Knights of the Black and White

by Jack Whyte

  “I see. Did he say no more?”

  “Only that I should pray, and that the torment, whatever is causing it, will recede eventually.”

  “So he believes you should return to your patrol duties?”

  The look that St. Clair shot back at him was filled with cynicism. “Did you expect otherwise, Master Hugh? I draw four patrols to every other brother’s one. Of course he would want me to return to my patrol duties, but he did not say so.”

  De Payens grunted, deep in his chest, and bit back the impulse to chastise the younger monk for his angry tone, reminding himself that St. Clair had been under great strain recently. Instead, he walked away, scratching with one finger at a sudden itch in his ear. “I don’t think I want you to return to patrol duties. Not yet, not for a while.” He turned back and waved an open hand towards the table and the chairs beside it. “Sit you down.”

  As St. Clair moved slowly to obey, de Payens continued. “I believe it might not be in your best interests at this time to be too much out there in the world you have so recently sworn to forsake, and so I intend to keep you walled in here for a time, away from the world of ordinary men. I have work for those young muscles of yours—work that your elder brethren will be glad to see you undertake.” A wide, kindly smile took any sting from his words, and he sat down on the other side of the table.

  “We have had great news this day, Stephen, news that justifies everything we have been doing since we came here. Gondemare and Bissot broke into a tunnel this morning. I have not seen it yet, and none of the others know it has even happened—I’ll be telling them all as soon as you and I are finished here. It is, of course, an ancient excavation, and it appears to have been filled in deliberately. Gondemare and Bissot both agree on that. The passageway is filled with rubble. That means it is likely to be one of the tunnels sealed and filled in by Titus’s legionaries after the capture of Jerusalem. That was a thousand years and more ago, Stephen, eleven hundred and fifty years, in fact. Think of that. It defies comprehension.” He sat quietly for a time, trying in his own mind to grasp that time span.

  “The work will be easier from now on, but it will still be arduous. We will no longer be piercing solid rock with every hammer blow, but we will now be faced with removing far more detritus, far more quickly than we have been required to in the past. You wish to ask me something?”

  “What about—? How will we know where we are down there? I remember hearing you say once, long ago, that there are scores, perhaps hundreds, of passages down there.”

  “Mathematics.” De Payens smiled. “Our first task will be to find an intersection with another tunnel. Our tunnel has done its work, and from now on it will function only as an adit to the workings. Once we find that new intersection, we will be able to work out where we are on this map. It may take us a long time, perhaps even more years, but at least we know now that we are within reach of our goal, and that the goal is real. So, will you be content to work beneath the ground for a while, away from the sunlight?”

  St. Clair nodded, his face devoid of expression. “I will, Master Hugh.”

  FOUR

  Over the course of the ensuing weeks and months, they found that there were areas within the newly discovered network of tunnels where the air was better, purer, than it was in others, and this appeared to depend upon the undulations of the tunnels themselves, for they were by no means regular. Sometimes one branch would stretch levelly for scores of paces and then, for no discernible reason, the grade would tilt up or down for a distance, sometimes returning to the original level, sometimes not. Montdidier had been the first to remark that the air always seemed thicker and more foul at the bottom of these variances than it ever did at the top. In saying that, he had stirred up controversy, for there was little else down there to capture the attention of his brethren, but after months of arguing back and forth and pro and contra his observation, a consensus had formed, accepting his opinion.

  Stephen had been in one of the sweet-air regions the previous week, and he knew that he might not have seen what he found there in another spot, for one of the main advantages of the sweet-air zones was that the light of their lanterns and candles always seemed brighter in such places, as though the very flames themselves rejoiced in the clean air. He had been working smoothly that day, shoveling rubble into the small, wheeled carts they had built to haul away the detritus. As he filled up each cart, he would pull on the rope attached to it, and whoever was working behind him at that point would pull the filled cart away, then push an empty one back up to him. Perhaps twenty or thirty paces distant now, to the rear of where they were digging, there was a lateral split in the tunnel, a shift formed by some upheaval in the earth that had taken place since the tunnel was dug, and one side of the split fell away into a deep crevasse. It was less dangerous than it appeared to be at first glance, for the rift was barely more than a stride across, but it seemed endlessly deep, for a stone dropped into it produced no sound of impact beneath, and the tunnelers had been tipping all their refuse into it now for months.

  The space where he had been working that day was narrower than usual, and St. Clair had been stooped over, alone at the end of the tunnel, when he thought he saw a metallic glint among the stone fragments ahead of him. Curious, he had picked up the nearby lamp and stepped forward, and the glint grew stronger, reflecting the light. He had found a jewel, a translucent blue stone, teardrop-shaped and almost as large as the pad of his thumb, its narrow end clasped in a silver loop that was clearly designed to hold a chain. He had held the bauble up to his light to examine it, and found himself smiling at the beauty of it, its color and its texture, smooth and cool to the touch, and then he had dropped it into his scrip and taken up his shovel again, his lamp safely returned to where it had been. It was far from being the first treasure they had unearthed since finding the tunnels. They had found more than a score already, including several magnificent pieces of jewelry and a number of copper, silver, and even gold coins bearing the likenesses of several Caesars, predominantly Augustus and Tiberius, although a few were of Nero.

  Now, a week later and twenty paces farther down the tunnel, the wall ahead of him subsided slightly as he pulled out yet another shovelful of small stones and dust, and he found himself looking at a gap between the top of the dirt wall and the tunnel roof. Within moments he had clambered up and crawled carefully, sheltering his candle flame, into one of the infrequent stretches of tunnel that had not been filled with dirt. He had barely entered the place, however, when his candle began to gutter and its flame shrank to a fraction of its normal size, indicating that the air in there was foul, and so he struggled out again.

  He had barely escaped, and with only his head and shoulders projecting from the narrow crawl space, he choked on the acrid smoke from the candle’s smoldering wick and was shaken by how close he had come to losing consciousness. He sprawled face down on the slope of the rubble and sucked air into his lungs in great, whooping gulps until he felt strong enough to struggle forward and slide free. Then, after rolling onto his back at the base of the pile, he sat up and pushed himself on his heels to where he could prop himself against the wall and look up at the narrow gap near the roof.

  Before anyone else tried to enter that section of tunnel, he knew, all the rubble blocking it would have to be cleared away, allowing fresh air to penetrate the space and make it habitable, but he felt no driving urge to leap up and tackle the task immediately. He had come close to panicking while he was scrambling out of there, fighting off waves of nausea and dizziness as he struggled to draw a breath, and he was content, for the time being, to relish the pleasure of simply breathing clean air. Farther back along the tunnel behind him, he could hear voices and rumbling wheels as his shift mates, Montdidier and Rossal, worked at emptying the last trolley he had sent back to them, so he knew that, despite the disorientation caused by his misadventure, he had not been long away from his work. His stomach tightened and heaved without warning, and he rolled onto all f
ours and vomited up the foulness of whatever it was that had almost overcome him. Then, feeling better, he rolled onto his back, looking up at the arched roof as he concentrated upon breathing deeply and regularly, enjoying the cool, clear air, seemingly far more fresh than usual, that was flowing from somewhere nearby.

  A short time later his hand moved to his breast, where the blue stone bauble now hung from a string about his neck, and he began to rub the smooth surface gently between his thumb and his forefinger, his attention drifting away from his surroundings. He had not turned the jewel over to Brother Godfrey as he should have at the end of his shift the day he found it, and even as he had walked by him, he had wondered at his own behavior. He had no intention of stealing the thing; that thought had not occurred to him at all. The jewel held no value for him, or for any of his brothers, unless they might wish to sell it, which would have been sheer madness. St. Clair felt no lust to own it, and no desire even to look at it, for in the permanent semi-darkness of his sleeping quarters its beauty would have been invisible. The simple truth was that he had found something formlessly comforting in the smoothness of its texture between his fingers, and he had decided that he did not wish to part with it straightaway. The thing itself was a mere trinket, with no intrinsic worth, but it gave him solace, so he was content that he had committed no sin in temporarily keeping it for himself. He did not permit himself to wonder why he should need solace, but he did tell himself frequently that he was doing no wrong.

  There had been moments throughout that time, however, when his conscience had bothered him, because do what he would, his mind kept throwing up whispered reminders of oaths and vows undertaken, and it did little good to attempt, at such moments, to rationalize the underlying logic of his stance. That had been bothering him increasingly, and now he thought of it again, hearing Rossal’s harsh, characteristic bark of laughter in the distance as Montdidier made a jest of some kind.

  He and his eight brethren of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ, supported and sustained by their sergeant brothers, had built themselves a rock-solid reputation over the years they had spent as warrior monks here in Jerusalem. They were generally perceived as being friends and valuable allies of the Church authorities, dependable, lacking in worldly ambitions, and therefore trustworthy in a world where few men inspired or deserved trust. The Patriarch Archbishop relied upon them heavily for the protection of the growing streams of pilgrims forever coming to the city, and King Baldwin made no secret of the fact that the activities of the brotherhood, to whom he referred as “his” monks, greatly simplified his task of defending his borders and maintaining what he called “the peace of Christ” within his domain.

  St. Clair found that ironic, and he frequently wondered how his brethren felt about it, although he had never spoken of it with any of them. An unwritten law had come into existence since their formation here in Jerusalem forbidding them to discuss any of the things that marked them as being different from others, save in the conclave of their ritual Gatherings as the Order of Rebirth. Even there, however, the irony of their situation was never mentioned, since the Gatherings occurred so seldom nowadays and the need for absolute security was serious enough to ban any discussion of sensitive Order-related topics. There were too many ears around, and too little real privacy within the stables, to permit regular Gatherings. One day, perhaps, they might be able to acquire secure, defensible quarters in which they could safely conduct their rites and ceremonies, but in the meantime they lived together each and every day, their behavior and their way of life constant reminders of their duties and responsibilities. That awareness, allied with the risks of being overheard by profane ears, ensured that they did not speak among themselves of the things that only they knew.

  Stephen St. Clair, however, could not stop marveling at the contradictory nature of their very existence, and he spent much of his time thinking about the cold reality, and the staggering cynicism, involved in being a warrior monk.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  The voice startled him, and he opened his eyes to find Montdidier staring down at him. Stephen grunted and hoisted himself onto one elbow, then pointed to the tiny space at the top of the slide.

  “I went—” He was surprised to find that his tongue and lips were coated with thick, powdery dust. He spat, drily and with great difficulty, and tried uselessly to moisten his lips with his tongue before speaking again. This time his voice emerged as a dust-blurred croak. “I went through there. The air’s foul.”

  Montdidier looked up at the narrow strip of blackness. “Idiotic thing to do, my friend. You would have had my hide had you caught me doing such a thing. Here, drink.” He handed St. Clair his flask of water. “What’s back there?”

  St. Clair rinsed his mouth and spat, then swallowed a mouthful of water before passing the flask back. “A stretch of empty tunnel. I broke through into it, then crawled in to see how long it was, but I had to turn back before I could see anything. We’ll have to clear the entrance and let the air change before we go inside.”

  “That was a fool’s trick, Brother. You know better than to do a thing like that without calling for support before you go in. Are you all right?”

  “I will be in a few moments. But I thank you.”

  “Hmm. I thought it was taking a long time for you to send down the next truck, so I came up to see what you were doing. You’re absolutely thick with dust—did you know that? Caked with it. Even your face.”

  St. Clair scrubbed at one cheek with the back of his hand, feeling the coating on his skin. “It’s from the rubble, where I crawled through … it’s like flour in there.”

  Montdidier shrugged, unimpressed. “Well, I’m glad you’re not as bad as you look. I thought you were dead when I saw you lying there. Looked like you’d been turned to stone. But then I saw you breathing. That foul air can kill you faster than you can snatch a breath—you know that. You could have been dead even before I thought of coming to look.”

  “Help me up, I’m fine.” Montdidier hauled him to his feet and St. Clair brushed off the worst of the dust that coated him, then retrieved his shovel and was back to work before the other man had begun to walk away, and as he shoveled, he forgot about the space behind the rubble and began to think again about what had been preoccupying him earlier, the great secret of his Order and its place within the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

  Cynicism was what he had been thinking about when Montdidier interrupted his thoughts, and now he returned to thinking of it, acknowledging that hypocrisy had walked hand in hand with it in the inauguration of the fighting monks of the Temple Mount, and that, irrespective of the noble motivations underlying their establishment, he and his fellow monks were living a lie simply by being here, pretending to be Christian while they searched surreptitiously for evidence that could destroy the Christian faith. What else, he asked himself wryly, could that attitude encompass besides hypocrisy?

  St. Clair knew, although he seldom stopped to think about it, that he was one of the rarest of rarities in his own age—a literate, educated knight who had been gently reared within a good and devoutly Christian environment. He had spent much of his youth in the company of the small, devout fraternity of monks who lived and labored industriously on a small corner of his father’s lands and who adopted the boy as their special favorite, much as they might have taken in a stray dog.

  As they began to see young Stephen’s potential, the monks grew serious in tending to his education, so that the youngster spent fully half of his time with them, absorbing what they taught him, and the remainder of each day with his father’s veteran master-at-arms, Pachim of Arles, who had elected to see to the boy’s military education in person. Learning from both sources, Stephen had been taught, as a matter of course, to be ethical, judicious, and temperate in everything he undertook, and now that he was a full-blown knight with duties of his own, he frequently found himself recalling those days and wondering when the magic that had illuminated them died. He kn
ew that disillusionment had killed it, if magic it had been, and that it had occurred long before he joined the Order of Rebirth and, hand-picked, had set sail for Outremer, at the direct order of Count Hugh of Champagne.

  As a young knight, from the moment he came of age to bear arms, Stephen had lived and served as an ordinary knight-at-arms in the service of Count Hugh, although he had never set eyes upon the Count. But the experience, to which he had looked forward with keen pleasure, had been disastrous, and Stephen had been appalled by the casual and mindless depravity, the venality and the corruption of his fellow knights. None of them, he quickly came to see, betrayed the slightest interest in anything other than the pursuit of pleasure and satiation. Their entire lives were dedicated to armed violence, and to the violation of women, with rape and ravishment accepted as part of the reward for serving in the armies. He was sufficiently disgusted to give serious consideration to joining the fraternity of his friends the monks, but bound by his feudal duty to his liege lord and driven by the need to be scrupulous and exact in fulfilling his commitments, he had first sought out Count Hugh in person and explained why he wished to do such an unheard-of thing in forsaking the world of arms for that of prayer.

  Count Hugh, astonished as he had seldom been, had taken close notice of this remarkable young man, knowing already that St. Clair was a firstborn son of one of the Friendly Families. Discovering soon afterwards—for he launched immediate enquiries—that St. Clair had been approved several years earlier for admission into the Order of Rebirth, but had left home to travel and fight abroad before he could be initiated, the Count had promptly set about arranging matters so that the Order could benefit from the young knight’s sterling abilities, a melding of the radically opposed professions of arms and the priesthood, by using him for its own purposes in Outremer. At that time, Hugh himself had but recently returned to his county in Champagne from Jerusalem, and he was one of the handful of men in the entire world who knew that the Order’s purposes there had multiplied in recent years, since the revolution initiated by Warmund de Picquigny when he formed the Patriarch’s Patrol.