than what you’re going through—”
“And your greatest fear becomes the fear that you might
De Tremelay scoffed and looked St. Clair straight in the eye. “They say women can’t remember the pains of childbirth after they are done. Believe me, my friend, that is not the way with seasickness. I will never, ever forget what that is like and I have no wish ever to experience it again, although I know I will on this voyage. That should be enough to guarantee me a place in Paradise, think you not? To plunge voluntarily through Hell in order to redeem the Holy Land … I’m going to bed. We’ll be in Lyon the day after tomorrow. Did your father happen to mention how long we will remain there?”
“Yes. He said if we stop at all, it will be overnight, no more. We’re not supposed to stop there, but he is convinced that it will only be practical that we should, and that the timing of our arrival and departure will have to be arranged in advance, as we draw nearer the town. The army will split there, probably the morning after we arrive, and Philip’s force will head east while we strike south along the Rhone to Avignon and Aix, and then to Marseille. By the time we reach Lyon, we postulants should number a score, perhaps more. I know there’s another party of knights on the way to join us from the commandery at Pommiers, a few miles northeast of Lyon, and they’re supposed to bring at least six more postulants. Our induction in Lyon will be a private Temple ritual, with no effect upon anything to do with the army. I assume it will be carried out while we are in the city, during one of the prayers of the night office.”
“You are probably right, but it will be a secret, so how would I know? Enjoy it, anyway. Once you’ve taken the plunge, you’ll see precious little of me and our other brethren for a while. The Temple will keep you too busy to have time to dwell upon our needs, at least until you take your initial vows.” He stood up to leave, then hesitated.
“What?”
“You said something I didn’t understand, when you were talking about reaching Lyon. Something about the planning required to arrive there on time … What did that mean?”
St. Clair grinned and stretched like a cat, then leaned towards the fire again, one elbow braced on a knee. “Think about it, Bernard. Tomorrow, instead of riding blindly and feeling sorry for yourself, look about you as we march and think about it. Have you ever seen anything like this? You have been working for and with de Sable, organizing Richard’s fleet, but this is even bigger. Massively bigger. You can’t tell from a casual glance, because it’s not as visible as a fleet with all its masts—here you can only see what’s close around you—but we are surrounded by, and part of, more than a hundred
De Tremelay’s brow creased in thought. “A hundred men,” he said eventually. “I rode down into Navarre with my liege lord when I was younger, about eight years ago, and there were a hundred and nine of us, not counting camp followers.”
“And how many of those were there, think you?”
He shrugged. “Grooms, servants, cooks, smiths … Who knows? Twenty, perhaps? Perhaps a few more than that.”
“So your party of a hundred was closer to seven score, one hundred and forty. Do you remember whether you had any difficulty finding camping places on that journey?”
“Aye, we did, every day. I remember well, because I had to scout for them and I hated it. I had to ride out every day, all day, miles in front of the main party, looking for good camping spots. Sometimes I’d have to ride all day to find one.”
St. Clair stood up and looked about him at the sleeping camp. “This camp of ours is huge, isn’t it? More than a thousand Templars—far more, as you say, if you count the servants and handlers. Must be close to three hundred more, counting them.
“And we are but one camp. There must be at least another hundred camps like ours out there—two hundred, if each of them be only half our size. Do you really wonder why planning every aspect of our route of march is important? When we began to march yesterday, we did not all march straight ahead. Most of us marched diagonally to one side or the other, until we formed a moving front two miles wide. Tomorrow, we will do the same again, spreading our front farther until we are four miles in width.”
“Why will we do that?”
“Because if we do not do that, my friend, our hooves and wheels and marching feet will destroy all the land we march through on our two-mile front. There is no road in all this land strong enough or wide enough to bear our weight, and the fields might take years to recover from our passing as it is. When we encounter forests, and we already have, our passage through them will leave them blasted. One hundred thousand men, and then their horses and wagons. It is a miracle that we can move at all on such a scale, but when we reach Lyon, it will probably take at least a full day to march the columns into place from all sides, and then they’ll have to camp in the fields surrounding the city. It is a frightening undertaking. The mere thought of it has tired me out, so now it is my turn to bid you a good night.” He stood up just as the curfew sounded throughout the camp, and nodded in farewell to his friend. “Sleep well, and try not to wonder where we are going to find enough supplies to feed us on the way.”
“Damn you, St. Clair, I will be awake all night now.”
Andre grinned as he turned away. “Well, if you are, keep good watch.”
SEVEN
Andre St. Clair did not doubt for a moment that his life had changed radically with the formal conclusion of the induction ceremony in Lyon, for after it no single element of his daily life remained as it had been before. The rigid schedule of the Order’s regimen, based upon the ancient Rule of Saint Benedict, with variations and extensions added by Saint Bernard for the Rule of the Temple, stipulated an unvarying rotation of formal prayers and scriptural readings that occupied most of the monks’ time both day and night, and that was merely the most obvious of the changes affecting him and his fellow novices. But there were no intervals in the work periods between these prayer sessions in which a novice might snatch a moment for himself. It was as though the entire Rule by which they now lived had been designed to deprive the arrivals, collectively, of any memories or comforts that they might have retained from earlier, more familial times.
Andre watched the ceremony unfold with a feeling akin to amused incredulity, for he recognized elements of the proceedings that echoed, and sometimes came close to aping, passages and fragments of the ritual he had undergone years earlier on his Raising to the Order of Sion. But although this occasion resonated with pomp and solemnity, he experienced none of the sense of revelation that had overwhelmed him throughout the other. It was, he thought, as though the ceremony had been cobbled together by a group of men groping selfconsciously for ways to impart a sense of occasion to an otherwise sterile event. There were prayers and incantations aplenty, intoned by Templar priests and dignitaries among clouds of incense, and there were formalized, secretive rituals carried out in near-darkness, lit only by one or two candles, but it was glaringly obvious to St. Clair that there was no substance to the reality and no meat in the broth of the concoction. The induction ceremony was a spectacle designed to awe and intimidate those who participated in it, and most particularly the inductees. By the time they had undergone all the variations of the ritual involved, they were benumbed with visions of the greatness of the commitment they had made, and convinced that they were doomed to live thenceforth in perpetual meditative silence and would never again have time for frivolous personal pursuits.
In the few furtive moments when they did manage to scratch out whispered conversations among themselves, the former postulants tried to pretend that things were not as awful as they seemed, and that every monk within the Order suffered the same hardships, but they could see that was not true. The novitiate was a period of deliberately engineered trial and tribulation, intended to cull each intake of recruits remorselessly, to winnow out those who were unfit for the monastic life that lay ahead of them.
Well warned of that in advance, Andre was resolved not to be discouraged, determined to bite down on his dissatisfaction and struggle through, single-mindedly, to the end of this purgatorial process. He told himself that he was prepared for anything the Order’s martinets might throw at him, and he set himself to obeying every command and instruction instantly and meticulously, no matter how demeaning or dehumanizing the tasks set him
