Raymond stared aghast at the priest. ‘This is murder!’ he rasped. ‘I am a knight of Christ, not an assassin!’
‘Open her mouth!’ Eutyches shouted.
Both knights backed away. The young woman was moving, her eyes fluttering. Eutyches put the pyx down and drew a bejewelled dagger from his robes. Sir Raymond stepped forward: those lovely eyes were open, smiling up at him. The Hospitaller lashed out, intending to block the thrust of the raised dagger. Instead, he struck Eutyches a powerful blow on the side of the shoulder. The old priest staggered and fell; his head hit the marble floor, cracking open like an egg. The blood seeped out. Sir Raymond stared in horror but turned at the warm, soft touch to his cheek. The young woman’s eyes were so lovely, so entreating her hands stretching out. .
2
In the beginning:
The Rosifer, Lucifer’s great henchman,
Took a rose from the gardens of heaven
And rode down to Paradise to pay court to Eve.
Sir Otto Grandison was much changed. No longer the fiery young knight, he was clothed in a cloak of camelhair with rough sandals on his feet. Yet the greatest change, at least to the eye, was his face: no longer smooth and olive-skinned but deeply furrowed, burnt by a fiery sun, whilst his hair had turned grey, and an unkempt beard fell in a tangled mess to his stomach.
Sir Otto Grandison, now a hermit, stood on the cliffs of Masada. Narrowing his eyes, he stared out over the shimmering mass of the Dead Sea. It was just after dawn. The sun had sprung up like a fiery ball and already Grandison could feel the blast of heat from the desert below. He shaded his eyes and stared down the precipitous cliffs. He had slept badly, his mind racked by nightmares, the fears and terrors of the night. He looked back over his shoulder at the small cave built into the rock. A hermit’s dwelling: nothing but rough sacking for a bed; a battered pair of saddlebags hung on a peg; and a stone jar, the gift of a kindly Arab, to hold the water he drew from the well.
Grandison looked up. Vultures hung black against the sky, hovering, keen-eyed for any prey or for those about to die. Sir Otto crossed himself. Usually the vultures would preen their great feathered wings and fly out over the desert but, recently, they had begun to stay, hovering above him. He wondered whether they, too, sensed that death was near.
He stared round the ruins built on the top of these cliffs. A traveller, a seller of perfumes from whom Sir Otto had begged scraps of food in the valley below, had told him about these ruins. How Masada had once been a great fortress built by Herod the Great, he who had slaughtered the innocents at the time of Jesus’ birth. Later it had become a stronghold for the Jews in their violent struggle against the Roman legions, and its last defenders, determined not to be taken prisoner, had poisoned themselves, their wives and their children. Otto often wondered if their ghosts haunted this eagle’s eyrie or if Herod the Great, bound by chains in his own fiery hell, walked the ruins of his former greatness.
During the day, all was well. Sir Otto would stay in his cave, sleep, pray or pore over the battered copy of the Scriptures he had bought before leaving Rhodes. Sometimes, if he saw a camel train or merchants on the road below, he’d go down to beg for coins or food, assuring his would-be benefactors of his prayers to God Almighty. He was always treated gently by Christian, Turk or Jew. Some saw him as a holy man, a hermit; others a madcap fool to live in the heart of the wilderness and haunt the ghostly ruins of Masada.
Sir Otto, feeling the heat of the sun, walked back to the coolness of his cave. He knelt down and stared at the makeshift wooden cross placed on a ledge beside his bed.
‘I cannot blame them, Lord,’ he murmured. ‘I am what I appear to be: a sinner, a lost soul.’
Otto combed his iron-grey, straggling beard. His brother would not recognise him now. He drank a little of his precious water and lay down on his bed.
‘God bless you, Raymond,’ he whispered. ‘Wherever you are.’
He knew they’d never meet again, yet, sometimes, whether it was a temptation from the devil or not, he just wished he could clasp his brother one more time, especially now, before he died. Otto, deep in his heart, realised the Demon had found him. Turning on his side, he stared at the tangle of wild roses, now decaying, where he had thrown them into a corner of the cave. Otto had found these about a week ago, after he had come back from the road below, placed on a stone outside the entrance to the cave. Wild roses! He didn’t know where they had come from or how they could survive for so long in the fiery heat, yet they were a token, a warning: the Rose Demon was, once again, about to enter his life.
Otto rolled back and clasped his hands. He was ready for death. He had atoned for his terrible sin. He had spent seven years here: a life of atonement, for breaking his oath and, above all, loosing the Rose Demon into the world of man.
Otto could never forget Eutyches lying on that marble floor, the blood seeping out of his hoary, cracked head. Raymond and he had taken the princess out of the sarcophagus; so beautiful, so delicate, her body exuding the most fragrant of perfumes. She had not said much but thanked them softly and asked for their protection, which they had solemnly pledged.
Then the Turks broke into the Blachernae. He and Raymond, the princess between them, had fled along the gloomy gallery and up steep stairs which took them out on to a hillside just beyond the walls of Constantinople. They had hoped to reach their ship but a squadron of Sipahis, Turkish light horse, had cut off their escape. He and Raymond were threatened with a violent and bloody struggle. God knows why or how — perhaps in their souls they realised what they had failed to do — but Otto and his brother had allowed the Sipahis to seize the mysterious princess. In return, the Hospitallers had been permitted through.
Bloody and bruised, Raymond and Otto had secured passage on a small boat. By dusk that day they were on board a Venetian galley and, like the rest of the refugees, could only stare helplessly at the shoreline, watching columns of smoke float up from the city. To the Venetians the fall of Constantinople was a disaster but, to the two brothers, it was a personal shame. They had broken their oath. Eutyches had been killed — and the princess? Otto could never forget the hateful look she threw at them as the Sipahis seized her.
‘We did not mean to hand her over,’ Raymond later told the Grand Master of the Knights Hospitallers when they reached the island of Rhodes. ‘The Sipahis took her. It was impossible to rescue her.’
The Grand Master, however, had sat grey-faced, open-mouthed, staring at them. At last he shook himself and rose slowly to his feet.
‘You should have killed her,’ he whispered.
‘Why?’ Raymond had asked.
The Grand Master sat in a window seat and put his head in his hands.
‘Why?’ Raymond followed him across the room. When the Grand Master looked up, his face was suffused with a terrible anger.
‘In his last letter to me,’ the Grand Master jabbed a finger at Raymond, ‘His Imperial Highness, the Emperor Constantine, asked me to name two Hospitallers, two of my most trustworthy men for a task which only a priest and a soldier could perform. I chose you. You took your oath and you broke it. Now, because of your perfidy, not only is a good and venerable priest killed but a terror, much worse than any Ottoman army, has been unleashed on the world!’
Raymond had fallen on his knees before the Grand Master, head bowed, hands clasped. Otto had done likewise.
‘Father,’ Raymond confessed, ‘we have sinned before Heaven, before earth and before thee.’
