Standard of Honor

FOUR

André St. Clair fully expected the King to launch an attack against Isaac Comnenus immediately, but Richard did nothing of the kind, showing good sense and forbearance instead. He sent off a letter to Comnenus early that very afternoon, compiled with the assistance of a crew of bishops, that was astonishingly mild, given the provocation he had received. If Isaac would release the survivors of the wrecked dromon, with all their goods, and return Richard’s missing treasures, including the Great Seal of England, which was useless to anyone else, then Richard would take no further steps against Cyprus or its Emperor but would set sail again for Palestine with all his forces and not come back.

And while the letter was being delivered, King Guy of Jerusalem was brought ashore without incident and installed in Richard’s royal pavilion, a mile east of the city gates on a heavily guarded hill. The remaining ships and men of Richard’s advance squadron came into view on the horizon, sure to arrive before nightfall as predicted. But even before the fleet had dropped anchor in the various spots assigned to them, Comnenus’s response to Richard’s letter arrived, and as the envoy bearing it rowed out towards Richard’s galley, Isaac Comnenus himself appeared on the beach before the town. He paraded himself in front of a ragamuffin gathering of soldiery, who erected portable barricades before the gates in what André St. Clair, watching from the deck of his own ship and unaware of the King’s letter, took to be a display of defiance and challenge.

And that was exactly what it was.

Isaac’s response to the King’s conciliatory letter was so abrupt and outrageously high-handed that those of Richard’s advisers who read it could only shake their heads and mutter about the fellow’s obvious insanity. He would not release his captives, Isaac said, nor would he return a single piece of gold. The Latin interlopers, he said, had injured his reputation by invading his territories and treating him as unworthy of their respect, and they had therefore earned his anger and the forfeiture he had imposed upon them. They must now accept the humiliation and the losses they had so justly earned. He expected to hear no more of them, he stated, other than reports of their departure in the immediate future, and he reminded them to be grateful that he had responded at all, since no Emperor would normally deign to have dealings with a mere King.

Several people told André later that Richard stood wide eyed with shock as his chancellor read this response aloud, and then he laughed a savage, barking laugh and ordered an immediate landing of three hundred men-at-arms, screened from attack by two hundred archers and crossbowmen, on the beach where Comnenus was parading.

They landed within the hour, and although Isaac’s defenders came forward bravely enough to meet them, they had never before encountered anything as chilling or effective as the massed volleys of bolts and arrows that Richard’s people poured down onto their heads from ships anchored close to the shore. The defenders, including Isaac himself, scattered quickly, running back into and through the town behind them, leaving the field to Richard’s troops.

Throughout that evening and the remainder of the night, Richard gave priority to the unloading of his warhorses. Some of these had spent upward of a month at sea, and none was in any condition to be ridden, let alone ridden into battle, but long before dawn that morning the word circulated that Richard was in need of volunteers—two score of them—to ride with him before daybreak along the coast to Kolossi, five miles away, where Isaac and his men had supposedly ended up the previous evening.

As soon as he heard that being shouted to one of the guards on the prow from a night guard on the pier, André, who had been up on deck most of the night, restless and unable to sleep, went looking for his ship commander, claiming his right as one of Richard’s vassals to respond to the call for volunteers. But Tournedos, barely risen from his bunk to face the day, shook his head, disclaiming any ability, as a naval commander, to grant such a request from a knight. He sent him instead to ask permission from the senior Templar officer on board.

André had never spoken to the man in question, a renowned and popular knight called Don Antonio del’ Aquila, but he had seen him many times since boarding the ship. He found him now on the long stern deck, leaning against the rail near the sergeant brother guarding the helm, and talking in hushed tones with another dark-faced knight. They were clearly preoccupied, but the knight listened to St. Clair’s request, albeit impatiently, frowning at being interrupted, and never taking his eyes off the man to whom he had been speaking. But then he curtly refused his permission, dismissing André with the tone of his voice.

Astonished at the finality of the man’s response, André challenged the Templar’s right to refuse him. He stubbornly insisted that he had not yet taken the oath of obedience to the Order and could not, therefore, be bound to accept or obey any order that was not a direct command.

Del’ Aquila, who was known affectionately within the Templar community simply as Aquila, had been about to resume his interrupted conversation, reaching out to grasp his companion familiarly by the shoulder, but now he stopped and straightened slightly, raising an apologetic finger to the other man before turning back to face his challenger. The flickering light from a lamp on the bulkhead cast shadows on his face, and André expected to see anger stamped there. Instead, Aquila stood watching him calmly for long moments, showing no discernible emotions. He was a youngish man, in his fighting prime, and André estimated him to be thirtytwo or thirty-three. He had a thick reddish-brown beard, although it looked black in the shadowy predawn light, and he kept it close-cropped beneath the mailed hood of his hauberk. His white surcoat bore the longshanked red cross of the Temple Knights of Outremer front and rear, but in the frontal upper left quadrant of that cross, between his left breast and his shoulder, he also wore the equal-armed black cross with the flared ends, the cross-patté, that had been the original emblem of the Order before its investiture with the bold red cross signifying the Blood of Christ. Very few men wore both insignia, and all of those were knights who had distinguished themselves, and thereby the Order, in battle.

Aquila stood staring at St. Clair, eyes narrowed, teeth nibbling gently at his upper lip, and then he inhaled deeply and turned away towards the other man. “Forgive me, Signor Loranzo, but I must attend to … this. If you would wait for me in my quarters, I shall return as soon as I may.”

The other man bowed deeply and moved away, and Aquila crooked his index finger at André. “Come. Walk with me.”

As André fell into step beside him, the other man asked, “Why do you want to ride with Richard?”

“The Duke is my liege lor—”

“I know that, Master St. Clair, but why do you wish to ride with him?”

André blinked, mildly surprised that the other man should know his name, but he replied, “It is my duty, as his vassal.”

“No, your duty as his vassal is to obey his every command. He has issued no commands in this. His call was for volunteers. Now let me ask you again: why do you wish to ride with him?”

“To—” André checked himself, aware that he was looking for a lie to justify his wishes, then smiled in spite of himself and conceded defeat.

“To feel a horse between my legs again.”

“After so long at sea, you mean.” Aquila had not been looking at him and had not seen him smile.

“Aye.”

“Do you think you are alone in that?”

“No, not—”

“Quite.” They had turned and crossed in front of the disarmed tiller and were now pacing slowly along the right edge of the stern deck, aware of the watching eyes and the listening ears of the guard at the helm behind them, but now, at the farthest point from where the guard stood watching them, Aquila stopped, turning inward so that he and St. Clair were almost nose to nose, and as he did so he grasped André by the wrist and frowned, as though snarling angrily at him, and lowered his voice dramatically. “Do not move. Do not look away from my face. Listen to what I am saying to you. Listen, as we are being listened to! Let us suppose I granted you permission to ride off with your lord. You would ride for perhaps five miles, on a beast that might prove fit to handle such a distance after a month at sea. And you might encounter this Cypriot Emperor and his crew of fools, after which you might fight them. But you might equally end up on a less than fit horse, on questionable terrain, fighting against men whose skills, though ludicrous, have the potential to be lethal on occasion. Suppose that one of those inept warriors were fortunate enough to strike you down and kill you by accident.” He paused, allowing his words to hang between them, while his eyes never flinched from André’s.

“So there you are,” he continued, his voice little more than an intense whisper. “Sir André St. Clair, dead on an unknown scrap of land in the middle of nowhere, having achieved nothing, and all that you have gone through in this past year is set at naught, a waste of time and effort. And not merely your own time and effort but the efforts of all those people who have worked with you throughout that time in order to prepare you for the task that has been set for you in Outremer.” He stopped, watching confusion and then understanding bloom in André’s eyes, then cocked one eyebrow and nodded, confirming what he saw there.

“We had already decided,” he said, in a louder voice, “those of us in command here, long before this call King Richard has made for volunteers, that the affairs of the Temple must, as always, take precedence over those of a mere king. Our task, our dedicated duty, is to reach the Holy Land alive and to replenish the strength and the fighting blood that our sacred Order has lost in the battles of the past few years. Our reserves there have been severely depleted, our continuing existence endangered, so we cannot afford to lose, or even to risk, the life or welfare of one single man before we come face to face with Saladin and his swarming hordes. The fate of Christianity itself, in Christ’s own land, might depend upon each single man of us, or even upon a single one of us … And who can say who that one man might be?

“So, we remain aboard our ships, or within our own community should we land. We hold ourselves intact, and we avoid becoming caught up in such petty, prideful, unimportant squabbles as may kill good men to no useful purpose. Do you understand me?”

The only thing that André had truly understood until that point was that once again, and unexpectedly, he had encountered a fellow member of the Order of Sion who was aware of his secret purpose in visiting Outremer. He had also understood Aquila’s message beyond a doubt, and now he had not the slightest trouble in seeing the strength of the reasoning underlying the man’s refusal of his request, and the acknowledgment of that made him feel both foolish and selfish. The prattle about the fate of Christianity itself depending upon the Temple was no more than that—prattle designed for the ears of anyone who might be overhearing them. The true message André had received was that he was constantly being watched and guarded, even against himself, by his concerned brethren in Sion. He inhaled deeply, then raised his head and nodded.

“I do, Brother Aquila. I understand … completely. And I regret having brought myself to your attention on such a trivial matter. Forgive me.”

“No need, for no harm was done. But you remain on board from now on unless King Richard summons you directly.”

André found a smile and inclined his head. “I can improve even upon that for you, Senor del’ Aquila, for I have had this conversation with myself, in other circumstances. I will attend upon King Richard only if he summons me as my liege lord, the Duke of Aquitaine. Otherwise I shall remain here and take no foolish risks. I owe no fealty to the realm of England.”

Even as the two of them spoke, Richard and his party were already setting out to ride west towards the town of Kolossi, and hearing them go, for it was yet too dark to see them, André felt no slightest pang of regret at remaining behind. Aquila’s admonition had reminded him of the priorities that governed his life now, and he spent the rest of the morning tending to his weapons, and most particularly to his crossbow, cleaning it of the salt and corrosion that had accumulated on it over the previous months at sea, then cleaning and polishing his supply of bolts and making sure that his supply of bowstrings was in prime condition, dry and well protected against dampness.

After the midday meal, lured by the sights and sounds of the butts where other crossbowmen had set up shooting posts and targets, he went ashore with two other knights and spent an hour at practice until Richard and his party arrived back from their sortie, laden with plunder. The story of their successful raid spread quickly and was greatly enjoyed. The men had found Isaac’s encampment undefended, all of its occupants asleep and not a one of them having considered that the enemy might follow them that night. Richard had attacked immediately, and the ensuing engagement had been a rout from the start, the enemy leaping out of their beds in panic and fleeing for the hills, making no effort to don their discarded clothing or weapons or to fight or defend themselves. Isaac had disappeared and was presumed to have fled among the mob, reportedly heading inland, through the Troodos mountain range to the north, towards Nicosia, seventy miles away, and Richard was in high good humor. The day was Sunday, the twelfth of May, the feast day of Saint Pancras in the year 1191, and it was to prove momentous in several ways other than the defeat of the hapless Isaac, the first of those being the sighting of the remainder of the fleet on the horizon, well ahead of schedule.

André had already listened to several versions of the morning’s events by the time he heard about the incoming fleet, and he was on his way back to his boat on the beach when he heard a familiar voice shouting his name and saw the King himself cantering up behind him. Richard’s color was high and he was very obviously pleased with himself. He swung down from his saddle and flung one arm around André’s shoulders, pulling him strongly and effortlessly down and inward across his chest in the semblance of a wrestling grip.

“I missed your face this morning,” he began, before removing his arm. “Thought you would be with me when I called for volunteers, but then I saw that yours was not the only Templar visage missing from the throng. None of you came with me. Why was that? Does the Temple have a message that it wishes me to be aware of?”

André grinned ruefully, flexing his right shoulder, which, months after his injury, could yet be tender at times. “Yes and no, my lord. I tried to join you but was reminded, as was everyone else who sought permission, that my first duty to this expedition is the rebuilding of our Order’s presence in Outremer. It was pointed out to me that an inglorious and pointless death at the hands of a buffoon in a small Cyprus field would do little to benefit the Temple, whereas my presence in the Holy Land might achieve great things on God’s behalf.”

“Hah!” Richard’s bark of laughter confirmed that not even the Temple’s policies could overcome his goodwill this day. “Whereas my own inglorious and pointless death in the same venture would have no impact at all upon the Temple! God’s balls, these people are arrogant beyond credence.” He hesitated, the merest fraction of a pause. “But you remain my vassal, do you not? You did not swear any vows while I was away?” He saw André’s head shake in denial, and his grin grew wider. “Then that is marvelous, because this day, before the fleet makes harbor and before God can lay claim upon your loyalties, I require you to achieve great things on my behalf, my lad.” His grin still in place, he glanced about him almost furtively, like a small boy contemplating mischief, then plucked at André’s sleeve, pulling him sideways to where they could stand together in the sheltered angle of two wooden, opensided sheds. “There is something I require you to do for me, you alone and right this very minute, while the decision is yet ringing in my mind.”

“Of course, my lord. What is it?”

The King looked him in the eye, appeared to hesitate, and then plunged on, his words tumbling over each other in his haste to get them out. “I need you to commandeer a boat.”

“Already done, my lord. I have one here, close by.”

“Good. Then take it and get you out to the dromons in the bay. Present yourself there to my betrothed and inform her that she and I will be wed today, this evening, before the dinner hour. I will send an escort for her and my sister when the time is right. In the meantime, she is to dress and make herself ready. She will have several hours in which to prepare—two hours, at least, and perhaps three. I have already spoken with Father Nicolas, my chaplain, on the way back from Kolossi. He will conduct the marriage rites, as is his privilege, and he is even now making the necessary preparations for the remainder of the ceremonies. We will use the Chapel of Saint George the Dragon Slayer in the castle of Limassol, which is already ours, and the assembled bishops of our various domains—we have the Bishop of Evreux here, and another from Bayonne, as well as a few archbishops—will name and anoint her formally as Queen of England and place the crown upon her brows as soon as we are man and wife. Tell her all that. And warn Joanna to make sure that everything is as it ought to be. Bid her bring her own women and Berengaria’s, too, to insulate the Queen from such a hedging-about of grim, unsmiling churchmen … And be sure to inform de Sablé’s man, Coutreau, of how many women will be going ashore, for he will need to provide suitable transport for them—a barge, to keep them stable, and with a canopy to keep their hair and headwear free of risk from the wind and their clothing safely dry in the crossing. It would do me little good to have them row through wind and rain to appear there as a bedraggled brood, amidst all the ranks of peacockery that will assemble once the word of this is spread.” He stopped abruptly, then grasped André’s shoulder again, and the pinch of his digging fingers penetrated even the chain-mail shirt beneath André’s surcoat. “Do you understand all I have told you?”

“Aye, my lord.” André quickly rattled through the instructions he had been given, enumerating them succinctly for the King’s benefit, yet thinking all the time that this had come into being very quickly and without warning, and he wondered why that should be so. Lent was long over, and the natural post-Lenten nuptial period of Easter, with all its overtones of rebirth, renewal, and fecundity, had passed without comment, thanks to the Easter storm and the scattering of the fleet. The betrothal might now have been extended indefinitely, without incurring as much as a raised eyebrow, since the urgency of the impending campaign in Outremer now eclipsed everything else and was growing larger with every day that passed. So why, André wondered, was there such an urgency in Richard to perform this wedding now, within the space of a single day? There had been no mention of it the day before, after André’s visit to the Princess. Might it be such a sudden imperative, he wondered now, because the King, riding the high wave of victory over this island’s tyrant, needed to make the leap in full flight, before his courage failed him completely? He searched for signs of panic or desperation in Richard’s demeanor and discovered that he could see evidence of both, and in profusion, although both were muted and strongly held in check.

Richard, unaware of André’s scrutiny, was talking again. “Good. Tell my lady it will be splendid. There is a monastery here in Limassol, a Benedictine fraternity, and I am told they sing wondrously well, so we will have music and light—solid banks of the finest white candles—and copious, billowing clouds of fragrant incense. Tell her that, lest she believe she is being cheated of a Queen’s nuptials. Make sure she knows otherwise … Music and light and incense to set all the senses reeling … and a nuptial feast to follow, to be sure, oxen and sheep and swine already turning on the spit, and fish and fowl being prepared as we speak—” The King broke off, his face suddenly filled with doubt, and looked back over his shoulder. “At least, I trust they are … I spoke to—” He turned back quickly to André. “So be it. Go and do as I bid you. I have other things to see to and other folk to instruct. Quickly now. There’s little time to be lost and none at all for wasting.”

Before André could complete his salute, Richard was gone, swinging himself up into the saddle and pulling his mount sharply around, setting spurs to it and surging towards and through the crowds on the beach, scattering them with no regard for their safety as he bore down on them. André went in search of his boat.

This time his arrival at the dromon’s side was unexpected, and after his boat captain had hailed the deck, André had to bide his time in silence until someone eventually threw him down a rope ladder, his advent evidently having been deemed insufficiently important to warrant the effort of lowering the heavy access ramp. He had had to stand uneasily in the bobbing boat as his two oarsmen manipulated the small vessel with great skill until one of them managed to hook an oar between two of the hanging ladder’s rungs and angle it in to where André could catch it. He grasped the rope sides of the ladder in both hands, then leaned back against the sagging pull of it, looking up the swelling side of the enormous vessel and wondering how he would manage to climb up there in a full suit of mail.

“My thanks,” he called back to the senior oarsman. “If I don’t drown, I should not be long.”

He was dry, at least, when he reached the level of the deck, and consoled himself that only his own men, beneath him, could have seen his undignified scramble to pull himself up the ship’s side, but he was angry at having been put in a position where he needed to run the risk of falling into the sea, unobserved by anyone above. A seaman on the deck opened the gate in the ship’s side to admit him, and two deck officers turned casually, and insolently, André thought, to inspect him as he strode forward. One of them, the senior of the two, judging by the braid on his tunic, opened his mouth to say something, but André shot up an arm in front of him so that the heel of his hand almost smacked against the fellow’s nose.

“Stand at attention when you speak to a King’s messenger, you ill-mannered lout,” he snarled. “I represent Richard of England here, in person, and bear tidings from him to his betrothed and to his sister Joanna, Queen of Sicily. Would Richard himself be required to suffer your insolence and lack of regard on his arrival? Would he be forced to drag himself aboard your ship by hand?” He ignored the increasing pallor of the hapless officer’s skin and pressed himself relentlessly forward into the fellow’s face. “Rest assured that I shall inform him of the possibility when I return to him this afternoon. And don’t you ever again lose sight of the fact that this is not, and will never be, your ship. It is a King’s ship. King Richard’s ship.” He snapped his head sideways and jabbed a finger towards the second, younger officer. “You! Nitwit! Shut your drooling mouth and turn Sir Richard de Bruce out here this instant. Now!” He roared the last word, cutting short the man’s attempt to respond, and the fellow spun on his heel and scampered through a door in the stern wall. André stood staring after him, making no effort to relax his rigid features.

“Sir … Master Sai—”

“Be silent! You had your opportunity to speak as I approached the ship, and you chose to remain aloof and deliver silent insults instead of assistance or courtesy. Now you will learn how it feels to wear wet rags and heave upon an oar as a common seaman, so do what you can to prepare yourself.”

As the officer stood gaping in dismay the door behind him opened and Commodore de Bruce emerged, his glance moving curiously from one of them to the other so that André knew the junior officer had already told him what was happening.

“Master St. Clair,” he said, the beginnings of a frown puckering his brow, “I had not expected to see you again.”

“Clearly. And neither had your pet ape here. I want this man stripped of his rank and duties now, for laziness and disrespect, crass insolence to a King’s messenger, and lèse majesté, insult to the King himself.” He raised a hand quickly, palm outward, to forestall de Bruce’s protest. “Do as I say, Master de Bruce. Do not attempt to sway me or to excuse the man’s conduct, I warn you. He is unfit to be an officer of any kind, even a ship’s officer, and were he mine to command I would have him flogged and forced to serve in the ranks. So see to it that my wishes in this are carried out. I shall expect to see it done by the time I leave here, which should be within the hour, and I intend to make full report of what has happened to King Richard in person.”

“I have no such authority aboard this ship, sir. The ship’s commander—”

“Are you not commodore of these dromons, then?” “Yes, I am, but—”

“No buts, Master de Bruce. Either you command or you do not. Which shall I tell King Richard?”

De Bruce’s shoulders slumped slightly. “Very well, then, I shall instruct the captain … But, Sir André, this man is senior lieutenant of this ship.”

“Was he, by God? How then are the mighty fallen. Now, if you will, send word to the ladies Berengaria and Joanna that I attend them here with urgent tidings from the King.”

De Bruce drew himself erect and bobbed his head. “Of course. At once.” He turned an icy glance upon the condemned officer. “You, sir, will wait in my quarters.”

As both men left, leaving only the junior officer on deck, extremely subdued and crestfallen, André turned his back and stared out over the distant bow of the ship, aware that the seaman who had held the gate for him was standing rigidly at attention, his eyes on André and his face absolutely without expression. I wonder what you thought of that, he asked himself, beginning to wonder if he might have been too hard on the lieutenant, making a point merely to emphasize and simultaneously purge his own anger. The thought barely lasted a moment, however, for he knew he had been right—he recalled the manner in which the fellow had sneered at his appearance the previous day, the first time André had come aboard the ship. There had been no real offense given or taken on that occasion, but the man’s attitude of disdainful intolerance had been noticeable and, André now realized, memorable. He put the fellow from his mind just as the door opened at his back and de Bruce re-emerged to tell him that the ladies would receive him at once.

ANDRÉ ST. CLAIR HAD WONDERED from the outset at the suddenness of the King’s determined resolve to be wed at once, and he had thought even then, listening to Richard talk of singing monks and massed candles and assembled bishops and archbishops, that the abruptness of it all was likely to be causing enormous inconvenience to everyone involved, from cooks to housekeepers and quartermasters, nearly all of whom must have been caught as flat-footed as he himself had been by the monarch’s impetuous and imperious decision. He was completely unprepared, however, for the storm of furious and impassioned disbelief and protest that his tidings precipitated among the women on the dromon. It broke over his head out of a clear blue sky and left him reeling, mouth agape, and beginning to perceive, yet unable to comprehend, the enormity of the crime he had been cajoled into perpetrating upon, and in the eyes of, Richard’s women. It mattered not that he was merely the messenger, guiltless of complicity or wrongdoing; someone had to bear the brunt of their collective outrage, and he was the closest and most qualified recipient for their ferocious indignation.

Afterwards he would realize, with gratitude, that the worst of it was brief lived, solely because the women had no time to waste on him once the gravity of their situation began to make itself felt. They were plunged into a frenzy of preparations, and he was quickly forgotten. St. Clair found himself standing in a whirlwind of panic-inspired noise, amid a seething blizzard of women’s clothing that seemed to fill the air entirely, and moments after that he had been ejected from the cabin.

Although vaguely dazed, he had acquired the knowledge that he needed most: there would be nine women in the attending group to be collected by de Sablé’s barge. The Princess would bring her aged dueña, who had been her nurse from infancy, and two younger ladies of Navarre; Joanna would be accompanied by her own senior companion and servant, Maria, and by three Sicilian women, two of them widowed and the other single, who had been her ladies-in-waiting when she was Queen in her own right.

He made his way towards the exit gate in the side of the ship, noticing only as he arrived there that the access ramp had been swung out and lowered into place, and the sight of it reminded him of the other matter he had set in motion. The same seaman was standing by the gate in the ship’s side, and André told him to alert his boat’s crew that he would be there soon. He then turned back to where the junior lieutenant stood watching him warily, poised on the balls of his feet.

“Call Sir Richard for me.”

“Yes, Sir André.” The response was as clipped as any one expected on a parade ground, and the lieutenant spun smartly away to deliver the summons. Sir Richard de Bruce emerged from his quarters moments later and came, stiff faced, straight to André, who nodded brusquely.

“The other fellow, what have you done with him?”

“I have confined him to his cabin, Sir André.”

“Not good enough. Strip him to his tunic, put him in chains, and hold him under guard, publicly, over there in that corner, to await the King’s verdict. It will do your self-satisfied fool no harm to see the world for a time through the eyes of those less fortunate than he is. He needs to be reminded that, as an undistinguished officer aboard one of the King’s ships, he ranks only slightly higher than the ruffians he commands and can ill afford to give offense to anyone, let alone anyone who might be in a position at some time to seek revenge on him. What is his name, by the way?”

“De Blois, Sir André.”

St. Clair’s eyebrows shot up, but then he smiled. “D’you say so? One of his kinsmen did his best to kill me a little while ago. He failed, of course, but I found him decidedly unpleasant to be around, and now I find it interesting that this fellow is another de Blois. Family traits, Sir Richard … Family traits.”

André left the commodore staring after him and went directly to the gate, which the seaman held open for him. His boat was waiting at the bottom of the ramp, and this time he jumped aboard easily and settled himself in the stern as the rowers swung away from the great ship. And there André learned another lesson about the strangenesses of the maritime fraternity. He asked his boat master, the helmsman, if he had any idea where they might begin to look for the Count of Coutreau, the Deputy Master of the Fleet, and the fellow looked all around the assembled ships, then pointed unhesitatingly to one of the newcomers.

“Over there, sir,” he growled, “aboard yon Englishman.”

“How can you know that?” André was truly astonished, and the big helmsman grinned and tapped the side of his nose.

“The standard, sir, the high flag yonder at the masthead, higher than all the others, with the three green triangles on the white field and the twin tails. That’s the standard of the fleet commander. Goes with him from ship to ship, so the rest of the fleet knows where he is at any time. Green triangles is the deputy, and means the Master himself isn’t here. His standard’s triangles are blue. Same flag, otherwise.”

André was duly impressed. “You tell me so,” he said, “but is it always thus?”

“Always, sir. Without fail. Where the Fleet Master goes, his standard goes, and mounts to the top of the mast. It’s only good sense, sir, when ye think on it. In time of trouble, or in war, when people look for guidance or command, they look to the masts for the flagship, the one that flies the Master’s standard. That’s where the Master is, and that’s where command is held.”

“By Heaven, that is inspired! Who thought of that?”

The helmsman dipped his head, tapping the side of his nose again. “Someone smarter than me, sir … and a few years older. I don’t think there’s ever been a time at sea when that wasn’t the way of things. Like I said, it’s only good sense, isn’t it, when you think on it?”

“Aye, you’re right, it is.” André’s face broke into a slow grin. “The same kind of good sense that keeps men away from women when there’s marriage in the offing … Take me to the Fleet Master now, directly.”

SEVERAL HIGH-RANKING MEMBERS of the Order of the Temple attended the royal nuptials that evening, to witness the marriage and the new Queen’s coronation, and by all reports it was a grand occasion, with massed banks of candles turning the air golden in the chapel while incense billowed. The monks of no fewer than five monasteries combined with those from Christendom to generate chanted prayers the equal of which had never been heard in Cyprus. The large number of bishops in attendance, all of them decked in their finest jeweled robes and attended by their retinues of sumptuously dressed acolytes, turned the scene into a glittering riot of colors and fabrics, and yet the bride and her women, despite the lack of notice they had received, succeeded nonetheless, and in spite of all this churchly splendor, in dazzling the eyes of every layman present, and no doubt those of many a churchman, too.

André and his companions did not even hear the singing of the massed monks. Like almost everyone else in the port of Limassol who was not involved in the actual marriage festivities that day and night, their time was entirely taken up by the arrival of the fleet. They had all had duties apportioned to them hours before the first ships made harbor, and their afternoon and evening fled by in brutal, backbreaking work that lasted well into the darkest hours of the night. They worked alongside others, in gangs or groups, although the Templars formed their own work parties and held themselves apart from everyone else, and each group was assigned to a specific task by the officials responsible for the orderly disposition of the incoming ships and their cargoes.

By the time the initial levies of dockside workers fell into sleep that night, whether they were locally conscripted laborers or arbitrarily assigned soldiers and seamen, they were all worn out and senseless from lack of rest, and tempers had been sorely frayed and blood spilt in more than one dockside tussle. And still the work of disembarkation continued, the various tasks taken over by fresh crews and gangs.

St. Clair rose as usual for morning prayers, but he had had little sleep in the previous thirty-six hours, and so he felt no guilt about finding himself an obscure corner afterwards and curling up to sleep again unseen while his fellows went about their assigned daily chores. He awoke refreshed about an hour before noon to discover that the day had been declared a day of rest and celebration to mark the King’s marriage, and then, attracted by loud voices and the delicious aroma of roasting meat nearby, he made his way to the ship’s side and saw several score of men gathered around a cluster of cooking fires on the beach close by his ship. A cask of beer had been mounted on a trestle on the sand, and the sight of it sitting there in the bright sunlight dried his mouth, so that he felt the lust for the cool taste of it against the back of his tongue. He went to his quarters, almost empty at this time of day, took off his mailed hauberk and dressed himself in plain tunic and leggings for the first time in weeks. Then, glad as a boy to be without armor, he strode ashore and made his way directly towards the fires and the celebration going on there. He helped himself to a flagon of beer, and then someone cut him a slab of meat from one of three carcasses roasting on spits, and he wedged it between two thick slices of fresh bread and went looking for a place to sit and eat it in comfort. He found a log large enough for two people to sit on by one of the fires and settled down to eat and to listen.

The talk around him was all of the previous night’s wedding feast, and the arrival of the force from Outremer, with its three ships bearing King Guy and his entourage of highly placed dignitaries and a hundred and sixty knights. André had little interest in the wedding talk, knowing he would soon learn more than he needed to know about it, but the topic of the visitors from Outremer interested him greatly, for he had seen some of the knights the previous day and had been impressed by their dour and hard-worn appearance. He could not begin to imagine why King Guy, the rightful King of Jerusalem, should leave the country in a time of war, accompanied by so many battle-ready knights, unless he had been ousted in some manner that defied understanding, but he learned more about that situation in the first half hour after his arrival at the cooking fires than he could have learned in a week in any other place, because the men around the fires, by sheer good fortune from his viewpoint, were members of Richard’s own guard. As such, they were inevitably privy to more trustworthy information than were many of the King’s more high-born followers, because the guards were present around the King’s person on all public, formal, and even semi-private occasions and thus were normally taken for granted, ignored and all but forgotten by the people they were there to watch.

The first thing that sank through to him from all that he was hearing was that Philip of France, on landing at Acre, had chosen to support Conrad of Montferrat over Guy de Lusignan in the matter of their conflicting claims to the crown of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. That really surprised André, for it had been made clear to him by his own brotherhood, months earlier, that Conrad was both cousin and vassal to Barbarossa, the so-called Holy Roman Emperor, and that both of them were adherents of the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity. Each had publicly avowed his dedication, years earlier, to reinforcing the Orthodox Church within the Kingdom and the city of Jerusalem, twin affirmations that had been noted with alarm and then condemned by the Roman papacy and had resulted in the frenzied papal support that had fomented the current Frankish campaign to recapture the Holy City. But Philip himself was one of the two leaders of that campaign. Barbarossa was dead now and his army no longer a threat to Rome’s ambitions, but if Philip of France was now siding openly with Conrad of Montferrat in opposing the legitimate claim of Guy de Lusignan to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, then the French King was thumbing his nose, deliberately, at the Pope … which meant, by direct association, that he was including Richard, his nominal partner and coequal, in that defiance. That, André knew, was a major error on Philip’s part, for it would force Richard to make a choice, and a commitment, that was likely to benefit no one.

André had little personal sympathy for King Guy’s plight, because de Lusignan was no man’s idea of a heroic leader, especially when his record was compared with that of Richard. Guy had demonstrated time and again, with depressing repetitiveness, that his inconsistency was limitless and that he was incapable of holding, for any length of time, a position or an opinion that was purely his own and uninfluenced by anyone else’s thinking. Despite that, however, and even though his own deplorable behavior had done nothing to strengthen his situation, Guy’s claim to his crown was legitimate, albeit decidedly flimsy.

The undisputed claimant to the crown of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, or the Latin Kingdom as most men were now calling it, had been Guy’s wife, Sibylla, the sister and sole surviving heir of King Baldwin IV, the Leper King. No one had disputed Sybilla’s succession to the throne after the death of her brother’s only male heir, a sickly nephew who had not survived childhood, but everyone had been outraged by her choice of a consort. She had chosen her current lover, Guy de Lusignan, to rule with her, and coerced the aged Patriarch of Jerusalem into crowning the fellow not merely as a Prince Consort to the Queen but as the legitimate King in his own right. Her barons, the entire nobility of her realm, were scandalized, for they regarded Guy as an interloper, an adventurer, and a shameless opportunist.

He had arrived in the kingdom sometime earlier, an unknown from France, supposedly well born but with a background that was murky and shaded by rumors, and had succeeded somehow, in spite of that, in ingratiating himself sufficiently with the local barons to persuade them to appoint him as regent in the young heir’s minority. His regency had been less than spectacular, and on the sole occasion when he had to make a show of force against the Saracens, at a place called Tubania, he had all but run away from the confrontation. That buffoonery had cost him his regency, although the young heir had died soon afterwards, rendering the annulment moot, but it had also cost Guy all his credibility in the eyes of the barons of the kingdom.

André swallowed a last mouthful of food and wiped the grease from his lips with the back of one hand before drinking deeply and then turning to look at his nearest neighbor, a slight, clean-shaven man with a hooked nose and a hollowed-out face that seemed lacking in lips and teeth. The fellow also had almost excessively broad shoulders, and he had sat down quietly beside André only moments earlier and was now diligently attacking a thick slice of juicy pork. He paid no attention to anyone at first, but when André greeted him he looked across at him and grunted, then stuffed the meat in his mouth into one cheek. André had noticed that he had brought nothing with him to drink.

“Good pig,” the fellow said. “Did you have some?” He spoke narrowly, barely opening his mouth, so that his accent—André had no idea which region it sprang from—sounded tight and nasal, but his words were understandable at least, and André was pleased, for the odds of having found, at first try, someone with whom he could converse straightforwardly among this enormous force were greatly less than even. He swallowed a belch and nodded.

“No, I think what I ate was goat, but it was good. When was the day of rest declared? I missed hearing about it until I woke up and caught the smell of roasting meat, about an hour ago.”

His neighbor sniffed. “Last night at midnight,” he said.

“What about the people unloading the ships?”

“What about them? Somebody has to unload the ships. I worked all afternoon, yest’day, then had to go on watch last night. I saw you out there, too, with one of the Templar crews, didn’t I? You one of them?”

André grunted. “Aye, a novice, lowest of the low. Not a Templar yet, but not a common nobody either, so I can’t win at anything, anywhere.” He hoisted his empty flagon. “I’m going to get more beer. Can I bring you one?”

The man looked about him as though surprised to discover that he had none, and then made to get up. “I’ll come with you.”

“No, then we’ll lose our seats. Stay here and finish your meat.”

By the time he returned, his new companion had finished eating and was staring morosely into the fire in front of him. André handed him a flagon of beer and sat back down beside him.

“Interesting that King Guy should turn up here, all the way from where you’d expect him to be, when we’re supposed to be on the way to help him. Don’t you think?”

“Interesting?” The guardsman shrugged. “No. I mean … I suppose it is if you care. But who cares? Besides, we’re not going over there to help him. We’re going over to kick the Saracens out of God’s country, aren’t we? To take it back for the Church …” He shook his head. “Can’t see much in favor of our helping him, when I think about it … if I thought about it … He’s not much of a king at all, if you ask me. I mean, our boy, Richard, now there’s a king. Looks like one, dresses like one, and behaves like one. That’s what a king’s supposed to be … a fighter. A scrapper, d’you know what I mean? Someone who knows what’s his and’ll take your head off if you so much as look sideways at it. That’s a king. These other characters … Well, I mean, look at Philip … Or don’t. I’d rather not. Do you look at him and see a king right off? I think not. Oh, we all know he is one … and he talks like one and wears the fine clothes, but he’s too prissy. He’s too … I don’t know what he is, what the word is, but he’s too something for my liking. Something that he needs to be but isn’t. Certes, he’ll have you murdered in your bed or stabbed in a dark alley if you cross ’im, but he’ll never stand up and damn you to your face before he rips your head off with his bare hands, like Richard will … And this King Guy’s the same way, from what I’ve heard.”

“What have you heard? What’s your name, by the way?”

“Nickon … Nich’las, really, but Nickon’s what I get. What’s yours?” André told him and he nodded. “Aye, well, André, from what I’ve been told, this Guy, this Jerusalem King, looks as though he should be good in a fight, but he doesn’t often get to fight, if you know what I mean. Not too many people confident of his leadership … He’s the one caught all the blame for the big battle at Hattin, where your lot and the Hospitallers got slaughtered and we all got kicked out of Jerusalem. They say he lost it all single-handedly, ’cause he didn’t know his arse from his elbow and couldn’t make up his mind whether to stop and fight or run and hide … Anyway, one of the nobs he brought with him was talking to the King—our King—day before yest’day, and I was on duty, right there within reach of ’em. Anyway this fellow, some big baron from Jerusalem, he was saying that Guy was the one who set up the siege of Acre, two years ago, and he’s been holding Saladin’s crew tied up there ever since.”

He cocked his head, looking sideways at André. “He was captured and held prisoner by old Saladin himself, did you know that?” André shook his head, pursing his lips, and Nickon nodded solemnly. “Well, he was, for more than a year … Mind you, being a prisoner and a king probably isn’t the same thing as being a prisoner and a plain old sweaty guardsman, because Saladin let him go after that, on condition that Guy promised not to fight against him again. So Guy promised, and he got out, and then he started raising an army right away … Well, a promise to a godless heathen’s no promise at all, is it? ’Specially if it’s made under … you know …”

“Duress.”

“Right. Anyway, it took him a while, but he finally raised an army and set siege to Acre …” Nickon tilted his head, eyeing André from an angle. “You’ve ’eard about Acre, haven’t you? You know what it is?”

“Yes … and no. I remember hearing something vaguely, but it was a long time ago and I didn’t pay much attention. I had no notion at the time that I’d ever be going there. Tell me about it. What’s so important about Acre?”

“Well, it’s a port, isn’t it? One of the places that Saladin overran and swallowed up right after Hattin. The only place he didn’t get, right at that time, was Tyre, another port, farther to the north, and he would’ve had that as well if it hadn’t been for Conrad of Montferrat. I’d never heard of him before yest’day, but I’ve heard a lot about the whoreson since then, I’ll tell you. He’s a German, some kind of baron or high lord, one of Barbarossa’s people, and he turned up in the Holy Land by accident—” He checked himself. “Well, not by accident, not really, but nobody there knew he was coming, and he sailed right into the harbor at Tyre with a fleet of ships full of knights and soldiers on the very day the people in charge was getting ready to surrender the city. Put an end to that, Conrad did, and right quickly, and the upshot was that Saladin withdrew … Nobody really knows why he withdrew, but he did, straight away. Turned around and marched away down south and captured Acre instead … And his army’s still holding it, even though they’ve been under siege for two years now, and King Guy’s the fellow who started the siege.”

André wrinkled his brow. “Wait, now … I understand all that, but what has it to do with Conrad and Guy being enemies?”

“Nothing, my old lad … and everything. I can see why you’re still a novice. Conrad and Guy are two cats fighting over the same mouse … The mouse is the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and there’s nothing happens in the Holy Land that isn’t touched by it. Conrad sailed into Tyre by accident and rescued it. Now he’s Marquis of Tyre. Guy sailed into Jerusalem and tupped its Queen—though she wasn’t the Queen then, not yet— and now he’s the King of Jerusalem. Conrad is envious. The kingdom’s bigger than a pissy little port and he wants it for himself. And according to what this nob was saying to the King yest’day, he might get it, one of these days … See, he’s arguing—and there seems to be a lot of people over there who support him—he’s saying that Guy was only king there because his wife, this Sibylla, was the rightful queen. Sibylla died last year … she’s gone. Ergo, according to Conrad and those who’d like to see him on the throne, Guy no longer has a claim to the crown.”

“But Guy was crowned legally, was he not?”

The guardsman turned and looked at André from beneath raised eyebrows, lifting his arms in appeal. “I don’t know. Somebody forgot to invite me to the coronation.”

“Aye, well, he was, by the old Patriarch Archbishop of Jerusalem.”

Nickon slowly pushed his lips out into a pout that was all the more impressive because he had no lips to speak of, his mouth little more than a horizontal slash. Nonetheless he managed to convey great skepticism, perhaps because of that, and as André began to ask him why, he lifted one hand and shook his head slowly from side to side.

“Ask yourself one question, lad … Do you really believe Montferrat and his cronies care for a moment about what some doddering bishop might have done five years ago? There is a kingdom at stake here, lad. The actions of one bishop, patriarch or not, won’t stand up for a single heartbeat against the urgency of that …” He paused, and then his face broke into a wrinkled grin. “And I can tell you that with certainty, because I heard the Jerusalem baron fellow say the same thing, word for word, to King Richard yest’day, after the King said what you did, about King Guy’s coronation …

“See, they don’t care about what’s legal. All they care about is setting Conrad on the throne and throwing Guy out into the desert. Ever since Conrad first landed in Tyre and heard about what happened at Hattin, he’s been working at undermining Guy and taking his place. He’s never stopped, not for a moment … When Guy won free from Saladin and went to Tyre, the first thing he did was ask for the keys of the city from Conrad, because he was the King and this was all that remained of his kingdom. Of course, he didn’t get them. Conrad accused him of uselessness and cowardice right then and there and told Guy that with the disgraceful defeat at Hattin, he had forfeited the right to call himself King. And then, shortly after that, he turned around and claimed the kingdom for himself and kicked Guy out of the city. He wasn’t shy about claiming the crown like that. He’d already gone from nobody to Marquis of Tyre, so the step to kingship couldn’t have looked like much of a challenge.

“After that, instead of going away—because the fact was he had nowhere to go—Guy simply stayed outside of Tyre and worked at raising an army beyond the walls, and Conrad did nothing to discourage him … in fact he sent him men because he had more people inside the city than he could feed. Guy eventually gathered about seven hundred men, most of them Templars and many of them from inside Tyre, including the Master of the Temple, de Rid-something-or-other.”

“Gerard de Ridefort.”

“Yes, him … and that made all the difference, because once Guy had the support of the Templars behind him, others kept drifting in to join him, and soon he had several thousand under arms, all of them eager for a fight, and in the month of August he marched them south and set siege to Acre. A little while after that, fearing to lose the advantage to Guy, Conrad led some of his own people to join the siege. He and Guy managed to cooperate for a while, and to his credit, Guy held his end up really well in the one big clash they had with Saladin’s forces outside of the city. But the army soon split up into factions—Guy’s people against Conrad’s—and that’s the way it remained for more than a year …”

“And? There’s more. I can hear it in your voice.”

“Aye, there is … And then King Philip showed up with his half of the army … He met with both several times, weighed one up against the other, and chose Conrad. That’s why King Guy is here. He decided he couldn’t wait for Richard to come to him, because Philip’s been telling everyone that Richard is more interested in dallying with his friends than in reaching the Holy Land. So Guy left Philip and Conrad in front of Acre and he sailed here with the pick of his best knights, hoping to convince Richard of the need to hurry to Acre and bring Philip to heel.”

“And will he, think you?”

“Will he convince the King, you mean?” Nickon twisted his face. “King Richard’s advisers might tell you he will … Personally, I think he already has, because Richard listened very carefully to all he had to say, and when he had finished talking he gifted him with new clothes and armor … Guy’s old clothes were threadbare and his chain mail rusted and falling apart. He also gave him fifteen hundred pounds in silver marks and various other treasures to replace what he had lost ... Now, I’ve been in attendance on the King for many years, and I’ve never known him to do a thing like that for someone he doesn’t like, or doesn’t intend to help.”

“Hmm. And based upon that familiarity and experience, what d’you think he’ll do now?”

He never did receive an answer, for even as he asked it, one of Nickon’s friends came striding urgently towards their fire with word that brought both men to their feet. Isaac Comnenus, he told them, had sent envoys to Richard, suing for peace and a settlement of their differences, and Richard, precipitate as ever, had already agreed to a truce and committed to meet the Emperor outside the gates of Limassol at mid-afternoon. The King would ride out in full panoply, and Nickon and his fellows were recalled to duty immediately, to escort him, dressed in full parade armor. Within moments, Nickon had vanished in the direction of the city gates, and André was alone again, mulling over what they had discussed and trying to decide what to do next. He knew that he did not want to miss the confrontation between his King and Isaac Comnenus, so he went back on board his ship, collected his crossbow against the possibility of finding time to practice later in the day, and set off on foot, his crossbow and quiver dangling from his shoulder, towards the appointed meeting place on a slightly elevated plateau on the flatlands slightly to the west of the city gates.