Tess glanced at Reilly, unsure about what to say. A moment ago, she was seething with indignation, thinking the old woman was out to steal the codices. And yet here they were now, comfortably ensconced in the woman’s living room, sipping coffee and having a courteous little chat.
Reilly nodded her a go-ahead, mirroring her own feelings.
So she told her. Everything. The whole story, from Sharafi’s appearance in Jordan to the shoot-out in the underground city, although she skirted around the gorier parts of it, not wanting to shock her host. Throughout, the old woman listened intently, surprise and fear playing on her face, her eyes roaming Tess’s face and glancing away to Reilly every now and then, only asking for additional clarification a time or two. By the end of it, her hands were shivering. And once Tess was done, she sat quietly for a long moment, working the story over in silence, clearly racked by indecision and worry.
Tess hesitated to wade in. After giving her what she felt was enough time to process it all, she asked, “Why did your granddaughter follow us to our hotel? You asked her to, didn’t you?”
It seemed like the woman didn’t hear her. She just kept staring into her coffee cup, lost in thought, back in the grips of some momentous struggle. After another lengthy deliberation, her words came out slow and soft.
“They didn’t know what to do with them, you know,” she told Tess, barely able to look at her. “We’ve never known what to do with them.” She shut her eyes with remorse, then turned to face Tess. It was as if she’d just crossed a line from from which there was no return.
Tess stared at her blankly for a second, making sure she’d heard her right, then a searing charge of elation burst out of her heart and swept through her. “You have them? You have the other books?” She was now on the very edge of the couch, every pore in her body brimming with anticipation.
The old woman studied her, then nodded slowly.
“How many?”
“Many.” She was surprisingly casual about it, as if she were confirming the most trivial of comments. “The woman, Maysoon. She brought them here, for safekeeping. After Conrad died.”
Tess couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Her face felt like it was on fire. Her eyes flicked across to Reilly and were met with a broad, supportive grin. She turned back to the old woman. “So Conrad did have a woman with him?”
“They met in Constantinople, where they both lived.”
“She was a Sufi?” Reilly asked.
“Yes.”
Tess asked, “So what happened to them? Conrad did die in Zelve, didn’t he?”
Chapter 56
CAPPADOCIA
MAY 1310
The villagers received them with a warm, if tentative, welcome. Conrad and Maysoon found the small settlement in a narrow canyon, tucked away from the outside world, a cluster of rock cones set around a church that had been carved into a cliff face. Their arrival was an unusual occurrence. The villagers didn’t get many visitors and were wary of them at first. Still, they brought with them news of the outside world and a sense of event that was rarely seen in the isolated, canyon-based community, and the locals soon relaxed. The priest who tended the rock church also ended up grudgingly giving them his approval, despite his obvious wariness at the sight of a knight of the Cross traveling with a heathen companion. The fact that Conrad had fought to free the Holy Land and lost his hand doing so forced the man to overcome some of his prejudice. Maysoon also helped win him over when, much to his surprise, she quoted lines of scripture that she had learned as a child while studying tolerance under her Sufi master.
The local midwife who doubled as the town’s physician helped Conrad splint and dress Maysoon’s wrist, and they were offered food and drink. By nightfall, the two of them were huddled together by a window high in a carved-out cone of rock whose sole occupier had recently passed away, watching the sky above the rim of the canyon run the gamut of imaginable pinks and purples before settling into a crisp, uniform blackness.
Conrad hadn’t said much all evening, and he hadn’t said a word for the last half hour. Every breath he exhaled was swirling with despair.
Maysoon pulled back from his chest and scrutinized his face.
“What is it?” she asked.
He didn’t answer or meet her eyes at first, seemingly lost in his melancholy. After a long moment, he said, “This. What I’m doing. It’s pointless.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s pointless. Hector, Miguel … they’re gone. God knows what’s waiting for me in Cyprus.” He sighed heavily. “I can’t do this alone.”
“You’re not alone.”
He looked at her, and his face brightened a touch. “You’ve been magnificent. But it’s still pointless. Even together, we can’t do this. I was a fool to think I’d ever be able to make a difference.”
She edged closer. “No, you weren’t. You were right to go after it, you were right to find those books and get them back. But if you can’t achieve what you set out to do … it doesn’t mean you still can’t change the world.”
“What do you mean?”
“You wanted to use these writings, this knowledge, the same way it’s been used for the last couple of hundred years. You wanted to blackmail the pope with it and get him to free your friends and reinstate your Order. Which is a noble goal, of course. You had to try and make that happen. But if you’d succeeded … the knowledge in these books would have stayed locked away and hidden from the rest of the world.”
Conrad’s face crinkled with confusion. “Keeping it secret was why the popes gave us anything we wanted. It’s what allowed us to build up our strength and our standing while waiting for the right time to share it all with everyone out there.”
“Was there ever going to be a right time? Or is it always the right time?” She shook her head. “People have kept these texts hidden for a thousand years. You and the Templars who came before you have been using them as a weapon for centuries, and if Hector and Miguel were still alive, you’d still be trying to use them that way. Maybe the time has come to look at things differently. Maybe it’s time you started thinking about how to bring these writings to light instead of keeping them locked away.”
“It’s not possible,” Conrad countered. “Not now. Not when the pope is as strong as he is. Look at what happened to the Cathars. The Vatican has inquisitors everywhere. Nothing heretical can ever be allowed to make itself heard.”
“There’s always a way. Look at Rumi. His preachings were all about love and looking inside ourselves for enlightenment. His words would have been considered blasphemous by any conservative cleric, but they caught the heart of the sultan himself, who invited him to live and preach in his capital and became his protector.”
“I’m not a preacher.”
She smiled. “No, but maybe it’s time you started thinking like one.” She drew nearer and kissed him before slipping her tunic off her shoulders. “But not in every sense of the word.”
THEY SPENT THE NEXT DAYS working the wheat fields with the villagers by day and debating their options by night. How to transport the texts was still a central problem. They only had one horse to their name, and—not that they had the means to pay for it—there was only one open wagon in the settlement, one the villagers couldn’t do without.