by Jack Whyte
Once safely delivered, a pair of jars, from corresponding positions on each side of the gallery, was placed upon a separate table in one of the corners, then marked and numbered with great precision before de Montbard broke each seal with exquisite caution and gently removed the contents. St. Clair had been present at the time—they all had—anxious to set eyes upon whatever it might be that they had worked so long and so hard to find, and when it became obvious that the jars did indeed contain parchment scrolls, as predicted by Montbard, they all stood silent, watching almost in awe, as de Montbard called for a bowl of water and washed his hands absolutely clean, then dried them thoroughly on a clean towel before sitting down and leaning forward with great deliberation to unroll the first portion of the very first scroll, holding it open with spread fingers. The writing on it was tiny, the letters and symbols exquisitely formed, but to all of them, save perhaps de Montbard himself, it was completely alien and indecipherable.
De Montbard sat transfixed, utterly motionless except for his eyes, which scanned the document eagerly until some of the other men began to shift and fidget. Even de Payens and St. Omer hovered anxiously, their eyes intent upon their companion, their faces making it appear that they were holding their breath, but eventually de Montbard nodded his head, satisfied with something, and sat back, cradling the parchment as it sprang back into its tube shape. He raised his eyes to look at each of the two elders in turn.
“Yes,” he said, and nodded again, more emphatically this time. “Yes! This is it. We have it. This is what we came to find.”
Hugh de Payens gasped aloud, and St. Omer fetched him a resounding thump on the shoulder, a wide grin breaking out on his seamed, grizzled face while the other six men looked at each other with varying degrees of baffled curiosity and incomprehension. De Montbard was already on his feet and moving to the tables in the center of the room where his own documents were neatly laid out. He shuffled through several before selecting one and bringing it back to the table that held the scroll, and only then did he notice the expressions on the faces of the others. He hesitated, looking from man to man, and then he rested his buttocks against the edge of the table behind him and looked again at each man in turn, his smile widening to a rather rueful grin.
“I can see that none of you really knows what has happened here, so let me try to explain it to you in a way that will make some sense.” He paused, aware of the fact that every man there was hanging on his words, then waved to indicate the four pairs of jars in their respective corners. “What you have found, my friends, in these jars and the others down below, is the Rebirth in Sion. With this discovery, our ancient Order of Rebirth in Sion is reborn in Sion. These scrolls contain the absolute vindication of all that our ancestors have believed, and have striven to find, for centuries, for more than a thousand years. And the honor and glory of having found them is yours.”
He was no longer smiling. “We—you—found the Ark of the Covenant, the most treasured, fabled relic of Antiquity. We have not touched it since finding it, as you all know, and none of us yet knows what it contains. But the discovery itself is of enormous importance, even if it appears to be nothing more than an elaborate wooden box, perhaps an empty box, covered with a coating of hammered and carved gold. It was made, we are told, to contain the twin tablets of stone that Moses brought down from the mountain—the Ten Commandments—the proof of God’s covenant with man, but none of us here would dare or presume to touch it, open it, and look upon what is inside. Therefore we cannot estimate its worth in terms that ordinary men could understand. But is there any of us here who doubts its provenance?”
He waved his hand again towards the jars. “But we also found these. Sealed jars, filled with ancient, brittle scrolls. You have said nothing, but I know that many of you must be disappointed that the treasure you have worked so hard to find seems to have so little substance. Some of you might even think it worthless, a poor reward for so much dedication in time and brutal work. But I promise you, Brothers all, that had every jar we found been full of precious jewels, they would not, could not, have begun to approach the value of what we have found instead. This”—he held up the document in his hand and used it to indicate the others on the table behind him—“and these, are the keys to those.” Again he indicated the jars.
“I am not a greatly learned man, but I have spent much time being taught by others who are, and who have studied the Lore and records of our Order throughout their lives, and I have managed to learn enough to enable me, at least, to recognize and to authenticate what we have found here as being the genuine and original records of what our Order calls the Jerusalem Community, the original Assembly, the original church, if you will, established by Jesus and his followers here in this city. James, the brother of Jesus, was its first leader, perhaps before his brother’s death, but certainly afterwards.”
He allowed that to settle in their minds before going on. “I know you all recall the shock and consternation you felt soon after your initiation to the Order, when you first learned of our belief that all is not as it should be within the Christian Church as it exists today. Acceptance of that, the first tenet of the Order, was a harrowing and difficult experience. I know it was for me, as a young man of eighteen, because I had come from a devoutly Christian family, as had every one of you, and it seemed to me that I was being asked to condone and accept a heresy that involved the repudiation of the teachings of the hallowed Saint Paul and the entire New Testament.
“But, like all of you, I became convinced—in a surprisingly short time, I remember—by the scholarship and the logic of my teachers and the Order itself. I quickly came to accept and believe that Simon Peter was not the first leader of the Church; he was not the first Pope, as the Church would have us believe. That honor belonged to James, the brother of Jesus, known to his followers as James the Just. But the Church also teaches that Jesus had no brothers, and indeed how could he have, in their viewpoint, being born of a virgin? Are we to believe that Mary, having experienced divine intervention, then became carnal and worldly, a prey to the pleasures of the flesh?
“And so we all had to ask ourselves, at different times, the same profoundly disturbing questions. If Church doctrine is wrong in so fundamental an error as the identity of its first leader, and if the Church denies the existence of Jesus’ brothers and his family structure, then what else, which other aspects of its teachings, might come into question?”
Once again he looked from man to man, including the two senior brothers. “You all know our teachings, based upon the records and the annals in our vaults: Jesus had a family, his mother was Mary, and James the Just was one of his brothers. It was the man Paul, sometimes and confusingly known as Saul, who altered the truth for his own reasons, and most likely to fit his own designs, to make this faith politically and racially acceptable to the Romans, with their fear, distrust, and hatred of anything that was Jewish.
“Jesus was arrested and executed for his radical beliefs, for his political activities. Crucifixion was the fate of political dissidents and rebels.
“The strange thing is, Brothers, and once more you know this from our Order’s teachings, that the death of Jesus provoked no significant reaction in Jerusalem or anywhere else. He died, and his brother James continued to direct the affairs of their community. It was in reaction to the murder of James, assassinated years later on the steps of the temple of Herod, that civil unrest and open war broke out, and soon after that, sent by his father, Vespasian, the Roman general Titus led an avenging army to obliterate Jerusalem and its insurgents, and to destroy the temple, believing that only thus could they break the spirit of the Jews.
“They were wrong. They destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, but the members of the Assembly saw the end approaching, in time to conceal their precious records—this treasure—and to escape the destruction of the city, carrying with them sufficient written information to ensure that someday, when the troubles had died down and been forgotten, their descendant
s would be able to return and reclaim their history.
“We, my friends, are those descendants. And that history is what we have rediscovered: the complete record, we believe, of the Jerusalem Community, its achievements, its people and their ancestry, the tenets and articles of their beliefs, and their struggles to redeem their people from the tyranny of the Herod family and the infamous, repressive religion they had foisted upon the entire Hebrew race.”
St. Clair sat motionless, holding his breath and feeling the pounding of his heart as de Montbard stopped to think through his next words.
“That is what you have unearthed, Brothers. The true and incontrovertible story of what really happened to Jesus, his family and friends, and the religion, or the beliefs, by which they lived. And now all that remains to be done is to translate these scrolls. It will be a prodigious task and a fearsome responsibility. Your primary work here is now almost done, and from this point forward you will be able to spend more time on your secondary responsibility, the guardianship of the roads of Outremer. My task, in the time that now begins, will be to examine what we have—not to translate it, for I have neither the skills nor the time for that, but to use what little skill I have, aided by the documents entrusted to me by my superiors in the Order, to ensure that everything we have here is intact, and that it is, beyond dispute, what we believe it to be. And so I must begin working immediately, and you may retire to discuss this among yourselves and to ponder the consequences, all of them unforeseeable, that must undoubtedly come to pass in the years ahead.
“I know I have no need to remind you of your oath of secrecy and the need to keep this information absolutely secure and unsuspected by anyone not of our brotherhood, but I also know you will forgive me for bringing it back to your awareness. Be more careful from this day forth than you have ever been in guarding our secrets. And now, with the agreement of Brother Hugh, who is Master here, I thank you all on behalf of every brother in the Order of Rebirth. You have, by your own efforts, brought about that Rebirth.”
The meeting broke up at that point and the brethren dispersed, talking quietly among themselves, but St. Clair left the room alone and walked off by himself, his mind filled with the wonders of all that had happened to him and around him in the previous month, and as he walked he felt himself grow buoyant, as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders and he was free to blow in the wind, weightless and able to drift where the breeze took him.
THAT EPISODE had occurred almost two months earlier, and St. Clair reflected that de Montbard’s work had continued quietly since then, with none of the brotherhood making any attempt to ask questions about the progress of his investigations. By and large, work had continued as before, but with freedom from the years-long need to dig, the program of patrols had been expanded and intensified until, the previous evening, de Payens had announced the impending return to France. It had been decades since any of the brothers had seen their homeland, and so the selection of the third envoy had been viewed with great enthusiasm and suspense. The draw had been made immediately, and St. Clair, to the good-natured chagrin of everyone else, had won.
Even as he accepted the position, however, St. Clair had been aware that Gondemare, who was arguably the quietest of all the brethren, had been more deeply disappointed than any of the others, and his conscience had begun to plague him. Gondemare, like Payn Montdidier, as St. Clair knew well, had been widowed early and had come to Outremer soon after the death of his wife. Unlike Payn, however, Gondemare had left several young children behind in the care of relatives, and word had reached him, a few years earlier, that those children had produced grandchildren. This might have been Gondemare’s only opportunity to meet those grandchildren, and St. Clair had gone to bed that night with that knowledge in his mind, and had been unable to sleep. He had no family of any closeness remaining in Anjou, and although he would have enjoyed returning there, it would have been for no real purpose other than his personal attendance to the duties of his Order—a task that Gondemare could accomplish just as easily as he. Besides—and this was the awareness that had troubled him more than any other—he, among all of the brotherhood here, was the one who had broken all his vows and proved himself, in his own eyes at least, to be unworthy of the honor involved in representing his brethren on this expedition. And so St. Clair had spent an entirely sleepless night and had arisen well before dawn, to walk the streets and struggle with what he ought to do.
He had finally decided, with great relief, to relinquish his place to Gondemare, and at that point, engrossed in his own thoughts as he was, he might never have become aware of Odo at all, had it not been for the bishop’s last spurt of speed in seeking to avoid him. St. Clair sensed, rather than saw, a sudden movement and looked over just in time to see a man’s shape vanishing into the alley. He recognized something familiar about it, something in the way the fellow moved, but by the time his attention sharpened sufficiently, the figure had vanished, and St. Clair walked past the alley, glancing casually down its length just in time to see the figure turn left and disappear from view, once again leaving him with an elusive feeling of having recognized the man. He hesitated, aware of an urge to follow, then shrugged and kept walking.
He had gone no more than ten or twelve paces, however, when he realized, against all logic, that the scurrying figure he had seen reminded him unmistakably of the Patriarch’s amanuensis, Odo, the Bishop of Fontainebleau. He knew he must be mistaken, for the man he had twice glimpsed had been shabbily dressed, far too shabbily to be a bishop, but then, as he remembered the shiftiness and untrustworthiness he had sensed in the selfsame bishop, his curiosity became aroused, and he retraced his steps to the mouth of the alley, where he stood for several moments gazing into its shadowed depths and then moved idly forward to the spot where he had last seen the vanishing figure.
There was nothing there. The corner he had seen was merely the entrance to a blind alley with high, blank walls on all three sides, which meant that the hurrying man, whoever he had been, had entered it purely to avoid being seen from where St. Clair had been watching. His curiosity now fully engaged, St. Clair left the alley again and turned left, lengthening his pace in pursuit of the enigmatic shadow, aware that he was in unknown territory and that the few people he saw, all of them men, were staring at him with pronounced hostility. Unperturbed, he shifted his sword belt, bringing his hilt closer to hand, and strode on.
FAR AHEAD OF HIM NOW, and safely concealed by several twists in the narrow, winding street, Odo was congratulating himself on his avoidance of being seen, when he emerged into a small, enclosed square and saw several swarthy, dangerous-looking men straighten up on seeing him, almost as though they had been waiting for him to appear. He knew, of course, that no such thing was possible, and so he swallowed the sudden fear that flared in him and drew himself up to his full height, holding his head high and striding resolutely forward. Even as he did so he heard a sound at his back and turned his head to see two more men converging on him from the rear, both of them holding long, curved daggers. Choking on a strangled cry of fear, he swung around in a complete circle, counting six men, all of whom now held bare blades, and saw that they all came to a halt, surrounding him but several paces distant. He was steeling himself to challenge them, to tell them who he was, when he felt his heart and his soul shrivel within him.
“Bishop.” The single word was spoken quietly, but there was no doubting what it was or what it meant, and he turned, suddenly terrified, to face the direction from which it had come. A single man, tall and slim and dressed from head to foot in the long, flowing black robes of a desert nomad, was walking towards him, his face concealed except for his dark, unblinking eyes, which were fixed on Odo’s. He approached to within two paces of the bishop, who stood frozen, and then he spoke again, another single, unmistakable word. “Arouna.” Then, before Odo could even begin to react to what he had heard, the fellow struck.
For the briefest of moments, Odo thought the man had p
unched him in the stomach, the blow heavy and solid, driving the wind from him, but then his assailant twisted his wrist, hard, turning the blade in Odo’s flesh and dragging its razor-sharp edge up along the inner curve of his ribs and across, eviscerating him so that, as the incredible pain belatedly struck home, Odo felt his bowels sag loose and tumble out into his clothing. His mouth opened and closed, emitting only a high-pitched whine of fear and agony, his voice stilled forever, but before he could lose consciousness, his killer leaned close and breathed into his ear, “This for Princess Alice, a wedding gift, and for Arouna’s father, vengeance. You bought this death when you befouled his daughter.” He then whipped out his blade and stepped back, watching as Odo fell to his knees and unaware that the bishop’s last conscious thought was of Alice, the faithless bitch, and how she would now claim his treasure.
With a wave of his hand, Hassan the Shi’a sent his Assassins melting into the surrounding doors and alleyways before he removed a folded letter from his breast and tucked it carefully into the dead man’s clothing where it would not be stained by his blood. Without even wrinkling his nose at the stench of Odo’s loosened bowels, he wiped his blade clean on the dead man’s cloak and casually walked away, leaving the square deserted.
Mere moments later, St. Clair stepped into the small square.
THE ASSASSINATION of a bishop caused an uproar among the Frankish community, but it was short lived, since the letter found in his clothing detailed the bishop’s sins and transgressions, and the murdered body of a young Muslim woman, the daughter of a local sheikh, was discovered a short time later, in the house that was soon proved to be held in Odo’s name. Within the day, two more Franks were found dead together, murdered in the same manner, one of them the spy Gregorio, and the other a sergeant brother of the order of the knight monks, Giacomo Versace. This discovery, too, caused little public fuss, since the men’s association with Odo was already known, their names written clearly in the letter found on the bishop’s body, but the killers of all four went undiscovered.