The Seal(59)

‘Well these lands have enough secrets for you and me, that is certain. Days ago we passed a country south of here, known of old as the dying place of the great king, Dagobert.’

Etienne raised his brows. ‘Is that so? Dagobert?’

‘He was a great Merovingian king, who was pierced with a lance while resting under a tree.’

Etienne lifted his face to the falling snow. It felt good, that coolness on his eyelids. ‘Is there nothing you do not know, Jourdain? What is this Merovingian, then?’

Jourdain smiled again. ‘A line of kings. Dagobert was the last of this line, so it is said. Godefroy de Bouillon, the defender of the Holy Sepulchre, was a descendant of his. Some even tell that this line extends to the Holy Land from the blood of Jesus himself.’

‘And you believe this?’

‘I believe that our Lord Jesus Christ sacrificed himself upon a cross and shed his blood. It unites us, each one, though we are not born of the same mother. That is what I believe.’

Etienne gave him a significant look. ‘Lineage of blood, Jourdain, is something left over from past times and will soon come to an end.’ He looked ahead. ‘Our Order considers all men brothers who give their life to Christ’s purposes and his Holy Sepulchre, regardless of blood.’

‘I am thankful for that.’

‘The same as I.’ Etienne noticed, in the dimming day, an expression in the young eye. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘When you speak of the Holy Sepulchre, it makes a picture in my mind of the Holy Land and how it must seem. I suspect it is beautiful to behold!’

Etienne pictured it in his mind’s eye. ‘It is hot and cold, beautiful but not as you would imagine beauty. It is the spirit in that land that makes it so, not wide green valleys and lush trees and fair rivers. Once I travelled with the Commander of Sidon upon a galley to Athlit. I could not believe the beauty of it. There are vineyards and orchards and olive groves. Fig trees that give the biggest and sweetest fruit you have ever tasted, and there is camphor and myrrh and rosemary so that the scents from the land are sensed even upon a galley far off. Such a place gives a man the desire to stay to tend the land in his old age and see the sun dawn over the same rise one day after another.’ He paused then, having bewildered himself since he realised that this world he imagined was doomed, if not now, certainly tomorrow, and he was not likely to meet old age but expected to die the seal’s watchdog in some corner of the world unknown to him. He settled this into his heart like a steel band and made a nod to make sure it would not unfasten. It made him snatch a breath.

‘I should like to see this barren beauty with my own eyes!’ Jourdain gave the horse a pat and the animal twitched its ears and continued its walk as if Jourdain were but an irritating flea upon its back. ‘Jerusalem seems to me like a woman, like Mary – the womb of heaven, the beloved of Solomon’s songs!’ He gave a laugh sitting high in his saddle with the dying day’s worth of snow upon his face.

When he looked like that, Etienne was hard-pressed to see the Jourdain who, with sword in one hand and shield in the other, was like a device made to kill.

‘Solomon was a wise man,’ Etienne told him. ‘He saw the great mother, Sophia, in all women . . . his Temple was a fine thing, we are told, before it was torn down too many times to recount. What remains in Jerusalem is no more than a heathen shrine.’

Jourdain sat straight. ‘Tell me more about the Temple, Etienne.’

Etienne found it a strange thing to be instructing Jourdain, and it made him smile to himself. ‘It was built over a great rock which is revered by the Jews and also the Saracens who know it as the centre of the earth. Here is something you might not know; the mount upon which it stands is said to have been held in the mouth of the serpent Tahum, and that it formed the intersection of the underworld . . . at least that is what they tell.’

Jourdain thought about this. ‘I have heard something of that, that Jerusalem is the centre of the world. A place that Christian, Jew and Saracen all consider holy because of Abraham. Where man and God come together . . . And the Ark of the Covenant, Etienne, was it a promise or a real thing?’

‘Perhaps one and the other . . . Perhaps the ark is a picture of the human being whose number and measure is like the Temple – a vessel wherein are held the laws of the universe and man’s covenant with God.’

‘A fine picture, Etienne!’ Jourdain said, slapping his thigh with enthusiasm. ‘Man, the image of the heavens in number and measure, and within him a promise with God to follow the commandments!’