Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (51 page)

“Man, that is some purple-ass prose,” Gordon comments. “And those guys fell for it, huh? Even though it was a suicide mission.”

“They were men of simple piety–credulous goat herders, for the most part. Of course they fell for it,” says Lloyd. “In all, Hasan was responsible for some fifty targeted slayings over the course of his thirty-five year reign. That’s not so very many when you consider the 70,000 men, women, and children slaughtered in Jerusalem during the First Crusade.”

Gordon is more appalled than impressed. “Wow,” he says, “so they were more like the Mafia, rather than just some dumb army.”

“Where do you think the Mafia got its inspiration? The Assassins had a much greater impact on the world at large than most people realize,” Lloyd says, licking his lips. “Of course, the term
assassin
is now a commonplace. It was adopted by nearly every medieval European language. In popular theory, the word was derived from a corruption of the name for Hasan’s killers,
hashishim
, which was Arabic for ‘hashish user.’ But the legend that the Assassins committed their murders while under the influence of hashish is almost certainly false.”

“Yeah, well, murder isn’t exactly the first thing on the minds of any of the stoners I know,” Gordon observes. “After doing a few bong loads, they’d all pretty much rather listen to Pink Floyd or catch a movie by Big Stan Kubrick.”

“There’s that…” acknowledges Lloyd. “There’s also the less well-known theory that the term
assassin
was derived instead from the Arabic word
Assasseen
, meaning, ‘guardians’–as in ‘guardians of the secret.’ If true, it lends credence to the theory that the Assassins passed along certain mystical teachings to the Knights Templar, which were then incorporated into the secret Templar heresy that led to their persecution and to the dissolution of the Order. Do you know the story?”

“Not that well,” Gordon admits.

“The Templars were essentially brought down by a conspiracy of three men: the King of France, Philip the Fair; Philip’s papal stooge, Pope Clement the Fifth; and the first lawyer of the realm, Guillaume de Nogaret. Philip, as I mentioned earlier, was deeply in debt to the Templars. He also owed prodigious sums to Jewish moneylenders, but he solved that particular problem by having every Jew in his kingdom arrested on July 21st, 1306. Nogaret supervised that operation, which greatly added to the royal balance sheet by canceling out debts and contributing seized assets. In fact, it worked so well that Philip decided to apply the same tactic to the Templars, with the idea that he could seize their treasury and redirect their colossal banking system toward his own selfish ends.”

“Why didn’t the Templars just kick his royal ass?” Gordon asks. He knows it’s juvenile, but he’s thinking along the old lines of
Megalodon Vs. Tyrannosaurus Rex: Who Would Win?

“It seems the Order was caught off-guard…. Philip, that crafty frog bastard, had sent sealed mandates to all the officers of his realm, which weren’t to be opened until a predetermined time. Inside was a document accusing the Templars of the vilest crimes imaginable–worded, no doubt, by Nogaret. It ordered the officers to arrest every French Templar at dawn on Friday, October 13th, 1307–which is where we get our superstition about Friday the 13th being unlucky. It’s estimated that some 5,000 Templars were rounded up and tossed into jail that day. What’s odd is that none of them put up a fight.”

“Yeah, what happened?” Gordon asks. “These guys were badass warrior-monks. But when the police showed up, they just fell on the ground and peed all over themselves like puppies? I don’t get it.”

“I doubt there was any urination involved,” Lloyd scowls. “And they would have been outnumbered. But the Templars were so well connected in those days–surely they would have gotten wind of the King’s plans. Actually, there’s a legend that the Templar treasure was smuggled out of France on a hay wain and put aboard a Templar ship, which then set sail for Scotland. If that’s true, then you have to ask yourself why so many of the knights were arrested, including Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master. Why didn’t they implement a counterattack, or simply disappear beforehand? Why submit? It’s almost as if they craved abjection.”

“Maybe they didn’t think they’d be in jail for all that long. They probably thought the Pope would bail them out. After all, they’d been doing the Church’s dirty work for close to 200 years.”

“Another Pope might have taken control of the situation, but Clement was weak. He claimed to be outraged by what King Philip had done, when he found out about it, but by then the Templars had been handed over to the Inquisition and confessions of heresy were being extorted from them under torture. Clement only roused himself to the mildest sort of passive-aggressive behavior in their defense, dragging out their trial for years. He may have been in collusion with Philip from the start.”

“What kind of heresies are we talking about?” Gordon asks. “Was it anything like what the Cathars were accused of? The Inquisition had them jacking off on the Eucharist and worshipping a giant toad that turned into a freezing-cold albino man who made them forget all about Christianity with a kiss. They were also supposed to lick black cats on the ass and sodomize each other like maniacs.”

“When Clement released the articles of accusations against the Templars in 1308, they proved every bit as charming.” Lloyd says. “The list of 127 offenses included such highlights as spitting on the cross, kissing fellow knights on the behind, and worshipping a severed head called Baphomet. Article Five, I think, accused them of adoring a ‘certain cat’ in contempt of Christ and the orthodox faith. Sodomy was a given, seeing as how the Templar seal depicted two knights riding together on a single horse.”

“That reminds me…” says Gordon, “the Hoo-Hoo Club’s seal is a black cat with its back arched–”

“– and its tail curled into the shape of the number nine. It represents the original nine Templars, in case you were wondering… as well as the Nine Principles of the Great Ennead in the religion of ancient Egypt.” Lloyd seems pleased with the connection.

“So does that mean the Hoo-Hoos are a bunch of cat-worshipping butt-pirates?” Gordon has to ask. His father’s former sexual orientation is at stake.

“I’ve been told your father was relentlessly hetero, if that’s your concern,” Lloyd says, as if reading Gordon’s mind. He lets out a matronly sigh. “But I can’t vouch for every single one of the Hoo-Hoo Club’s members. They could be filled to the rafters with sodomites and cat-lickers, for all I know. Who cares?”

“Live and let live, right?”

“That’s never been the Holy See’s attitude, but yes, I believe others should be allowed to worship as they choose, without fear of reprisal. Freedom of religion is guaranteed by our Constitution’s First Amendment for a very good reason, and it’s not just because our first President belonged to a cult that was condemned as pagan and unlawful by the Catholic Church.”

“He did?” It’s news to Gordon.

“You didn’t know? George Washington was a Grand Master Freemason. At least fifty of the fifty-six signatories to the Declaration of Independence were Masons as well. And in 1738, just a year after Chevalier Andrew Ramsay had publicly suggested a link between Freemasonry and the Knights Templar, Pope Clement the Twelfth issued the famous bull,
In Eminenti
, which threatened any Catholic joining the Masons with excommunication.”

“Four hundred years later and they’re still pissed, huh?”

“The Church knows how to hold a grudge.”

“I guess. Do you think the Templars really did any of that stuff, like spit on the cross?”

“No one knows for sure,” says Lloyd, “but my answer would be a qualified ‘yes.’ Almost every imprisoned Templar confessed to spitting on the cross, but they often said they did it with ‘mouth only, not with heart.’ Some said the practice had been instituted after a Templar Grand Master’s imprisonment by a Muslim sultan. The Grand Master had been forced to deny Christ in order to secure his release. So the practice of spitting on the cross may have been a rehearsal for the humiliation that captured Templars would face–thereby preparing them to commit apostasy without really meaning it.

“There’s a simpler explanation, though–one the Church would like even less. It goes back to the Cathar belief that all matter is intrinsically evil. They believed Jesus was a part of God, an emanation, who never assumed physical form on Earth. In other words, Christ’s whole show was a projected illusion, meant to teach poor, fallen humanity how to obtain
Gnosis
–or knowledge–of their condition so they could escape it. Jesus never suffered on the cross, because he had no body to suffer in. To the Cathars, the cross was a symbol of the material world to be despised, not venerated. Perhaps the Templars were being taught something similar.”

A wave of nausea shudders through Gordon. His insides feel like a just-flushed toilet filling up with heavy water. He wonders if it’s alcohol poisoning or Kierkegaardian fear and trembling. “But I thought the Templars were materialists,” Gordon says, feeling self-conscious and shaky. “I mean, Philip wouldn’t have gone after them if they hadn’t turned into bankers and piled up all that loot.”

“You have a good point,” Lloyd says. “You also look as if you could use a drink.” He reaches into the desk’s bottom drawer and pulls out a sinister green bottle. Its faded label appears to have been chewed by worms.
Terminus
, it reads. With much ceremony, Lloyd places two squat glasses on his desktop and pours three fingers of the clear liquid into each of them. Then he gets a pierced spoon from the drawer, along with two cubes of sugar. Cradling the sugar in the spoon and balancing it over a glass, Lloyd next produces a bottle of French mineral water. As he pours the water over the sugar, the liquor pearls to the color of sea foam.

“What is that stuff?” Gordon asks him.

“
Absinthe…
” Lloyd says grandly. “The Green Fairy. It’s getting very hard to find these days. It’s been banned for almost 70 years.”

He hands the glass to Gordon, who asks, “You’re sure it’s not poison?”

“I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you there’s a
little
poison in it,” Lloyd admits, “but it’s the kind of poison that inoculates you against the bigger poison you’re already swimming in: the consensus reality that everyone is expected to swallow whole.”

Something–either the conversation or the milky green liquor–is giving Gordon a thudding case of
déjà vu
. He worries that the absinthe will send him into a
grand mal
seizure, or something worse, the instant it touches his lips. Quietly, he asks Lloyd: “It won’t make me go blind, will it?”

“On the contrary,” Lloyd says, “it’ll help you to see. You’ll be able to peer at the world through the eyes of van Gogh. I understand he painted ‘Starry Night’ while he was hopped up on this stuff.”

“Was that before or after he cut off his ear?”

“Who gives a rat’s ass? ‘The Starry Night’ is worth any number of bloody ears. So drink up! You’re in illustrious company. Absinthe was the favored drink of Picasso, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Edgar Allen Poe.”

“Also Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Alfred Jarry,” Gordon appends, recalling his childhood immersion in French literature.

“Who’s Alfred Jarry?” Lloyd asks him, stumped for once.

“A pistol-packing midget who scandalized Paris around the turn of the century with a play he’d written called ‘Ubu Roi.’ It’s about this fat, crazed, scatological king who keeps his conscience in a suitcase. Actually, he kind of reminds me of you.”

“Ha! At least you’re not afraid to speak your mind,” Lloyd grins. “Just like my nephew, that charismatic little shit…. Well then, to King Ubu!” he toasts, tapping his glass against Gordon’s. As Lloyd gulps down the emerald liquid, his squinty eyes boggle. “Holy cats, that’s good…” he mutters.

Seeing Lloyd drink, Gordon decides it’s safe enough to take a drink of his own. The first sip is bitter, weedy, with a hint of licorice. It’s instantly familiar, like something he’s drunk before–although he can’t remember where or when.
Maybe in a past life,
he thinks to himself. He sips again–takes more of a slurp, really, or a greedy swallow. Gordon has a feeling he and the Green Fairy will soon be getting along like old friends.

“Now, what were we talking about? Oh, yes… the Templars as materialists!” Lloyd eyes his half-empty glass as if it’s a crystal ball. “It’s true that after the fall of Acre in 1291, public opinion seemed to turn against the Order, just as it had in 1187 after the failure of the Second Crusade, when Saladin beheaded 230 Templar knights at the Battle of Hattin and ousted them from Jerusalem. People were asking why God had failed to intervene on the Templars’ behalf while the Mameluks were eradicating them from the Holy Land; they wondered:
Had the Templars fallen out of God’s favor?
Christian priests left behind had been massacred; nuns forced into prostitution. It made for bad press. And it didn’t help that the Templars back in Europe were so fucking rich.
Why couldn’t all that wealth buy them victory?
Vicious rumors began to circulate:
The Templars had sunk into indolence and depravity; in fact, they were treasonous; they’d sold the Holy Land back to the Muslims in secret negotiations and fled to Cypress with their ill-gotten riches; meanwhile, the rest of them were hiding out in their far-flung commanderies, living like sultans….
Well, you get the picture. From there, it’s only a short step to accusations of apostasy and ass-banditry.”

“People were just jealous,” Gordon says, setting his empty glass on Lloyd’s desk. He
loves
the Templars right at that moment. They had
balls.
Other people just sat around bitching while the Templars went off to fight the noble fight on foreign soil.
Fuck those small-minded fucks back at home!
So what if God hadn’t always made it easy for them? At least the Templars had the courage to actually go out and
do
something, unlike those chicken-shit complainers. And so what if they hung out with the Assassins and blew hash smoke up the tiny pink assholes of cute fluffy kittens and sang liturgies to a decapitated demon. At least they weren’t boring.