Knights of the Black and White

THREE

Hugh and Arlo were back in their own quarters in Jerusalem within five days, having left St. Omer safely installed in the ancient hospice in the monastery of Saint John the Baptist, close by the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where the Hospitallers would keep him under close watch and nurse him back to full health. Despite his weakened condition, however, and much to Hugh’s surprise, St. Omer had been strong enough on the journey to tell them the story of his misadventure with the followers of Mohammed and his stay among them, chained to an oar on a corsair’s galley.

They had covered less than half the twenty-mile distance that first day, constrained by the need to travel slowly for the comfort of the sick and injured men in the six wagons, but they were a strong, well-armed party, and no one had any worries about braving the dangers of the night ahead as they set up camp along the road. Hugh and Arlo had lifted St. Omer’s stretcher down from the wagon bed and placed him near their cooking fire, and after their meal, fortified with a draft of wine from the full skin Arlo had brought with him, St. Omer had begun to talk.

“I want to ask you something,” he said, his voice whispery and fragile. “When you first went home to Payens, after the first campaign, did you find it utterly different?”

“Different?” Hugh thought about that for a few moments, looking over to where Arlo sat watching them. “Aye, now that I come to think of it, I did. What makes you ask that?”

St. Omer nodded, barely moving his head, and muttered, “Because I did, too, but I thought I might be the only one. None of the others seemed to feel that way.”

Hugh sat musing for a moment longer, then frowned. “I don’t think it was home that had changed, Goff, not really. It was me …”

“Me too.” St. Omer drew several deep breaths, then began again, speaking clearly but very quietly. “I had nothing in common with any of … any of my old friends who had not been out there with us. And I couldn’t talk to any of them about what it had been like, at Antioch or any of the other places. They all wanted to know … but I couldn’t tell them. I didn’t want to talk about it, because … because I knew they couldn’t imagine … the reality of it. And besides, all they wanted to hear was what they thought they knew already. The priests had told them everything they needed to know about the glorious Holy War, and anything I tried to say, at the start of things, anything that seemed to … to contradict the priests shocked and frightened them. They did not really want to hear what I … what I had to say, Hugh.”

Hugh had been nodding his head from time to time as he listened, and now he reached out and gripped St. Omer by the wrist. “I learned the same things, just as quickly as you did, but by then you had gone home to Picardy and I was stuck in Payens.”

“I had to go, as soon as I got home. I had no choice, as you know. Louise was sick and I had … I had been away from her too long … She died eight years ago, in ’08. Did you know that?”

“No, my friend, but I suspected it, for I have not heard from her since then, and she was a great writer of letters. I knew that only death or grave infirmity could stop her from writing to me. Where is she buried? Did you take her home to Champagne?”

St. Omer’s headshake was barely discernible. “No. She rests in the garden of our home in Picardy … She loved it there. Did you hear … Have you heard of your father?”

“No. What of him? Is he dead, too?”

“Aye … soon after you set sail to return here. He had … he had no will to live without your mother …”

Hugh’s mother had died while he was studying in the Languedoc, and he had been shocked by his father’s condition at her funeral, some part of his awareness recognizing that the Baron showed no interest in continuing to live.

“So William is now Baron of Payens?”

“Aye.”

“And how came you to Outremer again? Do you feel well enough to talk about that, or should we leave you to rest?”

“I am … tired. Forgive me, my friend. But we will talk again tomorrow, and every day thereafter.”

St. Omer was asleep by the time Hugh rose and moved to make him comfortable. Arlo brought an extra blanket from the wagon and wrapped it round the sleeping man, after which he and Hugh both lay down to sleep.

It was late the following day by the time they delivered St. Omer to the hospital along with the other invalids from Jericho, and so they had had no time to talk that night, and Hugh was on duty all day long the day after that, so that Arlo visited St. Omer alone the second night, sitting with the knight and talking of inconsequential things from time to time when St. Omer felt like speaking. Hugh returned with Arlo the evening after that, and he was more than pleased to find St. Omer already far stronger and with better facial color than when he had last seen him, three days earlier.

“The other night, you were about to tell me how you came to Outremer again,” Hugh began, grinning. “But it must be a very dull story, because the mere thought of it sent you to sleep.”

St. Omer smiled back at him, a shadow of his former irreverent and irrepressible grin. “I will not do that to you tonight, I promise … not for some time yet, at least.”

“What did happen over there, Goff? Why did you come back? I thought you never would.”

St. Omer grimaced. “I could not settle down. I was like a fish out of water in Amiens from the moment I returned. And then after Louise died, I lost all will to live without her … much like your father after your mother’s death. I never knew how much I loved my wife until she grew sick and I lost her, and then I was burdened with guilt over all the years I had spent away from her, playing at being a knight when I could have been with her instead. I tell you, Hugh, I wanted to die. I thought I would never recover from the grief and the guilt … I even thought of killing myself. But I couldn’t. I had inherited everything, against all odds, all my elder brothers having gone before me, one way or another. I had become the paterfamilias, responsible for my entire damned clan and all its holdings. I never wished for it and God knows I never sought it, but it happened anyway and I wanted no part of it. And so I sought advice and assistance from … a trusted friend.” The hesitation was barely perceptible, but Hugh had seen the flickering glance towards Arlo and knew that the friend had been the Order of Rebirth.

“I see, and what came of that?”

“Excellent advice, and assistance from my own resources. I wished I had consulted my friend earlier, because the solution, once pointed out to me, was self-evident. As soon as my official year of mourning reached its end, I signed over my entire inheritance, lands and holdings, to my closest relative, a younger cousin from Picardy, from the town of Rouen, retaining only sufficient funds to cover the expense of arming and re-equipping myself and a small group of retainers and mounted men-at-arms to return to Outremer. My farewells were few, so there was nothing to detain us from leaving immediately. We went directly from Amiens to le Havre, then by ship to Marseille, and from there we set sail for Cyprus and eventually Outremer.”

He grunted deep in his chest, a derisive sound, as though he were sneering at his own folly. “We never came near to Cyprus. We were severely damaged in a collision with a sister ship during a violent summer storm in the Straits of Gibraltar, and less than a day after that we were attacked and sunk by corsairs. They didn’t want to sink us, of course. They wanted our cargo, but the ship went down. I suspect it might have foundered even without their attack, for it was badly holed. Anyway, I was one of only three survivors.”

“Only three?” Hugh’s voice showed his surprise. “How many died, then?”

Once again, St. Omer’s headshake was barely discernible. “It shames me to admit that I have no idea, because I paid no attention to such things, too tied up was I in my own problems to take note of what was happening around me. And then, when I needed to know, it was too late. But there were a lot of them. I had a score of men-at-arms, and half as many again of servants, cooks and the like—I had no intention of starving in Outremer this time. Then there were a score and a half of horses and mules, so it was a large ship, with a large crew … perhaps a score of seamen, perhaps even more. But they all died. I was taken at the outset, struck down from behind and then dragged aboard their vessel and chained to the mast, where I could see everything. My men-at-arms fought well for a while, until the deck went down beneath them, and they were armored, so they sank like stones.

“They took us ashore somewhere in Africa and I never saw the other two prisoners again. My captors could tell from my dress that I was wealthy, so they held me for ransom. One of them spoke our tongue, and so I told him how to contact my fortunate young cousin in Rouen.

“A year passed by, and then I found out that my cousin had suffered a grievous loss of recollection and had no knowledge of my name or who I was, swearing that he had never known or heard of me.”

“Aha—” Hugh caught himself on the verge of commenting that the cousin was obviously not a member of the Order. He had completely forgotten that Arlo was sitting there listening. He managed, however, to recover well, he thought. “Tell me, if you will, why that leaves me disgusted but not surprised? Am I becoming cynical? Hmm … So what happened then?”

“They sold me, as a galley slave. I spent the next four years shackled to an oar. Four years of never having enough food and always having too much work. Four years of whippings, of pain and despair, and of having no friends. Galley slaves have no friends, you know. That’s something you never think about until you find yourself chained to an oar. Their entire life is focused upon staying alive, and their survival depends absolutely upon their own efforts and their own inner strength.”

He sighed, his eyes focused on some distant point. “One day I fell sick, and I grew worse from day to day. Finally, when I was too weak to stand up and be shackled to my rowing tier, they decided I was finished. One night they picked me up by the wrists and ankles and threw me over the side.”

He ignored the shocked reactions of his two listeners, his attention still focused on whatever it was he could see in his mind. “That should have been the end of me. But it wasn’t, as you can see … The thing I have never been able to understand is that they threw me overboard with my wrists still manacled together, still wearing chains. They should not have done that. I’ve seen it half a score of times: a man dies at his oar; they strike off his leg irons, to get him away from the oar so his place can be taken by another slave; then they strike off his manacles, because the rusted iron is worth more than the dead man, and only then do they throw the man over the side. It didn’t happen that way with me, I don’t know why … it might have been because I wasn’t shackled to the tier, so they didn’t have to strike off my leg irons. Or maybe they simply didn’t care, or didn’t notice, but whatever the reason, they threw me over wearing iron chains, and against all logic, that saved my life.”

Now his gaze sharpened and he looked at both his listeners, drawing them into his story. “It was dark, remember, so none of them had noticed that there was a dead log floating alongside. I must have landed right on top of it and knocked myself senseless, but somehow—and I only worked this out later, when I had time to think about it—those chains snagged on or around a stubby projection on one side of the log. The weight of my body must have shifted the balance of the thing and made it roll, because when I woke up I was lying across it, one wrist trapped beneath the water on one side and my legs trailing on the other, but my head was above the water …”

“What happened then?” Arlo was leaning forward, his face avid.

St. Omer grunted again and his body moved, as though he were stretching beneath the covers. “I remember I woke up in agony. My arm was twisted up behind me and stretched as though it must break, and once I had regained consciousness I screamed with the pain of it. And then I began to struggle. That was a mistake, for I upset the balance of the log again, and it rolled over. I almost drowned then, but without knowing what I was about, I managed to throw the chains around the log and make it roll again, and that’s when I saw the roots. It was an old tree, not a cut log, and I worked my way along it until I could wrap some chain around the roots and float with my head above water again.

“And then I spent a full day in the water, feeling the salt crusting on my skin and suffering the agonies of Hell while I fought against the temptation to drink the salt water. I swear there is no greater torment on God’s earth than thirst, but to suffer thirst while immersed in water is unimaginably painful. I knew I would do it, sooner or later—drink the water, I mean—but I fought it for a long, long time and I think I must have gone out of my mind at one point, for I woke up suddenly with my head underwater, and I panicked. But even as I began to kick and flail I heard a shout and felt hands pulling at me, at my hands and arms and hair, and dragging me out of the water. And that, my friends, is when I began believing in miracles.

“I had been saved by a fishing vessel out of Malta. My tree had drifted towards an islet where they had been fishing. They only saw me when their vessel bumped against my tree. But having saved me, they fed me and tended me until I was strong enough to work, and then they kept me working, ceaselessly but not cruelly, for more than a month. By the time we returned to Valetta, their home port, thanks to good food and simple labor, I had regained much of my health and former strength.

“I stayed in Valetta for another month, working as a cobbler’s assistant and fighting a congestion in my lungs, and then I picked up a berth on an Italian trader out of Ostia, sailing to Cyprus. I worked my way from there to Jaffa, but I had little money for food and I was growing weaker again by the day. By the time I reached Jericho, where someone had told me I would find the new hospital, I was barely strong enough to walk. The monks took me in, and when I was able to talk again and tell them who I am, they sent word to you.”

De Payens sat silent for some time, his mouth pursed in a thoughtful moue, and then he inhaled sharply and spoke almost to himself. “Aye, they did … They sent word to me.” He sat straighter. “You’ve been on quite an odyssey, Goff, but it’s over now. You’re safe among your friends … or perhaps I should say between your friends, since there’s only Arlo and myself. But our sole priority now is to have you back on your feet, with meat on your bones and the fire back in your eye. After that, we’ll put you back atop a horse and have you swinging a blade with the best of us, as is your right. I spoke with the brother preceptor today and he told me you should be able to leave here within ten days. By that time, Arlo will have found a place for us all to live … a decent place, with some space and plenty of light and a spot where we can exercise and drill and practice swordplay.

“In the meantime, you have to work on winning free from here, so sleep and eat well and rebuild your strength. One of us, at least, will visit you each day, to keep you from being too depressed, but I have to ride out tomorrow to escort a group of pilgrims to Jericho. I will be gone for four days, and I will see you as soon as I return. Sleep well, my friend.”

BY THE TIME de Payens and St. Omer spoke again, five more days had elapsed and Godfrey had improved beyond all Hugh’s expectations. He could get up from his bed and move around easily, leaning lightly on a walking stick, and his voice was full and strong. His eyes were bright and sparkling again, and his skin had taken on a healthy, ruddy glow simply from spending an hour or two outdoors each day.

After the dinner hour that night the two men were finally alone, sitting on folding chairs by the side of one of the cooking fires, with no one close enough to hear what they were saying.

St. Omer massaged the palm of his right hand with his left thumb, wiggling his fingers and watching them move. “I’m stiffening up,” he said. “I’m growing old.”

“All of us are, Goff. No one ever grows younger.”

“Arlo tells me you went back to your old solitary ways as soon as you returned here, and now you are famed as the knight who never speaks. Why is that?”

Hugh was momentarily thrown off by the non sequitur, an unexpected challenge, but he merely shrugged. “We’ve been through all this before, Goff.”

“Aye, but that was years ago. You were angry then—with reason, I agree—over the sins committed in Jerusalem.”

“There are no buts, Goff. Nothing has changed, despite the passing of the years. The men, the godly knights who are here now, are the same men who were here before. They have different names, and many of them are younger, but, given the opportunity, they would behave in exactly the same way the others did, screaming ‘God wills it!’ as they slaughter women and children.”

“I doubt that, Hugh.”

“You doubt it?” De Payens’s voice was low, pitched little above an angry whisper, but his face was twisted into a grimace. “Look about you, Goff, and listen when these people speak of who they are and what they are resolved to do in God’s high, holy name. Because of them, and what they are and what they have done, the name Christian stinks in my nostrils. I have been looking since we came back here, Arlo and I, and I have seen but little Christianity among our allies, or even among our own ranks. There is no love or tolerance, forgiveness or enlightenment among the Christian armies that come here. And believe me, my friend, I searched high and low for months, among leaders, lords, barons, counts, knights, and men-at-arms. I found nothing but greed and avarice, cupidity and lust. I saw men everywhere paying tribute with their voices to the All-High and belching forth prayers of humility and gratitude, while all the time grasping and clutching at anything and everything they could find to steal, and fighting among themselves to win power and position here in this new world they were creating.

“We came here in the beginning, all those years ago, to free God’s Holy City, and those of us in the Order came to seek God’s truth as it is laid out in our Lore. Instead, we founded kingdoms for ourselves. The Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Edessa! We have set up an empire of our own among the holiest places on this earth, and there is precious little of our God or of the Christian Jesus to be found in any part of it.”

De Payens lapsed into silence, aware that St. Omer was looking at him from beneath raised eyebrows.

“Tell me, if you will, why that should surprise you,” the sick man asked.

Hugh blinked at him. “I don’t understand. Why should what surprise me?”

His friend was unfazed by his lack of comprehension. “That our Christian brethren should be the way they are? You know better than to be surprised at that, Hugh. You’ve spent years studying the mysteries of our Order. Have you stopped believing in the truth you’ve learned?”

“No, I have not.” Hugh’s response was instant and indignant. “But the rites I studied were arcane, and those truths were hardly relevant to this world in which we live nowadays. That has been borne out to me since my return by the silence from home, from the Order itself. We expected—I expected—instructions, guidance on what to do, how to proceed. Instead we have heard nothing.”

“Strange, but I have been thinking quite the opposite, these past five years and more.” St. Omer shook his head gently and smiled at his friend. “While I was shackled to that oar, it seemed to me that the lessons the Order taught us, back in our youth, concerning how we ought to live and what we might expect to learn from our devout Christian brethren were the closest thing I have ever found to the real truth—the truth that prevails in the world in which we have to live. And while much of what we learned back there in our homeland was based upon the Order’s accepted Lore, even more of it was based upon supposition … upon what we might expect, if this and that transpired. Now our entire world is changed, Hugh, and what we were warned to look for has occurred.”

St. Omer paused, regarding his friend levelly from sunken eyes. “How long has it been since you last had any real communication with our brethren?”

De Payens shrugged. “Too long, at least five years … But I doubt they have been trying to reach me, for I have not been in hiding.” He thought for a moment, and then went on. “But it has been a long time since I spoke with a brother, other than yourself. There was a time, back when I first returned here, when I would sometimes meet others of our Order, and we would invariably talk of gathering together to rehearse our rituals at the very least, even if we were too small in numbers to celebrate them. Rehearsal was even more important than performance, we all knew, for the rites themselves would survive without us, and could pass for years without being celebrated. But the brotherhood, the brethren themselves, relying as we do on memory and repetition to retain the words and format, need to practice the rituals constantly—the content of them, if not the form. Most of us managed, over the years, to remain close to at least one of the other brothers, so that we could act as catechizers to each other. I kept close company at that time with a knight called Philippe of Mansur. Philippe and I fought together and practiced our ritual work together until he was killed in a skirmish on the road to Jaffa, about a year after I returned. Since then, I have done nothing. My disillusionment began soon after that …

“But then there is another thing to consider. I can read and write—I am one of the few people around here who can—so that made the task of revising and relearning words far easier for me than it could be for any of the others. And so, for a time in the beginning, as I told you, we tried to foregather from time to time. But you know what it’s like as well as I do, to try to arrange something for personal motives while on active duty in the middle of a war. The men I knew in those days were all contemporaries, and we had all known each other before the Pope’s war. But then we came to Outremer with our different liege lords, and that alone kept us all far apart from one another. And men were constantly dying, too, so that where there had been a few score of us in the beginning, there were soon less than one score, and reports kept coming in of yet another and another who had fallen in battle or succumbed to one of the plagues and pestilences that thrive here.”

St. Omer watched him closely as de Payens sat with lowered head, rubbing the bony bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. In a moment, however, Hugh sat erect again and resumed where he had left off speaking.

“Then, for another while, there came a succession of new faces, eager young men, hungry for glory, with shining eyes and peeling, sunburnt faces, who had come out from France and went about shaking hands with everyone they met until they received a correct response. Those ones were always eager to meet elder brethren and spread the word from home. We almost made it once, nine of us, but on the very day we were to meet, a caravan was attacked within three miles of where we had assembled, and we spent the ensuing night scouring the desert and rescuing hostages.” Hugh’s eyes narrowed to slits as he remembered.

“In those days, the brotherhood would still come looking for me whenever they found themselves near my camp, or, if I heard tidings of one of them being in my vicinity, I would send Arlo to make contact with him, and he would arrange for me to meet with the newcomer in secret. But that could only apply, obviously, to those brethren whom I knew in person. The others, the newcomers, had no way of reaching me, and I had no means of learning who they were. And thus I fell into a growing pattern of silence that extended even to my oath-brothers and the Order itself. I know that is reprehensible. It might even be unforgivable, but I can offer no excuse, other than eccentricity.”

St. Omer was peering up at Hugh from beneath his furrowed brows, and now he nodded. “Aye, which some might think of as willfulness.” The words were condemnatory, but the tone in which he uttered them was mild.

De Payens nodded. “They might. That is true. But what about you? When did you last have dealings with the Order?”

St. Omer twisted in his seat and glanced over his shoulder, checking to make sure that they were still alone by the smoldering fire before he responded. “Five years ago, and they were directly concerned with you, my friend. I was carrying instructions for you from Amiens when I fell into the hands of the Turks.”

“For me, from Amiens? I know no one in Amiens.”

“You knew me.”

“Aside from you, I mean. Who else would write to me from there?”

“The Order. The letter was from the Seneschal himself, Jean Toussaint, Seigneur of Amiens, second in rank only to the Grand Master.”

“Toussaint wrote to me? Why? What could he want of me now?”

“Many things, apparently, judging from the bulk of the dispatches. Unfortunately, however, I lost them when our ship was sunk at sea.”

“You lost them …” De Payens sat blinking at him, then nodded his head. “Well, you must have. You lost everything, except your life, thank God. And had you no indication of what the letters contained?”

“Absolutely none. Why should I? Like you, I am decently literate, but they were none of my concern. I was coming to rejoin you, as a friend, at the suggestion of the Order, which needed my compliance to deliver documents to you. I thought no more of bringing them than I would of scratching myself. I knew that you would read them when we met, and that if you chose to tell me what was involved, it would mean that the senior brethren at home had wished me to know. But to wonder what was in there before they were delivered would have been to invite the temptation to pry, during the long nights of travel, to the imperilment of my sacred oath. Anyway, now that years have elapsed, I presume that the brethren at home have learned that I did not arrive here in Outremer and have either abandoned their intentions for you or switched them to another recipient. You have heard nothing at all from them in the interim?”

“Not a word, written or spoken. And that is really strange, because you must have left Amiens more than a year before Count Hugh left Champagne to come back here. He arrived two, nigh on three years ago, in 1114, and remained for almost a year. I was on duty in Edessa much of that time, but I did see him, albeit briefly, on several occasions, yet he made no mention of anything being sent to me. Nor did he know anything of your misadventure, now that I come to think of it. Your name was never mentioned, and we would have spoken of your disappearance, as a fellow member of the Order, had the Count known anything about it …” Hugh sat frowning for a moment. “That is passing strange, for the Count is high in the Governing Council, so I would think he must know of anything involving me.”

St. Omer waved a hand. “Not so, Hugh. The Council may have seen no need to inform anyone else of what they had required of you the previous year. After a year had passed it might have seemed less urgent, or they might not have expected to hear from you for some time to come … At any rate, we cannot begin to guess at the instructions they had issued you. It might be a good idea, however, for you to send word back now, somehow, that you are back in communication.”

“I will, rest assured on that. Lucien of Troyes is leaving to return to Champagne tomorrow, and once there he will report directly to Count Hugh, as his deputy. Now I shall find him again and tell him all that you have told me, and he will take the word back for us.”

“Is he one of us?”

“Of course he is, otherwise I would not dream of trusting him with word of mouth. He is senior to me in membership by two years, but he is from the Argonne, so you might never have met him.”

“Excellent … So be it that he is of the Order.” St. Omer nodded, then pushed himself to his feet, where he stood swaying for a moment, waving away Hugh’s offer of help. “I am well, stay where you are. But I’m getting tired and it is growing cold. Go you now, and find this Lucien of Troyes, and be sure to tell him everything, so that he can report you had no knowledge of any task being assigned you. I can find my own cot. Sleep well, and we will talk again tomorrow.”

Hugh bade his friend good night and went looking for Lucien of Troyes, who was in the final stages of preparing for departure. The magnificent Roman rooms that the Count and his deputy had occupied for the past three years lay empty now, their furnishings cleaned out and packed for travel by de Troyes’s men, and Hugh’s steps echoed emptily as he strode across the tessellated floors. He found Sir Lucien in a tiny sleeping chamber by the front entrance to his quarters, and the knight listened intently as Hugh told him all that he had just discovered, making no interruption and nodding deeply at the conclusion of the tale, after which he promised to waste no time in reporting Sir Hugh’s story to Count Hugh, and to ask him to pass it along to the senior members of the Governing Council.

The following morning, Hugh was on hand to watch Sir Lucien depart for home, accompanied by a small but heavily armed retinue that struck out towards the coast, where a ship waited to transport them to Cyprus and from there, by various stages, home to Christendom. He knew he would hear more from the Order, now that he had broken his silence, but he had no way of knowing when that might be. For the time being he was content to wait, and to assist his friend Godfrey to regain his health and strength. He watched until the knight of Troyes and his party had disappeared from view, then turned and beckoned to Arlo, bidding him bring their swords and other weapons for sharpening.