In no time at all, he veered on to a crooked lane.
For the first two years he ran with a fast crowd who fancied themselves latter-day libertines, ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know.’ When the late-night revels became old hat, his scholastic passions revived. However, craving academic excitement, he did the unthinkable and changed from Egyptology to medieval history, the Knights Templar far more thrilling than mummified pharaohs. Earning a reputation as a rogue scholar, the impulsive move eventually resulted in his ousting from Queen’s College. ‘The Manifesto’, as he jokingly referred to his dissertation, was summarily dismissed as a ‘harebrained hypothesis that could only have been opium-induced’. When, a few months later, MI5 came knocking at his door, it seemed a blessing in disguise.
Little did I know …
But the overlords at Thames House had not deadened his spirit. Nor had the dons at Queen’s College blunted his academic passion. The fact that he was setting off for Montségur proved that he was still curious. Still intrigued by those questions that had no answers.
In a hurry to get to the Metro, Cædmon sidestepped a group of tourists who, maps and cameras in hand, huddled on the pavement. He glanced at his wristwatch. The high-speed TGV train for Marseille was scheduled to depart Gare de Lyon in forty-five minutes. Giving him just enough time to arrive at the train station and purchase a ticket. According to the schedule, they would arrive in Marseille by mid-evening. He intended to use the three-hour train ride to devise a plan of action. Wi-Fi Internet access would enable him to begin his preliminary research.
He knew that the trip might prove a fool’s errand. Many men had sought the Grail. Many had met their death in the ill-fated quest. Be that as it may, he felt compelled to join the hunt.
Making his way across the Square René Viviani, the small park adjacent to St Julien-le-Pauvre Church, Cædmon sensed an unseen presence following in his wake. The nape of his neck prickled as he ducked into a church doorway.
Hidden in a dark alcove, cheek pressed to the fluted limestone, he surreptitiously peered around the corner. This time of day the tree-lined park brimmed with harried mothers chasing tots and pushing prams. From where he stood, he had an unobstructed view across the Seine to the much larger, and more magnificent, Notre-Dame.
Eyes narrowed, Cædmon searched for the telltale person who did not belong. The anomaly in the endless stream.
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
As a precaution, he waited a few seconds more. Because all train passengers had to pass through a metal detector, he’d been forced to leave his Ruger pistol back at the flat.
He released a pent-up breath. ‘I’m seeing fiends where none exist.’
Stepping away from the portal, he continued on his way. He quickened his pace as he glanced at the western horizon and noticed a strange chartreuse cast to the sky.
A warning that a violent storm was brewing.
PART III
‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes’ – Marcel Proust
47
Montségur Castle, The Languedoc
0914 hours
Could anything be more ridiculous than a middle-aged man on a Grail quest?
‘Only the Fool about to blithely step off a steep cliff,’ Cædmon muttered under his breath.
To prevent a fatal mishap, he braced both hands on the ruined battlement as he set his gaze on the Pyrenees. Perched atop a limestone and granite outcrop that rose an impressive three thousand feet into the air, Montségur commanded a panoramic view that left one awestruck. Ragged peaks. Colossal mountains. Sheer precipices. Set against a cerulean blue sky, the ancient mountains seemed impregnable.
Although appearances could be deceiving as the doomed Cathars discovered when their ‘impregnable’ citadel was besieged by the Pope’s army.
According to legend, just before the fortress capitulated, on a frigid and moonless night, four brave Cathars scaled Montségur’s western cliff. Managing to sneak past the enemy line, they travelled under cover of night to the Templar preceptory located twelve kilometres away. To persuade the warrior monks to fight on their behalf, the four Cathars bore a gold medallion with an encrypted map that revealed the secret location of the greatest treasure of the Middle Ages, the Holy Grail. Having presented the medallion to the Knights Templar, the Cathar emissaries promised that the encryption key would be turned over as soon as the Templars took up arms. The prize too tempting to resist, the Templars saddled their war horses and set off for Montségur.
By the time they arrived, the citadel had already fallen, the last two hundred and fifty Cathars forcibly marched through the barbican gates. They were put to the torch by order of the Pope’s envoy, a white-robed Dominican priest, thus bringing to a fiery close the thirty-year-long Albigensian Crusade.
As had happened on all of his previous visits to Montségur, Cædmon found himself contemplating the tragedy with renewed vigour. Everywhere he looked the ghost of those humble heretics hovered amidst the ruined ramparts and shattered curtain walls, all that remained of the Cathars’ mountaintop eyrie. A limestone monument to the dead, it invoked the memory of that other doomed mountaintop fortress, the Jewish bastion at Masada. Which no doubt explained the heart-rending aura that clung to the citadel like a finely spun burial shroud.
Opening the flap on his field jacket, Cædmon removed his BlackBerry. Because of the precipitous hike up the winding mountain trail from the village below, he’d dressed in khaki cargo pants, a practical long-sleeved shirt and rugged boots. Accessing the photo log on the BlackBerry, he stared at the symbols incised on the medallion: star, sun, moon and four strangely-shaped ‘A’s arranged in a cruciform.
His gaze zeroed in on the four ‘A’s.
Yesterday, on the train ride from Paris, he’d carefully examined a map of the Languedoc. With numerous place names in the region beginning with the letter ‘A’, it would take a lifetime to search each and every one. Moreover, the Languedoc encompassed an area that measured nearly sixteen thousand square miles. Most of it, mountainous terrain. The disheartening reality was that the Grail could have been hidden anywhere within those sixteen thousand square miles.
He skipped to the next photograph, a close-up of the engraved text on the medallion’s flipside. The first two lines, written in the Occitan language, read: ‘In the glare of the twelfth hour, the moon shines true.’ A curious turn of phrase since the moon was most often associated with the night sky. The last line of text had been scribed in Latin. Reddis lapis exillis cellis. ‘The Stone of Exile has been returned to the niche.’ While the meaning was obvious, it was also frustratingly vague, no mention made of where ‘the niche’ was located.
The mystery compounding, Cædmon took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the pine-scented air as he stared at the craggy mountains in the near distance. Terra incognita.
Worried that he’d journeyed to Montségur in vain, he gazed at the barren courtyard beneath the ramparts. Two blokes who’d hauled surveying equipment to the citadel were toying with a transit-level. Another pair, who were filming a documentary, had just set a very professional-looking video camera on to a tripod. A tour group on the far-side of the courtyard was taking turns reading aloud from Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival.