40
Tomar, Portugal
The grandiose castle and church of medieval Tomar loomed above the small, surrounding town, like the great wooden effigy of a saint held aloft by humble peasant hands.
Nina and Adam sat sipping bad Portuguese coffee in an inconspicuous corner of the cobbled main square. The palm trees rustled in the December wind, a few shops were already selling lurid, clownish costumes for Carnival alongside Christmas treats: festive pumpkin fritters, broas de mel. Adam startled himself with the realization: it was Christmas Eve. He had lost track of time, like a lonely child at a fairground, bewildered by the fleeing colours. Was he going to ring his dad for Christmas? No, he hadn’t spoken to him in three years, not since they had last come to blows, when Adam was defending his mother.
He wondered how his mother put up with it all, now he wasn’t there to protect her. His father had never actually hit his mother; but he certainly bullied her, and in the end Adam had found it too much. The urge to protect had made him eventually intervene in one of his parents’ rows, and so he and his father had fought. And yet, now he considered it, maybe his mother was at fault as well: she tolerated it, passive-aggressively. Maybe they both liked it.
You can’t choose your parents, but you can choose not to be like them.
What effect had this all had on Adam? He often wondered. Maybe he was drawn to vulnerable women, women he really could protect. Like Alicia. Except he hadn’t protected her, not in the end.
And what about Nina? She was different to Alicia, much stronger, much more defiant; yet she also had that protectable quality that he found so desirable. And so troubling. He looked her way. She was anxiously scrutinizing an old woman, at the next table.
‘I don’t think the Camorra recruit elderly widows,’ Adam said, sipping his scorched black coffee.
‘Ach. Who knows who they recruit? There’s something wrong here. I don’t like it. Everyone is staring at us.’
‘Everyone is drunk. It’s lunchtime on Christmas Eve.’
She stared at him. ‘Jesus. Is it really?’
He could see the hollowness in her eyes, the void where her family should be: yet all killed at their own hands. And now it was Christmas.
Quickly he tried to fill the gap. ‘Shall we go over it again? The American link. You said you had questions.’
‘Did I?’ Her moist gaze was vastly regretful. ‘OK, then, Ad. Tell me.’ The pigeons warbled on their churchly sill: beneath the rose window of Sao Joao Baptista.
‘I remembered what your, uh, dad said. At Rosslyn. He referred to the Norse serpents carved on the Prentice Pillar. We know there is a strong link between the early Templars and the Scottish court.’ Adam opened his notebook. ‘In 1128 the cousin of St Bernard of Clairvaux, and Hugues de Payens, the founder of the Templar Order, met King David in Scotland, and established one of Europe’s first Templar preceptories, in Scotland. Payens had been on the First Crusade with Henri St Clair, Second Baron of Roslin.’
‘Are you going to rehearse all that Holy Blood Da Vinci stuff? Sinclairs sailing to Los Angeles in a coracle-’
He doodled viciously in his notebook. ‘The St Clairs did have Norse links. The Sinclair lineage dates back to a Viking raider called Hrolf the Ganger, who invaded Normandy in the tenth century. This is all recorded in the Norse sagas. But even without the Sinclairs we know the medieval Scots court had strong Norse connections. The Scots royals intermarried with Viking aristocracy, with the kings of Orkney, and with the Lord of the Isles…’
‘Adam. We are on the run from people who killed my family. Hurry up.’
‘The graves are also crucial. Those strange little slots. We have seen them in two Templar preceptories — Penhill in Yorkshire, now Trevejo in Spain. As your father says in the book, there are scarcely any others known in Western Europe. Apart from Heysham in Lancashire, England, in the graveyard of Saint Patrick’s church. And I’ve checked this place. Historians know those graves at Saint Patrick in Heysham are Viking — used for interring skeletons, temporarily. So that’s it, Nina: we now see unusual Norse cultural practices were adopted by the Templars.’
Nina tucked a stray lock of black hair behind a small white ear. Somehow nervous and beautiful at the same time. ‘That doesn’t prove much.’
‘Why did the Templars go to Scotland so early in the Order’s history? For what? The Scottish court was hardly rich, and it was at the ends of the earth, as far away from the Holy Land as you can get. What were those first Templars after?’
‘The big dark secret?’
‘Exactly: this secret technique, this warlike trance, that would make the knights brave and fearless. We know the Templars’ first forays into battle were faltering, and uncertain: they were just a tiny band of men. Two guys on a donkey, the icon of the Templars, the icon we see in Rosslyn. But some Scottish knight with Viking forebears, perhaps a Sinclair, must have told Hugues Payens a secret, on the First Crusade: a way to bind his brethren together, to attract new recruits, something attractively occult and mysterious, the Babylon rite, the group hypnosis, a way to inculcate sexualized blood lust. And this something was itself a technique the Scots had learned from the Vikings. The Vikings were wild fighters, madly bloodthirsty, like the Templars. And so the Vikings knew the trance, and they got it-’
‘From America.’ Nina nodded, unhappily. ‘I do get it, Adam. The Vikings were in America in…’
‘In the tenth and eleventh centuries they had several settlements in Newfoundland where they met the natives.’
‘That’s still a fucking long way from seventh-century Peru. Tenth-century Newfoundland?’ Nina finished her tiny cup of coffee, and stared at the silt at the bottom. Her expression was morbid.
The pigeons chattered. Adam sighed. Christmas Eve, and here they were, a long way from anywhere, many miles from home. But maybe there was no home any more. Maybe they were exiled from everything, for ever. So they had to focus on the present because the past was too horrific and the future too frightening.
Adam sprinted through the rest of his argument. ‘Some cultural practices were shared across pre-Columbian South and North America: human sacrifice, pyramid building, styles of mural painting, for a start. This is a fact. It happens. Look at Indo-European languages, sharing similarities from the Punjab to Portugal. So it’s quite possible the Babylon rite made its way from Peru, where it began, then into Mexico, then further north, even to the east coast of Canada.’
‘Come on,’ said Nina, standing, abruptly. ‘The castle will shut soon and I want to get out of here tomorrow.’
He dropped a few euros in the saucer and hastened after her. Small, determined, fierce and vulnerable, she was striding up the medieval stone steps of glorious Tomar. The path led through the cypresses and pines of the wooded rise, and led to a car park and a scratchy kiosk, where a woman with a faint moustache took their money, and gazed at them with a curious squint.
A little gate opened. They stepped through. The contrast with the humdrum car park and ticket booth, with the citadel itself was quite stunning.
The Templar church and castle of Tomar were as ‘monumentally stupendous’ as Archibald McLintock promised in his gazetteer. It was also eerily empty: they were the only tourists, because everyone else was already preparing for Christmas. The vastness of the churches and gardens and battlements and cloisters obliged them to whisper; Adam didn’t know why.
Together and quickly they explored the dormitories and ambulatories, the monastic kitchens and Renaissance chapterhouse. Then they climbed high steps to the mighty and battlemented walls.
The views of the town below were contemptuously lofty. Another Templar flag rippled, arrogant and proud, in the stiff, chilly breeze. Nina said, ‘It’s so bloody big.’
‘This is where the Templars survived longest in Europe; in fact they never went away,’ Adam said, quoting his own research. ‘They survived because the Portuguese king protected them, and refused to reduce them. Eventually the Portuguese Templars evolved into the Order of Christ. So this Templar citadel became the global headquarters — of the Order of Christ.’
