jack said slowly. “Jacobus de Voragine, Richard of Holdingham.”

O’Connor nodded. “They were the last. Somehow the line had survived for over a hundred years following its greatest crisis, in 1170. In that year Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered by followers of King Henry II in his own cathedral. Becket’s ascendancy had been the time of greatest power for the true felag, and his death was the beginning of the end.”

“Thomas Becket was a member of the felag?” Jack exclaimed in astonishment.

“And the holder of the knowledge,” O’Connor said. “The knights who hacked him down were not only seeking vengeance for Henry II.”

“Did they get what they wanted?”

“He refused to reveal any secrets, and in their rage they murdered him. They were reviled in England and joined the Third Crusade, ostensibly to seek absolution for their crime. They became known as the Knights of the Blooded Hand, for all these men had scars across their palms where they had cut themselves to form a blood pact. Their quest had gained its own mystique, its own rituals, though their allegiance to the cause of Harald Hadrada was a sham. They began to seek the other Jewish treasure, the treasure that Harald had left behind when he escaped from Byzantium with his Varangian companions. The golden table from the Jewish Temple, the Table of the Shewbread.”

“But that was in Constantinople.”

O’Connor nodded. “The knights were all butchered before they could get there, by Saladin and his Muslim warriors before the walls of Jerusalem. But another one did get to Constantinople, a generation later, in 1204.”

“That’s the date of the Fourth Crusade,” Costas said. “What we’ve been looking for in the Golden Horn. The chain and everything.”

It was suddenly cold in the cell-like room, a chill breeze seeping through a crack in the window. Jack’s mind was racing. “Hang on. The sack of Constantinople. That was Baldwin of Flanders. Are you saying…”

“He was the one. As a young man Baldwin had been to Rome and had seen the Arch of Titus in the Forum. The arch had become a place of pilgrimage for the felag, a sacred shrine. Richard of Holdingham undoubtedly went there. They not only saw the image of the menorah, but also the other treasures being carried by the Roman soldiers. They knew what the golden table looked like. Baldwin didn’t divert the Crusade to Constantinople by accident, just to do the Venetians’ dirty work. But others, those of the true felag, knew Baldwin’s intent, and got there in secret before him. There were still Varangians in the imperial guard at Constantinople, men for whom the name of Hardrada was hallowed, a legend from the glory days. They were persuaded to take the remaining treasure and sink it at a secret location in the harbour before the Crusaders arrived. All of the Varangians died in the siege, and the location was lost.”

“Eureka,” Costas murmured. “Not bad for us. Maybe Maurice Heibermeyer’s got something to look forward to in the Golden Horn after all.”

“By the time of the Fourth Crusade, the schism in the felag had turned into an all-out blood feud,” O’Connor continued. “Retribution was sought for the murder of Thomas Becket, and the cycle began. Even those who still held the cause true lost sight of their nobility, and lived in fear of their lives. Like many secret societies they turned in on themselves, began to self-destruct. Richard of Holdingham must have known he was a marked man once he returned from Iona, once he had torched his master’s body in the longboat in the hallowed felag ritual, sending him off to Valhalla at the very spot where their king had set sail. Their enemies knew that Jacobus must have passed on the knowledge to Richard before he died. There was no apprentice for Richard. His last act was to have been his record on the Mappa Mundi, his assignation of their secret to the future, to be discovered and deciphered by someone when the darkness had passed. And with the murder of Richard the line came to an end.”

“Do you think he relented in his final moments, when he faced death in the Chained Library?” Jack asked.

Maria looked at him, her face full of emotion. “He had the spirit of Thomas Becket beside him. He must have known he was going to die whatever he did. I believe he was strong to the end. Fortunately his attacker must have failed to recognise the exemplar of the map for what it was, or maybe Richard had time to conceal it in the library in the moments before he was confronted.”

“He could never have guessed it would be more than seven hundred years,” Jack murmured.

“And I fear the darkness is still with us,” O’Connor said.

“Fine.” Costas was fingering the ring, and held it up between them with the symbol of the menorah clearly visible. He pointed with his other hand at the swastika on the dagger. “And now to the really big question. How do we get from the medieval murder mystery to these bad guys in the twenty-first century?”

Jack sat enraptured in the book-lined room of the old abbey, amazed at what he was hearing. Thoughts crowded in on his mind, and he struggled to separate them out. He had known they were on the trail of Hardrada since the revelation of the map, that an extraordinary thread tied their discovery in the Golden Horn of Istanbul with the longship in the ice off Greenland, but he could never have guessed that the holy isle of Iona was another link in the chain. And now O’Connor was telling another story, one which moved beyond the thrill of discovery to a world of darkness and danger.

“With the end of the Crusades and the rise of the Ottoman Empire, any hope of finding the remaining treasure in Constantinople seemed lost,” O’Connor continued. “To the west, all contact with Greenland was severed, and the promised land discovered by the Vikings was forgotten. By the time of the European voyages of discovery in the late fifteenth century, the last of the Knights of the Blooded Hand was long dead. Yet the myth endured, passed from father to son in the greatest of secrecy, by descendants of the felag across Europe and eventually in America. By the nineteenth century, all who received the story thought it fantasy, no more historical than the stories of King Arthur and the Round Table, and held on to their pledge only to sustain a romantic legend. Then it somehow reached the ears of a mad Austrian inventor obsessed with World Ice Theory.”