All this took time. Later, a sickly clerk opened a cupboard and brought out a whole armful of parchment documents, dotted with numbers and the crests of dukes, and records of trade transactions, which the Pope began to analyse in great detail. The only thing that Efthymios understood out of all this was that the Templars and the Hospitallers frequently came up in the Pope’s monologue and that those accounts were the dealings of Rome with the Orders of the Crusaders. He also understood that each time documents and new numbers were pulled out, the anger of the Papal Conclave grew and the threats and the insinuations against the Templars came thicker and faster.
Fra-Greco, ignoring the glances and the mute signals of Efthymios, did not go to the trouble of translating anything of what was sa
