Eric Lustbader - The Testament

"The Order followed Ockham in believing in the basic separation of faith and reason, religious doctrine and scientific investigation. How can an astronomer deduce from the orbits of the planets God's design? How can man, using concepts created by the mind of man, possibly come to know God's will?"

Nearing its end, the path pitched gently down toward a low-lying field that bordered a placid-looking pond, drowsing in the heavy sunlight. A high stone wall, the farthest limit of the cemetery, was in sight. The gravestones were thin and flinty, with the bony shoulders of extreme age. Some were so obscured by lichen and moss that it was virtually impossible to decipher the inscriptions. Just beyond, where the path ended not far from the stone wall, hunkered a final mausoleum, quite plain. A jagged crack ran up the left side, as if at some time in the distant past it had been dealt a violent blow by vandals. The ancient stone was as rough as a carpenter's palm. The elbow of a tenacious weeping willow root had inveigled its way into the foundation, as if nature itself was making a bid to reclaim what man had sought to preserve.

A small dark bronze door presented itself to them, above which was a stone pediment, wide and low-pitched, blackened by the elements and acid rain, a triangle of sorts in the center of which, thrust into shadow, was etched a name: MARCUS.

As they stood looking up at the name, Jenny said, "What you may not know is that the rift had been predicted-some have said prophesied-by the twelfth-century abbot Joachim of Fiore. Fiore had written a number of compelling apocalyptic tracts which trumpeted a coming age of the Holy Spirit, when the Church would be reformed by two religious Orders, one living in apostolic poverty. Between 1247 and 1257, Giovanni Burelli of Parma was the Minister General of the uneasy Franciscans. He was summarily deposed because he was close to the Spirituals, a sect of Franciscans from whose ranks the founders of the Order would eventually come. The Spirituals were followers of Joachim of Fiore, whose writings echoed precisely their main doctrine and complaint against the rest of the Franciscans. In 1257, the pope ordered Giovanni of Parma to resign, exiling him to Greccio."

Bravo nodded. "I'm familiar with these facts. He was sent to La Cerceri, the Franciscan hermitage on Monte Subasio near Assisi. He was incarcerated there for the rest of his natural life."

"Or so it was reported to the pope." She took out a key, placed it into the lock on the bronze door. "This is where your knowledge ends, this is where the secret history begins."

She opened the door, and they stepped inside. They were greeted by the smell of must and air seeming as old as the mausoleum itself. At first, he thought the inside was clad in sheets of marble, but on closer inspection, he discovered that walls were in fact plaster, painted in a faux marble pattern as beautiful as it was cunning. A pair of bronze crypt doors were set flush with the wall. They were long and narrow to accommodate the caskets within which rested the remains of the dead. At intervals, just above eye level, there were old-fashioned wrought-iron sconces along the walls, some with lights, others obviously receptacles for flowers, for there hung from two of these the glass-encased withered remains of poppies and irises like skeletons in a haunted house.

"In fact, Giovanni was never a prisoner," Jenny continued as she lit the lamps. "As it happened, a number of the friars in charge of La Cerceri were Spirituals. They were not only sympathetic to Giovanni but were instrumental in installing him as the Magister Regens of the Order, which was even then gathering to it secret followers."

Bravo gestured. "But this is a Jewish cemetery, the family name on this mausoleum is Marcus."

Jenny gave him the ghost of a smile, her strong white teeth showing. "Giovanni of Parma had a sister, Marcella. She fell in love with a painter by the name Paolo di Cione, but it wasn't until after they were married that he told her that he was an Italian Jew, that his family name was Marcus."

She put the flat of her hand against one wall. "You see, Bravo, it wasn't simply our insistence on apostolic poverty that so angered the pope that he sent his private army to hunt us down. The Order has a secret-one so important, so potentially dangerous, that only the members of the Haute Cour knew of its existence.

"Consider the logic of it. The Order had taken a vow of poverty and therefore couldn't own anything, as the other orders did. How, then, were we to survive? It was Marcella, Giovanni of Parma's sister, who came up with the solution. It happened that before he was deposed, the pope allowed Giovanni to pick his successor. He chose Bonaventura Fidanza. It was widely believed that Giovanni chose this master at the university of Paris because they were friends, but in reality it was because Marcella knew that Bonaventura had violated his vow of chastity and fathered a child by Marcella's cousin. This secret she confided to her brother, and thereafter the acquisition of certain select secrets became the currency by which the Order continued their work.

"Eventually, as I told you, the cache became a litany of the evil in the world. The important thing to keep in mind now is that with the power of these secrets we were often able, as I said, to influence kings, merchant-princes, generals-at times, if we were very clever and very lucky the course of history was altered by our intervention. We protected those with knowledge, scientists and writers, independent thinkers born ahead of their time who otherwise would have been persecuted, burned at the stake, publicly flogged or hanged. We hid firebrands, muckrakers and whistleblowers so that they could continue exposing the workings of dirty politics, revealing difficult truths. Of course, we didn't always succeed, but we always did our best to work for the greater good of mankind. Still, our work made us anathema to the Vatican, which is a storehouse of secrets, lies and repression."

Jenny's face was half in shadow. Her gray eyes were very large and in them floated motes the same color as the freckles that dusted the bridge of her nose.

"And then, there came into our possession an artifact so valuable that the Haute Cour was compelled to move the entire cache, to protect it with multiple measures. By tradition, two men possessed the key to the cache and the knowledge of where the cache was buried: the Magister Regens and one from among the Haute Cour whom they called the Keeper."

Several strands of hair, glowing like live copper, had come loose from her ponytail, riding against the surge of her cheek, and she pushed them behind her ear. "The Keeper is special, Bravo, never more so than now. There has been no Magister Regens for decades. The Haute Cour governs the Order now. The Keeper is the official key-bearer, but there was one other from the Haute Cour used as a backup, should anything happen to the Keeper."

"You said was."

"The backup was a man named Jon Molko. He was the first taken and tortured by the Knights. When they discovered he wouldn't talk, they killed him, just moments before your father found him."

"What happened to Molko's key?"

"We don't know."

Bravo put his hand in his pocket, fingered the strange key his father had given him six months ago in Paris. His father's key. But what about Molko's key? Did the Knights of St. Clement have it?

"Our cache of secrets," Jenny was saying. "All that keeps us strong, all that will keep us strong is in the Keeper's hands. This awesome responsibility, this terrible burden was handed down from one Keeper to the next through a process of meticulous and painstaking selection." She moved her head back and forth in an intimation of wariness, and the ruddy lights glimmered on her skin, burnished her in a glow that seemed centuries old. Her lips, bright crimson, were half-parted, and her voice, when she continued, was breathless. "Bravo, your father was the Keeper of all the Order's secrets."