But this was all of the past.
The Order was no more.
He was a civilian now, free from the extreme constraints of his previous life. And yet he still felt caught between both worlds, still found it hard to fully embrace his newfound freedom.
It had been hard enough before he met her.
Thinking about her now, he remembered a particular Templar Rule, one that forbade knights from hunting of any kind—except for lions. An odd rule, given that no lions roamed the lands where Templars lived and fought. Early on, Conrad had been taught that it was an allusion to its scriptural symbolism: “Your adversary, the devil, roams as a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.” He knew it referred to the struggle between man and the beast of desire, a conflict that all knights constantly strove to overcome.
He wasn’t sure he’d be able to overcome it much longer.
Which caused him even more turmoil, now that the past he thought he’d left behind had reached out and grabbed him by the throat.
He had work to do.
“IT’S OVER, CONRAD,” Hector of Montfort told him. “You know what those bastards have done in Paris. For all we know, the others have been put to the torch as well by now.”
They sat cross-legged under a blanket of stars, around a small fire in a room of a dilapidated old mansion that had lost its roof and its owners decades ago. Three former brothers-in-arms, three rugged men who had escaped an unjust arrest warrant and were now reinventing themselves in a foreign land.
Conrad, Hector, and Miguel of Tortosa.
The news they’d heard a few weeks earlier had been devastating. In February, well over six hundred of their brethren who had been arrested in France had changed their minds and recanted their earlier confessions. They’d decided to defend their Order against the king’s outlandish accusations. A brave move, but an ill-fated one: By denying their previous confessions, they became lapsed heretics, which carried the penalty of death by burning. That May, fifty-four of them had been burned at the stake in Paris. Other Templars suffered the same fate elsewhere across France.
Hundreds of others now awaited their turn.
“We have to try and save them,” Conrad insisted. “We have to try and save our Order.”
“There’s nothing to save, Conrad,” Miguel countered, tossing one of the broadswords back into the pile of scabbards and knives that Conrad had shown them. “Ever since Acre and the loss of the Falcon Temple, our Order has been dead and buried.”
“Then we have to bring it back to life,” Conrad said, his face blazing with fervor. “Listen to me. If we can recover what Everard and his men lost, we can do it.”
Hector glanced at Miguel. They both looked weary, clearly still reeling from what Conrad had told them when he’d showed them the weapons earlier that evening. As one of the master and commander’s favorites, Conrad had been invited into the small circle of knights who knew the Order’s real history. He had been privy to what Everard of Tyre and his men had been sent out to do back in 1203. Hector and Miguel hadn’t. They hadn’t been aware of the secrets of the Order. Not until this night.
It was a lot to take in.
“Be realistic, brother,” Miguel sighed. “What can three men do against a king and a pope? They’d have us up on those stakes before we managed to utter a single word.”
“Not if we have it,” Conrad said. “Not if we play it right. Look, it brought them to their knees before. Nine men built a small empire with it. We can do the same. We can rebuild what we had and continue their work.”
He studied his fellow knights. They were different now. Older, for one. It had been almost twenty years since they had all fought together at Acre. Older, heavier, slowed by the spoils of an unfettered life. He felt a flutter of doubt and wondered if he believed his own words. What he was asking of them was a tall order, a huge sacrifice for something that carried a far-from-certain outcome.
“We can stay here, turn our backs on our past and live out our lives like this,” he told them. “Or we can remember our vows. Our mission. We can remember all those who gave their lives for our cause and try to ensure that they didn’t die in vain. I say there is no choice here. We have to try.” He reached down and grabbed one of the broadswords. “These swords could have ended up in the hands of any trader in the land. But they didn’t. They found me. They found us. We can’t ignore that. Our brothers are calling out to us from their graves. Tell me you’re not going to turn a deaf ear to their pleas.”
He looked at Hector. The Frenchman held his gaze for a long moment, then nodded slowly. Conrad nodded back, then turned to Miguel. The Spaniard glanced at Hector, then shook his head with a slight chortle before giving them a nod that was dripping with reluctance.
THEY RODE OUT FOUR DAYS LATER: Conrad, his two brother-knights, Mehmet and his son, along with four other men that the trader had drafted in as muscle.
Much to the trader’s curiosity, Conrad wasn’t on horseback. Unlike Hector and Miguel, who were, he was driving an old and rickety open-top, horse-drawn wagon.
“You never said anything about a wagon,” the trader told him. “This is going to slow us down.”
“Which has implications on our agreed price, is that it?”
The trader gave him a toothy, mock-offended smile. “Have I ever been anything less than fair?”
“You’re a pillar of virtue,” Conrad said. “Now name your new price and let’s get moving.”
They were soon riding out of the city, heading toward the rising sun. A day later, they left Byzantine territory and crossed into land that was now controlled by the various beys.
Enemy territory.
Following the trader’s advice, the knights were dressed in a similar fashion to their escorts: simple dark robes and tunics, linen dolmans and sashes. Their faces were partially hidden under their turbans, and their belts carried scimitars, not swords.
The ruse worked.
Along with Mehmet’s verbal skills, it got them safely past a couple of bands of wandering Ghazis, and after eight days of hard riding, they reached the Sari Han, a huge, wide, and low stone edifice with no openings in its outer walls apart from a richly decorated entrance portal.
Once they were inside, finding the monastery proved more challenging. None of the caravaneers, or the han’s manager, seemed to know of its existence. They rode on and tried a few more caravanserais, without success. Days drifted by without any hint of promise until their persistence finally paid off when they came across a priest from a local Cappadocian rock church who knew of the monastery.
Despite his vague directions, and several steep crags and dizzying ravines later, they eventually found it: the small cluster of rooms, nestling in the base of a rock face, tucked away from the rest of the world.
Conrad asked Mehmet to join him for a closer look. They left their horses and the wagon with the others and crept up a small ridge, where they took up position behind a large rock, close enough to be able to identify the monks as they ventured in and out of the hermitage.
Mehmet soon spotted one of the monks who’d sold him the swords.
The rest, Conrad needed to do alone.
They rejoined the others. Conrad recovered his horse and led it up to the monastery, on his own.
He was still making his way up the rock-strewn incline when two young acolytes came out, alerted by his struggling horse’s whinnies and the clatter of its hooves. By the time he made it up to the hermitage, its entire population was outside, watching him curiously and in silence. Then the abbot, a withered old man by the name of Father Nicodemus, came out and studied him cautiously before inviting him inside.
They sat in the refectory, surrounded by a half dozen other monks. After accepting a drink of water, Conrad didn’t waste too much time on any idle banter beyond telling them his name—his real one—and saying he had come from Constantinople, despite the fact that the monks were eager to hear news of the city’s current state.
“I’m not here by accident, Father,” he told the abbot.
“Oh?”
“I’m here because of something you sold not long ago.”
“Sold? And what would that be?”
