The Seal (53 page)

Now he had to
steady himself at the realisation of what Etienne must have suffered all these
years. This was the Order: between man and God! The Order of the Temple stood
between what was and what would be . . . soon to be extinguished . . . too
soon, before the performance of its glory! To all intents and purposes in its
prime! And those men, spare and dwindled in their mantles, the last of the
Templars, had placed their souls in the hands of their caretakers. He was one
of them, he realised now. Without Etienne, how must he command these last
remnants to their deaths?

The Catalan
disappeared behind the closed doors and the Magyar took his place inside them.

Jourdain waited
a moment longer, hoping for Etienne’s appearance. When it seemed he would not
come he stood upon the short dais and, looking at the puzzled faces, began the
formulas in Latin. The men followed and soon the hall was full with the sound
of voices in their adoration of God.

But it did not
last long, this ecstasy of brotherhood, for at that moment the door to the hall
burst open in splinters making the darkness suddenly lessened by the moonlight
coming through to touch upon a confusion complete and disproportionate to their
meditative mood. The wind was stirring now and it carried the sound of the
cries of his men – easy prey to a multitude of soldiers that spread over
the chapel shouting and hacking with their swords in the dark light.

His brothers
fought back as best they could. He heard the Catalan’s cry and saw a fleeting
glimpse of a sword. It took the light into it and came down again and again,
then
it was gone into the disorder of bodies. Jourdain
punched and kicked and struggled, seeking for his weapon in the fray. The
immensity of it reached him then: Christian men murdered at prayer by
Christians in the name of God! Had the beast been favoured by God above his
servant Theseus? But even as he thought this a shadow like that of the great
Minotaur passed before his eyes and blotted out the moonlight and the sounds of
the men in their screaming. There was no struggle, only two blows: one to the
middle which
cut off his breath and another to the leg.

To his mind the
moon was both Ariadne and Selene, coming to bring him the golden thread and the
eternal sleep of Endymion.

‘The secret
passage in the well!’ they said to him.

T
he
night sky dropped a curtain of rain over Jourdain, and above, a great noise
like the roar of a beast but many times multiplied preceded a crack that
announced the end of the world. He shivered. His senses took in the wet and the
sound of the wind surging upward past him and over the wall that dropped, it
seemed to him, violent and steep beneath his feet.

He remembered
dreams full of cries and death, and then he was awake to a pain in his leg
whose relentless gnawing pierced the dullness of his mind and made him open his
eyes.

Now he shivered
into his bones and forced himself to look down to where he was lodged,
entangled in ropes against the wall of the keep. There he saw the wound that
made waste his leg and thus confirmed what, by virtue of his pain, he already
knew. For a moment his stomach rolled and he did not know if he was up or down,
or this side of life or this side of death.

‘Etienne?’ There
was a question that needed an answer!

He put the
question to the air, having felt it rising for some moments in his mind. Where
is Etienne?

He looked out to
the wet world turned blank and inward, hiding its face inside its black cloak.
Dawn was
near,
he could hear it, a stirring of the
earth as it rolled over in its sleep. He tried to pray but was full of anger.

‘These are
bitter trials, my Lord!’ he shouted at the sky. He could not then fetch his
hand to his face to strike it, tangled as it was in the ropes, and so he bit
his lip and let the tears flow from his eyes. ‘I will not fall out of faith! My
faith will outlast this!’

He was shaking
with cold. When had he felt such cold?
Cold in the bones and
cold in the heart?
He burned with thirst. Soon he must die.

Of a sudden the
air was calmed and all around him the world waited. He closed his eyes and let
his mind emerge from and sink back into the dream. When he opened them again he
saw fog and greyness and dawn breaking over the mountains. The memory of his
fate surfaced in a surge of pain, as if the flesh were to tear from his bones.

They had come
when the men were at prayer in the hall . . . Hungarians or Austrians . . .
they had known of the secret panel in the well – the town had betrayed
them.

He thought of
the slaughter of his brothers in that confused darkness, of Delgado, struck
down. He was full of anguish. ‘Where are you, Etienne?’ he shouted loud and heard
it bounce from the hills.

No, Etienne was
most likely dead, he told himself, and he was doomed to suffer alone like Odin,
who hung from a tree that kept up heaven and earth, wounded and hanging on windy
gallows for nine long nights.

He heard a
sound, a human sound from beyond the fog that was not of his making. Somewhere
another man was calling out to him. Perhaps Etienne!
But the
fog was suspending the truth of things somewhere between him and the voice and
he could not see, somewhere between the dream and the ropes on which they
endured together.

‘It is I,
Jourdain!’ he cried.

There was no
answer. Perhaps, he told himself, Etienne was coming in and out of heaven and
hell as he was, suffering the same fate. He grasped this thought tenderly, that
the space between them was lessened by a concurrence of suffering. Such a fate
would seem to him eloquent.

‘Hey!’ he heard
then.

‘
Ecoutes
, Etienne!’ he called out but his
lungs were only good for little more than a whisper. ‘Where are you?’

The fog moved
off and the dawn light showed him more clearly, the coils of ropes wound around
his own body preventing him from falling down the precipice of the castle keep.
When he looked to his right and his left he saw what had become of his brothers
and he was struck with fear. He strained and contrived his body forward but his
leg gave a stab. He waited for the pain to drag him to oblivion but it did not.

Once again the
voice, ‘Hey!’ called to him.

But he ignored
it since he was looking out from under his brows to something that compelled
him: bodies with their heads cut off their stalks, and their arms caught by ropes.

All of the men
drowning in the milky air that rose upward, silent and obedient.

Then came the
voice again.

‘Hey!’ it called
to him and he realised it was not Etienne. He gazed upwards a little to his
right where his ropes were attached to a device. He saw an upside-down face and
it was shouting down at him full of impatience. ‘Frenchman! I have let you live
to see your brothers . . . now hold still!’

Jourdain did not
understand his words but in that frowning form doubled over the parapet staring
down with the axe in its hand he saw the entire matter of his destiny made clear
to him. ‘No!’ he cried then.

But at that
moment from above there came the axe cut and to Jourdain the dawn became a
shadow of something brighter still, since he was floating over the world and
from this great height he saw the sun reflecting from the gold dome of the
Temple in Jerusalem and his soul smiled.

‘Hey Etienne!’
it said. ‘It
is
the centre of the
world!’

THE SEVENTH CARD

E
tienne
found the underground chapel not displeasing to his eye. Here he said the quiet
worship of the holy office and found in the listening something soothing to his
soul. In the solitude of the round nave created out of stone, beneath the
man-made reflection of the great dome of heaven suspended above, he felt a
harmony of feelings, a reminder of tranquil prayers beneath stars.

Penitent and
contemplative since that night, he now spent his time labouring in silence.
This inner hermitage he found to his liking, since the world here was not as it
had been. For among such things as this familiarity felt and acknowledged,
there was also the truth that what Etienne encountered with his eye and ear was
strangely counterfeit: an illusion of life.

All that was
would never again exist. The Holy Land was gone forever, his Grand Master, his
brothers, and with them all hopes were changed. One needed a new eye to look
upon those hopes with will in the heart. A new ear had to stretch to hear with
fresh intention. The eye of his spirit had become old, and his ear was stubborn
with the echoes of his dead friends.

He was taken
with a desire to go up to the courtyard, for he had heard the sounds of a
battle. Then he remembered that it had been some time ago, for there
lay
his body still and dead beside the altar. He looked at
it now. It did not seem to him a pious thing, but a thing of the earth.

He lay beside it
and looked up to the symbols scratched upon the stone of the chapel.
One day
men would try to decipher them and they would not
understand their meaning.

Something came
then.

Twice he looked
out from his meditation to see the apparition standing before him. Twice he
looked up again to the ceiling of the chapel and continued his meditation.
Something told him it would not leave him until he turned his attention to it.

Etienne! Ecoutes
. . . You have travelled the path between the two towers and escaped the wiles
of the dog and the wolf, you have been two things and to these are to be added
a third life.

He took a long
time to face that voice. When he did he observed a figure whose light was made
too bright to be penetrated coming from out of the sun towards him. He
squinted.

From whence
comes the sun?

The bell tolled
. . . since his friends had died in that struggle it seemed the bells
always tolled
chapter in the hall beyond the grilled manhole.
The figure came closer.

It was St
Michael. St Michael had come to deliver him of his burden.

He closed his eyes.

He felt the
splintering of stars in his head. The world blinked and longed to be beyond
itself.

You are grown
old, Etienne.

S
he
had grown old, like that other woman who had saved the boy Etienne from the
pyre. Now as she sat near the door to her shop, the day, the writer and the
cards melted into the sun and a voice spoke to her.

Do you remember?

She shrugged it
away, sour in her heart. ‘I remember the folly of men!’

It is time.

‘Please!’ she
pleaded. ‘They are all dead now . . . and I can do nothing for them. How may I
leave my shop . . . must I not guard the seal?’ She frowned, struggling to
surface from the entangled remains of familiar things. ‘No . . . I have no seal
. . .’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘He has hidden it!’

Her life as an
old woman, a keeper of memories, became less visible and grew distant,
passionless, and once again she saw the knight Etienne. He was taking himself
through the bitter corridors to the courtyard flooded with moonlight. When he
came to the manhole he set down his candle and removed the grille.

He let down the
rope ladder and made his difficult descent, one rung at a time. His bones made
a stiffness
in his back when he landed on the stone flooring
beside the bowl. He made a pull on the ladder and it came down.

He would not
need it, since he knew he would not leave this place.