The Seal(6)

Marcus shouted then to the crowd something in their language and the people were suddenly made silent, stock-still. The expectation that had kept them from their final despair, that had brought life to blood and limb, had drained away at those words and so left them no more than standing stones.

But Jacques did not make a move for the gates. He stood amid this sea of faces while behind them the army of Hama, of Damascus and the great swarm of Mameluks could be heard making their way through the streets to them. He looked upwards at the gilded lions on the towers and to the dawning sky blotted out by smoke and then once more to the crowd and a look passed over his face. He raised his brows, nodded once and made a sign to the guards, who stepped aside to allow the wretched group to enter.

‘Go!’ Jacques herded them like sheep, Etienne thought, to the slaughter. ‘Pray! Make your confessions! This time tomorrow or the next day you will be in God’s heaven!’

Beyond the gates a boiling, chanting mass swept the streets towards the fortress. From the gates the men saw that pierced on spikes were the heads, still dripping blood, of those young boys and old men the infidels had massacred upon the walls.

Words bothered Etienne’s lips, but he would not betray even to himself his feelings of doom. Instead, he took the child in his arms and followed the others as they walked through the great oak gates and once again through the second gates to watch as they were closed and bolted shut.

And so it was that in this familiar place, exchanging no word, each man walked to the harbour, leaving the city to itself.





2


THE PROPHECY

If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams . . . thou shalt not hearken.

Deuteronomy 13:1


Cyprus, September 1306

It was fifteen years since the fall of Acre, and Etienne de Congost, Seneschal of the Temple, walked the halls of the modest house with firm heel, his head down and his hands behind his back. He found himself for once a-refuge from the troubles of the commandery since the deserted halls and the disturbance of a storm-full afternoon provided a rare respite not felt since Acre and even before that.

To be seneschal at such a time as this, after the retreat of the Temple from the Holy Land, with the great and small of Outremer pouring into Cyprus, meant that he was rarely alone. It was therefore logical that concern should lie on his mind at such moments with nothing to distract him.

Fifteen years cast into the silence of God’s absence, like Ishmael from Abraham, had made his communion   with God disordered. It had made his duty an imitation of what it once had been. How could he not think on that? Since Acre, the

Temple had lost its place. Exiled from its duty it met the world differently – he met the world differently. Gone was the heat haze of deed and will, the poetry of war, to be replaced by the tedium of clever words and politics, of cunning work that was, to his sense of it, demeaning.

There was thunder. He paused before rounding the east walk. The wind and rain did not reach here and he observed the half-darkness with his burdens gathering upon his shoulders. He recalled the loss of Acre, Sidon, their retreat to this place with the newly elected Grand Master, Thibaud de Gaudin, and then his subsequent death. There had been the difficult election of his friend and mentor, Jacques de Molay, and the struggle to gather what was left of his Order’s dignity, its responsibilities and royal standing, among such dangers as might be found in that small kingdom of refugees, where friends were not distinguished from enemies. Such matters had required brooding, and a devotion to short-term solutions that bore no resemblance to the far-reaching outlook the Temple had once cast upon the world.

After all, new ways, new ways.

Once again that numb pain came into his left hand, a tingling in his fingers as he rounded the north walk and the west. He shook it and walked on, thinking no more on it, listening instead to the ring of his boots, boots that marked him more soldier than priest.

From behind him the sound of footsteps. It was Brother Jourdain the youthful captain, his knight companion, in charge of his squires and the running of the more mundane aspects of his daily affairs. The young man came towards him from out of the gloom and when he reached Etienne he stood at attention and bowed his head in deference. ‘Etienne,’ he said, ‘I do not wish to detain you but I have come on behalf of Alphonse the Scribe. To plead for your mercy.’

Etienne took a breath in and let this thought sit in his head a moment, observing the captain.

‘He has asked me to say again that the woman was his mother, his father was a Frankish knight who fought valiantly on Crusade. She is a Cypriot and treated unkindly by the people of her village because of it. She has lost her farm and has no means to feed herself.’