‘Your Grace,’ Julien said, ‘I have something of importance to tell you.’
‘What is it?’ came the annoyed reply.
‘I have occasion to warn you that this day you shall not see Renaud de Provins . . .’
‘Why ever not? How shall we not see him?’ The man looked on somnolently and waited with regal impatience.
‘I have it on the best authority that the Archbishop of Sens will once again make your commission look like a laughing stock.’
‘Watch your words!’ His face was losing some of its torpidity.
Julian was not to be put off; he moved closer and continued in a harsh whisper, ‘It is his desire to make a show of his new position by interfering once more with your commission’s activities.’
Gilles Aicelin scowled down the length of his red-veined nose, annoyed that again he was put on the spot. ‘How does he have jurisdiction over the lawyer?’
Julian moved closer. ‘Renaud de Provins is from the diocese of Sens.’
The man drew himself upwards and back, looking askance as if attacks were coming from all directions.
‘The papal commission, your Grace, will not be able to determine the guilt of the entire Order when, under its very nose, its key witnesses and their defenders are being disposed of. The Pope himself, your Grace, has given the commission sanction to restrain by ecclesiastical censure anyone who interferes with its proceedings.’
The man made a sigh. ‘Oh! Very well! It seems something must be done if I am not to look altogether like a fool.’
Julian bent his head. ‘That was my estimation, your Grace. And I know what you are thinking.’
He raised a brow. ‘You do?’
‘You must apply subtle force . . . threaten to expose his excesses.’
‘His excesses?’
‘Excesses that could see the Church maligned before the world if they were exposed to public scrutiny. Excesses that would excite the King’s disdain.’
‘Come, boy!’ the archbishop said. ‘What excesses?’
Julian lowered his voice. ‘That he embezzles Templar wealth.’
‘He does?’ The man was put out of balance and had to grasp at Julian for support. ‘How do you know it?’
‘I will not stain your soul with the things that I have been privy to in my work, your Grace.’
‘Oh!’ The man was speechless.
‘He should be reminded, your Grace, of the consequences should the King learn of his indiscretion, considering also his contempt for the Church.’
‘Oh Lord!’ He stifled his cry. ‘This is just the excuse Philip needs to take everything from our hands!’
‘It would pain you, your Grace, because you are an honest and pious man, but you would be doing both the Church and the archbishop a great service by not alerting the King. And the archbishop, your Grace, shall be so grateful to you that he will return Renaud de Provins to your commission so that you may serve justice.’
The other man’s face smoothed over and he put concern aside as though it were dust on his mantle. ‘Justice? Since when is an ecclesiastical trial about justice?’ He belched then, and left.
All day messages flew across Paris, between the papal com-mission and the provincial council. Towards evening, around vespers, Philippe de Marigny, the Archbishop of Sens, relented. The outward world knew only that pressure was brought to bear by the commission and that his own suffragans had convinced him to obey the directives of the Pope, who had ordered that any man who came before the commission to defend the Order could come ‘under full and safe custody’.
The lawyer Renaud was once more returned to the bosom of the papal commission; however, the other procurator, Pierre de Bologna, the key lawyer, was missing.
Gilles Aicelin sent for the jailer and in his apartment questioned him on the lawyer’s apparent disappearance.
Jean de Jamville looked puzzled and frowned with a wine-flushed face. ‘Your Lordship . . . the one hand does not know what the other is doing. I was commanded . . . to . . . to dispose of him.’
‘Where is he, you lice-infested vermin?’ Aicelin shouted, having found himself outwitted.
The jailer, cowering, with sweat dripping over his chin and nose, answered, ‘He is food for the birds . . .’
The Archbishop of Narbonne then sent a curt note to the Archbishop of Sens seeking an explanation. He awaited a reply that never came.
A month later the Archishop of Narbonne felt the final sting of Philippe de Marigny’s machinations. During a sitting of the provincial council, Renaud de Provins was stripped of all his clerical privileges and deprived of the habit of the Temple, which immediately disqualified him from defending the Order.
Days later the archbishop sought to question Renaud de Provins personally and could not find him – his name had been struck from the prisoners’ list.
It was no surprise to Gilles Aicelin that afterwards no man dared to formally defend himself or the Order.
46
JACQUES DE MOLAY
O death where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
I Corinthians 15:55
March 1311
Jacques de Molay sat upon his pallet in the lamplit dungeons of the Paris Temple with his body all a-tremble and his teeth and jaw clenched from cold. He could barely open his mouth to take in the mouldy bread or drink down the thin, pale soup full of weevils. His abused limbs would not keep still and, despite his efforts, the soup drizzled over his long beard and found its way into the cassock of rags over his weary old bones.
Something made him wince with pain and he reached into his mouth. The broken tooth was jagged and sharp and when he brought the finger to his eye to look upon it he saw that it was red with blood from the bite to his cheek.
If he had a knife, a short sharp one, he would dig into the flesh of his gum and cut out the tooth that ripped his mouth open like glass and thumped with pain in the night. But he did not have a knife, and perhaps if he did, he might make better use of it. He might wait until the guard came to take away his bowl and he might then find the right moment to direct the knife’s length into that space between the shoulders or to the base of the neck and into the brain pan. He pictured it, the knife parting flesh and drawing blood, the guard falling upon the dirt of the cell. Such a thought did not bring him satisfaction. He put down the metal bowl, spilling soup and weevils, and chastised himself. He was in a cage but he was not yet turned animal. Not yet.
He gave a sigh; he was weary and spent of mind, but his heart made a flutter when at times the sun shot its rays through the aperture and he was able to feel it upon his face. He was able also to hear the birds that came to compete for space on the branches of a nearby tree in spring and summer. Their song fell upon his soul and made a picture of the world, recalling wind and cloud, sun and oceans and rivers. It conferred upon his soul the seasons, each one made known by the tone of their song.
How many winters and summers had he seen with his soul’s eye upon that pallet of stone? He took his face to the markings made each night with the metal bowl upon the wall, and let his fingers trace each one. After counting, and counting again, he came to a surprised conclusion. Four years! he told himself, rubbing the soup from his beard. Four years, dear Lord! And how many more to come? The rise of emotion that this realisation provoked caused him to hold tight to the pallet with bent-broken fingers until the lightness in his head had passed.
He took a deep breath into his wounded lungs. ‘I am Jacques de Molay!’ he whispered to the walls and the floor and the light coming through the aperture. ‘I am Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Poor Knights and the Temple of Solomon! I am not afraid of you for I have conquered you!’ he said to the still dank air. ‘I have not succumbed to despair, to hate, to fear!’ He took in great gulps of air, holding on to the pallet as if to let go would mean to fall into an abyss from which he would never recover.
At that moment the sun entered the aperture and fell upon the half-full bowl beside him.
This was not the season, for winter had not yet surrendered to spring. And still the light broke into the quivering soup like stars playing upon the surface of a lake. A familiar feeling, dizzy and faint, began to steal over his skin, his bones, his mind – a tingling ripple, and in his ears, wide-placed tones, far-off and insistent. His soul was peeled away from being to nonbeing, and his spirit left the flooring of the world to hover over the bowl’s profundity.
He saw a vision. The walls of his prison were torn down brick by brick, and beyond was revealed the centuries, time itself, rushing, wild-starred and heaving, pitching, tumbling from sunrise to sunset, again and again until the past stormed the present and passed ahead to the future. He saw the people of the earth surrounded by fire and smoke and blooded steel, headed for thunders and lightnings towards the cliffs and screes and crags that rose above a great abyss. There were calls for Brotherhood! Freedom! Equality! And before his sight stood the figure of a bewigged king whose bent form lost its crowned head beneath a great blade that came thrusting down from out of the night.
‘Oh horrible sight!’ Jacques de Molay cried, trembling, but he could not look away since the vision held him in its grasp. It had one last thing to tell him. Amongst this boiling multitude of death and blood, he heard his own name.
Jacques de Molay . . . this day thou art avenged!
He blinked and the world was returned to its original state. The sun had moved beyond the aperture and the vision was dis¬solved into weevils and leftover soup. Jacques de Molay sat with the breath knocked out of him, looking this way and that as if he had misplaced something of himself inside the vision and would now have it back. His heart moved against his thoughts and he felt a pain deep in the marrow of his bones. A groaning and a creaking, as much as if the weight of such a vision were settling into him and taking its time to inform him of the added burden.
He took the bowl and placed it on the clay floor and lay then, upon his pallet, hugging at his sides to stop his trembling.
And his mind, having found it unbearable to remain in the world, drew a veil over his eyes and he fell to sleep.
47
NINE TEMPLARS
. . . let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.
Romans 13:12
Vienne, October 1311
Roger de Flor looked up at the fat moon held about by clouds. ‘Soon it is dawn. Look, there is old Saturn,’ he told Andrew beside him.
‘I don’t know what they shall think of it,’ said the Templar with a temper held in and anxious. ‘This is a madness!’
Roger de Flor smiled. ‘Then they shall think us madmen!’ He laughed out loud. The others laughed too – brothers in hiding they had met in their travels. In a nearby paddock sheep bleated, and the cold came in from the mountains, and the men upon their horses returned to their quiet, with their white mantles flapping, tilting against the leaves and dust that hit them like needle points.
‘He shall call the bluff,’ Andrew warned, ‘and we shall be dead by nightfall. Why do you come, Roger of Flor? To die with dead men?’
Roger made a frown over his disordered face and such a grin spread out below it as to light up the night. There was, after all, truth in such a question. Had he not also found it a marvel that a mercenary of his calibre, devoted to his faithlessness, had maintained faith in the worthless enterprise begun at Famagusta? And as for fidelity, at any time – while they lay in wait at Atouguia for orders from the Grand Master – could he not have taken the gold and sailed on to Syria or Egypt or the ends of the earth? Yes, he could have saved himself the headache of an ill-fated journey, for one thing, and for another he would still have his galley. As it was, the Eagle was drowned and if that were not enough, he was finding himself on a fool’s expedition to Vienne to throw down a gauntlet under the Pope’s nose! Under the nose of a world that wished to burn him and to throw his bones to dogs! What strange wonder had passed through his heart to make his previous life dwindle to a small thing? The realisation had come to him in small measures, little by little, so that by the time he was sat upon that miserable beach before the figure of Marcus in the throes of his madness, he recognised how much he himself had altered.
Since Cyprus, Roger had known the true intentions of the Grand Master: if the Order was to face peril, the gold’s fate would be to drown in the sea. He had known it at Atouguia when he observed Marcus’s worship of the gold grow, and he had known it when the galley had left Portugal for Scotland. With this knowledge, Roger had of necessity thrown his galley in the way of the English ship – how else could he alone have prevented Marcus from accomplishing his doings of making a god out of the gold?
Jacques de Molay had mistrusted a commander of the Order and had laid all the hopes of his heart upon the shoulders of a mercenary! How had the old man known that such trust and loyalty and brotherhood would make an inroad into Roger’s soul?
Jacques de Molay, it seemed, had known the two men better than they had known themselves!
He looked at this and it filled him with bewilderment, and a moment later he realised he had not answered Andrew. ‘Why have I come? The burden of trust is a good weight, my friend, it builds muscles of faith . . . I have come because I have begun to remember the Order and why I once thought it valiant and good. Besides, I am immortal, old man, and petulant at that! I wish to see the commissioners when we wave the Beauseant in their faces. History shall record it. The people will know it. Nine knights on horseback ride into the grand cathedral before the Holy Father! What a marvel!’
Andrew huffed but the others laughed at this and brandished their blades in the waning night. The sheep answered by moving off as they approached the city gates.
The sun lifted the sky, and the city of Vienne swallowed them into her cold streets. In that intrepid time what people were about stared at them. The silence in their faces grew loud in Templar ears. Women took their children in hand, guiding them to the houses; men bowed their heads and continued with their work. They sensed danger, like a pall, over the men in white.
‘They do not look at us,’ Andrew said, hunching over.
‘We are marked to their eyes,’ Roger answered merrily.
They pressed on. The wind picked up and swept them like leaves to the church; two men held open the doors and the others entered the nave on their horses.
Roger observed the ailing churchmen who sat huddled in communion. One sneezed and the others just opened their mouths.
‘We come to defend the Order!’ he cried into the damp space of the church and his voice was great and bold. ‘In the name of Christ! You offered us safe conduct!’
Incredulous silence circled the men in red and white sitting tall upon their horses.
Roger de Flor gazed down from his height at the men in whose hands lay the ending of the Order, at the stiffened bones of the church, and thought that it was a good day to die.
A cardinal stood; his strange eyes touched lightly on the men but his mouth said nothing. The stillness hung stiffly in the air.
Outside a cloud passed over the sun and the Pope’s men, having sat before the light from the rose window, were thrown into darkness.
‘Where is the Pope?’ asked Roger.
‘He is absent,’ said the prelate. ‘Leave and do not return.’
‘Tell the Holy Father,’ he said, ‘there are two thousand of us around these parts at the ready. We are innocent men, who have fought for Christ in the name of the Church. Let it be upon his head! Beauseant! ’
With their white mantles flung around, fluttering in the returned sunlight a brilliant moment, they were gone.
It was almost noon before the Pope’s men caught up with them. By then clouds had blackened the sky and the wind was lifting wildly. The men sensed a storm behind it.
When they saw the guards, the Templars whipped their horses into a gallop.
‘Head for the forest!’ Roger shouted into the wild air. ‘Circle back! We are outmatched.’
A moment later the Pope’s men came at them and there was storm and blood on the ground when the other six brothers came from behind with raised axes and ambushed them.
A man fell from his horse with his throat cut and another took a sword through his heart. Others fell and took men with them.
When Roger saw a break in the fighting he called out to, ‘Ride!’
And so they rode low and ducked the swaying branches. Andrew’s horse panted and snorted trying to get its breath, but there was no letting up. Behind them a dozen, maybe more, pursued them. Then it began to hail, big balls that struck the trees and splintered wood. One struck Roger and nearly flung him from his horse. It hit the enemy equally well, pushing down hard though it had now begun to lose its size and made the ground mush and the horses lose their grip.
Arrows found them and men fell to be trampled by horses. They were through and in open country. There were only the three of them now, and they pressed their horses hard and rode fast over the crest of a hill. They rode on, skirting the forest, not looking back, and when the sun shone its face again they pulled in at their horses and slowed to a trot.
Roger de Flor felt a strange sensation, a flutter in his heart, and he was out of breath. He saw himself slump upon the horse that, sensing no tension on its rein, paused, letting him fall to the ground.
By the time the others had come off their horses and made their way to him he was almost beyond himself.
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