Knights of the Black and White

EIGHT

“That’s more like it! By the bowels of Christ, lads, I swear to you we’ll be inside by noon. Would anyone care to make a small wager on that?”

“Fools we may be, Goff, but we are not entirely stupid. No wagers this time.” Montdidier was the only one who answered him, shouting to make himself heard over the noise of falling masonry as he cuffed his friend’s helmed head playfully. The others, Hugh and Arlo, were both too rapt to pay any attention to them, staring up at the pockmarked walls of Jerusalem, less than fifty paces from where they stood, as Montdidier continued. “None of us is mad enough to bet against that. Look at it, in God’s name! Nothing could withstand that kind of battering. And there goes the whole façade. Look, it’s coming down!”

Sure enough, as he spoke, a long fissure split in the wall directly in front of them, spreading from one hole to another and radiating from there to other breaches, so that the entire surface seemed to crumple all at once and slide forward, stripping the outer shell to expose the rubble with which the interior of the fortifications had been filled. No sooner had the shell stopped sliding, however, than another missile exploded into the rubble-filled center, dislodging a huge amount of debris, and it was plain to see that, within a very short time, the wall at this point would collapse completely beneath the constant hammering of the barrage.

Hugh straightened up from where he had been leaning against the low ruins of an ancient mud wall and sheathed his sword before beckoning to one of his men-at-arms. He pointed to the wall.

“You see that damage there? You know what it means?” The soldier nodded, and Hugh punched him lightly in the upper arm. “Good man. Go you then and find His Grace the Count. He should be in or close by his quarters at this time of day. Bid him good day from me and tell him it is my opinion that the wall will come down this morning … probably within the hour. Advise him, with my compliments, that should he wish to be among the first to enter the city, he should make his way—discreetly, mind you—back here with you. Do you understand the message?”

“Aye, sir.”

“Good. Tell it to me, then.” He listened carefully and then nodded. “So be it. Go now, and waste no time. And remember, this is for the Count’s ear alone. From me to you to him is the only route for these words to take, so say nothing to anyone else, not even should one of the kings ask you. Off with you now.”

He watched the man leave and then he turned back to the others, flinching reflexively as a particularly heavy concussion sent stone splinters thrumming past them.

“Well, my friends, it seems that for once in our lives, we find ourselves in the right spot at the right time. Once the word spreads that the breach is here—and the people creating it will spread the word—others will swarm to it. But I, for one, intend to be at the point of the first group through that gap, so let’s form up and make sure no one eases in ahead of us.”

They formed a tight knot immediately, and began to move forward slowly, Hugh in the center, Godfrey on his right, and Payn, who was left handed, on his left. One pace behind them, positioned slightly to Payn’s left and carrying the standard of Baron Hugo de Payens, Arlo advanced with them, his face expressionless, his eyes shifting constantly, even although he knew that the sole danger they faced at this point was the danger of flying splinters.

It was Friday, the fifteenth day of July in the year 1099, and the enormous siege artillery the Franks had built had been hurling great stones at the city walls for days on end, but here in front of their vantage point, the effects were becoming more noticeable with every missile that struck the crumbling façade. The stretch of wall directly ahead of where they stood had been identified three days before as the weakest stretch on this side of the city, and three of the largest and most powerful siege engines ever built had been brought forward and aligned so that their missiles could all strike the same spot. The smallest of the stones being hurled was as big as a heavy man, while the others were the size of a horse, so that the loaders had a backbreaking task loading them into the trebuchets. From the moment all three had been aimed, the barrage they launched had been incessant, with a single, massive stone striking the weakest point of the wall every minute.

Antioch had withstood a siege by four thousand knights and thirty thousand infantry for eight months. Now, a full year later, Jerusalem was about to fall within six weeks, to a besieging Frankish army numbering less than one third of the one that had captured Antioch. But the Franks who were now about to take Jerusalem were an army of hardened and bitter veterans, each of them a survivor of a nightmarish journey, half a year in duration, from Antioch. Famine had plagued them all along the route, and more than a few of the wild-eyed warriors had turned cannibal, eating the flesh of slain enemies in order to stay alive. Jerusalem, the end of their odyssey and the symbol of all their dreams, had no hope of keeping them out with mere walls. After losing more than half of their force in the 350-mile march south from Antioch, fighting every step of the way towards their objective, the Frankish survivors never doubted the outcome or their own righteousness. The Holy City was theirs. God willed it.

Some time later that morning—it might have been an hour, or perhaps even less, because no one had any sense of the passage of time—Hugh and his three companions were dangerously close to the walls, exposed to lethal splinters from every massive stone projectile that arced down from the huge catapults at their backs, and to the lesser risk of well-aimed arrows from the defenders on the city walls on each side of the target area. The four of them huddled close together, their knees bent and their shields raised high, but they were more concerned about being overtaken than they were about anything else, for in the time that had elapsed since Hugh sent word to the Count, a throng of watchful warriors had gathered in the previously empty space before the walls, eyeing the damaged stonework and waiting for the first full breach to occur. So far at least, the quartet from Payens had managed to keep the point position and they were not prepared to yield it to anyone save Count Raymond, with whom they would share it, should he wish to join them.

“Here he comes now,” Payn grunted, having glanced back over his shoulder to make sure no other group was coming too close to them. “Count Raymond and—” He made a quick tally, gazing back to where the Count’s party was claiming right-of-way through the throng behind their own group. “Six, no, seven knights. De Passy’s there with him, and de Vitrebon. Don’t know—”

His last words were lost in the thunderous crash of falling masonry as boiling dust erupted ahead of them like smoke, hiding the walls completely from view, and for long moments there was no sound to be heard other than those of the aftermath of the collapsing rubble. The sound of falling, pattering fragments finally died away, and as the dust began to settle noticeably, Hugh spoke almost under his breath.

“This will be it, lads. That was a breach, or I’m a Burgundian.” He hefted the spiked mace that had hung by his right side and settled the shield more comfortably against his left shoulder. “Now, with any luck, the spotters will see the break and they’ll stop the bombardment. If they don’t, we might find it unpleasant approaching the walls … Arlo, start counting. We’ll move as soon as we know the stones have stopped and it’s clear enough to see the way ahead.”

In the hushed silence at their backs, Arlo’s voice, counting in cadence, sounded ludicrously loud, but it provided a necessary discipline. In the normal scheme of the bombardment, the next projectile should arrive before his count had reached eighty, but he reached eighty and counted on through one hundred before Hugh nodded. “Good, they’ve stopped. My lord Count, welcome. Do you wish to take command?”

Count Raymond, who had silently joined them, shook his head. “No, Sir Hugh, you appear to have it well in hand. Carry on.”

Hugh nodded again and slowly raised his mace over his head, signaling the crowd behind him to make ready. “Right,” he said, his voice almost conversational, “the barrage has certainly stopped now, so we can go. Another minute or so, to let the dust clear. Mind where you step, now, but keep your heads up—they’ll be waiting for us and you don’t want to die looking down at your feet. Steady now … wait for it …” An eddy of wind sprang up and whirled the dust aside, revealing a break in the formerly even line of the wall’s top.

“There! It’s a breach, sure enough, so here we go, up and over. With me, now!”

They broke out of the dust cloud right at the top of the piled rubble in front of the break in the walls to find the city’s defenders waiting for them. Hugh, in the lead, found himself alone for the briefest of moments, gazing down at the swarthy faces of the massed defenders below, all of whom appeared to be glaring up at him with hatred in their eyes. He was aware of a feeling of calm detachment, a sensation of silent unreality, and yet conscious at the same time of the insecurity of the rubble beneath his feet as he fought for balance, and then an arrow pierced his shield, sudden and jarring, punching the device solidly back against him and sending him reeling off balance. His heel caught on something and he sat down, hard, his backside jarring painfully on a sharp-edged stone, and then his hearing returned and he clambered back to his feet, aware of the chaos of sight and sound around him and slightly surprised by how many scores of his own men were ahead of him now, having surged by him when he fell.

Ignoring the sharp pain of his bruised buttock, he leapt nimbly down the rubble slope inside the walls and found himself face to face with an armored, grim-faced Muslim swinging a bright-bladed scimitar. Hugh blocked the swing with his shield and swung his mace in a short, chopping arc, plunging the spike on its end through the Muslim’s helmet. The man fell away, and Hugh barely felt the tug as he wrenched his mace free again and jumped to his left, swinging an overhead chop at another defender who was on his knees over a Frankish soldier, struggling to stab him with a hooked dagger. The point of the spike crunched into the exposed nape of the man’s neck and killed him instantly, but before the fellow could even begin to fall, Hugh sensed another presence lunging towards him from his unprotected right and knew he had no time to free his mace.

He released his grip and spun away to the left, turning hard on his heel and swinging his shield down and inward in a desperate attempt to cover his side as he drew his dagger with his right hand. He heard a quick intake of breath close to his ear, a muttered curse, and then a whiff of some fragrance he had smelled before, and someone’s back came hard against his own. He dropped instantly to his left knee and turned again, hard, sweeping his dagger in a tight arc outwards and up until he felt the blade sink into yielding flesh. And then, in a weltering crush of grappling bodies, hearing the clang and grating of blades and the heavier thuds of blows from other weapons, all mixed with the sobbing, grunting, hissing, screaming sounds of men in torment, he sensed a looming shadow—had no time to really see it—and felt a rushing pressure of air as something swept down and smashed into his head, hammering him into blackness.

HE FOUND THAT he could not move his body and it hurt almost beyond tolerance when he tried to open his eyes, and so he lay still for a while, allowing his head to clear and collecting his thoughts. A short time later he tried again to open his eyes, cautiously this time, and was able to do so, but the pain was no less intense than before, and although he could see light this time, he could discern nothing else that made sense to him and he still could not move. And so he slowly closed his eyes and willed himself to lie still and breathe steadily, fighting the urge to panic, until his heartbeat returned to its normal pace. He flexed his fingers slowly, happy beyond belief that he could and that they worked, and then he braced them and pushed hard, straightening his arms. Something yielded at his back and he pushed harder, and whatever was on top of him fell away suddenly. And then he opened his eyes for the third time. It still hurt abominably, but this time he could see, although everything was heavily blurred.

It took him several moments longer to extricate himself and twist his body into a sitting posture, but by then he understood that he had been lying head downward, near the base of the rubble pile behind the city wall, his shoulder caught on a fragment of broken masonry and his face thrust into the debris surrounding it. His eyes were full of dust and grit, and the weight pinning him in place had been contributed by two dead men, one of them Muslim, the other Frankish. The fighting had passed him by—he could hear the sounds of it in the distance—and he became aware of a steady flow of Frankish warriors, knights and men-at-arms, all filing quickly down from the top of the breach in the wall and dispersing into the streets and alleyways of the city ahead of him, moving rapidly as though they feared the fighting might be over before they arrived. None of them paid him the slightest attention.

Hugh rose to his feet but quickly discovered that he was not yet ready to go anywhere, for the world tilted alarmingly sideways and he fell back to his seat again. In falling, however, he felt the heavy weight of his water bottle banging against his side. He pulled a kerchief from inside his mail coat and soaked it from the bottle, then washed the sand and grit from his eyes, hissing against the pain of it yet feeling the relief and improvement immediately. He repeated the treatment with fresh water, and now that he could see better, he looked around the spot where he had fallen, seeing bodies everywhere. He noticed that there appeared to be an equal division of defenders and attackers among the corpses, but he was relieved that he saw no one among the casualties whom he recognized, and he wondered where St. Omer and the others were, and why they had left him behind. The only explanation he could think of—and he suspected it must be accurate, since Arlo had never quit his side before—was that they had lost him in the whirl of the original fighting, which had been utterly chaotic. They must have thought him ahead of them and gone surging forward in search of him.

Knowing he was in no danger here, he removed his flat steel helmet, loosened the thongs at his neck and pushed the chain-mail hood back from his head, grateful that he could feel no obvious rents in the mail with his bare hands. He then soaked his kerchief thoroughly one last time and wiped his face, head, and hands. His skull was pounding from a massive headache, from the blow that had struck him down, he assumed, but there had been no blood on his kerchief and the remainder of his body felt surprisingly well, its various parts responding when called upon to move. He rinsed out his mouth and spat out the dislodged grit, then swallowed a mouthful of water, sealed the bottle, and replaced his hood and helmet, refastening the ties at his chin before he rose once more to his feet, his arms outstretched for balance. Beyond a tiny sway on reaching his full height, this time he was stable.

His sword was where it should be, still in its sheath, but his shield and his dagger were nowhere to be seen, and he stood blinking for a moment, looking around for them before he saw the well-known painted shaft of his spiked mace. Its spike was still buried in the spine of the last man he had struck with it, and he tried not to wonder who the fellow had been as he twisted and pulled at the weapon until it ripped noisily free. He looked at the clotted spike, then struck it into the ground, cleaning the worst of the gore off it, and glanced around in search of his dagger. Realizing that it could be anywhere, hidden under any of the bodies littering the scene, he abandoned trying to find it and drew his long sword from its sheath instead. Then, clutching the mace firmly in his left hand and the long sword in his right, Hugh de Payens stepped forward and finally entered the Holy City of Jerusalem.

He carried both weapons all day long, but he was never even tempted again to use either one of them, except, on three separate occasions, against his own people, when he found them committing atrocities against people who could never, by any stretch of anyone’s imagination, have taken any part in the defense of Jerusalem—old and young women, some of the latter pregnant, and helpless, terrified children.

Towards nightfall, after walking around the fallen city for hours on end, he left through the Damascus Gate, passing St. Omer and Montdidier with no sign of recognition and making no response to their shouts. Perplexed, but knowing him well enough to know they would earn no thanks by accosting him, his two friends stood and watched him walk away into the gathering dusk. The faithful Arlo, who had been searching frantically for his friend and master all day long, stayed up the entire night, waiting for him to return. They had assumed he would return to their encampment, but they were wrong.

Weeks passed, and everyone, including his three closest friends, believed that Hugh de Payens was dead. Arlo grew gaunt, for he alone of the remaining three friends had had time to dwell upon Hugh’s loss and to wonder what had befallen him. Godfrey and Payn had been kept mercifully busy by the demands of Count Raymond, who was well aware of the dangers inherent in the loss of a bosom friend. Arlo, lowborn as he was, expected and received no such consideration, and thus was left to his own devices. By the end of the third day, after making widespread enquiries, he had become convinced that Hugh had fallen among thieves and been killed, his body hidden in some hole. He had prowled the length and breadth of the city after that, searching every street and every empty house and cave for a sign of his master’s corpse before the chaos of the city’s sacking had been cleared away, the decomposing bodies gathered up and burned, and the thoroughfares cleaned up and made habitable again.

That initial cleansing, a leviathan undertaking by anyone’s estimate, had taken fifteen clear days of backbreaking work by every man-at-arms and every prisoner fit enough to ply a shovel or a broom, but still the stench of blood and death lingered in narrow, shaded places of the city, as though baked into the very stones by the intense heat. And when all his searching had led to nothing, Arlo had spoken individually to everyone in authority among the Pope’s armies. No one had seen Sir Hugh de Payens, and no one knew or appeared to care what might have happened to him.

And then one morning, without explanation, Hugh returned, walking into camp soon after dawn, dressed in rags beneath a tattered homespun robe, and leading a donkey piled high with bundled packages. He ignored Arlo’s stupefaction, merely nodding quietly to him as if he had seen him only moments earlier, then began unloading the donkey’s cargo, which transpired to be his chain-mail hauberk, his quilted tunic, his armor, and his mace and sword. He offered no word of explanation of what he had been doing, and when Arlo eventually asked him directly where he had been, he answered only, “By myself, thinking.” Arlo said nothing more, but he recognized that the Hugh de Payens who returned that morning was not the man who had led the charge into the breached city three weeks earlier.

Arlo immediately sent word of Hugh’s return to St. Omer and Montdidier, and both men came by Hugh’s camp within the hour, only to find that their friend was soundly asleep and that Arlo would not permit them to waken him, pointing out that his master must be exhausted, since he would never otherwise permit himself to be abed at such a time of day. Accepting that as self-evident, the other two demanded that Arlo tell them everything he knew. Arlo, of course, knew nothing more than they did. He told them of Hugh’s unheralded return, of his unusual reticence and quietude, but there was nothing more he could add.

That same evening, the two knights returned and found Hugh sitting quietly in front of a fire of horse and camel dung, wrapped in the homespun robe he had acquired and staring into the glowing embers. He greeted them cordially enough, but would respond to none of their questions, and when they became insistent, he would speak to one of them while plainly avoiding answering the other. They suffered it for an hour and then withdrew, shaking their heads.

They returned the next night to discover that nothing had changed, but Godfrey sat narrow-eyed, watching and listening and saying little, his mouth pursed. On the following evening he returned alone and sat in silence for more than an hour, staring into the fire beside his friend. Hugh seemed grateful for his companionship, and they sat in comfortable silence until Godfrey cleared his throat and spoke.

“I was angry at you, you know, the day the walls went down, and I’ve been angry at you ever since.”

The silence that followed was long, but just as St. Omer was beginning to think Hugh would not respond, the other man cocked his head and looked at him sideways. “Why?”

“Why? How can you even ask me that, Hugh? Why? Because I needed you, and you weren’t there—Crusty and I both needed you, more than we ever have. You are the only person we can trust without a doubt, and you vanished when we needed you the most. Where did you disappear to, in the name of God?”

Hugh de Payens straightened up in his seat as though he had been hit, and for a moment his face was transformed, his ears drawing backward and the skin over his cheekbones stretching tight in response, the crease lines by his eyes showing pale against the sunburnt bronze of his face.

“In the name of God? You ask where I went in the name of God? I went nowhere in the name of God. I ran in shame and terror from the name of God, out into the darkness of the desert to where I could no longer hear His name being screamed by madmen. I heard enough of the name of God that day to sicken me for a thousand lifetimes, and I never wish to hear His name again.”

St. Omer forced himself to sit quietly, counting from one to twenty, before he asked, his voice quiet, “What are you talking about, Hugh? I don’t understand what you are saying.”

The silence stretched again for what seemed like an age before de Payens responded, his voice softer than it had any right to be, considering the weight of what he now said. “God willed what happened in Jerusalem that day, Goff. God willed it. I looked in the face of a bishop for whom I had gone searching, to confess my sins for the first time since I joined our Order, and I saw blood matted in his beard and in his hair, and I saw the madness of the blood lust in his eyes and the slashed stain on his robe where he had wiped his blade clean of the blood he had spilled that day. It hung from a belt across his chest, a long, rusted old sword, clotted with gore, and I thought, This man is a bishop, one of God’s anointed shepherds, and he is stained and defiled with human blood … a priest, forbidden to kill! And then, and only then, I understood that I alone, of all the people in Jerusalem that day, saw anything morally wrong in what was happening, in what we had done and were doing. How could we be wrong? We were carrying out God’s will. Deus le veult!

“How many did we kill that day, do you know?”

St. Omer gazed down at his feet. “Aye, Hugh, I know. The number was made known. Everyone was very proud of it. The greatest victory in the history of Christendom … the redemption of Jerusalem from the hands of the Infidel …”

“How many, Goff?”

St. Omer sucked in a great, deep breath. “Ninety thousand.”

“Ninety … thousand. Ninety thousand souls …” Hugh turned and looked at his friend squarely. “Think about that, Goff. Think back. Do you remember how proud we were to belong to our splendid army on the day we set out from Constantinople into Turkey? That was four armies combined into one, and it was less than forty-five thousand strong … less than half the number killed in Jerusalem that day. Do you remember how vast it seemed to us then, that gathering of forty-odd thousand, with its four thousand, five hundred mounted knights and its thirty thousand infantry? Do you remember the sheer size of it, the awe-inspiring mass of it? And here were ninety thousand, a gathering twice as large as that great army but composed of men and women and children, all of them starving, frail and sick and ailing, walled up in one city, helpless and at our mercy. And we slew them because God willed it …”

His voice failed him and he stood up and crossed his arms, his chin sinking onto his breast, and when he spoke again he held one hand over his eyes, pinching them shut. “I knew the number had to be huge, because there were times when I was wading in blood and guts to my ankles … places where the drainage was poor and the walls were high … where there were houses full of wealthy people and family retainers, slaughtered in their homes. And I believe the screams I heard that day—and still can hear today—will never again permit me to hear silence.”

St. Omer raised his hands and then let them drop helplessly into his lap. “Hugh—”

“Please tell me you were not about to say that it was not as bad as I remember, Goff, because it was, and worse. I saw men whom I have known my entire life, Christian knights, transformed into beasts, slaughtering women and children wantonly, some of them dragging cloths stuffed with booty they could not have carried. I killed one man myself, a knight from Chartres, whom I found ravishing a girl who could not have been older than seven. He glared at me, demented, and screamed that he was doing God’s work, driving the devil out of her. I took his head off with one stroke and left him sprawled over her, because she was already dead. He had killed her before violating her. Because God willed it, Goff … Because God willed it, through his priests and followers. Don’t ever talk to me of God again.”

“I will not. You may rely on that.”

Something in St. Omer’s tone penetrated the other man’s awareness and he cocked his head suddenly, curious again. “Why were you angry at me that day? I don’t believe you told me.”

“Yes, I did. You disappeared. That’s what we’ve been talking about. And now you will doubtless be surprised to hear that I am even angrier than I was then.”

He twisted in his seat to stare stonily at Hugh. “How can you say you were the only one who felt the way you did that day? How can you even think such a thing? How can you … can you have that much … what’s the word old Anselm used to use for pride, the dangerous kind? Hubris, that’s it. How can you have that much hubris, Hugh? That is insulting. Insulting to the point of inviting a slap in the face. It’s insulting to me, and to Crusty, and to your father the Baron, and the Count himself, and to every other member of our Order who was in the city that day. None of us could avoid being there, if you’ll but throw your mind back. We had marched halfway across the world to be there that day, seeing it as a bounden duty, and so we all went in there willingly.

“But not all of us enjoyed what happened there, and what we saw being done sickened more good men than you near to death. You were not the only man to be repelled by what went on that day in that place. I can name you a hundred men I know in person, all of whom are sick at heart over what happened here, but what can they do to change any of it? The treasures that were captured are all gone, into the coffers of the bishops and the nobility. The people who owned those treasures are all dead. The city is uninhabitable, a stinking charnel house, and I would wager no one will live there for the next ten years or more. Titus destroyed Jerusalem twelve hundred years ago, and now the Church of Jesus Christ, a Jew who lived here at that time, has destroyed it again, and somehow you have convinced yourself that you alone can see that? That truly is hubris, my friend, and it is too much so for me. I’ll bid you a good night.”

St. Omer stood up abruptly and turned to walk away.

“Wait, Goff, wait, wait. Turn around, if you will, and look at me.” Godfrey did so, and Hugh immediately looked away, gazing into the fire for a spell, aware of Godfrey’s eyes on him, and then looked up at his friend, and shook his head as if clearing it. “Forgive me, in the spirit of our ancient Order. You are correct in every word. I have been steeped in hubris—pickled in it—and unable to see beyond the end of my own stubborn, self-pitying nose. Please, my friend, sit down.”

Half an hour later, having talked in depth about their innermost feelings and the experiences of others of like mind, Hugh said, “Thank you for this, Goff. You have made me feel much better, knowing that so many others share my anger and my grief. But there are still those others who do not …”

“And what do you intend to do about them, Hugh?”

“Nothing at all. Providing they leave me to my own affairs, I intend to ignore them.”

“Ignore them?” St. Omer seemed on the verge of smiling. “All of them?”

“Every one of them. Why does that make you smile?”

“Simply because of the way you said it. But what if they refuse to leave you to your own affairs, what then?”

Hugh de Payens’s face was utterly without humor or compassion when he said, flatly, “Then I will kill a few of them, as they killed in Jerusalem. That will convince them quickly to leave me alone, and I will do it without hesitation if I must. In my eyes, they have lost any vestige of humanity they might have had before coming here, and I wish nothing to do with them. My liege lord, while I am here in Palestine, is Count Raymond, and to him I will dedicate my life and duty as I did before. Beginning once again tomorrow, I will go where he sends me, do what he bids me do, and if it should transpire that I must share duties or fight alongside these others, then I shall do so. But I will have nothing to do with any of them otherwise.”

“But—”

“But what, Goff?” Now Hugh smiled, his old nature showing through for the first time. “Think about it, lad—about me, and about what you are saying. I have never willingly had anything to do with any of them ere now anyway. I spend my spare time only with my friends, and all my friends are within the Order.” He paused, then said, “What about you and Crusty, what will you do, now that you have seen how wondrously the Holy City was saved for all good Christian souls?”

St. Omer shrugged. “The same as you. We will address ourselves to our sworn duty, in obedience to our lord the Count. Which reminds me, I am summoned to attend him at daybreak, so I had best be on my way. I have a feeling he intends to send me somewhere. Not Crusty, just me. But if he does not, then I’ll be back tomorrow night, with Crusty.”

“So be it, and may Fortuna ride with you if he sends you out. Be careful and come back safely.”

St. Omer nodded and turned to leave, then swung back yet again. “We will be going home soon, you know, now that the campaign is complete. The army is breaking up, did you know that?”

“Breaking up?” Hugh sat blinking for the space of several heartbeats. “What does that mean, breaking up? That would be utter folly, Goff. The army can’t break up. The moment that happens, the Turks will sweep back in here like avenging devils, with no one to stop them, and we will have achieved nothing. Where did you hear that nonsense?”

St. Omer stood frowning for a moment. “I don’t know where I first heard it, really, but now everyone’s talking about it—about going home, I mean. We need to go home, Hugh, particularly those of us who have wives and children. We have been gone for four years already, and even if we were to leave tonight, it would be nigh on six years by the time we win home.” He hesitated. “Besides, it’s not as if everyone is leaving. There is too much at stake for that. Kingdoms and duchies and counties are being created even as we speak, and they will have to be defended.”

De Payens frowned. “Kingdoms? What are you talking about, Goff? Kingdoms, here in God’s homeland? Where are these kingdoms?”

St. Omer threw his hands in the air. “They are nowhere, Hugh, not yet. It is all talk at this stage. But there is talk of establishing a Kingdom of Jerusalem, for the protection of the Holy Places. The barons and nobles wanted de Bouillon to be king, and named him such ten days ago, while you were absent, but he refused, saying no mere man should wear a crown of gold where Jesus wore a crown of thorns. He has accepted the lesser title, however, of Advocate of the Holy Sepulcher.”

“Hmm. What does that mean?” Hugh knew and admired Geoffroi de Bouillon, the Duke of Lower Louraine, who had been the undisputed leader of the Christian armies on the march to Jerusalem, and he thought it typical of the man that he would have the moral strength to refuse a kingdom because of his beliefs. De Bouillon was modest, and even self-effacing, and his undoubted honesty and integrity were the true reasons underlying his popularity and the high regard in which he was held. Now, as he thought about it, it became plain to Hugh that de Bouillon’s refusal would provide an opportunity for someone else, for the kingship, once dreamed up, would not go long unclaimed, but as soon as Hugh mentioned this, Godfrey shook his head.

“Not an issue,” he said. “De Bouillon’s new title, Advocate of the Holy Sepulcher, usurps all the powers of kingship without using the name. It is a pretty piece of politicking, but it may serve all our needs.”

“Aye, for as long as Geoffroi lives. Who else is involved?”

St. Omer shrugged. “The usual crowd, I should think. Geoffroi’s brother Baldwin won’t be far away from the pickings. A cold fish, that one. Then there’s Bohemond of Taranto. They say he is already laying claim to Antioch, naming it his own fiefdom and calling himself the Prince of Antioch. And they say, too, that Baldwin, for his own protection, while keeping one eye on his brother’s claim to the crown of Jerusalem, is pressing himself forward to claim Edessa, as its Count. There are wheels turning within wheels among those three … And then there are the two Roberts, of Normandy and Flanders, and their cohort, Stephen of Blois, who wed the Conqueror’s daughter in a moment of weakness and has rued it ever since. Also, of course, there is our own Count’s liege, Count Raymond of Toulouse. They are all looking around like hawks, preening and peering to see what pickings are available to them.”

Hugh was staring back into the fire again, nodding his head intently at whatever he could see in the glow of the coals. “I need to speak with Count Raymond,” he said, more to himself than to his friend. “I shall be there before you leave him at first light, hoping that he will speak with me. Go now and find your bed, my friend, and sleep well.”