The Flaming Sword

by Breck England

  It was not long before her GeM rang and Mortimer ordered her down to dinner. “Maryse. The white thread and the black thread look-alike. The shofar has sounded! Time to break the fast!”

  She had risen, dressed, and descended automatically to the restaurant. The little group was already seated at a round table on a veranda beyond French doors. They had a view of the old city, framed by a lone black palm hanging over one side of the table and an isolated black cypress on the other. Beyond them, the walls of the citadel shone in the yellow light like the frayed teeth of a skull.

  Jean-Baptiste Mortimer, in full knightly evening dress, stood as she approached and settled her into a chair. Between Mortimer and Grammont sat Dr. Rabia al-Adawi, her face sober, strained. Ari sat next to Maryse.

  The dinner was quiet. Grammont ate artistically, savoring the pear crèpes and the whitefish with a frail radish salad, commenting on each course to no one in particular. Mortimer had double helpings and tossed off bits of poetry.

  “ ‘Now I see all the bright-eyed Achaeans, but not the two leaders, Castor and Pollux, both my brothers.’ So said Helen of Troy. The Iliad. Castor and Pollux were dead, you see? The Gemini? They were the twin sons of Zeus, who seduced their mother Leda in the body of a great swan. What do you say, Grammont?”

  The Frenchman was contemplating the texture of the whitefish. “I haven’t the remotest idea what you’re talking about.”

  Mortimer piled more of the succulent radishes onto his plate and munched for a while. Then he held up his fork. “Now I see. Do you remember, Maryse, I’ve always wondered why the Gemini were in the wrong place on the Zodiac Window at Chartres. It’s simple, and it’s all wrong. The Chandos twins. They were never intended to be Cherubim.”

  Ari smirked at the old man, who paused for another bite. “I see you shaking your head and smiling at the incoherent old fool, Mr. Davan. But when I say I’m still learning to read the Cathedral, perhaps you’ll understand how great—and unfathomable—a book it really is.”

  Eventually, dessert was cleared and tea and coffee brought. Maryse asked Rabia with pain in her voice, “How is Dr. Ayoub?”

  Rabia glanced up from her plate, and then at the horizon. “He is resting. I’ve given him medication.” She gave Maryse the hint of a hopeful smile. “I think there will be time.”

  “Time?”

  “To educate another son.”

  Ari sighed and pushed himself away from the table. “To what end? Maybe the time of the Cherubim is over.” He picked up his wine glass. Staring into it, he asked, “Will anyone ever trust the Cherubim again?”

  Grammont looked alarmed enough to put down his fork.

  Rabia laid her hand on Mortimer’s. “Oh no, the Cherubim must continue. The flaming sword burns on as long as there are people who want peace. Do not be despairing. Remember, ‘At all times God walks with the lost-hearted.’ ”

  Mortimer smiled back at her and finished the verse from the Koran. “ ‘We who see nothing and from a distance cry, O God!’ Wise, just like your father. You’re right, of course. We blunder along, thinking the whole show depends on us, when in the end we are only witnesses after all.”

  “Witnesses?” Maryse looked coolly at him. “Witnesses of what?”

  “Of love,” Rabia whispered.

  “Love?” Maryse stared across the city at the blinding globe of the Dome of the Rock. She felt that the whole long labyrinth of her life had led her to that empty temple on the hill, only to find nothing at its heart. She remembered Ezekiel—the withdrawal of the shekinah from the temple of Solomon. “It’s a long time now since God left us. If you love someone, you don’t abandon them.”

  Mortimer sipped his wine and, after a slow silence, touched his lips with a napkin. “There was once a King of England. A very noble, memorable king, he mourned the loss of the Order of Templars, the protectors of the Mount of God in Jerusalem. An evil plot had destroyed that order, leaving the Mastership vacant and the knights scattered or dead. So he built a new order of guardian knights, the Order of Gardeurs. The twenty-four knights of the Gardeurs symbolized the twenty-four angels of the Apocalypse who guard the throne of Christ.

  “The King was hopeful. But then he lost his beloved eldest son, the master of the order in whom he had invested the guardianship of the future. The father despaired. His other sons were quarrelsome, wasteful; none of them was worthy to guard Christ’s throne.

  “But the dead prince had a bosom friend, a noble young man who loved peace and honor more than life. He stood before Edward III, and the King loved Sir John Chandos and privately made him the Lion of England, the Master of the Temple.

  “A long line of successors stayed faithful to that charge, even after the Order degenerated into a shallow honorary fraternity and its name was corrupted to ‘the Order of the Garter.’ ”

  Mortimer leaned forward with sudden intensity and spoke to Maryse. “We have not lost that faith. We serve that throne as knights should. When one falls, another is raised up. We are tested, yes. Tried and tested like fire right down to our bones. And the test consists of this: will love die in us, or will it flame up again and make us one?”

  Maryse gazed into the colorless wine in her glass.

  “You’re a witness too. You saw it today,” Mortimer urged. He gestured toward Ari. “The sons of Abraham, Arabs and Israelis, were saved once again. Israel is bound to that Rock, to that altar, but only through love is he ever redeemed.”

  “I don’t follow,” Maryse said, hesitating.

  “Why did this young man, this Ari Davan, come back alone this morning? Why didn’t he alert the whole Israeli Defense Force and let them do the job? Hasn’t it occurred to you yet?”

  Maryse turned and looked intently at Ari, burned, bronzed, and thin in his linen suit, his face abraded by sharp rocks, his injured leg bent to one side. The boy on the mountain…

  She felt hot tears in her eyes, stood and went to the wall overlooking the trees of the garden. Ari struggled to his feet and followed her, clumsily. Together they gazed past the palms and the cypresses at the deepening glow of the Old City. In the distance, tiny figures in white were leaving the citadel as the traffic picked up in the streets. Jerusalem had survived the day.

  “It’s over. Yom Kippur,” Ari said, leaning on the wall. He pictured Tovah Kristall in her chair at headquarters, wrapped in a tobacco fog, relieved that the crisis had passed. “The last prayer for the Day of Atonement is the Neilah. It’s the one prayer I remember because after that we could go home and eat.” He laughed softly. “Neilah means ‘locking.’ When the gates of the Temple were locked for good, long ago, there was despair. The Neilah is a plea to God to unlock the gates again.”

  Timid, she touched his hand and looked at him, eyes newly open.

  Mortimer approached with two rings in his palm. “This one belonged to the late Emmanuel Shor, the faithful Ox.” He held up a simple, worn circlet engraved DVCEI. “Some say it is a relic of Maimonides, the great defender of the faith of Israel. I don’t believe it, do you?” He slipped it onto Ari’s finger.

  “And this,” he held up a massive ring emblazoned with a golden lion and a royal crown athwart a world globe. He put it in Maryse’s hand. “The Lion. I saved it from the ashes. My dear, from the day Kane sent you to me in Chartres, that day you turned up a starving, dirty, dizzy adolescent, I suspected you were the one. It was in the cards.”

  He put his hand to her cheek and then turned back to the table. “Now, they say the lioness is the fiercer of the breed. What do you say, Grammont?”

  The Frenchman primly swallowed his coffee. “But you are the Angel, and you are seventy-five years old. Who will replace you?”

  Mortimer shrugged and winked at Ari and Maryse. “I don’t need replacing. Not yet.”

  Rabia al-Adawi held up a glass of tea. “There’s a saying of the Prophet. ‘I swear by the One who holds my so
ul in His hand that you will not enter paradise until you believe. And you won’t be believed until you love one another, and until you spread the ‘salaam’ among you.’ ”

  “In that case, Salaam aleykum,” Mortimer intoned quietly, raising his glass. “Peace be with you.”

  “Shalom,” Ari smiled at Maryse. “Peace.”

  The End

  About the Author

  Breck England juggles writing thrillers with composing classical music, French cooking, teaching MBA’s in the world-class Marriott School of Business, ghostwriting for authors such as Stephen R. Covey, and (formerly) singing in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. He is the author of The Tarleton Murders: Sherlock Holmes in America, published by Mango. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Utah. Breck lives with his wife Valerie in the Rocky Mountains of Utah among nearly innumerable grandchildren.