Knights of the Black and White Book One. Jack Whyte

looked in amazement at Payn, who opened his eyes and spread his hands in a silent shrug.

      “What should surprise you about that?” Payn said. “You know me well, my friend, better than any other. I am a knight, and that is all I wish to be. I am a warrior by birth, a fighter—a brawling, ignorant lout—and happy to be one. I have no time, and no wish, to fill my life with the kind of mystic, smoke-shrouded things that excite you … all this mummery about the secrets and mysteries within the Order. To us it’s all babble and bluster and we don’t understand a word of it.”

      “Crusty’s right, Hugh.” Godfrey was nodding solemnly. “We don’t know what to believe, but we both believe that you know what’s right, and if you tell us what that is, we’ll believe you.”

      Hugh had abandoned any pretense of laziness soon after Godfrey launched into this astonishing plea, and now he sat straight-backed and pale-faced, gazing at his two friends from wide, unblinking eyes. He made to speak, but although his mouth opened and his lips moved, nothing emerged. He pushed himself to his feet. Godfrey glanced worriedly at Payn and then spoke up again.

      “Hugh, we’re not asking you to sin, or to betray anything. This is very straightforward. Among the three of us, you are the one who knows most about this kind of matter. All we’re asking you to do is tell us what you think, what you believe, based upon what you’ve learned since you joined the Order. That’s all.”

      “That’s all?” Hugh’s voice sounded different to his own ears, husky and throaty. “That’s all? You’re asking me to be your priest, your spiritual guide, to direct you towards salvation. I can’t do that, Goff. I don’t know where salvation lies, even for myself.”

      “That’s not true, Hugh.” Payn’s voice was urgent. “All we are asking you to do is talk to us, about what you think might be true. We believe the people we know within the Order, and we believe what they tell us. But we cannot understand any of it, once we move outside the ritual rooms. The Order is a secret world, Hugh. Out here, in the real world, among people who are not of the Order, we don’t know who to trust … who to believe.”

      Hugh de Payens stood there in the meadow, his back to the sinking sun, and looked at his two friends through new eyes, seeing the doubt, confusion, and misery in their faces.

      “I have to walk,” he said. “I can’t think, standing here. Walk with me, and we’ll see what comes into my mind.”

      Some time later, on the edge of a fast-flowing brook, he stopped and stood, his friends beside him, gazing down into the still waters by the bankside, searching for trout. “You asked me what I believe, but what I heard you asking me to do was to tell you the truth. That’s why I was angry at first … because I don’t know what the truth is. Everything I believe might be completely wrong.”

      He turned away from the water then, and looked at each of his friends in turn. “So,” he continued, “I am going to tell you what I believe. But I absolutely do not want either one of you to think, under any circumstances, that I’m convinced that what I tell you is the truth. Do you understand that? I am not telling you the truth, because as God is my witness, I do not know what the truth is, or even where it resides.”

      He waited until each of his friends had nodded in agreement, and then he walked away from them without looking back, allowing his next words to trail back over his shoulder.

      “I believe in Jesus,” he began. “I believe he lived and was crucified. But I do not believe he was the physical son of God, not now. I believe he was crucified for his political activities against the Romans and their allies—Herod and his clan. I believe he was a fighter in the cause of a free and unified Jewish nation, free of foreign occupation, and free to worship their own God in their own way. I also believe, because our Order has convinced me by showing me evidence—and not simply telling me about it and ordering me to believe—that Jesus was a member of the priestly sect known as the Essenes, whom some called Nazoreans, and that they formed a community that they called the Jerusalem Community, a brotherhood of what we would call monks today—a community of dedicated souls living in isolation and in voluntary poverty, practicing chastity and self-denial and striving to make themselves worthy in the eyes of their God, who was a stern and vengeful God with whom they held a covenant, an understanding that they would live their lives in strict commitment to His expectations … Do you want to ask me any questions about any of that?”

      He walked on in silence, waiting, and when nothing came from behind him, he began again. “I believe that Jesus was crucified and died. And after his death, his brother James, whom men called James the Just, continued to head their commune until his death. James was murdered on the steps of the Temple, and his death—far more so than the death of his brother Jesus—caused insurrection and rebellion, leading directly to the last Jewish war against Rome, when Titus destroyed the Jewish nation and those few who survived the destruction were scattered to the ends of the earth.”

      He stopped suddenly and turned on his heel to look back at them. “That is what I believe, and none of it should surprise you, for you have heard it all before, from your sponsors and tutors in the Order. We have evidence, within our Order, for all of it, but it might not all be true. Or it might be totally false, its interpretation lost over the centuries since our families first came here, after their flight from Jerusalem. In my own heart and mind, however, I believe it. But now comes the hard part. And it’s the part, I know, that causes all the grief you feel over this.”

      He started walking again, more slowly this time, and his companions walked on either side of him, their heads bent.

      “All our families, all of them who do not belong to the Brotherhood of the Order, are Christians, and that is what makes this all so difficult, because I also believe that the Christian Church, as it exists today, is built upon a myth created by the man called Paul. Paul was a gentile, we all know that, but nobody really knows today what a gentile was. Do you know, Goff?” Godfrey wrinkled his nose and shook his head, and Hugh smiled. “Well, a gentile was anyone who was not a Jew, and to the Jews, that was all that mattered. I believe that Paul was a friend of Rome, which is a spy, in the pay of the Empire, and I believe that he was an opportunist of the first magnitude. He never knew Jesus—although he knew the brother, James, and James knew Paul, and disliked and distrusted him.

      “I believe, absolutely, that Paul somehow heard mention of the Raising ceremony practiced by the Essenes of the Community. He could never have witnessed it, for the Essenes’ rites were practiced in secret and Paul was twice an outsider—a gentile and uninitiated—but I believe most certainly he heard of it, and he misunderstood everything he heard, except the most important part—the outline of the premise involved. He took the idea of resurrection that had been practiced in secret for centuries by learned men, and from it, and around his gross misunderstanding of it, he built an edifice that now rules the world in which we all live. He even invented a name for it after a time. He called it Christianity, based upon the Greek name he eventually dreamed up for the man Jesus—the Christus.

      “Then, once he perceived the success of his message and could see where he might go with it, he stripped it, his fundamental idea, of everything Jewish that might be offensive to the Romans, and he constructed his new religion with great skill to appeal to Roman tastes, traditions, and superstitions, incorporating most of the favorite myths of Rome, and of Greece, and of Egypt, and all their gods.

      “He took the story of the virgin birth, for one thing, from several sources. Mithras, the Roman soldiers’ god, for example, was born in a stable, delivered of a virgin. And Horus, the god-son of Isis and Osiris, was born of a virgin, too, and destined to die to expiate the sins of mankind. Paul named Jesus the Son of God in that tradition, and cited his resurrection as the sign of his divinity. Paul the saint made Jesus the Christ an immortal. But the most blatantly untrue thing he did was to deny James’s existence as Jesus’ brother by denying his existence and transferring the power of the founding bishop to Peter the Rock.”

      “Tell us about this Mithras,” Godfrey said. “I’ve never heard of him.”

      Hugh