Simon jumped up in horror and looked around. Decayed, partially discolored skulls and bones were strewn all across the floor. Apparently, he had fallen through the rotted flooring into the crypt. A few rays of light streamed in through an opening above him. On the western side of the crypt, a narrow stone staircase led to a trapdoor in the ceiling that no doubt was once used as an entrance. Plaques with inscriptions on them were set into the stone walls here, showing knights with swords and on horseback. Simon looked closer. The men pictured there were probably Guelph rulers or members of the House of Hohenstaufen, which had inhabited this castle after them. The physician remembered that the castle had once served the Romans, too, as a fortified tower. Just how old were these bones?
“Is everything all right?” Benedikta’s voice came from the opening above, where he could see her anxious face now. “I heard the crash and came over right away. What happened?”
Simon grinned. “I probably shouldn’t have helped myself to so many dumplings at the Epiphany feast. I fell through like a sack of potatoes.” He gestured to the plaques and the bones scattered around him. “With a little less luck I would be lying here along with the others.”
Benedikta looked down at him. The floor of the crypt lay about thirty feet below the church. “We’ll need to get a beam for you to climb up on,” she said, looking around.
Simon nodded. “Look over there on the right, by the altar. I think I saw some big boards there. But for heaven’s sake, be careful, or we’ll both be down here together.”
Benedikta smiled at him. “Is that the worst thing that could happen?”
She disappeared, and Simon could hear her cautiously walking across the rotting floor of the church. As the medicus waited for help, he examined the plaque closer. The Latin inscriptions gave the names of the deceased, and the stone reliefs showed knights in armor, standing, lying, and on horseback. One plaque even portrayed two knights on a horse. The physician stopped short.
Two knights?
Something bubbled up inside Simon, a fuzzy image, something that had lain dormant in his subconscious until that moment. Hectically, he fished the little guidebook by Wilhelm von Selling out of his jacket pocket and leafed through it. About halfway through the book, he found the solution.
Two knights. One horse.
“Benedikta! Benedikta!” he shouted, hoarse with excitement. “I think I’ve found something, the solution to the riddle-it’s here!”
Benedikta’s face appeared again in the opening. “What?”
“The Templars!” Simon shouted. “They must have been here. There’s a Templar’s grave plaque down here. The seal of the Grand Master always showed two knights on horseback. There’s an old illustration of it here in Selling’s book!”
Simon waved the book around as Benedikta carefully lowered a beam.
“For the Templars, riding horseback together was considered a sign of great confidence, a symbol that they shared everything, and for that reason, they put it on their seal. Now I can read the inscription.” He moved closer to the plaque and passed his finger over the raised letters along the edge of the plaque.
“Sigillum Militum Christi,” he whispered. “Seal of the Warriors for Christ. It is, in fact, their seal.”
In the meantime, Benedikta had slid down the beam and was standing alongside him.
“Another grave plaque,” she groaned. “This is getting boring.”
“There has to be something behind it.” Simon pulled out a stiletto that he occasionally used for minor surgical procedures and began to scratch away at the mortar along the edges of the plaque. Benedikta worked along with him for a good quarter hour until the plaque came loose and fell to the ground.
There was nothing behind it.
Only a bare wall on which someone had, in fact, chiseled a few lines into the rock. Unlike all the other inscriptions in the crypt, these sentences were in German, though in an archaic one. Simon quietly read them to himself.
“This is what I discovered among men as the greatest wonder, that the earth did not exist, nor the sky above, nor trees, nor mountains, nor any other thing, and the sun did not burn, the moon did not shine, and the beautiful ocean did not sparkle.”
“For heaven’s sake, what does that mean?” Benedikta whispered. “Another riddle from the Bible?”
Simon nodded. “That’s what it looks like. But I’ve never heard this passage before. And there’s something else remarkable…”
“What?” Benedikta looked at him questioningly.
“Well, if it’s from the Bible, it actually should be in Latin. At that time, so far as I know, there was no German translation-at least nothing sanctioned by the church. But the inscription is in German.”
Moving in for a better look, Benedikta pointed to a word in the second line.
“The word tree is all in capital letters. But why?”
Simon once more ran his index finger over the letters. “Perhaps this word is especially important,” he said. “Perhaps the treasure is buried under a tree.”
Benedikta scoffed. “But which one? It’s a forest out there.”
“It would have to be a very old tree, one that was standing here more than three hundred years ago. And there must be something special about it so you could recognize it again.” Simon hurried over to the charred beam and began to pull himself up. “Come, let’s have a look around. Perhaps we’re close to solving the riddle!”
Benedikta sighed and climbed up after him.
They searched all morning and half the afternoon for old trees, or unusual crippled trees, or oaks with something carved into the trunk, or beeches that stood apart, on hills. They looked for hidden signs and stone plaques on the ground; they searched in knotholes, in the crevices among roots, in old badger holes.
And found nothing.
After five hours of searching in vain, Simon sat down on a large snow-covered stone block that had fallen out of the wall, rubbing his ice-cold hands together. “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” he said, his breath turning to clouds of steam in the frigid air. “Even if the treasure, or whatever it is, lies hidden under a tree here, the ground is frozen and much too hard for us to dig.”
Benedikta sat down beside him on the stone block, her face chafed from the dry cold. “Do you still believe there’s a gold treasure buried up here somewhere?”
Trying to warm up, Simon stood and began pacing. “Perhaps it’s not money at all. It could be gold, jewelry, diamonds, something very small and valuable. But it could also all be rubbish, and I’m just getting carried away.”
Angry, he tossed an egg-size stone down the hill. It knocked over a little mound of snow, setting off a small avalanche that came to rest among the trees below.
“Let’s go home,” he said, turning to Benedikta. “You have to prepare for your brother’s funeral, and for the time being, I have had enough of these Templars.”
Together, they tramped back through the snow into the valley. Neither noticed the three figures hiding behind a wall, staring after them with spiteful eyes.
Brother Avenarius rubbed the thick bandage on the back of his head where the hangman had hit him with the club.
“It doesn’t look like they found anything,” he said in his Swabian dialect. “Perhaps the young man is not as smart as he thinks he is. Sapientia certa in re incerta cernitur…True wisdom is found in an uncertain situation.”
“He’s smarter than you, wiseass!” The man with the scarred face and the rasping voice fiddled with the curved dagger in his hand. “What have your erudite maxims done for us so far, eh? They’ve given us nothing but a dead priest and a heap of trouble!”