The Templar Knight

Текст добавлен: 21 октября 2016, 21:00

Текст книги "The Templar Knight"

Автор книги: Ян Гийу

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“Well, I don’t want to hurt you, young man. Is it enough if I knock you out of the saddle a few times?” asked Arn.

“You won’t win anything by offensive speech, Sir Arn; that will merely cost you even greater suffering,” replied Sir Wilfred with a sneer that seemed to Arn well practiced.

“Bear one thing in mind, young man,” said Arn. “You are riding against a Templar knight for the first time, and we never lose against tenderfeet in such games.”

More was not said, for Sir Wilfred turned his horse and galloped back across the field, where he wheeled about again, lifted his helmet, and jammed it onto his head. He was using a helmet of the new type that covered his whole face and made it hard to see anything except what was straight ahead.

Arn also rode back to get ready, but more slowly.

They stood facing each other for a while without anything happening. Since his opponent seemed to have turned his gaze toward King Richard’s pavilion, Arn also glanced in that direction. When silence had fallen over the crowd, King Richard stood up and stepped forward with a big red scarf that he held in his outstretched hand. Suddenly he dropped the scarf and at once the young knight set off to attack from across the field.

Arn was riding Ibn Anaza, which gave him an advantage so great that his opponent, who came thundering on a heavy Frankish stallion, would never be able to imagine it. That alone would make the battle turn in his favor, but the hard thing for Arn would be not to inflict more than bruises on his opponent.

On his way across the field, Arn at first rode at the same moderate pace as his approaching opponent, and he saw what was clearly the intention: to strike the other man’s head or shield, either to kill him or knock him from his saddle. It appeared to be a very dangerous game, and Arn did not want to strike with the tip of his lance at full speed.

Shortly before they met, Arn increased his speed so that Ibn Anaza was galloping hard, and then he leaned as he swung to the left just before impact. This brought him up on the wrong side of his opponent and enabled him to sweep the knight from his saddle with the broadside of his lance.

With some uneasiness he turned around and trotted over to the young man, who lay swearing and kicking in the sand.

“I hope I didn’t injure you too badly, because I didn’t mean to,” said Arn kindly. “Are we done now?”

“No, I do not yield,” said the tenderfoot, grabbing angrily for the reins of his horse and getting up. “I have the right to three attacks!”

Somewhat disappointed, Arn then rode back to the place where he had started before, thinking that the same simple trick would probably not work a second time.

He switched hands so that he was now holding the lance in his left hand with the shield slipped over his upper arm so that it would not be seen before they were very close to each other. By then it would be too late.

Again the king dropped his red scarf, and once more the young Englishman attacked as fast as he could make his heavy stallion run. There was obviously nothing wrong with his courage.

This time Arn did not switch sides in the attack. But just before impact he raised his left arm so that the shield came down at an angle across his opponent’s lance, as he gripped the blunt end of his lance hard with his right hand. The tip of Sir Wilfred’s lance glanced off Arn’s oblique shield. In the next instant the Englishman was struck in the middle of his chest as if by an oar, and this time it connected with twice the force as before. The result was the same, except that Sir Wilfred now flew farther through the air before he slammed into the ground.

Yet he again refused to yield.

The third time Arn flung away his shield and held his lance backward like a club and rode at his opponent with the club lowered until the very last moment. Then with both hands he raised it so that the Englishman’s lance flew up and past him while his own gigantic cudgel slid as if on a track along the other’s lance and hit him solidly in the face. The helmet saved him from being killed, but naturally he flew off his horse just as he had done twice before.

When Arn assured himself that his opponent was not badly hurt, he took off his round, open helmet, rode up toward King Richard, and gave an exaggerated bow.

“Sire, your young Wilfred deserves great respect for his courage. Never before has such a young man ridden without fear against a Templar knight.”

“Your tricks are amusing, but incorrect according to our rules,” the king replied crossly.

“My rules are from the battlefield and not from the jousting field, Sire. Besides, I told you that I didn’t want to injure your knight. His bravery and nerve will surely be of great joy to you, Sire.”

This childish game had two consequences for Arn. The first and for the moment most important was that King Richard adjusted the conditions a bit for Saladin’s payment.

The other result was that a young knight by the name of Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe, who now took part in his first large-scale war, for the rest of his life would have an easy time with all opponents on both the jousting field and battlefield, except for Templar knights. He would often have nightmares about them.

When Arn went back to the Templar quarters to return the weapons he had borrowed, he was invited to dine with the new Master of Saint-Jean d’Acre, whom he had known for years, ever since they had been at the fortress of La Fève together. His brother had a good deal to complain about when it came to the English king, especially the fact that this man could not get along with his peers. He had thrown the Frankish king Philippe Auguste out of the Templar quarters. After the royal palace—which was where King Richard had moved in, of course—the Templar residence was the next most elegant in Saint-Jean d’Acre. The two sovereigns had begun to squabble so badly about this trifle that the Frankish king had now decided to take all his men and head home. King Richard had also insulted the Austrian grand duke, by taking down the Austrian standard, which hung between the English and Frankish ones up on the walls. He then broke it in pieces and cast it into the moat. Violent brawls had erupted between the English and the Austrians, and now the Austrians were going to leave too. Through these childish actions the Christians had lost half the strength of their forces, but King Richard seemed to be convinced that only he and his own men were needed to retake Jerusalem, together with the Knights Templar. It was an attitude that was as dangerous as it was rash, but this was understood better by those, like Arn and his old friend, who had been at war with Saladin much longer. The mere prospect of having to move all these archers on foot in the burning sun on the road to Jerusalem would cause great suffering when the attacks from Saladin’s Syrian mounted archers commenced.

But one thing was even worse. King Richard was not only a moody man who kept inciting trouble for no reason. He was a man whose word could not be trusted.

Saladin honored the agreement as negotiated. After ten days he would deliver fifty thousand besants in gold and a thousand freed Christian prisoners. However, it would take longer to locate the one hundred named knights who were imprisoned, since they could be almost anywhere in the dungeons of Syrian or Egyptian fortresses.

Because none of the hundred knights had been delivered, it was King Richard’s view that Saladin had broken the agreement.

So he ordered crossbowmen and longbowmen to surround a hill outside Acre named Ayyadieh. Then he drove the two thousand seven hundred captives out from the city—the men in chains, the women and children beside their husbands and fathers.

The Muslims found it hard to believe their eyes when they saw what happened next, and once they did believe it they could hardly see through their tears. All two thousand seven hundred captives that were to be released that day according to the agreement were beheaded, impaled on spears, or clubbed to death with axes.

Soon Saracen horsemen began attacking from every direction, moving in wild disarray, howling and out of their wits. They were met by a hail of arrows, and none of them survived the advance. The slaughter went on for many hours before the last small children were discovered, and they too were killed.

Finally only English corpse-robbers were left up by the dead on the hill called Ayyadieh. They went from body to body cutting open the stomachs to search for any gold coins that had been swallowed.

By that time Saladin had long since left the site, where he had witnessed the start of the massacre.

He sat down by himself a short distance from his tent. No one in his retinue dared disturb him, but Arn hesitantly approached.

“This is a difficult hour, Yussuf, I know that, but in this hard hour I ask for my freedom,” Arn said in a low voice, sitting down next to Saladin. He did not answer for a long time.

“Why do you want to leave me just now at this evil hour, on this day of sorrow that will live forever?” Saladin asked at last, trying to stop his tears.

“Because today you have defeated Richard the Lionheart, even though it was at a high price.”

“Defeated!” snorted Saladin. “I lost fifty thousand besants in gold only to see those I believed I had ransomed slaughtered before my eyes. That is truly my strangest victory.”

“It is indeed a heavy loss,” said Arn. “But the victory is that you will not lose Jerusalem to this villain. He will not go down in history as anything but the butcher of Ayyadieh and the one who abandoned the True Cross; our children and their children will remember him as a traitor without honor. He has damaged his own cause more than yours. The Frankish king had already left for home after a childish quarrel about who should live in what lodgings inside Acre. The Austrian grand duke left him for a similar reason, and the German emperor is rotting in his grave in Antiochia. You no longer have a hundred thousand enemies, but fewer than ten thousand under that mad King Richard. And he will soon have to head for home too, I heard, or his brother will seize his land. In this way you have won, Yussuf.”

“But why leave me at this difficult hour when the grief is much greater than the hope of successful revenge, Arn, my friend?”

“Because now I can no longer negotiate for you. Negotiations with that mad murderer are over. And because I want to go home to my loved ones, to my country, my language, and my people.”

“What will you do when you get there, to your country and your people?”

“The war is over for me, that much I know for certain. I hope to be able to fulfill a vow I swore long ago, a vow of love. But what I would now like to know is what was the meaning of it all? What was I doing here? What was God’s intention? I fought for twenty years and I was deservedly on the losing side, because God was punishing us for our sins.”

“You’re thinking of Heraclius, Agnes de Courtenay, Guy de Lusignan, and such people?” Saladin whispered with a hint of an ironic smile in the midst of his grief.

“Yes, precisely,” replied Arn. “For such people I fought, but what God intended by it I will never understand.”

“I do,” said Saladin, “and I will explain it to you now. But first, other matters. You are now free. You took only fifty thousand besants for my brother when he was your prisoner, even though you knew that you could have extorted twice that from me. I believe that it is God’s intent that I happen to have exactly that sum left from what I was going to pay to that butcher Richard. The money is now yours, and it is poor compensation for the sword you gave me. By the way, there is a sword waiting for you in Damascus which will probably suit you in more ways than one. I beg you now to leave me to my sorrow. Ride with God’s peace, my friend Al Ghouti, whom I will never forget.”

“Yes, but the meaning of it all? You said that you knew God’s meaning,” Arn protested, not yet willing to leave. That question preoccupied his thoughts more than the fact that Saladin had showered a fortune upon him.

“God’s meaning?” said Saladin. “As a Muslim I can tell you that it was God’s intent that you, a Templar knight, should give me the sacred Sword of Islam that would make me victorious. But as a Christian you might explain it differently. You told me why we shouldn’t do with the people of Jerusalem what Richard has just done to the people of Acre. It was advice that I took to heart. And thus it was so, as you advised me. Your words saved fifty thousand Christian lives. That was God’s meaning with your mission in Palestine, for He sees all and He hears all, and He knew what He was doing when He brought you and me together.”

Arn got up and stood there for a moment hesitant and silent. Then Saladin stood up as well. They embraced each other one last time, and Arn turned and left without another word.

His long journey home had begun, back to the land where he intended never to raise a weapon again.

About the Author

Swedish-born journalist JAN GUILLOUis the creator of the two most successful Swedish works of fiction of all time: the Hamilton series and the Crusades Trilogy. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in Stockholm.

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Credits

Jacket design by Jarrod Taylor

Copyright

THE TEMPLAR KNIGHT. Copyright © 1999 by Jan Guillou. English translation © 2010 by Steven T. Murray. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

EPub Edition © April 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-199257-5

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