The Seal (28 page)

Etienne felt
perspiration on his brow. ‘What women?’

Jourdain helped
him to his horse. ‘We have been here more than a week, Etienne,’ he said, ‘and
you have been sorely wounded, but they have tended your wound for they wanted
you to live long enough to torture you into telling them something. Tonight
they brought women from the
village,
Gideon made a
friend among them, a Norman. He made them believe he would join them in their
business, that he had no loyalty to us, and they let him join in their
debauchery. He waited for the occasion and took the knife to the Norman’s
throat and the keys from his hands and opened our cells and your cage. He has
done well. Eh, Gideon! You have done well.’

The mercenary
beamed his white teeth at them in the oncoming morning. It was a strange
gesture placed over a melancholic landscape.

Etienne gave a
sigh and turned to Delgado. ‘Let the women go, they shall not harm us.’

The Catalan
nodded once and stepped lightly away.

Etienne then
made a gesture of the head towards the donjon. ‘Who are they?’

Jourdain said, ‘
Our
hunters, Germans, on hire. It seems, Etienne, that . . .
well, that our Grand Master lies in the French King’s prison and the Order is
arrested . . . They accuse us of heresy!’

‘It has begun
then,’ Etienne said with a sigh. ‘And the bodies?’

‘The brothers of
this small house.’

Etienne closed
his eyes; Michael and the dream lurked behind his lids. He hung his sword on a
leather thong and Jourdain helped him mount. His legs were weak and the wound
in his side was crawling towards his chest. He held tight to the reins and
leant on the neck of the animal. He looked out for a moon but his head not yet
cleared went giddy and he looked down until it passed lest he fall off the
horse.

‘Has the world
turned mad, Etienne? What does it mean?’

Etienne looked
across to Jourdain as it began to snow and the wind turned and made the trees
sway and slap beyond the walls of the house. In his half-awareness, Etienne
heard it as a language he did not understand. Perhaps it told of his
death, that
wind? Perhaps he and the Order were one in the
veins and the heart, and the death of one meant the death of the other? He felt
for his wounded side, bending before the pain of it and holding tight to the
reins. ‘This can only mean one thing, my Jourdain, it means it is the end of
us.’

At that moment
Delgado returned with a group of seven or more women tied at the wrists. He
told them, ‘Go!’ and shooed them like chickens. They scampered in silence out
of the gate and into the dawn.

‘We too had
better hurry a little,’ Etienne said, ‘soon it is light.’

They galloped
knee to knee out of the empty house of the Order and headed for the bodies that
lay beneath a shroud of snow.

They buried the
carcasses of their dead brothers in the hard ground as the sun rose over the
trees. Etienne said a meagre prayer over their graves. He prayed for himself
also, that St Michael might keep him from dying as long as it took to find the
resting place of his Order’s mystery, and if it should please his Lord, he
should then like to close his eyes and offer his soul to the soul of the world
and be done with it once and for all.

M
arcus
placed one foot beyond the other, clad in wet and wind, a mind half waning,
half waxing, showing a face that was storm-eyed and peering through the driving
snow. It was night. He had set free the horse to find itself another master but
the creature would not leave him. It stood some way off, watching him. He told
it that soon he must die with his cheek to the snow among the disordered world
of elements that whirled and sprang to life about him. But still it did not move.

He showed it the
dagger. With it he would make himself a red cross, he told it, and there in the
warmth of it he would lie, in the blood that had been poured into him and would
now be given back. This mantle of the Order, he told the animal, would cover
the entire world! He smiled at that – a last gesture to this lie he had
lived and to the God that had deceived him. One part of him welcomed it while
another was afraid.

When he saw the
apparition, he was leaning back on the gale preparing to thrust the knife. In
the dark the vision, surely

peculiar
and mystical, came to him without his bidding and carried no light
of its own, no warmth, just an outstretched hand. Marcus with his broken faith
let go the dagger and knelt in the snow before it.

‘Who are you?’
he said, but a gust sent him from his feet. ‘I stumble!’ And he fell backward
in the snow.

Some time later
he sensed wetness on his face and opened his eyes. Above him hovered the yellow
orbs of a black dog. In them he saw intelligence and cunning

‘What is this?’
he asked it.

The dog sat up
in the blizzard and waited. In the very gesture of the head and the limbs it
spoke to him, then it stood on its four legs and moved away, waiting for him to
follow.

He got up, shook
his head of snow, and looked for his horse. ‘We go,’ he said with a shiver and
stumbled through the snow after the beast.

O
n
one side of the large opulent hall at the royal palace at Poitiers sat the Pope
upon his pontifical throne. A purple shield of cardinals and a large crowd of
ecclesiastics surrounded him on both sides, suggesting to all present his
spiritual power. On the other hand, directly across the hall from him, as in a
game of chess, the fair king graced his own dais, flanked by a resplendent
retinue of counsellors and laymen, whose size and number was a blatant show of
Philip’s temporal power.

Even from this
distance the Pope could see clearly the dis-tinctions between them. He was old,
huddled together, blinking bloodshot eyes under inflamed lids, while his
opponent was youthful, tanned and handsome and in full charge of his body.

Clement sighed.

Lately he
suffered from the terrible fevers that resulted always in copious
sweats which
left him drained and fatigued. He was gripped
by bouts of dysentery alternating with terrible constipation, which his
physicians tried to cure by bleeding him so utterly dry that he was surprised
he could stand at all. They poked strange, foul smelling concoctions into his
body, and made him drink odious mixtures of herbs and salts, which made him
vomit.

To fight so
worthy a foe with his health threatening, looming over
him,
was surely a foolish act. But what was there to do? Philip had threatened him
openly, and Dubois, a royal lawyer with a talent for writing pamphlets, had
begun a hateful program to erode his character. In these little communications
circulated throughout France, Dubois had accused him of nepotism, and this
simply because he employed relatives, as all popes before him had done. He
called him corrupt because he had accepted the Templar dioceses as gifts
– and why not? Various communications had done nothing. The King –
he was now certain – would see him dead before conceding to his authority,
and this had never been
more clear
since his arrival
at Poitiers, unannounced and aswarm with men-at-arms.

Of course the
King had prostrated himself before his holy person, and shown him every dignity
and respect, but Clement knew the viper too well. No sooner had Philip’s dainty
feet alighted on pontifical soil than he had begun to turn the screws, since
even before his copious luggage was removed from his carriage he was calling
for a public consistory into the royal case against the Templars. Clement might
be ill and, he was the first to concede, a little less endowed with the moral
attributes of his predecessors, but he was a practical man who knew well the
intrigues of court and how to take advantage of advantageous situations. He
knew that art when it was applied and Philip applied it liberally. He was
calling in the favour, and Clement
must needs
comply.
Come now, he reminded himself, that was after all how he had come by the keys
of Peter. It was a fair trade, the Templars for his papacy.

His philosophy
may not have seemed to others entirely pious, but Clement knew that piety made
short days for popes. Was it not piety that had ended Boniface, then Benedict?
With Boniface and Benedict gone the curia, fearing for its own existence, had elected
a French pope. What man with sense would have refused such an appointment?
True, he had duped himself into believing that he could be a champion of
Christ, a bastion of justice . . . in exchange for some minor promises. How
could he have known that he would find himself no more than a puppet, at the
behest of all men who, under the shadow of God’s grace, wanted something from
him? How could he have presaged that he would have to wage constant battle with
his curia? That he would discover himself exiled from Rome where he was hated,
and living in Avignon where he was treated with contempt, aware that his
enemies were not far behind and preparing to send him to the Devil? This fell
sourly on his face and the servant, noticing the frown, brought him rosewater.
The pontiff pushed it away with a swollen hand. Soon, he thought with dismay,
they would have to cut the jewels from his fingers.

He sighed and
the familiar well of self-pity sprang up inside him. Indeed these had been hard
things to face. So many enemies! I am a man who must walk barefoot through a
field of thorns. He shifted uneasily under the weight of his regalia.

He did have one
advantage – the astrologer Iterius. He was a counterfeit, of course, but
even so, what he had told him concerning the secrets of the Order – which
he had intimated to be various and dangerous – had confirmed his
suspicions. What would Philip not do to have such a power over him? It was
impossible for him to interrogate Jacques de Molay himself, since Philip had refused
to bring the man to Poitiers, and Clement could not go to Paris for he feared
that the moment he placed a pontifical foot upon French soil, Philip would find
a way of slipping a halter around his neck. Even if Philip agreed to bring
Jacques de Molay to him, Clement would not be able now to question him alone as
he was ever watched by his cardinals and their spies. No, he had to content
himself with having sent the little Egyptian heretic to be a fly on Philip’s
walls. At worst the man could warn him should Philip discover anything of
importance. At best he might make good his promise of uncovering what the
Templars held so dear and delivering the secret into his waiting ears.

Clement squirmed
in his seat and burped. The royal lawyer Guillaume de Plaisians was ascending
the platform. That hateful man was Nogaret’s shadow; how else could Nogaret,
Boniface’s murderer and an excommunicate, have his words heard without coming
before a hostile and unforgiving curia? Clement eyed the thin,
well-proportioned de Plaisians, who had at that moment begun his speech.

The man started
by invoking Christ, calling Philip Christ’s minister on earth, a saviour king
no less! Clement eyed his curia. The cardinals were listening but occasionally
he felt a glance in his direction. He knew they were speculating as to how he
would deal with the young fox.

‘.
. . Even Jesus did not win against
the enemies of his Church,’ the lawyer said impudently, ‘a single victory as
admirable, as great, quick, useful and necessary as King Philip has recently
won in our own time, by means of his ministers and delegates, in uncovering the
affair of the perfidious Templars and their heretical depravity . . .’

What blasphemy .
. . what
lies
! Clement yawned. To compare Philip to
Jesus! Pretending that it broke that Capetian’s heart to have to arrest a rich
Order whose gold could solve all his economic woes and, further, fund his wars
with Flanders and Gascony. If only Philip knew that the Order’s fortune was
pale in comparison to what other treasures they had hidden. Jacques de Molay
should have listened to him that night at Poitiers . . . pride had got the
better of him, stubborn ill-begotten pride. How quickly pride gave way under
torture applied in the right way. The Grand Master had not heard his plain
speech in the drawing room that night, and now the danger was clear: today,
tomorrow or the next day could see Jacques de Molay confessing everything into
the waiting ears of inquisitors whose souls belonged to the King of France!

What a legacy he
had inherited from Boniface!

Indeed these
days the man plagued him. He came to him in dreams with his peasant face torn
and bloody, beaten in, threatening to haunt Clement until his death if he did
not renounce the evil king and avenge his name.

He felt a spasm
and clenched his buttocks, hoping that dysentery would not compel him to leave
his seat in haste, thereby occasioning an odious circulation of rumours. He
watched the lawyer, so eloquent on his dais.