by James Becker
De Sevry noticed that several of the other knights had nodded agreement at the man’s suggestion.
“Very well,” he said, his gaze resting briefly on each member of the company in turn. “Am I to assume that that suggestion is acceptable to you all? If not, speak now.”
No dissenting voice was heard, and the newly elected grand master himself nodded.
“Very well. Resume your posts, my brothers, and have the sultan’s envoy brought before me. I will address him myself.”
* * *
Within the hour, a group of roughly one hundred Mamluks, a significant force and each armed with both a scimitar and a curved dagger mounted on a belt worn outside his robe, strode boldly toward the closed doors of the Temple castle. But before they reached it, de Sevry, who had been watching their approach from the crenelated wall above the gate, ordered it to be opened, as soon as he was satisfied that only this group of men was close enough to enter the building.
The Mamluks swaggered inside the fortification, looking around them with interest at the battered and bone-weary defenders who had held out against their attacks for so long. Like the Crusader knights, many members of the Templar order spoke at least some Arabic, but when the leader of the Mamluk group made his first demand, none of the knights present would allow it. But during his earlier conversation with the envoy, de Sevry had been told precisely what the enemy soldiers would wish to do, and had reluctantly agreed to it. In a tired and resigned voice he instructed one of his knights to lead them to the highest point of the castle, where the flagpole stood.
It was the work of only a few seconds to haul down the distinctive battle flag of the Knights Templar, the black-and-white Beauseant, and replace it with the sultan’s own personal standard. As the new flag reached the top of the pole, a light breeze briefly fluttered it, revealing its colors and design to the watching men. The Mamluk group immediately responded to the sight with a ragged cheer, the sound instantly echoed by a thunderous roar of approval from members of the encircling army. Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil now had nominal possession of the castle, and the inhabitants, under the terms of the accommodation de Sevry had agreed to with the envoy, would vacate the building within twenty-four hours.
In the courtyard below, several knights had already begun packing their few possessions, ready to leave, and in other places groups of the women and children who had sought refuge in the building were also beginning to assemble. Through this scene of hurried preparations the Mamluk soldiers strode, confident of their own superiority and invulnerability, there in the very heart of the enemy camp.
De Sevry and a handful of the senior members of the order stood together on one side of the courtyard, watching the activity with jaundiced eyes.
“When we leave this place,” the grand master said quietly, “ensure that your sword arms are unencumbered. We may walk out of here freely, but that does not mean that we will easily be able to pass through the enemy lines.”
“You do not trust the infidels?”
“I do not,” de Sevry replied flatly. “They may still plan to fall upon us the moment we step beyond the gate. As I said before, we may simply be exchanging a quick and honorable death in battle to a more prolonged process of dying if we allow the siege to continue. But we will know soon enough.”
A shrill scream, suddenly silenced, echoed from somewhere within the gray stone walls of the fortress, and instantly each knight reacted. With a metallic slithering sound, battle swords were drawn from their scabbards as they attempted to identify the unseen threat.
“Spread out,” the grand master ordered. “Find out what’s happening.”
The knights dispersed in different directions, each trying to identify the source of the sound. It didn’t take long to find it.
One of the senior knights rounded a corner in one of the passageways and was confronted by an appalling scene. Two of the Mamluk soldiers had apparently happened upon a woman and her young son and had set upon them. The woman lay, clearly unconscious, on her back, her face bloodied and bruised, while the Mamluk heaved his body on top of her. The boy was still conscious, but the second Mamluk had effectively silenced him by twisting a length of cloth around his neck. The boy had been bent forward over a barrel, his clothes ripped asunder, to allow the Mamluk to enter him from behind.
The knight didn’t hesitate. The scene before him was an affront to every tenet of the order and to simple human decency. His sword was already in his hand, and in two swift strides he reached the infidel who was sodomizing the boy. He seized him by the shoulder, dragged him backward, and swung his sword around in a lethal arc, the broad double-edged blade cutting deeply into the man’s body.
The other Mamluk scrambled to his feet and reached for his curved scimitar, but he never had time to draw his weapon. As the first man tumbled backward to the ground, already dead, the knight withdrew his blade and swung it toward the second Mamluk. The end of the sword cut through the enemy soldier’s right arm just above the elbow, and the man screamed in agony. An instant later the knight reversed the direction of his blade and swung the tip through the Mamluk’s neck, instantly decapitating him. His body collapsed to the ground as his head bounced to one side.
The knight stood for a moment, sword still in his hand and ready for immediate use should any other danger present itself. After a moment, he heard the sound of running footsteps approaching him and turned to face this potential new threat, raising his sword with a two-handed grip.
But the man who appeared was not a Mamluk, but another member of the Templar hierarchy, and immediately the knight lowered his weapon.
The newcomer sheathed his own sword as he stared at the two dead men.
“We should never have trusted these infidels,” he said bitterly.
He strode across to where the boy still lay spread-eagled over the barrel, removed the length of cloth from around his neck, and helped him stand up.
The first knight bent down beside his decapitated victim and cleaned the blood from the blade of his sword with the Mamluk’s robe. Then he sheathed the weapon and knelt beside the woman who’d been raped. She was still unconscious, but at least she was breathing. The knight rearranged her clothing to cover her thighs and groin, affording her a slim measure of decency, and then stood up.
Moments later, Pierre de Sevry himself appeared on the scene with two other senior knights, his face reflecting the fury he felt at what had taken place.
“I was perhaps too hasty, Master,” the first knight said, somewhat hesitantly, “but when I saw what was happening I reacted instinctively.”
De Sevry shook his head. “No, my brother. You did what any of us, what any decent man, would and should have done.”
He paused for a moment, and then nodded, his decision made. He turned to the knights standing beside him and issued three simple orders.
“Find them,” he said. “Find them all, and kill them all. When you’ve done that, tear down that rag and hoist the Beauseant in its place. And then summon Tibauld de Gaudin to my presence.”
* * *
“I am unhappy about this,” de Gaudin said, sitting on the opposite side of the table to the grand master. “I feel that my place is here, with you and the other members of our order, until the end comes.”
De Sevry nodded.
“I know that,” he replied, “but we have to look at the whole situation. Because of what happened here today, and no matter what transpires tomorrow, this fortress is going to fall. Perhaps not this week, perhaps not even next week, but within a month the siege engines and the miners will have done their work and the walls will give way. I know that you are unconcerned for your own life, but we have charge of these women and children and the only hope they have is you, my brother. I have already ordered my men to load the chests onto the ship. As soon as they have completed that work, I want you to take on board the vessel as many of the women and childre
n as the ship will physically hold, and then sail as quickly as you can to Sidon and to our castle there. That would at least ensure that we salvage something from the disaster of Acre, even if it is only the lives of the innocents.”
“Very well,” de Gaudin said, “if that is your order, then I will of course obey. When I reach Sidon I will organize a force to sail here as quickly as possible to assist you.”
“Do not bother, my friend. I have a feeling that this will all be over long before any reinforcements could possibly arrive.”
That evening, while it was still light enough to see, the galley that had been allocated to Tibauld de Gaudin, the treasurer of the Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici in Outremer, the land beyond the sea, moved slowly and silently away from the dock that was protected by the Templar castle. Positioned in a line above the keel were half a dozen ironbound and locked chests, and sitting or standing on every available few square inches of space on the deck were the women and children fortunate enough to have been selected to accompany him.
The galley headed directly away from the shore, opening out to the west, so as to put some distance between the vessel and the archers of the besieging Mamluk army as quickly as possible. Only when the crew was certain they were out of range did the heavily laden vessel begin a slow and somewhat cumbersome turn to starboard, around to the north, for the fifty-odd-mile journey up the coast to Sidon.
In those days, vessels rarely sailed at night, for a number of reasons, but on this occasion they had had no option, and they did have one device that helped them in their mission. Next to the helmsman, illuminated by a shielded oil lamp, was a small container of water in which floated a piece of wood carrying a slim length of steel, one end bearing a daub of red paint. The Templars were one of the first groups ever to use a basic compass, and there were still discussions about exactly how and why it worked, but the pragmatic view was that it did and so they employed it. For whatever reason, the red end of the metal always pointed in the same direction, and that was all the sailors of the order needed to know.
Tibauld de Gaudin stood in the stern of the craft, behind the helmsman, and stared back toward Acre. A few lights flickered in the Templar castle, the torches placed in sconces on the battlement walls, and beyond them he could see the much brighter and more obvious illumination from the blazing fires that delineated the front line of the besieging army. De Gaudin stared behind the slow-moving galley until he could no longer see anything save for a dull yellowish glow in the sky, and then he left his post to stare with equal intensity into the blackness of the night ahead of the ship.
He knew with absolute certainty that he would never see any of his Templar brothers from Acre again.
And in this belief he was perfectly correct.
* * *
The morning after de Gaudin had made his somewhat reluctant escape from the doomed city of Acre, another envoy arrived at the Templar stronghold bearing a further message from the sultan, in response to the brief explanation de Sevry had already provided for the continued presence of the Templars. According to the envoy, the group of Mamluks who had entered the fortress the previous day had clearly been guilty men who had acted in an unacceptable manner, and the sultan was so embarrassed by their conduct that he wished to apologize in person to the commander of the Templar forces and give his personal guarantee that the terms agreed for the surrender of the fortress would be respected.
In hindsight, the Templars should have known better than to have even listened to the man. But in accordance with the expressed wishes of the sultan, de Sevry and a handful of his senior knights left the fortress and strode toward the center of the encircling army. The moment they were outside bow shot range of the fortress walls, they were surrounded, swiftly disarmed and forced down to their knees, and then one by one beheaded to the accompaniment of the spaced beats from a single Mamluk war drum. The defenders of the castle looked on in horror, but were powerless to do anything to intervene.
One of the great strengths of the Templar order was that if a leader fell in battle or was otherwise unable to continue in his post, the members of the order simply elected a new leader and carried on fighting. As was the custom, a senior knight was duly elected to command the force inside the castle, but it was already obvious that his tenure in the post was likely to be even shorter than that of his predecessor.
Three days after de Gaudin had left, the Mamluk miners set fire to the stacks of timber that they had placed in the tunnels they’d dug under the outer wall of the castle, and within a matter of hours the first crack appeared in the outermost wall of the structure. And as soon as that happened, an attack was launched against the building by over two thousand Mamluk soldiers, the attackers outnumbering the remaining defenders by more than ten to one.
But even as the final battle for the Templar castle began, other sections of the wall that had been seriously undermined by the tunneling operations simply collapsed, crushing most of the attackers as well as virtually all of the defenders. Once the dust had quite literally settled, hundreds of other Mamluk troops swarmed into the ruins, slaughtering every Christian they found.
* * *
At Sidon, when news of the fall of Acre reached the Sea Castle, de Gaudin was elected grand master of the order of the Knights Templar in Outremer, though his command now only comprised a bare few dozen knights. About a week after he had safely landed his human cargo at Sidon, he returned to his galley and ordered the crew to sail back out into the eastern Mediterranean to the island of Cyprus, then owned by the Templars, in order to raise reinforcements to protect and defend the last remaining Templar mainland strongholds in the Holy Land.
But in this quest de Gaudin was unsuccessful, and the relieving force he had hoped to create never materialized. After he left, Sidon itself was attacked and quickly fell to the massive army of the marauding Mamluks. The few surviving knights, squires, and sergeants of the order made their way to Tortosa, but that stronghold, like the other remaining mainland Templar castle in the Holy Land, Athlit, was abandoned in August that year, even before the Mamluks had launched an attack on either.
The last redoubt for the Templars proved to be the tiny fortress island of Ruad, located about two miles off the coast of the mainland, where the few surviving members of the order gathered. It held out for some time, but in 1303 it, too, was besieged and then captured by the victorious Mamluks. The defenders who managed to survive the siege were either randomly slaughtered as soon as the walls finally tumbled or marched in chains to Cairo where they were slung into the dungeons and later died through starvation and ill treatment.
De Gaudin blamed himself for the failure to summon reinforcements. He had both called for volunteers to fight against the infidels as a simple Christian duty and tried to hire mercenary soldiers, without success. Clearly even mercenaries were only too aware that attempting to take on the Mamluks was simply opting for an unusual form of suicide, and no amount of money would act as a sufficient inducement.
The reality was that never again would Christian forces occupy the Holy Land. The Crusades were over, and in less than twenty years the Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici, the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, would effectively cease to exist, betrayed by the greed, cupidity, and treachery of the king of France, Philip the Fair.
De Gaudin died a bitter and broken man less than two years after the fall of Acre, and was succeeded as grand master by Jacques de Molay, one of the senior knights who had accompanied him to Sidon and then on to Cyprus, and with whom he spent many hours talking in private.
And during one of those quiet conversations, toward the end of his life, de Gaudin finally and almost reluctantly confided a single piece of information to the man who would succeed him, vital information that de Molay would himself jealously guard during his tenure as grand master of the Knights Templar, and the agonizing end of his own life in the so-c
alled cleansing flames of his execution pyre in Paris.
1
Dartmouth, Devon
Present day
Robin Jessop gazed curiously at the leather cover of the book in front of her. The lettering on the spine was nearly illegible, and the front of the volume, which should arguably have been better protected if it had, as she’d been told, been stored in a proper bookcase over the years, showed considerable signs of wear, although the title was still readable. What it said didn’t make any sense, but she could certainly read it.
“‘Ipse Dixit,’” Jessop murmured to herself. “Who on earth would give a book that title? And why? And no author’s name, either.”
It was Latin, obviously, the two words translating more or less as “the master has spoken,” which Jessop, as a former classics scholar, albeit some time ago, and, lately, a somewhat reluctant antiquarian bookseller and valuer, a young woman operating in a world that was normally occupied by elderly and shortsighted men, had not the slightest difficulty in translating.
It had seemed like an easy, if rather dull and tedious, assignment. A middle-aged man named William Stevens who lived just outside Torbay had received an unexpected bequest from an uncle whom he barely knew existed. It wasn’t money, but simply the entire contents of the old man’s library, a collection of well over one thousand books that ranged from a couple of hundred paperback novels published over the last few dozen years through early-twentieth-century hardback books to almost one hundred ancient leather-bound tomes. And it was these latter volumes that the beneficiary of the will hoped might be worth a small fortune.
When Stevens had first telephoned Jessop, she explained to him at some length that age in itself was no guarantee, or even a reliable indicator, of a high price. Condition, edition, and rarity, she went on, were the three most vital words. To have real value, the book had to be in as good a condition as possible, and the older the book the less likely it was that the condition would be fine enough to command a high price. And a first edition would invariably be worth more than all the subsequent printings, and by definition there were always a smaller number of first editions printed.