by Jack Whyte
The thought of what that device could be unnerved him slightly, and even as he reached out to grasp the first padlock the hackles rose on his neck and he had to stop. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was suddenly dry and he had to work his tongue before he could open it. He licked his lips and took a firmer grip on himself, then inserted the key, only to find that he had chosen the wrong padlock. Moments later the second lock opened with an oiled click and he reached for the key to the first. The metal hinges of the hasps grated gently as he raised them, and he paused again, drawing a great breath before pulling upwards, gently at first but then much harder than he had anticipated, to lift the heavy, lead-lined lid.
The contents of the chest were covered by a voluminous quilted blanket that he lifted out easily with both hands, dropping it on the floor by his feet as he gazed, open mouthed, at the astonishing object that now lay revealed. It fitted the interior closely, filling almost the entire space, and its ends and corners were wrapped and padded against abrasion by the sides of the chest. The golden glow it emitted seemed to radiate outwards, spilling over the edges of the container, although he knew that was no more than an illusion caused by the brightness of the shaft of sunlight striking the metal-coated surface of the artifact. From the way his skin reacted, though, causing him to shiver and stirring the short hairs at his nape, he had no doubt in his mind that he was looking down at the most compelling object in creation, the single most precious relic on earth: the gold-sheathed coffer made to contain the Covenant between God and His chosen people; the Ark of the Covenant from the Holy of Holies in the Temple of King Solomon.
He lost awareness of how long he had stood there, gazing down at the thing, his senses awash in its beauty, but at one point he found himself reaching out to touch it, his hand coming within inches of the beaten gold surface of the lid before his fingers closed spastically and he jerked his elbow back, holding his forearm out unnaturally in front of him. According to the legends of this thing and the lore of his own Order of Sion, only priests were permitted to touch it. Anyone else who did so died violently, and the ancient scriptures cited examples of such transgressions. He released a shuddering breath and lowered his arm, pushing his hand behind his back, where it might no longer be tempted. And then he allowed himself to look more closely at the two towering golden figures that surmounted the lid of the Ark. They were angels, he knew, Seraphim, but there was little angelic or serene about them. The figures were filled with menace and exuded vigilance and tension, the upper tips of their spread wings almost touching one another as the angels leaned forward, appearing to hover over the lid of the Ark, sheltering the sacred area between them from which the voice of God Himself was said to have spoken to the priests.
Graven images, he thought, and was surprised by the vehemence with which the anomaly thrust its way into his consciousness. The Jews abhorred graven images, believing them idolatrous, and yet here, atop the very repository made to store the stone tablets bearing God’s own Law, was an absolute and categorical defiance of their first commandment, for these two images were graven in pure gold. And Aaron’s Rod was in there, too, if the ancient lore were true: the sacred rod that turned into a serpent and devoured the serpents set upon it by Pharaoh’s priests and sorcerers. Will found himself frowning, for he had always imagined that Aaron’s Rod would be at least as long as its bearer’s height, but the Ark itself was less than four feet in length and just over half that much in width, and thus, if the Rod was really in there, it must be far less imposing in appearance than his imaginings had led him to believe. But then he had a sudden memory of the heavy rod of state the King of France had carried on the only occasion when Will had seen him; it had been a twoinch-thick, intricately carved baton of ebony wood, ornate and solid and imposing, the embodiment of regal authority. The image in his mind of Capet’s Rod, as he thought of it, satisfied him, and he immediately stopped wondering about the size of Aaron’s Rod. But still he stood gazing at the golden box, one detached segment of his mind yet playing with the need to reach out and touch the thing with his bare hands.
He shuddered and wrenched his awestruck mind away from the appalling thought as a vision of his own end burst into his mind and he saw and felt himself stricken and overwhelmed by flames of heavenly immolation, and before he even knew what he was going to do, the lid of the great wooden chest slammed shut beneath his hands and he threw his full weight on it, pushing it down, his head hanging and his open mouth working as he struggled to catch his breath. Moving awkwardly, he forced himself to turn away from the Prime Chest and contemplate the other three, finding enormous difficulty in focusing on them and fighting to shut the image of the Ark and its brooding Seraphim out of his mind.
He failed. He filled his lungs with air, turned away from the chests, and began to walk rigidly towards the corner nearest him, looking straight ahead until he reached it, and then he squared the room, marching to each of its corners before turning right and making his way directly along the wall to the next. Three times he made the circuit before stopping again where he had begun, and now he found himself able to look at the remaining chests with something approaching equanimity. He knew what was contained in these three, because he had been told two decades before, when his studies had first touched upon them, but he had been told again, more recently, what they contained, and this latter time, as a senior member of the upper hierarchy of the Order of Sion, he had learned more than he knew before, because now the safety and welfare of the chests had become his personal responsibility.
He went back to his father’s desk and collected the remaining keys that lay there, unlocking each of the chests in turn until they all yawned open side by side, their contents on display. Each of them, solidly made from dense, heavy wood and reinforced with iron strapping, was packed to capacity with uniform rows of earthen jars in a double layer, eight above and eight below, all of them made from the same thick, reddish clay, indistinguishable one from another. The tops had been covered with stretched, wet leather centuries before, the coverings then tightly bound in place with wet thongs of rawhide that, when dried, formed an airtight seal as hard as iron.
Will felt no desire to touch these items, and no curiosity about their contents. He was merely happy to see that they were intact, their seals unbroken. He already knew what they contained, because several of the jars had been broken at the time of their discovery in the ruined vaults beneath Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, by the nine original knights who had founded the Order of the Temple, two hundred years earlier. The contents of those broken jars had been studied for years thereafter by the scholars of the Order of Sion, and had confirmed the teachings contained in the Order’s ancient lore, which had itself emerged from Judea a thousand years before that, at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in the first century Anno Domini. These plain and unimpressive jars, Will knew, were the real Treasure of the Templars, notwithstanding the importance of the Seraphimcrowned Ark in the Prime Chest. The Ark of the Covenant represented religious tradition, awe and the fear of God, but the contents of the jars represented nothing supernatural. It was their simple existence that was awe inspiring and revolutionary, for they contained, on tightly rolled scrolls of papyrus, the written records and history of the original community of the Essenes in Qumran, the community that the man Jesus and his brother, James the Just, had ruled and guided. Their contents proved beyond dispute that the Jesus of Qumran, now known as Jesus of Nazareth, was an ordinary man and not, as Paul had decreed, the Son of God, risen and reborn miraculously from the dead …
Will was intensely aware that the threat these records posed to the very existence of the Catholic Church could not be underestimated. Their existence was unsuspected, but were they ever to be found by Rome, they would be destroyed immediately, their threat expunged by fire, along with the lives of everyone who knew of their existence. Will knew the truth of that from his own training within the Order of Sion, because the Church’s entire edifice was built upon a misu
nderstanding.
Among their ancient secrets, brought with them from their days of slavery in Egypt and firmly rooted in the age-old rites that had dominated their worship for the centuries of their enslavement, the priests of the Israelites had preserved a ritual involving a symbolic death and resurrection—a rebirth into Enlightenment and the search for Communion with God Himself—that had been passed down through the millennia and now existed as the central ceremony of the Order of Sion. Will himself had undergone the ritual, when being Raised to brotherhood in the ancient fraternity, a ceremony that had roots stretching back into the earliest days of Egypt and the worship of Osiris, the God of Light, and his wife-sister, Isis.
Paul, the Order of Sion believed, had caught wind of this ceremonial—or of the reported fact that Jesus had “died” and been “reborn” decades earlier, before Paul’s own time—but being a Gentile and therefore by definition an outsider, he knew nothing of the true Way of the Essenes and thus had been incapable of understanding the truth of what he had discovered. The result was that he had transposed the ritual “death” in the Raising rite into the actual death of the man Jesus, believing that he had truly risen from the grave as a divine being. And upon that misunderstanding had been born the Catholic Church.
“Will! Are ye done in there?”
Will came out of his reverie with a start. “Aye, I’m coming.” He moved quickly now to close and lock the chests again, raising the lid of the Prime Chest and replacing the quilted blanket before closing it firmly and slipping the twin padlocks through the hasps. When he was done, he replaced the keys in their chest and locked that one too, lifted it onto one of the large chests, then hung the key around his neck and thrust it down into his tunic. He slapped the dust from his hands and looked around the room, checking that everything was as it should be, and then he walked quickly to the door and rejoined Tam outside.
FOUR
Will and his party were back in Arran within three weeks of their arrival in Roslin, having covered the three-hundred-mile journey there and back without incident. They had met potentially dangerous groups on both legs of the journey, but their own strength of twenty strongly armed and mounted men had been sufficient to discourage anyone from trying to molest them. In the meantime, the Treasure was safely concealed in the underground cavern close to his father’s home, and the excavation work had been expertly handled, so quick and thorough in its execution that the great bramble thickets hiding the entrance hid it still—they had been uprooted very carefully and then replanted in their original position when the work of sealing the entrance was completed.
Will was relieved to discover that nothing untoward had occurred during their absence, and that the new program of allocated work had progressed well, the newly structured organization apparently functioning smoothly. The brethren were already almost indistinguishable from the ordinary folk he and his men had encountered on the journey to and from Roslin. Their clothing was drab and sturdy, their beards had all been cropped to be unremarkable, and their scalps were overgrown by new-sprouting hair.
The secondary chapter had been set up at Lochranza mere days after Will’s departure, with the senior Temple bishop there, Bruno of Arles, functioning as temporary chaplain and Sir Reynald de Pairaud installed as acting preceptor. This development pleased Will immensely, because the veteran knight, for all his prickliness and his Temple Boar mentality, was utterly reliable when it came to his duty and responsibilities. On his first visit to Lochranza, four days after his return from the mainland, Will was open and sincere with his praises for the work that de Pairaud had already achieved in his new stewardship.
As a castle, with towering mountains in the distance at its back, Lochranza was well established, built upon a high crag overlooking the bay beneath, and very easily defended, but its principal feature was inside: a great, strongly built hall that was both draft free and well lit, two elements that rendered it more hospitable than nine out of any ten other castles Will could think of. De Pairaud had already taken advantage of that, setting skilled carpenters to partitioning the huge hall onethird of the way along its length, leaving ample room for all the necessary daily functions that the garrison required. The partitioned third had been turned into a Temple Chapter House, complete with a single, fortified door; the required celebrants’ Chairs, mounted on rostra in the east, west, north, and south; and a squared central floor laid out in alternating foot-square blocks of black- and white-painted boards thickly covered with multiple layers of clear, hard-set varnish. Here, in quarters far more elaborate and sumptuous than those used by their brethren in Brodick, the knights of Lochranza would convene in the hours of darkness to hold their chapter meetings and conduct the rites and ceremonies of their Order.
Beyond the walls, a smithy had been set up in one of the castle outbuildings, and most of the heavy livestock, the knights’ big warhorses, had been brought from Brodick and divided into small herds of seven to ten animals, each of them tended by a small team of men and allotted its own grazing territory among the lush valley bottoms that penetrated the highlands and mountain ridges soaring behind the castle. The fisher folk who had lived in the village by the harbor had vanished with the approach of the strange Southrons, as they called the newcomers, and it was generally assumed that they had fled to the high hillsides out of fear, caused more by the treasonous conduct of their former chief, Menteith, than by fear of the newcomers per se. De Pairaud believed they would return eventually, as soon as they had convinced themselves that they were being neither hunted nor persecuted, but in the meantime, several of the sergeants had moved into the small stone huts left vacant at the sea’s edge and were making themselves valuable to the community by fishing every day, bringing in a constant and varying supply of fresh fish for the castle tables.
Farther out, de Pairaud explained, on the high moors behind the castle and sloping towards the island’s western shores, other small teams of men were amassing and drying mountains of peat that would be stocked for the following winter’s needs, while yet others were busy felling the remaining trees of the island’s only extensive woodland, pillaged beyond salvation by the English garrison that had built the hall at Brodick. A team of men from both chapters had refurbished the old sawpits used by the English soldiery, and sawyers were now hard at work, cutting the green logs into planks, boards, and beams for their construction needs in both Brodick and Lochranza. Those, too, would have to be stacked and dried before they could be used, but Will no longer believed that his party’s stay on Arran would be a brief one, and even if it were, the exercise of cutting and stockpiling both the fuel and the green lumber served a worthwhile purpose in keeping the men busy and preoccupied against boredom.
He ended his visit to Lochranza by setting out on a long, southwestward sweep of the high moors on his way back to Brodick, visiting the various worksites and greeting the men involved in person, inspecting their efforts and expressing his satisfaction and encouragement to each group he met. But he found himself fretting more and more about the King’s rumored illness, for if Bruce were to be removed from power, he and his men would be in great peril on this island, perhaps even unable—and this thought chilled him—to reclaim their galleys from the MacDonalds. That final thought weighed heavily on him from the moment it occurred to him, and he arrived back at Brodick Hall on a blustery day of wind and chill rain, his mood matching the weather perfectly, bleak and comfortless.
His worst fears were put at rest immediately. Sir James Douglas had called in to Brodick while Will was at Lochranza and had left word that the Bruce was well, and had withdrawn with his brother and all his army to Strathbogie on the Deveron River near Aberdeen, where the local lord was a staunch supporter and where the King was recovering his strength and preparing for a spring campaign against the English forces in the area.
Douglas had left a packet of dispatches for Will, in care of Sir Richard de Montrichard, and Will collected it and took it with him to read while Tam Sinclair supervised th
e preparation of a hot bath—a weakness, in the eyes of many, that Will had developed in his years of traveling among the Moors in Spain. Whenever he grew chilled or was drenched by cold rainwater, Will would insist on bathing in hot water, and Tam had long since grown inured to the strange behavior. Tam had not accompanied him to Lochranza, opting instead to remain in Brodick to undertake the interrupted training and education of Will’s nephew Henry, who, as squire now to a military monk, would need to know far more than was required of the squire of a common knight, and Will had been content to leave them both behind.
Will cut the leather binding on the packet and withdrew two documents. One was a folded note on a scrap of parchment from Douglas himself, written in a bold, looping hand, with the tidings of the Bruce’s sickness and mentioning that the King, now much improved, was greatly pleased with the loyalty and dedication of the “Arran” men who rode with him. It ended with a simple, flourished signature, plain “Douglas.”
The second missive was entirely different, carefully folded into a neat oblong and sealed at the rear with a waxen stamp that Will had never seen before. His name was written in a small, neat hand in the upper right front corner. Curious, he broke the seal and opened up the letter, aware of the rich and supple texture of the three sheets of fine parchment between his fingers. He turned first to the last page, his eye going directly to the name at the bottom, and the breath caught in his throat as he saw the simple signature of Jessica Randolph de St. Valéry. For long moments he could do nothing, his pulse pounding and his thoughts churning, seeking vainly for reasons why this woman, of all people, should write to him. But eventually, accepting the folly of such feckless thoughts, and acknowledging his own unreasonable excitement with chagrin, he turned back to the first page and began to read the delicately formed Angevin script, whispering the words aloud to himself in the accents of his own boyhood, in the time before the more ubiquitous French overwhelmed his native tongue.