The Seal

by Adriana Koulias

  But his mind was recalling how the wind felt on his face when he charged across the desert sands – the ancient movement of those winds that cracked the lips and made hoarse the throat. How the skies were washed with blue! How the battle flags unfurled, fluttering the Beauseant crosswise that sky! And the valiant nature of men! The courage and self-sacrifice of his departed friends!

  How we have sat and drunk below a metal moon and wet our lips with water from icy rivers!

  A tear fell down his face and flowed unseen into his beard. Frustration welled up inside him, pain and humiliation, sorrow and guilt for his confessions, regrets at his own incompetence. All of it came flooding out of him, pouring out, loosened.

  ‘The hour has come,’ he whispered to himself.

  ‘The accused are therefore condemned to perpetual imprisonment, that they may obtain the remission of their sins by means of their repentance. In nomine Patris ...’

  There was a resigned silence from the crowd. The cardinal sat down and rolled up his parchment.

  ‘I protest!’

  The crowd gasped. The council was thrown into confusion. The cardinals were perplexed. They whispered to one another and exchanged looks of amazement.

  The Archbishop of Sens was on his feet moving forward with thin lips taut and limbs trembling with rage. ‘Liar!’ he called out to the man in rags. ‘Liar!’

  ‘I have yielded.’ Jacques de Molay turned to the crowd. ‘I have yielded to promises, to threats and tortures. My bones have been broken and my flesh has been torn, I have succumbed because the flesh is weak! God who hears us knows I am innocent, innocent of all these crimes!’

  The crowd stirred with uncertainty. Marigny watched it with disbelief and called out to the man, ‘But you have confessed to heresy!’

  ‘Under duress, from pain and fear of torture!’

  ‘To indecency, sodomy, corruption, sorcery!’

  ‘Under torture all of it, from hunger and cold! What man who is possessed of blood and sinew would not have done the same? I retract it! I retract everything! I retract all that I have said in the name of our Lord!’

  Then his friend Geoffrey de Charney next to him called out, ‘And I, I retract it all! I am guilty only of believing in goodness and truth. I refused to see the plots and the treachery of the King and his men. Before God I vow that I am innocent!’

  A man escaped the guards and came out into the open space then. He ran into the centre of the square. He was young and fair and his eyes were rimmed with red and his face was full with fever. Before the guards could take him he yelled to the crowd,

  ‘These men are innocent! They are innocent! I have observed their confessions and I have seen their tortures!’

  The guards moved to seize him but he struggled and freed himself. ‘I was present when the Grand Master was nailed upon a door! Upon a door he was sacrificed like our Lord, by the Grand Inquisitor! These champions of Christ are honourable men. There!’ He pointed to the tribunal. ‘There is the face of the Devil in the countenance of those men! Rise up! Rise up against these injustices!’ He stumbled.

  The Bishop of Paris stood, crying out words that went unheard in the din from the crowd since it had broken loose and a great chaos had ensued.

  The people took these words to heart and were now prepared to champion the men. The sergeants-at-arms bore down on the crowds with blows from their staves. Everywhere guards lined up, their pikes levelled at the people, who raised their fists and shouted out, spitting and swearing.

  Philippe de Marigny observed the turn of events and rage mingled with trepidation on his face. Jacques de Molay watched it, but did not feel exhilarated, he felt a sense of amazement and relief wash over him and he grasped his friend’s hand. ‘Who is that boy?’ he said.

  The archbishop raised his episcopal crosier in a suggestion that he was about to speak, but there was no expected silence, instead he was insulted and shouted at. The crowd swelled towards the platforms and fear overtook the cardinals, who rose from their seats en masse and began a rushed scramble for the stairs. The platform started to rock and sway and the ropes seemed likely to loosen.

  ‘I pronounce these men relapsed heretics!’ the archbishop said quickly and with a flailing of arms called the Provost of Paris to him whereupon he whispered in his ear and the man began shouting orders to his archers to remove the prisoners to the King’s prisons.

  The Bishop of Paris tried to make his way down to the square but guards prevented him.

  When the prisoners were taken away and the people were forced to move off, he went to the square, looking for Julian, and found him upon the ground. His throat was cut and the blood made a halo of red around his head.

  The bishop knelt before the figure of his charge. Filled with grief he brought the boy’s head to his lap and closed his eyes.

  57

  ISLAND OF THE JEWS

  Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.

  Seneca, DE PROVIDENTIA

  The bell tolled the hour of vespers from the Sainte-Chapelle and across the water on the small Island of Jews; a crowd gathered in great numbers waiting impatiently, expectantly, to see the sentences carried out.

  For many, this morning’s outburst had given way to resignation. They no longer clamoured to see justice. Their excitement, their loyalty to truth, had been drowned in wine and lunch, pacified by a good sleep and the harsh realities of life and death.

  However placated his people might seem, the King had taken no chances, and a circle of armed horsemen and many more on foot guarded the little clearing where two stakes had been hastily erected.

  Only a narrow channel separated the island from the palace, and this afforded the King and his entourage a perfect view of events. On the King’s right stood Enguerrand de Marigny and the Archbishop of Sens. De Marigny was now his chief counsellor since Guillaume de Nogaret’s unseemly death the previous spring. He stopped to think on it; the man had died with his tongue thrust out between two rows of teeth sunk deep enough to draw blood, while his eyes had been forced wide open by some unknown hand – a tortured death, most likely poison. He wondered vaguely if he had ordered it in one of his moments of aggravation, and decided that it didn’t matter one way or the other – the man had served his purpose.

  Next to his counsellor stood his brother the Archbishop of Sens, full of contentment, and beside him William of Paris, Inquisitor General of France. The Bishop of Paris was a little aloof from the group and with good cause. Had Philip known about the bishop’s charge, the boy would now be on his way to the pyre to burn alongside his saviours, adding another fine note to the exquisite tragedy.

  There was a noise to his left. His sons were making a jest. Philip looked askance at the pitiful issue of his loins. Louis was weak-willed and stupid, Charles was sour and full of rancour, Philippe was detached and empty-headed. In truth Philip had managed only one kingly child, Isabella, whom he had joined to the English sodomite Edward.

  Pity.

  He took a glance at Guillaume de Plaisians standing nearby – why couldn’t his sons have been more like him?

  De Plaisians met his glance, his youthful face was smooth, a look of grave intelligence sprang from those eyes and was mixed with cunning at the corners of the mouth. De Plaisians tilted his head respectfully and Philip made a gesture of returned affection. The lawyer was ruthless and dispossessed of morals – he would make a fine Keeper of the Seals.

  His attention was taken then by his brother Charles, who, having seen this exchange, was all smiles of ingratiation beside Guillaume.

  The King ignored him.

  He turned his eye instead to the population of Paris, seen from the balustrade of the loggia. The light from a hundred torches bathed the multitude in a warm glow. These, his people, were excited. He took a moment to listen to his own heart – it was racing – and why not? After so many years of waiting, after endless infuriating frustrations, his bitterness would now be reconciled! Jacques de Molay could not escape him. In
a moment, those long-awaited secrets would be laid bare as promised. After all the conjunctions were in place, the draughts had done their task. He did not need the absconding astrologer to know that the great spirit he had spoken of was even now swelling within him, marking his path into the depths of the Templar’s death-ridden eyes, where all would be laid bare. There was no taboo, no crime, however terrible, from which Philip would shrink, to see this revelation.

  The pyres awaited their consummation but the weather looked bad, clouds trembled above and a chilly breeze picked up, blowing the fire from the torches in a frenzied manner. The gathering hummed with expectation; no doubt afraid that it might rain. Suddenly a hush descended on the island. The two disgraced Templars were ushered through crowds towards the clearing by a monk carrying a large cross and surrounded on all sides by men-at-arms.

  Someone shouted out, ‘Save your souls!’

  Jacques de Molay, looking all of his seventy years and more, raised his pale face in the direction of the voice. ‘I have only ever fought for your salvation.’

  Another cried, ‘Why must you die without consolation?’

  ‘Because of a wicked king and an antipope,’ Geoffrey de Charney told them.

  A shiver ran through the crowd, and all looked in the direction of the palace.

  Those tongues will soon lie silent, the King said to himself. I am a patient man.

  At the foot of the pyres Jacques de Molay cast off his shirt and asked that his hands be left free so that he could pray. He asked also if he could be tied facing the Notre Dame, towards the Virgin, ‘in whom our Lord Christ was born’.

  The crowd roared. The provost Philippe de Voet hesitated and then made a nod for Jacques de Molay to ascend the pyre.

  When the two men had been sufficiently tied, the monk carrying the large cross, held it up to them, making one last exhortation. ‘Confess your faults and repent or face the flames of everlasting hell!’

  The crowd listened.

  Jacques de Molay, a ghostly figure, already detached it seemed from life, looked down on the monk and shook his head. His colleague did the same.

  ‘Let it be known,’ the monk said, ‘that both men have not repented and refuse to confess,’ then he fell to his knees and began his prayers.

  All eyes turned to the loggia. But the King’s eyes were locked on his adversary. Standing at the balustrade their glances interlocked.

  This, their first, was a silent conversation.

  Even the crowd sensed something implicitly significant, something meaningful between them. A moment longer and the King tore his eyes away from the other man; his hands trembled slightly, he felt a deep nausea rise up to his throat. Images of death danced before his eyes, his head felt light, then heavy. He raised his arm and the executioner, seeing his sovereign’s command, placed the lighted brand under the faggots.

  The Grand Master cried out, ‘Let evil swiftly befall those

  who have wrongly condemned us. God will avenge our death! I summon all those who have betrayed us to the tribunal of heaven before the year is out, to answer for their crimes!’

  The crowd sighed. A mixture of admiration, horror and relief as the flames began to consume the pyre.

  Then they lit Geoffrey de Charney’s pyre. It caught brightly. He cried out, trying to escape the flames that licked at his feet.

  The Grand Master, opening his mouth in an effort to breathe, glanced over, ‘Brother . . . brother . . .’

  The man, seeing his master and hearing his words, answered, ‘I follow in the way of my master, as a martyr . . . On this day I shall die with my master.’

  The flames consumed them in a brilliant light that whipped them in its ardour, burning beards and hair to ashes, bones to dust. In that instant through the flames the Grand Master’s eyes widened and Philip from his balustrade could see them clearly. Eagerly he sought his way into the man’s soul as he had done so many times with others.

  For a moment the King was filled with a terrible confusion; a deep doubt broached the surface of his consciousness for he was observing the sharp contrast between their souls. He pushed this doubt back with another emotion that like fingers plunged into his heart and filled it with a fierce and powerful sentiment.

  ‘I am God!’

  But the Grand Master’s eyes would not let him be. He could not help but look, and in them he saw the panorama of the entire colourful world pass: the unsolved secret, the stillness of a lake arrested by light, a weeping child, old age, the branches of a tree, the pinpoints of stars, the whirling of planets, the red earth, an effulgent light, a radiance golden like that of the sun as it rises over Jerusalem, and it told him:

  Est deus in nobis.

  There is a God inside us.

  58

  HELL

  And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it.

  Revelation 9:6

  April 1314

  Clement lay in his bed at death’s door. His body, racked with spasms, wasted away while his doctors came and went, bleeding, purging and blistering. He was weak beyond comprehension and covered in festering wounds that would not heal.

  In this state he lay, torpid, aware of the courtiers, servants, secretaries, priests and cardinals only as spectres in a confusion of noise, light and dark. Well distinguishable, however, was the pain that no longer came in waves but hurtled at his body with relentlessness: the pain of the body and the pain of conscience; but worse than that, the face of Boniface.

  He struggled to free himself from the stinking rotted face of the ghost, but Boniface reached down into Clement’s abdomen with infinite patience, directing his hands, pulling, opening him up and plucking with long nervous fingers as if Clement were an instrument to be worked hard. In his ears the words: ‘And then it was commonly said that by the use of torture they had made their confessions, those of the Order.’

  He saw then his engraved pearly bowels coiled, serpent-like, personified, and they turned to Clement in his stupor and smiled grotesquely. In those features there was something primeval, something familiar. The serpent curled its body wet with blood and mucus around him, tightening till he was suffocating. It opened its jaws wide, wider than the earth, encompassing all the stars, the planets and the universe. Within those jaws, like a mirror, he observed his tedious, useless life pass before the figure of Judas who gazed at it and laughed, holding out the secrets of the Temple on a parchment, which he tore to shreds. ‘Nota bene! Betrayal has its price! I’ll see you at the gates of hell!’ and his face became the face of Jacques de Molay. ‘Judas or Peter?’ the apparition asked him, melting into a fire that consumed Clement also, burning his hair, his skin, his hands, liquefying his face and popping out his eyes and, finally, dissolving him into the formless ocean into which Pilate dived down with his hands, to wash them in the blood that was coming from Clement’s anus.

  But Clement was plunging into a great visceral womb, a dark hell pit, sulphurous-hot, wherein he came across the Devil who was chained to a grate with his gnarled hands grasping for his throat; but Clement was running, he ran a long way until he came to a void, a darkness so terrible, so vacuous that in it he became nothing, a nonbeing, a speck of dust, and he saw Judas once again, sitting upon an island where every day was Good Friday. He smiled, waving to him. ‘Welcome to hell, brother!’ Now Clement was yelling with all his might, his hands grasping at nothing since he was sliding down the length of a dark vulva that strained and convulsed with spasms propelling him, the grotesque child, the malignant, disfigured, deformed child, outward, where waited a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns upon its heads, its mouths open at the great, vulval gate. One head belonged to Philip, the other to the inquisitor, another was the likeness of de Nogaret, and another a picture of Nogaret’s assistant de Plaisians. There was the appearance of the Archbishop of Narbonne and the Archbishop of Sens, but the last evaded him; the neck moved this way and that, escaping scrutiny. When finally it turned in his direction, it was
a most vile expression that met him. Clement vomited.

  The face was his own.

  At last Clement knew his fate, his lungs expelled all their air and he groaned two great groans . . .

  . . . and he was devoured.

  59

  SNAKES AND SNARES

  He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it.

  Ecclesiastes 10:8

  October 1314

  Iterius waited for his master at a distance from the avenue of chestnut trees. Here he was cast in shades of silver as the stars crept out from behind the clouds.

  He peered about, gathering to him the dirty purple cloak edged with fur and holding tightly to the bag that squirmed beneath it. Poisonous snakes . . . his insurance. After all, he was what he was now, remembering what he had been then, before the loss of his king’s regard. It was not his fault that he must resort to other loyalties and to foul means.

  And so it had been favourable that Philip had summoned him to this place at this hour, for although he might be fair sport standing alone among the chestnut trees, he felt safe in the knowledge that his dream had predicted he would die by falling from a great height.

  Alas . . . alas . . . he consoled himself, looking up to the hiding stars. Perhaps the King called him here because he still needed him? After all, he could still make the draught that caused the images to pass before Philip’s mind. In that case Guillaume de Plaisians might enjoy a visit from his lizards.

  He saw a shadow manifest from other shadows near the pale little chapel. He tightened his grip around the bag. We will see . . . he told himself and out loud. ‘Sire? Is that you?’