Standard of Honor (84 page)

ELEVEN

A
ndré St. Clair had cause to recall his cousin's observations concerning chastity and asceticism the following day, for before the army struck camp and marched out to the south, he found himself almost face to face with Richard's sister Joanna Plantagenet. The massive army had been astir since long hours before dawn, when the bells and trumpets of the King's Heralds had rousted everyone from their beds to begin preparing for what would be a long and wearisome day, Sunday, the twenty-fourth day of August 1191, the Feast Day of Saint Bartholomew. The prayers of matins had been set aside that day, because of the preparations for departure, but before dawn, notwithstanding that, the priests and bishops were everywhere celebrating Holy Mass, and the sound of chanted prayers reverberated on all sides, spilling over on each other from place to place and generating a sound that was like the buzz of an enormous beehive.

André, carrying his steel helm, and with his mailed hood unlaced to bare his head, had been making his way from crowd to crowd of worshippers, searching for Alec, and managing to look devout and intent as he deftly avoided stopping anywhere, but as he emerged into one
area that had a higher concentration of torchlight than any other, it registered upon his awareness that the smell of incense was thicker here, the light stronger and the clothing of the celebrants, including no fewer than three officiating bishops, was of a much richer quality than anything he had seen before. He saw a concentration of clean and brilliant red-crossed white surcoats on his left and recognized Sir Robert de Sablé among them, unmistakable in his magnificent Grand Master's mantle of thick white woven wool with the plain black, equal-armed cross on front and rear. Alec Sinclair stood beside the Grand Master, and André began to swerve towards them, but he stopped abruptly when he saw the King standing on de Sablé's other side, and on Richard's left, the two Queens, Berengaria and Joanna Plantagenet, with their women clustered behind them.

Because of the angle from which he had begun to approach them, no one in the royal grouping had seen him moving, but something in the way he froze caught Joanna's attention, and she turned her head and looked right at him. André did not even have time to lower his head, and so he merely lowered his eyes, hoping that, from where she was, he would blend into the mass of faces behind him. He kept his eyes cast down for a count of five, highly conscious of how slowly time was passing, then looked up again to find her staring at him still, a slight frown marring the smoothness of her forehead. Willing himself then not to move a muscle or react in any way, knowing that if he did he would tighten her focus on him, he lowered his eyes again
slowly and counted once again to five and then to ten, reciting to himself a litany of reasons why she should not be expected to recognize him: she had never seen him in the full Templar uniform, and when she had seen him, he had been clean shaven and his hair had been long and unkempt, befitting an unranked novice, whereas now his head was cropped short and he wore a heavy growth of beard. By his estimation, she was unlikely to remember him, but yet she plainly had recognized something about him, even if she had not placed him absolutely. He raised his eyes again, slowly, and felt a great surge of relief to see that she was no longer frowning at him, although she was still frowning, her eyes moving now over the other faces around him. He watched her then, willing her to look away, and soon she did, turning back towards the altar at the front. He decided he had best move away to stand in a different place on the fringe of the crowd, resolving to wait until later before speaking to Alec.

He did not leave immediately, however. Confident now that he had not been recognized and that Joanna would not be able to pick him out among the crowd again, he eased himself up onto a nearby stone and looked his fill upon the two Queens, neither one of whom, it seemed to him, had suffered even slightly from the privations of living in a military encampment. Berengaria in particular looked superb; queenly and self-possessed, radiant and manifestly content, she showed no slightest indication that she might be the wife of a man whose complete disinterest in women was
a matter for jest and public commentary. Looking at her now, and noting the hectic flush upon her cheeks, André fancied that he saw her glance sideways towards a fine-looking young guardsman who stood vigilantly by her side, approximately one step ahead of her, and he looked more closely at the man, noting the stalwart, upright stance, the held head high, and the defiant ardor with which his bearing proclaimed his devotion to his duty as the Queen's Guard.

Amused, but not at all surprised, André moved his eyes to where Joanna stood, as prominent as though she were alone, although surrounded by a crowd. Joanna Plantagenet, he thought, not for the first time, was a remarkable and attractive woman. It was plain to see that she, too, was not lacking in physical affection or attention, although try as he would, he could gain no inkling of who, if anyone, among the crowd might be the recipient of her favors. He found it surprisingly easy to smile at his own wonderings and to accept and then dismiss the fact that he might have enjoyed those charms. With one last, lingering look at the slim, upright figure, with its thrusting breasts and closely draped waist and hips, he tilted himself wryly towards asceticism, if not outright chastity, and decided to make his way back to his own marshaling area.

With his thoughts thus busy on carnal matters, André had almost forgotten about another gaze that he wished to avoid, and before he stepped down from the stone he was perched on, he felt, more than saw, the King's eyes fixed upon him. He would never know whether the
iciness in Richard's baleful stare was an expression of regal rancor or of his own consciousness of having crossed and disappointed the King—something his father had warned him never to do—in the matter of Berengaria. Aware of some safety in the physical distance between them, André held the King's gaze for a long moment, feeling courageous as he did so, yet simultaneously conscious of a deep dread, spawned by a nagging doubt about his responsibility to the man who was once his hero, in spite of everything he knew about him now.

It was Richard who looked away first, leaving André to rejoin his comrades with a sickening sense of having been irrevocably cast out, for better or for worse.

As soon as the Masses were concluded, camp-breaking stepped up to a frenzy as thousands of tents were laid out and uniformly folded before being loaded on the baggage train. The great siege engines had been dismantled and mounted on their transport platforms weeks earlier, after the surrender of the city, and armies of sappers and engineers had been busy for the previous few days manhandling them into position for the march to the south. They had then moved forward with them the day before, so that they were already several miles ahead of the army that would follow. There was much coming and going of traffic between the marshaling points and the Acre harbor, too, as barges pulled in to the piers to be heavily laden with foodstuffs and weaponry in preparation for the journey down the coastline, paralleling the army's line of advance along the ancient coast road built by the Roman legions before the time of the Caesars.

But eventually everything was laden, the troops were drawn up in their formations, the last of the encampments were dismantled and the latrines filled in, and to a great, brazen rally of trumpets, the first ranks of the advancing host wheeled into place and struck out along the road to Jerusalem.

TWO DAYS LATER
, after a slow and uneventful march in which they covered less than ten miles, marching in the cool of the morning and avoiding the sun in the afternoon, André St. Clair finally met with his cousin. He had decided to stay well away from Alec on the march and to leave it to his cousin to seek him out when he had time, for there was an ever-present danger of encountering Richard in the area surrounding the Templars' tent and de Sablé's own pavilion, and André had no wish to court the possibility of a casual encounter with his former liege. He was unsure of how he might react on meeting his father's killer face to face, be he king or no. And so it was Alec who found him, sitting alone on the ground close by his tent and free, for the time being, from the presence of any of his squadron, his closest neighbors almost twenty feet away, a significant degree of privacy in the middle of an army that numbered tens of thousands.

“I brought wine,” Alec said in lieu of greeting, lobbing a full skin into André's hastily outstretched hands and then looking around him in surprise. “Where's your squadron? Did you lose them?”

“No, but I lost patience with them. They're out there somewhere, drilling. I told my first sergeant,
Le Sanglier, to have them set up butts and practice with their crossbows until dinnertime. It's been nigh on two weeks since last they practiced, and it seems like twice that long since I last had a moment to myself without their voices deafening me. Why is it, think you, that soldiers seem incapable of speaking quietly? Anyway, thank you for this. I won't even ask where you stole it from, but will drink straight to your good health.” He unstoppered the wineskin and held it up to his mouth, then drank deeply before offering it back to Alec.

“Well,” he continued eventually, “we are alone, so tell me, for my ears only, since you are the man with the inside information. Where are we going and what is our intent?”

“Arsuf is where we're headed. Have you ever heard of it?”

“No. Had you, before someone told you we were going there?”

“Yes, but solely because I went there once. It's an ancient port, about sixty-five miles south of Acre. And I said ancient, not merely old. The Greeks who built the place called it Apollonia. It's a walled town, too, not very large but easily defensible, with a sandstone fortress, now in ruins, on the landward side. It's one of the places Saladin's people captured after Hattin. Now Richard intends to take it back and use it as a base for his attack on Jaffa, another, larger port six miles to the south of Arsuf. Once he has those ports as safe harbors for his supply barges, he can then swing inland for the fifty-mile drive on Jerusalem.”

“Hmm. And where is Saladin's army? Instinct tells me they may be protecting Jerusalem, but we are nowhere near there yet, so why would they bother, at this stage?”

“They are here. As you say, Jerusalem is in no danger at this point. Saladin is above us, up in those hills ahead and almost within view, watching our progress until he gauges that the time is right for an attack.”

“What hills are those? With one sole exception, they do not appear to be too high.”

“Nor are they. The high one is Mount Carmel.”

“Now
that
is a name I have heard. Mount Carmel … Is it close to where we are going?”

“Aye, it's right beside our destination.”

“And you think Saladin will attack us from up there, from above?”

“Absolutely, but he won't wait until we reach Carmel. As soon as we penetrate the foothills, where the road rises and falls from crest to crest, he'll hit us with everything he has, but on a broad plane of attack— small groups of hardened attackers, plunging down out of the hills independently of each other, along the entire extended length of our line of march, hitting whatever they can hit, wherever they find it. They will swoop in, create as much damage and havoc as they can, then pull back out and flee before we can rally anything like a counterthrust.”

“And is there nothing we can do to stop them?”

“Aye, we can turn tail and march back to Acre, but even so there will be no guarantee that they will not chase us. So we may just as well press forward.”

“Faster, I hope, than we have been moving to this point?”

“No.” Alec shook his head and almost smiled. “I find myself admiring Richard at times like this … as a general, I mean, a strategist. I think he is inspired in this. He is restrained, cool headed, judicious, and clearly thinking far ahead. His policy of advancing slowly and in comfort is unimpeachable. March in the cool morning hours, rest in the long, hot afternoons, and thus remain unruffled and adaptable, untaxed by the heat and capable of responding quickly and strongly to anything the enemy might throw at us. If he continues to use tactics like these, he will have the edge on Saladin. Four miles a day, I know, seems deathly slow to men like us, accustomed as we are to riding everywhere, but you know as well as I do that an army's progress is tied to the speed of its slowest units, and in our case, the slowest units are our siege engines. We will be fortunate, I think, if we can maintain four miles a day with those. Were it not for the fact that this road was Roman-built and has been more or less maintained, our speed might well be cut in half. And yet we can't simply walk off and leave these devices behind us, lying at the side of the road, not without opening ourselves to the threat of having them used against us at some future date. So, we will keep forging forward and resisting the temptation to charge the enemy.”

“Since when has charging and engaging the enemy been something to deplore?”

Alec Sinclair looked straight at his cousin without the slightest hint of raillery in his voice or his look. “Since
Gerard de Ridefort led a Templar charge into total extinction at Hattin, four years ago. Since he lost his full force of a hundred and sixty Temple knights, plus a knot of Hospitallers, a mere month prior to that, charging downhill against four thousand Saracen horsemen at the Springs of Cresson. And since two thousand Frankish infantry went charging into death on the same day as de Ridefort's cavalry at Hattin. Every time we mount a charge against this enemy, we are overwhelmed and defeated, because Saladin's people know exactly how to counteract the superior advantages of our Christian horse. De Ridefort is dead now, and so are his tactics. You will see no more foolish charges mounted nowadays against a mobile, agile force of mounted bowmen.” He stopped suddenly, cocking his head. “Listen. What was that?” The sound came again, a ripple of brazen trumpet notes. “Damnation, I thought that's what it was. Officers' call. I have to go.”