The Seal

by Adriana Koulias

  Etienne looked down to the child walking with silent deter-mination at his heels, and frowned. ‘Would you not do the same if it were yours?’

  Marcus gave a great guffaw. ‘Mine? Well, there is one certainty, my brother, I would have made a swift clean cut of that little throat before you could have fetched him and I would have cut yours as well!’

  Etienne smiled at him. ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  But the old man was stretching his sorrowful howl in their wake and Marcus stopped in his tracks and looked behind him. ‘It seems that all wish to die this night! Shall I once more finish what you have started?’

  Etienne did not pause but said over his shoulder, ‘Best to move on, brother. Soon the gates close.’

  Marcus stood a moment, striving to ascertain quarrel from reasonable logic, then narrowed his eyes and chose to make a smile of it, nodding to himself. ‘This day has you full of strange tempers, Etienne!’ he shouted after him. ‘First you wish to die a paragon, then you add to it by wishing to save the world! Well . . . perhaps I am of the same mind! I am decided to leave him as a gift . . . for Mameluks!’

  Etienne continued his walk with the boy child entangled in his skirts until he caught up with Jacques. He felt a familiar pain travel down his left arm then to the tips of his fingers. He shook the hand and it began to lift its grip. He had not paused his stride and no one could tell that he felt as though something unfamiliar had entered into him and was now moving about in his head. He put his hand, still trembling, to his brow and found it wet. Fear, he thought to his surprise – not of Mameluks or Turks, certainly not of death. He said nothing. He walked on faster than before, and the child beside him had to double its pace to keep up.

  Jacques de Molay craned his neck to look at the boy with knitted brows. ‘I wonder, Etienne, what we shall do with this creature? Surely it shall be misplaced in our world?’

  Jacques was his better and could have ordered him to leave the child behind, but Etienne knew he was not in the habit of bending men to his will. Such liberties given to men used to living by rules provoked a search of the heart more deep, it gave a man more weight to bear, and this either made a strength in the soul or a weakness.

  Etienne searched for reasons and settled on this: ‘These wars wear out hope.’ He looked at Jacques and left it at that.

  Jacques nodded, thoughtful, and looked ahead. ‘That, Etienne, is the way of children, they give us hope they do not have for themselves.’

  ‘Ahh!’ Marcus said, kicking out at the child who ducked to escape behind Etienne’s leg. ‘There will not be room for him in the galleys, and tomorrow or the next day or even the next day after that, when the evil of mankind storms the Temple gates, it shall spill forth its hatred upon him and every other like him . . . As I said, better a knife to the throat.’

  Etienne had no adequate counter to this plain fact and so he ignored the boy whose small hands grasped at the scabbard at his leg and the shield upon his back for balance. Tonight or tomorrow they would leave this place with Thibaud de Gaudin. The fortress and all pertaining to it would belong to the Saracens soon enough. He gave the child a push and it fell on its back. ‘Go!’ he shouted. But the child caught up with him. Etienne did not resist it, and the two continued their awkward walk.

  The Templars were now passing the Genoese quarter and could see the Tower of the Temple that lay at the seaward extremity of the city. On either side of them behind the barred doors and shuttered windows, the city lay quiet, awaiting its fate.

  A hawk landed on the edge of a roof and Jacques de Molay paused to look at it. It belonged to Al Ashraf, they had seen it the day before upon his arm. The bird was proud and magnificent and viewed them with disdain; presently it flew away, trailing behind it its jesses and ribbons, startled at the sounds of footsteps on the roof tiles.

  Etienne put the child to one side and looked into its eyes again. ‘Stay here!’ he commanded, and this made the child quiet and begin to suck his thumb. Etienne looked upon this with severity and he gave himself up to a sigh. He drew his long sword from out of its scabbard, stuck a little from dried blood, and slid his shield from his back, slipping it through an arm. Together with his brothers he readied himself as five shapes lit by the new sun came off the rooftops and landed on the street ahead of them.

  The Saracens stepped lightly to form a line. By comparison the Templars moved like a wall with their shields at the fore and their swords raised in the air. They called on their battle cry ‘Beauseant!’ and momentarily the two sides came together with a clash.

  Etienne fought with his eyes open and his mind swift. He struck one Mameluk through the shoulder, beating in his face with his shield and turning in time to thrust his blade into the shoulder of another. Blood mingled with the light before his eyes, he blinked and blinked again.

  Next to him Jacques was in a calm rage. ‘Christ protect me!’ he shouted. Holding a short knife in one hand and his sword in the other, he thrust the knife into a neck and, slipping towards the front, drove his sword into the belly so that the body fol¬lowed the descent of its bowels to the ground. Jacques stumbled over them and made a curse.

  Marcus, bleeding from a cut across his face, ran his blade through the skull of a man, but he could not see that another had sneaked up behind him to put a knife into his side. Etienne

  did not have time to prevent it before a brother coming from out of the shadows had cut the man’s throat.

  The fight over, the child returned to Etienne and hid behind his skirts. The men put away their weapons and, having seen only a scattering of enemy in the distance, concluded there was time before the gatekeeper closed the fortified gates.

  ‘Roger of Flor, is that you?’ Jacques said. ‘Why has your ship not yet made for the sea?’

  The big man took off his metal cap and wiped his brow. Over his brown-creased face a white smile. ‘I was chasing money owed by a merchant, but I have been unfortunate!’

  ‘Well, brother, your misfortune is the fortune of our brother, Marcus.’

  Marcus gave a grumble, holding his face together with a hand. ‘I saw him,’ he said from out of one side of his mouth. ‘I was biding my time!’

  ‘Did you not find the merchant then?’ Etienne asked of Roger.

  Roger laughed. ‘The thief was killed, murdered by his whores . . . And the money . . . well, the money, I’ll wager, is divided among them. By God! If I had known it yesterday when those women were at the quays climbing aboard any vessel that would put to the water, I would have taken their money and let them drown in their swollen little boat.’

  Ahead of them the men saw John of Villiers, Grand Master of the Hospital, being helped to the Temple gate. He was covered in blood and looked not to last a night. Behind them there was the woeful sound of slaughter. Etienne knew the Saracens would go from house to house until the killing was done and leave the Templar fortress for last.

  When they came upon the immense and noble gate-tower of the Temple, they were met with a gathering of those citizens turned back from the harbour yesterday. A smattering of women and children, old men and their wives, forestalled in their desire to find shelter in the Temple grounds by four knights who stood guard before the great portal. As Etienne and his brothers drew closer the people broke into sobbings and weepings, grasping at their mantles and falling at their feet.

  Etienne looked at this spectacle and the misery and despair of it. The child at his leg pulled on his white mantle, tugging and tugging again to get his attention. Before him a woman with a bitter face made a spit at the ground and lashed out curses, holding up a pagan device he recognised, something blue – an evil eye. The old man next to her pulled at his white hair, taking chunks of it in his hands and crying out something Etienne did not understand. And among this confusion and equal tempers of noise and reproach the infant continued tugging at his mantle, and its plain language spoke to him, for it was afraid, it could hear the hell sounds drawing closer. Etienne rubbed the bridge of his nose; it w
as wet with blood and he gave a grunt of discomfort.

  Next to him Jacques de Molay was raising his arms to silence the crowd. ‘There are not enough ships! You shall have to remain behind!’

  A woman held out an infant swaddled in a red cloth at his face and Jacques de Molay pushed it away so that the woman, having lost her grip, very nearly let it fall. Jacques, trying to prevent it, very nearly lost his balance among the cobbled stones and people and their belongings at his feet. The infant gave a cry of fear and Jacques fumbled with his hands and returned the bundle to its mother. He said to her in a voice almost breathless, ‘Do you understand, woman? I cannot save you! Thousands are drowned in the harbour yesterday! The boats sink from the weight of so many!’

  The child’s cries rose in the air and it was met by the sound of weeping from the women and men, a multitude of noise that, compared with the noise of the killing throng behind them, made Etienne’s head all a-daze and he had to fight to keep from falling into unsteadiness.

  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.’

  ‘I was at chapter, Jourdain, I am aware of the particulars. She may be his mother, but she is also a woman. He has broken the rule twice therefore: to look upon a woman is a dangerous thing, be it widow, young girl, mother, sister, aunt or any other; a knight is to remain eternally before the face of God with a pure conscience and sure life.’ Etienne gave him a significant look. ‘In providing food for the woman from the larder he has transgressed a second rule. Remind him that one-tenth of all food is given each day to the almoner, whose duty it is to see that it reaches the needy. Tell Brother Alphonse to pray and ask our Lord for His forgiveness. The decision of the chapter, however, is accomplished and what is accomplished cannot be revoked. Tomorrow he shall lose his mantle and his privileges and for six months he shall eat his food from the floor. That is the decision.’

  The captain made a slight gesture, a glance with the eyes and turned to go.

  Etienne sighed. ‘Jourdain?’

  The young man turned again and Etienne saw something in his face.

  ‘Tell him if he endures the punishment with steadfastness he shall soon be wearing his white mantle, for God is merciful. Then go to the almoner, see to it that he finds the woman . . . tell him to give her part of my ration.’

  There it was again, just like that! It seemed to Etienne that the moment he was close to understanding the language of Jourdain’s face, the look was flown away.

  He narrowed his eyes. ‘You are thinking something, Jourdain?’

  The captain looked down. ‘It is only this, Etienne . . . if you will permit me to say . . . Aristotle once said that a virtuous action should bring pleasure to the soul . . . I only ever see it bring you pain.’

  Etienne was used to this young man’s strange thoughts and even stranger ways, for his father had been a man of great learning whose donations to the Temple for his immortal soul had not only included all of his estates but also his only child. Etienne sighed, the boy meant well. ‘There is no provision for pleasure in the rule, Jourdain, as you know . . . Now I am in a hurry and you must see to your duties,’ he said, but his voice was not without warmth.

  The young captain gave a nod and Etienne continued on his way with disquiet in his heart. Such was the Order of the Temple in Cyprus, he thought, underwarred and un
wound, loose in habit and in will, so that each day there was a new thing to think of, a new transgression to punish. Soon those who were penitent would outweigh those who were constant, and he wondered how the Order could battle the numerous outward perils that pressed in upon it from all sides, when its mind was turned inward to lick its own wounds.

  He found that he was standing before two sergeant brothers whose task it was to guard the Grand Master’s cell. He held his face together with frown and stern lip and put away these concerns and prepared to enter the room with a calm heart.

  He showed the outer guards his ring and they nodded and ushered him in.

  The inner guard was released and he entered the room.

  Inside stood Marcus, these days made Grand Commander of the Order. Beside him the marshal, Ayme d’Oselier, holding himself in as tight as an overwound lute that at any moment would let loose its strings.

  Both men were surrounded by an activity of the soul that burdened the air in the cell. Etienne was given a notion and a thought came to him.

  This looks like a council of war.

  Jacques de Molay, in contrast, was full of grave serenity. He stood by the window, dressed in white mantle and chain mail with hands crossed behind him, staring outwards to a black sky and beyond with his face into the breeze. Rain fell upon the stone of the floor at his feet and was lit by reflections of gold that, coming from below a cloud, communicated something too important to be interrupted. There was a flash, the room filled with light and died away.

  The cell was sparse. A chair, a table crosswise the window, with a rough wooden cross above it were all the adornment.

  How the man has changed since Acre!

  As Etienne thought this, Jacques half turned to him. He was thin-lipped, his mouth relaxed and brow cut straight across, bridging eyes that were no longer furrowed. Those eyes did not look sharply at the world, but had loosened their hold these last years. They no longer darted here and there; they were unguarded, contemplative, and what was beyond, perfectly revealed and acknowledged. To Etienne he looked like a dying tree, naked in the light that threw his shadow less big and drew his shoulders in.