Standard of Honor

by Jack Whyte

  The system was set into place with great care and great planning, and from the outset it worked magnificently. Because of the need to ensure the very highest standards of behavior and performance in each candidate, the scrutinizing and evaluation process was slow, painstaking, and continuous. No one could be admitted before reaching the age of eighteen years, but entry was often awarded long after that age, since each son born into a generation had to be given his opportunity to be evaluated. No candidate ever understood anything about what was happening to him during the early stages leading to his initiation; he understood only that he was being prepared for something momentous, that it was secret, serious, and solemn, and that the people preparing him, his mentors and sponsors in the work, were the people in his life for whom he held the highest regard. Only after his initiation, when he was Raised to full membership of the Brotherhood of the Order, would his early training begin to make any sense to him, and only then would he realize that he, perhaps the only living member of the brotherhood in his entire family, was the only one who knew the brotherhood existed. That was often the most difficult element of initiation for a new member to understand: that he was cut off forever, in a very basic and fundamental sense, from the remainder of his family, knowing a truth about himself and about their origins that he was forbidden to share; forever unable to discuss with them, or even to acknowledge, an area of his life that would continue to grow greater and more important to him while they remained unaware of its existence and oblivious to its significance.

  André St. Clair had been troubled by that only infrequently for several years now, but this evening it had come home to him to sting like a serpent’s venom, enhanced by the irony of his father’s ignorance of what they were really discussing. Sir Henry St. Clair, the noble Angevin, was intensely proud of his heritage and his family’s ancient and honorable lineage, and he meant every word of what he said when he claimed to have no prejudice against Jews, and his son had not the slightest doubt of that. But notwithstanding Sir Henry’s integrity and his genuine goodwill, André also knew that his father would be insulted and outraged were anyone to attempt to make him believe that Jewish blood ran in his veins and that his ancestors had been Judean priests. Furthermore, it would be inconceivable to him, utterly incomprehensible, that his own son should adhere to those beliefs and in accordance with them should dedicate his life to ensuring that the ancient teachings they involved would come to pass in today’s world. That reality would be forever alien to the old man, and André had no choice but to grit his teeth and come to terms with it, for there was nothing he could do to change a whit of it.

  The disgusting business of the tooth pulling was real enough, but it was a relatively minor piece of knavery, and André had used it deliberately to shock his father into seeing how serious were his concerns. But the real villainy, André knew, lay in the less ostensibly brutal but far more widespread and lethal persecutions of the Jews throughout the length and breadth of England in the previous half year. It had begun on the day of Richard’s coronation, the third of September in the previous year, 1189, at his notably, some said scandalously, masculine coronation dinner. The Bachelors’ Feast, it had been called, and no woman of any rank, including the King’s mother, had been invited. Towards the end of the proceedings, when everyone was far gone in drink, a delegation of Jewish merchants had come to offer gifts and good wishes to the new monarch. But they had been stopped at the entrance to the King’s Hall, their gifts confiscated, and then they were stripped and beaten before being thrown out into the streets, where they were pursued by a mob who followed them right into the Jewish quarter of London and there set about burning the houses of the Jews who lived there.

  No one made any attempt to stop the mob until the fire began to spread to the neighboring Christian district. On the day that followed, Richard publicly ignored the atrocity, other than ordering the death by hanging of several men who had been instrumental in the burning of Christian-owned properties. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who was present at the time, said no single word in defense of the hapless Jews, content merely to comment that if they chose not to be followers of Christ, then they must be prepared to be treated as followers of the Devil.

  With such examples of mercy and forbearance for guidance from their King and their Archbishop, it surprised few observers that the citizenry of England’s great cities indulged in orgies of anti-Jewishness in the months that followed, their hunger for the blood of the “Christ killers” bolstering their hysterical determination to wrest back the Holy City from the godless Saracens. André had been on the way to visit the King’s Quartermasters of the city of York when the last great outrage occurred there in the days leading up to Easter, a mere month before his return to Anjou. It was all over by noon on the day he arrived at York, but everyone was still talking about it.

  He learned that a vengeful mob had collected and then chased a crowd of nearly five hundred terrified Jews—men, women, and children—into the fortified Tower of York, which they then surrounded, screaming for the Jews to come out and face their “punishment.” In the expectation of certain torture and appalling slaughter, the Jewish elders decided to be merciful to themselves. All five hundred committed suicide.

  André knew in his heart that similar atrocities had occurred in his own homeland from time to time, but the scope, the regularity, and the bloodthirstiness of the uprisings in England had soured him forever against that country, and the tacit approval of its newly crowned King had effectively killed any enthusiasm and willing support he might have shown for joining in Richard’s military adventures. Only his greater duty, his fraternal obligations to the Order of Sion, prevented him from divorcing himself completely from the company and service of the English King, and even so, knowing the importance of what he had to do on the Order’s behalf, the younger St. Clair was finding that overcoming his repugnance and maintaining a veneer of enthusiasm was far from easy.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the sounds of movement close by, and he turned to look across at the guard on duty on the other side of the tower platform, who had been joined in his corner by another man. Their voices reached him as no more than a murmur, but as he looked, André saw the newcomer start to move in his direction, silhouetted against the glare of the sentry’s fire basket. He straightened up and rose to his feet just in time to recognize his friend and companion from Orléans, Bernard of Tremelay, who greeted him with raised eyebrows.

  “St. Clair? I thought you would have been fast asleep by now, after all the riding we have done these past few days.”

  “Then clearly you think me weaker than you are. Why aren’t you abed by now?”

  “I was, but I could not sleep. Too many matters on my mind, I suppose. Tomorrow will come quickly enough, but I thought to defer it a while by staying awake. So, what were you thinking about up here all alone?”

  André waved in farewell to the watching guard, then followed de Tremelay down the narrow steps to the causeway beneath the battlements, holding his response until he was beneath the line of the guard’s sight.

  “That membership in our brotherhood sometimes comes at great cost.”

  They had begun descending the next flight, but de Tremelay stopped and turned to look up at André behind him. “Your father again?” André nodded. “Well, it’s true, Brother. It does. But when you find yourself fretting over that, remember this: just when you think that cost has grown unbearable, it can grow worse. And it will, without fail. Trust me, despair is the only road left open to us.” And then he barked a great, guffawing laugh and swung back to his descent.

  “Bernard, in honesty, has anyone ever told you what a turd you truly are?”

  “Aye, a few.” This time de Tremelay did not pause and the words drifted back over his shoulder. “But when you’re a turd, people walk around you, rather than risk treading on you. Trust me on that, too.” He laughed again as they reached the bottom of the stairs, then grasped a handful of André’s surcoat and pul
led him gently but firmly back into the shadows at the side of the stairs, where they could be neither seen nor heard.

  “Bear this in mind from now on, lad,” he said in a low voice that held no trace of humor, “and don’t ever forget. In a few days, when we reach Vézelay, you will be accepted into the outer ranks of the Order of the Temple formally, as a postulant. After that, if you keep your nose clean and look to your assignments, you will become a novice, and eventually, all things being equal, you’ll end up a full-blown knight of the Temple, privy to all its secrets and its so-called sacred lore. You believe it’s difficult now, keeping secrets from your noble father? Well, that difficulty will seem like nothing within a matter of mere days.

  “Wait until you enter the temple and are shut off among people whose every thought is alien to all that you know and believe. Wait until you find yourself floundering among the pig-headed ignorance and unquestioning stupidity you’ll find within the ranks you are about to join, where the knights all firmly believe they are God’s chosen and the world’s elite—and many of their sergeants think the same way—and you will not be able to breathe a single word about the truth you know: that their sacred and secretive Order was invented by the brotherhood to which you belong, to safeguard that Order’s sacred secrets.

  “Your entire existence in their ranks will be a lie, and you will have the salt of that rubbed into your awareness every time they wake you in the middle of the night to pray in a ritual that holds no truth for you. You will know better, but you will have no other option than to comply and to observe their false rites, and you will never be able to say a word in protest or complaint. Now that, I suggest to you, might cause you some real difficulty. And that, unlike the minor business with your father, represents the real cost of belonging to our brotherhood.

  “Fortunately, of course, your isolation will not last forever. As soon as you have passed all the tests and met all the qualifications for achieving full membership, the strictures surrounding you will be relaxed and members of our own brotherhood within the Temple ranks will see to it that you are assigned to duties in which you can be used to best advantage.”

  He grinned again, squeezing St. Clair’s shoulders in his hands. “But I promise you, albeit I have never been inside a Temple gathering, your next few months are destined to be sheer misery.”

  “Aye,” André sighed. “I have been warned about all that already. But I want to thank you for the obvious delight you have taken in reminding me of what lies ahead.”

  “It does lie ahead of you, André, but by the time we reach Outremer, it should be over and you’ll be back in the world of living men. Now get you to bed and sleep well, then rise and greet tomorrow’s day bright eyed. They say it’s going to rain, so it will be a long, wet pilgrimage to Vézelay, and we’ll endure great misery before we find comfort again.”

  THE MORNING SUN ROSE DAZZLINGLY above the snowy peaks of the Alps in the eastern distance, illuminating the great banner of the Order of the Temple that stood proudly alone, reflecting the blinding rays back from the crest of a hill that overlooked the fields surrounding the town of Vézelay. The banner did not flap in the light breeze, as did some others in the throng below the hill; it hung rigid, weighted along its bottom, from a bar at the top of an enormously high pole, allowing its equal-armed, eight-pointed red cross to stand out stark, challenging, and unmistakable against the pure white of its field, proclaiming the Order’s pre-eminence. Beneath it stood its formal guard of ten armored, white-clad knights, and around them, covering the entire hilltop and neatly laid out in regular, rectangular patterns, lay the campsite of the Order’s personnel: knights and sergeants of the Temple, the majority of them new and untested, recruited only recently to fill the Order’s depleted ranks after the tragic losses sustained in Outremer.

  More than a thousand fighting men were drawn up in formation there, on the downward slope of the hill in front of their foremost line of tents, and fewer than one hundred of those had ever been involved in a real battle. The knights among them, fewer than six to every score, wore plain white surcoats, emblazoned not with the black cross of the Temple but with the brilliant red, long-bodied cross of their mission to regain the Holy Land. The remaining men, the Sergeants of the Order, wore the same red crosses over surcoats of plain brown, save for a scattering of senior sergeants who wore distinctive black surcoats signifying their rank.

  Below and in front of the Templars, the remainder of the armies of Christendom seethed and eddied like fields of grain in a high wind, save that no field of grain, even when rich with wildflowers, could ever show such a profusion of colors. They completely filled up the fields that stretched away towards the little town of Vézelay, which was hidden in the distance by a forest of tents and pavilions. To the right of the watching Templars, the ranks of Richard Plantagenet’s followers stood banked, block after solid block of them, horse and foot, interspersed with formations of the King’s crossbowmen and archers, who were easily distinguishable by their drab colors and their lack of formal armor. Within that host, the individual colors of the various divisions could be discerned in places among the surrounding welter: the wine-red standards of Burgundy stood firmly alongside the dark, rich blue of Aquitaine, and the greens and gold of Anjou and Maine were visible behind those, as was the black and crimson of Poitou, along with the blue-and-white stripes, pale greens, and yellows and reds of Brittany and Normandy and, of course, the golden lions of St. George’s England on their crimson field, flapping above all the others on a gigantic silken banner and supported by no less a churchman than Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, who had personally levied three thousand Welshmen, mainly archers, to join Richard’s host.

  Opposite this panoply, ranged on the Templars’ left, were the forces of Philip Augustus and his allies. As befitted the dignity of a French King, Philip’s own royal standard, the golden fleurs-de-lis on a sky-blue field of the House of Capet, appeared to be at least as large as that of his English ally, and behind it were clustered the colors of his own major allies and vassals, comprising the flower of the nobility of Christendom. The brilliant colors of Stephen, Count of Sancerre, were prominent there, as Richard had foretold they would be, more than a year earlier. So were those of Count Philip of Flanders, and Henry the Count of Champagne, nephew to both kings, accompanied by an entire cavalcade of lesser French nobility. The German Louis, Margrave of Thuringia, had lent his stature to the French King’s use, as had a huge number of knights from Denmark, Hungary, and Flanders. And there were bishops everywhere among the throng on both sides, many of them clustered in prayer in a vast gathering between the two armies, but many, many more among the armies themselves, armored over and beneath their vestments and accoutered for war, hungry for the blood of any Saracen foolish enough to come within their reach.

  André St. Clair sat gazing down at the spectacle from a knoll at the front edge of the Templar formation, several horse lengths ahead of the leading rank, with his immediate superior, Brother Justin, the Master of Novices, on his left side. Justin was a scowling, grim-faced veteran who stank like rancid goat cheese. St. Clair was two horse lengths away from him, but the acrid smell of the older man threatened to take his breath away every time he inhaled. Brother Justin was flanked on his own left in turn by their expeditionary force’s taciturn commander, Etienne de Troyes, whose austerity and utter lack of tolerance for public spectacles like this were legendary. De Troyes was what his brethren in the Order of Sion called a Temple Boar—un sanglier Templier. He did not belong to the Order of Rebirth and had, in consequence, no knowledge or suspicion of the Order’s existence.

  One of the most highly ranked Templars in all the Frankish territories of what had been Gaul, de Troyes, like so many others of his ilk, was utterly intolerant of everyone and everything that was not a part of his world, and within that narrowly circumscribed world there was but one entity of any significance: the Order of the Temple. Anything that interfered with his intense dedication to the Temple and i
ts priorities was not to be tolerated. On this occasion, however, much as he disliked the restraint, Sir Etienne could not disdainfully dismiss the goings-on below and absent himself. He was the Master of the Temple in Poitou, which made him the senior officer of the Order present in Vézelay that day, and he had thus a responsibility to observe all that happened. The Temple neither owed nor accorded fealty or allegiance to any temporal king or lord. Its loyalty and fealty lay wholly with the Pope in Rome, and its representatives were here this day as the Pope’s personal emissaries, although they would fight with both of the Kings below against the common Saracen enemy.

  Brother Justin had designated St. Clair a courier that morning, against the need for someone to carry dispatches to, or gather information from, anyone in the armies below. The designation was extraordinary, everyone knew that, since St. Clair was a mere postulant to the Order, admitted a mere two days earlier, but Justin was taking blatant advantage, and to no one’s surprise, of André’s filial relationship with the Master-at-Arms below. At their backs, bound by the discipline of the Order’s training, the Templar ranks were utterly silent, the only sounds they made emanating from the restless movement of horses that had been standing still for too long. By contrast, the noise from the army massed ahead of them was chaotic, a low rumbling of a hundred thousand voices overscored by louder, sometimes strident shouts of command, unintelligible from this distance, and the constant braying of trumpets and horns. André’s horse stamped and whinnied, sidling closer to Brother Justin’s mount and fighting against the rein when André, almost revolted by the man’s stench, tried to bring it back.

  “Where is your father? I can’t see him.”

  Ignoring the frowning presence of their field commander on his left side, Brother Justin had spoken brusquely from the corner of his mouth, without moving his head, and in response, unaware of what might be permitted him in this situation, André leaned forward in his saddle and turned his head very slightly to his right, to peer down the slope to where the standard of St. George waved over a churning mass of brightly clad bodies, human and equine, that made nonsense of any attempt to discern order.