Warlord (Outlaw 4) (25 page)

The students too were housebound during these unseasonably wet days. As their lessons were usually held on the Petit-Pont in the open air, they had been cancelled while this stormy weather continued. Matthew and a few of the others spent their free time in a local tavern, the sign of the Cock, and came back to the room after nightfall, rosy-faced and cheery with wine. But one of the students, Luke, a slight chap, who cared less than the others for wine and games of dice, preferred to stay in the Widow
Barbette’s
salle
and improve his skills as a copyist. He sat for long hours at the scribe’s desk, copying out a text in Latin called the
Institutiones Grammaticae
by a long-dead Roman pedant called Priscian.

I was fascinated by Luke’s work – not the book he was copying, which was a turgid exposition on Latin grammar, full of advice on inflexion, word-formation and syntax, but by the process of writing. Luke bought the parchment from a dealer on the Left Bank and he would cut it to the right shape and scrape it smooth with a knife, polish it with a boar’s tooth, and then when it was ready to receive the ink, he would rule neat lines across the parchment, and down the margins, with a lead point. He bought goose quills by the sheaf from another shop nearby, and he would cut the quills with a sharp knife to make a nib, dip it in a cow’s horn of black ink and begin, in tiny precise strokes of the quill, to copy out Priscian’s dull text.

I knew my letters, of course – I had been taught by Robin’s own brother, years ago in Sherwood, and I had a decent command of Latin, too, but there had been little time for writing in the past few years of war – and I had spilled far more blood than ink since I was a boy. All the same, I loved the idea of transmitting my thoughts and feelings, and of recording deeds, and some of my better songs and poetry for future generations to read. Luke occasionally and rather reluctantly allowed me to practise my writing on the offcuts of his pages, and I believe it was then that I conceived the idea of writing this memoir that now strains your tired eyes. You have young Luke to thank for this tale, for his work in Paris gave me the idea to make a book all of my own, and fill it with my own adventures; although he was horrified by my eccentric plan to compose the story in English, my own mother language, rather than in French or good, honest Latin.

‘But, Sir Alan, Latin is the language of proper literature,’ he protested. ‘All educated people read Latin.’

‘And what of those who are not so well educated?’ I said. ‘Should I not share my songs and stories with them?’

‘If they are not educated they will not be able to read, whether it is written in Latin or English or Ethiopian,’ shot back Luke. I could see his point. They were sharp boys, my young student friends, and ruthless wielders of the formal logic they were taught; I could never manage to best them in any argument. But he did not dissuade me from setting down this tale in English – and if none can read my story in the years to come, so be it. It is all in God’s hands.

After a week of almost constant thunderstorms, the August sun returned and Hanno, Thomas and I set off for the Ville de Paris once again, this time through clean, gently steaming streets, on horseback and fully armed. My bruised back and shoulder were still stiff, marked yellow and brown and purple and remained very painful – but I was able to move. As Hanno had pointed out, I should be grateful that I was not in my grave. My Bavarian had reproached himself severely for not being with me on the day that I had visited the Seigneur d’Alle, although I had not asked him to accompany me, and the attack had come with no warning at all. Nevertheless, Hanno felt that he should have been there to protect me. He did have a thoroughly good reason to be absent from my side, though – he had discovered a Flemish ale-wife living in Paris, and although she was fat, middle-aged and married, he had fallen in love.

‘Oh God, Alan,’ Hanno had told me in mock despair, ‘she is so wonderful; sweet and plump as fresh butter, and her heavenly brew, her ale – strong, brown, bitter and clean – and tasting a little of hazelnuts. It is perfect! I love her! I think I should kill her man, that good-for-nothing Provost’s lackey; I should cut his throat and take her for myself.’

I knew that Hanno was not serious – at least, I hoped he was not. However I made him promise not to molest that unfortunate
ale-husband – I did not wish to bring the wrath of the Provost upon us. This powerful royal official, who resided in the Petit Chastelet, a small fortress on the south side of the Petit-Pont, was famously corrupt and lazy. But he was responsible to the King for the maintenance of law and order in Paris and he had over a hundred men-at-arms at his command. We had heard nothing more of the men Thomas and I had killed on the Rue St-Denis – Matthew had passed by the spot shortly after dawn the day after the fight and he had reported that the bodies had been removed by someone, but what became of them I never discovered. May their souls rest in peace.

So, on a gleaming day in late August, Hanno, Thomas and I crossed the Seine at the Grand-Pont, turned right on the Ruga Sancti Germani, and left again to head north on the Rue St Martin. We were retracing the steps we had taken almost two weeks earlier when we entered Paris – but I was not reneging on my vow to St Michael to remain in the city until I had discovered the identity of the ‘man you cannot refuse’. We were heading to the Paris Temple, the huge new compound of the Order that was being constructed just outside the northern boundary of the city, next to the Priory of St Martin where we had spent the night on our arrival. I had a broad and bulging money belt around my waist, which held nearly four pounds in silver, and I wished to make a deposit at the Temple, so that the money would be secure from thieves – footpads like the men who had so recently attacked me. At least, that was what I would be telling the Knights of the Order when we presented ourselves at the gates and demanded entry.

In truth, we were on a scouting mission: while I had been idle during the past few thundery days thinking about the mystery, a single word kept popping into my head. The word was: ‘Templar’. The one thing that all the knights who had attacked me had in common, both in Paris and at Fréteval, was that they were bearded. Now, of course, the Templars were not the only hirsute knights in
Christendom, but most of the members of the Order of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon favour beards. I believe it may even be one of the many vows they take when joining the Order.

And there were other signs, too. The cross was a well-known Templar symbol, although theirs was red not blue, and the black border on a white field echoed the famous black-and-white flag under which the Templars fought. The knights of the blue cross, I reasoned, might well be Templars of some kind, or have some link with them: and by going to the Paris Temple and making a deposit of money into their safekeeping, I would have a perfect excuse to inspect the inside of their stronghold and perhaps learn something about my enemies.

As we rode up the crowded Rue St Martin, I saw that Hanno kept glancing behind us. After a while, he put out a hand and the three of us reined in and stopped, allowing the heavy traffic to push past us on both sides.

‘What is it?’ I asked my Bavarian friend, who was twisted in his saddle and scanning the street behind with narrowed eyes.

‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it is nothing, but I have a feeling in my backbone that someone is following us, watching us.’

I looked behind me and saw shopkeepers, tradesmen and workers striding up and down the street, going about their lawful business, a monk or two, a knot of black-robed students, laughing together and drinking wine from a large earthenware jug, a pair of glum men-at-arms standing outside a church. A very dirty man was tending a herd of pigs, who were foraging in the remaining muck in the centre of the thoroughfare that had not been swept away by the storms. A lone mounted man, evidently a rich townsman by the quality of his clothes and horse, was coming closer: but he showed no interest in us and when I looked into his face I realized I had never seen him before. I had never seen any of them before, as far as I could recall.

‘There is nobody following us,’ I said to Hanno, releasing the hilt of Fidelity.

‘I cannot see him,’ my friend replied, scowling, ‘but I feel him in my marrow.’

Jumpy
, I thought,
he’s jumpy, that’s all – and perhaps he feels a little guilty because he was with his butter-sweet ale-wife when I was attacked last week. Nothing to worry about, Alan, just fix your mind on the task at hand
.

We were admitted to the enormous Templar compound, and once again my ears were assaulted by the ringing of chisels on stone and my nostrils clogged with fine white dust. The knights had recently completed a very strong, three-storey stone tower as the core of their defences, and a big round church, which reminded me painfully of the Temple Church in London, where Robin had been tried for heresy by this same Order the year before. And they had also recently finished building the encircling walls of their stronghold, but the huge compound, perhaps six acres in size, still resembled a mason’s yard. The Knights were constructing a grand palace for the Master of France in the south of the compound, next to the great tower, and a hospital further to the north, and a dozen buildings of wood and stone – conventual houses, cloisters, farm buildings, stables, chapels – were slowly rising into the sky. But while the Paris Temple might have been unfinished, it still represented a formidable fortification; perhaps as strong as any castle in France. And the Brother Sergeant who manned the powerful gatehouse admitted me through a portal guarded by two round towers, a portcullis, and an iron-studded oak gate.

After hearing my story, the gatehouse guard indicated that we should take our business to the largest stone building to the front of the Temple Church, the Counting House, where all the Order’s money matters with outsiders were transacted.

I had the utmost respect for the fighting abilities of the Templar
knights, and I had never met one who was not an extraordinary man, in one way or another – but the Order was cunning, too, and full of guile. And they were wealthy. Despite the vow of poverty that each knight took upon entering, the Order itself had amassed an abundance of treasure in the seventy years of its existence, and wide lands and estates, too, across the breadth of Europe. It was said that many a king or duke envied the coffers of the black-and-white knights – and part of the reason for their wealth lay in the nature of the exchange that I was about to make with them.

The Templars had preceptories all over Christendom and each was staffed by the Order’s knights and their sergeants, clerks, chaplains and servants. For decades, the Templars had been conveying goods – food, wine, clothing, building materials, weapons and so on – to their bases in remote parts of the world, from Syria to Scotland, from Denmark to the Douro, and in doing so they had also, naturally, begun to take part in commerce. Moving goods over the face of the earth, and selling them here and there had meant that sometimes the members of the Order needed to carry large sums of silver coin; and they thus laid themselves open to attack by bandits and thieves in the wilder regions. So the knights had devised a simple method of money exchange: a traveller would not carry money in the form of specie or coin, he would carry a letter, written in code, which commanded a Templar clerk when he arrived at his destination to hand over a particular sum of money on receipt of the parchment. This proved to be a great success – as a piece of parchment could have no value for a back-country thief – and soon the idea spread to other knights, who were not members of the Order, and then to townsfolk and traders who were travelling to far-flung markets and wished to safeguard their own silver.

On that fine morning in August, when Hanno, Thomas and I rode into the Paris Temple, there was nothing at all unusual in a
knight with a large sum of money in heavy silver coin wishing it to be converted into a simple letter, to be redeemed in another preceptory, in another town, in another land, or indeed, almost anywhere in Christendom.

The scouting plan, as such, was that while I conducted my business with the Templar treasurers, and perhaps reassured anyone who cared to listen that I believed that I had recently been attacked by mere footpads, Hanno would reconnoitre the interior of the fortress, wandering off in a casual manner like a bored man-at-arms stretching his legs, while Thomas looked to the horses. Hanno was my eyes and ears, he would explore the compound on foot, perhaps chatting to some of the Templar sergeants or some of the lay brothers and servants, and seeing if he could discover any evidence of the knights of the blue cross.

When I had explained the plan to Thomas and Hanno, my squire had voiced the sensible worry that, if the knights of the blue cross were indeed Templars, and we were within their precincts, they might decide simply to kill us, and I had to agree that there was a risk attached to our stratagem. But not, I judged, a large one. At Fréteval, in a dense patch of wild woodland, secluded, miles from the main armies, the knights of the blue cross had felt confident enough to show their identity and display their animosity towards me. But when they had attacked me in the streets of Paris – in public – they had made an attempt to hide their status as knights and had pretended to be beggars. It had not been a very impressive masquerade – I have found that soldiers often stand out from the common run of men – but it demonstrated that they did not wish us to know, or anyone who saw us fighting to know, that they were knights. We would be safe in the Paris Temple, I argued, because they wanted to hide their identities. The knights of the blue cross could not openly attack us in this big, open semi-public place without being observed by many eyes, and this was something they were most unwilling
to allow. We were as safe here, I told my friends, as we would be anywhere in Paris. This was my logic, anyway, and I prayed that it might be true.

I left Hanno and Thomas with the horses outside the Counting House and walked inside. It was cool and airy – I came through a great wooden double door into a tall stone hall with a double row of columns supporting the huge roof, and a series of doors at the back leading, I assumed, to private chambers, perhaps treasure vaults or rooms where parchment rolls and accounts might be stored. Two Templar sergeants wearing black surcoats over mail and with long swords belted at their waists stood guard on either side of the main door. In the centre of the room were four long tables covered in green cloth, and at each table sat a pair of clerks. At two of these tables, the clerks were in the process of transacting business with clients: at one, a French knight was passing over two small linen sacks of coins to the clerks; at the other a wealthy merchant was carefully reading a parchment document, holding it close to his face and frowning at the words written upon it.