The Templar Vault *** NUMBER ONE BOOK ***: A Peter Sparke Book, page 6
The Templars rebuilt it. A wall was begun and the sleeping quarters rebuilt. Pilgrims were happy to give their labour and their donations for such a cause, so progress was rapid.
There is no point attacking a building site, especially one guarded by several heavily armed knights, so as the house was built the local bandits watched but stayed away.
As the building neared completion, the walls fully built and the accommodation rooms ready to receive pilgrims, a particularly large and, judging by the pack animals and servants, wealthy group arrived from the coast.
Shortly after dawn the day following the group’s arrival, watchers in the hills could see the escort of several knights and their animals leave and head back to the coast, obviously under the impression that the new house provided good protection for pilgrims, at least overnight.
The warlord had seen enough pilgrims, and the worthless private guards they often hired from the coast, to know that the fortified house was no protection without organised defenders like the Templars to guard it. Scaling a wall is no hard matter and the false sense of security the wall created would make their attack all the more shocking. Nevertheless, to make sure that he could easily take the building he sent out to local villages for more men so by nightfall he could look over a group of nearly fifty.
Panicking pilgrims had a habit of burying valuables when trouble appeared creating tiresome work in torturing them to reveal hiding places. Surprise was best.
He had half a dozen men detailed to climb the walls, overcome any guards, and then open the main gate for the full force to storm through. The walls were only just higher than a man could reach so it took only a few minutes of scrabbling for the advance party to reach the top and start dropping silently into the courtyard below. Strangely, the courtyard was considerably lower than the ground outside making walls almost impossible to scale from within. Apart from one broken ankle due to the height of the drop there were no mishaps and not even a guard in sight.
The men moved towards the main gate, which they managed to open soundlessly. The instant the gate was open the warlord stormed in at full gallop, followed by his men. As soon as he passed through the gate he knew something was badly wrong. There was no noise, no screaming and no pilgrims trying to flee. The lowered ground inside the courtyard and the smooth walls, bare of any ladders or handholds, made him think of being at the bottom of a bucket. The sound of the gate slamming behind him was confirmation of the trap.
Eight Templars in full armour now stood in a straight line between the bandits and the gate, shoulder to shoulder, armed with their long swords and short axes, and holding the full-length shields over their left arms. One of the knights was barely old enough to be a squire in normal life but he had been in the care of the Order since he was a child. This was his first chance to serve fighting as a man-at-arms. The Mason stood next to the boy and noticed his air of calm as they formed up against the attackers.
From the roof of the new stable, six Templar bowmen appeared and immediately a steady rhythm of arrows began strumming cross the courtyard, each finding its target. The bowmen aimed their arrows at men on the left hand side of the courtyard, driving the milling bandits towards the right where the wall was highest.
As the men started to press into a mass in an attempt to evade the arrows, the knights formed into a shallow V shape, creating a shield wall and walked towards in them in lockstep driving them into a corner. They barely slowed but simply walked right over the men, their swords and axes rising and falling like blacksmiths at work, their heavy shields and helmets shrugging off the blows from the light weapons of the bandits. Any who managed to wriggle past the knights were immediately brought down by the bowmen. It took almost twenty minutes for the knights to hack their way through the group and into the far corner where a few survivors huddled screaming.
At a command, the knights stepped back over the bodies of the dozens they had slain. The bright, full moon turned the pools of blood black. Helmets off, the knights looked to each other, smiling and nodding at a job well done. The Mason looked towards the youngest knight and was happy to see him calmly inspecting the damage to the edge of his heavy sword blade.
The bowmen had, by now, come down from the roof and begun pulling bodies from the tangled mass and gathering up their loose horses.
The unwounded survivors were locked in the stables, the wounded swiftly killed. The eight knights and six bowmen had killed forty bandits whose bodies were now being laid in a tidy line. At dawn the survivors were brought out and made to dig a shallow trench outside the pilgrim house into which the stripped bodies were tipped. A knight stood and blessed the grave sending the bandits’ souls to be judged.
Once done, each of the ten prisoners was led back to the stables where the forge had been started and brought to full heat. One at a time, each was blinded in the left eye with a red-hot chisel and the big toe on their right foot severed, the heat instantly cauterising the wounds.
Each was then burdened with a huge load of clothes taken from their dead comrades and sent off, weeping and hobbling, back to the villages they had set off from the night before. It took many of them days to reach their villages and their arrival brought grief, shock and terror to every heart for miles.
For years afterwards the safest pilgrim road in the Christian world was the path from the coast to Jacob's Column.
The Mason's role in bringing security to the shrine was noted, particularly the use of a building as a weapon so he found himself increasingly touring the castles and outposts of the Order, making changes wherever he went, making the Order stronger, making the very stones they stood on into warriors for the cause.
The skills that the Mason brought to his work were his blessing and his curse. For all of his service he never knew a home. After his work was done in one place he was already needed elsewhere. He met everyone, but had few friends. The world outwith the Order lost any meaning to him that it might ever have had. Every year made him leaner, and harder and tighter in his service to the Order.
Chapter 9
"Is this Professor Pink?" asked Sparke into the telephone. He was standing in the kitchen of his company's apartment in London. Having been forcibly sent on holiday by his HR department, he had wangled the free use of the apartment in central London for two weeks. He was so nervous about this call that he was making it standing up, his eyes staring out of the window at the roofs beyond.
"Yes, speaking," Professor Pink answered.
"I am sorry to call you out of the blue like this. My name is Peter Sparke. I hope I haven't interrupted your day too much. Do you have a few moments to talk or should I call back some other time?" Sparke was pedalling very softly.
"No, now is not a particularly bad time, how can I help you?"
Professor Pink was happy for almost any distraction at the moment. She was ploughing her way through drafts of the dissertations her PhD students were working on and was struggling with the eternal challenge of telling some of them that their work was highly unlikely to add to the sum total of human wisdom.
"I have a very simple question really," said Sparke. "You see, I have read a lot of your work and wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed it."
"Thank you," she said, genuinely taken aback. "We don't tend to get a lot of feedback so it is nice to hear from a reader."
"Well, you make a complex subject very easy to understand from a layman's perspective, so thanks for that," said Sparke, then summoning up his courage he pressed ahead. "The reason I called actually was to ask your opinion on something, it is a single question really."
"This sounds intriguing," laughed Tilly gently. "I can't promise that my opinion is particularly valuable but if I can help I will. Shoot."
"OK," said Sparke, "let me put this into a bit of context. My proper job is to work in crisis management and disaster response."
"Crisis management, you mean like the oil rig thing with the missiles on television? The inquest is happening now, that sort of thing?"
"Precisely that sort of thing," answered Sparke. "In fact I am in London at the moment for that inquest. I was a witness on behalf of our company. It was our oil rig that nearly got bashed by the ship."
Tilly was impressed. "That sounds a lot more interesting than medieval history," she laughed. "Is there some connection to your job and this question you want to ask?"
"Yes, there is quite a close connection really. Let me run through a few points as I understand them and you can tell me if I am miles out."
"All right, let me hear them," said Tilly, now intrigued, the pile of student work pushed to one side.
Sparke took a deep breath. This was the first time he had ever spoken out loud to another person about this and he had chosen to speak to one of the world experts in the field.
"At the end of the thirteenth century the Knights Templar were, as far as we know, highly efficient, effective, extremely wealthy and connected to the highest levels of society throughout the Christian world. In terms of organisational structure and flexibility they were probably miles ahead of anything else in the world at that time. Yes?"
"OK, let's accept that for the moment," answered Tilly resisting the academic's urge to make qualifications and corrections to Sparke's statement.
Having cleared one simple hurdle, Sparke moved ahead. "For hundreds of years before their downfall, the Order had experienced great successes but also a lot of crises and disasters, yes?"
Tilly was now thoroughly intrigued by this call, she was hunched forward on her desk listening to Sparke and waiting for the question. "That is a fair comment," she answered carefully.
"So," said Sparke, "we have a dynamic, multinational organisation with great wealth to protect and a leadership who had seen the impact of disasters and were closely in touch with the political structure of the time."
"I am still with you," answered Tilly.
"So my question," said Sparke. "Don't you think that an organisation as wealthy, experienced, used to dealing with disaster and also dedicated literally to a mission from God would have a plan for what to do if things went really, really wrong. A disaster response plan?"
Tilly did not know what question she had expected Sparke to ask, but his mixing up medieval history with modern business thinking had thrown her.
"When you put it like that," she said slowly, "it is an interesting premise." She thought further and then said, "They had dealt with big setbacks and disasters many times by then, military defeats, loss of much of their territory in the Mediterranean, and so forth. They were noted for being good at defending their own wealth and interests so it is potentially a reasonable supposition to make that, having come through difficult times in the past and survived, they may well have made some contingency plans for when things might go wrong again. But I do need to tell you there has never been any evidence of that being the case."
"Well," said Sparke, "working in the crisis management industry, I can tell you that the last thing any organisation is going to share with the world is their plan for what they will do when things really go wrong."
Tilly was never very careful about what she said and had found herself in trouble more than once for thinking out loud. She had no real idea who Sparke was and now she realised that she may just be treading on risky ground.
"I'm sorry," she said, "I didn't catch your name actually."
"Oh, of course, sorry," said Sparke. He quickly repeated his name and the name of the company he worked for. As he spoke he could hear her typing into her computer. Sparke wondered if she was checking him out on-line.
"Sorry," she said, “I was just checking you out on-line. I see your LinkedIn profile; Executive Vice President of Crisis Response Management."
"Of course, quite right. That's me,” answered Sparke, "you can find me on our company website too if that helps. And the website for the Institute."
Sparke could hear Tilly thumping the keyboard of her computer.
"Ok," said Tilly, "so your question is what exactly?"
"Just this," said Sparke, "how likely is it that the Knights Templar had a crisis plan for the disaster that overtook them?"
"The problem you have there is the scale of the disaster," said Tilly. "It was an almost total catastrophe for the Order when they were arrested. It was probably worse than anything they could have imagined. I mean, even your organisation can only plan so far, right? For example, if a meteor landed on your head office there is not much you could do about it is there?"
There was silence from Sparke's end of the phone for a while. "Actually we do have a plan for that. I mean not a meteor specifically but if our head office was wiped out without warning we would know what to do next."
"You're serious?" asked Tilly. "What about when that boat started drifting and the air force had to blow it up with a missile?"
"That too,' said Sparke. “We actually rehearse for that one."
"Seriously?" asked Tilly.
"Very seriously. That is my job really. If an oil rig blew up or the top fifty people in our company all disappeared in a flash it would cause huge problems, but the company would keep running. You see, nearly all big organisations, and governments, have plans for how to respond to terrible events. There is nothing new in this and so my thought is that I find it hard to imagine that the Knights Templar with all of their political connections and military experience did not have a plan."
"As I mentioned before, Mr Sparke, there is nothing, as far as I know, anywhere on the record to support this idea, and if they did have such a plan there is nothing to indicate that it was successful. They were pretty comprehensively wiped out."
"I think that is my point," said Sparke. "Almost completely wiped out almost everywhere, but not absolutely destroyed everywhere at the same time. Or do I have that wrong?"
"Some individuals certainly escaped," said Tilly. "Some threw themselves on the mercy of the courts, turned against the Order and survived. But as an organisation they only had a few bolt holes open to them at the end."
"That is what I understood from your work," said Sparke, "and those bolt holes were where exactly?"
"As far as we can tell there were only two places where they continued for a while as an organisation, on the Baltic coast and, almost certainly, in Scotland."
"Would the Order have been able to predict that these two places might provide them with a safe haven if things suddenly went terribly wrong for them?" asked Sparke.
"Well you are running way ahead of any facts now," said Tilly, "but if I had been running the Knights just before their collapse and I had put my mind to it then, I suppose, if anyone had asked me, I would have guessed that both of those places may have been a bit safer than anywhere else. But, as I say, there is nothing in evidence to support that."
"Of course," said Sparke, "you're right. This is all just conjecture. I suppose this is just what we call scenario planning and it seems a plausible scenario."
"And what do you plan to do with this scenario, Mr Sparke?"
"Oh I really don't know that I will do anything at all. If we find a viable scenario in crisis management what we do is test it with experts in the subject matter and I suppose that is what I am doing now, testing the concept. If it holds up in theory then we would tend to test it against the facts as we know them and then run what we call probability analysis for situations that there are no available facts for."
"Well I hope I have been of some help," said Tilly. "But to be frank there is nothing here that I would be willing to be quoted on."
"Please don't be concerned on that front, Professor," said Sparke hurriedly. "I am definitely not going to do anything in public on something as wild as this. It is purely a personal interest and I really want to thank you for your time."
"I enjoyed talking to you, Mr Sparke," said Tilly. "If you ever find anything to support your idea let me know."
Sparke laughed. "If I ever do you will be first to know."
Chapter 10
Ulli and his men settled quickly into their valley and the long, high ridges that surrounded it.
They rebuilt the four hovels, digging out the animal filth that layered the floor and building chimneys to remove the smoke. The wood in this area was good for nothing but burning so timber was brought from the island and used to join two of the closest huts into one, creating something that reminded the knights a little of a real Hall. It earned the name 'Small Hall' amongst the group even before it was completed.
When not working on their new domain they would range far around the valley on horseback in day-long patrols sweeping the countryside.
At this point, the country people had not yet developed a fear of the valley, so any the knights found were pursued on horseback and knocked down with the flat of their swords. When they saw people in the distance they would fire an arrow toward them then head slowly to retrieve it. People learned not to touch the arrow and to run long before the knights reached them. Any approach to the valley was dangerous.
One evening, shortly after the Small Hall had been finished, a group of four figures, two men and two boys, entered the valley from the high snout end driving a herd of a dozen cattle. Ulli had seen slow-travelling groups of highland cattle before, cows that looked like bears with their long dark hair, tended by a few men and boys. The fat cattle of the north were well prized in the flat southlands and there were few other ways to earn useful southern money.
The group were halfway through the valley when the knights silently rose from the thick gorse. The killing lasted only a few seconds. By dawn the heads of the twelve beasts were left rotting at either end of the valley alongside the bodies of the herdsmen. The valley was closed to cattle.
As the buildings were nearing completion they had their first visitor. The Mason entered the valley from the tail end, passing the Gate Stone with only one retainer. He made his way to the Small Hall where Ulli was waiting.
