Standard of Honor

clandestine thing that I did not particularly enjoy. It ended when I was taken prisoner by Saladin’s people. I have not spoken to the Old Man since—although now, as you will see when you read my orders, I will have to. In telling you of this, I was trying to give you some idea of how much I have learned of many things … and how little I truly know. The simple truth is that I made a friend among the Muslims when I was their captive, a close friend and perhaps the best I ever had. He was my captor, the man who took me, although the reality was nowhere near as simple and straightforward as that sounds. His name is Ibn al-Farouch, an emir in Saladin’s personal guard.” He smiled as he saw the astonishment spread over his cousin’s face. “It’s a long tale, but I think you might find it worth the hearing, if you have the time.”

Andre looked about him. “I seem to have no pressing engagements to detain me from listening.”

Thus, for the next hour and longer, Andre sat rapt while Alec Sinclair told him first the story of the Battle of Hattin and the loss of his friend, Sir Lachlan Moray, and then of his encounter with the injured Saracen and his subsequent capture by the search party who came looking for their missing leader, al-Farouch. And thereafter he listened eagerly as Sinclair described his life among the Saracens and his eventual and reluctantly acquired admiration and respect for his enemy and their ways.

“They have so much more than we do,” Alec concluded. “They have everything that we possess, but all of it, it seems to me, in greater measure, and they appear to appreciate it more than we do. Certes, they live in a harsh land, and most of them spend the major part of their lives living under tents instead of a solid roof. But even that permits them to remain largely clean. They pick up their tents and move to a fresh area whenever they so wish, whereas our peasants at home build a hovel in one squalid spot and there they stay for years, living in their own stink and sharing their abode with swine and cattle. And when the Prophet’s followers do aspire to build fine buildings, they construct them, it appears, out of light and air, with only gracious, swirling, weightless lines of stone and marble to hold them together. Completely unlike our dark, dank, and windowless piles of heavy granite stone.

“And they are clean, Andre. Saracens are clean in a way that we in Christendom can never comprehend. The words of the Prophet Muhammad lay upon them, as a burden, an obligation to purify themselves weekly at least, and before all religious festivals. They see no sin in cleanliness, whereas we, in our world, avoid it as we would the plague. Cleanliness, in our world of Christendom, is looked upon as some form of sinful depravity, as some Devil’s lure that will lead straight to fornication and the evils of the flesh. However, I am grown convinced since my return to freedom and the civilized company of my companion brothers that the rank, rancid stench of foul and filthy unlaved bodies and stinking, unwashed nether garments must militate strongly against any temptation to sin willfully with a bearer of such odors.”

He lapsed into silence then, and Andre sat mute for a time, thinking over what he had heard and what it meant. He then surprised himself by spouting words he had not known were in him, waiting to be said.

“I agree with you completely,” he said, earning himself a glance of mild surprise from his cousin. He shrugged. “I know it would earn me little in the way of praise were the truth known to our fellow Templars, but I am a bather myself, although I keep it secret nowadays. I grew into the habit of it while I was in southern Provence, studying with my Arabian tutors at a villa belonging to one of the senior Councillors of the Order of Sion. The tutors were Muslims, to a man, as I am sure yours were in your time, but since there is nothing Christian in the beliefs of our brotherhood, there was no ritual conflict to hamper them from pursuing their own ways and living their lives according to the Koran.”

He smiled, recalling something from the distant past. “The senior of them, a learned man I soon came to revere for his wisdom, took exception to the smell of me when I first arrived to take up my studies, and by the time he had called in his servants to search for and find the wild, dung-covered goat that had somehow found entry to his chambers, I had begun to sense that I might be smelling a little ripe. He went on to point out, with great patience, that since I was of the brotherhood and only nominally and of necessity a Christian, I could afford to behave in a civilized manner while I was on premises owned by the brotherhood, which meant that I was free to bathe without fear of reprisals, and consequently blessed thereafter to be able to absolve my friends of the need to pinch their noses and suffer my rank odor.”

Alec had been listening closely to this, one arm crossed over his breast and supporting his other elbow while he scratched the tip of his nose idly with the nail of his little finger. “This tutor. You say he was the eldest of the group? Might his name have been Sharif Al-Qalanisi? I know the chance is—”

“Yes! How could you—?”

“Because he was my teacher, too, in the same place, in Provence. The Villa Providence, home of Gilbert, the Master of St. Omer, great-nephew of Godfrey St. Omer, one of the nine Founders of the Temple. Al-Qalanisi must be nigh on seventy now, for he was over fifty when I knew him. How small, the world in which we walk, do you not agree? Pardon me for my enthusiasm, but you were describing an experience I once had, too, in minute detail. And did he then encourage you to bathe daily?”

“He did. And I did as he bade me, so that in the space of half a year, while learning Arabic, I had grown so accustomed to the pleasures of bathing that my return to Christian smelliness and filth was almost intolerable. I could not believe how everyone reeked. The stench of my companions took my breath away at times, and so I soon learned to avoid their company, and Sharif Al-Qalanisi, God bless him, had taught me a way to keep myself reasonably, or at least tolerably, clean. As you know, there are occasions when it is considered laudable and indeed obligatory for a Christian man to bathe—Easter springs to mind, as do the feast days of several major saints—so that all in all, a man may bathe as frequently as once every season, should he so desire. But that is only part of the struggle. Even if they washed their bodies, very few men will wash their clothing at the same time. It was that little truth, passed on to me by Sharif Al-Qalanisi, that enabled me to bathe as often as I was able to arrange it, so be it I kept a set of suitably rancid, sweat-stained clothing to wear around my fellow novices. But when I was alone, I would wear clothing that smelled as fresh and clean as hillside air on a cool morning.” He nodded emphatically. “The only sin a sane man might connect with cleanliness is the hypocrisy and ignorance that leads the Christians to deny its worth. Tell me, therefore, what else do they have that you consider superior?”

“Superior to what we have? Are you sure you want to hear that?”

“No, consider what we have been discussing … We are of the Brotherhood of Sion, an entity unto ourselves. I want to know what else the Saracens have that you consider superior to the Christian equivalent.”

“Ah, I see. There is a difference. So, let me see. Well, I could start with honor—the true kind, that has all the solidity and worth and value that is seldom found among the ranks of Christendom today. The Saracens have that in profusion, whereas among the Frankish ranks today, from kings to pikemen, honor is merely a sound mouthed by knaves to gull fools. Then there is integrity, closely linked to honor in that the one cannot exist without the other. Next might come fidelity, to ideals, to commitments, to agreements, and to good— truly good—intent. The military virtues I will not include, for they are simplistic rituals played out by mindless fools for the most part —bravery, courage, constancy, mercy, and compassion, though it seems obscene even to include those latter two by name. But all of those may be adhered to or abandoned in the heat of battle by men of either side, with no one being any the wiser. No, I think I will make suffice of honor, integrity, and fidelity. The Saracens possess all of those three in greater mass than do the Christian Franks.”

St. Clair nodded. “Tell me this, then, for it is puzzling me. You say that you only discovered these things, and reluctantly, while you were prisoner in the hands of the Saracens, yet you have been dealing with Islam and with the Muslim Sons of the Prophet ever since you arrived here. Why were you not aware of these things before? You must have had some inkling that it was so.”

“No, not so. My liaison with Islam prior to my being captured had nothing to do with the Saracens. I was dealing with the Assassins, and they are Shi’ite, originally from Persia. And not merely that, but I was dealing personally with Rashid al-Din Sinan himself, the Old Man of the Mountain, and he is not an endearing man to be near. The Assassins are single-minded and humorless, like all zealots, merciless and incapable of compassion. They are very much like their counterparts here, the Templars. In all the years in which I dealt with the Old Man and his minions, I handled them with care and expected truth in our contracts and justiciary precision in our dealings. I never doubted their fidelity to their leader and the agreements he made with us, but I never thought of them at all in terms of honor or integrity as I understood those things. They might have had their own versions of each, within themselves, but there was nothing there of either one that I could recognize. It was only when I fell among the Saracens and came to know Ibn al-Farouch that the scales of blindness began to loosen and fall from