Order In Chaos

De Berenger inclined his head, clearly waiting to hear more, and Sinclair continued. “Secrecy, we all know, has been paramount in all we have done since the very beginnings of our Order, more than a millennium ago. But those few of us who think of such things today tend to think that the secrecy was originally based upon the need to hide our Jewish identity from the threat of Rome’s vengeance.” He gave the lie to his own words with a tiny jerk of the head. “Not so. Rome was never a threat to us since the earliest days of our settlement in southern Gaul, when we concealed our true roots and blended into the local structure, eventually becoming Christian. No, our need for secrecy was far more than that, and far older. The priesthood of ancient Judea, we know from our own records, was a secret, closed society long before Rome began to stir beyond its seven hills. Its roots went all the way back to Egypt at the dawn of time, in the era of the early Pharaohs, when the Israelites were enslaved for hundreds of years until Moses led them out in search of the Promised Land.

“I know you know all this, so forgive me if I seem to preach, but what comes next is the important part: our earliest forefathers brought their knowledge out of Egypt with them, and much of that knowledge was deeply rooted, after so many generations, in the religion of Egypt, with its worship of Isis and Osiris. That lore they took to Jerusalem, where Solomon built his Temple, and the priests were the sacred guardians of its secrets. They—our early forefathers—had their own lore, just as we have ours, but their sources were Egyptian, unutterably ancient.”

Sinclair stopped to watch a young seaman, carrying a bucket, make his way down the ladder from the steering platform above their heads, and when the youth had passed and vanished from view, he continued. “What Anselm enabled me to see then—and I would never have thought of it had he not directed me—was that our more recent forefathers, the fugitive priests from the sack of Jerusalem, had been unable to bring all of that with them. They had escaped with only what they could carry, and had concealed the rest, hoping to return for it later. We found it eventually, when Hugh de Payens and his friends unearthed it, but twelve hundred years had passed by then, and throughout that time, our Order had formed itself around the lore salvaged from Palestine…Naturally, being human and dedicated to their eventual return to their true home, the earliest brethren gave the greater part of their attentions to those parts of the lore that offered most towards that end. And other, seemingly lesser parts they neglected and allowed to fall into disuse, so that their origins were forgotten and all that remained was the original mention of such things. And most prominent and mystifying among those was—and it remains so to this day—the element that we know as the legend of Merica.”

Listening to Sinclair, Sir Edward de Berenger had moved to lean against the ship’s side, where he remained now, staring wordlessly at his young superior.

Sinclair smiled at him. “Do you find that hard to credit?”

The vice-admiral shook his head. “Not at all. I believe it makes perfect sense. What you see in my face as doubt is mere amazement, born of my own disbelief that no one, myself included, has ever thought of this before.”

“Why should you have—you or anyone else? It is an obscure legend, forgotten by everyone except a few. It was by merest accident that I found out about the ancient Egyptian roots. Had Brother Anselm not been who he was—and had he not been in Carcassonne when I went there—I would never have been able to envision such antiquity.” He straightened his shoulders and turned towards the sea again, spreading his arms and leaning his hands on the galley’s rail as he gazed towards the southwest, where a rift had occurred among the clouds and a single brilliant shaft of light shone down clear edged, illuminating one patch of water.

“Look at that. A single ray of sunshine changing the world as we see it. What petty, ineffectual things we are, we men. We vaunt our prowess and our power, thinking to alter the world, building empires and Orders, only to watch them scattered and destroyed by things we can never hope to control…Three days ago, we had a fleet at our command—nigh on thirty ships. A month before that, we had an enterprise, a mighty Order, that we thought inviolable, invincible. And what do we have now?” He scanned the seas around them. “I count three ships. And none of them, I think, is Admiral St. Valéry’s.” He grimaced wryly at de Berenger. “I have a fear, in my heart, Edward, that we may be lost out here, helplessly witnessing the ending of an era. The ending of the world we have known.”