by Jack Whyte
“I shall have him change it. I will enjoy doing that, too. You realize he is not one of us?”
André frowned. “Not one of us? I don’t understand.”
“No reason why you should, but he is one of Philip’s men, born and bred in the Vexin, during my father’s occupation of it. I believe he detested my father, the old lion, even more than I did. Anyway, he was left here with us, when Philip flounced away, to act as messenger and liaison between France and us should the need arise. He is supercilious, tends to be overly … critical. Seems to believe that everything we do and everything we have is not quite to the standards that he would impose, given the opportunity. But then he is very young. I find him occasionally hard to stomach, but he is pleasant to behold. Now, I need you to take the ladies hunting in the morning.”
André stood motionless, caught off balance by what he had heard and rendered incapable of responding, but then he found his voice and his mind started working again and he shook his head. “No, my lord, forgive me but I may not do that … I am forbidden, as a novice of the Order, to consort with women. It is expressly forbidden, one of the strictest requirements of the Order. Failure to observe that would disqualify me for acceptance.”
“Aye, it might. But would that really trouble you? I have work enough to keep you employed on my behalf forever, if you but say the word.”
“No, my lord, that cannot be ... although I realize that even saying such a thing is unforgivable. But I cannot, in honor, withdraw from my situation now. I am already committed, not yet under oath but clearly understood to be within an inch of committing fully. Besides, I cannot understand your objections now. It was your idea that I should join the Order.”
“Aye, it was. But that was before I’d had the choice to think things through—and those damned priests were yet alive. Everything has changed since then, and now I need you.”
André began to shake his head, but Richard held up an imperious hand. “Enough, say no more now. I was but jesting, although not completely so. Perhaps half jesting. And perhaps testing … Take some time and think this matter through thoroughly. You yet have time before anyone expects you to take formal vows, and that means you have time to change your mind for good and sufficient reason. In the meantime, I still need you to take the women hunting in the morning. I can arrange a special dispensation for you, through the Master of the Temple in Poitou, the man de Troyes, and I will. You have no choice in this, André. It is not a request, it is a command. I can’t take much more of this, being surrounded constantly by women … it will make me mad. Joanna has decided that she wishes to go hunting and I know my sister. She will not stop harping on it now until she has her way, but I want her to go hunting, and to take my lady wife Berengaria with her. She hunts well, I’m told—rides like a man and kills like a fox, as does Joanna. You will enjoy them, I believe, once you overcome your monkish reluctance, but that is the way it has to be …
“I offered to send my guards with the two of them, but Joanna would hear none of it. She wants someone she can converse with, someone with sufficient brains, as she put it, to walk and talk at the same time without tripping over his foreskin. The main thing is, she wants no guards at all. She simply wants to hunt—no pomp, no panoply, and no visible presence. She will dress as a huntsman, as she always does, and no one seeing her from more than ten paces’ distance will ever suspect she is a woman. Berengaria will do the same, apparently. She has her own hunting armor, Joanna tells me. Joanna says, and I agree, that they have no need of any massive escort. But at the same time, Berengaria is my wife, the Queen of England, so I cannot allow her to go off into the countryside unattended, at the utter mercy of the gods. There must be someone with her, someone trustworthy and responsible, in case they encounter an emergency or have an accident.” He shrugged. “So you became my natural choice as custodian of my bride.”
André spread his hands in protest. “But why me, my lord? There must be—”
“Joanna asked for you by name, André, so there’s an end of it. You obviously impressed her greatly.”
“Impossible, sir. I was with her and the lady Berengaria for less than an hour.”
The King smiled slightly, his eyes crinkling. “That, my young friend, is far more than enough time for women to weave plots and make plans. I shall inform my sister that you will await her at the stables at dawn. You will be there, will you not?”
“Of course I will, my lord, if you insist.”
“Excellent, I do insist. And you will dine with us tonight. It is time you met King Guy, anyway, and came to know some of his knights. You will enjoy them. They are our kind of people, André, honorable, straightforward, unafraid to speak their minds. Besides, your father will be at table tonight. I sent him to Famagusta a few days ago, at the head of an armed sweep, and he returned this afternoon. He’ll be looking to see you, as you will be him, so you will enjoy the evening. I’ll see you at table.”
RICHARD MAY HAVE SEEN André at table that evening, André had no way of knowing, but the two of them certainly did not speak. There was too much noise to converse without shouting anyway, and too many new people to meet. André liked almost all of the Latin knights that he met, and he asked if any of them had knowledge or recent tidings of his kinsman Sir Alexander Sinclair of the Templars. Three of them remembered Alex more or less clearly, although none of those could recollect having seen him after the Battle of Hattin. André swallowed his disappointment and continued asking questions, not about Alex Sinclair now but about anything he could think of having to do with Saladin and the Saracens and their ways of waging war. He ate well, this being the King’s table, but he drank sparingly because he did not want to miss a word of what was going on around him. He found himself fascinated by these men and with what they had to say in response to his questions, because they were all veterans of the desert wars and every man of them had fought the enemy face to face.
He went looking for his father later, at that stage of the evening when the amount drunk began to dictate the volume and intensity of the arguments, debates, and outright quarrels that were taking place everywhere, but Sir Henry was nowhere to be found, and André guessed that he had simply slipped away to his own quarters, satisfied that both his presence and his absence would go unremarked at this time of the night. Despite his profession of Master-at-Arms, Sir Henry had always been decidedly fastidious and generally avoided exposing himself to occasions like these, where there was always a danger of being felled by an unexpected blow from some overheated drunkard.
Now, sober and looking around him detachedly, André decided that his father was a clever man and his example was worth following. Besides, he reminded himself, he had to be up early, to take the two Queens hunting, although he thought he would rather have stuck thorns in his eyes than be committed to that. He knew, without thinking about it, that the activity would bring him grief from his fellows, no matter how loud or public the dispensation from Etienne de Troyes might be. Women, he was learning quickly, were anathema to the Temple. Even the brief association he had had with Queen Joanna and Queen Berengaria, mere conversation and initiated at the King’s personal insistence, had been noted and unfavorably viewed. Tomorrow’s outing would not go unnoticed either, he knew, but he had no choice. He walked away from all the revelry just as two knights were beginning to circle each other with drawn blades in a hastily cleared space on the floor.
It was a fine night, and by the time he walked out through the city’s gates towards the harbor, he had left the sounds from the dining hall far behind him. But then there were other loud voices being raised ahead of him, and he heard the clash of steel on steel again, more urgent than the sounds he had left behind in the hall. The knights in the hall had been fighting for sport, in an arranged bout, else they could not have drawn steel in the King’s presence. These men ahead of him had no such restraints, and in all probability they neither knew nor cared where the King might be. He could tell from the noise of the curses being thrown around that blood would
be spilled quickly and perhaps copiously. He knew, too, that the fighters would be men-at-arms and that if he went closer to them he would be bound, as an officer and a knight, to intervene. And at this time of night, to confront unknown, angry, and drunken foot soldiers and try to face them down would be madness. No one but a total fool would expose himself to such a risk; an unknown, unaccompanied officer alone in the dark could be an irresistible target to an angry, disenchanted ruffian.
He stopped and stood listening, peering into the darkness ahead of him. He was close enough to hear what was happening but too far away to see or be seen. He hesitated a moment longer, then made up his mind and walked away from the sounds of the brawl, and mere moments later he realized that he was walking towards the small plateau where Richard and Isaac Comnenus had met earlier that day. As he recognized the place, the towering shape of Isaac’s imperial pavilion came into view, ringed about and illuminated by the flickering torches of Richard’s guard, who had been assigned to ensure the comfort and security of their former foe.
Knowing he would surely be challenged if he continued on his present route, he turned again to head back towards the beach, the noise of the brawl now faint, off to his left and moving away from him. A full moon emerged then from behind a cloud, and its light flooded the entire plain, making it almost as clear as day, so that he could see the forest of masts in the harbor ahead of him, outlined against the sky. Something stirred at the edge of his vision, in the direction of Isaac’s pavilion, and he glanced that way but saw nothing. Intrigued then, because he knew something there had attracted his attention, he stopped and stood watching for a while, one upraised foot propped on a knee-high boulder, bent knee serving as a brace for his elbow, to see if whatever it had been would move again. It did not, and as he stood there, hunched forward and motionless, one of Richard’s guardsmen came marching on his rounds. The man passed solemnly on his way without even a slight pause to check for irregularity, and soon disappeared from view behind a fold in the terrain.
And then, in the instant before André straightened up to resume his walk, a figure darted out from the shadows of a pile of rocks and began to move quickly but furtively straight towards André. Whoever the man was, he was almost scuttling, crouched over and flitting from one patch of shadow to the next and turning to peer back over his shoulder every few steps. André did not move. He remained bent over, watching the running man and wondering what he was witnessing, aware that if he straightened up and the runner saw him, he would have to give chase and might lose the fellow. But who could he be, and what was he doing? Clearly, he had come from Isaac Comnenus’s pavilion, and equally clearly, he was doing everything in his power to avoid being seen by the King’s Guard. The running man must be one of Isaac’s Cypriots, André reasoned, for no one in Richard’s army would have dared to risk offending the King by doing something foolish to the Cypriot Emperor. But then again, what if one of Richard’s own men, perceiving Isaac to be a greater threat than he really was, had thought to dispose of him? It was not such an outlandish thought. The selfsame thing had happened to Richard in the marketplace in Sicily. Isaac Comnenus, André now realized, might already be lying dead in his pavilion, murdered by the man who was now running directly towards him, completely unaware that he was there.
The moon had gone behind a cloud again and the night now appeared to be darker than it had been before. André straightened up and moved quickly forward to intercept the man, and as he did so he heard a startled intake of breath, followed by the quick slither of steel from a scabbard and then the whistling hiss of a hard-swung sword blade. He had no time to draw his own weapon and only his own reflexes saved his life. He dropped down, tucking himself into a forward roll, diving beneath the slashing blade and bowling his adversary over, sweeping the legs from beneath him. He spun on his shoulders as he felt the other man go flying and thrust himself up and onto his feet, drawing his dagger as he rose.
The other man had landed well and had not lost his grip on his weapon, and he was already surging back to his feet again, one arm straight-braced against the ground and the other, his sword arm, extended for balance. André made to lunge forward, meaning to kick away the bracing arm and knock the fellow down again, but the other man was catlike, fast and strong, and he brought his weapon in and down again in a scything blow that would have cut through anything it met. Fortunately, André had seen the danger and changed direction, springing backward instead of forward, and the tip of the blade swept by his right knee, missing it by a hand’s breadth. He threw himself forward again, flipping the dagger to his left hand and leaping as soon as his left heel touched the ground, lunging straight armed at the other man’s neck, then sweeping his right leg forward and around to kick the swordsman’s legs away. He almost succeeded, but the other man was already springing back and away. André’s foot caught him on the ankle and sent him staggering, and by the time he regained his balance, André had his own sword in his hand.
The sounds of their blades clashing brought the guards running from the pavilion, and the sight of them coming spurred the runner to greater efforts. He loosed a flurry of blows that André was hard pressed to withstand, and then he stepped in and slammed a shoulder into André’s chest, sending him staggering, so that he fell on his back, the sword jarred from his hand. Casting a swift glance towards the running guards to make sure they were still far enough away, the other man reversed his grip upon his sword, holding it two-handed above his head and pointing downward like a spear, preparing to stab it down into André’s breast, chain mail and all. But as he reached the height of his extension and hesitated as he aimed the blow, the iron hilt of André’s dagger, thrown from the ground with all St. Clair’s strength, struck him in the throat, crushing his Adam’s apple and dropping him like a pole-axed ox.
Moments later, three running guards arrived and crouched, weapons drawn, around the two supine men, and when André tried to rise, one of them stepped forward and held a sword point to his neck. André subsided and raised his hands.
“I have no weapons. My name is St. Clair. Sir André St. Clair of Poitou, vassal to King Richard. You have a sergeant among you called Nickon. He knows me. Is he on duty with you tonight?”
“Aye,” one of the men growled, glaring truculently. “What of it?”
“Take me to him. But first, let me look at this fellow.” He rose slowly to his feet and the guards came closer, keeping their weapons ready. André leaned over the fallen runner, reaching to search for a pulse beneath the jawbone. He found one, and it seemed strong and steady, but then the moon came out again and he saw the face of the man who had tried to kill him and might possibly have killed Isaac Comnenus. More puzzled than ever, André rose to his feet and waved the guards’ threatening sword wearily away.
“Come,” he said. “I need to talk with Nickon, at once. One of you may hold a weapon on me if you feel a need to ensure I won’t try to escape, but I want the other two to keep close watch on this fellow. I suspect him of murdering the Cyprus Emperor, the one you are supposed to be guarding. I watched him pass through your patrols as though you were not there, and he came from the pavilion. So until we know what he was doing there, keep him here, on the ground and under guard. And if he tries to leave, tie him down. Now, one of you take me to Nickon.”
They found Nickon surrounded by his fellow guards, in hot debate, and André was mildly suprised to note that Nickon, whom he had taken to be just another guardsman, evidently ranked higher and had more authority than his fellows, all of whom clearly looked to him for guidance in whatever was at stake here. St. Clair interrupted their wrangling and tugged Nickon aside, then launched into what he suspected his prisoner might have done. But the angry incredulity on the guardsman’s face quickly leached the certainty from his suspicions and he stopped speaking, almost in mid-word.
“Isaac’s not dead,” the guardsman said. “He’s gone, with all his people, on horseback, headed for the mountains at full gallop. Ran over two of my guards on
the way out and killed one of them, one of my very best. My lads were looking to their front, never expecting to be struck down from behind … especially not by the people they were guarding. I don’t know what’s going on, but that whoreson Cypriot will choke to death on his own bile if I ever set eyes on him again.” André pointed back over his shoulder with his thumb. “I have a prisoner back there, a French knight. I caught him running from your guards, from this pavilion. Two of your men are holding him now and I want you to keep him close and take him directly to the King. I know who he is, but that will do us no good if he escapes. He would vanish into the mountains just as quickly and as easily as Isaac has and we might never catch him again. Whatever is going on here, this man holds a key to it, so Richard will want to question him. In the meantime, have you searched the pavilion? Are you sure Isaac is gone?”
Nickon grunted, a sound of sheer disgust. “Aye, I’m sure. We haven’t had time to do a thorough search, for the whoresons only ran a few minutes before you showed up here, but I sent men inside to check as soon as that happened. There’s no bodies in there, no blood, but I don’t know what else is there or what they might have left behind. All I know is, they’ve gone, and from the speed at which they left, they won’t be coming back. You say this knight you captured is French?”
“Aye, one of Philip’s men, left here as liaison with Richard.”
“Then we had best drag his arse in to Richard as quickly as we can and leave it to the torturers to find out what he was doing.” Nickon turned to one of his subordinates and started snapping orders to assemble his men, leaving only four behind to protect the magnificently ornate pavilion, which Richard would be glad to reclaim, against looters.
Richard was furious. He listened in perplexity as André recounted how he had seen and then intercepted the French knight, and his eyebrows rose high when André described how Dorville had tried to kill him. Only then did the King have the Frenchman brought before him under guard, and André sensed, as he watched and listened from a position in a rear corner of the audience chamber, that the King was reluctant to believe ill of the fellow. As his questioning of the French knight progressed, however, it was plain that the monarch’s patience, notoriously short lived at the best of times, was being notably tested by the French knight’s truculence and disdain.
