The Seal (49 page)

A
nima autem mea exultabit in Domino: et delectabitur super salutare
suo
...

Between the
stone and God, Jacques surrendered to the vision.

And from his
mouth emitted his own voice: ‘Slayed! The white-robed lamb . . . thirteen times
after the feast of the carrier of holy oils!’

Jacques de
Molay’s eyes rolled from inside his head and with a sudden rush he was knocked
back into his chest and took the breath of a drowned man.

He was awake and
there was a sound.

He flinched.
Tears left his eyes and burned down his cheeks. He had commanded armies,
governed provinces! He gathered what strength was left to him and waited for
the bolt to move. From behind the door came two guards followed by the provost,
Philippe de Voet.

He knew why they
had come.

‘Get up!’ said
the provost and went about removing the chains, leaving on the heavy iron
anklets.

The Grand Master
lifted his bony face upward to look into the man’s eyes. ‘You are not a bad
man, Provost . . . Please, one last request, may I be allowed to wear a mantle
of the Order, and not some dirty cassock? Today, it seems like to be my last.’

The provost’s
face was blank but he turned to a lesser guard and ordered that a mantle be
found.

Making their way
through the dungeons to the outside, Jacques could barely lift his legs,
weighted as they were with fetters. The tower steps, narrow and steep, made his
progress slow.

Outside, his
eyes were assaulted by light and
his skin, porous and pale,
was awakened by the chilly breeze that entered his nostrils and made him tingle
from head to toe
. A bird flew overhead and he found himself smiling.
There was sky! How long had it been? Seven years? He was held by it, and in it
he found a sudden lucidity. He looked around him. Alain de Pareilles stood
waiting for him, beside a wagon. Behind it fifty or more soldiers were standing
at ease. This man was captain of the King’s
soldiers,
he attended every execution, and had always accompanied the condemned to
sentence. His presence con-firmed the significance of this day.

Jacques de Molay
summoned his strength and stood as erect as his withered body would allow. I am
going to my judgement, he told himself.

Three men were
coming from the tower escorted by guards. He squinted to see. They were
emaciated, dirty, white-haired and hunched at the shoulders. Jacques realised
with surprise that one of them was the visitor general, another he saw was the
Preceptor of Normandy and another the Commander of Aquitaine. He held out his
arms and whispered to them,‘Defenders of the Holy Sepulchre!’

The four men
embraced.

He gave his
attention to his old friend the Preceptor of Normandy, Geoffrey de Charney, who
had warned him those many years ago against going to Richerenches. ‘Geoffrey!’
he said, and thought sadly,
This
man was once a
lion-warrior . . . see the scars on that face! Now he is like me, old and
wasted and ruined.
‘My brother . . . let us have courage . . . courage.’ He
clasped the man by the shoulders. ‘Remember the dignity of the Order. Remember
how we have fought for Christ, how He lives in our hearts.’ He looked at the
visitor Hugues de Pairaud, whose followers had plotted to have
Jacques
killed in Cyprus. Now the man made a weak kneel. Jacques
shook his white head. ‘Get up, brother!’ He helped him to his feet. ‘Come . .
.’ He reached for the Commander of Aquitaine, whose eyes were silent and
vacant. ‘Come, brothers, may the spirit we have always sought when we have
worked in His name, the spirit who has sacrificed his Godhood for us, for the
good of the world, for the freedom and improvement of His children, be with us
and the hard duties we are about to perform.’ And for the last time the men
formed a circle of faith.

The provost
waited for it to be over, then he moved closer and with his face bent over
towards the men he said, ‘I shall remove your chains . . .’

Jacques de Molay
closed his eyes, and shook his head. ‘But we have no money . . .’

‘I shall remove
your chains,’ the man insisted.

Jacques de Molay
raised his head and tried to stand tall. ‘Well then, we thank you.’

They climbed
upon the cart that would take them to the commission at Notre Dame. Each man
lost in contemplation of what future awaited him. Jacques did not look upon the
Temple for one last time. He did not gaze like his brothers upon the ramparts
and battlements, upon the spires and crenellations. He thought instead of the
fifty-four men who had been taken to their deaths in such a cart, and prayed
for them. In his heart he told their spirits that what had come to pass had
been as inevitable as the passing on of the seasons.
That all
of it had been ordained but that good would triumph once again.

Geoffrey de
Charney turned to him. ‘Will they condemn us?’

The Grand Master
drew in a sigh. ‘Remember, he that believeth in Him is not condemned.’

‘I am abused!’
Geoffrey said. ‘And old . . . I have confessed to heinous things!’

He looked at the
wasted man with deep compassion.
But what to say to him?
He too wished that he had remained firm but he had not. He wished that he was
less tormented . . . yes, younger! Little now remained of his life, his
adventures, his loves and his devotions. Little remained. All that was left to
him was a longing to surrender his creations to God as a sacrifice. But what
had he created? He had wandered and fought and wounded and cried in the brick
dust of foreign lands. He had joined men in massacre and in victory, but what
was there to show for it? Outside the Porte du Temple he observed the crowd fall
upon the cart and the guards force their way through the citizens of Paris
– the very people for whom he had fought and protected the Holy Land. He
heard the cries as though they were very far away.

‘Death to the
heretics!’

He wondered of
whom they could be speaking. He looked at his men. The visitor was mumbling to
himself; the Commander of Aquitaine was silent, his eyes glazed and lost; only
Geoffrey de Charney seemed to have kept his wits.

‘We must be
prepared to die,’ he said to him, firm of eye.

‘Yes, I
understand that, Jacques.’

‘Thieves!
Heretics!’

He was startled
by these words.

‘But to die this
way! Why do the people not see our plight?’ Geoffrey asked.

The Grand Master
shook his head. ‘They do not know how we have suffered, that we have been tortured,
that the commission could not condemn us and that Philip had to resort to
corruption that he might burn our men. Two years have passed since our Order
was abolished and we have wasted in prisons because we are the leaders and they
have not known what to do with us. The people do not know these things –
one day they shall. We must lay it all before the Lord now . . .’

They passed the
cloister of Saint Merry, so many faces. Children were hoisted up that they
might not miss the sight of four old men shivering. In the crowd of faces
craftsmen, beggars, thieves, scholars, priests, merchants, all of them
gathered, pressing forward to see four old men shivering. He looked up rather
than watch their faces. The sky was a delicate new blue, washed clean by the
night. There was his destination, he told himself, to soar like a bird, elegant
and light of weight! But when he looked down to the crowd he was once again
faced with what was held written upon the faces of the men and women who had
come to watch his humiliation. He saw in their eyes the sum total of his worth.
He knew what they were thinking. There goes the Grand Master of the illustrious
Order of the Temple – a ragged old man, a heretic, or perhaps only a weak
man who could not endure torture? He saw himself reflected in their eyes
– but that was not all he saw. He saw them and knew that they were seeing
themselves in him. Men who were unfree, who lived cowering in the shadows of
Church and state, disease, death and poverty; men who lived a life of duty not
to God but to their desires, fears and hopes. They only truly lived when they
faced death. Only by coming close to it did they, for one moment, leap out from
their numbness to feel freedom. Freedom from the fearful clutches of destiny,
whose gaze had momentarily fallen upon another man.

Did they not
sense the soul of the world, merging and separating, entering within and
expanding without, dividing the unity into individual parts and unifying the
particular into a universal whole? A man was, therefore, not merely the mirror
for another man, but was entered into him and became one with him . . . and
when two men were entered into one another, how could they not think the same
thoughts or breathe together the air in their lungs? How could their hearts not
beat in rhythm to experience the same pains and sorrows or move their limbs
towards the same goals?

His old friend
Christian came before his mind’s eye and he knew what his friend had meant to
tell him. The knowing of it gave him an astonishing strength and it rose up
through his legs and to the rest of him and stirred his tired, old veins. He
would not die in
murus strictus
! He
would not languish in a dungeon surrounded by rats and faeces – he would
die with will in the lungs! The old man with the long beard and tattered mantle
would then be truly free. Free because this would be his deed – not a
deed demanded of him by duty or rule, but one that had welled up from the
nature of his own being – to take the evil of the world into himself, to
fill himself up with it and to transform it to good through love!

This was a new
thing.

The sun came out
then, patient and clean, and the streets became his, familiar and jovial. They
no longer carried him to his execution; they were the avenues whose direction
pointed to the accomplishment of his task. He was not afraid. These people were
his brothers and he would fight for them and die for them upon a different
battlefield.

‘We need no
outward country, my brothers. Jerusalem exists in our souls and we battle there
against evil upon the soil of the spirit!’

Outside the
Notre Dame two temporary platforms had been erected in order to ensure that the
multitude of citizens gathered at the Place de Parvis were able to witness the
event. One platform stood ahead of the open doors of the great portico and was
occupied by the special council convened to hand down the final verdict on the
Templar leaders. The council consisted of William of Paris, Enguerrand de
Marigny, his brother the Archbishop of Sens, the Bishop of Paris, together with
Cardinal Nicholas de Fréauville and the cardinal legates from Rome, whose
presence, in the absence of the Pope, signified that the sentence was without
appeal. These men were then flanked by various bishops, canons and clerics, and
it seemed to many that the hasty construction, erected as it was on timbers
lashed together, would soon collapse from the weight of so many well-fed
churchmen. The second platform faced the tribunal. Upon it stood the chained,
tortured figures of Jacques de Molay and his three brothers, their backs to the
crowd.

A weighty
silence fell and it made the day seem more brightly coloured: the sky, the sun,
the cardinals’ robes, the ermine and velvet, the golden pectoral crosses. All
of it blinded Jacques de Molay and he barely heard as Cardinal de Fréauville read
out the heads of judgement.

The cardinal
spoke with unctuous majesty, pomp and ceremony. But the Grand Master heard only
as his name was called.

‘Monsieur de
Molay, who under interrogation has confessed and admitted the following . . .’

Seven years of
lies, of tortures and indecencies. Seven years! The cardinal appeared almost
satisfied as he read that during the reception ceremony brothers were required
to deny Christ, that the brothers committed sacrilegious acts upon the cross,
that the receptors practised obscene kisses on new entrants, that the priests
of the Order did not consecrate the host, that the brothers worshipped a cat,
or a head, that the brothers encouraged and permitted the practice of sodomy,
that he, the Grand Master, and other officials absolved fellow Templars, that
they held their receptions, ceremonies and chapter meetings in secret and at
night, that they abused the duties of charity and hospitality and used illegal
means to acquire property and increase their wealth...

But his mind was
recalling how the wind felt on his face when he charged across the desert sands
– the ancient movement of those winds that cracked the lips and made
hoarse the throat. How the skies were washed with blue! How the battle flags
unfurled, fluttering the Beauseant crosswise that sky! And the valiant nature
of men! The courage and self-sacrifice of his departed friends!

How we have sat and drunk below a metal moon and wet
our lips with water from icy rivers!

A tear fell down
his face and flowed unseen into his beard. Frustration welled up inside him,
pain and humiliation, sorrow and guilt for his confessions, regrets at his own
incompetence. All of it came flooding out of him, pouring out, loosened.