by Jack Whyte
“Good. Let us hope she will be safe. But that was dangerous, aiding her like that, no matter what the cause. Our business here gives us no time for chivalry, Tam, and debate it as you will, you took a foolish risk.”
Sinclair shrugged. “Mayhap, but it seemed to me to be the right thing to do at the time. You were already through the gates and safe by the time I took her up, and you are the one charged with our task. The rest of us are but your guard.” Sinclair lowered his voice until it was barely louder than a throaty whisper. “Look, Will, the woman needed help. I saw that you were going to be fine, then I weighed everything else and made a decision. The kind you make all the time. What’s the word you use? A discretionary decision. A battlefield decision. It had to be made, yea or nay, and there was no one else around to tell me what to do.”
The monk grunted. “Well, it’s done now and we’re none the worse for it, by God’s grace. So be it. Let’s get on. Aha! My sword. Thank you, Hamish.”
Hamish and his helpers, working so industriously at the rear of the wagon, had unearthed a cache of carefully wrapped weapons from the bottom of the pile of rusted scrap that filled the bed, and had quickly stripped away the protective wrappings before Hamish himself brought the monk a sword that was clearly his own. The monk instantly grasped the hilt with sure familiarity and he drew the blade smoothly from its belted sheath, holding its shining blade vertically to reflect the last light of the fading day. As he did so, they heard the sound of racing feet, and the last of their number came rushing towards them.
“They’re coming, Sir William,” he gasped, laboring for breath. “The knight remembered you. It took him a while, but sure enough, he straightened up suddenly, right in front of me, and his face was something to behold. ‘Templar!’ he shouts, and roused the guard again. Ranted and raved at them, then sent them after you. Ten men at least he turned out, I saw that much before I left, but there may be more. But he thinks you were alone. He sent them to find you, nobody else, so they’ll not be expecting opposition. They went off in the wrong direction first, along the main road.”
“Aye, towards the monastery, because they are looking for a monk, not for me.” The man addressed as Sir William was shrugging quickly out of his threadbare black habit. He pulled it forward over his head, then gathered it into a ball and flung it into the bed of the wagon. “Quickly now, Watt,” he said, gesturing to the newcomer. “Arm yourself, quick as you like, and let’s be away from here. Tam, we’ll leave the wagon here. No more need for it, now that we’re inside.”
He turned away from all of them then, pulling and tugging in frustration at the tunic he had been wearing beneath the monk’s habit. He had tucked it up around his waist earlier, to safeguard against its being seen through his rent and ragged habit, and now it was gathered thickly in unyielding layers around his waist and loins. He grimaced and cursed under his breath, squirming and wriggling until he eventually teased the bunched-up garment out of its constricting folds and wrinkles and arranged it to hang comfortably about him.
“My hauberk, Tam,” he said then, “but keep the leggings with you. There’s no time now to put the damned things on. I’ll do that later.”
From the bed of the wagon, before he jumped down himself to the cobblestones, Tam heaved him another, longer garment, this one a full coat of calf-length fustian, split to the groin in front and rear and covered in links of heavy mail.
“What about the horses?” he asked, vaulting down to the ground with a helmet and mailed hood in his hand.
“Leave them here. Someone will think himself blessed to find and claim them. Here, help me with this.” The knight had immediately donned the mailed coat, but his impatience was frustrating his efforts to fasten the leather straps that would hold it in place beneath his arms, and now one of the other men stepped forward to help him, concentrating closely on feeding the straps through the buckles beneath Sir William’s shoulders. The knight felt the last of them being tugged shut and he raised his arms high and flexed his shoulders, checking that they were securely covered yet not too tightly bound for swordplay. He then took the mailed hood from Tam Sinclair and pulled it over his head, spreading the ends of it across his shoulders and tugging at the flaps that he would lace together later, beneath his chin. When he was satisfied with how it felt, he took the flat crowned helm from Tam and settled it on his brows. “My thanks, Tam.” He nodded tersely to the other man who had helped him. “And to you, Iain. And now my sword, if you will.”
He hefted the long, cross-hilted broadsword and grasped it near the top of the belted leather sheath, then slung the belt aslant across his chest so that the sword hung down along his back, its long hilt projecting above his shoulder. “Now, quickly, lads. We’ve been here overlong already and they’ll be on our heels once they discover I am not ahead of them on the road to the Dominican House. Bring the bag, Thomas, and you, Hamish, bring the coats and hand them out as we go. The rest of you, stay together and make haste, but be quiet and be prepared for anything. Keep your weapons sheathed and your hands free, but if anyone tries to stop us, or to contest our passage, be he guardsman or citizen, I care not, cut him down before he can raise an alarum. Come!”
They moved away immediately, the former monk and his attendant wagon driver striding at the head of the group while their companions positioned themselves protectively around and behind them, and as they went the tall apprentice called Hamish held a large leather bag open in front of him, from which one of the others pulled out and distributed tightly rolled bundles of cloth, all save one of them a pale yellowish brown. As each man received his, he grasped a flap of the cloth and snapped his bundle open, shaking it until it was loosened, and then he shrugged it over his head, transforming himself instantly from a nondescript but strongly armed pedestrian into an instantly recognizable Sergeant of the Order of the Brotherhood of the Temple, his ankle-length brown surcoat emblazoned front and back with the equal-armed red cross of the Templar Crusaders. Their leader’s surcoat, the only white one among them, marked him clearly as a Knight of the Order, and he now walked ahead of them once more, his bare ankles and sandaled feet pale and strikingly evident beneath the heavy hem of the armored tunic under his white coat.
Tam Sinclair shifted a bulging sack effortlessly on his shoulder. “So, Sir Willie, are you going to tell me? Who was that popinjay knight? He knew you, plainly, but from where?”
Sir William Sinclair smiled for the first time. “Well, he did and he did not, Tam, but I’m surprised you even have to ask. Of all the people he might have been, he was the one I should least have expected to meet here. Did you really not know him?”
“No, but I knew there was something far from right when you started braying like a donkey. Where did that come from?”
“From need, Thomas, from necessity. I find it unbelievable that you didn’t recognize the man. How could you forget such a grating, swinish squeal? Less than a year ago you wanted to gut him, and I was hard put to pull you away. That was Geoffrey the Jailer. We crossed paths with him when last we traveled to Paris. He was in Orléans then, in charge of the King’s prison.”
At the words, the frown vanished from the other man’s face. “Of course! Virgin’s piss, now I remember him. It was the armor that obscured it. The torturer! He was an unpleasant whoreson even then, without the King’s surcoat—too fond by far of causing pain to the people in his power. But never mind me wanting to gut him. He made you clutch at your dagger, too, at one point. I thought you were going to fillet him right there in his own jail.”
“Aye, that’s the man. Geoffrey de something … Martinsville, that’s the name! I knew I knew it. But it’s the worst of chances that I should run into him here. He didn’t recognize me because my beard is gone and my head is shaved, but he obviously does have a memory for faces, as he claimed.”
“Here they come.” The voice came from the rear rank.
“How many, and where are they?” Sir William did not even glance back, and it was Tam Sinclair
who answered him, his voice tense.
“Three pair of them. A hundred paces behind, perhaps more. At the far end o’ the street.”
“Can they see us clearly?”
“No, no more than I can see them, and that’s but poorly.”
“Good, keep going, then, and don’t look back unless you hear them running. They’re looking for a monk—a single man. Bear that in mind. They’ll take no heed of us as a group, not in our coats and this close to the Commandery.”
The seven men kept walking as a loose-knit group and apparently in no particular haste, yet managing nonetheless to cover the ground quickly as they made their way through the twisting streets of the ancient town towards their destination on the waterfront, the fortified group of buildings that made up the regional Templar headquarters known simply as the Commandery. Five of the men were strangers to the city—only Sir William and Tam Sinclair had been there before—and as they walked they looked about them, straining to see the gray stone buildings now in the rapidly falling darkness while keeping their ears cocked for the sounds of running feet or raised voices. No lights had been lit yet in the buildings they passed, and it seemed as though they were the only people alive and stirring in the entire city of La Rochelle.
The white-coated knight did not look about him. He strode along with his head high, gazing straight ahead, the monkish sandals on his bare feet making no sound on the cobblestones, and his mind was filled to distraction with an image of that woman. A woman of astounding beauty, with enormous eyes. She was no one he had ever met, for he had known no women in his adult life, celibate for so long that the condition was as normal to him as breathing. And when he tried to fasten on the image of this woman’s face he could not. He saw only those remarkable eyes.
Angry at his own folly in wasting time with such ridiculous meanderings, he shook his head as though to dislodge the treacherous thoughts, and lengthened his stride, forcing himself to concentrate on the task he faced. The Commandery of La Rochelle lay mere minutes ahead of him, and his mind filled now with the things he had to say to the men with whom he would be meeting very shortly. He was struggling to redefine, for perhaps the hundredth time, the arguments he would marshal. He knew that no matter how circumspectly he approached his explanation, and irrespective of the tact and skill he might use in laying out his tidings, his report, by its mere delivery, would inspire anger, disbelief, dismay, and doubts about his sanity.
Sir William Sinclair had spent his life acquiring a reputation for service and dedication to the ideals of the Order of the Temple, traveling so widely and for so long upon Templar affairs that he was now more familiar with France and Italy than he was with his native Scotland. And now, as a man in the earliest years of midlife, prematurely graying and grizzled yet still hale and strong, he took enormous pride in his newly acquired status as a member of the Inner Circle, the Order’s Governing Council. The last thing he had any need for now was the slightest hint that he might be delusional. And yet he knew that the information he was carrying would be unbelievable to him were it laid baldly in front of him by someone else. His record of service, he knew, would prevent him from being laughed out of countenance as he delivered the unimaginable tidings he bore this day, but the truth was that the story he had to tell defied credence, and his fellow knights, if they were nothing else, were pragmatists, known for neither gullibility nor inane credulity. To their ears his story must, and surely would, reek of delusion and outright folly. Their hard-nosed common sense and the fabled integrity of their senior elders were firmly grounded in a two-hundred-year-long tradition of probity and service to the Church and to Christendom.
Sir William’s task in the hours ahead was to convince the Knights Commander of the preceptory in La Rochelle that their world—the absolute power and influence enjoyed by the Templars throughout Christendom and beyond—would cease to exist within the week.
He knew, although he found little comfort in the knowledge, that he really had no need to convince them of the truth of his astounding message. He had the authority to enforce his mandate, to demand the full compliance and assistance of the La Rochelle commandery in prosecuting his own official duty, laid upon him personally by the Grand Master of the Order, Jacques de Molay. All he had to do was order them to withdraw all their forces and possessions inside the temporary safety of their gates and remain there, fortified against the deadly and treacherous approaches of the King of France.
Lost in his ponderings, Sinclair was nonetheless aware of his surroundings, and he felt a surge of recognition as he rounded one last bend in the narrow street and saw the spill of light that marked the end of his journey and the broad, cobbled plaza that fronted the main entry to the Templar compound.
The preceptory buildings of the Commandery had been built by the side of the harbor, along the water’s edge, to accommodate the comings and goings of the vessels and the teeming personnel of the Order’s massive fleet of galleys, the majority of them cargo vessels that plied all the seas of the trading world. But a significantly large contingent of the fleet was composed of ferociously efficient war galleys, manned and commanded by brethren of the Order. This force, the Battle Fleet, existed for the sole purpose of precluding any possibility of theft of the Order’s assets at sea.
Sir William Sinclair hitched his shoulders and with both hands loosened his sword blade in its sheath, a habit so ingrained in him that he had lost awareness of doing it. But he expected no trouble now that he could see the lighted square ahead. The guardsmen who had been behind them earlier had vanished to search elsewhere, paying them no attention, plainly having accepted them for what they were. He flexed his fingers and grasped the sheath of his sword more firmly, straightening his shoulders and addressing himself once more to what he would say to the preceptor, and as he did so he became aware of a dark, narrow slash, a lane or alleyway between the high buildings on his left, mere paces ahead of him. He paid it little attention and strode by, followed by his companions, but in passing he heard a clamor of voices spring up from the blackness of the alley’s shadowed depths.
“Keep moving,” Sir William growled. “Pay no attention.”
“Halt!” The shout echoed from deep in the alley’s gloom. “You there! Halt in the name of King Philip.” They heard the clatter of running footsteps.
William Sinclair kept walking, lengthening his stride as he spoke over his shoulder. “Challenge them, Tam. Stop them, but no fighting if you can avoid it. Just keep them far enough away from me to keep them from seeing what I’m wearing. If they see that I am not wearing leggings and only have on the sandals of a monk, one of them might be clever enough to guess I’m the monk they’re looking for and we’ll have to spill blood. And they are King’s men, so that might not be a wise thing to do under our current circumstances.”
He strode on, headed directly for the open end of the street less than thirty paces away, and soon stepped into the empty square that stretched as far as the Commandery’s main gates. Once there, he looked back to where his six men had spread themselves in a line across the road with their backs to him, facing the junction with the lane and holding their drawn swords point down on the stones of the street. As they stood there, each with sufficient fighting room to defend himself with ease, a group of unkempt garrison soldiers poured out of the lane and skidded to a halt, their clamorous shouting fading instantly into silence. There were only ten of them, and they had clearly not expected to find a line of six Templars awaiting them with drawn swords.
As he watched the confrontation take shape, Sir William became aware of running footsteps approaching from the direction of the Commandery, but when he glanced over to see who was coming, he recognized the young sergeant, Ewan, who had gone off to escort the lady.
“Sir William!”
Sir William swung back to face the young man, chopping with his hand to quiet him, but Ewan was beside him now, and urgent with tidings.
“Sir William! I—”
“Shush, boy! Be si
lent.”
“But—”
“Silent! And pay attention here.” He waved his arm towards the street from which he had just emerged.
Tam Sinclair had given the King’s guards no time to rally themselves but had jumped right into confrontation, addressing himself to the lout who seemed to be their leader. The loud, hectoring voice he assumed, speaking flawless street French and betraying no sign of his true nationality, carried clearly down the tunnel of the street to Sir William’s ears.
“Well, filth, what would you have of us? Eh? What? By what imagined right do you dare challenge the Brotherhood of the Temple? You accosted us, ordered us to stand, in the name of the King. Why?”
None of the guardsmen made any attempt to answer him, their ignorance of what to do next betrayed by the way they glanced at each other, avoiding looking at any of the Templars.
Tam raised his voice even higher. “Come now, it is a simple question. And it demands a simple answer. Why did you shout at us to halt? Are we criminals? Do you know what you did, making demands of any of our Order without due authority? Where did you find the stupidity to attempt to interfere in the affairs of the Temple?”
Still no one answered him, despite the open insult in his words, and he gave them no respite. “Are you all mute? Or are you simply even more stupid than you look? You are King’s men—at least you wear the uniform—so you must know who we are. And you must know, too, that you have neither the right nor the capability to call us to account, for anything. We are sergeants of the Temple and we answer solely to our Grand Master, who answers, in his turn, to the Pope. Your king has no power to bid us stay or go in our affairs. No king in Christendom has such a right.”
He paused, as though sizing up his now bemused opponents. “So what is it to be? Will you search us and die, or merely question us and die, or fight us and die? Your choice. Speak up.”
The leader of the King’s men finally found his voice at this. “You can’t threaten us,” he said, his tone more of a whine than a complaint. “We are King’s men. We wear the King’s uniform.”