The Secret of Excalibur

matter. Come in, come in.’

Hanif shouted at the imam, but Al-Sabban dismissively waved him away. Lips quivering, the younger man whirled and stalked across the courtyard into the depths of the mosque. ‘Children!’ al-Sabban spat. ‘No respect. And a poor scholar too - the Koran tells us to welcome all strangers as friends. Even strangers from the Great Satan.’ He chuckled. ‘So, what brings you to my mosque?’

The imam had a private room, an office-cum-study with a copy of the Koran open on a desk, at the rear of the mosque. The low-ceilinged space smelled strongly of coffee and nicotine, the narrow windows tinged with yellow. Used to the smoke-free establishments of New York, Nina couldn’t help coughing as al-Sabban lit up his third cigarette in a row. ‘I thought the Koran was against smoking,’ she said hopefully.

‘There is some dispute among scholars,’ al-Sabban replied, taking a long draw before carefully blowing out a smoke ring. ‘And as a scholar myself, I say . . . it is fine.’ He leaned back in his threadbare chair. ‘Yes, I know the item you have told me about. I will let you see it. For a . . .’ He reached over to close the Koran as if shielding it from what he was about to say. ‘Donation.’

‘We’re willing to pay, of course,’ said Mitchell. ‘Will dollars be okay?’

‘I would have preferred euros, as dollars have been devalued recently - every refugee from Iraq comes with an armful of dollars! But they will do, I suppose. For a good price.’

Mitchell nodded. ‘We were hoping to do more than just look at the piece, sir - we actually came here to buy it.’

‘Then the price will have to be excellent!’ He carefully stubbed out the cigarette, balancing it on the side of his ashtray for later, and stood. ‘Come with me.’

Al-Sabban led them through the mosque to its central prayer hall. ‘Parts of this building are over eight hundred years old,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, it shows.’ He indicated the base of the minaret at the corner of the hall. A pile of loose bricks lay at the bottom of a ladder, beside a wooden pallet attached to a dangling rope. ‘At least there is one good thing about having Rami here. I can make him climb the ladder to call for prayers!’

‘It’s impressive,’ Nina told him. Although the mosque as a whole was shabby, the decorations on the prayer hall’s ceiling were mostly intact, needing only proper cleaning to restore their beauty.

‘You think?’ said al-Sabban, shooting her a look of incredulity. ‘If I could, I would flatten the whole place and build something that was not falling apart!’ He came to a stop at the prayer hall’s southern end. An ornately decorated arched recess was set into the wall: the mihrab, indicating the direction of Mecca, towards which the faithful would pray. Beside it was a small flight of wooden steps leading up to a pulpit - the minbar, from which the imam delivered his sermon.

The sides of the steps were panelled, but al-Sabban crouched and fiddled with what at first seemed to be a piece of painted ornamentation, before it moved with a click. He swung open a small door, shifting round so the others could see inside. ‘Down here,’ he said, tapping on a flagstone, ‘is where the relics are kept.’ He straightened, stroking his beard thoughtfully. ‘We need tools to open it. I will get them, and bring lights. Wait here. Although, Mr Mitchell, this would be a good time for you to fetch your donation!’

‘Well, that was easy,’ Chase observed once the imam had left.

‘At least we know the Russians didn’t beat us to it,’ said Nina. ‘How much money do you think he’ll want?’

‘Unless he’s insanely greedy, I’ve got enough to cover it,’ Mitchell said.

Karima wasn’t happy. ‘I can’t believe an imam would openly take a bribe like that. No wonder they want to replace him, if that’s how he behaves.’ She narrowed her dark eyes. ‘Allah will judge him.’

Mitchell shrugged, turning to go back to the camels. ‘The important thing is that he’s willing to help us.’

He returned with a messenger bag a few minutes later. Al-Sabban reappeared soon after, carrying a rusty crowbar, a lantern and a pocket torch. ‘Here,’ the imam said, pointing to a spot on one side of the flagstone, where a small gap was visible. ‘One of you, open it.’

Everyone looked at Chase. ‘Oh, like that, is it?’ he complained, taking the crowbar. ‘Eddie the packhorse.’

‘I was thinking more Eddie the strongman,’ Nina reassured him, patting his arm. Chase slid the end of the crowbar into the gap and pulled it back. The flagstone rose a couple of inches with a dry rasp, enough for Mitchell to get his fingers underneath to lift it. The two men quickly moved the stone aside.

Al-Sabban pointed his torch down the hole, revealing a low cellar beneath the floor. ‘I keep the few treasures of the mosque down there,’ he said. ‘They may not be much, but being here for over thirty years has taught me that there are always men who want to steal them. Dr Wilde, you come down with me. The rest of you, wait here.’

Chase’s reluctance to let Nina go without him was clear, but he stood by as first al-Sabban, then Nina, lowered themselves into the cellar. ‘Watch yourself,’ he told her.

‘I’ll be fine,’ said Nina. ‘See you soon.’ She switched on the lantern and ducked into the low passage.

The cellar was more extensive than she had expected, a central corridor with chambers on each side. The ceiling was barely five feet high, the arched entrances to each side room lower still. Al-Sabban hunched down ahead of her, kicking up dust with each step as the circle of his torch beam swept back and forth. ‘Down here.’

She followed him to a chamber near the cellar’s far end. It was occupied by battered cardboard boxes and old wooden planks stacked haphazardly against one wall. Al-Sabban carefully lifted the planks aside to reveal another box behind them, a metal chest that from the faded stencilling on its side Nina guessed had once been used to hold ammunition. He blew cobwebs from the handle, then opened it.

‘This is the blade that Muhammad Yawar used to kill the leader of the infidels,’ he said, reaching into the box. Whatever the mosque’s other treasures were, they were apparently hidden elsewhere in the cellar, as the metal case was empty except for the length of steel he carefully withdrew.

Nina brought the lantern closer. It was definitely part of a sword, almost three feet long, but jagged and broken at each end, missing both the tip and the hilt. Although grubby, the metal still appeared in good condition.

It was not plain, though: patterns had been inscribed along its length, just as she had seen on the stained- glass window in Peter’s tomb. Could they really hold the clues that Rust had believed would lead to Excalibur?

‘May I hold it?’ she asked.

Al-Sabban nodded. Nina put down the lantern, then he handed it to her. Turning it to pick out the inscriptions in the lantern’s glow, Nina saw a faint line of text in Latin: ARTURUS REX. ‘King Arthur . . .’ she whispered.

In any other circumstances, that would have immediately convinced her the sword was a fake: it was extremely unlikely that Arthur would have inscribed a nametag on his own sword. But in this case, she was actually searching for a fake, created by the monks of Glastonbury Abbey to convince their king that he had been given the real thing. The nobility of the twelfth century were far more wealthy and ostentatious than their counterparts from six hundred years earlier, and would have expected their symbols of power to be just as showy. ‘Pimp my sword . . .’

‘What?’ asked al-Sabban.

‘Sorry, just thinking out loud.’ Her gaze moved on to the other markings scored into the metal. Most seemed to be purely decorative, florid loops and curls, but there was also a repeated symbol: a labyrinth, a tightly wound path contained within a circle. Unlike a maze, there was only one route from the outside to the centre. Along the path were dots marking particular points. The number and position of the dots varied on each symbol, but there was no readily apparent pattern.

Nina turned the sword over, finding more of the same markings. She associated the symbol of the labyrinth with Greek mythology, the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur, but it also appeared in other cultures, the particular form of this one nagging at her memory. It had appeared somewhere amongst her cram studies of Arthurian legend . . .

Sudden shouting broke her reverie and she looked round, startled. ‘Rami!’ cried al-Sabban, annoyed. The commotion was coming from the prayer hall. ‘Wait here, I will deal with him.’

Above, Chase and Mitchell stood helplessly as Hanif, more angry than ever, screeched at them in Arabic. Karima tried to speak, but barely got a few words out before being shouted down. ‘Guess we really pissed him off this time,’ Chase muttered.

Al-Sabban’s head popped up through the hole like a gopher. ‘Rami!’ he snapped, beginning a vocal exchange