‘Oh horrible sight!’ Jacques de Molay cried, trembling, but he could not look away since the vision held him in its grasp. It had one last thing to tell him. Amongst this boiling multitude of death and blood, he heard his own name.
Jacques de Molay . . . this day thou art avenged!
He blinked and the world was returned to its original state. The sun had moved beyond the aperture and the vision was dis¬solved into weevils and leftover soup. Jacques de Molay sat with the breath knocked out of him, looking this way and that as if he had misplaced something of himself inside the vision and would now have it back. His heart moved against his thoughts and he felt a pain deep in the marrow of his bones. A groaning and a creaking, as much as if the weight of such a vision were settling into him and taking its time to inform him of the added burden.
He took the bowl and placed it on the clay floor and lay then, upon his pallet, hugging at his sides to stop his trembling.
And his mind, having found it unbearable to remain in the world, drew a veil over his eyes and he fell to sleep.
47
NINE TEMPLARS
. . . let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.
Romans 13:12
Vienne, October 1311
Roger de Flor looked up at the fat moon held about by clouds. ‘Soon it is dawn. Look, there is old Saturn,’ he told Andrew beside him.
‘I don’t know what they shall think of it,’ said the Templar with a temper held in and anxious. ‘This is a madness!’
Roger de Flor smiled. ‘Then they shall think us madmen!’ He laughed out loud. The others laughed too – brothers in hiding they had met in their travels. In a nearby paddock sheep bleated, and the cold came in from the mountains, and the men upon their horses returned to their quiet, with their white mantles flapping, tilting against the leaves and dust that hit them like needle points.
‘He shall call the bluff,’ Andrew warned, ‘and we shall be dead by nightfall. Why do you come, Roger of Flor? To die with dead men?’
Roger made a frown over his disordered face and such a grin spread out below it as to light up the night. There was, after all, truth in such a question. Had he not also found it a marvel that a mercenary of his calibre, devoted to his faithlessness, had maintained faith in the worthless enterprise begun at Famagusta? And as for fidelity, at any time – while they lay in wait at Atouguia for orders from the Grand Master – could he not have taken the gold and sailed on to Syria or Egypt or the ends of the earth? Yes, he could have saved himself the headache of an ill-fated journey, for one thing, and for another he would still have his galley. As it was, the Eagle was drowned and if that were not enough, he was finding himself on a fool’s expedition to Vienne to throw down a gauntlet under the Pope’s nose! Under the nose of a world that wished to burn him and to throw his bones to dogs! What strange wonder had passed through his heart to make his previous life dwindle to a small thing? The realisation had come to him in small measures, little by little, so that by the time he was sat upon that miserable beach before the figure of Marcus in the throes of his madness, he recognised how much he himself had altered.
Since Cyprus, Roger had known the true intentions of the Grand Master: if the Order was to face peril, the gold’s fate would be to drown in the sea. He had known it at Atouguia when he observed Marcus’s worship of the gold grow, and he had known it when the galley had left Portugal for Scotland. With this knowledge, Roger had of necessity thrown his galley in the way of the English ship – how else could he alone have prevented Marcus from accomplishing his doings of making a god out of the gold?
Jacques de Molay had mistrusted a commander of the Order and had laid all the hopes of his heart upon the shoulders of a mercenary! How had the old man known that such trust and loyalty and brotherhood would make an inroad into Roger’s soul?
Jacques de Molay, it seemed, had known the two men better than they had known themselves!
He looked at this and it filled him with bewilderment, and a moment later he realised he had not answered Andrew. ‘Why have I come? The burden of trust is a good weight, my friend, it builds muscles of faith . . . I have come because I have begun to remember the Order and why I once thought it valiant and good. Besides, I am immortal, old man, and petulant at that! I wish to see the commissioners when we wave the Beauseant in their faces. History shall record it. The people will know it. Nine knights on horseback ride into the grand cathedral before the Holy Father! What a marvel!’
Andrew huffed but the others laughed at this and brandished their blades in the waning night. The sheep answered by moving off as they approached the city gates.