Tales of the Knights Templar (34 page)

Pillared and stone-floored, the chamber reached hollow. The kitchen entrance at the far end was shut for the night. The furniture remaining here was an iron coffer, three stools, and the big sales counter, on which four tallow candles in sticks made a wavery dusk to see by. They stank. In the right wall was the door to a separate room below the stairs from the vestibule, formerly for storing valuables, now secured by an ornate built-in lock. A tough-looking man in the brown habit of the Order crouched before it, gripping a halberd and yelling.

“Hold!” Everard cried in the Parisian gutter dialect he had acquired. “Lay down your pole and we’ll spare you.”

“God’s bones, no!” the Templar clamored. Had he been a common soldier before he took his vows? “Jehan! My lord! Help!”

Everard signaled his followers. They dashed for either side of the guard.

They didn’t want to kill. Sonic stun guns were nested inside their weapons. Let them close in, distract him, give him a jolt. He’d wake up supposing he’d been whacked from behind—yes, it’d be needful to bang his head with the club, but cautiously.

Two more men sprang out of the vestibule. They were naked, as folk wontedly slept, but armed. The shorter, grubby one likewise carried a halberd. The tall one lifted a long, straight sword. Its blade caught the wan light in a ripple as of fire. Its wielder—

Everard knew that aquiline face. Marlow had often surreptitiously recorded it with a microscanner, to put in his reports along with other views. Did he mean to look at it, over and over, when his mission was done and he must return home?

Fulk de Buchy, Knight of the Temple.

“Ho!” he bayed. “Go for the watch, someone!” Laughter gibed at Everard. “They’ll cart away your corpses, swine.”

Others clustered in the entry, half a dozen men and boys, unarmed, dismayed, imploring the saints, but witnesses.

Goddamn it,
Everard groaned inwardly,
Fulk’s spending the night, and he’s recalled the household staff.

“Careful with the stunners!” he barked in Temporal. Don’t strike the opposition down with an invisible, sorcerous blow. Maybe he needn’t have warned. These were Patrolmen he commanded. They weren’t cops like him, though, they were simply the most promising he’d found among personnel familiar with this milieu, hastily briefed and drilled.

They mixed it up with the halberdiers. Fulk was plunging at him.

Tooflinking much visibility here. I can’t stun him unless we get so close I can fake something—or I can maneuver him in back of a pillar—and his sword’s got the reach of mine, and chances are he’s better. I know fencing techniques that haven’t been invented yet, but they aren’t a lot of use when blades like these play.
Not for the first time, Everard saw that he might get killed.

As always, he was too busy to feel scared. It was as if his inner self stood aside, watching, interested in a detached fashion, now and then offering advice. The rest of him was in action.

The longsword flashed at his skull. He blocked with his falchion. Metal rang. Everard shoved. His was the advantage in mass and muscle. He forced Fulk’s weapon up. His free fist doubled. No knight would expect an upper-cut. Fulk disengaged with feline smoothness and flowed out of range.

For an instant they glared across two yards of stone. Everard realized how the posts hemmed him in. It could prove fatal. Almost, he reversed his sword to use the gun in the pommel. He could then move quickly enough that none would notice his enemy had fallen before being struck. But while others rioted around this chamber, Fulk stepped forward. His glaive leaped.

Everard was in karate stance. Reflex eased the tension he kept on one knee and swung him aside from the slash. It passed within an inch. Everard struck for the wrist.

Again Fulk was too swift. Rising, his blade nearly tore the Patrolman’s hilt loose from the hand. He kept his left side half toward the foe, arm slanted over breast. It was as if he bore a phantom crusader shield, cross-emblazoned. Above, he grinned with battle glee. His steel snaked forth.

Everard had already cast himself downward. The sword whined barely above his head. He hit the floor in full control. Such martial arts were unknown here. Fulk would have slain a man who flopped while he tried to scramble erect. Everard was coiled, his torso up. He had perhaps half a second until the knight hewed. His falchion smote the thigh.

It bit to the bone. Blood spouted. Fulk howled. He went to his sound knee. Once more he raised his sword. Once more Everard had time only to strike. Now the metal caught the belly. Momentum drove it deep and across. A loop of gut slipped out through a red torrent.

Fulk crumpled. Everard jumped back to his feet. Both swords lay unheeded. He bent over the sprawled man. Blood had splashed him. It dripped down into what was pumping forth and spreading wide. Even as he stood, the spurt lessened, the strong heart failed.

Teeth gleamed in Fulk’s beard. A last snarl at his slayer? His right hand lifted. Shakily, he drew the Christian sign. But the words he gasped were
“Hugues, O Hugues—”

The hand fell. Eyes rolled back, mouth gaped, torn bowels went slack. Everard caught the reek of death.

“I’m sorry,” he croaked. “I didn’t want that.”

But he had work to do. He looked around him. Both pikemen were down, unconscious but apparently not seriously hurt. It must have happened seconds ago, or his squad would have come to his aid.
Those Templars put up a good fight, they did.
Seeing him hale, the Patrolmen turned their attention to the help huddled in the entry.

“Be off or we’ll kill you, too!” they bawled.

The attendants weren’t schooled in battle. They bolted in abrupt, trampling panic, with a backwash of moans and screams, out the vestibule and the broken door beyond.

Stumbling through the night, they might nonetheless find city guards. “Get busy,” Everard ordered. “Collect an armful of loot apiece and we’ll clear out. That’s as much as a gang who’d raised this kind of ruckus would stop to take.” His mind couldn’t keep from adding in English,
If they hung around, they’d assuredly hang.
A thought more real nudged him. “Try for well-made things, and handle with care if you can. They’re going to museums uptime, you know.”

And so a few bits of loveliness would be saved from oblivion, for the enjoyment of a world that, possibly, this operation had also saved. He couldn’t be sure. The Patrol might have managed some different corrective action. Or events might have shaped themselves to restore their long-term course; the continuum has considerable resilience. He had merely done what seemed best.

He glanced downward at the dead man. “We had our duty,” he whispered. “I think you’d’ve understood.”

While his team hastened upstairs, he sought the strong-room. The clumsy lock would have yielded to almost any burglar tools, but those in his pouch were special and it clicked directly over. He swung the door aside.

Hugh Marlow lurched out of lightlessness. “Who’re you?” he choked in English. “I heard— Oh, the Patrol.” His gaze found the knight. He forced back a shriek. Then he went to the body and knelt beside it, heedless of the blood, shuddering with the effort not to weep. Everard came after and loomed above him. Marlow looked up.

“Did—did you have to do this?” he stammered.

Everard nodded. “Things happened too fast. We didn’t expect we’d find him here.”

“No. He … returned. To me. He said he could not leave me alone to face … whatever was on the way. I hoped … against hope … I could talk him into fleeing … but he wouldn’t desert his brothers, either—”

“He was a man,” Everard said. “At least he—I’m not cheerful about this, no, but at least he’s been spared torture.” Bones crushed in the boot or hauled apart on the rack or the wheel. Flesh pulled off them by red-hot pincers. Clamps on the testicles. Needles— Never mind. Governments are ingenious. If, afterward, Fulk had recanted the confession twisted out of him and denied the dishonor in it, they would have burned him alive.

Marlow nodded. “That’s some consolation, isn’t it?” He leaned over his friend. “Adieu, Fulk de Buchy, Knight of the Temple.” Reaching out, he closed the eyes and held the jaw shut while he kissed the lips.

Everard help him rise, for the floor had gone slippery.

“I’ll cooperate fully and freely,” Marlow said, flat-voiced, “and I won’t ask for clemency.”

“You did get reckless,” Everard answered, “and it’ll lead to the fleet escaping. But that was ‘always’ in history. It just turns out that this was how it came about. Otherwise, no harm done.” Aside from a death. But all men die. “I don’t think the Patrol court will be too hard on you. No more field assignments, obviously. However, you can still do useful work in compilation and analysis, and that way redeem yourself.”

How smug it sounded.

Well, love doesn’t excuse everything by a long shot. But is love in itself ever a sin?

The men were descending with their plunder. “Let’s go,” Everard said, and led them away.

Epilogue

T
he Templar legend lives on, still inspiring speculation and an aspiration to many of the higher ideals the historic knights espoused. A number of modern chivalric Orders strive to preserve the humanitarian legacy of their crusader forebears. The Order of Malta and the Sovereign Military and Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem continue some of the work of the original Hospitallers, carrying out disaster relief and other charitable works and providing ambulance services in a number of countries, under a number of different names. The Military and Hospitaller Order of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem, which was founded to care for crusaders who contracted leprosy, gradually expanded its focus to the plight of lepers the world around and now engages in disaster relief as well. The Supreme Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem, inheritor of the archives spirited out of occupied Belgium under diplomatic seal half a century ago, is one of several modern-day organizations carrying forward the Templar name, promoting philanthropic works and the preservation of heritage. Often the chivalric Orders work together.

We have mentioned the Masonic link to the Temple and perhaps should elaborate briefly on this connection. No Masonic organization claims direct descent from the Temple—to the contrary, Freemasonry traditionally claims to predate the founding of the Temple—but a great deal of Templar symbolism and history is intertwined with Masonic tradition.

Freemasons, who comprise the oldest and largest fraternal organization in the world, progress through three degrees to attain the rank of Master Mason; much of the symbolism of the degree work alludes to the Temple of Solomon. (The last Grand Master of the historic Temple is remembered in the name and many of the rituals of the Order of De Molay, a Masonic organization for building the character of young men between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one.)

Master Masons have the option to continue through one of two associated degree systems generally known as Scottish Rite and York Rite Masonry. Those working in the latter tradition progress through a series of orders or ranks leading to initiation as a Masonic Knight Templar—no merely grandiose title, for the Masonic Templars carry forward part of the Hospitaller tradition of their historic crusader forebears by funding cataract surgery for those who otherwise could not afford it and by maintaining a research facility dedicated to children’s eye diseases. Templar imagery appears in numerous other aspects of Masonic work as well.

Outside of Freemasonry, however, perhaps the most poignant tribute to the Templars in this century occurred in London at the end of World War I. To appreciate it, a bit of background is in order.

Most readers of this book will be aware that in England, trial attorneys are called barristers; not everyone will know why. When Pope Clement V gave over the majority of Templar properties to the Knights Hospitaller in 1312, one of the most valuable locations they acquired was the former Templar headquarters in London, sited between Fleet Street and the Thames—an area still called the Temple.

The only Templar structure still surviving there is Temple Church, built of stone brought from Normandy as ballast in Templar ships and consecrated by the Patriarch of Jerusalem in 1185. The original church is round, as were many Templar churches, and contains the effigies of several Templar Knights. A rectangular choir was added in 1240.

Since the Hospitallers already had a London base at Clerkenwell, they leased the Temple property to lawyers practicing at the King’s Court, just through the gate between London and the city of Westminster. Because of its location, the gate was called the Barrière du Temple, or Temple Bar, and those lawyers going back and forth through the “Bar” became known as “barristers.”

The property passed into Crown hands after the dissolution of the monasteries in 1534, but Henry VIII allowed the barristers to remain as sitting tenants. In 1608, King James I permitted the senior barristers of the Temple, the “Benchers,” to purchase the property, on condition that they would also assume responsibility for the maintenance of the Temple Church. This they have done for nearly four centuries, even to the extent of rebuilding bomb damage sustained during the London blitz. Temple Church enjoys a unique status that is quite in keeping with its Templar ancestry. It belongs to no diocese; its Anglican canon, whose title is Master of the Temple, reports directly to the Crown.

And in 1917, when General Edmund Allenby led a column of British troops through the gates of Jerusalem—the first Christian army to do so since 1244—the barristers of the Inner and Middle Temple held a special service of thanksgiving in Temple Church, and processed into the round church to lay laurel wreaths upon the effigies of the Knights Templar in silent remembrance.

About the Authors

P
oul Anderson
was born in 1926 and grew up mostly in Texas and, later, on a Minnesota farm. He majored in physics at the University of Minnesota, graduating with honors, but having already sold a few stories while in college, went into free-lance writing. In 1953 he moved to California and married Karen Kruse, who has published work of her own, some of it in collaboration with him. They live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their daughter Astrid is married to their colleague Greg Bear and has two children, both incomparable.