The Templar Salvation (2010) by Raymond Khoury Page B

Order and vowed to obey its Rule without hesitation. Like any monk, he’d committed himself to a rigidly regulated life stripped of any kind of possessions, wife, or family. As a warrior-monk, he had to contend with the added burden of quite possibly having his life cut short by a scimitar or an arrow. That sacrifice had already cost him dearly, as he’d left a part of himself on the blood-soaked soil of Acre, a part he would never get back.
    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