The faithful and brothers
Of Christ, our Saviour,
Servants of God
The gateway of love…
As he came out of the passage, the Temple cast its shadow over him. With castellated arches and with windows that inhaled the light, like a threat. Efthymios’s heart beat louder. A huge Templar, with crossed arms, was welcoming the procession. The monks who were at the head of the procession, with Gregorios between them, exchanged two words with him quietly, like a password, and proceeded into the porch. So did Gregorios. Except that the Guard exchanged the vagrant’s clothes that he was still wearing under the robe for the uniform of the novice: a silk shirt, to the knees, sandals, belt. He put the robe and the cap, with two narrow slits for the eyes, on top again.
The first choristers reached the Door. Efthymios waited with his muscles ready to launch him away if danger approached, the danger which he saw now was more mortal than the one he had weighed up last night. And a short time ago, in the passage-way…
The Guardian of the Threshold took the white candles and gave them new ones, lit, with black tulle and ribbon. Nothing else. Not a word. Not a password; no test…
One after the other, Efthymios among them, entered the nave.
The Temple was pitch dark inside. And nowhere, either in the clerestory, or in the angular dome or in the sanctuary, were visible any of the windows which on the outside shone colourfully in the light. It was as if they had entered another place, underground and dark… Or not. Now that Efthymios’s eyes had adjusted, he made out high screens and interior walls, apses and aisles which hermetically sealed every skylight. The space was lit solely by their black candles and the aloe wood which was burning and emitting foul fumes under the grating of an altar in the centre. Two candelabra, right and left of the sanctuary, were unlit. The little light there was breathed over a painting, the only one in the Temple. It depicted Jesus dragging the Cross and Lucifer biting the ripe apple which a youthful Adam was offering.
Grand Frère approached the novice. In his impressive uniform he appeared even more handsome and dignified. “I haven’t seen a nobleman like him,” Gregorios had said to him the first day they met the Head of the Temple. “I said timidly that I want to enter the service of the Templars… He told me that before I enter their service and they mine, I must enter the Order frst.. To give soul and body for the service of the Crucified. That’s what I want, I told him. That’s why I’ve come! If you have come to the Temple to find what you haven’t got, welcome, my child” he said.
With a deep bow, an officer who addressed Grand Frère as “Great Mystagogue”, put into his hands a cross of mother of pearl with an ivory Christ.
Gregorios knelt at a command. And the voice of Grand Frère called on him to take the oath:
“I swear: whatever I see, whatever is done to me, I will keep it secret.”
“I swear: whatever I see, whatever is done to me, I will keep it secret” repeated Gregorios.
“To the grave.”
“To the grave.”
“Otherwise I accept as the least punishment…”
“Otherwise I accept as the least punishment…”
“The grave.”
The choir began to chant again:
Happiness in the silence
and in the silence pleasure
And the Lord of the World sings
When he sanctifies his body with the caress…
As soon as their hymn died away, Grand Frère Gianis Templar solemnly asked, placing the bronze cross on the forehead of the initiate:
“Do you believe the Crucified is truly the Son of God, as the people wish and believe him to be?”
Gregorios raised his eyes to the cross, then to the Mystagogue. In the silence that intervened until he replied, the hymn rose again:
Happiness in the silence
And in the silence pleasure
Lord, take Hades by storm
Sowing the darkness of my body.
“I believe what Grand Frère believes. Whatever you believe, confess it and I will obey” he said in French.
The Staff-bearer raised his voice:
“He was a false prophet.”
“He was a false prophet.”
“False prophet,” said the Templars, both officers and ordinary crusaders in unison.
As soon as the final echo of the refrain was absorbed in the cornices, Gregorios stood up, threw down the cross which Grand Frère handed him and then, laying aside cloak and shirt, urinated on it and stamped on it.
When you seek God in the light
Your step is erased in the darkness
When you seek God in prayer
You are a quenched lamp, without oil.
God, Holy Principle and Purpose
Is the fleshly body.
My body, may you become the source of joy,
The source of bold joy …
While the choir unfolded the chant, Grand Frère and all the Templars with him removed their cloaks and turned them inside out. They were black inside, with the symbols of the Order in silver on the chest and on the back: the dividers and the pillar, with the acorn-shaped capital. They kissed the symbols and dressed again.
The Steward lit the candelabra while the verses and the painting began to be loaded with meaning. Then, going to the sanctuary, he returned with a chalice. He placed it on the marble slab of the altar and assisted the initiate to remove his garments, slowly and one by one. The youthful, slender body was stripped.
Grand Frère took a sponge, dipped it in the chalice and began to wash him, making the sign of the cross upside-down on the body of the initiate, beginning with the genitals, then the armpits and finally on the forehead. The same sign, now with oil, he drew on Gregorios’ body for the second time. He did it for the third and last time with red paint.
Then he himself removed his big uniform, stripped and kissed the youth on the top of his head, his lips, his navel.
A rippling shudder seemed to stir the body of his friend. But Efthymios, too, with shame and fear felt his body awaken…
With his lips in the hollow of the initiate’s backbone the Mystagogue began slowly to creep upwards, while his arms wrapped round and squeezed the youthful body of his friend. When he reached the neck, he dug his teeth into the flesh. Gregorios screamed and tried to free himself but in vain… The naked body of Grand Frère crushed him, bent him, made him kneel, wail.
My body, may you become the source of joy
The source of the bold joy…
II
“One after another the monks washed him and embraced and kissed him,” Efthymios continued, his head bowed before the Holy Pope. “All who wanted, subjugated him and debauched him. Others took children from the choir into the corners. I had a narrow escape; they took the boy next to me… But most of them, in accordance with their class and rank, waited in turn for Gregorios… After some time they dressed him again, half dead, in the filthy clothes of their filthy order and dragged him into the sanctuary. He didn’t appear for days. One morning he came to my hovel. I’ve come for my things, he said. I asked how he was… He said that they treated him with love, bought him cassocks, clothes and books, were teaching him Latin so he could go to Rome to study. Out of shame I concealed all that I had seen. But I felt the need to talk to someone, to tell everything that was devouring me… And since I had no one else in the world, I went to Grand Frère Hospitaller. On my knees, I asked him to help… To burn down the filthy Temple. He said he would do it only if I confessed to your Holiness everything I had seen and knew. I came with pleasure… All I wanted was to kneel before you and ask for forgiveness for my friend Gregorios… They have given him gold, a position, glory. He seems happy. But I, who know, lived and grew up with him… he went to them out of fear, he is terrified of the Mamelukes and the shameful soldiers of the King who covet us… Now the Templars…”
The papal secretary, Fra-Greco, translated into Latin with difficulty the rambling account of the y
oung man, which was not in the articulate Greek that he knew. Every so often he stopped the translation and accompanied it with comments that made the Holy Father sometimes frown and sometimes half-laugh, with his slender, pale hands concealed below the desk and his cassock, just like Grand Frère Hospitaller had done, recalled Efthymios, when he first heard this story. And sometimes the Pope angrily interrupted Fra-Greco, spoke and made threats in language which Efthymios, as much as he fought against this thought, could only suspect was unbecoming for the “Primate of the Latins”.
The Holy Pope ordered the Conclave to begin. Among the members was the Hospitaller Fra-Innocentio, who had accompanied Efthymios to Rome. They stood in line, according to their order and rank, around the great oak table. Only the oldest, a ninetyyear old Monseigneur, at a sign from the Pope, sank onto a chair. The Pope blessed them, gestured to them to sit down and began to explain what had happened. The unfamiliar, rounded words came out one after the other, calmly and with evident satisfaction, which puzzled young Efthymios. Every so often, the Pontiff paused, drank two or three sips of wine, made the sign of the cross and blessed his mouth and began again.
All this took time. Later, a sickly clerk opened a cupboard and brought out a whole armful of parchment documents, dotted with numbers and the crests of dukes, and records of trade transactions, which the Pope began to analyse in great detail. The only thing that Efthymios understood out of all this was that the Templars and the Hospitallers frequently came up in the Pope’s monologue and that those accounts were the dealings of Rome with the Orders of the Crusaders. He also understood that each time documents and new numbers were pulled out, the anger of the Papal Conclave grew and the threats and the insinuations against the Templars came thicker and faster.
Fra-Greco, ignoring the glances and the mute signals of Efthymios, did not go to the trouble of translating anything of what was said in the Conclave. Only at the end, when the Pope signalled to them to leave and they were alone in the ante-chamber, did he tell him:
“A great day, today, Efthymios! A great day indeed! Bravo!”
“What did his Holiness say about Gregorios? Will he help us?” asked Efthymios.
But Fra-Greco went back inside and the huge door closed in front of Efthymios.
Exhausted, he went out into the square, into the colonnade. He sat on the steps of St Peter’s and waited there for Fra-Innocentio. Then, at the base of a column, his eye took in by chance the symbol of the Temple carved there: the dividers and the pillar. He jumped up. He went to the next one. To the next. The same symbol in the same place. On all of them… He crossed over to the twin colonnade opposite. No! On this series of columns there was another symbol carved: a half-opened pomegranate “Why are the wicked symbols of the Templars under the Conclave and the Throne?” he later asked Fra-Innocentio.
He did not receive an answer. He asked about other things too: What had the Pope decided? What were all those documents? “Debts of the Templars to the Holy See?” But again Innocentio preferred to keep his mouth shut.
III
Grand Frère Hospitaller Fra-Toumas received them at the port of Famagusta. He embraced Innocentio. Then, with two warm palms, he covered and patted Efthymios’s hand. He addressed them unassumingly, treated them to wine and fruit.
“Only fruit for Efthymios,” he said with a smile and filled Innocentio’s goblet and his own.
His gestures and his gaze bore witness to a nobility and a serenity which filled the youth with assurance. They reminded him again of his fruitless struggles to persuade Gregorios that only with Grand Frère Hospitaller Fra-Toumas, they would find refuge and protection and not in the Temple. Not that the Templars at that time gave any indication that they were different from the Hospitallers. For the world and before the world they were the same: “The shoes of Rome,” said the people. “The right and left shoes of the Pope!” Alike in the eyes of the people in their devotion and loyalty to their creed, in their charity, tough warriors and zealots of Christ. But something inexplicable, a powerful impulse, told Efthymios that they should go to the Hospitallers, that there was the genuine gold… Nonetheless, timid as he always was, he had done nothing to stop Gregorios. Not even at the moment when the others were degrading him, or later when he saw him in the hovel, had he dared to shrug off his fear and stretch out his hand…
“I bring a letter from the Holy Father,” the voice of Innocentio interrupted his thoughts.
And he saw him take a papyrus scroll with a gold seal from his breast. So many weeks now, together on the galley, and he did not know that Innocentio had on him a message with the papal seal.
“Good!” said Fra-Toumas.
“The confession of Efthymios helped His Holiness to find at last the grounds we needed…”
Fra-Toumas slowly broke the seal.
“What else?” he asked calmly.
“From our friend the Titular Lartini, greetings and the assurance that His Holiness is sending a similar encyclical to all the kingdoms…”
The papyrus was unrolled. A second, smaller one, with two seals, rolled out from inside. Fra-Toumas bent over the lines.
“Does he write about Gregorios?” asked Efthymios.
But Innocentio signed to him to remain as he had instructed him: patient and reticent.
“You may read it,” said Fra-Toumas.
Innocentio took it.
“Aloud,” added the Grand Frère. He smiled at the young man. “Thanks to our new novice, Rome has at last seen and been enlightened…”
Innocentio almost absent-mindedly nodded “Yes” and began to read the encyclical which he had already read at a glance while Fra-Toumas was speaking.
Our dear son,
Grace and our pontifical blessing be with you.
By this letter know that our open letter you may read immediately. Keep the enclosed letter in a safe place. Do not allow anyone to break the seal before the Feast of Pentecost. This holds for you and for your successor, should the Lord wish to call you before Him in the meantime. On the day of Pentecost, when the Mass is over, before the congregation leaves, break the seal and whatever I order you, do it. Otherwise the most heavy excommunication of the Crucified will pursue you both in your present life and in the next…”
The eye of Innocentio was riveted inquisitively on the sealed papyrus which the Grand Frère was concealing in the pocket of his inner robe.
“Till Pentecost?” Efthymios was disappointed.
“The Pope’s command is law,” smiled Fra-Toumas. “I understand your love and concern for your friend but … Let’s hope that till then, and with your help, he will repent and seek the mercy of the Lord and our protection…”
“If he does, if he comes, will you accept him?” asked Efthymios in the Cypriot dialect, forgetting himself in sudden hope; and in disappointment at the same time. If they had said this, right from the start, he would not have made such a journey, would not have been compelled to humiliate before the Conclave of Cardinals the only person in the world he had ever loved …
“Didn’t the Lord teach us this? Repentance and forgiveness?”, the Catholic answered with a smile. Then he signed to the inn-keeper to approach. The Famagustan, seeing the gold coins, protested. He did not accept money from monks. “Only blessings!”
At the gate of the inn and in front of the innkeeper who was bidding them farewell with deep bows, Fra-Toumas thrust the money he had ready into the palm of a blind beggar.
A palace carriage passed by them with a guard. Six black horses and one white one in front. The thoroughbred! Opposite the Royal Dignitary, Seigneur Valery, who greeted them with a polite inclination of the head, sat tense and rigid the stranger who had travelled with them from Rome.
“The churl!” said Efthymios.
“Who is he?” asked Fra-Toumas with concealed curiosity. “Do you know?”
“He travelled with us. No one on the galley had as much as a “Good morning” from him. Maybe a representative of the Pope … Perhaps an Envoy�
�”
Till Pentecost, Efthymios only met his friend once. He was now called Fra-Gregoire and the shadow of guilt which Efthymios saw or believed he saw in his eyes at their first meeting had vanished completely. On the contrary, he shone with certainty and high spirits, which obliged Efthymios* to remark that “in the sorry state we’re in now, my joyful name is one thing, the grace another…”
“Why? Aren’t you happy?” said Gregorios in his broken Latin and triumph lit up his eyes. He knew it! How was it possible that his friend Efthymios, with so many dreams and thirst for life, should find happiness with the Hospitallers?
And he continued, still in Latin,
“If you wish, it’s not too late for you to enter the Temple as well. Grand Frère is my friend and protector…
“I go to the Templars?” protested Efthymios in a tone and with a glance which revealed disgust. But realising his mistake, bit his tongue.
“If you knew what I know, you’d keep quiet,” said Gregorios in Greek. Then he repeated the phrase in French and added “And you have so much to gain…”
“Christianity is not for this… When you went to them you were looking for something else…
“I was inexperienced. I didn’t know… Now I know. I have learnt what is right, what is fitting, holiness… Gregorios had learnt his lesson by heart.
“The things which delight us?” Efthymios flung at him.
“What do you mean? What are you hiding? Is it…?” asked Gregorios and his laughter at their absurd conversation in Latin and Cypriot broke off abruptly.
Efthymios realised that he was on the verge of betraying himself and this must not happen. He had sworn to Fra-Toumas. His friend should never learn, never suspect that he had seen…Or what happened in Rome…
“I’m not hiding anything from you,” he replied, in Latin now. “I’m just saying what I hear.”
Gregory Page 11
