by Jack Whyte
Accepting that awareness, years earlier, had been a difficult task for André, eased only by the recognition that it had been shared by every individual initiate of the ancient brotherhood into which he had been inducted, or Raised as his brethren called the initiation, at the age of eighteen, even before being knighted by Duke Richard.
The brotherhood conducted its affairs beneath a shroud of inviolable secrecy, with a simply stated purpose: to safeguard and study the incalculably valuable secret that was its sole reason for being. From the moment of his Raising to a full-status brother, André had grown increasingly fascinated with the reality of that secret, so that now, endlessly enthralled by what it all entailed, he found himself thinking of varying aspects of it at different times, every day of his life, no matter what he was doing or where he might be.
For more than a millennium, ever since the end of the first century of Christianity, its presence unsuspected and undreamed of by anyone outside its own ranks, the organization, the brotherhood, had been known to successive generations of initiate brothers as the Order of Rebirth in Sion, and throughout that time its members had been studying the great body of lore that lay at the root of its being. The secret they guarded so zealously and jealously was one so old and so alien to their everyday world that it defied belief, perhaps even more so now than ever before, after eleven hundred years. It had certainly defied André’s belief when he first learned of it, and he now believed implicitly that it had affected every one of his initiate brethren, older and younger, living and dead, in the same way since time immemorial, for alien it was. Its substance was inconceivable, and awareness of its mere existence induced nausea, profound terror, and the appalling possibility of eternal damnation, with the irretrievable loss of one’s immortal soul and forfeiture of any possible hope of achieving salvation on either side of death. And so the initiates questioned it vigorously and disputed its credibility with everything—every whit of logic, intellect, and instinctual horror and distaste at their disposal— beginning as soon as the trauma of their introduction to it had begun to wear off. And every individual initiate who fought against it came to appreciate, eventually, that every single one of his brethren, over the past thousand years, had shared the same odyssey and come to harbor at the end of it, at ease with the immensity of what he had learned to be the absolute truth. And one by one the entire brotherhood, to a man, became content to dedicate the remainder of their lives to proving that truth, by proving the truth underlying the lore of the Order.
That unity of purpose had survived unbroken, André knew, until approximately sixty years earlier, in 1127, when the Order had renamed itself by dropping the word Rebirth from its title, calling itself simply the Order of Sion. Only the brothers themselves knew of the change, and they smiled with pride when they thought of it, for after a millennium, the Rebirth had been achieved when a small group of nine knights from the Languedoc area, all of them members of the brotherhood, led by a man called Hugh de Payens, had excavated under the foundations of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and, after searching diligently and in secret for eight years, had unearthed exactly what the Order’s lore had told them would be in that precise place.
Thinking about what he knew, and what his father would never know, André lay his head down that night feeling more like a stranger in his father’s home than he had ever felt before.
THE NEXT MORNING, father and son were out in the training yard between the castle and its outer walls, waiting for sunrise, neither one enthusiastic about being there or about acknowledging the other’s presence. Sir Henry stood back with the heavy arbalest in his arms while André stooped close to the front wall of the yard in the dim light of the newborn day, a quiver of heavy crossbow bolts dangling from his shoulder, and carefully examined the old and battered balk of oak used for sword practice.
“This will serve, for now,” he said, striding back to join his father. “I’ll shoot from over yonder on the other side. The light will soon be strong enough for us.” He then led the way to the far side of the yard, less than fifty paces from the thick practice post, where he took the heavy weapon from Sir Henry and proceeded to arm it. Henry could see that his son was an expert in its use, for he pressed it front down against the ground and placed his foot firmly in the stirrup at the end, then leaned forward, bracing the butt end against his belly while he used both hands to wind the pair of swivel ratchets that dragged the bowstring of thickly woven leather back, against the pull of the steel bow, until it tipped and was held in place by the notched end of the trigger that protruded through the body of the weapon, at the end of the channeled groove that would hold the feathered bolt. It was hard work, and his father admired the way André performed the task with the ease and skill of a master.
“That’s the worst part,” André said, straightening his back and wiping a trickle of sweat from his eyebrow with the back of one hand. “Now we simply load the bolt and watch what it does.”
“Is this the same device you said will throw a missile five hundred paces?”
“Aye, it is. Why do you ask?”
“Because it is less than fifty paces from here to the post you’re aiming at. What do you hope to achieve there, in order to impress me?”
“Just watch. Pass me one of those bolts.”
Henry pulled one from the quiver on the ground and straightened up slowly, one eyebrow raised as he held the missile out towards his son, who took it and placed it in the launching position.
“Aye,” André said. “Heavier than you expected, was it not? And so it should be. That thing is solid steel. Now, watch.” He raised the arbalest to his shoulder, sighted quickly with one eye closed, and squeezed the lever that operated the trigger. There was a loud, sharp snap, and Henry saw the end of the weapon leap high into the air. He grinned, meeting his son’s eye.
“Unfortunate, that. The violence of that snap back must have destroyed your aim, no?”
“No, Father.” André’s headshake was definite. “Too much power involved for that. The bolt was clear and gone long before the nose began to rise. Look.” He pointed to the post, but peer as he might, Henry could see no sign of the bolt.
“You missed the post,” he said.
“No, sir, I did not. Look more closely.”
Henry moved forward, peering towards the distant pole, his pace increasing as he approached it, and then he hesitated and stopped, unable to believe what he was seeing. The steel bolt, fifteen inches long and as thick as one of his fingers, was almost completely buried in the post, splitting the weathered wood vertically above and below its point of impact. Only the flighted end of the bolt remained visible, protruding a mere three inches. He reached out to touch it with his fingertips, then turned to his son.
“This post is solid oak.”
André nodded, smiling. “I know, Father. Solid, aged, and seasoned, and battered now beyond its capacity to withstand much more abuse. I helped select it and set it in place there, you may recall, about twelve years ago. Now ask me again about the five-hundred-pace distance involved in a long shot.”
“No need,” Sir Henry answered, shaking his head slowly. “How many of these does Richard own?”
“Nowhere near sufficient to his purposes. That’s the rub. He has very few real arbalests—this kind, I mean, with the steel bow. There are none at all outside Richard’s own domains of England and Aquitaine. Bear in mind that no one has used these weapons in fifty years, so even the art of making them is lost to most armorers. The man who made this one I use is a smith with skills that surpass belief. He makes them very well, but he appears to be the only one who can, and he cannot make large numbers of them, nor can he make them quickly. He appears to be the only one, at this point, who knows the secret of springing the metal bows. He is training others now, apprentices, but that takes time.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “Plain crossbows, with bows of wood and laminated horn and sinew, are easier to come by, but even they are scarce and precious nowadays, each one worth its
weight in silver, perhaps even gold. And of course Richard’s English yeomen have their yew longbows, and their bowyers continue to work as they always have.”
Henry nodded, accepting his son’s word without demur. The second Pope Innocent, using the power of his office, had banned all projectile weapons—bows and crossbows alike—fifty years earlier, and the proscription, despite its papal origins, had been unusually successful, honored and observed beyond credence by almost everyone throughout Christendom. The results of that success, inevitable and, as it was now turning out, unfortunate, had been that bowyers and fletchers everywhere outside of England and Aquitaine, deprived of purchasers for their products, had turned their skills towards other crafts, and projectile weapons had fallen into disuse. They were seldom seen nowadays, and those that did survive were ancient, worn-out things, barely capable of bringing down a hare or a deer.
The official explanation for the papal ban had been that God Himself found these weapons offensive and un-Christian, and their use against Christian warriors from that time on had been forbidden under pain of excommunication and eternal fire. But the truth underlying it—and the pragmatic reason for both the original proposal and its subsequent acceptance by the knightly class—was that the escalating power and strength of the weapons had made it possible for an untrained, landless, ragamuffin man-at-arms, or even a serf, to shoot down and kill a fully armored, highly trained knight from a distance far enough removed to offer the killer immunity.
Among the ruling heads of Christendom at the time of the proscription, only the young Henry Plantagenet, then Count of Anjou but later to become King Henry II of England, had possessed both the perspicacity and the self-sufficient defiance to ignore the papal decree from the outset, keeping the weapons in use—albeit ostensibly for hunting and training purposes—within his own territories. He recognized that these weapons were the strongest and most lethal killing machines ever developed for use by individual men in dealing death impersonally, and hence terrifyingly, from great distances and he therefore refused to deny himself the advantages they offered to him as a warrior and commander of armies. And later, adhering to his example almost inevitably, his third-born son, Richard, Count of Anjou and Poitou, and eventually Duke of his mother’s province of Aquitaine, had adopted his father’s enthusiasm with an even greater approval of his own.
It was the unexplained anomaly of that behavior— since Richard seldom aped or approved of anything his father did—that made Sir Henry now ask his son, “Why then, if he has so few of them, is he making you responsible for training men to teach other men to use them? That seems to be a waste.”
“Not at all, sir. We are producing more of them all the time. Not with bewildering speed, but even so, we will need trained men to use them. But it is the idea of the weapon, its potential for spreading awe and fear, that excites Richard. His will be the only men in all the Frankish forces who have these weapons, and that will give him an advantage over all his allies.”
“Wait! Think about what you are saying, lad. Do you honestly believe the German Redbeard will not have these weapons?”
“Barbarossa?” André shrugged. “He might … He probably will, now that I think of it, for he’s the only man in Christendom who cares as little for the Pope’s decree as Richard does. But that merely proves Richard’s correctness. Can you imagine the advantage the German would have, in lording it over all of us, had Richard no such weapons?”
“Hmm.” The evident lack of interest in Sir Henry’s grunt indicated that his thoughts were already far away from that, involved with other things. “So then, aside from that, if Barbarossa is so easily dismissed, are you telling me that Richard is merely interested in a perceived advantage over his own allies here?”
André blinked. “Pardon me, sir, but where is ‘here’? I think I may have misunderstood your question.”
“Here is here,” his father snapped, “in Christendom. My question is: what, if anything, does Richard have in mind about using these weapons in Outremer?”
“Well …” André was plainly mystified. “He will use them, most certainly—”
Henry cut him off, his voice strained, biting back a sudden, angry impatience. “I hope he will, most certainly, as you say, since the ban against them states clearly that they are forbidden solely from use against Christians. But the enemy we go to face in Outremer is most certainly not Christian, and I have been told, by several sources, that they themselves used these very weapons—bows, at any rate—to harry and destroy the last Frankish and Christian armies we deployed against them. I pray God that your Duke has a mind to that. And if that is not the case—although I admit I cannot imagine that it would be so—I will make it my concern to ensure that he is made aware of it.”
ANDRÉ LEFT TO REJOIN Sir Robert de Sablé a few days later, promising to return at the end of the month, and the next three weeks passed quickly. On the morning of the last day of the month, helmed and shielded and wearing a full hauberk of steel chain mail coat and leggings, Sir Henry made the rounds of his lands, exulting in the sheer pleasure of being who and what he was and in the semblance of youth he had regained over the previous few months of hard, determined work. He no longer had to steel himself against the pains of training, on or off the drill field, and on this particular day he carried a tilting lance in his right hand and a plain, undecorated shield on his left arm. His sword hung at his waist, the belt that supported it cinched loosely over a plain black knee-length surcoat that was covered in turn by his military mantle, with the crest of St. Clair on the back and above his left breast.
He had ridden around the full perimeter of his lands that morning, a circuit of more than fifteen miles, and he was filled with exultation as he spurred his warhorse up the slope of the last hill that would bring him within sight of his home and the high road that bordered the eastern reaches of his estate from north to south, for he had been eight hours in the saddle by then and he felt as though eight more would cause him no concern. He felt better and more carefree than he had in years, and he was looking forward with pleasure to André’s arrival that same day, after the intervening weeks spent in Angoulême, about some business set him by the knight de Sablé.
His horse surged easily up and over the crest of the hill, and Henry pulled it to a halt at the start of the downward slope on the other side, sitting easily in the saddle as he examined the scene spread out ahead of him. Half a mile away, to his left, on a rocky knoll surrounded by massive beeches that concealed an encircling river, sat his family’s stronghold, its tall, square, hundred-year-old donjon jutting up from the bare rock crest, surrounded and protected by high, thick crenellated walls that could accommodate all his tenants behind their solid bulk in times of danger, and a drawbridge across the deep river gorge that could be raised to secure the donjon itself in time of attack—although the presence of the huge beech trees proclaimed that no serious attack had taken place here since they were planted, nigh on a century earlier. From the castle gates, a hard, wide, beaten roadway struck directly for a mile to the high road that bounded his lands on the east. He turned in the saddle to look back towards the south, hoping to see André approaching from that direction, but the road was empty. Turning back, he glanced idly towards the point where the road from the north crested a distant ridge, then stood upright in his stirrups as he saw movement—increasing movement—where he had expected none.
Three mounted men, two of them recognizable as knights by their shields and plumed helms, had already crossed the ridge and were riding down the hill towards him. Behind them the third man, less richly dressed and clearly a military sub-commander, rode at the head of a strong phalanx of marching men, in ranks of six, that was only now coming into view, its files stretching back and out of sight beyond the ridge. Henry knew they could not have seen him yet, high on the side of his hill, and so he sat there and watched their approach. The tenth and last rank of the phalanx of men-at-arms crested the rise, their pike blades reflecting the light, an
d immediately behind them the high box of a passenger carriage came into view, rising towards the summit of the road. It was followed by another and then a third, each carriage flanked by a pair of mounted knights flaunting the colors of their individual houses like peacocks. Three more vehicles followed the carriages, heavy, flat-bottomed wagons drawn by teams of mules and piled high with cargo, securely covered and strapped down, and a second formation of infantry, the same size as the first and preceded by another pair of knights and a sub-commander, brought up the rear. By the time the last men marched into view the leaders were nigh on a half mile down the hill.
Henry was intrigued, but not alarmed by the approaching party, for despite its strength it was clearly not a warlike group. The great road they were traveling had been built hundreds of years earlier by the Romans. It ran straight south and west towards Marseille, and, much like a river of stone, collected tributaries leading from all the cities of the northern half of France, from Brittany and Normandy, Artois, and Paris itself, the home of King Philip Augustus. These travelers were obviously wealthy and important, judging by the number of vehicles and the strength of their escort, and he found himself wondering who would need six score men-at-arms, with officers and no fewer than ten fully armed knights. A senior prelate with his staff, perhaps a cardinal or an archbishop, was his first thought, or perhaps the wife of a powerful baron or a duke, with her household.
He spurred his horse gently and angled it down the hillside to where he could come within hailing distance of the cavalcade, then reined in on the edge of a coppice, casually concealed within twenty paces of the road and surprised that no one had drawn attention to his approach. He was on his own land and in full chivalric armor, so he had no fear in presenting himself, but he had misgivings about not having been seen, for that meant the men leading the advance party were riding carelessly, and coming into their view too suddenly might provoke them into overreacting, out of guilt and surprise.