The Sacred Scroll Read online

  ANTON GILL

  The Sacred Scroll

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE SACRED SCROLL

  Anton Gill was born in London and educated at Chigwell School and Clare College, Cambridge. He has written on a wide range of subjects, especially contemporary European history, and published a series of thrillers set in ancient Egypt. Until recently, he has divided his time between London and Paris, but now makes his home in London again.

  For

  Peter Ewence,

  with thanks for his

  friendship and support;

  11–16 September 2010,

  and thereafter.

  Prologue

  Istanbul, the Present

  Brad Adkins looked around the lab. He couldn’t disguise his tension from the others and knew they were feeling it too.

  They’d been working on the dig at Istanbul for three weeks now and they still hadn’t found what they had been sent to look for. And time was running out.

  The lab looked tidy enough to leave for the night, thought Adkins, watching his two colleagues carefully placing the boxes in the white cupboards ranged along one wall.

  He turned to the deck of computer screens on the broad table and switched them off, one by one, methodically checking that all the information input that day had been properly saved. His colleagues had finished before him, and stood watching. Su-Lin, he thought, looked anxious to leave, but he refused to be hurried by the junior member of his team, even if she was there by order of their main sponsor.

  ‘Almost done,’ he said. Quite a dish, Su-Lin, but that’d be hunting a bit too close to home, and he didn’t want to spoil the close professional rapport which the work on this project had created between the three of them. And God knows they needed it, he thought, given the pressure. He wondered how soon it would be before people would begin to get impatient.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said his Yale colleague, Rick Taylor. ‘Another dead day – it’s time to drown it out.’ Adkins reached for the switch on the final screen. Taylor was hitting the bottle hard these days. He’d keep an eye on that. Taylor was right – they’d had another fruitless search. He tried to stay hopeful, but every day confirmed his growing suspicion that what they sought simply wasn’t there. He glanced again at Su-Lin. Impassive now, she looked at her watch.

  Adkins flicked off the last button. But as he drew his hand back and the screen went blank the door to the lab crashed violently open.

  Five men in black, faces hidden by balaclavas, burst in, followed by a thin man and a plump woman dressed like tourists, wearing sunglasses large enough to cover their features.

  It was the woman who spoke. English accent. Cut-glass. Polite.

  ‘Sorry to disturb. We have some questions for you.’

  ‘Who the hell are –?’

  One of the men stepped forward and clubbed Taylor to the ground. He lay there without moving.

  ‘Don’t damage the goods,’ said the woman. ‘Don’t damage anything.’

  One of the men came towards Adkins. He flinched, expecting a blow. But none came. Instead, the man shoved a thick bag over his head and pulled it savagely tight at the neck.

  Adkins felt panic begin to rise before the man hit him once across the nape of his neck. A clinical blow.

  Then the darkness was total.

  1

  AD 1204

  Constantinople, Monday 12 April, and at last an attack. First, I must write of the noise: the screaming, the thunder, the smell of burning tar and burning flesh, everywhere about us. It was as if the full wrath of the true Catholic Church had been unleashed.

  The sun beat down that day, and it was windy. Huge buffets from the north, though at first it kept switching. But a good day for a battle, after so long a wait, and the wind at last swung round to a steady, harsh north, ramming our galleys and transports on to the shore. No way to turn back now, and there on the forecastle of the leading ship, Dandolo, ninety years old and blind, but with his helmet and breastplate shining, his sword aloft. By his side his trusted Viking, an old man too, but tough as hardwood.

  We lowered the great assault ramps which were fixed to the prows of our ships so they fell against the two nearest towers of the city walls. We’d been wise to cover them with roofs of cowhide soaked in vinegar because, dark and hot as it was as we swarmed up them to the platforms at their tops, the coverings saved us from the fire and stones the bastards hurled down upon us. And we smashed our way to the top.

  The smell of boiling pitch was everywhere in the dark tunnels of the ramps and we were blinded by the light when we emerged. The first of us were cut to pieces by the Viking Gu
ard, the wretched bunch of Saxons who protected the false emperor, but we kept coming and coming, and our ships spewed and squirted liquid fire through bronze siphons at the pitiful defenders. We watched the fire cling to them. They died screaming as they tried to wipe it off.

  The walls of the city stood high and tall, but we knew they were not as good as they looked. They were crumbling; they’d had centuries of neglect, ever since the Great City came to believe itself impregnable, under the protection of the very wing of Gabriel himself. But we could see where the mortar was rotting between the stones and we planted brushwood soaked in naphtha in the hollows we found, and set fire to it to weaken the walls further.

  There’d already been two conflagrations in the city during the attacks last year and they’d half destroyed the city then, though much of it was already falling down. Not that it wasn’t magnificent still. It made our Paris look like a village. They said it had stood for nine centuries, ever since the Emperor Constantine had made it the seat of his new Christian Roman empire. It was the gateway to the East and the bastion for Europe against the Seljuk Turks who had taken the Holy Land from us.

  Well, we’d deal with them soon enough. Once this business was over. The Byzantine Greeks who rule here still call themselves Christians, but they no longer show homage to the pope, and follow their own barbarous Eastern way of hearing the Word of God. Our job has been to put that right – these people must be brought back into the True Fold, by force. And by Christ’s Grace and the leadership of our good Lord Dandolo, we will do it!

  In time, Pope Innocent will understand, and see why we have had to raise our swords against fellow Christians. He will see the Divine Justice of our action. We’ll finish these bastard Greeks, now our blood is up. Bring them to their knees. Teach them to set themselves up against us, even to permit a mosque within their walls!

  But it has been hard. After our very first attack on the Eastern Christians at the city of Zara, Pope Innocent pronounced us excommunicate! That lay heavy on us. Like a bullwhip, a thousand lashes, across your back. He relieved his dread sentence later, as he desired us to continue as Pilgrim Warriors to Jerusalem. And there were letters sent from Doge Dandolo. Those letters must have made him relent. But what power of persuasion could the doge possibly have over the pope?

  Still, Innocent did not free the Venetians from excommunication. We marvelled, I remember, that they were unconcerned. Lord Dandolo even scoffed at it. We wondered what enabled him to dare do that. But he told us we had nothing to fear, and we believed him.

  We couldn’t disobey Dandolo, even though some of us murmured doubt. A few even tried to stand off from this present battle, but most were not resolute enough for that. There is something about the man, some power he has within him. He commands, and we must obey. And I am a simple Christian knight. I question not my leader.

  It’s always seemed a strange thing to me, but the fact is we’d follow him anywhere. There were times when some of us wondered why. But you can’t think about such things when there’s a war to be won.

  The Greeks used scimitars, that vicious sword they got from the infidel Seljuks they allow to live among them. It’s a good sword though, cuts like a scythe, so when even a centimetre of that crescent-shaped blade is in you the rest follows through on the curve, increasing the cutting power, and it slices through bone and muscle without a hitch. My countryman and captain, Mathieu le Barca, lost his sword arm that way in the fighting on the first day. He fought on – the excitement raced through his blood on account of the wound and he felt no pain – but he was on his knees by the time I reached him and there were three men attacking. I brought my broadsword down on the closest, through the shoulder on the shield-arm from the collarbone down to the heart, cut him in two like a side of beef. The others tried to run then, but I got one in the middle of the skull, their Greek helmets no good against French steel, split his head in half, made me laugh to see the mouth open and shut in two bits like that. The third I headbutted with my own strong helmet. Made porridge of his brain.

  But did any of us on either side pause to think, We are Christians and they too are Christians? We had gathered as Warrior Pilgrims under the Cross to drive the Turks from the Holy Land, to take back Jerusalem. That was our true mission.

  It seemed we had a new mission now: to serve Lord Dandolo and be guided by him in the True Path. And we did not question. We obeyed. We were all in thrall to the old doge of Venice, and most of us trusted him.

  As for the Greeks, they’d let things go to seed. They spent all their money on trumpery, nothing on arms and defence. They’d grown too sure of themselves, ruling the roost for nine hundred years. That’s what Dandolo told us.

  But I return to the battle. It was now at its height. There was no time for reflection. One of our ships, one that had not beached, we’d tied to one of the towers, but the sea’s ebb pulled the ship back, and the tower was so rotten that it rocked, and we cut it loose for fear it would fall on us. We could see fear, too, in the faces of the Greek defenders on the tower.

  The men on the beach sought weak gates, but the defenders hurled down stones and burning pitch with such fury that we had to find shelter, up against the very walls we wanted to bring down. Meanwhile most of our fleet, driven ashore and beached by the wind, disembarked thousands of men-at-arms, who ran up the ramps, stepping over the corpses, and gained a firm foothold. Lord Dandolo cried out that the wind which drove us on was the breath of the Archangel Michael, aiding us in our fight with the Great Satan.

  And then we found a gate in their walls. We hacked at it with axes and iron bars and it splintered and fell open. We got some horsemen through, but inside they were ready for us. Brought down the warhorses, the destriers, with kitehead arrows – heavy diamond heads, cut through anything, right into the horses’ flanks, severing muscle joining legs to body. I saw one come down, crush a kid, a little Greek boy there to watch the fun, couldn’t get away in time, yelled like a banshee when his legs smashed. I went over to him and cut off his head. Put him out of his misery. But the horse nearly killed me then, with his hooves. He was in agony too, flailing, poor beast, but there was no saving him, and I cut the great veins in his neck to give him peace too.

  With the horses down, the Greeks attacked our fallen knights, like the cowards they were. But we regrouped and we got in there and we fucking crucified them.

  2

  Constantinople, Friday 16 April, Year of Our Lord 1204

  The monk who’d been reading the document aloud now put down his papers, eased his thin body in his black habit, stretched his bony feet in their soft leather sandals and took a drink from the cup of wine at his elbow. He peered across the room, its stone walls hung with tapestries, to where his employer sat. The stiff brocade robes he was wearing seemed to be all that held the old man upright. A candle guttered in its stand and a draught blew through the room, then the flame grew steady again.