Jack Whyte - Standard of Honor

André, carrying his steel helm, and with his mailed hood unlaced to bare his head, had been making his way from crowd to crowd of worshippers, searching for Alec, and managing to look devout and intent as he deftly avoided stopping anywhere, but as he emerged into one area that had a higher concentration of torchlight than any other, it registered upon his awareness that the smell of incense was thicker here, the light stronger and the clothing of the celebrants, including no fewer than three officiating bishops, was of a much richer quality than anything he had seen before. He saw a concentration of clean and brilliant red-crossed white surcoats on his left and recognized Sir Robert de Sablé among them, unmistakable in his magnificent Grand Master’s mantle of thick white woven wool with the plain black, equal-armed cross on front and rear. Alec Sinclair stood beside the Grand Master, and André began to swerve towards them, but he stopped abruptly when he saw the King standing on de Sablé’s other side, and on Richard’s left, the two Queens, Berengaria and Joanna Plantagenet, with their women clustered behind them.

Because of the angle from which he had begun to approach them, no one in the royal grouping had seen him moving, but something in the way he froze caught Joanna’s attention, and she turned her head and looked right at him. André did not even have time to lower his head, and so he merely lowered his eyes, hoping that, from where she was, he would blend into the mass of faces behind him. He kept his eyes cast down for a count of five, highly conscious of how slowly time was passing, then looked up again to find her staring at him still, a slight frown marring the smoothness of her forehead. Willing himself then not to move a muscle or react in any way, knowing that if he did he would tighten her focus on him, he lowered his eyes again slowly and counted once again to five and then to ten, reciting to himself a litany of reasons why she should not be expected to recognize him: she had never seen him in the full Templar uniform, and when she had seen him, he had been clean shaven and his hair had been long and unkempt, befitting an unranked novice, whereas now his head was cropped short and he wore a heavy growth of beard. By his estimation, she was unlikely to remember him, but yet she plainly had recognized something about him, even if she had not placed him absolutely. He raised his eyes again, slowly, and felt a great surge of relief to see that she was no longer frowning at him, although she was still frowning, her eyes moving now over the other faces around him. He watched her then, willing her to look away, and soon she did, turning back towards the altar at the front. He decided he had best move away to stand in a different place on the fringe of the crowd, resolving to wait until later before speaking to Alec.

He did not leave immediately, however. Confident now that he had not been recognized and that Joanna would not be able to pick him out among the crowd again, he eased himself up onto a nearby stone and looked his fill upon the two Queens, neither one of whom, it seemed to him, had suffered even slightly from the privations of living in a military encampment. Berengaria in particular looked superb; queenly and self-possessed, radiant and manifestly content, she showed no slightest indication that she might be the wife of a man whose complete disinterest in women was a matter for jest and public commentary. Looking at her now, and noting the hectic flush upon her cheeks, André fancied that he saw her glance sideways towards a fine-looking young guardsman who stood vigilantly by her side, approximately one step ahead of her, and he looked more closely at the man, noting the stalwart, upright stance, the held head high, and the defiant ardor with which his bearing proclaimed his devotion to his duty as the Queen’s Guard.

Amused, but not at all surprised, André moved his eyes to where Joanna stood, as prominent as though she were alone, although surrounded by a crowd. Joanna Plantagenet, he thought, not for the first time, was a remarkable and attractive woman. It was plain to see that she, too, was not lacking in physical affection or attention, although try as he would, he could gain no inkling of who, if anyone, among the crowd might be the recipient of her favors. He found it surprisingly easy to smile at his own wonderings and to accept and then dismiss the fact that he might have enjoyed those charms. With one last, lingering look at the slim, upright figure, with its thrusting breasts and closely draped waist and hips, he tilted himself wryly towards asceticism, if not outright chastity, and decided to make his way back to his own marshaling area.

With his thoughts thus busy on carnal matters, André had almost forgotten about another gaze that he wished to avoid, and before he stepped down from the stone he was perched on, he felt, more than saw, the King’s eyes fixed upon him. He would never know whether the iciness in Richard’s baleful stare was an expression of regal rancor or of his own consciousness of having crossed and disappointed the King—something his father had warned him never to do—in the matter of Berengaria. Aware of some safety in the physical distance between them, André held the King’s gaze for a long moment, feeling courageous as he did so, yet simultaneously conscious of a deep dread, spawned by a nagging doubt about his responsibility to the man who was once his hero, in spite of everything he knew about him now.

It was Richard who looked away first, leaving André to rejoin his comrades with a sickening sense of having been irrevocably cast out, for better or for worse.

As soon as the Masses were concluded, camp-breaking stepped up to a frenzy as thousands of tents were laid out and uniformly folded before being loaded on the baggage train. The great siege engines had been dismantled and mounted on their transport platforms weeks earlier, after the surrender of the city, and armies of sappers and engineers had been busy for the previous few days manhandling them into position for the march to the south. They had then moved forward with them the day before, so that they were already several miles ahead of the army that would follow. There was much coming and going of traffic between the marshaling points and the Acre harbor, too, as barges pulled in to the piers to be heavily laden with foodstuffs and weaponry in preparation for the journey down the coastline, paralleling the army’s line of advance along the ancient coast road built by the Roman legions before the time of the Caesars.

But eventually everything was laden, the troops were drawn up in their formations, the last of the encampments were dismantled and the latrines filled in, and to a great, brazen rally of trumpets, the first ranks of the advancing host wheeled into place and struck out along the road to Jerusalem.

TWO DAYS LATER, after a slow and uneventful march in which they covered less than ten miles, marching in the cool of the morning and avoiding the sun in the afternoon, André St. Clair finally met with his cousin. He had decided to stay well away from Alec on the march and to leave it to his cousin to seek him out when he had time, for there was an ever-present danger of encountering Richard in the area surrounding the Templars’ tent and de Sablé’s own pavilion, and André had no wish to court the possibility of a casual encounter with his former liege. He was unsure of how he might react on meeting his father’s killer face to face, be he king or no. And so it was Alec who found him, sitting alone on the ground close by his tent and free, for the time being, from the presence of any of his squadron, his closest neighbors almost twenty feet away, a significant degree of privacy in the middle of an army that numbered tens of thousands.

“I brought wine,” Alec said in lieu of greeting, lobbing a full skin into André’s hastily outstretched hands and then looking around him in surprise. “Where’s your squadron? Did you lose them?”