Son of the Morning

He would not have been a good Guardian. Niall had not forgiven either the Church or God. He hated, he doubted, he cursed himself and Valcour and his own vow, but in the end he always came back to the same truth: he was the Guardian. Valcour had chosen well.

To protect the Treasure, Niall rode to face Huwe of Hay, well aware that a blood feud had started that day and determined that most of the blood would leak from Hay clansmen. Huwe wanted war? Very well, then, there would be war.

Part Two Niall

Chapter 12

"FEAR-GLEIDHIDH,"GRACE MUTTERED TO HERSELF, moving the words around on the computer screen and trying to make sense of the sentence.Fear-gleidhidh meant "guardian"; she was familiar enough withthat word to recognize it at a glance. Over the past several months she’d spent so much time with these blasted Gaelic papers that she’d learned to recognize a lot of the nouns, though sometimes the spelling threw her off. Even with the help of a two hundred dollar set of tapes that promised to teach her how to speak Gaelic, and which she’d bought in a useless hope that it would help clarify the murky medieval Gaelic syntax, it could still take hours to translate a few sentences.

But what on earth didcunhachd mean? Running her finger down the page of the Gaelic/English dictionary, she couldn’t find any such word. Could it becunbhalach, which meant "steady," or cunbhalachd, which was "judgment"? No, it wouldn’t be the first, for if she was reading it correctly the sentence was "The Guardian has theCunhachd ." The capitalization didn’t necessarily mean anything, but the sentence certainly wouldn’t be "The Guardian has the Steady."

"The Guardian has the Judgment"? Grace rearranged the words on the screen once again, wondering if she had misread the verb or tangled the syntax for what seemed like the millionth time. Without the benefit of classes, it was taking her more time to learn Gaelic than any other language she had studied. She was getting better at it, though.

She rechecked the paper, bending close and using her magnifying glass to study the faded letters. No, the verb was definitely "has."Cunhachd was the stumbling block. She turned her attention to it, and noticed that then was smeared. Could it be anm instead? Returning to the dictionary, she looked up cumhachd, and a surge of triumph went through her.Cumhachd meant "power."

"The Guardian has the Power." She raked her hands through her hair, lifting the long strands and letting them sift through her fingers. What were some synonyms forpower? Authority, right, might, will. All of those would fit, yet each differed somewhat in meaning. If she interpreted the sentence literally, then what power did the Guardian have? Power over the Treasure, absolute control of it? Money was power, as the old saying went, but the chronicles had also said that the Treasure was "greater than gold." It followed, then, that though there had likely been a monetary treasury, that wasn’t the Treasure referred to so reverentially.

So what had the Treasure been, and what sort of power had the Guardian wielded because of it? If Black Niall had been the possessor of such mighty power, why had he spent his life as a renegade in the remote westernHighlands ? How had a Templar, supposedly a religious man, become a man as renowned for his sexual appetite as he was for his skill with a claymore?

Two more hours of work still left her in the dark. The Treasure was either "a knowing of God’s will," something that was certainly ambiguous enough, or "proof of God’s will," which was equally unenlightening. It possessed the power to "bow kings and nations before it," and "vanquish evil."

She read aloud the words on the screen. "The Guardian shall pass-or travel, or walk-beyond the bounds of time, or season-in the way of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to do His battle with the Serpent." That sounded as if the Guardian would emulateJesus’s struggle with Satan, which hardly translated into any great power, but rather an effort to live an honorable, blameless life – something difficult enough, and from what she’d read about Black Niall he hadn’t eventried.

So what was the Treasure, and what was the Power? Religious myth? Parrish evidently believed the gold was real; on the surface that was motive enough, yet she kept coming back to the Treasure that was greater than gold, and wondering if more than wealth was involved. If so, what? No Templar had ever betrayed the secret of the Treasure, though some of them had been hideously tortured. Perhaps most of them hadn’t known anything to tell, but certainly the Grand Master had known, and he had gone to the stake with the secret untold. Instead he had cursed the King of France and the Pope, and within a year both Philip and Clement had died, giving credence to the superstition of the time that the Templars had been in league with the devil.

Slowly Grace paraphrased the unwieldy sentence. "The Guardian shall walk beyond time to vanquish evil." Sometimes putting the words in a more modem context helped her see through the lapsed centuries to find the most logical translation. She tried again. "The Guardian shall pass the season in battle against evil." What season? The years following the destruction of the Order? Was the Guardian supposed to fight Philip and Clement on behalf of the Order? If so, Black Niall had instead fought his skirmishes in bed and in the mountains and moors ofScotland .

It didn’t make sense, and she was too tired to keep at it. Grace saved the file, then turned off the computer. In six months she had translated all the tales of Black Niall’s battles and conquests, the Latin and French and English, but parts of the Gaelic still defeated her. Come to that, some of the Latin didn’t make sense, because for some reason adiet had been included. What did a carefully regulated consumption of salt have to do with a history of the Templars? And why was the amount of water they drank based on their weight? But there it was, right in the middle of a long passage on the duties of a Guardian:VictusRationemTemporis, the diet of time, or for time.