by Jack Whyte
“No, they are complete. The agreement has been made, the sale concluded.”
“I see. Well, I suppose it makes some kind of sense. What was the price, can you say?”
“Aye, I can tell you. But you can’t tell anyone else. Agreed?” André nodded. “One hundred thousand gold pieces—Saracen bezants. Forty thousand initially, as a down payment, and annual payments of ten thousand for six years, once they have established their Rule there.”
André whistled softly. “Richard did well … Forty thousand gold bezants is an admirable return on an investment less than three months old and that cost him nothing in the first place. And how long will it take the Temple to establish their Rule there, as you say?”
“Not long, it seems. They are prepared to move without loss of time. I have orders to sail for the island at once, to scout out a potential headquarters and report back to de Sablé. I will leave the day after tomorrow.”
“Will you, by God? Where will you start? Will you visit Famagusta? If you do, I should like you to find my father’s grave and tend to it for me. Will you do that?”
“Come, Cuz, you don’t even need to ask that. Of course I will. And even if my travels don’t take me there, I’ll make the journey anyway, on my own. Rest assured of that. Now, what about you, what are you up to these days?”
André grinned. “Soldiering, what else? Ever since finding you, I’ve lost my special status. As long as I could claim to be the Official Seeker of Sir Alexander Sinclair, I was privileged to come and go as I pleased. Now that you’re found and safe, I’ve become an ordinary grunt again, albeit a knighted grunt … I am now a plain Templar knight-at-arms, responsible for a forty-man squadron of sergeant brothers from Anjou, which means I am now permitted to rise for prayers throughout the nighttime hours, in addition to which, as a squadron leader, I am at liberty to conduct daily patrols of the sector of enemy territory facing, and sometimes almost encircling, our southeastern salient. But I have no time to be bored. Saladin’s lads attack us every day, determined to breach the Trench, and sometimes it’s all we can do to hold them off.”
Sinclair cocked his head. “You said Saladin’s lads … do you think of them that way? Without malice?”
“Without malice? I suppose I do, if and when I think of them at all. I think of them as simply being there, like the sand flies and the scorpions, part of this landscape. I certainly don’t hate them as infidels or ravening, blood-drinking demon’s spawn. As far as I have seen for myself, along with what you have told me, they are people much like ourselves, save that they adhere to different beliefs. They are men, like us, with problems of their own and tribulations we would recognize and acknowledge could we but see them. What made you ask me that?”
Alec grunted and stood up. “I don’t know. Perhaps the hope of hearing you say what you said. Particularly the piece about not hating them. It’s too easy to hate out here, and too many people are doing it, on both sides.” He tightened the cinch about his waist and stretched up on his toes. “What’s the difference between Jesus and Muhammad, Cuz, can you tell me?”
St. Clair grinned again. “No, I can’t, but I have a feeling you are going to tell me.”
“No, not I, for I don’t know. That’s too deep a conundrum for me. But even though I be not Christian in the proper sense, I would still support Jesus, as a man, for the difference between those two, it seems to me, lies rooted in power and the way, as men, they sought it. Jesus did not. He never did. He simply lived his life as he saw fit, and it was men, thereafter, who shaped him into the deity he has become. But Muhammad? Muhammad dealt in power from the outset, seeking to control men’s minds and actions in the name of God. He might have been divinely and genuinely inspired by Allah, but that is beyond my ability to determine. All I can say, from my own viewpoint as an observer of men, is that I distrust mortal men who claim a personal relationship with God that requires them to tell others how to think and behave. And I find it enlightening that none of those men, be they sultans, emirs, caliphs, popes, cardinals, patriarchs, archbishops, or bishops, ever appears to be impoverished. And damnation, I am still hungry. Can you credit that?”
“You can’t be. We ate but an hour ago. It’s the excitement of thinking about your coming trip to Cyprus that is making you feel hungry.”
“You might be right, Cousin, and mayhap you are, but I could eat something right now, nonetheless. Pick up your weapon there and let’s walk and stretch our legs.”
They had almost reached the point from which they had set out when Alec Sinclair stopped and handed his crossbow to André before digging his thumbs into his sides, below the edges of his cuirass, and arching his spine backward so that his shoulder blades came close to touching each other.
“Tomorrow will be the first day of July,” he said with a grunt when he had finished. “I expect it to be anything but a boring month and I expect that much will happen while I am away in Cyprus. I almost wish I were not going.”
“How long will you be gone, do you know?”
“No. It might take me a month to do what I have to do, so I’ll be gone that long, at least, and perhaps even longer. I have no need to rush and there is no call for haste. Better to do the preparatory work thoroughly and make the correct decisions the first time around than to botch the assignment and be made to watch someone else being sent to clean up your mess and rectify your errors, would you not agree?”
“No argument from me.”
Alec Sinclair looked up at the sky, then reached his hand out again for his arbalest, hefting it solidly and resting its shaft across his shoulder. “Look after yourself while I’m away, Cousin, and try not to get yourself killed. I’ll look for you as soon as I come back, and I have no wish to find you laid up with the Hospitallers. They are our rivals, you know, and they grow smug whenever any of us has to place himself in their care. God knows we are glad to have them with us, but they can be irritatingly supercilious at times. Fare ye well, Cousin.”
The two men embraced clumsily, bound in armor as they were, then went their separate ways, Sinclair returning to his quarters beside de Sablé’s pavilion and the Templars’ tent, and St. Clair to his own billet in the rows of tents that housed his squadron of sergeant brothers.
ON JULY THE EIGHTH, six days after Alec Sinclair’s departure for Cyprus, eight of André’s men were killed in a single encounter with a determined band of Saracen sappers. These men had evidently worked all night long, and without making a sound, to fill up a narrow section of the Trench with faggots—thick bundles of long stick-like bulrushes brought in from some great distance away, since there was no such growth to be found anywhere in the region surrounding Acre. They completed their task sometime before dawn, then lay in hiding on the ground beyond the Trench, concealed in plain view beneath their sand-colored cloaks, until after the guard had been changed just before daybreak. Then, when it was least expected, they attacked like djinns, leaping from concealment and charging afoot, in great numbers, to cross the narrow bridge they had built, while behind them their companions hurried to bring their horses over after them.
Their ruse almost succeeded, and their surprise would have been complete had it not been for two minor details that combined to confound them. One was that a young Turcopole, one of the lightly armored native levies trained to fight against the Saracen cavalry, had been unable to sleep, troubled by stomach cramps, and had gone walking in the predawn darkness, to stumble and fall to his knees at the very point where the newly built bridge of faggots reached his side of the Trench. Scarcely able to believe what he was seeing, he had raised the alarum immediately, attracting the attention of mounted Hospitallers who were passing on their way to an assigned patrol to the southward.
The Saracens attacked as soon as the Turcopole raised his alarum, but the Hospitallers were close enough to the bridge’s end to reach it ahead of them and prevent a complete penetration of the Frankish position. It was a close-run thing, nonetheless, and the incursion swelled quickly i
nto a major melee, with heavy casualties on both sides. St. Clair and his forty-man squadron had been heading out to the northward at the same time as the Hospitallers were heading south, but they heard the rising tumult at their backs and swung around to engage the enemy in a thundering charge. Afterwards, St. Clair would remember thinking that he had counted more than a hundred of the enemy on his side of the Trench as he arrived, some of them mounted, many more on foot, and that among the men on foot, Saracen sharpshooters were adding their own close-range missiles to the clouds of arrows and crossbow bolts being launched against the Franks from the far side of the Trench.
He saw his First Sergeant go down within moments of their arrival, killed by a heavy bolt that punched cleanly through him, armor and all, and sent him flying, and before he could even begin to react to that, two more of his men went down right in front of him, thrown over their horses’ heads as the animals collapsed headlong. A hand reached up at him, thrusting a long, light lance, and he swept it away backhanded, then brought his long blade slashing down to cleave the thruster. Straight ahead, two mounted men converged on him, each of them swathed in the green robes of martyrdom, and because he could do nothing else he stood up in his stirrups, pulling his massive horse up onto its hind legs, its big, steel-shod hooves kicking lethally at the lighter animals approaching it. But even as the great beast reared, a man on foot ran in beneath its chest and stabbed it to the heart with a long spear, sending it toppling so that St. Clair barely avoided being crushed beneath it, kicking free of the stirrups and pushing himself nimbly backward, one hand thrusting against his heavy saddle as he vaulted like a man wearing nothing at all. But he was wearing more than ninety pounds of mail and armored plate, and when his heels struck the ground he fell backward, twisting violently sideways, and he barely managed to retain his grip on his sword hilt as the enormous weight of his dead horse crashed to earth beside him.
He rolled away desperately, knowing his two would-be killers were now looming over him, but only one of them pressed home an attack. André hacked desperately to parry a heavy, slashing blow that numbed his arm, then watched the glittering arc of the shining scimitar as it swung up again to finish him. But before the weapon could reach the top of its arc, there came a flashing blur and the thump of a crossbow bolt hitting meat, and the scimitar wielder vanished, smashed backward into the martyr’s death he had come seeking.
Panting, almost sobbing, St. Clair lay still, gazing upward and unable to move for a moment. Around him, he could hear the cacophony of battle, the moans and grunts, curses and harrowing screams that always accompanied the clash of weapons and other sounds of strife, but for the time being he lay alone, catching his breath and wondering if he would be able to move when the time came for him to make the attempt. He tensed, raised his head slightly and looked around, unable to see anything at all on his right side because of the bulk of the dead horse, but then he grunted and half rolled, struggling first to a sitting position and thence to his feet, where he stood swaying slightly, flexing his fingers on the hilt of his sword. A spiked Saracen mace lay on the ground by his feet, and he stooped and picked it up in his left hand, holding it loosely and hefting it until he had the feel of it, lithe and springy yet pleasingly heavy in the wickedly spiked head. He sensed movement to his right and swung to see two of Allah’s bearded Faithful come leaping towards him, dodging around obstacles as they raced to reach him, each trying to outdo the other. The sight filled him, surprisingly, with elation, and he drew a deep breath and felt himself grinning as he prepared to meet them.
The man on his right won the race, gripping his scimitar with both hands over his head and screaming Allah’s name in exultation as he brought his blade down on the infidel’s head, but André caught the blade on the upraised edge of his own, then clubbed him into oblivion with the mace in his left hand, before turning back and dropping to one knee to allow the second man to run directly against his extended sword and impale himself. As he felt the fellow’s weight come to bear against his point, he thrust himself upright again and leaned into the blow, twisting his blade fiercely and then jerking it back and free before the man’s flesh could close around it and imprison the steel.
He heard trumpets at his back and a rising thunder of hooves as more reinforcements arrived, shouting the names of Richard and Saint George, and suddenly the Saracens were in full flight, back across the makeshift bridge that had come close to breaching the Frankish lines. He looked back to the body of his warhorse, then ran as quickly as he could to snatch the arbalest and a quiver of bolts from the saddle horn where they had hung, but the crossbow had fallen beneath the animal and he could not budge it at all. By the time he straightened up again and headed towards the Trench, the fighting was all over. The last of the Saracens had retreated beyond the range of even the strongest arbalests, and someone at the front of the Hospitaller formation had already set the bridge ablaze with a bottle of Greek fire. Watching the roiling, viscous smoke and flames billowing from the Trench, St. Clair suddenly felt unutterably weary; the fear and exhilaration of battle were gone and in the aftermath, totally drained of energy and tension, he could happily have sunk down then and there to rest on the sand.
Instead, he set out to find his new secondin-command, whoever that might be now that his First Sergeant was dead. He found the man easily, the one nicknamed Le Sanglier, the Wild Boar, by his mates and who would have been naturally first in line for promotion in any case, and André set him to making a formal tally of the squadron’s strength. That was when he discovered they had sustained eight fatalities, fully twenty percent of their complement, and ten injuries and wounds, one of which was serious enough to threaten to raise their losses to nine dead.
He accepted the tally without comment, then went, grim faced, to select a new mount from among the five that had survived the loss of their riders. He hauled himself into the saddle, surprised to discover that he had a deep ache in his right side, and that he could see dark columns of smoke staining the sky far to the south of Acre, seemingly beyond the sea. He instructed the Boar to have the others assemble and be prepared to set out on the patrol to which they had been assigned that day, then swung his horse around and cantered rearward, to where a small group of English knights sat staring southward at the smoke on the horizon.
“What’s burning?” he asked as he rode up.
One of the knights nodded brusquely, recognizing him, and André remembered meeting him, too, in Richard’s tent. “It would appear to be Haifa.” The Englishman sounded completely uninterested, and shrugged. “Can’t think of anything else it might be. It’s on the far side of the bay, and there’s nothing else between us and it, unless Saladin is burning his entire fleet at sea.”
“Have we attacked Haifa?”
“God’s entrails, no, certainly not. We have enough to deal with here, trying to topple Acre.”
“Then who would burn Haifa? It could only be Saladin, but why would he destroy a town he holds secure?”
The English knight made a moue and shrugged disdainfully. “Who can say what goes on in the mind of a man like that? Perhaps he wants to keep it safe from us. Burning it down would certainly have that effect, would it not?”
St. Clair sat for a moment, absorbing that. “I think you are probably right, Deniston. Acre must be closer to collapse than we thought. Saladin must think we intend to move against Haifa the moment Acre falls. It is so close and it’s a port, with deep water and safe anchorages, unfouled by wrecks. That means he must know Acre is going to collapse very soon—today, perhaps, or tomorrow.”
“Oh, come now. How could he know that? We have the place sealed up tighter than a Cistercian nunnery. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out, including information … most particularly information. That’s what a siege is all about.”
St. Clair grinned. “Tell me, Lord Deniston, do you swim?”
“Swim? You mean in water?”
“Aye, like a fish. The Arabs do. There are swimmers coming out of and go
ing into Acre every night that God sends. Believe me.”
“Believe yourself,” the English knight growled huffily, glancing at his companions to be sure they were witnessing his handling of this French idiot. “Never heard such nonsense. Swimming in and out, indeed. Hah!”
St. Clair could hardly admit that he had been assured that was so by a Shi’ite Assassin, so he merely shrugged, keeping his smile in place, and added, “Flying, too, in and out.”
“Flying? Flying?” Again the appeal to his witnesses. “The fellow’s mad.”
“Not people, Deniston, birds. Pigeons. They send pigeons back and forth, bearing messages. Devout Muslim pigeons, I’m assured, who fly directly from mosque to mosque, minaret to minaret.” He raised a warning finger. “Keep it in mind, and beware. Farewell.” He turned and spurred away before any of the English knights could think of anything to say.
He made his way directly to where the remnants of his squadron sat waiting for him.
The Boar saluted him as he drew close. “All present, sir. Twenty-two sergeants fit for duty. Ten more in the care of the Hospitallers, one of them like to die, three to be kept in care, six more expected to return to duty within the day, after treatment.”
André nodded in acknowledgment, his thoughts teeming. Reduced to barely half strength, his squadron was not, strictly speaking, capable of carrying out its patrol assignation for that day, for the rules were very clear concerning strength and numbers. All mounted expeditions must be in sufficient strength to discourage random attacks. A forty-man squadron was a deterrent to such attacks; a twenty-man force was not.
“We will return to quarters, Sergeant, and regroup. We are hard hit and too few in number now to ride out as we are without endangering our mounts. I’m sure you know by now that they are more valuable than we are. Every horse we lose damages our chances of victory. See to it, if you will, and send the squadron standard-bearer to accompany me. I will report to the field commandery and request replacements for the men we lost today. I shall need a list of the names of the dead, too, but not immediately, unless you have them ready. Do you?”