The Templar Knight

by Jan Guillou

  The Hospitallers of St. John were no friends of the Templars, though Arn did not know why, only that there was always tension between the two orders. It often happened that if the Hospitallers were in a battle, the Templars would stay out of it, and vice versa. This time the Hospitallers had not participated with more than a symbolic force, while their main force remained in safety behind the walls of Beaufort.

  The nickname the Templars had for the Hospitaller Order was the black Samaritans, which referred both to their black mantles with the white cross and to the fact that they had originated as a hospital offering free medical care. But since there were now many wounded to take care of, not a word of affront was heard among the rescued and wounded Templar knights who had involuntarily become the guests of their rival order.

  It was a hard first night with many wounded to look after at the fortress of Beaufort. Exhausted and red-eyed from lack of sleep and with a paralyzing sorrow within him, Arn forced himself to take a walk around the walls of the fortress to observe and learn. Beaufort was situated at a high elevation. He could see the glittering sea in the west, the Bekaa Valley in the north, and snow-clad mountains in the east. The high location of the fortress made it impossible even to imagine how an enemy could build siege towers outside on the slopes to get over those walls. The steep cliffs all around would make it equally impossible to drag catapults into position. Standing outside the walls and screaming insults, as the enemy soldiers were now doing, was meaningless. Not even a very long siege would have any effect, because the fortress was supplied by its own spring and had cisterns that were so overfilled that they had to release water into an artificial stream toward the west. The grain magazine was always full and held enough to support five hundred men for a year.

  One drawback was possibly that the steep cliffs outside made it impossible to strike back at a besieger with surprise cavalry attacks. Right now there were more than three hundred knights inside the fortress and an equal number of sergeants. That was a force that on a flat battlefield would quickly have obliterated the vituperators that now camped outside the walls. Had they known what a large force was inside the fortress they would surely have been less audacious. But that was the thing about fortresses: they always contained a secret. Were there only twenty defenders inside? Or a thousand? More than once a superior enemy had passed by fortresses without attacking because they had miscalculated the size of the garrison. The opposite had also occurred. As in this case, the enemy thought they were besieging an almost empty fortress and let themselves be lulled into a false sense of security. Then they were crushed in the first assault.

  Arn went to take care of Khamsiin again, brushing the horse and speaking to him about his great sorrow. For the third time he examined every inch of his steed’s body to assure himself that there was no hidden arrow-wound. But Khamsiin proved to be as uninjured as his master, with only a few scratches, the sort that they both had learned to live with.

  After tending to Khamsiin he proceeded to the sergeants’ quarters, speaking with the wounded and praying. After prayers he took Harald Øysteinsson up on the walls to teach him how a fortress functioned.

  As they walked along the breastwork on the eastern wall, they discovered a grisly procession on its way up to the fortress. There were several squadrons of Mameluke cavalry slowly working their way up the slopes. On their raised lances they each bore a bloody head, and almost all the heads had beards.

  They stood as if petrified, without saying a word, without showing on their faces what they were feeling. This was hard for Harald Øysteinsson, but he made a great effort to behave in the same apparently unmoved manner as his lord.

  The triumphant Mamelukes lined up in row after row below the eastern wall and shook their bloody lances so that the beards on the severed heads flapped up and down. One of them rode up in front of the others and raised his voice in something that sounded to Harald like a prayer, a lament, and a victory cry all at the same time.

  “What is he saying?” Harald whispered, his mouth dry.

  “He says that he thanks God the Almighty that the indignity of Mont Gisard is now eradicated, that what happened yesterday at Marj Ayyoun is more than sufficient redress, that we will all have our heads skewered in this way, and more such talk,” said Arn without expression.

  Just then Beaufort’s weapons master came hurrying up onto the wall along with several Hospitallers. The weapons master shouted orders not to shoot at the enemy, and the sergeants who had already begun to fumble for their bows and crossbows laid down their arms.

  “Why can’t we shoot?” asked Harald. “Shouldn’t some of them have to die so we can put an end to their bluster?”

  “Yes,” said Arn in the same toneless way he had spoken before. “The one riding in front should die. You can see by the blue silk band around his right arm that he is their commander, and he’s the one who is proclaiming that he’s the great conqueror, God’s favorite, and other blasphemy. He should be the first to die, but not before we have sung none.”

  “Shouldn’t we take revenge rather than sing hymns?” Harald muttered with ill-concealed impatience.

  “Yes, it might seem so,” replied Arn. “But above all we must not act prematurely. You see that they have lined up at what they think is a safe distance from arrows and—”

  “But I can—”

  “Hush! Don’t interrupt me. Remember that you are a sergeant. Yes, I know that you could hit him from here. So could I. But the braggart down there doesn’t know that. We’re not in charge here at the Hospitallers’ fortress. Their weapons master gave orders for no one to shoot, and that was a wise thing to do.”

  “Why was that so wise? How long do we have to put up with this blasphemous display?”

  “Until after we have sung none, I said. Then the sun will be low in the west; the men down there will have the sun in their eyes and won’t see our arrows until it’s too late. The Hospitallers’ weapons master was wise because those of us up here must not show our despair or shoot wasted arrows that will provoke only laughter. We certainly don’t want to goad on their merriment. That’s why he gave the order.”

  Arn took his sergeant over to the weapons master, who was still up on the walls. He greeted the man very courteously and requested permission to kill some of the Mamelukes that afternoon, although no one would loose an arrow before then.

  Only reluctantly did the weapons master give his permission, since he thought that the enemy would stay at a safe distance for at least that long.

  Arn bowed humbly and requested furthermore that he and his sergeant might borrow bows from the armory, since they had lost their own when they crossed the River Litani. He also asked that they be allowed to practice with the bows down in the courtyard before it was time.

  Perhaps there was something in the earnestness of Arn’s manner, or perhaps it was the black edge of his mantle that showed his high rank, but the Hospitallers’ weapons master suddenly changed both his tone of voice and bearing as he granted Arn everything that he had asked.

  A while later Arn and Harald tried out various bows in the armory and took two each along with a large quiver of arrows out to the courtyard; there they set up two hay bales as targets. They practiced resolutely until they found the bows that suited them best and learned how high above the target they had to aim. The knights among the Hospitallers came to watch their desperate guests attempt a feat that was far too difficult, at first acting somewhat superior in both speech and manner. But they soon fell silent when they saw what the tall brother and his sergeant could do.

  When the sun was the correct height that afternoon and they had sung the hymns they had to sing with the Hospitaller brothers in the big fortress church, Arn took some of his Templar knight-brothers and Harald up on the walls. He asked them to walk back and forth a few times to show themselves. As he had hoped, the white mantles up on the walls incited the enemy down below, and the soldiers again raised their lances with the severed heads of the knights’ broth
ers. Hooting and taunting, they took up where they had left off earlier before they tired of all the commotion, since it had not prompted even one vain shot from above.

  The Templar knights stood silent and grave, in full view up on the walls, as the scornful enemy dared come ever closer. Soon the Templars could recognize some of their brothers who were now in Paradise. Siegfried de Turenne was one of them. Ernesto de Navarra, the great swordsman, was among them too.

  Once more the emir who yelled loudest about God’s protection and the great victory at Marj Ayyoun rode up in front of the others with his bloody trophy raised before him.

  “He’s the one we’ll take first,” said Arn. “We’ll both shoot at him, you high and I low. When he’s dead we’ll see how many of the others we can hit.”

  Harald nodded somberly as he drew his bow, raised it, and glanced at Arn, who was also now raising his drawn bow. They stood like silhouettes against the sun, and the shadows of their bodies concealed the shiny tips of their arrows.

  “You go first,” Arn commanded.

  The emir down below was just moving on from a long tirade of boasting to invoking God anew. He had leaned his head back and was singing a prayer as loudly as he could.

  Then an arrow slammed into his open mouth and out through the back of his neck, and another arrow struck him low in the chest where the ribs divide. He fell soundlessly from his horse.

  Before the men around him understood what had happened, another four of them fell, skewered by arrows, and a tumult arose as they all tried to withdraw at the same time. A shower of arrows then landed in their midst, for now all the archers up on the breastwork had orders to take their best shot. More than ten Mamelukes fell due to their boastful pride and their willingness to mock the defeated.

  Afterward Harald reaped much praise from both the Templars and the Hospitallers for taking the first shot and shutting the mouth of the worst of the blusterers in the best imaginable way. That arrow-shot would live long in the memory of all.

  Harald admitted to Arn that he had struck too high, that his intention had been to put the arrow somewhere below the man’s chin. Arn said that there was no reason to admit that miss to anyone else. In any case it looked as though God had steered the arrow straight into the blasphemer’s mouth. The pranks of the Mamelukes were now over, and that was the important thing. When their own dead lay before the walls they would surely lose their desire for further taunting.

  And so it was. The Mamelukes withdrew and waited for the dark of night so they could fetch their dead. The next morning they were gone.

  At the request of Count Raymond III of Tripoli, who was also among the defeated behind the walls, the master of the Hospitallers’ fortress at Beaufort had refrained from inviting Arn to the evening wine and bread after completorium. It was well known that Count Raymond detested the Templars.

  But when the master of the fortress heard how his brother in rank from the Templars had shut up the boisterous foes outside the walls, he found it unreasonable not to invite Arn for wine and bread that same evening.

  Arn arrived unsuspecting, although he knew that Count Raymond was the foremost among the secular knights in Outremer; but he knew nothing about the count’s hatred of the Templars.

  What he noticed first that evening when he entered the master’s own rooms in the northeastern part of the fortress was that the count was the only one among both the secular and ecclesiastical knights who refused to greet him.

  When all had sat down and blessed the bread and wine, the mood was tense. They ate and drank for a while in silence, until Count Raymond in derisive terms asked what the madmen had intended at Marj Ayyoun.

  Arn was the only one in the room who did not understand what the count meant by “the madmen,” so he didn’t think that the question was directed at him. But he soon noticed that everyone was staring at him and waiting for an answer. Then he spoke the truth, that he hadn’t understood the question, if it indeed was directed at him.

  Count Raymond then asked Arn, in a sarcastically polite tone of voice, if he would relate what had happened to the Templar knights who had been expected to rescue a royal army in great difficulty.

  Arn told him briefly and bluntly about the mistakes that had led the Templar knights into death. He added that he had seen it all, because at the crucial moment he was high up on one flank and perhaps had been able to see what his Grand Master unfortunately could not when he gave the last command of his life.

  The Hospitallers in the room bowed their heads in prayer, for they could imagine better than anyone what had happened. They too were known for their sometimes foolhardy attacks.

  But Count Raymond was not for an instant moved by the tragic tale. In a loud voice and without the slightest courtesy he began describing the Templars as madmen who would lead an army to its doom on one occasion only to be victorious the next; they would really be better off without them. The knights were reckless fools, friends of the condemned Assassins, uneducated louts who knew nothing about Saracens and who through their ignorance might lead the entire Christian population of Outremer to their deaths.

  He was a tall and very powerful man with long blond hair that had begun to turn gray. His language was coarse and harsh, and he spoke Frankish with the accent of a native Frank, those that were called subars. It was said that a subar resembled the cactus fruit the word described, prickly on the outside but deliciously sweet inside. Yet their speech could be hard to understand for newly arrived Franks because they used many of their own words and many words that were Saracen.

  Arn did not reply to the count’s insults because he had not the slightest idea how to handle the uncomfortable situation in which he now found himself. He was a guest of the Hospitallers, but a guest of necessity. And he had never before heard such affronts spoken about the Templars. For the sake of his honor a Templar knight could draw his weapon, but the Rule also forbade any Templar knight from killing or mistreating a Christian. The punishment was the loss of his mantle. So Arn could not defend himself with his sword. Nor with words.

  Yet his submissive silence did not put a stop to Count Raymond, who had lost a stepson in the battle and was in despair like all the others in the room over the crushing defeat. The presence of an odious young Templar knight at the same table provoked his wrath.

  As if to put Arn in his place once and for all, he repeated some of the last things he had said about the filthy brutes who didn’t even know what the Koran was, and understood the Saracens even less.

  At last a bright idea entered Arn’s head. He raised his wine glass to Count Raymond and spoke the language of the Saracens to him.

  “In the name of the Merciful and Compassionate, honored Count Raymond, bear in mind the words of the Lord as we now drink together: And from the fruits of the date palm and the grapevine you shall extract both wine and healthful sustenance; in this there is certainly a message to him who employs his reason.”

  Arn sipped his wine slowly, set his Syrian wine glass carefully on the table, and looked at Count Raymond without rancor, but without lowering his gaze.

  “Were those really the words of the Koran? About drinking wine?” asked Count Raymond after a long, tense silence in the room.

  “Yes, indeed,” replied Arn quietly. “They are from the sixteenth sura, the sixty-seventh verse, and it bears thinking about. In the previous verse it does say that milk is preferable. But it does bear thinking about.”

  Count Raymond sat in silence for a moment, gazing intently at Arn, before he suddenly asked a question in Arabic.

  “Where, Templar knight, did you learn the language of the unbelievers? I learned it during ten years of captivity in Aleppo, but surely you have not been a captive, have you?”

  “No, I have not, as you may well understand,” replied Arn in the same language. “I learned from those who worked for us among the believers. The fact that I, unlike yourself, am forbidden to submit to captivity was made quite evident from what we saw today outside the walls. I
t pains me, count, that you speak so ill of my dead brothers. They died for God, they died for the Holy Land and for God’s Grave. But they also died for you and yours.”

  “Who is this Templar knight?” Count Raymond then asked in Frankish. His question seemed to be directed at the weapons master of the Hospitallers.

  “That, Count Raymond,” said the weapons master, “is the victor of Mont Gisard, when two hundred Templar knights conquered three thousand Mamelukes. That is the man whom the Saracens call Al Ghouti. With all respect, count, I would therefore like to ask you, as long as you are our guest, to pay more attention to your language.”

  Everyone now looked at Count Raymond without saying a word. He was the master of Tripoli and the foremost knight of the Franks, used to commanding any table at which he sat. The predicament he now found himself in was an unfamiliar one for him. But he was a man with great experience of both his own and others’ mistakes, and he decided to repair as quickly as possible the unnecessary dilemma that he had precipitated.

  “I have been an ass here this evening,” he said with a sigh followed by a smile. “The only redeeming feature I possess as an ass, however, is that unlike other asses I know when I’ve made a mistake. I shall now do something that I have never done in my life.”

  With these words he got up and strode across the room to Arn, pulled him to his feet and embraced him. Then he fell to his knees to beg forgiveness.

  Arn blushed and stammered that it was not right for a worldly man to humble himself so before a Templar knight.

  In this odd way a long friendship was begun between two men who in many respects stood far apart, but who both stood closer to the Saracens than did other Christians.

  That evening they were soon left alone in the three rooms of the Hospitallers’ fortress master. Count Raymond had taken a seat next to Arn and insisted that they both speak only Arabic so that all the others would be shut out of their conversation, which was his initial intention. Once they were left alone, which had also been his intention, and he ordered more wine as if he were at home in one of his own fortresses, Count Raymond still wanted to continue their conversation in Arabic. For as he said, the walls had ears everywhere in Outremer, and some of what he had to tell Arn might be called treason by malicious people.