The Templar Knight

by Jan Guillou

  Prince Fahkr ibn Ayyub al Fahdi, which was his full name, would bring a ransom greater than anyone had ever been able to demand for a Saracen, since he was Saladin’s brother. Even emir Moussa should be worth a good price.

  To the amazement of both Fahkr and Moussa, Arn had quite a different suggestion. He wanted to propose that Saladin pay a ransom for every prisoner of the same price; 500 besants in gold, equivalent to about 78 ounces. Fahkr objected that most of the prisoners were not even worth one gold besant, and that he considered it an insult to make such a proposal. Arn then explained that he actually meant 500 besants for each prisoner, including Fahkr and Moussa themselves.

  To this they were speechless. They didn’t know whether to feel offended that this Al Ghouti—infidel though he was, yet considered among the believers to be the foremost of all Franks—had set the same price on them as on their slaves. Or whether Al Ghouti’s proposal indicated that he didn’t intend to extort an unreasonable price from Saladin to release his own brother. The possibility that a Templar knight might have no head for business never entered their minds.

  They discussed this question and made slow headway when they ate together once a day. Nothing that Arn served them was unclean food, and cold fresh water was the only drink at mealtime. When they were left alone in Arn’s quarters they had access to the Holy Koran.

  Even though Arn treated his two prisoners with such great respect that they could have been guests, there was no doubt that they were prisoners. It made them both naturally circumspect during the conversations of the first few days.

  But Arn wondered somewhat about their reluctance either to speak their opinions straight out or offer clear counter-proposals, and the fourth time they sat down together for dinner he seemed to be losing patience.

  “I don’t understand you,” he said with a resigned gesture. “What is it that is unclear between us? My faith tells me to show kindness toward the vanquished. I would be able to speak a great deal on this topic, although I don’t want to force you to listen to a faith that is not yours, especially not now when you are not free men. But your own faith says the same thing. Consider the words of the Prophet, peace be with him, and his own words to you: “When you meet unbelievers in battle, let your sword fall over their heads until you have forced them to their knees; take then the survivors captive. Then will come the time when you shall set them free, in good faith or in exchange for ransom, so that the burdens of war are lightened. This is what you have to observe.” Well? If I now tell you that my belief is the same?”

  “It is your generosity we cannot understand,” muttered Fahkr self-consciously. “You know very well that five hundred besants in gold for my freedom is a price that can only arouse ridicule.”

  “I know that,” said Arn. “If you were my only prisoner, I might suggest to your brother to pay fifty thousand besants. But what of the other prisoners? Should I leave them to our Saracen executioners? What is a man’s life worth, Fahkr? Is your life worth so much more than that of every other man?”

  “The man who claims such a thing is boasting and at the same time blaspheming against God. Before God one man’s life is the same as another man’s life. That is why the Holy Koran declares that life is inviolable,” replied Fahkr quietly.

  “Perfectly true,” said Arn, sounding pleased. “And Jesus Christ says the same thing. Let us not dispute this matter anymore; we actually have other things to talk about that demand more thought. So I would like Saladin to pay me fifty thousand besants in gold for all the prisoners, the two of you as well as all the others. Could you, Moussa, take this message to your lord?”

  “You’re releasing me and sending me as a messenger?” asked Moussa, astonished.

  “Yes, I can’t imagine a better messenger to take my demands to Saladin. Just as I cannot believe that you would seek only your own freedom and flee from this task. We have vessels that sail to Alexandria every other day, which you may or may not know. Or would I be sending you in the wrong direction? Should you travel to Damascus instead?”

  “Damascus would be a much more difficult journey, but it doesn’t matter in the least,” said Moussa. “From any city in Saladin’s realm I can get the message to him the same day. Alexandria is closer and easier.”

  “From any city at all…on the same day?” Arn wondered. “It is said that you can do that, but how is it possible?”

  “Simple. We have doves that fly with the messages. Doves always find their way home. If you take doves that were born in Damascus and move them in a cage to Alexandria or Baghdad or Mecca, they will fly straight home when you release them. You only have to wrap a letter around one of their feet.”

  “What an ingenious way to make use of them!” Arn exclaimed, obviously impressed. “So from here I could speak with my Grand Master in Jerusalem, where I believe he is now, in only an hour, or however long it takes for a dove to fly there?”

  “Yes indeed, if you had such doves and someone to take good care of them,” muttered Moussa with an expression as if he thought the conversation was taking an irrelevant turn.

  “How strange…” Arn mused, but then regained his composure. “Then let’s do it! You sail to Alexandria with one of our own ships tomorrow. Don’t worry about the men accompanying you. I grant you safe passage, and the crew is mostly Egyptian anyway. You’ll also be taking some of the injured prisoners with you. But let’s talk about something else now.”

  “Yes, let’s do that,” Fahkr agreed. “For there is certainly much else to talk about. I beseeched my brother Saladin to stay here outside Gaza and lay siege to the city. But he wouldn’t listen to me. Imagine how different things would be now if we had stayed.”

  “Yes, at the very least I would have been the one who was dead,” Arn agreed. “You would have had half your army left, and you would be sitting here as the rulers of Gaza. But He who sees all and He who hears all, as you would say, willed a different outcome. He wanted the Knights Templar to be victorious at Mont Gisard even though we were only two hundred against several thousand. This was proved by virtue of the fact that it happened; it was His will.”

  “Were you only two hundred?” Moussa burst out. “That’s astounding! I was there myself…we thought you were at least a thousand knights. Only two hundred…?”

  “Yes, that’s true. I know because I led the attack myself,” said Arn. “So instead of dying here in Gaza as I was sure I would, I won a victory that was truly a miracle of the Lord. Do you understand now why I didn’t want to boast or behave with arrogance and cruelty toward the conquered?”

  It was true for both believers and unbelievers that he who was granted God’s grace so miraculously could not boast and imagine that he had done it all on his own. Such an overweening attitude was a sin which God would punish harshly, regardless of whether one understood God in the words of the Prophet or in the words of Jesus Christ.

  They were in full agreement on the necessity for restraint after such a victory. On the other hand, what they could discuss even more heatedly, now that the sensitive matter of ransom of the prisoners had been clarified, was the question of God’s will or man’s sin.

  Everything would have been different if Saladin had stayed in Gaza with his army and taken the city—that much was clear. But why did God then punish Saladin for showing leniency toward both Gaza and Al Ghouti himself? He had spared Al Ghouti and shortly thereafter God let Saladin suffer his greatest defeat at the hands of this very man. So what was God’s intention?

  All three of them brooded a long time over this question. Finally the emir Moussa said that it might be that God was sternly reminding His most beloved servant Saladin that in jihad there was no room for any man’s personal wishes. In jihad one could not spare a city of infidels because one had a personal debt to a specific individual. For emir Moussa was, like Fahkr, convinced that Gaza would have been taken by force if its commander had not been Al Ghouti, to whom Saladin owed a personal debt. The defeat at Mont Gisard was God’s punishment for
that sin.

  Arn not surprisingly held an entirely different view. He thought that the victory at Mont Gisard showed that God had protected those of his believers who stood closest to Him, for He had favored the Christians in such a way that it could only be explained as divine intervention. Gaza had been spared because Saladin wanted a greater prize, and the siege force outside Ashkelon had been too small. Instead of heading directly toward Jerusalem, Saladin had allowed his once unconquerable army to disperse to plunder. The fog had favored the side that had the smaller force to lead at Mont Gisard. And as if this were not enough, Arn and his brothers had had the improbable good luck to ride blindly to the precise spot where the Mameluke cavalry would pass. And as if this were still not enough, the attack by the Knights Templar came exactly at the spot where the enemy had the most difficulty both defending themselves and regrouping to counterattack.

  All this in a single context was too much to be explained away as mere luck or skill. On the contrary, it was proof that the belief in Jesus Christ was the true path, and that Muhammad, peace be unto him, was a prophet inspired by God but not the messenger for the one truth. For how could the miracle at Mont Gisard otherwise be explained?

  Emir Moussa ventured another explanation. When God saw how the faithful were on their way to crush the Christians, who were nevertheless human beings like any other human beings, then God had turned his back on all of them. After that, human errors and not God’s will had prevailed.

  For the the faithful had demonstrably committed a long series of mistakes, just as Al Ghouti had enumerated. The errors were due mostly to arrogance, the fact that they believed victory was assured long before the first real battle was fought. Such arrogance was always punished in every war, in ways both small and large. He who had war as his profession and was old enough must have seen a thousand idiotic decisions and another thousand lucky ones that determined the difference between life and death. These things always happened. And wasn’t it boastful to believe that God always participated in every little battle that His children fought? Yes, for otherwise God would not have much else to do other than rush from one war to another and from one battle to the next. So as far as Mont Gisard was concerned, a combination of human pride and the usual fortunes of war might be the simplest explanation.

  Neither Arn nor Fahkr would agree to that. Fahkr thought that it was blasphemy to believe that God would turn His back on His warriors during jihad. And Arn thought that if war was being waged close to God’s Grave, then He would not choose to be busy somewhere else.

  And so they were back to the question of whose set of beliefs represented the true faith. No one would yield on that point, and Fahkr, who was an expert negotiator, then led the discussion to the only point on which they could agree. They could not know whether God punished those who in His name advanced in jihad toward Jerusalem, or if He was protecting those who in His name defended Jerusalem. If they did not know whether God was showing mercy or doling out punishment, then they could not say whether the message of the Prophet, peace be unto him, was the true one, or whether it was the message that came from Jesus Christ, peace be unto him as well.

  Arn’s fortress master brother Siegfried de Turenne, whose name in his own language was spelled Thüringen, was one of the Knights Templar who was wounded at Mont Gisard. Arn had convinced him to seek treatment for his wounds in Gaza, but he hadn’t explained why he thought there would be better care in Gaza than in Siegfried’s own fortress Castel Arnald up in the Ramle region.

  What Arn had not told his brother was that the doctors at the fortress in Gaza were Saracens. Some among the Templar knights found it outrageous to employ Saracen doctors. It was mostly the new brothers who held such views, and it was the same among the worldly Franks in Outremer. Those who had just arrived usually held the view that all Saracens should be killed with impunity as soon as they were discovered. Even Arn had entertained such simplistic beliefs when he served his first year in the white mantle. But that was long ago, and Arn, like most brothers who had long served in the Holy Land, had learned that Saracen doctors were able to heal more than twice as many wounded as Frankish doctors did. More experienced brothers usually joked that if one fine day you lay wounded on the battlefield, the safest doctor to treat you was one from Damascus, the next safest no doctor at all, and the surely fatal one was Frankish.

  Naturally there was a difference between what belonged to this world and what was faith. Some fortress masters and high brothers would probably agree, based on their own experience, that Saracen doctors were more skilled. Yet they still wouldn’t rely on the unbelievers because that would be considered sinful.

  Arn used to joke about such opinions, saying that it was truly odd for a man to be allowed to live because of his sin and die as punishment for his purity of faith. Going to Paradise because you died on the battlefield was one thing, but going there because you had neglected your health in the sickbed was hardly the same.

  As Arn had instinctively felt, Brother Siegfried belonged to those who because of their faith would rely only on unskilled doctors. But Siegfried was brought to Gaza on a stretcher, and at that moment he was in no condition to raise objections. An arrow had bored through his shoulder and shoulder blade, and a lance had penetrated deep into his left thigh. A Frankish doctor might have done something that would have cost him both his arm and his leg.

  Initially Siegfried had strongly criticized Arn for his trick of leaving him in unclean hands. But the two doctors Utman ibn Khattab and Abd al-Malik had first succeeded in removing the arrow point despite the fact that it had penetrated all the way into the shoulder blade. Then using various herbal drinks they had quickly brought down the fever caused by the wound and thoroughly cleansed the opening with brandy, which burned like fire but also purified the wound. After only ten days Siegfried noticed how his wound was starting to heal, and soon he could move his arm, although the doctors immediately tried to stop him and in broken Frankish admonished him to lie still.

  As Siegfried grew noticeably better he also began to observe with greater interest the huge differences that existed between Gaza and his own fortress when it came to treating the wounded. The first big difference he noticed was that here in Gaza the wounded lay high up in the fortress, cool and dry, and each bed was far away from its neighbor so that the wounded could hardly speak with one another. The cool air was no cause for concern, for each of the patients were bedded in both linen and pelts. The fact that this would have any importance for the healing of wounds was hard to believe, but it was pleasant to lie in clean bed linen.

  All the arrow slots were furnished with wooden shutters to keep out the wind and rain, which seemed an unnecessary bother. If they had done as they did elsewhere, the wounded would have been kept down below in a grain storage chamber. But the Saracen doctors clearly insisted on keeping plenty of fresh air and a low temperature in the infirmatorium itself. This was not the first time Siegfried had been wounded, so he could compare this treatment to previous experiences.

  Besides the temperature and ventilation, the big difference was in the absence of prayers in connection with the treatment, which was also quite minimal for most of the wounded brothers. After the Saracen doctors had washed and dressed the wounds, they mostly let the men rest; they didn’t continually come running with new poultices, warming cow manure and other things that a wounded man might usually expect. On rare occasions the doctors would cauterize the wounds with red-hot irons, if the evil could not be washed away with the searing brandy. When such things were to be done, Arn de Gothia himself would come up with some sergeants in tow who would hold down the unfortunate patient while he was treated with the glowing iron.

  But Arn also visited the wounded every day to observe a brief moment of prayer with them. Then he would go from bed to bed along with one of the doctors and translate his recommendations and opinions. All this was extremely foreign behavior, and at first Siegfried de Turenne had looked on medicine in Gaza with great suspici
on. But reason also had a say in the matter, and it wasn’t easy to deny. Of the many wounded who came to Gaza after Mont Gisard, only one had died, but he’d had deep wounds in his abdomen, and it was well known that there was no remedy for such a grievous condition. But there was no denying the fact that the infirmatorium was emptied little by little, and that most of the wounded, even two who’d had their wounds burned with red-hot irons, would be able to go back into service. According to Siegfried’s experience, half of the brothers who were treated for wounds in battle would usually die. And of the half that survived, many would be cripples. Here in Gaza the infidel doctors had only had one death, and it was a hopeless case. That fact could not be ignored. So it would be foolish not to try and employ Saracen doctors also at home in Castel Arnald as soon as possible. This was not an easy decision for Brother Siegfried to make. But if he had refused to accept what he saw with his own eyes, he would have sinned against wounded brothers, and that would have been even worse.

  Doctor Abd al-Malik was one of Arn’s oldest friends in Outremer. They had met when Arn was a shy and childish eighteen-year-old and new in service at the Knights Templar fortress of Tortosa far up the coast. It was Abd al-Malik who at Arn’s stubborn insistence had given him his first lessons in Arabic, which then continued for two years before Arn was posted elsewhere.

  The Holy Koran was naturally the best of all texts for this purpose, since it was written in consummate prose, which Abd al-Malik always explained by saying that it was God’s own pure language given directly to human beings with only one Messenger, peace be unto him, as intermediary. But Arn explained that the Koran had come to be the standard for all written Arabic and thus had been perfected after the fact, since all had to sing in the same manner.