Knights of the Black and White (48 page)

There was a long silence during which de Payens sat gazing at the younger knight, seeing his obvious and genuine misery, and in the course of it another of their number, Archibald St. Agnan, came to the door and hovered on the threshold, looking from one to the other of 460

KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK AND WHITE

them and clearly realizing that there was something going on between them that was not for his ears. He raised an eyebrow at de Payens, who shook his head gently and sent him on his way with a wave of the hand. De Payens turned back to St. Clair.

“You said ‘before this began.’ Do you remember when it began? Is there a specific date or event in your mind associated with its onset?”

St. Clair sighed. “No, nothing that clear. But it began after my … illness.”

“You mean your abduction.”

“Aye, abduction, illness. Whatever we call it. But it was after that that this began to happen to me.”

“But that was nigh on eight months ago. When did these dreams begin?”

“I don’t know, Master Hugh, but I think now it was perhaps three or even four months after my return. I was aware of … certain things, certain inconsistencies in my body’s functions. As time passed by, I grew more and more aware of them, because the incidence increased, from once or twice a month to three or four times, and then to once a week, and twice a week. Now, as I have said, it is nightly, and I have no control over myself. I am possessed.”

De Payens rose to his feet and began to pace the room, his hands clasped behind his back, his chin sunk on his chest, and St. Clair sat staring straight ahead as the older man moved from side to side. Finally de Payens stopped and stood facing him. “I cannot help you with this, Brother Stephen. It is beyond my capabilities and Confessions

461

my experience. But I do not believe you are possessed, and so I want you to go and talk with the Patriarch, Archbishop Warmund. Tell him all you have told me. He will know far better than I how to help you. I am a mere knight, like you, a warrior, not a priest, and therefore I have no knowledge of possessions and such things.”

St. Clair’s face fell. “Aye, Master Hugh, but the Archbishop is a Christian. Have I need of Christian prayers now, think you, after so long without?”

“You have need of prayers, Brother, and of the understanding and assistance of a good and noble man who can intercede for you with his God, who is the same as your own. Our ancient Order has never quarreled with that kinship. Our concerns stem only from the misdirection that Christians have received from other men, over more than a millennium, concerning the allegations that the man called Jesus was the son of God Himself. That alone is the basis of our difference. Unfortunately, however, we suspect with good reason that it would quickly prove to be a lethal difference were it to come to light, and so our brotherhood has learned to live with the inevitable hypocrisies involved in being non-Christian yet living and behaving as Christians in a Christian world. It seems invidious and yet it is no more than simple self-preservation.”

He paused, mulling over his next thoughts, and finally added, “There is far more to it than that, of course, although few of us in the brotherhood ever appear to think about it. I am referring to our own strictest rule: one family member, at most, from each generation.” He looked 462

KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK AND WHITE

St. Clair directly in the eye. “I have lost many hours of sleep over that, from year to year, since joining the Order, and I still have not yet come to terms with it. Every man of our brotherhood has kinsmen, brothers, cousins, and friends among the Families—and I am not even referring to wives and female relatives—who do not belong to the Order and therefore live as Christians, never suspecting what we know to be true. And we live among them and they have no knowledge of who we truly are.

“Does that difference make us better men than they are? Does it disqualify them from being admirable, or make them lesser in any way? No, it does not. We know, through the Order, that they have been duped. But that is not a weakness, for the entire world, Christendom itself, grew out of that duplicity. And so, for the sake of our own sanity, we must accept that despite all the atrocities and abuses, the corruption and the disgraceful behavior that we see perpetrated around us in the name of Jesus Christ, this world is none the less peopled, by and large, with men of genuine goodwill, admirable men, governed by conscience and their own sense of propriety and the fitness of things.”

He squinted at St. Clair from beneath furrowed brows, then nodded decisively. “Such a man is Warmund de Picquigny. I have no slightest doubt of that. The error of his beliefs is unimportant in this matter, compared to the strength of his convictions and his personal integrity, and I am
equally
sure of that. And as your Master, I tell you that you may believe the same with absolute certainty. Do you have any doubts of that?”

Confessions

463

“No, Master Hugh.”

“Excellent. Then I will go now, today, to talk to him and ensure that he will see you as soon as may be. In the interim, I will ask you to spend the remainder of this day in prayer and wait for me to summon you. Now go, and be at peace. Archbishop Warmund will give you peace of mind, and if he feels you are indeed possessed, he will ex-orcise whatever demon dwells within you. Go now.”

TWO

The Patriarch Archbishop of Jerusalem stood musing by an open window, his right elbow supported on his left fist as he leaned against a wall, stroking his nose with the tip of one finger and gazing out absently into the courtyard by his chambers. Behind him, in the Archbishop’s private chapel, Hugh de Payens’s youngest knight knelt alone in front of the altar, awaiting the Archbishop’s return. The Patriarch, however, had no intention of returning before he had taken the time to decipher everything the young man had told him, and already he was faced with a mystery that he suspected might be insoluble. He knew beyond a doubt that young St. Clair was not possessed by devils. Bewitched, perhaps—and that thought, as it came to him out of nowhere, elicited a grim little twitch of one side of the Archbishop’s mouth.

464

Confessions

465

Although he was saddened by all St. Clair had told him, he was unsurprised, because it merely confirmed what he had suspected since the day of the young monk’s unexpected return. He had asked one particular question of his supplicant, a question about color, prompted by something St. Clair had said, and the response had confirmed his suspicions and made clear to him some, but not all, of the many frustrating elements of this situation.

Warmund de Picquigny now knew who had abducted St.

Clair, but he was utterly mystified as to what might have prompted the abduction.

From the hazy details of the young man’s ill-remembered dreams, and a specific color he had uncertainly recalled in response to the Patriarch’s probing question, the Archbishop had clearly identified the royal palace, the former al-Aqsa Mosque, as the place in which St. Clair had been held captive, and with that he had known that there was only one possible abductor: the King’s wayward and hardheaded daughter, Princess Alice. That was the source of Warmund’s present perplexity, for although he held absolutely no illusions about what kind of person the King’s daughter was, the Archbishop could see no sense of any kind in what he had just learned, unless the entire abduction and confinement had been dictated by sheer, unrequited lust. He could clearly remember the occasion on which he had rescued the unworldly young monk from Alice’s clutches, and he had seen how angry she was with him at the time for his interference. Even so, he could barely give credence to 466

KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK AND WHITE

the idea that Alice would go to such lengths simply to have her way with a complete innocent.

Alice le Bourcq, he knew beyond dispute, was a volup-tuary and a hedonist, never having known the restraints of life in Christendom. Born and raised in the East as a child spoiled by doting servants and an indulgent father, she had been accustomed early to the luxuries and the exotic pleasures she enjoyed so shamelessly. It made no sense, therefore, in any slightest, conceivable degree, that accustomed since infancy to all the pleasures and perfumed delights of the bathing habits of the Arabs and Turks among whom she lived, she would stoop to abduct a foul-smelling, dirt-encrusted, ascetic, and penniless knight monk, heroic and laudable though that monk may be in his military aspects. And it made even less sense that she would do so in secrecy, and then go to such extreme lengths as must have been necessary in order to ensure his safe return to his brethren, after having tortured him for the final weeks of his captivity. That, in de Picquigny’s estimation, was the final, imponderable facet of this puzzle. The Patriarch heaved a deep, heartfelt sigh and straightened up from his slouch.

Brother Stephen, de Picquigny could tell, was completely under Alice’s sexual thrall. The color—violet—that the knight had mentioned in connection with his dreams of fornication existed only in one place in all the Kingdom of Jerusalem, to the Patriarch’s certain knowledge: within the bedroom of the Princess Alice.

De Picquigny had no slightest doubt of that because it was he who had been instrumental in importing the Confessions

467

pigment from Italy, on behalf of the King, for the princess’s fourteenth birthday. It had been extraordinarily difficult to find and outrageously expensive to purchase, and they had imported only that sufficient for the princess’s needs.

De Picquigny also knew, from his spies, that the princess frequently used opiates and narcotics to enhance her physical pleasures, and he knew, too, from personal experience, how stunningly effective opiates could be. He had been thrown from a horse years earlier and suffered a massive and complex fracture of his left thigh bone, in which the splintered end of the bone had been driven through the flesh of his leg and had then refused to heal, leaving him in constant pain and in danger of death, should the wound turn gangrenous. The physicians had been powerless to do anything for him, and in desperation his staff had engaged the services of the famed Muslim physician Ibn Az-Zahir, of Aleppo. The Syrian physician had immediately ordered the application of opiates, and the dementing pain had abated within moments, to Warmund’s shocked but formidably grateful disbelief.

Warmund’s priestly colleagues, forgetting their former helplessness, had at once started muttering jealously about sorcery and witchcraft, but he quickly silenced them. He had known about opiates for years, he told them, from information gleaned from his wide-ranging reading. He knew that the Roman legionary surgeons and physicians had used opiates for hundreds of years, and he had read many examples of how their painkilling 468

KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK AND WHITE

powers had verged upon the magical. What he had not been able to imagine, until he experienced them for himself, was just how magically analgesic the opiates would prove to be. Under their influence he had lost all awareness, and all memory, of the pain from which they protected him.

But he had become addicted to them, too, and being weaned away from them once his wounds had healed was one of the most harrowing experiences he had ever known. Seeing the intense and debilitating sickness that the young knight monk had suffered in the days following his return, Warmund had recognized the symptoms of withdrawal that he himself had endured years earlier.

He had said nothing to anyone, merely intimating that he would pray for the young knight and that the man would regain his senses within a short time.

Now there was no doubt in the Archbishop’s mind that Stephen St. Clair had been abducted by the princess, for reasons known only to herself, and that he had been heavily drugged for the duration of his captivity.

The question bedeviling the Patriarch Archbishop at the moment was, what to do next? He could see no benefit at all in telling the young knight, or his fellow monks, what he now knew, because he knew St. Clair, hothead that he sometimes was, would be likely to go storming off in search of the princess, demanding an explanation, and that would lead to nothing but grief. Besides, if he were to inform the young man, or anyone else for that matter, that he had been abducted by the princess, he Confessions

469

would virtually guarantee the loss of all hope of discovering what underlay the abduction.

Pushing himself away from the window, the Archbishop moved to sit at the long work table against the eastern wall, where he sat drumming his fingers on the tabletop for a long time before he rose again and went to the chapel where St. Clair awaited him.

“These dreams, my son,” he said as he entered. “I have been thinking about them and about what you have gone through. You say you recall some of them clearly after awakening. Do you recall them with pleasure?”

The younger man had sprung to his feet as the Archbishop entered, and now his eyes went wide with consternation. “No, my lord Patriarch, I—”

“Do you anticipate them with pleasure before going to bed, or falling asleep?”

“No, my lo—”

“And do you compose your mind to accept the dreams before you fall asleep?”

“No—”

“I thought not, and I am glad of it. But I had to ask.”

St. Clair’s mouth hung slightly open and his brow was furrowed in incomprehension. Warmund beckoned with one hand.

“Come with me, if you will.”

He led the other man out of the chapel and into the room with the table, where he pulled out a chair for St.

Clair, bidding him sit, and perched himself on one corner of the table.

470

KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK AND WHITE

“You may have forgotten this,” he said, “but the primary constituent of a mortal sin—the single element without which there can
be
no sin—is
intent
. Intent to sin. And intent to sin entails two things: the clear recognition that a given course of action will result in the commission of a mortal sin, and a decision, after that, to go ahead and sin deliberately, despite that certain knowledge. Do you understand?”