The crowd sighed. A mixture of admiration, horror and relief as the flames began to consume the pyre.
Then they lit Geoffrey de Charney’s pyre. It caught brightly. He cried out, trying to escape the flames that licked at his feet.
The Grand Master, opening his mouth in an effort to breathe, glanced over, ‘Brother . . . brother . . .’
The man, seeing his master and hearing his words, answered, ‘I follow in the way of my master, as a martyr . . . On this day I shall die with my master.’
The flames consumed them in a brilliant light that whipped them in its ardour, burning beards and hair to ashes, bones to dust. In that instant through the flames the Grand Master’s eyes widened and Philip from his balustrade could see them clearly. Eagerly he sought his way into the man’s soul as he had done so many times with others.
For a moment the King was filled with a terrible confusion; a deep doubt broached the surface of his consciousness for he was observing the sharp contrast between their souls. He pushed this doubt back with another emotion that like fingers plunged into his heart and filled it with a fierce and powerful sentiment.
‘I am God!’
But the Grand Master’s eyes would not let him be. He could not help but look, and in them he saw the panorama of the entire colourful world pass: the unsolved secret, the stillness of a lake arrested by light, a weeping child, old age, the branches of a tree, the pinpoints of stars, the whirling of planets, the red earth, an effulgent light, a radiance golden like that of the sun as it rises over Jerusalem, and it told him:
Est deus in nobis.
There is a God inside us.
58
HELL
And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it.
Revelation 9:6
April 1314
Clement lay in his bed at death’s door. His body, racked with spasms, wasted away while his doctors came and went, bleeding, purging and blistering. He was weak beyond comprehension and covered in festering wounds that would not heal.
In this state he lay, torpid, aware of the courtiers, servants, secretaries, priests and cardinals only as spectres in a confusion of noise, light and dark. Well distinguishable, however, was the pain that no longer came in waves but hurtled at his body with relentlessness: the pain of the body and the pain of conscience; but worse than that, the face of Boniface.
He struggled to free himself from the stinking rotted face of the ghost, but Boniface reached down into Clement’s abdomen with infinite patience, directing his hands, pulling, opening him up and plucking with long nervous fingers as if Clement were an instrument to be worked hard. In his ears the words: ‘And then it was commonly said that by the use of torture they had made their confessions, those of the Order.’
He saw then his engraved pearly bowels coiled, serpent-like, personified, and they turned to Clement in his stupor and smiled grotesquely. In those features there was something primeval, something familiar. The serpent curled its body wet with blood and mucus around him, tightening till he was suffocating. It opened its jaws wide, wider than the earth, encompassing all the stars, the planets and the universe. Within those jaws, like a mirror, he observed his tedious, useless life pass before the figure of Judas who gazed at it and laughed, holding out the secrets of the Temple on a parchment, which he tore to shreds. ‘Nota bene! Betrayal has its price! I’ll see you at the gates of hell!’ and his face became the face of Jacques de Molay. ‘Judas or Peter?’ the apparition asked him, melting into a fire that consumed Clement also, burning his hair, his skin, his hands, liquefying his face and popping out his eyes and, finally, dissolving him into the formless ocean into which Pilate dived down with his hands, to wash them in the blood that was coming from Clement’s anus.
But Clement was plunging into a great visceral womb, a dark hell pit, sulphurous-hot, wherein he came across the Devil who was chained to a grate with his gnarled hands grasping for his throat; but Clement was running, he ran a long way until he came to a void, a darkness so terrible, so vacuous that in it he became nothing, a nonbeing, a speck of dust, and he saw Judas once again, sitting upon an island where every day was Good Friday. He smiled, waving to him. ‘Welcome to hell, brother!’ Now Clement was yelling with all his might, his hands grasping at nothing since he was sliding down the length of a dark vulva that strained and convulsed with spasms propelling him, the grotesque child, the malignant, disfigured, deformed child, outward, where waited a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns upon its heads, its mouths open at the great, vulval gate. One head belonged to Philip, the other to the inquisitor, another was the likeness of de Nogaret, and another a picture of Nogaret’s assistant de Plaisians. There was the appearance of the Archbishop of Narbonne and the Archbishop of Sens, but the last evaded him; the neck moved this way and that, escaping scrutiny. When finally it turned in his direction, it was a most vile expression that met him. Clement vomited.