Knights of the Black and White

ONE

Brother Stephen came awake blustering in panic, his head ringing with what might have been the echo of a strangled cry, and found that he was sitting bolt upright, shoulders hunched defensively, hands outstretched as though to fend off a blow. It took a few seconds longer for him to realize that he could not see a thing, that his mouth was dry from fright, that his heart was thudding hard, almost painfully, and that he was holding his breath. He swallowed hard and lowered his arms cautiously, then scrubbed at his eyes with the heels of both hands and peered around at the darkness surrounding him. It was black as pitch, but his rump recognized the hard slats of his own cot, and as his heartbeat slowed towards normal, he began to hear the familiar nighttime sounds made by his companions sleeping nearby, grunts and murmurs and the occasional snore. He was not, as he had feared at first, back in that hellish dream room in which he had been chained hand and foot to a bed of narrow plank boards.

Shuddering with relief, he strained to hear anything unusual. Something had awakened him, he knew, and it must have been something threatening, to have startled him out of a deep sleep the way it had. But he could hear nothing out of the ordinary, and after a while he eased himself off the cot, straightening to his full height without a sound and reaching out surely in the blackness to where his sheathed sword hung from the armor tree against the wall, by the prie-dieu in the corner. He eased the blade silently from its sheath, laid the empty scabbard on the cot, then moved quietly to the doorless entrance to his cell, where he stood still again, listening intently, his bare blade held at the ready.

Within moments, he had identified the breathing of each of his sleeping companions and had almost assured himself that there was no one else breathing there in the darkness of the communal space in front of him, dimly lit as it was by a solitary, long-burning candle. What, then, had wakened him? Judging from the overall stillness surrounding him, St. Clair estimated that it was deep in the middle of the night, and he knew that, had he and his brethren really belonged to a Christian order of monks, they would all be up and in chapel at this time, reciting the psalms and prayers of the Night Order of Saint Benedict. As it was, having worked long and brutal hours all day long in the tunnels, as they did every day, his brothers were sleeping deeply, fortifying their bodies against the day ahead.

Bissot, whose cell lay opposite where Stephen stood, was always the noisiest sleeper among them, and now he erupted in an explosive, spluttering snore and turned heavily on his cot, breaking wind loudly. One of his neighbors—it sounded like Rossal—cursed him drowsily from a neighboring cell, less than half awake but aware of the sudden disturbance, and St. Clair permitted himself a quiet smile.

All was well, he finally decided, and he had merely been startled awake by a bad dream. But even in accepting that, he wondered what kind of dream could have awakened him so violently. In the past, his worst experiences had been caused by those nocturnal episodes of overwhelming sexuality that he had come to abhor deeply, but those had all been more disgusting and morally repugnant than truly frightening. He had awakened terrified this time, his heart pounding in fear and distress.

He returned to his cell and found a candle that he took and lit from the single flame burning in the common area outside. He sheathed his sword and returned it to its peg on the armor tree in his cell, then lay down on his cot again, hands behind his head, fingers interlaced as he gazed up at the ceiling and wondered what he had been dreaming about.

The flickering image of a face flashed against the back of his eyelids, frightening him so badly that he hunched forward again in a reflexive, cowering gesture, whipping his elbows down towards his navel, as though to protect his ribs. What was he thinking of? he asked himself frantically, screaming the question out into the silence of his mind. But even as he asked, the face that had frightened him came back to him, unmistakable and intransigent in its arrogant beauty, yet with a vulnerable softness to the pouting curve of the lips edging the imperious mouth. Whimpering aloud in disbelief, he squirmed sideways to sit on the edge of his cot and lowered his feet to the floor, squeezing his eyes tightly shut and clasping his hands despairingly over his head to block his ears.

He would not, could not, allow himself to believe that this was anything other than a visitation from the Devil himself. And yet, even as he told himself that, he saw images that were intensely, achingly familiar: the blue jewel now hanging from the string about his neck had in his dream been suspended from a golden chain, a chain that he had held in his hand as he dangled the suspended bauble to nestle between the breasts of the woman who lay beside him in the sumptuous bed on wrinkled, silken sheets, the woman whose warm, naked thigh was draped over his hip, holding him captive. The woman whose smiling face brought him surging to his feet again, to stand swaying in panic.

There was no possibility of error, and he made no attempt to delude himself or excuse himself. The woman in his dream was Alice, the Princess Royal of Jerusalem, King Baldwin’s second daughter, and he knew, suddenly and crushingly, that he had lain and rutted with her. The heavy, yielding weight of her breasts in his hands was as real as the solid, unmistakably remembered weight of her thigh. He could even recall the musky perfume she wore, and the sensation of probing the tip of his tongue into the deep well of her navel, the tautly sculpted smoothness of her warm belly against his face.

In less time than it takes to tell, he was fully dressed and armored, pulling his linen surcoat over his head and fastening his heavy sword belt over it before cramming his flat-topped steel helmet beneath his arm and snatching up his three-balled flail in a gloved right hand. He strode almost noiselessly through the common area beyond his cell, his booted feet making only the slightest of swishing sounds in the thick straw on the floor, and the single guard on duty in the stables merely huffed once in his sleep and then settled his shoulder more comfortably against the wall. No one expected anyone to attempt to steal anything from the monks of the temple stables.

St. Clair bridled and saddled his horse expertly, barely making a sound, and led it slowly to the exit, making no attempt to mount until he was safely outside beneath the stars. Once there, he stopped to place his helm firmly on his head, then hung his flail from its saddle hook and transferred his short, heavy battle-axe from the belt at his waist to a corresponding hook on the other side of his saddle. That done, he dropped the reins and went quickly back into the stables, where he took a spear and a shield from the racks inside the door, then returned directly to mount his horse. He spurred the animal hard, down towards the scattering of buildings that separated him from the South Gate, where he roused the guards, told them who he was and that he was on a mission for the Patriarch, and passed quickly through the portal before the heavy gates were fully open.

He gave no thought to what his brethren might think of his disappearance, because in his own mind he knew he was unlikely to see any of them again. They had mourned him as dead once already, and in his despair he now doubted that they would care to do so again, and he reflected grimly how much better it would have been for everyone had he been dead in truth at that time. He had no idea where he was going. He knew only that it would be far from where anyone would know him by his name or his face, and if that meant he had to ride away and die in Syria, fighting alone against a Saracen horde, then he would be content to do so, in the hope that his death might atone for the heinous nature of his sins. He had lain with the King’s daughter, fornicating with her like a rutting beast, and the memories of it were now swarming in him, shaming him to the depths of his soul.

Only once, and then very briefly, did he stop in his headlong flight from Jerusalem, and that was when the thought occurred to him that one part, at least, of what he had experienced in his dream was an impossibility. He reined in his mount and sat still, staring towards the lightening eastern horizon. The blue bauble that he wore around his neck had been buried deep underground throughout the time of his abduction. He had not found it until months after his return, which meant that his “memory” of what he did with it was false and that he had, in fact, been dreaming. He felt his heart leap in his chest as he realized and accepted that; felt his chest expanding with hope that was like a great intake of fresh breath as the possibilities of error rang through his mind like the jangling clamor of the spring-mounted bell above the door of the cook’s room in his mother’s kitchen.

No sooner had he thanked God for the impossibility of the blue bauble’s presence, however, than he began to think about the chain from which it had hung suspended: a thick, heavy, snake-like chain of solid, hand-wrought links of buttery yellow gold, supple and slippery smooth, strong and beautifully made, and far and away the single most valuable item he had ever held in his hands. And he had held it in his hands, many times. He had cupped one hand often to enjoy the feeling of the solid links pile up in his palm as he lowered the chain into it from above, his upheld hand clearly limned against the pale purple perfection of the walls of the princess’s bedchamber. And he had placed the chain around Alice’s neck, too, on several occasions, and then carefully inserted his own head into its loop, so that the two of them, he and she, had been bound close together by it, unclothed breasts touching, naked and raging with riotous lust.

He had broken his vow of chastity. Now his entire body felt leaden as he kicked his horse gently forward again, prodding it to a walk. Warmund of Picquigny had told him he was free of sin so long as he had remained free of intent to sin. St. Clair had believed him and had, in fact, begun to mend. The nightly visits from the succubus had waned noticeably in recent weeks, and Stephen had been feeling better about himself, about his life and his duties. Now, however, he was again at an impasse. Had there been volition involved in his fornications with the princess?

His own painfully restored memory of what had occurred made it seem scarcely possible that he had not willingly engaged in the activities he was now recalling more and more clearly with every passing moment. Pleasure, certainly, he knew had been there; pleasure had been there in indescribable amounts, as had voluptuous abandon and wanton excesses. He was crushingly aware of all of those things. But there was still one small, stubborn voice in his mind that insisted upon asking him over and over again if his volition had been involved. Had he participated in the debauchery willingly and knowingly? Parts of him had, certainly, he knew beyond dispute, for he recalled the deliberate and sensual way he had insinuated his head into the chain binding the two of them together, but still the voice persisted: had his bodily responses been dictated, or regulated, by his conscious will? This was a question more suited for clerics than for soldiers, Stephen knew, yet even as he mentally threw up his hands at his inability to answer the question with any confidence, he knew too that both the question and its answer, infuriatingly vague as they were, were of crucial importance.

And then, after a long period of agonized self-doubt, his mind began to present him with things he could consider sanely, snippets of memory, and long, real gaps in his memory, the awareness of periods of time, both long and short, when he had absolutely no memories of anything. And then, eventually, it brought memories of very strange behaviors: of staring at Alice, seeing her as though poorly reflected in an untrue mirror, watching her closely, convinced that her body, so strangely shimmering and flowing, was about to dissolve into nothingness, and feeling his head spin while the chamber revolved around him and he laughed like a man demented … There had been times, he came to accept then, when he had not been in control of himself at all, and that mystified him, for throughout his life, he had always kept himself under strict and tight control.

Thus there was something unwholesome, or at least mystifying, about the period of his abduction. There was no connection, for example, and no transition between his memories of the sexual lust he enjoyed in the purple bedchamber and the torture he had undergone in the place where they had chained him to a bed. And he had no knowledge of how he had arrived in either place, or of how he had escaped, other than the vaguest memory of the unknown, half-seen woman who had pulled him along behind her with a strong grip on his injured wrist, apparently leading him to freedom and then leaving him there alone.

And then, just as he was beginning to believe that there might be a glimmer of light in the darkness that surrounded him on all sides, he became aware of the blue jewel that hung from the string around his neck. He had reached up almost unconsciously to take it between his finger and thumb, in a movement that had become habitual over the past few weeks, and with that simple action unleashed an entirely new set of revelations and self-recrimination. He had retained—and he immediately corrected himself ruthlessly, emphasizing the truth—he had kept, secreted and in fact stolen the bauble, uncaring of its true value, whether it be jewel or worthless glass, on a purely personal whim, and in his determination to keep hold of it simply because he wanted to keep it, he had broken another of his vows, the one that was not quite a vow of poverty but rather a promise to hold all things in common with his brethren and to keep nothing for himself.

He felt the weight of that realization settling about his shoulders like a millstone, and if he had been capable of tears by then, he would have wept. But there were no tears within him, and he felt his self-loathing multiply. The blue jewel was worthless, a mere piece of stone, prettily shaped and pleasant to touch, deceptively soft-seeming in its hardness and smoothly warm in a way that reminded him of the inner intimacies of Alice le Bourcq’s flawless thighs. And with that association newly sprung to mind and instantly acknowledged, he ripped the thing from his neck, breaking the string, and threw it away, seeing its flight clearly against the dawn sky and noting where it fell against a good-sized boulder. He sat there staring at the place where it had fallen, unable to see the blue stone itself, but thinking of other things, of how that tiny piece of blue stone had been involved in his triple dereliction, the breaking of the only three sacred vows he had ever made, to God or man. Chastity, poverty, and obedience. He was thrice damned and undeserving of life, and the thought came back to him that all that was left for him to do now was to ride out and sacrifice his life in battle against the Infidel.

And so Sir Stephen St. Clair, Brother of the Order of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ, climbed down from his saddle and retrieved the bauble he had just thrown away, then, with the string that was still attached to it, he tied it carefully and tightly about the cross-guard of his sword. That done, he sheathed the sword, gathered up his reins, secured the butt of his spear in the holder by his stirrup and, with his shield slung over his left arm, spurred his horse again and rode defiantly eastward into the new day, resolved to die quickly and bravely in the name, and for the glory, of his God.