Etienne let his head hang back and tried to think of some word to turn around this strangeness but found none. If Jourdain had been here he would have thought of something.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said, bewildered.
The Grand Master let out a breath and it seemed to Etienne that in that one breath lay pain and sorrow and years that exhausted faith. ‘This holy creature is more than a seal upon our secret documents, it is more than a mark of my sovereignty. The memory of its task has not been known, and should remain so. You must find for it a dark, quiet place in which it can rest, forgotten. Men are by nature not more than animals when they see something that is to their advantage. You are my deputy, and on the surface you and I have shared the same seal; mine, however, has a hidden compartment. The Sacred Seal lies beneath, made of brass and iron. Do not look upon it for it shall steal into your heart.’
Etienne tried to fit these words into a coherent understanding but all he could say was, ‘Where shall I take it?’
‘Follow the map . . .’ The Grand Master gave him a parchment from beneath the folds of his white habit. ‘The route is marked, it is long and skirts around Paris to the north, and leads far from this place. Do not go to any of our preceptories, it shall not be safe, all except one . . . It is marked . . . there . . . in the north. From that place you may provision for the longest part of the journey, travelling the pass through the Alps to a place called Hungary from whence come the Magyars. Nearby the village of Lockenhaus there is a castle of the Order. Your journey there shall be full of peril . . . that is certain.’ He lowered his voice to the barest whisper. ‘Give me your ring and place this one upon your own finger. If they come looking, they will not realise the difference. Guard it until you are sure that all is lost . . . when you hear that all is done you shall lay it to rest.’
At that moment the entire meaning of his master’s words were made plain to him. Weary and weighed down he bowed his head. ‘My lord.’ A coldness swept over him and with it he saw pass before him the dreams of his heart – the hope for Christ’s purposes on earth and the hope for the redeeming of the Holy Land.
Jacques de Molay looked at Etienne and placed a hand over his head in a blessing. ‘My brother, my son . . . I wish to fight beside you when the time comes but it cannot be! You have your task and I have mine . . . we shall meet them in different ways.’
There was a noise outside the door to Etienne’s cell. The two men were wrenched from their meditations to it and the shadows. They saw nothing but darkness.
By the time Etienne and Jourdain had weighed down their horses with harnesses full loaded with provisions, Iterius, armed with his secret, was at the monastery of the Franciscans, begging an audience with Pope Clement.
The weather moved in, and it began to snow again.
13
THE MERCENARIES
These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth’s foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages and are dead.
A.E. Housman, ‘Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries’
March 1307
It was cold, Etienne hugged the lambskin over his shoulders as wisps of snow lay down over a group of miserable trees bare of leaves.
‘What is this?’ Gideon asked Etienne, before the fire.
‘From the north comes the wind,’ said Etienne, ‘it comes like this and hugs the edges of the world.’
Three months ago the four of them had left Poitiers. Their journey had been without incident since they had travelled under the cover of darkness, moving northwards towards the slopes of the mountains, avoiding the houses, mills and granaries that here and there dotted the countryside. They kept to rough-worn tracks and rested in wooded places. Then the country had begun to rise up into the mountains and they had made their way through narrow valleys. Today the Norman and the Catalan had hunted and slaughtered a goat, and as the dark day lay brooding upon the forest they sat at meat.
The mercenaries respected Etienne’s silence and spoke merrily amongst themselves, drinking the last of the wine and eating roasted goat and leaving him to his thoughts. They sat huddled by a great fire, looking in his direction and then upward to the clouded sky, uttering what seemed to him curses.
Unlike the mercenaries, Etienne liked the snow. It seemed fitting to him to sit with his bones shaking and his teeth clenched from cold. To be on land and suffering privation filled him with a sense of familiarity that would have been comforting were he surrounded by brothers. But he was not surrounded by brothers, he warned himself, he was among thieves, running from the ruination of the Order.
The mercenaries raised their voices in argument. Etienne ignored them and ran the plan over in his head. The gold would be sitting at Atouguia de Balaia some distance from Tomar. Marcus waited there for word. Etienne could not portend the consequences of Marcus’s failure and, worse still, the consequences of his success! But it seemed to him not altogether wrong, his wish that Marcus should fail and take the galley with its gold and its slaves, the archives and titles somewhere safe and return to France with what men of the Order would follow him to battle. He looked down at the sacred ring of his Order. It spoke to him in a mysterious tongue he did not understand. But this he understood: to take it to its resting place was to mark the end of the life he had always known and this filled him with an urge to disobedience. Once more this defiance was making itself felt among the fear and disillusion in his heart, as it had once before, at Acre. Now, however, he did not see the sin so plain to his eye and he prayed to St Michael, the Archangel of the Lord, that he might find the sin in such an urge and therefore the guilt, so that it might be duly punished.