“As would you, were you to speak out.” Sir Henry’s voice was measured, filled with regret. “So, what are you to do now, my son? It seems clear you have no wish to continue as you are at present.”
Andre, however, demurred. “No, Father, that is not so, and that is what makes this choice so difficult for me. It may seem clear to you, as you say, that I have no wish to continue as I am, but it is far from clear to me. I have had many duties and responsibilities thrust upon me in past months, and few of them have stemmed from Richard. The truth is that much of my loyalty is now willingly committed to Robert de Sable, and he, in turn, is bound to Richard and knows nothing about what we are speaking of tonight. The most frightening thing of all, perhaps, is that, in spite of all I know, I still see much in Richard to admire. The man is a phenomenon, both in his strengths and in his weaknesses. He is a mass of indivisible contradictions. Cruel and inhumanly unjust as he can be in this matter of the Jews, he possesses at the same time all the military virtues and the strengths that I admire and to which I aspire. And his people—
“It is late. The fire is almost out again, and although I myself am not tired I have kept you too long from your bed. I’ll go and take the night air for a while and leave you to sleep. You have to be on parade at dawn and I do not, so I can be more dilatory in rising than you can … but I have much to think upon before I sleep this night.” Andre smiled lopsidedly, then embraced his father warmly. “Thank you, Father, for listening. Sleep well.”
Henry undressed slowly and climbed into bed, blowing out the last candle. He did not expect to find rest easily that night, after listening to his son, but he fell asleep almost instantly.
SIX
Andre St. Clair had much on his mind when he left his father that night, and without any conscious awareness of seeking height, he soon found himself answering the challenge of the guardsman on the battlements at the top of the highest tower of the keep of Castle Baudelaire. He met the challenge, identified himself, then went to lean against the side of one of the embrasures, gazing out into the enveloping blackness. Were he to lean forward, he knew, the dying campfires of Richard’s army would be visible below, a river of embers stretching away on both sides, edging the winding path of the river Loire. In front of him, however, in the distant west, there was nothing visible at all, which meant that either the night was moonless or the cloud cover was absolute, and he glanced up, unsurprised to see the heavy blankness of a starless sky. He sighed and turned his back on the emptiness, lodging his buttocks against the sill of the embrasure and crossing his arms on his chest, then allowed his thoughts to drift.
The following morning he would set out with Richard and all his army for the Burgundian town of Vezelay, where, according to tradition, the bones of Saint Mary Magdalene had been enshrined twelve hundred years earlier. It lay a three-day march to the west from Baudelaire and had been the officially approved assembly point for the armies of western Christendom ever since the sainted Abbott Bernard of the Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux had dispatched the Soldiers of Christ from there on the first campaign to recapture the Holy Land from the Muslim Seljuk Turks, ninety-five years earlier in 1095. Now, this month of June in the year 1190, all the puissant forces of Frankish Christendom would gather there, to be blessed and freshly rededicated to their purpose by Holy Mother Church, after which the entire assembly would travel southward to Lyon on the river Rhone. From Lyon, the French King and his followers would make their way across the Alps of Savoie to Torino and thence south to Genoa, where Philip had hired the entire Genoese fleet to transport his army eastward. Richard’s forces would march directly south from Lyon through his own ducal territories, following the Rhone to Marseille, where his English fleet would be awaiting them under the command of his admiral, Sir Robert de Sable. The embarkation would work smoothly, Andre knew, for it had the benefit of long and careful planning with an eye to every conceivable contingency.
Despite the impression he had given to his father earlier, he really had little difficulty, moral or otherwise, with the thought of accompanying Richard to war in person. The Andre St. Clair who had emerged from hiding a year earlier, under threat of death from the trio of venal priests, might have balked at doing so, but he was a different person from the man who sat now at the top of Castle Baudelaire, considering his options. That younger man, more naive and perhaps more selfabsorbed than Andre St. Clair was today, might have been sufficiently foolish and intolerant to endanger himself by showing his disapproval of the King’s behavior, but much had changed in the intervening year to blunt the point of young Andre’s impetuosity.
His initial encounter with Robert de Sable, triggering fraternal recognition between them, had quickly brought about a complete renewal of Andre’s commitment to the Order of Sion after a lengthy period in which isolation and responsibility for running the family estate had caused a drifting from the brotherhood. De Sable had brought an end to all that. Andre was now constantly moving between one place and another, ostensibly on business related to de Sable’s task of readying the fleet but in reality serving as a courier between de Sable and the other members of the Governing Council of the Order, whose members were scattered widely across the provinces of what had once been Roman Gaul. For a thousand years, beginning in the Pyrenees and the Languedoc, then extending outward into Aquitaine, Poitou, and Burgundy and as far west and north as Brittany, Normandy, and Picardy, the ancient confederation of clans who called themselves the Friendly Families had spread throughout the land, taking their influence and the ancient, secret brotherhood of their Order with them. Now, working with a few other members of the brotherhood as a full-time liaison between the outlying members of the Governing Council—which was how he had come to meet his friend and brother Bernard de Tremelay—Andre no longer had any doubt about his future admission to the ranks of the Temple. That was already a
The origins of the Templars, a mere seventy-two years earlier, in 1118, were already legendary. Every boy old enough to thrill to tales of adventure and great exploits knew how the veteran warrior Hugh de Payens had gathered about him a tiny band of knights, nine of them including himself, and dedicated them to defend and champion Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land against the swarming hordes of Arab bandits who for years had lain in wait for them at every turn in the roads. Calling themselves the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ, de Payens and his men had undertaken monastic oaths of poverty, chastity, and obedience and had quartered themselves in some abandoned stables on the Temple Mount within the city of Jerusalem and from there, in the face of incalculable and seemingly impossible odds, they had won spectacular successes against the marauding bandits, making the roads of the Kingdom of Jerusalem relatively safe to travel for the first time since the capture of Jerusalem in 1099.
Thereafter, within less than a score of years from the date of their founding, championed by Bernard of Clairvaux, who had written a rule for their new order, their successes and their heroic prowess had become so renowned that their recruitment numbers had swollen almost beyond counting. They had become widely recognized and revered throughout Christendom, first as the Knights of the Temple Mount of Jerusalem, then as the Knights Templar, and eventually quite simply as the Order of the Temple, although their official name remained the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon. There were other military orders in the world today, most notably the Knights of the Hospital and the Emperor Barbarossa’s recently formed Teutonic Knights, but the Temple Knights had been the first of their kind, the first monk knights, and their glory would never fade.
That was the legend. The truth was as sparse as legendary truths must always be. The reality, a secret known only to the initiates of the Order of Sion, was that de Payens and his eight original companions had all been Brothers of the Order of Sion, and they had been sent deliberately to Jerusalem to unearth a treasure. As described in the lore of the ancient Order, this treasure had been laid down there eleven hundred years earlier, at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem and its people by the Roman General Titus, son of the Emperor Vespasian. Estimates of the slaughter carried out there varied, but few doubted that upward of six hundred thousand Jews had died, and many sources, most of them Roman records, claimed twice that many had perished. Whichever was correct, the Jews had ceased to function as a race in their own homeland since that time.
