The Sword of Moses

by Dominic Selwood

  There was something of a challenge in the statement, but Ava returned his gaze without flinching.

  Saxby lifted a copy of an English newspaper off the corner table beside him. He passed it to Ava, pointing at the main article. “You’ve seen that?”

  She looked at the headline.

  GENERAL DANQUAH CONFIRMS HIS TRIP

  She was aware of the story. It had been in all the papers recently.

  General Danquah, the de facto military ruler of a large central African country and international pariah, was planning to visit the Federal Republic of Somalia—one of the only countries still to maintain diplomatic relations with him. Danquah’s office had been busy pumping out press releases announcing his visit was to celebrate an initiative in the glorious cause of Pan-African unity. But eager journalists had not been slow to ferret out that the real purpose of his trip to Mogadishu was to cement a multi-million dollar deal to supply him with an arsenal of up-to-date Iranian-made surface-to-air missiles.

  “Remember that headline,” Saxby looked at her gravely, “and watch the news this evening.”

  This was not the sort of revelation about the Foundation Ava had been expecting. “You’re behind Danquah?”

  “Not quite,” Saxby took back the paper. “We believe we can make the world a safer place.”

  “With arms deals?” Ferguson made no effort to hide his scepticism.

  “Maybe this will help,” De Molay announced, picking up a battered wooden box from the table beside him, and opening the lid.

  Ava watched with interest as he began to lift a long chain off the folds of the faded sky-blue silk lining its interior.

  With mounting incredulity, she saw the chain was made of sturdy gold links, each as thick as a matchstick, alternating between solid and filigree work, with a break every five inches for a hammered gold cross-patty the size of a walnut, each with a blood-red ruby at its centre.

  As he pulled the chain clear of the box, she realized there was something chunky suspended from it—an ornamented and gem-encrusted gold pendant the size and shape of an oversize chess pawn.

  De Molay put the chain down between them onto the polished surface of the butler’s table.

  Even without examining it, Ava knew in an instant what it was.

  The grand chain was unmistakably an elaborate piece of medieval jewellery. There could be no doubt. Nobody made gold chains in those proportions and with that degree of craftsmanship any more.

  She could also immediately tell it had been made for a highly important person—a member of a royal or noble family, or a senior churchman. It exuded wealth and influence. Few could afford that quality, even among the privileged elite who filled the castles of medieval Europe.

  “Go on,” De Molay encouraged with a smile. “You can pick it up.”

  Ava reached out, lifting it gingerly off the table with both hands. She knew that if it was pure gold, which was rarely the case with jewellery, it would be nineteen times heavier than water. She could not tell its exact weight without scales, but even from just holding it, she was left in no doubt that it was solid gold.

  She also knew without looking what the pendant dangling from it was for, and she suspected the reason De Molay had given it to her was engraved onto its base.

  Taking hold of the pendant and turning it over, she was not disappointed.

  Exactly as she had anticipated, the gold bore an image cut into the metal in counter-relief.

  At its centre was a crude picture of an oriental building—a portico with four arches topped by a large striped dome with an outsize cross on top. None of the lines were straight. It was as if drawn by a child.

  Around the edge of the image she could clearly read three words in mirror writing:

  She gazed back at De Molay, open-mouthed.

  “There’s the other side, of course,” he smiled. “The head twists over.”

  Looking more closely, she saw a hairline join running around the base of the pendant a match head’s width from the bottom. Inserting her thumbnail and twisting gently, the end popped off into her hand, the size and shape of a thick coin.

  Flipping it over, she caught her breath at what was looking up at her.

  She already had a suspicion what the building on the front was, and what the writing around it meant. But now gazing at the image on the reverse, there could be no doubt.

  She could feel her pulse quickening.

  The metal intaglio showed two medieval knights sitting together on the back of the same galloping horse. They wore flowing surcoats, and each carried a long kite-shaped shield protecting his body from shoulder to calf. Their heads were covered by chain-mail coifs, and each knight was brandishing a vicious looking lance. Around the image were the words:

  Ava stared at De Molay and Saxby in a partial daze.

  She knew exactly what she was looking at. She could see the knights in her mind’s eye—their billowing white surcoats emblazoned with bright red crosses.

  At last she managed a reply. “You’ve got to be joking?” She spoke quietly, her eyes travelling slowly from one man to the other.

  “What do you think?” De Molay asked gently.

  Ava let the chain run through her fingers as she placed it back onto the table. She replied slowly. “I think I need you to tell me what you’re doing with this.”

  De Molay nodded, settling back into his chair. “What I’m about to tell you is in the utmost confidence.” He fixed her with an intensity she had not seen in his face before—the geniality gone, replaced by an earnest severity. “If I discover you’ve breathed a word of what I’m about to say, you’ll never see or hear from us again.” He shot a similarly firm glance at Ferguson. “The same goes for you, Major Ferguson. Do I make myself clear?”

  Ferguson nodded. “But is someone going to tell me what that is?” He nodded towards the chain on the table.

  “It’s a seal die, or matrix,” Ava replied. “You push it into wax, and it creates an image—a seal.”

  “I guessed that,” Ferguson looked across at her. “But what’s its significance?”

  “It means,” Ava began, pausing to take a deep breath. “It means these gentlemen,” she indicated De Molay and Saxby, “want us to believe that they belong to an Order all experts say was eradicated seven hundred years ago.”

  De Molay looked at Ava and Ferguson in turn. “You may have expected threats to ensure you don’t tell others what I’m about to tell you. But none are needed, because if you ever repeat what you’re about to learn, no one will believe a single word of your story. You’ll be labelled as deranged—like conspiracy theorists, obsessed with the Opus Dei, the Illuminati, the New World Order, the Rosicrucians, or whatever else is flavour of the month. But do please believe me—you’ll never hear from us again, and that will mean you’ll have lost your one and only realistic chance to track down and retrieve the artefacts we are now all so earnestly seeking.”

  Ava nodded.

  “Understood.” Ferguson stared at the seal matrix. “I guess ‘SIGILLUM’ means seal. What’s the rest?”

  “It means Seal of the Knighthood of Christ.” Ava answered. “‘MILITUM’ comes from the Latin miles, meaning a knight—where we get the name Miles. And ‘XPISTI’ is a medieval spelling for Christi, using the Greek alphabet for the first two letters.”

  “The X and P together,” De Molay added, “the first two letters of the word Christ in Greek, were often written over each other as a monogram to form one letter called the Chi Rho. It’s one of the most ancient Christian symbols in existence.”

  “Say it then,” Ava paused, turning to Saxby. “Tell him who you are. I don’t think I’ll quite believe it until I hear it.”

  Saxby took a deep breath. “Very well. The Foundation is an ancient brotherhood. But what you know of us is almost certainly a farrago of half-truths and speculation, fed by rumour-mongers over the centuries.”

  “So I was right,” Ferguson cut in. “That portrait of Sir Robert Moray at
the Royal Society gave it away—you’re freemasons.”

  “Freemasons?” Saxby shook his head. He paused, allowing himself a half-smile. “Well, yes and no. That is—not entirely.”

  Ferguson raised an eyebrow. “That’s cleared it up.”

  “Major Ferguson,” De Molay leant forward in his chair, his expression sombre. “You must understand, we’re not accustomed to speaking openly. It’s something of a rarity for us to explain who we are to outsiders.”

  “Our Order has been hunted and persecuted down the centuries,” Saxby continued, “for more reasons than I care to think of. So we live in the shadows, and are not very practised at emerging into the daylight.”

  De Molay stretched his arm over the table and picked up the chain and seal matrix again. He paused before continuing, touching them thoughtfully, his voice tinged with an air of nostalgia. “Once, a long time ago, we held our heads high across Christendom. We moved in the uppermost circles of influence, the right-hand of kings and popes. We wove the very fabric of power in a way that few have done before or since. With our monks’ hoods and mailed fists, we ruled the land and sea, the royal courts and papal curia. Our citadels dominated every great Christian town—from Jerez to Jerusalem. The Order’s blood red cross was a symbol of might that has rarely been rivalled.”

  He gazed distractedly into the middle distance. “But if there’s one constant thing in life, it’s change. So when our Order came to a sudden and brutal end, we retreated from the open light of day, and moved into the shadows.”

  He was running the heavy chain through his fingers as if it was an outsize rosary. “But the truth is—we never went away.”

  Ava felt a shiver shoot down her spine. She was struggling to take on board what she was hearing. She knew De Molay and Saxby could only be talking about one Order—the seal was unmistakeable, unique. And the historical description De Molay had just given fitted perfectly.

  She glanced at both men. “Why should we believe you? You know as well as I do there are thousands of fantasists out there who claim to be that Order, and they are all certifiably mad.”

  “Is someone going to tell me what you’re all talking about?” Ferguson interjected. “Which Order?”

  “Tell him then.” Ava gazed at Saxby, the gentle light glinting off his silver hair.

  Saxby seemed at something of a loss. He glanced at De Molay.

  “Well then I will.” Ava continued, turning to Ferguson. “They’re claiming to be the Knights Templar, for two centuries the heroes of Christendom, the medieval Church’s elite military unit. The knights who won their bloody spurs in the crusades, then turned their victories into a business empire with riches to rival kings.”

  “The knights you said first found the Menorah in Jerusalem?” Ferguson asked Saxby.

  The older man nodded.

  “But after two centuries as Christendom’s most skilled soldiers, bankers, and advisers to kings and popes,” Saxby continued, “they were brought down by the king of France in a storm of scandalous accusations—black magic, idol worship, secret ceremonies, blasphemy, and homosexuality.”

  Ferguson’s eyes widened. “Was there any truth in them?”

  “The charges were politically motivated,” De Molay countered. “King Philip of France was ambitious but bankrupt. He coveted the power of the pope and the wealth of the Templars. He calculated that if he destroyed the pope’s most powerful Order, he would be seen as stronger than the pope. At the same time, he figured he would get his hands on the Templars’ money, which he needed to fill his barren coffers and fund his wars. It was win-win for him.”

  “But,” De Molay continued, “he also knew that if he wanted to bring the popular knights down, he first needed to turn public opinion against them. So he ordered his lawyers to fabricate the usual slew of medieval accusations—each guaranteed to appal the God-fearing public. He knew exactly which buttons of public opinion to press, as he had recently thrown the exact same slanders against his last enemy, Pope Boniface VIII. In fact, he was largely responsible for Pope Boniface’s death, after which he arranged a posthumous trial to accuse the dead pope of heresy, idolatry, black magic, and sodomy. Having seen the power of the charges on that occasion, he then hurled the same ones confidently at the Templars. And he faced no resistance from the new pope, Clement V, who sat quietly on the sidelines.”

  “That doesn’t make much sense.” Ferguson frowned. “If the Templars were such a rich and influential Order within the Church, why would the pope hang them out to dry?”

  “Corruption,” De Molay answered simply and sadly. “Once King Philip had rid himself of Pope Boniface, he rigged the election of a weak Frenchman to replace him as pope.” De Molay shrugged. “The new pope, Clement V, owed King Philip everything. The king had given him the pope’s Triple Crown, and he could take it away just as easily.”

  “Without any protection from the Vatican, the knights were brutally tortured for seven years in Philip’s dungeons, forced to confess all sorts of terrible things. But eventually the Order’s seventy-year-old Grand Master could no longer stand the public shame. Despite the terrible tortures, he began a passionate defence of the Order, definitively denying all charges, and giving his broken knights the strength to withdraw their blood-soaked confessions and assert their innocence.”

  De Molay turned to Ferguson. “As you may know, in medieval times, withdrawing a confession of heresy was effectively suicide. The knights knew they would no longer be treated as penitents undergoing spiritual rehabilitation. Instead, they would be classified as relapsed heretics, fallen back into their previous errors. Having spared their lives once, the Church would not do it again. Instead, it would send them to the pyre, to cleanse their corrupted souls with fire.”

  “Nevertheless, even knowing the terrible consequences, many of the knights followed their leader, withdrew their forced confessions, and willingly chose death to clear their names and consciences.”

  “But that’s not the end of it.” Ava continued. “Even though the pope shut down the Templars, and all its members were either burned at the stake, imprisoned for life, or pensioned off into other Orders, there have ever since been rumours the Templars secretly survived as one of the most powerful clandestine societies in history.”

  She turned to De Molay. “Something like that?”

  The old man nodded his assent.

  “You do know how absurd this all sounds?” Ava replied slowly. “The idea that the Order survived? Only the most ardent conspiracy theorists believe it. All the experts confirm the Templars ceased to exist in 1312, officially shut down for all time by the pope. It’s pure fantasy to believe the knights still exist, perpetuating some secret mission.”

  “And yet,” De Molay answered wistfully. “Here we are.”

  Saxby spread his hands in a gesture of openness. “Dr Curzon, you already have the most convincing piece of evidence.”

  That was news to Ava. She wracked her brains to see if there was something she had missed, but she was not aware she had yet heard or seen anything conclusive.

  Saxby nodded in the direction of the head of the Foundation. “Does the name De Molay not mean anything to you?”

  As Saxby spoke the words, it was as if she was hearing the name for the first time. She had not registered it properly back at the Royal Society—her mind had been on other things

  But now, in the current context, her brain made the connection immediately. “But that’s—” she began, before being interrupted by Ferguson.

  “Does someone want to tell me what you’re all talking about?”

  “The last Grand Master of the Templars,” she explained to Ferguson, “the one who was burned at the stake. His name was Jacques de Molay.”

  De Molay cut in. “Along with Hugh de Payns, who founded the Order two hundred years earlier, Jacques de Molay is the most famous of all our Grand Masters. He was a war hero, then later the man who led the knights to the pyre and into history’s pages.”

&
nbsp; Ferguson raised his eyebrows. “A war hero? In the crusades? From what I hear, it was butchery. There’s nothing heroic about that.”

  De Molay settled back into his chair, shaking his head. “The Templars were no butchers. They did not exist at the time of the carnage when Jerusalem was captured. And there are no records that they ever committed any atrocities. Quite to the contrary.”

  He paused. “Jacques de Molay was an old man when he was burned. The doomed last stand of the crusaders had been twenty-three years earlier, at Acre in Palestine. Jacques fought there—and was one of the few survivors.”

  “I’ve been there,” Ava murmured. “You can still feel the drama among the ruins.”

  “The fall of Acre was the stuff of legend,” De Molay continued. “And it tells you something very important about our Order’s values.”

  De Molay stroked the chain, letting it run through his fingers as if he was in prayer. “It was 1291, nearly two hundred years after the Christians first took Jerusalem, and a hundred years after Saladin had seized it back again—a century in which the crusaders had been pushed further and further towards the sea. Now, of all the great Christian cities in the crusader states, only Acre remained. If it fell, the crusades would be over.”

  “The Muslim forces were ranged under Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil and his Mamluks—brutal hardened soldiers, quite unlike anything the crusaders had ever seen before, and a far cry from the genteel chivalry of Saladin a century earlier. The Mamluks had been crushing the crusaders in battle after battle, and the outcome of the siege of Acre was never in doubt. The Muslims had vastly overwhelming numbers, and it was merely a question of how and when the end would come.”

  “The Stalingrad of the crusades,” Ferguson muttered.

  “Something like that,” De Molay acknowledged. “It didn’t take the sultan’s troops long to smash into Acre. Soon they had control of most of the city, and the inhabitants were massacred or taken into slavery. Only the Templars’ compound held out, filled with the Order’s knights and terrified civilians seeking protection and shelter. The sultan offered safe passage to all civilians if the Templars surrendered their tower. Grand Master William de Beaujeu had already died in the fighting, so a senior Templar named Peter de Severy went to the sultan’s camp to negotiate the handover and save the civilians. He knew it would mean the almost certain execution of all Templars, but he did it to save the civilians.”