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Etienne’s head all a-daze and he had to fight to keep from
falling into unsteadiness.
    Marcus shouted
then to the crowd something in their language and the people were suddenly made
silent, stock-still. The expectation that had kept them from their final
despair, that had brought life to blood and limb, had drained away at those
words and so left them no more than standing stones.
    But Jacques did
not make a move for the gates. He stood amid this sea of faces while behind
them the army of Hama, of Damascus and the great swarm of Mameluks could be
heard making their way through the streets to them. He looked upwards at the
gilded lions on the towers and to the dawning sky blotted out by smoke and then
once more to the crowd and a look passed over his face. He raised his brows,
nodded once and made a sign to the guards, who stepped aside to allow the
wretched group to enter.
    ‘Go!’ Jacques
herded them like sheep, Etienne thought, to the slaughter. ‘Pray! Make your
confessions! This time tomorrow or the next day you will be in God’s heaven!’
    Beyond the gates
a boiling, chanting mass swept the streets towards the fortress. From the gates
the men saw that pierced on spikes were the heads, still dripping blood, of
those young boys and old men the infidels had massacred upon the walls.
    Words bothered
Etienne’s lips, but he would not betray even to himself his feelings of doom.
Instead, he took the child in his arms and followed the others as they walked
through the great oak gates and once again through the second gates to watch as
they were closed and bolted shut.
    And so it was
that in this familiar place, exchanging no word, each man walked to the harbour,
leaving the city to itself.

2
THE PROPHECY
If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams
. . . thou shalt not hearken.
Deuteronomy 13:1
Cyprus, September 1306
    It was fifteen
years since the fall of Acre, and Etienne de Congost, Seneschal of the Temple,
walked the halls of the modest house with firm heel, his head down and his
hands behind his back. He found himself for once a-refuge from the troubles of
the commandery since the deserted halls and the disturbance of a storm-full
afternoon provided a rare respite not felt since Acre and even before that.
    To be seneschal
at such a time as this, after the retreat of the Temple from the Holy Land,
with the great and small of Outremer pouring into Cyprus, meant that he was
rarely alone. It was therefore logical that concern should lie on his mind at
such moments with nothing to distract him.
    Fifteen years
cast into the silence of God’s absence, like Ishmael from Abraham, had made his
communion with God disordered. It had made his duty an imitation of what it
once had been. How could he not think on that? Since Acre, the
    Temple had lost
its place. Exiled from its duty it met the world differently – he met the
world differently. Gone was the heat haze of deed and will, the poetry of war,
to be replaced by the tedium of clever words and politics, of cunning work that
was, to his sense of it, demeaning.
    There was
thunder. He paused before rounding the east walk. The wind and rain did not
reach here and he observed the half-darkness with his burdens gathering upon
his shoulders. He recalled the loss of Acre, Sidon, their retreat to this place with the newly elected Grand Master, Thibaud de Gaudin,
and then his subsequent death. There had been the difficult election of his
friend and mentor, Jacques de Molay, and the struggle to gather what was left
of his Order’s dignity, its responsibilities and royal standing, among such
dangers as might be found in that small kingdom of refugees, where friends were
not distinguished from enemies. Such matters had required brooding, and a
devotion to short-term solutions that bore no resemblance to the far-reaching
outlook the Temple had once cast upon the world.
    After all, new ways, new ways.
    Once again that
numb pain came into his left hand, a tingling in his