They clattered into the village that was neighbor to the hermitage just before dark on the third day. Their steaming mounts were led away by an ostler, all agog at this unheralded visitation by two knights accompanied by their own minstrel. Jaufre managed not to laugh when he was so addressed but Alaric straightened up as if he’d heard a trumpet fanfare and paraded into the common room, hand on the hilt of his sword and looking loftily down the length of what was after all a very long nose.
The innkeeper, a man of some dignity himself, was deferential without being obsequious. He bowed Alaric to the best table, flapping his apron at the two men who already occupied it, who gratified him by springing to their feet and finding another table without comment or complaint. Félicien’s gitar might have had something to do with that, because after a meal of hearty stew, bread and an excellent cheese, one of them approached the table and asked humbly if the lord’s minstrel might favor them with a song or a story.
Jaufre looked around and saw that the word had gone forth. There were no longer any empty seats and there were more people leaning against the walls. Ah well, country folk must find their entertainment where they could, and the hermitage, so far as he could tell as they had approached it at dusk, was in an isolated spot that could not have seen much traffic.
“I don’t expect there will be many coins in my cap from this crowd,” Félicien said in an undertone.
“Be kind,” Jaufre said. “It’s not every day one has the privilege to hear the song of a young goliard who has traveled all the way to Cathay and back again. Especially in a town this size, this far off any main road.”
The room was dimly lit by a few fat candles in sconces and the light of the fire on the hearth, but he thought the boy blushed. He wondered again if Félicien had even been out of swaddling clothes when he left home. Other than admitting to being a Frank, the goliard had steadily ignored any other questions as to his life before he had joined their campfire and company one evening somewhere between Chang’an and Dunhuang. Or possibly Dunhuang and Turfan. “Sing,” Jaufre said. “They may not have much to give, but you do. And they will talk of this night for years to come.”
The goliard struck a chord and did as he was bid, and before long a bashful young man appeared with a small drum to beat out the time. A tonsured monk brought a wooden flute to play high while Félicien sang middle and the gitar sang low. There were songs of the Road, marching songs and marrying songs. Songs of love lost and love found, songs of battles lost and won. Many Jaufre recognized and many more he did not, but then the goliard had the gift of the true entertainer, the ability to divine what his audience wanted to hear and to give it to them in a key they could hum along to.
The next morning they were up with the dawn, or Jaufre was, the need to be back in Milano at Johanna’s side riding him hard. Félicien didn’t stir but Alaric followed him downstairs to break their fast in the common room, the site of last night’s concert. “Enough!” Jaufre said, cutting the knight’s grumbling short. “You wanted to make this journey and you wanted me to meet your friend. Let’s go meet him and be about our business.”
They presented themselves at the door of the monastery, an imposing edifice built of square blocks of local stone. There was an arcade surmounted by a second story with a row of rectangular windows, a church with a vaulted ceiling supported by pointed arches and painted with luminous frescoes, and a low dormitory attached to the main building. There was a thriving garden and an orchard filled with fruit trees.
The knight had rung the bell hanging outside the main door. It was answered by the same tonsured monk who had accompanied Félicien on the flute the night before. Jaufre had thought that the purpose of a monastery was for its inmates to be sequestered from public life but the ways of Christianity were still a mystery to him and he made no comment. The monk, who introduced himself as Fra Lamberto, greeted them with enthusiasm, heard out Alaric’s request, and shook his head. “I will ask,” he said, “but Brother Donizo rarely speaks to anyone these days.” He saw Alaric’s look and shook his head. “No, no, he is well, at least in body.” His brow creased. “It is his spirit which suffers, and nothing I nor Father Matteo say can ease him.” He cast a shrewd glance over the two of them. “Perhaps you can,” he said thoughtfully. “Oblige me by waiting a moment, do.”
He rustled away and returned shortly. “Come with me.”
They followed him down the arcaded passageway, each of the column’s capitals carved with fearsome animals or human figures writhing in the worst the Devil could do to them, a sight guaranteed to keep you at your prayers. They entered the long, low building and proceeded down a corridor of many doors, entering the last one on the right. “Brother Donizo? Brother Donizo, I have here two visitors for you.” He stepped inside and motioned the others to follow.
It was a tiny room, scrupulously clean and sparsely furnished with a cot and a niche in the wall with a statue Jaufre recognized as the most prevalent Christian saint, the woman in blue with the child in her arms. The statue was delicately made and really beautifully colored, perhaps by the same hand that had created the frescoes in the church. Before it knelt a man clad in the same rough spun brown robes as Fra Lamberto. His hands were clasped in front of his face and his eyes were closed and his lips moved soundlessly.
“Brother Donizo?”
The man on his knees looked up finally, blinking, as if the light from the eastward-facing window hurt his eyes. They were a light blue, so light that for a moment Jaufre thought his was blind. But those blue eyes looked first at Fra Lamberto and then traveled to the knight standing at his shoulder, and widened. “Alaric?” The monk stumbled to his feet and had to be caught by Fra Lamberto before he fell. “Alaric!” He reached out, weeping, to grasp Alaric’s hands in his own. “Alaric! You came! You came at last!”
They sat outside in the sun, Fra Lamberto fetching watered wine and a plate of bread and olives and then tactfully leaving them alone. Jaufre sat a little apart, watching the other two men. Brother Donizo had stopped crying but he was still incapable of complete sentences. “Alaric. After all this time, I—When we parted, you—I never expected—It’s been so long—”
Alaric patted his arm and muttered soothing nothings and plied Brother Donizo with watered wine. After what felt like a very long time to Jaufre the monk pulled himself together and attempted a smile. “And who is your companion, Alaric? I’m sorry, my boy,” he said belatedly. “I am a little overcome. It has been so very long since I saw Alaric, you see.”
“You know his face, Gilbert,” Alaric said, watching the monk closely.
“No, I—” The blue eyes widened. “No! Robert? But how can this be? He left us when—”
“Yes, he left us,” Alaric said, interrupting the monk. “He married afterward, Gilbert. This is his son.”
“His son!” There was a long moment of profound silence as Brother Donizo, or Gilbert, stared at Jaufre. “He saved us. He saved us both. And how we repaid him, Alaric. How we repaid him.”
“He didn’t want it, Gilbert. He didn’t want any part of it.”
The monk made a gesture of repugnance. “I know, but—”
“What did you do with it, Gilbert?” Alaric said softly.
“What’s ‘it’?” Jaufre said, his head whirling at the thought that here was someone else who had known his father. “What are you talking about?”
Gilbert sought Alaric’s eyes. The two older men looked at each other for a long moment. “He is truly Robert’s son?” the monk said.
“Show him your sword,” Alaric told Jaufre.
Jaufre pulled his sword from the sheath he wore on his back, and handed it to the monk, who received it reverently. His grip was sure and practiced, for a monk. “It is Robert’s, of course,” he said, his awed voice barely above a murmur.
“Yes, it belonged to my father,” Jaufre said, losing patience. “What of it?”
“You didn’t tell him?” Gilbert said.
Alaric’s face was lik
e iron. “Some of it. Not all.”
In that moment both men looked considerably older than their years.
8
Lombardy, Summer, 1324
There had been four of them after the fall of Ruad. Alaric and Robert, Jaufre’s father, yes, but also Gilbert, a Frank like Alaric and now the man known to them as Brother Donizo, and a fourth man, Wilmot of Bavaria. The son of a wealthy mason with social ambitions, his father had bought Wilmot his knighthood. “Like Robert, it was what he could do, not what he wanted to do,” Gilbert said, sounding rueful.
Ruad, the island redoubt of the last of the Crusader outposts in the Levant, had been given to the Templars by the Pope in 1301, who would hold it until it was overrun by the Mamluks two years later. The ordinary troops had been slaughtered to a man and the surviving knights shipped off to prison in Egypt, where most of them starved to death.
“It was Robert,” Gilbert said. “The four of us would have been caught, too, but for Robert.” He gave Jaufre a sober look. “I owe your father my life.” He looked at Alaric. “We all do.”
“Why?” Jaufre said. “How?”
Gilbert looked at Alaric and sighed. “Robert was much more long-sighted and realistic about the future of the Templars in the East.”
“About the future of the Templars, period,” Alaric said.
“That, too,” Gilbert said.
Confusion is rampant at the end of any sack, they told him, which he already knew from Johanna’s account of the fall of Talikan. Confusion at the fall of Ruad was compounded by Ruad’s location. “An island,” Gilbert said. “And we were hopelessly outnumbered. In 1301, when Ghazan didn’t come when he said he would—”
Alaric spat. “Mongols,” he said, the word itself an epithet. “Never trust them.”
Jaufre thought of the Mongol Baron Ogodei, and didn’t disagree.
“Yes, well, when the Mongols didn’t come, Robert told us it was over.” His smile was wry. “We didn’t believe him, of course.”
“Wilmot did,” Alaric said.
“But you and I didn’t,” Gilbert said. “Our faith was still strong. We believed in the righteousness of our cause, that the Holy Land was meant to be under Christian rule, that we would triumph over the Saracen savages and that that God Himself would appear in our vanguard to lead us with flaming sword back to Jerusalem.” He closed his eyes and shook his head.
Jaufre let the silence linger for just as long as he could bear it and no more. “But my father…”
Gilbert opened his eyes, looking upon the flourishing garden as if uncertain how he’d come there. “I think he was planning our escape from the moment Ghazan’s forces retreated. The week before Ruad fell, he went up to the walls to look over the situation and when he came down he gathered the four of us together and told us that we had to leave. By that time, none of us needed much convincing.” He looked again at Alaric. “I’m going to tell him. All of it.”
“Confession is good for the soul,” Alaric said.
“So they say,” Gilbert said. “At any rate, I have never confessed this to anyone else, but I am going to now, to Robert’s son.” He turned to Jaufre and straightened where he sat. Clad in rough homespun, his hair tonsured, he nevertheless somehow had the faint air of the knight he had once been, with all the strength and pride that came with the oath and the office. “There was a room,” he said, “where they kept what remained of our treasury.”
Jaufre stiffened. Gilbert noticed, and gave a wry smile. “Yes. The structure of our lives was crumbling, and all we had to hold us together was Robert’s determination that we would survive. How, we asked ourselves, we who had always had our meals and roofs and clothes and armor and weapons provided for us, how were we to live?” He sighed. “But I won’t make excuses. Alaric and I decided to help ourselves to some of it before we left. In all the confusion we thought it would never be missed, that we would never be noticed.” A short laugh. “Our mistake. There were others, equally interested in the remnants of the Templars’ treasure.” He glanced again at Alaric. “Alaric was wounded in the escape. Wilmot would have left him behind, I think, but Robert insisted.”
Jaufre tried to imagine it, the noise, the shouting, men wounded and dying, the boats landing on the beaches, the walls breached, the enemy pouring in.
“The fort was burning by the time he got us down to the beach. He’d hidden a small boat among the rocks. We buried our mantles and armor in those same rocks and got in the boat and pushed off. Halfway to shore we were seen and capsized. God, I have never seen such a hail of arrows. They might be heathens but the Saracens are excellent shots. I can only attribute to the protective hand of God Himself that only I was hit.” Gilbert put a hand to his leg, massaging the memory of an old wound. “Wilmot took me and Robert took Alaric and they managed to get us ashore and into hiding. He found us food and medicines and tended us until we were well enough to travel.”
“And the treasure?”
Gilbert laughed shortly. “We should have drowned with the weight of gold and silver we were carrying with us, Alaric and I. Wilmot and Robert would have killed us both when they discovered it, if we hadn’t needed it so badly, to pay for the food and medicines.”
“And afterward?”
Gilbert shrugged. “Robert and Alaric went to Antioch to seek work as caravan guards. Wilmot and I went to Byzantium and took ship for Venice. I came here.” He glanced at Alaric. “It was what I had always wanted.”
“You talked about it enough,” Alaric said.
“Yes, I suppose I did. I imagine that is how you knew where to find me?” Alaric nodded, and Gilbert sighed. “Wilmot left me here and went north, he said to seek work as a mason at Chartres. They’re building a cathedral there.”
“They’ve been building it for a hundred years,” Alaric said sourly.
“Then Wilmot should have been successful,” Gilbert said. “I have seen or heard nothing of him since.”
There was a weighted moment, and then Alaric, as though the words were forced from him, said, “Where is it?”
Gilbert looked up. “Where is what?” he said blankly.
“The rest of the treasure. Where is it?”
“Where is—” Gilbert’s face cleared and he turned a look composed equal parts of realization and sympathy on the man who had once been his brother in arms, his co-conspirator, his fellow thief. “It is here, Alaric,” he said gently.
“Where?” Alaric looked around the garden. “Is it buried somewhere?”
Gilbert sighed. “Come with me,” he said, rising to his feet.
They followed him about the monastery until the bells rang for vespers. There was a great deal to see, the handsome church and the arcaded cloister they had seen before, a chapter room large enough to accommodate all the community at Sant’ Alberto’s, lay and clerical. There was a many-roomed novitiate, spare and scrupulously clean, a library of well-filled shelves that made Jaufre’s palms itch, and a scriptorium with cunningly arranged skylights that introduced much-needed light on the work of monks laboriously copying out more manuscripts. There was a large kitchen, an infirmary, two guesthouses, one for men and one for women, and a large and well-tended herb garden that Jaufre wished Shasha could see. The vegetable garden and the orchard they had already seen. “There is also a leper’s hospital,” Gilbert said, with a wave of his hand that indicated the hills in back of the monastery.
Alaric had followed Gilbert on this tour of Sant’ Alberto’s facilities with a steadily decaying patience. Now he said, “Where is it, Gilbert?”
Gilbert met his eyes with a slight smile. “I told you, Alaric. It is here.”
“You gave it to the monastery,” Jaufre said, a grin spreading across his face.
“What!”
Gilbert smiled again. What with his confession to Jaufre of the truth of their escape from Ruad and his confession to Alaric of what had happened to the rest of the Templar treasure, he was looking years and years younger. “Yes,” he said happily. “
I put it to work here. It seemed best.”
Alaric seemed unable to speak. When he did he was barely coherent. “I—we trusted you! How could you—you—you false friend! You thief!”
“You could have taken your share with you when you went east with my father,” Jaufre said. “Why didn’t you?”
Gilbert chuckled. “Because he was following Robert and Robert wouldn’t have countenanced it.”
Alaric shouted something incomprehensible to the sky and stamped off into the orchard, scattering monks as he went.
He seemed to have calmed down by the time they gathered in the refectory for dinner. Jaufre thought he detected what might even have been a trace of pride in the eyes that appraised the long, well-polished oak table and the finely woven tapestries that warmed the stone walls.
And later that evening, when the other two supposed him asleep in his blankets, he heard the low-voiced conversation. “You are weary, and heartsore, Alaric,” Gilbert said. “You could stay here. You should stay here. I won’t guarantee you will find peace here. I haven’t.” A brief pause. “Although perhaps the possibility of it, now. We could use a good blacksmith. You were always handy around a forge.”
Alaric grunted, and Jaufre wondered if he would be returning to Milano alone.
But then Alaric said, slowly, “No. Perhaps, one day. But no, not now. Not yet.”
“What are you looking for, Alaric, that you can’t find here?”
“Goodnight, Gilbert,” Alaric said. “We’ll say our goodbyes in the morning.”
“Alaric. Why did you come seeking the treasure? Why now, after all these years?”
A loud snore.
A sigh, the light of the candle snuffed, and the slap of the monk’s sandals as he let himself out of the guesthouse.
As promised the next morning Gilbert stood at their stirrups to wish them goodbye and godspeed. “Thank you, my boy,” he said to Jaufre. “I am glad that Robert went on to have some happiness in his life. Your mother sounds like a fine woman, and I can see for myself that they had a fine son.”
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