The Iron King Read Online Free PDF Page A

seemed to be bursting, and he had begun to scream that he would confess everything, admit every crime, all the crimes of the world. Yes, the Templars practised sodomy among themselves; yes, to gain entrance to the Order, it was necessary to spit upon the Cross; yes, they worshipped an idol with the head of a cat; yes, they practised magic, and sorcery, and had a cult for the Devil; yes, they embezzled the funds confided to their care; yes, they had fomented a plot against the Pope and the King … And what more besides?
    Jacques de Molay wondered how he had managed to survive it all. Doubtless because the tortures had been exactly calculated, never pushed to the point where there was a risk of his dying, and because, too, the constitution of an old knight, trained to arms and war, had greater resistance than he himself could have believed.
    He knelt down, his eyes turned towards the beam of light that entered by the little window.
    ‘Oh, Lord my God,’ he cried, ‘why hast Thou given me greater strength of body than of mind? Was I worthy to command the Order? Thou hast not prevented my falling into cowardice; spare me, Lord God, from falling into folly. I cannot hold out much longer, no, not for much longer.’
    He had been in chains for seven years, only leaving his dungeon to be dragged before the commission of inquiry, and to be submitted to all the pressures and threats that the theologians and lawyers could devise.
    In the circumstances one might well fear madness. Often the Grand Master lost all sense of time. As a distraction, he had attempted to tame a couple of rats that came every night to eat the remains of his bread. He passed quickly from anger to tears, from crises of religious devotion to a longing for violence, from idiocy to fury.
    ‘They’ll die of it, they’ll die of it,’ he kept repeating to himself.
    Who would? Clement, Guillaume, Philip. … The Pope, the Keeper of the Seals and the King. They would die. Molay did not know how, but it would certainly be amid appalling suffering and in expiation of their crimes. He unceasingly chewed over these three hated names.
    Still upon his knees, his beard raised towards the narrow window, the Grand Master murmured, ‘I thank thee, Lord God, for leaving me hatred. It is the sole force that sustains me now.’
    He got painfully to his feet and went back to the stone bench which, cemented to the wall, served both for seat and bed.
    Who could ever have thought that he would come to this? His mind constantly returned to his youth, to the boy he had been fifty years before, as he came down the slopes of his native Jura in search of adventure.
    Like all the younger sons of the nobility of the time, he had dreamed of wearing the long white mantle with the black cross, the uniform of the Order of the Knights Templar. In those days, the mere name of Templar evoked the epic and the exotic, ships with bellying sails scudding towards the Orient, lands where the skies were always blue, charges at the gallop across the desert sands, treasures of Arabia, ransomed prisoners, captured and pillaged cities, fortresses with huge staircases, built beside the sea. It was even said that the Templars had secret ports from which they embarked for unknown continents. 4
    And Jacques de Molay had achieved his dream; he had marched proudly through distant cities, clothed in the superb mantle whose folds hung down to his golden spurs.
    He had risen in the Order’s hierarchy, higher than he had ever dared hope, achieving every dignity in turn, at last to be elected by the brothers to the supreme function of Grand Master of France and Overseas, and to the command of fifteen thousand knights.
    And all this had but led to a dungeon, horror and destitution. Surely few people’s lives could show such prodigious success followed by so great a fall.
    Jacques de Molay was idly tracing lines with one of the links in his chain upon the damp mould on the wall, lines which reminded him of the plan