"Oh, Guy will be the next King of Jerusalem. Never fear of that."
"But that is not what I asked—"
A pounding at the door interrupted the Master Templar.
"What is it?" Gerard bellowed.
The door pushed open a crack and a young Turcopole, half-breed of a Norman father and a Saracen woman, stuck his head through. Many such were in service to the Templars, mostly their own sons from the wrong side of the blanket. This boy's fine, brown face was streaked with sweat and the dust of the road. His startling blue eyes were misted with fatigue.
"I come from the Keep at Antioch, My Lord, with dispatches from Sir Alois de Medoc."
"Can they not wait?"
"He says they are urgent, My Lord. Something about a pigeon too ripe for the plucking."
"Very well, bring them here."
The boy brought a leather wallet from under his surcoat and handed it to Gerard. The latter took up a dagger with a slender blade, cut the strings holding the wallets flaps, withdrew a bundle of parchment, and cracked the wax seal with the butt of the knife. He unfurled the folded yellow skin with a snap and held it before his eyes.
He sighed and handed it to Amnet. "The writing is indistinct. Such was Alois's hurry in the matter."
Thomas Amnet took the document and began reading it silently.
Gerard watched this with some uneasiness. A fighting man who could also read was, in Amnet's world, still a rarity. Although many Templars could read enough to ponder out a city's or stream's name upon a map, or put their Christian names to a deed of land, those who felt comfortable communicating in this fashion were a minority. Amnet knew that Gerard de Ridefort himself had other powers—of position and authority—and so would stand in no real awe of those who could read. For the moment, however, it would irk him to realize that the parchment might speak to a cunning little fellow like Thomas Amnet and yet remain silent to an important one like Gerard de Ridefort.
"What does it say?" Gerard asked at last.
"Sir Alois has made a loan to one Bertrand du Chambord, a distant kinsman of his. In exchange for the pledge of some land in Orleanais, the Temple will outfit this Bertrand with knights, footmen, horses, arms, and equippage to the value of 1,200 dinars."
"How much land?"
"Three thousand acres... Is the land worth that much, I wonder? Alois does not say of what quality it is."
"Have you ever known him to deal for bad land? Go on."
"Alois proposes that we buy Reynald's favor by making the land over to a cousin of his, whom he says is returning to France within the year... But," Amnet objected, "the land is not ours yet. How can we dispose of it so quickly?"
"The land will be ours straightaway," Gerard predicted. "The loan will go bad."
"How do you and Alois know this? Do you have a Stone of your own?"
Gerard tapped the side of his head. "Oh, no, my young friend. Do I need the powers of divination when I have the brains that God gave a child?" The Master Templar chuckled at turning Amnet's own words against him. "This Bertrand will be seeking glory, to make amends for his short and sinful life. So we will give him glory."
"And what might that be?" Thomas asked patiently.
"We will suggest to the poor fool that the greatest glory he might win will be to wipe out the Hashishiyun at their citadel of Alamut."
"They do not call it 'Eagle's Nest' for nothing. That place is impregnable."
"Yes, but the valiant Bertrand won't know this until he is fully committed. By then it will be too late."
"A young French noble, hungry for glory, set against a band of seemingly unarmed Assassins. That will put a scorpion in the bed of Sheikh Sinan, the Old Man of the Mountains."
"And it will put 3,000 acres of Orleanais in our gift."
Thomas Amnet considered the scheme in silence for a moment. "Charles," he said suddenly.
"Eh?" Gerard de Ridefort looked up from the parchment. He had taken it back and had been picking at the sealing wax with his fingers.
"That is the name of Reynald's homesick cousin. Charles."
"Whatever. He'll put us in good stead with Reynald."
"When you feed the beast, it's best to wear a long arm."
"So we'll feed him Bertrand du Chambord—and then count our fingers."
* * *
In his turret room, high in the Keep of Jerusalem, Thomas Amnet swung the shutters and drew the draperies against the cool night air. It was not only the air he wanted to block out.
Despite his verbal fencing with Gerard de Ridefort, he was troubled by the approaching coronation of Guy de Lusignan as king of Jerusalem. The man was a knave on the surface of it; anyone could see that. And Thomas Amnet was not just anyone.
A dozen years as Keeper of the Stone—a position that came to him young, and not only because of his noble birth and skill with the broadsword in the Order's service—had made him more than humanly sensitive to the streams of time.
Other men might meet each dawn as a fresh day, deal with each battle or forced march as a new problem to be solved, come upon each bout of sickness, wound, and finally death as a surprise.
Amnet, instead, saw patterns.
This day was a link in the chain of years. This battle was a single pawn moved on the great board of war and politics. This wound was a part of the totality of death that would ultimately come to the body. Amnet saw the flow of time and saw his body as a chip of white wood upon it.
The Stone, of course, focused that flow.
Thomas Amnet opened his heavy old chest and took out the casket that held the Stone. It was made of walnut wood, almost black with age, and lined with velvet. Amnet had insulated it with the correct pattern of pentagrams, dual points inward, around the lid. To contain the energies and hide the Stone from those eyes—and other senses—which might discern it.
He lifted the lid.
In the light of the single taper, the Stone flashed darkly, as if greeting him. It had the shape of the Cosmic Egg, smooth and glistening, more bulging at one end and more pointed at the other, as eggs always are.
He reached into the confines of the box and lifted the Stone out with his naked fingers.
The expected thrill of pain ran up his arm. With time and long experience, the pain might become more bearable but never became less. It was like the tremor you could feel in the back of a horse that has taken a war arrow through the neck. It was the tremor of approaching death.
The touch of the Stone also brought music into his head: a choir of all the angels sang a hosannah of glory to their God. It was a celestial ululation that cycled over and over while the Stone was in his hand.
At the same time the blaze of glory lit the dark spaces behind his eyes: a shower of colors like those a cut of crystal would throw against the wall from a beam of sunlight. The colors danced and wove patterns in his head until he set the Stone down on the bare planks of his workbench.
Amnet was breathing hard.
He half-expected the underside of the egg to char the wood and create a blackened nest of ashes for itself. But the energies it threw off were not of the kind that burned wood.
The next part of Amnet's ritual of divination was simple alchemy. In an alembic he mixed rosemary oil, dried basil, and attar of honeysuckle—imported from France at great expense to the Order—with clear well water and a dram of distilled wine. This mixture itself had no potency, it merely created a stock, a background against which the Stone could work.
He swirled the base mixture around the glass bulb, set a candle stub under it, and lit the wick from his taper. By trimming the wick and dripping the melted tallow, he could control the heat under the alembic quite exactly. The surface of the mixture inside should fame but never boil. The fumes rose into the neck, which directed them down in a curling flow over the pointed end of the Stone.
Trial and error had led Amnet to this process. The Stone itself was too dark to see into. Its substance was a bro
wn-red agate that was totally opaque, except from a view taken across the shortest, shallowest chord through its surface—and that sight must be made in the brightest, most direct sunlight.
The Stone's energies could order the things surrounding it—but weakly. Smoke or the mist on a glass was too heavy for those energies. Their touch was more delicate, suited to a vapor that was already in motion. Rosemary oil, mixed as before with water and spirits and other herbs, worked best.
What the Stone might show him depended on its humors, not on anything Thomas Amnet might bring, knowingly or not, to the session.
Once it had shown him the exact location of Priam's golden lode, blocked by a rectangular pattern of stones a hundred feet under the brush and topsoil at Illium. Amnet had instantly been hot to mount an expedition to go and find the treasure, but finally doubt held him back.
The Stone would never trick him, of course, but it could easily mislead him through his all-too-human eagerness to work its patterns into terms his own mind could find useful. The Ilium that the Stone had shown him might well not be the Ilium of historical fact. What was shown through the Stone's power was not always perfectly congruent with the world that men inhabited.
Once it had shown him truly, though. It had revealed to him the invisible structure of the Order of the Temple, like a tower of hewn stones, and every stone a prayer, a money loan, or a feat of arms. Nine Grand Masters before Gerard, going back to Hugh de Payens in Anno Domini 1128, had plotted and fought and dealt to make a place for the Northman Franks in the Holy Land. These were the same fair-haired, fierce-hearted fighters who had crossed the North Sea, first to raid, then to settle on the wild coast that France showed to the white flanks of Albion. These same Sons of the Storm had built and manned William's boats when he set out to make good his claim to that island nation against the Saxons. Now, just 120 years later, as old King Henry of England warred with young King Philip of France, the Northman Franks stood in the middle, king makers and king breakers. At the same time, far away over the sea, they rode as members of the Order of the Temple to help both kings lay claim to the Holy Land.
In a vision ordered by the Stone, Thomas Amnet had seen the Knights Templar of almost sixty years past ride through the fuming mists from his alembic. Garbed in clinking mail, cloaked in white wool with the long cross, armed with sword and lance, armored with the Norman's teardrop shield, they rode past on a single file of horses: white horses bearing the living wights with their dim and life-dazzled eyes; black horses bearing dead souls whose eyes blazed with knowledge of the judgment of Odin and the resurrection in Valhalla.
The lesson had not been lost on Amnet. The first of the Templars to ride through his vision, all on black horses, had been lean and sunburned men with hardened, calloused hands; rangy, corded muscles; and fresh blood on their sheathed swords. The latest of the Templars, mostly on white horses, were plump men with pale skins from lingering within rooms and under awnings. They had soft hands, loose muscles, and ink-stains on their fingers from making loans and deeds.
While the cloaks of the early Templars were scented with the dust and gore of the battlefield, the linen surcoats of later members of the Order smelled of incense from the chapel and perfume from a harlots boudoir.
That had been a true vision—and the last unsullied act of clairvoyance Thomas Amnet had enjoyed for some months past.
Now Amnet would try again. With his left hand he wafted the fumes from the glass throat across the end of the Stone, ordered his thoughts to stillness, and looked down.
The face of Guy de Lusignan looked out at him, slack jawed, sated with passion, tongue lolling at the corner of his mouth. Long, tapering fingers—their skin a coppery, Saracen brown—stroked his forehead, his temples, the skin of his chest, his engorged manhood. Guy groaned and turned away into the mists.
A plume of vapor rose and hardened in the indirect light of the candle. With a ripple, like a reflection reshaped on a surface of still well water, the light became a merciless midday sun, beating down on a horn of hard stone that was raised above the desert floor and bent like a lady's finger to bid him come hither. The finger bent and curled back into the mists.
A black mustache, shaved and trimmed with the fine-honed edge of a dagger, solidified out of the fuming mass. Above its two black wings glowed two eyes, red as a wolfs but slotted like a cat's. The mustache wings lifted and flapped once in a smile that showed perfect white teeth, filed flat at the bottom like a tombstone's footing in the grass and rounded at the top where the teeth were sunk in red gums. The eyes searched across the blank, gray vapor until they found Amnet's eyes, and then they locked with his. The wide blade of a nose which divided that face then uncurled—again, like a lady's come-hither finger—and beckoned to Thomas Amnet.
Before the image could change again, he whipped it aside with the flat of his hand.
The candle had gone out under the alembic, and no more fumes poured from it. Just as well. That face, those wolflike eyes, had intruded on every vision he had taken in the last months. Somewhere and at some time—present, past, or future—a sorcerer had declared, or would declare, psychic war upon the Keeper of the Stone. Such declarations were not uncommon, littered as the past and future were with magi. But this declaration was presently disturbing the alignment of the Stone's deepest energies. Thomas Amnet must think upon his response; it should be appropriate to the challenge.
He set the apparatus aside and let it cool. He lifted the Stone again into its box—enduring the tremor of pain, the singing of angels—and closed the lid. Each time he touched it or used its energies, the Stone changed him, strengthened him, heightened his awareness.
Thomas remembered the day he had taken possession of it from Alain, the Templar who had formerly kept the Stone.
* * *
The older knight had been stretched out on his deathbed, wounded in the lung with a Saracen arrow. For two days he had been spitting black blood, and none expected him to see the dawn.
"Thomas, come here."
Amnet had approached the bed humbly, his hands clasped before him. Those hands had then borne tough callouses from the hilt of a sword and the strap of a shield. Seventeen he had been and a raw boy. His head had been as empty as the steel shell of a tilting helm.
"The Templars in council can find no better use for you. So they give you to me."
"Yes, Sir Alain."
"The Order must have a Keeper of the Stone. It's not an important post, I'll grant. Not like being master of a keep or a commander in battle."
"No, Sir Alain."
"But the Keeper has a certain prestige, still." The man had roused off his pillows, his eyes burning. They did not quite focus on Amnet. "The Stone is dangerous to hold. It is a device of the Devil, that I know. You must handle it as little as possible, and use it only in extreme need."
"What is it, this Stone?"
"It came from the North Country, with the first knights who formed our Order. It has always been ours. Our secret. Our strength."
"Where is the Stone, Sir Alain?"
"Always keep it near you. Always hold it for the good of the Order. So long as it rides with the Templars, they shall never be vanquished in battle. But touch it—touch its naked surface—as little as you may. For your—"
The fever that burned in Sir Alain's chest seemed to turn like a mad dog and snap at him. The man's breath caught in his throat. His eyes bulged, fixing finally on Amnet's face. The last word came out of him in a hissing, groaning sigh.
"—soul."
And that was all.
Amnet knew he should do something. He closed the man's eyes, holding them with the edge of his hand as he had seen his yeoman teachers do on the battlefield. He should tell someone that Sir Alain had passed. First, though, he should take the Stone that was now his charge.
Where was it?
Sir Alain had told him to keep it near him. Where would a dying man hide a prized possession?
Thomas bent to look under the bedframe: bare flags and dust—the covered chamber pot. He dragged that vessel forth, to see if the old knight had hidden the Stone there. Thomas was greeted with its reeking contents. By swirling them slowly around, he could see they hid nothing so solid as a stone.
Where else?
He pulled back the sleeve of his blouse and felt under the pillow. Upset by his groping, the knight's head lolled to one side and his eyelids parted on gray film. Amnet's hand hit on something solid. He got his fingers around it and pulled it slowly out.
A casket of black walnut. He examined the latch and found it needed no key. He opened the lid.
A dark crystal as high as his hand lay within. In the dim light it was hard to see clearly. The Stone seemed by turns to be colored the evil red of old, drying blood, then the ochre of rich French farmland, turned by the plow on a spring day.
Amnet ignored Sir Alain's last warning and touched it with his finger. The shock of pain, the choir of music, the malevolent hunger for his life—such as would trouble his dreams and his waking thoughts till he died—these reached up for his soul with that first finger-touch. Thomas Amnet knew he was changed in that instant.
He had found the Stone, and it was his.
The Stone had found him, and he was its.
* * *
Amnet had understood immediately that the energies locked in the Stone might have saved Sir Alain from death, might have cured him of his wound and its poisons. He also understood why the old knight would have rejected that kind of salvation.
Now, in his tower room a dozen years later, wiser by much reading in old scrolls—some of them seen only in visions—and stronger by a thousand touches of the Stone, Amnet understood many things about its powers and their uses.
He knew that he could not die, not as other men. Whatever his deeds as a Knight Templar in Outremer, he would never ride a black horse before some other Keeper of the Stone. He would never look into the stern face of Odin One-Eye at the door of Valhalla. Nor would he kneel in worship at the Throne of Heaven.
The Mask of Loki Page 2