скачать книгу бесплатно
The man behind the projector continued to stare at the bright white square on the screen. His heart far away, his eyes filled with angry tears.
AUGUST 1522, STELTZENBERG, SOUTHWEST GERMANY (#ulink_b48c9f91-7760-50b5-9c4c-2e9d0c13f257)
Eberhardt von Steltzenberg lay asleep on his four-poster bed in the tower of his castle, his barrel chest exposed. The canopy over the bed was worn and moth-eaten, full of dust and dead flies.
It was a hot night; a mass of cloud brooded over the single main tower of his cramped castle in the forest. It blotted out the moon and stars, pouring a thick darkness over the land. His bedchamber took up the whole of the first floor of the tower. The heavy old ceiling beams were hung with cobwebs. His accoutrements littered the room: a suit of armour, his lance, saddles, his chests of clothes.
On one side of the room was the trap door that led down to the great hall where his manservant and his ten hunting dogs slept; their excreta mixed with the rushes on the floor. The hot stench of it rose up through the gaps in the floorboards.
The tower was packed with heat. There had been clear summer skies for the last few weeks; the dark red sandstone had been baked like a kiln during the day and now emanated warmth. The main door was barred shut and no breeze could stir through the five thin arrow slits that punctured the walls of the knight’s chamber. A heavy weight pressed on the air in the room.
The figure on the bed breathed in slowly, his eyes fluttering in deep sleep, and then stopped.
Dreaming furiously, Eberhardt saw a black spot appear in his heart.
He could see it against the deep red in his chest.
It grew slowly.
He watched it.
What was it?
It was getting larger and heavier. He could feel the weight of it beginning to strain the fibres in his chest, like heartburn. It was hard and jet black, cutting into his soft tissues.
The Nubian Deathstone had returned.
He knew it.
What was it doing there? Why had it come back to him now after twenty-one years?
Blackness swirled out of it like a mist and began branching out along the blood vessels in his heart. The tendrils were reaching across his chest like black ivy.
Confusion at first but fear coming now.
He could feel the strength of the strands clutching at him, squeezing him. He could not breathe. Terror built, pouring through his veins.
‘I can’t breathe!’ he screamed.
The figure on the bed twitched and convulsed. It groaned and scrabbled at its chest with both hands.
His eyes flew open.
Now he could see it properly! He could see the Deathstone and the black miasma that was choking him. It was the smoke from the stone all over again — the cloud of it was now moving in and out of his body at will.
In the darkness he saw it clearly. The rock pressed down on him, forcing him deeper into the mattress. He struggled desperately against it, thrashing his arms and legs. He was a being of fear fighting a being of darkness.
A mighty effort and he was on his feet.
The darkness was all over him, both within and without, coiling around his body and weighing him down. The stone hung down inside him, the darkness wriggling through his blood vessels, penetrating out through his ears and his eyes, choking his throat. He had to escape it, he had to breathe!
He lurched across the room, blundered into a chest and fell onto his knees.
It had him on his knees now; he had to fight back.
He forced himself through the pain and straightened his legs. There in front of him was an arrow slit. He could sense the clean air outside. He could tear the slit open and escape the foulness that was forcing itself down his throat. His fingers gripped the thin stone edge of the slit where it narrowed in through the thick walls.
He tore at it with all his might. His huge shoulders knotted, the tendons tensed and sweat stood out on his skin.
It did not move. The stone blocks were ancient but well laid.
‘The Deathstone is conspiring against me. It has seeped into the stones here.’
He lurched around the edge of the room, supporting himself with one arm against the wall. His fingers found the next arrow slit and he heaved on that. Again it stayed resolute.
‘No!’
The figure blundered round the circular room, pawing at the wall and then tearing at the arrow slits. His fingers were torn and bleeding.
Five times he heaved and five times he failed. Finally he sank to his knees, wheezing for breath and clutching at his throat.
Above him the thunderheads were grinding against each other in the sky. Dark winds swirled around the tower. Lightning flashed, and then came an explosion of thunder that banged the room like a drum and shook the floorboards against his knees. The hunting dogs in the hall below started up, baying and howling.
The rain came in like a wave. It crashed against the stone, gushed off the guttering and spattered down the walls.
‘The sky. I can reach the sky.’
He lurched to his feet again and blundered up the crude wooden steps that led to the trap door in the ceiling. Scrambling up them on his hands and knees, he hit the trap door with his shoulder and flung it open. It banged back against the floorboards and terrified the old woman, his grandmother, who lived in the upper chamber. She shrieked from behind her bed curtains. Seizing her horsewhip, she threw them open and flew across the room in her nightgown, a white-clad banshee shouting obscenities and flailing at him with the whip.
‘A plague on you, you dog! Coming into a lady’s chamber!’
The new onslaught combined with the coiling darkness that still squeezed him. He ran from her and charged up the final steps to the roof. Flinging the next trap door open, he at last emerged into the air.
It was hot and thrashing down with rain. He was soaked instantly. He ran to the edge of the tower and leaned over a gap in the battlements, seventy feet up, whooping in air. The pressure in his chest began to ease.
The old woman caught up with him and laid the whip squarely across his back. He jerked with the pain, turned round and caught the whip. Anger at his oppressor filled him now that it had taken human form; at last he could fight back.
Strength flowed into his limbs; he seized the creature by the throat and lifted it off the ground. He grabbed one of its legs with the other hand, held it above his head.
A huge curtain of sheet lightning lit up the sky. The figure standing high up on the battlements was momentarily silhouetted against it.
It held the oppressor over its head for a second and then cast it down, down into the darkness.
SEPTEMBER 1522, PFÄLZERWALD FOREST, CENTRAL GERMANY (#ulink_a1fd784b-2377-5e98-9855-0e95b0ece892)
Eberhardt gently slit the soft white flesh on the inside of his forearm with his knife.
He clenched his fist and let the bright red blood run out and drip off his elbow. He aimed the drops so that they splashed richly on a patch of earth on the roadside.
‘Sir!’ Albrecht, his steward, shouted in alarm and tried to restrain him.
Eberhardt was enraged. ‘You swine!’ he bellowed, and angrily brushed the smaller man away. ‘Our blood cannot be separated from the soil that bore us! It will return! It will return again!’
He continued dripping blood, whilst he muttered through gritted teeth, ‘Blood and soil, blood and soil, we will become one again,’ like an incantation.
His hands held out, Albrecht wailed helplessly, ‘Sir, what are you doing?’ He screwed his eyes up and looked away.
‘I am a blood sacrifice for the German nation!’ Spittle flecked Eberhardt’s beard as he shouted through the pain. ‘I will become an oblation poured onto the soil. The soil that raised us, that has cradled us since our inception. Our father, our mother … our land!’
It was mid-morning, three days after the tragedy on the tower. Eberhardt was not sure what had happened to his grandmother. Her broken body had been discovered the next morning, cold and wet in the mud: did she jump or had he thrown her? He was unsure if he had experienced a dream or a spiritual visitation. Either way, his brush with the Deathstone had unsettled him. Why had it returned to him? What mission was it calling him to?
Albrecht had put it about in the village that his master’s grandmother had taken fright at the thunder and leaped to her death, and few had enquired further. He was a middle-aged, worrisome character who peered out suspiciously at the world from under a thatch of brown hair.
In contrast, his master was a big man in his forties, an old roué whose appetites had overrun his frame; his gut bulged out over his hose. He had a mane of silvery hair, with a heavy beard cut off square just under his chin. His eyes were rheumy and the skin of his face sagged like the canvas of an old tent.
Eberhardt was a Raubritter — a Robber Knight — although he preferred just to call himself a knight. He was from an ancient German family, but was really a bandit in charge of a cramped castle, a village and a few square miles of the Pfälzerwald.
The imminent Knights’ War against the Imperial Princes had revived some of his youthful passion.
He shouted at Albrecht, cowering in front of him, ‘The Pope and the Princes are ransacking the German people! The Emperor has banned our right of feud! The Knights won’t stand for it. The German people won’t stand for it!’
‘Yes, but—’
‘The good Dr Luther has raised the clarion call against the papists — Rome is leeching this country dry! We Knights will ride against the Princes. The time for sacrifice has come, Albrecht!’
They were two days’ ride from home in a shady spot in the forest, on the way south towards Landau, where the Knights were rallying. Eberhardt had spontaneously made his blood gesture on a break in their journey, having brooded on their mission as they rode along that morning.
‘Things can’t go on as they are.’
With this statement of fact he calmed down at last and stopped clenching his fist. He held his arm out to Albrecht.
‘Bind it up.’
Albrecht rummaged in the saddlebags of his horse for some spare cloth. He walked back over to Eberhardt and began binding his forearm. He was a simple man who focused on practical arrangements and left matters of national politics and religion to his lord. He was not even sure what Eberhardt meant by the concept of ‘the German people’. The Holy Roman Empire covered the area and was composed of hundreds of states run by Princes, and imperial free cities. Such ideas were beyond him.
The Knights had been able to hold their lands in this strange hotchpotch for centuries because they had the legal right from the Holy Roman Emperor to conduct armed feuds. This was supposed to allow the chivalrous art of war to be practised but was now just an excuse for murder and racketeering.
The new Emperor, Charles V, had tired of such anarchy and triggered the Knights’ War by banning their right of feud. The Knights had been declining for centuries and saw this as their last-ditch attempt to hold on to what little status they had left.
‘We’ll teach them a lesson,’ Eberhardt mused as he watched Albrecht tie off the white cloth.
‘There you go.’ His servant looked at his neat handiwork with satisfaction. Although he was used to his master’s outlandish manner, he was relieved that Eberhardt had calmed down.
He had known Eberhardt since he was a boy and he had always been a romantic. As a student at Heidelberg University he was an enthusiastic Renaissance man: a knight but a scholar as well, one who had joined the German intellectual revival that was shedding light into the Dark Ages. He was so inspired by the new thinkers that he’d begun writing his own magnum opus entitled The Quest for Glory, and had developed his own motto, Lumensfero!
However, these lofty ideas had been undermined when he was caught in bed with a professor’s wife. He had to flee, and travelled south where he fell in with a company of Landsknecht, German mercenaries, heading down to the Italian Wars, where he proved to be a brave soldier.
He journeyed on to Constantinople and fell in love with its exoticism. People of all creeds and cultures passed in front of him in a kaleidoscope of colours, languages and scents.
He felt preternaturally alive. His skin was taut; he could sense his body pushing against it, straining to take in all the new experiences. It was a wild, mad, beautiful time.
With sensations such as these it was no wonder that he had been writing like a fury. Every spare minute he had, he would sit and transcribe his adventures. He accumulated so many books that he had to bundle them up and send them back to Ludwig Fritzler, an old university friend working in the Heidelberg library.
When he thought back to those times, Eberhardt often wondered what had happened to Abba Athanasius, the Nubian mystic who led the Ishfaqi cult. He was such an odd mixture of religions. ‘Abba’ meant Father in Aramaic and ‘Athanasius’ meant immortal in Greek — both came from his background as a Coptic Christian priest. But he had then formed a cult that mixed elements of Islam and Christianity with animism, the worship of spirits. In this case the spirit was inside a large piece of black rock found in the heart of an extinct volcano in central Africa: the Deathstone.
The strange priest was the biggest human being that Eberhardt had ever seen, as forbidding and impenetrable as the Deathstone itself. With his bald head and black flowing robes he had a charisma as powerful and brooding as the volcano that the Stone came from.
He preached that the mountain was the new Mount Sinai and that it held the keys to the gates of death. The people there feared the Stone; those who had worked in mining it had all died of strange diseases.
Eberhardt was enthralled by the cult and took part enthusiastically in its ceremonies. In the Deathstone he was sure that he had discovered the nexus between life and death; an object that had true meaning.
The German had become a trusted follower of Abba Athanasius, with Latin their common language. His curiosity led him to ask the monk for the whereabouts of the holy mountain. Eventually he was given the task of organising an expedition to find the origins of the Stone.
He had set about planning avidly, obtaining directions from the monk and Arab traders that went into the area. Using rivers to mark out his route, he sketched a map along the Nile through the deserts of Egypt and Sudan and then southwest, cutting down right into the heart of the Dark Continent.
It was all planned out and he was getting ready to set off on his new odyssey when he received a letter from his mother. His father had died and he was summoned to return immediately to inherit his sestate before other greedy relatives tried to claim it.
It was a bitter blow; his heart had been set on the journey. In a daze he had walked into Abba Athanasius’ bare cell, clutching the letter, and with great sadness explained that he had to go home.
Eberhardt stared longingly at the sketch map he had drawn before folding it up and tucking it into his journal. Then he took a last look into the heart of the Nubian Deathstone, bade farewell to its mighty keeper and left.
But the Stone remained lodged deep inside him.
Eberhardt had gone back to be lord of his little patch of backwoods Germany. He had donated the remaining notebooks of The Quest for Glory to Ludwig and the library, and then for the past twenty years he had lived the life of a country squire in a damp and crowded castle, forced to stay put to retain his inheritance whilst going quietly mad, dreaming of foreign lands and the freedom of his youth.
Now though, the thrill of the campaign was beginning to awaken him once more as he mounted up and rode on south through the woods.
He could feel his skin tightening, his pulse quickening. The Deathstone was calling him for its purpose; he did not know what it was but he spurred his horse on to the coming war.
PRESENT DAY, 17 NOVEMBER, LONDON (#ulink_0df31776-5f22-59ca-bac5-0e7e66956dd0)
‘OK, so here’s the plan for our war.’
Kalil stepped up to the projector screen and circled an area on the satellite image with his finger. Today he looked even more of a playboy than he had before. His black hair was neatly coiffured and he wore a pearlescent white shirt, designer jeans and expensive loafers.
‘This is the target area for the attack. The extinct volcano where they actually do the mining is here; the blue circle is the caldera lake in the crater.’
He smiled excitedly as he turned back to face Alex and Colin — ‘Col’ — Thwaites, a former sergeant-major from the Parachute Regiment, who were sitting on chairs in the plain meeting room. They watched him attentively, notepads on their knees. Kalil had provided a small rented mews office in Mayfair for them to work from. He apparently lived five minutes’ walk away but still drove to work and parked his silver Porsche Carrera in the basement garage.
‘This shot covers a four-hundred-square-mile area and as you can see there isn’t exactly a lot going on in the neighbourhood.’
Apart from some rivers, the lake was the only thing that broke the green carpet of jungle that filled the rest of the picture; the sharp cone of the volcano stood out from the flat terrain by its shadow.
‘OK, so if we zero in on this you can see some more detail of the actual buildings.’ Kalil clicked the remote and the image zoomed in.
‘These are very good shots.’ Alex nodded appreciatively. ‘Where did you get them from?’
The remark was well meant but Kalil reacted uncomfortably. ‘The cartel has … connections.’ He looked evasive and turned back to the screen.
