Standard of Honor

by Jack Whyte

  “Did no one ever warn you people never to relax your guard?”

  The voice came from directly behind them, so close that the speaker had had no need to shout, and both men spun around so quickly, fumbling for their weapons, that anyone watching might have laughed at their consternation. Harry Douglas was quicker to react than St. Clair. His sword cleared its sheath as he completed his pivot, and he had it half raised to attack before the significance of what he was seeing struck home to him. André had been less well balanced when he heard the stranger’s words, and he had to shuffle his feet quickly before he could begin to turn around, but his hand had barely closed about his sword hilt when he identified what he was seeing and straightened up immediately. He did not relinquish his grip on the hilt—the folly of such naïve behavior had been drilled into his skull years earlier—but he felt the tension bleed from him as quickly as it had sprung up as he swept his gaze from side to side, searching for others. There were none. The man facing them was alone.

  “Who are you?” Harry asked the question before St. Clair could formulate it.

  The stranger merely looked back at him. “Who should I be? Whom did you expect to find here, so far into the desert and at such a time of day? I am Alexander Sinclair.”

  It was all he needed to say, and André felt his heart leap in his chest with relief, not because he had doubted who this was but because he had doubted his own ability to recognize his cousin after so many years. He might, he felt now, have recognized the face, changed though it was, but the voice, deep and resonantly alien in its Scots intonation, was unmistakable and unchanged. Before he could say a word, however, the stranger looked from Harry to him.

  “You are young André, I can tell. I remember your eyes, and the wee crook in your nose. Had you no’ mentioned that in the message you sent me, I would never have answered you. I have but little truck wi’ people nowadays.”

  André smiled, feeling euphoric, for he had heard little good of this man since arriving in Outremer, and he had begun to suspect that his cousin might, indeed, have turned away from everything he once knew. Now, however, within moments of setting eyes upon him again, he knew deep down in his heart that Alec Sinclair was no whit less than, or different from, the man he had always been. He was tall and lean, dark eyed, gaunt faced, and long legged, with broad, strong shoulders. His beard was iron gray and clipped short, and in conjunction with the edges of the close-fitting mailed hood he wore beneath his helmet, it emphasized the deeply graven lines of his face. He wore the full dress of a senior Templar knight, with the equal-armed black cross embroidered on his left breast, in the upper quadrant of the white surcoat bearing the long red cross on its front and rear. The chain mail of his hauberk and hood had the burnished look about them that André already knew to be the result of years spent in the desert dryness, being scrubbed and polished every day by blowing sand, and he carried a long-bladed sword, harnessed somehow to hang at his back, between his shoulders. In that single glance, he registered that Sinclair’s leggings were different, too, ankle length rather than calf length, and flared from the knee down so that they could be worn over heavy, thick-soled riding boots.

  “Then I am glad I sent the message as I did,” he said in response, his wide smile still in place. “But it was nothing subtle. I merely thought you might remember the incident. Well met, Cousin. It’s been too long a time, too many years. And say hello to my friend of friends here, one of your fellow countrymen, Harry Douglas. Harry, this is my cousin, Sir Alexander Sinclair.” He extended his arm and Alec gripped it firmly, smiling with the astonishingly bright, warm eyes that André remembered well. But then André twisted his arm subtly and gripped his cousin’s hand in both his own, and beyond a momentary flicker of surprise, Alec betrayed no reaction, but returned the required counter grip of brotherhood. He then turned to Harry and shook with him, too, initiating the grip himself this time and receiving no reaction.

  “Well met, Sir Harry Douglas,” he said. “Do you know what we are talking about, your friend here and I?” When Harry shook his head, Sinclair laughed, a single sound deep in his throat and swallowed before it could emerge completely. “That beak of his,” he said. “With the bend in it. ’Twas I did that for him, one summer afternoon when he was yet too young to do anything other than bleed. I turned quickly, to see what he was doing, and there he was, right at my back. The butt of the spear beneath my arm caught him from the side as I came around, and it mashed his nose across his face. It was a marked improvement, for even as a boy he was too comely, but I was tormented by guilt over it for at least an hour.” He paused dramatically. “Well, it felt like an hour. But in honesty it could have been less.” He stopped, then looked from one to the other of them, and his face grew sober.

  “You will have heard, no doubt, about how changed I am since I returned from my captivity among the Infidel?”

  He had spoken to both of them, but he was looking at André, and André returned the look openly, nodding. “Aye, we have heard some drolleries, but as you see, they did not deter us from coming to find you.”

  “Aye, and had I known for certain it was you seeking me, I might not have brought you so far out into the desert for a meeting. But I have learned that very few men are worth trusting nowadays, and I was never the great truster of people in the first place. I thought, just from the way your message was worded, that you might be who you said you were, but I have heard nothing of you since last we met, more than twelve years ago. It was not inconceivable that you might have told the tale to someone, who then thought to use it as a lure to draw me out of hiding. And it was possible, too, that you were being used against me. But here you are in the flesh, a Knight of the Temple, and I can see you’re still the lad I knew and liked. How is your lady mother? I have never stopped being grateful to her for the way she took me in that year.”

  “She died a few years ago, but she remembered you fondly. She would often talk of you, years after you had gone. But my father is well, and aged as he is, he is coming to Outremer with Richard, as his Master-at-Arms.” Before Alec could react, he asked, “Why would anyone seek to draw you out of hiding, Alec? Why are you in hiding, for that matter?”

  “Och, that’s a long story and for another time and place. But it grieves me to hear about your mother. Is that why you have been at such pains to find me? Has it to do with … family affairs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Friendly, I presume?”

  “Oh yes, very much so. I have much to tell you. But before I tell you anything, you have to tell me how you did that, how you were able to creep up on us so quietly.”

  “Quietly? The two of you were making so much noise I could have ridden up behind you with an entire troop without your hearing me.”

  “For a few moments, perhaps, we were making noise, but where were you before that? Where did you come from?”

  Alec Sinclair smiled. “I was in hiding, watching you and listening. Close by, as you suspect, but you’ll pardon me if I don’t tell you exactly where. I will tell you, however, that the opportunity it afforded me to hide and observe is why I chose this spot.”

  His cousin thought about that for a few moments, looking around him speculatively, and then he nodded. “Accepted. Were the secret mine, I would not reveal it, either.”

  “And speaking of secrets,” Harry Douglas intervened, “I know that you two have things to discuss—confidential family matters that do not concern me—so I will leave you to talk. Now that you are here I am prepared to believe that there are no fleabags watching us and waiting to attack. I shall unsaddle our mounts and feed them some oats, and then I will walk about among the stones and try to find your horse, Sir Alexander, for I presume you did not walk all the way out here in full mail. Should I become lost, I will whistle loudly, so if you will keep one ear apiece cocked to the air, I’ll be obliged. And so, in which direction should I seek your horse?”

  Sinclair raised an arm and in a slow and elaborate mime pointed directly nor
th, and Harry nodded in acknowledgment and began to walk away, leading the two horses, until Sinclair stopped him again.

  “I know you have been out here in the kingdom for a while, but I doubt you have been here before. Be careful walking among those stones. Keep your eyes open and your wits about you, and don’t stick your bare hands into open holes. This place is a paradise for vipers.”

  Harry nodded. “My thanks for that. I promise you, I will keep my hands where I can see them at all times.”

  “HE SEEMS LIKE A GOOD MAN,” Alec Sinclair said as Harry vanished behind a boulder, leading the two horses. “But then, he is a Scot, so I should not be surprised. Mind you, he does not sound like one.”

  “He is a good man, in every sense,” André replied quietly, “and he is his own man, which is far more important and appears to be an unusual attribute out here. The Temple brothers, knights and sergeants both, walk somewhat in awe of him, and that makes Harry uncomfortable, so most of the time he avoids people altogether. He always was a quiet man, from what I’ve heard, but now he is one of the most celebrated knights in all of Outremer, and that does little to increase his comfort.”

  Sir Alexander pointed to a pair of smallish stones, then reached back over his shoulder and drew the great sword from behind his back. “Can we not sit down while we talk? I have been standing for hours. You’ll pardon me, I hope, for drawing steel, but I canna sit with this thing in place.” He stepped to one side and carefully leaned the long-bladed weapon upright against a stone.

  “That is an impressive weapon. I do not believe I have ever seen its like.”

  “Then you have never been in Scotland. Twohanded broad-sword. They are common there.”

  “That blade must be more than five feet long.”

  “It’s certainly long enough to keep the pests away when you swing it around your head.”

  André laughed and looked again at the impressive blade, gauging the width of it at a full hand’s breadth where it met the double cross-guard. “What were we talking about?”

  “About your friend. You said he was uneasy. Why?” André crossed his arms on his chest. “Well, he is a monk, and some of those make a religion out of discomfort. But were I to guess seriously at a realistic reason, I would say he feels guilty for missing the disaster at Hattin. He was at the springs of La Safouri with the rest of the army a few days before the battle, but he was sent off with dispatches to the garrison at Ascalon the night before de Chatillon and his cronies talked King Guy into abandoning the oasis and marching directly for Tiberias. So most of his friends ended up dead.”

  “And he feels guilty because he survived, you think? Then I shall have to talk to him. I was there that day, and believe me when I tell you that Harry has no need to berate himself for his good fortune in being somewhere else. So how came he to be in Acre?”

  “Because he fought his way out of Ascalon, just before it fell, then spent the following months acquainting himself with the land of Palestine, sometimes on horseback, mostly afoot. The entire region was in chaos, for after Hattin, the Muslims were invincible and our side could barely field a force of cavalry. Every city in the Latin Kingdom went down, as you know, and it seems Harry was there at most of them, usually in the thickest of the fighting. He was wounded a few times but he came out alive every time, and men began to say he was indestructible. In a time when there were no senior officers anywhere, to plan or take command, men rallied to Harry, forcing him to be a leader despite his own unwillingness. And eventually, he led a tired and tattered little army back to Tyre.”

  “How long ago was that, do you know?”

  “No, but Harry can tell you. It must have been half a year after Hattin, at least.”

  “Aye, at least. So he reached Tyre. They must have feted him when he arrived, after so long.”

  “They tried, I’m told, for the men who had been with him sang his praises everywhere they went, and God Himself knows the Franks had need of heroes in those days … conquering heroes first, but failing those, defiant heroes. Especially in Tyre.”

  Alec Sinclair nodded. Tyre remained the only Christian-held city in all the Holy Land, the only place that had not fallen to the Saracens, and in the weeks and months after Hattin it had filled to overflowing with the remnants of the Christian army. Conrad de Montferrat, the German Baron who had snatched the city from Saladin’s grasp a bare moment before it was lost forever, ruled it with iron discipline, even claiming sovereignty over the last of the Templars there, which in itself was a measure of how far the Temple’s star had plunged after Hattin.

  “There were fewer than a hundred Templars— knights and sergeants both—in the city when Harry arrived, and he brought only three more with him among his followers. But Gerard de Ridefort was already there.”

  “And not entirely pleased with the situation, I understand.”

  “Apparently so.”

  There was no need for either man to say any more on that matter. De Ridefort, notoriously choleric and intolerant at the best of times, had been reduced to seething impotence in Tyre, bitterly resenting his subordination to de Montferrat and the obligation that went with it to accept orders from the German and obey them meekly, upon pain of expulsion from the city with his knights. There had been no slightest doubt in the Master’s mind that Conrad would expel him and his congregation out of hand at the first sign of insubordination or opposition, and he had told his Templars that. He also made no secret of how much it nauseated him that he, as the embodiment of the Temple Order, could do nothing to resist or to change that situation, for he had lost his entire command structure, not to mention four-fifths of his entire command, during and after the battle at Hattin. He was reduced to watching and biding his time, powerless, grim faced and tooth grinding in his acknowledgment of that.

  De Montferrat was a newcomer to the Latin Kingdom, a German whose primary loyalty was to the Holy Roman Empire, which meant to Constantinople and its Orthodox Christianity. By extension of that, and there was no great leap of understanding required to appreciate the subtleties involved, de Montferrat’s ideal military order was the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa’s Order of Teutonic Knights, which meant that other Orders, namely the Hospitallers and Templars, were inferior and less than ideal. In Conrad’s eyes, it was only right and proper that the Teutonic Knights should and would provide the future strength and protection of the Christian presence—Orthodox Christian being plainly understood—in the Latin Kingdom. And given sufficient time, he believed, the Latin Kingdom itself might well become the German or the Teutonic Kingdom. In the interim, he was determined that the graspingly ambitious and politically unacceptable papal Christianity, Roman Catholicism as it was now known, would be shut out from Jerusalem and forced to return to Rome, taking its knights and its Frankish adherents with it. And neither the Templars nor the Hospitallers, both inextricably linked to the Roman Catholic Church, would be permitted to operate in Outremer thereafter.

  “Barbarossa’s death must have come as a shock to Conrad,” Sinclair mused, and his cousin nodded.

  “Aye, and unwelcome.”

  “Completely. Think about that from his viewpoint, if you can imagine it. There he is, sitting strongly in the throne he built himself, awaiting the arrival of his cousin the Emperor with an army of five hundred thousand men, sufficient strength to enable him to thumb his nose at everyone from Saladin to Richard Plantagenet and Philip of France. He must have felt omnipotent, invincible … And then in a clatter of hooves comes a worn-out rider with the word that his universe has fallen apart: his Emperor is dead, his mighty army scattered, and all his hopes and promises no more than smoke blowing in the wind.” Alec shook his head in wonder. “I know not how I might adjust to such a reversal, such a vast reversal. But then, I am not Conrad de Montferrat. And yet, for any man to go from heights to depths so quickly … And then, no sooner was he down than the next blow struck him: Saladin released de Lusignan. The confluence of timing is incredible.”

  “Aye, it i
s—literally incredible. I doubt that was coincidence, Alec, no matter what so many people say. Saladin is no man’s fool. He released de Lusignan upon Guy’s sworn word that he would not again take up arms against Islam. Everyone knows that, and they laugh at him because of it, thinking him a fool not to know that no Christian need be bound by an oath given under duress to an infidel. But think about that for a moment, if you will. Saladin has been fighting us for years and has had many dealings with our highest-ranking officers and potentates. Do you really believe he is stupid enough to be unaware of the sneering contempt in which every Frank holds him and his? Bear in mind, this is the man who has welded the entire world of Islam, from Syria to Egypt, into one entity, melding and commingling two caliphates and fielding what is probably the largest army ever assembled by any one man in history—greater than Xerxes or Darius, perhaps even greater than Alexander. Do you not think it makes more sense to believe that this Sultan, seeing the danger to his supremacy that existed within Tyre in the person of de Montferrat, might think it advantageous to release King Guy, knowing beyond doubt that Guy would break his given word immediately and march on Tyre, there to claim his kingship and his other rights from Conrad?”

  Alec Sinclair smiled, gazing out into distance. “Aye, it makes perfect sense, and I have never thought otherwise. It worked out perfectly, too, did it not? Guy and Conrad were at each other’s throats within days.”

  “But not for many days. The wind changed and the smoke from the fire he lit blew back into Saladin’s face when Conrad threw Guy out of Tyre and Guy marched south to besiege Acre. He took the Templars with him, under de Ridefort, and that brings me to the end of Harry’s story.”

  “The end of Harry’s story?” Sinclair crossed one ankle over his knee and grasped it in both hands, leaning backward. “How can that be? Harry is still with us.”