by Robyn Young
Will was stunned into total silence. He felt crushed by the revelations, by the depth of Garin’s betrayal, felt his whole world starting to crack under the enormous weight of it. The emotionless wall that had slammed up inside him at the sight of his daughter’s body was ripped down in the turmoil inside him and he gave a strangled roar of anguish.
As Will came the last few feet toward him, Garin flung the dagger into the waves. “You know what it feels like now, don’t you?” he cried. “You know how I’ve felt my whole life! Used and betrayed!” Dropping to his knees, the water spraying up around him, he spread his arms wide. His blistered lips cracked apart in a smile. “Now you understand.”
“Get up!” Will yelled at him, flicking the sword at his throat. “Get up, you bastard!”
“It’s over, Will. Don’t you see? It’s over for both of us. We’ve lost everything. All we can do is die!”
“Get up!”
“Do it. I want it over. I want it ended.”
Will grabbed Garin’s tattered tunic. His tears and his spit spattered Garin’s face as he screamed at him. The sea washed around them, soaking them, its salt in their mouths.
Garin caught hold of Will’s wrist. “Do it!” he yelled, turning the sword toward him. “Do it!”
Suddenly, Will pulled himself free. Then, still clutching his sword, he began to walk away.
Garin stared after him, slack-jawed. “Where are you going?” he shouted, struggling to his feet. “Finish it!” He stood there, his legs weak as he watched Will go; then he turned and began to walk, slowly at first, then faster, the Templar ship filling his vision. Over the lashing of the waves, he didn’t hear the footsteps charging up behind him.
Garin felt a pain in his back, a sensation like being struck, then a searing agony that ripped right through him, turning his insides to liquid fire. Looking down, he saw a sword point protruding from his stomach. Then it was gone, wrenched back through him, twisting as it went, splaying him apart inside, splicing organs and muscles with one silver stroke. He half-turned, then fell to his knees. Clutching the ragged hole in his stomach, he collapsed sideways onto the rocks and rolled onto his back, arching and squirming. Looking up, through the blinding pain, he saw Will standing above him like some avenging angel, dressed in white, his sword drenched in blood, the sun and the city on fire blazing behind him. He opened his mouth to draw in a breath, but it filled with seawater as a wave curled over him. He went with it, tumbling off the mole into the deep green water of the harbor. For a few moments, he hung there, buoyed up by the waves, then slowly, struggling weakly, he went under. As he sank, Garin saw Will on the surface watching him, his form rippling, distorted. Then the sea filled his lungs and he was dragged down into blackness.
Will made it to the end of the mole and halfway across the harbor, before he slumped to his knees, his father’s sword clattering down beside him. Bending over, he vomited onto the stone, ignoring the people who raced past him, still trying to get to the boats, still trying to find safety. His bile was black with the smoke he had inhaled in the battle, but it felt like all the poison inside him was coming out, as if, unable to stomach Garin’s words, they was pouring back out of him; the ugly truth. For it was true. He could feel it. It all made a horrible, dreadful sense. He was a fool, a blind fool. He had wasted his life in pursuit of a dream. Now that dream was burning up around him and he had been left with nothing. His father, Everard, Kalawun, all were gone, along with all hope for peace. He could have lived with that, could have lived with Garin’s betrayal even, if only his wife and daughter had been spared. But they were gone too, turned to ashes along with everything else.
Suddenly, he threw back his head and roared at the sky. “What more do you want from me, you bastard?” he screamed at God, whom he could feel watching him emotionlessly from somewhere in that endless blue, like a cat with a mouse it has played with and now grown bored of. “What more?”
“Sir William?”
Will, swaying on his hands, spittle trailing from his mouth, stared up at the voice. A stooped, bearded man was in front of him, bending down toward him. It was the old rabbi, Everard’s friend. “Elias,” he said thickly.
“Are you hurt?” questioned the old man, offering his hand. “Let me help you.”
Will sat back on his heels. “No,” he breathed, pushing away Elias’s hand. “No.” He got to his feet with effort and picked up his sword.
“We came from the Jewish quarter, looking for a ship, but there are none,” said Elias, gesturing anxiously to a group of people huddled together behind him; there were a few men, but most of them were women and children. “What can we do?”
“I don’t know,” said Will, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I don’t know.”
Screams sounded from the city gates. Mamluk riders were storming onto the harbor, cutting through the last citizens gathered there. In desperation, people started throwing themselves into the water, trying to get away from the soldiers and their blades. Elias clutched Will’s arm. Will saw a child go down, trampled by the Mamluks’ horses, saw a sword plunge into the belly of a pregnant woman, saw an old woman’s skull crushed by a spiked mace. Then he saw the men and women in front of him, wailing and crying and clinging to one another, smelled urine as children wet themselves, felt Elias’s hand clamped in terror around his arm. And something stirred in him, firing his deadened senses. “That way,” he said to Elias, pointing across the harbor to the entrance of the underground tunnel that ran under the city to the preceptory. “Go!” he urged the rabbi, thrusting him forward. Will strode to the group of Jews. “Move!” he shouted at them.
Confused and terror-stricken, they needed little encouragement. Will herded them across the harbor wall, driving them on like sheep. As they saw the group, a few Mamluks broke off and thundered toward them. Will went to meet the Mamluks, swinging his sword, two-handed, through the neck of one of the horses. He slashed through the back legs of another, crippling it, then stabbed down into the throat of its fallen rider. “Go!” he yelled at the fleeing citizens, ducking as an arrow shot past him. Another struck his back, but bounced off his chain mail. The entrance to the tunnel loomed up ahead. Most of the Mamluks were busy with the slaughter of the stampeding crowds around the gates. Will fought off another soldier, then led the frightened group into the tunnel. Knights were there, guarding the entrance. They ushered Will and the citizens through.
It wasn’t until they climbed up into the preceptory’s sunlit courtyard, twenty minutes later, that Will realized just how many he had managed to save. There was around sixty of them, all white-faced and shaking, but all alive. And they weren’t the only survivors. The Temple, whose indomitable walls had shut out the world for so long, had opened its gates to Acre’s citizens. Men and women, rich and poor, they thronged the courtyard in a fretful mass. There were thousands of them.
“Will!”
He looked around as his name was called, but couldn’t see anyone he recognized.
“Will!”
He turned in a circle, staring about him, until he saw someone pushing through the crowds to his right. It was Simon. In his arms was a girl. Her gold hair hung loose around her shoulders; her face was sooty, eyes blinking bewilderedly around her. It was Rose. She cried out as she saw him and stretched out her arms, one of which was blistered and red. Will rushed to her, sweeping her up.
“She woke after you’d gone,” Simon was saying. “I was carrying her and she started speaking. Gave me the fright of my life!”
But Will wasn’t listening. Holding his daughter to him, feeling her body shuddering with grief against his, he sank to the ground.
48
The Temple, Acre 25 MAY A.D. 1291
The tunnel was dark and dank. The splashing of feet through the water-logged ground echoed off the walls, along with the whisper of many breaths and the muffled crying of children. Torchlight flickered agitatedly in the air, which smelled of salt and dampness. Over two hundred people moved in
the pool of light. Many were dazed, some were quietly weeping, others were grim and silent.
At the head strode Theobald Gaudin with several officials and the seneschal. Behind them, twelve sergeants pulled handcarts filled with the Temple’s treasury and the order’s documents. Coins, holy relics, jewels, golden chalices, rings and books—all were stacked into the carts. Following the treasury were forty-two knights, twenty-seven sergeants and a few priests. Bringing up the rear were over one hundred of Acre’s refugees. In this group, Will walked in silence, staring rigidly ahead. To his left was Robert, a freshly stitched scar carving a line across his forehead. To his right was Simon. The groom’s broad face was white, but he moved staunchly at Will’s side, glancing at him every so often, then around at Rose, walking behind with Elias, clutching the rabbi’s hand and staring after her father. Her burned arm had been treated with a poultice and bandaged with fresh linen, but her face was smudged with dirt and she still wore the singed traveling cloak she had been wearing when Garin pulled her from the house. She had hardly spoken a word since then.
Will saw Simon’s expression and, reading his thoughts, glanced back at Rose. He met her stunned eyes briefly, then fixed his eyes forward. It would change, he knew, in time. But after the overwhelming relief of finding Rose alive, he had discovered that when he now looked at her all he saw was Elwen, her beautiful face a screaming mask of fear and agony as she burned alive, over and over, in his mind. The image threatened to tear him apart, and there had simply been too much to do for him to be able to let it. And so, his grief locked inside him, he had left his daughter in Elias’s care and battled on, hardly eating or sleeping.
It was seven days since Acre had fallen. The Crusaders’ capital was gone and with it the dream of a Christian Holy Land. The slaughter, which had begun as the Mamluks stormed through breaches in the walls, had continued for the rest of that day, and by the time the sun set, a shroud of black smoke hung over the city and the streets were littered with the dead. Acre had become a charnel house, a stinking open grave filled with children, lying twisted and bloodied, men hacked down as they ran, women viciously raped then disemboweled or beheaded. All along the walls and outside the gates and entrances of towers, the corpses of knights and soldiers lay sprawled across one another, along with many Mamluk, Bedouin and Syrian troops. Banners and flags, some still clutched by their bearers, fluttered limply over the piles of dead. Here and there, the wounded groaned and stirred, trying to pull themselves through the quagmire of blood and death before the Mamluk patrols came.
As evening had fallen on the first day, carrion birds gathered in the skies, as through the smoking ruins, survivors flitted, trying to find somewhere to hide from the roaming soldiers. Sultan Khalil had managed to bring most of his army to order, but some men, mercenaries and undisciplined marauders, were still crazed from the killing, and for them the rape and the butchery continued. Others sought plunder, and palazzos, churches and stores were raided for treasure. As Khalil set up his headquarters in the royal palace and his generals moved to rein in their men, squadrons were sent out to round up the survivors. Only wealthy men or those of rank were spared the sword. The women and children were taken as slaves, gathered up in their thousands. Only three buildings withstood these systematic raids: the strongholds of the Hospitallers, the Teutonics and the Templars, all of which were crammed with refugees.
The sounds of killing had carried on into the night. Will, standing at the window in the grand master’s chambers, listened to them grimly for a time, before he heard Zaccaria move behind him and a priest begin to mutter, and turned to see the grand master drag in his last breath. Guillaume hadn’t spoken since he had been brought into his solar, still bleeding profusely from his wound, except to ask how the city was faring. When Theobald Gaudin told him it was lost, the grand master sunk back onto his pillows. A silent tear slipped from the corner of his eye as he lay there, hearing the massacre continuing beyond the walls. Guillaume de Beaujeu was buried the next morning in the preceptory’s orchard. Zaccaria wasn’t at his funeral. After the grand master’s passing, he led a small company of knights, including some Hospitallers who had taken refuge in the preceptory, out of the gates. According to the only survivor, they stormed several Mamluk companies, killing many, Zaccaria and the Templars yelling the grand master’s name as they cut a brutal path through the soldiers.
A day after this, the fortresses of the Hospitallers and Teutonics had capitulated, the knights on the ramparts observing the nakkabun being drawn up, ready to begin mining the walls. They appealed to Khalil for amnesty and the sultan agreed. The Temple held out, with some of the refugees within its walls being taken each night through the underground tunnel to ships returning from Cyprus. The Mamluks had no way of stopping these evacuations. They had no ships of their own, and the Franks’ vessels, safely at anchor in the bay, were armed with trebuchets that would sling stones at any Mamluk patrols that ventured onto the harbor. Unable to counter them, Khalil pulled most of his forces back from the docks, unconcerned by the escape of a few hundred civilians. Inside the preceptory, the evacuations were happening all too slowly. They had nowhere near enough provisions for this many people, and with the death of the grand master creating a general sense of despair, the Templars finally agreed to surrender. Before they sent word to Khalil, Marshal Peter de Sevrey ordered Theobald Gaudin to leave with the order’s treasury on the one Templar ship that remained in the harbor.
As the knights approached the entrance to the tunnel, the gate was opened. Some of the men went ahead to secure the harbor wall. The few Mamluks on patrol there were killed, quickly and quietly, and the sergeants began to move out, hauling the handcarts across toward the mole, followed by the refugees. In the bay, the lanterns on the Templar galley, which was called the Phoenix, glowed like tiny beacons, guiding them. Whilst the other knights filed out, swords drawn, Will paused in the entrance.
The seneschal was standing there with several men who had helped convey the treasury. His hard gaze turned on Will. “What are you waiting for, Commander?”
“Come with us,” murmured Will.
The seneschal jerked his head at the men. “Start making your way back,” he ordered them. When they were out of earshot, he looked at Will. “My place is here, with the marshal and the others.”
“You’ll be killed or imprisoned.”
“I am old,” said the seneschal gruffly, “and I have lived most of my life in this city. I would call nowhere else home. My time has passed. Yours has not. You still have work to do.”
“It is over,” said Will flatly. “We have lost the Holy Land. The Anima Templi no longer has a purpose.”
The seneschal’s eyes narrowed. “You are wrong,” he replied sternly. “We may have lost our base in the East, but that is only land, mere sand and stone. We are more than that. The Temple still exists, and without a master it is rudderless. This is a dangerous time. Now, more than ever, you must work to safeguard the order from those who would seek to use its resources for their own ends. You must work to preserve the peace and the aims of the Brethren, if not in Outremer then in the West, for its kingdoms are as war-torn as this one. There are men on those thrones, Commander, unscrupulous men, hungry for power, who would jeopardize entire nations to satisfy their desire for supremacy. It will be your task, as it was here, to preserve the balance and to safeguard those of all races and faiths who would be destroyed by the greed and ignorance of others.” The seneschal’s voice was rough. “That is your purpose and that is why it was made certain that you and Robert de Paris were on this ship. Others stayed behind in your place, Campbell. Do not let our sacrifice be in vain.” He took hold of the gate. “Now, go.”
Leaving the seneschal in the tunnel to haul the gate closed behind him, Will stepped out into the cool night air. The rush of the waves was loud in his ears.
OUTSIDE THE WALLS OF THE TEMPLE, ACRE, 28 MAY A.D. 1291
Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil stood in silence and watched as the lines o
f captives were led out of the ruins of the Temple. The evening sun cast a ruddy light over the crumbled walls, which had been undermined and had collapsed that afternoon. Into the breach, two thousand Mamluks had ridden into battle with the last remaining knights and soldiers inside. But the walls had been destabilized by the mining, and half of the landward side of the fortifications came down in a roar of dust and stone, crushing Christians and Muslims alike beneath the piles of rubble. It wasn’t supposed to have been this way, but negotiations with the Templars had broken down and Khalil had decided to force his way into the compound.