by Dan Davis
With remarkable speed, Edward twisted so that the blade caught him on his arm instead of his chest. Quickly, the prince struck the treacherous Saracen to the ground while tearing the man’s dagger from his hand. Edward, showing a decisiveness that was fundamental to his character, immediately used the enemy’s weapon to stab the fedayin. Before Edward could restrain them, his servants smashed the Assassin’s brains in with the prince’s footstool.
Though he was furious, Edward considered himself to be unscathed. But he was thinking like an upstanding Christian, and not a treacherous Mohammedan.
For the Assassin’s dagger had been poisoned.
Edward became seriously ill.
His flesh around the wound on his arm began to fester and oozed a steady stream of thick, stinking pus. No supposed antidote worked and his condition deteriorated. Finally, his surgeon simply cut away all the rotten flesh from around the original wound and his robust constitution enabled him to overcome the poison in his system.
The very moment he was well enough to travel, he left the Holy Land forever and returned to the civilised people of England.
What if the fedayin’s poison had taken Edward’s life? What then for England? His younger brother, Edmund, was also on the Crusade. Presumably, he would have become King of England. Edmund was a good man. Solid, dependable. A dutiful second son all his life. But he was no Edward, and I doubt he would have conquered the unruly Welsh and hammered the mad Scots into submission.
Thanks to God, and to the Plantagenet robustness, Edward survived and returned home. In time, I served in many of his campaigns and did more than my fair share of the work.
The monks William of Rubruck and his elderly companion Bartholomew left Karakorum in the summer we had, back in 1254. Both of them somehow managed to make it to Tripoli little over a year later and eventually to Rome and finally home to Paris, although the shrivelled-up Bartholomew died immediately after. At some point, Rubruck wrote an absurdly long and detailed letter to King Louis about everything that had occurred. Years later, Stephen claimed to have read a copy of the letter that had belonged to another Franciscan named Roger Bacon and said it mentioned nothing at all about an English knight and the trouble he caused. Poor Thomas as leader of the expedition was also excised entirely, as was Bertrand. Even Stephen was barely mentioned in the rambling narrative. Considering how we had abandoned him, in one way or another, such hurt feelings were to be expected. Amusingly, King Louis seems to have taken no actions based on the content of Rubruck’s letter, and no other lord, priest or monk read it either. Rubruck returned to obscurity as a monk for the rest of his days. One might say his great efforts were entirely wasted other than the fact that his mission provided cover for mine and so ultimately helped to rid the world of Hulegu.
Tragically, our great city of Acre fell to the Mamluks in 1291. After so long stemming the tide of Saracen expansion, the Crusader kingdoms were finally no more.
Failure.
Our people could no longer resist the ferocity of the Mohammedans and the kingdoms of Christendom turned against each other rather than uniting to drive out the invaders from the Holy Land. Even though I had seen their fanaticism first hand, and for so long, I did not imagine that they would eventually take Constantinople and threaten to overrun Europe itself.
One of the most severe consequences of the loss of the fall of the Crusader states would be the fall of the Templars. Their collapse in the face of the Mamluks and the Mongols brought them into disgrace and the order was much criticised by those who wanted someone to blame. Pressure on the Templars grew from many sources until Philip IV of France arrested every Templar in France in 1307. The vile French king seized the order’s assets, tortured and tried the men and eventually burned the final master to death in 1314. Thomas took it hard, of course, for he remained a Templar at heart even after decades serving the Order of the White Dagger. For a time, he was convinced that Philip IV was one of William’s immortals and I was willing to believe that the cruel bastard was a vampire. But it turned out not to be the case, as far as I know. In time, the hurt of it faded but Thomas never got over the betrayal. Without the Templar’s presence linking different kingdoms together in resistance to the Saracen expansion, successive states would be isolated, overwhelmed and conquered in turn. We needed the Templars. May Philip IV burn in the hottest fires of Hell for eternity.
It would be two hundred years before I returned to the East but I would again fight to protect Christendom from the rampaging Turk.
***
It was many years before I heard what happened to Khutulun. She returned to her people as she had intended, and found a great Mongol named Kaidu who was an enemy of Kublai, who William was supporting. Kaidu was the leader of the House of Ogedei and Khan of the Chagatai Khanate. Khutulun must have chosen him because of his opposition to Kublai, and William, and also because he was a war-loving steppe warrior at heart, just like she was. No doubt when she presented herself to Kaidu, he would have wanted her for his wife but she certainly refused because she became famous as the daughter of Kaidu. When I heard that, I laughed, for I can well imagine this Khan’s confusion and ultimate compliance to her demand. The lie could have been made quite easily. I imagine her riding alone across the step and claiming that her mother was some woman that Kaidu had taken years before. Whether that was the way of it, or whether he believed her or not, he certainly claimed her as his own.
In return for this dishonourable act of deceit, she offered him her brilliance as a warrior, a tactician, and political strategist.
With her help, by 1280 Kaidu was the most powerful ruler of Central Asia, reigning from western Mongolia to Oxus, and from the Central Siberian Plateau to India.
In time, stories of her ability made their way to Christendom.
There was a lowly Venetian merchant and conman named Marco Polo who claimed to have visited the court of Kublai Khan. I know for a fact that he never travelled further than the shores of the Black Sea, and his accounts of the East were stolen from hundreds of braver men, who themselves had only heard the tales second or third hand, while he plied them with cheap wine in the Venetian trading colonies. This Marco Polo was a man who wished to be a great traveller but he also lacked the courage to venture from safety. As a collector of stories, he made a great impression, however, it was not he but another man who wrote down those collected stories which were presented as the experiences of the fraudster Polo himself.
Whatever his personal lies and deceit, he at least got some things correct. He described Khutulun as a superb warrior, one who could ride into enemy ranks and snatch a captive as easily as a hawk snatches a chicken. She fought with Kaidu in many battles, particularly those against Kublai and William. The story goes that Khutulun insisted that any man who wished to marry her must defeat her in wrestling but if he failed she would win his horses. That certainly sounds like her as she knew that no man on Earth could ever defeat her. Well, I supposed I could have done but whether she would have married me is another matter. But through this cunning challenge, she spent years winning horses from those competitions and the wagers of hopeful suitors and it is said that she gathered a herd numbering ten thousand.
There are a half-dozen stories of who was her eventual husband. Some chronicles say her husband was a handsome man who failed to assassinate her father and was taken prisoner. Others refer to him as Kaidu's companion from another clan. A Persian chronicler wrote that Khutulun fell in love with Ghazan, a Mongol ruler in Persia.
So many contradictory tales surely mean one thing. She had no husband. No doubt many eminent men professed their certainty that they would be the one to claim her, and thus these stories spread. But she had no interest in such things and wanted only to fight and kill and be a great warrior.
Kaidu had fourteen sons but Khutulun was the one from whom he most sought advice and political support. Indeed, he named her as his successor to the khanate before he died in 1301. When Kaidu died, Khutulun guarded his tomb. But h
is sons hated her brilliance, hated her ageless beauty and strength and they feared whatever dark magic prolonged her youth. Above all, perhaps, they knew she was not of their blood, so the sons of Kaidu banded together all their men and they killed her, though she is said to have killed a hundred of them before she fell.
If she had stayed with me, fought with us in our order, she would likely have lived longer. But she would not have lived the life of a Mongol warrior and that was all she wanted. Her death at the ungrateful hands of men she had made great caused me to feel a terrible surge of hatred and a thirst for revenge on them. But by the time I heard, it had already long come to pass. Besides, I am sure her death was also glorious and I smiled to imagine the ferocity and virtuosity with which she would have fought to her last.
What of her enemies, Kublai Khan and William de Ferrers? The Great Khan slowly and relentlessly conquered all China and established the Yuan dynasty and became Emperor of China as well as the Great Khan of the Mongols. That conquest was perhaps the most remarkable of all the achievements of the Mongols, for the Chinese were the most advanced, the most numerous and the most well-defended people the world had ever known. Indeed, their cities were so well defended, by walls so high, wide and strongly-built that William advised Kublai to send word to the Ilkhanate for the great trebuchets used by Hulegu to smash the walls of Baghdad. With those weapons, the Great Khan was finally able to break through city and after city and complete the conquest.
Kublai was astonishingly successful, and yet he also experienced great failure. His attempted conquests of lands that would become Vietnam and Japan ended in disaster. His favourite wife died and that broke his heart and his spirit. A few years later, his son and heir also died and this calamity broke what remained. The most powerful man on Earth indulged his gluttony and grew disgustingly fat and riddled with gout and God only knows what else. He died in 1294, aged 78.
William, it seems, had learned his lesson. He had not made Kublai into an immortal and had instead served in a quieter role, advising and steering. Manipulating and assassinating.
After Kublai came his grandson. And after him, a series of young successors who each ruled for only a short time. Some were more capable than others but all were severely lacking in the glory and ability of their forefathers, becoming no more than administrators of their enormous empire. Like all Chinese dynasties, the Mongol Yuan dynasty turned inward and became obsessed with the machinations of the court. While they called themselves Khan as well as Emperor, they soon became nothing like steppe nomads and lost that which made them unique. Still, the Chinese always knew they were ruled by northern barbarians, no matter how sinicised they became, and after only a hundred years they were overthrown.
So many Yuan Emperors died young and died early into their reigns. What was William hoping to accomplish by his machinations? Always, he tried to remake the world, and remake the people of the world, into what he wanted them to be. William wanted naked power. He wanted to be worshipped. But he dressed it up in grand notions of religiosity or civic glories for ordinary men. I do believe that somewhere in his black heart he wanted to build great things, to change the world for the sake of some confused, empty notions of change and progress. That is why he always told men precisely what they wanted to hear. And yet because of his evil nature, all he ever truly did was destroy. Just as his efforts to shape the Yuan dynasty ended in their overthrow and destruction.
William would return to the West and begin to wreak his evil on the people of Christendom once more but it would not be for some time.
But in his prolonged absence, we still had many immortals scattered throughout the kingdoms of Europe to find and to kill.
***
William’s immortals had to die. We had two names only from William but I knew well what I would do. The plan was a good one. I had been repeating it for months, even years.
Take either man alive, or even both of them, and torture them for the names of all the others that they knew. Then I would behead them and chase down the next one. Thusly, I would clean the corrupt filth from all of Christendom.
I knew of Simon de Montfort. He was a French lord and also Earl of Leicester in England. He was one of the men who joined Innocent’s Crusade and took part in the shameful sacking and conquering Constantinople decades before.
The other was an English knight named Sir Hugh le Despenser. I half-remembered some fellow named Despenser but it had been a long time since I had been in England.
When Thomas and I rode into France and asked after de Montfort, we eventually discovered that the man I knew of had died fighting the Cathar heretics, almost fifty years earlier.
“Then our work is done for us,” Thomas said. “Fifty years ago, or nearly.”
“Perhaps,” I said, partially relieved and also enormously disappointed. “Yet, these immortals can be tricky. William would have chosen the most cunning of men.”
The old de Montfort’s son, also the Earl of Leicester, had lately been stirring up trouble against King Henry III. No matter how often I had heard it, I was still astonished that the little boy I had known before my self-imposed exile was still the King of England, now an old man. This new Simon de Montfort had risen in rebellion.
“He is the true ruler of England,” said a giggling, fat, Burgundian townsman in Dijon. “Henry is nothing.”
The story was confirmed a number of times before it dawned on me.
“The son is the father,” I said to a bewildered Thomas. “Do you not see? They have done the very same thing that we have proposed to do in order to pass our wealth down from generation to generation. The very same thing, or something similar. This new Simon de Montfort is the same man as the father. William must have granted him the gift, he lived for some time and then decided to pretend to die.” With sudden inspiration, I could imagine how it could be done. “You or I could do the same thing, Thomas. On the battlefield, you are run through and fall dead. A trusted man takes your body away, perhaps gives you blood to drink. And much later you return, claiming to be your own son, now grown. I am sure it could be done.”
“This is all a fancy,” Thomas said, for he always lacked imagination. “You believe this only because Stephen suggested it for us.”
“William said that they were men after his own heart,” I replied. “And this Earl of Leicester has seized England for himself. Does that not sound like something William would do? Our duty is to slay this de Montfort, and to thus save the King and his kingdom.”
Thomas remained sceptical until we discovered that de Montfort’s right-hand man in the rebellion was none other than Hugh le Despenser.
Our joy at discovering both our quarries were already flushed into the open was short lived. When we neared Paris, we found out that the rebellion had been crushed in battle, and both de Montfort and le Despenser were slain.
“Perhaps they are feigning death once more,” I suggested. “We should observe the men who claim to be their sons. Perhaps they have simply pulled the same trick once more.”
As I would eventually discover, I was wrong about that and the vampires de Montfort and Despenser were truly dead. Our best chance for smashing William’s immortals was snuffed out.
But we continued on to England in order to investigate.
Whenever I had imagined coming home, I had pictured myself walking through damp woodlands and colourful meadows, with the hills of Derbyshire as my horizons.
In fact, our ship crossed the channel and hugged around the coast of Kent and then up the Thames into London. It was a truly vile place, and only ever became worse as the centuries rolled by. It was a city for the grasping, the ambitious, and the perverse. Seekers of power and pleasure. Desperate men and women living in filth, breathing in the smoke and stench of rotting shit while dreaming of one day winning great wealth and marrying their son to an impoverished lady. A city of pimps, jesters, smooth-skinned lads, flatterers, pretty boys, effeminates, paederasts, singing girls, quacks, sorceresses, extortioners, ni
ght wanderers, magicians, mimes, beggars, and buffoons.
Stephen was right at home.
Stepping off the boat was just like it was in every other port between Calais and Acre. A swarm of skinny boys shouting questions and saying welcome back, sir, or welcome home, as if they recognised you.
And yet…
It was different. The stench was more powerful than anywhere but Paris, nevertheless there was a familiarity to everything that confused me at first. The sounds of so many English voices raised in cries as men laboured on the dockside or shouted their wares from the public cookshops just up the way along the waterfront. I found myself drawn to the smell of hot pastry and the savoury aroma of boiled beef.
“What can I get you, squire?” the cheery man in front of his shop said as I drew to a stop in front of him. He was plump and ruddy cheeked, as was appropriate for an English vendor. “Fresh game and fowl, the best in London, as I’m sure you know, squire.”
I could smell suet, onions, eggs, and butter, and I wiped the drool from the corners of my mouth. The roasted birds looked wonderful but I pointed to a dark, glazed pie big enough to feed a dozen. “What is in that?”
“Beef and kidney, squire. The finest cuts, by God’s hooks, they are. Onion stewed for half a day until it—”
“I shall take it.”
I fished coins from my purse while the fellow scratched his head. “You’ll be sending your servant to pick it up, will you, squire?”
“Hand it over.”
He was uncomfortable and unsure but he took my coin readily enough and handed the thing over like he was passing me a child and I tucked it into my arm. The smell was glorious and I could not resist a moment longer. Punching through the thick, inedible crust, I pulled out the rich, savoury filling within and shoved a fistful into my mouth.
“Steady on, squire,” the shopkeeper said.
The taste of it was remarkable. Salty, tender meat, slippery with the rich juices.