head.’
‘Attack the city and — and I shall burn it before you get to m-me.’
Dark hooded eyes settled on him for a long while. ‘Then, dear brother, you will know the agony of a witch’s fire before I have you opened up and quartered. You will see your own heart in my hand before your head comes off.’
John stood up. ‘I am leaving. We are done!’
Richard remained seated. ‘Then you will die very badly, brother.’
John pushed his way past the velvet drapes, cursing as his robes tangled with it and he stumbled awkwardly out into the open, Richard’s raised voice following him.
‘If you burn it, you fool … you will die badly!’
CHAPTER 74
2001, New York
‘But those letters, they don’t spell anything!’ said Maddy. ‘They’re just a bunch of weird Celtic squiggles.’
Adam was looking around her messy desk for something. ‘It’s not the letters we want — just
Normally there were half a dozen pizza boxes lying around, but she’d binned a whole bunch of them the other day. ‘Uh? What do you want cardboard for?’
Sal looked around at the filing cabinet to the right of the computer table. Liam had left a breakfast bowl up there and, being the scruffy shadd-yah he was, the box of Rice Krispies. She reached for it.
‘This any good?’
Adam grabbed it. ‘Yeah. Scissors?’
Both girls shook their heads.
‘This isn’t a freakin’ craft store,’ said Maddy.
‘I need to cut out windows,’ said Adam. ‘Have you got
Cabot reached into the folds of his monk’s habit and pulled out a small knife. ‘Would this do?’
‘Perfect.’
Adam grabbed the knife from him. He pulled the bag of Krispies out and then began to hack at the cereal box. Maddy frowned. ‘You gonna make something you saw on
Adam ignored the jibe and pointed at the computer screen. ‘Make a note of those stand-out letters.’ He took his cardboard box and Cabot’s knife across to the kitchen table where the Treyarch was still stretched out under the glare of the overhead light.
He finished cutting one side of the cereal box out and laid it gawdy, print-side down on the parchment, carefully lining up the ragged corners of the cardboard with the corners of the margin illuminations.
‘Too big,’ he muttered. He began trimming one side. Cursing as Cabot’s serrated blade chewed at the flimsy cardboard, leaving a rough, uneven, shredded edge.
Sal, Cabot and Becks joined him.
‘This’ll be no good for cutting out the windows,’ he said. ‘I need a modelling knife or something. The cardboard’s just shredding up.’
Sal looked down at the parchment. ‘Why not just cut the letters out of this Treyarch thing?’
Adam looked at the ragged wobbling scrap of cardboard in his hand, then down at the unravelled scroll. ‘Yeah, why not.’
Cabot’s eyes grew round. ‘But — but … ’tis a valuable account from the First Crusade!’
‘No,’ said Adam, ‘it’s a
Maddy rushed over with a sheet of paper in her hand. ‘I printed it out.’ She laid it down on the table, the highlighted characters still just about discernible from the rest of the text. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘this first line … it’s this character that’s highlighted,’ she said, pointing to the upside-down Gaelic symbol Cabot had noted minutes earlier.
Adam took the knife, and carefully dug its sharp tip into the parchment and the wooden table beneath.
‘What if we’re wrong?’ said Maddy. ‘What if it’s something else? You’re about to cut holes in this thing, and, like, there’s only this one copy!’
Adam hesitated a moment. ‘Ahh … true.’ He blew air through his teeth.
She looked down at the printout. ‘But looking at that …’
He nodded. ‘Exactly. Those letters are different ink. There’s only one reason you’d write certain letters out of order like that.’
‘Yeah …’ she shrugged. ‘Ahh heck — go for it, then.’
As Adam began cautiously cutting the first character out of the stiff parchment, Cabot absentmindedly crossed himself with the tips of his fingers and muttered an apology in Latin to God above.
CHAPTER 75
1194, Nottingham
Liam and the soldiers standing alongside him ducked again at the warning shout from the gatehouse. Half a dozen rounded boulders the size of mead barrels came hurtling over the top of the city wall and with a clearly audible whistle arced downwards into the market square.
One landed with a heavy thud that he felt vibrate through the ground. It sent up a mushroom cloud of dust and airborne soil and chicken droppings. The others found market stalls and the wooden shacks that surrounded the thoroughfare, shattering them like eggshell.
‘Jay-zus-’n’-Mother-Mary!’
Bob stood beside him, calmly evaluating the paths the boulders had taken. ‘Information: they are adjusting their angles of trajectory.’ He pointed towards a section of wall twenty yards to the right of the city’s main gatehouse. ‘They are aiming for that. The wall there is weak.’
Liam could see a faint discoloration to the section of wall, as if different stone had been used there to patch up an age-old breach.
The first few volleys had overshot the wall and disappeared among the jumble of slate and wood rooftops in the middle of Nottingham, sending up plumes of dust and smoke into the cloudless blue sky. A fire had been started in among that somewhere; and the darker column of smoke, growing thicker, suggested it was beginning to take hold and spread.
Liam could feel the nervous darting eyes of hundreds of the town’s people on him; looking to their young sheriff to issue his orders.
‘Suggestion.’
Liam leaned closer to Bob. ‘Yes please … I’ve got no idea what to do, so help me.’
‘The wall will fail there,’ he said, pointing towards the discoloured section. ‘We will need to concentrate the garrison where the breach will be.’
‘Right.’
Bob pointed up to the top of the city wall and the gatehouse. Nottingham’s meagre garrison of troops were mostly dotted along the front wall, firing sporadic, unaimed arrows towards the metallic, shimmering and glinting mass of Richard’s assembled army. ‘These soldiers, also the ones held in reserve to defend the keep, are not efficiently deployed,’ rumbled Bob.
