He smoothed a rectangular area of sand with one hand and stuck a poniard, hilt first, into the center of it to create a sundial. Then he sat back to watch the shadow creep slowly towards the line that he had traced as marking half an hour. When shadow and line crossed, he waited a few minutes longer, then rose up and sheathed his blade, moving to saddle his patient horse. He had thrown the saddle across its back and was tightening his girths when he heard an approaching noise and looked up to see Alec, his face solemn.
“Well, welcome to you, Sir Knight of the Mournful Face. You took your time arriving. Where have you been?” He was still working beneath the horse’s withers, tightening the straps, but when he heard no answer to his gibe he straightened up and looked across to see no warmth in his cousin’s face. “Alec? In God’s name, man, what’s wrong? You look as though you have lost all you value. What’s happened? Is it de Sable?”
Alec Sinclair managed to shake his head, but strangely, as though he were numb or impaired in some manner. Then he swung his leg over the cantle and slid loosely to the ground, collecting himself fluidly and with ease. But still his eyes were unfocused.
“De Sable is well. I left him only a short time ago. Come and sit down.” He moved past Andre on stiff legs and lowered himself to the depression in the sand where Andre had waited for him. Andre felt apprehension coiling strongly in his gut, and he patted the horse’s flank and left it standing there as he went to sit on the sand beside his cousin.
“Alec, tell me what is troubling you. You went to look for de Sable yesterday, so why did you have to meet him today?”
“Couldn’t find him yesterday. He had too much marshaling to attend to. But I remembered what you had told me about his joining the Temple, and so I left word at the commandery that if Sir Robert were to appear, he should inform him that I had come seeking him. He sent for me this morning and I’ve been with him ever since.” Alec sat up straight and drew a great breath, and Andre could see that his cousin was in some kind of torment, his eyes haunted with awareness. Before he could say anything, however, Alec bent forward quickly and seized a double handful of the fabric of Andre’s surcoat, pulling him close and into an embrace.
“Andre— Your … your father is dead.”
The words, emerging choked and close to indistinguishable, washed over and through Andre with no effect. He heard them, and a tiny portion of his mind may have absorbed their meaning, but their significance had absolutely no effect upon him. He was highly aware of the discomfort caused by the position into which Alec had pulled him, and he could feel the links of his cousin’s mailed shoulder digging painfully into the skin of his face. He even felt slightly embarrassed about the intimacy of this unexpected embrace, thinking they might be compromised were anyone to see it, but the words he had heard held no meaning for him. His father was dead. He knew that must be important, but his face was pressed against his cousin’s clothing, against his armor, and he realized that Alec Sinclair bore the same aroma as his father, the same beloved, unmistakable tang that marked Sir Henry St. Clair, and in that instant, in the space of half a heartbeat, the barriers fell and he heard what Alec had said.
Afterwards, much later, he would recall Alec gazing at him solemnly, his eyes wide and concerned as he told him how Sir Henry had been waylaid and struck down, with two of his junior officers, as they made their way back one night from a popular hostelry towards their quarters in Famagusta, where they were coordinating the details of a mixed strike force, horse and foot, that was to be led by Guy de Lusignan against Isaac Comnenus’s forces the next day. Their assailants had not been identified, let alone captured, but there was ample evidence that the attack had been carried out by one of several well-organized guerrilla groups operating out of the foothills to the north of the city.
Sir Henry St. Clair had fully discharged all his responsibilities to the liege lord whom he had served so faithfully throughout his life. He and the two officers with him had received full military honors in their funerary rites, Alec Sinclair said, and the King himself was in attendance, accompanied by an entourage of some of the senior lords and barons of his holdings throughout Christendom, including Sir Robert de Sable. The Archbishop of Auxienne had offered prayers for the souls of the slain heroes, and Richard of England himself had spoken highly of his Master-at-Arms and how he had learned much of what he knew about fighting under Sir Henry’s tutelage.
All of these things, Andre knew in moments of lucidity over the course of the following few days, might be cause for pride and pleasure at some unknown date in the future, but for the time being, while he was feeling the cavernous emptiness that had filled him, it was all meaningless.
When they returned to camp, Alec Sinclair, fretful over his cousin’s condition, set about seeking the best in medical aid that he could find, for Andre had fallen into a state of deep melancholia and refused to be shaken out of it. And as was not unusual among the Frankish populace of Outremer, many of whom had now lived there for generations, he chose to engage the services of a celebrated Muslim physician whose acquaintance he had made several years before, although he would tell no one where or how. The truth was that Saif ad-Din Yildirim, reputedly a first cousin to one of Saladin’s most trusted associates, was in fact Shi’a and an associate of the Assassins.
Yildirim promptly set Andre St. Clair upon a regimen of liquid foods and powerful opiates, designed to keep him abed and asleep most of the time. There was no logical explanation, he said, for Sir Andre’s reaction to the death of his father, but he had seen similar cases among men of his own religion and was quite sure that the effects would soon pass, aided by sleep and rest. And sure enough, Alec discovered, so it was.
Yildirim suspended the administration of the opiates on the morning of the fourth day following the onset of Andre’s strange symptoms, and Andre St. Clair awoke at his usual time before dawn the next day with no memory of having been ill. When Alec questioned him, he remembered receiving the tidings from Alec, and he was subdued and saddened, but he now behaved as any other young man would on losing a well-loved parent.
A little later that same day, Andre came seeking his cousin in the knight’s new quarters close by the Templars’ tent, the great, bannered pavilion that served the Templars in the field as a mobile commandery. Although Sir Alexander Sinclair would have refused to place himself so close to the heart of the Temple Command a mere week earlier, the reason for his profound change of heart was simple: Sir Robert de Sable’s personal pavilion now stood squarely beside the Templars’ tent. Scarcely less elaborate than its imposing neighbor, de Sable’s pavilion had been erected several days earlier, after Sir Robert had formally resigned as King Richard’s Fleet Master and accepted his new posting as Grand Master Elect of the Order of the Temple of Solomon. Alec had sought out de Sable as soon as he heard that the veteran had arrived, and had offered his personal services immediately and without reservation, for the two of them had known each other for more than two decades and had been Raised to the Brotherhood of Sion in the same ceremony, on a warm August night near the ancient town of Carcassonne. De Sable had embraced Sinclair enthusiastically, and instantly appointed him to his personal staff. And that, very markedly, had been the end of Alec’s loss of popularity.
Andre found Alec working diligently when he arrived, frowning over a letter he was writing. He sat quietly until his cousin had completed what he was doing and sat back in his chair.
“I owe you a great deal, it seems, Cousin. I have been told that there is no better or more renowned physician in these parts than Saif ad-Din Yildirim.”
Alec flicked his fingers in a gesture of dismissal. “Nonsense. You owe me nothing. You are all the kin I have out here, and selfishness insists I look after you, since you are a mere child. Yildirim is an old friend and was happy to oblige me in this. How are you feeling now? Any ill effects from the opiates he fed you?”
Andre smiled. “None. But I seem to remember dreams that I would enjoy examining more closely now.” His face sobered. “Let me ask you this again, Alec, but one more time and for my own satisfaction, simply so I can be sure that my memory is serving me correctly. Am I correct in believing that my father was struck down at night, returning to his quarters from a hostelry where he had eaten with two friends?”
“Two associates, both his subordinates. All three of them were killed, the assailants unknown. We have to believe there were multiple assailants, since otherwise the odds would have militated against all three being killed. Your father’s age might have worked against him in a long struggle, but the men with him were both serving officers, both experienced veterans, and both at the top of their profession of arms. Those two would not have gone down easily. Ergo, multiple assailants and most probably from ambush. But we have no way of knowing how many or who they were.”
“And this was when, do you know? How long after I had left Cyprus?”
“Hmm. De Sable said you would ask that. Three days after you left Limassol. Your father had been shipped to Famagusta that same day, the day you left, before daybreak, and had arrived there that same night. He had been in Famagusta for two days when the incident occurred.”
