Knights of the Black and White (76 page)

FAR AHEAD OF HIM NOW, and safely concealed by several twists in the narrow, winding street, Odo was congratu-lating himself on his avoidance of being seen, when he 736

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emerged into a small, enclosed square and saw several swarthy, dangerous-looking men straighten up on seeing him, almost as though they had been waiting for him to appear. He knew, of course, that no such thing was possible, and so he swallowed the sudden fear that flared in him and drew himself up to his full height, holding his head high and striding resolutely forward. Even as he did so he heard a sound at his back and turned his head to see two more men converging on him from the rear, both of them holding long, curved daggers. Choking on a strangled cry of fear, he swung around in a complete circle, counting six men, all of whom now held bare blades, and saw that they all came to a halt, surrounding him but several paces distant. He was steeling himself to challenge them, to tell them who he was, when he felt his heart and his soul shrivel within him.

“Bishop.” The single word was spoken quietly, but there was no doubting what it was or what it meant, and he turned, suddenly terrified, to face the direction from which it had come. A single man, tall and slim and dressed from head to foot in the long, flowing black robes of a desert nomad, was walking towards him, his face concealed except for his dark, unblinking eyes, which were fixed on Odo’s. He approached to within two paces of the bishop, who stood frozen, and then he spoke again, another single, unmistakable word. “Arouna.”

Then, before Odo could even begin to react to what he had heard, the fellow struck.

For the briefest of moments, Odo thought the man had punched him in the stomach, the blow heavy and Complicities

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solid, driving the wind from him, but then his assailant twisted his wrist, hard, turning the blade in Odo’s flesh and dragging its razor-sharp edge up along the inner curve of his ribs and across, eviscerating him so that, as the incredible pain belatedly struck home, Odo felt his bowels sag loose and tumble out into his clothing. His mouth opened and closed, emitting only a high-pitched whine of fear and agony, his voice stilled forever, but before he could lose consciousness, his killer leaned close and breathed into his ear, “This for Princess Alice, a wedding gift, and for Arouna’s father, vengeance. You bought this death when you befouled his daughter.” He then whipped out his blade and stepped back, watching as Odo fell to his knees and unaware that the bishop’s last conscious thought was of Alice, the faithless bitch, and how she would now claim his treasure.

With a wave of his hand, Hassan the Shi’a sent his Assassins melting into the surrounding doors and alleyways before he removed a folded letter from his breast and tucked it carefully into the dead man’s clothing where it would not be stained by his blood. Without even wrinkling his nose at the stench of Odo’s loosened bowels, he wiped his blade clean on the dead man’s cloak and casually walked away, leaving the square deserted.

Mere moments later, St. Clair stepped into the small square.

THE ASSASSINATION of a bishop caused an uproar among the Frankish community, but it was short lived, since the 738

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letter found in his clothing detailed the bishop’s sins and transgressions, and the murdered body of a young Muslim woman, the daughter of a local sheikh, was discovered a short time later, in the house that was soon proved to be held in Odo’s name. Within the day, two more Franks were found dead together, murdered in the same manner—one of them the spy Gregorio, and the other a sergeant brother of the order of the knight monks, Giacomo Versace. This discovery, too, caused little public fuss, since the men’s association with Odo was already known, their names written clearly in the letter found on the bishop’s body, but the killers of all four went undiscovered.

Only Stephen St. Clair was left with anything to wonder about, and his curiosity was something he could share with no one else, much as he might wish to. It had been he who found the bishop’s body, and he who found the neatly penned letter, written in Latin, that, if it did not explain or expunge the crime, at least clarified the corrupt reasons underlying it. Everyone had accepted what was there, seeing it as self-evident after the fact. St. Clair was the only one who gave any significance to the pen-manship of the letter—an elegant, delicate, and vaguely, indeterminately feminine script—or to the container in which the condemnatory letter had been wrapped for protection, a soft and supple envelope of bright yellow leather, with a tiny crescent moon stitched carefully into one corner, but he wisely chose to keep his own counsel.

“Go with God, Brothers, and may He

guide your every footstep henceforth.”

With those words, Godfrey St. Omer

bade farewell to the three departing delegates who would, within the year, represent the Order of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ to the Church and the establishment in France and the rest of Christendom. St.

Omer was now assuming command of the remaining two thirds of the fraternity of Knights of the Temple Mount, all of whom sat their horses silently at his back, their faces studiedly expressionless as they watched their three friends and comrades salute them one last time and then turn their mounts to ride away downhill, accompanied by their escort of five sergeants, towards the lengthy cavalcade that was already wending its way down to the city gates.

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Their personal farewells had all been made long since, and now the homeward-bound contingent would join the procession of the royal newlyweds for the first stage of their journey, northward to Bohemond’s principality of Antioch and the port of Alexandria, where the three knight monks would take ship for Cyprus, on the first seagoing leg of their long journey home to France.

Watching the three of them ride away—de Payens, de Montbard, and Gondemare—St. Clair was aware that he was smiling, if only with one side of his mouth, because of a random thought that had come to him moments earlier, reminding him of Princess Alice and her alluring ways. He would feel much more comfortable here in Jerusalem now, he knew, than he would have riding along the route to Antioch with the constant presence of the princess in his awareness. It mattered nothing to him that Alice seemed radiantly happy and obsessed with her magnificently attractive new husband; the simple nearness of her would have disturbed and aroused his own memories intolerably, and he was honest enough with himself now to admit that. He no longer felt sinful or guilty over what had happened between him and her, and his sleep had been untroubled by thoughts of her for months, but he was still young enough, and male enough, to be curious and vulnerable. Better by far, then, that the faithful Gondemare should ride with her, in ignorance and innocence.

As soon as the departing knights had disappeared from view, St. Omer turned to St. Clair. “Have a safe patrol, Brother Stephen,” he said, raising one hand in

salute. St. Clair nodded in response and pulled his mount around, his eyes seeking and finding his co-commander, Montdidier, and their senior brother sergeant, who was, on this occasion, St. Clair’s own man, Arlo. He raised a hand to Arlo and nodded, and the sergeant immediately spurred his horse away downhill, shouting the orders that would bring the already assembled patrol to attention and set them moving.

“One more time, then,” Montdidier murmured, reining his mount to where he could ride knee to knee with St. Clair. “Shoulder to shoulder against the Infidel, swords bared, for the glory of God and the safety of the pilgrim. I confess to you, Stephen, I would far rather be riding towards Anjou than to Jericho.”

“Ah, but think of how much better off you will be in ten days’ time, when you are safely back here in Jerusalem, abed in comfort and scratching idly at your lice, while those poor wanderers are being tossed on stormy seas, wretched and seasick, spewing until their entrails protrude from their heaving gullets. Much better to be here, my friend.”

Montdidier grunted. “Perhaps,” he said, “but we are not yet through the gates on our outward journey. We may have much to distract us yet, before we win home.
If
we win home … St. Agnan was saying something last night to de Payens, at supper, about increased bandit activity between here and Jericho. More and more hostiles gathering all the time and creating chaos, he says, although I don’t know where he finds his information. I know even less how he processes it, once he has received 742

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it. Give Archibald one fact, it seems to me, and he will build a gospel from it.”

St. Clair wanted to respond to that with some observations of his own, but he did not have the opportunity, because they had reached the city’s eastern gate—chosen on this occasion to avoid the press caused by the royal departure through the southern gate—and his attention was taken up with passing his men through without incident, after which, as soon as they were on the road outside the city, both he and Montdidier had their hands full for a while, organizing their units. It was only long afterwards, when all their scouts were out scanning the terrain ahead of them and the patrol had settled down into the routine it would pursue for the remainder of their ten-day patrol, that he had time and opportunity to return to what Montdidier had said. At first he debated with himself over whether it might be better to say nothing, since he had no wish to upset his friend as he himself had been.

In the end, however, he decided to share what he knew.

“I had a fascinating talk with Brother Hugh last night.”

“I’m surprised he would have time to talk, with all the preparations for today’s departure. What was he talking about, and what was so fascinating about it?”

“About this whole affair … the treasure, the records, his return to France, and the effect that what he has to say will have on the Church. Have you thought much about that?”

Montdidier twisted lazily in his saddle and grinned his slow grin. “Thought about that … you mean about the

Church? Me? Please, I pray you, Brother, I have other matters to engage me, and no time to fret over what our worthy religious brethren—outside our own Order, I mean—might be doing with their own holy orders. I would rather keep my blades sharpened for fighting Allah’s minions than save my wits for debating with God’s benighted brethren of the cloth.”

St. Clair nodded, unsurprised. “No more had I, until I asked an idle question of de Payens.”

Montdidier cocked his head. “And?”

“And received more than I had bargained for. In the space of moments, our estimable Brother Hugh offered me a glimpse of the depths of my own ignorance. I have been thinking about it ever since.”

Montdidier was no longer smiling. Something in St.

Clair’s demeanor had alerted him that here was something more serious than he would have suspected, and his own bearing changed, his back now straight, his head held high. “That sounds grave, my friend. Tell me about it.”

St. Clair glanced over to where his companion sat watching him. “I asked him how long he thought it would take for our discovery to take effect, for the changes we had set in motion to take effect and become apparent. At first he said nothing, simply throwing me what I thought at the time to be a droll look. But then he pulled me away with him to where the two of us could talk alone, he said, without being overheard. We talked for a long time then. Well, he talked, mainly, and I listened. And I was … shocked, I suppose would be the most accurate word, by what he had to say.”

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“Stephen, you are making me impatient. What did the man
say
?”

“That nothing is going to change. Nothing is going to happen.”

Montdidier tucked in his chin, his eyes narrowing to slits. “But that is patently ridiculous. Things
have
to change now. We have proof that they
need
to be changed, that the reality of the Church’s
foundation
is question-able, even that it is based upon lies. How then can de Payens say nothing will change?”

“He said that the established Church will not bend the knee to what we have discovered. They will ignore it if they can, and if they cannot ignore it they will deny it, using the entire weight of their history and worldly authority to reinforce their stance, and anyone who makes it too difficult for that denial to be maintained will be dealt with.”

“What do you mean, ‘will be dealt with’?”

“What do you suppose I mean, Payn? Do you think I am trying now, having come so far, to be obscure? Think about it for a while. We have a Church that considers itself universal, and for the last what—eight hundred years?—for the last eight hundred years, since the days of Constantine the Great, it has been solidly based in Rome, its well-fed, worldly princes blithely ignoring the beginnings they abandoned so quickly under the flattering, seductive spell of imperial bribery—those beginnings that were founded in poverty and proudly proclaimed that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle

than it was for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

“This discovery of ours, de Payens pointed out, were it to be made public, would result immediately in the senior hierarchy of the entire Church having to admit the error of their ways, and being forced to relinquish all their wealth, their privilege, and the luxuries they now enjoy. That would be the very least that would happen.

The knowledge, revealed, would destroy the Church.”

“Well, I hardly think it would go that far …”

“Oh, really? You don’t think people would be angry to discover that they’ve spent their lives in poverty when they needn’t have? That they’ve starved in their hundreds of thousands, giving most of what they own to the Church, not for the glory of God, or because God asked for it, but for the welfare and benefit of lazy clerics, simply because the priests think that is the way it should be?