Fifth Gospel(149)

And yet all is not lost. I look now to the summit of Bidorta like that centurion who long ago sat upon a horse waiting for the sun to creep over the rim rock of the mountains. This dawn however, I am not looking for Mithras, I am looking for the sign that our treasure is safe for only then can we go to our deaths in peace. My eyes are fixed to that summit as I walk into the palisades built to contain us on this field, a field which one day you will know as The Field of Fires. Holding the hand of the Marquésia de Lantar on one side and the hand of Saissa de Congost on the other I step onto the logs constructed into one great pyre and I think of Guilhabert.

Poor Guilhabert had seen the future those moments before he died. He had seen where his promise might lead and had been desperate for my forgiveness. How strange and yet how natural it is to know that he was once that stubborn woman, Claudia Procula! In Guilhabert her independence had been transformed into service, her love into his joy, her devotion into his understanding. The woman I revered in one life became my dearest friend in the next, and so it will go on, from life to life.

But the soldiers of France are setting fire to the straw and the fagots that have been dipped in pitch. The air is damp and the smoke rises black at the perimeter and we, two hundred men and women, all Friends of God, huddle in the middle, watching the plumes stain the air around us. The black friars, the inquisitors and the Clergy move away, singing their songs and so they do not see what I see.

There is the sign! High above on the snowy summit of Bidorta a light is kindled, a blaze of yellow fire as bright as the sun illuminates the dawn and causes us all to smile! I am full of peace, for the child is safe! You see amongst those many things that Lea showed me was the identity of the charge of the Marquésia de Lantar. That beautiful boy who is Lazarus-John born again. He is our greatest treasure, a child destined to be the founder of a great school of knowledge whose members will be called Rosicrucians, those who can add the living wisdom of the rose to the cross of death, for Lazarus John was baptised with fire by Christ Himself. Perhaps in those far off times I shall meet him again? Perhaps I shall be one of his followers?

Matteu will also safeguard books of John and those writings I have called The Fifth Gospel which are interpolated among them. For now they are safe! Lea showed me how in future times Matteu will return to find these treasures again as a young Grail historian, a German. He will save them from the grasp of unworthy souls.

But the bee’s buzzing takes me from my ruminations. It circles over my head one last time before flying upwards to that saffron dawn. And as the flames rise higher and come nearer and the heat begins to prick my skin – in that moment before the pain consumes me and my own screams fill my ears – I imagine that I follow the bee out of this momentary terror and waste. I imagine that I float over the Fields of Fires a moment before flying away with her to a rose hedge to wait for the future.

In that far off time the sun will continue to rise in the east and to set in the west, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci will have come and gone, thoughts will travel from one end of the earth to the other in the blink of an eye and a man will be able to hold all the books in the world in the palm of one hand. And if you are holding this book in your hand, then perhaps it is because The Fifth Gospel has not been forgotten?

Only you can know this with certainty, my friend, for although it is true that no accident rules the universe, it is also true that the heart of a man has a will and something of his future must remain a mystery, even to God.