Tales of the Knights Templar (28 page)

She opened the gate, as if it were her own, and padded up across the yard to the table under the retama tree. “Lupe!” she called, as if expecting the Widow Rosales to be home. “Lupe, I brought you some tomatoes from the Escobar’s—”

“You,” said a quiet voice at her elbow.

“Ey,” she said, dropping an onion. It was only half a pretense; she had not sensed him until he spoke. It was like the great storms which could come out of a calm, in one sudden blast of wind.

“You are the witch,” he said in English. She knew that much English, but she knew better than to show it. No man minds a silent woman, her father had said. She stood silent, hands folded, waiting.
“Bruja. Curandera,”
the old man said. He didn’t have the accent right, but she could understand that. A quick glance at him—yes, the blue eyes she had heard of, a different blue than she had ever seen. And very old, and dying … she could tell that, this close to him. Yet he had with him, on his person, in his hand, very close—such power as ought to keep him young forever. She could feel it rumbling in her bones. “You speak no English?” he asked.
“Ingles?”
So, he had learned that much Spanish.

“Nada,”
she said.
“No Ingles.”
Of course she knew some English, but she wasn’t about to say so. She looked politely away from those eyes again.

“You know about power,” he said. He spoke slowly, so slowly that Esperanza had time to think each word to its Spanish equivalent. She did not look up; she dared not. How did he know? Could he sense her power as she sensed his? “You frighten the priest,” he went on. “Are you an evil woman?”

When she understood that, she gave him a quick glare, intended to pierce and wound. Evil! They were always so quick to accuse, the men in general, and the men of power in particular. Let a woman do anything wise or strong, and they said she was evil. But his answering look was mild.

“Show me your power,” he said. He held out his hand; even looking down, she saw it. “Please.”

She could not tell it if was his courtesy or her own desire for that power, but she found herself holding his hand as if he were any husband come to find out if the baby was his, if his son would return from the army, if the lost cow would be found. She felt the age of it, the fragility of approaching death in the looseness of its skin, the slackness of tendon and muscle. In the sunlight, the lines on his palm showed clearly.

“You have come from far away,” she said in Spanish. It didn’t occur to her that he might not understand. “You have crossed the water … a great water … more than one. You have fought many battles.” She had been saying that to the men who came to her since the war, and it was always true. But this man’s battles … they felt different. And that line—she hated to speak of it. “You were in hiding a long time. And your son—no, not your son, but someone you thought of as your son—died, and you felt you had outlived yourself. You came seeking death, and you bear a great wound that must be healed.”

She felt the air around her pulsing in a vast heartbeat, and then she had to let go of his hand, feeling the sting of tears in her eyes. She squeezed her eyes shut:
Do not cry, Esperanza. Not now, of all times.

“More,” he said softly. “There is more. Tell me.”

She did not need to look at his hand again. She could feel directly what he bore, and to her surprise there were two foci, both upon him, but different. “Your power,” she said. “It seeks a home, for when you die.” That was true of both. One she recognized … a bit of someone’s body, a tooth or bone or fingernail. It had the power of all such relics. The other, the more powerful, lay outside her experience.

“Yes,” he breathed. “I know … if should go to the priest. But he won’t believe me.”

“No,” she said. “Not our padre. If it is to rest here, it must be with me.” She had surprised herself; she felt her mouth hanging open and covered it quickly with her hand and shawl.

“It is a man’s power,” the old man said firmly. “A king’s wisdom. It is not for a woman.”

“Pardon me,
jefe,
” she said, looking away. Why had she let her tongue run loose? Now he knew she wanted it; now he would guard it more closely.

“Only God can pardon you,” he said. He said it not in English, but in a language near enough Spanish that she could make out the meaning. It sounded like the priest’s talk in Mass, but the accent was different. Secret laughter shivered in her bones. His God need not pardon her; his God had never condemned her, except in the mouth of that priest.

“You laugh at God?” he asked.

“God laughs in me,” she said, not entirely sure what she meant by that, only knowing it was true.

“I … see.” She could feel those skylit eyes on her skin as if they were flames. His interest hurt, pulled her tight against her own assumptions. At last she had to look up, and meet that piercing blue gaze. No wonder gringos were insane, so many of them had those pale eyes. No decency at all; no veils between the soul and the world.

“If only you were …” he murmured. Then: “You keep many secrets, I daresay.”

She did not answer that; she knew she didn’t have to. He had a secret, and it weighed on him, as secrets always did weigh on good people. Only the greediest, most evil, truly delighted in an unshared secret. He wanted to tell her, and he would if she did nothing to impede him.

“What do you think of this?” he asked. On the hand he held out was a small brown object the size of a fifty-centavo piece, incised with a design unlike anything she had ever seen. Beside it another, a sliver of obvious bone, darkened with age. Power blazed from his hand.

Esperanza extended a trembling forefinger. “That—” she pointed to the bone, the more familiar, “is the bone of someone you loved. It is the unhealed wound of your sorrow.” She would not tell a man, a gringo, a friend of the priest, what else it was, what could be done with such a bone, cherished so long. Its thin voice piped vengeance in her ear. “This—” she pointed at the rounded brown shape, “is another power, but it is not a power I know.”

“And yet you attend Mass,” the old man said. “You should know this power, if you know good and evil. Tell me, do you know what it does?”

That was obvious. Behind it, in some other place, voices roared curses. She did not know the language, but she knew the tone of cursing. It held them back, from whatever mischief they would do. But how to say that?

“It is the stone that stops the mouth of the dead who would curse the world,” she said finally.

“Close enough,” the old man said. “And you, witch, would you see the world cursed?”

For a moment the old vision wavered in her sight, the vision given by the old woman who had taught her the arts, who had demanded those years of service. Terrible lights, terrible winds, great deaths, so terrible even the vultures died after gorging. A foretelling which had made her teacher cackle in glee, knowing she would not live to suffer in it but those who had tormented her might. Or their grandchildren, she didn’t care. Esperanza had burst into tears that first time, and the old woman had tasted her tears and scolded her.
You are too soft. You must learn.
She had not cried again, but she had never enjoyed her own visions of coming doom.

“No,” she said. “But it is cursed, whether or not I wish it.”

“Not utterly, not so long as this is safe. Will you keep it so?”

“I?” Surprise drew her eyes back to him. “I am a woman, sir, and you said—”

“I have kept my vows these many years, and found no solution.… I will try breaking them at last, and risk a little.” He smiled at her; she felt her heart skip a beat. “Open your hand, witch.”

She opened her hand, and he turned his over. For a moment they stood, hand clasped to hand, with the power burning between them. The bone pricked her palm; the other thing, whatever it was, felt like warm clay asking to be molded. Then the old man pulled his hand back, and she had to close her fist to keep from dropping the things.

“Now look,” he said. She looked. The bone was unchanged; the other could have been any fifty-centavo piece, an unremarkable coin not worth stealing. “Don’t spend it,” he said lightly. Then, more seriously, “Except for the right things.”

When the old man died, after coming to his senses and making a proper confession, Father Patrick Dougherty saw him decently buried and said Mass for him. He would miss their talks; the old man had finally revealed that he had studied history in Cracow and Vilnius, that he had fought “in the forests” of Latvia and Lithuania, which Father Patrick took to mean in irregular forces. He said nothing more about relics.

Under his thin mattress the priest found a flat leather wallet with twenty American dollars. He gave the money to the Widow Rosales. He took the books in the box for himself. He did not find what Xavier took.

Two days after the burial, Xavier slipped away from his home with the worn cloth bundled under his arm and climbed into the back of a truck filling with laborers for the new dam. His father explained that
“mi hijo”
wanted to see the dam for himself. The men chuckled and knuckled his head gently. The truck lurched ahead, bouncing along the spur road that led from the highway to the river. Xavier squeezed himself into the front corner and peered out between the panels. Although they had explained the dam, what he saw made no sense. Open pits, rows of huge pipes big enough to live in, a line of growling concrete mixers with the first already letting its gray load rasp down the ramp into a hole.

“You will know the place,” the old man had said. “It is important that this last remnant of our Order be buried safely.”

“You will know the place,” the
curandera
had said. “The old man was right, and here is a charm that will bind the waters.”

So far he had no idea what that meant. Once off the truck, he was ordered this way and that by foremen who didn’t want a small boy anywhere around. “Away from the trucks, boy. Away from those pipes, boy. None of your mischief, boy.” His father had disappeared into a swarm of workmen shoveling sand and gravel; his father had warned him to stay out of trouble.

He was hot and thirsty. The old man had told him about that, about being hot and thirsty on the battlefield. About the sting of sweat in a swordcut, about the stench of blood and filth.
If only you were older,
the old man had said,
what a crusader you would make.
Thinking of that, Xavier hitched up his bundle and kept skulking from shade to shade, from cover to cover. The gringo foremen, huge and hulking with their red sunburned faces, were the Infidel; he was a knight on a secret mission for the Order.

He knew the place when he found it. One of a row of deep pits, wood-lined now, waiting for its filling of concrete. No one was near enough to notice. He fished the fifty-cent piece out of his pocket and wondered about the
curandera.
Why would she give money for this burial? Or was it about something else? His fingers lingered on the coin. Fifty centavos. He shook his head. He was a Knight of the Cross, a holy warrior; he had his orders.

Xavier slid the coin into the folded cloth under his arm and very carefully climbed down into the pit, down the rough wood forms, from brace to brace. It was cool and shadowy here, smelling of raw wood, damp gravel, stone. The growling machines seemed far away; in the close stillness he could hear his own breath again. He raked out a little hole in the gravel, laid the cloth and the coin it wrapped into it, and pushed the gravel back over it. Then he climbed out, into the glaring sunlight, the heat, the noise.

He believed in visions as he believed in
susto
and the evil eye and the terrible things the
curandera
kept in her back room. (He had once peeked and seen the eggs rolling in their jar, the dangling bundles of pungent herbs and various feathers.) Now he had no reason to find answers for the figure that wavered in the air above him, the tall warrior on the great horse, the shining white surcoat with a broad red cross on breast and back. And no reason at all to doubt the twinkling flight of something toward his hand, which when he opened it was a silver dollar, American.

As a grown man, he nailed it over his bed, and never wondered whence came his ten strong sons.

And Esperanza put the sliver of bone with her other bones and sang it to sleep.

INTERLUDE SEVEN

A last Templar turning up in Roma, Texas, may seem far-fetched, but as we have seen, speculation about the survival of the Templars, in some form, has been with us since 1314. What if it all
were
true, and the Temple was possessed of some secret knowledge, some potent legacy of mystical power passed through an inner circle of initiates down through the ages, with the mandate to protect the weak, right wrongs, restore what was lost, make whole the broken?

Dion Fortune, a British occultist writing between the two world wars, spoke of the Astral Police, whose agents could be summoned in one’s hour of need by visualizing a red cross on a black background. Some have chosen to visualize that cross as a Templar cross. At least one modern author has asserted, perhaps not at all facetiously, that “The Templars are everywhere.” The thought is somewhat comforting—that spiritual descendants of the Knights Templar might function as crack special forces operatives on the Astral, continuing to guard certain hallows entrusted to them all those centuries ago. Maybe Wolfram von Eschenbach and others had it right when they portrayed the Grail Knights as Templars.

Stealing God

Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald

I
was working the security leak at Rennes-le-Château when the word came down. The Rennes flub was over a hundred years old, but the situation needed constant tending to keep people off the scent. That’s the thing about botches. They never go away.

Now I had new orders. Drop whatever I was doing and get my young ass over to New York mosh-gosh. Roger that, color me gone. I was on the Concorde out of Paris before the hole in the air finished closing behind me in Languedoc.

With the Temple paying my way, cost wasn’t a worry. I had enough other things to think about. The masters weren’t bringing me across the Atlantic just to chew the fat. We had plenty of secure links. Whatever this was, it required my presence.