Christian was silent.
Jacques raised brows and searched his eyes.
‘And you will make a step from the light to the darkness?’
‘If I could but live once again in the lightness of the moment, in such simplicity!’ Jacques answered him. ‘Ahh, it would be a respite from the complex darkness of these future concerns. But the world moves in complicated rounds, not simple ones, brother, as you know.’
‘To be but a leaf falling from a tree,’ Christian added. ‘To be a tree. The grass and the sky and the dirt in which lives the creative power behind it!’
Now a look passed over Jacques’ face that creased his scars and raised his brows. ‘You seem like those Persian mystics, who spin words into mysteries.’
‘I shall let you in on a secret . . . these words are a mystery to me as well!’ He smiled and chuckled and gestured for the water, which Jacques gave him little by little from an earthenware cup.
‘Come,’ he said, when he was finished. ‘Move closer, I am weary and you are right, I prepare to join my friend Eisik in that great sea of souls who bask in the eternal, in the arms of the great wise mother of God . . . but this dawn we sit as friends, one last time, so let us talk now, you and I. What keeps you in your faith as all things fall to pieces?’
Jacques de Molay answered readily, his eyes far away. ‘My love for Christ.’
Christian looked at the man, at the hooked nose and bones of the face too thin of skin scarred silver over the cheeks. The greying hair, the straight-cut shoulders. There were many Templars and many Grand Masters but only a man such as Jacques de Molay could be the last Grand Master of the Order. He wondered where a man such as sat beside him might find comfort.
‘What is this love of Christ, Jacques, if not a murmur? Something fleeting that is felt in the heart and as soon as it is felt it vanishes? It is a thought as fragile as a rose that blooms only in the mind, an ideal that fires up the will and dies down again, Jacques, and can easily become only a dream that slips from the memory into darkness like a rock thrown down a well. You have lived this love of Christ for all the world! Forging ahead upon the backs of the gods! And in this swift life there is no room for those who cannot follow. Some must fall behind. Too much too soon . . .’
Jacques de Molay nodded. ‘This is so, but what shall remain of our struggles when all is lost?’
‘A shape formed from the sacrifices of so many into which Christ can drop his heart . . . it is as yet no more than a seed ...’
‘This is a pleasant dream.’
‘What a man dreams today is carried on into eternity. It creates the world for those who come after him. So tell me, what is your resolve?’
Jacques de Molay looked up at this. ‘To follow my duty to its end,’ he said. ‘I shall not resist what the Lord has waiting for me . . . We shall sacrifice ourselves rather than be sacrificed.’ The Grand Master looked into Christian’s eyes and it seemed then to the old monk as if a rush of surprise and wonder and grief entered into them. He was struggling, Christian knew, to rein in a passion that was like a wild horse headed for doom.
‘You are a patient man, Jacques, you have never asked me why I have spent my long and sinful life in this place, surrounded by walls, scribbling on parchment . . . why you have sequestered me and kept me safe. I shall now tell you that I have been setting down with my unworthy faculties what shall remain hidden and unknown – the secrets of the Order.’
Jacques looked upon the old man with surprised intensity.
‘Yes,’ Christian nodded. ‘The secrets . . . these things too shall remain for tomorrow, though hidden. I have written how one day men will accept into their souls the essence of Christ, in the way that a seal makes an imprint in wax . . . This day shall come, but there is something I shall impart to you now that I have left unwritten in my history, something you should know – sacramentum regis – the kingly sacrament. Come . . . come closer still . . .’
Jacques let out a breath like a man full of dying thoughts and stretched his neck forward to lean in to him, every muscle taut.
‘The seal which you carry upon your finger,’ he said, taking Jacques de Molay’s hand in his, ‘it is a symbol of the wisdom of the Order handed to our first Grand Master, Hugues, bless his soul . . . It was something known only to those who were initiated into the secret Gospel of the two Johns, into the mystery of the sons of the widow . . . vouchsafed by Ormus, disciple of St Mark who was the disciple of Paul. You see . . . there on the surface, the seal tells of the Holy Sepulchre, as does the second seal, the replica that is worn by your seneschal . . . However, as you know there is something that lies hidden, something peculiar and unknown, a mystery behind the mystery of its miracle . . . Bring me the quill,’ he gestured to the rough-worn wooden table by the window.