Standard of Honor

by Jack Whyte

  He lapsed into silence then, and André sat mute for a time, thinking over what he had heard and what it meant. He then surprised himself by spouting words he had not known were in him, waiting to be said.

  “I agree with you completely,” he said, earning himself a glance of mild surprise from his cousin. He shrugged. “I know it would earn me little in the way of praise were the truth known to our fellow Templars, but I am a bather myself, although I keep it secret nowadays. I grew into the habit of it while I was in southern Provence, studying with my Arabian tutors at a villa belonging to one of the senior Councillors of the Order of Sion. The tutors were Muslims, to a man, as I am sure yours were in your time, but since there is nothing Christian in the beliefs of our brotherhood, there was no ritual conflict to hamper them from pursuing their own ways and living their lives according to the Koran.”

  He smiled, recalling something from the distant past. “The senior of them, a learned man I soon came to revere for his wisdom, took exception to the smell of me when I first arrived to take up my studies, and by the time he had called in his servants to search for and find the wild, dung-covered goat that had somehow found entry to his chambers, I had begun to sense that I might be smelling a little ripe. He went on to point out, with great patience, that since I was of the brotherhood and only nominally and of necessity a Christian, I could afford to behave in a civilized manner while I was on premises owned by the brotherhood, which meant that I was free to bathe without fear of reprisals, and consequently blessed thereafter to be able to absolve my friends of the need to pinch their noses and suffer my rank odor.”

  Alec had been listening closely to this, one arm crossed over his breast and supporting his other elbow while he scratched the tip of his nose idly with the nail of his little finger. “This tutor. You say he was the eldest of the group? Might his name have been Sharif Al-Qalanisi? I know the chance is—”

  “Yes! How could you—?”

  “Because he was my teacher, too, in the same place, in Provence. The Villa Providence, home of Gilbert, the Master of St. Omer, great-nephew of Godfrey St. Omer, one of the nine Founders of the Temple. Al-Qalanisi must be nigh on seventy now, for he was over fifty when I knew him. How small, the world in which we walk, do you not agree? Pardon me for my enthusiasm, but you were describing an experience I once had, too, in minute detail. And did he then encourage you to bathe daily?”

  “He did. And I did as he bade me, so that in the space of half a year, while learning Arabic, I had grown so accustomed to the pleasures of bathing that my return to Christian smelliness and filth was almost intolerable. I could not believe how everyone reeked. The stench of my companions took my breath away at times, and so I soon learned to avoid their company, and Sharif Al-Qalanisi, God bless him, had taught me a way to keep myself reasonably, or at least tolerably, clean. As you know, there are occasions when it is considered laudable and indeed obligatory for a Christian man to bathe—Easter springs to mind, as do the feast days of several major saints—so that all in all, a man may bathe as frequently as once every season, should he so desire. But that is only part of the struggle. Even if they washed their bodies, very few men will wash their clothing at the same time. It was that little truth, passed on to me by Sharif Al-Qalanisi, that enabled me to bathe as often as I was able to arrange it, so be it I kept a set of suitably rancid, sweat-stained clothing to wear around my fellow novices. But when I was alone, I would wear clothing that smelled as fresh and clean as hillside air on a cool morning.” He nodded emphatically. “The only sin a sane man might connect with cleanliness is the hypocrisy and ignorance that leads the Christians to deny its worth. Tell me, therefore, what else do they have that you consider superior?”

  “Superior to what we have? Are you sure you want to hear that?”

  “No, consider what we have been discussing … We are of the Brotherhood of Sion, an entity unto ourselves. I want to know what else the Saracens have that you consider superior to the Christian equivalent.”

  “Ah, I see. There is a difference. So, let me see. Well, I could start with honor—the true kind, that has all the solidity and worth and value that is seldom found among the ranks of Christendom today. The Saracens have that in profusion, whereas among the Frankish ranks today, from kings to pikemen, honor is merely a sound mouthed by knaves to gull fools. Then there is integrity, closely linked to honor in that the one cannot exist without the other. Next might come fidelity, to ideals, to commitments, to agreements, and to good— truly good—intent. The military virtues I will not include, for they are simplistic rituals played out by mindless fools for the most part—bravery, courage, constancy, mercy, and compassion, though it seems obscene even to include those latter two by name. But all of those may be adhered to or abandoned in the heat of battle by men of either side, with no one being any the wiser. No, I think I will make suffice of honor, integrity, and fidelity. The Saracens possess all of those three in greater mass than do the Christian Franks.”

  St. Clair nodded. “Tell me this, then, for it is puzzling me. You say that you only discovered these things, and reluctantly, while you were prisoner in the hands of the Saracens, yet you have been dealing with Islam and with the Muslim Sons of the Prophet ever since you arrived here. Why were you not aware of these things before? You must have had some inkling that it was so.”

  “No, not so. My liaison with Islam prior to my being captured had nothing to do with the Saracens. I was dealing with the Assassins, and they are Shi’ite, originally from Persia. And not merely that, but I was dealing personally with Rashid al-Din Sinan himself, the Old Man of the Mountain, and he is not an endearing man to be near. The Assassins are single-minded and humorless, like all zealots, merciless and incapable of compassion. They are very much like their counterparts here, the Templars. In all the years in which I dealt with the Old Man and his minions, I handled them with care and expected truth in our contracts and justiciary precision in our dealings. I never doubted their fidelity to their leader and the agreements he made with us, but I never thought of them at all in terms of honor or integrity as I understood those things. They might have had their own versions of each, within themselves, but there was nothing there of either one that I could recognize. It was only when I fell among the Saracens and came to know Ibn al-Farouch that the scales of blindness began to loosen and fall from my eyes.”

  “And so when you came back you defended them when you heard them maligned.”

  “Whenever I heard them unjustly maligned I did, yes.”

  “Hmm. No wonder, then, that people look askance at you. And you say you have had no dealings with the Assassins or their leader since you were captured four years ago?”

  “None at all, no.”

  “Do they even know you are yet alive?”

  “They do now, for I have made it known to them, this past week. That’s why you have not heard from me. The dispatches you delivered made it clear that I need to renew my relationship with them, and so I set about that right away. But my prime contact had moved on two years earlier, and once I found out where he had gone— no easy task in itself—it took me three whole days of cajoling and explaining before he would even see me. He simply did not believe I was me. He was quite sure that I had died at Hattin, for they had acquired the names of all the Frankish knights who survived the fight and the ransoms that followed, and of course mine was not among them. I had to convince him that I had changed my name from Sir Alexander Sinclair of the Temple to plain Sir Lachlan Moray, knight of Scotland, when al-Farouch captured me, because Saladin was executing Templars and I saw little future in being known as one.”

  “Is the Old Man still alive?”

  “Oh yes. Alive and well, and as malignant as he ever was. I am to meet with him the day after tomorrow. He has been at al Kahf, the Eagle’s Nest, his favorite, unreachable stronghold in the northern mountains, but he is already on his way back and will be here, within riding distance of us, by tomorrow night.”

  �
�What will you say to him? And is he still paying tribute to the Temple?”

  Alec sat up straighter and stretched mightily. “I have no notion of what to say to him. He will tell me what he expects to hear. Rashid al-Din Sinan is not an easy man with whom to make idle conversation. Yes, he is still paying tribute to the Temple. But before I can tell you any more and still make sense—”

  He half raised one hand, finger pointed, in a tacit order to be quiet and listen, and far off in the distance, rising clearly in the desert air, they heard what sounded like the noise of battle. Both men surged to their feet and set about shaking the sand from their clothing, looking around to where their horses waited quietly.

  “Take the dispatches with you,” Sinclair said. “They are in my saddlebags. Read them tonight, then meet me here tomorrow at the same time. I’ll bring food again. But you will know what’s involved by then and you will be able to understand what I intend to do when I explain it to you. Now let’s see what all the shouting is about.”

  The din grew noticeably louder as they approached the rear lines, and eventually they came to a place where they could see that the entire army was up and shouting, facing towards the northeast while armed riders ran up and down in every direction, cheering and screaming, all semblance of discipline abandoned.

  “What is happening out there?” André shouted. “Can you see anything?”

  Alec Sinclair was standing high in his stirrups, shielding his eyes with one hand as he peered towards the distant horizon, and he stood motionless for a long time before he settled back into his saddle. “Richard of England,” he said, turning to his cousin. “Finally he comes. I can see his great standard out in front of everything else.” The English host is out there, filling the horizon with an admirable blur for as far as the eye can see. A very large, broad blur. They’ve been a long time a-coming and there were more than a few here who said they never would arrive, but they are here now. They must have landed up the coast, at Tyre, and marched from there, then made camp early yesterday and set out on the last leg to here long before dawn, for the sun’s been up less than two hours. You told me they were more than a hundred thousand strong. Were you exaggerating?”

  André bridled a little. “No, I was not. Why should I need to exaggerate? When you combine Philip’s French and allied levies—Burgundy, Flanders, and Brittany—with Richard’s English and Angevins, they total nigh on seven score thousand, according to my father. One hundred and forty thousand men, with weapons and munitions, horses and livestock, servants and camp followers in addition. The fleet required to carry them numbered more than two hundred and twenty large vessels and there was not an inch of space left available in any one of them.”

  “Excellent. Then we should soon see things start to happen more quickly around here, once they are settled in and have had time to flex their muscles. The raptors will be lusting for blood. Acre will not stand long against them now, and once it falls, the legend of Saladin’s invincibility will be forever tarnished.”

  Alec looked away again, back towards the fevered activity in the Trench, then stooped and pulled the dispatch wallets from his saddlebags. “Here, make sure you take time to read these tonight, no matter what madness happens here to celebrate this arrival. This reading is more important than anything else you could conceivably be called upon to do. Chew on it and digest it. We will talk about it in greater depth tomorrow, before I have to leave to meet Rashid al-Din. For now, I am instructed to talk with your friend Sir Robert de Sablé, if he is with the main host there, and it were best I did that alone. If I find him, I will deliver greetings to him from you, but we do not wish to attract unwelcome attention by seeking him out together. So fare ye well, for now, and meet me here in this same place tomorrow, even if it is allocated to some incoming group in the meantime. It should not be. Everything has been laid out already in the flat area southwest of the Trench, but you know how it is with armies. Some bright lad might decide to erect a general’s tent right on this spot between now and tomorrow at this time. We’ll meet here anyway, because no one will know us or care who we are, and we will move on elsewhere if we must.”

  André waved and watched his cousin spur away towards the approaching blur, as he thought of it, then tucked his wallets into his saddlebags and turned his horse back towards the stables. He knew that planning had been under way for weeks and probably for months to accommodate the enormous influx of personnel and materiel that Richard’s arrival would precipitate, and that a veritable city of street grids had been prepared in the area to the southwest of where he now sat his horse, with encampments for the various contingents of infantry, cavalry, sappers, engineers, and assorted others that made up the vast army. This afternoon, he decided, he would watch the great arrival unfold, keeping well out of everyone’s way. In the evening he would read Alec’s dispatches, and the morrow would look after itself.

  As he kicked his horse into motion he was wondering what was going through the minds of the garrison commanders in Acre as they watched the approaching dust clouds of Richard’s army blot out the sky.

  NINE

  The night had passed relatively peacefully, once the first chaotic arrivals and dispersals had been over- come, an event that lasted throughout the entire day and well into the hours of darkness. But the furor died down eventually, and the strident, heckling voices of the marshaling sergeants had dwindled and faded slowly as the last remaining units of the incoming forces were received and led away to where they would set up their encampments for the next few weeks at least.

  André St. Clair had plugged his ears with fine white candle wax and spent more than four hours, two of them by candlelight, reading and then rereading the contents of the two wallets he had transported across the seas for his cousin. He now felt he understood most of what was required of Alec, and of himself, but what he had yet to learn could now come only from Alec, and he was impatient to return to their interrupted discussion. He contrived to miss matins that day, surmising accurately that the activities of the previous day and night might have resulted in a general lapse of enthusiasm for midnight prayers, and he made his way to the horse lines to select a mount more than an hour before the sky began to show the first hint of the coming day.

  He then made his way out into the desert, riding by the pale light of the last, lingering stars until he reached the rendezvous, where he dismounted and off-saddled his horse, then tethered the beast to a dragging iron tent peg so that it would not wander far, and slipped a nose bag containing a handful of oats over its head. That done, he left the animal to munch contentedly and fashioned himself another seat in the sand.

  An hour later, the sun long since risen, it was evident that something had happened to detain Alec, and André resolved to wait another half hour before returning to his own tent. It was pointless even to think of going in search of his cousin, for he had no vaguest idea of where to begin looking, and he could not even guess at what kind of changes would have been wrought in the general camp layout by the overnight addition of a hundred thousand men. But he had no desire to remain here alone for much longer, for the sun was growing measurably stronger and he had not thought to bring any kind of shelter against it, reasoning that their business there would be concluded in short order and that the two of them would then return to do whatever needed to be done.

  He smoothed a rectangular area of sand with one hand and stuck a poniard, hilt first, into the center of it to create a sundial. Then he sat back to watch the shadow creep slowly towards the line that he had traced as marking half an hour. When shadow and line crossed, he waited a few minutes longer, then rose up and sheathed his blade, moving to saddle his patient horse. He had thrown the saddle across its back and was tightening his girths when he heard an approaching noise and looked up to see Alec, his face solemn.

  “Well, welcome to you, Sir Knight of the Mournful Face. You took your time arriving. Where have you been?” He was still working beneath the horse’s withers, tightening the straps
, but when he heard no answer to his gibe he straightened up and looked across to see no warmth in his cousin’s face. “Alec? In God’s name, man, what’s wrong? You look as though you have lost all you value. What’s happened? Is it de Sablé?”

  Alec Sinclair managed to shake his head, but strangely, as though he were numb or impaired in some manner. Then he swung his leg over the cantle and slid loosely to the ground, collecting himself fluidly and with ease. But still his eyes were unfocused.

  “De Sablé is well. I left him only a short time ago. Come and sit down.” He moved past André on stiff legs and lowered himself to the depression in the sand where André had waited for him. André felt apprehension coiling strongly in his gut, and he patted the horse’s flank and left it standing there as he went to sit on the sand beside his cousin.

  “Alec, tell me what is troubling you. You went to look for de Sablé yesterday, so why did you have to meet him today?”

  “Couldn’t find him yesterday. He had too much marshaling to attend to. But I remembered what you had told me about his joining the Temple, and so I left word at the commandery that if Sir Robert were to appear, he should inform him that I had come seeking him. He sent for me this morning and I’ve been with him ever since.” Alec sat up straight and drew a great breath, and André could see that his cousin was in some kind of torment, his eyes haunted with awareness. Before he could say anything, however, Alec bent forward quickly and seized a double handful of the fabric of André’s surcoat, pulling him close and into an embrace.