Standard of Honor (88 page)

“Come down. Slowly.”

André lowered his hands and nudged his horse forward and sideways, picking the easiest route down and highly aware of the arbalests pointed at him. The knight probably thought him a deserter or a coward who had sought refuge high up on the slopes to avoid being killed, and thinking that, he would have no compunction about giving the word to shoot St. Clair down without mercy. Finally, he reached the roadway and moved forward to face the Hospitaller.

“Who are you and what were you doing up there? And be careful what you say.”

André made no attempt to smile or be engaging. “André St. Clair, and I was trying to get back to my unit. I was sent out last night by our Grand Master, de Sablé, to scout Arsuf and make sure it had not been occupied. He sent me because I speak Arabic and can pass for a Muslim. The clothing and weapons I wore out there are here, in the cases on the pack mule. Look, if you like.”

“And was Arsuf occupied?”

“No, it was not. But it makes no difference now.

Saladin's people will not stop running until they are far south of Arsuf.”

“Hmm.” The Hospitaller nodded towards the mule. “Show me what is in the cases.”

Moments later, he sat frowning at the circular Saracen shield he was holding.

“Right. Well, I suppose I'm obliged to believe you, St. Clair, but I have to send you now to my superior, Sir Pierre St. Julien. You would have to do the same with me, were things reversed.”

“I would. Where do I find him?”

The Hospitaller turned to the man on his right, who had long since put down his arbalest. “Take him to St. Julien.” He glanced back at St. Clair. “God be with you, St. Clair, and good luck.” He raised a hand briefly and swung away, already shouting at some of the men working nearby.

The knight called St. Julien accepted St. Clair even more quickly than the other had. As he was quickly checking the contents of André's packs, a group of men moved past them, carrying five wounded Hospitallers on improvised stretchers.

“How many men did you lose?” André asked him.

St. Julien twisted his mouth. “Not nearly as many as I thought we would. Our Grand Master went to argue with King Richard, begging him to turn us loose, but Richard refused. When the charge did break out, it was because one or two of our own knights had simply had enough, and out they went … And everyone else went after them. It simply happened, and when it did, everyone joined in. I don't know about the rest of the line of battle, but I would be surprised
if we lost more than half a hundred men—knights and foot soldiers both.”

“You must have taken out ten men for every one you lost, then.”

“Oh, more than that, for by the time we broke out, the men were beyond anger. They showed no mercy, gave no quarter. Everything that moved in front of them went down. Ah! They've found something over there. God speed, Sir Templar.”

Thereafter, André St. Clair made his way along the road without being bothered again, and for the entire distance he was amazed at the disproportionate numbers of Muslim dead and wounded lining the road, with corpses piled in head-high heaps in many places. The crews whose task it was to clean up the carnage had nothing to say to him and little to each other. They were already listless and dull eyed, appalled into speechlessness by the awful, repetitive nature of the work they were doing and the condition of the mangled and dismembered bodies with which they had to deal, surrounded by the sounds and stenches of humanity in unspeakable distress. From time to time, he would pass a dead man who stood out as someone special by virtue of the clothing and insignia he wore, but for the most part, André was smitten by the sameness of it all and by the pathetic lack of dignity apparent in the heaped piles of discarded corpses. He had seen so many headless bodies and so many bodiless heads, arms, and legs that he thought he might never again be able to sit in a saddle and swing a sword, and it was while one such
thought was passing through his head that something caught his attention from the corner of his eye, and he drew rein to look more closely.

But looking now at the carnage surrounding him, he could see nothing that struck him as being anomalous. There were living men among the fallen all around him; he could see some of them moving and he could hear their moans and cries, and somewhere almost beyond his hearing range, someone was screaming mindlessly, demented by pain. But whatever had caught his attention was no longer evident, and he dismissed it, gathering his reins to ride on.

He had traversed almost the entire line of battle by that time, and the cleanup crews had not yet reached this far. The section through which he was now riding had been the right of the line, occupied by the Templars and their supporting Turcopoles, and St. Clair had not realized before how closely the latter resembled the enemy they fought, for they were not uniformly equipped, and in many instances he could not tell, looking at the strewn bodies, which were which. But then, just as he began to turn away, he saw movement again, a flicker of bright yellow higher up than he had been looking before, just in front of the line of trees above him. He tensed, looking at it intently, knowing what it was but unable to say why it should be significant to him.

It was a Saracen unit flag, the equivalent of the colors carried by each of the Frankish formations, but whereas the Frankish troop divisions carried individual colors, each
to its own, the Saracens bore only uniform yellow standards: large swallow-tailed banners on the end of long, supple poles, distinguished from each other by the varying devices used by each unit to identify itself and its leader. Now the banner moved again, not waved by the wind but stirred erratically, as though someone were moving against it, causing it to sway unevenly back and forth, and as it unfolded it displayed the device it bore, a number of black crescents, their leading edges facing right.

André felt his stomach lurch as he recalled the evening, months before, when Alec Sinclair had described the personal standard of his friend Ibn al-Farouch. “Remember,” he had said, “if you find yourself outnumbered or in danger of defeat, don't go seeking death, for death achieves nothing but oblivion for fools. Go seeking life instead. Find the squadron with the five-moon pennant and surrender to its leader. That's Ibn. Tell him you know me, that I'm your cousin, and he'll find a comfortable chain to shackle you with.”

Five black crescent moons, Sinclair had said, their leading edges facing right. The brief glance he had had of the pennant had been too short to count the number of crescents. He had seen only a cluster, perhaps five, but it might as easily have been six or seven, and he knew that he could not now ride away without satisfying his curiosity, so he turned his horse around and nudged it forward, up the hill to where the yellow banner now sagged motionless.

Among the bodies of slaughtered Arab and Christian horses, three dead Templars lay in plain view,
their red-crossed, white-coated bodies intertwined and surrounded by Saracen corpses. He spurred his horse closer, examining the individual bodies of the knights, looking for men he knew, but he felt the hair stir on the back of his neck when he saw that the dead man atop the other two had not died by a Saracen scimitar but had been stabbed through the neck with a long, straight Christian sword. The blade was still in place, thrust clear through the chain-mail hood that covered the dead knight's head. The sole question in André St. Clair's mind was why, in a fight to the death against Saracens, a Christian knight would aim such a deliberate and lethal thrust at one of his brethren.

The knight had sunk to his knees and died there, his lifeblood drenching the front of his surcoat, and the men who lay beneath him, and the upthrust angle of the sword that killed him, had prevented him from falling forward. His heart beating fast now, André dismounted and stepped quickly to the kneeling knight. He pulled the head back and looked into the dead face. The man was an unknown. André pushed him firmly, so that he fell sideways and rolled off the bodies beneath him.

The next man lay face down on top of the man below him, covering his head and shoulders, but the man beneath had been the one who thrust the killing sword, for it had been torn from his hand by the weight of the falling corpse when André pushed it. He stooped and seized the second knight by the armholes of his cuirass and heaved him up, rolling him to see that, again, the fellow was unknown to him. He had been
killed by crossbow bolts, three of which projected several inches from his breast. As he turned now to the third knight, André gave a whimpering, childlike cry and fell to his knees, his face crumpling as he stared between his outstretched hands into the dead face of his cousin Alec.

How long he knelt there, struck dumb, he would never be able to recollect afterwards, but he remained there, rocking slowly back and forth in agonized disbelief as he watched the slowly welling blood ooze from the grim rent in the armor over his cousin's left breast.

And only very, very slowly did it penetrate his awareness that dead men do not bleed.

When the realization did hit him, he whimpered again, and reached out with both hands to cup Alec's face, and as he did so, Alec's eyes opened.

“Cousin,” Alec Sinclair whispered. “Where did you come from?”

André merely sat, hunched forward, gazing at his cousin's face, which was pallid and deeply graven with stark, blue-tinged lines. He knew he should say something, respond in some manner to his cousin's greeting, but his tongue felt frozen in his mouth.

“Where is al-Farouch?”

The strangeness of the question snapped St. Clair back to full cognizance, and his fingers tightened on his cousin's chin. “What did you say? Where is
who
?”

“Ibn al-Farouch. He was here but a short time ago. Where did he go?”

André sat back on his haunches but remained leaning forward, face to face with his cousin, his hand still grasping Sinclair's chin. “Alec, what are you talking about? Al-Farouch is not here.”

“Of course he is. What is that, if not his?” André looked up, following the direction of Sinclair's gaze, and saw the yellow swallow-tailed pennant with its five black crescent moons.

“Quick, André, lift me up, quickly. Lift me up.”

The urgency in Alec's voice provoked an instant response in St. Clair, and he rose immediately to kneel behind his cousin and grasp him carefully beneath the arms, cradling him as gently as he could. “How is that?” he asked. “Am I hurting you?”

“Aye, but not badly. I think I may be lying on top of al-Farouch, and if I am, he may not be able to breathe, so lift me up and move me to one side. Then I will need you to see to him—” Alec stopped, gasping for breath, but then continued. “Gently now, Cuz. Lift me straight up and step to your left. Can you do that?”

“Aye, I can manage that,” St. Clair replied, but as he moved to straighten up, thrusting powerfully but steadily with his thighs against the deadweight of Alec's armored body, the agony of being moved, even thus slightly, ripped a tortured scream of protest from the wounded knight's throat. André froze before he could straighten completely, so that he was left crouching. Alec's weight seemed to increase in his arms and was growing insupportably heavier by the moment.

“Alec,” he hissed, straining the words through his teeth. “Alec, can you hear me?”

There was no answer, and he knew his cousin had fainted from the pain. He tensed again, drew a deep breath and expelled it noisily, then inhaled again, sucking the air into his lungs as hard as he could, and straightened up quickly, lifting Alec as far as he could and then walking backward very carefully for two paces.

André lowered the unconscious knight to a flat piece of ground as gently as he could and then used his dagger to cut savagely through the straps and laces that held the riven armor in place. Grateful that his kinsman could feel nothing, he manhandled him remorselessly, turning him back and forth as he tore at the chain mail, clothing, lining, and bindings until he could see bare skin and the sluggish welling of blood from the wound in Alec's chest. Whatever had pierced the armor had been massive and sharp, and André guessed it had been a hard-swung battle-axe, for it had driven clean through both cuirass and chain-mail shirt, hammering individual links and pieces of metal into the gash it had made in Sinclair's chest. André prayed that the wound was not lethal, but he suspected that several of his cousin's ribs had been smashed, and he had no means of guessing at the extent of the damage Alec had sustained beneath that.

When he felt that he could do no more, he rose to his feet and peered back to the northward, looking for the distinctive black-and-white uniform of the Hospitallers, but none of them had yet come into sight, and so he knelt back down beside his cousin to find him
conscious again. As soon as he came close enough, Alec grasped him by the forearm. His fingertips dug deep.

“Sweet Jesus, that hurt, Cousin. Did I pass out? I must have … Was I right? Was Ibn beneath me?”

André St. Clair shook his head. “I don't know, Alec. I haven't had time to look. You were lying atop someone, a Saracen, but how would I know who he is?”

“An amulet, hanging from his neck on a silver chain. Heavy silver … Amulet is green … the Prophet's favorite color … Is there an amulet? Look and see.”

André moved away and looked at the man who had been lying beneath Sinclair, but he had to reach out and search before he could find anything about the man's neck. A few moments was all it took, however, and he was kneeling by Sinclair again.

“Aye,” he muttered. “A carved amulet of pale green stone, with a chain of heavy silver links.”

“Jade, Cousin, it's called jade … Is he alive?”

“No, Cousin, he is not. I checked most carefully and I could find no pulse. Your friend is dead. What happened here?”

For a moment Alec Sinclair looked as though he might actually laugh, but then his breath caught in his throat and he grunted, clearly incapable of breathing as he struggled against the pain of his wounds. André felt the strength in his grip tighten then relax, still firm, but no longer panicked. “I saw him here, when we burst out. Could scarcely believe it.” He paused, breathing hard, and André waited, making no attempt to rush him. “There he was, on foot and right in front of me,
bleeding from the forehead so that he had to wipe the blood from his eyes with the back of his wrist. His horse, Wind Spirit, was dead beside him …” Another pause, filled with laborious breathing, and then, “He had a bare half dozen of his bodyguard still left around him, and as I saw him, one of our knights charged in to kill him, but he was careless and one of the bodyguards got him with a flung scimitar that took his head right off … And then I saw two or three more of our knights close in to finish Ibn. He wore nothing to mark him as an emir, but there was something about his bearing, as there always was, that set him ap—” The coughing spell broke unexpectedly, and for the next brief while André held Sinclair as his entire body convulsed in pain, racked with the ravages of coughing through a mouth suddenly filled with thick blood. Finally, when the fit subsided, André pressed him back onto the ground.