The Seal(5)

The Saracens stepped lightly to form a line. By comparison the Templars moved like a wall with their shields at the fore and their swords raised in the air. They called on their battle cry ‘Beauseant!’ and momentarily the two sides came together with a clash.

Etienne fought with his eyes open and his mind swift. He struck one Mameluk through the shoulder, beating in his face with his shield and turning in time to thrust his blade into the shoulder of another. Blood mingled with the light before his eyes, he blinked and blinked again.

Next to him Jacques was in a calm rage. ‘Christ protect me!’ he shouted. Holding a short knife in one hand and his sword in the other, he thrust the knife into a neck and, slipping towards the front, drove his sword into the belly so that the body fol¬lowed the descent of its bowels to the ground. Jacques stumbled over them and made a curse.

Marcus, bleeding from a cut across his face, ran his blade through the skull of a man, but he could not see that another had sneaked up behind him to put a knife into his side. Etienne

did not have time to prevent it before a brother coming from out of the shadows had cut the man’s throat.

The fight over, the child returned to Etienne and hid behind his skirts. The men put away their weapons and, having seen only a scattering of enemy in the distance, concluded there was time before the gatekeeper closed the fortified gates.

‘Roger of Flor, is that you?’ Jacques said. ‘Why has your ship not yet made for the sea?’

The big man took off his metal cap and wiped his brow. Over his brown-creased face a white smile. ‘I was chasing money owed by a merchant, but I have been unfortunate!’

‘Well, brother, your misfortune is the fortune of our brother, Marcus.’

Marcus gave a grumble, holding his face together with a hand. ‘I saw him,’ he said from out of one side of his mouth. ‘I was biding my time!’

‘Did you not find the merchant then?’ Etienne asked of Roger.

Roger laughed. ‘The thief was killed, murdered by his whores . . . And the money . . . well, the money, I’ll wager, is divided among them. By God! If I had known it yesterday when those women were at the quays climbing aboard any vessel that would put to the water, I would have taken their money and let them drown in their swollen little boat.’

Ahead of them the men saw John of Villiers, Grand Master of the Hospital, being helped to the Temple gate. He was covered in blood and looked not to last a night. Behind them there was the woeful sound of slaughter. Etienne knew the Saracens would go from house to house until the killing was done and leave the Templar fortress for last.

When they came upon the immense and noble gate-tower of the Temple, they were met with a gathering of those citizens turned back from the harbour yesterday. A smattering of women and children, old men and their wives, forestalled in their desire to find shelter in the Temple grounds by four knights who stood guard before the great portal. As Etienne and his brothers drew closer the people broke into sobbings and weepings, grasping at their mantles and falling at their feet.

Etienne looked at this spectacle and the misery and despair of it. The child at his leg pulled on his white mantle, tugging and tugging again to get his attention. Before him a woman with a bitter face made a spit at the ground and lashed out curses, holding up a pagan device he recognised, something blue – an evil eye. The old man next to her pulled at his white hair, taking chunks of it in his hands and crying out something Etienne did not understand. And among this confusion and equal tempers of noise and reproach the infant continued tugging at his mantle, and its plain language spoke to him, for it was afraid, it could hear the hell sounds drawing closer. Etienne rubbed the bridge of his nose; it was wet with blood and he gave a grunt of discomfort.

Next to him Jacques de Molay was raising his arms to silence the crowd. ‘There are not enough ships! You shall have to remain behind!’

A woman held out an infant swaddled in a red cloth at his face and Jacques de Molay pushed it away so that the woman, having lost her grip, very nearly let it fall. Jacques, trying to prevent it, very nearly lost his balance among the cobbled stones and people and their belongings at his feet. The infant gave a cry of fear and Jacques fumbled with his hands and returned the bundle to its mother. He said to her in a voice almost breathless, ‘Do you understand, woman? I cannot save you! Thousands are drowned in the harbour yesterday! The boats sink from the weight of so many!’

The child’s cries rose in the air and it was met by the sound of weeping from the women and men, a multitude of noise that, compared with the noise of the killing throng behind them, made Etienne’s head all a-daze and he had to fight to keep from falling into unsteadiness.