Knights of the Black and White Book One. Jack Whyte

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      Count Hugh himself had returned to his County of Champagne the previous year, after a brief stay of little more than a year in Jerusalem, and so Hugh obtained permission to travel to Jericho from Lucien of Troyes, the Count’s deputy in the Holy Land. De Troyes, a fellow member of the Order of Rebirth, knew Godfrey of St. Omer well, so his permission had been immediate, even while he himself was preparing to return to France within the coming few days.

      “So, Sir Hugh, may I ask what takes you to Jericho so hastily?” De Beaufort had turned in the saddle to address de Payens, but as the older man jerked his head and looked back at him, startled out of his reverie, the other raised a hand quickly. “Forgive me, I was merely being curious. I had no wish to pry. But you did say you had not planned to make this journey.”

      De Payens waved a hand, dismissing de Beaufort’s apology. “I am not offended. I received word that an old friend is in the care of the hospital in Jericho, released but recently from captivity among the Turks. I had not known he was even in the Holy Land, let alone that he had been taken by the Mussulman. For many years I relied upon his wife, my sister, Louise, for all my information, but I have not received a letter from her in more years than I care to count, and now I find I do not even know if she is still alive. Have you—?” De Payens glanced at the younger man and answered his own question. “No, you have not. You are too young. You will find, however, that as you grow older, time has a way of accelerating. I had no idea until two days ago that twenty years have passed since I first came to Outremer, although I have been home since then … but seven years have fled since I last heard word from my sister.”

      Riding behind the two knights, Arlo listened to what was being said, smiling to himself and taking note of the way de Beaufort listened wide-eyed to every word Sir Hugh uttered, for he knew de Beaufort would benefit by this encounter and the conversation that was taking place. Sir Hugh de Payens was famed for many things, but being friendly and talkative with strangers was not one of them. He was, in fact, notorious for being brusque and taciturn, a man of high principles, dark moods, and unflinching opinions who preferred his own company and actively encouraged the world to avoid him. That he was actually passing the time of day and sharing personal information with de Beaufort was extremely unusual and would not go unremarked.

      DE PAYENS HAD NOT ALWAYS been unfriendly or distrustful. That had been a gradual transition, brought about over a decade of hard living and life lessons harshly learned, but Arlo knew that the final phase of the transformation had been triggered on the day Jerusalem fell, on the fifteenth of July, a Friday, in 1099. It had been Hugh’s twenty-ninth birthday. The full extent of his transformation proved to be deeply unsettling, leaving many of the knights unsure of how to deal with this man they had thought they knew.

      They need not have bothered to wonder, for de Payens had simply stopped dealing with them, having decided that he desired no truck or commerce with any of the self-styled “Christian” warriors and their blood-lusting hypocrisy. Hugh de Payens lived in a self-imposed exile of silence, surrounded by others but interacting with none of them, except when his duty demanded that he act as part of the army. When one knight, noted for his intolerance and hot temper, believed he had been slighted by Hugh’s silence, he grasped de Payens from behind, to wrench him around and face him. Hugh spun and felled him with a single, straight-armed blow to the forehead that left the man senseless. Later that day, as evening approached and the other knight felt sufficiently recovered to convince himself that he had been caught unawares, the fellow renewed the quarrel, attacking Hugh with a bare blade, which was against all the laws of the armies. De Payens disarmed him immediately and almost casually, using a heavy oak cudgel to snap the man’s sword blade, and then he thrashed him severely enough to remove all doubts from everyone’s mind about the wisdom of trying to thrust themselves uninvited into the awareness of the knight from Payens.

      After that, word spread quickly that de Payens was crazed and, except in the execution of his knightly duties, would speak to no one other than his servant. In the eyes of his fellow knights, he had crossed out of heroism and into madness, but no one ever sought, or attempted to supply, an explanation for his bizarre behavior. It was simply accepted that he had been accursed somehow during the sack of Jerusalem. And thus Sir Hugh had become something of a soldiers’ legend, his exploits and his eccentricities widely reported and remarked upon, so that even after he returned to Christendom, men continued to talk about him, his strange notions, and the reputation for military prowess, ferocity, and bravery that no one begrudged him.

      Summoned home with his friends by their liege lord, Hugh had returned to Champagne in the year after Jerusalem’s capture, and there, for the first six years of the new century, he had immersed himself in studying the Lore of the Order of Rebirth, traveling the length and breadth of his home country, from northern Flanders to Languedoc in the far southeast, to study with some of its most learned scholars and teachers. Thinking privately about that time in later years, Hugh regarded the period as the most enjoyable time of his life. Surrounded by his peers, none of whom bore any guilt for what had happened in Jerusalem, he had lived what was, for him, a full and normal life, where his daily weapons training was the only diversion open to him and his entire duty otherwise revolved around study and learning.

      Early in 1107, however, he had been summoned before a plenary meeting of the Order’s Governing Council and had been charged with returning immediately to Outremer, there to establish contact with as many brethren of the Order as he could find, and to keep them aware of their oaths while they awaited further instructions from home on how they must proceed when the time was judged to be right. It crossed Hugh’s mind at the time, right there in front of the entire tribunal, to ask for more specific information regarding that timing and its rightness, but he resisted the impulse, telling himself that he would be informed of everything he needed to know when that need arose. In the meantime, he was informed, he would ride as one of a company of one hundred knights and three hundred men-at-arms raised by the Duchies of Burgundy, Anjou, and Aquitaine in response to requests from the King and the Patriarch Archbishop of Jerusalem. He would be attached to the contingent from Anjou, and would come under the command of whomever was appointed by Count Fulk to represent him in Outremer.

      Excited by the prospect of putting his newly acquired learning to good use, he had gone looking for Montdidier, to try to persuade Payn to sail back with him, but Payn had been in England, visiting his wife’s father at Sir Stephen’s great castle in Yorkshire, and Godfrey, Hugh already knew, was unable to accompany him either, being at his home in Picardy, looking after his sick wife. Hugh had felt guilty about not having made the time to go and visit his ailing sister, whom he had not seen since the death of their mother five years earlier, and now he found there was not enough time for him to travel to Picardy to see her. He had contented himself with writing to her, a long, rambling letter of the kind he enjoyed writing and he knew Louise loved to read, and then, reluctantly, he had set sail for Outremer without his friends, on his way to Malta, the ship’s first port of call, within two weeks of his meeting with the Council. Less than half a year after that, he was back in Jerusalem, noticing the changes that had been effected in his absence.

      Primary among those was that the Kingdom of Jerusalem had become a reality. The scruples expressed by Geoffroi de Bouillon, when he refused to wear a golden crown where Jesus had worn thorns, had not extended to his more ambitious brother Baldwin, and when de Bouillon had died after only a year as Advocate of the Holy Sepulcher, Baldwin had been quick to claim the throne. Since then, he had been working hard, and admirably, people said, to consolidate and strengthen his new kingdom, and hand in glove with that to stabilize Christendom’s hold in Outremer, including the Principality of Antioch and the Counties of Edessa and Tripoli, deftly juggling the ambitions of the various lords involved and ensuring that each of them contributed to the support of Jerusalem itself as the administrative center of all Outremer.

      The city no longer stank of corruption, its stench burned away by the desert sun years earlier, but apart from its occupying garrison it still lay virtually derelict, with only a few civilian inhabitants, most of those Christians. The King himself СКАЧАТЬ