Michael Jecks - The Templar

Baldwin was unable to speak. They had reached the level area before the circular church. A young child was running past, and Baldwin watched him speed over the ground, laughing as another boy chased him. ‘I am sure you are right, claveiro ,’ he said huskily.

‘I believe so. I find it painful to think of all the violence inflicted on men whose only crime was trying to obey God.’

They had reached a small gate in a wall, and Joao motioned to it. ‘I wondered … it is a pleasing little area. I must leave you, but if you wish, you may enter and rest for a while.’

‘What is it?’ Baldwin asked.

‘A graveyard.’ Joao looked about him sadly. ‘It is where the monks who used to live here were buried. Wait here, and meditate quietly. Leave your sword sheathed, and you might learn something useful.’

Afonso climbed up the roadway with Sir Charles. The English knight stood at the gateway peering out over the view, while Afonso entered the castle’s gates and walked into the courtyard.

The place was enormously loud, with men shouting at each other, the beating of hammers and chisels, bellows making the flames roar, and over all the sonorous tolling of the massive bell in the church. Afonso gazed at it with wonder. It was nothing like a church as he knew it. Instead, it looked like a citadel, a castle’s keep. It was a tower that dwarfed every other tower in Tomar.

The place he wanted to go was near the church, and he entered it quietly by the small gate. Immediately, the noise died to a background hubbub, and he found himself in a small cloister with a pleasing area of lawn. There were no seats apart from some stone-carved benches, and he walked to one and sat, staring at the grass.

There was another man in there with him, he saw, a man in a white tunic, and at first he wondered if it might be a Knight of Christ, but then he thought that they must all be in the church for a service, for the bell had ceased its clanging invitation.

Afonso was not worried. He bent his head and clasped his hands and began to pray as he had been shown by his father all those years ago. At once he felt the calmness return and envelop him. All the frustrations and worries of the last ten years began to disappear. It was as though he was able to tell his father what had happened, as if he could talk to his father properly again. Not that it was possible, of course. He had died many years ago. But simply confiding in him would, he hoped, make his father’s soul happy.

When he was done, he sat back. After a few minutes, he heard footsteps approaching. A man sat on a bench nearby.

Baldwin cleared his throat. ‘I came here to try to find you.’

‘You have succeeded.’

‘May I speak to you?’

‘Not here.’

Afonso stood, and without a backward glance, walked from the cloister out to the courtyard, Baldwin following. As soon as Afonso opened the gate and stepped out, there was a shrill cry, and the little boy whom Baldwin had seen before, ran past, clipped Afonso’s leg, and fell headlong. For a moment, there was no noise from him, but then he began to shriek with pain and surprise.

Baldwin saw the lad sit up, his mouth a blood-filled hole where he had fallen and dragged the inner surface of his bottom lip along the gravel-strewn ground. Baldwin felt his courage quail within him, but Afonso had no hesitation. He picked up the boy, and with a piece of his tunic, began to hook out the stones and grit which had been caught in the little fellow’s mouth, not stopping until he had most of them out. Then he walked to a hut and demanded some watered wine for the boy. Only when he had seen the boy drink a little, still crying pitifully, and had found another to look after him, did he turn back to Baldwin.

‘Why did you want to talk to me?’ he demanded.

‘Because I wanted to kill you,’ Baldwin said seriously. ‘And now I am not sure.’

‘Yes, I wanted to kill him. I hated him — I still do,’ Afonso said passionately.

Baldwin felt his hackles rise. ‘An old man like that? What had he ever done to you?’

Afonso gave him a ferocious stare and his mouth opened, but then he shook his head and stared out over the town below them.

They had walked out from the castle and were sitting on a low wall a short distance away. Afonso had been quiet all the way, as though helping the boy had exhausted all his energies, but Baldwin was seething with a curious emotion. He wanted to strike the man, but something restrained him … probably Joao’s words. ‘ Leave your sword sheathed .’ Why had he said that? Joao must have known that Afonso was going to be here. How had he guessed?

‘Were you told to go there to the graveyard?’ he asked.

‘No. I went there to find some peace and to pray. The claveiro said I might meet someone there and he suggested it could be good for me to tell my story,’ Afonso said. ‘If you wish to hear it, I can tell you now.’

There was a strange listlessness to him still as he began his story, as though he had been on a long journey, but had at last finished it. He was home.

‘I am called Afonso de Gradil. I was the second son of Dom Alvaro, but my older brother died when I was young. My grandfather helped fight the Moors and won back our lands, and my father felt the debt to God deeply. When I was young, he renounced the world and took on the white robes. He became a Knight Templar, living here in Tomar.

‘Like my mother, I was proud of him. I honoured him for taking up the sword in God’s name. When she died, I thought that I might wish to come and join him here in the castle, but before I could do so, the Templars were arrested.’

He looked at Baldwin. ‘The accusations against those men were false. I know this. And then they began the foul process of destroying the Order — all on the words of a few lying men.’

‘I know,’ Baldwin said impatiently. ‘So why did you choose to punish another innocent Templar?’

‘Innocent? Brother Matthew was an agent of the French King sent to destroy the Templars!’ Afonso spat. ‘He was here for a while, but he invented stories about worshipping a devil’s head, about urinating on the cross … all kinds of nonsense! Then he took those stories back with him to France and gave evidence against the Templars, helping to have them destroyed. And one of the men who died was my father.’

Baldwin fell back in his seat, and he felt a hideous crawling sensation over his flesh, as though tiny demons were enjoying his discomfiture. Suddenly the remoteness of Matthew, the ‘otherness’ of his behaviour, made sense. It was why he had never been tortured; he had no need of torture. He had willingly given evidence against his own brethren. ‘No!’

‘My father heard of the courts being held in France and travelled with others to give evidence in support of the Templars. Many were listened to, but because of Matthew, my father was captured. In 1310, he was burned to death with fifty others outside Paris, in a meadow near the Convent of Saint Antoine.’

Baldwin knew that place. Saint Antoine des Champs, on the road to Meaux, was a huge fortified precinct, entirely walled and moated. The Templars had been taken there to break the spirits of those who still denied guilt, and had been led there on wagons, shouting their innocence still. Chained and manacled, they could not escape when the King’s men slipped the horses from their harnesses and set fire to the wagons, not even giving the men the dignity of a stake.

‘I knew Matthew … are you sure he was guilty?’

‘My uncle saw the records.’

‘Your uncle?’

‘The claveiro here. He came here willingly to restore the castle and convent to its previous glory,’ Afonso said. ‘After the shame brought upon the convent and my father by Matthew, he felt the need to do all he could to put matters right again. As did I in my own way.’