Michael Jecks: The Templar

‘Get away from her, you bloody bastard!’ he muttered.

On arriving at the great column, Simon and Baldwin knelt and reached in with their hands, in the ritual of holy greeting to the Saint, Baldwin gazing up at the Saint with a murmured prayer, soon after repeating the paternoster .

Simon was bemused to see his friend so overcome.

Sir Baldwin de Furnshill, as he well knew, had been a Templar, and Simon also knew that his friend was deeply embittered by the destruction of his Order. It wasn’t the kind of act that could ever be forgiven: Baldwin had been a driven man since the end of the Templars. Before that, Simon reckoned, Baldwin must have been focused on the ruin of the Moors who had evicted the Christians from their most holy city and forced them from the Crusader kingdoms in 1291 when they kicked the last of the garrison of Acre from the Holy Land. Baldwin was deeply religious, though he detested the Pope and eyed the Church askance, and Simon reckoned he must have been a ferocious enemy of the Moors.

Since that terrible year of 1307, Baldwin’s life had utterly changed. He had lost his friends, many of whom were murdered by the French King’s men and the Church’s own ‘Hounds of the Lord’, the Dominicans, who manned the inquisitions and tortured the poor warriors, most of them unlettered, who had been held for so long. Men who had devoted their lives to God and His Holy Land were persecuted by another of the Pope’s own Orders. It was no surprise that Baldwin had been so deeply disgusted, nor that he blamed the avaricious instincts of a corrupt and ignoble King and his lackey, the Pope at Avignon.

And yet Baldwin still trusted and believed in God. Simon wasn’t so sure whether, if he himself had undergone these same trials, he would have been able to maintain the same faith as his friend. Baldwin seemed convinced that the Pope was responsible, and that had left him untrusting of politics and power, but he still had a strong belief in God and God’s determination to protect His own.

Simon sniffed. If it had been him, he might have renounced his religion entirely and joined the ranks of the Moslems in the face of such dishonour and treachery. Others had, from what he had heard. Poor devils, once they realised that their own faith was turning against them, they bolted and found comfort in the ranks of the Moors. At least there they were respected.

Baldwin had strode on into the nave and Simon withdrew his hand from the hole in the column, cast an apologetic look skywards to where the Saint’s figure now seemed to peer down with a more forbidding expression, and scurried after his friend.

Parceval didn’t recognise the man at Dona Stefania’s side, but Gregory did, and as he saw the tatty-looking figure bend towards his ex-wife and murmur in her ear, he felt a worm of unease uncoil in his gut. Like the painful ache in his bad shoulder that invariably predicted a change in the weather, this feeling left him convinced that he would soon know more of the man he had seen leading the attack against the pilgrims.

He had thought the man was a mere outlaw, a felon set on stealing the few belongings of the pilgrims on their way to Compostela, and when the attack had failed and the survivors had been routed, he fully expected the leader to have bolted like the cowardly scum he must be, and he had; he had fled the field without standing by his men.

Gregory observed the two as closely as a man some hundred feet away could, and felt sure that the robber glanced about him as though checking that they were unobserved, and then, he thought, they passed their hands together as though touching — a clandestine signal of affection, he assumed at first, but then he looked at the man’s hunched back and twisted neck, and his air of utter misery, and revised his opinion.

As he watched, he saw the foul-looking scoundrel stow something away in his purse. What could it be? A token of her affection?

The idea made him wince. His wife was of noble birth, and was painfully aware of the barriers between serfs and those who were freeborn. She would have looked down upon a squire, from her elevated position, let alone upon a miserable cur like this one. No, it couldn’t be a sign of her love. Perhaps he was her servant … but no. He was not steward to a nunnery, not from the look of him, not unless affairs in Castile had changed greatly since his last visit.

But it could, he reckoned, be a payment.

There was some irony there. It was just his luck that he should have been close to being attacked by one of his ex-wife’s own servants.

But that made no sense! Why should his wife pay a felonious son of a bastard Breton pirate and a Southwark whore money? It made no sense at all.

For Caterina, seeing her brother Domingo was a relief. He was a figure who had always loomed large in her life, up until her marriage, and spotting him in the square with his head held at that curious angle — the result of a fall from a pony when he was very young — made her heart lurch as though this in itself was a sign that her luck was about to change.

‘Domingo! Domingo!’ she called, but he paid her no heed.

That was odd. Domingo, always a man to have a finger thrust up to the knuckle in any pies available, was habitually cautious, always keeping a weather eye open for any officials. It was most strange to see him apparently deaf to her voice. Not like him at all.

Caterina pushed her way through the crowds until she was a great deal nearer, her forcefulness earning her curses and one hack on the ankle. At last she got close to him, just in time to see how he was ordered away by the Lady Prioress.

Caterina had heard much about her, of course. Dona Stefania de Villamor was spoken of in hushed voices by Caterina’s family, mainly because she had enjoyed a rather sordid history, being a married woman who gave up the world for a place in the convent. Not everyone liked her. They thought her to be a grasping woman, remote and unfriendly, with her eyes firmly fixed upon whatever pleasures she could win for herself on this earth, rather than the gains she would make in heaven.

That, so far as Caterina was concerned, was fine. She too had lost faith in heaven. All she wanted was a little peace here on earth.

‘Domingo!’ she called again, this time a little more peremptorily as he made to pass by her and go back out into the square.

His face was black with ingrained dirt, sunburn and a kind of grim misery that was so palpable, she felt his look strike her like a blow.

‘Go away, peasant!’ he snarled.

‘Domingo, it’s me — Caterina.’

‘It can’t be,’ he declared, scowling at her closely.

‘You look terrible,’ she said gently. ‘What is the matter?’

‘My son. He’s dead.’

‘Sancho?’ She listened aghast as he told her of the ambush on the pilgrims. ‘But why did you attack them in the first place?’

He wouldn’t meet her eye. ‘It was for a good reason,’ he said evasively. ‘But the bastards cut my poor Sancho down as if he was nothing more than a calf. Just struck him down like a calf.’

She opened her arms to him, and he went to her, his sister, the widow who begged in black in the great square at the foot of the Cathedral. The sister who was dead to him.

When the two men had finished their prayers at the shrine of Saint James, they made their way out through the Cathedral to the northern square.

Simon was mentally drained after visiting the Saint’s shrine and kissing the relics. The incense used had affected him like a strong wine, making him warm and comfortable, yet the rest of the experience had been unsettling. Although the words spoken by the priests were the same Latin ones he knew and expected, the intonation and accents were strangely different, as though being pronounced by children or untutored priests who were pretending a greater understanding than they truly possessed. To think that they should be guardians of such a magnificent cathedral!