Tales of the Knights Templar (32 page)

Death and the Knight

Poul Anderson

Paris, Tuesday, 10 October 1307

C
louds raced low, the hue of iron, on a wind that boomed through the streets and whined in the galleries overhanging them. Dust whirled aloft. Though the chill lessened stenches—offal, horse droppings, privies, graves, smoke ripped ragged out of flues— the city din seemed louder than erstwhile: footfalls, hoofbeats, wheels creaking, hammers thudding, voices raised in chatter, anger, plea, pitch, song, sometimes prayer. Folk surged on their manifold ways, a housewife bound for market, an artisan bound for a task, a priest bound for a deathbed, a mountebank in his shabby finery, a blind beggar, a merchant escorted by two apprentices, a drunken man-at-arms, a begowned student from the university, a wondering visitor from foreign parts, a carter driving his load through the crowd with whip and oaths, others and others and others in their hundreds. Church bells had lately rung tierce and the work of the day was fully acourse.

All made way for Hugues Marot. That was less because of his height, towering over most men, than his garb. Tunic, hose, and shoes were of good stuff, severe cut, subdued color, and the mantle over them was plain brown; but upon it stood the red cross that signed him a Templar. Likewise did the short black hair and rough beard. Whether or no the rumors were true that the Order was in disfavor with the king, one did not wish to offend such a power. The grimness on his lean features gave urgency to deference. At his heels trotted the boy who had brought his summons to him.

They kept close to the housefronts, avoiding as much as possible the muck in the middle of the street. Presently they came to a building somewhat bigger than its similar and substantial neighbors. Beyond its stableyard, now vacant and with the gate shut, was an oaken door set in half-timbered walls that rose three stories. This had been the home and business place of a well-to-do draper. He fell in debt to the Templars, who seized the property. It was some distance from the Paris Temple, but upon occasion could accommodate a high-born visitor or a confidential meeting.

Hugues stopped at the front door and struck it with his knuckles. A panel slid back from an opening. Someone peered through, then slowly the door swung aside. Two men gave him salutation as befitted his rank. Their faces and stances were taut, and halberds lifted in their fists—not ceremonial, but working weapons. Hugues stared.

“Do you await attack already, brothers, that you go armed indoors?” he asked.

“It is by command of the Knight Companion Fulk,” replied the larger. His tone rasped.

Hugues glanced from side to side. As if to forestall any retreat, the second man added, “We are to bring you to him straightway, brother. Pray come.” To the messenger: “Back to your quarters, you.” The lad sped off.

Flanked by the warrior monks, Hugues entered a vestibule from which a stairway ascended. A door on his right, to the stableyard, was barred. A door on his left stood open on a flagged space filling most of the ground floor. Formerly used for work, sales, and storage, this echoed empty around wooden pillars supporting the ceiling beams. The stair went up over an equally deserted strongroom. The men climbed to the second story, where were the rooms meant for family and guests; underlings slept in the attic. Hugues was ushered to the parlor. It was still darkly wainscoted and richly furnished. A charcoal brazier made the air warm and close.

Fulk de Buchy stood waiting. He was tall, only two inches less than Hugues, hooknosed, grizzled, but as yet lithe and possessing most of his teeth. His mantle was white, as befitted a celibate knight bound by lifelong vows. At his hip hung a sword.

Hugues stopped. “In God’s name … greeting,” he faltered.

Fulk signed to his men, who took positions outside in the corridor, and beckoned. Hughes trod closer.

“In what may I serve you, Master?” he asked. Formality could be a fragile armor. The word conveyed by the boy had been just that he come at once and discreetly.

Fulk sighed. After their years together, Hugues knew that seldom-heard sound. An inward sadness had whispered past the stern mask.

“We may speak freely,” Fulk said. “These are trusty men, who will keep silence. I have dismissed everyone else.”

“Could we not always speak our minds, you and I?” Hugues blurted.

“Of late, I wonder,” Fulk answered. “But we shall see.” After a moment: “At last, we shall see.”

Hugues clenched his fists, forced them open again, and said as levelly as he was able, “Never did I lie to you. I looked on you as not only my superior, not only my brother in the Order, but my—” His voice broke. “My friend,” he finished.

The knight bit his lip. Blood trickled forth into the beard.

“Why else would I warn you of danger afoot?” Hugues pleaded. “I could have departed and saved myself. But I warn you anew, Fulk, and beg you to escape while time remains. In less than three days now, the ax falls.”

“You were not so exact before,” the other man said without tone.

“The hour was not so nigh. And I hoped—”

Fulk’s hand chopped the protest short. “Have done!” he cried.

Hugues stiffened. Fulk began pacing, back and forth, like one in a cage. He bit off his words, each by each.

“Yes, you claimed a certain foresight, and what you said came to pass. Minor though those things were, they impressed me enough that when you hinted at a terrible morrow, I passed it on in a letter to my kinsman—after all, we know charges are being raised against us. But you were never clear about how you got your power. Only in these past few days, thinking, have I seen how obscure was your talk of Moorish astrologic lore and prophetic dreams.” He halted, confronting his suspect, and flung, “The Devil can say truth when it fits his purposes. Whence comes your knowledge, you who call yourself Hugues Marot?”

The younger man made the sign of the cross. “Lawful, Christian—”

“Then why did you not tell me more, tell me fully what to await, that I might go to the Grand Master and all our brothers have time to make ready?”

Hugues lifted his hands to his face. “I could not. Oh, Fulk, dear friend, I cannot, even now. My tongue is locked. What I—I could utter—that little was forbidden—But you
know
me!”

Starkness responded. “I know you would have me flee, saying naught to anyone. At what peril to my soul, that I break every pledge I ever swore and abandon my brethren in Christ?” Fulk drew breath. “No, brother, if brother you be, no. I have arranged that you are under my command for the next several days. You shall remain here, sequestered, secret from all but myself and these your warders. Then, if indeed the king strikes at us, I can perhaps give you over to the Inquisition—a sorcerer, a fountainhead of evil, whom the Knights of the Temple have discovered among themselves and cast from them—”

The breath sobbed. Pain stretched the face out of shape. “But meanwhile, Hugues, I will hourly pray, with great vows, pray that you prove innocent—merely mistaken, and innocent of all save love. And can you then forgive me?”

He stood for a moment. When he spoke again, the words tolled. “It is for the Order, which we have plighted our loyalty under God. Raoul, Jehan, take him away.”

Tears glistened on Hugues’ cheekbones. The guards entered. He had no weapon but a knife. With a convulsive movement, he drew it and offered it hilt foremost to Fulk. The knight kept his hands back and it dropped on the floor. Mute, Hugues went off between the men. As he walked, he gripped a small crucifix that hung about his neck, symbol and source of help from beyond this world.

San Francisco, Thursday, 8 March 1990

Manse Everard returned to Wanda Tamberly near sunset. Light streamed through the Golden Gate. From their suite they saw cable cars go clanging down toward the waterfront, islands and the farther shore rising steep from a silver-blue bay, sails like wings of some wandering flock. They had hoped to be out there themselves.

When he came in, she read his battered face and said quietly, “You’re on a new mission, aren’t you?”

He nodded. “It was pretty clear that was what HQ had in mind when Nick phoned.”

She could not keep all resentment out of her voice. Their time together had been less than two months. “They never leave you alone, do they? How many other Unattached agents has the Patrol got, anyway?”

“Nowhere near enough. I didn’t have to accept, you know. But after studying the report, I did have to agree I’m probably the best man available for this job.” That was what had kept him since morning. The report was the equivalent of a library, most of it not text or audiovisual but direct brain input—history, language, law, customs, dangers.

“Ol’ noblesse oblige.” Wanda sighed. She met him, laid her cheek on his breast, pressed close against the big body. “Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Get it done and pop back to the same hour you tell me goodbye, you hear?”

He grinned. “My idea exactly.” He stroked the blond hair. “But look, I don’t have to leave right away. I would like to get it behind me”—on his intricately looping world line—”but let’s first make whoopee from now through tomorrow night.”

“Best offer I’ve had all day.” She raised her lips toward his and for a while the only sound in the room was murmurs.

Stepping back at last, she said, “Hey, that was fine, but before we get down to serious business, suppose you explain what the hell your assignment is.” Her voice did not sound altogether steady.

“Sure,” he answered. “Over beer?” When she nodded, he fetched two Sierra Nevada Pale. She settled down on the couch with hers. Restless, he kept his feet and loaded his pipe.

“Paris, early fourteenth century,” he began. “A field scientist, Hugh Marlow by name, has gotten himself in deep yogurt and we need to haul him out.” Speaking English rather than Temporal, he perforce used tenses and moods ill-suited to chronokinetics. “I’ve had medieval European experience.” She shivered slightly. They had shared a part of it. “Also, he’s my contemporary by birth—not American: British, but a twentieth-century Western man who must think pretty much like me. That might help a bit.” A few generations can make aliens of ancestor and descendant.

“What kind of trouble?” she asked.

“He was studying the Templars, there in France where they were centered at the time, thought they had chapters all over. You remember who they were?”

“Just vaguely, I’m afraid.”

Everard struck fire to tobacco, drank smoke, and followed it with ale. “One of the military religious orders founded during the Crusades. After those failed, the Templars continued to be a power, almost sovereign, in fact. Besides war, they went in for banking, and ended up mainly doing that. The outfit got hog-rich. Apparently, though, most of its members stayed pretty austere, and many remained soldiers or sailors. They made themselves unpopular, being a hard and overbearing lot even by the standards of that era, but they seem to have been essentially innocent of the charges that were finally brought against them. You see, among other things King Philip the Fair wanted their treasury. He’d wrung all the gold he could out of the Jews and Lombards, and his ambitions were huge. The Pope, Clement V, was his creature and would back him up. On October thirteenth, 1307, every Templar in France who didn’t manage a getaway was arrested in a set of very well-organized surprise raids. The accusations included idolatry, blasphemy, sodomy, you name it. Torture produced the confessions the king wanted. What followed is a long and complicated story. The upshot was that the Templar organization was destroyed and a number of its members, including Grand Master Jacques de Molay, were burned at the stake.”

Wanda grimaced. “Poor bastards. Why’d anybody want to research them?”

“Well, they were important.” Everard left unspoken that the Time Patrol required full and accurate information on the ages it guarded. She knew. Oh, but she knew! “They did keep certain of their rites and gatherings secret, for more than a century—quite a feat, huh? Of course, in the end that proved helpful to getting them railroaded.

“But what really went on? The chronicles don’t say anything reliable. It’d be interesting to know, and the data might be significant. For instance, could surviving Templars, scattered across Europe, North Africa, and the Near East, have influenced, underground, the development of Christian heresies and Muslim sects? Quite a few of them joined the Moors.”

Everard puffed for a minute and admired Wanda’s head, bright against the deepening sky, before he proceeded.

“Marlow established an identity and enlisted in the Order. He spent a dozen years working his way up in it, till he became a close companion of a ranking knight and was let into the secrets. Then, on the eve of Philip’s hit, that knight seized him and confined him incommunicado in a house. Marlow’d talked too much.”

“What?” she wondered, puzzled. “He was—is—conditioned, isn’t he?”

“Sure. Incapable of telling any unauthorized person he’s from the future. But you have to give operatives plenty of leeway, let ’em use their own judgment as situations arise, and—” Everard shrugged. “Marlow’s a scientist, an academic type, not a cop. Softhearted, maybe.”

“Still, he’d have to be tough and smart to survive in that filthy period, wouldn’t he?” she said.

“Uh-huh. I’ll be downright eager to quiz him and learn what beans he did spill, and how.” Everard paused. “To be quite fair, he did have to show a bit of occult power—forecasting events now and then, that kind of thing, if he was to advance within the Templars in anything like a reasonable time. Similar claims were common throughout the Middle Ages, and winked at if a blueblood thought they were genuine and useful to him. Marlow had permission to do it. Probably he overdid it.

“Anyhow, he got this knight, one Fulk de Buchy, believing that disaster with the king and the Inquisition was imminent. The conditioning wouldn’t let him go into detail, and my guess is that Fulk realized it’d take impossibly long to get the ear of the Grand Master and convince him, if it could be done at all. However that is, what happened was that Fulk nabbed Marlow, with the idea of turning him over to the authorities as a sorcerer if the dire prediction came true. He could hope it’d count in the Templars’ favor, show they actually were good Christians and so on.”