The Templar Knight

by Jan Guillou

  The Grand Master glanced at the bull, recognizing the papal seal; he also realized that he could not read the text because it was in Latin. He therefore had no choice; he had to humble himself and ask Arn to read it and translate, which Arn did without showing a hint of surprise.

  Both the Grand Master and his new Jerusalem’s Master James de Mailly lost their good humor immediately when they heard the bad news. Heraclius was the man who had campaigned harder than anyone in the Church for Gérard de Ridefort to become Grand Master. As a result the new Grand Master now owed a debt of gratitude to a known poisoner.

  Arn was waved away, and he left the Grand Master at once after giving a deep bow. It was with an unexpected feeling of relief that Arn now went to seek lodging for the night among the guest rooms, for it had struck him that he had only a little more than a year left of his penance. He would soon have served nineteen of the twenty years that he had sworn to complete in the Order of the Knights Templar.

  This was a new and foreign thought for him. Until the precise moment when he had been dismissed by the new Grand Master Gérard de Ridefort and for the last time walked through the high-ceilinged halls in the quarters of the Knights Templar in Jerusalem, he had avoided counting the years, months, and days. Possibly because it was more than likely that he would be sent to Paradise by the enemy long before he had managed to serve his twenty years.

  But now there was only a year left, and a peace accord was in place for the next several years with Saladin. There was no war on the horizon in the coming year. So he might survive after all; he might at last travel home.

  Never before had he felt such a strong longing for home. At the start of his time in the Holy Land the twenty years had seemed such an eternity that it was impossible to imagine himself living beyond that point. And in recent years he had been much too busy with his blessed work as Jerusalem’s Master to imagine another life for himself. On that evening, not long ago, he had sat in the rooms where Gérard de Ridefort now ruled, discussing the future of the Holy Land with Count Raymond, Prince Bohemund, Roger des Moulins, and the d’Ibelin brothers. On that evening all the power in the Holy Land and Outremer was together in the same room, and the future had looked bright. Together they had been able to conclude peace with Saladin.

  Now the entire chessboard had been overturned. Gérard de Ridefort was a mortal enemy of the regent Count Raymond. All plans to bring the Templars and the Hospitallers closer together would now probably come to naught. As if he felt some warning about the future, Arn sensed that he was seeing only the beginning of evil changes that were in store for the entire Holy Land.

  When he returned to Gaza he could at least look forward to seeing his Norwegian kinsman Harald Øysteinsson, who by this time was heartily tired of singing hymns and sweating all day long in a remote fortress in the baking sun. The little that Harald had seen of war in the Holy Land had not been to his liking; the tedious daily life time in a fortress during peacetime must seem even worse.

  Arn then realized that as fortress master he would be able to order the brothers and sergeants who could swim and dive to continue practicing those skills. If Gaza’s harbor was ever blockaded by an enemy fleet and the city was simultaneously under siege, the ability to swim at night through the enemy blockade would be of great importance. Since Arn himself and Harald were the only ones who could really swim and dive, this new exercise would be more for their own private pleasure than any serious preparation for war. The Rule forbade them to practice together on Gaza’s jetties, since no Templar knight could show himself undressed before another brother, nor could anyone swim solely for the sake of pleasure. So they would have to take turns swimming, but their enjoyment in partaking of this alleged practice for war would surely be considerably greater than its military usefulness to the Knights Templar.

  Some years earlier Arn would never have dreamed of twisting and turning the Rule so wantonly. But now that he felt his remaining time in service to be more of a waiting period than a holy duty, he surrendered much of the gravity that had previously marked his behavior. He and Harald began to speak of traveling together; as fortress master Arn could relieve Harald at any time from his duties as sergeant. They agreed that such a long journey to the North was something they would prefer to do together.

  Yet it was difficult to imagine how they would get together enough funds for the journey. During his almost twenty years of being personally penniless Arn was no longer accustomed to thinking of money as a problem. On reflection, however, he found that he could certainly borrow enough traveling money from one of the worldly knights he knew. In the worst case, he and Harald might have to go into service for a year or so, for instance in Tripoli or Antioch, before they could afford to leave.

  Once they began talking about the journey, it made them long for home even more. They dreamed of regions they had long ago pushed out of their minds; they saw faces from the past and in the silence heard their own language. To Arn a special image from what had once been his home grew stronger than everything else. Each night he saw Cecilia, each night he prayed to God’s Mother to protect Cecilia and his unknown child.

  Occasionally he received news from travelers going between Gaza and Jerusalem, and his feeling was reinforced that everything was sliding downhill when it came to the Holy Land. Now in Jerusalem no prayers were permitted except by Christians, and no Saracen doctors or Jews could work for either the Templar knights or the worldly ones. The enmity between Hospitallers and Templars had grown worse than ever, since the two Grand Masters refused to speak to each other. And the Knights Templar seemed to be doing whatever they could to sabotage the peace that the regent, Count Raymond, was trying his best to maintain. One warning sign was that the Knights Templar had come to be close friends with the caravan plunderer Reynald de Châtillon of Kerak. As Arn understood the situation, it was probably only a matter of time before that man would venture out on new plundering raids. When he did the peace with Saladin would be broken, and that was what the Knights Templar clearly wanted to happen.

  But nowadays Arn was thinking about his journey home and was more interested in counting his remaining days in the Order of the Knights Templar than he was concerned about the black clouds he saw looming over the eastern horizon of the Holy Land. In his own mind he defended this attitude by thinking that he could no longer do any useful work since God had taken away all his power within the Order. Nor could he blame himself for his new indifference.

  During this uneventful year in Gaza he devoted more hours than necessary every day to riding his Arabian horses, the stallion Ibn Anaza and the mare Umm Anaza. They were the only property permitted to him; if he found the right buyer they would pay for both his and Harald’s trip home to the North several times over. But he had no intention of voluntarily relinquishing these two horses, because he judged them to be the best steeds he had ever seen, much less ridden. Ibn Anaza and Umm Anaza would definitely come home with him to Western Götaland.

  Western Götaland. He said the name of his country to himself now and then, as if to get used to it again.

  When he had ten months left of his service, a rider came with urgent news from the Grand Master in Jerusalem. Arn de Gothia was to ride immediately to Ashkelon with thirty knights to serve as part of an important escort.

  Obviously he obeyed at once, and arrived with his knights in Ashkelon that same afternoon.

  What had happened was momentous but not unexpected. The child king Baldwin V had died in the care of his uncle, Joscelyn de Courtenay, and the body now had to be accompanied to Jerusalem along with the funeral guests Guy de Lusignan and Sibylla, the apparently not very sad mother of the child.

  On the road between Ashkelon and Jerusalem Arn had already realized that the import of the journey was much greater than grieving for and burying a child. There was a power shift in the making.

  Two days later in Jerusalem, when Joscelyn de Courtenay proclaimed his niece Sibylla as successor to the throne, the plans of the consp
irators of the coup were made clear.

  In the Templars’ quarter where Arn was now living in the guest rooms for the lower knights, he met a dejected Father Louis, who told him everything that had happened.

  First Joscelyn de Courtenay had come rushing to Jerusalem. There he met with the regent, Count Raymond, and told him about the death of the child king Baldwin. He suggested to Raymond that he summon the high council of barons to meet in Tiberias instead of in Jerusalem. In this way they could avoid interference from the Grand Master of the Templars, Gérard de Ridefort, who did not feel bound by any oath to obey King Baldwin IV’s last will, and the patriarch Heraclius, who also tried to get his fingers in everything.

  Count Raymond had thus let himself be duped into leaving Jerusalem. At that point Reynald de Châtillon came thundering into the city with scores of knights from Kerak; then Joscelyn de Courtenay at once proclaimed his niece Sibylla the next successor to the throne. This would mean, if the plan were carried out, that the incompetent Guy de Lusignan could soon be King of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Count Raymond, the d’Ibelin brothers, and all the others who could have prevented such a move had been lured away from Jerusalem. All the gates and walls around the city were guarded by the Knights Templar, so no enemy of the conspirators could slip into the city. It seemed that nothing could stop the evil that was about to befall the Holy Land.

  The only one who made any attempt to avert this calamity in the following days was the Grand Master of the Hospitallers, Roger des Moulins. He refused to betray the oath he had given before God to the late King Baldwin IV. The patriarch Heraclius, however, did not feel bound by any oath, and the Grand Master of the Templars, Gérard de Ridefort, pointed out that he himself had never sworn such an oath; the promise that a dismissed Jerusalem’s Master had made on his behalf could not be considered valid.

  The coronation took place in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. First the caravan plunderer Reynald de Châtillon gave a powerful speech in which he claimed that Sibylla was in truth the rightful successor to the throne, since she was the daughter of King Amalrik, the sister of King Baldwin IV, and the mother of the deceased King Baldwin V. Then the patriarch Heraclius crowned Sibylla. She in turn took the crown and placed it on the head of her husband, Guy de Lusignan, and then placed the scepter in his hand.

  As everyone was filing out of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to go to the customary banquet in the Templars’ quarter, Gérard de Ridefort shouted out his joy. With God’s help he had finally taken his great and absolutely glorious revenge on Count Raymond, who now sat far off in Tiberias and could do nothing but gnash his teeth.

  Arn was present during the coronation because he had been entrusted with the responsibility for the guards that would protect the lives of the new king and queen. He found this to be a bitter task, since he viewed those he protected as perjurers who would drive the Holy Land to its doom. He steeled himself with the thought that his remaining time in the Holy Land was only seven months.

  To add to Arn’s bitterness, Grand Master Gérard de Ridefort called him over to assure him that he did not bear a grudge. On the contrary, the Grand Master said that there was much that he did not know when he so hastily relieved Arn of his command of Jerusalem. He had now learned that Arn was a great warrior, the best archer and rider, and also the victor of Mont Gisard. So now he wanted to make amends to some extent by giving Arn the honored assignment of becoming commander of the royal guard.

  Arn felt insulted, but he didn’t show it. He began counting the days until the 4th of July, 1187; it was on that day twenty years earlier that he had sworn obedience, poverty, and chastity for the length of his penance.

  What he saw during his brief time as commander of the royal guard did not surprise him in the least. Guy de Lusignan and his wife Sibylla carried on the same indecent nighttime activities as did the patriarch Heraclius; Sibylla’s mother, Agnes; and her uncle Joscelyn de Courtenay.

  Earlier in his service Arn would have probably wept to see all power in the Holy Land gathered in the hands of these sinners from the abyss. Now he felt more resigned, as if he had already become reconciled to the idea that God’s punishment could only be one: the loss of the Holy Land and Jerusalem.

  Toward the end of the year, as expected, Reynald de Châtillon broke the truce with Saladin and plundered the largest ever caravan to be attacked on its way between Mecca and Damascus. It was not hard to understand that Saladin was furious; one of the travelers who had landed in the dungeon of the fortress of Kerak was his sister. Soon the rumor reached Jerusalem that Saladin had sworn to God to kill Reynald with his own hands.

  When Saladin’s negotiator came to King Guy de Lusignan to demand reparations for the breach of the peace agreement and the immediate release of the prisoners, Guy could promise nothing. He regretted that he had no power over Reynald de Châtillon.

  With that there was no salvation from the coming war.

  Prince Bohemund of Antioch, however, quickly concluded peace between Antiochia and Saladin. Count Raymond did the same for both his County of Tripoli and his wife Escheva’s lands around Tiberias in the Galilee. Neither Bohemund nor Raymond considered that they had any responsibility for what the demented court in Jerusalem might do, and they soon informed Saladin of this fact.

  Now a civil war amongst the Christians seemed imminent. Gérard de Ridefort persuaded King Guy to send an army to Tiberias to humble Count Raymond once and for all.

  However, at the last minute Balian d’Ibelin managed to convince the king to listen to reason. Civil war would be the same as death, because they would soon be in a full-scale war with Saladin. What was needed now, argued Balian d’Ibelin, was reconciliation with Count Raymond; he offered to serve as the envoy and go to Tiberias to negotiate.

  Appointed as negotiators were the two Grand Masters, Gérard de Ridefort and Roger des Moulins, Balian d’Ibelin, and Bishop Josias of Tyrus. A few knights from the Hospitallers and the Templars would escort them, including Arn de Gothia.

  Meanwhile, Count Raymond in Tiberias had a difficult dilemma. As if to test the viability of the peace accord between them, Saladin sent his son al Afdal with a request to be allowed to send a large scouting party for one day through Galilee. Count Raymond agreed to this, under the condition that the force would ride into the region at sunrise and be out by sundown. So it was agreed.

  At the same time Count Raymond sent riders to warn the approaching negotiation group not to end up in the clutches of the enemy force.

  Outside Nazareth, Count Raymond’s messengers encountered the negotiators and issued the warning. They were thanked kindly for the warning by the Grand Master of the Templars, Gérard de Ridefort, but his gratitude was not for the reasons they would have guessed.

  Gérard de Ridefort now thought that this was a brilliant opportunity to defeat one of Saladin’s forces. He sent a message to the fortress of La Fève, where the new Jerusalem’s Master James de Mailly was located with ninety Templar knights. In the city of Nazareth they were able to scrape together an additional forty knights and some foot soldiers. And as they rode out from Nazareth to search for al Afdal and his Syrian riders, Gérard de Ridefort stirred up the residents of Nazareth to follow after them on foot, for he assured them that now there would be much rich booty to plunder.

  Bishop Josias of Tyrus wisely stopped in Nazareth, since he didn’t think he was qualified to proceed any farther unless negotiations were to be conducted. He would never regret that decision.

  A Christian force of a hundred and forty armored knights, of which the majority were Templars, accompanied by about a hundred foot soldiers, made a rather imposing presence. But when they encountered the enemy at Cresson’s springs as expected and gazed down the slopes, they at first couldn’t believe their eyes. Down there by the springs they now saw seven thousand Mameluke lancers and Syrian mounted archers watering their horses.

  It might all come down to simple arithmetic and nothing more. If they were a hundred and forty
knights, of which most were Templars and Hospitallers, under favorable conditions they might be able to take on seven hundred Mamelukes and Syrian archers. Seven hundred, but not seven thousand.

  The Grand Master of the Hospitallers, Roger des Moulins, therefore calmly counseled retreat. The Templars’ military commander James de Mailly was of the same opinion.

  But Grand Master Gérard de Ridefort was absolutely opposed. He flew into a rage and called the others cowards. He insulted James de Mailly by saying that he was much too concerned about the safety of his blond head to risk it before God. He said that Roger des Moulins was an unworthy Grand Master, and he made other claims of this sort.

  Arn, who now had too low a position to be consulted, sat a short distance away on his Frankish stallion Ardent, but not so far that he couldn’t follow the heated argument. To him it was clear that Gérard de Ridefort must be insane. An attack in broad daylight against such an overwhelming force could only end in death, especially since the enemy had already noticed the danger and had begun mounting their horses to form ranks.

  But Gérard de Ridefort was unrelenting. He was going to attack. With that the Hospitallers and the others were forced to follow, for honor left them no choice.

  When they were arrayed in battle order, Gérard called Arn over and asked him to ride as confanonier, since that task required an especially bold and skilled horseman. This meant that Arn was to ride next to the Grand Master and carry the flag of the Knights Templar. At the same time he would function as the Grand Master’s shield, ready at any moment to sacrifice his life to protect the highest brother in the Order. The Grand Master and the flag were the last that should be lost in battle.

  Arn was aware of several emotions, but fear was not the strongest as he formed up with his other brothers in a straight line of attack. His strongest feeling was disappointment. He had come so close to freedom. Now he would have to die for the whim of a fool; his death would be just as meaningless as that of all the others in the Holy Land who had fallen because they were subordinate to insane or incompetent leaders. For the first time in Arn’s life his mind was filled with the thought of flight. But then he remembered his oath, which applied for another two months. His life was finite but his oath was eternal.