Alec Sinclair smiled. “I was in hiding, watching you and listening. Close by, as you suspect, but you’ll pardon me if I don’t tell you exactly where. I will tell you, however, that the opportunity it afforded me to hide and observe is why I chose this spot.”
His cousin thought about that for a few moments, looking around him speculatively, and then he nodded. “Accepted. Were the secret mine, I would not reveal it, either.”
“And speaking of secrets,” Harry Douglas intervened, “I know that you two have things to discuss— confidential family matters that do not concern me—so I will leave you to talk. Now that you are here I am prepared to believe that there are no fleabags watching us and waiting to attack. I shall unsaddle our mounts and feed them some oats, and then I will walk about among the stones and try to find your horse, Sir Alexander, for I presume you did not walk all the way out here in full mail. Should I become lost, I will whistle loudly, so if you will keep one ear apiece cocked to the air, I’ll be obliged. And so, in which direction should I seek your horse?”
Sinclair raised an arm and in a slow and elaborate mime pointed directly north, and Harry nodded in acknowledgment and began to walk away, leading the two horses, until Sinclair stopped him again.
“I know you have been out here in the kingdom for a while, but I doubt you have been
Harry nodded. “My thanks for that. I promise you, I will keep my hands where I can see them at all times.”
“HE SEEMS LIKE A GOOD MAN,” Alec Sinclair said as Harry vanished behind a boulder, leading the two horses. “But then, he is a Scot, so I should not be surprised. Mind you, he does not sound like one.”
“He is a good man, in every sense,” Andre replied quietly, “and he is his
Sir Alexander pointed to a pair of smallish stones, then reached back over his shoulder and drew the great sword from behind his back. “Can we not sit down while we talk? I have been standing for hours. You’ll pardon me, I hope, for drawing steel, but I canna sit with this thing in place.” He stepped to one side and carefully leaned the long-bladed weapon upright against a stone.
“That is an impressive weapon. I do not believe I have ever seen its like.”
“Then you have never been in Scotland. Twohanded broad-sword. They are common there.”
“That blade must be more than five feet long.”
“It’s certainly long enough to keep the pests away when you swing it around your head.”
Andre laughed and looked again at the impressive blade, gauging the width of it at a full hand’s breadth where it met the double cross-guard. “What were we talking about?”
“About your friend. You said he was uneasy. Why?” Andre crossed his arms on his chest. “Well, he is a monk, and some of those make a religion out of discomfort. But were I to guess seriously at a realistic reason, I would say he feels guilty for missing the disaster at Hattin. He was at the springs of La Safouri with the rest of the army a few days before the battle, but he was sent off with dispatches to the garrison at Ascalon the night before de Chatillon and his cronies talked King Guy into abandoning the oasis and marching directly for Tiberias. So most of his friends ended up dead.”
“And he feels guilty because he survived, you think? Then I shall have to talk to him. I was there that day, and believe me when I tell you that Harry has no need to berate himself for his good fortune in being somewhere else. So how came he to be in Acre?”
“Because he fought his way out of Ascalon, just before it fell, then spent the following months acquainting himself with the land of Palestine, sometimes on horseback, mostly afoot. The entire region was in chaos, for after Hattin, the Muslims were invincible and our side could barely field a force of cavalry. Every city in the Latin Kingdom went down, as you know, and it seems Harry was there at most of them, usually in the thickest of the fighting. He was wounded a few times but he came out alive every time, and men began to say he was indestructible. In a time when there were no senior officers anywhere, to plan or take command, men rallied to Harry, forcing him to be a leader despite his own unwillingness. And eventually, he led a tired and tattered little army back to Tyre.”
“How long ago was that, do you know?”
“No, but Harry can tell you. It must have been half a year after Hattin, at least.”
“Aye, at least. So he reached Tyre. They must have feted him when he arrived, after so long.”
“They tried, I’m told, for the men who had been with him sang his praises everywhere they went, and God Himself knows the Franks had need of heroes in those days … conquering heroes first, but failing those, defiant heroes. Especially in Tyre.”
Alec Sinclair nodded. Tyre remained the only Christian-held city in all the Holy Land, the only place that had not fallen to the Saracens, and in the weeks and months after Hattin it had filled to overflowing with the remnants of the Christian army. Conrad de Montferrat, the German Baron who had snatched the city from Saladin’s grasp a bare moment before it was lost forever, ruled it with iron discipline, even claiming sovereignty over the last of the Templars there, which in itself was a measure of how far the Temple’s star had plunged after Hattin.
“There were fewer than a hundred Templars— knights and sergeants both—in the city when Harry arrived, and he brought only three more with him among his followers. But Gerard de Ridefort was already there.”
“And not entirely pleased with the situation, I understand.”
“Apparently so.”
There was no need for either man to say any more on that matter. De Ridefort, notoriously choleric and intolerant at the best of times, had been reduced to seething impotence in Tyre, bitterly resenting his subordination to de Montferrat and the obligation that went with it to accept orders from the German and obey them meekly, upon pain of expulsion from the city with his knights. There had been no slightest doubt in the Master’s mind that Conrad would expel him and his congregation out of hand at the first sign of insubordination or opposition, and he had told his Templars that. He also made no secret of how much it nauseated him that he, as the embodiment of the Temple Order, could do nothing to resist or to change that situation, for he had lost his entire command structure, not to mention four-fifths of his entire command, during and after the battle at Hattin. He was reduced to watching and biding his time, powerless, grim faced and tooth grinding in his acknowledgment of that.
De Montferrat was a newcomer to the Latin Kingdom, a German whose primary loyalty was to the Holy Roman Empire, which meant to Constantinople and its Orthodox Christianity. By extension of that, and there was no great leap of understanding required to appreciate the subtleties involved, de Montferrat’s ideal military order was the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa’s Order of Teutonic Knights, which meant that other Orders, namely the Hospitallers and Templars, were inferior and less than ideal. In Conrad’s eyes, it was only right and proper that the Teutonic Knights should and would provide the future strength and protection of the Christian presence—
“Barbarossa’s death must have come as a shock to Conrad,” Sinclair mused, and his cousin nodded.
“Aye, and unwelcome.”
“Completely. Think about that from his viewpoint, if you can imagine it. There he is, sitting strongly in the throne he built himself, awaiting the arrival of his cousin the Emperor with an army of five hundred thousand men, sufficient strength to enable him to thumb his nose at everyone from Saladin to Richard Plantagenet and Philip of France. He must have felt omnipotent, invincible … And then in a clatter of hooves comes a worn-out rider with the word that his universe has fallen apart: his Emperor is dead, his mighty army scattered, and all his hopes and promises no more than smoke blowing in the wind.” Alec shook his head in wonder. “I know not how I might adjust to such a reversal, such a
