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LITERARY CAFE
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Jerusalem, 1238: Bertrand de Comps, the Grandmaster of the St. John Order of Jerusalem, and Secret Council made a decision to keep the Cross with the Holy Blood in secret until there’s need in it.
... The Keeper abides solely to the Grandmaster. If the Keeper is so dangerously ill, that there’s not even a ghost of a chance of his recovery, the Grandmaster is to destine a new Keeper, who commits himself with a vow to be kept as the vows of chastity, obedience and voluntary poverty without personal acquisitiveness. As for the document itself; it is said in the end of it that it must not be rewritten, must be kept by the Grandmaster, sealed by the Order’s seal and in a case of utter danger it must be committed to fire...
 ... The ancient silver cross, which was included into the registry of crown jewels of Russian empire by the order of emperor Pavel the First. It is strange, as there were much more valuable relics among the belongings given to him; but he never included them into the registry. This cross is considered to be lost… The cross had always been kept in Hermitage repositories.
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... In the lower part of the drawing a naked man and a woman were pictured. They were copulating in an elaborate position, which could be dipped out from Kama Sutra only. Alexander ironically congratulated himself on finding an early work of a medieval adult master and was about to toss the engraving as an irrelevant one. But at that moment he saw the sought signalment! From a cloud, soaring above their heads, an enormous snake was coming down to the loving couple. In the last coil of its body, right next to the head with a forked tongue, a cup on a thin stalk was grasped. The very same cup from the engraving, depicting the meeting by the Alamut castle. Alexander raised his eyes to the upper part of the drawing, where, as he had assumed at first, there was a cloud with some celestials standing on it. Now, having had a closer look, he realized that he had been wrong. Three figures atop weren’t archangels, but humans. Dressed in robes with white crosses on their chests, they could’ve been priests or monks. Two of them were holding cups in their hands. Their other hands were all bleeding, the blood forming a pool at their feet. All the figures were reflecting in that pool, like in a mirror. The man in the center was holding an octagonal cross with a locket…
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