“And yet within the Temple structure itself, carefully concealed, are our brethren, the Brotherhood of Sion, forming the living sinews that coordinate the muscles of the corpus and keep the body functioning. Remove those brethren, and the lore they live to perpetuate, and the Temple itself will fall and pass into history to no one’s great regret, while the Brotherhood of the Order of Sion will continue.”
St. Valéry stood frowning, pinching at the hair on his chin, then nodded. “Aye, you have the right of it. Reluctant though I find myself to admit that it is true, I will not dispute you. The Order of the Temple is corrupt, and if it falls or is transformed in any way, our brotherhood will survive. But at what cost, Sir William? We will be forced to live and work in secrecy again, constrained to be clandestine in all things, to the detriment of our Order’s designs. That alone, I believe, must give us pause. The Temple brotherhood, and the very fabric of the Temple itself, provide us with a mantle of invisibility. Existing within the outer shell, we are unnoticed and anonymous. I believe we must do all in our power to maintain that mantle, and in order to do so, we need to give the rank and file of the Templar brethren something to believe in, something from their own lore that will encourage them to endure in the face of these present troubles.”
A cold gust of wind swept in across the beach, buffeting them, and St. Valéry glanced up at the rack of scudding cloud that had begun to gather as they made landfall and now darkened the sky. “Squalls,” he said, pulling his light cloak more securely around him. “Let’s hope they blow over quickly. If the weather worsens, we could be caught in here, unable to beat out to sea.” He looked back to where Sinclair was adjusting his own clothing against the sudden wind.
“The Temple has no lore of its own, Admiral,” the Scots knight said, as though St. Valéry had made no mention of the weather. “It is too new to have developed lore.”
“True, I know that.” St. Valéry was eyeing the cloud banks again. “I doubt this will turn to much, but if need be, we can use our oars to tow the transports out into deep water. But as I said, if it becomes too bad, we may have to bide here awhile.”
“Too close to La Rochelle for my liking,” was Sinclair’s response. “Barely thirty miles by road from there to here. De Nogaret’s men could catch us sitting here helpless.”
“They could, if they knew where to look, but they don’t. There’s cause for gratitude in that thought, my friend.” St. Valéry looked at the sky once more, then turned to look about him at the activity in the tiny harbor. “But things appear to be going smoothly, and the tide will not begin to ebb for several hours. The laden vessels are already standing out to safety, well clear of land and in the lee of Oleron Isle, and there are very few remaining. We should be well enough. The Treasure is all shipped, and most of the livestock. All that remains is materiel that we could leave behind, if pushed.”
He dismissed the weather with a wave of his hand. “About this lore, or the lack of it…There is one piece, one fragment of the ancient lore of Sion, that escaped somehow and was long since adopted by the Temple.”
“The Merica matter.”
“Aye, precisely. No one has ever discovered the source of the betrayal, or how the information was divulged, but it was the only instance, ever, of such a thing occurring. Personally, I began some years ago to suspect that Hugh de Payens himself may have released it deliberately, early on in the Jerusalem growth of the Order of the Temple, believing it to be harmless, yet valuable as an earnest of a need for secrecy within the new-established Order. A seed, perhaps, from which to grow a tradition. Do you think that fanciful?”
Sinclair jutted his jaw. “No, not at all. It makes perfect sense now that you mention it. The Merica rumor never had much substance to it, and had been unimportant to our objectives. It was regarded as trivial by everyone who knew of it. Its disclosure was certainly not the kind of thing that could ever threaten our Order. So yes, I think that Hugh de Payens might have borrowed it, in a time of need.”
“Merica is no rumor, Sir William. It is an accepted and ratified segment of our ancient teachings and beliefs.”
“Yes, I know the substance of it, Admiral: that there exists, beyond the Western Sea, a fabled land of plenty, vast and endless, watched over by a brilliant evening star that the people who live there call Merica. I have even studied what there is to know of it, though that is very limited. But no matter what any of us might wish to believe, it remains no more than a fable, rooted, as you say, in our lore. We may speculate on it, but we have no proof that it exists, or that it ever was.”
“I agree, but that is what I was thinking about…”
“Sir Charles, you are not making sense.”
“On the contrary, Sir William, I believe I am. How many vessels would you say we have in our fleet?”
Another gust of wind drove icy drops of rain against their faces, and Sinclair raised a hand to wipe his cheek, surprised to feel the coldness of the skin against his fingers. “You know that better than I, Admiral. It is your fleet. I have made no attempt to count them, but the number twenty is in my mind.”
St. Valéry dipped his head. “That is a fair estimate. We have seven naval galleys and fourteen cargo vessels—twenty-one in all. In addition, by this time next week, dependent upon what we may find off Finisterre, we could have half as many ships again.”
“But the newcomers would not be cargo carriers.”
“No, that is unlikely. If any vessels reach the rendezvous at all, they will be naval galleys, simply by virtue of the word sent out to the ports.”
“How many fighting men do you have at your disposal?” Sir William asked.
“At my disposal, as opposed to yours?”
“Aye, seamen and landsmen.”
“Hmm…Landsmen, not counting your brother’s contingent, one hundred fifty-four from the garrison at La Rochelle, of whom thirty and six are serving lay brothers and therefore noncombatant…” St. Valéry made a grimace while he calculated in his head. “One hundred and eighteen fighting men of all ranks, therefore, under de Montrichard. Seamen? The crews of the cargo ships, about four hundred men in total, are not fighters. The galley crews are all fighting men, and they range in size from forty oars to twenty. Two men to an oar, with a relief crew of one to two extra men per oar on each craft…That could total seven hundred men, but it is a misleading tally because the number of relief oarsmen varies widely from galley to galley, no matter how hard we try to sustain them.” He shrugged. “But there you have it. A large force, on the face of it. It could be formidable.”
“Aye, it could. And it will be. So whence comes all this talk of Merica, and what has it to do with this fleet?”
St. Valéry stopped walking and turned to him. “Would you need that many ships in Scotland, a foreign land? Seven to perhaps twenty galleys and a fleet of cargo vessels? For if you do not, I should like to take a few of the ships, manned only by men who wish to go with me, and sail in search of this fabled place.”
“Merica?”
St. Valéry showed no reaction to the incredulity in Sinclair’s voice, and the two men stood eyeing each other.
“This is not tomfoolery,” Sinclair said at last, his voice without inflection. “You mean what you say.”
The admiral shrugged very slightly. “I do not deal in tomfoolery. I never have; a lifelong habit. I have always been careful to say what I mean…and in consequence, to mean what I say.”
Another silence ensued, this one shorter, until Sinclair spoke again. “You are aware, I presume, of how absurd that sounds. You are proposing to sail off with a portion of our fleet, for vast distances and through uncharted waters, in the hope of finding a place no man has sought in more than a millennium—a