‘Not bad!’ Delgado made a turn of the mouth. ‘There are Templars in my country, and yours, Norman? There are Templars?’
‘Yes, there are Templars.’ Gideon lay down, bored.
Delgado shook his head. ‘But so many rules! I do not like these rules, eh Gideon? No hunting, no meat, no money . . . no women?’
‘They have many rules,’ the Norman repeated, yawning and settling down to the business of sleep. ‘In the north there is another Order, they call themselves Teutons. They have women . . . and money . . . and they are all sons of sows.’
‘What else does your rule tell, Lord?’ asked Delgado.
‘How to live, how to fight and pray,’ Etienne answered.
‘We Almugavars have one rule, it is to have no rules . . . What is yours, Norman?’
‘To kill is a good rule,’ he said. ‘The most important is not to die.’
‘Yes . . . we Amulgavars never die . . .’ Delgado flashed a smile. ‘Our cry in battle is Desperte Ferre.’
Etienne looked at this with a passive curiosity.
‘It means…iron awaken! You see, lord, we never die because the iron is always awake!’ He held himself between the legs and burst with merriment.
Etienne looked up to the steely sky and hoped for peace, away from these questions and this corruption. Soon he must relieve Jourdain and he found this thought comforting.
‘And yours, lord? What is this Beauseant that you cry in battle?’
Etienne took his eyes from the day. ‘It is our standard, our flag – white and black, because we are meek and mild to our friends and treacherous to our enemies,’ he said this, almost in anger.
The Catalan merely nodded. ‘It is the same for us Amulgavars, we have two sides – bon e malament, good and bad . . . it is natural for us . . .’
Etienne was much struck by this, and the tangle of thought this comparison provoked made him move down into the damp leaves and close his eyes.
Delgado crouched on the tips of his toes a moment, like a panther ready to pounce, gave a laugh and surrendered his questions to sleep.
But sleep did not come for Etienne; he thought of the mariners’ tune sung by the Catalan, a tune he had long forgotten and now remembered with uneasiness, since it was proof that Etienne had once lived a different life.
Flors de Paradis,
Regina de bon ayre,
A vos mi ren clis,
Penedens ses cor vayre,
Forfaitz e mesquis:
Preguatz per mil salvayre
Quem guit a bon port,
Em guart de la mort
D’infer, don conort
Negus homs nos pot trayre
Per neguna sort.
The Norman and the Catalan snored, and the fire consumed itself against the cold.
14
THE GOLD
Yet shall that gold be thy bane,
and the bane of every one soever who owns it.
The Völsunga Saga, chapter XVIII
Tomar, Portugal, September 1307
Marcus returned from Atouguia de Balaia and a visit to the galley as the early afternoon sun made shadows of the trees that lined the road.
He looked about him like a man who has been in a strange land and returns home to find all things changed: the air was cooling, the lands were harvested and the grapes picked. The smell of winter was in the air. He realised with some surprise that it was now a year since the galley had left Cyprus weighed down by the Order’s gold.
On their arrival to a bay near Atouguia, Marcus had ordered the Byzantines removed from the galley and put in a sea cave for safety. Andrew of Scotland was left in charge so that none not loyal to Jacques de Molay knew where the gold was hid. After that Marcus took himself to Tomar, to that great castle of the Order.
Now returning from his second excursion to the gold, he remembered his first visit to the cave, and his desire to hear from the gold itself what it had to tell him of its impiety.
It had taken the mercenary Roger de Flor the best part of a morning to find the hiding place. From where they stood upon the sand they looked up to a vertical cliff that speared the sky and fell down to a rock shelf pounded by surf. A path over a rock floor pitted with pools and covered in shells and seagrass led to a small cave cut off from the beach by the tide. Beyond it nothing but sea and sky and the edges of the world.
The cave was small and squat, made of gouged-out stone. It held the barrels with not much room to spare. At his behest, Roger left him alone with the gold and, sitting before it, Marcus listened with patience. He was there a long time but the spirit of the gold was as circumspect as a virgin and for all his effort Marcus heard nothing of its mysteries. He heard the pounding of the waves on the rocks and the strangled cries of gulls and nothing more.
For his part Roger de Flor began to fidget to get back, owing to the movement of the tide, and Marcus was persuaded to leave it, thinking himself no more and no less than he had ever been: incapable of making traffic with the spirit of things.