Knights of the Black and White (50 page)

Before anyone else tried to enter that section of tunnel, he knew, all the rubble blocking it would have to be cleared away, allowing fresh air to penetrate the space and make it habitable, but he felt no driving urge to leap up and tackle the task immediately. He had come close to panicking while he was scrambling out of there, fighting off waves of nausea and dizziness as he struggled to draw a breath, and he was content, for the time being, to relish the pleasure of simply breathing clean air. Farther back along the tunnel behind him, he could hear voices and rumbling wheels as his shift mates, Montdidier and de Rossal, worked at emptying the last trolley he had sent back to them, so he knew that, despite the disorientation caused by his misadventure, he had not been long away from his work. His stomach tightened and heaved without warning, and he rolled onto all fours and vomited up the foulness of whatever it was that had almost overcome him. Then, feeling better, he rolled onto his back, looking up at the arched roof as he concentrated upon breathing deeply and regularly, enjoying the cool, clear air, seemingly far more fresh than usual, that was flowing from somewhere nearby.

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A short time later his hand moved to his breast, where the blue stone bauble now hung from a string about his neck, and he began to rub the smooth surface gently between his thumb and his forefinger, his attention drifting away from his surroundings. He had not turned the jewel over to Brother Godfrey as he should have at the end of his shift the day he found it, and even as he had walked by him, he had wondered at his own behavior. He had no intention of stealing the thing; that thought had not occurred to him at all. The jewel held no value for him, or for any of his brothers, unless they might wish to sell it, which would have been sheer madness. St. Clair felt no lust to own it, and no desire even to look at it, for in the permanent semi-darkness of his sleeping quarters its beauty would have been invisible.

The simple truth was that he had found something formlessly comforting in the smoothness of its texture between his fingers, and he had decided that he did not wish to part with it straightaway. The thing itself was a mere trinket, with no intrinsic worth, but it gave him solace, so he was content that he had committed no sin in temporarily keeping it for himself. He did not permit himself to wonder why he should need solace, but he did tell himself frequently that he was doing no wrong.

There had been moments throughout that time, however, when his conscience had bothered him, because do what he would, his mind kept throwing up whispered reminders of oaths and vows undertaken, and it did little good to attempt, at such moments, to rationalize the underlying logic of his stance. That had been bothering him Confessions

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increasingly, and now he thought of it again, hearing de Rossal’s harsh, characteristic bark of laughter in the distance as Montdidier made a jest of some kind.

He and his eight brethren of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ, supported and sustained by their sergeant brothers, had built themselves a rock-solid reputation over the years they had spent as warrior monks here in Jerusalem. They were generally perceived as being friends and valuable allies of the Church authorities, dependable, lacking in worldly ambitions, and therefore trustworthy in a world where few men inspired or deserved trust. The Patriarch Archbishop relied upon them heavily for the protection of the growing streams of pilgrims forever coming to the city, and King Baldwin made no secret of the fact that the activities of the brotherhood, to whom he referred as “his” monks, greatly simplified his task of defending his borders and maintaining what he called “the peace of Christ” within his domain.

St. Clair found that ironic, and he frequently wondered how his brethren felt about it, although he had never spoken of it with any of them. An unwritten law had come into existence since their formation here in Jerusalem forbidding them to discuss any of the things that marked them as being different from others, save in the conclave of their ritual Gatherings as the Order of Rebirth. Even there, however, the irony of their situation was never mentioned, since the Gatherings occurred so seldom nowadays and the need for absolute security was serious enough to ban any discussion of sensitive Order-related topics. There were too many ears around, and too 484

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little real privacy within the stables, to permit regular Gatherings. One day, perhaps, they might be able to acquire secure, defensible quarters in which they could safely conduct their rites and ceremonies, but in the meantime they lived together each and every day, their behavior and their way of life constant reminders of their duties and responsibilities. That awareness, allied with the risks of being overheard by profane ears, ensured that they did not speak among themselves of the things that only they knew.

Stephen St. Clair, however, could not stop marveling at the contradictory nature of their very existence, and he spent much of his time thinking about the cold reality, and the staggering cynicism, involved in being a warrior monk.

“What’s wrong with you?”

The voice startled him, and he opened his eyes to find Montdidier staring down at him. Stephen grunted and hoisted himself onto one elbow, then pointed to the tiny space at the top of the slide.

“I went—” He was surprised to find that his tongue and lips were coated with thick, powdery dust. He spat, drily and with great difficulty, and tried uselessly to moisten his lips with his tongue before speaking again. This time his voice emerged as a dust-blurred croak. “I went through there. The air’s foul.”

Montdidier looked up at the narrow strip of blackness. “Idiotic thing to do, my friend. You would have had my hide had you caught me doing such a thing.

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Here, drink.” He handed St. Clair his flask of water.

“What’s back there?”

St. Clair rinsed his mouth and spat, then swallowed a mouthful of water before passing the flask back. “A stretch of empty tunnel. I broke through into it, then crawled in to see how long it was, but I had to turn back before I could see anything. We’ll have to clear the entrance and let the air change before we go inside.”

“That was a fool’s trick, Brother. You know better than to do a thing like that without calling for support before you go in. Are you all right?”

“I will be in a few moments. But I thank you.”

“Hmm. I thought it was taking a long time for you to send down the next truck, so I came up to see what you were doing. You’re absolutely thick with dust—did you know that? Caked with it. Even your face.”

St. Clair scrubbed at one cheek with the back of his hand, feeling the coating on his skin. “It’s from the rubble, where I crawled through … it’s like flour in there.”

Montdidier shrugged, unimpressed. “Well, I’m glad you’re not as bad as you look. I thought you were dead when I saw you lying there. Looked like you’d been turned to stone. But then I saw you breathing. That foul air can kill you faster than you can snatch a breath—you know that. You could have been dead even before I thought of coming to look.”

“Help me up, I’m fine.” Montdidier hauled him to his feet and St. Clair brushed off the worst of the dust that coated him, then retrieved his shovel and was back 486

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to work before the other man had begun to walk away, and as he shoveled, he forgot about the space behind the rubble and began to think again about what had been preoccupying him earlier, the great secret of his Order and its place within the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Cynicism was what he had been thinking about when Montdidier interrupted his thoughts, and now he returned to thinking of it, acknowledging that hypocrisy had walked hand in hand with it in the inauguration of the fighting monks of the Temple Mount, and that, irrespective of the noble motivations underlying their establishment, he and his fellow monks were living a lie simply by being here, pretending to be Christian while they searched surreptitiously for evidence that could destroy the Christian faith. What else, he asked himself wryly, could that attitude encompass besides hypocrisy?

St. Clair knew, although he seldom stopped to think about it, that he was one of the rarest of rarities in his own age—a literate, educated knight who had been gently reared within a good and devoutly Christian environment. He had spent much of his youth in the company of the small, devout fraternity of monks who lived and labored industriously on a small corner of his father’s lands and who adopted the boy as their special favorite, much as they might have taken in a stray dog.

As they began to see young Stephen’s potential, the monks grew serious in tending to his education, so that the youngster spent fully half of his time with them, absorbing what they taught him, and the remainder of each day with his father’s veteran master-at-arms, Pachim of Confessions

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Arles, who had elected to see to the boy’s military education in person. Learning from both sources, Stephen had been taught, as a matter of course, to be ethical, judi-cious, and temperate in everything he undertook, and now that he was a full-blown knight with duties of his own, he frequently found himself recalling those days and wondering when the magic that had illuminated them died. He knew that disillusionment had killed it, if magic it had been, and that it had occurred long before he joined the Order of Rebirth and, hand-picked, had set sail for Outremer, at the direct order of Count Hugh of Champagne.

As a young knight, from the moment he came of age to bear arms, Stephen had lived and served as an ordinary knight-at-arms in the service of Count Hugh, although he had never set eyes upon the Count. But the experience, to which he had looked forward with keen pleasure, had been disastrous, and Stephen had been appalled by the casual and mindless depravity, the venality, and the corruption of his fellow knights. None of them, he quickly came to see, betrayed the slightest interest in anything other than the pursuit of pleasure and satiation.

Their entire lives were dedicated to armed violence and to the violation of women, with rape and ravishment accepted as part of the reward for serving in the armies. He was sufficiently disgusted to give serious consideration to joining the fraternity of his friends the monks, but bound by his feudal duty to his liege lord and driven by the need to be scrupulous and exact in fulfilling his commitments, he had first sought out Count Hugh in person and 488

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explained why he wished to do such an unheard-of thing in forsaking the world of arms for that of prayer.

Count Hugh, astonished as he had seldom been, had taken close notice of this remarkable young man, knowing already that St. Clair was a firstborn son of one of the Friendly Families. Discovering soon afterwards—for he launched immediate enquiries—that St. Clair had been approved several years earlier for admission into the Order of Rebirth, but had left home to travel and fight abroad before he could be initiated, the Count had promptly set about arranging matters so that the Order could benefit from the young knight’s sterling abilities, a melding of the radically opposed professions of arms and the priesthood, by using him for its own purposes in Outremer. At that time, Hugh himself had but recently returned to his county in Champagne from Jerusalem, and he was one of the handful of men in the entire world who knew that the Order’s purposes there had multiplied in recent years, since the revolution initiated by Warmund de Picquigny when he formed the Patriarch’s Patrol.

Since the early beginnings of knighthood, there had been little love lost between churchmen and the warrior class, and the differences between the two estates had widened since then. The knights of Christendom, only nominally Christian at the best of times, knew no containment and nothing of moderation, and they had no fear of reprisals for anything they did, since reprisals, when all was said and done, entailed fighting, and fighting was the be-all and the end-all of their existence. There were countless thousands of them, each a law unto himself, and Confessions

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until Pope Urban had conscripted all of them to free the Holy Land from the grip of the infidel Muslim, they had threatened all of Christendom with utter anarchy.

Nowadays, the Holy Land was filled with knights, few of whom bore any resemblance to Christians in the traditional sense, removed as they were from any vestigial remnants of the civilizing influences of wives, families, and social responsibilities. They were warriors all, and savage in the way of warriors. Many of them were guilty of heinous crimes, both at home and in Outremer, and most of them were still so ungovernable that until the formation by Warmund de Picquigny of the new order of warrior monks in Jerusalem, no sane person would have believed that such a thing would ever be possible. Until the Patriarch Archbishop took that unprecedented step, no cleric had ever been permitted to bear weapons, let alone take human life. The fifth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” was unequivocal, and its application universal.

Warmund de Picquigny, however, had viewed things from a different and greatly troubled perspective: that of a senior prelate faced with the apparently hopeless task of protecting an entire patriarchy against destruction by a hostile, anti-Christian presence that surrounded it.

Spurred by urgent and unrelenting need, he had applied some moral definitions of his own that were both radical and innovative, bluntly stating that men sworn to the service of God must, by definition, have a Christian duty to defend their God and His works against faithless unbelievers who sought to destroy His servants in His 490

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earthly kingdom. The Patriarch had, in effect, pro-pounded a justification for creating a new breed of churchmen, making it not merely forgivable but laudable for priests and monks to fight and kill other men in the name of God and His Holy Church, and it was clear that, as Patriarch Archbishop of Jerusalem, he saw neither cynicism nor hypocrisy in such a blatant warping of rules, cri-teria, and interdictions that had existed for centuries in order to suit the political exigencies of the moment.