Jack Whyte - Knights of the Black and White

He was no longer smiling. “We— you —found the Ark of the Covenant, the most treasured, fabled relic of Antiquity. We have not touched it since finding it, as you all know, and none of us yet knows what it contains. But the discovery itself is of enormous importance, even if it appears to be nothing more than an elaborate wooden box, perhaps an empty box, covered with a coating of hammered and carved gold. It was made, we are told, to contain the twin tablets of stone that Moses brought down from the mountain—the Ten Commandments—the proof of God’s covenant with man, but none of us here would dare or presume to touch it, open it, and look upon what is inside. Therefore we cannot estimate its worth in terms that ordinary men could understand. But is there any of us here who doubts its provenance?”

He waved his hand again towards the jars. “But we also found these. Sealed jars, filled with ancient, brittle scrolls. You have said nothing, but I know that many of you must be disappointed that the treasure you have worked so hard to find seems to have so little substance. Some of you might even think it worthless, a poor reward for so much dedication in time and brutal work. But I promise you, Brothers all, that had every jar we found been full of precious jewels, they would not, could not, have begun to approach the value of what we have found instead. This”—he held up the document in his hand and used it to indicate the others on the table behind him—“and these, are the keys to those.” Again he indicated the jars.

“I am not a greatly learned man, but I have spent much time being taught by others who are, and who have studied the Lore and records of our Order throughout their lives, and I have managed to learn enough to enable me, at least, to recognize and to authenticate what we have found here as being the genuine and original records of what our Order calls the Jerusalem Community, the original Assembly, the original church, if you will, established by Jesus and his followers here in this city. James, the brother of Jesus, was its first leader, perhaps before his brother’s death, but certainly afterwards.”

He allowed that to settle in their minds before going on. “I know you all recall the shock and consternation you felt soon after your initiation to the Order, when you first learned of our belief that all is not as it should be within the Christian Church as it exists today. Acceptance of that, the first tenet of the Order, was a harrowing and difficult experience. I know it was for me, as a young man of eighteen, because I had come from a devoutly Christian family, as had every one of you, and it seemed to me that I was being asked to condone and accept a heresy that involved the repudiation of the teachings of the hallowed Saint Paul and the entire New Testament.

“But, like all of you, I became convinced—in a surprisingly short time, I remember—by the scholarship and the logic of my teachers and the Order itself. I quickly came to accept and believe that Simon Peter was not the first leader of the Church; he was not the first Pope, as the Church would have us believe. That honor belonged to James, the brother of Jesus, known to his followers as James the Just. But the Church also teaches that Jesus had no brothers, and indeed how could he have, in their viewpoint, being born of a virgin? Are we to believe that Mary, having experienced divine intervention, then became carnal and worldly, a prey to the pleasures of the flesh?

“And so we all had to ask ourselves, at different times, the same profoundly disturbing questions. If Church doctrine is wrong in so fundamental an error as the identity of its first leader, and if the Church denies the existence of Jesus’ brothers and his family structure, then what else, which other aspects of its teachings, might come into question?”

Once again he looked from man to man, including the two senior brothers. “You all know our teachings, based upon the records and the annals in our vaults: Jesus had a family, his mother was Mary, and James the Just was one of his brothers. It was the man Paul, sometimes and confusingly known as Saul, who altered the truth for his own reasons, and most likely to fit his own designs, to make this faith politically and racially acceptable to the Romans, with their fear, distrust, and hatred of anything that was Jewish.

“Jesus was arrested and executed for his radical beliefs, for his political activities. Crucifixion was the fate of political dissidents and rebels.

“The strange thing is, Brothers, and once more you know this from our Order’s teachings, that the death of Jesus provoked no significant reaction in Jerusalem or anywhere else. He died, and his brother James continued to direct the affairs of their community. It was in reaction to the murder of James, assassinated years later on the steps of the temple of Herod, that civil unrest and open war broke out, and soon after that, sent by his father, Vespasian, the Roman general Titus led an avenging army to obliterate Jerusalem and its insurgents, and to destroy the temple, believing that only thus could they break the spirit of the Jews.

“They were wrong. They destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, but the members of the Assembly saw the end approaching, in time to conceal their precious records—this treasure—and to escape the destruction of the city, carrying with them sufficient written information to ensure that someday, when the troubles had died down and been forgotten, their descendants would be able to return and reclaim their history.

“We, my friends, are those descendants. And that history is what we have rediscovered: the complete record, we believe, of the Jerusalem Community, its achievements, its people and their ancestry, the tenets and articles of their beliefs, and their struggles to redeem their people from the tyranny of the Herod family and the infamous, repressive religion they had foisted upon the entire Hebrew race.”

St. Clair sat motionless, holding his breath and feeling the pounding of his heart as de Montbard stopped to think through his next words.

“That is what you have unearthed, Brothers. The true and incontrovertible story of what really happened to Jesus, his family and friends, and the religion, or the beliefs, by which they lived. And now all that remains to be done is to translate these scrolls. It will be a prodigious task and a fearsome responsibility. Your primary work here is now almost done, and from this point forward you will be able to spend more time on your secondary responsibility, the guardianship of the roads of Outremer. My task, in the time that now begins, will be to examine what we have—not to translate it, for I have neither the skills nor the time for that, but to use what little skill I have, aided by the documents entrusted to me by my superiors in the Order, to ensure that everything we have here is intact, and that it is, beyond dispute, what we believe it to be. And so I must begin working immediately, and you may retire to discuss this among yourselves and to ponder the consequences, all of them unforeseeable, that must undoubtedly come to pass in the years ahead.

“I know I have no need to remind you of your oath of secrecy and the need to keep this information absolutely secure and unsuspected by anyone not of our brotherhood, but I also know you will forgive me for bringing it back to your awareness. Be more careful from this day forth than you have ever been in guarding our secrets. And now, with the agreement of Brother Hugh, who is Master here, I thank you all on behalf of every brother in the Order of Rebirth. You have, by your own efforts, brought about that Rebirth.”

The meeting broke up at that point and the brethren dispersed, talking quietly among themselves, but St. Clair left the room alone and walked off by himself, his mind filled with the wonders of all that had happened to him and around him in the previous month, and as he walked he felt himself grow buoyant, as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders and he was free to blow in the wind, weightless and able to drift where the breeze took him.