Knights of the Black and White tt-1

by Jack Whyte

  De Payens shrugged, his face untroubled. “We do not yet know, but we will keep them secret. We have no intention of allowing anyone not of the brotherhood to suspect, or even imagine, that there are things happening here of which they have no knowledge. That would be sheerest stupidity. So it may mean that the brother sergeants will eventually have quarters separate from ours. That would raise no concerns, since it has ever been thus, we being knights and they being commoners. Now that we are to be monks bound by solemn vows, while they remain lay brethren, the same division will apply. Separate lives and separate quarters. And separate activities—carried out, in our case, in secret.”

  “What will you call yourselves—ourselves?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “You need a name, Hugh, you and your brethren. If you are to become monks, you are going to need a name suitable to who you are and what you do. The Patriarch’s Patrol is hardly a proper name for a fraternity of monks.”

  “What is wrong with it?” Gondemare said. “It describes us well, I think.”

  “It lacks dignity. You—we—need something more fitting. Something that reflects our purpose.”

  “What about Knights of the Temple Mount?” Montdidier was normally silent in conference and now he bridled when everyone turned to look at him. “Well that’s what everyone seems to be calling us nowadays,” he said defensively.

  “Is that true?” De Montbard looked around at the others, and when he saw the nods of assent he grimaced and turned back to Payn, shaking his head. “It is a … straightforward name, I suppose, and one can see how it might become popular, but …” He grimaced again. “It seems to me that the best thing we can hope for is that that particular name will simply fade away. It places too much emphasis on both who we are and where we are. Knights of the Temple Mount … It could attract undesirable attention to our endeavors. I think we had best forget that one. Does anyone else have a suggestion?”

  “The Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ.” It was Hugh de Payens who spoke this time, and his words attracted every eye in the chamber. The silence afterwards was profound as each man thought about what he had just heard.

  “Where did that come from?” de Montbard asked.

  “I don’t know. The words simply came into my mind.”

  “It is perfect. What say you others?”

  Only Montdidier disagreed. “I think it is hypocritical,” he said.

  Hugh stared at him. “Hypocritical? How can you say that, Payn?”

  “Easily, Hugh, because it is. It’s hypocritical of us to use the name of Jesus, and particularly the full name, Jesus Christ, believing what we all believe … And the hypocrisy of the Church is what appalls us most.”

  De Payens sighed, sharp and loud. “Crusty, we have been through this a hundred times. We all agree on the importance of the task facing us. We also agree and believe that the Christian Church is an invalid creation. We all agree, further, that only by pretending to conform to the Church’s dictates and expectations can we have any expectation of completing our task. And we have proceeded to this point upon those agreements.

  This new name conforms to everything we have agreed to do: it will enable us to go about our work without being harried by anyone, and it will lend us, tacitly, an air of probity and trustworthiness. I say we should keep the name. All those who agree, raise your hands.”

  The vote was six to one, and Montdidier threw up his hands in resignation, muttering that he would withdraw his objection. The name sat well with all the others, every man present repeating it to himself at least once, and when they were finished, they all looked at de Payens.

  “So mote it be,” he said. “From this day forth, we will call ourselves the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ, and let us pray that through it we may live up to the responsibility placed upon us.”

  “Amen, so mote it be,” came the chorus.

  “In the meantime, however, we have other, pressing responsibilities,” de Montbard said. “That is why we are here. When do you think you will begin to dig?”

  The question evoked a wry grin from de Payens, who rose to his feet and walked towards the middle of the long, narrow chamber. “Come and see this,” he said, beckoning with a crooked finger, and de Montbard rose and followed him obediently to where a hole had been dug in the floor. It was a wide but shallow hole, barely three fingers deep, and its bottom had been brushed clean of dirt and dust, showing the exposed bedrock.

  “That is what we are sitting on,” de Payens said, crouching to sweep his hand across the bare stone. “It is exactly like the stone vaults over our heads. This is not called the Temple Mount without reason. It is a mountain. But if there is a ruined temple down there beneath our feet, as our Order’s Lore would have us believe, then it must have been dug at great cost, and there is no mention of such a thing anywhere in the scriptures.” He shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands. “Until we can discover more about our search—where to set about it, for example—I fear there is little we can do. None of us would have great objections to tunneling through solid rock, if that is what is truly required, but until we know the direction in which to dig our tunnel, it would be sheerest folly to begin.”

  André de Montbard was frowning down into the shallow depression in front of him, his arms crossed on his chest as he nibbled his lower lip between his teeth, but then he turned on his heel and looked all about him, gazing at the walls as though he could see through them. Finally he turned to de Payens, nodding as though he had arrived at a decision.

  “I may have the solution to that. I bring you documents from the Seneschal, and one is a map, copied with great care from the Order’s archives. It purports to be a map of the layout of Solomon’s Temple, and of the labyrinth of tunnels surrounding it.” He held up a hand quickly, to forestall any interruption. “It purports, I say. It is a faithful copy of an ancient document, but its age is all that can be warranted. It has belonged to the Order for a millennium, according to our records, but it was ancient long before that and its accuracy has never been tested, as far as we know. I do, however, have it here with me. It is in the long, wooden travel case among my belongings in the other room, and if you have anything similar—a plan or map of the city as it is today—we should be able to compare the two.”

  “Indeed we should.” De Payens was already clicking his fingers for attention. “Montdidier, and Gondemare, bring Sir André’s wooden case in here, if you would.”

  A short time later, all of them were crowded around the table, looking at the chart that had been spread out and anchored with small rocks at all four corners, and for a long time no one spoke, as they all tried to make some sense of what they were looking at, attempting vainly, for the most part, to superimpose the lines of the drawing in front of them upon the landscape surrounding them.

  In the end it was Archibald St. Agnan who reached out an index finger to touch the map. “There,” he growled. “Isn’t that where we are now? Look, you can see the line of the wall, there, and it runs along the dip here, where the wavy lines are. That’s where we are now, in the stables.”

  “There are no stables marked here, St. Agnan.”

  St. Agnan did not even look up to see who had spoken. “No, of course not. The King’s palace isn’t shown, either, even as the al-Aqsa Mosque that it once was. This entire place was the temple when this map was drawn. These stables were walled into the cavern later, here in the precincts, after the new temple was destroyed and probably after the mosque was built, and that was more than six hundred years after the destruction of that same new temple. When was the original temple destroyed, and how long ago might this map have been drawn, Hugh?”

  De Payens shrugged and looked at André de Montbard, who made a wry face and said, “The original? I can only guess … two thousand years? It must have been at least that long ago. Titus destroyed Herod’s temple forty years after the death of Christ, and that was a thousand and two hundred years ago. This map is of Solomon’s Temple
, which was built many hundreds of years before that.”

  “Well, in the name of all we aspire to, I hope you are wrong, St. Agnan.” De Payens’s voice was heavy, prompting more than one pair of eyes to glance his way.

  “How so? I have to be right, according to what is here in front of us. And if I am …” St. Agnan hesitated, frowning, then stabbed a finger at the same point. “If I am, we are standing right there, at this moment.”

  “I accept that,” de Payens said. “But if you are correct, and we are standing there, we are … permit me …” He bent forward and placed his thumb on the point St. Agnan had selected, then stretched his hand to lay the point of his middle finger in the center of what was indicated on the drawing as being the main body of the temple. He held it there, his entire hand stretched widely, and stared at the distance involved, pursing his lips in thought before he continued. “I would say we are at least three score of long paces—strides might even be a better word in fact—three score of strides removed from the outer wall of the temple proper, where we wish to be. And that makes no consideration for our being above ground, while our target is deep below ground.”

  “Well, what of that?” St. Agnan sounded genuinely perplexed. “We knew from the outset we would have to excavate. That was explicit in our instructions.”

  No one else said anything, but it was evident from the faces of several of the others, from the way their eyes shifted uncomfortably from St. Agnan to de Payens, that some of them agreed with St. Agnan. Only St. Omer, Montdidier, and de Montbard kept their faces blank, and it was St. Omer who spoke next.

  “What Hugh is saying, Archibald, is that the King’s palace is directly at our backs, so that the only direction in which we can dig our tunnel is straight down, and then sideways, until we can turn again and strike towards the temple foundations. And the space between us and our target is filled by the Temple Mount. Filled completely by it. If we are to dig a passage underground from here to where we wish to be, it will have to be through solid bedrock, all the way. That will take years, and we have no tools, nor are we engineers.”

  St. Agnan’s ears flushed red as the truth of St. Omer’s words sank home to him, but André de Montbard stood staring down at the drawing, tapping one finger thought-fully against the spot the big knight had indicated.

  “St. Agnan might be wrong,” he mused. “We may be misreading what is here, but even so, there’s no doubting that we are standing on a rock. We need to find out more about this place. We need to know where to dig, and how to proceed. So where will we find more information on that kind of thing?”

  There was silence for a time until St. Omer spoke up again, making a wry face. “You are not going to like this, André, but the answer to that question lies within our own archives, at home, where someone clearly should have done more searching than they did before sending you out here. Our Order has more accurate information about Jerusalem and its temple in its archives than any other source anywhere. What happened here in these very precincts is our history, after all, and our ancestors took their records with them when they left, holding them safe against theft, pollution, and destruction. No one—no person, no organization, no entity anywhere—possesses better or more accurate information on this topic than our Order does.” He looked about him at his friends and companions. “I should not need to remind anyone here of that, since that is why we are here, after all, and faced with this task.”

  “But we are here and the information we require is back there,” de Payens murmured. “We can retrieve it, but that will take time, perhaps too much time. So what are we to do in the meantime? De Montbard, have you any thoughts on that?”

  “Aye, I have,” the other answered. “Two things. The first is to examine all the other documents I brought with me. I have not even looked at them, for Count Hugh told me to deliver them to you privily, and in person, but I know there is no shortage of material. The only thing I actually saw was this chart, because the Count himself was proud of its workmanship and showed it to me before I left—you saw that it is enclosed with several other drawings in its own container. For all I know, the remainder of those documents might contain all the information that we need, because the Count was fully aware of what had been asked of you and what you would be obliged to do about it.” He half turned and indicated the case that he had opened to find the drawing they had been studying. Its lid gaped open, revealing a thick leather wallet underlying the long cylinder that had contained the drawing of the temple and several other, smaller charts. “I suspect now that every sheet of parchment, every document and every drawing in that wallet will have a direct bearing on what we are discussing.”

  De Payens, who had been gazing at the package like everyone else, nodded. “You may be right. We’ll go through them all carefully, as soon as we have finished here. But you said there were two things we could do. What’s the other one?”

  “Verify or disprove St. Agnan’s suspicions about the layout of the map, because if he is correct, the treasure we are looking for could lie beneath the foundations of the palace itself … under the mosque.” He ignored de Payens’s sharp intake of breath and carried on, muttering in a low voice as though speaking to himself. “If that be the case, our task could be less time consuming. Not less arduous—we would still be tunneling through stone—but we might have less far to travel. Still requiring years of work, perhaps, but fewer of them …” He looked up, his voice reverting to its normal tone. “We need to find another, more recent map of the city and locate the temple site on that. Then we can compare the two and find out exactly what we have in this drawing. Where would we find such a thing?”

  “I doubt that there is one.” Every eye in the place turned to look at Payn Montdidier, who had not spoken since withdrawing his objection to their new name. He smiled, nervously, and held up his hands. “If there is,” he continued, “then there are but two places it could be, and neither of those is desirable from our viewpoint: either the King might have one in his palace, or the Patriarch Archbishop might have one in his residence. No one else would ever have a need for such a thing, and were we even to ask about it, we would probably fall under suspicion of plotting something before the request was fully uttered. But if you want me to, I’ll ask some questions next time I go to the Archbishop’s residence. I have befriended one of the senior clerics there, and if I give it enough thought beforehand, I might be able to find a way of asking him a question like that casually, as though in passing, without arousing his suspicions.”

  “Good, Crusty. Do that,” de Payens said, then turned to Godfrey St. Omer. “How went your patrol, Godfrey? Anything of interest to report?”

  St. Omer stood up to deliver his report formally, but he spoke his opening words for effect. “Aye, Master de Payens. We saved the life of the King’s wife today, Queen Morfia, and she thanked us most warmly.” Having ensured that every man there hung on his every word, he went on to describe the patrol in meticulous detail, omitting nothing.

  It had become customary for each patrol leader to report in person to the brethren upon his return to the stables on the Mount, and to answer any questions that anyone might want to ask, because in the earliest days following their formation, when their patrol activities were new and unanticipated by the brigand bands, every sortie had been different and worth studying, and everyone had been highly aware that a lesson learned from one patrol might be of vital importance to a later one. As time passed, however, and brigands grew less and less aggressive in the face of what had rapidly become certain pursuit and punishment, only those patrols that yielded something extraordinary ever occasioned close questioning. The name of Queen Morfia caused a stir on first mention, but once it became clear that nothing serious had happened to her in the course of the attack, the knights quickly lost interest in her. Everyone was acutely aware that the most important business of the day concerned the documents that André de Montbard had brought to them from overseas.

  The meeting was adjourned as s
oon as St. Omer completed his report, the documents were laid out for study, and before the shadows of that afternoon had lengthened into evening, de Payens, St. Omer, and de Montbard, the only three of the brethren who could read with any kind of ease or fluency, had discovered that they had no need of finding a contemporary map of Jerusalem. Almost all of the information they needed was provided, in some form, in the documents from the Seneschal. Hugh of Champagne, in a letter to de Payens written in his own hand, explained how he understood exactly the difficulties that Hugh and his companions would face in carrying out the task assigned to them, and how he had gone to great lengths to supply them with painstakingly accurate copies of every document he could find that had a bearing on the temple in Jerusalem and the site of the treasure for which they were to search. These copies, he reminded de Payens, were themselves made from copies of copies, for the originals were of such great antiquity that they were preserved and protected with great care, hermetically sealed against air and dampness lest they rot or fade or be otherwise corrupted. The copies, however, were as perfect as the expertise of his best clerics could make them, and each had been closely scrutinized to ensure that it matched its original in every detail. He had enclosed two copies of each item, one in the original script in which the information had been set down, and another in the common Latin into which the documents had all been translated after their arrival in ancient Gaul, a full millennium earlier.

  By the end of the following few days, the three knights had catalogued and cross-referenced every single item of information in the Count’s dispatches, and they had established, beyond dispute, that their target lay, at least partially, beneath the foundations of the al-Aqsa Mosque. A minimum distance of sixty paces separated them, they estimated, from their objective in the bowels of the ancient temple, and much of that distance involved bedrock. The lower levels of the Temple Mount itself, they had learned from their reading, were riddled with networks and mazes of tunnels dug over the millennia, but all access to those tunnels appeared to have been confined to the inner precincts of the temple. Only people inside the temple had been able to enter the tunnels, and the temple had been destroyed, its subterranean interior demolished and filled in a thousand years earlier by the Jewish priests themselves, in order to defeat and frustrate Titus’s rapacious legions. The new diggers knew that while it was at least conceivable that they might intersect an ancient tunnel in the course of their excavations, and be faced thereafter with merely clearing out the debris that had accumulated since the tunnels were last used, the odds against such an occurrence were incalculable.