by Dan Davis
Yet, when I broached the notion of penance, she cursed me and said that our quest for William’s monsters, our very continued existence was our penance. And although I did not quite understand what she felt, I agreed to let the matter lie.
There was another great sin that I had committed. One which I pretended to myself and to God that I had not done. And yet I had carried with me, for years, the guilt and the shame of my abandonment of her in Baghdad. I had looked at her, my wife, surrounded and assaulted on all sides, and I had left her to die. No matter that I justified my actions post hoc by telling myself her strength and skill would always have saved her from the horde. I left her to die.
It was my greatest sin, though it already had such mighty competition. What is more, the abandonment had accomplished nothing. William had eluded me anyway.
That decision that I made must surely have demonstrated to Eva, beyond all words that I could ever utter, that my quest for vengeance against William would also come before her, my wife.
Ours had never been a proper marriage. Looking back with the power of hindsight, I saw how I had treated her in many ways just like the squire that she often pretended to be and indeed served as. I had neglected to provide her with what she needed. A wife is subordinate to a husband, of course, but while the male domain is the world, the married woman’s realm is the home. A marriage is for producing and raising children, but even for those who are barren, a woman, a wife, rules her home, she commands the servants and directs the meals and company, creates income from the assets, manages the economy of the household. She has that power. She serves that role, as the man serves his in turn as provider and protector.
But Eva had never had her own place, her own realm. Her own life. Never had anyone to command, anywhere to grow, and had been at my side like a servant more than a wife.
I was such a fool. A fool for women, people liked to say of me, ever since I was a boy. It was meant to imply that beauty made me stupid, and that has been true from my first decade to my last century. But in truth, it was more than that. I was foolish in all ways, where women were concerned.
And I had not seen any of that at the time.
Which is why it hit me with such terrible force and brought me so low when it happened. We sat opposite each other across a small table in the morning sun outside the tavern near to our rooms. It overlooked a quiet, narrow inlet and though there were people all about, they were going about their daily business and paid us no mind. The wine was good, and Eva drank off three full cups before she had the courage to say what she had to say.
“I will not travel with you into France,” Eva said, looking me in the eye. “I am going to England, and there I will establish one of the two houses that we will run for our order.”
A thousand thoughts ran through my head. Mostly, I was simply confused. “Why have you not spoken of this to me before now?”
“Cowardice. I feared saying all that I must say. And I feared your reaction.”
My heart began racing as I struggled to comprehend what she was getting at. “You have not yet said all you must say?”
Her courage faltered and she looked away for a moment. “When William killed me, and your blood brought me back, you saved me. We were together. We have been together ever since.” She sighed. Eva had never been gifted with speech. “I am tired, Richard. Tired of always travelling. Tired of dressing this way. Pretending to be a man, to be your squire. You will not stop your quest. The thought of trailing from town to town in the search. I cannot do it. I will go to London, and make a house there, or I shall go to some other town. My oath to the Order stands. I am committed to our purpose. My life will be dedicated to finding and ending all of William’s spawn. But I will live my own life.”
“Your own life?” I said, stuttering like a boy. “And not a wife to me?”
She looked at me again. “Not a wife, no. I shall pose as a widow, in order to have the appropriate station. I will take no husband.”
Suspicion crept into my thoughts. “Is this some scheme to marry Stephen?”
Eva stared in astonishment, then laughed in my face. “He is a boy. I want nothing of love from him. But, in truth, yes, I also wish to learn more from him.”
“Learn?” I said. “What could you learn from him? He is a boy, as you say. You could never learn from him what you have from me.”
“He is a boy in his heart. But his mind is devious and he burns with ambition. He is clever.”
“And you wish to be around him, rather than me?” I could not believe my ears.
“It is not him that I want,” she said, growing irritated. “I will live my own life but will correspond with him, visit with him, coordinate our efforts. You see, it is his cunning I wish to cultivate. Cunning that can be turned into power.”
I struggled still to understand. “You want power?”
She waved her hand and shook her head, growing impatient. “You have listened to Stephen, but you do not take him seriously, so you do not take his ideas seriously. Imagine it. Look at us. We still have not aged. How long will we live? Decades more, certainly. Centuries, perhaps many centuries. Imagine what we can build in that time. We would have to be careful, pretending to be small people while hiding our wealth and our connections, but with the knowledge to find all of William’s spawn. And then, when they are all dead and our oaths are complete, God willing we will still be here. What else might we achieve with what we have been given? With this Gift?”
Stephen’s ambition had infected her. I should have seen it earlier but perhaps I could have done nothing even if I had known where it would lead. Although, I could always have cut off Stephen’s head and thrown him into the sea before we ever reached Venice. Perhaps that would have kept Eva by my side over the centuries.
But it may also have condemned England to a tawdry existence on the edge of the world, rather than becoming the greatest empire that ever would bestride it. Stephen and Eva made that empire. With my help, of course.
In Venice, sitting before my wife under a pale blue sky, the stench of the lagoon and with a cloud of flies determined to die in my cup of wine, I had more selfish concerns. “We took oaths,” I pointed out. “To be undone only by our deaths.”
“We have lived together for fifty years, Richard.” Her eyes grew damp. “A lifetime of marriage for mortal men and women. We have been faithful to each other, in all ways. I think God will forgive us.”
Eva had decided. She was not asking permission, as a woman should, which was typical of her forthrightness. Quite rightly, she had not considered our marriage to be an ordinary one. It struck me suddenly as quite astonishing that she had lasted as long as she had. Even before I had met her she had received some simulacrum of a knight’s training and had served as a bodyguard for her perverse father. But no other woman in all the world would have entertained for a moment’s thought what she had embraced with me as we fought and killed across the world.
“You will need blood,” I said. “Every few days. You must be prepared. I will not be there to give you mine and you must not be without for too long.”
I do not know why but at that she burst into womanly tears. The first time I had ever seen her weep.
***
In the face of the rampant Mamluks under Baibars and his successors, the Crusader kingdoms in the Holy Land would not survive for very much longer.
The remaining Syrian Assassins were initially overjoyed by the Mamluk defeat of the Mongol armies. Of course they were. Hulegu had destroyed hundreds of their castles in Persia and had slaughtered everyone who had lived in them. For a time, the Mamluks were an avenging force, delivering a righteous blow against the Mongols.
But when the Mamluks had subdued the Mohammedan peoples of Syria, Baibars turned his attention to wiping out the heretic Assassins between 1265 and 1273. Even with their fine castles, the Ismailis of Syria could not resist the might of Egypt and their new allies, and they ceased to be an independent military or political force. Baibars did
not exterminate them as Hulegu had done to the Persian Assassins, and so the Ismaili Assassins struggled on in Syria, keeping their faith but lacking any power in the world. Indeed, they survived only by being subjected to the authority of Baibars and the Mamluks and agreeing to carry out the political murders that the sultan ordered.
Saracens turning on each other should have been a good thing for Christendom. But the Assassins were so easily subdued that it barely slowed down the Mamluk assault on the Crusader Kingdoms.
The Mamluks raided Antioch in 1261. Nazareth fell in 1263 and Acre was encircled, only surviving due to ongoing supply from the sea. Caesarea and Haifa fell in 1265 and then all our remaining inland Crusader castles could not survive. In 1271, it was the White Castle of the Templars and the magnificent Krak des Chevaliers, Beaufort and Gibelcar that fell. Without reinforcing Christian armies to save them, the greatest fortifications could not survive the Mamluk siege engines.
The Mamluks even employed a Syrian Assassin to murder the chief baron of Acre, Philip of Montfort in 1270. Unholy savages that they were, the fedayin struck down poor Philip while he prayed in his chapel.
From being the terror of the Holy Land, feared by the Abbasids, Persians, Mongols and Crusaders alike, the Assassins ended up becoming nothing more than hitmen for the sultan. A truth demonstrated by their attempt on the life of my future king, Edward I of England.
Prince Edward, as he was then, joined the Crusade that was to undo the conquests of Baibars.
And who was the great saviour of Christendom come to save the Crusader Kingdoms? The great King Louis IX launched a new Crusade to smash the Mamluks and was even seeking to coordinate with the Mongols of Persia who had inherited Hulegu’s empire.
And yet, the great fool messed it up once again. Louis diverted the Crusade to Tunis with the intention of converting the sultan there to Christianity. No doubt they convinced themselves it was for good and noble reasons, and not due to their fear of facing the ferocity and ability of the Mamluks. Either way, they paid for their cowardice when the army was struck with the bloody flux. The pestilence tore through the men on the North African shore and even took Louis himself. Good riddance. An ignominious end to an incompetent crusader.
Prince Edward of England, son of Henry III, and a man destined to become a truly great king arrived in the Holy Land in June 1271. He led a force on Louis’ Crusade to Tunis but was not willing to accept that failure and so sailed on to Acre. His army was small but the Mamluks rightly feared the might of Christian knights and so Baibars decided to have this English prince killed.
Edward struck into the Plain of Sharon, near Mount Carmel and coordinated with the Mongols, who sent a tumen of ten thousand to Syria to support him. But without the leadership of Hulegu, the Mongols quickly withdrew in the face of the Mamluk counterattack, leaving Edward to negotiate a peace with Baibars.
The Mamluk peace was negotiated to last ten years, ten months, ten days and ten hours. This is the timeframe allowed for hudna, the truce that is allowed to interrupt jihad if there is a justified tactical advantage for the Mohammedans to temporarily halt their duty to annihilate the infidel. Such practices show very well their fundamental deceptiveness and cunning. As does their continued love of political murder.
Not satisfied with the peace, Baibars sent a Syrian Ismaili fedayin to assassinate Prince Edward of England. The Mamluk governor of Ramla pretended to be willing to betray Baibars and sent a messenger with gifts for Edward. With a cunning and patience that Hassan would have been proud of, the messenger was admitted many times into the prince’s presence while the false negotiations were undertaken. Even though he was searched for weapons, the fedayin’s patience had caused Edward and his men to let their guard down. A knight who claimed to be there later told me how it happened.
Edward was unused to the climate and reclined on a couch in no more than a cotton tunic. The fedayin, posing as a messenger, approached in order to pass the prince a document, a false letter supposedly from this traitor Mamluk lord. Edward took the letter and asked the messenger a question regarding its content. The messenger bent over the reclining prince, directing Edward’s attention to a line in the letter with one hand, and with the other, he drew a concealed blade, cunningly hidden on the inside of his belt.
He thrust this blade at Edward’s chest.
But the future King of England was no ordinary man. He had a lifetime of martial training honing his instinct and he was a big, powerful fellow.
With remarkable speed, Edward twisted so that the blade caught him on his arm instead of his chest. Quickly, the prince struck the treacherous Saracen to the ground while tearing the man’s dagger from his hand. Edward, showing a decisiveness that was fundamental to his character, immediately used the enemy’s weapon to stab the fedayin. Before Edward could restrain them, his servants smashed the Assassin’s brains in with the prince’s footstool.
Though he was furious, Edward considered himself to be unscathed. But he was thinking like an upstanding Christian, and not a treacherous Mohammedan.
For the Assassin’s dagger had been poisoned.
Edward became seriously ill.
His flesh around the wound on his arm began to fester and oozed a steady stream of thick, stinking pus. No supposed antidote worked and his condition deteriorated. Finally, his surgeon simply cut away all the rotten flesh from around the original wound and his robust constitution enabled him to overcome the poison in his system.
The very moment he was well enough to travel, he left the Holy Land forever and returned to the civilised people of England.
What if the fedayin’s poison had taken Edward’s life? What then for England? His younger brother, Edmund, was also on the Crusade. Presumably, he would have become King of England. Edmund was a good man. Solid, dependable. A dutiful second son all his life. But he was no Edward, and I doubt he would have conquered the unruly Welsh and hammered the mad Scots into submission.
Thanks to God, and to the Plantagenet robustness, Edward survived and returned home. In time, I served in many of his campaigns and did more than my fair share of the work.
The monks William of Rubruck and his elderly companion Bartholomew left Karakorum in the summer we had, back in 1254. Both of them somehow managed to make it to Tripoli little over a year later and eventually to Rome and finally home to Paris, although the shrivelled-up Bartholomew died immediately after. At some point, Rubruck wrote an absurdly long and detailed letter to King Louis about everything that had occurred. Years later, Stephen claimed to have read a copy of the letter that had belonged to another Franciscan named Roger Bacon and said it mentioned nothing at all about an English knight and the trouble he caused. Poor Thomas as leader of the expedition was also excised entirely, as was Bertrand. Even Stephen was barely mentioned in the rambling narrative. Considering how we had abandoned him, in one way or another, such hurt feelings were to be expected. Amusingly, King Louis seems to have taken no actions based on the content of Rubruck’s letter, and no other lord, priest or monk read it either. Rubruck returned to obscurity as a monk for the rest of his days. One might say his great efforts were entirely wasted other than the fact that his mission provided cover for mine and so ultimately helped to rid the world of Hulegu.
Tragically, our great city of Acre fell to the Mamluks in 1291. After so long stemming the tide of Saracen expansion, the Crusader kingdoms were finally no more.
Failure.
Our people could no longer resist the ferocity of the Mohammedans and the kingdoms of Christendom turned against each other rather than uniting to drive out the invaders from the Holy Land. Even though I had seen their fanaticism first hand, and for so long, I did not imagine that they would eventually take Constantinople and threaten to overrun Europe itself.
One of the most severe consequences of the loss of the fall of the Crusader states would be the fall of the Templars. Their collapse in the face of the Mamluks and the Mongols brought them into disgrace and the order was much critic
ised by those who wanted someone to blame. Pressure on the Templars grew from many sources until Philip IV of France arrested every Templar in France in 1307. The vile French king seized the order’s assets, tortured and tried the men and eventually burned the final master to death in 1314. Thomas took it hard, of course, for he remained a Templar at heart even after decades serving the Order of the White Dagger. For a time, he was convinced that Philip IV was one of William’s immortals and I was willing to believe that the cruel bastard was a vampire. But it turned out not to be the case, as far as I know. In time, the hurt of it faded but Thomas never got over the betrayal. Without the Templar’s presence linking different kingdoms together in resistance to the Saracen expansion, successive states would be isolated, overwhelmed and conquered in turn. We needed the Templars. May Philip IV burn in the hottest fires of Hell for eternity.
It would be two hundred years before I returned to the East but I would again fight to protect Christendom from the rampaging Turk.
***
It was many years before I heard what happened to Khutulun. She returned to her people as she had intended, and found a great Mongol named Kaidu who was an enemy of Kublai, who William was supporting. Kaidu was the leader of the House of Ogedei and Khan of the Chagatai Khanate. Khutulun must have chosen him because of his opposition to Kublai, and William, and also because he was a war-loving steppe warrior at heart, just like she was. No doubt when she presented herself to Kaidu, he would have wanted her for his wife but she certainly refused because she became famous as the daughter of Kaidu. When I heard that, I laughed, for I can well imagine this Khan’s confusion and ultimate compliance to her demand. The lie could have been made quite easily. I imagine her riding alone across the step and claiming that her mother was some woman that Kaidu had taken years before. Whether that was the way of it, or whether he believed her or not, he certainly claimed her as his own.