The Lost Treasure of the Templars Read Free Page B

anumber of reasons, but on this occasion they had had no option, and they did have one device that helped them in their mission. Next to the helmsman, illuminated by a shielded oil lamp, was a small container of water in which floated a piece of wood carrying a slim length of steel, one end bearing a daub of red paint. The Templars were one of the first groups ever to use a basic compass, and there were still discussions about exactly how and why it worked, but the pragmatic view was that it did and so they employed it. For whatever reason, the red end of the metal always pointed in the same direction, and that was all the sailors of the order needed to know.
    Tibauld de Gaudin stood in the stern of the craft, behind the helmsman, and stared back toward Acre. A few lights flickered in the Templar castle, the torches placed in sconces on the battlement walls, and beyond them he could see the much brighter and more obvious illumination from the blazing fires that delineated the front line of the besieging army. De Gaudin stared behind the slow-moving galley until he could no longer see anything save for a dull yellowish glow in the sky, and then he left his post to stare with equal intensity into the blackness of the night ahead of the ship.
    He knew with absolute certainty that he would never see any of his Templar brothers from Acre again.
    And in this belief he was perfectly correct.
    *   *   *
    The morning after de Gaudin had made his somewhat reluctant escape from the doomed city of Acre, another envoy arrived at the Templar stronghold bearing a further message from the sultan, in response to the brief explanation de Sevry had already provided for the continued presence of the Templars. According to the envoy, thegroup of Mamluks who had entered the fortress the previous day had clearly been guilty men who had acted in an unacceptable manner, and the sultan was so embarrassed by their conduct that he wished to apologize in person to the commander of the Templar forces and give his personal guarantee that the terms agreed for the surrender of the fortress would be respected.
    In hindsight, the Templars should have known better than to have even listened to the man. But in accordance with the expressed wishes of the sultan, de Sevry and a handful of his senior knights left the fortress and strode toward the center of the encircling army. The moment they were outside bow shot range of the fortress walls, they were surrounded, swiftly disarmed and forced down to their knees, and then one by one beheaded to the accompaniment of the spaced beats from a single Mamluk war drum. The defenders of the castle looked on in horror, but were powerless to do anything to intervene.
    One of the great strengths of the Templar order was that if a leader fell in battle or was otherwise unable to continue in his post, the members of the order simply elected a new leader and carried on fighting. As was the custom, a senior knight was duly elected to command the force inside the castle, but it was already obvious that his tenure in the post was likely to be even shorter than that of his predecessor.
    Three days after de Gaudin had left, the Mamluk miners set fire to the stacks of timber that they had placed in the tunnels they’d dug under the outer wall of the castle, and within a matter of hours the first crack appeared in the outermost wall of the structure. And as soon as that happened, an attack was launched against the building by over two thousand Mamluk soldiers, the attackers outnumbering the remaining defenders by more than ten to one.
    But even as the final battle for the Templar castle began, other sections of the wall that had been seriously undermined by the tunneling operations simply collapsed, crushing most of the attackers as well as virtually all of the defenders. Once the dust had quite literally settled, hundreds of other Mamluk troops swarmed into the ruins, slaughtering every Christian they