Young King Baudouin let his horse pick its way along through the gathering dusk, his squires coming close on his heels. The heavy air stank like a shambles. The twilight was thick with gross noises, the crunch of jaws and the snapping of beaks, the flutterings and flappings of wings, the hoarse caws of carrion birds, too gorged to fly.
The whole great plain was scattered with bodies; he had ridden for miles, now, and he was still passing bodies.
He was only now beginning to understand how great a victory this was. All these dead were Saracens. All Saladin’s huge army had broken here, on the banks of this wadi, under the hammer of a few hundred knights. God’s knights. God had given him this victory, a token, a promise; if he kept faith, if he did not give up, God would sustain his Kingdom.
Ahead in the gloom, the wadi like a wound laid the plain open. Just short of the bank, a looter rushed down like a jackal on a fallen man. Then fled back, driven off. Down there, someone was not dead.
The King said, “Hold,” and reined in, wary. The light had gone. All he could see was a shape in the darkness, someone sitting there on the plain, his back to him. He thought suddenly, from the look of him, that this was a Frank, and he rode forward, and then, even in the night, he saw what Frank it was.
Again, he said, “Hold,” and put out his hand, keeping his squires where they were, and alone he rode down the last few yards to the man sitting there on the plain.
It was the Templar Rannulf, bareheaded, silent. Even when King Baudouin reined in his horse next to him, the knight paid no heed to him. Then Baudouin saw the other Templar lying there.
This man was dead, or seemed so. Wrapped in a piebald blanket he lay huddled on the ground. The King dismounted. Still Rannulf said nothing. He sat cross-legged; in his left hand, resting on his knee, he held the dead knight’s hand. His eyes were wide and unblinking, fixed on the infinite distance.
Baudouin stooped, and reached out toward Mark, and then abruptly Rannulf moved; his free arm shot out, he caught the King by the wrist and held him back. “Don’t touch him.”
The King drew his hand back. “Is he still alive? Bring him to Ramleh. We can tend him there.”
Rannulf shook his head. “He’s finished.”
“We can bury him there, with the honor he deserves.”
“I will bury him in Jerusalem, where he belongs.”
The King sank down on his heels, face to face with him, trying to make the Templar focus on him. “We won a wonderful victory here. The other Templars say you nearly took Saladin himself. I have need of you. Come to Ramleh.”
“I am going to Jerusalem.”
“I am your King.”
“Jesus is my King,” the Templar said, and Baudouin gave up. He straightened onto his feet, tired; when he turned to his horse, it took all his strength and will to mount. The wind keened, a whistle of a dirge, a warning of the battles yet to come. He wanted to stay here, to make company with these men, but they were not his, and he had to go where he could act. Swinging his horse’s head around, he led his squires away toward Ramleh.
Chapter III
Rannulf Fitzwilliam had been born in the Cotentin, in Normandy, youngest son of a landless knight. The family lived in a remote castle on the coast, where the father was chatelain. His mother died when Rannulf was still a baby, and he could not remember her. He had grown up like a weed, learned to fight before he could walk, to take what he wanted by force, to trust no one.
He followed his brothers into the Angevin wars, and when they died, he avenged them with an ardor far surpassing any affection he had ever felt for them alive. Fighting was all he could do. His sword got him a place in King Henry’s army; his inferior birth kept him from advancement in King Henry’s court. He could not read, or write, or figure, or speak much Latin. He seldom went inside a church. He spent his idle time drinking and gambling and chasing women, and knew no other medicine than that: when he woke up with a headache after a night’s debauch, he drank to cure it, and when one woman nearly got him killed, he went out and found another.
He felt the rottenness and wickedness of this life like a curse laid on him, and yet he clung to it. He loved the power in it. He would reck no limit to his will, he refused himself nothing he wanted, even when what he wanted revolted him.
While he was serving in the garrison of a fortress on the Breton border, he fell in love with a village woman and harassed her until she fled into a convent, and then he attacked the convent. For this the Bishop excommunicated him. The King dismissed him. His comrades shunned him. He felt the doors of faith and light and hope slamming shut around him; he saw himself plunging headlong into Hell, but he could not stop; sometimes he even wanted to hurry, to get it over with.
One day, somewhat after the bell was rung on him, and the book closed, he came on a chapel in a little wood, and for once, perhaps because it was forbidden him, the idea overcame him to pray. He went inside, and knelt down at an altar of turf and sticks. Suddenly there was a young girl in the chapel with him, carrying an armload of flowers.
“Have you come here to be saved?” she asked him. She was all unafraid of him, although he was forming the notion right then of ravishing her. “I’ll show you how,” she said, “but first you must be bound.”
“Bind me, then,” he said, with a laugh, believing nothing of it, only wanting her to come within his reach.
She came up to him, sweet and soft and fair, so close her breath touched his face. She took hold of his callused hands and laid them palm against palm, and then wound a chain of her daisies around his wrists, all solemn, as if by such a means she could actually bind a man like him.
He trembled with lust; he wanted to throw her down and violate her, to see her weep, to see the blood mottling her white thighs. The flowers shackled him like iron. The child ruled him like a king. She looked into his eyes and said, “Now you must ask God to save you.” He knelt beside her and repeated the Credo with her, and for the first time he heeded the words; then he it was who wept; blinded by shame and guilt and terror and sorrow, he cried for hours. When he returned to himself, the child had vanished.
He understood that he had one more chance. He rode into Rouen, to the Templar preceptory there, and offered himself to Jesus Christ. Three months later he was on his way to the Holy Land, sworn never to look at a woman again, and to fight only against the enemies of God.
That had been more than ten years ago. Now it seemed to him that he had always lived here, in the Temple, in Jerusalem.
Mark had been here only a year and a half. Mark would lie here forever.
Rannulf stood at the edge of the grave, looking down at the dead man, who was dressed in a clean white jerkin and wrapped in his black cloak. Only three other knights stood with him to watch as the priest in his green robes said the last blessing and sprinkled holy water. The rest of the chapter had gone north weeks before to make a show of crusading around the city of Homs and thus far only a few of them had come back.
After the usual words of the funeral, the Templars gathered together in a rite of their own. Linking arms around the grave in a mass embrace they leaned together, swayed back and forth, and called out to God to deliver them as He had delivered Mark. Finally, passing the shovel from hand to hand, they cast down the dirt on top of Mark’s body. When he had done his turn Rannulf knelt down by the grave and tried to pray.
He hated this, more than any other part of this life, the endless kneeling and mumbling the same words over and over. Sometimes he could not do it at all, but only crouched on the ground, head down, while black thoughts of murder and lust streamed through his mind. For Mark’s sake he forced himself through several paternosters. As he said the words the shovel grated and swung, and the dirt thudded into the grave, and the other knights went away, all but one.
This was German de Montoya, the Preceptor, who had just come back from Homs; being an officer, he did not wait very long before he cleared his throat, and said, “Excuse me for interrupting you, Saint.”
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“I’m done,” Rannulf said, and got up onto his feet. The wet dirt clung to his jerkin where he had knelt on it. He thought of Mark lying in the middle of the dirt and shuddered.
German de Montoya crossed himself. “God save him. When he first came here I thought he would fall away, or run away—he seemed a worthless man.”
Rannulf remembered Mark’s courage in the battle; God would surely take him, who had given up his life following the True Cross. He stuck the shovel into the loose earth and started up the hillside. “We’re all pretty damned worthless.”
The Templar graveyard was on the steep thorny slope outside the blocked-up Golden Gate, above the Valley of Kidron. Across the plunging ravine in a dark thicket of bushes and vines was Gethsemane. The burden of this place lay on him like iron. On this ground where he walked God Himself might have walked, or Abraham, or Jesus. Even the sun seemed the shadow of some greater light, floating like a ghost in the clouded sky. The eastern wall of the city rose above them, ranks of stone blocks like coffins piled one on the other.
“God made us, and wants to save us; we cannot be utterly without worth,” German said placidly. “I’d like to hear about your journey to Cairo.”
German’s black beard was striped with grey, an oddity among the Templars, where Rannulf at thirty-six was heavy in years. German owed his age to his office as master of the novices, the duties of which usually kept him out of battles. As they walked along the foot of the wall to the next open gate, Rannulf told him about the long ride into Egypt, and how he and Mark had lied and bribed their way around Cairo.
“And Saladin’s in control there, you think,” said German. They went along the narrow footpath to the gate at the corner of the wall, and thus into the great sprawling quarter that was the Temple Mount.
“Nobody moves except as he tells them,” Rannulf said. “They have no heart any more for fighting, the Egyptians. It’s pitiable. All they want to do is sell you things.”
“I thought the Shi’ites would liefer die in bed with a dog than live at peace with a Sunni. Don’t they miss their caliph?”
“If they do they don’t dare say so. Half the mullahs have disappeared and the other half have their faces to the floor.”
They were climbing up onto the great broad pavement of the Temple. This was the highest place in Jerusalem, and beyond the western fringe of palm trees the city rooftops spread down and away in cluttered ledges. In front of Rannulf, midway down the ancient terrace, the Tem- plum Domini stood, round and faceted; near the top of its lead dome a few patches of gold leaf shone. It had been a Saracen church once, and the blue tiles that covered its walls inside were Saracen work. But on top of the dome was the Cross of Jesus Christ.
“You were gone a long while,” German said. He led Rannulf along the western side of the pavement, where there were fewer people. There in the columned archways of an old arcade were the storerooms and workrooms of the Order. “We had an election. For Marshall. Your name got into it.”
Rannulf grunted at him, startled, and loath to show it, or to look pleased. “Not for too long, I think.”
“Not long at all. Gerard de Ridford won.”
That made it easier: he laughed, and turned toward German. “And worth its weight in gold it was, too.”
German’s smile widened only slightly. “As you can imagine, after six months, that joke’s lost its shine. He should do well enough; we need men like that at court, to manage things there.”
“We don’t need him,” Rannulf said, looking away. The great pavement was cracked, and grass grew up through the cracks; he scuffed his boot through the spidery green stalks.
“Don’t make trouble over it,” German said. “We need to stand together, or at least appear so to the world.”
This sounded like a warning. Rannulf made no answer; he hated Gerard de Ridford. He knew German was right.
They were walking through the middle of the Temple haram. He had heard it was King Herod who had built this place, the slayer of the Innocents. The broken columns that held up the arcade roof were carved with leaves like stone palm trees. Each archway held a workshop: the saddler’s, the candlemaker’s, the shoemaker’s. In a place where the arcade opened into a little square the forge stood, cold now, smelling of stale charcoal. A black-and-white cat rolled on the sun-baked pavement. Rannulf stopped, looking around him.
The Saracens believed that once Jesus and Mohammed had stood face-to-face on this spot. Rannulf liked knowing that. This, not Holy Sepulcher, was the heart of his war, just as Jesus was his only officer.
It held him fast, this way of understanding. He felt pulled together again, thinking it; he felt better about Mark, who was home now, gone to rest. His spirits lifted. German went on ahead of him, toward the sprawling building at the edge of the pavement that was the Templar barracks, and Rannulf followed him.
Chapter IV
After the miracle of the battle of Ramleh, King Baudouin went to Ascalon and to Gaza, to see to the defenses of the south of the Kingdom; then, in the cool of the year, as Advent began, he travelled back to Jerusalem, on its inland hilltop. The great men of his kingdom, who had all spent the summer crusading in the north, were gathering for the holy time of Christmas, and the King knew better than to let them gather without him.
His mother and his sister held court at their palace of La Plaisance, on the western side of the city, where the air was sweetest and coolest. In the afternoons they received their guests in a gallery whose long southern windows even in winter let in a flood of light. With only a page and a knight, the King went quietly into this crowded hall; shy of his looks, he wore a hooded cloak, and for a while he was there without anyone noticing.
He saw his mother, Agnes de Courtenay, sitting on a Persian chair by the window. Her hair was stiff with henna. She wore a gown of layers of Gaza cloth, the bodice cut very tight and low, as if she were a young woman, and her face was painted to hide the seams of age. Beside her stood a French knight named Amalric de Lusignan, who was his mother’s constant friend, and as the King went slowly among the bright silks and satins of the courtiers, he saw his mother reach out idly and stroke the Frenchman’s leg, as if she were petting a lapdog.
In the giddy reel and flutter of the court, the young King stood watching this, and his soul cankered. He remembered the first charge at Ramleh. That had been as honest as a sword blade, to give his life into God’s hands, and run headlong against the enemy. Here nothing was honest, not the laughter, not the piety, not the faces of the women or the promises of the men. He wished for the perfect clarity of that moment in the battle. Then someone noticed him.
“The King,” the whisper ran, like the wind through the grass. “The King.”
The great crowd hushed, not all at once but in waves that spread out
Through the long cold room with its showers of sunlight, and everyone turned to see him, and seeing him, the women sank down in submission and the men bowed deep. A swift rustle of half-voiced greetings died away. He looked around him at the bent backs and the faces concealed behind hands and fans, and lifted his eyes to his mother, across the hall.
She stood up, her hand raised to him. “Sire. My dear boy. Come to me. Welcome back to Jerusalem. Come, let us heap you up with praises for your glorious victory.”
Quietly he said, “God’s is the glory.” He walked up through the stooped court, toward his mother’s side.
As he came up beside her chair, Amalric de Lusignan moved back, giving him room; the King looked wide-eyed at him, and said, “Thank you, Father.”
The constable’s handsome face twitched, puzzled. “I beg your pardon, Sire.”
“I grant it,” Baudouin said. He nodded to his page. “Fetch me a chair.” Turning his back on the constable, he sat down side by side with his mother.
She said, “You look much better, my dear boy.” But leaning forward to greet him, she kept a good depth of the air between them, kissed at his face, held her hands above his, never touching. The p
aint on her cheeks was cracking. Her brilliant hair was a wig. She turned her head slightly toward Amalric, now standing directly behind her chair. “My friend, see that the King has refreshment.”
Baudouin sat still a moment. His strength was uncertain; his hands and feet had been numb and cold all day, which made him feel sometimes as if he were disappearing, inch by inch, into a black void. Before his chair the courtiers were pushing in closer, trying to be recognized. He had to do that soon, begin to see them, to let them come forth and dangle their little ambitions in his face. He shut his eyes a moment, unwilling.
“Sire,” Amalric murmured, and young Baudouin opened his eyes and took the warm cup of wine from him, with its breath of cloves and cinnamon.
Agnes said quietly, “My dear boy, I have a boon to ask you.”
She always did. “Yes, Mother.” He listened to her circuitous request for a minor position at court for one of her friends’ friends’ friends.
In the milling crowd before him, now, Raymond of Tripoli had appeared. The Count of Tripoli always reminded Baudouin of a gazelle, slight and agile, with prominent, intelligent eyes. He had been Regent during Baudouin’s minority and still thought himself true King of Jerusalem. He was too great a man to pretend not to see, and Baudouin caught his eye and smiled and nodded.
The Count of Tripoli strode forward. “Sire. God bless you for your splendid victory. You’re looking very well.” He bowed as an afterthought. His dark eyes searched eagerly over Baudouin’s face, assessing the progress of his illness, wondering when he was going to die and get out of the way. “Very well, indeed.”
Baudouin sipped his wine, the taste faintly metallic on his tongue. “Thank you, Cousin.”
Agnes called out, “My lord Count, I understand your wife has a wonderful new harper; you must command her to send him to me at once.”
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