Standard of Honor

St. Clair puffed out a breath. “I have no idea, but from the way you ask I can surmise that the number would probably be greater than any I might suggest.”

“Much greater. The sole limitation that would apply to such a load is the physical bulk of the bundles of arrows. Now imagine a number of those, all neatly tied up, with five and twenty arrows in each bundle. Each bundle would be approximately the thickness of a double fist.” He illustrated what he meant by placing his clenched fists together, thumb to thumb. “Now imagine crates made out of lath and wire—cages, each as wide as an arrow’s length, and sufficiently long and deep to hold ten bundles side by side, stacked four layers deep. Each crate, a light but strong cage, would hold one thousand arrows, and it would be no great feat of engineering to bind six such crates together on each side of a camel. That represents twelve thousand arrows, carried by just one beast.”

St. Clair shrugged, smiling and spreading his palms. “An interesting premise, I will grant you that,” he said quietly. “Given, of course, that one could even find twelve thousand arrows.”

“Find them? Sir Henry, the army that defeated us at Hattin was made up almost entirely of bowmen— mounted bowmen, on horses much smaller than ours, wiry and spare, faster and much more agile. Each bowman carried his own arrows into the campaign, three or four quivers full at least. But Saladin had already thought beyond such things and seen what he must do. Months before he assembled his army, summoning them from Egypt and from Syria, from Asia Minor and all the other fiefs that he commands, he sent out the word for arrows to be made in numbers that had never been seen before, and for all of them to be shipped to the places where the different contingents of his armies would assemble.”

“And he loaded them all onto a camel, is that what you were going to say?”

“No, Sir Henry, it is not. That would amount to only twelve thousand arrows. By the time he moved against us, coming to lay siege to Tiberias, Saladin had seventy—seventy—camels laden with extra arrows in his baggage train. I know not how many arrows they had in total, but when the slaughter at Hattin was over, the Muslims were boasting among themselves that they had transformed the infidel pigs from knights and soldiers into hedgehogs. I have never seen anything to equal the storm of arrows that were shot at us that day.”

“Seventy camel loads … How do you know that?” “I was their prisoner, and I speak their language.

I heard them talking about it afterwards, and about the difficulties they had had in collecting the spent arrows after the battle.”

St. Clair now felt distinctly ill at ease. “Wait now, because I am not sure I understand what you have said here. Are you telling me that the Christian army at Hattin was destroyed from a distance, without ever engaging the enemy? If so, it goes against everything else I have heard about the battle. What about the feats of the individual knights, and the charge of the Templars?”

“What charge?” Montdidier scoffed. “The Templars made no heroic charge at Hattin. Trying to close with the enemy was like trying to capture smoke. They outnumbered us hugely, and rode in circles around us, and every time we tried to charge them and engage them, their formations would disintegrate and scatter as we drew near. They would move away to a safe distance, permitting us to ride through and then closing in behind us, cutting us off from our own forces and exposing our flanks to their bowmen. The Temple Knights held the rearguard. They recognized what was happening, after several attempts to engage, and to their credit, they fell back to reinforce the King’s encampment on the knoll above the battle. But the King’s people had pitched their tents between the King’s main force and the Templars, so that the knights were forced to ride around and between them, being shot from behind as they jostled one another, trying to find a way through the lines of tents and the thousands of guy ropes that confounded their horses.

“No solid portion of our army even came close to a hand-to-hand encounter with the enemy that day. Some individuals did, but they were few against hordes and they were swiftly slaughtered. Our infantry, almost twelve thousand strong, were allowed to march right through the Muslim ranks. It was the same technique— they simply moved aside and let our men pass through without a fight, and then they were followed and picked off piecemeal from both sides as they made their way down towards the lake. None of them survived.

“And that, for all intents and purposes, is the story of Hattin: we sat helpless on our horses and were shot down. We were outmaneuvered, outmanned, and outplanned, and our leadership was impotent in the face of the enemy’s superior ability. It was not a glorious occasion for Christendom.” He turned his face away, then hawked and spat, disgust and outrage radiating from him almost visibly. “Leadership, I called it. Hah! May God forgive me, but I have seen more leadership among a pack of rats than I saw that day at Hattin.

Arrogance, stupidity, ignorance, and vaunting pride I saw aplenty, but leadership, ability, or inspiring behavior? God help us all next time, if we are foolish enough to go at all.”

“Are you implying that we might see the same thing happen again, next time?”

Montdidier looked at him with raised eyebrows. “Do you doubt it? What has changed, between then and now? The arrogant old warhorses like de Ridefort are gone, but we’ve replaced them with even lesser fools. I swear to you, Master St. Clair, if we ride into battle in the same fashion in this coming war, arrogant in our notions of superiority, Saladin will meet us with exactly the same tactics and achieve precisely the same effect. That is why the kings must be made to see that change is needed.”

St. Clair opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again, and the Hospital Knight waited.

“Is—?” Henry coughed to clear his throat. “There is a question I must ask, purely for my own peace of mind. Are there … Is there any possibility that the defeat at Hattin was merely an accident of war? Might it have turned out differently had the armies met in another place, on another day?”

The other’s headshake was terse and definite. “I doubt it. There might have been some minor differences in the way the fight was fought, but the outcome would have been the same. On the day after the battle, July the fifth, when the Saracen physicians were tending to my wounds, Tiberias, which had been under siege, surrendered—unsurprising, you might say, since the citizens had watched the slaughter from their walls the previous day—but five days later, on the tenth day of the month, Acre fell. And then, one after the other in rapid succession, Saladin’s army captured Nablus, Jaffa, Toron, Sidon, Beirut, and Ascalon. All heavily fortified towns. After that, apart from a few scattered castles that still held out in remote spots, only the port of Tyre and the city of Jerusalem remained in Christian hands. And then Jerusalem went down to Saladin in September. None of those events occurred by accident.”

“Aye …” St. Clair rose to his feet and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Sir Gautier simply waited, giving him time to think, and at last St. Clair said, “I am no king. I will, however, stand in your support of your views from this time on.” He then crossed the deck to the starboard rail, where he stood with his back to Montdidier, staring quietly out at the distant horizon.

The Hospitaller hovered where he was for a moment, looking at St. Clair’s back and the set of his shoulders, then walked away.

“GOD’S WOUNDS, Henry, tell me straight! If I wanted veiled hints and mysteries I’d call in a priest. You are my Master-at-Arms, so what I require from you is straight talk, with no muttered nonsense. You’ve seen this morning how we intend to transport our army to Outremer, but to this point you have said nothing, not a single word, about how we are to conduct ourselves when we finally arrive there and confront Saladin and his Mussulmen. How are we to approach this task, to come at them anew without suffering the same fate as Guy de Lusignan and the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem? Damnation, man, I need guidance in this, before I speak to the others. Philip of France will scream outrage if he even begins to suspect that I have not yet found an answer to that.”

Richard was right, of course. As Duke of Aquitaine, King of England, and co-leader of the new expedition to win back the Holy Land, Richard expected and needed some straightforward, unequivocal advice from his recently appointed Master-at-Arms. More accurately, he needed to know exactly what original and innovative tactics St. Clair was developing in order to offer his armies some hope of victory against Saladin’s hordes. Henry had been riding around with his Duke for three days now, waiting for an opportunity to present his findings and proposals without the threat of being interrupted. Richard was increasingly preoccupied with the preliminary logistical arrangements for the sea voyage to Outremer. The great fleet would not begin to assemble for at least another two months, but the Fleet Master, Robert de Sable, had already been planning with his quartermasters and subordinates for months, and shipping and supplies were being assembled in more than a score of major ports. That morning, Henry and Richard had ridden together, inspecting troops and reviewing plans. The time had passed