"Look at me," he said. "I have thirty-nine years. I should be growing old, but my hair remains black and my teeth stay in my head. I never sicken, and if I am wounded I quickly heal. He has cursed me to guard His damned Treasure even after I should be dead."
"No," she said softly. "You're just a healthy man." She could reassure him on this, for she was all too piercingly aware of his humanity, his mortality. "In my time, people easily live into their seventies and eighties, sometimes even over a hundred. I'm thirty-one."
His brows lifted and he looked a little surprised. He surveyed her, noting her smooth, clear skin and lack of wrinkles, her shiny hair. "You look a mere girl."
She didn't want to think of her looks, with her eyes red and swollen from her emotional storm, her face drawn with fatigue from the long night of nothing less than debauchery. She sat down on the bench, wanting to be close to him even if she didn't dare touch him.
"Tell me of this Foundation," he ordered. She told him what she knew. She had already choked out the details of what had happened to her, how Ford and Bryant had died, and why. He listened, his long fingers drumming on the table.
"I wonder how they discovered the Treasure's existence," he murmured at one point.
"An archaeological discovery, probably, " Grace said. She hesitated. "This Power - what exactly is it?"
"It is God's power," he said. "With it, all things are possible."
"But power isn't something you can leave in a chest and take it out when you need it! God can't store His power in the basement of a Scottish castle and-"
He shook his head. "Nay, 'tis not that. Though He could, if He wished. The Knights understood that, the fact that mortal man cannot understand God, that we must not say a thing is impossible, because all things are possible to Him, and our understanding too paltry. God is not limited by our imagination or our small minds. The Church makes rules and says they come from God, but they come only from man and his attempt to interpret God."
Believing God was so powerful, how indeed could he not hate Him? Grace wondered. Niall had long since reached the conclusion that God had deliberately destroyed the Templars, for had He wished to save them they would still be flourishing.
"But why would He want to destroy the Order?" she whispered, and Niall's black eyes flashed.
"To protect the Church," he said tiredly. "Flawed as it is, still the good outweighs the bad. The Church gives the framework of civilization, lass. Rules. Limits."
"How were the Knights a threat to the Church?" He stood and walked away from her to the window, where he looked out over the wild and beautiful land he ruled. "We knew."
"Knew what?" "Everything."
She waited, and the minutes passed. Without looking at her he said, "Did you note I never called you by name? Your name! Grace Saint-John. I want you until I think I shall be alive, but your name eats at me. There is no state of grace, there is only one of ignorance."
She hadn't noticed, but now she felt a pang, as if he had rejected her. Perhaps he had; he hadn't touched her since her confession. "What did you know?" she whispered.
"They found it all in theTemple , inJerusalem . The Lion Throne, that great barbaric throne on which are carved both Yahweh and Ashara, god and goddess, male and female. They were two, and they were one; the ancient Israelites worshipped them both. Then the priests deliberately destroyed all the altars built to Ashara, and tried to erase knowledge of her. Yahweh became Jehovah, the one God."
"Yes, I know," she said. Archaeology had uncovered all that, eliciting a storm of conjecture among the scholars of ancient Jewish history.
"There were other things," he said. "The Cup. 'Tis a plain thing, and despite the quest for the Holy Grail it gives no powers. The Banner. The army it flies over is never defeated, its firebirds rising again and again from the ashes.It plainly depicts the same lions of the Throne, though legend has it that it isn't that old, and that only the Knights had it " He sighed softly. "And there is the Oath."
Her mouth went dry. "The Shroud?" He made an impatient gesture. "So it would be called, but that is false."
"Then what is it?" "The cloth in which Jesus was wrapped when he was taken from the cross," Niall explained. "Then it is the Shroud. He was entombed in it" Niall's eyes were blacker than she had ever seen them before, looking through her. His mouth had a bitter line. "No, not a shroud, because he lived.
He was God's son in spirit and the cross could not defeat him. The Church built itself around the preposterous tales of the resurrection even though its own writings plainly state he did not die, and afterward the truth could not be told without destroying the Church. So we remained silent to protect the Church, to serve God - and He destroyed us in return.
"His face." The words were pulled out of him, taut with fury. "We had his face from the Cloth. We revered it, because he was proof of God's power. Jesus lived! God reached down and saved him, because his duty was fulfilled, and then he left in an explosion of light and heat. We found the record of it! We know how! But when our duty was fulfilled, He broke us, He destroyed us. And still... still I serve."
Grace couldn't speak. Her lips tingled, and she realized she had stopped breathing. The explosion of heat and light... she had felt something like that, when she had come back
"We knew thehow didn't matter. The method He used did not matter; we trusted Him, worshipped Him. Others wouldn't understand, though, with their small minds and rigid superstitions. They try to limit God to their own understanding, their own imaginations. They would have turned from the Church.We didn't."