stash their consignment. Once that was settled, he’d need to figure out how to go about using it to get the pope to release his brethren and rescind the charges against their Order.
He thought of taking the consignment to France. The pope, a Frenchman, was now based there, in Avignon. Conrad’s imprisoned brothers were also in France, as was their nemesis, King Philip. Any approach to the pope and any monitoring of its results would need to happen there. But France was dangerous. The king’s seneschals were everywhere. It would be difficult to travel around with a conspicuous cargo in tow, and Conrad didn’t know whom he could still trust there. The other option was Cyprus. He had friends there, and there was little Frankish presence on the island. They could hide their trove there, he could leave Hector and Miguel in place to guard it and venture alone to France to make his play. Either way, they had to get to a port first, the one they’d landed in when they’d left Cyprus: Corycus. Heading there made sense in another way: Once they got across the Taurus Mountains, they’d be in the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia, which was Christian territory.
The problem was, the going was slow. The old wagon was lumbering along, its twin horses straining from the heavy load under its canvas cover. Harder still was that the knights had to avoid the easy route. The last thing they wanted was to meet up with some roaming Ghazi warriors, which meant they needed to keep away from any well- trodden trails. Instead, they were trudging up rocky, less stable terrain and cutting through dense forests, which was delaying their progress even more.
By the end of the next day, they’d reached a wide plain that stretched all the way to the distant mountain range they needed to cross. The open ground ahead of them provided little in terms of cover, which made Conrad uncomfortable. His only other choice was just as unattractive: the long, narrow canyons that snaked across the plain, cut into the flatlands as if gouged out by a set of gargantuan claws. Given the load they were carrying and their lack of chain mail and battle weaponry, coming across a horde of bandits in one of the canyons would lead to a certain defeat. The odds of encountering one, though, had to be less likely than being spotted out in the open. After a short debate, they opted to take the canyon route and camped out on a ridge at the mouth of the one they thought would be their best bet, using some unusual rock spires for cover.
Their reasoning was sound—except that the threat came from elsewhere.
The first arrows struck the next morning, a couple of hours after they had set off. Hector was on point, leading the small convoy through the twists and turns of the canyon, when one of the bolts slammed into his chest, far enough under his right shoulder to cut into his lung. Two others buried themselves into his horse, one of them hitting it in its foreleg and causing its leg to collapse under it. Hector hung on as his mare neighed in agony and came down in a messy cloud of blood and dust.
Conrad spotted two archers at the top of the canyon, ahead of them, and pulled hard on the reins of his steed to spin it around, anticipating what was coming up behind them and hoping he was wrong.
He was right.
Four riders were charging at them, riders that he recognized.
The trader, his son, and two of the men they’d brought with them.
He felt a flush of acid in the pit of his stomach. He knew the trader was greedy, but they’d been careful about covering their tracks and had Miguel making sure they hadn’t been followed.
Clearly, they hadn’t been careful enough.
Twenty years earlier, in the heat of battle, Conrad wouldn’t have bat-ted an eyelid about engaging them. With a helmet and chain mail, a lance, broadsword, and mace, and a well-shielded horse, any Templar knight would have thought nothing of taking on four enemy fighters.
This was different.
This wasn’t twenty years ago. It was now. After Acre.
After the defeat that had cost him his hand.
He’d lost it in the heat of battle to a Mameluke scimitar, sheared right off at the wrist, a clean cut that came close to costing him his life. He had never experienced pain like what he felt when the infirmarer had fought to sear his wound shut with a red-hot blade. He’d lost a bucketload of blood, and as he and his surviving brethren sailed away from the fallen city, he hovered at the precipice of death for days on end, until a gust of life somehow found him and dragged him back from it. During his long recovery in Cyprus, he tried to find some comfort in the fact that it had been his left hand and not the hand with which he held his sword, but that didn’t cheer him much. He knew he would never be the formidable warrior he had once been. Then he found a talented Cypriot blacksmith who said he could help and made him a copper prosthesis, a false hand that fit snugly onto the stump of his forearm with leather straps to hold it in place. It was beautifully crafted and had five fixed fingers that were a reasonable rendition of what he had lost and were fixed in a bent position that allowed him to do certain key tasks such as holding on to his horse’s reins, lifting a jug of water, carrying a shield, or punching the jaw off anyone who crossed him.
Still, given his handicap, he knew the odds weren’t favoring him and Miguel. The odds shrank to four-to-one an instant later when another arrow thudded into the Spaniard’s back and threw him off his horse.
Conrad drew his scimitar and struggled to control his rearing horse as Mehmet and his men thundered in. The two hired riders were at full gallop and streaked past him, one on either side, right up against the wagon. He whipped his blade across in a wide, upward arc and caught one of them across the face, opening up a wide gash under the man’s ear and flinging a wake of blood through the air behind it, but the other rider cut him in the thigh as he threw himself onto him and knocked him off his perch.
He fell heavily to the ground, his arms breaking the fall but losing the scimitar in the process. He pushed himself to his feet, surveying the situation through hazy eyes. All three of them were now down: Hector, trapped under his wounded horse, blood gurgling out of his mouth, gasping for breath; Miguel, back on his feet now, but staggering like a drunkard from his injury; and Conrad, limping now, blood flooding down his leg, straightening up in time to see the trader and his son riding in for the kill.
Qassem was bearing down on him, fast. Conrad’s eyes scanned the ground around him, looking for something, anything he could use as a weapon. There was nothing within reach, no time to think of anything fancy. His body reacted instinctively and he just leapt up at the Turk as he blew past, leading with his metal hand and letting it take the brunt of the blade’s strike while grabbing the man’s belt with the other hand and pulling him off his horse.
They fell in a heap of flesh and bone and a frenzy of elbows and fists, but it was a fight Conrad knew he’d lose. A kick to the gash in his thigh sent a shock of pain through him and brought him to his knees. An elbow to the cheekbone floored him. He squirmed on the hot canyon bed, a metallic taste of blood back in his mouth, a sensory blast to a long-gone era, one that had also ended in defeat.
He looked up. The trader had dismounted and was sauntering over to join his son, who loomed proudly over his vanquished opponent. Behind them, Conrad saw Miguel, lying dead at the feet of the two riders who had rushed him, and, farther away, he saw the prone body of Hector.
“I told you these lands weren’t safe,” the trader chortled. “You should have listened to me.”
Conrad sat up and spat some blood out, hitting the son’s boots. Qassem pulled his leg back and was about to launch a kick at the knight’s face when his father’s shout stilled him.
“Stop,” Mehmet ordered. “I need him awake.” He scowled at his son for a moment, then turned his attention at something up the canyon and smiled contentedly.
Conrad followed his gaze. The archers had climbed down from their ambush positions and were bringing the wagon back.
The trader waved them over. “So this is how you treat your partners?” he told Conrad. “You call on me to help you with all your little swindles, then when a big deal shows up, you decide to keep it to yourself and brush me away like some pustular servant?”
“This doesn’t concern you,” Conrad hissed back.
“If it’s worth something, it concerns me,” the trader replied as he stepped away to examine the packhorses’ cargo. “And I have a feeling it’s worth quite a lot.”
He climbed onto the body of the wagon and nodded to the men. They loosened the clasp around the first of the chests and opened it up.
The trader looked inside it, then turned to Conrad, his face crinkled with confusion. “What is this?”
“It doesn’t concern you,” the knight repeated.
Mehmet blurted out some orders while waving his hands manically, clearly displeased. His men moved furiously, unlocking and opening the other two chests.
