Sacred Bones : A Novel

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Looking out from the eastern parapet of Kolossi Citadel’s square tower, Jacques DeMolay gazed across the open expanse of the Mediterranean, his white mantle and thick auburn beard fluttering against a warm breeze. For a knight nearing fifty, his regal features—long nose, penetrating gray eyes, firm brow, and sculpted cheekbones—were surprisingly youthful. His cropped hair was thick and peppered with gray.

Though he couldn’t actually see the shores of the Holy Land, he swore he could smell the perfume of its sweet eucalyptus trees.

It had been almost a year since Acre, the last major Crusader stronghold in the eastern Kingdom of Jerusalem, had fallen to the Egyptian Mamluk’s. The siege lasted six bloody weeks, until the then Grand Master, Guillaume DeBeaujeu, had thrown down his sword and retreated from the citadel wall to the rebukes of his men. DeBeaujeu had responded: “Je ne m’enfuit pas...Je suis mort.”—“I’m not running away. I am dead.” Raising up his bloody arm, he had shown them the arrow plunged deep into his side. Then he had fallen, never to rise again.

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