exactly what he was about in this matter. Richard was the Warrior King, the Shining Light of Christendom; he was the Lionhearted Monarch, England’s Paladin and the Soldier of Salvation to Rome’s Church; he would never settle for a mealy-mouthed, negotiated peace. Richard’s personality demanded nothing less than total victory. He had bankrupted his new kingdom to pay for this war, and he intended to capture every shred of glory that might be available for the taking … and there would be little glory in accepting the chastened capitulation of a cowed infidel. Therefore the King was doing everything within his power to push the Sultan into committing all his strength to total war—a war Richard was convinced he could not lose.
So much, then, for honor and for Richard’s commitment to his charges, Andre thought bitterly, certain now that his analysis was accurate. Beside the flaring light of the King’s need for personal glory and acclaim, the rights, lives, and expectations of all his countrymen and subjects were expendable, and he had the power, on all sides, to do whatever he needed to do to achieve his ends. He would defy Saladin to the death of the last man on either side.
Another movement caught his eye, too far away to identify, but bright and unusual, a flash of feminine yellow against the high walls of the royal pavilion. Berengaria? Or might it be Joanna? He thought of both of them, seeing their eyes regarding him steadily in return, and he smiled to himself, albeit nervously, wondering what they had thought of his sudden and unexplained disappearance from Limassol.
Strange, he thought now, and not for the first time, that he had not heard a single word from anyone in Richard’s camp since that day onward. He had spoken to de Sable, it was true, but only very briefly and of general things. De Sable was far too preoccupied with his many duties to have time for idle chatter over whether or not his friend the King had been displeased with one of his lesser minions. It was true, too, that he himself had made no attempt to contact his liege lord since the King’s arrival in Outremer. Some might call that dereliction, but a small voice in the back of Andre’s mind whispered quietly and mutinously to him of loyalty and responsibilities. Sir Henry St. Clair had given up everything to come out of his honorable retirement and place himself anew at the service of his King in a strange land, struggling to learn new tasks and skills at an age when most of his contemporaries had already died of old age, and there was something lodged deep within Andre that insisted, with an unrelenting pressure, that the responsibility lay with Richard to acknowledge the loyal old man’s death to his son in person. Until that happened—and the truth surprised him because he had not articulated the thought before that moment —Andre knew he would make no effort to approach the King. As for the two women, wife and sister, he grimaced ruefully, half grin, half groan, thinking himself well out of that situation, despite another small voice that muttered mournfully in regretful undertones at the back of his awareness.
He grunted wordlessly, a sound born deep in his chest, then sucked in a deep breath and attempted to empty his mind of such thoughts, pulling hard on his reins and kneeing his horse around to return to his squadron, where, for the next few days, he worked to smother his own vague and confusing feelings of guilt over Richard and loyalty by driving and drilling his men hard and pitilessly.
But four days later, on the twelfth day of July, the city fell, and in the blink of an eye, it seemed, everything changed. The morale of the entire army took an upward leap, and suddenly everyone was enthusiastic again, eagerly seeking something concrete to do, so that they might be able to talk afterwards of what they had done at the fall of Acre.
Andre, wanting no part of any of that, found himself in the middle of it all regardless, relieved of his squadron-leader status and promoted to command a specially raised one-hundred-horse troop charged with keeping peace during the surrender. The day after the capitulation, he sat in attendance with his new comrades in arms as the defeated Arabs marched out of the city they had defended for so many months.
The crowd watching the evacuation was huge; every soldier in the Frankish armies who was not on duty that day turned out to watch the defeated enemy depart. But anyone expecting to see a ragtag, dispirited procession of shuffling miscreants was disappointed. The enemy emerged from the gates in a long column, walking with their heads high and their dignity wrapped around them so solidly that their mere appearance deprived the watching Franks of any wish to cheer or even jeer. Instead, they watched in profound silence, tinged with respect, and no man among them thought to offer insult to the departing enemy.
Andre St. Clair sat watching the exodus with something akin to pride glowing in his breast, for he knew that his cousin Alec would have been proud of the way these men accepted defeat and showed no regret or deference to their conquerors. When the last of them passed by, leaving none but hostages and prisoners behind for Richard’s use, the officer commanding Andre’s troop gave the prearranged signal, and the troop fell into place behind the Arab column in files of twenty-five mounted men, riding four abreast. They accompanied their charges as far as the boundaries of their siege lines, then left them to make their own way into the desert, to wherever they might go.
“DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY IDEA why we are out here, sitting in the sun like this as though we were all idiots?”
Sitting at the head of his own squadron, two horse lengths ahead of its front rank, Andre St. Clair heard the question clearly—it had come from the extended triple rank of knights ahead of him—but he made no attempt to answer it or even to think about what the answer might be. His attention was dedicated to a matter that troubled him more personally. Something, some kind of creature, was crawling across the skin of his ribs beneath his right arm, and the slow itch of it was practically unbearable. Louse or beetle, he knew not what it was and cared less. His entire attention was focused upon the impossibility of scratching it, catching it, or interfering with its progress in any way, for it was separated from his clawing fingers by several layers of stinking clothing, fustian padding, chain mail, and an armored cuirass. He had not bathed in five weeks, and his stench was overpowering even to himself. Five weeks of unending desert patrols had achieved that, five weeks of strictly rationed water and the infuriating tedium of chasing phantom formations that remained uncatchable, were but seldom seen, and which sometimes attacked at nightfall and daybreak, inflicting casualties and then vanishing into the vast expanse of dunes. The men at his back, his own Red Squadron, were as sick of this existence as he was.
After a silence that seemed long in retrospect, one voice, also from in front of him, replied to the rhetorical question. “Because we
“Silence!” Andre heard then. “I will not tolerate such talking in the ranks. Have you no shame? Remember who you are and where your duties lie. One more word like that from anyone and I will see the guilty man walled up for a few days, to contemplate the insults he is offering to God and to our sacred Order.”
The speaker was Etienne de Troyes, and no man hearing him doubted for a moment that the notoriously humorless Marshal would do as he threatened. The internal disciplines and punishment exercised by the Temple for the mental purity and salvation of its brethren were designed as impediments to sin, intended to be savage, as a disincentive to waywardness, and it was not unusual for a disobedient or fractious brother to be walled up, quite literally bricked into a confined and lightless place, for a week or longer, supplied with no more than a bowl of water while he contemplated how he might achieve acceptance, reinstatement, and salvation.
A silent stillness settled over the assembled knights again. A horse whickered and stamped, setting off a series of similar reactions from other mounts, all of which had been standing in one place for far too long. The animal directly ahead of St. Clair raised its tail, and he watched emotionlessly as it evacuated a pile of dung to steam briefly in the sun. He leaned forward slightly to look to his left, to where the black-robed ranks of the Hospitallers occupied the other end of the Frankish line, and he wondered if they knew any more than his own people did about why they were all here. He had led his men out before daybreak with nothing but the order to march—no destination, no objective, which in itself was highly unusual—and they had marched until they reached this desolate place, where they had halted and drawn up in their battle formations.
The Hospitallers held the left of the line, on the lower slopes of the hill called Tel Aiyadida, which marked the easternmost boundary of the Christian advance. The Templars, as usual, manned the right, and the two extremities were joined by the various contingents of the lay forces, forming a front more than half a mile in expanse. Ahead of the line, stretching away to the southeast, the road to Nazareth was virtually invisible in the noonday glare, and to the left of that, rising in the middle distance, was another hill, the Tel Keisan. There was no visible activity on the Tel Keisan, but it was enemy territory, securely held, the Templars knew, by Saladin’s teeming and apparently inexhaustible regiments of black-robed Bedouin from Africa.
