by Dan Davis
It would be at our great victory at Crecy that I discovered a foul vampire on the battlefield and the Order of the White Dagger would bend our will to capturing and killing the monstrous bastard. Our quest would be interrupted by the disaster of the Black Death and for the sake of the Order I would have to journey through unprecedented death and horror in the hopes of finding salvation.
But that is a story for another time.
I had not known how much I had missed England until I had returned there. From the savages of the east to the madness of the Greeks, and the volatility of the Italians, I had been amongst strangers for half my life. Returning to my own country, campaigning alongside men who were just like me, it made me never want to leave ever again. In fact, I would be ready to venture forth again after a mere couple of centuries but for the time being, all I knew was that it was my land. I was an Englishman. And the English were my people.
Finally, I was home.
***
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The exclusive short story Vampire Templar follows
VAMPIRE TEMPLAR
The Immortal Knight Chronicles
This short story takes place between books 3 and 4 in the series.
Richard of Ashbury
and the Destruction of the Templars
1311
Dan Davis
Copyright © 2018 Dan Davis
All rights reserved.
Chinon, France
AD 1311
Thomas and I stole through the darkness of the ancient crypts beneath the Château de Chinon. With only the faint glow of our lantern to see by, it was slow going and Thomas fretted and hurried me all the way.
“Quiet, sir,” I hissed at him for the umpteenth time while pulling a spiderweb away from my face. “Lest you give us away.”
“Only the dead can hear us down here,” he replied, his voice echoing in the gloom.
“We shall be dead men ourselves if you do not slow your pace.”
Thomas stopped, his shoes scraping on the bone-dry floor, and spoke through gritted teeth. “There is no time to waste, Richard. If we do not reach them and escape by dawn then all this has been for naught!”
That was true enough.
Our quest that night was to free the leaders of the Templars before they could be further questioned, convicted, and ultimately executed.
“Come, then,” I whispered. “Yet do not give such full voice to your fears. We must be close to the gaol now and surely the gaolers themselves shall be within earshot. If they raise the alarm—”
“I will be silent,” Thomas hissed, “if you will but hurry.”
We pushed on deeper through the tunnels.
The seeds of the fall of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, commonly called the Knights Templar, or simply the Templars, were many but the most fruitful were sown when Acre was lost. In 1291, the last Crusader city fell to the Saracens and our presence in the Holy Land was finally ended. The Jews and the Saracens mocked us, worse, they mocked Christ for failing to defend us. It was a terrible blow and the Templars received much of the blame.
It was true that they and the Hospitallers had grown increasingly embittered against each other and their conflict had weakened the Christian presence. Following the tragic loss of Acre, both Orders were rightly criticised by lord and commoner alike but the Templars had the worst of it.
And yet, it was not only the fault of the military orders. I had seen over the decades a loss of fervour as far as the Holy Land was concerned. In my youth, men had burned with the desire to take back what the Saracens had stolen from us. We had felt in our bones the wanton aggression from the Moors in their assaults on Spain and Sicily and the devastation caused when the wild Saracens had long ago smashed the Christian Roman cities and forced those good people into subjugation. Protecting the pilgrims who were so abused by the Mohammedans was inspiring, as was the chance for winning glory for ourselves.
But our lords and knights grew ever more concerned with fighting each other rather than uniting against the common enemy. We knew, or thought we knew, that the Saracens could never conquer our homelands and so they were not considered to be a true threat. Our Christian neighbours, on the other hand, often were a danger and smaller kingdoms and counties were swallowed up by the greater kingdoms until those emerging empires threatened each other. And so Christendom turned inward.
Still, the Templars played their part in the transformation. They had become ever more comfortable as facilitators and bankers rather than carrying out a spirited armed defence of the people of the Holy Land. Their attention had turned to the rest of Christendom and their squabbles with kings, dukes, and the other military orders had morally weakened them. Supposedly subordinate to the Pope, the Templars had become a force unto themselves, almost independent of the Church and certainly free from control by even the most powerful kings. When Acre fell, there was considerable criticism and many a man spoke the thought that the Templars and their rivals the Hospitallers should be merged into a single order and brought to heel.
Indeed, that was one way in which we could win back what had been lost in the Holy Land, so our lords said, and it was urged in all quarters. Leading royal and spiritual voices formed a consensus that conquering small castles and cities at the borders of Saracen territory and slowly working our way in to the heart of the Holy Land was the best way forward to retake Jerusalem.
The Templars alone resisted. Led by Grand Master James of Molay, an honourable but ageing and old-fashioned knight from Lorraine, they urged the Pope and the Kings of Europe to launch a large-scale invasion of Egypt with a combined force of ten thousand knights, transported by the Venetians and Genoese, to smash the enemy swiftly in grand battles. This proposal was met with an embarrassed silence by the kings. As far as they were concerned, their fathers and grandfathers had attempted this method and had failed time and again.
What is more, Grand Master Molay was illiterate, unimaginative and stubborn and powerful forces sensed weakness in this inflexibility. His contemporaries recognised that he was a man made from an outdated mould, no longer fit for a more complicated and cynical world.
Of course, I could well sympathise.
Illiteracy was ever rarer in the heartlands of Christendom as the new century came and the lower classes began to take advantage of the opportunities that widespread learning enabled. Lawyers were on the rise. Jumped-up, clever second sons of the middling orders of society, the lawyers began to wield power far above their station. Nowhere was this truer than in France, where the power of law grew along with the cunning of King Philip IV. With the French Pope and a mass of French Cardinals in his pocket, he felt secure enough to go after the Templars.
A group of iniquitous knights had recently been expelled from the Order for their degenerate behaviour, and they in turn made accusations of impropriety which the Grand Master James of Molay, knowing them to be false, had begged the Pope to investigate. He was a straightforward man who naively believed that the law would discover the truth, not realising that the law may be used by the powerful as a tool to destroy their enemies.
There were five charges lodged against the Templars.
The first was the renouncement of and spitting on the cross during initiation into the Order. The second was the stripping of the man so initiated and the thrice kissing of that man by the preceptor on the navel, posterior and the mouth. The third was telling the neophyte, that is the novice, that sodomy and other unnatural lusts were lawful and indulged in commonly by knights, sergeants, squires, and priests. The fourth was that the cord worn by the neophyte was consecrated by wrapping it around an idol in the form of a human head with a great beard and that the idol was adored in all Templar chapters. The fifth, and perhaps greatest charge of all, was that the Templar priests did not consecrate the host when celebrating Mass.
On these obviously false pretexts, Philip IV seized James of Molay on Friday 13th October 1307, at the Templar compound outsid
e Paris.
And it was not the Grand Master Molay alone. Far from it.
Three weeks before, King Philip had sent secret orders throughout France commanding his bailiffs and seneschals to detain all Templars for undefined but terrible crimes. I was astonished when I discovered that fifteen thousand Templar knights, sergeants, chaplains and servants were rounded up and detained in a single day. As far as I could recall, nothing the like of it had ever been done before.
Thomas was incandescent with outrage.
He had spent his adult life as a devoted Templar knight, before he had his guts ripped open by my brother in far-off Karakorum, and it was only at Thomas’ urging that we had gone to Chinon at all.
“We must do something, Richard!” he had said when news of the arrests spread like fire across Christendom. Thomas and I were in the hall of our Order’s house in London in the middle of the day, with the sun streaking through gaps in the closed shutters.
“What can we do?” I asked.
“Save them.”
I scoffed. “We could never save even a fraction of them. There are thousands of Templars, Thomas. Thousands, from Scotland to Cyprus, and most of them are in France.”
“A few of them, we may save a few. Some will be better than none.”
“I do not disagree,” I allowed. “And yet it is not for us to do anything. Our Order exists to uncover William’s immortals and this assault on the Templars is not of our—”
“For the love of God, Richard! My brothers will be destroyed. And for what? Because this damned king wishes to remove a rival power? To seize the Order’s wealth? We cannot stand by and do nothing. We must act, not as members of the Order of the White Dagger but as good Christians. As knights. It is our duty. None other than us could do it and so it must be us.”
“By God, you lay it on thick, sir. But how could it be done?”
“With our strength and speed and skill. With Stephen’s connections and the wealth he has cultivated. We can have boats ready on the coast of France which will bring the Templars to England. The most senior of the lords, at the least. They will be safe here.”
I was tempted to action by the very impossibility of it but I was not so enamoured by the Templars as was Thomas.
“What if they truly are guilty of these crimes?”
“How can you say such a thing?” Thomas asked, affronted.
I cleared my throat, wary of offending him too greatly but it had to be said. “Some of the charges… I do not know, Thomas, they sound… plausible.”
“The causes of this could not be more apparent. It is no more than a disgraceful attempt to seize the Templar’s wealth. To do away with a potential challenge to Philip’s authority.”
“Yes, yes, I am sure that is true.” I eyed him. “Is there no chance that your former brethren were perhaps engaged in some nefarious practices?”
“No, of course not. Never.” He hesitated. “That is to say, we always had a certain affinity for elaborate initiation rituals but there was nothing heretical about them or our beliefs. We are entirely orthodox, I assure you.”
“As far as you know, perhaps. But you were initiated long ago.”
“They could not change so much as to worship idols and spit on the cross. It pains me even to utter such nonsense.”
I pursed my lips. “And what about the unnatural lusts? We both know what young monks get up to in the darkness. Squires, too, the filthy little brutes.”
He looked away. “Not ours. Not the Templars. They are good men. Dutiful men.”
“I suppose you are right enough about that. But whatever the truth of it, we cannot interfere. We must not risk the lives and the resources of the Order of the White Dagger for these leaders of the Templars. We have other sworn responsibilities. For the love of God, Thomas, we could be killed in such an attempt.”
On and on we went. I denied him for days but in the end, I agreed. For all his grand arguments, ultimately it was because Thomas was my friend, a brother in arms, and I could not deny him. Also, I thought I might have a chance to kill Frenchmen, which is an opportunity never to be passed up.
And that was how we found ourselves creeping through the tunnels beneath the massive Castle Chinon that night, already four years after the Templars initial arrests. Many of the lesser men had been swiftly released while others had been held in various secure places from Paris to Avignon until at last the most senior leaders had been diverted to Chinon for their final questioning by the Inquisition before their trial.
The town of Chinon nestled on the bank of the River Vienne just a few miles from where it joined the Loire. Above the town was a vast outcrop of stone and atop that was the castle itself. It was an ancient place. The Romans had a fort there and before them, no doubt, the pagans would have done the same, for it commanded views over a rich and fertile land, full of vineyards and orchards with trees heaving under the weight of their fruit. After the Romans, an order of monks built a monastery and then later a series of local lords built the castle and added to it over generations until it covered the plateau. The stone for all that building had come from the vast rock itself and the tunnels the quarrying left behind had been used for storage and as a mausoleum for monks’ bones. The secret ways had been used in Henry II’s day, when that great king of England had held the castle and greatly added to the fortifications. I had heard of the tunnels’ existence in my youth by old men who had seen them and walked them. Those ways had been forgotten by all but a handful of smugglers and prostitutes in the town and one desperate sergeant. Luckily, these were precisely the sorts of people willing to give up their secrets in exchange for money.
“This is the stairway,” Thomas said, pointing into the shadows. “The one the sergeant told us about.”
“Is it, indeed,” I muttered, for I had my doubts that the supposedly sympathetic sergeant was telling us the truth about any of it. I was more than happy to pay him for his revelations about the secret way inside but something about him had seemed off. “How can you know that this is the stair he told us about?”
“How many other stairways are down here, Richard?”
I shrugged and pulled out a long dagger before making my way up to the trapdoor above. “Shield the light.”
The sudden darkness was complete, shrouding us like a blanket. Mercifully, the door was unlocked, just as the sergeant had promised, and I pushed it up as slowly as I could, straining to hear and to see in the silent blackness above. The stench of sour wine hit me.
We came up in the corner of a storage cellar. All was quiet.
Thomas pushed by me. “Come, we must make haste.”
I grabbed him and whispered close to his face. “If we do not take care, we shall be discovered and then we will have to start killing your countrymen. You claimed to wish to avoid such a thing.”
“We may accomplish this feat without harming a single man,” Thomas muttered, pulling away. “As long as we hurry.”
The cellars were more extensive than we had expected and we made our way through, looking for the door out. We had descended into the catacombs from the edge of the town at sunset and it felt as though half the night had passed already, so Thomas was right to hurry. And yet we bumped into so many barrels and scared out so many scurrying rats that anyone listening in the chambers above our heads would surely have heard our approach.
Finally, the door into the bowels of the gaol was up ahead. Thomas, almost overcome by pity for the plight of his Templar brothers, did not wait for me, nor did he shroud or extinguish his lamp as he yanked the heavy door open.
Quite frankly, I was astonished that it had been unlocked. It seemed that the old sergeant had done as he had sworn to do and so we were into the castle.
Beyond was a low corridor lined with squat doors on one side and at the far end sat a table with a single candle, an empty wooden plate and an upturned cup.
Sitting at the table was an ugly young soldier who peered at us, shielding the light of his candle with one hand.
“Ah!” I called out. “How wonderful to see you, my dear fellow. Might we trouble you for directions to the privy?”
He jumped to his feet and shouted over his shoulder at the stairwell behind him. “Intruders! Sergeant!”
I was already running before the first word was out of his mouth and I covered the distance so rapidly that he was incapable of responding before my shoulder collided with his chest. He flew clean off his feet, travelled eight or nine feet through the air and hit the wall behind him with a wet crunch. He bounced off and fell into a heap by the base of the stairwell.
“You killed him,” Thomas said, coming up behind me.
“I believe I did,” I replied. “Poor lad. Let us have his keys, shall we? Quickly, now.”
Thomas went back and began unlocking the squat doors behind us while I waited at the bottom of the spiral stairs with my dagger drawn. Sure enough, two pairs of feet came running down the steps along with heavy breathing and the clatter of arms.
The first man to appear held a spear outstretched before him, which I grasped and pulled on while slipping behind it and stabbing my dagger up into his throat. The man behind swung his spear down at my head. I darted to the side and leapt up the stairs at him. He wavered then turned to flee before I caught him by the ankle and dragged him down to the bottom. He was right dazed from the fall and I gave him a quick punch on the nose to keep him that way while I disarmed him.
“Where are the other prisoners?” I asked him.
“Dear God,” he mumbled, despairing. “Dear God.”
Behind me, Thomas called out. “Richard? Help us.”
Keeping hold of the guard, I peered into the dim light as Thomas led a stream of broken men out of their gaol cells.
The French Inquisition had tortured the Templars.
Barred from spilling blood during their interrogations, the Inquisitors favoured using the rack to stretch limbs into dislocation at the joints. They also enjoyed using the strappado, where the victim’s wrists were bound behind his back before being raised by them over a beam so that the pressure put an incredible strain on the limbs but primarily caused slow suffocation through the pressure on the chest. The Inquisitors also used fire. Applying fat to the soles of the feet before placing those feet in the fire where they would be slowly cooked and the skin of the feet turned into thick, crispy crackling like roast pigskin.