by Jack Whyte
“What is going on, Nose? And don’t say ‘who knows’? I’ve been on constant patrol these past five weeks and came in only last night, so I have no idea what’s been happening around here. Why have they brought these prisoners all the way out here? Richard clearly has a purpose in mind for them. Do you have any idea what it might be? Have you heard any rumors? Anything at all?”
Nose looked back at him, then dipped his head. “They’re the prisoners from Acre … nigh on three thousand of ’em, taken at the fall of the city and held against Saladin’s promise to free his prisoners—our men—and return the True Cross.” He shrugged, spreading his hands. “That must be what this is all about. I can’t think what else it might be. Saladin has been very quiet of late, making no great efforts to live up to his promises. But now he must be coming to meet us, to carry out the exchange of prisoners.”
“Then why is there no sign of him? Why are we here alone?”
Nose grunted, deep in his throat. “Who knows? You’d best ask Richard that. Kings and sultans have ways of their own, I’ve noticed. They don’t ask me for advice, and I don’t offer any.”
For the next half hour and more André sat and watched as the column wound down towards the center of the front line, and he took note of how even the veterans of the two monastic Orders joined in on the general chorus of acclaim and enthusiasm that greeted the advent of the English King. Richard was in fine form, showing no signs at all of his recent battle with scurvy and waving and smiling to everyone around him as he approached the line. When he arrived there, he drew his elaborate golden-hilted sword and brandished it above his head, and the line before him broke and opened up to allow him and his party to pass through. The sight of that caused a stir of anticipation among all the units making up the line of battle, for the prisoners, although still under heavy escort, were now theoretically beyond restraint and approaching the enemy lines, led by King Richard and drawing closer to freedom with every step they took. But nothing happened. The appearance of the column of prisoners evoked no visible response from the slopes of Tel Keisan, and André found himself wondering how far the captives would be permitted to go before they were stopped.
His unvoiced question was answered almost as soon as his mind asked it, for Richard, now approximately a hundred paces from where André sat watching, raised a hand above his head and made a circular signal before drawing off with his party to one side and making room for the phalanx of guards at his back to carry out what was clearly a set of orders drawn up earlier. The guards had stopped on a flat stretch of ground close to the midpoint between the two opposing hills, Tel Aiyadida and Tel Keisan, and now they split and wheeled, moving back and to both sides to flank the prisoners. As they did that, the other guards who had been marching on the captives’ flanks began to usher them into formal lines and blocks, herding and pushing and counting heads until the front rank numbered one hundred men and there were ten men in each file, making a thousand men in all, each separated from his closest companion by two paces front and rear and an equal distance on each side. The sun glared down malevolently and there was not a sign of shelter or relief anywhere, and the assembled army sat, or stood, and waited, sweating, taking care not to lay bare skin against their armor. And in places, across the extent of the Frankish lines, a man would sway and fall, undone by the torturous heat.
When the block of men was complete, it looked impressive, St. Clair thought, still wondering why Richard was going to so much trouble here, and to what end, for there were still almost twice as many men again in the original column. But no one moved and nothing was said until the sergeants began shuffling the next ranks of prisoners into place to build a second block, also of a thousand men. Someone behind St. Clair, one of his own squadron, started to mutter something, but André twisted around in his seat and snarled at the man to shut up, being careful not to look and actually see who it had been. No one else spoke after that, and the time dragged slowly by, the misery growing with every moment that passed. And André St. Clair became increasingly aware that no slightest sign of Saladin or any other Saracen presence was being shown opposite them.
Some time later, when the prisoners had all been arranged into block formations, a senior sergeant passed the word along to the King, who sat pouting for a moment after receiving it. Then he nodded and sat upright in his saddle. He raised his long, brilliantly colored sword high above his head and swept it in another circular signal. Immediately, a corps of drummers marched smartly forward and began to rattle out a series of staccato beats. As the rhythm swelled, quadruple columns of crossbowmen jogged forward from the rear and took up position behind the prisoners. André knew, because he had worked on the composition of formations with his father, that each column of crossbowmen contained two hundred men, and he felt his shoulders start to grow rigid as he sensed what might happen next, but even as he saw the first bolts plunge silently into the backs of the bound and helpless prisoners, he was unable to believe what he was seeing.
The prisoners went down in swathes, like corn before the reapers’ scythes. After the first few moments of suspense and uncertainty, the prisoners in the forward ranks realized what was happening behind them, and their fear and panic flared and spread like wildfire in a high wind, so that they broke and tried to run. But they could not run, because their legs were too close-shackled, so all they could do was stumble awkwardly and fall, screaming to Allah for succor.
To the left of the slaughter, sitting his horse with his entourage clustered behind him, Richard Plantagenet watched the massacre unfold, his face expressionless as though he were doing no more than watching a colony of bees being smoked into insensibility so that its honey could be harvested. Then, somewhere off to St. Clair’s right, facing the carnage, someone among the Templars began to bang his sword rhythmically against his shield, twice with the hilt end and then once with the flat of the blade, creating a three-beat cadence to accompany his own chant of “By the Cross, by the Cross, by the Cross …” The hammer-blow chant was picked up quickly by his neighbors to spread across the Templar ranks until it seemed everyone was shouting it, although not everyone was. André St. Clair’s was not the only face dulled by consternation and disbelief among the Templar ranks that day, but they were a small minority. When the chant finally swelled to become intelligible to the watching King, Richard held his sword up over his head again, this time by the blade, so that the golden hilt became a symbol of the Cross being extolled by the Christian ranks, and the chant grew ever louder as the last of the Muslim prisoners were killed.
When it was over and the last man was dead, Richard signaled again, and his crossbowmen regrouped and trotted at the double step back to their original stations. After that the entire army wheeled about and returned to Acre, leaving the landscape strewn with enough murdered men to sate every vulture for miles around. André St. Clair rode among them, looking neither left nor right and making no attempt to speak to anyone, appalled to the very depth of his soul not merely with the magnitude of the sin he had witnessed but with the fact that its perpetrator was the same man who, a few years earlier, had reacted memorably with horror and outrage to the tidings that Saladin had executed a hundred prisoners after the Saracen victory at Hattin. But as the unmistakable sounds of jubilation and celebration began to burgeon around him on all sides, André could not continue to ignore what was happening around him, and he turned to stare, dead-eyed, at the spectacle of sober, solemn knights reeling like drunken men in the euphoria of having killed so many infidels for the greater glory of God.
“TWO THOUSAND AND SEVEN HUNDRED MEN, Alec. That’s how many there were … Two thousand and seven hundred … More than that, truth be told … more than the seven hundred, but less than eight … Slaughtered like animals and left to bloat and rot in the desert sun.”
“Hmm.” Alec Sinclair kept his face free of expression and his voice toneless. “Well, once they’re slaughtered, there’s no place else out here to leave them, Cousin, during daylight hours
at least. There’s naught but the desert sunlight in which to bloat and rot. Not that I am trying to make light of any part of what you say. It is simply that the sane mind refuses to accept atrocities like that … What did you do while it was happening?”
“Nothing. I did nothing. I was … I can’t say what I was, or what I was even thinking. I was numb, terrified, incredulous. But I am shamed to say I made no move to stop it.”
Sinclair twisted his face into the semblance of a wry grin. “D’ye say so, Cousin? You were afraid to step forward and denounce the King of England as a murdering butcher, simply because he was surrounded by a few thousand of his rabid army, who were murdering thousands of other men with great enthusiasm? Tut, man, that’s terrible.”
His unformed smile vanished and he turned his head to look all around the place where they were sitting, an empty fire pit within fifteen paces of André’s tent. The spot offered nothing of privacy, and a steady stream of knights and sergeants moved incessantly about it, coming and going on errands of all imaginable kinds. One man nodded to Alec in passing, recognizing him without evincing any untoward interest, and Alec returned the nod, muttering something unintelligible. He looked all around again, making sure they were not being particularly heeded, before he looked back at André, his face sober.
“It was the first thing I heard about when I stepped off the boat from Cyprus last night, and because the ship turned right around to return, the word will be in Cyprus the day after tomorrow. I heard the Bishop of Bayonne instruct the captain of the ship how to spread the glorious word on his return to Cyprus.”
“What did you hear, what did he say?”
“That Richard had achieved a great moral victory over Saladin by executing the hostages being held against the Sultan’s performance. That he had taught the infidel his proper place and chastised him sternly— and appropriately—for attempting to break his sworn agreement to return the True Cross. And I know that everyone else who heard the bishop speak of it believed it was a great victory and a much-needed moral lesson.”
“It was murder, Alec—murder on a scale I could not have imagined. Pure, premeditated murder, merciless and mortally sinful. If there is indeed a Hell of fire and brimstone as the Christians believe, then Richard Plantagenet purchased himself a special place in the depths of it yesterday, for nothing in the tenets of Christian belief, no matter how distorted by priestly logic, could ever justify what that man did. That same man who swore piously and publicly, in the name of their living, merciful Christ, to return God’s Holy Land to the people of the gentle Savior.”
Alec Sinclair nodded. “Your liege lord is not as noble a figure as he would have the world believe, is he?”
“No, he is not …”
“And now we have other important matters to discuss, but it must be elsewhere. There are far too many flapping ears hereabouts. Bring your arbalest and something to shoot at and we will find a place to practice our skills where no one can overhear us.”
A short time later and a half mile removed from the crowded confines of the encampment, St. Clair stuck a long spear into the ground, point first, at the foot of a dune. He had tied his sheathed dagger a head’s length from the top of the shaft to form a crossbar, and suspended an old horse blanket over that, to suggest the size and shape of a tall, thin man, an impression heightened by the addition of a rusted, cloven old helmet to the butt of the spear. When he was satisfied with its appearance and sure that it would be recognized as a simple target from a distance, he remounted and rode back with Alec until a good hundred and twenty paces lay between them and it, and there they dismounted and unsaddled their horses before slipping their nose bags, each with a handful of oats, over the animals’ heads. Only then, when the horses were looked after, did they unlimber their crossbows and walk towards the firing line Alec had dug into the sand with one heel.
Neither man had actually brought an arbalest with him, for the simple reason that the weapon was too powerful for such a casual exercise, since every bolt they fired from this close would vanish into the sand of the dune behind the target and be lost. Instead, they had brought smaller crossbows, less demanding in strength and power and more demanding in the skills they called for. Using these weapons, and from this distance, there was at least a possibility that the bolts they threw at the target would be recoverable. André fired the first shot, watching the flight of the missile critically, and when it fell short of the target he made a minor adjustment to his stance and tried again, grunting in satisfaction as he saw the quarrel hit this time and glance off the spear shaft.
His cousin acknowledged the shot, then took his own stance and did exactly the same thing, save that his second shaft glanced left off the target, rather than to the right as André’s had.
“Very well, then,” André said, holding his weapon tucked beneath one arm, “we’re established. We have each hit the target and there appears to be no one watching us. And even if there were, no one could come close enough to us to overhear us, so may we talk now?”
“We may.”
Sinclair turned, head down, and walked away to where his saddle lay on the side of a tiny hill of sand. He rested one booted foot on the cantle and propped the stirrup of the crossbow against his raised toes, crossing both his hands on the butt. André followed him quietly, merely watching and waiting, knowing that whatever his cousin might say next, it would not be inconsequential, nor would it be spontaneous.
“I sensed …” Alec stopped, obviously considering his words. “I sensed a reversal in you today, Cousin, something that was not there today as it had been before, or perhaps more accurately, something that was there as it had never been before.” André stood silent, waiting for the other to continue. He could tell that Alec was having difficulty with whatever he was trying to say, because his diction was far more precise, more painstaking than usual. His French was fluent and effortless, but the alienness of his Scots birth and background came through in the way he articulated his words and vowels, speaking them crisply and clearly, yet in a way that no native of Gaul ever would.
“I have been out here in Outremer, perhaps, for too many years,” Alec continued after a moment’s additional thought. “I have grown used to living alone like an anchorite, away from other men, Christian men, if you understand what I am trying to say, and to conducting my own devotions in the way I was taught. In consequence of that, I have obviously not been exposed to the kind of changes that everyone who came over the sea with you appears to accept as commonplace. Not the kind of changes that one may point to and identify clearly. I suppose, really, that I am referring more to moral differences, to changes in perception and acceptance.
“Now that I am aware of them, I can see that most of them must have occurred since I left Scotland, and certainly since I left Christendom to come out here. They are changes of attitude, and of perception, more than anything else, I believe—changes in the way men look at things and see things nowadays.” Again he stopped, shaking his head. “You plainly have no idea what I am ranting about here, and I can’t blame you.”
He sucked in and released a sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Let me try another way. I am speaking here of the truths that you and I were taught by our brethren in the Order of Sion, when we were first Raised to the brotherhood—the truths that we were taught, unchanged since our forefathers fled Jerusalem twelve hundred years ago to escape the wrath of Rome and the false and Godless ‘Truth’ the Romans would impose upon them. And now here we are, you and I, more than a millennium later, back in our ancient homeland and still dealing with the wrath of Rome and the new, updated Roman version of truth. We swore oaths, all of us in the brotherhood, to do certain things, to observe certain conventions and to obey and sustain certain ancient laws that will enable us to carry out our duties and our tasks with honor at all times. And since the earliest days of our Order, those oaths and laws and promises have remained unchanged.
“But look now at our supposed exemplar, the Roman
Church. Nothing is immutable therein, André. Nothing at all. Everything—every duty, every law, every obligation, every element of their credo—is negotiable and changeable, according to the will of whoever happens to be wielding the power at any given time. Look no further than the beginnings of this Order of the Temple, ninety years ago. Until then, for a thousand years, the mere idea of priests and monks killing other men had been anathema. But then—and granted, it was at our own brotherhood’s suggestion—the priests perceived a way to effect great change in that, to their great benefit, as always, and it was a simple matter of rearranging a few priorities and repositioning certain criteria to conform to the will of God, as expressed to and interpreted by His priests. Nothing in the Roman Church, it seems obvious to me, is absolute … Are you following me now?”
St. Clair nodded. “Aye, easily enough, but I have no idea where you are leading me.”
A tiny smile cracked the seriousness of Sinclair’s expression. “I have no idea, either, but I think it is time we both found somewhere new to go. Everything was brought into focus for me by the way you voiced your reaction to—your disgust over—the way Richard dealt with his Muslim prisoners.”
St. Clair barely reacted to that, limiting his response to a minuscule headshake and keeping his voice low and calm. “Disgust is too small a word for what I felt. Nothing that I could possibly say could even come close to expressing what I want to say. I have the knowledge inside me, and someday, I know, it will spill out, purging and absolving me. Or so I hope. But between you and me let there be no misunderstandings and no lies. Richard did not ‘deal with’ his Muslim prisoners. He slaughtered them out of hand, and their blood is still thick and wet out on the killing ground. He murdered them by the thousand, and for no other reasons than to vent his spleen and show Saladin that he was angry and impatient with the Sultan’s behavior.”