The Seal

by Adriana Koulias

  At that moment a strange thing happened: the moon began to fade away. He had seen this once before – it was an omen! A portent, he was certain, of evil. A cleft opened in the cavity of his chest, he stopped breathing, the world stopped also since he could hear no night noises, only a silence, full in his ears. Time passed and he stood staring upwards, with feelings of dread enough to make his hair to stand on end, and then a stream of cloud passed over the space where the moon had been and in a moment it returned slowly to itself.

  Someone was beside him.

  He turned his head hoping to find Etienne’s disapproving face, instead he found the Catalan’s bewildered one.

  ‘He is not come?’ said Delgado, moving from one foot to the other. He too looked upwards to the moon that came and went behind the clouds. ‘Storm,’ he said.

  Jourdain nodded but he was thinking other things.

  Where is Etienne?

  In five years, Etienne had not missed a meeting or chapter. In five years! How must he miss a council of war? Something had gone awry.

  The old Magyar Jozsef came out of the hall to find him. It was time to begin, he said, the men waited. Jourdain’s fears for Etienne were weighed against the uneasiness of the men and he decided he would proceed as best he could with the council until Etienne arrived. If he did not return by daybreak he would send men to look for him. Jourdain dared not think on what might have befallen him.

  ‘We go,’ he said, his mind taken with concern.

  As he made his way to the knights’ hall he thought on Etienne’s illness. He knew what the pain that often seized him meant, since his father had suffered and died of it. Etienne’s heart was failing him. This did not surprise him, for how could a heart so full hold its own weight? Then again, Etienne had survived betrayals and plots in Cyprus, the contradiction of his very being in having to abandon Jacques de Molay at Poitiers. He had survived battles and wounds, exhaustion, hunger and finally the death of his faith in the nature of men. Such abuse would have killed a lesser man. No, Etienne was destined to die with a sword in his hand, crying out, ‘Beauseant!’

  With this thought he entered the thick darkness of the hall, broken only by a candle on the bronze tripod. He saw the silhouette of the men as they knelt waiting in their white mantles and he was struck then in his own soul by a full and sudden load, such as he had never known, having always leant upon the firmness of Etienne’s shoulders.

  Now he had to steady himself at the realisation of what Etienne must have suffered all these years. This was the Order: between man and God! The Order of the Temple stood between what was and what would be . . . soon to be extinguished . . . too soon, before the performance of its glory! To all intents and purposes in its prime! And those men, spare and dwindled in their mantles, the last of the Templars, had placed their souls in the hands of their caretakers. He was one of them, he realised now. Without Etienne, how must he command these last remnants to their deaths?

  The Catalan disappeared behind the closed doors and the Magyar took his place inside them.

  Jourdain waited a moment longer, hoping for Etienne’s appearance. When it seemed he would not come he stood upon the short dais and, looking at the puzzled faces, began the formulas in Latin. The men followed and soon the hall was full with the sound of voices in their adoration of God.

  But it did not last long, this ecstasy of brotherhood, for at that moment the door to the hall burst open in splinters making the darkness suddenly lessened by the moonlight coming through to touch upon a confusion complete and disproportionate to their meditative mood. The wind was stirring now and it carried the sound of the cries of his men – easy prey to a multitude of soldiers that spread over the chapel shouting and hacking with their swords in the dark light.

  His brothers fought back as best they could. He heard the Catalan’s cry and saw a fleeting glimpse of a sword. It took the light into it and came down again and again, then it was gone into the disorder of bodies. Jourdain punched and kicked and struggled, seeking for his weapon in the fray. The immensity of it reached him then: Christian men murdered at prayer by Christians in the name of God! Had the beast been favoured by God above his servant Theseus? But even as he thought this a shadow like that of the great Minotaur passed before his eyes and blotted out the moonlight and the sounds of the men in their screaming. There was no struggle, only two blows: one to the middle which cut off his breath and another to the leg.

  To his mind the moon was both Ariadne and Selene, coming to bring him the golden thread and the eternal sleep of Endymion.

  ‘The secret passage in the well!’ they said to him.

  63

  VOICES

  I know that I hanged on a windy tree nine long nights wounded with a spear . . .

  Poetic Edda

  The night sky dropped a curtain of rain over Jourdain, and above, a great noise like the roar of a beast but many times multiplied preceded a crack that announced the end of the world. He shivered. His senses took in the wet and the sound of the wind surging upward past him and over the wall that dropped, it seemed to him, violent and steep beneath his feet.

  He remembered dreams full of cries and death, and then he was awake to a pain in his leg whose relentless gnawing pierced the dullness of his mind and made him open his eyes.

  Now he shivered into his bones and forced himself to look down to where he was lodged, entangled in ropes against the wall of the keep. There he saw the wound that made waste his leg and thus confirmed what, by virtue of his pain, he already knew. For a moment his stomach rolled and he did not know if he was up or down, or this side of life or this side of death.

  ‘Etienne?’ There was a question that needed an answer!

  He put the question to the air, having felt it rising for some moments in his mind. Where is Etienne?

  He looked out to the wet world turned blank and inward, hiding its face inside its black cloak. Dawn was near, he could hear it, a stirring of the earth as it rolled over in its sleep. He tried to pray but was full of anger.

  ‘These are bitter trials, my Lord!’ he shouted at the sky. He could not then fetch his hand to his face to strike it, tangled as it was in the ropes, and so he bit his lip and let the tears flow from his eyes. ‘I will not fall out of faith! My faith will outlast this!’

  He was shaking with cold. When had he felt such cold? Cold in the bones and cold in the heart? He burned with thirst. Soon he must die.

  Of a sudden the air was calmed and all around him the world waited. He closed his eyes and let his mind emerge from and sink back into the dream. When he opened them again he saw fog and greyness and dawn breaking over the mountains. The memory of his fate surfaced in a surge of pain, as if the flesh were to tear from his bones.

  They had come when the men were at prayer in the hall . . . Hungarians or Austrians . . . they had known of the secret panel in the well – the town had betrayed them.

  He thought of the slaughter of his brothers in that confused darkness, of Delgado, struck down. He was full of anguish. ‘Where are you, Etienne?’ he shouted loud and heard it bounce from the hills.

  No, Etienne was most likely dead, he told himself, and he was doomed to suffer alone like Odin, who hung from a tree that kept up heaven and earth, wounded and hanging on windy gallows for nine long nights.

  He heard a sound, a human sound from beyond the fog that was not of his making. Somewhere another man was calling out to him. Perhaps Etienne! But the fog was suspending the truth of things somewhere between him and the voice and he could not see, somewhere between the dream and the ropes on which they endured together.

  ‘It is I, Jourdain!’ he cried.

  There was no answer. Perhaps, he told himself, Etienne was coming in and out of heaven and hell as he was, suffering the same fate. He grasped this thought tenderly, that the space between them was lessened by a concurrence of suffering. Such a fate would seem to him eloquent.

  ‘Hey!’ he heard then.

  ‘Ecoutes, Etienne!�
� he called out but his lungs were only good for little more than a whisper. ‘Where are you?’

  The fog moved off and the dawn light showed him more clearly, the coils of ropes wound around his own body preventing him from falling down the precipice of the castle keep. When he looked to his right and his left he saw what had become of his brothers and he was struck with fear. He strained and contrived his body forward but his leg gave a stab. He waited for the pain to drag him to oblivion but it did not.

  Once again the voice, ‘Hey!’ called to him.

  But he ignored it since he was looking out from under his brows to something that compelled him: bodies with their heads cut off their stalks, and their arms caught by ropes.

  All of the men drowning in the milky air that rose upward, silent and obedient.

  Then came the voice again.

  ‘Hey!’ it called to him and he realised it was not Etienne. He gazed upwards a little to his right where his ropes were attached to a device. He saw an upside-down face and it was shouting down at him full of impatience. ‘Frenchman! I have let you live to see your brothers . . . now hold still!’

  Jourdain did not understand his words but in that frowning form doubled over the parapet staring down with the axe in its hand he saw the entire matter of his destiny made clear to him. ‘No!’ he cried then.

  But at that moment from above there came the axe cut and to Jourdain the dawn became a shadow of something brighter still, since he was floating over the world and from this great height he saw the sun reflecting from the gold dome of the Temple in Jerusalem and his soul smiled.

  ‘Hey Etienne!’ it said. ‘It is the centre of the world!’

  THE SEVENTH CARD

  THE HIEROPHANT

  64

  THE SEAL

  Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof ?

  Revelation 5:2

  Etienne found the underground chapel not displeasing to his eye. Here he said the quiet worship of the holy office and found in the listening something soothing to his soul. In the solitude of the round nave created out of stone, beneath the man-made reflection of the great dome of heaven suspended above, he felt a harmony of feelings, a reminder of tranquil prayers beneath stars.

  Penitent and contemplative since that night, he now spent his time labouring in silence. This inner hermitage he found to his liking, since the world here was not as it had been. For among such things as this familiarity felt and acknowledged, there was also the truth that what Etienne encountered with his eye and ear was strangely counterfeit: an illusion of life.

  All that was would never again exist. The Holy Land was gone forever, his Grand Master, his brothers, and with them all hopes were changed. One needed a new eye to look upon those hopes with will in the heart. A new ear had to stretch to hear with fresh intention. The eye of his spirit had become old, and his ear was stubborn with the echoes of his dead friends.

  He was taken with a desire to go up to the courtyard, for he had heard the sounds of a battle. Then he remembered that it had been some time ago, for there lay his body still and dead beside the altar. He looked at it now. It did not seem to him a pious thing, but a thing of the earth.

  He lay beside it and looked up to the symbols scratched upon the stone of the chapel. One day men would try to decipher them and they would not understand their meaning.

  Something came then.

  Twice he looked out from his meditation to see the apparition standing before him. Twice he looked up again to the ceiling of the chapel and continued his meditation. Something told him it would not leave him until he turned his attention to it.

  Etienne! Ecoutes . . . You have travelled the path between the two towers and escaped the wiles of the dog and the wolf, you have been two things and to these are to be added a third life.

  He took a long time to face that voice. When he did he observed a figure whose light was made too bright to be penetrated coming from out of the sun towards him. He squinted.

  From whence comes the sun?

  The bell tolled . . . since his friends had died in that struggle it seemed the bells always tolled chapter in the hall beyond the grilled manhole. The figure came closer.

  It was St Michael. St Michael had come to deliver him of his burden.

  He closed his eyes.

  He felt the splintering of stars in his head. The world blinked and longed to be beyond itself.

  You are grown old, Etienne.

  65

  THE ANSWER

  In my end is my beginning

  Mary Queen of Scots

  She had grown old, like that other woman who had saved the boy Etienne from the pyre. Now as she sat near the door to her shop, the day, the writer and the cards melted into the sun and a voice spoke to her.

  Do you remember?

  She shrugged it away, sour in her heart. ‘I remember the folly of men!’

  It is time.

  ‘Please!’ she pleaded. ‘They are all dead now . . . and I can do nothing for them. How may I leave my shop . . . must I not guard the seal?’ She frowned, struggling to surface from the entangled remains of familiar things. ‘No . . . I have no seal . . .’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘He has hidden it!’

  Her life as an old woman, a keeper of memories, became less visible and grew distant, passionless, and once again she saw the knight Etienne. He was taking himself through the bitter corridors to the courtyard flooded with moonlight. When he came to the manhole he set down his candle and removed the grille.

  He let down the rope ladder and made his difficult descent, one rung at a time. His bones made a stiffness in his back when he landed on the stone flooring beside the bowl. He made a pull on the ladder and it came down.

  He would not need it, since he knew he would not leave this place.

  He stood paused, taking in a difficult breath, the pain in his side, the pain that came from his heart, had seized the fingers of his hand in a stronghold of spasms. There was little time to do what had to be done. Bent and pain-ridden he took himself through that darkness lit by the meagre light to the altar in the south. He placed the candle at the foot of the little effigy of Christ; it made shadows over the Vesica Pisces carved into the altar’s stone face. He traced the grooves with his fingers – the bladder of the fish, the womb of God, beneath it the twin circles of duality. Raising his eyes he saw only vaguely what lay inscribed with pigment on the domed ceiling and despite the chill, the damp-cold that sunk to the bones, the symbols filled him with warmth. It occurred to him now that his strange Egyptian dreams of the great sarcophagus of stone, the dreams of the small flickering flame, had been a prediction of this end. But he had little time to think on it, for he was once more struck by the pain that yawned in his chest and left him gasping for air. He would have to gather the forces that lay unspent in his mind, heart and will, to keep from dying long enough to lay the seal to rest – before that part of him that was wedded to evil made a move to prevent it.

  Kneeling on one knee and holding on to the altar, he took into his lungs an in-sweep of breath and it was as his mind was returned to itself and he prepared to pray that he realised, by the chill in the air, that it had come, and that he was no longer alone with the darkness . . .

  Blessed St Michael, son of the Divine Sophia, messenger of Christ, protect me!

  There was a profane whisper near his ear and it made his hair to stand on end.

  What speaks?

  He drew his eye about, turning his head this way and that – something in the shadows was seeking to enter into him. He grasped at the cross on the garments of the Order.

  Thou art my saviour and my comforter. Overcome, O Lord, those who are against me. Help me to finish it finally!

  But it had moved closer to observe him, to throw limbs of shadows over him.

  I battle with forces that may be beyond me . . . Hark! It comes!

  Like a wall of heated frost it made a leap towards him.

  I – will – not – yield!r />
  It struck then, and the pain swelled through him and out from the old wound in his side, from that place where all his hurts came together, as though it had been torn open and the mangled flesh ripped out. He fell forward and his cheek touched the stone floor. Sounds not intelligible danced in his head and a force compelled him from his knees to his heels. He swayed. His eyes were struck sluggish and he tried to see. Why could he not see? His ears stretched out to become one with the silence. Why could he not hear?

  But the force was more than eyes, more than ears, and had made a place for him in its wretchedness. In it Etienne felt himself dissolving, and in his mind the thread upon which his salvation now hung was St Michael. He gathered all his strength in order to prevail upon his assistance.

  Michael, take hold of arms and shield and rise up to help me. Send forth the spear and conclude against those who persecute me; say to my soul ‘I am your safety . . .’

  But the whole mind and purpose of evil was bent with devastating force upon him.

  ‘Yield it! Dead man!’ it said. ‘Insignificant, corrupt and rebellious man! You could never bear it, dead man, old man, slave! Your faith splinters . . . and you will yield it!’

  Christ protect me! Enter my Temple and defend me from those who are attacking me!

  ‘Why should Christ protect a coward who abandoned his mother to save his own life,’ it said, ‘who deserted his Grand Master and all the brothers of the Order and left them to languish in prisons or to die with the skin melting from their bones? You were afraid, pious man, defeated man! Afraid of the devil in your soul and in your heart! And while you were praying for forgiveness, elsewhere a woman was savaged and her child torn to pieces! Now Jourdain and the Catalan and all the men who have ever followed you shall have their heads cut off, and their bodies hung from the walls of this castle for the flies and the hawks, while you guard this small thing, old man, dead man! They shall die knowing that you have deserted them!’