The Templar Vault *** NUMBER ONE BOOK ***: A Peter Sparke Book, page 2
They found refuge with the small community of Polish refugees and Piotr, his engineering skills much in demand, quickly became part of the war machine. He joined the merchant navy.
He did not survive the war, dying in a torpedoed ship far out in the North Atlantic, so his widow and young child were left alone in a distant country where they knew virtually no one. The child, Sparke's father, was also called Piotr Skranislav, although this became Peter Sparke when he went to school.
At home, young Peter spoke Polish to his mother who remained a foreigner in her adopted country, and this distance from people became almost an inherited trait in her son. Peter was a very quiet man who worked hard, married young and had the happiest few years of his life following the birth of his son. Sparke was christened Piotr but from the day of his birth he was called Peter. Peter's parents died within two years of each other, shortly after he left school, and since then he had rarely been back.
Sparke picked up a rental car at the airport, accepting the offer of a complimentary map from the rental people even though he knew the area. Sparke liked maps.
The meeting was mercifully short. After lunch he was in his car, driving the short distance to his hometown.
The town of Balloch was a few miles north of the river, sitting at the southern tip of the huge freshwater lake, Loch Lomond. Sparke drove through the town and then parked to walk around the landmarks of his youth.
The schools seemed little changed, although smaller than he remembered. The shops and stores seemed to look the same as those in almost every town, although the coffee shops were improved since his day. He did not see any faces he recognised and no one recognised him.
It did not take him long to exhaust the few places he wanted to visit and soon he ended up down at the bank of the loch where a few late-season pleasure boats were still visible. He recognised one of the boats called, "Maid of the Loch". It had been running tourists up and down the loch since he was a boy although, as a local, he had never been on board. If you live in a town where there are activities laid on for tourists you can pretty much bet that locals will never go within a mile of them.
He noticed someone was on board, moving around doing those busy things that people on boats always seem to have to do. Fastened to the fence next to the boat was a handmade sign with the words, "Next Sailing" painted on it and underneath that a space for someone to write a time in chalk. It said "3.30".
Sparke looked at his watch and walked over to the boat. "Hello, are you leaving at 3.30?"
A figure in a bright-yellow rain-jacket turned round, a woman in her early sixties, smiling and relaxed. "If you're ready, so are we," she said.
"Is there anyone else going?" asked Sparke, looking at the empty pier.
"Well, we leave in ten minutes if we're going," said the woman, in a cheerful, sing-song voice, "and if you buy a ticket then we'll definitely be going."
Sparke climbed aboard and after a few minutes they set off directly north up the loch. Sparke had spent time on the water occasionally as a child, but very early on people in coastal towns somehow decide to either become water people or not and Sparke had never taken to sailing or canoeing like some of his friends. The loch was there but as something in the background.
The small white boat moved among the little islands that crowd the south of the loch, then moved out into clear water. Sparke buttoned his coat tightly against the breeze and watched the countryside change on each side. The mass of the mountain, Ben Lomond, took up almost the whole of the right-hand eastern bank, while the western bank on his left changed more gradually from lowland farm to highlands.
About halfway up the loch he noticed the woman leave her wheelhouse and come round to where he stood near the prow. "We have a full service of tea, coffee, soft drinks and snacks," she said smiling.
"Tea, I think," said Sparke.
"Tea it is," she replied, disappearing back inside the cabin.
Sparke, suddenly noticing the cold wind cutting across the surface of the water, followed her in.
"We won't stand on formality. You can sit up in the wheelhouse if you like. It's warmer and you can see everything just fine from there."
The woman, whose name was Peggy according to the name written neatly on her jacket, handed Sparke his tea in a white china mug. "Would you like the full tourist commentary or are you fine with just the view?"
"Well I was brought up in Balloch but I really can't think of much I could ever tell a tourist about the loch."
"Now that is a terrible sin. This is a wonderful place and here are you born here and not knowing a thing about it."
She thought for a moment. "Right, here's one for you. Did you know that some of those wee islands down the loch were man-made?"
She looked at Sparke to see if her announcement had the impact she felt it deserved.
"Life on the land was just so dangerous, I suppose, that people lived on huts built on sticks in the water and kept on bringing rocks out and throwing them in until whole islands were created."
"Is that a story for the tourists?" smiled Sparke.
"Oh no, it's the very truth, there's a book about it in the Tourist Office. Seems that the land was so full of wolves and robbers and whatever that it was just unbearable. It's a good book. I know the lady who wrote it."
"Is there enough to say about a lake to fill a book?" asked Sparke.
"Loch," corrected Peggy, emphasising that particular Scottish pronunciation with a soft ‘ch’, making the word sound very un-English. "Yes, there are loads. It turns out that, because the land was so terrible, the water was a regular highway, especially since one end is in the lowlands and the other in the highlands. According to the book, it seems that down at the south end of the loch people spoke Scottish and up in the north end they all spoke Gaelic. Completely different cultures staring at each other across the water. If there was any trade to be done then the safest and fastest way was up and down the loch."
Even now, only one bank of the loch had a road along it, and that had been blasted out of the stone. The other bank looked like wilderness. Sparke looked at the water and the landscape with fresh eyes. As a boy he had hiked and cycled around the water's edge and he had looked down on the loch from the summits of all of the nearby mountains, but he had never really thought about the water itself except as something to look at and get around.
By now the small boat had reached the northern end and Peggy turned its snub nose around to head back towards Balloch. As they approached the islands again, Sparke peered closely at them to see if there was anything about their appearance that made them look manmade.
"This one here is awfully interesting," said Peggy, steering the boat closer. "It has a lot of old gravestones on it. Mediaeval, Knights Templar and all that sort of thing."
"Seriously?" asked Sparke. "Knights Templar? I never heard that."
"Absolutely," confirmed Peggy, nodding. "It was on the television."
"Now that is an interesting thing," said Sparke. "You would imagine they would have been buried around castles or abbeys or churches. I wonder why they were buried on a small island in the middle of the countryside."
Chapter 2
Ulli was, if anyone ever could be, a complete Templar.
As a five-year-old child, the only son in a family of six, he had seen his father brought back from wars against the Moors, crushed by the effects of badly-treated wounds, months of near-starvation endured in a small forgotten siege, and a dose of the pox collected in Paris.
The family was noble, but lacked wealth, so when his father responded to one of the periodic waves of crusading mania that swept the Rhineland, and spent every penny he could find or could borrow to equip himself as a proper knight, his wife had known they would soon find themselves in poverty.
His father was a stranger to Ulli before he left, and he died almost immediately after he arrived home. He was brought home to die by the Templars who had come across his wrecked body in a freezing mountain monastery. His pleas to be allowed to die in the land of his fathers and in the bosom of his family were answered by the knights.
To thank the Templars for their many kindnesses and to ensure that he could claim his place in paradise, Ulli's father had passed his lands and his family into the care of the Order. His wife and daughters were found refuge within a convent. The Order provided a donation to the Mother that ensured a comfortable life for the women, and enough prayers to guarantee the father's path into heaven.
Ulli was taken directly into the care of the Order. From the first days, there were no women in his life, and virtually no people at all from outside the Order. He learned to read, write and speak in Latin and French, enduring many knocks to the head when his heavy German accent struggled to find a way around the new words.
He learned some mathematics and the required amount of knowledge from the bible, but mostly he learned how to deliver death to the enemies of the Church. He was placed in the care if a number of experienced knights and, under their guidance, learned to see the world through the eyes of the Order.
At the age of fourteen he had been travelling on a pilgrim ship from Malta to Cyprus with a small group of knights, when it was attacked by a Moorish ship. The Moors came up so fast that there was barely any warning.
There were only five fighting men on board, Templars, but they managed to retreat quickly to the high forecastle of the ship and barricade themselves in. Unfortunately, few of the pilgrims were as fast and they fell to the pirates like lambs before wolves. As the raiders ransacked the ship and began to slaughter the pilgrims, the Templars burst out of the forecastle and counter-attacked.
The shock of their charge took the raiders by surprise and almost half of their boarding party were killed before they knew what was happening. After the first mad rush, the struggle became a stand up fight across the open deck, blade against blade.
The two sides formed a ragged fighting line, hacking and slashing at each other back and forth, both pushing to outflank the other, both struggling to hold their line. The knights, including Ulli, were clad in hastily donned armour, wielding heavy axes and swords. The lightly-armoured Moors could move more quickly, but many of their blows had no effect on the Templar steel. Every blow from a Templar blade that struck one of the raiders wreaked devastating damage. Almost any cut was enough to disable, and the instant one of the Moors was injured and stumbled, he lost his ability to ward off the next blow which would hammer him dead to the deck.
One of the Templars, starting to tire, overreached himself and was pulled suddenly forward into the midst of the Moors who fell on him thrusting long daggers into the eye slots of his helmet. In leaping onto the thrashing body of the knight, the Moors had broken their own line.
At this, the remaining Templars leapt forward, crashing into the Moors and the fight became a wild melee of swinging swords and axes. Ulli was in the midst of this and with no directions he simply fought and fought. Although he may have still looked like a child to many, he had been in the care of the Templars for more than half his life and he had trained with weapons every day.
Exhaustion came upon the Templars and, one at a time, they fell to the blades of the surviving Moors, but the toll they took on their enemies was terrible. Ulli had lost all track of time or place and simply hacked at every limb or head within reach that was not wearing armour. His mind lost all thought except that which his teachers had trained into him and he felt the axe he was holding in both hands was an extension of his body.
For the hundredth time since the fight began, he found his balance and filled his lungs with hot, bloody air. As he swung back his axe he realised slowly that there were no targets for him. He stood alone on the deck. Around him were heaped the dead or dying bodies of dozens; Moors, Templars and pilgrims. The sound of his own breathing inside his helmet now deafened him so he lifted it from his head and felt the rush of fresh air and the stench of blood hit him at the same time. Only now did he realise that the surviving attackers had cut the ropes that bound the two ships together and were slowly drifting away from the slaughterhouse of the pilgrim ship. The last thing he saw before he collapsed was a line of faces from the Moorish ship staring at him with open horror. Every part of his body from his boots to the crown of his helmet was soaked in blood.
As the adrenaline left his system, his body crashed into total exhaustion causing him to fall to the deck against the main mast.
He was found three days later by a merchant ship from Genoa, the only survivor on a ship full of dead. The Genoese handed Ulli over to the Order on their arrival at Tyre. They kept the ship. After his recovery Ulli was made the youngest Templar knight in the Order's records.
Fighting was what he was made for and what the Order had made of him. He fought constantly and joyously against Turks, Basques, Moors, pirates, heretics and robbers across Europe and the Mediterranean.
On the Anatolian coast he learned how a few well-led men could destroy many times their number when he was one of a tiny group of Templars who slaughtered an infamous robber band and helped pacify the pilgrim route to a shrine known as Jacob's Column. It was here he met The Mason.
Chapter 3
Sparke spent so much of his life traveling that it made no difference where he lived. His CEO thought that it made a lot of sense for him to be near the corporate head office, so he found himself living in Munich, close to his firm's architectural-award-winning building.
The building was constructed from layers of pale-blue and green glass sheets fixed to a brushed-steel skeleton, which was left visible in several places to show the structure. It was intended to represent a harmony of nature and science but most people called it, "The Pack of Cards".
In fact, Sparke loved the building. When he sat at his desk he had a feeling of being outdoors and almost suspended above ground, thanks to the open spaces all around him and the huge atrium with living trees that formed the centre of the structure.
One wall of his office was filled by a massive, state-of-the-art, touch-sensitive computer screen. Measuring two metres by three, it could be used to display images, video-streams and maps, to capture notes written on it, and act as a video-conference system. By selecting filenames the entire content of the wall could be changed instantly. Sparke could scroll back in history to any of the catastrophes or near disasters that he had helped manage over the years and view the actual notes that had been written in the heat of a crisis, replay video conferences and review emails. It had cost a lot of money and had been built exactly to Sparke's specifications. It had taken the personal approval of the CEO to get it done but it paid for itself a hundred times over in the first incident it was used in.
A freight train, made up of bulk tanker wagons, derailed near Port Elisabeth in South Africa and half of the trucks contained chemicals his firm was shipping. The liquids in all of the trucks were fairly harmless in their own right, and individually each was being carried properly. Unfortunately the crash caused a number of tanks to rupture and the spilled contents combined, creating a chemical reaction that sent a deadly cloud of corrosive gas into a nearby township.
Using Sparke's wall screen they managed to contact, by video-conference, every company who had chemicals on the train, the local fire services and the main laboratory of his own firm. Within two hours it was decided that they should be able to neutralise the toxic cocktail by releasing the contents of one of the remaining trucks. Volunteers from the fire service fixed hoses to the truck and a particularly brave helicopter pilot manoeuvred the head of the hose into the centre of the spillage, a task greatly complicated by the fact that he was wearing, for the first time in his life, a full-body plastic protection suit which had not be designed with the needs of helicopter pilots in mind.
Not only had Sparke and his wall screen been at the centre of the recovery operation, but proved invaluable in the several court cases that followed. Expert witnesses estimated that the fast response saved several lives and hundreds from probable blindness.
Sparke's CEO was pleased and there were no more questions about the cost of his big screen.
Sparke had grown accustomed to using his big screen whenever he was faced with a problem so, on arriving back from Scotland, he had decided to go straight to the office rather than head home.
As he walked towards the security desk he saw a banner draped down the three floors of the atrium. "Commit to excel, excel to commit", was written on it in simulated handwriting, each letter a metre high. As ever, Sparke marvelled at the durability of the English language which could be twisted beyond all recognition and still survive. It could even survive the mangling of brand consultants. He smiled to the guard on duty, placed his ID card and left palm on the scanner, which allowed the guards to issue him with his pass. Even though he worked there, Sparke, like all other staff, had to prove his identity every time he entered the building.
The security man beamed at Sparke. "Have an excellent evening," he said.
"Thank you, I'll try," answered Sparke. "I am just trying to decide if I should spend today committing to excellence or perhaps I might excel in my commitments."
The guard nodded thoughtfully. Sparke enjoyed working in an international business culture, but he had totally failed in translating his sense of humour to an international audience and his inbuilt scepticism towards corporate culture frankly baffled those he worked with.
"The commitment to excellence is like two halves of a single puzzle," the guard said sagely. "We need to see the whole picture. You will enjoy the new Excellence Incubation Programme I think."
"I am sure I will," answered Sparke. "I am excited."
On getting beyond security, he walked through the towering atrium, and then up the long, pale-blond, wooden staircase towards his office on the top floor. The room was clean and bright, the glass-topped desk and pale furniture made the space appear almost translucent. Books and papers were hidden behind pale-blue glass cabinets and the only stamp of personality was a collection of certificates and diplomas covering most of one wall. Amongst these framed documents one thing stood out, a battered and well-worn mountaineer’s ice axe was mounted on a wooden frame with a plaque saying, "Summit Challenge. 2012". Sparke, as a member of a corporate team, had climbed Mount McKinley in North America some years before.
