Jack Whyte - Order in Chaos

He shuddered and wrenched his awestruck mind away from the appalling thought as a vision of his own end burst into his mind and he saw and felt himself stricken and overwhelmed by flames of heavenly immolation, and before he even knew what he was going to do, the lid of the great wooden chest slammed shut beneath his hands and he threw his full weight on it, pushing it down, his head hanging and his open mouth working as he struggled to catch his breath. Moving awkwardly, he forced himself to turn away from the Prime Chest and contemplate the other three, finding enormous difficulty in focusing on them and fighting to shut the image of the Ark and its brooding Seraphim out of his mind.

He failed. He filled his lungs with air, turned away from the chests, and began to walk rigidly towards the corner nearest him, looking straight ahead until he reached it, and then he squared the room, marching to each of its corners before turning right and making his way directly along the wall to the next. Three times he made the circuit before stopping again where he had begun, and now he found himself able to look at the remaining chests with something approaching equanimity. He knew what was contained in these three, because he had been told two decades before, when his studies had first touched upon them, but he had been told again, more recently, what they contained, and this latter time, as a senior member of the upper hierarchy of the Order of Sion, he had learned more than he knew before, because now the safety and welfare of the chests had become his personal responsibility.

He went back to his father’s desk and collected the remaining keys that lay there, unlocking each of the chests in turn until they all yawned open side by side, their contents on display. Each of them, solidly made from dense, heavy wood and reinforced with iron strapping, was packed to capacity with uniform rows of earthen jars in a double layer, eight above and eight below, all of them made from the same thick, reddish clay, indistinguishable one from another. The tops had been covered with stretched, wet leather centuries before, the coverings then tightly bound in place with wet thongs of rawhide that, when dried, formed an airtight seal as hard as iron.

Will felt no desire to touch these items, and no curiosity about their contents. He was merely happy to see that they were intact, their seals unbroken. He already knew what they contained, because several of the jars had been broken at the time of their discovery in the ruined vaults beneath Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, by the nine original knights who had founded the Order of the Temple, two hundred years earlier. The contents of those broken jars had been studied for years thereafter by the scholars of the Order of Sion, and had confirmed the teachings contained in the Order’s ancient lore, which had itself emerged from Judea a thousand years before that, at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in the first century Anno Domini. These plain and unimpressive jars, Will knew, were the real Treasure of the Templars, notwithstanding the importance of the Seraphimcrowned Ark in the Prime Chest. The Ark of the Covenant represented religious tradition, awe and the fear of God, but the contents of the jars represented nothing supernatural. It was their simple existence that was awe inspiring and revolutionary, for they contained, on tightly rolled scrolls of papyrus, the written records and history of the original community of the Essenes in Qumran, the community that the man Jesus and his brother, James the Just, had ruled and guided. Their contents proved beyond dispute that the Jesus of Qumran, now known as Jesus of Nazareth, was an ordinary man and not, as Paul had decreed, the Son of God, risen and reborn miraculously from the dead …

Will was intensely aware that the threat these records posed to the very existence of the Catholic Church could not be underestimated. Their existence was unsuspected, but were they ever to be found by Rome, they would be destroyed immediately, their threat expunged by fire, along with the lives of everyone who knew of their existence. Will knew the truth of that from his own training within the Order of Sion, because the Church’s entire edifice was built upon a misunderstanding.

Among their ancient secrets, brought with them from their days of slavery in Egypt and firmly rooted in the age-old rites that had dominated their worship for the centuries of their enslavement, the priests of the Israelites had preserved a ritual involving a symbolic death and resurrection—a rebirth into Enlightenment and the search for Communion with God Himself—that had been passed down through the millennia and now existed as the central ceremony of the Order of Sion. Will himself had undergone the ritual, when being Raised to brotherhood in the ancient fraternity, a ceremony that had roots stretching back into the earliest days of Egypt and the worship of Osiris, the God of Light, and his wife-sister, Isis.

Paul, the Order of Sion believed, had caught wind of this ceremonial—or of the reported fact that Jesus had “died” and been “reborn” decades earlier, before Paul’s own time—but being a Gentile and therefore by definition an outsider, he knew nothing of the true Way of the Essenes and thus had been incapable of understanding the truth of what he had discovered. The result was that he had transposed the ritual “death” in the Raising rite into the actual death of the man Jesus, believing that he had truly risen from the grave as a divine being. And upon that misunderstanding had been born the Catholic Church.

“Will! Are ye done in there?”

Will came out of his reverie with a start. “Aye, I’m coming.” He moved quickly now to close and lock the chests again, raising the lid of the Prime Chest and replacing the quilted blanket before closing it firmly and slipping the twin padlocks through the hasps. When he was done, he replaced the keys in their chest and locked that one too, lifted it onto one of the large chests, then hung the key around his neck and thrust it down into his tunic. He slapped the dust from his hands and looked around the room, checking that everything was as it should be, and then he walked quickly to the door and rejoined Tam outside.

FOUR

Will and his party were back in Arran within three weeks of their arrival in Roslin, having covered the three-hundred-mile journey there and back without incident. They had met potentially dangerous groups on both legs of the journey, but their own strength of twenty strongly armed and mounted men had been sufficient to discourage anyone from trying to molest them. In the meantime, the Treasure was safely concealed in the underground cavern close to his father’s home, and the excavation work had been expertly handled, so quick and thorough in its execution that the great bramble thickets hiding the entrance hid it still—they had been uprooted very carefully and then replanted in their original position when the work of sealing the entrance was completed.

Will was relieved to discover that nothing untoward had occurred during their absence, and that the new program of allocated work had progressed well, the newly structured organization apparently functioning smoothly. The brethren were already almost indistinguishable from the ordinary folk he and his men had encountered on the journey to and from Roslin. Their clothing was drab and sturdy, their beards had all been cropped to be unremarkable, and their scalps were overgrown by new-sprouting hair.

The secondary chapter had been set up at Lochranza mere days after Will’s departure, with the senior Temple bishop there, Bruno of Arles, functioning as temporary chaplain and Sir Reynald de Pairaud installed as acting preceptor. This development pleased Will immensely, because the veteran knight, for all his prickliness and his Temple Boar mentality, was utterly reliable when it came to his duty and responsibilities. On his first visit to Lochranza, four days after his return from the mainland, Will was open and sincere with his praises for the work that de Pairaud had already achieved in his new stewardship.