by Jack Whyte
“Seven of them,” Hugh said to the man sitting beside him. “They must have run into a strong party.”
“Needn’t have been that strong,” the other remarked, his eyes moving restlessly from corpse to corpse. “These fellows have all been arrow shot. Take a look at the holes in them. Not a sword slash or a chop cut anywhere. Three or four archers could have done that. I suppose you’ll want to give them a Christian burial?”
“I think not, Arlo. We don’t even know they were Christian. They might have been Jews, or Levantines. Besides, we have no shovels and it will soon be dark. We can change nothing here. They are dead and thus beyond our help, so let us leave them as they are. No point in even hauling them together into one pile. They’ll only stink the more and take longer to rot. As they are, the vultures and the desert beasts will make short work of them.” He raised his voice so that everyone could hear him. “Shall we ride on, my friends? There’s naught to be done here and we are yet six miles from Jericho, with less than an hour of light remaining. De Beaufort, lead us on, if you will.”
As the group began to move again, de Payens scanned them quickly, then kicked his horse towards the head of the column, where Julian de Beaufort rode straight-backed, his shield slung behind him and the butt of his long spear resting in the cup at his right stirrup, his eyes moving constantly from side to side, on the lookout for brigands. There were eighteen men in the group, all well mounted and heavily armed and armored, wearing chain-mail hauberks, helmets, and leggings, their surcoats marked with the various emblems of the nobles to whom they paid allegiance. Sir Hugh knew most of their faces but few of their names, but all of them knew who he was.
Hugh de Payens, at forty-six years of age, was regarded with awe by everyone who met him. A veteran of the sacking of Jerusalem seventeen years earlier, he had become an honored champion of Christendom and a warrior whose prowess was legendary throughout the Holy Lands, not merely in the Kingdom of Jerusalem but in northern Antioch and the other, lesser kingdoms of the region known by then to the Frankish conquerors as Outremer, “the land beyond the sea.” He had taken command of this traveling band by natural ranking, not because anyone had appointed him, and there was not a man among them who objected.
Even after seventeen years of occupation, travel within the Kingdom of Jerusalem was more hazardous than it had ever been, because the hills between Jerusalem and Joppa, thirty miles west on the coast, and between Jerusalem and Jericho, which lay about half as far away in the other direction, swarmed with bandits and brigands who preyed on those people—always Franks and usually pilgrims—who used the country’s roads to travel between the Holy Places. Thus it was a matter of mere common sense to wait until a journey, no matter how important it might be or what it might entail, could be undertaken in a large group for common safety and self-defense. This was exactly such a group, although by some strange chance, it was composed purely of knights and men-at-arms, with no pilgrims and no merchants. But even among these professionals, there was a grateful acknowledgment that, under Hugh’s command, they were in the company of a veteran who knew exactly what he was doing.
Hugh rode in silence for a while, alongside Sir Julian, and he was aware, without any need to look, that Arlo rode close behind him, as he had for the past four decades. But he knew, too, that neither he nor his faithful retainer felt completely at ease here, because this journey to Jericho had been unplanned, and they had long since learned that survival in Outremer relied upon careful planning before committing to any journey. Only a few days earlier, however, a man had come looking for Hugh de Payens, with word from his oldest friend, Godfrey St. Omer. According to the messenger, whom Hugh had distrusted on sight as a shifty-eyed, duplicitous scoundrel who would tell any lie in the hope of profit, St. Omer was now in the care of the recently formed Order of the Knights of the Hospital at their secondary hospice in Jericho, recovering from atrocities inflicted upon him while he had been a slave in the hands of the Muslims.
That had been an astounding piece of information, because Hugh had not seen or heard from Godfrey in years, and his first reaction was that this summons must be a hoax. St. Omer had remained at home on his family estates in Picardy years earlier, in 1107, when Hugh himself had returned to Outremer. Godfrey had retired there with the full concurrence of Count Hugh of Champagne, to be with his ailing wife, Louise, who had fallen gravely ill of some paralyzing affliction five years earlier, soon after Godfrey had returned from Palestine. But a full decade had elapsed since then, and Hugh was convinced that if Goff had intended to return to Outremer he would have contacted his old friend and brother-in-law through the Order of Rebirth. And so he instinctively distrusted the bearer of the message from Jericho.
On reflection, however, he had quickly understood that his suspicions made no sense, since had Godfrey not been in Jericho, the fellow would have had no basis for his tale, and so he had told Arlo to make ready for a journey and to find a suitable party with whom they could travel as soon as possible.
Count Hugh himself had returned to his County of Champagne the previous year, after a brief stay of little more than a year in Jerusalem, and so Hugh obtained permission to travel to Jericho from Lucien of Troyes, the Count’s deputy in the Holy Land. De Troyes, a fellow member of the Order of Rebirth, knew Godfrey of St. Omer well, so his permission had been immediate, even while he himself was preparing to return to France within the coming few days.
“So, Sir Hugh, may I ask what takes you to Jericho so hastily?” De Beaufort had turned in the saddle to address de Payens, but as the older man jerked his head and looked back at him, startled out of his reverie, the other raised a hand quickly. “Forgive me, I was merely being curious. I had no wish to pry. But you did say you had not planned to make this journey.”
De Payens waved a hand, dismissing de Beaufort’s apology. “I am not offended. I received word that an old friend is in the care of the hospital in Jericho, released but recently from captivity among the Turks. I had not known he was even in the Holy Land, let alone that he had been taken by the Mussulman. For many years I relied upon his wife, my sister, Louise, for all my information, but I have not received a letter from her in more years than I care to count, and now I find I do not even know if she is still alive. Have you—?” De Payens glanced at the younger man and answered his own question. “No, you have not. You are too young. You will find, however, that as you grow older, time has a way of accelerating. I had no idea until two days ago that twenty years have passed since I first came to Outremer, although I have been home since then … but seven years have fled since I last heard word from my sister.”
Riding behind the two knights, Arlo listened to what was being said, smiling to himself and taking note of the way de Beaufort listened wide-eyed to every word Sir Hugh uttered, for he knew de Beaufort would benefit by this encounter and the conversation that was taking place. Sir Hugh de Payens was famed for many things, but being friendly and talkative with strangers was not one of them. He was, in fact, notorious for being brusque and taciturn, a man of high principles, dark moods, and unflinching opinions who preferred his own company and actively encouraged the world to avoid him. That he was actually passing the time of day and sharing personal information with de Beaufort was extremely unusual and would not go unremarked.
DE PAYENS HAD NOT ALWAYS been unfriendly or distrustful. That had been a gradual transition, brought about over a decade of hard living and life lessons harshly learned, but Arlo knew that the final phase of the transformation had been triggered on the day Jerusalem fell, on the fifteenth of July, a Friday, in 1099. It had been Hugh’s twenty-ninth birthday. The full extent of his transformation proved to be deeply unsettling, leaving many of the knights unsure of how to deal with this man they had thought they knew.
They need not have bothered to wonder, for de Payens had simply stopped dealing with them, having decided that he desired no truck or commerce with any of the self-styled “Christian” warriors and their blood-lusting hypo
crisy. Hugh de Payens lived in a self-imposed exile of silence, surrounded by others but interacting with none of them, except when his duty demanded that he act as part of the army. When one knight, noted for his intolerance and hot temper, believed he had been slighted by Hugh’s silence, he grasped de Payens from behind, to wrench him around and face him. Hugh spun and felled him with a single, straight-armed blow to the forehead that left the man senseless. Later that day, as evening approached and the other knight felt sufficiently recovered to convince himself that he had been caught unawares, the fellow renewed the quarrel, attacking Hugh with a bare blade, which was against all the laws of the armies. De Payens disarmed him immediately and almost casually, using a heavy oak cudgel to snap the man’s sword blade, and then he thrashed him severely enough to remove all doubts from everyone’s mind about the wisdom of trying to thrust themselves uninvited into the awareness of the knight from Payens.
After that, word spread quickly that de Payens was crazed and, except in the execution of his knightly duties, would speak to no one other than his servant. In the eyes of his fellow knights, he had crossed out of heroism and into madness, but no one ever sought, or attempted to supply, an explanation for his bizarre behavior. It was simply accepted that he had been accursed somehow during the sack of Jerusalem. And thus Sir Hugh had become something of a soldiers’ legend, his exploits and his eccentricities widely reported and remarked upon, so that even after he returned to Christendom, men continued to talk about him, his strange notions, and the reputation for military prowess, ferocity, and bravery that no one begrudged him.
Summoned home with his friends by their liege lord, Hugh had returned to Champagne in the year after Jerusalem’s capture, and there, for the first six years of the new century, he had immersed himself in studying the Lore of the Order of Rebirth, traveling the length and breadth of his home country, from northern Flanders to Languedoc in the far southeast, to study with some of its most learned scholars and teachers. Thinking privately about that time in later years, Hugh regarded the period as the most enjoyable time of his life. Surrounded by his peers, none of whom bore any guilt for what had happened in Jerusalem, he had lived what was, for him, a full and normal life, where his daily weapons training was the only diversion open to him and his entire duty otherwise revolved around study and learning.
Early in 1107, however, he had been summoned before a plenary meeting of the Order’s Governing Council and had been charged with returning immediately to Outremer, there to establish contact with as many brethren of the Order as he could find, and to keep them aware of their oaths while they awaited further instructions from home on how they must proceed when the time was judged to be right. It crossed Hugh’s mind at the time, right there in front of the entire tribunal, to ask for more specific information regarding that timing and its rightness, but he resisted the impulse, telling himself that he would be informed of everything he needed to know when that need arose. In the meantime, he was informed, he would ride as one of a company of one hundred knights and three hundred men-at-arms raised by the Duchies of Burgundy, Anjou, and Aquitaine in response to requests from the King and the Patriarch Archbishop of Jerusalem. He would be attached to the contingent from Anjou, and would come under the command of whomever was appointed by Count Fulk to represent him in Outremer.
Excited by the prospect of putting his newly acquired learning to good use, he had gone looking for Montdidier, to try to persuade Payn to sail back with him, but Payn had been in England, visiting his wife’s father at Sir Stephen’s great castle in Yorkshire, and Godfrey, Hugh already knew, was unable to accompany him either, being at his home in Picardy, looking after his sick wife. Hugh had felt guilty about not having made the time to go and visit his ailing sister, whom he had not seen since the death of their mother five years earlier, and now he found there was not enough time for him to travel to Picardy to see her. He had contented himself with writing to her, a long, rambling letter of the kind he enjoyed writing and he knew Louise loved to read, and then, reluctantly, he had set sail for Outremer without his friends, on his way to Malta, the ship’s first port of call, within two weeks of his meeting with the Council. Less than half a year after that, he was back in Jerusalem, noticing the changes that had been effected in his absence.
Primary among those was that the Kingdom of Jerusalem had become a reality. The scruples expressed by Geoffroi de Bouillon, when he refused to wear a golden crown where Jesus had worn thorns, had not extended to his more ambitious brother Baldwin, and when de Bouillon had died after only a year as Advocate of the Holy Sepulcher, Baldwin had been quick to claim the throne. Since then, he had been working hard, and admirably, people said, to consolidate and strengthen his new kingdom, and hand in glove with that to stabilize Christendom’s hold in Outremer, including the Principality of Antioch and the Counties of Edessa and Tripoli, deftly juggling the ambitions of the various lords involved and ensuring that each of them contributed to the support of Jerusalem itself as the administrative center of all Outremer.
The city no longer stank of corruption, its stench burned away by the desert sun years earlier, but apart from its occupying garrison it still lay virtually derelict, with only a few civilian inhabitants, most of those Christians. The King himself had taken over the magnificent al-Aqsa Mosque, the site of the Dome of the Rock, and had converted it into his royal palace. The fact that in doing so he had scandalized and offended all devout Muslims mattered nothing to Baldwin, but it had also done nothing to help his efforts to repopulate the city.
The newcomers from the great duchies were made welcome with great panoply and pomp by King Baldwin, and he made no secret of how great his need for them had been, and would remain. His kingdom was small—as indeed was the total area of all the “redeemed” lands of Outremer, a slender chain of holdings running north to south, with the Mediterranean Sea lying on its western flank—and it was threatened along its entire western perimeter by an enormous host of Muslims, outnumbering the Frankish conquerors by more than twenty to one, according to highly conservative and optimistic estimates. That reality forced Baldwin and his military commanders to maintain a constant readiness, poised to respond at once to any threat to their borders, grateful for a lack of cohesion on the side of the enemy. The Seljuk Turks, the nominal overlords of an empire that had lasted for a hundred years, had never recovered from their igno-minious defeats by the Frankish armies in 1098 and 1099. They had forfeited their supremacy among the Muslim peoples of the desert and no one else had yet stepped forward to take it up, so that the Frankish army, small as it was, had never had to be deployed against any major alliance of Muslim groups and had succeeded, to this point in 1116, in fighting off any invasion of its territories. The newcomers from Christendom, four hundred strong and both self-sufficient and adequately equipped, represented a considerable improvement in the strength and readiness of Baldwin’s forces, and after an effusive welcome, they were absorbed into the military fabric of life in Outremer.
Hugh’s re-entry into the daily life of Jerusalem and its kingdom forced him to make a decision that was to affect his entire life. During the years he had spent at home after his return, he had been content among his own brotherhood, immersing himself wholeheartedly in duty, work, and study and requiring little in the way of what other men considered normal. He had developed little interest in women, not because he disliked them but simply because he seldom found himself in female company and felt no compelling urge to pursue it, but he would have been surprised to realize that many people who knew him thought of his life as verging on monastic. Hugh had known a few women carnally, from time to time, but he had never been tempted to develop any kind of relationship with any of them, and early in his manhood he had come to accept that he could, whenever he so wished, allay any insuperable sexual longings without great difficulty, since women, when he sought them out, appeared to find him attractive. The fundamental truth of his existence, although it was one that he never thought of, was that
chastity became an incidental product of a way of life dominated by attendance to duty, responsibility, and solitary study.
Among his own family and his brethren in the Order of Rebirth, Hugh de Payens could be himself, with no inhibitions and no constraints on his behavior. His view of other men, however, knights who were not of the Brotherhood of the Order, had been gravely distorted by what he had witnessed in Jerusalem on his twenty-ninth birthday, so that Hugh now accepted, rightly or wrongly, that hypocrisy, hatred, bigotry, and ruthless intolerance contaminated the entire Christian Church and its military adherents.
In consequence of that, soon after his arrival back in Outremer, Hugh had voluntarily cut himself off again from all intercourse with anyone who did not belong to the Order of Rebirth and had concentrated all his attention on finding other brethren. He soon discovered, however, that the task he had been assigned by the Order was a far from simple one, and the information from which he had to work was tenuous at best. According to the reports compiled by the armies after the capture of Jerusalem and verified by the Order from its own records, there had been a total of thirty-two knights of the Order in Outremer at the beginning of the century, but the challenge of finding them would be enormously difficult, and convening them after that, Hugh knew, would be nigh on impossible. He was skeptical of the reliability of the lists of survivors compiled after the capture of the city, for the casualties among the Christian armies before the victory, on the route from Constantinople via Antioch, had been appalling, and the powers-that-be had been at great pains to present their conquest in the best possible light. That, in turn, had led to many dead men being reported as having voluntarily remained in Outremer.