He knew how that would end.
He’d seen it enough times.
He looked up at Qassem, and saw a reflection of his realization in the Turk’s face. The man held his gaze for a moment, then raised his scimitar like an executioner and held it there.
“What the hell. Maybe I’d better do it now before you rob me of the pleasure—”
And his face froze in a tight clench just as something thumped into him from behind and crunched its way out of his chest.
A bolt.
He stared down at the arrowhead that was sticking out of his rib cage and dripping with blood, and surprise flooded his face. He turned around, slowly, Conrad following his gaze.
Maysoon was standing in the clearing, by his horse.
A crossbow in her hands.
Pain visibly etched into her face.
The woman from the fields, the one the Turk had taken hostage, was there, beside her. A clutch of bolts in her hand.
Qassem moved to head toward them, but Conrad wasn’t about to give him that chance. He pushed hard on his legs and rose up, using his body’s momentum to tackle the Turk and plunge his dagger deep into his back, twisting and turning and grinding it in, making sure he cut through as many organs and ducts and arteries as possible.
The two men tumbled to the ground in a bloody, dusty heap.
The Turk spasmed and gurgled for a few seconds, his eyes wide and locked on to Conrad with silent rage, before he gave out a final shudder and his body went limp.
Conrad let his head drop back onto the hard, dry soil. He stared at the sky, then Maysoon was right with him, cradling his head, running her fingers through his hair, tears streaking down her face.
“Don’t leave me,” she sobbed.
“Never,” he replied, but he knew he was lying. Blood was bubbling out of the edge of his mouth and his breathing was getting more ragged. The air he was fighting to take in was escaping before getting a chance to do its job.
“Keep it safe,” he mumbled. “Find a way. Keep it safe. And maybe, one day, someone will be able to do what we couldn’t.”
“I will. I promise … I will.”
With startling speed, his lips began to turn blue and his skin took on a dusky pallor. His mouth felt heavier, and as his brain grew starved of oxygen, his words became more slurred.
And then he was gone.
Chapter 57
They buried him there, in the church. Then she came to Konya and settled here,” the old woman continued. “She joined a tekke. And for the next several months, she went back to that cave many times, alone, taking an extra horse with her, and brought back the texts, one small load at a time. She kept them hidden and didn’t tell anyone about them. And then, years later, she met someone.”
“A draper,” Tess guessed. She was utterly spellbound, hanging on the woman’s every word.
“Yes. He was also part of the same lodge. She confided in him. Told him her secret. Eventually, they got married. Started a new life together, here, in Konya.” Her face softened into a bittersweet smile. “They were my ancestors.”
“So the mural, the lines from the poem … that came after?” Tess asked.
The woman nodded. “Yes. She went back and had it added much later. In the church where Conrad was buried, as you saw.”
Reilly asked, “How do you know all this?”
The woman pushed herself to her feet and crossed to an old desk. She rummaged through it and recovered a small key, which she used to open one of its drawers. She pulled out a folded document and brought it over to show Tess.
It was composed of several handwritten pages, old and yellowed. Tess couldn’t read them, as they were covered in a tight Arabic script, the alphabet used in Turkey before 1928.
“This tells the whole story,” the old woman said. “It’s everything Conrad told Maysoon. It’s been handed down from generation to generation. Has been for close to seven hundred years.”
“And all this time, the texts stayed hidden,” Tess said.
“Maysoon had promised Conrad to keep them safe and to try and share them with the world. But there was no way for her to do that. Not back then. East and West were fiercely divided. In this land, the Seljuks were on the way out and the Ottomans and their hordes of ‘warriors of the faith’ were taking over. They were out to create an Islamic empire, and the last thing Maysoon wanted was for these writings to be used as a weapon to discredit an enemy faith.”
Tess glanced at Reilly. He’d also caught the echo in the woman’s words and gave Tess a discreet, cognizant nod that caused a small flutter in her belly.
The old woman caught their drift and half-smiled wistfully, then her mouth folded with despair. “She didn’t know who to turn to in the West either. The Templars were gone, of course. And the Church was hugely powerful back then. No one, not even a king, would have dared to champion something that threatened its dominance.”
“So they kept them tucked away … here?”
“Yes,” the woman said. “Safely stored, waiting for the right day.”
Tess’s throat tightened up like a pinched straw. She had to ask again. “Here here?”
The old woman nodded.
Tess swallowed an invisible golf ball. “Can we see it?”
The woman didn’t answer at first. Then she got up from the couch and stepped across to the desk, where she retrieved some keys. She turned to face them and said, “Come.”
She led them across the living room and through a dark, narrow hallway that had the kitchen off one side and looked like it gave onto a bedroom at its far end. It had a lower ceiling than the living room and was lined with cupboard doors on one side. A kilim carpet hung from a brass rail on the opposite wall. The old woman opened a cupboard door and brought out a flashlight, then went up to the kilim and pulled it to one side. Cut into the wall behind it and barely visible in the darkness was a narrow, winding staircase, not much wider than a man’s shoulders.
The old woman entered the niche and climbed down, taking each of the tall risers with care, steadying herself against the curving wall, the light of her flashlight playing against its rough, pockmarked surface. Tess and Reilly followed. The stairs wound down twice before ending in a tunnel, also narrow and rough. It all had a similar feel to the underground city they’d been trapped in, and Tess wondered if it was of the same vintage.
The old woman led them past a series of old wooden doors lining one side of the tunnel, over a length of about thirty yards, until she reached the last door, one that faced down the tunnel. She then unlocked it, stepped inside, and ushered them in behind her.
They were standing in a small room. More of a walk-in cupboard, really. It was windowless and low-ceilinged and, like the chambers in the underground city, had a pleasant temperature despite the heat aboveground, and none of the humidity.
Tess looked around, and every last molecule of air in her lungs gushed out.
All of the small room’s walls, apart from the one with the door in it, were lined with shelves. The shelves, in turn, were lined with books. Old books. Small, leather-bound, positively ancient codices. The oldest books on the planet: two-thousand-year-old gospels, from the earliest days of the Church.
Dozens of them.
Tess couldn’t believe it.
Her mouth managed to ask, “May I?” as she pointed at one of them.
The old woman gave her a resigned “help yourself” gesture.
Tess reached out and picked up one of the books. It was very similar to the two codices she’d found in Conrad’s grave. Same kind of leather binding, same folded back, same strap wrapped around it. It seemed in equally good condition. She hesitated, then peeled back the fold and opened the book and looked inside. It had similar lettering, Koine Greek.