Poul Anderson: Death and the Knight

Fulk sighed. After their years together, Hugues knew that seldom-heard sound. An inward sadness had whispered past the stern mask.

"We may speak freely," Fulk said. "These are trusty men, who will keep silence. I have dismissed everyone else."

"Could we not always speak our minds, you and I?" Hugues blurted.

"Of late, I wonder," Fulk answered. "But we shall see." After a moment: "At last, we shall see."

Hugues clenched his fists, forced them open again, and said as levelly as he was able, "Never did I lie to you. I looked on you as not only my superior, not only my brother in the Order, but my—" His voice broke. "My friend," he finished.

The knight bit his lip. Blood trickled forth into the beard.

"Why else would I warn you of danger afoot?" Hugues pleaded. "I could have departed and saved myself. But I warn you anew, Fulk, and beg you to escape while time remains. In less than three days now, the ax falls."

"You were not so exact before," the other man said without tone.

"The hour was not so nigh. And I hoped—"

Fulk's hand chopped the protest short. "Have done!" he cried.

Hugues stiffened. Fulk began pacing, back and forth, like one in a cage. He bit off his words, each by each.

"Yes, you claimed a certain foresight, and what you said came to pass. Minor though those things were, they impressed me enough that when you hinted at a terrible morrow, I passed it on in a letter to my kinsman — after all, we know charges are being raised against us. But you were never clear about how you got your power. Only in these past few days, thinking, have I seen how obscure was your talk of Moorish astrologic lore and prophetic dreams." He halted, confronting his suspect, and flung, "The Devil can say truth when it fits his purposes. Whence comes your knowledge, you who call yourself Hugues Marot?"

The younger man made the sign of the cross. "Lawful, Christian—"

"Then why did you not tell me more, tell me fully what to await, that I might go to the Grand Master and all our brothers have time to make ready?"

Hugues lifted his hands to his face. "I could not. Oh, Fulk, dear friend, I cannot, even now. My tongue is locked. What I–I could utter — that little was forbidden — But you know me!"

Starkness responded. "I know you would have me flee, saying naught to anyone. At what peril to my soul, that I break every pledge I ever swore and abandon my brethren in Christ?" Fulk drew breath. "No, brother, if brother you be, no. I have arranged that you are under my command for the next several days. You shall remain here, sequestered, secret from all but myself and these your warders. Then, if indeed the king strikes at us, I can perhaps give you over to the Inquisition — a sorcerer, a fountainhead of evil, whom the Knights of the Temple have discovered among themselves and cast from them—"

The breath sobbed. Pain stretched the face out of shape. "But meanwhile, Hugues, I will hourly pray, with great vows, pray that you prove innocent — merely mistaken, and innocent of all save love. And can you then forgive me?"

He stood for a moment. When he spoke again, the words tolled. "It is for the Order, which we have plighted our loyalty under God. Raoul, Jehan, take him away."

Tears glistened on Hugues's cheekbones. The guards entered. He had no weapon but a knife. With a convulsive movement, he drew it and offered it hilt foremost to Fulk. The knight kept his hands back and it dropped on the floor. Mute, Hugues went off between the men. As he walked, he gripped a small crucifix that hung about his neck, symbol and source of help from beyond this world.

Manse Everard returned to Wanda Tamberly near sunset. Light streamed through the Golden Gate. From their suite they saw cable cars go clanging down toward the waterfront, islands and the farther shore rising steep from a silver-blue bay, sails like wings of some wandering flock. They had hoped to be out there themselves.

When he came in, she read his battered face and said quietly, "You're on a new mission, aren't you?"

He nodded. "It was pretty clear that was what HQ had in mind when Nick phoned."

She could not keep all resentment out of her voice. Their time together had been less than two months. "They never leave you alone, do they? How many other Unattached agents has the Patrol got, anyway?"

"Nowhere near enough. I didn't have to accept, you know. But after studying the report, I did have to agree I'm probably the best man available for this job." That was what had kept him since morning. The report was the equivalent of a library, most of it not text or audiovisual but direct brain input — history, language, law, customs, dangers.

"Ol' noblesse oblige." Wanda sighed. She met him, laid her cheek on his breast, pressed close against the big body. "Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Get it done and pop back to the same hour you tell me good-bye, you hear?"

He grinned. "My idea exactly." He stroked the blond hair. "But look, I don't have to leave right away. I would like to get it behind me" — on his intricately looping world line—"but let's first make whoopee from now through tomorrow night."

"Best offer I've had all day." She raised her lips toward his and for a while the only sound in the room was murmurs.

Stepping back at last, she said, "Hey, that was fine, but before we get down to serious business, suppose you explain what the hell your assignment is." Her voice did not sound altogether steady.

"Sure," he answered. "Over beer?" When she nodded, he fetched two Sierra Nevada Pale. She settled down on the couch with hers. Restless, he kept his feet and loaded his pipe.

"Paris, early fourteenth century," he began. "A field scientist, Hugh Marlow by name, has gotten himself in deep yogurt and we need to haul him out." Speaking English rather than Temporal, he perforce used tenses and moods ill-suited to chronokinetics. "I've had medieval European experience." She shivered slightly. They had shared a part of it. "Also, he's my contemporary by birth — not American: British, but a twentieth-century Western man who must think pretty much like me. That might help a bit." A few generations can make aliens of ancestor and descendant.

"What kind of trouble?" she asked.

"He was studying the Templars, there in France where they were centered at the time, though they had chapters all over. You remember who they were?"

"Just vaguely, I'm afraid."

Everard struck fire to tobacco, drank smoke, and followed it with ale. "One of the military religious orders founded during the Crusades. After those failed, the Templars continued to be a power, almost sovereign, in fact. Besides war, they went in for banking, and ended up mainly doing that. The outfit got hog-rich. Apparently, though, most of its members stayed pretty austere, and many remained soldiers or sailors. They made themselves unpopular, being a hard and overbearing lot even by the standards of that era, but they seem to have been essentially innocent of the charges that were finally brought against them. You see, among other things King Philip the Fair wanted their treasury. He'd wrung all the gold he could out of the Jews and Lombards, and his ambitions were huge. The Pope, Clement V, was his creature and would back him up. On October thirteenth, 1307, every Templar in France who didn't manage a getaway was arrested in a set of very well-organized surprise raids. The accusations included idolatry, blasphemy, sodomy, you name it. Torture produced the confessions the king wanted. What followed is a long and complicated story. The upshot was that the Templar organization was destroyed and a number of its members, including Grand Master Jacques de Molay, were burned at the stake."