Knights of the Black and White

by Jack Whyte

  A few of the men smiled at that, although uncertainly, and de Payens looked from face to face among them, awaiting their responses. Montdidier coughed and shuffled his feet, then coughed again.

  “Ridiculous as your story sounds, Hugh, he might be tempted to permit it … save that it would be of no use to him.”

  Hugh glanced at St. Omer, raising one eyebrow quizzically, then looked back at Montdidier. “Explain that, Payn.”

  “Well, the only reason I can think of for him to listen to your tale at all is that we, you and your friends, are all veteran knights. He could use our skills and experience. But then, if we became monks, as you suggest, our fighting skills would be lost and useless to him. Monks are forbidden to fight, even verbally, among themselves, although they do that all the time. But to fight with weapons, as we do? That’s anathema.”

  “That’s right, Crusty. Anathema. That is exactly correct. Were he to accept us as monks, all our prowess, our training, our disciplines, and our skills would be useless to him. We would be no more useful to him than are the Hospital knights.”

  “But the Hospital knights are very useful, Hugh.” St. Omer’s objection was immediate. “In their own way, doing what they do best, they are invaluable.”

  De Payens smiled. “Aye, that’s right, too, Goff. They are, are they not? You know that better than any of us. And the Archbishop knows it, too. He also knows that the foolish people of Jerusalem are expecting the monks of the Hospital to fight like knights.”

  Godfrey sat blinking for a few moments, then asked, “What are you saying, Hugh?” His voice was quiet enough to make everyone else sit forward, watching his mouth. “You sound as though you might be talking sense, but everything you say comes out as a riddle.”

  De Payens shrugged. “Not if you marshal your thoughts from a different direction. Warmund de Picquigny, the Patriarch Archbishop of Jerusalem, has all the power here in Outremer that the Pope possesses back in Christendom. He can make kings, counts, dukes, and knights, and he can make and unmake bishops. It follows, therefore, that he can make monks.”

  “Well of course he can. No one is disputing that.”

  “Imagine warrior monks, Godfrey. Fighting monks. Veteran fighting monks who would answer to Warmund de Picquigny alone, as their ecclesiastical superior. Think you that thought might intrigue him?”

  This time the silence was profound, reflecting the unthinkable tenor of what de Payens had suggested, and he allowed it to hover palpably above all of them before he continued. “Think about it seriously, lads, and forget about all the rules that would tell you a thousand times why this could never be. The times today are different, demanding different measures, different directions, and different solutions to different problems. So imagine, if you will, fighting monks, religious warriors bound by vows, answerable only to the Patriarch. Not to the King, and not to feudal lords. Were we such monks, we could then dedicate ourselves to patrolling the roads and protecting the pilgrims, ridding both Warmund and King Baldwin of their greatest headache. And being bound by the vow of poverty, we would not require to be paid—merely supported through the charity and alms of the Church.”

  “Fighting monks?” Archibald St. Agnan’s scornful tone expressed all their skepticism. “Fighting monks? That is ridiculous, Hugh. Who ever heard of such a thing? It’s as logical as copulating virgins.”

  This time no single man smiled in response to St. Agnan’s rough humor, and de Payens nodded. “That is true, Archibald, but you are a knight, so you should know better than any cleric that logic has little place in the middle of a fight—and make no mistake, a fight is what we are discussing here. We are about to become engaged, like it or not, in a fight for our ancient Order’s very survival, and to win it, we will have to fight the battles of the Christian Church, protecting its pilgrims, certainly—and I see nothing wrong with that—but upholding and appearing to endorse its hegemony, and defending the existence of this Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, even though that entails a breakdown of sense and logic.”

  He fell silent for a count of five heartbeats, then said, “Listen now, all of you, and hear what I am saying. No one has ever heard of fighting monks because there has never been such a thing. But that idea will stop being ridiculous as soon as the first order of fighting monks is created to confront circumstances extraordinary enough to warrant such a thing. Warmund de Picquigny has the power and the authority to do that, and I believe the circumstances in force here are extraordinary enough to warrant that.”

  “But why would we even think about doing such a thing, Sir Hugh?” This was Gondemare again, and de Payens smiled at him.

  “It would provide us with the means of obeying our orders from the Seneschal.”

  “What?” St. Agnan’s tone was skeptical. “You mean about excavating the temple? We all agreed that’s impossible. How can it be less so now?”

  De Payens was ready for him, his answer spilling out almost before the question was complete.

  “Because we are considering becoming penniless warrior monks, my friend. Once we become that we will have horses, but we will lack the wherewithal to provide feed and shelter for them—and for ourselves, be it said. And so, as partial payment for our services, we will ask leave of the King and the Archbishop to install ourselves and our mounts in the old stables above the temple ruins.

  “Warmund de Picquigny will not object to that, I promise you, having gained our military skills for his own ends. Nor will the King object to having a reliable force of knights quartered in his own grounds. And once we are installed in the stables, we can begin to dig, in safety and in privacy. That should solve our most immediate problems for a while, at least.”

  “Hugh, you have the mind of a Pope,” St. Omer growled. “That is brilliant, my friend.”

  “Aye, you might well be right,” St. Agnan said, “but do we have to become monks? I know but little of how monks are made, but I mislike the idea of taking monkish vows. How much of that would we have to endure, were we to go ahead with this?”

  “Three, Archibald, no more. Poverty, chastity, and obedience.”

  “Swear me to chastity? Never!”

  De Payens winked at St. Omer. “Come, now, St. Agnan, and be truthful,” he challenged the big knight. “When did you last have an unchaste thought of anything other than a pretty goat? How old are you now? Forty? Older? And you have been here in the desert for half your life. You smell like a rancid goat, as do we all, and no self-respecting woman would come near you, even were self-respecting women of our own kind to be found here. Truly, I ask you, what matters chastity to you?”

  St. Agnan grunted and grinned, not even slightly offended. “Aye, fair enough, I might grant you that one. But what about the others? Obedience? And poverty, in God’s name?”

  “You already live by those two, my friend. And in God’s name, too. That’s what the ritual we observed here today is all about. You undertook both of the vows you are questioning now, with only very minor differences, when you were Raised to the Order. You swore to obey the superiors set over you by God, and you swore to hold all things in common with your brethren in the Order, is that not correct?” He waited for St. Agnan’s nod, then smiled. “Aye, I’m glad you remember. You swore vows of obedience then, Archibald, and, for all intents and purposes, of poverty.”

  No one appeared to have anything to add after that, and de Payens looked around at them, catching each man’s eye in turn until he was sure they were all waiting for what he would say next, and then a very small smile played along his lips. “Look, my friends,” he began, “I can see that you all have doubts about this, and I admit to you freely that until mere hours ago, I shared most of them. But lying awake last night, I thought about many things, and only now do I see that all of those things centered upon this dilemma we face, so let me share them with you.

  “You all know of my self-imposed exile, these past years, shutting myself off from everyone.” He hesitated, thinking for a moment, then continued s
lowly, as though examining each word before he spoke it. “That mood, that frame of mind, was born of disappointment … and of something close to despair—despair for my fellow man, and for myself and my beliefs and my defaced ideals, because everywhere I looked, I seemed to see men wading through blood, befouled by the kind of filth I was taught to detest as a boy. Our Christian brethren, as all of you know, make much of their faith and the power of it. They call it a supernatural gift of God, and priests speak of losing faith as one of the greatest disasters that can befall a man, causing the loss of his very soul. And they say the greatest sin against faith is despair, because it denies the existence of hope.

  “Well, my friends, I was in despair for all those years, a despair caused by what I had been watching in my fellow man all my life, and by the ease with which the behavior that inspired my despair can be forgiven, and is forgiven, by the Church, leaving men mysteriously cleansed, absolved of guilt, and free and able to go out and commit the same atrocities again and again and again. There is no sin, we are all taught, that cannot be forgiven merely by confessing it to a priest.”

  He straightened his back and closed his hands over his face, squeezing his eyes shut as he said, “But most priests are just as venal and corrupt as the very men they forgive, citing God’s clemency.”

  He lowered his hands, blinking to clear his eyes. “Most of them are, I said. Not all of them. There may well be some out there who are completely sincere in their beliefs, but I have never met one in person. That is the truth, and it appalls me. I was brought up, as were all of you, among knights and warriors, and I learned the laws of chivalry when I could barely walk. I also learned the laws of God and of the Church at the same time, but I had not grown beyond mid-boyhood before I also learned that few people beyond my family’s circle paid any attention at all to God’s laws. Most of them—lords, knights, and soldiers—heeded only those laws that had the power to punish and hurt them in this world. The other world they left wholly to the priests. And the priests, the clerics, gave all of their time towards the care of themselves. They spoke of the goodwill of others, but only insofar as it enriched them in real terms: money, power, and status.

  “And then, after several years of increasing discouragement through all of that, I was initiated into this Order of Rebirth and discovered that the love of God, and my faith in God, can thrive outside the framework of the Church. That transformed my whole life, for it taught me to see and appreciate, for the very first time in my life, that every single thing that people do in life is influenced and dictated by the Church, and that the Church today is run by venal, grasping, corrupt, and self-aggrandizing men. Oh, we are expected to believe the Church fathers are all God-chosen and God-blessed, and we are encouraged and expected to entrust our priests with the care of our immortal souls, but who tells us such things? They do, of course. The priests tell us what to do and what to think, in everything to do with God—and in everything else, if the truth be told. They proclaim God’s infinite mercy and they claim that they embody God’s voice in this world … and they make it perfectly clear that if we disobey them, or if we choose not to believe them, they have the power to punish us, to condemn and even damn us to eternal perdition.”

  He looked again from man to man, all of them rapt by what he was saying. “They damn people, brothers, to eternal perdition. Think about that again, for a moment, for it is something we tend to shy away from. Priests consign ordinary people maliciously to the everlasting fires of Hell and they do it simply because they can, because they possess and enjoy the power and the willfulness to rule men’s lives and dispossess their souls. And while they are doing it, they preach about God’s eternal and bottomless mercy. And who is to gainsay them, believing that they have the ear of God?”

  His voice took on an edge that had not been there before. “Our Order taught us that we may change all that. Do you not recall the excitement of discovering that? Of knowing that we might someday change the entire world into a better place? The Church, as we know it today, was built by men, not by God, and not by his supposedly man-born son, Jesus. Jesus was man-born, certainly, but what is believed to be his Church was usurped, then shaped and fashioned long after his death, by Paul the gentile and by his Roman associates and advisers. But our Order, the Order of Rebirth in Sion, held out to us the hope of changing all of that someday, not by killing all the ungodly and unworthy priests but by bringing the truth, the real truth of what happened a millennium ago, here in Jerusalem, to light.

  “I had forgotten that, my friends. I had lost sight of it among all the carnage and the filth of what has happened here since first we came. I had lost sight of it because no word was reaching us, I believed, from the Order itself. But I was wrong, and now that word has come, strange as it may seem in our ears, and I have come to see and to know now what I believe. I have no faith in men for their own sake, but I believe that God has brought us here, every man of us, for a purpose. And I believe that purpose is what brought this plan into my mind last night, while I lay abed.

  “We are being asked—or ordered, if you wish—to find, to rediscover, the truth of our Order’s Lore. And when we have found it, we will make a start on righting all the wrongs that the real loss of faith—the manipulation and distortion of the real teachings of Jesus and his Jewish brethren—has visited upon this world. And we will change it. And when it is changed, although our names will be long forgotten, people will remember and talk about what we achieved.” He stopped, and the silence held until he asked them, “So, what say you? What do you want to do?”

  “We shave our heads and dig,” came St. Agnan’s voice from among the circle of nodding heads.

  THAT NIGHT, when he finally made his way to bed, Hugh failed to fall asleep and soon rolled on to his back, aware that he was facing another restless night. Normally he would fall asleep as soon as he lay down and would wake up refreshed, no matter how long or short his rest might have been. He could even nap, if the need arose, standing on his feet or propped in his saddle. Invariably, a failure to drop off instantly meant that something was troubling him, but this time he was unaware of anything that might be niggling at him and so, after a period of tossing and turning, he threw back his coverings and swung his legs out of bed, deciding to take a walk in the cool night air. He shrugged into the long, flowing Arab robe that, like most of his companions, he wore for comfort and convenience when he was not armored, then slipped one arm through the loop of his sword belt and settled it across his shoulder before making his way to the main doors leading to the courtyard. There he yawned and scratched his head, shivering slightly in the chill of the desert night.

  “Why aren’t you asleep?”

  Hugh spun around and saw Payn Montdidier sitting on a bench against the wall behind him on his right, lit by the full moon and the flickering flames of a burning cresset.

  “Crusty! You startled me … But I’ll return your question: why aren’t you asleep?”

  “I should be. But I’m going in now, because I’m chilled to the bone. I’ve been sitting here thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “Margaret … and my son, Charles, and Helen, my daughter. Helen will be eight years old tomorrow and I had forgotten, until tonight, when you mentioned that only two of us have families, back in Christendom …”

  Hugh was appalled by his own thoughtlessness. Until Montdidier spoke, he had not considered what effect his earlier statement might have had on the two men in question, Montdidier and Gondemare. Now the pain in his friend’s voice was too obvious to miss.

  “Payn,” he said, “forgive me. I had no—”

  “I know that, Hugh. You simply spoke the truth, and you said nothing that came to me as a surprise. The die was cast on that affair long years ago, to everyone’s consent, Margaret’s as well as mine. But you caught me unprepared when you brought the matter up so suddenly …” His voice faded, and he stared into nothingness before he resumed. “Remembering my daughter’s birthday … it made me
think about the pattern of our lives—of all our lives—and how it has changed so completely from what we anticipated when we were young and bright-eyed and full of great ideas.” He smiled, looking down at his feet, then shook his head and looked up at Hugh, his smile still in place.

  “D’you remember how horrified we were when we found out that they knew about us? We thought they had discovered all about the Order. That was the most disastrous thing we could imagine at the time. May God help us!”

  Hugh smiled, too. “Well, it was quite dramatic, I recall.”

  “Now it seems laughable.”

  Hugh cocked his head, intrigued by something in his friend’s tone. “Laughable? How so? I never thought to laugh. The women have made a tremendous sacrifice, without so much as the comfort of knowing what that sacrifice is for. And they stood back and allowed us to do what we needed to do. They could have wept and screamed. They chose not to, and they prepared themselves for lives without their men. God bless them, I say.”

  “Aye, as you say, God bless them …” Montdidier stood up and moved towards the door, then hesitated and reached out to grasp Hugh’s shoulder. “It has just occurred to me that I do not even know if Margaret is still alive. She could be dead by now.”

  Hugh looked his friend in the eye and nodded. “Aye, she could be, but if so, it could only have been in the past year. I think we would have heard word of her passing by now, were it otherwise. She is probably as alive and hale as you are, living happily in Payens.”

  Montdidier stood for a few more moments without moving, then nodded his head. “Aye, you’re probably right. I hope you are. Now I’m going to bed, and you should, too, at least to rest, if not to sleep.”

  Hugh pulled his robe about him before turning to walk back inside the hostel with his friend.

  SEVEN

  By mid-morning on the following day, with the cooperation of his six companions, de Payens had a plan of action that would take his proposal to the next stage. They had been together since before dawn, discussing the question of how best to make the first approach to Warmund de Picquigny, and Hugh was now confident that his ideas were well enough fleshed out, and based on sufficiently solid grounds, to permit him to proceed immediately. And so, an hour before noon, he was striding along the main route to the Archbishop’s residence, dressed in his finest clothes and armor and accompanied by St. Omer, St. Agnan, and Montdidier, all three of them dressed similarly, in the parade-best clothing they had brought to wear to their inaugural temple Gathering. It never occurred to him to wonder if the Patriarch Archbishop might, for whatever reason, be unable or unwilling to receive him and his friends. He had known and liked Warmund de Picquigny for years and he knew that the liking was mutual, so he was looking forward to the coming meeting and reviewing once again what he would say to the Patriarch, when he felt St. Agnan’s arm being thrust across his chest, pulling him to a halt.