Jack Whyte: Standard of Honor

“You there! Templar! Stand where you are.”

St. Clair reined in and saw that the speaker, or the shouter, was a Hospitaller, flanked by a pair of crossbowmen, each of whom was pointing a heavy arbalest uphill at him. He dropped the reins on his mount’s neck and raised both hands above his head.

“Come down. Slowly.”

André lowered his hands and nudged his horse forward and sideways, picking the easiest route down and highly aware of the arbalests pointed at him. The knight probably thought him a deserter or a coward who had sought refuge high up on the slopes to avoid being killed, and thinking that, he would have no compunction about giving the word to shoot St. Clair down without mercy. Finally, he reached the roadway and moved forward to face the Hospitaller.

“Who are you and what were you doing up there? And be careful what you say.”

André made no attempt to smile or be engaging. “André St. Clair, and I was trying to get back to my unit. I was sent out last night by our Grand Master, de Sablé, to scout Arsuf and make sure it had not been occupied. He sent me because I speak Arabic and can pass for a Muslim. The clothing and weapons I wore out there are here, in the cases on the pack mule. Look, if you like.”

“And was Arsuf occupied?”

“No, it was not. But it makes no difference now.

Saladin’s people will not stop running until they are far south of Arsuf.”

“Hmm.” The Hospitaller nodded towards the mule. “Show me what is in the cases.”

Moments later, he sat frowning at the circular Saracen shield he was holding.

“Right. Well, I suppose I’m obliged to believe you, St. Clair, but I have to send you now to my superior, Sir Pierre St. Julien. You would have to do the same with me, were things reversed.”

“I would. Where do I find him?”

The Hospitaller turned to the man on his right, who had long since put down his arbalest. “Take him to St. Julien.” He glanced back at St. Clair. “God be with you, St. Clair, and good luck.” He raised a hand briefly and swung away, already shouting at some of the men working nearby.

The knight called St. Julien accepted St. Clair even more quickly than the other had. As he was quickly checking the contents of André’s packs, a group of men moved past them, carrying five wounded Hospitallers on improvised stretchers.

“How many men did you lose?” André asked him.

St. Julien twisted his mouth. “Not nearly as many as I thought we would. Our Grand Master went to argue with King Richard, begging him to turn us loose, but Richard refused. When the charge did break out, it was because one or two of our own knights had simply had enough, and out they went … And everyone else went after them. It simply happened, and when it did, everyone joined in. I don’t know about the rest of the line of battle, but I would be surprised if we lost more than half a hundred men—knights and foot soldiers both.”

“You must have taken out ten men for every one you lost, then.”

“Oh, more than that, for by the time we broke out, the men were beyond anger. They showed no mercy, gave no quarter. Everything that moved in front of them went down. Ah! They’ve found something over there. God speed, Sir Templar.”

Thereafter, André St. Clair made his way along the road without being bothered again, and for the entire distance he was amazed at the disproportionate numbers of Muslim dead and wounded lining the road, with corpses piled in head-high heaps in many places. The crews whose task it was to clean up the carnage had nothing to say to him and little to each other. They were already listless and dull eyed, appalled into speechlessness by the awful, repetitive nature of the work they were doing and the condition of the mangled and dismembered bodies with which they had to deal, surrounded by the sounds and stenches of humanity in unspeakable distress. From time to time, he would pass a dead man who stood out as someone special by virtue of the clothing and insignia he wore, but for the most part, André was smitten by the sameness of it all and by the pathetic lack of dignity apparent in the heaped piles of discarded corpses. He had seen so many headless bodies and so many bodiless heads, arms, and legs that he thought he might never again be able to sit in a saddle and swing a sword, and it was while one such thought was passing through his head that something caught his attention from the corner of his eye, and he drew rein to look more closely.

But looking now at the carnage surrounding him, he could see nothing that struck him as being anomalous. There were living men among the fallen all around him; he could see some of them moving and he could hear their moans and cries, and somewhere almost beyond his hearing range, someone was screaming mindlessly, demented by pain. But whatever had caught his attention was no longer evident, and he dismissed it, gathering his reins to ride on.

He had traversed almost the entire line of battle by that time, and the cleanup crews had not yet reached this far. The section through which he was now riding had been the right of the line, occupied by the Templars and their supporting Turcopoles, and St. Clair had not realized before how closely the latter resembled the enemy they fought, for they were not uniformly equipped, and in many instances he could not tell, looking at the strewn bodies, which were which. But then, just as he began to turn away, he saw movement again, a flicker of bright yellow higher up than he had been looking before, just in front of the line of trees above him. He tensed, looking at it intently, knowing what it was but unable to say why it should be significant to him.

It was a Saracen unit flag, the equivalent of the colors carried by each of the Frankish formations, but whereas the Frankish troop divisions carried individual colors, each to its own, the Saracens bore only uniform yellow standards: large swallow-tailed banners on the end of long, supple poles, distinguished from each other by the varying devices used by each unit to identify itself and its leader. Now the banner moved again, not waved by the wind but stirred erratically, as though someone were moving against it, causing it to sway unevenly back and forth, and as it unfolded it displayed the device it bore, a number of black crescents, their leading edges facing right.

André felt his stomach lurch as he recalled the evening, months before, when Alec Sinclair had described the personal standard of his friend Ibn al-Farouch. “Remember,” he had said, “if you find yourself outnumbered or in danger of defeat, don’t go seeking death, for death achieves nothing but oblivion for fools. Go seeking life instead. Find the squadron with the five-moon pennant and surrender to its leader. That’s Ibn. Tell him you know me, that I’m your cousin, and he’ll find a comfortable chain to shackle you with.”

Five black crescent moons, Sinclair had said, their leading edges facing right. The brief glance he had had of the pennant had been too short to count the number of crescents. He had seen only a cluster, perhaps five, but it might as easily have been six or seven, and he knew that he could not now ride away without satisfying his curiosity, so he turned his horse around and nudged it forward, up the hill to where the yellow banner now sagged motionless.

Among the bodies of slaughtered Arab and Christian horses, three dead Templars lay in plain view, their red-crossed, white-coated bodies intertwined and surrounded by Saracen corpses. He spurred his horse closer, examining the individual bodies of the knights, looking for men he knew, but he felt the hair stir on the back of his neck when he saw that the dead man atop the other two had not died by a Saracen scimitar but had been stabbed through the neck with a long, straight Christian sword. The blade was still in place, thrust clear through the chain-mail hood that covered the dead knight’s head. The sole question in André St. Clair’s mind was why, in a fight to the death against Saracens, a Christian knight would aim such a deliberate and lethal thrust at one of his brethren.