Knights of the Black and White (29 page)

“I see. And are there others who share your vision?”

“Seven of us, my lord.”

“Hmm …”

“But we could be more. I told only my closest friends. Of the six I told, all decided to join me, but already they have other names, of friends of theirs, whom they would like to enroll.”

“The noblemen would see this as a mutiny. You know that, do you not? They would see it as weakening their resources.”

“How could it do that, my lord Archbishop? Even were our numbers doubled, we would not amount to twenty knights, all growing old after a lifetime of hard and loyal service. That could hardly be called a dilution of the strength of Jerusalem’s armies.”

“Nonetheless, Sir Hugh, twenty veteran knights—”

“Twenty
aging
knights, my lord Patriarch, and less than half of that, in truth, all of us past our prime.”

The Patriarch pursed his lips, and de Payens continued. “Even so, my lord, I have to hark back to what you said before, about each order of monks having its own tasks, its own duty in addition to its daily routine of prayer and piety. We have no such incentive, no such direction. But we could have, were one selected for us that we found appropriate to what we are.” His voice, which had begun that statement full of enthusiasm, quickly dropped and became dispirited. “Ah, but then all we Awakenings

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know how to do is fight, and monks do not fight …” He smiled and shook his head. “Ah, my lord Archbishop, were there such a thing as an order of warrior
monks
…

what a contribution we could make to that! Now
there
would be a way for us to serve our God in piety and to great purpose. Pity such a thing may not be. Still, we can learn to deal with other tasks. We can adapt. We would not lack in willingness to tackle anything assigned to us.”

He stopped talking then, hearing the silence of his friends and imagining the creaking of wheels within the Archbishop’s mind. And then Warmund de Picquigny stood up and raised his right hand to bless them, so that they all knelt in front of him with their heads lowered.

“Come again tomorrow, Hugh de Payens, at the same hour. I will think upon what you have said and will have an answer for you when you arrive. It may be one that you will wish to discuss afterwards with your friends here, but you may come alone to receive it. Afterwards, if there is more to be discussed, we will have time to do that. But for now, no word to anyone, from any of you, on what we have discussed today. Is that understood? Now go in peace.”

GODFREY ST. OMER looked up from the board game he had been playing with Payn Montdidier, attracted by the movement as the door swung open noiselessly. “Ah,” he cried,

“finally. We thought you were never coming back.”

Hugh de Payens stood just inside the door, holding it open as he waited for his eyes to adjust to the shadows 270

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of the interior after the brightness of the early afternoon outside. St. Omer, Bissot, and Montdidier sat gazing at him from the brightly lit table by the window, and behind them, on a couch against the wall where he had been lying in semi-darkness, Gondemare was raising himself on one elbow. De Payens noticed the absence of St. Agnan and deRossal, but before he had time to ask where they were, they crowded through the door at his back, requiring him to move into the middle of the room, where they all began to throw questions at him.

“Enough, in God’s name! Listen to yourselves, like a pack of old women. You can’t all talk at once if you seriously want answers. Give me time to take off my cloak and lay down my weapons and catch my breath, and I’ll tell you everything. But I am not going to stand here like a street huckster and be shouted at. St. Agnan, find Ibrahim and ask him to bring us some food and drink, if you will, and the rest of you, sit down around the table like civil creatures.”

De Payens took a few moments to rid himself of his long, sheathed sword and the belt that held the dagger and the scrip at his waist. Then, when he had stripped off his long outer garment and the flowing headdress that he chose to wear instead of an iron Frankish helmet, he moved to seat himself at the head of the table, where he waited for St. Agnan to return from his errand. No one spoke to him in the interim, but every eye in the room was on him, trying to detect some hint of what he had to tell, and as soon as all six of them were assembled, he spoke, wasting no time on preliminaries.

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“He said yes. We will have our permission.”

He waited for the first outburst of approval to die down, then quelled the last of it by simply raising one hand. “It will not happen today or tomorrow. It might take a year to achieve, perhaps even longer. But it will happen. The Patriarch wants it to happen.”

“How? What did he say?” This was St. Agnan, eager as always.

“He outlined what he wants, and made it very plain, although he approached it with some subtlety.

In fact, had we not taken the pains we did to suggest exactly what we wanted from him, I might have thought he had come up with the idea himself. Certes, he himself believes he did, and that is the finest result we could have won.

“He was waiting for me when I arrived, and his secretary, Bishop Odo, led me right into his presence, in the small room where he works daily, not the audience chamber where we were received yesterday. He then dismissed Odo and followed him to the outer door to check that he was gone from the anteroom before we began to talk.”

“Odo would not have liked that,” St. Agnan growled.

“I had the feeling yesterday that he is the kind of fellow who likes to know everything that’s going on everywhere.”

“Aye, he was not happy, but Warmund de Picquigny is not a man to be crossed lightly.

“Anyway, as soon as we were alone, the Patriarch reminded me of what I had said about being willing to assume a task like other monkish orders, should someone 272

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wish to assign us one that seemed appropriate, and he revisited my comments about the misfortune of not having such a thing as an order of warrior monks, although he did not dwell on any of that. Instead, he talked then about the problem of brigandage on the roads, and the escalating threats to the safety and welfare of pilgrims to the Holy Places. Of course, he knew that we are all familiar with the situation and understand it to be a chronic thorn in the side of the administration of the kingdom, but he went to great lengths to explain, and to justify, why the King is unable to do anything about the problem, contentious as it is. And he went to even greater lengths to make sure that I was fully informed about his own responsibilities as Patriarch and Archbishop, which make him nominally responsible for the safety of the entire Church in Jerusalem, including the priests and clerics who administer the daily affairs of the Church, and the pilgrims who entrust themselves to the authority and supervision of the Church within the Holy Land—”

His eyes widened, and he sat up straighter and looked at each of his friends around the table. “Do you know,”

he continued in a voice tinged with wonder, “it has but now occurred to me that he spoke invariably of the Holy Land. Not once did he call this place the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the name Outremer never arose in our conversation, and only now does that lead me to see that our Patriarch perceives his position, and his responsibilities, as having nothing even remotely to do with King Baldwin, or with the King’s ambitions for Jerusalem, or his visions of the kingdom as a civil state. Our Warmund Awakenings

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de Picquigny has eyes only for the
religious
reality of Jerusalem—the Holy City in the Holy Land. As far as he is concerned, nothing else has any significance, and the King and his nobles are mere nuisances, interfering with the conduct of the Patriarch’s ecclesiastical affairs.”

He became aware of the blank looks on his listeners’

faces and cleared his throat. “Aye, well … He asked me then to give him my own personal opinion about what might be done—what
needed
to be done—about the situation on the roads, and I did not have much to say. But I told him of our little escapade of two or three nights ago, when we chased the brigands out into the desert, and that led me to speculate on how little actual armed force might be required to halt the depredations of these people. I opined, and he agreed with me, that the difficulties are expanding, and the bandits are proliferating in numbers, simply because they are encountering no opposition at all. That would change rapidly, I told him, if only someone could field even a tiny force of determined, disciplined invigilators to patrol the roads. The mere threat of their presence, I said, once that presence was established and expected, would probably reduce the number of such incidents dramatically.

“And then, having said that, I said no more.”

A soft knock sounded at the door, and de Payens waved a warning hand, silencing everyone as the inn-keeper himself opened the doors wide and stepped inside, ahead of a pair of grinning servants carrying a stretcher of food slung from their shoulders and another, this one a giant, who carried an enormous copper tray 274

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laden with potables. The talk dwindled into triviality as the servants fussed about, setting out the food, and after they were alone again, none of the knights paid any attention to anything other than the food in front of them: fresh-baked bread, still warm, with fresh-made, creamy goat cheese; a dish of olives glistening with oil and herbs; three kinds of fresh fruit; hard cheeses of several kinds and shapes; two cold fowl and a number of dried sau-sages. No one spoke again for some time, until the food had been depleted and they sat back, belching softly in satisfaction.

Eventually, it was de Rossal who brought everyone back to the subject at hand. “Hugh,” he said, “there is something I do not understand. You said you believe the Patriarch favors your request, and that it suits all his personal purposes, but that it might take a year or more for him to be able to put it into effect. I thought the Patriarch of Jerusalem has all the spiritual power in Outremer that the Pope in Rome enjoys throughout Christendom. Is that not true? And if it is, why would it take so long for him to make it possible for you to do what you wish to do?”

De Payens wiped his chin and rinsed his mouth with a draft of chilled grape juice before he answered, and even the least attentive of the others could see that he was thinking carefully about how he would respond. Eventually, however, he sat back and stroked his beard. “Nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems, Roland. What to us may seem a simple matter of logic, cause and effect, Awakenings

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is seldom seen as such by those whose concern it is to keep the world’s affairs proceeding smoothly.

“Warmund of Picquigny, even although he is Patriarch Archbishop of Jerusalem and therefore spiritual leader of his flock in Outremer, is none the less constrained to live in harmony with his temporal coequals.

He could go straight ahead and do as he wishes, secure in his awareness of superiority as God’s representative here in the Holy Land, but by doing so he would probably alienate—needlessly—every king, every count, and every other nobly born man of power and means within his own dominion. That would be stupid, in my opinion, and if you but think on it for a moment, I have no doubt that you will agree with me. There is an ancient saying, from the New Testament, that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. That is a very simple truth, except that, in its self-avowed weakness, the flesh can sometimes be brutally strong, and that is what the Patriarch has to consider.

“He could turn around tomorrow and issue a decree, backed by the absolute power of the Church, that one knight in every three, for example, must be seconded to the Church’s affairs for the duration, answerable only to himself as the Church’s senior representative here in the Holy Land. He could do that, beyond any trace of doubt, for he has the authority, in theory at least. And the chances are that many of the lords would submit to it, in the belief that God speaks directly through His representatives here on earth. But there would be many others who 276

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would balk at it, interpreting his idea as an unwarranted intrusion by the Church—or by cynical churchmen—upon their legal and justifiable affairs. That entire realm of perceptions, beliefs, and interpretations is a quagmire into which no sane and forward-thinking man would ever wish to blunder, for once that refusal has been evoked, and the bit of disobedience is firmly clamped between the teeth of the rebels, who is to say what mutinies might follow or how long it might take to resolve the differences stirred up?”

No one spoke in response to that, until St. Agnan asked, “So what will happen next?”

De Payens spread his hands. “I have no idea. First, the Archbishop will have to convince the King that what he is proposing—this idea of using us as a counteractive invigilator force—has self-evident merit. On that point, I anticipate he will have little difficulty. The King is in dire need of an alternative solution, to divert some of the heat from his own skillet. This that we are offering might well be exactly what he is looking for.

“But it is not the King who concerns us most. He has a keen mind and can be trusted to look to his own advantage. Unfortunately, much the same can be said of the very people to whom we owe our feudal allegiance. They, too, are never without an eye to their own advantage, and in this instance there is nothing, in any part of this proposal, that redounds to their benefit. They lose on all fronts, because they are the people who have to absorb the loss—the permanent loss, without compensation—of our services. Those are the people whom Warmund de Awakenings

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Picquigny will have to convince of the soundness of his thinking in this matter, and I have no slightest idea of how he might approach that task. I do know, however, that I wish him well of it.”

He thought for a while, then nodded his head emphatically. “That is all I have to say. I believe that what we have petitioned will come into effect. I have no knowledge of what will be entailed, in the final reckoning, other than that we will become Christian monks, supported out of churchly funds, and that we will bind ourselves by the same solemn vows that bind us, for the most part, already, and that we will hold ourselves accountable primarily, albeit purely on the surface, to Warmund de Picquigny, the Patriarch Archbishop.”