Brethren: An Epic Adventure of the Knights Templar (49 page)

A few murmurs rose from the knights.

“The fortress had been under heavy attack for almost eight days when we left it. I expect it has fallen by now. The Mamluks are on their way here, taking out any strongholds that could threaten their rear on the way.”

The low buzz of voices rose into exclamations and questions.

“How do you know this?” asked one knight.

“When will they be here?” voiced another.

The Master stirred as Garin looked uncertainly to him. He raised his hands for silence. “Please. Let Brother de Lyons finish. Perhaps if you start from the beginning, brother.”

“Of course.” Garin faced the company. And caught Will’s rigid gaze. His mouth remained open, but no words came out. After a moment, he shut it and looked away. “I was in Jaffa in March. The Mamluks attacked us and the city fell to them in a day.” Garin pushed on through the murmurs, avoiding Will’s gaze. His hands were making fists again. “It has been impossible to guess the sultan’s plans for individual battles, as well as for his general campaign because he’s so unpredictable. Sometimes he promises freedom to surrendering garrisons, then goes back on his word as at Arsuf and Safed.” Garin’s eyes darted to Will, then flicked away again. “Sometimes he lets the women and children go and makes slaves of the men and at other times he does the opposite. In Jaffa, he killed most of the citizens, but let the garrison go free. As we left, we saw slaves dismantling our castle. It’s rumored the sultan is building a new mosque in Cairo. They say he wants to build it out of all the Frankish strongholds left in Palestine. We retreated to Acre.

“A few weeks later, I was in a company sent to reinforce Beaufort, after we received reports that Baybars was headed that way. The Mamluks arrived at our walls in April. On the seventh night, I was on watch when I saw a man crawling through a ditch to a postern in the wall below me. I went down to the postern thinking to capture him to discover what he had been sent to do. He was a deserter. When he had tried to abandon his post, he had been caught and sentenced to death. He had escaped and had fled to our fortress, hoping we would disguise him as one of our servants in exchange for information. We were able to discover through him that Baybars’s primary target in this campaign is Antioch.” Garin gestured to the three knights behind him. “Beaufort’s commander helped the four of us to flee so that we could warn you.” He looked to the Master. “That’s it.”

“Thank you, Brother de Lyons,” said the Master, stepping forward. “Your quick thinking and selfless actions have no doubt greatly enhanced our chances for survival.”

Many of the knights voiced their agreement, or nodded, although their praise was muted by the gravity of the news. Robert yawned loudly and Will gripped the edge of the bench until his knuckles turned white.

“May I ask, brother,” called one knight, “has Grand Master Bérard been informed of this?”

The Master looked to Garin, who shook his head.

“There wasn’t time. We came straight here.”

“Then we should send word to Acre at once.”

“Any message we sent now would arrive too late,” said the Master. “Baybars would be ahead of any reinforcements that could come to our aid. We cannot look to outside help, but we can muster all that we have here in our defense. A city expecting a fight is a far more formidable target than one that waits, hoping there won’t be one. I will inform Constable Mansel immediately. No doubt, he’ll want to convene a council.”

A few knights spoke up, asking about the general preparations and offering suggestions. But aside from this, and a prayer for the knights at Beaufort, the chapter was done. The Master gathered his officers around him as a clerk was brought in to send a message to Antioch’s constable.

Will rose as Garin descended the dais. The knight glanced briefly at him, then hastened for the doors. Will strode after him.

“Will!” shouted Robert, sprinting out of the doors behind him into the sunlit yard.

Garin, who was halfway across the yard, turned at the call. He looked fearful as Will came at him, but stood his ground. Will didn’t break his stride, but grabbed Garin and propelled the knight into the wall of the armory. Garin gave a winded gasp as he was slammed against the rough stone. Will’s hands pressed into his shoulders, pinning him.

“Will!”

“Stay out of this, Robert,” snapped Will, turning on him.

“All right,” said Robert, holding up his hands and coming to a halt. Two knights came out of the chapter house. They stopped as they saw Will holding Garin against the wall. Robert smiled at them. “Brothers,” he explained, cocking his head toward Will and Garin. “Haven’t seen one another in a while. Emotional reunion.”

The knights walked on after a pause.

“I don’t have the book if that’s what you’re after,” Garin told Will quickly. “I never tried to get it from the Hospitaller. I don’t know where it is.”

“The book?” Will’s voice was low, hardly more than a whisper, but his eyes were blazing. “You think I give a shit about that?”

Garin cried out as Will’s hands dug into his flesh.

“The whorehouse,” said Will, forcing the words through his teeth. “The poison you gave me.”

“I’m sorry for that!” exclaimed Garin, trying to push Will away. “But I had to do something. Rook wanted to kill you! He would have if I hadn’t drugged you.”

Will grabbed two fistfuls of Garin’s mantle. “The girl,” he snarled in the knight’s face. “What about her? Are you going to tell me you’re sorry for leaving me in bed with a whore?”

Garin stopped struggling. “What?”

“Don’t even try to deny it!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

As Will went for his sword, Robert sprang forward and grabbed his arm. Will twisted away, but Robert held him fast.

“I’m going to kill you!”
Will yelled at Garin.

Garin slid out from between Will and the wall and backed away. “I didn’t leave you in bed with anyone, I swear!”

“You expect me to believe that when you had me meet you in a whorehouse?”

Garin faltered. “Adela,” he said finally. “That was why we had you meet us there. I had been going to her for a few months. Rook just wanted to get you out of the preceptory.”

“You were bedding her?”

Garin was still. “I loved her.”

Will began to laugh. It was a harsh sound that made Garin flinch as if struck. The laughter became a choked cry. “Don’t you
dare
talk to me about love!”

Robert had to use all his strength to restrain Will from drawing the falchion.

“Elwen saw me with that girl. I lost her because of you, you
bastard
!”

“I don’t know anything about any girl, I promise you.” Garin held up his hands. “Will, none of this was my fault. I didn’t want to do it. Rook made me.” He spoke in a rush. “Rook wanted the book, not me. I don’t know how he knew of it, but he somehow found out that my uncle had been involved with Everard. He came to me in Paris and made me tell him everything I knew, everything my uncle had told me. He said he was going to use it against the Temple. Will, he threatened to rape and kill my mother if I didn’t do as he said.” Garin’s face crumpled and his eyes filled with tears. “You have no idea what he’s capable of. But I’ve left him now. He can’t threaten me anymore. I’ll do anything you want to make this right! Tell me and I’ll do it!”

Will stared at Garin: the bloodstains on his mantle; his raised hands; his tear-filled eyes. He stared at the man who had filled him with such hatred and saw only the scared little boy who used to lie about the bruises on his face. All the tension in his body drained, leaving him weak and shaking. “I want nothing from you.” Brushing Robert’s hands aside, Will walked away.

T
hey couldn’t take their eyes off it. For the last two hours they had watched it come; an incredible, awful sight, like a wave rearing far out to sea that the people on the shore can only stand and wait for as it washes in to flood houses, overwhelm fields, drown children. Their hope lay behind them in the castles and armories of the knights, where men donned helmets, fastened chainmail, strapped on swords. Their doom lay ahead, marching through the valley in a wide golden line, making a new river beside the Orontes. For the citizens of Antioch, one of the five most holy sees of Christendom, the approach of the Mamluk army was by far the more arresting view.

“What the Hell are they doing up there?”

Will, helping to guide a mangonel into place, glanced around to see Lambert, the young officer in charge of their company, pointing to a group of people on the tower next to theirs. Will could tell by their dress that they weren’t soldiers. Bishops, or nobles, he guessed, by the cut of their silks. “Praying probably,” he said, going over to Lambert as the sergeants maneuvered the siege engine into position.

Lambert turned to Will. “I’ve seen children on the walls this morning, throwing stones into the valley, trying to hit the enemy. They’ll wind up dead, or in our way. Someone should be marshaling them, getting them inside their houses, or up to the citadel.”

“I agree,” said Will, “but there aren’t enough soldiers for the walls, let alone for keeping order.” He looked down into the valley where the Mamluk army was steadily approaching, then back at the nobles clustered on the tower. “It might work in our favor, you know. The Mamluks will think we have more troops than we do.”

“It will just give them more targets to aim at.” Lambert cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hey!” he yelled at the nobles. A few of them looked in his direction. “Get down, you fools!” He swore when they turned their backs on him.

“They’ll soon move when the arrows start flying,” said Robert, coming over.

“Where’s Simon?” asked Will.

“Settling the horses. They’re getting skittish now they can hear the drums.”

“I know how they feel,” muttered Lambert.

They all did. The sound, which had begun as a faint throbbing like a tremor in the earth then had risen with the Mamluk’s approach to a rhythmic, maddening thudding, was viscerally disturbing. The Mamluk army had thirty bands, each of which was ruled over by an officer called the Lord of the Drums. The knights on the walls could just about make out these companies now: tiny men beating tiny drums that made an enormous noise.

“How is Simon?” Will asked Robert.

“Don’t ask. Every time I try and say something to comfort him, he runs off to piss. I’m thinking, if he goes much more, we can open a sluice gate and drown the bastards.” Robert rested his hands on the parapet. “Can’t say I blame him though.”

The three of them watched as the head of the army funneled through the valley mouth and swelled into the plain. At the vanguard came the heavy cavalry—armored men on armored horses, bearing spears and swords. Each regiment was marked by the different colors of their surcoats: blue, jade, crimson, purple and, at the head, the yellow-gold of the Bahri, whose cloaks glittered in the morning sun.

Companies of mounted archers flanked the cavalry and behind them marched a solid mass of infantry: men carrying shields slung over their shoulders; nakkabun with their mining tools; soldiers with barrels of deadly naphtha. In the midst of the infantry lines, camels loaded with medical supplies, weapons, food and water were herded alongside siege engines that were being hauled up the valley by the companies who would prime and fire them in the battle. The Mamluks, an older knight had told Will and the others, gave these weapons names like the Victorious, the Leveler, the Bull. On hearing this, the company of ten knights and seven sergeants under Lambert, had christened their two engines—a mangonel and an espringale, which was smaller and fired javelins rather than stones. One they called the Undefeated and the other, Sultan-Killer.

“I reckon they’ll set up their main camp down there,” said Lambert, pointing to a flat strip of land the gold-clad Bahri were moving toward, like a pride of lions. “Well out of range,” he added.

Will glanced around as the nobles on the opposite tower began to leave, heading along the walkway toward the ramparts that curled steeply around Mount Silpius to the citadel. For several hours, since the alarm had been raised, little streams of people had been winding their way up the mountain toward the fortress. But many citizens, as Lambert had complained, had been milling about in the city; gathering on corners to chatter fearfully with their neighbors; going to the walls to watch the soldiers come; staying home to nail timber over doors and bury coins and land deeds in holes in their gardens. The only ones with any apparent sense of purpose or urgency were the companies of men heading for their posts.

All along the walls, mounted on the towers, were little groups like theirs: Hospitallers, Teutonic Knights from the Kingdom of Germany, Syrian and Armenian soldiers, the city guard under Simon Mansel. But only half the towers were occupied and the eighteen-mile-long perimeter seemed conspicuously empty. The walls, for the most part, were in good repair and any weaker sections had been more heavily manned where possible.

At the last war council, called yesterday, the Templar and Hospitaller Masters, in a rare show of unity, had expressed concerns over an area near the Tower of the Two Sisters, where the wall began its steep march up the slopes of the mountain. Constable Mansel, however, had already allocated all of his men and had refused to spare anyone for the task.

Mansel had been confident that Baybars would be persuaded to listen to reason. After all, he had reminded the skeptical commanders, the Mamluks had been turned away once before with just a few wagons of treasure. While the constable had drawn up settlements for negotiation, it had been left to the Templar Master to redirect Lambert’s company from St. George’s Gate to the area concerned. Will, on seeing the section that ran from the Tower of the Two Sisters up the spine of Mount Silpius, hadn’t been able to see how the Mamluks could easily storm the walls from the treacherous terrain below. But, then, he had never been involved in a siege.

It had been a shock to discover, when the army had appeared, that all his years of training apparently counted for nothing. He and the others of his company had been breaking their fast in one of the tower’s bare, cobwebbed chambers that was littered with bat droppings when the alarm had sounded. They had raced up the spiraled stairs to the battlements, hands on swords. And there they had stopped. Hand to hand, face to face, they could fight, but from the tower top they had only been able to watch and wait as the Mamluks advanced.

The older knights, those who had fought most of their lives in campaigns in Outremer, were calm, preparing themselves and their weapons. The younger men were restless; joking nervously one moment, snapping at the slightest annoyance the next, skittish like their horses, which were stabled in a potter’s workshop Lambert had commandeered outside the tower that was to be their home for the next few days, weeks or possibly months.

Will took a drink from his water skin and adjusted his sword belt. He felt the need to have the weapon in his hand, to strike out at something tangible. His anticipation was reverberating inside him like the Mamluks’ drums, setting him on edge. Four knights came out onto the battlements, carrying javelins for the espringale. Among them was Garin. As they locked gazes, Garin lingered for a moment on the battlements, then moved off across the walkway to the other tower where they had set the espringale.

Robert shook his head. “Eighteen miles of wall and they put him here?”

Gripping the hilt of his falchion, Will turned to Lambert. “Is there anything I can do?”

Lambert nodded. “Same as the rest of us. You can wait.”

THE MAMLUK CAMP, ANTIOCH, MAY
14, 1268
AD

The sun was going down in the west as the eunuchs finished washing Baybars’s feet and patted his skin dry with fresh linen cloths. When they were done, he rose and descended the throne platform that had been erected inside the royal pavilion. The wings of the pavilion had been pinned back and a space cleared outside it. His governors were waiting, barefoot, on a strip of springy turf where prayer mats had been laid out.

Baybars faced Mecca. The walls of Antioch occupied his vision, but as he stood with his men and began to chant the words of the first sura of the Koran they seemed to fade into the vista and become nothing more than rock and sand.

In the name of God, most Gracious, most Merciful. All praise is for God, the Lord and Sustainer of all the worlds!

When their prayers were done, the Mamluks rose and continued with their tasks; unloading supplies from the camels; erecting tents; priming the engines; lighting fires; preparing for the evening’s feast. Tomorrow was the first day of the holy month of Ramadan and for the next four weeks they would fast during daylight hours.

“My lord.”

Baybars turned as Omar came toward him, moving around the servants who were rolling up the prayer mats. “Have you relayed my orders to the governors?”

“I have, my lord. Everyone knows their positions.” Omar paused. “Except for me.”

“I want you at the rear with the engines.”

“The rear?”

“You heard me,” said Baybars, ignoring his hurt look. Over the last few campaigns he had been placing Omar farther and farther back from the front lines. Whereas he feared little for his own safety, he had, during these past years, become increasingly concerned with the welfare of his friends. Perhaps because he had so few of them.

“Sadeek,” protested Omar in a low voice, “if you insist on leading this battle, I want to be at your side. Didn’t you listen to what Khadir said?”

Baybars raised an eyebrow. “I thought it was you who never listened to Khadir.”

“I do when he says he fears a threat on your life. A threat within the city.”

“Khadir could not be specific about the nature of it and so I’m inclined to believe it is nothing more than the general desire of the Franks to be rid of me. He was, however, certain that the signs for the battle itself are auspicious. I will take the more confident prediction. Khadir is always unsettled so near his home,” Baybars added, referring to the Assassins’ stronghold of Masyaf in the Jabal Bahra Mountains—the place and Order Khadir had been exiled from.

“Do you have to lead the battle though, my lord?”

Baybars’s jaw tightened. “When I let others lead a force against this city, they were turned around by a petty offering. We do not accept gifts from the Franks, Omar.”

“My Lord Sultan.”

Baybars looked around to see Kalawun approaching. With him was a commander of one of the regiments.

Kalawun bowed to Baybars. “Can I speak with you?”

“Yes,” said Baybars. “We were finished, weren’t we, Omar?”

After a pause, Omar inclined his head. “We were, my lord.”

Baybars waited until he had gone, then turned to the two men. “Are you set?”

“Yes, my lord,” replied Kalawun.

“Good. I want you both in position by morning.”

“Then with your permission, we will go now, my lord,” said the commander.

“You have it.” As they went to leave, Baybars called Kalawun to wait. “Allah be with you,” he said quietly.

Kalawun’s strong-boned face creased in a faint smile. “I fear it is you who will need God’s protection, my lord. My task, I expect, will be simple by comparison.”

“That will depend on whether you meet resistance and the longer you remain, the more likely that will become, either from the Templars at Baghras and La Roche Guillaume, or from Cilicia.”

“We hit the Armenians hard last year,” said Kalawun quietly. “I doubt they could muster any great force.”

“Do not doubt anything, Kalawun. When we left Tripoli unscathed, Prince Bohemond would have certainly entertained the concern that we would come here. He may be able to marshal an effective army from the remnants of the kingdom in time, although I don’t intend to spend enough of it here to allow him the opportunity.”

There was the sound of a commotion and a small dark shape came rushing toward them out of the shadows. Kalawun went to step in front of Baybars, then saw that it was the sultan’s son. Hastening after Baraka Khan, puffing and panting, was his tutor, a retired commander called Sinjar whom Kalawun had suggested as a suitable mentor for the boy. There was a large red stain on the front of Sinjar’s white tunic. For a moment, Baybars thought he had been wounded, then realized that it was too pale for blood. Baraka skidded to a halt, breathing hard.

“Why aren’t you studying?” Baybars demanded of the seven-year-old. He looked questioningly at Sinjar, who bowed, trying to catch his breath.

“Apologies, my lord, we were embarking on a simple algebraic problem. When Baraka couldn’t solve it, he became angry and threw a jug of cordial over me.” Sinjar gestured to his stained tunic. “I went to punish him and he ran from me.”

Baraka glared at his tutor. “Sinjar was going to beat me, father.”

“As well he should,” said Baybars, swinging his son roughly into his arms. “I don’t want to hear of any more trouble from you, do you understand?”

Baraka pouted. “Yes, father,” he muttered.

Baybars nodded to Sinjar. “Leave him with me.”

“My lord.”

“If you refuse to attend to your studies,” said Baybars to his son, as Sinjar left, “then you can help me instead.” He half smiled at Kalawun. “Perhaps we should put him to work on one of the mandjaniks?”

Kalawun returned the smile. “Perhaps.” He ruffled Baraka’s hair. “Although I’m not sure that is fitting work for the heir to the throne and my future son-in-law.”

Baraka pouted even more. Baybars had told him that he would be marrying Kalawun’s daughter in a few years, when he was old enough. Baraka hoped his father would put
her
to work on one of the mandjaniks. She might have an accident and end up tossed over the wall into the city. He grinned at the thought as Kalawun bowed to Baybars and headed off across the camp to where a battalion was waiting. “Where is Amir Kalawun going, father?”