Crusade (9 page)

“It’s been over two years since we’ve had a master with us,” responded Will. “You cannot deny it has raised morale.”

“But do they have to fuss so?” Robert, who was always impeccably neat, eyed his eager companions scornfully. “You would think the grand master has never seen dirt before. I mean, look at you.” He gestured at Will. “You haven’t combed your hair in weeks and your mantle’s blacker than a wolf’s mouth, but is he really going to care so long as you’re a good soldier?”

Will glanced down at himself as Robert looked away.

Tall and rather lanky as a boy, Will had filled out during his youth, until now, at twenty-nine, his chest was broader, his arms and shoulders more muscular and he moved with greater ease and confidence, as if he had finally grown into his skin. Like all Templar Knights, he was forbidden from shaving his beard, although he wore it clipped as short as he could get away with. After a month on the road, however, it was a little bushy. His hair was perhaps a bit unkempt, with black strands falling in his eyes and curling untidily around his ears. And Robert was right; his mantle really was filthy. Will went to brush at a smear of dust, then stopped himself as he caught his friend’s impish smirk. Folding his arms, he scanned the harbor.

The area was bustling as usual, although nowhere near as busy as it would be by Easter, when ships sheltering in ports all around the Mediterranean, Adriatic and Atlantic coasts would set out for the East, laden with pilgrims, soldiers and cargoes of wine and wool. The knights stood in neat formation on the dock wall, just in front of a wide stone jetty that sloped down to the water, where smaller boats could off-load cargo and passengers. Acre’s inner harbor was protected by a heavy iron chain, which could be raised to block the approach of enemy ships and was suspended across the water between a tower on the end of the western mole and the Court of the Chain on the harbor. The inner harbor was always crowded with the vessels of local merchants and fishermen, the larger ships having to moor in the outer harbor just off the crumbling eastern mole. In the distance, near the Tower of the Flies, which rose from the end of the mole, the Templar warship the galley had sailed from surged in the choppy waters. The white mainsail with its red cross had been lowered, but the Temple’s black-and-white banner fluttered madly from the mast.

The marshal, Peter de Sevrey, the Temple’s chief military official, left in charge during the grand master’s absence, was waiting in front of the company of knights. He was deep in conversation with one of the customs officers and Theobald Gaudin, the Temple’s grand commander. The seneschal was also there. Will made out his stiff, upright form. Behind the customs building, which dominated the dockside, the city walls stretched right and left; the massive iron gates that led into the city were open on the busy Pisan market. A confusion of sounds and smells drifted from the market to mingle with the shouts of fishermen hauling nets engorged with fish onto the harbor wall and the thick smell of pitch from a boat repairer’s. Seeing the Templar warship out in the bay and the knights arranged in stately formation, a small crowd had gathered, filtering through the city gates.

As Will’s eyes roved over the onlookers, his gaze was caught by a young girl. Uninterested in the approaching galley, she was playing with a ball, tossing it into the air and catching it. She was walking slowly, coming toward the knights. Will’s breath caught in his throat. He turned away sharply.

“What’s wrong?” asked Robert.

“Nothing.” Will glanced surreptitiously over his shoulder to check where she was. His heart stopped. The girl was looking straight at him.

Her eyes lit up and she grinned widely. “Weel!” She skipped over, the skirts of her yellow dress trailing over the damp stones, silvery with fish scales.

“Who the hell is that?” murmured Robert.

“Cover for me,” Will urged quietly, then stepped out of formation and went to meet her.

“She must be lost,” he heard Robert saying cheerily to the curious knights in their row. “Don’t worry, he’ll help her find her parents. Ever the good Samaritan, Will.”

The girl bounced up, her unruly hair flopping in her eyes. She flicked it back with a careless toss of her head and grinned. “Where you been? I’m not seeing you for weeks!” Her lilting Italian accent made her English sound foreign.

“What are you doing here, Catarina?” Will asked, steering her gently away from the knights. He looked worriedly over at the marshal and grand commander, but they were still talking with the customs officer and hadn’t noticed his departure from the ranks. Will led Catarina behind a stack of crates that were being loaded onto a merchant galley. The crewmen were stamping up and down the gangplanks. “Are you here on your own?” Will repeated the question slowly when Catarina frowned blankly.

“My sister,” Catarina said after a moment. “I here with Elisabetta.” She giggled and then dissolved into a stream of rapid Italian, which Will didn’t understand a word of.

“You should go to Elisabetta,” Will told her. “I have to get back.” He pointed to the knights.

Catarina pouted and flipped her ball into the air, catching it deftly. “You no come to my house? Elwen no working today.”

Will shook his head. “I cannot. Not now.” He bent so that he was eye level with Catarina. “Will Elwen be at home tomorrow?”

Catarina nodded after a pause. “Night.” She grinned slyly. “You kith her?” She frowned intently.
“Kiss.”

Will gave an embarrassed laugh. “Elwen’s taught you another new word, has she? Never mind,” he said as Catarina looked puzzled. “Tell Elwen I’ll come to her after Vespers tomorrow. Do you understand? After Vespers.”

“I tell her,” Catarina said solemnly. “I go now.” She threw a hand in the vague direction of the city wall.

Will saw a slender, raven-haired girl standing just inside the gates, talking with a woman. He recognized Elisabetta, the eldest daughter of the Venetian silk merchant, Andreas di Paolo. “Don’t tell your sister,” he reminded Catarina. “Or your father.” He watched as Catarina skipped off.

“Excuse me, sir.” A crewmen from the ship was wanting to get at one of the crates. He ducked his head, eyeing with a mixture of respect and fear Will’s mantle with its red cross.

“Sorry,” said Will, moving out of the way.

The crewman looked taken aback by the apology, then hauled a crate from the pile, swung it onto his shoulder and tramped up the gangplank.

Will never failed to be surprised or discomfited by the deferential attention his status attracted. On the inside, he was simply himself, the person he had always been. He sometimes forgot that to the outside world he was one of the noble elite, a warrior of Christ, who lived beyond secular laws and temporal desires, guarding the treasuries of kings and answering to the pope alone. But the world had no idea that behind that stainless visage, personified by the white mantle, he was as deceitful and weak as the rest of mankind when it came to certain matters. Will’s eyes followed Catarina as she disappeared through the gates. Matters of the heart, for instance.

He was about to head back to the company, when he saw that the marshal had turned in his direction. Will recoiled behind the crates with a curse. Between him and the knights were a few fishermen, the men loading the merchant vessel and a young man watching the galley approach. None of them would give him any substantial cover and in his uniform he stood out a mile. Will tried to think of a suitable excuse he could give for deserting the ranks. He looked over at Robert, who beckoned urgently. The galley had reached the jetty.

Two of the oarsmen leapt ashore to hold her steady as a man, who looked to be in his late thirties, jumped agilely out, declining their offered hands. Beneath his white mantle, he wore a surcoat, sectioned by a belt from which hung a broad-bladed sword in an ornate scabbard. His hair, which he wore in a tail, was long and dark, and a black beard framed his jaw. Will was too far away to see his face properly, but the cross on his mantle, outlined in gold, clearly marked his elevated status. He was Guillaume de Beaujeu, grand master of the Temple.

Related by birth to the royal house of France, Guillaume had been a member of the order since he was thirteen. During the past decade, he had been master of the Kingdom of Sicily, where his cousin, Charles d’Anjou, brother of the late French monarch, Louis IX, was king. The government of Acre had been awaiting Guillaume’s arrival with mixed emotions, for although he had a reputation as a shrewd military strategist and a dynamic leader, he was also one of Charles’s staunchest supporters. And the last thing the city needed, fractured as it was by the internecine wars of the past, was any furtherance in influence of the ambitious Sicilian king, whose current bid for the throne of Acre was already causing old rifts to widen.

Will lost sight of the grand master as the young man lingering on the dock wall moved into his line of vision. Four knights were dragging chests from the galley. Noticing someone come up alongside him, Will glanced around. A small boy was standing a few feet to his right, seemingly transfixed by the grand master. Will, deciding he could risk moving now everyone’s attention was on Guillaume de Beaujeu, was about to head across, when he noticed the young boy’s face. It was a mask of terror. His skin was ashen, his eyes large and unblinking. His hands were bunched into fists at his sides and he was quivering like a leaf in a storm. Will was stopped in his tracks. He looked to where the boy was staring, wondering what on earth could have frightened him so. But there was just the grand master, now striding up the jetty toward Peter de Sevrey, a couple of burly fishermen and the young man.

And then he saw it.

The young man’s right arm was pressed stiffly to his side, much like the boy’s, his hand covered with the sleeve of a shabby cloak. Protruding from the sleeve’s edge was the tip of something hard and silvery.

Will felt shock tighten the skin on his face as all his instincts sang out. The man’s position near the point where the jetty met the harbor wall between the waiting knights and the approaching grand master; his out-of-place look; the object concealed in his hand; the boy’s terror—all were wrong. In one moment, Will took this in, and then he was out from behind the crates and shouting at the marshal. The calls of the merchant vessel’s crew drowned out his words. Will began to run as the young man’s hand slipped from beneath the cloak’s sleeve, revealing a dagger. The grand master was almost at the wall.

Will knew he wasn’t going to make it. All eyes were on Guillaume de Beaujeu, apart from Robert’s, and he watched in amazement as Will ran across the dock, yelling. Wrenching his falchion from its scabbard, Will did the only thing he could. Halting to take aim, he flung the blade at the young man, who was darting forward. He heard a high-pitched scream somewhere behind him as the short blade went sailing out of his hand and flew, five, ten, fifteen feet.

The weapon landed with a ringing clang and skidded across the wall a few feet behind the heels of the young man. Will had missed. The man’s arm was coming up, the dagger a slice of silver cutting air. But the sword had caught the attention of the knights and they all now realized the danger. The face of the grand master changed as he saw the man bearing down on him. He reached for his weapon.

Two seconds later, just feet from the grand master, the young man was cut down by the marshal, who leapt forward, swinging his sword in a mighty stroke. The force of the blow, combined with the young man’s momentum, which drove him onto the razor edge of the arcing blade, almost cleaved him in two.

The knights were shouting, drawing swords, scanning the dockside for other attackers. The marshal wrenched his sword from the young man, who crumpled to the dockside like a string-cut puppet. There were screams as the onlookers on the harbor wall saw him go down, blood and ropes of intestines gushing free from the gaping wound in his stomach. The grand master’s guards had dropped the chests and now raced to surround him, and the grand commander was barking orders. By the time the young man’s life had drained, the grand master was being hastened across the harbor to where the entrance to the knights’ underground tunnel lay.

“I want witnesses questioned!” Peter de Sevrey shouted, bending down to rifle through the young man’s tatty cloak that was fanned out around him, sodden with blood.

Within moments, the dockside dissolved into chaos as knights moved to question the crowd. Some people tried to leave, not wanting to get involved. Others tried to get closer to see the body, and there was soon a crush at the city gates. The crew of the merchant’s vessel had stopped working and were watching on, and customs officers were running from their building.

Will turned to the boy by the crates. His gaze was still transfixed by the young man, but his expression was no longer one of terror. Tears were rolling down his cheeks, making tracks through dirt. He looked up and started as he saw Will staring at him, and then he was off. Shouting for him to stop, Will chased him, but the boy dove into the excited, babbling crowd and was gone. Will forced his way to the gates, where rumor of an attack on the grand master and a death on the dockside had whipped the crowd into a frenzy. He tried to get into the marketplace, but although his mantle would usually be enough to clear a respectful path, the area was so packed that even if the citizens wanted to get out of his way, they couldn’t. By the time Will squeezed through, the boy was nowhere to be seen.

6

The Temple, Acre 17 JANUARY A.D. 1276

It was approaching dusk when Will returned to the preceptory. The wind had blown tattered gaps in the clouds, and sky had appeared, pale blue in the east, bronze and vermilion in the west. Will stepped through the gates and entered the main quadrant to find the place buzzing with talk of the attack. Knights had gathered outside the officials’ building, behind which rose the white towers of the grand master’s palace. They were speaking in fast, if decorously hushed voices, those who had been on the dockside describing what had happened to absent comrades. The sergeants, particularly the younger ones, were milling about in an agitated group outside the great hall gabbling loudly. As Will walked across the yard, a knight strode over and ordered them to return to their duties. With just a few snapped commands, the group disbanded, the sergeants hurrying off to see to horses or help prepare supper in the kitchens, or to light candles in the chapel for the evening office of Vespers.