Knights of the Black and White

by Jack Whyte

  Hassan paused again, and then said, deliberately, so that there could be no ambiguity or misunderstanding, “Anyone can vanish, Princess. Anyone. There is no person alive in the world today who cannot be made to disappear, suddenly, completely, and mysteriously. But it is also true that there is no person alive in the world today who cannot be made to die violently and shockingly, and highly visibly, in any public place at any hour of the day.”

  Alice’s mouth had gone dry and she had to moisten her lips before she could respond, for she understood exactly what he was saying. “You mean, killed for the effect the killing will create.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Like the Assassins. They kill for effect, and to spread terror.”

  Hassan shrugged his shoulders eloquently. “It surprises me that you should know the name, but yes, if you so wish, like the Assassins. The Hashshashin. But it is most unwise to speak openly of the Hashshashin or their activities. And it is also unnecessary. Mothers use their name to frighten their children and make them behave, but most people do not really believe that the Hashshashin truly exist.

  “Between us two, however, conversing alone and privately, suffice it to say that such matters as we have discussed are simple to arrange, and highly effective in their execution. You need simply call on me, at any time, and the matter is concluded.”

  Now, looking back on that conversation, Alice reflected that she had come to know the man himself well enough that she would not hesitate to call upon him should the need ever arise. He was unlike any other man of her acquaintance. From the outset of their relationship, he had clearly decided to trust Alice implicitly, for reasons of his own that he never explained to her—she was, after all, a woman and a Christian Frank, both of which should have precluded any interaction between the two of them—and she had always been deeply aware of the honor he had accorded her in the doing of it. And she respected and admired him greatly, ignoring the fact that her father would have had him executed out of hand had he known Hassan’s true identity. His name, for one thing, was not really Hassan. That was merely a title, indicating his rank and status to those who knew anything of the organization to which he belonged. He was, as she had suspected, an Assassin, the senior member of that secretive and greatly feared organization in the Frankish lands of Outremer. An Ismaili Shi’ite Muslim, he had been born in the Yemen, like the founder of his organization centuries earlier, and had been raised to be one of the fedayeen, zealots prepared to sacrifice their lives for the cause in which they believed and for which they fought.

  He told her that he had taken the name Hassan in honor of Al-Hassan, Hasan-I Sabbah, the Sheikh of Alamut, who was spoken of nowadays in hushed, awe-stricken tones as the Old Man of the Mountain, founder of the Assassins. The cult had existed since the eighth century, but in recent years, after the fall of the Alamut fortress, the charismatic Al-Hassan had reorganized his followers as single-mindedly religious enforcers, dedicated to the destruction of the ruling Sunni Abbasid caliphs. Since that time, the Shiite Assassins had pursued a campaign of ruthless terror centered around fearlessly executed public murders of prominent Sunni figures. Their weapon of choice was a dagger, they were meticulous in killing only the targeted individual, and they often performed their murders in mosques.

  The fact that they used only daggers ensured that their killings were always sudden, unexpected, and violent, and their attacks had the appearance of being inescapable. The killer would frequently wear a disguise, enabling him to penetrate close to the target, and the subsequent murder would spread terror and confusion among the enemy. Because they were so close to their victim, the killers were frequently unable to escape the scene of their crime, but faced with certain death, the Assassins never committed suicide. They much preferred the notoriety attached to being killed by their captors.

  Hassan explained to Alice that their name, the Hashshashin, which the Franks had corrupted to Assassins, supposedly meant “the eaters of hashish,” and it was commonly believed to have been given to them by their implacable enemies, the Sunni Muslims. The eaters of hashish, the orthodox Sunni claimed, defiled their bodies by polluting themselves with drugs in order to induce the trance-like state that permitted them to kill with such cold-blooded savagery and lack of conscience, even in holy places.

  Hassan rejected the Sunni contention as ludicrous, saying that it was demonstrably political and self-serving. He admitted readily that his people used hashish, but he maintained that they used it for religious reasons, as part of their initiation ritual when they joined the ranks of the secretive organization, and thereafter as an aid to meditation. He reminded Alice of her own experiences under the influence of the drug, which his people supplied regularly for her own use. It was a relaxant, not a stimulant, and its users were generally rendered comatose to some extent, and certainly incapable of violence. The Assassins did not use it, in any sense, to bolster their courage or their dedication in any of their endeavors, and no one who knew anything about the noble and austere Al-Hassan, he told Alice, could ever believe that the devout sheikh would indulge in the taking of debilitating drugs. Hassan’s own belief was that the name Hashshashin had originally meant “the followers of Al-Hassan” in the dialect of the Ismailis of the Yemen.

  Alice had no illusions about Hassan’s openness with her; she knew that he had something in mind in courting her goodwill the way he had, something that would work to his advantage and fit his agenda at some time in the future. That was to be expected in the world in which she lived, and it bothered her not at all. Everyone in power, anywhere, worked constantly towards safe-guarding and increasing that power. Besides, knowing what she knew about who and what Hassan was, she was also forewarned, and therefore forearmed against anything he might attempt in future, and she knew he was fully aware of that.

  Now she heard the swish and click of beaded curtains at her back and turned to face her visitor.

  “You sent for me, Princess. How may I serve you?”

  “As well as you always do. Be seated, Hassan, and hear what I have to say. I have a problem that I do not think I can resolve without your help—” She saw the flare of interest in his eyes and quickly held up a hand, smiling. “No, I do not desire to have someone vanish, but there is an individual—a man—with whom I need specific help.”

  Hassan’s grin was instantaneous. “You need help with a man?”

  Alice ignored his raillery and proceeded to tell him about the knight monk St. Clair and how he had proved to be immune to the power of her regular hashish. She was careful to give Hassan no indication that what she sought from the monk was information, merely asking him if he knew of any drug, or combination of drugs, that would render a man incapable of remembering what happened to him while he was drugged. She was more than content to leave Hassan to draw whatever lascivious conclusions he wished from what she was asking, and after a while he stood up and bowed deeply to her, waving his hand in salaam, from his forehead, to his lips, to his heart. He left then as silently as he had appeared, but Alice was content knowing that by the same hour of the following day she would have in her possession the means to overcome all conceivable resistance on the part of Brother Stephen St. Clair.

  EIGHT

  St. Clair was dreaming, a very pleasant, lethargic yet somehow frightening dream that had him struggling for wakefulness. It was not the woman in his dream who was causing him the concern, for he could see practically nothing of her, muffled in heavy garments as she was, and his only physical contact with her was the painful grip she had on his wrist, pulling him along behind her faster than he wanted to move, so that he staggered occasionally, unable to keep pace. He knew, vaguely, that she had a comely face, dark skinned with enormous brown eyes, but had anyone asked him how he knew that, he could not have told them.

  This dream woman had come to him in a darkened room, shaking him into semi-wakefulness and talking unintelligibly in tones of great urgency, tugging and pulling at him all the while until he arose from the
bed. He suspected that she might have helped him to dress, although he had no clear memory of such a thing, but then she had led him through a nightmarish maze of ill-lit, twisting passageways, each indistinguishable from its neighbors, tugging at him to move faster every time he tried to slow his steps, and stopping occasionally and inexplicably to push him against a wall, leaning her weight against him and holding a hand over his mouth, as though to prevent him from crying out. Each time she did that, he seemed to recall, he had felt as though someone was burning his wrists. They had come to a doorway and passed through it, and the light had blinded him, so that he had closed his eyes tightly against the glare of it. But still she had pulled him along, hurrying and bullying him.

  Now, however, she had stopped, and he had stopped with her, standing without moving for the first time in what seemed like hours or even days. His wrists still felt as though they were on fire, and there was an ache in his chest that grew unbearable whenever he tried to breathe too hard or too deeply, but he knew he was no longer dreaming. The pains he felt were real pains. There were noises now, too, coming from somewhere, but they sounded muffled, distant and distorted. He concentrated on listening, and pushed himself harder towards wakefulness. The woman no longer held his wrist, the light was no longer so abrasive against his eyelids, and he could feel the surface of a wall against his back, although he had no memory of leaning against any wall.

  Dreams could be extremely confusing, he knew and accepted that, but he was becoming frustrated now. He opened his eyes slowly, cringing only a little, and straightened up from the wall, turning his head to look at the woman beside him, but she had vanished, if she had ever been there at all, and he was alone, in an alley of some description, between high, blank walls and near a junction with a thoroughfare that was the source of all the noises he could hear. That much he saw and was aware of before the ground came rushing up towards him.

  “BROTHER STEPHEN!”

  The voice came again, calling his name from a great distance, but it was hard edged and insistent and he could not continue to ignore it, although he shook his head in protest and tried to turn away, seeking refuge in sleep again.

  “Brother Stephen! Master St. Clair, wake up!”

  He opened his eyes, squinting against the light, and saw someone looming above him, and his conditioning took control of him, so that he rolled away, throwing himself violently backward and reaching down for his dagger. But there was no dagger in his belt. He was wearing no belt. And his lightning-like roll was a sluggish, wallowing upheaval worthy of a besotted drunkard. He frowned again, still squinting against the outrageous light, and peered up at the shape above him.

  “Brother Stephen? It is you, is it not? You are Brother Stephen, of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ?”

  “Who’re you?”

  The question emerged as a mumble, but it earned an immediate response. “It is you! Praise be to God, we all thought you dead.”

  St. Clair made a mighty effort to pull himself together, shaking his head to clear it, and when he tried to sit up the other man supported him against his knee, one arm around his shoulders. Stephen did not even have the strength to push the fellow away, and so he remained there for a moment, leaning against the man and breathing deeply, fighting down fear and panic. A few moments later, he pushed himself until he was sitting more upright and looked down at himself, peering at his open hands, seeing raw-skinned bracelets of red and angry-looking flesh around his wrists, and then his eyes focused down between them at the material of a rough brown knee-length tunic that was completely unfamiliar.

  He attempted to speak, but his mouth appeared to be gummed shut. He hawked and spat weakly, then tried again, this time finding a croak that appeared to be all the voice he had. “Where am I … and who are you? Tell me that first.”

  “Giacomo Versace, Brother Stephen. I’m one of your sergeants … well, not yours, but I’m new. You don’t know me, but I have seen you several times since I joined.”

  St. Clair was still working his mouth, gathering saliva that would allow him to speak. “Thank God for that, then,” he croaked, “because I thought I ought to know you and was unable to. Where am I, and how came I here?”

  “We are in an alley near the souk, but I have no idea how you came here or whence you came. I was passing by, on my way to the street of goldsmiths, and saw you lying here. I thought you dead, or drunk, and would have passed on by without stopping had I not seen the whiteness of your skin. Thanks be to God that I did stop, for I have found a miracle: Lazarus arisen from the grave.”

  Stephen thought about that for a moment, trying to understand what the other man had said, and then he cocked his head. “Lazarus? You mean me?”

  “Aye, most certainly. We said the Holy Requiem for your soul a month and more ago, believing you waylaid and murdered somewhere, for you had vanished without trace ten days before and we had swept the entire land in search of you. Where were you? Where have you been?”

  “What mean you, where have I been? I have been here, in Jerusalem, since I returned from patrol …” He hesitated. “When was that, yesterday? It must have been. We lost two men—the Englishman, Osbert of York, and Grimwald of Brussels, in a skirmish with a Saracen band.”

  “That was more than a month agone, Brother Stephen. Since then you have been missing, and we all believed you dead.”

  Stephen sat silent for a long time before he stretched out his hand. “Help me up, if you will. I think you had best return me to my brethren without further ado. I feel most devilishly sick and my mind is not functioning properly. Take me back to the Temple Mount.”

  WHEN HE AWOKE the next time, St. Clair knew he was back in the stables on the Temple Mount. He remembered that his return had caused a great commotion, and that the analogy used by his sergeant rescuer, about Lazarus arisen, proved to be an apt one. All his friends and brothers crowded around him, staring open mouthed for the most part, touching him and fingering his clothing as though to assure themselves that he was, in fact, there among them and alive, and then the questions had begun, questions that St. Clair found himself incapable of answering because he could recall nothing of what had happened to him since what his friends referred to as his disappearance. They told him that he had returned from a long and arduous patrol, in which he and his men had ridden as far as the robbers’ town of Ascalon, twenty-two miles to the northwest, in pursuit of a band of Saracen marauders who had raided and robbed a caravan that had traveled unmolested all the way from Edessa, only to be waylaid within a few hours’ ride of Jerusalem.

  Stephen and his men had arrived at the scene of the attack less than an hour after the raiders had departed, and he had decided to give chase immediately. Two days later, having spent hours on end quartering stony ground for the quarry’s trail, which had been expertly concealed, he and his troop had been ambushed crossing a dry streambed, and although they had won the encounter and recaptured the goods stolen from the caravan, two of their number had been killed in the fighting.

  Safely home again, and in no mood to celebrate, Stephen had made his report to the brotherhood and had then gone into the city, as was his habit, simply to be alone and to escape from the talking of his friends in order to mourn the loss of his two men in his own way.

  He had not returned that night, and a massive search of the city turned up no evidence that he had ever been to any of his favorite places. The search had lasted for three days and had involved the Royal Guard and a large number of knights who volunteered their time out of appreciation for the efforts of the Poor Fellows in general and for St. Clair in particular, for his youthfulness and prowess had made him very popular despite his monkishness. Eventually, however, there came a point at which it had to be admitted that there was no place left that had not been searched, and that not a single gram of evidence had been generated to show where Brother Stephen might have gone or what might have happened to him.

  It had been Hugh de Payens himself, after consulting with his bre
thren and the Patriarch Archbishop, who had, in the absence of St. Clair’s body but with complete conviction that everything had been done that could be done to find the knight, formally declared him dead after an absence of fifteen days, pronouncing him abducted and killed by persons unknown, probably in retaliation for his activities against the brigands. Masses had been said for the repose of the dead knight’s soul, and all of them had been well attended, several of them by the King himself, accompanied by his Queen and their daughters.

  But now Stephen St. Clair was returned, miraculously restored, it seemed, if not to life at least to duty, for he appeared to be in reasonably good health. The Patriarch himself came to the stables on the afternoon of his rescue, to visit the prodigal and to welcome him back into the fold of his brothers’ concern, and announced that he would personally offer several masses in thanks for the young knight’s safe return. St. Clair had remained awake and alert throughout the activities that day, and he had even eaten a hearty dinner that night with his fellow monks, but then he had retired to his cot and fallen deeply asleep, and the prayer cycle of the night and the following day had not disturbed him at all. When he awoke later that second evening, he had been raving mad, and his fellow monks had been forced to restrain him, binding him to his cot with wide leather cargo straps from the stables and watching over him in shifts as, for five days and more, he behaved like an injured beast, gibbering and moaning and incapable of retaining food.