by Jack Whyte
His last words were lost in the thunderous crash of falling masonry as boiling dust erupted ahead of them like smoke, hiding the walls completely from view, and for long moments there was no sound to be heard other than those of the aftermath of the collapsing rubble. The sound of falling, pattering fragments finally died away, and as the dust began to settle noticeably, Hugh spoke almost under his breath.
“This will be it, lads. That was a breach, or I’m a Burgundian.” He hefted the spiked mace that had hung by his right side and settled the shield more comfortably against his left shoulder. “Now, with any luck, the spotters will see the break and they’ll stop the bombardment. If they don’t, we might find it unpleasant approaching the walls … Arlo, start counting. We’ll move as soon as we know the stones have stopped and it’s clear enough to see the way ahead.”
In the hushed silence at their backs, Arlo’s voice, counting in cadence, sounded ludicrously loud, but it provided a necessary discipline. In the normal scheme of the bombardment, the next projectile should arrive before his count had reached eighty, but he reached eighty and counted on through one hundred before Hugh nodded. “Good, they’ve stopped. My lord Count, welcome. Do you wish to take command?”
Count Raymond, who had silently joined them, shook his head. “No, Sir Hugh, you appear to have it well in hand. Carry on.”
Hugh nodded again and slowly raised his mace over his head, signaling the crowd behind him to make ready. “Right,” he said, his voice almost conversational, “the barrage has certainly stopped now, so we can go. Another minute or so, to let the dust clear. Mind where you step, now, but keep your heads up—they’ll be waiting for us and you don’t want to die looking down at your feet. Steady now … wait for it …” An eddy of wind sprang up and whirled the dust aside, revealing a break in the formerly even line of the wall’s top.
“There! It’s a breach, sure enough, so here we go, up and over. With me, now!”
They broke out of the dust cloud right at the top of the piled rubble in front of the break in the walls to find the city’s defenders waiting for them. Hugh, in the lead, found himself alone for the briefest of moments, gazing down at the swarthy faces of the massed defenders below, all of whom appeared to be glaring up at him with hatred in their eyes. He was aware of a feeling of calm detachment, a sensation of silent unreality, and yet conscious at the same time of the insecurity of the rubble beneath his feet as he fought for balance, and then an arrow pierced his shield, sudden and jarring, punching the device solidly back against him and sending him reeling off balance. His heel caught on something and he sat down, hard, his backside jarring painfully on a sharp-edged stone, and then his hearing returned and he clambered back to his feet, aware of the chaos of sight and sound around him and slightly surprised by how many scores of his own men were ahead of him now, having surged by him when he fell.
Ignoring the sharp pain of his bruised buttock, he leapt nimbly down the rubble slope inside the walls and found himself face to face with an armored, grim-faced Muslim swinging a bright-bladed scimitar. Hugh blocked the swing with his shield and swung his mace in a short, chopping arc, plunging the spike on its end through the Muslim’s helmet. The man fell away, and Hugh barely felt the tug as he wrenched his mace free again and jumped to his left, swinging an overhead chop at another defender who was on his knees over a Frankish soldier, struggling to stab him with a hooked dagger. The point of the spike crunched into the exposed nape of the man’s neck and killed him instantly, but before the fellow could even begin to fall, Hugh sensed another presence lunging towards him from his unprotected right and knew he had no time to free his mace.
He released his grip and spun away to the left, turning hard on his heel and swinging his shield down and inward in a desperate attempt to cover his side as he drew his dagger with his right hand. He heard a quick intake of breath close to his ear, a muttered curse, and then a whiff of some fragrance he had smelled before, and someone’s back came hard against his own. He dropped instantly to his left knee and turned again, hard, sweeping his dagger in a tight arc outwards and up until he felt the blade sink into yielding flesh. And then, in a weltering crush of grappling bodies, hearing the clang and grating of blades and the heavier thuds of blows from other weapons, all mixed with the sobbing, grunting, hissing, screaming sounds of men in torment, he sensed a looming shadow—had no time to really see it—and felt a rushing pressure of air as something swept down and smashed into his head, hammering him into blackness.
HE FOUND THAT he could not move his body and it hurt almost beyond tolerance when he tried to open his eyes, and so he lay still for a while, allowing his head to clear and collecting his thoughts. A short time later he tried again to open his eyes, cautiously this time, and was able to do so, but the pain was no less intense than before, and although he could see light this time, he could discern nothing else that made sense to him and he still could not move. And so he slowly closed his eyes and willed himself to lie still and breathe steadily, fighting the urge to panic, until his heartbeat returned to its normal pace. He flexed his fingers slowly, happy beyond belief that he could and that they worked, and then he braced them and pushed hard, straightening his arms. Something yielded at his back and he pushed harder, and whatever was on top of him fell away suddenly. And then he opened his eyes for the third time. It still hurt abominably, but this time he could see, although everything was heavily blurred.
It took him several moments longer to extricate himself and twist his body into a sitting posture, but by then he understood that he had been lying head downward, near the base of the rubble pile behind the city wall, his shoulder caught on a fragment of broken masonry and his face thrust into the debris surrounding it. His eyes were full of dust and grit, and the weight pinning him in place had been contributed by two dead men, one of them Muslim, the other Frankish. The fighting had passed him by—he could hear the sounds of it in the distance—and he became aware of a steady flow of Frankish warriors, knights and men-at-arms, all filing quickly down from the top of the breach in the wall and dispersing into the streets and alleyways of the city ahead of him, moving rapidly as though they feared the fighting might be over before they arrived. None of them paid him the slightest attention.
Hugh rose to his feet but quickly discovered that he was not yet ready to go anywhere, for the world tilted alarmingly sideways and he fell back to his seat again. In falling, however, he felt the heavy weight of his water bottle banging against his side. He pulled a kerchief from inside his mail coat and soaked it from the bottle, then washed the sand and grit from his eyes, hissing against the pain of it yet feeling the relief and improvement immediately. He repeated the treatment with fresh water, and now that he could see better, he looked around the spot where he had fallen, seeing bodies everywhere. He noticed that there appeared to be an equal division of defenders and attackers among the corpses, but he was relieved that he saw no one among the casualties whom he recognized, and he wondered where St. Omer and the others were, and why they had left him behind. The only explanation he could think of—and he suspected it must be accurate, since Arlo had never quit his side before—was that they had lost him in the whirl of the original fighting, which had been utterly chaotic. They must have thought him ahead of them and gone surging forward in search of him.
Knowing he was in no danger here, he removed his flat steel helmet, loosened the thongs at his neck and pushed the chain-mail hood back from his head, grateful that he could feel no obvious rents in the mail with his bare hands. He then soaked his kerchief thoroughly one last time and wiped his face, head, and hands. His skull was pounding from a massive headache, from the blow that had struck him down, he assumed, but there had been no blood on his kerchief and the remainder of his body felt surprisingly well, its various parts responding when called upon to move. He rinsed out his mouth and spat out the dislodged grit, then swallowed a mouthful of water, sealed the bottle, and replaced his hood and helmet, refastening the ties at hi
s chin before he rose once more to his feet, his arms outstretched for balance. Beyond a tiny sway on reaching his full height, this time he was stable.
His sword was where it should be, still in its sheath, but his shield and his dagger were nowhere to be seen, and he stood blinking for a moment, looking around for them before he saw the well-known painted shaft of his spiked mace. Its spike was still buried in the spine of the last man he had struck with it, and he tried not to wonder who the fellow had been as he twisted and pulled at the weapon until it ripped noisily free. He looked at the clotted spike, then struck it into the ground, cleaning the worst of the gore off it, and glanced around in search of his dagger. Realizing that it could be anywhere, hidden under any of the bodies littering the scene, he abandoned trying to find it and drew his long sword from its sheath instead. Then, clutching the mace firmly in his left hand and the long sword in his right, Hugh de Payens stepped forward and finally entered the Holy City of Jerusalem.
He carried both weapons all day long, but he was never even tempted again to use either one of them, except, on three separate occasions, against his own people, when he found them committing atrocities against people who could never, by any stretch of anyone’s imagination, have taken any part in the defense of Jerusalem—old and young women, some of the latter pregnant, and helpless, terrified children.
Towards nightfall, after walking around the fallen city for hours on end, he left through the Damascus Gate, passing St. Omer and Montdidier with no sign of recognition and making no response to their shouts. Perplexed, but knowing him well enough to know they would earn no thanks by accosting him, his two friends stood and watched him walk away into the gathering dusk. The faithful Arlo, who had been searching frantically for his friend and master all day long, stayed up the entire night, waiting for him to return. They had assumed he would return to their encampment, but they were wrong.
Weeks passed, and everyone, including his three closest friends, believed that Hugh de Payens was dead. Arlo grew gaunt, for he alone of the remaining three friends had had time to dwell upon Hugh’s loss and to wonder what had befallen him. Godfrey and Payn had been kept mercifully busy by the demands of Count Raymond, who was well aware of the dangers inherent in the loss of a bosom friend. Arlo, lowborn as he was, expected and received no such consideration, and thus was left to his own devices. By the end of the third day, after making widespread enquiries, he had become convinced that Hugh had fallen among thieves and been killed, his body hidden in some hole. He had prowled the length and breadth of the city after that, searching every street and every empty house and cave for a sign of his master’s corpse before the chaos of the city’s sacking had been cleared away, the decomposing bodies gathered up and burned, and the thoroughfares cleaned up and made habitable again.
That initial cleansing, a leviathan undertaking by anyone’s estimate, had taken fifteen clear days of backbreaking work by every man-at-arms and every prisoner fit enough to ply a shovel or a broom, but still the stench of blood and death lingered in narrow, shaded places of the city, as though baked into the very stones by the intense heat. And when all his searching had led to nothing, Arlo had spoken individually to everyone in authority among the Pope’s armies. No one had seen Sir Hugh de Payens, and no one knew or appeared to care what might have happened to him.
And then one morning, without explanation, Hugh returned, walking into camp soon after dawn, dressed in rags beneath a tattered homespun robe, and leading a donkey piled high with bundled packages. He ignored Arlo’s stupefaction, merely nodding quietly to him as if he had seen him only moments earlier, then began unloading the donkey’s cargo, which transpired to be his chain-mail hauberk, his quilted tunic, his armor, and his mace and sword. He offered no word of explanation of what he had been doing, and when Arlo eventually asked him directly where he had been, he answered only, “By myself, thinking.” Arlo said nothing more, but he recognized that the Hugh de Payens who returned that morning was not the man who had led the charge into the breached city three weeks earlier.
Arlo immediately sent word of Hugh’s return to St. Omer and Montdidier, and both men came by Hugh’s camp within the hour, only to find that their friend was soundly asleep and that Arlo would not permit them to waken him, pointing out that his master must be exhausted, since he would never otherwise permit himself to be abed at such a time of day. Accepting that as self-evident, the other two demanded that Arlo tell them everything he knew. Arlo, of course, knew nothing more than they did. He told them of Hugh’s unheralded return, of his unusual reticence and quietude, but there was nothing more he could add.
That same evening, the two knights returned and found Hugh sitting quietly in front of a fire of horse and camel dung, wrapped in the homespun robe he had acquired and staring into the glowing embers. He greeted them cordially enough, but would respond to none of their questions, and when they became insistent, he would speak to one of them while plainly avoiding answering the other. They suffered it for an hour and then withdrew, shaking their heads.
They returned the next night to discover that nothing had changed, but Godfrey sat narrow-eyed, watching and listening and saying little, his mouth pursed. On the following evening he returned alone and sat in silence for more than an hour, staring into the fire beside his friend. Hugh seemed grateful for his companionship, and they sat in comfortable silence until Godfrey cleared his throat and spoke.
“I was angry at you, you know, the day the walls went down, and I’ve been angry at you ever since.”
The silence that followed was long, but just as St. Omer was beginning to think Hugh would not respond, the other man cocked his head and looked at him sideways. “Why?”
“Why? How can you even ask me that, Hugh? Why? Because I needed you, and you weren’t there—Crusty and I both needed you, more than we ever have. You are the only person we can trust without a doubt, and you vanished when we needed you the most. Where did you disappear to, in the name of God?”
Hugh de Payens straightened up in his seat as though he had been hit, and for a moment his face was transformed, his ears drawing backward and the skin over his cheekbones stretching tight in response, the crease lines by his eyes showing pale against the sunburnt bronze of his face.
“In the name of God? You ask where I went in the name of God? I went nowhere in the name of God. I ran in shame and terror from the name of God, out into the darkness of the desert to where I could no longer hear His name being screamed by madmen. I heard enough of the name of God that day to sicken me for a thousand lifetimes, and I never wish to hear His name again.”
St. Omer forced himself to sit quietly, counting from one to twenty, before he asked, his voice quiet, “What are you talking about, Hugh? I don’t understand what you are saying.”
The silence stretched again for what seemed like an age before de Payens responded, his voice softer than it had any right to be, considering the weight of what he now said. “God willed what happened in Jerusalem that day, Goff. God willed it. I looked in the face of a bishop for whom I had gone searching, to confess my sins for the first time since I joined our Order, and I saw blood matted in his beard and in his hair, and I saw the madness of the blood lust in his eyes and the slashed stain on his robe where he had wiped his blade clean of the blood he had spilled that day. It hung from a belt across his chest, a long, rusted old sword, clotted with gore, and I thought, This man is a bishop, one of God’s anointed shepherds, and he is stained and defiled with human blood … a priest, forbidden to kill! And then, and only then, I understood that I alone, of all the people in Jerusalem that day, saw anything morally wrong in what was happening, in what we had done and were doing. How could we be wrong? We were carrying out God’s will. Deus le veult!
“How many did we kill that day, do you know?”
St. Omer gazed down at his feet. “Aye, Hugh, I know. The number was made known. Everyone was very proud of it. The greatest victory in the history of Christendom … the redemption
of Jerusalem from the hands of the Infidel …”
“How many, Goff?”
St. Omer sucked in a great, deep breath. “Ninety thousand.”
“Ninety … thousand. Ninety thousand souls …” Hugh turned and looked at his friend squarely. “Think about that, Goff. Think back. Do you remember how proud we were to belong to our splendid army on the day we set out from Constantinople into Turkey? That was four armies combined into one, and it was less than forty-five thousand strong … less than half the number killed in Jerusalem that day. Do you remember how vast it seemed to us then, that gathering of forty-odd thousand, with its four thousand, five hundred mounted knights and its thirty thousand infantry? Do you remember the sheer size of it, the awe-inspiring mass of it? And here were ninety thousand, a gathering twice as large as that great army but composed of men and women and children, all of them starving, frail and sick and ailing, walled up in one city, helpless and at our mercy. And we slew them because God willed it …”
His voice failed him and he stood up and crossed his arms, his chin sinking onto his breast, and when he spoke again he held one hand over his eyes, pinching them shut. “I knew the number had to be huge, because there were times when I was wading in blood and guts to my ankles … places where the drainage was poor and the walls were high … where there were houses full of wealthy people and family retainers, slaughtered in their homes. And I believe the screams I heard that day—and still can hear today—will never again permit me to hear silence.”
St. Omer raised his hands and then let them drop helplessly into his lap. “Hugh—”
“Please tell me you were not about to say that it was not as bad as I remember, Goff, because it was, and worse. I saw men whom I have known my entire life, Christian knights, transformed into beasts, slaughtering women and children wantonly, some of them dragging cloths stuffed with booty they could not have carried. I killed one man myself, a knight from Chartres, whom I found ravishing a girl who could not have been older than seven. He glared at me, demented, and screamed that he was doing God’s work, driving the devil out of her. I took his head off with one stroke and left him sprawled over her, because she was already dead. He had killed her before violating her. Because God willed it, Goff … Because God willed it, through his priests and followers. Don’t ever talk to me of God again.”