Templar Throne Page 13

  The sidewalks were narrow, the traffic was crushing and everything looked like it needed repairing. There were so many blobs of pressed old bubble gum on the sidewalks it looked like some sort of inlay. If for nothing else Holliday stood out for his size; it seemed that the average Wicklownian male was short and the average woman was both short and tending to fat. A pack of teenagers in magenta and gray forced Holliday and Meg off the sidewalk as they powered onward, three-quarters of them smoking, all of them talking and none of them paying any attention to anyone else.

  They stopped at the local Cead Mille Failte—a hundred thousand welcomes—Tourist Office and picked up a brochure.

  “It says here the Gaelic name for Wicklow means Church of the Toothless One,” said Meg.

  “Toothless one,” said Holliday, looking at the dreary collection of pastel buildings. “That sounds about right.”

  “Boxtys are potato pancakes.”

  “Pardon?”

  “What Sean’s cooking for dinner,” answered Meg.

  “I bet his name isn’t Sean at all. It’s probably John but the girls like Sean better.” Holliday shook his head. “Toothless,” he muttered.

  They reached what passed for a town square in Wicklow, a pocket-handkerchief-sized triangle of grass with a wrought iron two-foot-high fence around it and a statue in the middle. The statue was of a dour- faced bearded man in an old-fashioned ship captain’s outfit. He looked constipated, but most Victorian men and women seemed to look that way. According to the brochure he was the captain of the Great Eastern, the ship that laid the first transatlantic cable. Someone had spray-painted Pat Kenny is a git & a wanker! in fluorescent pink all over the base of the monument.

  There was a miniature department store on the square and they managed to buy some clothes and backpacks to put them in, then continued their walk. They turned down Bridge Street and headed back down the hill to the port. They went into Bridge Books, a cottagelike building with apartments above the store, the whole place painted a horrible shade of robin’s egg blue. They asked if there was anything in the store about the island of Iona.

  Holliday wasn’t expecting anything at all and he was surprised when they actually had two volumes: a history of Iona from its founding in the sixth century to the present, including a detailed map, and a book of prayers from Iona Abbey. Holliday bought the history and Sister Meg bought the prayers.

  Having toured Wicklow they went back to the ship and helped O’Keefe with the dinner. They stayed the night in port and headed north the following morning at daybreak.

  18

  Iona, according to the Reverend James Walker, author of the book The Wild Geese Fly: A History of the Sacred Isle of Iona from Ancient Times to the Present, is an island five miles long and two miles wide lying a mile offshore of the Island of Mull, a much larger but equally windswept and lonely place in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland’s western coast.

  It is, to the Scots Presbyterian minister, “a thin place,” so isolated and distant from the world that it exists in a very narrow space between reality and things spiritual, thus bringing it that much closer to God. Its first occupant after man’s Stone Age forebears was a saint from Ireland, St. Columba, an exiled priest-soldier kicked out of the country for leading the losing side during the Battle of Cul Dreimhne in A.D. 561.

  Columba arrived on Iona two years later, bringing twelve men with him and establishing a monastery. Each monk was required to build a cairn of stones on the beach equivalent to the sins of his life, and the remains of those cairns can still be seen on the beach, now romantically known as the Bay at the Back of the Ocean.

  After St. Columba came the Vikings and after the Vikings a flock of Benedictine nuns, complete with a priest and a prior and then an abbey, built in 1202. The nuns built a nunnery to go along with the monastery, and a village, Baile Mòr, which ironically translates as Large Town. No crops grew on the stony, boggy ground, but sheep could be bred on the windblown gorse and stunted grass, and the resulting wool harvested and spun. A poor living was all the island offered, and a poor living was all that was needed.

  As the decades and the centuries passed, Iona spread the word of God, first to the craven, pagan English, and then to France and the rest of Europe. By the time Jean de Saint-Clair and the Blessed Juliana arrived at Iona in 1307 on their Venetian ship the Santa Maria Maggiore , the island was already deemed holy and at least fifty-six kings of Scotland and Norway had been buried there, not to mention four Irish kings, one saint, and one former leader of the British Labour Party named John Smith who had enjoyed holidays on Iona several times.

  The Mary Deare came upon the Holy Isle two hours after dawn on the following morning, the mist still lying along the narrow strait between Iona and Mull, the island itself no more than a thin green line rising only a little above the darker green of the sea. As they neared the island and the mist cleared, Holliday could see a scattering of houses at the foot of a low, twin- humped hill.

  The houses looked like so many perching gulls spread out along the shore, their roofs dark slate and the walls a brilliant washed white that glowed in the rising sun. At the northern end of the island they could see a second hill, much smaller, but much higher than the one with the houses huddled below it. The second hill had to be the famous Dun I, Iona’s Hill, called Mt. Zion by St. Columba and Temple Mount by the nuns and priests who came after him. According to Reverend Walker in his book, the summit of Dun I was St. Columba’s favorite place to meditate as he vainly looked back for a sight of his beloved Ireland. The next nearest landfall was actually seventeen hundred nautical miles away on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula, home to the first European settlement in the New World.

  O’Keefe radioed the harbormaster and they eased into the tiny bay, warping into the simple stone and concrete pier that jutted out from the rocky shore. On the other side of the pier the MV Loch Buie, a small passenger and car ferry, was loading up with walk-ons going back to Fionnphort on the Island of Mull, a mile away across the narrow strait to the east.

  From the look of the steel gray clouds and the silvery curtain that lay over Mull, it was raining cats and dogs, but Iona was graced with a kind, warm sun with just enough breeze to puff out the sails of a Sea Scout squadron of Bug-class Lasers on a race round the small island.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Meg as they stepped off the boat, Holliday behind her. He looked back at the wheelhouse of the Mary Deare and saw O’Keefe was still standing at the wheel. He’d told them he had work to do in the engine room when he declined Meg’s invitation to come with them, but there he was talking into the radio microphone.

  Holliday didn’t bother mentioning his growing suspicions to Meg; she was completely taken by the man’s smooth and smiling charm. Yesterday, standing at the wheel, he’d crooned a succession of maudlin Irish ballads, like “Four Green Fields” and “The Rising of the Moon.” Holliday had tried to bait O’Keefe into revealing his true colors by casually mentioning that in his opinion the Irish fought so much simply because they enjoyed it; after all, they were the only nation in the world who had a district of their capital city named for a style of drunken brawl: Donnybrook. O’Keefe had just smiled and said, “Now isn’t that the bloody truth then, yeah?”

  Holliday turned again, following Sister Meg down the pier. O’Keefe was no Hollywood Irishman; there was something deeper and darker going on there. When they got back to the Mary Deare he was going to find out just what it was. The first step perhaps was a look in the old puffer’s cargo hold.

  They cut through the crowd of outgoing and incoming passengers and reached the end of the pier. Ahead of them a dozen or so men sporting marine haircuts and carrying identical enormous black sports bags were laughing and talking together.

  Holliday kept well back and watched them carefully until he saw that they were wearing matching black windbreakers with “48th Fighter Wing Paintball Team, Lakenheath” emblazed on the back. Flyboys from the Statue of Liberty Wing down in Suffolk. Holl
iday and Meg reached the end of the pier and asked a likely-looking local wearing gum boots and a tattered roll-neck sweater for directions. He pointed to a small white building close to the shore to the left of the pier.

  “Tha’s post office,” the local drawled. “E’ll tell ye were to go all right.” The man laughed at his small joke, hawked and spit into the water. They went to the post office. A grave-looking man named Mockitt gave them directions to the abbey where the Reverend Walker was working. Holliday bought a Mars Bar from a display on the counter and they left the post office.

  They walked up a gravel pathway to the main north-south road. There wasn’t a car to be seen; the road was full of walkers with a few wobbling, hired bicycles here and there. The wind picked up and Holliday looked back toward Mull. Then he broke the gooey Mars Bar in half and handed the larger piece to Meg.

  “They deep-fry Mars Bars here,” commented Holliday. He took a bite of the tooth-achingly sweet candy bar.

  “No way!” Meg responded.

  “No word of a lie. Same oil as the chips.”

  “That’s disgusting!” Meg answered.

  “When in Rome and all that,” Holliday said and grinned. He took another bite from his portion and smacked his lips. “Yum-yum.”

  “Now you’re being disgusting.”

  The Sea Scouts had disappeared behind the sheeting rain off the coast of the larger island. He grinned; they’d be soaking wet and enjoying every minute of it, safe from their mothers’ anxieties about catching their death.

  The cadets at West Point had been just the same, thriving on muddy maneuvers in the rain or on the obstacle course, their uniforms filthy, their faces even dirtier, their eyes bright.

  He missed his kids and the teaching. He missed West Point, something he hadn’t thought possible. Most of all he missed Amy, as he knew he would as she lay dying, more than ten years in the past. He turned to the road ahead, Meg a few steps ahead of him now, and thought about Amy all the way to the abbey.

  Mockitt’s directions had been correct; the abbey stood on the slightly sloping ground a mile or so from the town, a group of gray stone buildings huddled on the sparse land, a low stone fence running along beside the road for a hundred yards or so, enclosing an anonymous field of gorse.

  As abbeys went there was nothing exceptional about it except for its isolated location. According to the Reverend Walker’s guidebook it had been built on the site of St. Columba’s original parish church in 1203 and expanded over the years to include a refectory, a nearby nunnery and even a scriptorium, in which it was said the magnificent illuminated manuscript known as the Book of Kells, Ireland’s most prized possession, was created, even though it had originated on the little Scottish island.

  They found Walker in the refectory on the far side of the cloister. The big man was up on a ladder scrubbing what appeared to be a square of plastic wrap against something high on the wall between two narrow windows.

  The reverend was large in every sense of the word, tall, big-bellied, ginger- haired with a full beard and a thick curling mustache. Sensing their presence, the big man twisted slightly on the ladder. Like many men his size he was quite graceful. He wore old-fashioned tortoiseshell spectacles, his eyebrows riding over the lenses like furry red caterpillars.

  “Hi-ho,” he said, his face breaking into a wide smile. “Come to see a man of the cloth fall from grace, have you?” He gave a snorting laugh. “Wouldn’t be the first time, that’s certain enough!” The accent was Scots but the burr had been softened after years elsewhere. At a guess Holliday would have bet on Cambridge or perhaps Oxford.

  “Reverend Walker?”

  “ ’Tis I,” said the big man. He came down the ladder and greeted them properly, hand extended. He shook Holliday’s first and then Meg’s. They introduced themselves.

  “Just taking molds of a few more Mason’s Marks. One finds them in the strangest places. He held out his hand and showed them the small reverse impressions of the obscure glyphs: arrows, reversed number fours, circle letters, two Xs side by side.

  The minister had made the impressions with some sort of plasticine. “It’s called flex-dough,” explained Reverend Walker. “It’s not dough at all, of course—it’s some sort of plastic. It’s usually used by stroke victims to exercise their hands with, but it makes a perfect matrix for taking mold impressions. I make plaster reproductions of all the marks with it.”

  “What were they for?” Meg asked. “The marks, I mean.”

  “Every master mason had a different mark,” the minister explained. “Each block they laid was given the mark for payment. Sometimes they were also used for decoration or to show later masons who had come before them. They were used a great deal in Freemasonry, as well. Follow me and I’ll show you some I took yesterday. It’s quite a lot of fun, actually.”

  The minister trotted off to the front of the refectory, where a large crucifix stood against the wall. Below the crucifix a table had been constructed, a door laid across two sawhorses. They followed and he showed them at least a hundred more of the obscure marks, graffiti from almost a thousand years ago. Suddenly Holliday froze.

  “That one,” he said, pointing. “Where did it come from?”

  “That? Yes, it is a little odd. The first time I’ve seen one like it, as a matter of a fact.”

  “It’s the only one in the church?” Holliday asked.

  “As far as I know,” said Walker. “What’s the matter, young man? You look white as a sheet.”

  Holliday almost laughed. It had been a long time since he’d been called young man.

  “I’ve seen a ghost,” he said, smiling faintly. The little blob of bright red flex-dough bore the mark of Saint-Clair—an engrailed cross. It was unmistakable. “The cross, where did you find it?”

  “In the undercroft,” answered Reverend Walker.

  “What’s the undercroft?” Holliday asked.

  “A crypt if it’s beneath a church, a basement storage area anywhere else,” explained Meg.

  “Quite right, my dear,” said Walker, impressed.

  “And here?” Holliday asked.

  “The refectory was once the abbey dining hall. Originally the undercroft was the kitchen. Eventually the undercroft was used as a crypt, as your friend said,” replied Walker. “I took that impression from directly above one of the old burial slabs.”

  “A knight?” Meg asked quickly.

  “Good Lord!” Walker said. “How on earth did you know that?”

  Meg slipped off her backpack, dug into it and pulled out the little book of prayers she’d purchased in Wicklow. She flipped through the pages until she came to the prayer she wanted, then began to recite:Lord God, in Jerusalem’s temple crowned,

  We your steadfast soldier and your handmaiden ask

  Only for thy grace and favor found

  If as thy servants we complete the task.

  Save us from Satan’s royal vengeance once more

  And give us Mary’s holy wings to fly

  Us to the farther sable shore

  Then we shall keep thy treasures safe

  In Arcadia’s pale enclosing arms once more.

  “Astounding,” said Walker. “The Knight’s Prayer. Just about the oldest recorded prayer from the abbey.”

  “From 1307, to be precise,” said Holliday.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” muttered Walker, staring closely at them. “How could you possibly know when the prayer was written? Even I don’t know that.”

  “Because we know who the ‘steadfast soldier’ and the ‘handmaiden’ were and we know exactly when they came here and why,” said Holliday. “Now, please show us where you found that particular Mason’s Mark.”

  19

  The refectory undercroft was a long, low-ceilinged chamber supported by a series of four heavy stone pillars down the center. There were stairs at the east end and a small root cellar at the west end. In between the steps and the root cellar twenty stone burial slabs were laid against t
he north wall, their upper surfaces all but worn off. A brass rubbing in white against black hung on the wall above each slab.

  Walker, Holliday and Sister Meg walked along the aisle formed between the slabs and the pillars, Holliday carefully checking the brass rubbings. At the ninth slab he stopped and stared at the rubbing.

  “This is the one,” he said.

  “How do you know?” Walker asked, fascinated by the story he’d been told.

  “The shield is quartered,” said Holliday, pointing to the faint image on the rubbing. “In the upper left you have Saint-Clair’s engrailed cross, in the upper right you have the image of a Venetian ship with a lateen sail, and in the bottom quadrant you have two crescents, both facing inward. If it was in color the two crescents would probably be green—islands.”

  “Fanciful, but how do you know they’re islands? They could just as easily signify moons, or even Arabic crescents.”

  “The poem,” said Meg, suddenly seeing it the way Holliday did. “And give us Mary’s holy wings to fly us to the farther sable shore,” she quoted. “The farther shore—the other side of the Atlantic.”

  “And sable?” Walker asked.

  “According to the book the poems were originally written in Gaelic—all except the Knight’s Prayer. That was written in French,” said Holliday.

  “That’s right. French was the language of chivalry. Most of the aristocracy spoke it in medieval times,” said Walker, still looking a little bewildered.

  “In French ‘sable’ means sand, as in a beach,” added Meg.

  “Well, that’s all fine and good,” argued Walker. “That makes your quest quite simple then, doesn’t it. Just find a sandy beach somewhere on the east coast of North America, that’s all.”