by Gregg Loomis
Would I had given my soul the same consideration as my flesh. Perhaps I would not be at the dismal place at which I find myself.
Translator’s Notes
1. 5.029 meters.
2. He describes a typical two-decked thirteenth–fourteenth-century galleon-type vessel used in the Mediterranean.
3. Medieval ships carried their own sources of food for all but the shortest voyages, as the means of preservation of meats and vegetables were uncertain at best. Servants such as Pietro would have shared quarters with both the horses and other animals as may have been aboard for purposes of food.
4. Roman cartographers devised a method roughly similar to the present system of latitude and longitude by the use of kardo maximus, which ran north–south and decumanus maximus, running east–west. Although latitude as we know it today was known by the ancients, it was not until the late eighteenth century that Thomas Fuller, an English watchmaker, devised an accurate measure of longitude.
5. Medieval maps were absurd in their simplicity. In the seventh century, Isadore, Bishop of Seville, designed a world that was like a disk, with Asia, Europe and Africa sharing unequal quadrants with Jerusalem always at the center, based upon Ezekiel 5:5: “This is Jerusalem, which I have set in the midst of the nations and countries that are around about her.” This practice or similar ideas persisted until the Renaissance. Fortunately for Western civilization, the Arabic world both admired and continued to use the Ptolemaic method of cartography, partially described in 4 above. The Templars, no doubt, learned this method while in Palestine as they did the mathematics, engineering and navigation known in the ancient world but lost or suppressed by a Church that did not trust knowledge of a pagan society.
6. The actual word used is castellum, which could include a palace as well as a castle. The translator has chosen the word with the connotation of fortifications.
7. 1127
8. See 5 above.
9. 5.029 meters. The medieval measurement was likely somewhat smaller.
CHAPTER TWO
1
London, St. James
1600 hours the same day
Gurt reread the note before she wadded it up and sent it flying into the trash can.
That bastard! She slung her purse across the room where it smashed against the far wall with gratifying violence. She had saved his ass in Italy and used her connections, not to mention her money, to get him to London.
He thanked her by dumping her like a one-night stand.
She almost wished she could cry, so great was her hurt and humiliation. She sat on the edge of the bed and lit a Marlboro, staring at the rope of smoke spiraling towards the ceiling.
As the minutes passed, her rational nature began to take control. Lang had made her no promises, had in fact tried to talk her out of coming here. How typically male: gallantly concerned about exposing her to danger while ignoring the fact someone needed to watch his back. Old- fashioned chauvinism, though charming, could get him killed.
Would serve him right, too.
She could shoot better on her worst day than Lang ever could, was current on modern trade craft and, most importantly, was someone the opposition, whoever they were, probably did not know was a player. With his picture on the front of a dozen newspapers, he needed the cover of being part of a couple more than ever.
Men in general and Lang in particular were capable of phenomenal stupidity. The thought made her feel somewhat better.
You need me, Langford Reilly. You need me, Schatz. And the Dumkopf factor does not diminish this fact in the least.
She reached for the phone on the other side of the bed, stopped and stood. Stubbing out her cigarette, she left the room, trying to remember where she had seen the nearest pay phone.
2
Oxford
1000 hours the next day
Late the next morning, Lang turned the ancient Morris Minor off the M40. The sixty miles from London had been as uneventful as possible in a car the size of a shoe box. A small shoe box. His only problem, other than cramps in muscles he didn’t even know existed, had been a major case of flatulence, the result of an Indian meal Rachel, Jacob’s wife, had insisted on preparing for dinner. In the intelligence community of the past, Rachel had been known as one of the world’s worst and most enthusiastic cooks. Her dinner invitations had inspired legendary excuses. Last night, she had prepared a version of Bombay aloo, a fiery potato dish, the heat of which had mercifully seared Lang’s taste buds, rendering him impervious to her latest culinary disaster. All in all, he had probably gotten off lightly with only gas.
The Magdalen Bridge was, with typical British disregard for the number of letters in a name, pronounced “maudin.” However articulated, it gave Lang a picture-postcard view of the honey-colored spires and gothic towers that were Oxford. He could have been looking at a skyline unchanged in five hundred years. The town, of course, had changed. The Rover automobile factory, among others, was located here. Still, the town had a medieval quality that its residents, both town and gown, intended to preserve.
Unlike American universities, Oxford was a composite of any number of undergraduate and graduate colleges, all more or less independent. Christ Church was one of the oldest and largest.
Just off the Abington Road, Lang found a rare parking spot among the bicycles that are Oxford’s most popular form of transportation. He entered the Tom Quad, the university’s largest quadrangle, named for the huge, multiton bell that chimes the hours there. Not only do the British ignore letters, but they also like to name towers and bells.
He had written Jacob’s directions down and read them over before proceeding along one of the paths that formed a giant X across the neatly trimmed grass. On the other side, two young men tossed a Frisbee.
He entered an arch and climbed stone stairs as worn by centuries of student feet as those to Jacob’s office had been by lawyers and clients. Down a poorly lit corridor, he found a tarnished plaque that informed him he was standing at the entrance to the office of Hubert Stockwell, Fellow in History. He was reaching to knock when the door swung open and a young woman emerged, her arms full of books and papers. She gave Lang a startled look before dashing for the stairwell.
Lang was fairly certain the expression on her face had nothing to do with his digestive tract problems.
“Come in, come in,” a voice boomed from inside. “Don’t stand about in the hall.”
Lang did as ordered.
His first impression was that he had walked into the wake of a tornado. Papers, books and magazines were scattered across every surface, including the floor. This place was the brother to Jacob’s office. There was an odor, too: the smell of old, stale documents Lang recognized from his occasional foray into the court clerk’s archives at home. Bound and unbound papers were stacked on a mound he subsequently identified as a desk behind which sat a round-faced, bearded man peering at him through thick horn rims. He could have passed for a young Kris Kringle.
“You must be Jacob’s friend,” he said. “Look too old to be one of my students.”
Lang extended a hand which the man ignored. “Lang Reilly.”
“Hubert Stockwell,” the man behind the desk replied without getting up or reaching out his own hand. “A pleasure and all that rubbish.”
He started to say something else, but stopped and his face wrinkled as he sneezed. “Bloody old buildings! Drafts, damp, cold stone floors. Bleeding wonder we don’t all die of pneumonia!”
He produced a soiled handkerchief, wiped his button of a nose and returned the cloth to wherever it had come from, all in a single motion so quick Lang was unsure he had seen a handkerchief at all. Lang would not bet on any shell game the good professor ran.
“You’d be the chap interested in the Templars.”
“I understand you’re an authority.”
“Rubbish,” Stockwell said, enjoying the compliment anyway. “But they did traipse through a period of history about which I know a little. Yank, ar
en’t you?”
The change of subject made Lang shift mental gears before responding. “Actually, I’m from Atlanta, where a lot of people might resent being called that. Has to do with a Yankee general who was careless with fire.”
Stockwell’s head bobbed, reminding Lang of one of those dolls given to the first five thousand to enter a baseball game. “Sherman, yes, yes. Gone With the Wind and all that. Didn’t mean to offend.”
“You didn’t. About the Templars . . .”
He held up a hand. “Not me, old boy, not me at all. Had an associate, chap named Wolffe, Nigel Wolffe, was fascinated by the blokes, translated some sort of manuscript, scribblings supposedly written by a Templar before he was put to death. Beseeching God for mercy, confession of sins, contrition, all of the claptrap of the medieval church, I’d imagine.”
“And of today’s Catholics,” Lang said.
Stockwell’s jaw slackened and the glasses slid to the tip of his nose. “Oh dear, I didn’t mean . . .”
Lang smiled, an assurance they were perfectly comfortable together, just two antipapists. “You said you had an associate.”
Stockwell sighed heavily. “That’s right, past tense. Poor Wolffe is no longer with us. Splendid chap, played a killer hand of whist. Tragic, simply tragic.”
Lang felt a chill not entirely caused by the drafts Stockwell had complained of. “I don’t suppose Mr. Wolffe . . .”
Stockwell sneezed, doing the trick with the hankie again. “Dr. Wolffe.”
“. . . Dr. Wolffe died of natural causes?”
Stockwell stared at Lang, his eyebrows coming together like two mating caterpillars. “How’s that?”
“I was asking how Dr. Wolffe died. An accident, perhaps?”
“Yes, yes. You must have read about it, seen it on the telly.”
“I’m sure I did.”
The professor turned to gaze out of the only window the cramped space had. There was a look of longing on his face, as though he were wishing he could go outside and play. “They said he probably left the bloody ring on after making tea. Explosion knocked out windows all the way across the quad.”
“There was a resulting fire?”
Stockwell managed to pull away from the view outside. “Extraordinary memory you have. Mr. . . .”
“Reilly.”
“Reilly, yes, yes. Surprising you would remember that from a newspaper or television account months ago.”
Lang leaned foreword, hands on the paper-swamped desk. “His work on the Templars, it burned, too?”
Stockwell’s Santa Claus face was masked with melancholy, the loss of scholarly work more lamentable than that of a colleague. “I’m afraid so. The original of the manuscript, notes, everything except his first draft.”
Maybe Lang hadn’t made the trip for nothing after all. “Where might that draft be?”
“The University library.”
“You mean I can just go to the library and read it?”
Stockwell stood and looked around as though he might have forgotten where he had parked his sleigh. “Not exactly, no. I mean, I’ll have to get it. Poor Wolffe ran me a copy on the machine, asked for help. Chap could never edit his own work. I was working on it when he . . . Well, he won’t be publishing anyway, not now, will he? I left it at my carrel, planned to finish it up, submit it in his memory. Let’s be off, shall we?”
Lang would have been surprised had the good professor been wearing something other than a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. He reached behind the door and took a tweed cap from a coat rack. His universal uniform of academia was now complete.
They dodged bicycles until they turned into Catte Street. Before them was the massive fourteenth-century Bodleian Library, the repository of an original draft of the Magna Carta, innumerable illuminated manuscripts and at least one copy of every book published in Great Britain.
Stockwell pointed to the adjacent round building of enthusiastic Italian Baroque architecture, featuring peaked pilasters, scrolled windows and a domed roof. “Radcliffe Camera,” he said. “Reading room. Meet you there soon’s I collect Wolffe’s papers.”
Lang entered through a heavy oak door, ducking to get under a lintel no more than five and a half feet high. Anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution should try smacking their heads on a few medieval doors, he thought grimly.
The Camera served as a general reading room. Oak tables, built to modern proportions, lined two walls. In the center, some of the library’s more famous contents were on display in cloth-covered glass cases. Light struggled through opaque glass windows and filtered from miserly overhead lamps. The quiet was tangible, a dusty deafness interrupted by the occasional sound of a page being turned or the beep of a laptop. A lurch in the gastrointestine made Lang wonder where the men’s might be, the loo, in Britspeak. This was not the place he could pass gas and escape undetected. He had been in noisier graveyards.
Lang waited for Stockwell, lifting the light-shielding cover from one case and another. A few Latin phrases greeted him like old friends, but most of the writing was Saxon, Norman French or some other language he had never seen.
He was concentrating on an elaborately illustrated, hand-lettered Bible in what, he was guessing, was Gaelic when the professor appeared at his elbow so suddenly he might have dropped down a chimney.
He took a sheaf of papers from under one arm and tendered them to Lang. “Here you go. Drop the lot off at my office when you’re done.”
Lang took them, scanning the first page. “Thanks.”
Stockwell was headed for the exit. “Pleased to do it. Friend of Jacob’s and all that.”
Lang sat at the nearest table, concentrating on what he was reading. For the second time in a very short period, he experienced a jolt in his stomach. But this one had nothing to do with Rachel’s cooking.
THE TEMPLARS:
THE END OF AN ORDER
Account by Pietro of Sicily
Translation from the medieval Latin by Nigel Wolffe, Ph.D.
4
I shed my novice status shortly after our arrival at Blanchefort, taking my vows as a Brother of the Order of the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon before the autumn harvest. I shed also my innocence and my faith, now I realize.
True to the inducements I had been offered, I supped on meat twice daily and bathed myself twice weekly until All Hallows’ Eve, when the air’s chill made it impractical to do and I was subjected to the body’s natural vermin once again. Even these deprivations seemed trivial, for I was allowed to change my vestments1 for clean ones weekly, thereby ridding myself of my small tormentors.
Not only did my belly grow with victuals far richer than those consumed by others in God’s service, but my knowledge increased its girth as well. I know now that I should have remembered Eve’s original sin in thirsting for forbidden knowledge, but like hers my mind possessed an unquenchable thirst. Uncontrolled lust for knowledge, forbidden or not, can be as deadly as carnal lust, as I was to discover all too late.
The castle had a library the likes of which I did not know existed except, perhaps, under the direct keep of the Holy Father in Rome. I had become used to one or two manuscripts illustrating both in word and picture the Holy Writ. The Brethren’s collection included volumes with scribbling resembling worms with brightly coloured ornamentation, which, I was told, was the wisdom of the Ancients preserved by the heathen Saracen.
When I asked why works of pagans and heretics were allowed in consecrated quarters, I was told that writings forbidden most Christians were permitted here. It was a refrain I was to hear repeated often, that the Knights were not bound by the same dictates as the rest of Christendom.
In acting as scribe and counting house clerk, I made another discovery. The Brothers had a system by which a Christian on a pilgrimage might both protect his money while being able to use it when he wished. A traveler could deposit a certain number pieces of gold or silver with any Temple and receive therefore a piece of parchment bea
ring his name, the amount deposited and a secret sign known only to the Brethren. When this parchment was presented at any other Temple, be it in Britain, Iberia or the German duchies, a like amount as the pilgrim had deposited would be paid over to him, thereby preventing the common scourge of robbery upon the highways or piracy upon the seas.2
For this service, the Temple issuing the parchment and the one rendering value for it received a fee. This seemed to me like the sin of usury, a practice forbidden Christians but allowed the Knights. Worse, the Temples were in the business of letting money out for profit, the same as any heathen Israelite.3
More curious were the sums of money that came from Rome in regular increments. Unthinkable riches arrived to be placed in the Temple’s treasure room. This wealth was not distributed as alms to the poor as Christ admonished but went to purchase lands, arms and such excess as the Brethren might desire. Even so, a substantial fraction of the Holy See’s bounty was not spent but rather accumulated for purposes I only now understand.
At first I feared to corrupt my soul, for gluttony takes many forms, including the wanton dissipation of wealth. I sought out Guillaume de Poitiers and interrupted his gaming with other Knights. Indeed, gaming, eating and the consumption of wine occupied more of the day than did practice with the sword, pike or lance.
He invoked the name of several saints along with consigning to hell the wooden cubes which he and his fellows constantly rolled, wagering on the outcome. “Ah, Pietro, little brother,” he said, his voice full of the aroma of the grape. “I see by your face you are disturbed. Do the figures in your counting house become amok?”
At this, there was much gaiety among his companions.
“No,” I said solemnly. “I am overcome by such curiosity as I cannot bear in silence. The Holy Father sends us great sums as he does to all Temples. Yet it is the duty of the body of the Holy Church to remit to Rome what they can for the sustenance of that same Holy Father. I understand not.”