Knights of the Black and White

by Jack Whyte

  “Aye, less than a year.”

  “Well, he has sent you a gift. You may have noticed that I came accompanied by a man leading a mule.”

  “Aye, I saw that.”

  “The chest is for you, from the Seneschal in person.

  It is locked and sealed, and you are to check most solemnly upon opening it to see that it has not been tampered with or opened.”

  “What’s in it, regalia?”

  De Fermond blinked in surprise. “Aye. How could you know that?”

  De Payens smiled. “Nothing magical involved. The last time that the Count and I were together, we talked about that. The Count himself had owned all the devices of the Order, but they had been lost in a surprise raid on the caravan that was bringing them to Jerusalem from Joppa, years ago. And of course, we had no way of replacing them, without sending someone to France to bring back a new set.”

  De Fermond inclined his head gravely. “Well, Sir Hugh, now that the insignia and regalia of the Order are restored to you and the other brethren here in Outremer, it is my solemn duty to instruct you thus: the Seneschal charges you, Sir Hugh de Payens, to think back upon the mysteries of which you learned in preparation for your entry into the brotherhood, and to look about you now, in the conduct of your duties in the Holy Land, for ways and means of bringing those mysteries to a culmination.”

  Hugh stopped walking. He crossed his left arm over his chest and rested his right elbow against the back of his hand, flicking his front teeth with his thumbnail. “Bringing those mysteries to a culmination,” he said after a while, speaking as though to himself. “As I said before, noises, but no sense. Do you know what that means, Fermond, what you have just said? Because I certainly don’t.”

  Fermond responded with a question of his own. “Have you heard of Count Fulk of Anjou?”

  “Is there a Frank anywhere who has not? Anjou is filled with Count Fulks. I have met both Fulk III and Fulk IV, father and son. Which one are you talking about?”

  “Neither, my lord. Both of those are dead. The Count in power now is Count Fulk V. He is a senior officer of our Order.”

  “Of course he is, as were his ancestors.”

  “Aye, well, I have been instructed to tell you that Count Fulk will be coming out to Outremer, within the coming year, if all goes well, to take charge of the Order’s activities here and to control and coordinate your efforts in your primary task.”

  “By whom were you instructed?”

  “By the Council.”

  “I see … And the Count is to control and coordinate my efforts in what primary task?”

  Fermond hawked and cleared his throat, then began walking again, keeping his voice low as a veiled woman approached them, carrying a long-necked water jug on her head with ease and grace.

  “Not your personal efforts, my lord—the efforts of the brethren in the Holy Land. You are instructed to gather and organize all of the brethren you can find in Outremer, to re-establish the customs and rituals of the Order, and to devise some means of undertaking an excavation of the ruins of King Solomon’s Temple, to rediscover the treasures and the artifacts that our Lore tells us lie buried there.”

  Hugh walked in silence for several more steps, his head bowed, but then he began to laugh, snorting at first in disbelief, and then throwing his head back to guffaw, his booming voice frightening the birds from the nearest date palms. Fermond looked askance at him, but kept walking and said nothing until Hugh’s mirth had died away. When he drew breath to speak, however, Sir Hugh cut him off with a swiftly upraised palm.

  “Hold! Say nothing for the moment, if you will. Give me time to think about what I must now say to you. You have had months to consider what you would say to me, and you have said it. I have had mere minutes to absorb it, and now I must think.” He walked slowly and resolutely, his head still lowered, watching the puffs of powdery dust stirred up from the pathway by his sandaled feet. Finally he snorted again and reached out to lay a heavy hand on his companion’s shoulder, bringing him to a halt and turning him around so that they could look each other in the eye.

  “Upon your honor now, Fermond, did these instructions of yours originate with Count Hugh, or did they come to you from the Governing Council?”

  De Fermond looked mystified, but then he shrugged, as if to ask if it made any difference. De Payens waited.

  “From the Council. They had already been under preparation before the death of Monseigneur Toussaint. Count Hugh merely passed them along as one of his first duties as Seneschal. But it was he who sent the insignia.”

  “Aye, that is what I thought. Now look here. I want to be practical, Fermond, to deal only with the realities of what you are suggesting, but I cannot. I have never heard anything as asinine as what you have just proposed. That I am to—what was it?—to devise some means of undertaking an excavation of the ruins of King Solomon’s Temple? Is that not what you said?”

  Gaspard de Fermond cleared his throat again and nodded sheepishly. He had no idea what he had said that was asinine, but it was evident that de Payens thought him a fool. De Payens, however, was now nodding his head emphatically.

  “Aye, well,” he said. “There would be no grave difficulty there, on the face of it, other than gathering the brethren in one place for any length of time. We all have different lords, you see, Fermond—you know that—different masters, and they are scattered throughout the kingdom and the counties, spread out over all the Holy Lands, in fact. All of those various lords make differing demands of their men, in duty and attendance, and since few of them are of our Order in the first place, that alone makes what you are proposing very difficult, since you are suggesting that we gather the brethren together in a working group and keep them in Jerusalem—perhaps for months on end—without offering an explanation to anyone. An explanation that might be widely demanded, of who we are and why we are assembled here in such numbers, and in such a way, and for such a long time, for Jerusalem is not like any city in Christendom.

  “The people who issued these instructions you bring us have no idea of what Jerusalem truly is. This is a city being reborn as we speak. We sacked it in our first campaign, and you may think you know what that means, but let me assure you that you do not. We destroyed the city, and we destroyed its people, wading knee deep in blood on the day the city fell to us. We killed everyone who lived there … everyone we could find, that is, for a few, a very small few escaped. Then, for the next ten years, the city lay abandoned, a stinking charnel house. Only a scattering of people lived there, until a few years ago, when King Baldwin realized that this was the center of his kingdom and it was not even strong enough to close its gates to brigands.

  “Since then things have changed. The city is being repopulated, and that was not a simple thing to achieve. It is isolated, close to no other fortified bastion, and it has no port to serve it, other than Joppa, thirty miles distant. Baldwin began by bringing in Syrian Christians from the lands across the Jordan, offering them land and houses for their families, and somehow he found men to rebuild and extend the city’s northern walls. But he had to feed them, too, and Jerusalem has never been rich in farmland. So he abolished all taxes on food being brought into the city, and at the same time imposed heavy taxes on all food going out. He made it possible, in other words, for a stable citizenry to live here again.

  “That does nothing, however, to change the fundamental fact that Jerusalem is landlocked and poor. It has no reason for existence other than as a religious center, to receive the pilgrims who flock to it to visit the Holy Places. And therefore it offers no means of concealing the kind of activities demanded by these instructions you have brought.

  “But leave that, for now, and think about this. Were we able to gather all our brethren together by some miracle, we could simply start to dig. No difficulty there. The ruins of the temple are clearly evident, unconcealed and plain to see, and abandoned these thousand years and more. It is never used for anything, other than being the base on
which the famed al-Aqsa Mosque was built by the Muslims. Have you seen the mosque yet?”

  De Fermond shook his head. “No, my lord. As I said, I am but newly arrived. I visited the city but briefly, then went down to Jericho, looking for you.”

  “Ah, well, in that case you might have seen it, but you would not have known it for what it was. In fact, however, it is no longer a mosque. It is now the official residence of the newly crowned King of Jerusalem, Baldwin le Bourcq, the second King Baldwin to hold that rank. And thus, the King’s palace sits atop the ruins of the temple far beneath.

  “But then, you see, to make matters more difficult, that temple is really Herod’s temple, even while everyone assumes it to be Solomon’s. Not so. It isn’t Solomon’s at all. The ruined temple visible here was built by Herod a thousand years ago, and it was completed just in time to be destroyed when the Romans finally grew sick and tired of Hebrew rebellions and unrest and decided to kill all the Jews and destroy the troublesome Province of Judea once and for all. I have been told the temple that is there now was never used for proper worship, that it was destroyed before it could be completed. I have also heard that it was built atop the site of Solomon’s Temple, but we have no means of proving or disproving it today.”

  He eyed de Fermond again, one eyebrow slightly raised and a mocking little smile on his lips. “Even so, had we the proof that Solomon’s Temple is really there, there would be no great difficulty entailed in excavating it. We would simply apply for permission to King Baldwin—he is the King of Jerusalem and, as such, he owns the city and the temple. I have no doubt that permission would be swiftly granted. Most particularly so when we inform him of the treasure for which we are searching.”

  “But—”

  “Ah yes, the ‘but.’ But we can tell no one about the treasure, can we? It must be secret, sacrosanct, as are our operations. So we must excavate the temple in secrecy, somehow accommodating the fact that it sits atop a hill within the city, and we must do that while maintaining the secrecy of the very existence of our own brotherhood and Order, all of this in full view of a surrounding city full of people, and without raising any suspicions or curiosity, even among our own knightly but uninitiated comrades, as to what we are about.”

  He allowed what he had said to reverberate with his listener, then continued. “Tell me, my friend, without compromising your loyalty to the Seneschal, or to the Councillors who compiled these orders and imposed upon him to send them—for I cannot believe Count Hugh would be the originator of such stupidity—have you any ideas about how we might approach this task you have defined for us? If you have, upon my oath, I will bare my head and bow to you, and I will resist the temptation to tell you to go home to the idiots who sent you here and bid them to come and see for themselves what they are so stupidly and arrogantly demanding.”

  De Fermond stood without speaking, his cheeks flaring with color, and de Payens grasped his upper arm. “Understand me, my friend, I know you are not to blame in this. You are merely the messenger. But tomorrow night we will be back in Jerusalem, and the day after that, I will take you and show you the Temple Mount. You will see instantly, the moment you set eyes on it, that the men who sent you here with these demands have never seen or imagined the reality of what they would have us face.”

  The flush on Fermond’s face had given way to a pallid waxiness. “Are you saying, Sir Hugh, that you will not obey the commands of the Council?”

  “Not at all. I am saying that it does not seem possible that anyone, including the Seneschal and the Councillors themselves, could achieve the task set for me and my brethren here in Jerusalem. But your instructions were that I am to attempt to devise a means whereby I can achieve the objective you have described, is that not so? I can promise you I will obey that order faithfully. I will examine everything that I can imagine, in seeking a way to obey the Seneschal. I have no idea how long it will take, but if Count Fulk of Anjou comes here within the year, I will have something to show him—even though it be only the outlines of the plans I have considered and rejected. How long will you remain with us?”

  Fermond shook his head. “I cannot remain at all, other than to deliver certain messages that are my charge. Immediately after that, I am bound for Cyprus, to meet with several of our brotherhood there.”

  “Then I will wish you well on your journey, for these are ill times for travelers, and I suspect you will not be journeying among a great company.”

  “No, but if God is with us, I will survive to deliver my tidings.”

  FIVE

  “Clearly, God was not with us in this matter, at least.”

  The news of Gaspard de Fermond’s death had been delivered mere moments earlier, and these were the first words spoken since the announcement. Arlo had brought the word from the marketplace, where he had received it from a knight he knew, who had been told of it by another knight, who had known de Fermond and had recognized his mutilated body where it had been found by a roadside, less than two leagues from the city gates.

  Arlo was still standing where he had delivered the news, and Godfrey St. Omer was sitting slack-jawed at the table, clutching a loaf of bread in both hands, stilled in the act of tearing it apart. Hugh pushed himself up with both hands on the tabletop and walked away towards the open window, sucking in a great breath.

  St. Omer’s voice was uncertain when he spoke. “What do you mean, Hugh, God was not with us in this?”

  “Those were almost the last words de Fermond spoke to me, three days ago. He said he must travel next to Cyprus and I told him to be careful—”

  “Cyprus?”

  Hugh spun around, impatient with St. Omer’s slowness. “Aye, Cyprus. He had tidings to deliver there, from Count Hugh to … certain people of the Count’s acquaintance, I know not whom.” Hugh barely caught himself before he blurted out the truth, forgetting that Arlo was present, and although he did not as much as glance in the man’s direction, the slightest twitch of one of Arlo’s eyebrows revealed that he had caught the minor hesitation and had interpreted it correctly. “He said that the messages were important and that if God was on our side, he would be kept safe until such time as he fulfilled his mission. I hope he died quickly.” He made the sign of the cross and looked around for verification of that from Arlo, and was surprised to see that he had left.

  “Another death on the Holy Roads.” St. Omer’s voice was low and rife with disgust. “It really is becoming unbearable.”

  Hugh turned back to him. “No, Goff, not unbearable. People will bear it because they must. The only alternative is to remain at home for ever and go nowhere. No one can stomach the thought of that. No amount of terror will keep people from traveling—at least, not for long.”

  St. Omer had finally broken the bread and now dipped a portion into a small bowl of olive oil and chewed it for a while, his eyes fixed on some midair point ahead of him. Then he drew a deep breath and continued. “I saw you with him three days ago, up on the Temple Mount. What were you doing up there?”

  “He wanted to see the temple.”

  “And was he thrilled with it? There’s nothing there except those old stables, and no one has used those in a hundred years.”

  “He wanted us to dig there.”

  St. Omer’s eyes widened. “He what? He wanted us to dig? Knights?”

  “No, not knights … brothers of the Order.”

  “Hmm …” A short silence as he considered that, then, “Dig where? In the mountain?”

  “Aye, but downward, into the ruins of the temple—beneath them, in fact. He brought word from the Council that I am to call the brotherhood together—all who are here in Outremer—and devise some means of excavating the temple and finding the treasure our Lore tells us is buried there.”

  St. Omer sat silent for a few moments longer, then shook his head, as if trying to clear it. “Aye, our Lore tells us there is treasure hidden there, Hugh, but it is lore, nothing more. There is no demonstrable truth to it. It is legend, tradit
ion. We do not even know for a certainty that the ruins of Solomon’s Temple underlie Herod’s.”

  “Agreed, and without debate, but it might be true nonetheless, Goff. I have been thinking about it ever since de Fermond mentioned it, and I don’t think it can be done … But I now have to think seriously about doing it, so I would appreciate your doing the same.”

  “Oh, no.” St. Omer raised a hand in protest. “Do not place that on me, Hugh de Payens, because you have just defined the impossible. It might be your task to achieve it, and if so, you have my warmest sympathies, but it is not my responsibility in any way, and I have no wish to share in it.”

  “Then damn you for a parasitic ingrate, after all the pain and effort I’ve expended on your behalf, nursing you back to health with my own gentle hands.” The tone was nowhere near as caustic as the words themselves, and neither man said anything else for a few moments until Hugh resumed. “Seriously, Goff, there must be a way we can do something … make an effort, at least.”

  St. Omer sighed. “Aye, there might well be, as you say, but I couldn’t even begin to guess about where we should even start. How many of the brethren are there in Outremer nowadays?”

  “I have no idea. Damnation, de Fermond might have known that. I should have asked him.”

  “Too late now. What about sending Arlo out to look for tidings of the Friendly Families? Would that be possible?”

  “Aye, if he’s willing to go. It’s not the kind of thing I would normally ask of him, because it might involve a lot of travel, and we all know too well how dangerous it is out there. But Arlo has been my eyes and ears ever since I withdrew from the world, so he might know those things already. Let’s ask him.”

  Arlo came back at Hugh’s summons and listened to the question, then nodded and counted off names on his fingers as he recited them. “Archibald St. Agnan. Gondemare of Arles. Payn Montdidier. Roland de Rossal. Geoffrey Bissot. And you two, of course.”