by Jack Whyte
St. Clair could hardly admit that he had been assured that was so by a Shi’ite Assassin, so he merely shrugged, keeping his smile in place, and added, “Flying, too, in and out.”
“Flying? Flying?” Again the appeal to his witnesses. “The fellow’s mad.”
“Not people, Deniston, birds. Pigeons. They send pigeons back and forth, bearing messages. Devout Muslim pigeons, I’m assured, who fly directly from mosque to mosque, minaret to minaret.” He raised a warning finger. “Keep it in mind, and beware. Farewell.” He turned and spurred away before any of the English knights could think of anything to say.
He made his way directly to where the remnants of his squadron sat waiting for him.
The Boar saluted him as he drew close. “All present, sir. Twenty-two sergeants fit for duty. Ten more in the care of the Hospitallers, one of them like to die, three to be kept in care, six more expected to return to duty within the day, after treatment.”
André nodded in acknowledgment, his thoughts teeming. Reduced to barely half strength, his squadron was not, strictly speaking, capable of carrying out its patrol assignation for that day, for the rules were very clear concerning strength and numbers. All mounted expeditions must be in sufficient strength to discourage random attacks. A forty-man squadron was a deterrent to such attacks; a twenty-man force was not.
“We will return to quarters, Sergeant, and regroup. We are hard hit and too few in number now to ride out as we are without endangering our mounts. I’m sure you know by now that they are more valuable than we are. Every horse we lose damages our chances of victory. See to it, if you will, and send the squadron standard-bearer to accompany me. I will report to the field commandery and request replacements for the men we lost today. I shall need a list of the names of the dead, too, but not immediately, unless you have them ready. Do you?”
“In my head, sir, but not yet written down.”
“Aye, well, be sure I receive a copy of the list when it is done … before you go off duty for the day.” The Boar saluted, and André turned away, pointing his horse in the direction of the distant field commandery.
There was great noise and activity around the enormous Templars’ tent that housed the field commandery, with knights, not all of them Templars, scurrying in all directions. St. Clair knew that the scuffle that had engaged his own men, expensive and fiercely fought as it had been, had nonetheless been a minor squabble, incapable of generating this much activity. Whatever the cause, he was forced to wait in a line before he could talk to the senior Temple officer on duty. The man, a Poitevin called Angouleme, listened to his report and his request for more men, then wrote something down before looking up at André.
“Sufficient unto the day, Holy Scripture says. It sounds as though you and the Hospitallers performed well. It cost you dearly, but I have already heard that your people took down five for every one you lost. Nevertheless, half your force lost in one action is enough to justify a rest on a day such as this. Philip’s own fortunes are proving little better than yours this day. Go you and order your men to stand down for the time being, but keep them close, against a sudden need.
In the meantime, I’ll send another squadron to make your patrol.”
André saluted and turned to go, but then hesitated and turned back. “Pardon me, but did you say King Philip is in action as we speak?”
“Aye, against the Accursed Tower again. The engineers reported that it’s fully undermined and should collapse at any moment, and so he mounted another assault to keep the enemy occupied. But he’s taking heavy losses, I’m told. Next man, step forward.”
St. Clair left the tent and found his standard-bearer waiting for him, and he sent the fellow back to their lines to tell the Boar to stand the men down for the remainder of the day. That done, he rode out seeking a vantage point where he could watch the French assault against the Accursed Tower, only to find that the action had already been disengaged, even though—or perhaps because—a large section of the tower’s wall, some thirty feet wide, had collapsed into piles of rubble that were swarming with frantic defenders, looking for all the world, from where St. Clair sat watching, like a colony of ants whose nest had been severely damaged. He watched Philip returning to his pavilion, his progress visible even from more than a mile away, thanks to the prominence of his personal standard, with the royal lilies of France so unmistakably displayed.
Slightly disappointed to have missed the action, André sat high on his horse and let his gaze roam over the prospect in front of him until it came to rest on the pavilion of Richard of England, with its own unmistakable royal coat of arms. Richard was reportedly still sick, suffering from angry boils, falling hair, loose teeth, and rotting gums, yet supposedly deeply engaged, too, in the attempt to hammer out the terms of surrender for the garrison of Acre. André sniffed at that thought. The camp was awash with rumors and counter-rumors, but the most prominent among them was concerned with Richard and his attitude towards this surrender. Word had it that he was being adamant in refusing to discuss terms with the Saracens, merely laying down the law instead and demanding unconditional surrender, with the immediate return of all Frankish prisoners and the return of every possession, including not only the True Cross but all the towns and fortresses that had been seized from Christendom after Hattin.
If that were true—and knowing Richard, André was quite prepared to believe that it could be—then it was folly of the most extreme kind, since it left Saladin no room for retaining either status or dignity. Simply by acceding to such extreme demands, the Sultan would commit suicide, politically, religiously, and socially, and even St. Clair, newcomer though he was, could see the stupidity of asking him to do so. A man like Saladin would sooner die than live in dishonor such as Richard was thrusting upon him. He would never accept Richard’s conditions.
Even as he thought that, André St. Clair knew he was exactly correct, and that Richard Plantagenet knew exactly what he was about in this matter. Richard was the Warrior King, the Shining Light of Christendom; he was the Lionhearted Monarch, England’s Paladin and the Soldier of Salvation to Rome’s Church; he would never settle for a mealy-mouthed, negotiated peace. Richard’s personality demanded nothing less than total victory. He had bankrupted his new kingdom to pay for this war, and he intended to capture every shred of glory that might be available for the taking … and there would be little glory in accepting the chastened capitulation of a cowed infidel. Therefore the King was doing everything within his power to push the Sultan into committing all his strength to total war—a war Richard was convinced he could not lose.
So much, then, for honor and for Richard’s commitment to his charges, André thought bitterly, certain now that his analysis was accurate. Beside the flaring light of the King’s need for personal glory and acclaim, the rights, lives, and expectations of all his countrymen and subjects were expendable, and he had the power, on all sides, to do whatever he needed to do to achieve his ends. He would defy Saladin to the death of the last man on either side.
Another movement caught his eye, too far away to identify, but bright and unusual, a flash of feminine yellow against the high walls of the royal pavilion. Berengaria? Or might it be Joanna? He thought of both of them, seeing their eyes regarding him steadily in return, and he smiled to himself, albeit nervously, wondering what they had thought of his sudden and unexplained disappearance from Limassol.
Strange, he thought now, and not for the first time, that he had not heard a single word from anyone in Richard’s camp since that day onward. He had spoken to de Sablé, it was true, but only very briefly and of general things. De Sablé was far too preoccupied with his many duties to have time for idle chatter over whether or not his friend the King had been displeased with one of his lesser minions. It was true, too, that he himself had made no attempt to contact his liege lord since the King’s arrival in Outremer. Some might call that dereliction, but a small voice in the back of André’s mind whispered quietly and mutinously to him o
f loyalty and responsibilities. Sir Henry St. Clair had given up everything to come out of his honorable retirement and place himself anew at the service of his King in a strange land, struggling to learn new tasks and skills at an age when most of his contemporaries had already died of old age, and there was something lodged deep within André that insisted, with an unrelenting pressure, that the responsibility lay with Richard to acknowledge the loyal old man’s death to his son in person. Until that happened—and the truth surprised him because he had not articulated the thought before that moment—André knew he would make no effort to approach the King. As for the two women, wife and sister, he grimaced ruefully, half grin, half groan, thinking himself well out of that situation, despite another small voice that muttered mournfully in regretful undertones at the back of his awareness.
He grunted wordlessly, a sound born deep in his chest, then sucked in a deep breath and attempted to empty his mind of such thoughts, pulling hard on his reins and kneeing his horse around to return to his squadron, where, for the next few days, he worked to smother his own vague and confusing feelings of guilt over Richard and loyalty by driving and drilling his men hard and pitilessly.
But four days later, on the twelfth day of July, the city fell, and in the blink of an eye, it seemed, everything changed. The morale of the entire army took an upward leap, and suddenly everyone was enthusiastic again, eagerly seeking something concrete to do, so that they might be able to talk afterwards of what they had done at the fall of Acre.
André, wanting no part of any of that, found himself in the middle of it all regardless, relieved of his squadron-leader status and promoted to command a specially raised one-hundred-horse troop charged with keeping peace during the surrender. The day after the capitulation, he sat in attendance with his new comrades in arms as the defeated Arabs marched out of the city they had defended for so many months.
The crowd watching the evacuation was huge; every soldier in the Frankish armies who was not on duty that day turned out to watch the defeated enemy depart. But anyone expecting to see a ragtag, dispirited procession of shuffling miscreants was disappointed. The enemy emerged from the gates in a long column, walking with their heads high and their dignity wrapped around them so solidly that their mere appearance deprived the watching Franks of any wish to cheer or even jeer. Instead, they watched in profound silence, tinged with respect, and no man among them thought to offer insult to the departing enemy.
André St. Clair sat watching the exodus with something akin to pride glowing in his breast, for he knew that his cousin Alec would have been proud of the way these men accepted defeat and showed no regret or deference to their conquerors. When the last of them passed by, leaving none but hostages and prisoners behind for Richard’s use, the officer commanding André’s troop gave the prearranged signal, and the troop fell into place behind the Arab column in files of twenty-five mounted men, riding four abreast. They accompanied their charges as far as the boundaries of their siege lines, then left them to make their own way into the desert, to wherever they might go.
“DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY IDEA why we are out here, sitting in the sun like this as though we were all idiots?”
Sitting at the head of his own squadron, two horse lengths ahead of its front rank, André St. Clair heard the question clearly—it had come from the extended triple rank of knights ahead of him—but he made no attempt to answer it or even to think about what the answer might be. His attention was dedicated to a matter that troubled him more personally. Something, some kind of creature, was crawling across the skin of his ribs beneath his right arm, and the slow itch of it was practically unbearable. Louse or beetle, he knew not what it was and cared less. His entire attention was focused upon the impossibility of scratching it, catching it, or interfering with its progress in any way, for it was separated from his clawing fingers by several layers of stinking clothing, fustian padding, chain mail, and an armored cuirass. He had not bathed in five weeks, and his stench was overpowering even to himself. Five weeks of unending desert patrols had achieved that, five weeks of strictly rationed water and the infuriating tedium of chasing phantom formations that remained uncatchable, were but seldom seen, and which sometimes attacked at nightfall and daybreak, inflicting casualties and then vanishing into the vast expanse of dunes. The men at his back, his own Red Squadron, were as sick of this existence as he was.
After a silence that seemed long in retrospect, one voice, also from in front of him, replied to the rhetorical question. “Because we are idiots, Brother. That should not surprise you. It is our calling. You know that. This is why we took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—purely so that we could sit out here in the desert sun, penniless, owning nothing, cooking in our own sweat, and obedient to the whims of some pitiless, demented whoreson whose task it is to dream up ways of testing our immortal souls. That’s why you are out here with the rest of us … you’re a Templar.”
“Silence!” André heard then. “I will not tolerate such talking in the ranks. Have you no shame? Remember who you are and where your duties lie. One more word like that from anyone and I will see the guilty man walled up for a few days, to contemplate the insults he is offering to God and to our sacred Order.”
The speaker was Etienne de Troyes, and no man hearing him doubted for a moment that the notoriously humorless Marshal would do as he threatened. The internal disciplines and punishment exercised by the Temple for the mental purity and salvation of its brethren were designed as impediments to sin, intended to be savage, as a disincentive to waywardness, and it was not unusual for a disobedient or fractious brother to be walled up, quite literally bricked into a confined and lightless place, for a week or longer, supplied with no more than a bowl of water while he contemplated how he might achieve acceptance, reinstatement, and salvation.
A silent stillness settled over the assembled knights again. A horse whickered and stamped, setting off a series of similar reactions from other mounts, all of which had been standing in one place for far too long. The animal directly ahead of St. Clair raised its tail, and he watched emotionlessly as it evacuated a pile of dung to steam briefly in the sun. He leaned forward slightly to look to his left, to where the black-robed ranks of the Hospitallers occupied the other end of the Frankish line, and he wondered if they knew any more than his own people did about why they were all here. He had led his men out before daybreak with nothing but the order to march—no destination, no objective, which in itself was highly unusual—and they had marched until they reached this desolate place, where they had halted and drawn up in their battle formations.
The Hospitallers held the left of the line, on the lower slopes of the hill called Tel Aiyadida, which marked the easternmost boundary of the Christian advance. The Templars, as usual, manned the right, and the two extremities were joined by the various contingents of the lay forces, forming a front more than half a mile in expanse. Ahead of the line, stretching away to the southeast, the road to Nazareth was virtually invisible in the noonday glare, and to the left of that, rising in the middle distance, was another hill, the Tel Keisan. There was no visible activity on the Tel Keisan, but it was enemy territory, securely held, the Templars knew, by Saladin’s teeming and apparently inexhaustible regiments of black-robed Bedouin from Africa.
A trumpet sounded from the rear and was soon followed by the sound of galloping hooves as a messenger arrived with word that King Richard was approaching from the direction of Acre, accompanied by a large body of troops, and everyone present—in excess of twelve hundred mounted men—turned in their saddles to see the Lionheart arrive, anticipating that the large body of troops referred to would be the infantry they had left behind in Acre.
It was, yet it was not. The infantry was there, in strength, but they were there as guards for the huge column of Saracen prisoners that walked in their midst, roped together hand and foot, rank and file, and winding down through the dunes like an enormous snake. Richard rode in front, at the head of the sna
ke, and he was in full blossom, riding the magnificent golden stallion that he had taken, had in fact stolen, from Isaac Comnenus. He was dressed resplendently as usual, in his finest, gilt-chased armor, over which he wore crimson, gold, and royal purple garments. Behind him thronged his personal retinue, a score and a half of peacocks and popinjays of all descriptions, including as always a number of celebrated knights and warriors whose manhood none could question without risk to life and limb. They rode some fifty paces ahead of the main bulk of their vanguard, sufficiently far in front to keep them relatively free of road dust other than that which they stirred up themselves in passing. Then, next in order, came an entire phalanx of Royal Guards, marching twelve abreast and led by a squad of drummers who set a steady, not too strenuous pace. Behind those, heavily guarded on both sides of their column, came the prisoners, their ankles tethered so that they could walk in a shuffle but could not stretch out into a stride.
Watching them emerging into view, André felt something formless shift in his belly, and glanced quickly towards the flanks of Tel Keisan, not knowing what he expected to see there, yet aware that something, some presentiment, was making him feel queasy. But the hillsides where he looked appeared to be empty of life and his unease deepened, for he knew that the opposite was true. The enemy was there. They were simply remaining out of sight. He swung back to look at the approaching column, trying to assess how many prisoners there were. The front was ten men wide, with two guards on each side, making a fourteen-man front, and he counted ten regular ranks behind the first before the movement and the clouds of dust defeated him. A thick haze hung over everything, stirred up by the passage of so many shuffling feet, and the moving ranks reached back into the opacity of the rising cloud until they became impossible to see. St. Clair’s misgivings increased.
He turned his head and spoke to the knight sitting on his right, at the head of his own, Blue Squadron, a taciturn, humorless English knight whose real name André did not know because everyone referred to him, even in conversation with him, as Nose. There was good reason for the name, because whenever he was asked a question, even in French, he was most likely to respond, in English, “Who knows?” But in addition to that, his own nose was spectacularly misshapen, broken and bent beyond repair years before by a hard-swung club that should have brained him but missed.