ALTDORF (The Forest Knights: Book 1) (8 page)

“Tell me Hospitaller. What do you think of the recent trial and condemnation of the Templar Knights by his Holiness the Pope? I understand they were rivals of your Order in a way.”

Seven years previous, the Christian world had been shocked to hear the Church and King Philip of France accuse the Templar Knights of heresy. The charges included spitting upon the cross, permitting sodomy, idol worshipping, and denying Christ and treading upon his image. Templars throughout Europe were arrested, including the Grandmaster Jacques de Molay. Subsequently, Molay and many others were subjected to the inquisition and confessed their crimes under torture. They had been kept in the dungeons of France for the past seven years awaiting their fate.

“We were both working to carry out God’s will. I never considered them rivals,” Gissler said.

“I have read the charges against the Temple. Incredible. And the knights have confessed to many of them. Did you know they worshipped a skull with three faces?”

“I did not,” Gissler said.

“And they rubbed small cords on this idol which they then wore wrapped around various parts of their bodies. The grandmaster himself confessed that the idol was responsible for imbuing the knights with great riches. Behavior more fitting a coven of witches than a holy order, do you not agree?”

“A man will confess to much under torture,” Gissler said, shifting his weight.

“Would he? Does not God dull the pain of the righteous? The Church tells us the innocent have nothing to fear from the inquisitor’s tools of truth. And in fact, the courts will not recognize a confession unless it has been obtained through torture. Is that not so?”

“It is my lord.”

“Well, it is in the past now I suppose, since the Grandmaster of the Temple has been burned at the stake. Ah, I see you did not know this.”

Gissler cleared his throat. “The last I heard Grandmaster Molay had been cleared of all charges.”

“Apparently King Philip of France decided otherwise. It is no secret that he has coveted the Templars’ holdings in France for many years, but his plan bore no fruit. The Pope transferred all Templar estates to the Hospitallers. How in the world your Grandmaster convinced the Pope to do that, I cannot imagine. What do you suppose he will do with all that wealth now? Continue fighting the infidel? After nearly two hundred years it seems pointless really.”

“As I said, I have no knowledge of any of this, my lord. I have been on the road for the better part of a year.”

Leopold could tell the conversation was making Gissler uncomfortable, but to his credit he held the Duke’s intense gaze with his own look of defiance. If he had been a normal peasant, Leopold would have had him whipped. Or worse. But he was a Hospitaller man-at-arms. A soldier forged in the wars of the Levant, and there was no finer training ground for his kind. And now, much to Leopold’s liking, he was without a master.

A murmur shot through the crowd as the next two competitors made their way to the clearing and readied themselves for battle.

“Where does the name Gissler hail from? It sounds familiar,” Leopold asked.

Gissler’s face brightened. “Here in the Aargau, my lord. My family is steward for one of the King’s estates near Sursee. Perhaps you know of my father? Hubert Gissler? Or, I suppose it possible my older brother Hugo is now chief steward.”

Leopold pursed his lips and turned to his man Klaus. The old soldier thought for a moment and then cleared his throat. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded like gravel sliding down a rock slope.

“King Albrecht granted that land to a French Count years ago. Brought in his own people to run it. Man named Lafayette is steward now.”

The light in Gissler’s eyes faded as quickly as it had appeared.

“They may still be working the land,” Count Henri said. “And if not, someone there would surely know where to find them.”

Gissler nodded slowly.

The crowd cheered again as the ringmaster called the combatants to their marks.

“Come Klaus. We must be returning to Kussnacht,” Leopold said.

“You will not stay and see the outcome of the tourney?” Count Henri asked.

Leopold waved his hand. “I have my wedding to prepare for, and besides, the outcome of the tourney was decided the moment our Hospitaller entered. For who can compete with someone who has God on his side?”

The young Duke held the trace of a smile in his eyes but did not wait for an answer as he turned to take his leave. At the last moment, seemingly as an afterthought, he turned back and said, “Gissler, once you have sorted out your family affairs, come to Habsburg castle. Perhaps I will have work for you.”

Klaus strode a few steps ahead of Leopold, cutting a path through the crowd with wide sweeps of his tree-limb arms, as they made their way to a waiting carriage with an armed escort of a dozen mounted soldiers clothed in the Habsburg colors of black and red. Two flag-bearers, one carrying a standard with the red lion of Habsburg, and the other a black bird of prey on a field of yellow, the colors of the Holy Roman Empire, stood nearby. A lithe figure with green hair twisted its way through the hundreds of spectators and was waiting at the carriage door seconds before Leopold arrived.

By late afternoon Leopold’s predictions had materialized, for no knight at the country tourney could stand before Gissler’s speed and skill. He dispatched his opponents with a ruthless efficiency, never taking longer than one or two minutes, except on those occasions when he decided a knight needed to be toyed with and publicly humiliated. Every man who faced him sustained injuries and limped, crawled, or was carried from the circle. By the final matches, Gissler’s ferocious reputation did as much to defeat his opponents as his sword blows.

After the final match, while a young knight still lay on the ground, his feet twitching in unconsciousness, Gissler took his prize purse and walked away.

He left the championship cup and pennant sitting on the table.

Chapter 6

S
PRING BURST upon the Alps like God was determined to thaw the Devil’s glaciers and drive the mighty stone crags back into the recesses of the earth once and for all. The green-covered slopes erupted in golden clusters of cowslips, interspersed with patches of blue grape hyacinths. Sparkling streams of the sweetest water trickled down every hill, and what seemed like an endless assortment of wild game suddenly appeared.

To Thomas and Pirmin, after a lifetime of campaigning in the deserts of the Levant, it seemed like a miracle. They welcomed the heat and worked better in it.

Thomas had convinced the old ferryman to sell his barge for twice what it was worth, making Thomas wish Max had been there to help him negotiate. During his life with the Order Thomas had very little experience with money and business dealings had always made him uncomfortable. It did not help matters when Pirmin finally saw the old barge Thomas had spent most of his savings on.

“Thomi, Thomi. I agreed to help you fix up a boat. Not build one from scratch.”

It was really no more than a rectangular raft of log floats covered with thick decking, most of which was rotting and in need of repair. It was large enough to carry five or six horses and perhaps ten men. The ferryman had connected it to a come-along system of ropes and pulleys hitched to a team of oxen on land. He was able to transport people across a narrow arm of the lake, and though it proved a safe way to cut almost two hours off the trip around the outside of the lake via the road, it could only cross at the same point every time.

Thomas knew it was not much, but he had a weakness for boats of all shapes and sizes and in his mind he saw what they could be. He meant to unshackle this barge and sail her freely. To him anything still sitting above the water had a God-given right to sail.

He was well versed in the mechanical laws that made sailing possible, but he did not credit their development to the ingenuity of men. Standing on the high side of a boat with the sails reefed in tight while she sailed almost straight into the wind was as close as one could get to God, for without His assistance, how else could a boat move forward with the wind blowing in your face, striving to halt your progress and spin you off in the opposite direction?

“A little work never killed a man, but you never were one to understand that,” Thomas said, shaking his head. “Do not look down on her. She’s got good bones and once we fit her with a leeboard, mast and a lateen-rigged yard, she will cut through this lake fast enough.”

“You mean to sail the beast? She will handle like what she is—a pile of logs held together with pitch! At least when she sinks and we have built up an appetite from our swim to shore, we will be able to eat the oxen.”

“We could have…” Thomas said. “If I had the silver to buy them.”

Pirmin groaned and held his head between his massive hands.

“And where are you going to get good planks if you already spent all your coin?”

Thomas picked up one of two old axes the ferryman had included in the deal. Holding it by the head, he pointed with the handle at the forest behind Pirmin.

“We have a shipbuilder’s dream of resources. Have you ever in your life seen trees as tall and straight as that? Granted, it may take a little more effort than ready cut timber—”

“You always insist on doing it the hard way, eh Captain?”

“Ah, but the ability to work hard is God’s gift to the common man,” Thomas said smiling. The scar tightened on his skin, but under the hot sun and with only Pirmin standing before him, it felt good.

They worked on the barge and lived in a tent on the water’s edge, rising before dawn and starting early to avoid the mid-day’s heat. Every day, they would watch in silence as the sun rose above the Alps and infused the Great Lake with light, turning the deep water a glimmering emerald green. It became a breathless ritual with them; one which involved no conversation for they could find no words to express how utterly different this life was from the one they had been living only a year ago.

But they did not live in isolation. Every few days, whenever they tired of camp cooking, they would saddle up their horses and ride into Schwyz. They would buy supplies and take a meal at Sutter’s Inn, the same inn and tavern that they had stopped at the first night they had spent in Schwyz those few weeks past. The inn had been in the Sutter family for generations, but with the recent traffic increase over Saint Gotthard’s Pass, Sutter’s business grew to be too much for his family alone and he found himself hiring on a cook and another widow to help his wife make the ale and honeyed mead.

“Sutter says he knows a man with a bitch that just had a new litter,” Pirmin said one night as they rode back from the inn, their bellies swollen with stew and ale. A half-moon hung over the Great Lake, sharing its other half with the water’s surface.

The comment snapped Thomas out of the hypnotic trance brought on by the rhythm of Anid’s gait and he looked up at Pirmin’s silhouette. The size of the big man’s charger made Thomas feel like he was rowing a skiff alongside a war galley. Thomas’s stallion, Anid, was a pure Egyptian, a breed many Franks would consider too light to carry a fully armored man into battle. But Thomas had found Anid to have the perfect combination of strength and fearlessness for the role. And like most Arabian horses, Anid’s speed and endurance was far greater than any destrier Thomas had ever ridden.

“You remember Zora?” Pirmin asked, his features unreadable in the dim moonlight.

“Of course,” Thomas said.

How could he forget? Every couple years Pirmin would bring up his childhood dog and talk about her. Usually when he was drunk. And once again, at the mention of Zora, a wave of exhaustion shot through Thomas’s body as his muscles remembered the long march from Schwyz to the shores of the Mid-Earth Sea.

A blonde-haired, scowling boy walked beside Thomas and though his words were laced with an accent Thomas struggled to understand, the boy talked enough that Thomas soon grew accustomed to his speech.

He was older, perhaps eight, but already his stocky build hinted at the massive man he would become. At his side walked the biggest working dog Thomas had ever seen. She was shorthaired and largely black, with a powerful white chest and snout, and a square head with a mask of black surrounding even blacker eyes. She would have been terrifying if it were not for the rust-colored thumbprints above her eyes that softened her expressions. The draft dog was hitched to a cart that she pulled effortlessly with a nonchalant grace, as though trying to pretend it was not there.