Crusade (81 page)

“It’s always
yours
, isn’t it,” Garin shouted back. “Your wife, your daughter, your place in the Temple.”

“What did you do?”

Garin stepped back as Will came forward. “But Rose wasn’t your daughter.” Will stopped, his sword frozen in midair. “Oh, Elwen said she didn’t know for sure. But I knew.” Garin jabbed at his chest. “I
knew
she was mine.”

“You’re lying. Why are you saying this?”

“Because it’s the truth and there’s no one else to tell it to you now. You need to know what I’ve lost. You need to understand.” Will was shaking his head. “Why do you think you spent all those years in her bed and she only bore you one child?” demanded Garin. “It doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“Elwen would never ... she would never ...” But the words gummed up in Will’s mouth and he found he couldn’t say them. Behind them in the city, something exploded, sending a shower of rock and flames into the sky. Screams drifted from the harbor. Neither of them looked around. “When?” said Will frigidly. “When did it happen?”

“Before you went to Mecca. Elwen came to me. There was no seduction, no pursuit on my part. She came to me.”

“And you took her,” breathed Will.

“Why do you think you can have everything?” Garin shouted suddenly. “What makes you so much better than everyone else? So much more worthy? You had a place in the Temple, but that wasn’t enough, was it? You had to have more, so when Everard recruited you, you forsook your oaths and joined the Brethren. But even that wasn’t enough. You deceived the Brethren to go after Baybars, betrayed the grand master when he tried to take the Black Stone, even after he made you commander, then you deceived everyone to be with a woman you treated like a whore!”

Will was staring at him, hardly hearing all the words. “How do you know of the Stone?”

“Elwen told me about it. She was scared for you.” Garin nodded as Will’s face filled up with shock and pain. “She did love you, I won’t deny that. She only lay with me once. But that was no excuse for what she did, shutting me out of Rose’s life like I was nothing, like I had no right to know my own child! God
damn
her!” He thrust the dagger toward Will. “I could have taken care of them. You wouldn’t have given them a real life, a good life.”

Will threw back his head and laughed, tears of rage and grief and disbelief burning from his eyes. “And you would have?” he seethed. “You? Garin de Lyons? Too feeble to stand up to his uncle, too weak to fend off Rook, too foolish to make a life for himself, too useless to be anything but a drunken whoreson. You’re envious of everything I have, Garin. You always have been, ever since we were children, and so you took it from me.” Will strode toward him. “You took the Book of the Grail. You took my virtue in that brothel. You took my wife and my child.”

“No, Will,” said Garin in a low voice, standing his ground. “I took much more than that.”

Will halted.

“Did you ever wonder why you were saved in the desert when the Bedouin caught you? Did you ever wonder who stayed that man’s hand?” Garin frowned and looked down into the water that washed around his feet. “Because I wondered myself, for years afterwards, why I spared you, why I shouted at Bertrand to leave you be. I’m still not sure why I did. Perhaps some old reflex of loyalty.” He looked back at Will. “Or perhaps it was because I didn’t want you to die not knowing the face of your betrayer. In my mind, when I killed you, you always knew it was me. You were always looking right into my eyes when it happened.” Garin laughed a little. “You see, Will, I do have some honor, which is why I want you to know that Rook was never my master. He was as much of a puppet as I was. It was always Edward pulling the strings.” Garin laughed again, harder and bitter. “And I dangled limply in his grip, whilst all my dreams faded and died around me, and all yours came true. Yes, Will, I am envious of your life, a life where forgiveness and hope have always existed, a life where all men aren’t brutal and cruel, a life filled with things you chose, not things forced upon you. Do you know, the only time I felt truly free was when Everard had me imprisoned? When I came to Acre to get Edward his money and I found out about the Black Stone and your involvement, I knew he could use it to his advantage and so I went after it myself. I had been Edward’s puppet for so long that I danced to his tune even when he wasn’t controlling me. Then I saw Rose and his hold on me broke.”

Will was stunned into total silence. He felt crushed by the revelations, by the depth of Garin’s betrayal, felt his whole world starting to crack under the enormous weight of it. The emotionless wall that had slammed up inside him at the sight of his daughter’s body was ripped down in the turmoil inside him and he gave a strangled roar of anguish.

As Will came the last few feet toward him, Garin flung the dagger into the waves. “You know what it feels like now, don’t you?” he cried. “You know how I’ve felt my whole life! Used and betrayed!” Dropping to his knees, the water spraying up around him, he spread his arms wide. His blistered lips cracked apart in a smile. “Now you understand.”

“Get up!” Will yelled at him, flicking the sword at his throat. “Get up, you
bastard
!”

“It’s over, Will. Don’t you see? It’s over for both of us. We’ve lost everything. All we can do is die!”

“Get up!”

“Do it. I want it over. I want it ended.”

Will grabbed Garin’s tattered tunic. His tears and his spit spattered Garin’s face as he screamed at him. The sea washed around them, soaking them, its salt in their mouths.

Garin caught hold of Will’s wrist. “Do it!” he yelled, turning the sword toward him.
“Do it!”

Suddenly, Will pulled himself free. Then, still clutching his sword, he began to walk away.

Garin stared after him, slack-jawed. “Where are you going?” he shouted, struggling to his feet. “Finish it!” He stood there, his legs weak as he watched Will go; then he turned and began to walk, slowly at first, then faster, the Templar ship filling his vision. Over the lashing of the waves, he didn’t hear the footsteps charging up behind him.

Garin felt a pain in his back, a sensation like being struck, then a searing agony that ripped right through him, turning his insides to liquid fire. Looking down, he saw a sword point protruding from his stomach. Then it was gone, wrenched back through him, twisting as it went, splaying him apart inside, splicing organs and muscles with one silver stroke. He half-turned, then fell to his knees. Clutching the ragged hole in his stomach, he collapsed sideways onto the rocks and rolled onto his back, arching and squirming. Looking up, through the blinding pain, he saw Will standing above him like some avenging angel, dressed in white, his sword drenched in blood, the sun and the city on fire blazing behind him. He opened his mouth to draw in a breath, but it filled with seawater as a wave curled over him. He went with it, tumbling off the mole into the deep green water of the harbor. For a few moments, he hung there, buoyed up by the waves, then slowly, struggling weakly, he went under. As he sank, Garin saw Will on the surface watching him, his form rippling, distorted. Then the sea filled his lungs and he was dragged down into blackness.

Will made it to the end of the mole and halfway across the harbor, before he slumped to his knees, his father’s sword clattering down beside him. Bending over, he vomited onto the stone, ignoring the people who raced past him, still trying to get to the boats, still trying to find safety. His bile was black with the smoke he had inhaled in the battle, but it felt like all the poison inside him was coming out, as if, unable to stomach Garin’s words, they was pouring back out of him; the ugly truth. For it was true. He could feel it. It all made a horrible, dreadful sense. He was a fool, a blind fool. He had wasted his life in pursuit of a dream. Now that dream was burning up around him and he had been left with nothing. His father, Everard, Kalawun, all were gone, along with all hope for peace. He could have lived with that, could have lived with Garin’s betrayal even, if only his wife and daughter had been spared. But they were gone too, turned to ashes along with everything else.

Suddenly, he threw back his head and roared at the sky.
“What more do you want from me, you bastard?”
he screamed at God, whom he could feel watching him emotionlessly from somewhere in that endless blue, like a cat with a mouse it has played with and now grown bored of.
“What more?”

“Sir William?”

Will, swaying on his hands, spittle trailing from his mouth, stared up at the voice. A stooped, bearded man was in front of him, bending down toward him. It was the old rabbi, Everard’s friend. “Elias,” he said thickly.

“Are you hurt?” questioned the old man, offering his hand. “Let me help you.”

Will sat back on his heels. “No,” he breathed, pushing away Elias’s hand. “No.” He got to his feet with effort and picked up his sword.

“We came from the Jewish quarter, looking for a ship, but there are none,” said Elias, gesturing anxiously to a group of people huddled together behind him; there were a few men, but most of them were women and children. “What can we do?”

“I don’t know,” said Will, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I don’t know.”

Screams sounded from the city gates. Mamluk riders were storming onto the harbor, cutting through the last citizens gathered there. In desperation, people started throwing themselves into the water, trying to get away from the soldiers and their blades. Elias clutched Will’s arm. Will saw a child go down, trampled by the Mamluks’ horses, saw a sword plunge into the belly of a pregnant woman, saw an old woman’s skull crushed by a spiked mace. Then he saw the men and women in front of him, wailing and crying and clinging to one another, smelled urine as children wet themselves, felt Elias’s hand clamped in terror around his arm. And something stirred in him, firing his deadened senses. “That way,” he said to Elias, pointing across the harbor to the entrance of the underground tunnel that ran under the city to the preceptory. “Go!” he urged the rabbi, thrusting him forward. Will strode to the group of Jews. “Move!” he shouted at them.

Confused and terror-stricken, they needed little encouragement. Will herded them across the harbor wall, driving them on like sheep. As they saw the group, a few Mamluks broke off and thundered toward them. Will went to meet the Mamluks, swinging his sword, two-handed, through the neck of one of the horses. He slashed through the back legs of another, crippling it, then stabbed down into the throat of its fallen rider. “Go!” he yelled at the fleeing citizens, ducking as an arrow shot past him. Another struck his back, but bounced off his chain mail. The entrance to the tunnel loomed up ahead. Most of the Mamluks were busy with the slaughter of the stampeding crowds around the gates. Will fought off another soldier, then led the frightened group into the tunnel. Knights were there, guarding the entrance. They ushered Will and the citizens through.

It wasn’t until they climbed up into the preceptory’s sunlit courtyard, twenty minutes later, that Will realized just how many he had managed to save. There was around sixty of them, all white-faced and shaking, but all alive. And they weren’t the only survivors. The Temple, whose indomitable walls had shut out the world for so long, had opened its gates to Acre’s citizens. Men and women, rich and poor, they thronged the courtyard in a fretful mass. There were thousands of them.

“Will!”

He looked around as his name was called, but couldn’t see anyone he recognized.

“Will!”

He turned in a circle, staring about him, until he saw someone pushing through the crowds to his right. It was Simon. In his arms was a girl. Her gold hair hung loose around her shoulders; her face was sooty, eyes blinking bewilderedly around her. It was Rose. She cried out as she saw him and stretched out her arms, one of which was blistered and red. Will rushed to her, sweeping her up.

“She woke after you’d gone,” Simon was saying. “I was carrying her and she started speaking. Gave me the fright of my life!”

But Will wasn’t listening. Holding his daughter to him, feeling her body shuddering with grief against his, he sank to the ground.

48

The Temple, Acre 25 MAY A.D. 1291

The tunnel was dark and dank. The splashing of feet through the water-logged ground echoed off the walls, along with the whisper of many breaths and the muffled crying of children. Torchlight flickered agitatedly in the air, which smelled of salt and dampness. Over two hundred people moved in the pool of light. Many were dazed, some were quietly weeping, others were grim and silent.

At the head strode Theobald Gaudin with several officials and the seneschal. Behind them, twelve sergeants pulled handcarts filled with the Temple’s treasury and the order’s documents. Coins, holy relics, jewels, golden chalices, rings and books—all were stacked into the carts. Following the treasury were forty-two knights, twenty-seven sergeants and a few priests. Bringing up the rear were over one hundred of Acre’s refugees. In this group, Will walked in silence, staring rigidly ahead. To his left was Robert, a freshly stitched scar carving a line across his forehead. To his right was Simon. The groom’s broad face was white, but he moved staunchly at Will’s side, glancing at him every so often, then around at Rose, walking behind with Elias, clutching the rabbi’s hand and staring after her father. Her burned arm had been treated with a poultice and bandaged with fresh linen, but her face was smudged with dirt and she still wore the singed traveling cloak she had been wearing when Garin pulled her from the house. She had hardly spoken a word since then.

Will saw Simon’s expression and, reading his thoughts, glanced back at Rose. He met her stunned eyes briefly, then fixed his eyes forward. It would change, he knew, in time. But after the overwhelming relief of finding Rose alive, he had discovered that when he now looked at her all he saw was Elwen, her beautiful face a screaming mask of fear and agony as she burned alive, over and over, in his mind. The image threatened to tear him apart, and there had simply been too much to do for him to be able to let it. And so, his grief locked inside him, he had left his daughter in Elias’s care and battled on, hardly eating or sleeping.