by Dan Davis
After living together with her, fighting beside her, teaching her our languages and training her to fight more effectively, she could throw us off so easily. Perhaps it was because her heart was broken from her loss. Perhaps it was the unassailable gulf that existed between our two peoples. Or perhaps it was that she was only ever a black-hearted Tartar with a beautiful countenance.
“By what name should our Order be known?” Stephen said, suddenly.
“It will not be known,” I said to him and to all of them. “It will be a secret known only by the members of the order. But its name amongst us will be the Order of the White Dagger.”
Eva’s head snapped up at that, her eyes shining. Thomas looked to the heavens, perhaps recalling that it was as he was being sliced open by my brother in the Khan’s palace that little Nikolas had used my dagger to attack William.
“You have named it this,” Stephen said, “because your fine dagger has upon it the image of Saint George and we will be dedicated to protecting Christendom from the dragon that is William’s men. Perhaps we should call the Order after the saint?”
I shook my head before he had even finished speaking. “No, Stephen. We will protect Christendom from the dragon, that is true, and we will seek to uphold knightly ideals. But we, too, are the dragons.”
We waited near to Maragha for the dust to settle. Without Hassan to help organise the network of informants, it was difficult but we watched and waited and saw how the Ilkhan’s great funeral was planned. It took place on the huge island in Lake Urmia. Only the inner circle of the Ilkhanate’s Mongols was in attendance, including Hulegu’s sons, all sired prior to William’s Gift, of course. The eldest, Abaqa, became the ruler of the Ilkhanate. Following his death after seventeen years, another of Hulegu’s sons became the ruler, Tekuder, who was also at the funeral.
The ceremony also featured the sacrifice of twenty-seven beautiful virgin girls. Their blood was poured across the burial site and then entombed with Hulegu.
Entombed along with vast amounts of treasure.
We did not want all of it. Indeed, we could not have transported so much as half of it without buying masses of slaves and horses and wagons to carry it and then we would have required an army to protect it.
But we crossed the lake at night, hopping from island to island in our two small boats. I was tired by the time we got there but I had energy enough left to kill all of the honour guards and slay the barbarian priests chanting and praying for the soul of their departed lord.
Of all the gold and silver and fine furniture and cloth that was buried, we took only the precious coins and the gemstones, and the finest jewellery.
It was a fortune, and we would need it.
I allowed Khutulun to take more than I should have because Eva was right and I was always a fool for women.
But there was enough left over to pay for passage across the Black Sea, and even to pay for comfortable cabins on a ship to Venice. We could afford to pay for plenty of healthy slaves for the journey who we bled every other day or so. That was how, after many days at sea, we came back to Christendom. Back to the lands where we all belonged, amongst people like us, where we could begin once again to track down and slaughter the spawn of William de Ferrers.
And that was when my dear Eva left me.
Part Seven – Venice ~ 1266
Though we had called at numerous ports on the journey home, disembarking from the ship at Venice felt like I had finally returned to civilisation. Though the Venetians were a haughty, arrogant people and were interested only in trade, and power over the Genoese, with whom they had been at war, their remarkable city was a fine sight to see after so many years in foreign lands. The urchins surrounded us the moment I set foot on the dockside, asking where we had come from and touting their wares. A few of the more desperate tugged on my sleeves until I clouted them about the ears.
“Best wine in the city, sir,” they would say. “Come, follow me and you will see.”
“Our rooms are clean. How many beds do you need, lord?”
“Such food we have, sir, you will never leave Venice.”
“Are you looking for a woman’s company, my lord? My master’s house has all that you could desire.”
The cleverer ones spoke French, and one or two even had a stab at English. And yet for all the familiarity I felt for the place and for the people, it was not England. It was not even France.
My companions and I had a task to complete and oaths, made to one another, to fulfil. There were two lords that we knew of, in France or in England, who we had to hunt down.
Stephen had been talking to me for months about his grand ideas for how to maintain the efforts of the Order of the White Dagger over many decades or even centuries, should we need to do so. A day after arriving in Venice, we sat all together while we ate at a busy tavern overlooking the lagoon. It was time to make a final decision about where we went after Venice.
“We should most certainly establish ourselves as merchants,” Stephen said, gesticulating with a chunk of bread. “And we should absolutely do so in London. Use some of our wealth to purchase an appropriate sturdy dwelling, perhaps buy a ship, buy and sell goods. And then we have an explanation for the wealth that we have and for our presence in society.”
“You are always so keen for us to be merchants, Stephen,” I said. “What do you even know of it?”
He waved his bread around. “It cannot be a difficult thing. Look at the fools we have met who are as rich as princes. But surely you see that we can have public wealth and means in this way without the responsibilities that come with obtaining land in fief from some baron who we would have to answer to?”
“Do you think that the merchants of London, or anywhere, will simply allow us to join them?” I pointed out. “Do you know how closely these merchants guard their trade? They do not know us.”
Again, he was unconcerned. “We can convince them.”
“How?” Eva asked, peering at him over her cup.
He grinned and shrugged. “Every man wants something. We will have to find out what each man wants and then give it to him. And so we will become established in London.”
“Why not Paris?” Thomas asked.
I nodded. “London is the worst place on all the Earth,” I said, and then remembered Karakorum. “Almost.”
“We are English,” Stephen said, then coughed. “Other than you, Thomas. We would do better with London as our home.”
“We have not needed a home these last years,” I said. “We can continue to move from place to place, as we need.”
Eva sighed. “Always, we have needed somewhere, have we not? Why continue to live like steppe nomads when we do not have to.”
I tried to get them to understand. “I had a home,” I said, thinking wistfully of distant Ashbury. “It is all very fine for a while but your servants, your friends, your lord, will all begin to notice that you do not age. And that is not something you can easily explain away. Why make a home at all? Why become established in a place when we would be run out of it within a few years? Perhaps even earlier than then. After all, it is likely that our blood slaves would speak to the servants of other masters in the city of our regular bloodletting. Gossip can be deadly in a town of meddlers like London.”
He nodded, excited to tell me what he had evidently been thinking for some time. “The blood slaves have never been a problem so far, Richard. A little bloodletting is good for everyone, is it not? The gossip might say we are overly concerned for our servants’ health but no more. Anyway, my thinking is that we operate two homes, in different parts of the kingdom. And I could live alone in London while you all continue to search for William’s immortals wherever the scent leads. After some years living in London, when my eternal youth begins to be remarked upon, I would move to the second house across the country and call myself by a different name, leaving the London house in the hands of a capable steward. And then, after a few years when most of the existing merchants have died,
I can return to the first home in London and continue to support your ongoing searches with the necessary funds. When I so return, I could claim to be the son of myself, do you see? As you yourself have done, Richard. And so we may inherit by legal means that which we would already own.” He dipped his bread in his wine and sat back to chew on it.
“Sounds complicated,” I said. “Complicated plans fail.”
“Not always,” he said, trying and failing to charm me with a grin. “Not in Maragha.”
I shook my head, still feeling uneasy with his ideas but unsure precisely why. His blind confidence, perhaps, which was certain to come crashing down when it met with the complexity of reality.
“So,” Thomas said. “You wish to be an idler in London while the rest of us trawl the Kingdom of France and the rest of Christendom for William’s spawn, is that it?”
I laughed but Stephen made a show of being greatly wounded by the suggestion. “Indeed, no, sir,” Stephen said. “I would apply what I have learnt from our dear departed lord of Assassins. We all saw the value of the knowledge we gained through speaking to merchants, troubadours, doctors, and any itinerant traveller, did we not? Imagine the very same thing, only for Christendom.”
“Men’s tongues wag only for coin,” I said. “And thus, you would burn through our fortune in a matter of years. Already, Stephen, you have purchased two homes for yourself in your mind’s eye. And you imagine that our order’s wealth would survive such expenditure?”
He sat back, satisfied with himself. “And that is why I must also become a successful merchant.”
Eva stared at Stephen thoughtfully. At the time, I believed that she was as grudgingly impressed as I was by the cunning young fellow’s creativity. And yet, my wife was having quite different thoughts.
Before leaving Venice, we spent time depositing and withdrawing wealth from the Templars and banking houses. We had those names to pursue, and we agreed first to head overland into France to track down Simon de Montfort, the French lord who William claimed to have turned. We decided that Stephen was to travel on alone by ship to England and there set himself up in the manner which he had been envisioning for many years.
That is to say, the decision was made for Stephen to travel alone but that is not what happened in fact.
And there was another thought on my mind I had not been able to truly ignore for years, no matter how often I attempted to dismiss it. When I came close to catching my brother in that gatehouse in Baghdad, he had made a claim so preposterous that it could not possibly have been the truth.
William had spoken to me of what he called the Ancient One. A man he claimed was our grandfather. A man who could be found in Swabia, perhaps three hundred miles north of Venice. Across difficult terrain but not a long journey, certainly not compared to the distances I had travelled before.
I was sorely tempted to head north.
***
“I recall quite clearly what William said,” I muttered to Eva, speaking softly. “He said that our true grandfather lives, and he is thousands of years old. Thousands of years. The things he has seen. The power that he has. You would learn a lot from him, brother, if you would but go to him. That is what William said to me in the gatehouse in Baghdad.”
“And what do you think he meant by that?” Eva asked me, stretching her long, naked body beside me.
We lay in bed with the morning sun streaming in through the open window. In the street below, Venetian voices shouted and the tangy scent of the waters mixed with the smell of fish being cooked on the dockside.
It would be one of the last times we shared such a moment together.
“I have been thinking of it often,” I said. “All these years, I believed that God had made me as I am. I believed that either God or the Devil made William immortal after the Battle of Hattin, and He made me the same so that I had the strength to put a stop to William’s evil. A long time ago, the Archbishop of Jerusalem told me that very thing. I swore an oath to my brother’s wife, Isabella to avenge her and her children, and I swore revenge for William’s murder of my first wife. But the notion that my blood was changed, was given this power by God… well, that is a notion I have accepted ever since and so my purpose is not simply a moral good but a God-given duty. The Lord changed my blood so as to create balance with William’s evil. And so the evil that I have done, the slaughter that I have done, that was ultimately just. But what if none of that is true? What if I was never gifted this power but was born with it, through this man who is the father of our father? What does that mean for my soul?”
I fell silent, irritated at my intellectual deficiencies. I had half a mind to ask Thomas what he thought or even, God forbid, Stephen. But these were questions, or vulnerabilities, that I could express only to my wife.
Eva waited until she was sure I had stopped speaking. “You are losing your wits by using them so much. Twisting yourself into knots for no more than a few mad words by a twisted man.”
“William has a way of making me dance to his tune, does he not?”
She sighed, thinking. “Perhaps you imagine his abilities to be greater than they are.”
“How so?”
“What is the likelihood that you have some secret ancestor still living in Swabia? It is an absurd notion. So why would he say such a thing? Perhaps he was speaking whatever words formed in his mouth, without thought, and he never even dreamed up the notion before he spoke it. Perhaps he does believe it because he is mad. Which clearly he is. And it could be that he was deceived himself by some decrepit old trickster. You imagine that he has some grand plan that he is unleashing on you and so you give his mad words credence when you should simply forget them.”
I listened to an argument break out on the dockside beneath the window. It was rather heated, especially for so early in the morning. But that was the normal manner of social interaction for Venetians.
“It is indeed a bizarre claim,” I said. “Our true grandfather is thousands of years old, and he lives still. The outlandishness of it alone makes me believe there is something to it. If he was going to lie, would he not have made it credible?”
“You may be right about him manipulating you,” she said. “His words always get their claws under your skin. Could it not be that some of his spawn are in Swabia? He is sending you to them so that they can kill you.”
I sat upright. “That is it. By God, that is it. It is so obvious, why did I not see it? I am a fool. Of course he has laid a trap. We should go there, immediately, find these immortals and slay them.”
Eva rolled over and faced away from me. “Why do what William wants? If it is a trap, by going to Swabia you may very well be charging headlong to your death.”
I could not understand her reticence. “This is why I founded the Order. We must go to Swabia and kill these immortals.”
“Immortals who may not even be there. You are giving his words credence when the truth is unknown. His other admissions are far more credible. He turned knights in France and England and we have their names, do we not? This is far more credible, as it mirrors his previous actions. You should focus on those men first, and then see what they have to say about the immortals of Swabia.”
I nodded, though she was not looking at me. “That is a reasonable course to follow. One immortal thoroughly questioned will lead to more. We should do precisely that.” I clapped her slender flank and grinned, banishing thoughts of William’s cunning. “What would I do without you, my love?”
She climbed out of the bed and pulled on her undershirt.
“We should go out and find some food,” she said over her shoulder. “And some strong wine.”
My smile fell from my face. “A little early for strong wine, is it not?”
She did not look at me. “We shall both want wine.”
Her words and demeanour filled me with dread.
All through the journey, Eva had been wistful, and distant. She had never been an overly-affectionate woman but it seemed as though she
spoke her thoughts less and less. We would not make love for weeks or months, even when we had the chance, and then she would suddenly seize me in a great lust and cling to me with a desperate passion. Other times, she would weep and then deny it. Although she also often seemed her old self—sturdy, confident, wise—I believed her changed from how she was before we set off into the steppe years before. I clearly recalled the Eva I had grown to love as we travelled from England to Spain, Italy, and Outremer, fighting in local wars and making our way in the world. She had been different when we ranged deep into Mongol lands, and those of the Assassins and the Saracens. And then there was the Eva who I had now. Aloof and gloomy.
Being a mere ninety-seven years old at that time, I had not yet begun to understand the mind of a woman and so I did not know what to make of it all.
I suspected that the toll of spending so much time amongst Godless peoples had worn her down. It certainly had me. And I was apprehensive about the world we were going back to yet I could not wait to see the French countryside and travel amongst my own people, or people almost the same as mine. Why Eva did not feel the same, I could not say.
Whenever I attempted to ask her about it, I would find myself angering her.
“You should be happy,” I recall informing her in our cabin on the way home. “French taverns serve proper food. Think on that. Think on riding all day in the rain before drying our boots on the hearth while we eat roast mutton and drink good wine from Bordeaux.”
“Think on what you like,” she said, not looking at me. “Do not direct my thoughts, so.”
“You are only bitter that we have not lain together for such a long time,” I said, grinning and reaching for her. “Come here to me.”
She slapped my hands away. “Come to yourself instead. And keep your tongue behind your lips so I can get some bloody sleep.”
There was a strong chance that it was the murder we had done in Maragha. Such a sin weighed heavy on me and on Thomas and it was not either of us but Eva and Khutulun who had lobbed the fire pots and so delivered the inferno to the Mongols and their innocent slaves. Women are not created for war, and despite all her skills with the blade and her unfailing, uncomplaining toughness, Eva was certainly a woman.