Knights of the Black and White tt-1

by Jack Whyte

  He paused, mulling over his next thoughts, and finally added, “There is far more to it than that, of course, although few of us in the brotherhood ever appear to think about it. I am referring to our own strictest rule: one family member, at most, from each generation.” He looked St. Clair directly in the eye. “I have lost many hours of sleep over that, from year to year, since joining the Order, and I still have not yet come to terms with it. Every man of our brotherhood has kinsmen, brothers, cousins, and friends among the Families—and I am not even referring to wives and female relatives—who do not belong to the Order and therefore live as Christians, never suspecting what we know to be true. And we live among them and they have no knowledge of who we truly are.

  “Does that difference make us better men than they are? Does it disqualify them from being admirable, or make them lesser in any way? No, it does not. We know, through the Order, that they have been duped. But that is not a weakness, for the entire world, Christendom itself, grew out of that duplicity. And so, for the sake of our own sanity, we must accept that despite all the atrocities and abuses, the corruption and the disgraceful behavior that we see perpetrated around us in the name of Jesus Christ, this world is none the less peopled, by and large, with men of genuine goodwill, admirable men, governed by conscience and their own sense of propriety and the fitness of things.”

  He squinted at St. Clair from beneath furrowed brows, then nodded decisively. “Such a man is Warmund de Picquigny. I have no slightest doubt of that. The error of his beliefs is unimportant in this matter, compared to the strength of his convictions and his personal integrity, and I am equally sure of that. And as your Master, I tell you that you may believe the same with absolute certainty. Do you have any doubts of that?”

  “No, Master Hugh.”

  “Excellent. Then I will go now, today, to talk to him and ensure that he will see you as soon as may be. In the interim, I will ask you to spend the remainder of this day in prayer, and wait for me to summon you. Now go, and be at peace. Archbishop Warmund will give you peace of mind, and if he feels you are indeed possessed, he will exorcise whatever demon dwells within you. Go now.”

  TWO

  The Patriarch Archbishop of Jerusalem stood musing by an open window, his right elbow supported on his left fist as he leaned against a wall, stroking his nose with the tip of one finger and gazing out absently into the courtyard by his chambers. Behind him, in the Archbishop’s private chapel, Hugh de Payens’s youngest knight knelt alone in front of the altar, awaiting the Archbishop’s return. The Patriarch, however, had no intention of returning before he had taken the time to decipher everything the young man had told him, and already he was faced with a mystery that he suspected might be insoluble. He knew beyond a doubt that young St. Clair was not possessed by devils. Bewitched, perhaps—and that thought, as it came to him out of nowhere, elicited a grim little twitch of one side of the Archbishop’s mouth.

  Although he was saddened by all St. Clair had told him, he was unsurprised, because it merely confirmed what he had suspected since the day of the young monk’s unexpected return. He had asked one particular question of his supplicant, a question about color, prompted by something St. Clair had said, and the response had confirmed his suspicions and made clear to him some, but not all, of the many frustrating elements of this situation. Warmund de Picquigny now knew who had abducted St. Clair, but he was utterly mystified as to what might have prompted the abduction.

  From the hazy details of the young man’s ill-remembered dreams, and a specific color he had uncertainly recalled in response to the Patriarch’s probing question, the Archbishop had clearly identified the royal palace, the former al-Aqsa Mosque, as the place in which St. Clair had been held captive, and with that he had known that there was only one possible abductor: the King’s wayward and hard-headed daughter, Princess Alice. That was the source of Warmund’s present perplexity, for although he held absolutely no illusions about what kind of person the King’s daughter was, the Archbishop could see no sense of any kind in what he had just learned, unless the entire abduction and confinement had been dictated by sheer, unrequited lust. He could clearly remember the occasion on which he had rescued the unworldly young monk from Alice’s clutches, and he had seen how angry she was with him at the time for his interference. Even so, he could barely give credence to the idea that Alice would go to such lengths simply to have her way with a complete innocent.

  Alice le Bourcq, he knew beyond dispute, was a voluptuary and a hedonist, never having known the restraints of life in Christendom. Born and raised in the East as a child spoiled by doting servants and an indulgent father, she had been accustomed early to the luxuries and the exotic pleasures she enjoyed so shamelessly. It made no sense, therefore, in any slightest, conceivable degree, that accustomed since infancy to all the pleasures and perfumed delights of the bathing habits of the Arabs and Turks among whom she lived, she would stoop to abduct a foul-smelling, dirt-encrusted, ascetic, and penniless monk knight, heroic and laudable though that monk may be in his military aspects. And it made even less sense that she would do so in secrecy, and then go to such extreme lengths as must have been necessary in order to ensure his safe return to his brethren, after having tortured him for the final weeks of his captivity. That, in de Picquigny’s estimation, was the final, imponderable facet of this puzzle. The Patriarch heaved a deep, heartfelt sigh and straightened up from his slouch.

  Brother Stephen, de Picquigny could tell, was completely under Alice’s sexual thrall. The color—violet—that the knight had mentioned in connection with his dreams of fornication existed only in one place in all the Kingdom of Jerusalem, to the Patriarch’s certain knowledge: within the bedroom of the Princess Alice. De Picquigny had no slightest doubt of that because it was he who had been instrumental in importing the pigment from Italy, on behalf of the King, for the princess’s fourteenth birthday. It had been extraordinarily difficult to find and outrageously expensive to purchase, and they had imported only sufficient for the princess’s needs.

  De Picquigny also knew, from his spies, that the princess frequently used opiates and narcotics to enhance her physical pleasures, and he knew, too, from personal experience, how stunningly effective opiates could be. He had been thrown from a horse, years earlier, and suffered a massive and complex fracture of his left thigh bone, in which the splintered end of the bone had been driven through the flesh of his leg and had then refused to heal, leaving him in constant pain and in danger of death, should the wound turn gangrenous. The physicians had been powerless to do anything for him, and in desperation his staff had engaged the services of the famed Muslim physician Ibn Az-Zahir, of Aleppo. The Syrian physician had immediately ordered the application of opiates, and the dementing pain had abated within moments, to Warmund’s shocked but formidably grateful disbelief.

  Warmund’s priestly colleagues, forgetting their former helplessness, had at once started muttering jealously about sorcery and witchcraft, but he quickly silenced them. He had known about opiates for years, he told them, from information gleaned from his wide-ranging reading. He knew that the Roman legionary surgeons and physicians had used opiates for hundreds of years, and he had read many examples of how their painkilling powers had verged upon the magical. What he had not been able to imagine, until he experienced them for himself, was just how magically analgesic the opiates would prove to be. Under their influence he had lost all awareness, and all memory, of the pain from which they protected him.

  But he had become addicted to them, too, and being weaned away from them once his wounds had healed was one of the most harrowing experiences he had ever known. Seeing the intense and debilitating sickness that the young knight monk had suffered in the days following his return, Warmund had recognized the symptoms of withdrawal that he himself had endured years earlier. He had said nothing to anyone, merely intimating that he would pray for the young knight and that the man would regain his senses within a short time.

  No
w there was no doubt in the Archbishop’s mind that Stephen St. Clair had been abducted by the princess, for reasons known only to herself, and that he had been heavily drugged for the duration of his captivity.

  The question bedeviling the Patriarch Archbishop at the moment was, what to do next? He could see no benefit at all in telling the young knight, or his fellow monks, what he now knew, because he knew St. Clair, hothead that he sometimes was, would be likely to go storming off in search of the princess, demanding an explanation, and that would lead to nothing but grief. Besides, if he were to inform the young man, or anyone else for that matter, that he had been abducted by the princess, he would virtually guarantee the loss of all hope of discovering what underlay the abduction.

  Pushing himself away from the window, the Archbishop moved to sit at the long work table against the eastern wall, where he sat drumming his fingers on the tabletop for a long time before he rose again and went to the chapel where St. Clair awaited him.

  “These dreams, my son,” he said as he entered. “I have been thinking about them and about what you have gone through. You say you recall some of them clearly after awakening. Do you recall them with pleasure?”

  The younger man had sprung to his feet as the Archbishop entered, and now his eyes went wide with consternation. “No, my lord Patriarch, I—”

  “Do you anticipate them with pleasure before going to bed, or falling asleep?”

  “No, my lo—”

  “And do you compose your mind to accept the dreams before you fall asleep?”

  “No—”

  “I thought not, and I am glad of it. But I had to ask.”

  St. Clair’s mouth hung slightly open and his brow was furrowed in incomprehension. Warmund beckoned with one hand.

  “Come with me, if you will.”

  He led the other man out of the chapel and into the room with the table, where he pulled out a chair for St. Clair, bidding him sit, and perched himself on one corner of the table.

  “You may have forgotten this,” he said, “but the primary constituent of a mortal sin—the single element without which there can be no sin—is intent. Intent to sin. And intent to sin entails two things: the clear recognition that a given course of action will result in the commission of a mortal sin, and a decision, after that, to go ahead and sin deliberately, despite that certain knowledge. Do you understand?”

  St. Clair shook his head, and Warmund sighed and spoke more slowly, enunciating each point clearly and emphasizing each one with a raised finger.

  “I am telling you, as Patriarch Archbishop of Jerusalem, that I detect no sin in you, Brother Stephen. You have done nothing to incur guilt. These events are beyond your control. They are inflicted upon you without your volition, and therefore you are innocent of intent, and innocent of sin.

  “I believe that much of the pain you are feeling is caused by your belief that you are sinning in these matters, so hear me clearly now in this, my son: you are not. Believe that, and it is my sincere belief that these dreams will pass from your awareness. Not at first, you must understand, and not quickly, but slowly and surely they will fade. Pray to God for sustenance and guidance, and place yourself in His hands. He will not abandon you. Now go in peace and remember me to Brother Hugh.”

  THREE

  “Brother Hugh, Brother Stephen is back.” Payn de Montdidier hesitated, seeing the incomprehension in his superior’s eyes, then added, “Brother Stephen. You asked me to let you know when he returned, from his meeting with the Patriarch.”

  “The Patriarch?” Hugh de Payens continued to look befuddled, but then, as he pronounced the words, his face cleared. “Ah, Brother Stephen, yes, of course. Have him come to me at once, if you will, Brother Payn.” As the other swung away in obedience, de Payens returned to the document over which he had been poring, his pointing fingertip once again tracing the lines on the ancient chart.

  That morning, shortly after Stephen St. Clair’s departure for the Patriarch’s palace, the word they had all been anticipating for years had finally arrived. But it had not come from Anjou. It had come from the ground beneath their feet, where against all odds, the two brothers working the early-morning shift in the tunnels had broken through into an older tunnel that ran above and slightly to the left of the one in which they had been working. The breakthrough had been accidental, signaled only by a sudden rift in the roof of the tunnel. The roof of that tunnel had, for years, been solid stone, yet now there was a hole, through which a stream of debris and dust was falling. As soon as the initial fall had abated, the monks had gone forward, with great care, to investigate, and it became immediately obvious that they had encountered something beyond their experience.

  Hugh had no doubt that they had found one of the very tunnels shown on the map he was now scrutinizing, one of a series of charts carefully copied from the ancient original in the Order’s archives. The tunnels it depicted were of unimaginable antiquity, dug deep beneath the Temple Mount itself, in the days following the flight of the Hebrews from Egypt.

  By sheer coincidence, Hugh himself had been the first person Gondemare and Geoffrey Bissot had seen when they came bursting from the tunnel entrance full of the news of their discovery and as stunned as he was by the unimaginable magnitude of what their find signified. He had none the less retained sufficient presence of mind to rein in their enthusiasm quickly, before their exuberance could endanger any of the secrecy the brothers had worked so hard to maintain. The two monks had been abashed and slightly chastened by his warnings to be cautious, but their eagerness had been irrepressible, and so he had sent them back to work temporarily, until he could have the opportunity to assemble the brethren for the announcement of their tidings.

  He had not yet had time to do that. He had not yet had time even to settle the turmoil in his own breast, for this discovery was the first sign they had encountered, in eight years of solid, grindingly brutal labor, that there might, in truth, be substance to the legendary lore they were pursuing, and a solid core of facts underlying all their hopes and endeavors. His first act, after sending the monks back to work in the tunnel, had been to retrieve the old map from the case in which it was stored and to check it against the direction in which they had been digging for the previous five months. They had sunk their primary shaft vertically for eighty-six feet, by Montbard’s calculations, and then, relying on the most careful mathematical analysis of which they were capable—and two of the brethren were highly capable in that field—they had established a sound method of directional digging, striking northeastward at a depth they had gauged likely to lead them to intercept another tunnel. None of them, Hugh was secretly convinced, had expected anything to come of it, for everyone knew that the odds against such an intersection were great enough to defy calculation. It was nothing short of madness to think that they could dig vertically, then horizontally, and actually find another excavation dug thousands of years before.

  Yet that was exactly what they had done.

  A noise from behind him made him turn quickly enough to surprise St. Clair, who had just entered. The younger monk drew himself up and bowed his head slightly. “You sent for me, Brother Hugh.”

  “I did, Stephen, I did. How went your interview with the Patriarch?”

  St. Clair nodded, his face somber. “Well enough, I think. He does not believe me possessed.”

  “I knew that. I told you so myself, did I not? What did he say to you?”

  “Not much. He listened closely while I told him everything you had bidden me tell him, and then he made me tell the whole tale again, interrupting me this time with many questions, some of them very strange and seemingly lacking in logic.”

  “Such as what?”

  St. Clair huffed a deep, sharp sigh. “The colors in my dreams held great interest for him, although I had scarce been aware of any colors.”

  “Colors?”

  “Aye, he was insistent that I think of those, and as I did, they came back to me … strange colors I could
scarce describe … yellows and purples and reds. Then, when I had finally remembered them, he lost interest in them, it seemed to me. Finally he told me to put my faith in God, who would not abandon me, and he said he believes that much of my torment comes from my own belief that I have sinned sorely. He attempted to convince me that I could not have sinned, since I had no intent to sin. But I’ve seen too many knights standing over butchered bodies that they had not meant to kill in the beginning to believe in that. A killing is a killing. A sin is a sin.”

  “I see. Did he say no more?”

  “Only that I should pray, and that the torment, whatever is causing it, will recede eventually.”

  “So he believes you should return to your patrol duties?”

  The look that St. Clair shot back at him was filled with cynicism. “Did you expect otherwise, Master Hugh? I draw four patrols to every other brother’s one. Of course he would want me to return to my patrol duties, but he did not say so.”

  De Payens grunted, deep in his chest, and bit back the impulse to chastise the younger monk for his angry tone, reminding himself that St. Clair had been under great strain recently. Instead, he walked away, scratching with one finger at a sudden itch in his ear. “I don’t think I want you to return to patrol duties. Not yet, not for a while.” He turned back and waved an open hand towards the table and the chairs beside it. “Sit you down.”

  As St. Clair moved slowly to obey, de Payens continued. “I believe it might not be in your best interests at this time to be too much out there in the world you have so recently sworn to forsake, and so I intend to keep you walled in here for a time, away from the world of ordinary men. I have work for those young muscles of yours—work that your elder brethren will be glad to see you undertake.” A wide, kindly smile took any sting from his words, and he sat down on the other side of the table.