Standard of Honor

by Jack Whyte

  That caught Sir Henry by surprise. He looked keenly at his son, trying to read his face, but seeing nothing he could identify, he slowly made his way back to the fire. “Very well, then, tell me what you mean by that, because it is a very strong indictment. ‘Inhuman cruelty inflicted for the sheer pleasure of doing so and observing the results.’ I would expect to hear something utterly infamous in the way of charges to back such a statement up.”

  “Well then, would you accept a report of the King’s guards being sent out into the streets to arrest any Jews they find and bring them back for the entertainment of the King’s guests at dinner? That in itself might not qualify as infamous, unless you consider that the entertainment consists of their being pinioned by men-at-arms and held erect while their teeth are pulled out with pliers … all their teeth.” The silence that followed seemed vast. André sat tensely, leaning forward in his chair and waiting for his father to respond.

  “You saw this? You were there?”

  “No, sir, I was not. It would appear that I have a happy knack of being absent on such occasions. But it has happened more than once, and I have been told of it each time by people who were present and whose word I trust.”

  “What people?”

  André shrugged. “The knight you met today, for one, Bernard de Tremelay.”

  “You trust him, you say?”

  “Implicitly, Father. I have known him now for eight months and he is become my closest friend, almost from the moment we first met.”

  Sir Henry looked steadily at his son, one eyebrow rising slightly. “I find that strange … you tend not to make friends that quickly.”

  “I know. But we liked each other from the outset, probably because of how we met, if truth be told. We were the only two young men in one particularly large and grave gathering of humorless graybeards, and I fear we found companionship in quiet laughter. He was the one who gave me the most detailed description of the abuse of one unfortunate Jew … the first one to suffer that way, I believe. I was away from London at the time, but Bernard told me all about it, in great and lurid detail, when I returned. He was sickened, and he sickened me, too, with the telling of it.”

  “And you say Richard condones such things?”

  André barked a sound that could have been the truncated start of a laugh. “Condones them? Better say foments them. Father, this is Richard’s notion of a wondrous way to keep his friends amused.” He looked away for a moment and then looked back to where his father stood thunderstruck. “As I understand it, the first occasion was almost accidental, one of those things that simply comes about unplanned. One of the Golden Clan made a comment to the effect that he was having trouble with a Jew to whom he owed money—”

  “The Golden Clan? What does that mean?”

  André frowned and shook his head. “Forgive me, Father, it is not something I would expect you to know about and certainly nothing you would ever approve of. The term is a pejorative, recently coined in England, a name used to indicate certain of King Richard’s cronies. The unnatural ones who have no use for women. They were originally called the Gilded Geldings, until someone pointed out that they were anything but gelded.”

  “Quite. So what did this fellow say about the Jew?”

  “Something about the fellow having his teeth in him. Whatever he said, it was evidently enough to spur Richard to shout, ‘Then let’s have the whoreson’s teeth out!’ and he sent his guards to arrest the Jew at his counting house and bring him back to the King’s Hall at Westminster. They pulled his teeth publicly that night, at dinner, apparently with such notable success that the entertainment has been repeated at random several more times, whenever the King or any of his guests feels bored. He simply sends his men out to find a Jew. Their Jewishness alone is condemnation enough to justify their so-called punishment.”

  “God in Heaven!” Sir Henry’s jaw dropped and he groped for the back of his chair, then lowered himself back into his seat “That is …” His voice failed him; his mouth moved, but no words emerged until he stopped trying, swallowed, and shook his head slowly. “That is infamous. And no one has complained? What about the bishops?” He slashed his hand in dismissal as soon as he spoke. “No, that would be a waste of time and effort. They would do nothing, except perhaps to bray encouragement. But surely some of the nobles must have complained of such outrages.”

  “Complained?” André St. Clair sounded as though he might either laugh or weep. “To whom should they complain, Father? To the King, about his own conduct? Would you dare that?” He held up a hand, palm outward, to silence a response. “Yes, you probably would, but what would you achieve? At best you would draw down his rage for offending him and his sensibilities. And at worst, what? Who knows? This is Richard Plantagenet … Besides, if you spoke out everyone would think you mad, to champion a Jew in any way. No one would have any sympathy for you, no matter what Richard did to you. You would stand alone, and you’d stand condemned.”

  “As would you, were you to speak out.” Sir Henry’s voice was measured, filled with regret. “So, what are you to do now, my son? It seems clear you have no wish to continue as you are at present.”

  André, however, demurred. “No, Father, that is not so, and that is what makes this choice so difficult for me. It may seem clear to you, as you say, that I have no wish to continue as I am, but it is far from clear to me. I have had many duties and responsibilities thrust upon me in past months, and few of them have stemmed from Richard. The truth is that much of my loyalty is now willingly committed to Robert de Sablé, and he, in turn, is bound to Richard and knows nothing about what we are speaking of tonight. The most frightening thing of all, perhaps, is that, in spite of all I know, I still see much in Richard to admire. The man is a phenomenon, both in his strengths and in his weaknesses. He is a mass of indivisible contradictions. Cruel and inhumanly unjust as he can be in this matter of the Jews, he possesses at the same time all the military virtues and the strengths that I admire and to which I aspire. And his people—all his people—appear to love him, from afar at least, in principle, be they in Normandy, England, Brittany, Aquitaine, Anjou, or at home in our own Poitou. All his allies in the gathering army look up to him and are proud to be numbered among his host, even Philip Augustus and the Count of Flanders. So I am still unable to decide what I must do, but I will not be quitting the army. Perhaps all I can hope to do is avoid attending any of the King’s dinners.” He rose and laid his drinking cup on the table.

  “It is late. The fire is almost out again, and although I myself am not tired I have kept you too long from your bed. I’ll go and take the night air for a while and leave you to sleep. You have to be on parade at dawn and I do not, so I can be more dilatory in rising than you can … but I have much to think upon before I sleep this night.” André smiled lopsidedly, then embraced his father warmly. “Thank you, Father, for listening. Sleep well.”

  Henry undressed slowly and climbed into bed, blowing out the last candle. He did not expect to find rest easily that night, after listening to his son, but he fell asleep almost instantly.

  SIX

  André St. Clair had much on his mind when he left his father that night, and without any conscious awareness of seeking height, he soon found himself answering the challenge of the guardsman on the battlements at the top of the highest tower of the keep of Castle Baudelaire. He met the challenge, identified himself, then went to lean against the side of one of the embrasures, gazing out into the enveloping blackness. Were he to lean forward, he knew, the dying campfires of Richard’s army would be visible below, a river of embers stretching away on both sides, edging the winding path of the river Loire. In front of him, however, in the distant west, there was nothing visible at all, which meant that either the night was moonless or the cloud cover was absolute, and he glanced up, unsurprised to see the heavy blankness of a starless sky. He sighed and turned his back on the emptiness, lodging his buttocks against the sill of the embrasure and crossing his arms on h
is chest, then allowed his thoughts to drift.

  The following morning he would set out with Richard and all his army for the Burgundian town of Vézelay, where, according to tradition, the bones of Saint Mary Magdalene had been enshrined twelve hundred years earlier. It lay a three-day march to the west from Baudelaire and had been the officially approved assembly point for the armies of western Christendom ever since the sainted Abbott Bernard of the Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux had dispatched the Soldiers of Christ from there on the first campaign to recapture the Holy Land from the Muslim Seljuk Turks, ninety-five years earlier in 1095. Now, this month of June in the year 1190, all the puissant forces of Frankish Christendom would gather there, to be blessed and freshly rededicated to their purpose by Holy Mother Church, after which the entire assembly would travel southward to Lyon on the river Rhone. From Lyon, the French King and his followers would make their way across the Alps of Savoie to Torino and thence south to Genoa, where Philip had hired the entire Genoese fleet to transport his army eastward. Richard’s forces would march directly south from Lyon through his own ducal territories, following the Rhone to Marseille, where his English fleet would be awaiting them under the command of his admiral, Sir Robert de Sablé. The embarkation would work smoothly, André knew, for it had the benefit of long and careful planning with an eye to every conceivable contingency.

  Despite the impression he had given to his father earlier, he really had little difficulty, moral or otherwise, with the thought of accompanying Richard to war in person. The André St. Clair who had emerged from hiding a year earlier, under threat of death from the trio of venal priests, might have balked at doing so, but he was a different person from the man who sat now at the top of Castle Baudelaire, considering his options. That younger man, more naïve and perhaps more selfabsorbed than André St. Clair was today, might have been sufficiently foolish and intolerant to endanger himself by showing his disapproval of the King’s behavior, but much had changed in the intervening year to blunt the point of young André’s impetuosity.

  His initial encounter with Robert de Sablé, triggering fraternal recognition between them, had quickly brought about a complete renewal of André’s commitment to the Order of Sion after a lengthy period in which isolation and responsibility for running the family estate had caused a drifting from the brotherhood. De Sablé had brought an end to all that. André was now constantly moving between one place and another, ostensibly on business related to de Sablé’s task of readying the fleet but in reality serving as a courier between de Sablé and the other members of the Governing Council of the Order, whose members were scattered widely across the provinces of what had once been Roman Gaul. For a thousand years, beginning in the Pyrenees and the Languedoc, then extending outward into Aquitaine, Poitou, and Burgundy and as far west and north as Brittany, Normandy, and Picardy, the ancient confederation of clans who called themselves the Friendly Families had spread throughout the land, taking their influence and the ancient, secret brotherhood of their Order with them. Now, working with a few other members of the brotherhood as a full-time liaison between the outlying members of the Governing Council—which was how he had come to meet his friend and brother Bernard de Tremelay—André no longer had any doubt about his future admission to the ranks of the Temple. That was already a fait accompli, guaranteed by the goodwill of the Council of the Order of Rebirth, that small group of powerful men who had, since its beginnings, dictated the fortunes and directions of the Order of the Temple, even while the vast majority of Templars were completely ignorant of their existence.

  The origins of the Templars, a mere seventy-two years earlier, in 1118, were already legendary. Every boy old enough to thrill to tales of adventure and great exploits knew how the veteran warrior Hugh de Payens had gathered about him a tiny band of knights, nine of them including himself, and dedicated them to defend and champion Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land against the swarming hordes of Arab bandits who for years had lain in wait for them at every turn in the roads. Calling themselves the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ, de Payens and his men had undertaken monastic oaths of poverty, chastity, and obedience and had quartered themselves in some abandoned stables on the Temple Mount within the city of Jerusalem and from there, in the face of incalculable and seemingly impossible odds, they had won spectacular successes against the marauding bandits, making the roads of the Kingdom of Jerusalem relatively safe to travel for the first time since the capture of Jerusalem in 1099.

  Thereafter, within less than a score of years from the date of their founding, championed by Bernard of Clairvaux, who had written a rule for their new order, their successes and their heroic prowess had become so renowned that their recruitment numbers had swollen almost beyond counting. They had become widely recognized and revered throughout Christendom, first as the Knights of the Temple Mount of Jerusalem, then as the Knights Templar, and eventually quite simply as the Order of the Temple, although their official name remained the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon. There were other military orders in the world today, most notably the Knights of the Hospital and the Emperor Barbarossa’s recently formed Teutonic Knights, but the Temple Knights had been the first of their kind, the first monk knights, and their glory would never fade.

  That was the legend. The truth was as sparse as legendary truths must always be. The reality, a secret known only to the initiates of the Order of Sion, was that de Payens and his eight original companions had all been Brothers of the Order of Sion, and they had been sent deliberately to Jerusalem to unearth a treasure. As described in the lore of the ancient Order, this treasure had been laid down there eleven hundred years earlier, at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem and its people by the Roman General Titus, son of the Emperor Vespasian. Estimates of the slaughter carried out there varied, but few doubted that upward of six hundred thousand Jews had died, and many sources, most of them Roman records, claimed twice that many had perished. Whichever was correct, the Jews had ceased to function as a race in their own homeland since that time.

  Notwithstanding that, according to the lore that had directed de Payens and his companions in their search, a large number of the Jewish priestly caste—inheritors of the original Jerusalem Assembly, the communal church supervised during their lifetimes by Jesus and his brother James the Just—had foreseen the tragedy and escaped the destruction and the bloodbath that followed, first burying the bulk of what they could not carry with them, the written records of their community, beyond the reach of even the rapacious Romans.

  Safely out of the doomed city, these people, sometimes called Essenes, had then made their way overland, traveling in large but loose-knit groups for mutual safety. South and west they walked, to the Nile Delta, Cairo and Alexandria, and then westward for years across the immensity of Africa, always keeping within sight of the great Central Sea on their right, until they reached the Narrows and managed to cross out of Africa and into Iberia. From Iberia, long before it became Spain, they made their way northward on foot again, crossing the Pyrenees eventually and arriving in Gaul, where they settled in the region now known as the Languedoc.

  Highly aware of who they were and what they represented, they were determined to return one day to their homeland, to claim their inheritance and unearth the treasure they had buried there. Rome had decreed their deaths, and thus their safety and their very survival depended upon their ability to conceal their true identity from others. And so they worked at doing precisely that, blending and mixing seamlessly into the primitive and unstable society that was Roman Gaul, less than a hundred years after Julius Caesar’s conquest of the region. They were not to know that more than a millennium would pass before their return, but they planned carefully and methodically nonetheless.

  Originally more than thirty families strong, from the start of their new lives in Gaul they called themselves the Friendly Families. They established a communal integrity that fitted easily within the tribal units of the Gallic world a
nd would persist while centuries elapsed and each of the original families expanded to become a wide-branching clan. Their assimilation was so successful that within four generations only a select few of them—and absolutely no outsiders—knew that their families had ever been Jewish.

  They adopted the new religion of Christianity with everyone else when it arose, but among themselves they formed a secret brotherhood they called the Order of Rebirth in Sion, the Rebirth anticipating their own renewed embrace of their ancient religion and their traditional way of life once safely returned to their home in Jerusalem. The elders of the Families decided that they themselves, the patriarchs, would be the only members of their clans to safeguard the knowledge of their Jewishness, practicing their rites and ceremonies secretly, away from the eyes and knowledge even of their own loved ones, purely as a matter of protection.

  As the years passed, without incident or alarum, and the longed-for return was still deferred, they decided upon recruitment to ensure the safety of their sacred knowledge. One male member, and only one, of each ensuing generation of each of the original families would be considered eligible for promotion to membership in their brotherhood, and his suitability would be judged by the membership at large, with the criteria for admission clearly defined. The male offspring of any woman who wed outside the Families were ineligible for membership, and since none but the Brotherhood of the Order knew anything about it, no one ever suffered by that.

  Apart from the requirement of direct male descent from Friendly Families blood, honor and integrity, intelligence and righteousness, single-minded purpose, and the ability to maintain close-mouthed secrecy at all times and under all conditions were the sine qua non elements of eligibility. Within a very short time, as the original Families grew larger, there was never any shortage of eligible candidates, so that in the event that no single member of a given generation of one family was thought fit for membership, then none would be chosen and the eligibility would pass to the next generation, with no slur of any kind against the family.