Standard of Honour

Unfortunately, he said after a lengthy pause, in his anger and indignation he had underestimated his opponents, not merely their strength but their number, taking the word of the fugitive at face value. He and his party had ridden into a cleverly constructed ambush in a steep-walled wadi, and he had lost seven of his men, shot down from concealment, before he could even begin to collect himself. Only Sayeed, Arouf, himself and one other had managed to fight their way free, three of them, and two of their mounts, wounded. The fourth man had died of his wounds soon after their escape, as had his horse, and Sayeed had cut the throat of Arouf’s horse some time after that, when the deep slash in its belly had finally split and spread, spilling the beast’s entrails to tangle in its hooves. Arouf, pressing a cloth to his bleeding groin wound, had then mounted behind Sayeed, and the three had kept riding until they found this place, where they had stopped for the night. Sayeed, the only one unhurt among them, had stanched the bleeding in Arouf’s groin first, sprinkling it with some powder that stopped the flow of blood, after which he had strapped the wound up tightly. He had then tended to al-Farouch’s leg, the smaller bone of which had been snapped by a crossbow bolt. He cleaned the wound, set the bone as well as he was able, and then bandaged and splinted the limb, which he expected to heal completely.

They had spent the night here together, all three of them, and when the next day dawned they discussed what must be done. Their companions would be far ahead of them by now, and might even have stopped to wait for them, or turned back to search for them, but all three men knew that the odds against their being found without assistance left little hope. And so al-Farouch decided that Sayeed would ride out in search of the others. Arouf would have none of that, swearing he was sound enough to ride, now that the bleeding from his groin had stopped. He would ride out with Sayeed, overriding his brother’s wishes for the first time in all the years they had known each other. He would take the northern route while Sayeed searched farther to the east. Al-Farouch, whose splinted leg made it impossible for him to mount a horse, would remain where he was, with a supply of food and water sufficient to sustain him for seven to eight days, by which time one or both of the others would have returned with help. The two then rode off, leaving al-Farouch’s round shield hanging from his upended spear to serve as a sign on their way back.

“And now you know as much as I do, ferenghi,” al-Farouch concluded, using the Arabic term for a Frank and lapsing back into silence.

Sinclair sat silent, mulling over what he had been told. If Sayeed had survived the storm and found his fellows, they would return here and that would be the end for him. He could still depart on the horse, he knew; one way or another he could contrive to mount it again, even without a mounting block, now that he knew its placid nature. He thought of looking out again to check that the horse was still nearby, but instead he leaned forward and spoke to the Saracen.

“How is it that you speak our tongue?”

“One of your tongues,” the other answered drily. “When you spoke at first, in that first tongue you used, it fell upon my ears like the gibbering of djinns. What was that noise?”

Sinclair grinned for the first time in days. “That was Gaelic, the language of my people in Scotland, where I was born.”

“You are not, then, a Frank?”

“No, I am what they call a Scot, but my family came there from France a hundred years ago. When the call went out for warriors to come here, I joined the army.”

“Are you a knight, then? I see no badges of rank on you.”

“I cast them off with my armor when I found myself afoot in the desert. There are too many ways to die out here without being foolish enough to seek one, weighed down with useless steel and heavy clothing.”

“Ah, I see. Plainly you have been here long enough to learn a smattering of Allah’s wisdom, praise His name…But you came here to kill Saracens, no?”

“No, not exactly. I came because my duty as a knight summoned me here, to Outremer. Killing or being killed is merely part of the knight’s code.”

“You are of the Temple, then?”

Something, some unidentifiable element of menace in the simple question, made Sinclair change the affirmative that sprang to his lips, but he managed to dissemble without either lying or, he thought, betraying himself. “I am a knight,” he drawled. “From Scotland, many days from France by sea. Not all the knights in Outremer are of the Temple or the Hospital.”

“No, but the Temple djinns are the most dangerous of them all.”

Sinclair let that statement lie as it fell. “You did not answer my question, about how you came to speak the language of the Franks.”

“I learned it as a boy, in Ibelin, where I grew up. There was a Frankish lord who built a fortress there, after the capture of Jerusalem, long before I was born. He took the name of the town as his own. I worked there when I was a boy, in the stables, and I ran and played with his son, who was my age. I learned to speak their tongue, as the boy learned mine.”

Sinclair was frowning. “Ibelin…Mean you Sir Balian of Ibelin? I know him. I rode with him from Nazareth to…” He broke off, aware that he might be saying more than he ought, but al-Farouch was already nodding his head.

“It would be he. His name in our tongue is Balian ibn Barzan, and he is a powerful man among the ferenghi nowadays—a knight, but not of the Temple.”

“Are you still friends, then?”

The Saracen shrugged. “Who can be friends, as Muslim and Christian, in a holy war of jihad? He and I have not met in years, not since we were boys. We might pass each other in the souk and not know it.”

Sinclair slapped his good hand on his thigh and straightened his back, turning to squint out into the brightness behind him. “We should eat something. All men share that need, even in a jihad, no? When did you last eat?”

Al-Farouch thought, his lips pursed. “I cannot remember, but it was a long time ago.”

Sinclair stood up. “I left my horse—your horse—saddled in the sun, and he must be suffering. If I bring him in here, close to you, will you help me to unsaddle him? It’s difficult to loosen a tight girth with one hand.”

“I will, if you can bring him close enough that I can reach him.”

A short time later, the horse seen to and its saddlebags removed, Sinclair dropped the saddle to the floor of the little shelter and sat on it while he rummaged in the bag that held the food, withdrawing a large piece of dried meat and the sharp little knife. He threw the meat first and then the knife to the surprised Muslim, who caught it easily, hilt first. “Here, you have two hands and can cut better than I can. Cut us to eat from that, while I see to the rest.”

The Muslim set to slicing the hard meat without comment, while Sinclair extracted dried figs, dates, and bread from the saddlebag for both of them.

They ate in a courteous, strangely companionable silence, each immersed in his own thoughts. Sinclair reflected upon the unlikelihood of the circumstances that had brought him to this point, placidly sharing a meal with an enemy who, under any other conditions, he would have attempted to kill on sight. He wondered if his silent companion might be thinking the same thing, but then his thoughts returned to the veiled threat he had suspected in the Saracen’s question about the Templars, and he began to take solemn stock of it.

Sinclair had no means of knowing whether his cautious response had been any more necessary than his decision to conceal his knowledge of Arabic, but he felt comfortable with the way he had deflected al-Farouch’s curiosity. He was indeed a Temple Knight, and he suspected that the Saracen would have accorded him little in the way of approval for that, but there was much more to Sir Alexander Sinclair than mere membership in the Order of the Temple, and he had good reason to be reticent about who he was.

Sinclair was a highly placed member of the clandestine Brotherhood of Sion, the secret society within the Temple that had founded and created the Order for its own ends, decades earlier at the turn of the century, and which still supervised and guided the Order’s policies. So secret was the brotherhood that not even its existence, let alone its activities, was suspected by the rank and file of the Order, and although many of the most senior officers of the Temple belonged to the brotherhood, many others of equivalent military rank lived out their lives and died without ever being aware of the brotherhood’s existence. Prime among the latter was Gerard de Ridefort, the current Master of the Temple, who, although prized and honored for his courage, military skills, and high-principled audacity, had been deemed unqualified, thanks to his pride and hotheaded arrogance, to enter the brotherhood.

Membership in the Brotherhood of Sion was not lightly bestowed. Its members were few and bound by oath and loyalty to utter silence and secrecy, and they seldom met in plenary session. Whenever they did convene, it was under the guise of traditional celebrations called Gatherings, and those were always held in secure and private properties owned by senior brethren of the Governing Council. There the brotherhood would assemble, surrounded by their families and friends, most of them kinfolk, and while the celebrations and rejoicing went on above, in the public spaces of the hosting family, the brotherhood would gather secretly in the lower reaches of whatever castle had been chosen as the venue, to celebrate their own clandestine business of initiations, instruction, and promotion, their activities unsuspected by the other celebrants at the Gathering.

Individual members of the organization were not distinguishable in any way save one, and even that knowledge was secretly guarded, close held among themselves, although it was a distinction that no one who was not an initiate could ever see. Every man of them was selected from one of a federation of aristocratic clans known among themselves as the Friendly Families, all of which lived in the region of southern France known as the Languedoc, so called because the region had its own ancient language. The name literally meant “the tongue of Oc,” or “the place where Oc is spoken.” The association of the federated families dated back more than a millennium, to the first century of the Christian era, when the founders of each of the clans settled together in southern Gaul after their long overland flight from the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in the year 79.

Their collective Jewish roots were the greatest secret of the brotherhood, for their families had assimilated seamlessly into local society soon after their arrival, and they had now been Christian for a thousand years, blissfully ignorant of their Semitic origins. Only the initiates of the ancient Brotherhood of the Order of Rebirth in Sion knew the truth, passed down in secret throughout the generations of that same thousand years, and they alone undertook to shoulder the great responsibility entailed in that knowledge, their singular entitlement safeguarded and reinforced by the inflexible edict that only one male member from every generation of each of the Families could be eligible for initiation.

Sir Alexander Sinclair, chosen from among seven brothers in a family that had produced no daughters, had been admitted to the brotherhood on his twentieth birthday. None of his siblings, all of whom were now of age and two of them knights of the Temple while a third rode with the Order of the Hospitallers, ever suspected that their brother Alec held a secret station above and beyond any of theirs. And because the duties imposed upon him by the brotherhood had made it all but impossible for him to interact normally with his brothers in their workaday world of filial and familial obligations, Christian dedication, and feudal loyalties, they chose to believe that their brother Alec was an ingrate, guilty of turning his back on his family responsibilities. Alec had had no other option than to shrug and appear to accept their condemnation.

And so he had disappeared into the secretive world of the brotherhood, where the Governing Council, having assessed and quantified his every trait and capability, began to educate him in a specific way, for its own purposes. Alexander Sinclair, Knight of the Temple, was a spy for the brotherhood.

“You are deep in thought, ferenghi.” Al-Farouch’s French was fluent, despite the guttural overtones of his Arabic diction. Sinclair smiled wryly and scratched at his scalp.

“I was thinking about my situation here, thinking I ought to climb back up onto your horse and make good my escape before your friends arrive to rescue you.”

“If they arrive. Nothing is certain but what is written, and it might be Allah’s will, blessings upon His name, that I should remain here and die.”

Sinclair thought about that for a while, then nodded slowly. “I find myself believing that Allah might be reluctant to discard a weapon as strong as I suspect you might be for him…I was also thinking that I do not enjoy the thought of simply riding off and leaving you here alone to live or die, strange as that might sound to you.”

The Saracen’s eyes narrowed to slits. “More than strange. It smacks of madness. Why should you care what happens to me here, when every moment that you remain places you in deeper peril of being taken, if my men arrive?”

A bleak smile flickered on Sinclair’s lips. “Call it a family weakness, bred in my bones: that no man of honor should ever leave another to die when he might either save him or help him.”

“Honor. It is…” The Saracen paused, searching for a word. “It is a concept, no? A reality without substance. One that is given much…external recognition…but is truly understood by very few.”

“Even among the faithful of Allah?”

“Even so, alas, as I am sure it is among your own kind.”

“Aye, yon’s the truth…” Sinclair had lapsed back into Scots, but even so he could see that the man across from him had understood his tone.

“What is your name, ferenghi? You know mine already.”

“Lachlan Moray.” The lie sprang naturally and unbidden to Sinclair’s lips.

“Lachlan…That almost sounds like an Arabic name. Lach-lan Murr-ay.”

“It might, to your ears, but it is Scots.”

“And you have but little beard. I thought all Frankish knights had beards.”

Sinclair scratched ruefully at his stubbled chin. “It is true. I would never be mistaken for a Templar were I in the midst of them. But if I stay out here much longer the beard will grow and I will regret that. I have an affliction, even in the eyes of my comrades, in that my face has little hair and my skin is…do you know the word ‘delicate’?”

The Saracen shook his head, and Sinclair shrugged. “Well, as my beard grows, the skin grows scaly and itches painfully, and so, to maintain my sanity and keep from scratching myself bloody, I choose to keep my face clean shaven, when I can. Few of my fellow Franks can understand that.” He said nothing of the fact that being clean shaven enabled him to wear a false beard of whatever shape and texture he required from time to time in the course of his work.

“Tell me of Hittin…Hattin, as you call it.”

The request was straightforward, but couched as it was in a mild command, it caught Sinclair unawares so that he sat blinking, unable to think of a response.

The Saracen sat straighter, flexing his shoulders. “You asked me when you first arrived if I had been at Hattin, and the tone in which you asked caught my attention. I was not there, as you now know, but Hattin is close to the place you call Tiberias, and the Sultan, may Allah smile upon him, summoned us to gather there. Was there a battle there? Is that why you are here alone?”

Sinclair silently cursed his own carelessness, but there was no point in lying now. He sighed. “Aye, there was a battle.”

“I see. And it was…decisive?”

“Aye, I fear it was. We were defeated. Your side was victorious.”

“Allah be praised. What happened?”

“What happened? You ask me that? Have you ever been in a major battle, involving thousands of men?”

“I have, several times.”

“Have you ever held supreme command in such a battle?”

The Saracen frowned. “No, I commanded my own men, but I am no general.”

“Nor am I. So you know as well as I do that a warrior in a battle has little awareness of what is happening in the overall sense of the fighting. He only learns of victory or defeat from what he sees at the end of it. In the midst of it, he strives to protect himself and his men—to stay alive.

“This battle at Hattin was enormous. We had the strongest army ever gathered solely in the kingdom—more than thirty thousand strong. Knights, Turcopole allies and infantry. Your Sultan, Saladin, commanded at least twice our number, probably more, and we were beaten. I saw only glimpses of the main battle, from afar. I was wounded and unhorsed early, breaking my arm, and then was left behind in the fighting. I had a friend with me and we escaped together that night. We decided to make our way back to La Safouri, but we were overtaken by the storm.”

“Where is your friend now?” the Saracen asked.

“Gone. Somewhere in the sands. He dragged me behind him for two or three nights—I was raving mad from my injuries—and then he went looking for water, leaving me asleep in a cave he had found. When I woke up the storm had arrived. I have not seen him since. He could be anywhere. I pray he is alive, but I fear he may be dead.”

“So what will you do now? Where will you go if you ride away from here?”

“I have no idea. There might be no place for me to go.” Sinclair grunted, part laughter, part disgust. “Perhaps that’s why I am loath even to make the attempt.”

Al-Farouch held up a peremptory hand, his head cocked suddenly as though listening. Sinclair strained to hear what it was that had attracted his attention, but he heard only the stillness of the desert, and eventually the Saracen lowered his hand, shaking his head.

“I thought I heard horses approaching.” He looked at Sinclair, one eyebrow rising high on his brow. “I suggest, however, that if you are contemplating an escape from here you should leave now.”

Sinclair turned his head slightly to gaze out into the gathering dusk, mildly surprised that the day had vanished so quickly. “I have been thinking about that,” he said, before turning back to al-Farouch. “And I find that I have a conflict to resolve in my own mind. We spoke of honor briefly, a short time ago, and honor, in my life, involves responsibilities that we Franks call duty.”

Al-Farouch nodded, his face impassive. “We, too, have duties, some of them more onerous than others.”

“Very well then. Since you understand the concept, as you called it earlier, perhaps you can help me to resolve my dilemma. This day is almost done, so were I to leave now, I would be riding out into the darkness with nowhere to go and no knowledge of how to get there, for the sole purpose of avoiding capture by your warriors. I might achieve that anyway, simply from their failure to come here at all. Then, on the other hand, I might ride straight towards them in the darkness if they do come, for I have no means of knowing the direction they’ll come from.

“My dilemma is this: if I ride off blindly into the desert now to avoid capture, with no knowledge of where I am going, will I be acting honorably, because it is my duty to win free, or will I be guilty of dereliction of duty by acting foolishly and endangering my own life needlessly? Do you see what I mean, Master Saracen? Is my duty better served by riding off in the darkness now, perhaps to die, or by remaining here and taking my chances?”

Neither man spoke for a moment, and then Sinclair resumed. “Besides, as I’ve told you before, I like not the idea of leaving you here alone…And so I have decided to stay here until the morning comes. Then, providing there is no sign of your men, I will make you comfortable and ride far enough away to avoid capture, and there I will wait. If your rescuers do not appear, I will return and eat with you, for nothing will have changed, and I will still not know where to go.”

Al-Farouch ran the tip of his middle finger down the length of his nose and pressed it against his pursed lips. “Why do you say you do not know where to go? Were your losses at Hattin so grave?”

Sinclair rose to his feet and went to lean against the edge of rocky wall that formed their small shelter, staring out into the approaching night. When he spoke, he did so without turning his head. “Night comes quickly here, in the desert. In Scotland, where I grew up, the evening light at this time of the year can linger for hours after the sun goes down. There is no word for it in French that I know of, but we call that time of lingering betwixt day and night the gloaming…It is the loss at Hattin, more than our losses, that concerns me—the defeat itself, rather than the casualties, although God knows they were appalling. Your Sultan, from all I know of him, is not a man to ignore an opportunity sent from God, and to his eyes that is how his victory at Hattin will appear. Tiberias will have surrendered to him by this time, I suspect, with the army crushed, and I already know his men have taken La Safouri, and probably Nazareth, too. Were I he, backed by a victorious army and knowing that the Frankish forces are in disorder if not completely destroyed, I would march on Jerusalem at once.” He straightened up and turned back towards the other man. “And that, I fear, leaves me with few places to run…When did you pray last?”

Al-Farouch blinked. “Some time ago, at the appointed hour. You were here. You simply did not notice.”

“Should you not have faced the east?”

The Saracen smiled. “Allah requires our prayers, but being merciful, He does not insist that we torture ourselves when we are disabled. I will pray properly when I am able, but until then I will pray as I can.”

“Well then, when did you last defecate?”

The Saracen’s eyes went wide, but then he shrugged. “The morning my friends left, but I have eaten little since then, so I have had no pressing need.”

“But you’ve eaten now. Can you walk on that leg at all, if I support you?”

“I believe I can.”

“Good, and did your friends dig a latrine?”

“They did, close by but far enough removed to be inoffensive. It is ten paces to the right of the entrance.”

“If I can help you there, are you capable of seeing to your own needs?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Good. Now, if I help you to stand up and walk, will you attempt to kill me?”

The merest hint of a smile showed in the Saracen’s eyes. “Not before you bring me back in here, despite my oath to destroy all infidels at any opportunity.”

Sinclair grunted, then moved forward, his good arm outstretched. “So be it, then, let’s see if we can raise you to your feet. Be careful of my other arm, for it is as badly broken as your leg, but not so well bandaged. Once you are up, we’ll go outside and I will leave you to do what you must. Call out when you are done and I’ll come and help you back.”

By the time they had completed their business at the latrine, full dark had fallen, and they sat together in the darkness of the small corner that was their shelter. They talked of small, unimportant matters for a time, but the night was utterly still and they were both tired, so they soon fell asleep, head to foot in the narrow space, and Sinclair’s last thought was that he would have to be awake and away by dawn.

SINCLAIR CAME AWAKE when a callused hand clamped itself across his mouth and chin, but his protesting reaction was stilled instantly as he heard a deep, guttural growl and felt the edge of a cold knife blade at his throat. He lay motionless, waiting to die. Dawn had yet to break, but there was movement all around him, and he knew he should have anticipated this development.