The Fall of the Templars: A Novel (Brethren)

by Robyn Young

  A wagon rolled by, puffing up dust, leaving the air dirty yellow in its wake. Nogaret squinted at the sun, sweat dribbling down his cheeks. He would never get used to this humidity. In the south, the summers had been hotter, but it was a dryer, purer heat, the air refreshed by breezes from the coast and the mountains. It had been summer when he left his home for the last time. He could still recall the scent of the ground baking in the sun, the grapes swelling to burst black from the vines, the click of insects. The smell of smoke. Of flesh burning. Nogaret closed his eyes. His sister was shrieking, crying for their mother as the fire crackled around her feet, consuming the wood. But his mother’s head was already hanging forward, the flames up to her thighs. The material of her dress burned away suddenly, scattering embers on the smoky air and affording the crowd a brief, indecent glimpse of her sex, before her body began to burn.

  “God is most grateful to His loyal sons, Guillaume,” the Dominican at his side had said, placing a solemn hand upon his shoulder. “You will be rewarded for the sacrifice you have made here today. Heresy must be rooted out wherever it is found. It is for the good of us all that we do this.”

  20

  Near Bordeaux, the Kingdom of France

  JULY 18, 1302 AD

  “Wait with the horses, Gaillard.” Bertrand de Got winced as he dismounted and handed the reins to his squire. “I will not be long.”

  Grasping the package he had carried from Bordeaux, damp in his sweaty hands, Bertrand made his way to the little white house on the brow of the hill. The sky was azure and limitless, with barely a breeze to ruffle his cloak, as he puffed and panted his way up the dusty track. He turned before he reached the house and was rewarded with a breathtaking view across pastures and vineyards, all the way to Bordeaux. He could just make out the spire of the cathedral and, for a moment, he wondered if someone in the bell tower could look all the way across the valley to where he stood. It was a dizzying thought and he was glad to strike his knuckles on the solid door behind him.

  A young woman he didn’t recognize opened it. “Yes, sir?” she ventured, staring at his sumptuous clerical vestments.

  “Is that you, Your Grace?” came a voice from down the hall. A stout woman with coarse features bustled the girl out of the way. “Back to the kitchen, Marie.”

  “Yes, madam.”

  The woman watched the girl slip off, then turned to Bertrand. “I’m sorry, Your Grace, I’ve instructed her not to answer the door.”

  Bertrand waited until the woman led him into a small, but well-furnished room before he unleashed his anger. “What is she doing here, Yolande?” he hissed, as she closed the door behind them. “Who is she?”

  “A serving girl, that is all.”

  “That is all?” Bertrand seethed, feeling light-headed from the climb and the shock. “She has seen me! Do you have any comprehension what it would mean if she ever told anyone?” He tossed the rumpled package onto a table.

  “She doesn’t know who you are,” said Yolande placidly. “And anyway, she lives here now. Who is there to tell?” The woman folded her hands calmly and watched Bertrand sink onto a stool by the window. “I need help now the boys are getting older.”

  “I said I would find you someone,” he muttered, rubbing at his slick forehead. He grimaced as a lance of pain drove through his stomach.

  “You said that months ago.”

  “You have a house, woman. What more do you want from me?”

  “This is not the life I would have chosen,” said Yolande stiffly. “If I had my way my husband would still be alive and I would be living with him. Instead I am out here all alone, raising my child and yours.” Yolande pursed her lips. “I can always leave.”

  Bertrand looked up quickly. “No.” He shook his head. “No, Yolande. But you must promise me this girl will say nothing. I would have found you someone suitable myself, but things have not been easy for me since my election.”

  Yolande seemed to relax, seeing she had won, and went to pour a goblet of wine from a jug she had set out.

  “King Philippe has not withdrawn all his troops from Guienne, despite the truce he signed with Edward of England.” Bertrand sighed, then winced at a fresh stab of pain inside. He accepted the clay goblet she handed to him. “Though half the garrison in Bordeaux were pulled out last month and sent to Flanders, so perhaps we may yet see an easing of the conflict now the king is occupied elsewhere.”

  Yolande nodded, entirely without interest in a conversation about politics. “Raoul has been looking forward to seeing you. Shall I fetch him?”

  “Yes.” Bertrand sat back, thankful for the breeze coming through the window as she shuffled from the room. He mused that perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad, having a younger woman around. Yolande had her own child late and was able to suckle the boy through infancy, but the years were showing on her now the milk had stopped flowing. Raoul was supposed to have had a young mother to care for him. He would have, had he not killed her during the labor.

  Bertrand had met Heloise five years ago, during a visit to his nephew’s church near Bordeaux. She was the seventeen-year-old daughter of a local lord, plain, but sweet as honey, and the first and only woman he had loved. After the first moment of passion, Bertrand vowed it would never happen again. But it had, again and often, until Heloise came to him one afternoon and tearfully told him she was pregnant. To conceive a child outside wedlock was sinful. To conceive a child at all as a man of the cloth was anathema. During the Church reforms of Pope Gregory VII, priests and bishops had their nuptials forcibly annulled, their wives condemned as concubines and their children declared bastards. Marriage had been denied to the clergy ever since.

  The irony of his lover’s name wasn’t lost on Bertrand. Two hundred years earlier, Heloise had been the young lover of Abelard, brilliant theologian in the schools in Paris. For his sins, Abelard had been castrated, and Bertrand, fearing more than just the loss of his benefice, had persuaded Heloise to run away from her family before the child started to show. He bought the little farmhouse on the hill with funds from his diocese, and it was here, miles from anywhere, that Heloise gave birth to their son, prematurely. Yolande, recently widowed, had been there to look after the house and help nurse the infant. She had no experience of midwifery. Bertrand arrived late one evening to find his lover stone cold in a pool of congealed birth-blood, and Yolande hugging a screaming boy.

  He buried Heloise in the woods beyond the house, cursing himself. Cursing God. He thought at the time that he was being punished, but as the months went on and he watched his son grow he couldn’t believe God had given him anything other than a gift in Raoul. After his election as archbishop of Bordeaux, a post he had fought for ruthlessly, it became easier to siphon off funds to pay for his son’s keep. He knew how to disguise his accounts, and as many in his familia were relatives, they would not question his administration. Heloise became a sad memory, but so distant that sometimes he thought of Raoul as a miracle, a child born without parents, who would grow up to change the world. It would be through his son that his sins would be expunged.

  The door opened and Yolande entered, leading a toddling boy with brown hair and large black eyes like his mother and a hooked nose like his. Raoul was gripping a worn leather ball and pouted as Yolande took it from him and pointed toward Bertrand. “Here’s your papa to see you, dear one.”

  Bertrand frowned in dismay as Raoul clung to Yolande’s leg. “What is wrong with him?”

  “He’s just shy,” she said, scooping the boy up and depositing him on Bertrand’s knee. “You must visit more often,” she admonished, “then he will know you better.”

  “I have a gift for you, Raoul,” said Bertrand, as his son squirmed and tried to get off his lap. “Here.” He picked the package off the table. The cloth covering it was still damp. Raoul stopped wriggling and grasped it greedily. “Let me take this off.” Bertrand unwrapped the cloth to reveal a small, embroidered scene of a domed church on a rock, surrounded by tiny white buil
dings, crowned with a blue sky. “One of my young acolytes made this for me.”

  Raoul stared at it with a heavy frown. “Picture,” he said, jabbing a finger at it.

  “It is not just any picture. This is Jerusalem.” Bertrand spoke the word in such a soft, reverent tone, that Raoul went still, suddenly interested. Neither of them noticed as Yolande slipped out of the room. “This is the city where our savior, Jesus Christ, once lived. One day, I will take you there, Raoul,” he murmured into his son’s pink ear. “One day, I promise we will see this together.”

  An hour later, Bertrand left the house and made his way back down the track to where his squire was waiting with the horses in the shelter of a clump of trees. The climb down was made easier by the spring in his step, and even the pain in his stomach, affecting him for some weeks now, seemed dulled. Gaillard, the only person other than Yolande who knew his secret, didn’t say a word, but dutifully laced his hands to help the archbishop into the saddle.

  As he rode slowly back through the hot afternoon toward Bordeaux, Bertrand’s joy at seeing his son was soon obscured by thoughts of the promise he had made to the boy. Reports had begun to come through from the Holy Land, where Jacques de Molay had been heading a Crusade. After some initial hope the previous year, borne on the news that the Crusaders had joined forces with the Mongols against the Mamluks, more recent reports revealed the campaign had suffered massive failure. It was said the Templars’ last stronghold on the island of Ruad had been captured by Muslim forces and that the grand master and his commanders had fallen back to Cyprus. With the Hospitallers unwilling to work with their rivals, the Teutonics fully occupied in their conquest of pagan Prussia, and King Edward’s promise forgotten in the recent wars, there seemed to be few fighting men left to continue the struggle.

  Bertrand had never set foot in the Holy Land, but it called to him like a prayer he yearned to answer. To walk in God’s footsteps, to see the places where the Savior of mankind had lived and breathed: this was what he aspired to. He could have gone on pilgrimage in his youth, indeed had considered it, but the thought of the turmoil on those far shores had stopped him from making the journey. He had heard the stories of the First Crusade, of streets awash with blood and piled with corpses. He didn’t want to see it in that way. He wanted to enter a golden city, smell the fragrant olive trees and hear the song of birds as he wound his way up the hill to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, surely the most hallowed ground on earth. It was the task of rulers to conquer and soldiers to fight. But it was his task to lead God’s faithful into the gates of a liberated Jerusalem.

  “What are they doing?”

  Bertrand was stirred from his thoughts by Gaillard’s voice. The squire was looking toward a huge oak, rising like a green tower from a cornfield. Bertrand saw a group of men heading for it. He realized he could hear shouts over the rushing of the wheat. It looked as if the group were dragging something. It was . . . ? Bertrand’s brow creased. Two people.

  “Should we intervene, Your Grace?”

  Bertrand started to shake his head, but went still as he saw that the figures were writhing, fighting against the men hauling them toward the oak. He caught a flash of metal and guessed the captors were armed.

  “Royal soldiers,” said Gaillard suddenly. “Your Grace, those men are royal soldiers.”

  “My God,” Bertrand murmured, as he realized the two struggling men were clad in the vivid scarlet and blue surcoats worn by the troops stationed in Bordeaux. One of their captors threw a rope over the branch of the tree. The archbishop’s hand went to the jeweled cross around his neck as he knew with a sick feeling that he was about to witness a murder.

  “We have to stop them, Your Grace.”

  “I cannot! They might ask what I am doing out here.” Bertrand glanced back to where the house was still visible on the hill. “My son,” he said helplessly. “You go, Gaillard. Find out what is happening. Make them stop this.”

  Gaillard looked afraid, but he spurred his horse off the track and into the cornfield, cutting a path through the gold. Bertrand watched two of the group break off to challenge the squire as he galloped toward them. He saw them raise swords. A second rope had been thrown over the branch and the soldiers were being hoisted up. Their shouts came to him, sharp with fear. Gaillard had dismounted and was confronting one of the captors. Bertrand sucked in a breath as the man pointed a sword at him. Gaillard backed away and mounted his horse.

  Bertrand looked on, aghast, as the soldiers were drawn haltingly into the air by their necks, the mob heaving on the ropes.

  “Your Grace,” panted Gaillard, hauling his horse to a stop alongside him. “I tried, but they . . .” He shook his head, looking back across the cornfield. “There was nothing I could do.”

  Bertrand said nothing, his gaze transfixed by the jerking soldiers.

  “They say there is an uprising against King Philippe’s occupation,” said Gaillard, “that they do not accept the truce Edward of England has made with him. They said they will drive out the royal forces themselves, like the Flemish have done in Bruges. They say others are doing the same, all over the duchy.”

  THE LOUVRE, PARIS, AUGUST 10, 1302 AD

  “Lord Philippe is aware of your situation, but as you are one of the principal moneylenders in Paris, he cannot help but be surprised by your inefficiency in paying this year’s tribute.”

  “What more can I do, my lord?” implored the elderly Jew, stepping past the royal treasurer and holding out his hands to Philippe, who was seated in a high-backed chair behind a table covered with rolls of parchment. “I have done everything in my power to collect the monies owed to me, but there are still many debts outstanding. As you can see.” He unfurled several of the rolls and pointed to the lists of numbers. “If I could have more time?”

  “You have had five months already,” said Philippe, before the treasurer could speak. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “I am disappointed, Samuel. Steps may have to be taken.”

  “My lord, the laws imposed upon my people by your grandfather, King Louis, have made it increasingly difficult for us to collect unpaid sums from Christian debtors. There is no real incentive for them to pay their debts. They cannot even be imprisoned if they refuse!”

  “I would be very careful,” said Philippe ominously, “about disparaging Saint Louis in any way.”

  “My lord, I am certain Samuel meant no offense.”

  Philippe glanced up at the whispery voice. He stared at the frail, white-haired Jew with the foreign accent. “I still do not see your part in this. Why are you here?”

  “Rabbi Elias is here to vouch for me,” interjected Samuel. “He has agreed to act as my guarantor in this matter.”

  “I can assure you, my lord,” said Elias, calmly meeting the king’s hostile gaze, “Samuel will pay his tribute to you as soon as—” He broke off at a rapping on the chamber door.

  Philippe looked around. “I said I wasn’t to be disturbed.”

  “I will deal with it,” responded Nogaret, pushing himself from the wall, where he had been watching the dispute in silence. He moved past the treasurer and pulled open the door.

  Philippe frowned, hearing a muttered exchange. “Who is it, Nogaret?”

  “A messenger and an official from the palace, my lord. They say it is urgent.”

  “Be quick,” Philippe ordered testily, as the two men entered the chamber. “I have enough business to get through today without interruptions.”

  “I bring news from Flanders, my lord.” The messenger said nothing more, but handed Philippe a scroll.

  The king unrolled it. As he read, his expression changed from one of impatience to one of disbelief. When he came to the end, his hand fell to his side. The parchment slipped from his fingers to curl into a roll on the flagstones.

  “My lord?” questioned Nogaret. When the king didn’t answer, Nogaret crossed to the scroll and swiped it up.

  “When our forces arrived at Courtrai, we fo
und the Flemish laying siege to the castle,” the messenger said into the hush. “Their army was composed of infantry alone, but they outnumbered us. They were led by guild heads and the sons of Guy de Dampierre.” Nogaret was still reading. Philippe had flattened his palm on the table, crumpling one of the parchments Samuel had set out. “Our knights led a charge, but were hampered by the marshy terrain and by Flemish archers. Those who managed to get close enough to their lines were beaten from their horses by the enemies’ clubs.”

  “Destroyed?” muttered Nogaret, his eyes still moving over the scroll.

  “We estimate more than one thousand knights were slain. A full list of casualties will be delivered shortly, but I was asked to inform you directly of two deaths. Count Robert d’Artois was surrounded on the field. I’m afraid our soldiers couldn’t reach him. The other . . .” The messenger bowed his head, not meeting Philippe’s stare. “The other was Chancellor Flote. He was found with his throat cut, some way from the center of the battle.” Now the messenger did look at Philippe, his eyes bright with anger. “They took the spurs of our dead knights as trophies, my lord. It is rumored they hung them in a church in Courtrai.”

  Still, Philippe said nothing. Elias and Samuel were looking uncertainly at the treasurer, who was wringing his hands.

  “I’m afraid these are not the only black tidings, my lord,” said the royal official, stepping forward. “Just this past hour the palace has received a report of a rebellion against royal forces in the Guienne region. It isn’t clear as yet how widespread the insurrection is, but we know some soldiers have been murdered and—”