Standard of Honor

ELEVEN

André St. Clair had cause to recall his cousin’s observations concerning chastity and asceticism the following day, for before the army struck camp and marched out to the south, he found himself almost face to face with Richard’s sister Joanna Plantagenet. The massive army had been astir since long hours before dawn, when the bells and trumpets of the King’s Heralds had rousted everyone from their beds to begin preparing for what would be a long and wearisome day, Sunday, the twenty-fourth day of August 1191, the Feast Day of Saint Bartholomew. The prayers of matins had been set aside that day, because of the preparations for departure, but before dawn, notwithstanding that, the priests and bishops were everywhere celebrating Holy Mass, and the sound of chanted prayers reverberated on all sides, spilling over on each other from place to place and generating a sound that was like the buzz of an enormous beehive.

André, carrying his steel helm, and with his mailed hood unlaced to bare his head, had been making his way from crowd to crowd of worshippers, searching for Alec, and managing to look devout and intent as he deftly avoided stopping anywhere, but as he emerged into one area that had a higher concentration of torchlight than any other, it registered upon his awareness that the smell of incense was thicker here, the light stronger and the clothing of the celebrants, including no fewer than three officiating bishops, was of a much richer quality than anything he had seen before. He saw a concentration of clean and brilliant red-crossed white surcoats on his left and recognized Sir Robert de Sablé among them, unmistakable in his magnificent Grand Master’s mantle of thick white woven wool with the plain black, equal-armed cross on front and rear. Alec Sinclair stood beside the Grand Master, and André began to swerve towards them, but he stopped abruptly when he saw the King standing on de Sablé’s other side, and on Richard’s left, the two Queens, Berengaria and Joanna Plantagenet, with their women clustered behind them.

Because of the angle from which he had begun to approach them, no one in the royal grouping had seen him moving, but something in the way he froze caught Joanna’s attention, and she turned her head and looked right at him. André did not even have time to lower his head, and so he merely lowered his eyes, hoping that, from where she was, he would blend into the mass of faces behind him. He kept his eyes cast down for a count of five, highly conscious of how slowly time was passing, then looked up again to find her staring at him still, a slight frown marring the smoothness of her forehead. Willing himself then not to move a muscle or react in any way, knowing that if he did he would tighten her focus on him, he lowered his eyes again slowly and counted once again to five and then to ten, reciting to himself a litany of reasons why she should not be expected to recognize him: she had never seen him in the full Templar uniform, and when she had seen him, he had been clean shaven and his hair had been long and unkempt, befitting an unranked novice, whereas now his head was cropped short and he wore a heavy growth of beard. By his estimation, she was unlikely to remember him, but yet she plainly had recognized something about him, even if she had not placed him absolutely. He raised his eyes again, slowly, and felt a great surge of relief to see that she was no longer frowning at him, although she was still frowning, her eyes moving now over the other faces around him. He watched her then, willing her to look away, and soon she did, turning back towards the altar at the front. He decided he had best move away to stand in a different place on the fringe of the crowd, resolving to wait until later before speaking to Alec.

He did not leave immediately, however. Confident now that he had not been recognized and that Joanna would not be able to pick him out among the crowd again, he eased himself up onto a nearby stone and looked his fill upon the two Queens, neither one of whom, it seemed to him, had suffered even slightly from the privations of living in a military encampment. Berengaria in particular looked superb; queenly and self-possessed, radiant and manifestly content, she showed no slightest indication that she might be the wife of a man whose complete disinterest in women was a matter for jest and public commentary. Looking at her now, and noting the hectic flush upon her cheeks, André fancied that he saw her glance sideways towards a fine-looking young guardsman who stood vigilantly by her side, approximately one step ahead of her, and he looked more closely at the man, noting the stalwart, upright stance, the held head high, and the defiant ardor with which his bearing proclaimed his devotion to his duty as the Queen’s Guard.

Amused, but not at all surprised, André moved his eyes to where Joanna stood, as prominent as though she were alone, although surrounded by a crowd. Joanna Plantagenet, he thought, not for the first time, was a remarkable and attractive woman. It was plain to see that she, too, was not lacking in physical affection or attention, although try as he would, he could gain no inkling of who, if anyone, among the crowd might be the recipient of her favors. He found it surprisingly easy to smile at his own wonderings and to accept and then dismiss the fact that he might have enjoyed those charms. With one last, lingering look at the slim, upright figure, with its thrusting breasts and closely draped waist and hips, he tilted himself wryly towards asceticism, if not outright chastity, and decided to make his way back to his own marshaling area.

With his thoughts thus busy on carnal matters, André had almost forgotten about another gaze that he wished to avoid, and before he stepped down from the stone he was perched on, he felt, more than saw, the King’s eyes fixed upon him. He would never know whether the iciness in Richard’s baleful stare was an expression of regal rancor or of his own consciousness of having crossed and disappointed the King—something his father had warned him never to do—in the matter of Berengaria. Aware of some safety in the physical distance between them, André held the King’s gaze for a long moment, feeling courageous as he did so, yet simultaneously conscious of a deep dread, spawned by a nagging doubt about his responsibility to the man who was once his hero, in spite of everything he knew about him now.

It was Richard who looked away first, leaving André to rejoin his comrades with a sickening sense of having been irrevocably cast out, for better or for worse.

As soon as the Masses were concluded, camp-breaking stepped up to a frenzy as thousands of tents were laid out and uniformly folded before being loaded on the baggage train. The great siege engines had been dismantled and mounted on their transport platforms weeks earlier, after the surrender of the city, and armies of sappers and engineers had been busy for the previous few days manhandling them into position for the march to the south. They had then moved forward with them the day before, so that they were already several miles ahead of the army that would follow. There was much coming and going of traffic between the marshaling points and the Acre harbor, too, as barges pulled in to the piers to be heavily laden with foodstuffs and weaponry in preparation for the journey down the coastline, paralleling the army’s line of advance along the ancient coast road built by the Roman legions before the time of the Caesars.

But eventually everything was laden, the troops were drawn up in their formations, the last of the encampments were dismantled and the latrines filled in, and to a great, brazen rally of trumpets, the first ranks of the advancing host wheeled into place and struck out along the road to Jerusalem.

TWO DAYS LATER, after a slow and uneventful march in which they covered less than ten miles, marching in the cool of the morning and avoiding the sun in the afternoon, André St. Clair finally met with his cousin. He had decided to stay well away from Alec on the march and to leave it to his cousin to seek him out when he had time, for there was an ever-present danger of encountering Richard in the area surrounding the Templars’ tent and de Sablé’s own pavilion, and André had no wish to court the possibility of a casual encounter with his former liege. He was unsure of how he might react on meeting his father’s killer face to face, be he king or no. And so it was Alec who found him, sitting alone on the ground close by his tent and free, for the time being, from the presence of any of his squadron, his closest neighbors almost twenty feet away, a significant degree of privacy in the middle of an army that numbered tens of thousands.

“I brought wine,” Alec said in lieu of greeting, lobbing a full skin into André’s hastily outstretched hands and then looking around him in surprise. “Where’s your squadron? Did you lose them?”

“No, but I lost patience with them. They’re out there somewhere, drilling. I told my first sergeant, Le Sanglier, to have them set up butts and practice with their crossbows until dinnertime. It’s been nigh on two weeks since last they practiced, and it seems like twice that long since I last had a moment to myself without their voices deafening me. Why is it, think you, that soldiers seem incapable of speaking quietly? Anyway, thank you for this. I won’t even ask where you stole it from, but will drink straight to your good health.” He unstoppered the wineskin and held it up to his mouth, then drank deeply before offering it back to Alec.

“Well,” he continued eventually, “we are alone, so tell me, for my ears only, since you are the man with the inside information. Where are we going and what is our intent?”

“Arsuf is where we’re headed. Have you ever heard of it?”

“No. Had you, before someone told you we were going there?”

“Yes, but solely because I went there once. It’s an ancient port, about sixty-five miles south of Acre. And I said ancient, not merely old. The Greeks who built the place called it Apollonia. It’s a walled town, too, not very large but easily defensible, with a sandstone fortress, now in ruins, on the landward side. It’s one of the places Saladin’s people captured after Hattin. Now Richard intends to take it back and use it as a base for his attack on Jaffa, another, larger port six miles to the south of Arsuf. Once he has those ports as safe harbors for his supply barges, he can then swing inland for the fifty-mile drive on Jerusalem.”

“Hmm. And where is Saladin’s army? Instinct tells me they may be protecting Jerusalem, but we are nowhere near there yet, so why would they bother, at this stage?”

“They are here. As you say, Jerusalem is in no danger at this point. Saladin is above us, up in those hills ahead and almost within view, watching our progress until he gauges that the time is right for an attack.”

“What hills are those? With one sole exception, they do not appear to be too high.”

“Nor are they. The high one is Mount Carmel.”

“Now that is a name I have heard. Mount Carmel … Is it close to where we are going?”

“Aye, it’s right beside our destination.”

“And you think Saladin will attack us from up there, from above?”

“Absolutely, but he won’t wait until we reach Carmel. As soon as we penetrate the foothills, where the road rises and falls from crest to crest, he’ll hit us with everything he has, but on a broad plane of attack— small groups of hardened attackers, plunging down out of the hills independently of each other, along the entire extended length of our line of march, hitting whatever they can hit, wherever they find it. They will swoop in, create as much damage and havoc as they can, then pull back out and flee before we can rally anything like a counterthrust.”

“And is there nothing we can do to stop them?”

“Aye, we can turn tail and march back to Acre, but even so there will be no guarantee that they will not chase us. So we may just as well press forward.”

“Faster, I hope, than we have been moving to this point?”

“No.” Alec shook his head and almost smiled. “I find myself admiring Richard at times like this … as a general, I mean, a strategist. I think he is inspired in this. He is restrained, cool headed, judicious, and clearly thinking far ahead. His policy of advancing slowly and in comfort is unimpeachable. March in the cool morning hours, rest in the long, hot afternoons, and thus remain unruffled and adaptable, untaxed by the heat and capable of responding quickly and strongly to anything the enemy might throw at us. If he continues to use tactics like these, he will have the edge on Saladin. Four miles a day, I know, seems deathly slow to men like us, accustomed as we are to riding everywhere, but you know as well as I do that an army’s progress is tied to the speed of its slowest units, and in our case, the slowest units are our siege engines. We will be fortunate, I think, if we can maintain four miles a day with those. Were it not for the fact that this road was Roman-built and has been more or less maintained, our speed might well be cut in half. And yet we can’t simply walk off and leave these devices behind us, lying at the side of the road, not without opening ourselves to the threat of having them used against us at some future date. So, we will keep forging forward and resisting the temptation to charge the enemy.”

“Since when has charging and engaging the enemy been something to deplore?”

Alec Sinclair looked straight at his cousin without the slightest hint of raillery in his voice or his look. “Since Gerard de Ridefort led a Templar charge into total extinction at Hattin, four years ago. Since he lost his full force of a hundred and sixty Temple knights, plus a knot of Hospitallers, a mere month prior to that, charging downhill against four thousand Saracen horsemen at the Springs of Cresson. And since two thousand Frankish infantry went charging into death on the same day as de Ridefort’s cavalry at Hattin. Every time we mount a charge against this enemy, we are overwhelmed and defeated, because Saladin’s people know exactly how to counteract the superior advantages of our Christian horse. De Ridefort is dead now, and so are his tactics. You will see no more foolish charges mounted nowadays against a mobile, agile force of mounted bowmen.” He stopped suddenly, cocking his head. “Listen. What was that?” The sound came again, a ripple of brazen trumpet notes. “Damnation, I thought that’s what it was. Officers’ call. I have to go.”

He clambered to his feet and tossed the wineskin back to André. “Keep this. You’ll need it. Tomorrow should be much like today, but we’ll start climbing into the foothills the morning after that, and that’s when the gnats will start to buzz down from the hills, so have your people ready. One of our staff members made the recommendation that crossbow units should march with their crossbows armed, ready for instant use, but his advice was disregarded. Personally, I think he was right, and if I were you, I’d have my people ride prepared for anything as soon as we enter the hill region. But as I said, that won’t be until the day after tomorrow. I’ll try to see you again before then.” The trumpet call sounded again in the distance as he said that, and he brought his clenched fist to his breast in a salute. “That said, keep your head down in the interim. There’s a sickness of Saracens out there.”

ALEC SINCLAIR’S PREDICTION proved accurate. The next day, having covered another four miles without seeing a Saracen or being molested in any way, the army made camp just short of the foothills of Mount Carmel, and the morning after that, as they began to climb the slopes of the first hills, the attacks began and then continued throughout the day and into the night, creating a tension that kept everyone awake and fidgety, since there was never any warning of where the next attack would materialize. The enemy came down surprisingly quietly from the heights—and particularly so at night—in small, lightly armored, and maneuverable groups of thirty to forty bowmen mounted on wiry, sure-footed Yemeni horses. There was seldom any time to prepare for their assault, because they made so little noise before they swooped in to the attack, emerging from nowhere to create chaos and strike terror into the units they hit, charging and churning and killing and then withdrawing before the defenders had any real opportunity to rally and counterattack.

But it soon became apparent that the attacks were far from being as random and haphazard as they first seemed. Soon after the initial attacks on the first day of the campaign—for a coordinated campaign is exactly what these attacks turned out to be—a pattern began to emerge. As it solidified in the days that followed, it caused great consternation among the Franks, and most particularly so at Command level, where Richard and his increasingly frustrated allied commanders began to appreciate fully that, as things currently stood, they were effectively unable to counteract, or even to evade, the Saracens’ design.

That design was simple, and its execution brilliantly effective. Any killing of Frankish knights or other personnel during the attacks was an incidental bonus. The primary target of every raid was each unit’s stock of giant English, Flemish, and German warhorses, the massive destriers that bore the Frankish knights into battle. The Franks were outraged by the targeting of their defenseless animals, and their bishops and archbishops whipped themselves into a frenzy, brandishing bell, book, and candle as they called down death, eternal damnation, and appalling curses on the heads of the scurrilous infidels who would stoop to such deplorable depths of iniquity. But as Alec Sinclair pointed out to André the next time they were able to sit and talk, the Saracens were merely being practical, and admirable. Had he been in their place, he said, he hoped he would have been clever enough to identify the need that gave rise to their strategy and to have done the same thing. St. Clair had been hit by an arrow not half an hour earlier—it had glanced off the cuff of his mailed glove with no ill effect other than a momentary numbness in his hand—and had not expected to hear anyone on his side say anything like that, and he spoke right out.

“I know you admire our enemy, Cousin, but must you cheer for them? What, in God’s name, is admirable about killing horses by the hundreds?”

“Everything, if it suits your needs. Show me your wrist. Can you grip your sword?”

“I can grip anything I need to grip. There’s nothing wrong with my wrist, or my hand. It’s my sense of outrage that’s involved here.”

“Pah! You’re thinking about it as a horseman, André, and you have a weakness for fine horse flesh anyway. The Saracens would feel exactly the same way were we targeting their mounts. But look at it practically. The Saracens are confounded by our knights, even more today than they were four years ago at the time of Hattin, because our armor, both mail and plate, is stronger and heavier than ever before and improving all the time. Their arrows can no longer penetrate our mail most of the time—witness the strength of your own glove there—and our horses, our magnificent destriers and sumpters, make theirs look puny and ridiculous. Our individual beasts may be four and five times as large as theirs, and are themselves weapons, trained all their lives to kick out with steel-shod hooves on anything that comes close enough to kill or maim. Thus when we form ourselves in line, knee to knee, nothing can stand against us. That is the strength in us that, properly employed, they cannot defeat, or could not until now …

“But now, I fear, they have finally seen that our greatest strength is our greatest weakness. Our horses, brought all the way across the sea from home, are irreplaceable. Each one, out here, is worth ten times its weight in gold because it would take that much and more to bring a new, fresh horse this far to replace one that dies. And each one that dies leaves a knight unhorsed and unable to function properly, for no man can fight adequately afoot, dressed as a Frankish knight in plate and mail. And in truth, no man can walk as a knight, in plate and mail, in the heat of the desert sun. It is not possible. Thus the logic in what the Saracens are doing now is faultless. By killing our horses, they can defeat us in the field, rendering us powerless to fight.”

St. Clair had been sitting rigidly since Alec’s diatribe began and now he was mute, his mouth slightly agape, his haunted eyes betraying that he understood the implications of everything Sinclair had said.

“Let your face sag a little, Cousin,” Alec said. “The outlook is not as bleak as you seem to think … I left you with more than half a wineskin when I last saw you. Did you drink it all?”

André shook his head, as though awakening from a light sleep. “The wine? No, I still have it. I do not often drink alone. Would you like some?”

“Oh no, not I. I merely wondered whether you might keep it until it dried up in the desert heat … Of course I would like some. Where is it?”

“Wait.” St. Clair went into his tent and emerged moments later, carrying the wineskin, and he tossed it to Alec, who held it up and hefted it before looking back at him in disbelief.

“You didn’t drink a drop of it.”

“No, and be thankful, for if I had, we would not be able to enjoy it now.” He sat back down where he had been before and watched as Alec held the skin aloft and directed a jet of wine into his mouth without spilling a drop. “You said the outlook is not as bleak as it appears. What did you mean?”

Sinclair wiped his mouth with the back of one hand and tossed the skin back. “We know what they’re up to now. That’s what I meant. And that knowledge itself is part of our defense. So, beginning tomorrow they will find no more easy targets scattered in and around our camps. Instead, if they want to risk reaching our horses, they will have to infiltrate heavily guarded positions selected for their natural safety and difficulty of illegal access. And of those few who might get in to where the horses are on any given day or night, very few will escape alive. By the time we make camp tomorrow, everyone will know the new arrangements and adequate guard rosters will be put into effect. We have already chosen scouts who know what we need, and they will go out tomorrow morning, in teams of three and ahead of the various units, to find suitable holding stations.”

“How many horses have we lost since this campaign began?”

“That depends on who you talk to. De Troyes believes the number to be around the one thousand mark. But de Troyes always sees the bleakest outlook on any prospect. I think he exaggerates. I would guess the number to be half of that, give or take a few score.”

“Five to six hundred, then. That represents a vast herd of horses … and a vast supply of meat, considering our shortage of fresh food, although in this heat meat spoils too quickly. ”

“Oh, it’s being eaten quickly enough. Some of the knights started selling the meat, and local warfare threatened to erupt, almost overnight, but Richard issued a proclamation saying that any knight who donated his horse meat to his own men would receive a replacement, free of charge.”

“Sweet Jesu! That must have cost him prettily.”

“Aye, no doubt, but it stopped the haggling, which could have grown ugly. Anyway, providing we can keep our remaining stock alive, we have no current shortage of horse flesh.”

“Well, fodder and water are improving, I’ve noticed the land around us is changing, the vegetation growing lusher and greener.”

“Aye, and as we round the flank of Carmel and come to the Plain of Sharon it will grow ever greener, with a profusion of water. It is marshland over there, and it is alive with wildlife, game of all kinds and giant beasts of prey. There are lions there as big as horses, and leopards the size of a man. It is beautiful. I was here once before, when first I came out here, long before Hattin, when the kingdom was flourishing, and it was a paradise. That’s when I saw Arsuf.”

“And you saw lions?”

Alec heard the awe in his cousin’s voice and laughed. “Aye, I did, and one I will remember to my grave, a monstrous male, in full prime, with a huge black mane that rippled in the air as he walked. I heard him roar before I saw him, and the sound of it loosened my bowels. I’ve seen some wondrous beasts out there, beasts most men never see at all. Great birds that cannot fly but can outrun horses, and beautiful catlike creatures than can outrun those birds and are said to be the fastest animals on earth, and curious, repulsive creatures called hyenas that eat carrion and slink and shuffle in the night like skulking demons, yet have such mighty jaws that they can bite a grown man’s face and crush his skull like any egg. I guarantee you will see some of those, for they swarm everywhere, even in daylight, and as long as this war endures and spawns dead men and horses, those things will thrive and prosper.”

Several of André’s senior sergeants had gathered around the two cousins, listening avidly, their eyes glistening. André looked over at the largest of them and grinned. “Did you hear that, Boar? Marshlands, and plentiful water. Hard to believe of this place, is it not?”

Alec spoke up again. “Hard to believe or not, it’s true. But don’t go thinking you might like to bathe in the waters there. Do you know what a crocodile is?”

André shook his head, but the man called Boar half raised a hand. “I do, I think? Isn’t it a giant lizard of some kind?”

“Aye, that’s exactly what it is. A giant serpent lizard that can grow to be the length of two tall men, with teeth the length of your fingers and jaws the length of your arm—jaws that will cut a man in half. I know not if it is true, but I have heard tell that the creatures cannot void their bodies’ wastes as other creatures do, and so when they have eaten, be it a man or an animal, they lie paralyzed on the water’s edge until the meal is digested, and other serpents crawl into their mouths and eat what remains in their stomachs. Thus, a man devoured by such a beast is eaten twice by serpents. Stay you clear of the water, friends.”

“Enough, Cousin, you will have my officers unable to sleep tonight with such tales. Come, I will walk you back towards your tent. The rest of you, prepare for sleep, for by the time I return it will be curfew.”

FIVE MORE DAYS passed by in slow and steady progress, and by the end of them the raids against the horses had all but stopped and the men had grown largely inured to seeing stretches of open water and strange, exotic creatures everywhere they looked. Morale and discipline among and within the various elements of the army was high, and a formless sense of anticipation was growing daily, nurtured by a constantly bubbling wellspring of rumor and hearsay: Saladin was massing his forces to attack them on the march; Saladin was concentrating his forces in the forest surrounding the town of Arsuf, where they were headed, and would set the woods afire as they approached; Saladin had gathered bowmen and countless wagonloads of arrows from all over his empire, sufficient to beggar the storms of arrows expended at Hattin, and intended to obliterate the Frankish advance beneath an unending rain of missiles. Whether or not any of the rumors were true, there could be no doubting the evidence of the marchers’ own eyes, for Saladin’s horsemen were visible everywhere, beyond bowshot and beyond easy reach, but there, and undaunted by the size of the Frankish army.

The army made camp that night on the coast, six miles north of Arsuf, near the mouth of a river and with a vast and impassable swamp at their back on the landward side, so that they settled down with more security and less fear of attack than usual, and André decided to go in search of his cousin, risking the possibility of coming face to face with Richard.

He saw no sign of the King, but found Alec sitting at a folding table, reading a document by the light of a four-branch candelabrum. Alec looked up, and his face split into a grin of welcome as he rose quickly to his feet and signed to a clerk at the table opposite him to gather up the parchment he had been reading. They were out in the open air after that within a matter of minutes, and as they walked swiftly away from the two great pavilions that dominated the center of the main encampment, André chuckled.

“You had my sergeants hanging on your words, Cousin, with your stories of the fabled crocodile, and I intended to ask you where you had heard such creature tales when next we met. But since then I have seen the things with my own eyes. I doubt that I have ever seen anything so evil looking as the sight of them sliding down the muddy riverbanks and gliding into the water. They are completely repulsive!”

“Aye, they are ugly, and they are frightening.” Alec hesitated, teetering as he glanced about him, then pointed to their left. “Head over there, that way. I almost missed the way, but there is a quartermaster here who is hugely in my debt, for three enormous antelope shot by the roadside this morning and delivered to him fresh, from me, and it comes to me that he might have a spare bag of wine in his stores.”

They found the quartermaster without difficulty, merely by following the smell of bread being baked by the ton in a massive array of portable clay ovens that were loaded and unloaded every day on the march, and he was profusely grateful for the services Alec had rendered to him. It turned out that not only did he have a spare bag of wine, he even had cups, a table, and two chairs in a small tent reserved for his own use, and no sooner had the two cousins sat down than he reappeared with a platter of fresh-baked bread and thick slices of cold meat.

When they had finished eating, Sinclair burped quietly and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “That was just what I needed,” he murmured. “Now, what about you? Why did you come looking for me this afternoon?”

“Because I had nothing else to do and I felt like it. Why do you ask?”

“Curiosity.” Sinclair wiped his mouth again, more carefully this time, and pinching the corners with finger and thumb to dislodge any errant particles of food. “Because when you arrived, I was just on the point of leaving to look for you. The document I was reading contained my own recollections of what had been said earlier at an officers’ gathering. I have a task for you, should you be willing to accept it. I cannot order you to do it.” He hesitated then, thinking about that, and shrugged. “Well, I suppose I could, but it would make no sense, for you would be under no obligation to proceed with it, once you were out of my sight.”

“What is it? And before you tell me, tell me this. Is it achievable?”

“You mean, will it get you killed? Cousin, you are my entire family now that your father is dead. I have no wish to lose you. The task requires an Arabic speaker— someone who can move among the enemy without being detected and identified as one of us. We have many of them, most of them Arabs, but there is none of them whom I would care to trust with a task this … sensitive. I intended to do it myself, but de Sablé found out and forbade me. He has other plans for me tomorrow, it seems.”

“Such as?”

“Commanding the Templar right.”

“Good. Excellent. The man shows even more sound common sense than I would have expected. Tell me what you wish me to do.”

“We are six miles from Arsuf. I need you to go and scout it out, to be absolutely sure that Saladin’s people have not occupied it against us.” St. Clair frowned. “Why should that matter now? We have come all this way to attack the place. Are you telling me now that no one anticipated that it might be occupied? That defies belief.”

“It does, and that is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that it now appears that things may change radically from what we had expected. For three days now, the enemy has been making broad and massive changes to his troop dispositions, and it all appeared to come together today in a series of open maneuvers that they did not even try to hide. Richard is now convinced that they intend to confront us tomorrow, nose to nose, and to try to provoke us into fighting on their terms. Saladin stands in sore need of a victory, for his credibility, and some say his discipline and control of his troops have all suffered badly since Acre fell … and because Acre fell. So Richard believes we have come as far as Saladin can permit us to come without doing battle. That is why we are camped here tonight, with our backs to the swamp and safe against attack from there. It is also why the presence of the Saracen horsemen has become so visible all around us. Richard believes they will now press us increasingly and relentlessly until we give battle, no matter how unwilling we may be to play the Sultan’s game. There is no doubt he is hoping to provoke us into committing the same folly that de Ridefort fell into so often, charging vainly against the drifting smoke of his mobile brigades. But Richard will have none of that, you wait and see. He will not be provoked. He intends to proceed with great caution from now on.”

“I see. So what is the essence of this great caution Richard intends to exercise from now on?”

“Close-order, disciplined advance with no reaction to enemy provocation until Richard himself deems the time to be exactly right. The order of march will change immediately, split into five divisions.”

“Divided how?”

“The Templars still hold the van, so there will be no great changes involved for us. But we will be joined by the division of Turcopoles, moved up from the center, which can only be to our advantage.”

André nodded in agreement, for the Turcopoles were excellent troops, locally raised and trained in the same light, swift-moving cavalry techniques used by the Saracens. “And behind us?”

“Richard’s liegemen from Aquitaine, Poitou, and Anjou, and his levies from Brittany. He has placed Guy in charge of those.”

“Guy de Lusignan?”

“That’s the man. Apparently his tactical skills are improving. Behind them, in the center, now come the Normans and the English, with the main battle standard. And then the French have the rearguard, with the Hospitallers in support and a motley collection of Syrian barons and their levies behind them. Henry of Champagne commands there, and he has Jacques d’Avesnes with him, so there is no lack of backbone in the rearguard.”

“That is but four divisions. You said there were to be five.”

“Aye, the fifth will be small but highly visible. Richard himself and Burgundy, supported by a hand-picked cadre of outstanding knights from all the various commands. They will be mobile, riding back and forth the entire length of the line of march, showing their faces and offering strength and support.”

“So, if all this is true, why is there a need for anyone to go to Arsuf?”

“Because we have come sixty-two miles and have but six to go to reach our goal, and if we are forced to fight for every step from here onward, as Richard suspects we will be, then reaching Arsuf will take on a great significance, and the very last thing we will need or want is to arrive there and find the place strongly fortified against us. Hence the need to send someone there in advance, to assess the situation and report back to us. If the place is held and fortified already, we will accept that and make no secret of it. If it is not, on the other hand, we may then dispatch a special force to occupy it against our arrival, denying it to Saladin.”

“When must I leave?”

“Ideally, you should leave immediately and spend the night between here and there, and you should take someone with you, someone you can trust. Do you know someone suitable?”

“Aye, you, but you can’t come. Of all the others I would pick, none can speak Arabic and not a single one of them could pass for anything other than what he is, a Frank. So I will have to ride alone. But I am a big lad now, and it won’t be the first time I have spread my blanket alone beneath the stars.”

“You had better take one of them along with you anyway, for the first stage of the journey, at least, because you will want to transform yourself into a Saracen before you ride among them, and you will not want to go riding through the middle of this mob dressed as one of Allah’s faithful. So you’ll take your Arab clothing, weapons, and whatever else you need on a packhorse and change once you are safely out there. Do you have everything you need?”

“No, not here. I have my Arab clothing, but I left my Saracen weapons and armor with yours, in the cave among the stones.”

“Hmm. See Conrad, the armorer. He will give you whatever you require, from the captured supplies.”

“I will, but I won’t need to take anyone out with me if I have a packhorse. I’ll take an Arab mule with me. Then I can carry my own armor with me, for I’ll tell you plain, I would not care to risk galloping back into camp here tomorrow, perhaps in the middle of a fight, dressed as a Muslim knight.”

Alec Sinclair grimaced. “You have a point there. Very well, take the mule and carry your own gear. If you get caught with it, you’ll already be in trouble, so it will make no difference.”

“Pleasant thought … I thank you for it. When will you want me to return?”

“Tomorrow, sometime after noon. That will give you time to settle down and examine the place closely in the morning, and then, if it is not already garrisoned, to sit tight and ensure that no concerted move is made to occupy it in the course of the morning. Of course, if you find it occupied, then all you need do is assess the strength of the garrison and make your way back to join us as soon as you can. You will not have as far to travel on the way back, and I can assure you that you will have no trouble finding us. Reaching us might be another thing entirely, but finding us should be very simple.”

“Aye, I take your point. I had better be going, then.”

“And on the topic that you brought up, of passing for other than what you are, make sure you take one of our Arabian horses when you go, and not a Belgian destrier.”

“Well, my gratitude is overwhelming, Cousin. Had you not thought of that, I might have ridden into the Saracens, all unsuspecting that I had betrayed myself. Sleep well tonight, and if you are brought to bay tomorrow, look after yourself. Farewell.”

ANDRÉ ST. CLAIR LEANED forward, almost standing in his stirrups as he urged his horse silently to the last, steepest part of the ascent, and the uncomplaining mule surged up behind him. They had been climbing constantly for more than a mile towards the crest that now lay not a hundred paces ahead, and he looked along the ridge from side to side, watching for movement. Forming three-quarters of a circle like the rim of a broken bowl, the escarpment’s edge was bare, sharply limned and clear of vegetation, and he wondered for a moment what had formed it, for beneath it the valley it contained did resemble a large bowl and he was perched high on the left edge of the break, the sea at his back, a mile below where he now sat, stretching hugely north and south, vanishing into a haze in both directions. He had no intention of climbing to the crest, and had come this high only because the terrain itself had dictated where he must go. His only interest now was in making the traverse, with his animals, from the narrow, precipitously sided ridge he was on to the sloping meadows on his left, where he intended to ride parallel to the crest, keeping below it, yet far above anyone who might be below him on the slopes.

Arsuf lay more than two miles behind him now, and it had been abandoned when he had reached it soon after dawn that morning, he and his horse the only living creatures within sight or sound. The ancient fortress with its sandstone walls was roofless and open to the weather, and he could see at first glance that no attempt had been made to secure it or to make it defensible again. He had remained there for four hours, nevertheless, obedient to his instructions, and at one point he had even ridden into the woods behind the town, aware that they stretched for miles, but remembering, too, the rumors that had whispered of ambush and destruction among the trees. He had traveled for more than a mile along a well-marked path before deciding that there was nothing in there and the rumors had been but rumors after all. Then, back on the town walls as the day wore on towards noon, it had become clear that if Saladin had any plans to man the fort, he had in all probability left it too late, for even at their normal rate of progress, less than one mile an hour, the Christian army would arrive by mid-afternoon at the latest. Unless, of course, it failed to arrive at all.

Confident then that he had done what had been asked of him, St. Clair had saddled up again and struck out northward, leading his pack mule towards the advancing army, and when he had reached the closest point to the slope that stretched up towards the high ridge, he had steered his mount off the road, to the right, and begun to climb.

He reined in now, with barely more than his own height between him and the top, and bent forward in the saddle, gentling his horse with the flat of his hand against its neck until it regained its normal breathing speed. He dismounted and led both animals, one at a time, across what proved to be a very narrow, steeply sloping, and treacherous strip of ground that fell away into the deep ravine that edged the ridge, then remounted and made his way to the shoulder of ground ahead of him that masked his view of the valley below. The hillside ahead of him swept down gently for a hundred paces or so, then rose upward again to another, lower ridge, beyond which he could see nothing but sky. He prodded his horse forward gently to the other slope, and this time as he approached the crest he became aware of a sound, strange and unrecognizable, rising and falling in the distance. Curious, he spurred his horse more urgently, and it surged up to the top of the second ridge to show him a sight that took his breath away and left him staring open mouthed at the scene below him, with not a thought in his head of being seen.

A battle was being fought in the valley bottom, but even as he looked at it for the first time, trying to absorb the scope of it, he could see that there was something fundamentally lopsided about it. It took several moments for him to adjust to the new perspective, for now he was looking down from what felt like an immense height and everything appeared strange and different. Nevertheless, within a few moments he saw what it was, and understanding came to him in a flash, although it was a flash of disappointment. With a rising surge of disbelief he saw that Richard Plantagenet had blundered, for the first time in a lifetime of warfare.

It was clear that the Muslim troop movements he had identified that morning, with hundreds of riders moving far up on the high wooded slopes, had featured prominently in Saladin’s attack, and that the first attack had come from there.

The Frankish army stood directly below St. Clair with their backs to the sea, and from where he sat he could not believe the closeness with which they were all jammed together, or the savagery with which Saladin’s forces were attacking them from above, shooting arrows and crossbow bolts into the densely packed mass as quickly as they could launch and reload. So thick was the press down there that no aim was required from the heights above. Every missile fired, no matter how carelessly, found a target, and the raised shields of the Frankish knights formed a kind of roof against the downpour.

To St. Clair’s right, the straight and narrow Roman road stretched back to the ground beside the swamp where Richard’s army had spent the night, and he could see that it lay open, with no signs of trap or ambush to deter the Franks from retreating in that direction. On the other side, however, to the south, the roadway vanished into a tunnel of trees about half a mile from where the Franks had stopped their advance, and there were sufficient bodies, both human and equine, on the surface of the road to demonstrate that the Muslims had attacked from there, sweeping out of the tunnel and down through the woods above the road to stop Richard’s army in its tracks.

Everything looked small and compact from where he sat, but André St. Clair knew that the Frankish host that looked so strangely small and cramped from his viewpoint was the largest foreign army ever assembled here since Roman times, and it was surrounded on three sides by a force that greatly outnumbered it. So closely were the Frankish troops packed that certain of the various contingents appeared as solid blocks of color, the most noticeable of those being the redflecked white mass of the Templars on St. Clair’s left, holding the vanguard which had now become the right of the line, and the solid, black-garbed mass of the Hospitallers of the rearguard, now forming the left of the line. Between those were the blue and gold of the French knights, but it was the military orders of the Temple and the Hospital who stood out most significantly in the solid phalanges of color.

Richard had insisted from the outset of this drive from Acre to Jerusalem that he would not commit the same errors that had doomed his predecessors in their misadventures with Saladin. He had great respect for the Kurdish Sultan and he was determined that he would make no foolish or impulsive errors with his command that would present the Saracen leader with any undue advantage, and in Richard’s eyes the greatest and most consistent weakness that the Frankish armies had demonstrated within recent years was their tendency to charge headlong against the enemy and consider the costs afterwards, when the appalling price had been paid and tallied. Richard was under no illusions about those tactics and their origins. They sprang directly from the stubborn, headstrong arrogance of the Templars and the Hospitallers, who simply refused to believe that there might ever be a circumstance in which they, with God so firmly on their side and in their prayers at all times, should even hesitate to engage the enemy tooth and nail. That the enemy knew exactly how to provoke those charges, and then how to avoid them and wreak havoc on the suicidal Christians as they charged past, appeared to have no significance to the senior field commanders of either Order. Their quest was for glory—their own personal glory first, and the greater glory of God incidentally.

Richard had been determined to curb that zeal, and had kept all of his subordinates on a tight leash. He had been fighting ruthless, determined, and ambitious enemies throughout his life, beginning in his boyhood, and there had been none of them whom he respected more than Saladin. And so he had insisted on a slow, steady progress from the moment he left Acre, keeping his knights tightly in check, in compact defensive formations that were, he believed, invulnerable to Muslim attack.

Now, however, from where St. Clair watched, it appeared that the King had held them in too tightly, for his cavalry forces were so densely compressed that they had no room to maneuver or even to regroup. Hemmed in on every side by their own infantry formations and under constant missile assault from the slopes above, they had no other option than to sit massed together, with the ground falling away at their backs towards the sea, and wait to be chopped down. Their armor was the finest in the world, and it rendered them all but invulnerable, but there were always weak spots in armor and accidental exposures to what was an incessant hail of arrows.

Then, even as he watched, St. Clair saw another phase of the attack develop as a solid phalanx of the black-clad desert nomads called Bedouin—he quickly estimated at least half a thousand—charged down from concealed positions high in the woods and launched a ferocious attack on the tightly compressed forces of the Hospitallers of the rearguard, on the far left of the Frankish line. Incredulous, St. Clair watched as the Hospital knights were squeezed even more tightly, something he would not have believed possible by that stage, and the protective lines of infantry fronting their formations swayed and buckled.

“Charge them! Break out, or you’re all dead men!” He was shouting at the top of his voice, bellowing advice down to the beleaguered men who could neither hear nor see him, but even as he hurled down imprecations and exhortation, he could see that nothing was to be done. The scene was set for a bloodbath. The front line of the Bedouin charge approached the farthest edge of the rearguard formations and then the riders drew rein and leapt from their horses to charge in a solid block towards what they must have identified, for reasons of their own, as the weakest part of the opposing front. St. Clair could visualize their dark, feral faces as they swept forward, brandishing their fearsome scimitars. Of all the warriors of the Faithful, the Franks disliked and feared the Bedouin above all others.

He was not aware of having dismounted, but André was pulling at his clothes, ripping off the Arab garments until he stood clad only in the white lamb’s wool loin wrapping of the Temple Knights. He crossed to the mule, moving slowly so as not to frighten the patient animal, and re-dressed himself as a Templar, complete with white, red-crossed surcoat, moving swiftly now that he had decided to die with his peers, and concentrating intently on wasting no time, not even to glance down at the scene below. Thus, engaged with the straps and lacings of his hauberk and cuirass, he missed the first few crucial moments of what next transpired down there, and it was only as he straightened up to slip his sword belt over his head and across his chest that he saw something had changed. Fully alert then, he stuffed his Muslim clothing and weaponry into the leather casings on the pack mule, then moved quickly to his horse and stepped up into the saddle, his eyes fixed on the scene below, to see a transformation that astounded him.

Whatever had occurred, he could clearly see that it had begun with the Hospitallers, for the knights had broken out there, surging through the defensive ranks of their own infantry to attack the Bedouin newcomers, most of whom were now afoot. But the breakout was not confined to the Hospitallers, for as St. Clair watched, rapt, the Frankish cavalry broke through all along their line in an irresistible rolling wave—and watching it occur he could think of no other term for it—that surged all the way to the right of the line and brought the Templars charging out and forward into the teeth of the enemy, who, judging from the way they buckled and recoiled from the assault, were obviously unprepared for anything of the kind. Even from as far away as St. Clair’s viewpoint, it was clear that the tables had been unexpectedly and completely reversed.

The Saracens, so unmistakably jubilant and confident mere minutes earlier, were now reeling and eddying in confusion, unable to assert themselves in the face of what must have appeared to them as an absolute and unstemmable explosion of heavy cavalry. St. Clair had no knowledge of what had happened to the ranks of infantry between the knights and the Saracens, of whether they had been trampled in the charge or had managed to slip between the horsemen, but the Frankish forces rallied with every heartbeat. And then the Bedouin phalanx that had charged the rearguard simply shattered as the men broke and ran in all directions to escape the massive horses of the charging Hospitallers. But the Hospitallers permitted no escape. The fear and frustration they had been forced to undergo for so many hours resulted in an orgy of blood lust and slaughter. They slew men by the thousands in front of their positions as the madness spread southward to the right of the line and Saracens fled in utter panic and fear, leaving their Sultan impotent to stop them or even to try to rally them.

Now St. Clair could hear the difference in the sounds rising from below and he knew, from his eagle’s-eye view, that he was witnessing the greatest rout in the history of the wars of the Latin Kingdom. The masses of cavalry were bunching up, pursuing the fleeing Saracens towards the edge of the forest in the south, but even so, before they could enter the forest proper, the leading ranks were stopped and began milling about, already starting to reform. He would learn later that it was Richard himself who stopped the pursuit, aware even then of past lessons learned through overzealous pursuit of fleeing enemies, and he would hear many accounts of Richard’s personal heroism during the heaviest of the fighting following the breakout, none of which he would doubt for a moment. For the time being, however, he sat his horse alone up on the heights and watched the army reform and regroup along the road until he realized that they were about to march southward in good order to their intended destination of Arsuf. At that point, feeling uncharacteristically jubilant over the victory, he set spurs to his horse and set out down the hill, leading his mule, to rejoin his companions.

HALF AN HOUR LATER, frustrated and increasingly impatient, he was still far above the straggling army, headed in the wrong direction and unable to do anything about it. He had discovered the truth of the oldest adage among climbers—that it is far more difficult to climb down from a high elevation than it is to climb up there in the first place. The way the hillside fell away beneath him simply compelled him to keep moving northward, to his right. The alternative, to strike stubbornly southward and to his left, was simply too dangerous to contemplate. The two animals he was leading left him in no doubt about the folly of that, balking and refusing, stiff legged, to go anywhere near the precipitous southern faces, and although he was unaccustomed to noticing such things, he quickly came to see, quite literally, that everything about this hillside sloped downward, visibly, to the right. And so he gritted his teeth and concentrated on picking his way along with great care, forcing himself to analyze all that he could see going on below him, rather than allow himself to grow more uselessly angry than he already was.

Someone, clearly, had made a decision to keep the main body of the army moving southward along the road to Arsuf, and St. Clair acknowledged to himself that whoever had been responsible—and he presumed it was Richard himself—had made the correct choice, for their current position was clearly untenable, an elongated, cramped, and narrow stretch of hillside between the road itself and the sea. After the pressures they had undergone in that same place, he was unsurprised that they had no wish to remain there for a moment longer than they had to, and so now almost the entire army, regrouped and redisposed in clear formations, was winding steadily along the road to the south, and progressing far more quickly than they had since leaving Acre, secure in the knowledge that the Saracens would not soon be returning to engage them.

The road, until it disappeared beneath the overarching trees at the entrance to the forest, was crammed with marching men, and the largest area of land between it and the sea had been converted into a vast marshaling area where troop commanders and officers were organizing units to join the exodus, falling into place behind the passing ranks as space became available. The exercises were being carried out efficiently, André could see, and the evacuation was proceeding smoothly, but the single most significant and striking thing that he could see as he drew steadily closer to the battlefield was the extent of the casualties, and most particularly among the Saracens.

There appeared to be thousands of dead and wounded Muslim soldiers everywhere he looked, and as he scanned them, seeing how they had been mowed down in swaths, an image grew in his mind from his boyhood, of a cornfield outside his father’s home in Poitou, one remembered afternoon at harvest time, when everyone had stopped working to eat at noonday and the rows of corn, scythed but ungathered, not yet bound and stacked, had formed clear-cut patterns on the stubbled ground. He could see very few Frankish bodies among the casualties, which surprised him, for he was above the far left of the line now, the rearguard position of the Hospitallers, and their black-and-white colors were easy to spot from above, but it seemed to him that for every Hospitaller or other Frankish form he saw on the field, he could count ten or more Muslims.

He reached a stretch of hillside where, unusually, the lie of the land altered and he was able for a brief time to turn his mount and ride southward, back towards the battlefield. And then, quite suddenly, he was within hailing distance of the road below, where the lay brothers of the Hospital were fully occupied in doing what they did best, tending to the wounded. Several of the black-clad fighting monks, riding up and down in full uniform, were supervising the efforts of large, organized groups of infantry who were separating the living from the dead and the Christians from the Muslims, carrying the Frankish wounded to a cleared space by the roadside and the Muslims to a more distant spot, closer to the seashore. Down there, André could see, were more Hospital brothers, tending to the infidels as their brethren were tending to their own.

“You there! Templar! Stand where you are.”

St. Clair reined in and saw that the speaker, or the shouter, was a Hospitaller, flanked by a pair of crossbowmen, each of whom was pointing a heavy arbalest uphill at him. He dropped the reins on his mount’s neck and raised both hands above his head.

“Come down. Slowly.”

André lowered his hands and nudged his horse forward and sideways, picking the easiest route down and highly aware of the arbalests pointed at him. The knight probably thought him a deserter or a coward who had sought refuge high up on the slopes to avoid being killed, and thinking that, he would have no compunction about giving the word to shoot St. Clair down without mercy. Finally, he reached the roadway and moved forward to face the Hospitaller.

“Who are you and what were you doing up there? And be careful what you say.”

André made no attempt to smile or be engaging. “André St. Clair, and I was trying to get back to my unit. I was sent out last night by our Grand Master, de Sablé, to scout Arsuf and make sure it had not been occupied. He sent me because I speak Arabic and can pass for a Muslim. The clothing and weapons I wore out there are here, in the cases on the pack mule. Look, if you like.”

“And was Arsuf occupied?”

“No, it was not. But it makes no difference now.

Saladin’s people will not stop running until they are far south of Arsuf.”

“Hmm.” The Hospitaller nodded towards the mule. “Show me what is in the cases.”

Moments later, he sat frowning at the circular Saracen shield he was holding.

“Right. Well, I suppose I’m obliged to believe you, St. Clair, but I have to send you now to my superior, Sir Pierre St. Julien. You would have to do the same with me, were things reversed.”

“I would. Where do I find him?”

The Hospitaller turned to the man on his right, who had long since put down his arbalest. “Take him to St. Julien.” He glanced back at St. Clair. “God be with you, St. Clair, and good luck.” He raised a hand briefly and swung away, already shouting at some of the men working nearby.

The knight called St. Julien accepted St. Clair even more quickly than the other had. As he was quickly checking the contents of André’s packs, a group of men moved past them, carrying five wounded Hospitallers on improvised stretchers.

“How many men did you lose?” André asked him.

St. Julien twisted his mouth. “Not nearly as many as I thought we would. Our Grand Master went to argue with King Richard, begging him to turn us loose, but Richard refused. When the charge did break out, it was because one or two of our own knights had simply had enough, and out they went … And everyone else went after them. It simply happened, and when it did, everyone joined in. I don’t know about the rest of the line of battle, but I would be surprised if we lost more than half a hundred men—knights and foot soldiers both.”

“You must have taken out ten men for every one you lost, then.”

“Oh, more than that, for by the time we broke out, the men were beyond anger. They showed no mercy, gave no quarter. Everything that moved in front of them went down. Ah! They’ve found something over there. God speed, Sir Templar.”

Thereafter, André St. Clair made his way along the road without being bothered again, and for the entire distance he was amazed at the disproportionate numbers of Muslim dead and wounded lining the road, with corpses piled in head-high heaps in many places. The crews whose task it was to clean up the carnage had nothing to say to him and little to each other. They were already listless and dull eyed, appalled into speechlessness by the awful, repetitive nature of the work they were doing and the condition of the mangled and dismembered bodies with which they had to deal, surrounded by the sounds and stenches of humanity in unspeakable distress. From time to time, he would pass a dead man who stood out as someone special by virtue of the clothing and insignia he wore, but for the most part, André was smitten by the sameness of it all and by the pathetic lack of dignity apparent in the heaped piles of discarded corpses. He had seen so many headless bodies and so many bodiless heads, arms, and legs that he thought he might never again be able to sit in a saddle and swing a sword, and it was while one such thought was passing through his head that something caught his attention from the corner of his eye, and he drew rein to look more closely.

But looking now at the carnage surrounding him, he could see nothing that struck him as being anomalous. There were living men among the fallen all around him; he could see some of them moving and he could hear their moans and cries, and somewhere almost beyond his hearing range, someone was screaming mindlessly, demented by pain. But whatever had caught his attention was no longer evident, and he dismissed it, gathering his reins to ride on.

He had traversed almost the entire line of battle by that time, and the cleanup crews had not yet reached this far. The section through which he was now riding had been the right of the line, occupied by the Templars and their supporting Turcopoles, and St. Clair had not realized before how closely the latter resembled the enemy they fought, for they were not uniformly equipped, and in many instances he could not tell, looking at the strewn bodies, which were which. But then, just as he began to turn away, he saw movement again, a flicker of bright yellow higher up than he had been looking before, just in front of the line of trees above him. He tensed, looking at it intently, knowing what it was but unable to say why it should be significant to him.

It was a Saracen unit flag, the equivalent of the colors carried by each of the Frankish formations, but whereas the Frankish troop divisions carried individual colors, each to its own, the Saracens bore only uniform yellow standards: large swallow-tailed banners on the end of long, supple poles, distinguished from each other by the varying devices used by each unit to identify itself and its leader. Now the banner moved again, not waved by the wind but stirred erratically, as though someone were moving against it, causing it to sway unevenly back and forth, and as it unfolded it displayed the device it bore, a number of black crescents, their leading edges facing right.

André felt his stomach lurch as he recalled the evening, months before, when Alec Sinclair had described the personal standard of his friend Ibn al-Farouch. “Remember,” he had said, “if you find yourself outnumbered or in danger of defeat, don’t go seeking death, for death achieves nothing but oblivion for fools. Go seeking life instead. Find the squadron with the five-moon pennant and surrender to its leader. That’s Ibn. Tell him you know me, that I’m your cousin, and he’ll find a comfortable chain to shackle you with.”

Five black crescent moons, Sinclair had said, their leading edges facing right. The brief glance he had had of the pennant had been too short to count the number of crescents. He had seen only a cluster, perhaps five, but it might as easily have been six or seven, and he knew that he could not now ride away without satisfying his curiosity, so he turned his horse around and nudged it forward, up the hill to where the yellow banner now sagged motionless.

Among the bodies of slaughtered Arab and Christian horses, three dead Templars lay in plain view, their red-crossed, white-coated bodies intertwined and surrounded by Saracen corpses. He spurred his horse closer, examining the individual bodies of the knights, looking for men he knew, but he felt the hair stir on the back of his neck when he saw that the dead man atop the other two had not died by a Saracen scimitar but had been stabbed through the neck with a long, straight Christian sword. The blade was still in place, thrust clear through the chain-mail hood that covered the dead knight’s head. The sole question in André St. Clair’s mind was why, in a fight to the death against Saracens, a Christian knight would aim such a deliberate and lethal thrust at one of his brethren.

The knight had sunk to his knees and died there, his lifeblood drenching the front of his surcoat, and the men who lay beneath him, and the upthrust angle of the sword that killed him, had prevented him from falling forward. His heart beating fast now, André dismounted and stepped quickly to the kneeling knight. He pulled the head back and looked into the dead face. The man was an unknown. André pushed him firmly, so that he fell sideways and rolled off the bodies beneath him.

The next man lay face down on top of the man below him, covering his head and shoulders, but the man beneath had been the one who thrust the killing sword, for it had been torn from his hand by the weight of the falling corpse when André pushed it. He stooped and seized the second knight by the armholes of his cuirass and heaved him up, rolling him to see that, again, the fellow was unknown to him. He had been killed by crossbow bolts, three of which projected several inches from his breast. As he turned now to the third knight, André gave a whimpering, childlike cry and fell to his knees, his face crumpling as he stared between his outstretched hands into the dead face of his cousin Alec.

How long he knelt there, struck dumb, he would never be able to recollect afterwards, but he remained there, rocking slowly back and forth in agonized disbelief as he watched the slowly welling blood ooze from the grim rent in the armor over his cousin’s left breast.

And only very, very slowly did it penetrate his awareness that dead men do not bleed.

When the realization did hit him, he whimpered again, and reached out with both hands to cup Alec’s face, and as he did so, Alec’s eyes opened.

“Cousin,” Alec Sinclair whispered. “Where did you come from?”

André merely sat, hunched forward, gazing at his cousin’s face, which was pallid and deeply graven with stark, blue-tinged lines. He knew he should say something, respond in some manner to his cousin’s greeting, but his tongue felt frozen in his mouth.

“Where is al-Farouch?”

The strangeness of the question snapped St. Clair back to full cognizance, and his fingers tightened on his cousin’s chin. “What did you say? Where is who?”

“Ibn al-Farouch. He was here but a short time ago. Where did he go?”

André sat back on his haunches but remained leaning forward, face to face with his cousin, his hand still grasping Sinclair’s chin. “Alec, what are you talking about? Al-Farouch is not here.”

“Of course he is. What is that, if not his?” André looked up, following the direction of Sinclair’s gaze, and saw the yellow swallow-tailed pennant with its five black crescent moons.

“Quick, André, lift me up, quickly. Lift me up.”

The urgency in Alec’s voice provoked an instant response in St. Clair, and he rose immediately to kneel behind his cousin and grasp him carefully beneath the arms, cradling him as gently as he could. “How is that?” he asked. “Am I hurting you?”

“Aye, but not badly. I think I may be lying on top of al-Farouch, and if I am, he may not be able to breathe, so lift me up and move me to one side. Then I will need you to see to him—” Alec stopped, gasping for breath, but then continued. “Gently now, Cuz. Lift me straight up and step to your left. Can you do that?”

“Aye, I can manage that,” St. Clair replied, but as he moved to straighten up, thrusting powerfully but steadily with his thighs against the deadweight of Alec’s armored body, the agony of being moved, even thus slightly, ripped a tortured scream of protest from the wounded knight’s throat. André froze before he could straighten completely, so that he was left crouching. Alec’s weight seemed to increase in his arms and was growing insupportably heavier by the moment.

“Alec,” he hissed, straining the words through his teeth. “Alec, can you hear me?”

There was no answer, and he knew his cousin had fainted from the pain. He tensed again, drew a deep breath and expelled it noisily, then inhaled again, sucking the air into his lungs as hard as he could, and straightened up quickly, lifting Alec as far as he could and then walking backward very carefully for two paces.

André lowered the unconscious knight to a flat piece of ground as gently as he could and then used his dagger to cut savagely through the straps and laces that held the riven armor in place. Grateful that his kinsman could feel nothing, he manhandled him remorselessly, turning him back and forth as he tore at the chain mail, clothing, lining, and bindings until he could see bare skin and the sluggish welling of blood from the wound in Alec’s chest. Whatever had pierced the armor had been massive and sharp, and André guessed it had been a hard-swung battle-axe, for it had driven clean through both cuirass and chain-mail shirt, hammering individual links and pieces of metal into the gash it had made in Sinclair’s chest. André prayed that the wound was not lethal, but he suspected that several of his cousin’s ribs had been smashed, and he had no means of guessing at the extent of the damage Alec had sustained beneath that.

When he felt that he could do no more, he rose to his feet and peered back to the northward, looking for the distinctive black-and-white uniform of the Hospitallers, but none of them had yet come into sight, and so he knelt back down beside his cousin to find him conscious again. As soon as he came close enough, Alec grasped him by the forearm. His fingertips dug deep.

“Sweet Jesus, that hurt, Cousin. Did I pass out? I must have … Was I right? Was Ibn beneath me?”

André St. Clair shook his head. “I don’t know, Alec. I haven’t had time to look. You were lying atop someone, a Saracen, but how would I know who he is?”

“An amulet, hanging from his neck on a silver chain. Heavy silver … Amulet is green … the Prophet’s favorite color … Is there an amulet? Look and see.”

André moved away and looked at the man who had been lying beneath Sinclair, but he had to reach out and search before he could find anything about the man’s neck. A few moments was all it took, however, and he was kneeling by Sinclair again.

“Aye,” he muttered. “A carved amulet of pale green stone, with a chain of heavy silver links.”

“Jade, Cousin, it’s called jade … Is he alive?”

“No, Cousin, he is not. I checked most carefully and I could find no pulse. Your friend is dead. What happened here?”

For a moment Alec Sinclair looked as though he might actually laugh, but then his breath caught in his throat and he grunted, clearly incapable of breathing as he struggled against the pain of his wounds. André felt the strength in his grip tighten then relax, still firm, but no longer panicked. “I saw him here, when we burst out. Could scarcely believe it.” He paused, breathing hard, and André waited, making no attempt to rush him. “There he was, on foot and right in front of me, bleeding from the forehead so that he had to wipe the blood from his eyes with the back of his wrist. His horse, Wind Spirit, was dead beside him …” Another pause, filled with laborious breathing, and then, “He had a bare half dozen of his bodyguard still left around him, and as I saw him, one of our knights charged in to kill him, but he was careless and one of the bodyguards got him with a flung scimitar that took his head right off … And then I saw two or three more of our knights close in to finish Ibn. He wore nothing to mark him as an emir, but there was something about his bearing, as there always was, that set him ap—” The coughing spell broke unexpectedly, and for the next brief while André held Sinclair as his entire body convulsed in pain, racked with the ravages of coughing through a mouth suddenly filled with thick blood. Finally, when the fit subsided, André pressed him back onto the ground.

“Wait here, Alec. There are Hospitallers close by. I am going to find one and bring him back here.” But when he tried to leave, he discovered that Alec had retained a firm grip on his wrist and would not let him go. Alec spat out a mouthful of blood and spoke again, his voice still strong but rattling in his throat.

“Don’t fret about the Hospitallers, Cousin. They can do me no good. I’m finished. Now listen. Listen to me … Will you listen to me?” André nodded, mute, and Sinclair continued. “You may hear people talk about me … about what I did … and they will probably make it sound shameful … And perhaps it was. I simply don’t know any more. I certainly did not set out to do it … didn’t know I would, or could, do such a thing. But there I was, and there was Ibn al-Farouch, about to be struck down … I don’t know what came over me, but suddenly he was down and on his knees, his sword gone, and I jumped down and was standing over him, seeking to defend him, I suppose … perhaps to take him prisoner … I know that was in my mind, that I could repay him for his kindnesses to me …

“But no one wanted to take prisoners. Everyone was mad for blood. I tried to beat them back, our own knights, to claim him as my prisoner, but then one of our fellows struck at me, and suddenly I was fighting for my own life, against my own people. Two of them came at once, one with an axe, and he struck me, hard. The second one I finished with my sword. And then you came … You say Ibn is dead?”

“Aye, Alec, he is.”

“Bring me his amulet, will you?”

When he had it in his hand, he looked at it and grunted, wincing with pain, then held it out to André, who took it and weighed it wordlessly. “Do something for me, Cousin,” Alec said in a hoarse whisper. “When all of this is over, will you find some way to send this back to Ibn’s brother?” He caught his breath again, sharply, on an indrawn hiss. “Sweet Jesus, that hurts. But thank God, not too much … His name is Yusuf. Yusuf al-Farouch … he lives in a village near Nazareth.” He stopped and held his breath for a long time before continuing. “The same Nazareth our Christian brethren tell us Jesus came from … It has an oasis … and they grow fine … fine dates there.”

“I know. I remember you telling me so. The brother is a mullah, is he not?” He was looking at the amulet, and Alec did not answer immediately. “Alec? Yusuf is a …” But Alec’s eyes were fixed and open, staring back at him unseeing.

“Brother? Are you well? May I assist you?” It seemed mere moments later, but as André looked up to see the black-robed Hospitaller standing over him, he knew that time had passed without his noting it. He glanced once again at Alec Sinclair, whose expression was unchanged, and then reached out one hand to the Hospitaller. “You can help me up, if you would. I fear I may have frozen here, for I have lost track of time.” When he was on his feet again, he nodded his thanks to the Hospitaller and then indicated the still form on the ground. “This man was my kinsman and also my closest friend. He was my cousin, the son of my father’s eldest brother. And I would like to bury him apart, I think. Perhaps down by the sea there, where his spirit might look out across the waters towards his home. Have you a shovel I might use?”

IT HAD TAKEN TWO JOURNEYS and several hours of backbreaking work to complete his self-appointed task, but now André St. Clair stood leaning on a longhandled shovel on a patch of firm sand several steps above the high-water mark that had been eroded over the years by the incoming Mediterranean tides. Before him at his feet lay a wide, deep grave, laboriously dug and wide enough to accommodate two bodies, side by side, and behind him lay the bodies of Sir Alexander Sinclair and his friend the Emir Ibn al-Farouch. He turned to where the bodies lay, then grasped Alec Sinclair beneath the shoulders and dragged him to lie along one side of the grave. Then he pulled al-Farouch to lie on the other. When they were both in place, he stood up and spoke to both of them, explaining how he would have enjoyed being able to treat them with more dignity, but that neither his honor nor their own would be besmirched by the means with which he, as a single man alone, was constrained to lay them down. He then bade them farewell in the name of the God they shared, albeit under different names, and when he had done so he went from side to side, rolling first Sinclair and then al-Farouch into the open grave. That done, it was the work of less than an hour to fill the grave again, tamping and tramping down the surface, then brushing it and scattering stones over it to conceal, as well as he was able, the fact that it was a grave and newly dug.

Finally, when his work was complete and the sun was close to setting, he sat down cross-legged at the foot of the grave and reached out to gather up the yellow piece of cloth that had been lying on the sand, pulling it towards him. It was the five-crescent pennant that had attracted his attention earlier that afternoon, and on it lay three objects. The first was the jade amulet that he had promised to send to the mullah Yusuf al-Farouch. The second was the magnificent dagger given to Alec Sinclair by Ibn al-Farouch, and the third was the emir’s own dagger, which André had taken from its place at the small of Ibn’s back, knowing he would find it there because Alec had told him, months earlier. Now, holding one of the sheathed daggers in each hand, he leaned forward and spoke conversationally, as though the two dead men at his feet could hear him perfectly well.

“Someone once read me a lesson from the Testament that said, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ I always liked the thought of that, but now I wonder if the love could be any greater because the friend in question was an enemy. Be that as it may, my lord Sinclair, it is what you have done and your honor will not suffer by it. Nor will yours, Amir al-Farouch, from being loved in such a manner. And as you have said to me so often, Cousin, honor is all we have. It is the only attribute that keeps us separate from the beasts, and most especially from the beasts who masquerade as men … But who will set the standard by which we govern honor when the men like you, the truly honorable men, are all gone? Another question that you posed and answered both. But is it one that you discussed with the emir? I wonder about that. For of course, the answer is immutable. We set our own standards, each of us, and each of us must cleave to his own distinctions.

“I never met you, Amir al-Farouch, but I wish I had. My cousin told me much about you and he painted you as a man of strictest honor. That makes you close to being unique, on either side of the gulf that divides your kind and ours. You are Muslim, Saracen, Arab, worshipper of the one, true God, whom you call Allah. This is your home, and Jerusalem is the Holy City of your Prophet, Muhammad, who ascended into Heaven from the Rock. Believing that, you believed, too, that you were privileged to fight in its defense, and you did so with great and unflagging honor. Your friend there, lying beside you, worships the same God, the One, the True, whom we call simply God. But his ancestors came, as did my own, from the self-same Holy City of Jerusalem. They were not Christian, but Jewish, and they called their God Jehovah, and His home, His temple, stood in Jerusalem, below where the Dome of the Rock now stands. And both of you have died in war, fighting against each other for possession of this sacred place. And for what? For honor? Whose honor? Certainly not God’s or Allah’s or Jehovah’s, for the very thought of that is blasphemy. God has no need of man, and honor is a human attribute. For whose honor, then, are these wars waged? And how can there be honor in slaughtering people for possession of a sacred place?

“I can answer that for both of you. There is no honor in this war. There is no honor among kings and princes, popes and patriarchs, caliphs and viziers or whatever else you wish to name as titles. All of those are men, and all of them are venal, greedy, gross, and driven by base lusts for power. Ours is the task of fighting for their lusts, and like poor fools, we do it gladly, time and time again, answering the call to duty and lining up to die unnoticed by the very people who sent us out there.

“Well, my friends, I have buried you together, as you died together, and now I will leave you together. I received a warning yesterday, Cousin, to watch my back. I meant to talk to you about it last night, but you sent me to Arsuf. Then I would have told you of it tonight, but you died on me. So I will tell you now, and let you think more on honor.

“It seems that I was recognized some days ago by one of the men who killed my father. I was in close proximity to him and to his friends and he assumed, wrongly, that I was snooping for evidence against them. The man who told me was a man I had never seen, but it was clear he had difficulties of his own with these people, whoever they are. He would not give me names, but only said I should beware of ‘Richard’s bullyboys’ as he called them, and watch my back because they were intent on killing me, to keep me quiet.

“In essence, Cousin, that does not inspire me to return to fight and die, killing good men like the emir here, either for Richard’s personal ambitions or at Richard’s instigation, so I know not where I’ll go next, but I will undertake to see that the mullah Yusuf receives the emir’s amulet. And so adieu, to both of you. I leave you wrapped there in your honor … I will weep for you, Cousin Alec, and will rejoice at having known you. But not yet. Not yet. It is much too soon for that. But I will weep, for you, and for my father, and for all the fond fools dying all around us. God give them rest. Farewell.”

Sir André St. Clair wrapped the two daggers and the emir’s amulet in the yellow folds of al-Farouch’s banner and stood up, stuffing the bundle inside his surcoat and then pulling his mantle about him against the evening chill as he went to where his horse and pack mule stood placidly grazing together. Lights were glimmering among the trees, where the Hospitallers had been working all afternoon to set up facilities to treat the wounded, and there was no shortage of people moving about, talking easily to each other now that the worst of the crisis was over and the cruelest excesses of the day had been set aside. He gathered up both sets of reins, for horse and mule, and led the animals slowly up the sloping rise to the old Roman road, where he mounted the Arab mare and turned northward, leading the mule.

“You are facing north, Brother. Arsuf lies south of here.”

André turned and looked at the man who had spoken to him from the darkness beneath a neighboring tree. He was dressed in black from head to foot, and André smiled at him. “Are you a knight?”

“No, Brother, I am but a simple monk of the Hospital. I fight to keep men alive.”

“And may you thrive and prosper at your craft, Brother. I am headed north, back towards Acre.”

“Back to Acre? Will you not fight at Jerusalem?”

“No, Brother, I will not fight at Jerusalem, nor for Jerusalem. I am done with fighting. I intend to ride in search of a field of stones, in which to meditate and commune with my God. After that, when He and I have come to know each other better, who knows? I might even go and live among the Infidel. It can’t be any more perilous than living where I do, among God’s faithful zealots …” He broke off and smiled at the expression on the tall monk’s face, which he could now see clearly in the light of the rising moon. St. Clair took pity on him. “Forgive me, Brother,” he said. “It has been a long day and I have far to travel in the coming years. Farewell, and God bless you.”

Without another word he set spurs to his horse and trotted away, the mule in tow, and the monk stood staring after him, watching the tall, white-clad figure with the blood-red cross on its shoulders until he lost sight of it among the trees that lined the road.

FINIS