Jack Whyte - Order in Chaos

Jessica swallowed the last, thoroughly chewed mouthful of the tasteless bannock and allowed herself to think for a moment of the crusty French bread that she had loved so much when she lived in France. But she was concerned for her host more than anything else, for St. Valéry had been sitting silent now for the better part of half an hour, gazing vacantly out at the sea, and his face was lined and tired looking in a way that she now thought had little to do with his sickness.

“You miss him greatly.” She had spoken in her own tongue, but St. Valéry had understood the idiom and responded in his heavily accented, almost distorted English.

“Hmm?” He looked at her with one eyebrow slightly raised. “Miss whom?”

She reverted to French. “Forgive me. I thought … for a moment there, I was convinced you were thinking of your friend Master de Thierry. But I spoke without thinking and I had no wish to intrude upon—”

He smiled, his eyes clouded with what she decided was regret. “There is no need. You are correct. I was thinking of Arnold. Such a cruel end to a noble life …”

“Tell me about him, for I did not know him well. What I knew, I admired, but you and he were friends for a long time, no?”

His smile remained in place and he dipped his head gently to one side. “Yes, we were, for a very long time …” She was beginning to think he would say no more, but then he continued, as though musing aloud. “They called us the Twins— les jumeaux —did you know that?”

Her eyes widened. “No. Why?”

He turned his hands in towards each other in a very Gallic gesture denoting bemusement and ignorance at once. “Because we looked alike, I suppose, for so many years. We wore the same mantle, as commanders of the Temple, and the same armor beneath it. Our personal insignia were different but not noticeably so, and I have been told many times that we were often indistinguishable from a distance, both of the same height and physique, with the same bearing—the result of many years of the Order’s training and discipline. And naturally, both of us wore the same tonsure and were gray-bearded these past ten years and more …” His smile became a grin. “Of course, we were not supposed to know what the brethren called us. None of them would ever have dared to refer to us as the Twins within the hearing of either one of us, so we pretended to be unaware.

“We joined the Order together on the same day, you know. On the island of Cyprus, the fourth day of July in 1276, thirty-one years ago … And we had met each other for the first time mere days before that, aboard the galley that took us there as postulants. It picked us up in Rhodes and carried us to Limassol, and from the moment we met, we became, and we remained, close friends.”

He turned and stretched out his booted legs on his own side of the table, twisting his body to sit up straighter and drawing the folds of his heavy mantle around him. “Arnold was twenty-one years old at that time—I myself was five and twenty—and he was already widowed, having lost both wife and son in childbirth. But he was filled with fire and zeal for our Order and its mission, and he became one of the Temple’s most honored knights, spending fifteen years on constant campaign in the Holy Land before taking part in the final siege of Acre in 1291.”

“He was at Acre and survived?”

“Yes and no. He was gravely wounded in the earliest stages of the fighting, long before the end, and was shipped out by sea to the island of Rhodes, where he eventually recovered under the care of the Hospitallers. But in the meantime, Acre fell and our presence in the Holy Land came to an end.”

“And what about you, Admiral? Where were you when all this was going on?”

“I was at sea, where else? I spent my entire life at sea before becoming shore-based in La Rochelle. I was born into a powerful mercantile family, as you know, since you were wed into it, and because of that, when I joined the Order at five-and-twenty, I was assigned to the fleet. And there I remained.”

“So how did you come to La Rochelle?”

“Because of my friendship with Arnold. And then, too, since we are speaking the truth here, there was the matter of our superiors’ collective common sense. It was a matter of compatibility, at root. La Rochelle is the Order’s primary base, its center of operations, and it serves two masters in situ , two commanders who must interact with each other from day to day—the land-based preceptor and his naval counterpart. Ideally, these two should know, like, respect, and admire each other and be equally dedicated, above all else, to the ongoing welfare of the Order.

“Unfortunately, because such is human nature, that is not always possible to achieve. There are very few highly placed equals, it appears, who genuinely like, respect, and admire each other to the extent that they can share command without jealousy. Personal ambition has a way of confounding such arrangements.” He shrugged again, in self-deprecation. “Because of that, the long-standing friendship between Arnold and myself—together with the reputations we had each achieved, of course—recommended us to our superiors. There was no jealousy between us, and we enjoyed joint stewardship in La Rochelle for more than ten years. Ten wonderful years.”

He glanced out into the body of the ship and raised a hand to summon a crewman, signaling to him to clear away the remains of their meal, and both of them sat watching as the man removed the leftovers and another folded the small table and took it away.

When they were alone again, facing each other across the space where the table had been, Jessica asked, “What will you do now?”

He looked at her levelly. “I am considering a quest.”

“A quest? We are already on a quest, to deliver your Order’s Treasure to safety in Scotland, and to deliver my treasure safely to the King of Scots.”

His lips quirked in what might have been the beginnings of a smile, but he shook his head. “What you are defining is a task, not a quest, and that particular task can be effectively carried out by others, without my participation.”

He left that hanging in the air, tantalizing her and piquing her curiosity so that she frowned slightly, trying to decipher his meaning.

“That is … cryptic.”

The admiral met her gaze without blinking, his intelligent blue eyes revealing nothing except their own brilliant color. She waited for a moment, to see if he would respond, and then decided that he was waiting for her to continue. She cleared her throat and glanced away for a moment, looking out towards the horizon to give herself time to think of what she should say next. If he had a quest in mind, it must lie at their journey’s end.

“This quest you speak of must then lie ahead of you, in Scotland … Have you been in Scotland?”

St. Valéry smiled slowly, the crow’s-foot wrinkles at the edges of his eyes the only sign that he was doing so, for the wind was ruffling the hair of his beard and moustache, obscuring his mouth.

“I have never been in Scotland, and I have no wish to go there now. I have been to England, twice, and have no wish to go there, either. I speak a very small amount of English, very badly, as you know, but the Scots tongue to me is unintelligible gibberish.”

She knew he was teasing her, for she had heard him say the same thing to her husband, years earlier, but she chose to humor him. “That is not unusual. Many of the people in Scotland speak gibberish in the ears of the others.

We have several languages, and several different groups of so-called Scots—Northmen, Gaels, Norwayans, and the oldest of all, the ones the Romans called the Picti, the Painted People.”

“Do any of your differing groups ever talk to one another?”