My will is not my own!
The air agitated around him.
‘Old man! Dead man! The evil in you shall overtake the good!’
It – will – not!
The chapel swirled. There was a noiseless thunder. The creature was poised at the edges of Etienne’s soul. ‘Where is your Archangel now!’ it said, and at that moment Etienne was knocked back, and within him he felt the ice-sharp penetration of that creature of dark surfaces.
In his head he heard a thousand voices cry in lamentation, and wondered if they were the voices of his brothers calling to him their rebuke. But he stood firm – the power was not his to use. He would stand before the smooth eye of his foe and feel what the abyss had in the making for him. He would look to the wide spaces and fill his heart with God’s weaving love, he would gaze upwards to the heights in selfless striving.
‘Save me, oh God, by thy name!’
Shadows furled and mantled, rising black inside him. He surrendered to the will of God and prepared to succumb, to the smothering of his spirit.
Oh man, you have known yourself – now behold anew the symbol and the name of a sovereign and conquering God, through which all the Universe fears, trembles, and shudders.
From the vast shades amid which stood his hard-pressed will a growing radiance, a spirit fire, drew about him, forming a circle to resist the shadows.
A feeling of safety washed over him, there was a release and his mind fell away.
How long he lay on the stone of the chapel he could not tell. When he woke he was numb from cold and hollowed out from torment and bliss. In his heart he knew that the mystery of his Order had not been stained with iniquity, it remained inviolate and must now be put to rest. Jacques had been right – it was a powerful thing, able to make a seal upon the heart of any man, be he profane or saintly.
He was paused a long time without breath, then the bell was heard for chapter and there were sounds of footsteps coming from the dormitories. He mustered what strength was left to him since he knew the men were making their way to the hall for the council. They would be looking for him, and though his heart was swelled with anguish for it, he knew he must do it now, before they found him.
He undertook to remove the ring from his finger but it would not come since he had grown together with it and it would not live without him. His head felt light and feathery as he brought forth the skull dagger given to him by Jacques de Molay those many years ago; the same dagger with which he had killed Marcus. He used it to trace the cross over his breast and made a sign in the air with it, calling on St Michael to keep him from falling out of his head before it was done.
He held his breath and lifted the knife over his hand.
The old woman was staring at the vision before her eyes. ‘Who is it?’ she asked St Michael. ‘Who is this man Etienne?’
In so many years she had not allowed herself to think on it. Now the question that had waited behind her tongue, kept silent by a force of will, was to be answered.
She blinked and blinked again.
It is you.
She gasped, and her hands shook, a tremor passed over her and she was no longer herself but that man, that knight Etienne on his knees with the ring in his hand. ‘My faith runs in a thin, pale stream and my soul dries up as if it were barren soil. I no longer know for what purpose I have battled and struggled and died . . . for this end of ends, as an old, wasted woman?’
It is time!
‘My eyes are not worthy – they are profane!’
Behold! What has been hidden since the fall!
Etienne put down the dagger, raised the hinged lid over the seal and leant closer to the candle. The light was cast over the inward being of the ring and was reflected from brass and iron. Etienne understood what he was seeing: the figure of a pentagram fused to a hexagram overlaid by a backward ‘S’. In the middle a sun sat within the cup of a sickle moon; above it a backward word – Yom, and below that the word Layla. To the right the moon stood alone with Pisces, to the left the sun and Virgo.
At the apex the backward letters RE and IS. Etienne knew that it should have spelt REBIS had the word not been interrupted by the two staves of the sign for Twins. Below its polar opposite, Archer raised its arrow toward the sun.
With his eye he entered into those lines, into those symbols, and moved through them and out into the emptiness of space. He saw the deepest night Layla shot through with intelligible light – Yom. He saw the equilibrium of earth and heaven, birth and death, good and evil, resting upon the six-pointed star of his soul. He understood then that he was below what existed above; that to spell the great poem of the hidden word was to understand how in the trinity of his being was sung the harmony of the universe; how in his blood the throb of pure wisdom formed its forms, surging through his limbs, tearing and rushing through them as if through a burning glass and fashioning him in the shape of a pentagram. He was suspended and carried into the widths of space, where the winged sun of his heart resting within the moon of his soul was dragged backward across a path strewn with stars. He was Gemini at midday and Sagittarius at midnight; he dawned in Virgo and fell into the twilight of Pisces.