“I beg you, please rid yourself of the habit of calling me Alaric the Templar.”
Excerpt…
On the Road, summer, 1323
“TELL ME ABOUT the Templars,” Jaufre said.
Alaric sighed. To Jaufre’s ears it sounded a little theatrical. “First, I beg you, please rid yourself of the habit of calling me Alaric the Templar,” the older man said. “Ram will have his little joke, but the farther west we travel, the more dangerous it gets.”
“Why?”
“Because our order has been proscribed, by church and state.”
“What church? Which state?”
“All of them,” Alaric said gloomily.
Dana sez–Historians don’t do well with what happens after. What happened after Philip the Fair of France broke the Knights Templar into pieces and looted the remains? There were too many Knights, too many to kill all of them. What did they do? Where did they go?
I was interested enough to dig into it a little, and it turned out that in fact plenty of Knights Templar lived on, although not under that title and certainly not in France, but elsewhere they were safe enough. The king of England even granted them a pension. It seemed reasonable that some would seek employment on the Silk Road, defending caravans against the thieves who besieged them between cities. Hence Jaufre’s father, and Alaric.
