But at that moment from above there came the axe cut and to Jourdain the dawn became a shadow of something brighter still, since he was floating over the world and from this great height he saw the sun reflecting from the gold dome of the Temple in Jerusalem and his soul smiled.
‘Hey Etienne!’ it said. ‘It is the centre of the world!’
THE SEVENTH CARD
THE HIEROPHANT
64
THE SEAL
Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof ?
Revelation 5:2
Etienne found the underground chapel not displeasing to his eye. Here he said the quiet worship of the holy office and found in the listening something soothing to his soul. In the solitude of the round nave created out of stone, beneath the man-made reflection of the great dome of heaven suspended above, he felt a harmony of feelings, a reminder of tranquil prayers beneath stars.
Penitent and contemplative since that night, he now spent his time labouring in silence. This inner hermitage he found to his liking, since the world here was not as it had been. For among such things as this familiarity felt and acknowledged, there was also the truth that what Etienne encountered with his eye and ear was strangely counterfeit: an illusion of life.
All that was would never again exist. The Holy Land was gone forever, his Grand Master, his brothers, and with them all hopes were changed. One needed a new eye to look upon those hopes with will in the heart. A new ear had to stretch to hear with fresh intention. The eye of his spirit had become old, and his ear was stubborn with the echoes of his dead friends.
He was taken with a desire to go up to the courtyard, for he had heard the sounds of a battle. Then he remembered that it had been some time ago, for there lay his body still and dead beside the altar. He looked at it now. It did not seem to him a pious thing, but a thing of the earth.
He lay beside it and looked up to the symbols scratched upon the stone of the chapel. One day men would try to decipher them and they would not understand their meaning.
Something came then.
Twice he looked out from his meditation to see the apparition standing before him. Twice he looked up again to the ceiling of the chapel and continued his meditation. Something told him it would not leave him until he turned his attention to it.
Etienne! Ecoutes . . . You have travelled the path between the two towers and escaped the wiles of the dog and the wolf, you have been two things and to these are to be added a third life.
He took a long time to face that voice. When he did he observed a figure whose light was made too bright to be penetrated coming from out of the sun towards him. He squinted.
From whence comes the sun?
The bell tolled . . . since his friends had died in that struggle it seemed the bells always tolled chapter in the hall beyond the grilled manhole. The figure came closer.
It was St Michael. St Michael had come to deliver him of his burden.
He closed his eyes.
He felt the splintering of stars in his head. The world blinked and longed to be beyond itself.
You are grown old, Etienne.
65
THE ANSWER
In my end is my beginning
Mary Queen of Scots
She had grown old, like that other woman who had saved the boy Etienne from the pyre. Now as she sat near the door to her shop, the day, the writer and the cards melted into the sun and a voice spoke to her.
Do you remember?
She shrugged it away, sour in her heart. ‘I remember the folly of men!’
It is time.
‘Please!’ she pleaded. ‘They are all dead now . . . and I can do nothing for them. How may I leave my shop . . . must I not guard the seal?’ She frowned, struggling to surface from the entangled remains of familiar things. ‘No . . . I have no seal . . .’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘He has hidden it!’
Her life as an old woman, a keeper of memories, became less visible and grew distant, passionless, and once again she saw the knight Etienne. He was taking himself through the bitter corridors to the courtyard flooded with moonlight. When he came to the manhole he set down his candle and removed the grille.
He let down the rope ladder and made his difficult descent, one rung at a time. His bones made a stiffness in his back when he landed on the stone flooring beside the bowl. He made a pull on the ladder and it came down.
He would not need it, since he knew he would not leave this place.
He stood paused, taking in a difficult breath, the pain in his side, the pain that came from his heart, had seized the fingers of his hand in a stronghold of spasms. There was little time to do what had to be done. Bent and pain-ridden he took himself through that darkness lit by the meagre light to the altar in the south. He placed the candle at the foot of the little effigy of Christ; it made shadows over the Vesica Pisces carved into the altar’s stone face. He traced the grooves with his fingers – the bladder of the fish, the womb of God, beneath it the twin circles of duality. Raising his eyes he saw only vaguely what lay inscribed with pigment on the domed ceiling and despite the chill, the damp-cold that sunk to the bones, the symbols filled him with warmth. It occurred to him now that his strange Egyptian dreams of the great sarcophagus of stone, the dreams of the small flickering flame, had been a prediction of this end. But he had little time to think on it, for he was once more struck by the pain that yawned in his chest and left him gasping for air. He would have to gather the forces that lay unspent in his mind, heart and will, to keep from dying long enough to lay the seal to rest – before that part of him that was wedded to evil made a move to prevent it.