The Seal

by Adriana Koulias

  There was a smile. ‘Nogaret burns oil when he stays up late at night working; the oil is scented to make his work more pleasant. It is said that he uses more than a bottle a week . . .’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And . . . he always buys his oil from a shop in the St Eustace quarter.’

  ‘Yes . . . so?’

  De Plaisians knew the count to be lacking in estimative capacities, but even a donkey would have discerned his intentions. He looked at the man patiently. ‘We shall poison the oil, monsieur. It will be a long painful death full of hallucinations and the calls of devils.’

  The count, a man who dreaded his own end, seemed to find something not so displeasing in another’s misfortune. ‘Brilliant!’ Then his face clouded over. ‘But what of my brother? He may live till he is a hundred . . . have you thought of that, Plaisians?’

  ‘I predict that heaven has only a short time allocated to him.’

  The other man’s ignoble eyes became round with surprise. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He is unwell . . . the six court doctors all agree. Tremors . . . a condition of the corpus nervus, perhaps due to substances administered by his astrologer . . . a poisoning of the source, like a tree whose roots are poisoned by degrees, loses firstly the leaves then the branches, then the rest. A sign that the body, or perhaps the mind, is diseased. Tertian fevers . . . the black biles . . . the bloody flux . . . madness . . . Tell me, Count, what is your pleasure?’

  ‘Madness . . .’ said the count, as if the word tasted good in his mouth. ‘And a cure?’

  ‘Tinctures, infusions, potions . . . draughts . . . and finally the dragons.’

  ‘Dragons?’

  ‘Snakes.’

  The count narrowed his eyes in the gloom. ‘Not even I know of snakes – how comes it that you are so well informed?’

  ‘The astrologer is disgraced and fears for his life. He absconded from the castle weeks ago and has not been seen since, except by me. He looks for any advantage.’

  The Count of Valois frowned, but then slowly his face contorted into a smile. ‘You are a serpent, monsieur, but . . . a useful one . . . If he does the doing no one can suspect . . . well, you, monsieur.’

  De Plaisians grinned his teeth. ‘And no one can suspect you, my dear Count!’

  The man gasped. ‘Me?’

  ‘If he fails, there are always other ways, of course.’

  ‘Other ways?’

  ‘Several.’

  A disquiet had settled over the count’s form. He made little blowing noises into the cloth and cleared the mucus in his throat. ‘And should I come to power, that is, once my brother has been safely installed in the brown earth, what of Marigny?’

  ‘The King had Dubois write a pamphlet against him, it accuses him of sorcery.’

  ‘Sorcery . . .’ The count became anxious, a pallor moved over his features and he bit his thumb again. ‘There is something heinous about it.’

  ‘No more heinous than murder.’

  ‘And yet to me it rings ill to accuse falsely of sorcery.’

  ‘Honesty is praised and left out in the cold,’ answered de Plaisians, ‘but I shall tell you that heroes are very often those whose brave acts are driven by duplicity.’

  ‘And what brave act shall I perform? It seems you have done it all for me, Monsieur de Plaisians.’

  De Plaisians wanted to laugh. ‘Convince the King to imprison the princesses for life . . . they must not be executed, and Respice finem . . . look to the end . . .’

  ‘And you? What shall you do?’ he asked, as de Plaisians prepared to leave.

  ‘I shall live as if every day were my last.’

  And he left the count to his sneezes.

  51

  MIDNIGHT OIL FOR BURNING

  Hath thy toil o’er books consumed the midnight oil?

  John Gay, FABLES

  Mademoiselle de Vigiers was beautiful. Towards the street of the tailors she walked, her copper hair tossed, her spine a straight line all the way to a small waist, and her steps brisk. She was on an errand of some importance for her eyes did not stray to those men who stopped to watch and comment and to reach out to touch. She walked on and on until she arrived at her destination.

  She wondered as she walked if she should have worn a black cape, but it had been her reckoning that such a woman would have drawn more curious attention than a pretty one walking the streets.

  She knocked on a door. A moment later it opened and a thin, one-legged man answered; his face, scarred and yellow, poked out of the gloom.

  ‘What?’ he said with a squint.

  The woman smiled sweetly. ‘I have come for the oil.’

  Puzzlement changed to cunning. ‘Get in.’

  Once inside, the man looked appreciatively over her form and licked his lips. ‘You have the money?’ he asked, keeping his mouth open and smiling.

  ‘Yes,’ she said and gave him a small pouch.

  ‘This will be greatly beneficial.’ The man grinned and left her.

  A moment later he returned with a bottle. ‘The oil must burn all night, for the poison to kill.’

  The woman gave him a frosty stare. ‘And who said that much work benefits a man?’

  52

  THE POPE AND THE DEVIL

  Ye are of your father the Devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do.

  St John 8:44

  When Iterius entered the Pope’s private garden the sun was pitched low and made shafts through air scented with lavender. It had been planted everywhere around the Pope’s summer house at Grozeau, as his doctors had instructed.

  Iterius, dressed in dark apparel and capped against the sun, looked to the Pope like a black cloud that spoils a bright day. He bowed low and his hat fell from his balding head.

  Clement grunted and sat back upon his cushioned day bed, sipping poppy tea as the last rays of the sun warmed his troubled skin. He said nothing to the Egyptian, preferring to leave him to busy himself awhile with his thoughts. Above, the full-grown cypress trees rustled in the light breeze and bees buzzed about. He could feel the flatulence; soon he must have recourse to its discharge.

  His eyes moved torpidly to the man standing before him. ‘What do you want? You have failed me,’ he said and yawned.

  Iterius bowed low once again. ‘I am still your loyal servant.’

  Clement raised a brow, his round face cold and bland, but his eyes now were lit up like candles. ‘You are a servant of the Devil . . . How comes it that you have not been successful? Failure is only something one ascribes to the angels of the Lord . . .’

  Iterius, at a loss for words, made a twitch of his mouth; an uncertain voice came out of his throat. ‘Your Holiness . . . please . . . I am a servant of the Lord . . .’

  ‘Ahh!’ The Pope spat and saliva lingered wetly on his lips and chin. ‘Do not meddle with me, Egyptian! I am no fool! God works in mysterious ways, even pacts with devils must he employ in order to perform his wonders!’ Then he sat forward; his watery legs hanging over the side of the bed became visible beneath the layers of fabric. ‘You have watched over Philip . . . yes . . . but after so many years, Jacques de Molay has kept his mouth shut and you have not found me what you promised . . . I could not care less now.’

  Iterius shifted about, thinking. ‘Will you not protect me?’

  ‘Protect you?’ The Pope raised a brow. ‘Why should I protect you? To me you are a foul, spindly little weed and you must, in the course of good husbandry, be plucked out!’ He took a sip of his tea, now gone cold, and made a wince. ‘All that I am left with is the small comfort of knowing that Philip has been equally served by you!’

  ‘Your Holiness . . . if I may? What must I do now? I did not betray you . . .’

  ‘And you have done as you should, my child.’

  ‘And?’ Iterius asked.

  ‘And?’ Clement raised his brows.

  ‘The King has his assassins around every corner . . .’

  ‘Poison him,’ Cleme
nt said jovially, feeling the effects of the tea.

  ‘How may I do it if I am exiled from his affections?’

  ‘Well then . . .’ The Pope perused the pathetic form of the infidel before him, and as though advising him of some pleasantry, said, ‘There is nothing for you to do but go back to the death that awaits you.’

  The evening grew cool and the earthy scent of thyme and basil hung down over the garden. The sun had descended below the horizon of distant hills. Iterius crossed the courtyard and made for a door to the cloisters. There, hidden in the shadows, a cowled monk took a vial from him. A moment later the Egyptian was gone into the void.

  And from the garden there came the sound of the Pope’s loud resonant snores.

  53

  CASTLE ON THE MOUNTAIN

  Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.

  St John 6:12

  Lockenhaus, March 1313

  Looking out at the sea of snow, Etienne was reminded of the day they had come by the castle on the mountain.

  The night they arrived, there had been rain. They had come round the bend of that narrow passage with their bodies curved to the wind, and in the shelter of frosty pines the three men had looked upward to the ramparts and battlements and had thought it a fine place to rest.

  It was now four years since they had set off from the woman’s house. Time had dulled the pain of it but it had not hid it from his eye.

  He remembered Jourdain’s words to him that day, ‘Courage is born of pain,’ and now it seemed to him false. It was not courage that he had ever felt standing upon the parapets of his life. He had only discerned cowardice in his limbs, hatred in his heart and doubt that made a fog in his head. These things had lain with him on this side of the abyss that existed between him and God and between his Order and the world of men.

  Now, standing before the material abyss below the castle walls, he misplaced his gaze into the distance, into the vastness of the horizon, whose four sides showed him endless rows of fir trees that melted into the steely sky and continued to eternity. This wild and far-flung vision showed him how insignificant he was to his faith and to the world, since all things continued without him and nothing was unhinged or thrown over the rim of the world because he was not present in it. The snow, profound and compelling, inclined upon the speck of land as if to better observe him and drew around him untroubled and unchanged, washing past the mountain towards the vastness – it was a small thing, this great castle, and he, even smaller upon it.

  He found worship in this. A humbling reverence no less faithful than that which looked to heaven from inside the walls of a church. To look at the world, inhabited by spirits, with the sun leaning upon it, or the moon, or the wind whipping the trees, his soul climbing heavenward and down again – this was his new devotion. In this picture before him he had seen his own spirit mirrored, and listened to himself speaking from it as though it were an instrument by which he could come to know something of his nature. It told him he must not only look for his Lord in those marks made by Him upon the earth: inside the wishing soul of a deer or in the sap of a tree. He must not find Him only in the wind or the rain or the lightning that tore through the thunderous clouds. Such devotion alone would put him out of balance and take from him his communion with other men. His Lord must be looked for also, and in the same measure, in all those whom he had known. He was one part Jourdain, another Andrew, and another part Jacques. He was the woman Amiel, in her soft silences, in the darkness of the lashes around her eyes. He was set upon the creases on the face of the old man and He lived in the laughter of the child. He was one part Iterius and another part Marcus. He lived in the hearts of all as that part of them which, to his sense of it, must be the higher and more refined part. He told himself that the Order of the Temple formed a community, a brotherhood, so that worship of Christ experienced among brothers might broaden to the worship of Christ in every man.

  He was reminded of the brothers of this house that waited even now for him. When he had come to this place those few left behind to hold this portion of desolate country from the Turks had surrendered to him the safekeeping of their souls. They had clung to Etienne, hoping to find in him an anchor since this house on the edge of nowhere, trapped by snow and rebelling townsfolk, had become home to a plague of dreams and visions of horror with each brother suspecting the other of an impiety that had caused phantoms and ghosts to descend upon them in the night. The men’s eyes had been darkened by fear and superstition.

  Etienne had felt himself a man of spent leagues and spent years who spoke to angels and devils and carried the secrets of the Order as if they were a thick skin grown over the eyes. How must he bring himself out of the darkness to hold these men together in faith? To wipe from hearts the distance that had passed between them and Christ?

  He had begun with small steps, by making the rule a support for the soul of the little community. The maintenance of weapons and harnesses was to be a regular work; repairs were to be made to the keep and to the fortifications. The men were to hear matins and the entire service according to canonical law and the customs of the regular masters of the Holy City of Jerusalem. They were to observe the silence during meals and drink diluted wine before compline. He stopped them hunting for food and regulated their meals in accordance with the rule.

  He required that they observe the feast days of the saints, heard each man’s confession weekly, and on Sunday celebrated the sacred and holy mass held only for those initiated into the great secrets that Christ had vouchsafed to his disciples during those forty days after his crucifixion.

  In this there was also a healing for his heart. In himself he began to hear an echo of what he once had been – a leader of men.

  And the years had passed.

  He heard feet upon the steps that led up to the ramparts.

  It was Jourdain, who was shouting now to him through cupped hands. The wind drove the snow up and brought his words to Etienne, who leant into their promise, inclining his head like an old man.

  How long would he strain to hear before he lost his balance and found his way to the bosom of the mountain and to God’s grace?

  Watching Jourdain as he made his way to him, he saw the young captain turned grown man now, with creases at the eyes and many cares hovering over the brow. Etienne had predicted the death of Jourdain’s youth in Cyprus, and now he felt two things: sorrow for the boy, lost now in concerns and sufferings, and joy that he had lived to watch the spirit mature inside that man whose smile could still tell something of spring.

  Jourdain reached him in pants and puffs entreating air, with a smile and a wrinkle of the brow. ‘The messenger has come with word from King Robert of Anjou,’ he said.

  Etienne had strained to hear these words before and had heard nothing but the snow on the wind and the trees. He knew what it meant, the messenger’s coming, something was near. Something he had felt but had not wanted to look at with his eyes. ‘He will not protect us, Jourdain?’

  Jourdain shook his head. ‘In his eyes we are disobedient because we do not light our own pyres!’

  Etienne nodded. ‘Well . . . we are made guilty.’

  ‘Without a hearing, Etienne.’

  Etienne looked at him. ‘I had expected it.’ Then he looked at the white horizon again. The snow turned in on itself below his feet, and he waited for it to wash over his soul and make of him a rock, a cloud, a bird’s wing.

  Jourdain blinked away the falling snow and stamped his feet to entice warmth into his limbs. ‘This . . .’ he said, looking up at the falling sky with his head outstretched, ‘is the last of the snow.’

  ‘Yes. It is the last of the snow.’ Etienne hugged his arms and buried his chin in the lamb’s-wool collar.

  ‘The men are hungry.’

  ‘We’ll send Simon the Jew to find food tomorrow.’

  ‘When do you think they shall come to besiege the castle?’ Jourdain put a hand to his collar as if to scratch at a flea, a peculia
r habit he had acquired of late when discomforted.

  Etienne thought for a long moment and then answered, ‘When they come.’

  ‘Is it too late to seek a new world, Etienne?’

  Etienne took in breath. ‘The world is old, Jourdain.’

  Jourdain nodded. ‘It is dull work, this hovering over the end of things.’

  ‘There is no noble work in putting away a lifetime of hope, Jourdain. A better man than I would know the right way of it.’

  Jourdain was silent.

  Etienne looked at him with a smile in his eye. ‘Well, say what is on your mind, Jourdain. After so many years will you now prevent yourself from amazing me?’

  Jourdain smiled back but it was soft and fleeting. ‘It is said, Etienne, that only those men who are divine can be right in what they say and do, even in grand matters . . .’

  Etienne was content with this. ‘I am beginning to understand your strange reflections, Jourdain . . . You mean to tell me that to be right is only a privilege of God and that I should be happy with however close I may come to that.’

  Jourdain looked at Etienne as much as if he were a father who was proud of his son. ‘I have waited for you to become a philosopher. You surely have taken your time!’

  ‘I am a man near death, Jourdain. Should my love for wisdom not guide me now?’ Etienne turned to the stairs.

  ‘You are a born philosopher, I have always thought so.’

  ‘A pity wisdom comes when there is no true use left for it . . .’ Then: ‘I am decided that should Simon desire it, we will succour him behind these walls . . . the townspeople will not like it that he helps us . . .’

  Jourdain remembered something then, for he paused before Etienne. ‘Delgado will not leave. It is his desire to stay.’

  Etienne stood astonished upon that step. He listened to the snow coming down. His ears were deceiving him. ‘For what cause?’

  ‘His own cause.’

  Etienne nodded his head and his brows creased together. ‘It has been explained to him that he is released from the bondage of his loyalty?’