The Seal (30 page)

Clement was
silent, listening beyond the outer skin of words. What the King was in fact
offering him was a way to do what they had conspired to do all along –
Clement would hear the confessions with his cardinals; they would all be
suitably enraged and disgusted, after which, none could contest his consent to
a reopening of the inquiry, and, when all was said and done, the King would
remain in control of the Templars, their gold and their property. Clement knew
that, in turn, he must squeeze what little juice he could from the lemon
himself.

He said nothing
for a long time. He looked to the tapestries on his walls, to his canopied bed
framed in sumptuous silk, but he was not perusing the grandeur of his apartment,
he was measuring his words.

‘This proposal
goes against my honour,’ he said finally, taking a cup of warm spiced wine that
had been prepared for him. He sipped it slowly. It made his gut
move
like a snake.

‘How so, your Sublimity?’
gasped Charles of Valois, blanching to the roots of his sparse grey hair.

Did you believe that you had me where you wanted me?
thought
Clement, suffused with
satisfaction. Then aloud: ‘I shall be short and blunt, my dear Count of
Romagne, hoping that you should hear what I say and return it unchanged forthwith
to your brother. Perhaps this tiresome affair might be over at last . . . hmm?
Now I cannot take any decision whatever concerning the inquiry until all the
members are handed over to me. Having said that, the Church may require, from
time to time, the use of the King’s prisons, this would be agreeable as long as
the Templars are at my every disposal. And as to Templar property, I may also
require the King’s assistance in its safekeeping. However, like the members of
the Order it is to be made available to the Holy See at all times. My own men
shall be responsible for auditing all accounts – not the King and the men
in his counting house. My bishops shall appoint curators of the properties belonging
to the Templars for each diocese, whose task will be to administer the goods on
behalf of the Order until a decision is made about their future. As to the fate
of the entire Order, I will say once again that I am not in a position to condemn
it if only the Templars of France are heretics. Think of Spain, Portugal,
England
! No, it is out of the question entirely.

‘Should I decide
to restore the powers of the inquisitors, they will act on behalf of provincial
councils formed to make inquiry against individual Templars. Each metropolitan
will then be responsible for those Templars who belong to this province. At the
same time I will set up a commission to make inquiry against the Order as a
whole. Eight commissioners will go personally to the city province and diocese
of Sens and make a separate inquiry of the truth with diligence, on our
authority. After all things are taken into consideration, all confessions
extracted and all evidence given, then both the provincial councils and the
commission will bring their findings to a general council at Vienne where the
fate of the Order shall be decided, two years from now. If the Order is
suppressed, and I say if, all goods are to be dispatched at my discretion.’ He
said this with no sign of the inner triumph he felt. Clement had bought himself
time.

Charles of
Valois was obviously perplexed. He knitted his brows and gave a slight evasive
nod.

‘To that end,
Valois,’ added the Pope, ‘I reserve the right to see Jacques de Molay and the
chiefs of the Order so that I may, thereby, later find myself in a better
position to judge the Order by their conduct. I wish them to come to Chinon.’

‘Chinon?’

It was expected
that Clement would ask to see the leaders of the Order. The ordinary knights
were one thing, but the
chiefs
of the Order were
another thing
entirely. His curia, the Romans and the
Spaniards, would not be satisfied to see just the ordinary knights. They
suspected torture to be at the back of the confessions and knew that the
leaders would be more confident in recanting them into their friendly ears.
Philip, on the other hand, was now encouraging it, for two reasons. He knew
that if the leaders recanted, his French cardinals could use it against them.

A confession was
one thing, it signalled a desire for the soul to be reconciled to God and to
the Church. But a retraction of that confession, a recanting, signalled that
dissent had taken deeper root and lay unrepentant and stubborn in the soul.
Such men were seen as relapsed heretics, men beyond the Church, and were handed
over to the King for burning. On the other hand, a confirmation of their
confessions could only speed up the condemnation of the entire Order and this
would put pressure on Clement to bring forward the general council. Either way
Philip would have his blood and Clement could stand to lose his advantage.

But Clement had
anticipated it and knew how to circumvent the entire affair. After all, he was
an expert at prevarication, his only tool. He would feign illness and instead
of going to Chinon himself he would send three cardinals. They would return to
him with their opinions as to the innocence or guilt of the Templar leaders,
the efficacy of which he would need to deliberate before making his own
decision on the matter. And since he would make a decree that no man need be
examined again after being examined by a cardinal, he would not be in a
position to do so and would be forced, on the pains of his conscience, to
withhold his decision until the pontifical commission came to its end . . .
years from now . . . Time would bend Philip to his will.

Once again he
must dance among thorns.

The pontiff
could see that the count sensed something in the air, but his lack of political
intelligence prevented him from seeing these evasions. ‘I shall have the leaders
of the Order sent to you, your Holiness,’ he said.

‘I will leave it
to you, Charles.’ The Pope gave a benevolent smile.

Charles de
Valois bowed deeply. ‘There is one more thing, your Holiness,’ he dared to say.

‘One more
thing?’ The Pope raised an annoyed brow.

‘There is the
matter of Monsieur de Nogaret . . . and his excommunication.’

‘What of it?’

‘The King wishes
him absolved, your Holiness.’

‘Well, the King
wishes for the impossible!’ Clement said, more flustered than he felt.

‘Your Holiness,’
Valois said softly, ‘it does not fare well for a king to have an excommunicate
as Keeper of his Seals.’

Clement
shrugged. ‘Philip should mind the company he keeps, then!’ Stifling a belch he
said, ‘
The
man is a devil! For goodness’ sake, Valois!
He tried to kidnap a pope! How would it look if I absolved such a thing?’

‘If your Holiness will pardon me . . . but Boniface was a heretic, a
whoremonger and a sodomite.
And so, your
Holiness, the King wishes his bones exhumed and burnt.’

‘The King, my
dear Valois, cannot have everything he wants! I shall look at the charges
against Boniface . . . etcetera... etcetera . . . but on Nogaret, I will not
bend.’

Valois hesitated
and then made a deferential bow of the head and a sweep of the hand. ‘Your
sublimity.’

‘Now away with you, my dear Count.
I
expect a swift reply.’

The man kissed
his ring, bowed once again and left.

When Clement was
alone he could not escape the voice of Pope Boniface in his ear, ‘Vain,
deplorable coward! The Devil take your soul!’

I
t had taken Etienne and
his men seven months to travel along the ancient route that led through the
mountains on a slow journey through steep gorges and narrow valleys. Summer had
made a pleasant day that hung blue and cool among the clouds and now they were
paused south of the river to rest until dark, when they would continue their journey.

Etienne was
unwell.

The wound in his
side had closed over after they had left that ill-fated house of the Order, but
it had opened soon after to reveal a deep, ulcerous, foul-smelling hollow that
would not mend. Now struck with fever, it had taken all his strength to come
off the horse and lay himself beneath a tree while Jourdain set off to fetch
wood and the mercenaries took themselves up the river to catch fish. In the
meantime, this outburst of inactivity meant that Etienne’s illness, kept restrained
by a concentrated force of will, now began its proper task, so that he lay with
his head aching and in his side a pain that travelled to his jaw and to his
fingertips, burning blood through his veins.

He lay like that
with his head resting upon the trunk of an oak when, through some knowing
sense, he opened his eyes and saw that a man was making a slow way beside a
mule along the track from which he and his men had just come. The man paused
some distance away, and Etienne saw that he wore the garments of a peasant and
that his face, what Etienne could see of it under the Spanish hat, was creased
and brown and frowning.

He took the hat
off, revealing an oversized balding head. He wiped his brow on his sleeve and
left the animal to graze while he took a walk over to where Etienne lay.

Etienne had the
sense, through the fever haze, that the man’s walk had a purpose to it, and he
seemed to draw the world in so that it became diluted into dimness around him.
Etienne, therefore, put a hand upon his short blade making, as it were, a
feeble attempt to look less like this was his dying day.

The traveller
paused a few paces from him and said something he did not understand.

Etienne shook
his head and the man spoke again, this time in French.

‘Master.’ He
bowed low. ‘I believe there are herbs in this valley to cure your ailment.’ His
voice was a gentle rasp upon the half-dream of the day. ‘I shall find them for
you.’

Not pausing to
hear Etienne’s reply, he left his line of vision and came back a moment later
carrying some green stems.

‘Put these in
your mouth and chew them, don’t swallow mind, just chew.’

Etienne took the
herbs, and if the thought of mischief had occurred to his dazzled mind it was
immediately lost under the gaze thrown down from out of those kindly eyes.

It was surely a
dream, Etienne told himself. ‘What is it?’ he said, looking at the herbs.

‘For your
malady.’

Etienne, not
removing his eyes from those of the man, put the greenery into his mouth and
immediately the bitter taste made a grimace of his face and he was near to
spitting it out when the older man cried out to prevent it.

‘No!’ He made a
laugh. ‘No, master, it is more potent the more foul it tastes!’

This logic
struck Etienne since he knew that goodness seldom walked hand in hand with
pleasure and so he continued with his chewing and grimacing and chewing again,
while the man sat not in the shade thrown by the young oak, but in the sun to
watch him, taking a blade of grass and then another, weaving something small in
his hands.

‘Where is your
wound?’ he said, not looking at Etienne.

Etienne, still
chewing, knew it pointless to pretend he was anything other than what he
seemed, and so he lifted up his shirt and took away the cloth wadding that
Jourdain had placed over it to reveal the meaty hole the size of a plum.

The man did not
make a move to come nearer; he nodded and nodded again. ‘Chew . . . it will
ease the fever in the chewing.’ Then, as if speaking to himself, ‘A dirty
razored knife put into the belly of others or into wild animals, used perhaps
to cut cheese or to flick dung from the floor of a boot, such a knife goes into
flesh and makes a home there for all manner of foulness.’ Then out loud, ‘Come
now, take out that paste and put it in the hole, squeeze the juice into it,
that’s right, do that three or four times a day after you have washed out the
dead flesh with spring water. That herb grows in this valley, you should find
it everywhere.’

Etienne took the
green substance into his hand and looked at it.

‘Go on!’ the man
encouraged with his hands.

He put the green
paste into the wound and drew in a breath when it touched the rotted flesh. He
put the wadding back over it and raised his eyes to the man. It was a moment
before he could speak and his voice sounded very far away to his ear.

‘Who are you?’

The man smiled a
long straight row of teeth at him. ‘I am no one, and I am everyone!’

This strangeness
seemed less strange to him since he was without pain for the first time in a
week. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

‘I spend my days
in forests and valleys.’

‘Do you not have
a home? A village?’ Etienne moved to find a comfortable place.

‘God is my
home,’ the man said simply.