Knights of the Black and White

EIGHT

St. Clair was dreaming, a very pleasant, lethargic yet somehow frightening dream that had him struggling for wakefulness. It was not the woman in his dream who was causing him the concern, for he could see practically nothing of her, muffled in heavy garments as she was, and his only physical contact with her was the painful grip she had on his wrist, pulling him along behind her faster than he wanted to move, so that he staggered occasionally, unable to keep pace. He knew, vaguely, that she had a comely face, dark skinned with enormous brown eyes, but had anyone asked him how he knew that, he could not have told them.

This dream woman had come to him in a darkened room, shaking him into semi-wakefulness and talking unintelligibly in tones of great urgency, tugging and pulling at him all the while until he arose from the bed. He suspected that she might have helped him to dress, although he had no clear memory of such a thing, but then she had led him through a nightmarish maze of ill-lit, twisting passageways, each indistinguishable from its neighbors, tugging at him to move faster every time he tried to slow his steps, and stopping occasionally and inexplicably to push him against a wall, leaning her weight against him and holding a hand over his mouth, as though to prevent him from crying out. Each time she did that, he seemed to recall, he had felt as though someone was burning his wrists. They had come to a doorway and passed through it, and the light had blinded him, so that he had closed his eyes tightly against the glare of it. But still she had pulled him along, hurrying and bullying him.

Now, however, she had stopped, and he had stopped with her, standing without moving for the first time in what seemed like hours or even days. His wrists still felt as though they were on fire, and there was an ache in his chest that grew unbearable whenever he tried to breathe too hard or too deeply, but he knew he was no longer dreaming. The pains he felt were real pains. There were noises now, too, coming from somewhere, but they sounded muffled, distant and distorted. He concentrated on listening, and pushed himself harder towards wakefulness. The woman no longer held his wrist, the light was no longer so abrasive against his eyelids, and he could feel the surface of a wall against his back, although he had no memory of leaning against any wall.

Dreams could be extremely confusing, he knew and accepted that, but he was becoming frustrated now. He opened his eyes slowly, cringing only a little, and straightened up from the wall, turning his head to look at the woman beside him, but she had vanished, if she had ever been there at all, and he was alone, in an alley of some description, between high, blank walls and near a junction with a thoroughfare that was the source of all the noises he could hear. That much he saw and was aware of before the ground came rushing up towards him.

“BROTHER STEPHEN!”

The voice came again, calling his name from a great distance, but it was hard edged and insistent and he could not continue to ignore it, although he shook his head in protest and tried to turn away, seeking refuge in sleep again.

“Brother Stephen! Master St. Clair, wake up!”

He opened his eyes, squinting against the light, and saw someone looming above him, and his conditioning took control of him, so that he rolled away, throwing himself violently backward and reaching down for his dagger. But there was no dagger in his belt. He was wearing no belt. And his lightning-like roll was a sluggish, wallowing upheaval worthy of a besotted drunkard. He frowned again, still squinting against the outrageous light, and peered up at the shape above him.

“Brother Stephen? It is you, is it not? You are Brother Stephen, of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ?”

“Who’re you?”

The question emerged as a mumble, but it earned an immediate response. “It is you! Praise be to God, we all thought you dead.”

St. Clair made a mighty effort to pull himself together, shaking his head to clear it, and when he tried to sit up the other man supported him against his knee, one arm around his shoulders. Stephen did not even have the strength to push the fellow away, and so he remained there for a moment, leaning against the man and breathing deeply, fighting down fear and panic. A few moments later, he pushed himself until he was sitting more upright and looked down at himself, peering at his open hands, seeing raw-skinned bracelets of red and angry-looking flesh around his wrists, and then his eyes focused down between them at the material of a rough brown knee-length tunic that was completely unfamiliar.

He attempted to speak, but his mouth appeared to be gummed shut. He hawked and spat weakly, then tried again, this time finding a croak that appeared to be all the voice he had. “Where am I … and who are you? Tell me that first.”

“Giacomo Versace, Brother Stephen. I’m one of your sergeants … well, not yours, but I’m new. You don’t know me, but I have seen you several times since I joined.”

St. Clair was still working his mouth, gathering saliva that would allow him to speak. “Thank God for that, then,” he croaked, “because I thought I ought to know you and was unable to. Where am I, and how came I here?”

“We are in an alley near the souk, but I have no idea how you came here or whence you came. I was passing by, on my way to the street of goldsmiths, and saw you lying here. I thought you dead, or drunk, and would have passed on by without stopping had I not seen the whiteness of your skin. Thanks be to God that I did stop, for I have found a miracle: Lazarus arisen from the grave.”

Stephen thought about that for a moment, trying to understand what the other man had said, and then he cocked his head. “Lazarus? You mean me?”

“Aye, most certainly. We said the Holy Requiem for your soul a month and more ago, believing you waylaid and murdered somewhere, for you had vanished without trace ten days before and we had swept the entire land in search of you. Where were you? Where have you been?”

“What mean you, where have I been? I have been here, in Jerusalem, since I returned from patrol …” He hesitated. “When was that, yesterday? It must have been. We lost two men—the Englishman, Osbert of York, and Grimwald of Brussels, in a skirmish with a Saracen band.”

“That was more than a month agone, Brother Stephen. Since then you have been missing, and we all believed you dead.”

Stephen sat silent for a long time before he stretched out his hand. “Help me up, if you will. I think you had best return me to my brethren without further ado. I feel most devilishly sick and my mind is not functioning properly. Take me back to the Temple Mount.”

WHEN HE AWOKE the next time, St. Clair knew he was back in the stables on the Temple Mount. He remembered that his return had caused a great commotion, and that the analogy used by his sergeant rescuer, about Lazarus arisen, proved to be an apt one. All his friends and brothers crowded around him, staring open mouthed for the most part, touching him and fingering his clothing as though to assure themselves that he was, in fact, there among them and alive, and then the questions had begun, questions that St. Clair found himself incapable of answering because he could recall nothing of what had happened to him since what his friends referred to as his disappearance. They told him that he had returned from a long and arduous patrol, in which he and his men had ridden as far as the robbers’ town of Ascalon, twenty-two miles to the northwest, in pursuit of a band of Saracen marauders who had raided and robbed a caravan that had traveled unmolested all the way from Edessa, only to be waylaid within a few hours’ ride of Jerusalem.

Stephen and his men had arrived at the scene of the attack less than an hour after the raiders had departed, and he had decided to give chase immediately. Two days later, having spent hours on end quartering stony ground for the quarry’s trail, which had been expertly concealed, he and his troop had been ambushed crossing a dry streambed, and although they had won the encounter and recaptured the goods stolen from the caravan, two of their number had been killed in the fighting.

Safely home again, and in no mood to celebrate, Stephen had made his report to the brotherhood and had then gone into the city, as was his habit, simply to be alone and to escape from the talking of his friends in order to mourn the loss of his two men in his own way.

He had not returned that night, and a massive search of the city turned up no evidence that he had ever been to any of his favorite places. The search had lasted for three days and had involved the Royal Guard and a large number of knights who volunteered their time out of appreciation for the efforts of the Poor Fellows in general and for St. Clair in particular, for his youthfulness and prowess had made him very popular despite his monkishness. Eventually, however, there came a point at which it had to be admitted that there was no place left that had not been searched, and that not a single gram of evidence had been generated to show where Brother Stephen might have gone or what might have happened to him.

It had been Hugh de Payens himself, after consulting with his brethren and the Patriarch Archbishop, who had, in the absence of St. Clair’s body but with complete conviction that everything had been done that could be done to find the knight, formally declared him dead after an absence of fifteen days, pronouncing him abducted and killed by persons unknown, probably in retaliation for his activities against the brigands. Masses had been said for the repose of the dead knight’s soul, and all of them had been well attended, several of them by the King himself, accompanied by his Queen and their daughters.

But now Stephen St. Clair was returned, miraculously restored, it seemed, if not to life at least to duty, for he appeared to be in reasonably good health. The Patriarch himself came to the stables on the afternoon of his rescue, to visit the prodigal and to welcome him back into the fold of his brothers’ concern, and announced that he would personally offer several masses in thanks for the young knight’s safe return. St. Clair had remained awake and alert throughout the activities that day, and he had even eaten a hearty dinner that night with his fellow monks, but then he had retired to his cot and fallen deeply asleep, and the prayer cycle of the night and the following day had not disturbed him at all. When he awoke later that second evening, he had been raving mad, and his fellow monks had been forced to restrain him, binding him to his cot with wide leather cargo straps from the stables and watching over him in shifts as, for five days and more, he behaved like an injured beast, gibbering and moaning and incapable of retaining food.

Now, unaware of how much time had passed, he awoke at mid-morning, feeling rested, fit, and hungry enough to eat his own horse, only to find that they would not yet let him out of bed, and so he was forced to remain there while they brought him bowl after bowl of hot, nourishing stew with crusty, fresh-baked bread. He was aware that everyone was watching him closely, but no one made any attempt to question him further than they had on the day of his rescue.

Towards mid-afternoon, he was visited by de Payens and St. Omer, and he knew from the outset that they had come in their official capacities, because they asked Gondemare and Roland, who were visiting him when they arrived, to leave. Stephen greeted the newcomers with a nod, then eased himself up until he was sitting erect, his back against the wall of his small cubicle.

“It is good to see you are become yourself again, Brother Stephen,” de Payens began, “because for several days we have been considering an exorcism to cast the evil spirits out of you. The Patriarch visited you himself at that time, however, and he decided that what you required was merely sufficient time in which to recover yourself. It pleases me to see he was correct.” He paused. “We have been making enquiries based upon what you told us when you first returned, and we now agree that you were abducted. That appears obvious now, and there is no mystery there. But even so, we have been unable to discover where you were held, or anything at all about the why of it, and that presents us with more mysteries than we can count.”

St. Clair frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“No more do we, Brother, but the mysteries are there.” De Payens began to tick off items on his fingers. “You were abducted. But why? Certainly not for ransom, because no demands were made and no one was informed you had been taken. And your disappearance most certainly had nothing to do with your high station, since you are no longer Sir Stephen St. Clair but a penniless monk, newly sworn to poverty. So why else would anyone wish to abduct you? Clearly not for revenge or punishment for some wrong, fancied or real, else you would be dead in truth.

“And you were tortured. You have burns and broken ribs and your entire body is a mass of bruising. Your wrists and ankles bear the scars of chains and manacles, too, yet there is mystery even there, for you had been missing for a month and more and yet, according to the physicians who examined you on your return, there was no injury or blemish on your body that appeared to be more than ten days old.” He shook his head. “Even more than that, however, you were clean.”

St. Clair’s eyes went wide in astonishment. “What d’you mean, clean?”

“I mean clean, as in recently washed, laved, bathed … Saracen clean.”

“Recently? That is impossible. I last bathed at Easter, with everyone else, as part of the Easter Rites. You are mistaken.”

De Payens shrugged. “I am not mistaken. It was the physician who examined you when you first returned—he was set to the task in person by the Archbishop—who remarked upon it. He said that you bore the scars of torture, but that your body had plainly been bathed and … what was it he said, Godfrey? Pampered, yes, that was it. Your body had been bathed and pampered mere weeks agone. When we asked him to explain, he told us your toenails and your fingernails had been pared and tended to—‘polished’ was the word he used—and that all dirt between your toes and in your body crevices had been washed away.”

“But that is impossible, Brother Hugh! I would remember such an outrage being committed upon me.”

De Payens shrugged again, but not unsympathetically. “How can anyone explain such things, Brother Stephen?” He held up a warning hand. “I pray you, do not be angry. Denial is acceptable, but bear in mind that you also have no memory of anything that happened during all those days when you were gone. Nothing at all. No memories. No awareness. And yet you were clearly alive somewhere, and presumably awake throughout that time.

“Thus I must ask you again, and beg you to be patient in obeying: can you think of anything that might help us find an answer to these questions? It might be something of which you have lost awareness, or something in your memory that you ignore for some reason, or even some thought, some image or idea that you have dismissed as insignificant.”

St. Clair sat silent for a count of five and then began to speak, nodding his head as if in agreement with what he was seeing in his mind. “Abduction. Yes, you’re right. I remember now what happened … or some of it. I was in the marketplace, walking among the stalls, going nowhere special … A thief stole a merchant’s purse, right in front of me, and he saw me seeing what he did. He stood there looking at me, the purse in one hand, a little knife in the other, and then he turned and ran. He had a limp, and I ran after him, into an alley. It was dark in there, but I could see him ahead of me, still running, and then I saw other shapes moving on each side of me, coming at me, and something hit me hard … The next thing I remember is waking up in the alley, perhaps the same alley, the day the sergeant brought me home.”

“And you can remember nothing else? Think hard. Anything you can recall might be important.”

St. Clair shook his head. “No, nothing else. Except the woman, and she was only a dream.”

“How do you know she was nothing more than a dream?”

“Because she wasn’t there when I opened my eyes and turned to thank her. I was alone in the alley.”

“But she had led you there.” St. Clair merely shrugged, neither confirming nor denying, and de Payens harried him. “What? You doubt that? If she did not, then how did you get there? Or do you think it was the same alley and you lay there for an entire month before being discovered?”

“Wait.” St. Clair held up his hand, frowning in thought. “There’s more … I remember her coming to me more than once. Yes. I was on a cot of some kind, the first time, in a dark room, and I could not move. I was in great pain, I recall … or I think I do. She carried a lamp and she leaned over me, peering into my eyes, and then she wiped my face with a cold cloth and went away, but I saw her nodding as she went, as though to someone on the other side of the room, someone beyond my sight. I remember I tried to turn and look, but the turning caused a pain in my back, so intense that I lost awareness of everything.”

“And she came to you again, like this?”

“Aye, once more, when she roused me up and took me away. There was no one else there on that occasion, and all the doors were unlocked. She led me directly out of the place, wherever it was, and through a wending maze of tunnels to the alley where the sergeant found me, and as soon as we arrived there, while I was sun-blinded, she must have slipped away again, back to where she had come from.”

“Sergeant Giacomo will remember where you were found, so we should find your escape route if we explore every entrance to the alley. The sergeant will take us back.” De Payens and St. Omer, who had not spoken a single word, rose to their feet, and de Payens bent forward to clap St. Clair on the upper arm. “Stay well and rest easy. We will find the place, and that will lead us to your abductors.”

Sergeant Giacomo remembered the exact location where he had found the young knight, but a painstaking search of all the surrounding buildings produced nothing positive that anyone could use to find either Brother Stephen’s abductors or the place where he had been confined. After a time, as month followed month, other matters emerged to claim the monks’ attention, so that the mystery of St. Clair’s disappearance eventually dwindled to become a part of the lore of the new brotherhood, forgotten by everyone save on odd occasions when it would resurface and be discussed briefly, before sinking back into oblivion.