Standard of Honour

“I told you that, my liege. Since my—”

“’Twill not take long. We’ll have you fit again within the month.” He grinned. “It may be the death of you, but if it be so, you will die in better health than you have now.”

Sir Henry smiled. “It will not kill me, my liege. I shall probably enjoy it, once I begin.”

“Well, young André will have no such problem. I’ll have Robert here put him to work at once, to learn the basic, general disciplines of the Order, those elements that are generally known and accessible, at least.” He cocked an eyebrow at de Sablé. “What think you, Robert? Will he have what is required for a Templar?”

“He has it already, my liege. All that will be required, from what I can see, will be a few…adjustments.”

“Aye, to praying morning, noon, mid-afternoon, and evening, and three or four times more during the night. A damnably strange way of life for a warrior knight.”

De Sablé smiled gently, negating the importance of what Richard had said with a flick of one hand. “That is the Rule of the Order, my liege. All members, without regard to rank, must abide by it.”

“Aye, and that is why I could never join. I wonder God’s Holy Warriors have any knees left to them with which to hold themselves upright and fight.”

De Sablé’s smile widened. “They appear to manage wondrous well, my liege, by your own admission mere moments ago. Besides, I have been told on good authority that the strictest measures of the Rule are set aside in time of war, and the application of the laws governing prayer is eased in favor of fitness and fighting readiness.” He turned to the elder St. Clair. “What think you, Sir Henry? Will your son settle to harness?”

“With great good will, Sir Robert, for he has a hero of his own already serving with the Temple Knights in Outremer, and I am sure he will work with great zeal to join him there, so be it the man is still alive.”

De Sablé quirked an eyebrow. “A hero? Who might that be?”

“A cousin, from the English branch of our family, although his family’s holdings are now in Scotland, to the north, these past thirty years. He is Sir Alexander St. Clair, although, having lived among those benighted islanders since his birth, he calls himself by name according to their uncouth tongue.”

De Sablé frowned. “How so? I do not follow you. You said his name is St. Clair.”

“Aye, but he pronounces it Sink-lur, not Sann Clerr as we do.”

“Sing-klur? That does sound strange…And why is he a hero to Sir André?”

The older man shrugged and smiled. “Because that is the kind of man he is. Why else? Alec—his own name for himself—is…heroic, a fighter of great repute and a veteran of the Temple. He spent two years with us, living in our household, soon after his admission to the Order, when André was but an unformed boy.” Henry hesitated, seeing the expression on de Sablé’s face. “What is it, Sir Robert? Have you heard of Alec St. Clair?”

De Sablé’s slight frown cleared immediately. “I know not. But it seems to me I recollect…something. It is a very unusual-sounding name.”

“Yes, for a very unusual man.”

“And why was he two years here after his admission to the Temple?”

“You must ask him, Sir Robert, if ever you meet him, because I never did know more than that he was about the business of the Temple in some fashion. And that, of course, is secretive, to those who do not belong.”

The outer doors swung open and Sir André entered, announcing that the Duke’s instructions had been delivered and were being carried out. Richard moved impatiently towards the doors at once, summoning Sir Henry to join him and shouting back over his shoulder to de Sablé, as he strode from the room, that he would await him by the front doors within the quarter hour.

As soon as the other two had gone, de Sablé and the younger St. Clair stood looking at each other, the younger man clearly ill at ease in being alone with his new superior. De Sablé gazed at him for a few moments, and then nodded his head graciously.

“Your father has been telling me about your friendship with your cousin Sir Alexander Sinclair.”

André St. Clair dipped his head, smiling slightly. “I could not call it a friendship, my lord. We liked each other, but I was a gangling boy at the time and Alec was a full ten years older, already a Temple Knight. We have not set eyes on one another in eight years, perhaps longer. But if Sir Alec is alive and still in Outremer, I will be honored to meet him again, and perhaps even fight beside him.”

“So you anticipate fulfillment, traveling to the East?”

The question, innocuous as it sounded, had multiple meanings and implications, St. Clair knew, and he hesitated.

“Come here.”

André moved closer almost with reluctance, wondering at the command, following as it had upon the unanswered question, and when the elder man stretched out his hand, he would have knelt had not the knight said, “No, take it.”

No longer hesitant, André St. Clair took the proffered hand in his, and when he felt the unmistakable shape and pressure of its grasp, he answered it in kind, silently confirming their membership in the brotherhood. De Sablé released his grip.

“I had a feeling, but I should have had it sooner,” he said, musingly. “I suspected your father might be of the brethren, but he did not respond to my grasp.”

“No, Sir Robert, my father does not belong. But Sir Alec does.”

“How did you learn that?”

“After my own initiation, of course. I had my suspicions soon after that, stirred by what I was learning, and remembering things that had puzzled me about him and his behavior when I was a boy. I asked my mentor and he confirmed it.”

“So then, even as an initiate of our ancient Order, you had no thought of joining the Temple Knights?”

St. Clair’s grin was open now. “None, sir, as I suspect you yourself had none. My loyalty was, and remains, to the brotherhood, and as I said earlier, I am—or I was—no monk.”

“Well, you will be soon, although under the vows of the brotherhood rather than those of the Church. You know, of course, what I mean by that?” André murmured that he did. “I have no doubt the brotherhood will task you with some duties while you are in the Holy Land. We must both make contact with the Council soon, informing them that we have met, along with the how and why.”

André nodded in response, thinking briefly of Sir Robert’s reference to vows. Upon being Raised to initiate status within the Brotherhood of the Order of Sion, each of them had been required to swear two vows that were closely related to, but essentially different from, the clerical vows of poverty and obedience. In the Order’s breviary, the brothers swore to own nothing personally—which entailed personal poverty—but to hold all things in common with their brethren, and their oath of obedience was sworn in fealty to the Grand Master of their ancient Order, not to the Pope, and certainly not to the Master of the Temple. The third canonical vow, the oath of chastity, went unspoken within the Order of Sion because individual chastity was integral to the brethren’s way of life. Within the Order of the Temple, the vow was insisted upon, and it posed no difficulty to those of the brotherhood who belonged to both orders. As he had so many times in the past, André shook his head in wonder at how little awareness outsiders had of such things, and that led him back to Richard Plantagenet, so that he looked at de Sablé and decided to be blunt.

“May I ask you something in the spirit of our brotherhood, Sir Robert?”

“Of course. Ask freely.”

“The Duke seems mightily pleased with your appointment as Master Elect of the Temple, but for the life of me I cannot understand why that should be so. The moment you join the Temple, he will lose his influence over you, since no man can serve two masters and the Order is subservient to no temporal authority. It is unlike Duke Richard to be happy over losing a strong vassal. Can you shed light upon that for me?”

De Sablé laughed outright. “I can, and simply. His pleasure stems from the fact that my appointment, if it comes, lies in the future.”

“Forgive me, but I don’t understand. You said ‘if it comes.’ Why should it not?”

“Oh, it will, but when it comes depends on whether or not the current Master, Gerard de Ridefort, be alive or dead. We suspect he may be dead, but we have no certain knowledge, for conditions in Outremer today are chaotic. The information that trickles back here to us is not always accurate, and in some instances not even true. So if de Ridefort yet lives, then I will wait until my services are required. And in the meantime, Duke Richard is well pleased because he has a use for me. I am to be his Fleet Master on the voyage to the Holy Land. He is assembling, ostensibly with his father’s blessing, to this point at least, a great argosy, the greatest the world may ever have seen, to transport his armies, livestock, provisions, and siege engines by water, rather than overland.

“Think about it, lad. I am of the brotherhood, and until recently my Council-assigned task has been to tend to the trading ventures of a house established by certain families friendly to each other.” The wording was noncommittal, but André St. Clair knew exactly what de Sablé was saying. “So, in order to fulfill my fraternal duties, I have spent decades learning everything I could of shipping and of cargoes, including the navigational and mathematical skills of commanding argosies at sea. Richard needs my services in that, and I, on behalf of the brotherhood, require his, in order to ensure that I reach Outremer alive and quickly. Surrounded by an enormous fleet, the odds in favor are greatly increased, and the Temple’s risk of being and remaining Master-less is set largely at naught.”

St. Clair nodded. “My thanks to you for that. It makes things much clearer. Now, what will you require of me from this time on, Sir Robert? Whatever you may have in mind, I can begin immediately. My father will see to the establishment of a crew to run these lands while we are gone. How long will we have, think you?”

“A month at least would be my guess, but it might be less, or even greatly more. Richard is keen to reach England, to set about the marshaling of his armies and his fleet, but for that he will remain dependent, as he always is, upon the goodwill and cooperation of his father the King. That is not a prospect that fills our liege lord with joy, although I believe that Henry will be at pains to appear tractable on this occasion, since he wants Richard safely out of England and bound for Outremer.

“But then, too, there is this ongoing matter of Philip’s injured pride over the Vexin, and the imaginary indignities suffered by Alaïs. That, too, must be dealt with and settled to the satisfaction of both sides before any of this business can go further forward.”

The silence that followed those words was brief, but fraught with meaning for both men. Alaïs Capet, the sister of King Philip Augustus, had been betrothed to Richard Plantagenet since childhood, shipped to England into the care of King Henry and Eleanor at the age of eight. But at the age of fifteen she had been seduced by her fiancé’s father, who was old enough to be her grandfather even then, and she had remained his mistress ever since. It had been a short-lived scandal nevertheless, for by then Queen Eleanor had already been locked up in the prison where she would remain for more than a decade and a half, and no one, least of all Alaïs’s cuckolded husband-to-be, really cared what became of the French princess.

The real grit in the dynastic ointment of the alliance between England and France, far more scandalous than the liaison between a lecherous old king and a silly, precocious girl, had sprung from the flagrant love affair between Alaïs’s brother Philip and her betrothed husband, Richard. That the two men had been bedmates for years was something that was widely known but rarely discussed. The two of them had bickered for years, frequently in public, like an ill-matched husband and wife, with Philip Augustus playing the shrewish, jealous wife and neither man giving a thought to the situation between King Henry and Alaïs. Now, with Philip actively preparing to quit France to travel to the Holy Land with his army, the entire matter of Alaïs’s dowry had arisen again between the two men, and this time it would not be easily deferred.

Alaïs’s dowry, the cause of friction between the two royal houses now for more than a decade, was the rich and powerful French province called the Vexin, given as a marriage incentive and a token of the goodwill of the House of Capet to the Crown of England when the child Alaïs had traveled to that country to live with the family of her affianced groom. Originally intended to marry Henry’s elder son, Prince Henry, her commitment had been changed in favor of Henry’s younger brother, Richard, after the young Henry’s early death. But irrespective of the reality that no marriage had yet taken place after nigh on twenty years, the strategic reality underlying the resentment and ill will over the disputed territory was that the boundaries of the Vexin lay less than a day’s hard march from the French capital of Paris, and that had resulted in its being grasped and jealously held by King Henry, and latterly by Richard, ever since Alaïs first arrived in England.