country, and the tacit approval of its newly crowned King had effectively killed any enthusiasm and willing support he might have shown for joining in Richard’s military adventures. Only his greater duty, his fraternal obligations to the Order of Sion, prevented him from divorcing himself completely from the company and service of the English King, and even so, knowing the importance of what he had to do on the Order’s behalf, the younger St. Clair was finding that overcoming his repugnance and maintaining a veneer of enthusiasm was far from easy.
His thoughts were interrupted by the sounds of movement close by, and he turned to look across at the guard on duty on the other side of the tower platform, who had been joined in his corner by another man. Their voices reached him as no more than a murmur, but as he looked, Andre saw the newcomer start to move in his direction, silhouetted against the glare of the sentry’s fire basket. He straightened up and rose to his feet just in time to recognize his friend and companion from Orleans, Bernard of Tremelay, who greeted him with raised eyebrows.
“St. Clair? I thought you would have been fast asleep by now, after all the riding we have done these past few days.”
“Then clearly you think me weaker than you are. Why aren’t you abed by now?”
“I was, but I could not sleep. Too many matters on my mind, I suppose. Tomorrow will come quickly enough, but I thought to defer it a while by staying awake. So, what were you thinking about up here all alone?”
Andre waved in farewell to the watching guard, then followed de Tremelay down the narrow steps to the causeway beneath the battlements, holding his response until he was beneath the line of the guard’s sight.
“That membership in our brotherhood sometimes comes at great cost.”
They had begun descending the next flight, but de Tremelay stopped and turned to look up at Andre behind him. “Your father again?” Andre nodded. “Well, it’s true, Brother. It does. But when you find yourself fretting over that, remember this: just when you think that cost has grown unbearable, it can grow worse. And it will, without fail. Trust me, despair is the only road left open to us.” And then he barked a great, guffawing laugh and swung back to his descent.
“Bernard, in honesty, has anyone ever told you what a turd you truly are?”
“Aye, a few.” This time de Tremelay did not pause and the words drifted back over his shoulder. “But when you’re a turd, people walk around you, rather than risk treading on you. Trust me on that, too.” He laughed again as they reached the bottom of the stairs, then grasped a handful of Andre’s surcoat and pulled him gently but firmly back into the shadows at the side of the stairs, where they could be neither seen nor heard.
“Bear this in mind from now on, lad,” he said in a low voice that held no trace of humor, “and don’t ever forget. In a few days, when we reach Vezelay, you will be accepted into the outer ranks of the Order of the Temple formally, as a postulant. After that, if you keep your nose clean and look to your assignments, you will become a novice, and eventually, all things being equal, you’ll end up a full-blown knight of the Temple, privy to all its secrets and its so-called sacred lore. You believe it’s difficult now, keeping secrets from your noble father? Well, that difficulty will seem like nothing within a matter of mere days.
“Wait until you enter the temple and are shut off among people whose every thought is alien to all that you know and believe. Wait until you find yourself floundering among the pig-headed ignorance and unquestioning stupidity you’ll find within the ranks you are about to join, where the knights all firmly believe they are God’s chosen and the world’s elite—and many of their sergeants think the same way—and you will not be able to breathe a single word about the truth you know: that their sacred and secretive Order was invented by the brotherhood to which
“Your entire existence in their ranks will be a lie, and you will have the salt of that rubbed into your awareness every time they wake you in the middle of the night to pray in a ritual that holds no truth for you. You will know better, but you will have no other option than to comply and to observe their false rites, and you will never be able to say a word in protest or complaint. Now that, I suggest to you, might cause you some real difficulty. And that, unlike the minor business with your father, represents the real cost of belonging to our brotherhood.
“Fortunately, of course, your isolation will not last forever. As soon as you have passed all the tests and met all the qualifications for achieving full membership, the strictures surrounding you will be relaxed and members of our own brotherhood within the Temple ranks will see to it that you are assigned to duties in which you can be used to best advantage.”
He grinned again, squeezing St. Clair’s shoulders in his hands. “But I promise you, albeit I have never been inside a Temple gathering, your next few months are destined to be sheer misery.”
“Aye,” Andre sighed. “I have been warned about all that already. But I want to thank you for the obvious delight you have taken in reminding me of what lies ahead.”
“It does lie ahead of you, Andre, but by the time we reach Outremer, it should be over and you’ll be back in the world of living men. Now get you to bed and sleep well, then rise and greet tomorrow’s day bright eyed. They say it’s going to rain, so it will be a long, wet pilgrimage to Vezelay, and we’ll endure great misery before we find comfort again.”
THE MORNING SUN ROSE DAZZLINGLY above the snowy peaks of the Alps in the eastern distance, illuminating the great banner of the Order of the Temple that stood proudly alone, reflecting the blinding rays back from the crest of a hill that overlooked the fields surrounding the town of Vezelay. The banner did not flap in the light breeze, as did some others in the throng below the hill; it hung rigid, weighted along its bottom, from a bar at the top of an enormously high pole, allowing its equal-armed, eight-pointed red cross to stand out stark, challenging, and unmistakable against the pure white of its field, proclaiming the Order’s pre-eminence. Beneath it stood its formal guard of ten armored, white-clad knights, and around them, covering the entire hilltop and neatly laid out in regular, rectangular patterns, lay the campsite of the Order’s personnel: knights and sergeants of the Temple, the majority of them new and untested, recruited only recently to fill the Order’s depleted ranks after the tragic losses sustained in Outremer.
More than a thousand fighting men were drawn up in formation there, on the downward slope of the hill in front of their foremost line of tents, and fewer than one hundred of those had ever been involved in a real battle. The knights among them, fewer than six to every score, wore plain white surcoats, emblazoned not with the black cross of the Temple but with the brilliant red, long-bodied cross of their mission to regain the Holy Land. The remaining men, the Sergeants of the Order, wore the same red crosses over surcoats of plain brown, save for a scattering of senior sergeants who wore distinctive black surcoats signifying their rank.
Below and in front of the Templars, the remainder of the armies of Christendom seethed and eddied like fields of grain in a high wind, save that no field of grain, even when rich with wildflowers, could ever show such a profusion of colors. They completely filled up the fields that stretched away towards the little town of Vezelay, which was hidden in the distance by a forest of tents and pavilions. To the right of the watching Templars, the ranks of Richard Plantagenet’s followers stood banked, block after solid block of them, horse and foot, interspersed with formations of the King’s crossbowmen and archers, who were easily distinguishable by their drab colors and their lack of formal armor. Within that host, the individual colors of the various divisions could be discerned in places among the surrounding welter: the wine-red standards of Burgundy stood firmly alongside the dark, rich blue of Aquitaine, and the greens and gold of Anjou and Maine were visible behind those, as was the black and crimson of Poitou, along with the blue-and-white stripes, pale greens, and yellows and reds of Brittany and Normandy and, of course, the golden lions of St. George’s England on their crimson field, flapping above all the others on a gigantic silken banner and supported by no less a churchman than Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, who had personally levied three thousand Welshmen, mainly archers, to join Richard’s host.
Opposite this panoply, ranged on the Templars’ left, were the forces of Philip Augustus and his allies. As befitted the dignity of a French King, Philip’s own royal standard, the golden fleurs-de-lis on a sky-blue field of the House of Capet, appeared to be at least as large as that of his English ally, and behind it were clustered the colors of his own major allies and vassals, comprising the flower of the nobility of Christendom. The brilliant colors of Stephen, Count of Sancerre, were prominent there, as Richard had foretold they would be, more than a year earlier. So were those of Count Philip of Flanders, and Henry the Count of Champagne, nephew to both kings, accompanied by an entire cavalcade of lesser French nobility. The German Louis, Margrave of Thuringia, had lent his stature to the French King’s use, as had a huge number of knights from Denmark, Hungary, and Flanders. And there were bishops everywhere among the throng on both sides, many of them clustered in prayer in a vast
