as he slowly hauled the portal open I noticed the far side of the door was uneven rock. This latest door would seem, from its other side, to merely be part of the wall of a cave. Had people above ever known this passage existed?
“Where the bloody hell are we?” Potts asked.
There was a wider cave ahead, and light. “I’m guessing we’ve come out in the cave under the holy rock itself,” I said with a whisper.
“We’re right under Kubbet es-Sakhra, the sacred stone, root of the world, and the Dome of the Rock.”
“Right under what once was Solomon’s Temple,” Farhi said excit-edly, gasping from exertion at the tail of our party. “Where Temple treasures might have been kept, or even the ark itself . . .”
“Right where any guardians of the mosque can hear intruders below,” Jericho warned. This was all going too fast.
“You mean the Muslims . . .”
The seamen weren’t waiting. “Treasure, boys!” Ned and his comrades pushed into the corridor. Then there was an Arabic cry and a shot and poor Pott’s head exploded.
One moment the ensign was dragging me with him in mad enthusiasm, and the next his brains sprayed us all. He dropped like a puppet with cut strings. Gun smoke filled the narrow passage with its familiar stink. “Get down!” I shouted, and we dropped.
Then a roar of gunfire and bullets pinged madly around us.
“Allah akbar!” God is great! The Muslims had heard us blundering into their most sacred precincts and had called their janissary guard!
We’d stirred up a hornet’s nest, all right. Through the smoke I could see a cluster of men reloading.
So I fired, and there was a scream in response. Tentwhistle’s pistol went off, too, hitting another, and now it was the janissaries’ turn to tumble to cover.
“Retreat!” I shouted. “Hurry, by God! Back through that door!” Yet even as we began to swing it shut, the janissaries charged and a t h e
r o s e t t a k e y
9 3
dozen Muslim hands grasped the rim from the other side. Ned gave a great cry and cleaved at some with his cutlass, severing fingers, but more guns went off and Little Tom took a ball in the arm. He bucked backward, cursing. The door was inexorably being pushed open, so Ned roared like a bear and waded into them, chopping like a dervish until the arms disappeared. Then he slammed it shut, taking one of our pry bars to jam it temporarily closed until they could ram it open.
We ran back down the twisting stairway to the empty Templar room.
Behind and above, we could hear the heavy slam of a hammer as the Muslims beat on the stone door.
If they caught us, they’d butcher us for sacrilege.
Only through the archway might we have a chance. In the passage back to the spring, Farhi had said, one man could block an army. We sprinted through the corridor with its frieze of skulls to the hole we’d excavated just an hour before. I’d buy time while the others fled, using cutlass and rifle. What a bloody mess!
Yet something had changed. The opening we’d made through the stone archway had shrunken. The stones were somehow reassembling themselves and the hole was too small to crawl through. What magic was this?
“Au revoir, Monsieur Gage!” a familiar voice called through the shrunken hole. Once again, it was the voice of the so-called customs inspector who’d tried to rob me in France, and who I’d fought in Jerusalem when his henchmen accosted Miriam. This time he was calling through what was now the space of a single block! So there was no magic after all, just Silano’s perfidy. The final stone slid back into place in our faces, sealing us in. The French must have followed us as I feared, broken Jericho’s lock on the grating at the Pool of Siloam, and heard our cries when we found no treasure. Then they’d started to brick up our escape route with the bag of mortar Big Ned had carried.
We were trapped by our own foresight.
“The mortar can’t have set!” Ned roared. But either the lime fused quickly, or the stonework was braced from the other side with rubble and beams. He bounced off like a ball. The sailor began beating on the blocked archway with his fists, while Little Tom staggered like 9 4
w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h
a drunk, holding his arm with a hand that dripped blood from his fingertips.
“We’ve no time for this!” Tentwhistle snapped. “The Muslims are going to get through the stone door above and come down the stairs of the Black Madonna!”
“The stairs of the White Madonna!” Farhi cried. “It’s our only chance!”
Back to the Templar hall we ran. There was a crash, and an echo of warlike Arabic cries spilled down from the stairway of the black statue. They were through! Tentwhistle and I ran to the bottom of it and fired blindly upward, the balls pinging and forcing some hesitation. On the opposite side Farhi squeezed past the White Madonna and began climbing those stairs, Jericho pushing his sister hard on the Jew’s heels. Then the rest of us retreated across the Templar hall too, squeezing upward one by one. Finally Big Ned shoved even me ahead of him. “I’ll take care of that rabble!” The goliath seized the White Virgin, muscles almost bursting, and broke her loose. Now our pursuers were entering the Templar hall, looking about in wonder, and then shouting as they spotted us on the opposite side. Turning sideways, Ned barely squeezed into the stairway entrance while dragging the Madonna’s head with him, jamming her stone body in the narrow entrance. That gave a partial plug between us and our pursuers. We turned and scrambled upward.
A wave of Muslims, running wildly, dashed against the obstruction and recoiled, howling with outrage and frustration. They began pulling to break the Madonna free.
