Standard of Honor (79 page)

He grunted wordlessly, a sound born deep in his chest, then sucked in a deep breath and attempted to
empty his mind of such thoughts, pulling hard on his reins and kneeing his horse around to return to his squadron, where, for the next few days, he worked to smother his own vague and confusing feelings of guilt over Richard and loyalty by driving and drilling his men hard and pitilessly.

But four days later, on the twelfth day of July, the city fell, and in the blink of an eye, it seemed, everything changed. The morale of the entire army took an upward leap, and suddenly everyone was enthusiastic again, eagerly seeking something concrete to do, so that they might be able to talk afterwards of what they had done at the fall of Acre.

André, wanting no part of any of that, found himself in the middle of it all regardless, relieved of his squadron-leader status and promoted to command a specially raised one-hundred-horse troop charged with keeping peace during the surrender. The day after the capitulation, he sat in attendance with his new comrades in arms as the defeated Arabs marched out of the city they had defended for so many months.

The crowd watching the evacuation was huge; every soldier in the Frankish armies who was not on duty that day turned out to watch the defeated enemy depart. But anyone expecting to see a ragtag, dispirited procession of shuffling miscreants was disappointed. The enemy emerged from the gates in a long column, walking with their heads high and their dignity wrapped around them so solidly that their mere appearance deprived the watching Franks of any wish to cheer or
even jeer. Instead, they watched in profound silence, tinged with respect, and no man among them thought to offer insult to the departing enemy.

André St. Clair sat watching the exodus with something akin to pride glowing in his breast, for he knew that his cousin Alec would have been proud of the way these men accepted defeat and showed no regret or deference to their conquerors. When the last of them passed by, leaving none but hostages and prisoners behind for Richard's use, the officer commanding André's troop gave the prearranged signal, and the troop fell into place behind the Arab column in files of twenty-five mounted men, riding four abreast. They accompanied their charges as far as the boundaries of their siege lines, then left them to make their own way into the desert, to wherever they might go.

“
DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY IDEA
why we are out here, sitting in the sun like this as though we were all idiots?”

Sitting at the head of his own squadron, two horse lengths ahead of its front rank, André St. Clair heard the question clearly—it had come from the extended triple rank of knights ahead of him—but he made no attempt to answer it or even to think about what the answer might be. His attention was dedicated to a matter that troubled him more personally. Something, some kind of creature, was crawling across the skin of his ribs beneath his right arm, and the slow itch of it was practically unbearable. Louse or beetle, he knew not what it was and cared less. His entire attention was focused upon the impossibility of
scratching it, catching it, or interfering with its progress in any way, for it was separated from his clawing fingers by several layers of stinking clothing, fustian padding, chain mail, and an armored cuirass. He had not bathed in five weeks, and his stench was overpowering even to himself. Five weeks of unending desert patrols had achieved that, five weeks of strictly rationed water and the infuriating tedium of chasing phantom formations that remained uncatchable, were but seldom seen, and which sometimes attacked at nightfall and daybreak, inflicting casualties and then vanishing into the vast expanse of dunes. The men at his back, his own Red Squadron, were as sick of this existence as he was.

After a silence that seemed long in retrospect, one voice, also from in front of him, replied to the rhetorical question. “Because we
are
idiots, Brother. That should not surprise you. It is our calling. You know that. This is why we took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—purely so that we could sit out here in the desert sun, penniless, owning nothing, cooking in our own sweat, and obedient to the whims of some pitiless, demented whoreson whose task it is to dream up ways of testing our immortal souls. That's why you are out here with the rest of us … you're a Templar.”

“Silence!” André heard then. “I will not tolerate such talking in the ranks. Have you no shame? Remember who you are and where your duties lie. One more word like that from anyone and I will see the guilty man walled up for a few days, to contemplate the insults he is offering to God and to our sacred Order.”

The speaker was Etienne de Troyes, and no man hearing him doubted for a moment that the notoriously humorless Marshal would do as he threatened. The internal disciplines and punishment exercised by the Temple for the mental purity and salvation of its brethren were designed as impediments to sin, intended to be savage, as a disincentive to waywardness, and it was not unusual for a disobedient or fractious brother to be walled up, quite literally bricked into a confined and lightless place, for a week or longer, supplied with no more than a bowl of water while he contemplated how he might achieve acceptance, reinstatement, and salvation.

A silent stillness settled over the assembled knights again. A horse whickered and stamped, setting off a series of similar reactions from other mounts, all of which had been standing in one place for far too long. The animal directly ahead of St. Clair raised its tail, and he watched emotionlessly as it evacuated a pile of dung to steam briefly in the sun. He leaned forward slightly to look to his left, to where the black-robed ranks of the Hospitallers occupied the other end of the Frankish line, and he wondered if they knew any more than his own people did about why they were all here. He had led his men out before daybreak with nothing but the order to march—no destination, no objective, which in itself was highly unusual—and they had marched until they reached this desolate place, where they had halted and drawn up in their battle formations.

The Hospitallers held the left of the line, on the lower slopes of the hill called Tel Aiyadida, which
marked the easternmost boundary of the Christian advance. The Templars, as usual, manned the right, and the two extremities were joined by the various contingents of the lay forces, forming a front more than half a mile in expanse. Ahead of the line, stretching away to the southeast, the road to Nazareth was virtually invisible in the noonday glare, and to the left of that, rising in the middle distance, was another hill, the Tel Keisan. There was no visible activity on the Tel Keisan, but it was enemy territory, securely held, the Templars knew, by Saladin's teeming and apparently inexhaustible regiments of black-robed Bedouin from Africa.

A trumpet sounded from the rear and was soon followed by the sound of galloping hooves as a messenger arrived with word that King Richard was approaching from the direction of Acre, accompanied by a large body of troops, and everyone present—in excess of twelve hundred mounted men—turned in their saddles to see the Lionheart arrive, anticipating that the large body of troops referred to would be the infantry they had left behind in Acre.

It was, yet it was not. The infantry was there, in strength, but they were there as guards for the huge column of Saracen prisoners that walked in their midst, roped together hand and foot, rank and file, and winding down through the dunes like an enormous snake. Richard rode in front, at the head of the snake, and he was in full blossom, riding the magnificent golden stallion that he had taken, had in fact stolen, from Isaac Comnenus. He was dressed resplendently as
usual, in his finest, gilt-chased armor, over which he wore crimson, gold, and royal purple garments. Behind him thronged his personal retinue, a score and a half of peacocks and popinjays of all descriptions, including as always a number of celebrated knights and warriors whose manhood none could question without risk to life and limb. They rode some fifty paces ahead of the main bulk of their vanguard, sufficiently far in front to keep them relatively free of road dust other than that which they stirred up themselves in passing. Then, next in order, came an entire phalanx of Royal Guards, marching twelve abreast and led by a squad of drummers who set a steady, not too strenuous pace. Behind those, heavily guarded on both sides of their column, came the prisoners, their ankles tethered so that they could walk in a shuffle but could not stretch out into a stride.

Watching them emerging into view, André felt something formless shift in his belly, and glanced quickly towards the flanks of Tel Keisan, not knowing what he expected to see there, yet aware that something, some presentiment, was making him feel queasy. But the hillsides where he looked appeared to be empty of life and his unease deepened, for he knew that the opposite was true. The enemy was there. They were simply remaining out of sight. He swung back to look at the approaching column, trying to assess how many prisoners there were. The front was ten men wide, with two guards on each side, making a fourteen-man front, and he counted ten regular ranks behind the first before the movement and the clouds of dust defeated
him. A thick haze hung over everything, stirred up by the passage of so many shuffling feet, and the moving ranks reached back into the opacity of the rising cloud until they became impossible to see. St. Clair's misgivings increased.

He turned his head and spoke to the knight sitting on his right, at the head of his own, Blue Squadron, a taciturn, humorless English knight whose real name André did not know because everyone referred to him, even in conversation with him, as Nose. There was good reason for the name, because whenever he was asked a question, even in French, he was most likely to respond, in English, “Who knows?” But in addition to that, his own nose was spectacularly misshapen, broken and bent beyond repair years before by a hard-swung club that should have brained him but missed.

“What is going on, Nose? And don't say ‘who knows'? I've been on constant patrol these past five weeks and came in only last night, so I have no idea what's been happening around here. Why have they brought these prisoners all the way out here? Richard clearly has a purpose in mind for them. Do you have any idea what it might be? Have you heard any rumors? Anything at all?”

Nose looked back at him, then dipped his head. “They're the prisoners from Acre … nigh on three thousand of 'em, taken at the fall of the city and held against Saladin's promise to free his prisoners—our men—and return the True Cross.” He shrugged, spreading his hands. “That must be what this is all
about. I can't think what else it might be. Saladin has been very quiet of late, making no great efforts to live up to his promises. But now he must be coming to meet us, to carry out the exchange of prisoners.”

“Then why is there no sign of him? Why are we here alone?”

Nose grunted, deep in his throat. “Who knows? You'd best ask Richard that. Kings and sultans have ways of their own, I've noticed. They don't ask me for advice, and I don't offer any.”

For the next half hour and more André sat and watched as the column wound down towards the center of the front line, and he took note of how even the veterans of the two monastic Orders joined in on the general chorus of acclaim and enthusiasm that greeted the advent of the English King. Richard was in fine form, showing no signs at all of his recent battle with scurvy and waving and smiling to everyone around him as he approached the line. When he arrived there, he drew his elaborate golden-hilted sword and brandished it above his head, and the line before him broke and opened up to allow him and his party to pass through. The sight of that caused a stir of anticipation among all the units making up the line of battle, for the prisoners, although still under heavy escort, were now theoretically beyond restraint and approaching the enemy lines, led by King Richard and drawing closer to freedom with every step they took. But nothing happened. The appearance of the column of prisoners evoked no visible response from the slopes of Tel Keisan, and André
found himself wondering how far the captives would be permitted to go before they were stopped.

His unvoiced question was answered almost as soon as his mind asked it, for Richard, now approximately a hundred paces from where André sat watching, raised a hand above his head and made a circular signal before drawing off with his party to one side and making room for the phalanx of guards at his back to carry out what was clearly a set of orders drawn up earlier. The guards had stopped on a flat stretch of ground close to the midpoint between the two opposing hills, Tel Aiyadida and Tel Keisan, and now they split and wheeled, moving back and to both sides to flank the prisoners. As they did that, the other guards who had been marching on the captives' flanks began to usher them into formal lines and blocks, herding and pushing and counting heads until the front rank numbered one hundred men and there were ten men in each file, making a thousand men in all, each separated from his closest companion by two paces front and rear and an equal distance on each side. The sun glared down malevolently and there was not a sign of shelter or relief anywhere, and the assembled army sat, or stood, and waited, sweating, taking care not to lay bare skin against their armor. And in places, across the extent of the Frankish lines, a man would sway and fall, undone by the torturous heat.

When the block of men was complete, it looked impressive, St. Clair thought, still wondering why Richard was going to so much trouble here, and to what end, for there were still almost twice as many men again
in the original column. But no one moved and nothing was said until the sergeants began shuffling the next ranks of prisoners into place to build a second block, also of a thousand men. Someone behind St. Clair, one of his own squadron, started to mutter something, but André twisted around in his seat and snarled at the man to shut up, being careful not to look and actually see who it had been. No one else spoke after that, and the time dragged slowly by, the misery growing with every moment that passed. And André St. Clair became increasingly aware that no slightest sign of Saladin or any other Saracen presence was being shown opposite them.