The Doomsday Code

CHAPTER 33

1194, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire

He listened to the sounds of his people, his followers, their voices echoing through the woods as they chattered around their campfires. Their spirits were lifted. For them, today had been a good day. They’d managed to intercept a merchant’s wagon destined to deliver to some baron a cart full of luxuries. The foreign wine they’d found was being consumed now. And their songs around the fire were gradually becoming less tuneful and more raucous.

They are like children.

He watched them from the darkness of his hut, his army of peasant bandits. So used to the grinding poverty of recent years, the starvation, grubbing for scraps of food. That here, in the forests of Nottingham, where they could poach royal deer and hares because the soldiers daren’t follow them in, they were like excitable children.

It reminded him, James Locke, too much of the place, of the time, he’d come from. A world of poverty, overcrowded and crumbling cities … polluted oceans populated by nothing but floating islands of plastic rubbish and slowly dispersing toxins. A dying world … a dying world.

He looked down at the wooden box in his hands, old weathered wood with an ornate pattern carved into its sides.

Locke stared at it. Inside this box was what he’d come back in time for. Inside this box was what his brotherhood had been waiting nearly a thousand years to recover. A lost truth. A warning. A prophecy.

Pandora.

Locke had glimpsed inside, had touched it, even unravelled some of it just to get a glimpse of the writing. And he’d felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. The words were there on the parchment, hidden from a casual eye: random, unintelligable, the meaning locked away by its code.

He looked up again, out through the flap of his hut at his bandits making merry by the flickering light of the campfire. Their raids on the baron’s goods, on the farms, on the taxmen’s carts — all of that was eventually going to bring King Richard up to Nottingham once he returned to England, up to these woods. That, and the knowledge that his precious Holy Grail had been taken.

Locke nodded.

He’ll come. And he’ll bring with him the other half of the Grail. The key.