Iterius shifted about, thinking. ‘Will you not protect me?’
‘Protect you?’ The Pope raised a brow. ‘Why should I protect you? To me you are a foul, spindly little weed and you must, in the course of good husbandry, be plucked out!’ He took a sip of his tea, now gone cold, and made a wince. ‘All that I am left with is the small comfort of knowing that Philip has been equally served by you!’
‘Your Holiness . . . if I may? What must I do now? I did not betray you . . .’
‘And you have done as you should, my child.’
‘And?’ Iterius asked.
‘And?’ Clement raised his brows.
‘The King has his assassins around every corner . . .’
‘Poison him,’ Clement said jovially, feeling the effects of the tea.
‘How may I do it if I am exiled from his affections?’
‘Well then . . .’ The Pope perused the pathetic form of the infidel before him, and as though advising him of some pleasantry, said, ‘There is nothing for you to do but go back to the death that awaits you.’
The evening grew cool and the earthy scent of thyme and basil hung down over the garden. The sun had descended below the horizon of distant hills. Iterius crossed the courtyard and made for a door to the cloisters. There, hidden in the shadows, a cowled monk took a vial from him. A moment later the Egyptian was gone into the void.
And from the garden there came the sound of the Pope’s loud resonant snores.
53
CASTLE ON THE MOUNTAIN
Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.
St John 6:12
Lockenhaus, March 1313
Looking out at the sea of snow, Etienne was reminded of the day they had come by the castle on the mountain.
The night they arrived, there had been rain. They had come round the bend of that narrow passage with their bodies curved to the wind, and in the shelter of frosty pines the three men had looked upward to the ramparts and battlements and had thought it a fine place to rest.
It was now four years since they had set off from the woman’s house. Time had dulled the pain of it but it had not hid it from his eye.
He remembered Jourdain’s words to him that day, ‘Courage is born of pain,’ and now it seemed to him false. It was not courage that he had ever felt standing upon the parapets of his life. He had only discerned cowardice in his limbs, hatred in his heart and doubt that made a fog in his head. These things had lain with him on this side of the abyss that existed between him and God and between his Order and the world of men.
Now, standing before the material abyss below the castle walls, he misplaced his gaze into the distance, into the vastness of the horizon, whose four sides showed him endless rows of fir trees that melted into the steely sky and continued to eternity. This wild and far-flung vision showed him how insignificant he was to his faith and to the world, since all things continued without him and nothing was unhinged or thrown over the rim of the world because he was not present in it. The snow, profound and compelling, inclined upon the speck of land as if to better observe him and drew around him untroubled and unchanged, washing past the mountain towards the vastness – it was a small thing, this great castle, and he, even smaller upon it.
He found worship in this. A humbling reverence no less faithful than that which looked to heaven from inside the walls of a church. To look at the world, inhabited by spirits, with the sun leaning upon it, or the moon, or the wind whipping the trees, his soul climbing heavenward and down again – this was his new devotion. In this picture before him he had seen his own spirit mirrored, and listened to himself speaking from it as though it were an instrument by which he could come to know something of his nature. It told him he must not only look for his Lord in those marks made by Him upon the earth: inside the wishing soul of a deer or in the sap of a tree. He must not find Him only in the wind or the rain or the lightning that tore through the thunderous clouds. Such devotion alone would put him out of balance and take from him his communion with other men. His Lord must be looked for also, and in the same measure, in all those whom he had known. He was one part Jourdain, another Andrew, and another part Jacques. He was the woman Amiel, in her soft silences, in the darkness of the lashes around her eyes. He was set upon the creases on the face of the old man and He lived in the laughter of the child. He was one part Iterius and another part Marcus. He lived in the hearts of all as that part of them which, to his sense of it, must be the higher and more refined part. He told himself that the Order of the Temple formed a community, a brotherhood, so that worship of Christ experienced among brothers might broaden to the worship of Christ in every man.