Order in Chaos tt-3

by Jack Whyte

  It was the preceptor, Richard de Montrichard, who asked the question that, on reflection, Will wryly acknowledged must be bothering all of them. They all had cups of wine in their hands and were at ease, talking among themselves, some sitting, others standing by the roaring fire, and several leaning idly against walls and tables as they discussed the chapter meeting. Will was standing slightly apart, watching all of them and making no attempt to assert himself, when he saw de Montrichard turn and seek him out with his eyes, then raise a hand to indicate he wished to speak.

  “Sir William, I have a question to ask, if you will permit me.”

  “You have no need of permission, Sir Richard. We are at leisure here, for the moment. Ask away.”

  “Well, sir, it concerns the matter of our raiment … our habiliments …”

  Will smiled. “You mean our clothing.”

  “Exactly. I agree with everything you said this morning on that topic. It makes perfect sense, for both our own protection and King Robert’s cause. We must become invisible, as you said. But … if we set aside our mantles and surcoats as you suggest, along with our mailed coats and blazoned armor, what will we wear instead?”

  Will had to fight the urge to laugh, reminding himself that these were men whose every movement and behavior, from dawn to dusk through each day of their lives, had been dictated by the Rule that governed them all. They possessed no concept of personal liberty in matters of clothing or deportment; they had spent their lives wearing the clothing issued to them by the Order. Solid but stolid men for the most part, they lacked the imagination to conceive of anything different from what they had always known. And so he nodded solemnly, accepting the question gravely.

  “Why, Brother Richard, we will wear what we have always worn—plain, simple tunics, unadorned, and comfortable leggings against the chill. We will merely set aside our outer clothing, replacing it with the plain cloth or waxed woolen cloaks and other overgarments worn by the common folk in these parts—leather jerkins, and bossed leather armor of boiled and hammer-beaten hides. We shall not freeze from exposure, I promise you. And if your next question be, where will we obtain these things, then I will tell you they are here already. There is a large family of weavers along the southern coast, who supply clothing for all weathers to the local fishermen. And another family of tanners, in the cove below Lochranza. I have spoken with the tanners, although not with the weavers, but I am sure that both families will be eager to work hard to clothe and equip us in return for solid silver coin … and most particularly so if we provide them with hides and woolen yarn, which our ships are already collecting abroad. So set your mind at rest on that, Brother.” Yet he saw confusion lingering in the preceptor’s face. “You appear unconvinced. Was I unclear?”

  “No, Sir William, not at all.” The protestation was almost apologetic. “I was merely wondering how we will distinguish ourselves … in rank, I mean.”

  Will’s eyebrows shot up in astonishment. “Why would we need to? We are less than two hundred here at any time. Is there a man in your commandery whose name and ranking you do not yet know?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “And is there any among them who would fail to recognize you, or any other here?”

  De Montrichard began to look slightly crestfallen, and Vice-Admiral de Narremat came to his rescue. “I think Brother Preceptor might have been referring to procedures in time of conflict or battle, Sir William. I confess the same thought had occurred to me, for all men look alike in the midst of action. An admiral needs to be recognizable to his men as does a land commander.”

  Will nodded. “A valid point, and one that had already occurred to me. But we were speaking here of normal activities, and there is little need for detailed recognition in the daily grind. We have our regimen of daily prayers and ritual, and that alone will suffice to maintain discipline now that it is re-established. In times of war, though, should such ever arrive on Arran, we shall identify ourselves by using colored patches and plain colored banners.” He glanced at the preceptor again. “That is already in hand, Sir Richard, the preparations being set in place, and all men will know the colors before a month has elapsed from now.”

  De Montrichard nodded his acceptance, and from there the conversation became general, with questions coming from everyone present, requiring Will’s illumination on all points raised. In consequence, the hours passed quickly, and when his fellows left him alone at last, Will felt great satisfaction. He had achieved more than he had hoped, and had encountered no opposition even on the details he had expected would be thorny.

  Tam had come in to replenish the fire as soon as the last visitor had left, and he cast a glance at the unopened package on the table where Will had laid it.

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t opened it yet. Part of the package from Master de Molay, for my personal attention.”

  “So when are ye goin’ to open it?”

  “Once you’ve gone. I told you, it’s for me alone at this point.”

  “Hmm. What would it be like, I wonder, to be a Templar without secrets? I jalouse ye’ll be itchin’ to be rid o’ me then, seein’ as how you’re no’ noted for your patience when it comes to bein’ kept waitin’ … well, let me finish here an’ I’ll leave ye to your business. Oh—what was the verdict in the trial?”

  Will told him.

  “So we’ll all ha’e bare faces from now on?”

  “No, not bare. You sergeants won’t have to change your hair or beards at all, except for letting your tonsures grow out. But the knights will trim their fabled forks. And all the signs that we are Templars will be hidden.”

  Tam grunted, pressing the last of an armload of logs into the fire with the sole of his heavy boot, and dusted off his hands. “Well, I’ll be interested to see what changes that will make.”

  “It will make very little difference to who and what we are, Tam. But it should fool a casual eye from a distance. We don’t want to hide ourselves, but we do want to hide our identity, as you well know. Now, out of here and leave me to my labors.”

  Tam merely nodded amiably, then closed the door firmly behind him as he went out.

  Will reached for the heavy, cloth-wrapped packet on the table. It felt slick in his grasp, for the entire thing had been dipped in sealing wax, forming a smooth, solid, yet brittle protective skin. He hefted it for a moment, gauging its weight and wondering what it could contain, then took his dagger from its sheath and rapped the hilt down hard against the wax covering, pieces of which scattered across the floor. But wax adheres strongly to coarse-woven cloth, and he had a minor struggle to free the contents, finally resorting to his dagger’s edge to cut through the packaging.

  A plain black slender iron key fell onto the table before he could catch it, and he sat still for a moment, staring down at it. It was slimmer than most such keys, almost delicate in appearance, and as long as his hand from heel to fingertips, its only decorative feature being that the handle formed the unadorned cross pattée of the Temple. He gazed at it, frowning slightly, then looked inside the wrappings in his hand to see the edge of a piece of parchment. He pulled it out and unfolded it, and as he read it he felt the small hairs stirring on his neck.

  William

  Should you become my successor you may have need to access the contents of the chests in your possession, for reasons yet to be discovered. There is among them one smaller than the rest, bound in brass and with a single padlock, sealed in wax. This fits that lock. Guard it well. It is the Master’s Charge. The chest contains the keys to all the others. Open them alone, in your own time, and view the vindication of our ancient Order of Sion, so that you may know what must be done to safeguard them, intact or apart, should a time of great need arrive. May God keep you, and all of us, in safety and in health.

  D.M.

  Will sat back heavily, aware only now that he should have been expecting this development, since it made no sense that he should be permitted t
o transport the fabled Temple Treasure without the means to open it. But the mere thought of now being able to do so, possessing the right to open the great chests and gaze upon their legendary contents, shrouded for so long in mystery, made him reel with dizziness.

  Contemplating that reminded him that the Treasure itself was still floating aboard one of their remaining ships in the bay of Lamlash, awaiting the discovery of a safe hiding place. It was covered in sailcloth and not even under formal guard, and by now most people there had been kept busy enough to forget its existence. But more than a month had elapsed and no good hiding place had been discovered by any of the trusted men assigned to the task. That, he now saw clearly, was neither acceptable nor even tolerable. And as he thought about the problem, the answer came to him without warning, raising gooseflesh on his shoulders with its aptness. There was no place on Arran safe enough to hold the treasure; several large caves and caverns there were, certainly, but they were far from inaccessible to anyone determined to enter.

  The perfect place, and, he instinctively believed, the only place made for such a use, lay far from Arran Isle on the Scottish mainland, in his father’s own lands of Roslin, deep in the forested hills southwest of Edinburgh and far inland from the sea. To the best of Will’s knowledge, no one but he and his brothers, three of whom he had not seen or thought of in many years, were aware of the existence of the place, a vaulted, subterranean cavern with a single narrow slit of an overhead entrance, discovered by sheer accident years before by Will’s elder brother Andrew when he fell into it while searching for an errant arrow and found himself rolling down a slope of scree into a vast black, empty space. The brothers had used the cavern as their secret place for several years after that, swearing fearful oaths that they would never reveal the place to others. Will had not thought of the cavern for years, having used the place for no more than two summers during his boyhood, and he would have wagered that his brothers, too, had forgotten about it. But now he recalled it perfectly, its single, narrow entrance, a black slash in the level ground at the base of a hill, invisible beneath an overgrown mass of ancient brambles.

  The entrance would have to be enlarged, he knew, for it had barely been wide enough to admit small boys, and it was a fracture in solid rock, not a subsidence of soft soil, but he barely spared a thought for the difficulty involved. The brethren of the Temple had been building fortresses and palatial buildings for more than a century, using mathematical and geometrical methods handed down, by the Order of Sion, from the architects of ancient Egypt. And a result, stonemasonry, the greatest of the builder’s arts, both ancient and modern, had become an honored craft among the Temple knights, who referred to their lore as sacred geometry. Will knew a score of expert stonemasons among his own circle within the brotherhood, and there were five of them among his current command. To them, he knew, the task of enlarging the entrance and then concealing it completely afterwards would be a simple one, quickly completed.

  He felt his stomach stirring in anticipation, knowing that, as a place of concealment for the Treasure, the cavern would be unbeatable, even safer and more secret than the cavern in the forest of Fontainebleau where the chests had lain in safety for decades.

  Now, he decided, his priority must be the safe transportation of the Treasure to his father’s land and its proper concealment there. The thought of seeing Roslin again after so many years, of seeing the faces and hearing the beloved voices of his father and siblings and all their broods, brought him to his feet and set him to pacing the room, already busy selecting the party who would ride with him.

  “Tam!” he roared, and the door swung wide a moment later to reveal his kinsman, wild eyed at the urgency of Will’s summons.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong, Brother Sergeant! I merely deliver advance warning. Clean yourself up and try to look respectable, and start practicing your manners. We’ll be heading home to Roslin within the week!”

  FIVE

  The days that followed seemed too short for the amount of activity that had to be packed into them, transportation from the island to the mainland being a high priority. Will had a galley at his personal disposal, commanded by de Narremat, but he decided to take along a cargo ship as well, one of the craft partitioned between decks to accommodate livestock, since he had estimated his traveling party at twenty trusted men, ten of them knights and ten sergeants, and all of them would need riding horses. He limited the number of spares to four mounts, but also had to include four dray horses for the wagon that would carry the Treasure chests, which brought the number to twenty-eight animals aboard a ship modified to carry thirty-six. The extra space he dedicated to the men of the expedition, since his galley could not easily carry all of them plus the space-consuming chests, and he was unwilling to leave the chests aboard the ship, where they would be out of his sight and control.

  One of the galleys they had lent to Angus Og MacDonald visited Brodick on the second day of their preparations, in the course of a normal patrol of their own waters, and Will took advantage of the opportunity to quiz the MacDonald’s captain on the safest route to follow in crossing from Arran en route to Edinburgh. The captain, a wiry-bearded, bushy-eyebrowed veteran with a face weathered to a mass of leathery wrinkles born of years at sea, spoke both Scots and Gaelic and even had a smattering of French at his command.

  “You will go by the dear green place,” he said, his soft, island-bred accent softening the harshness of the Scots in which he responded. “Straight north from here, up the Firth and then veering to the northeast along Clyde vale as far as you may go before the shallows cut you off. From there, it is journey of four or five days to Edinburgh on a sturdy horse. Where did you say you are going?”

  “A place called Roslin. My father’s home.”

  “Aye … I have never heard of the place.”

  “Why should you have? It is small and lies far inland. But you yourself named a place I have never heard of. What was it, the dear green place? Where is that?”

  “Och!” The captain threw back his head and laughed in genuine pleasure. “I forgot you are not from these parts. It is the place founded by the great saint Kentigern, hundreds of years ago—the mainlanders call him Saint Mungo, but he is Kentigern to us of the Isles, and his church town there at the top of the Firth is Glasgow, which is a Gaelic name, o’ two words, glas and gow, meaning dear an’ green.”

  “I see. And are Englishmen garrisoned there?”

  “I do not know, for I avoid the place. But there might be. It’s a strong place, wi’ a cathedral, so they’ll think it important. Anyway, take no chances. Keep you to the north bank of the Clyde and stay well clear of the town. It’s well wooded all along the vale o’ the river, and there’s few folk about nowadays. Just keep guards out ahead o’ you and ye should be fine. Edinburgh will lie about ninety miles to the east o’ you. The place you’re looking for, I canna help you wi’.”

  Will thanked the man and left him to his work while he himself went in search of Mungo MacDowal, to whom he repeated the captain’s words. Mungo nodded. He knew the route, he said, having traveled it several times as a boy, with his father.

  The next day, an hour before sunset, the watch atop Brodick Hall reported sails approaching from the south, and as dusk thickened around them Will was on the beach, awaiting the arrival of the pair of ships returning from the Channel ports of France, but apart from a brief and discouraging indication of the state of affairs there, he had to wait until late in the evening, after the communal prayers and meal, to hear the full extent of their discoveries. Immediately after dinner, he removed himself from the assembly and led the two captains to his quarters.

  Trebec, a laughing, amiable man when not on duty, hailed from the Breton port of Brest, and so he had covered the ports to the south of Brest, down as far as the Spanish border, since there was less chance of his being recognized there and remembered as a Temple captain. The younger man, a swarthy native of Navarre in northern Spain
, whose name was Ramon Ortega, had visited the northern ports, from la Rochelle itself, where he was unknown, north to Brest and on through Cherbourg as far as Dieppe, calling in to all of them and sending trusted men to find out what they could.

  Neither man smiled as he made his report, and Will paced the floor as he listened to them, too tightly wound to be seated. True to the predictions of the original warning to de Molay, it appeared that every senior officer of the Order had been arrested on the appointed day in October and thrown into prison to await interrogation by the Holy Inquisition, the grimfaced Dominicans who called themselves the Hounds of God and whose implacable zealotry for the absolute sanctity of Christian dogma had spread terror and dread among ordinary Christians for the past hundred years, keeping them in abject subjugation through the fear of death by fire and torture. Both captains could attest to the involvement of the Inquisitors from numerous observations. The length and breadth of the coast of France, the tavern talk was all about the imprisonment of the Templars, and rife with speculation as to what was happening to them behind the forbidding walls of the King’s prisons.

  Will listened in mounting anger and frustration to the reports, his frown deepening until he could stand no more of it and whipped up one hand, cutting both men into silence.

  “That’s all well and good,” he growled, “and plainly there’s no lack of it. But where’s the sense of it? Where’s the meat of the matter? It’s one thing to execute a coup like that, but it’s another altogether to maintain it in the absence of hard truth. What are our people charged with? What’s the nature of the crimes of which they stand accused? You have told me nothing of that.”