Standard of Honor

by Jack Whyte

  “I have no such authority aboard this ship, sir. The ship’s commander—”

  “Are you not commodore of these dromons, then?” “Yes, I am, but—”

  “No buts, Master de Bruce. Either you command or you do not. Which shall I tell King Richard?”

  De Bruce’s shoulders slumped slightly. “Very well, then, I shall instruct the captain … But, Sir André, this man is senior lieutenant of this ship.”

  “Was he, by God? How then are the mighty fallen. Now, if you will, send word to the ladies Berengaria and Joanna that I attend them here with urgent tidings from the King.”

  De Bruce drew himself erect and bobbed his head. “Of course. At once.” He turned an icy glance upon the condemned officer. “You, sir, will wait in my quarters.”

  As both men left, leaving only the junior officer on deck, extremely subdued and crestfallen, André turned his back and stared out over the distant bow of the ship, aware that the seaman who had held the gate for him was standing rigidly at attention, his eyes on André and his face absolutely without expression. I wonder what you thought of that, he asked himself, beginning to wonder if he might have been too hard on the lieutenant, making a point merely to emphasize and simultaneously purge his own anger. The thought barely lasted a moment, however, for he knew he had been right—he recalled the manner in which the fellow had sneered at his appearance the previous day, the first time André had come aboard the ship. There had been no real offense given or taken on that occasion, but the man’s attitude of disdainful intolerance had been noticeable and, André now realized, memorable. He put the fellow from his mind just as the door opened at his back and de Bruce re-emerged to tell him that the ladies would receive him at once.

  ANDRÉ ST. CLAIR HAD WONDERED from the outset at the suddenness of the King’s determined resolve to be wed at once, and he had thought even then, listening to Richard talk of singing monks and massed candles and assembled bishops and archbishops, that the abruptness of it all was likely to be causing enormous inconvenience to everyone involved, from cooks to housekeepers and quartermasters, nearly all of whom must have been caught as flat-footed as he himself had been by the monarch’s impetuous and imperious decision. He was completely unprepared, however, for the storm of furious and impassioned disbelief and protest that his tidings precipitated among the women on the dromon. It broke over his head out of a clear blue sky and left him reeling, mouth agape, and beginning to perceive, yet unable to comprehend, the enormity of the crime he had been cajoled into perpetrating upon, and in the eyes of, Richard’s women. It mattered not that he was merely the messenger, guiltless of complicity or wrongdoing; someone had to bear the brunt of their collective outrage, and he was the closest and most qualified recipient for their ferocious indignation.

  Afterwards he would realize, with gratitude, that the worst of it was brief lived, solely because the women had no time to waste on him once the gravity of their situation began to make itself felt. They were plunged into a frenzy of preparations, and he was quickly forgotten. St. Clair found himself standing in a whirlwind of panic-inspired noise, amid a seething blizzard of women’s clothing that seemed to fill the air entirely, and moments after that he had been ejected from the cabin.

  Although vaguely dazed, he had acquired the knowledge that he needed most: there would be nine women in the attending group to be collected by de Sablé’s barge. The Princess would bring her aged dueña, who had been her nurse from infancy, and two younger ladies of Navarre; Joanna would be accompanied by her own senior companion and servant, Maria, and by three Sicilian women, two of them widowed and the other single, who had been her ladies-in-waiting when she was Queen in her own right.

  He made his way towards the exit gate in the side of the ship, noticing only as he arrived there that the access ramp had been swung out and lowered into place, and the sight of it reminded him of the other matter he had set in motion. The same seaman was standing by the gate in the ship’s side, and André told him to alert his boat’s crew that he would be there soon. He then turned back to where the junior lieutenant stood watching him warily, poised on the balls of his feet.

  “Call Sir Richard for me.”

  “Yes, Sir André.” The response was as clipped as any one expected on a parade ground, and the lieutenant spun smartly away to deliver the summons. Sir Richard de Bruce emerged from his quarters moments later and came, stiff faced, straight to André, who nodded brusquely.

  “The other fellow, what have you done with him?”

  “I have confined him to his cabin, Sir André.”

  “Not good enough. Strip him to his tunic, put him in chains, and hold him under guard, publicly, over there in that corner, to await the King’s verdict. It will do your self-satisfied fool no harm to see the world for a time through the eyes of those less fortunate than he is. He needs to be reminded that, as an undistinguished officer aboard one of the King’s ships, he ranks only slightly higher than the ruffians he commands and can ill afford to give offense to anyone, let alone anyone who might be in a position at some time to seek revenge on him. What is his name, by the way?”

  “De Blois, Sir André.”

  St. Clair’s eyebrows shot up, but then he smiled. “D’you say so? One of his kinsmen did his best to kill me a little while ago. He failed, of course, but I found him decidedly unpleasant to be around, and now I find it interesting that this fellow is another de Blois. Family traits, Sir Richard … Family traits.”

  André left the commodore staring after him and went directly to the gate, which the seaman held open for him. His boat was waiting at the bottom of the ramp, and this time he jumped aboard easily and settled himself in the stern as the rowers swung away from the great ship. And there André learned another lesson about the strangenesses of the maritime fraternity. He asked his boat master, the helmsman, if he had any idea where they might begin to look for the Count of Coutreau, the Deputy Master of the Fleet, and the fellow looked all around the assembled ships, then pointed unhesitatingly to one of the newcomers.

  “Over there, sir,” he growled, “aboard yon Englishman.”

  “How can you know that?” André was truly astonished, and the big helmsman grinned and tapped the side of his nose.

  “The standard, sir, the high flag yonder at the masthead, higher than all the others, with the three green triangles on the white field and the twin tails. That’s the standard of the fleet commander. Goes with him from ship to ship, so the rest of the fleet knows where he is at any time. Green triangles is the deputy, and means the Master himself isn’t here. His standard’s triangles are blue. Same flag, otherwise.”

  André was duly impressed. “You tell me so,” he said, “but is it always thus?”

  “Always, sir. Without fail. Where the Fleet Master goes, his standard goes, and mounts to the top of the mast. It’s only good sense, sir, when ye think on it. In time of trouble, or in war, when people look for guidance or command, they look to the masts for the flagship, the one that flies the Master’s standard. That’s where the Master is, and that’s where command is held.”

  “By Heaven, that is inspired! Who thought of that?”

  The helmsman dipped his head, tapping the side of his nose again. “Someone smarter than me, sir … and a few years older. I don’t think there’s ever been a time at sea when that wasn’t the way of things. Like I said, it’s only good sense, isn’t it, when you think on it?”

  “Aye, you’re right, it is.” André’s face broke into a slow grin. “The same kind of good sense that keeps men away from women when there’s marriage in the offing … Take me to the Fleet Master now, directly.”

  SEVERAL HIGH-RANKING MEMBERS of the Order of the Temple attended the royal nuptials that evening, to witness the marriage and the new Queen’s coronation, and by all reports it was a grand occasion, with massed banks of candles turning the air golden in the chapel while incense billowed. The monks of no fewer than five monasteries combined with those from Christendom
to generate chanted prayers the equal of which had never been heard in Cyprus. The large number of bishops in attendance, all of them decked in their finest jeweled robes and attended by their retinues of sumptuously dressed acolytes, turned the scene into a glittering riot of colors and fabrics, and yet the bride and her women, despite the lack of notice they had received, succeeded nonetheless, and in spite of all this churchly splendor, in dazzling the eyes of every layman present, and no doubt those of many a churchman, too.

  André and his companions did not even hear the singing of the massed monks. Like almost everyone else in the port of Limassol who was not involved in the actual marriage festivities that day and night, their time was entirely taken up by the arrival of the fleet. They had all had duties apportioned to them hours before the first ships made harbor, and their afternoon and evening fled by in brutal, backbreaking work that lasted well into the darkest hours of the night. They worked alongside others, in gangs or groups, although the Templars formed their own work parties and held themselves apart from everyone else, and each group was assigned to a specific task by the officials responsible for the orderly disposition of the incoming ships and their cargoes.

  By the time the initial levies of dockside workers fell into sleep that night, whether they were locally conscripted laborers or arbitrarily assigned soldiers and seamen, they were all worn out and senseless from lack of rest, and tempers had been sorely frayed and blood spilt in more than one dockside tussle. And still the work of disembarkation continued, the various tasks taken over by fresh crews and gangs.

  St. Clair rose as usual for morning prayers, but he had had little sleep in the previous thirty-six hours, and so he felt no guilt about finding himself an obscure corner afterwards and curling up to sleep again unseen while his fellows went about their assigned daily chores. He awoke refreshed about an hour before noon to discover that the day had been declared a day of rest and celebration to mark the King’s marriage, and then, attracted by loud voices and the delicious aroma of roasting meat nearby, he made his way to the ship’s side and saw several score of men gathered around a cluster of cooking fires on the beach close by his ship. A cask of beer had been mounted on a trestle on the sand, and the sight of it sitting there in the bright sunlight dried his mouth, so that he felt the lust for the cool taste of it against the back of his tongue. He went to his quarters, almost empty at this time of day, took off his mailed hauberk and dressed himself in plain tunic and leggings for the first time in weeks. Then, glad as a boy to be without armor, he strode ashore and made his way directly towards the fires and the celebration going on there. He helped himself to a flagon of beer, and then someone cut him a slab of meat from one of three carcasses roasting on spits, and he wedged it between two thick slices of fresh bread and went looking for a place to sit and eat it in comfort. He found a log large enough for two people to sit on by one of the fires and settled down to eat and to listen.

  The talk around him was all of the previous night’s wedding feast, and the arrival of the force from Outremer, with its three ships bearing King Guy and his entourage of highly placed dignitaries and a hundred and sixty knights. André had little interest in the wedding talk, knowing he would soon learn more than he needed to know about it, but the topic of the visitors from Outremer interested him greatly, for he had seen some of the knights the previous day and had been impressed by their dour and hard-worn appearance. He could not begin to imagine why King Guy, the rightful King of Jerusalem, should leave the country in a time of war, accompanied by so many battle-ready knights, unless he had been ousted in some manner that defied understanding, but he learned more about that situation in the first half hour after his arrival at the cooking fires than he could have learned in a week in any other place, because the men around the fires, by sheer good fortune from his viewpoint, were members of Richard’s own guard. As such, they were inevitably privy to more trustworthy information than were many of the King’s more high-born followers, because the guards were present around the King’s person on all public, formal, and even semi-private occasions and thus were normally taken for granted, ignored and all but forgotten by the people they were there to watch.

  The first thing that sank through to him from all that he was hearing was that Philip of France, on landing at Acre, had chosen to support Conrad of Montferrat over Guy de Lusignan in the matter of their conflicting claims to the crown of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. That really surprised André, for it had been made clear to him by his own brotherhood, months earlier, that Conrad was both cousin and vassal to Barbarossa, the so-called Holy Roman Emperor, and that both of them were adherents of the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity. Each had publicly avowed his dedication, years earlier, to reinforcing the Orthodox Church within the Kingdom and the city of Jerusalem, twin affirmations that had been noted with alarm and then condemned by the Roman papacy and had resulted in the frenzied papal support that had fomented the current Frankish campaign to recapture the Holy City. But Philip himself was one of the two leaders of that campaign. Barbarossa was dead now and his army no longer a threat to Rome’s ambitions, but if Philip of France was now siding openly with Conrad of Montferrat in opposing the legitimate claim of Guy de Lusignan to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, then the French King was thumbing his nose, deliberately, at the Pope … which meant, by direct association, that he was including Richard, his nominal partner and coequal, in that defiance. That, André knew, was a major error on Philip’s part, for it would force Richard to make a choice, and a commitment, that was likely to benefit no one.

  André had little personal sympathy for King Guy’s plight, because de Lusignan was no man’s idea of a heroic leader, especially when his record was compared with that of Richard. Guy had demonstrated time and again, with depressing repetitiveness, that his inconsistency was limitless and that he was incapable of holding, for any length of time, a position or an opinion that was purely his own and uninfluenced by anyone else’s thinking. Despite that, however, and even though his own deplorable behavior had done nothing to strengthen his situation, Guy’s claim to his crown was legitimate, albeit decidedly flimsy.

  The undisputed claimant to the crown of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, or the Latin Kingdom as most men were now calling it, had been Guy’s wife, Sibylla, the sister and sole surviving heir of King Baldwin IV, the Leper King. No one had disputed Sybilla’s succession to the throne after the death of her brother’s only male heir, a sickly nephew who had not survived childhood, but everyone had been outraged by her choice of a consort. She had chosen her current lover, Guy de Lusignan, to rule with her, and coerced the aged Patriarch of Jerusalem into crowning the fellow not merely as a Prince Consort to the Queen but as the legitimate King in his own right. Her barons, the entire nobility of her realm, were scandalized, for they regarded Guy as an interloper, an adventurer, and a shameless opportunist.

  He had arrived in the kingdom sometime earlier, an unknown from France, supposedly well born but with a background that was murky and shaded by rumors, and had succeeded somehow, in spite of that, in ingratiating himself sufficiently with the local barons to persuade them to appoint him as regent in the young heir’s minority. His regency had been less than spectacular, and on the sole occasion when he had to make a show of force against the Saracens, at a place called Tubania, he had all but run away from the confrontation. That buffoonery had cost him his regency, although the young heir had died soon afterwards, rendering the annulment moot, but it had also cost Guy all his credibility in the eyes of the barons of the kingdom.

  André swallowed a last mouthful of food and wiped the grease from his lips with the back of one hand before drinking deeply and then turning to look at his nearest neighbor, a slight, clean-shaven man with a hooked nose and a hollowed-out face that seemed lacking in lips and teeth. The fellow also had almost excessively broad shoulders, and he had sat down quietly beside André only moments earlier and was now diligently attacking a thick slice of juicy pork. He paid no attention to
anyone at first, but when André greeted him he looked across at him and grunted, then stuffed the meat in his mouth into one cheek. André had noticed that he had brought nothing with him to drink.

  “Good pig,” the fellow said. “Did you have some?” He spoke narrowly, barely opening his mouth, so that his accent—André had no idea which region it sprang from—sounded tight and nasal, but his words were understandable at least, and André was pleased, for the odds of having found, at first try, someone with whom he could converse straightforwardly among this enormous force were greatly less than even. He swallowed a belch and nodded.

  “No, I think what I ate was goat, but it was good. When was the day of rest declared? I missed hearing about it until I woke up and caught the smell of roasting meat, about an hour ago.”

  His neighbor sniffed. “Last night at midnight,” he said.

  “What about the people unloading the ships?”

  “What about them? Somebody has to unload the ships. I worked all afternoon, yest’day, then had to go on watch last night. I saw you out there, too, with one of the Templar crews, didn’t I? You one of them?”

  André grunted. “Aye, a novice, lowest of the low. Not a Templar yet, but not a common nobody either, so I can’t win at anything, anywhere.” He hoisted his empty flagon. “I’m going to get more beer. Can I bring you one?”

  The man looked about him as though surprised to discover that he had none, and then made to get up. “I’ll come with you.”