The Seal (4 page)

After that
Marcus was the picture of self-satisfaction beside him. ‘Do you know what the
old man said to that infant, Etienne? “Go . . . boy!” Do you hear that? “Go,”
he says . . . for it was their plan to win your sympathy . . . it was a show
and you were duped, my Etienne, duped!’

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
was 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.

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.