Standard of Honour

Sinclair was more inclined to believe what was being said among the French-speaking Arabs of his acquaintance. They believed that the stars moved independently of each other, and that a number of the brightest stars in the firmament had now somehow moved into alignment with each other and combined their light to generate this blazing beacon, so bright it could often be seen even at noon.

When he reached his own squadron, Sinclair settled his flat steel helm more firmly on his brows and scanned his men. All awake and solemn; no badinage or laughter this morning…not, he reflected, that there ever was much laughter among the knights of the Temple. It was officially discouraged as being frivolous and not conducive to pious behavior. He sought out Louis Chisholm, the sergeant-at-arms, Alexander Sinclair’s personal servant since boyhood. Faced with the prospect of life as a free man when his employer joined the brotherhood of the Temple Knights, Chisholm had opted to remain close to the man he knew best in all the world, and had volunteered as a sergeant brother in the Order. Now as Sinclair approached him, he twisted around in his saddle and peered up through the drifting smoke towards the peaks of the Horns of Hattin.

“They say that’s where Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount,” he said. “Right up there on the slopes of that mountain. I wonder if anything he could say to that crowd out there today would make any difference to what’s going to happen.” He turned back and looked Sinclair in the eye, then lapsed into a heavy Scots accent. “We’ve come a long way from Edinburgh, Sir Alec, and we’ve changed a bit, the two o’ us, since we first set out…but this is an awfu’ grim place to die.”

“We had nae choice, Louis,” Sinclair replied quietly, pronouncing the other’s name in the Scots fashion, as Lewis. “It wasna our doin’.”

Chisholm grimaced. “Aye, well, you know what I think about that.” He looked about him again. “We’re about ready. The Hospitallers are starting to form up, over there on the right. They’ll move out soon, so we’d best be ready here. Ye’ll have seen how many we’re up against out there?” He spat, then ran the tip of his tongue over his teeth, sucking at the grains of sand there before spitting again. “It’ll be a short fight, I’m thinking, but we’ll try to make it a good one. Good luck to ye, Sir Alec. I’ll be right at your back, minding your arse.”

Sinclair smiled as he reached out and took the other man’s hand. “God bless you, Louis. I’ll have an eye for you, too. Now, what’s causing the delay?”

As he said the words, the first trumpet call rang out and was answered immediately by others as the army began to move into its battle formations, beginning with the Knights of the Hospital, who formed the army’s vanguard. The King’s division in the center, his royal standard swaying high above him, moved forward behind the veteran Hospitallers, although, encircled as they were, there was no clearly defined front for the Hospital Knights to face. Nevertheless, the knights of the royal bodyguard formed up at the King’s back, as did the Christian prelates and priests, bearing the giant, elaborate reliquary. It was fashioned in the shape of a mother-of-pearl cross and encrusted with jewels and precious stones, and it provided a highly visible rallying point, not only for its protectors but also for their attackers.

Beyond the block formations of the Christian army, surrounding them on all sides, Saladin’s great force eddied and moved, visible now although obscured at times by drifting smoke and the dust stirred up by their own movement. They waited patiently, and largely in silence, to see what the Christian army would attempt to do.

The crowd around Sinclair was abnormally quiet. Each man rose in his stirrups and craned to see over the heads of the men directly in front of him in the dawning light. The sounds of the horses were all that was utterly familiar—the stamping hooves and snorting breaths and the creaks and jingle of saddle leathers and harness. Already even the little movement they made was stirring up clouds of choking dust to add to the swirling smoke.

Sinclair loosened his sword in its sheath and bent forward in the saddle slightly to glance across at Louis Chisholm again.

“Bide ye close by me, now, Louis. This is going to be a dour, dirty fight.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when a flurry of competing trumpet calls began to sound, and as the army around him stirred in response, preparing to surge forward, Sinclair wondered who could have been responsible for such idiocy, for they had nowhere to go that did not lead directly into the masses of enemy cavalry. That single thought was the last coherent memory he would have of the chaos that followed, for a commotion in the ranks of the Templars at his back announced the arrival of a heavy charge of Saracen cavalry who had approached unseen from the still-dark west, under cover of the drifting smoke.

Sinclair and his fellow Templars of the rearguard, outmaneuvered and outnumbered from the outset, fought grimly to repulse the attack from their rear by Saladin’s elite cavalry. They mounted charge after futile charge against an enemy who fell away in front of them each time, only to regroup and encircle the frustrated, heavily armored knights. Enraged by the perfidy of the Muslim archers who concentrated on killing their horses and then picked off the dismounted riders, the Templars were driven inexorably backward into their own forces, only to discover that the King had ordered his followers to erect a barrier of tents between him and the enemy encroaching from the rear. The barrier, flimsy and futile though it was, nevertheless generated chaos among the surviving Templars, forcing them to break their depleted formations as they wheeled and dodged to ride between the useless tents, with the enemy cavalry snapping at their heels. Even when they passed beyond the canvas walls they found neither relief nor support, because the knights of the center were milling helplessly around the King and the True Cross, impeding one another and oblivious to any need to give themselves space in which to fight.

Sinclair, acting purely on instinct, swerved to his right and led his own squadron around the confusion of floundering men and horses, veering hard left in a tight arc, aware that in so doing he was exposing their unshielded right sides to the missiles of the enemy archers. He saw Louis Chisholm go down, struck by at least two arrows, but he himself was under attack at that moment from a warrior who had charged at him out of nowhere on a hardy, agile little mount. By the time Sinclair had deflected the Saracen’s sweeping scimitar and brought himself knee to knee with his assailant for long enough to chop him from the saddle with a short, savage slash to the throat, Louis lay far behind him, and Sinclair was too hard pressed to look back for him.

What had become of their twelve thousand infantry? Sinclair could see no sign of them, but by then his world had been reduced to a tiny, trampled arena filled with smoke, dust, chaos, and all the screams of Hell, as man and beast were maimed and killed on every side. He saw and recognized things and events in snatches of vision and incomplete thoughts, forgotten in the urgency of the next eye blink, the next encounter with a savage, bare-toothed face, the next swing of his shield or sword. He felt a heavy blow against his back and saved himself from being unhorsed only by hooking an elbow on the cantle of his saddle. That cost him his shield, but he knew he was a dead man anyway if he was hit again or fell. He managed to right himself, wrenching at his horse’s reins to turn the animal away from the threat. Then, for a space of heartbeats, he found himself on the fringes of the melee, at the edge of the high ground, looking down a slope to where the Hospitallers of the vanguard were surrounded, cut off from the main army by a wedge of enemy horsemen who had cut cleanly through the narrow space between van and center.

He had no time to see more than that, for his presence there alone had been noticed and he was being attacked again by two men at once, converging on him from each side. He chose the man on the right, the smaller of the two, and spurred his tiring horse straight for him, his long sword held high until the last moment, when he dropped it to the horizontal and allowed the fellow to impale himself on it, the speed of his passing almost wrenching the weapon from Sinclair’s grasp. Panting, he spun the horse around, left-handed, searching for the second man who was now close behind him. His horse reared and shied, taken unawares by the hurtling shadow closing on it. In a feat that he had practiced times beyond counting, Sinclair bent forward in the saddle, then, standing in his stirrups, he dropped the reins on the rearing horse’s neck and drew his dagger. A straight sword thrust deflected the enemy’s stabbing blade, and as their bodies came together he stabbed upward, hooking desperately with the foot-long, one-edged dirk in his left hand. The point struck a metal boss on the quilted armor of his assailant’s chest and glanced off, plunging into the soft flesh beneath his chin, the shock of the impact tumbling him backward from the saddle, heels in the air. Sinclair tightened his grasp instinctively, bracing himself against the falling weight of the dead man, but the dirk slid free easily and he was able to right himself. He reeled helplessly for the few moments it took him to see that he was alone again, in an eddy of comparative stillness.

Sunlight glinted on metal in the morning light above and beyond him and he glanced up to see another distant battle taking place high on the slopes of Mount Hattin. Infantry formations, obviously Christian, appeared to be breaking away from the crest of the high ridge and heading down towards the east, towards Tiberias. But then he heard his name being called and swung away to see a tight knot of his brothers in arms sweeping towards him. He spurred his horse and rode to join them, vaguely aware of arrows filling the air about him like angry wasps, and together they charged back up the hill towards the King’s tent, to defend King Guy and the True Cross. Once there, close to the King, they won a brief respite as the enemy withdrew to regroup, and Sinclair, looking towards the distant heights with his companions, saw a tragedy develop.

The infantry—on whose orders it was never known—were attempting to scale the slopes of Mount Hattin. They had almost reached the summit before being blocked by even more of Saladin’s inexhaustible supply of cavalry formations. The entire hillside seemed to be ablaze up there, and the entire infantry brigade, ten thousand men supported by two thousand light cavalry, apparently driven insane by thirst and smoke, wheeled away and began a desperate foray down towards the sanctuary offered by the distant sight of the waters of Lake Tiberias, glinting far below them in the morning sunlight. It was evident that they intended to smash through the enemy ranks and win through to the lake, but Sinclair knew exactly, and sickeningly, what was going to happen. There was nothing he could do, and his own duty was clear—he and his fellows had threats of their own to deal with—so he had little time to watch the slaughter that occurred on the lower slopes, where the Saracen cavalry simply withdrew ahead of the charge and left it to their mounted bowmen to exterminate the advancing infantry. Within the hour it was all over, in plain view of the knoll where the King’s tent was pitched. There were no survivors, and as hard set as they were while the carnage was carried out below them, there was not a single knight among the ranks surrounding the King who was unaware that twelve thousand of their men had died uselessly down below, beyond the reach of any assistance they might have thought to offer.

The Saracens saw it too, and their response was a frenzied attack on the mounted party atop the knoll. They pressed in hard from all sides, advancing and withdrawing in waves, intent upon wiping out the mounted knights by sheer weight of numbers. Saladin, as Sinclair would later learn, had thought deeply on this attack for months beforehand and had decided that his mounted bowmen would be his strongest asset in the fight against the heavily armored Christian knights. Every archer had gone into the fight with a full quiver of arrows, and seventy camels in their baggage train had been laden with extra arrows to replenish them. The Frankish knights fell quickly, battered and beaten by a hailstorm of missiles shot at them from all sides.

TWO

Lachlan Moray saw Sir Alexander Sinclair fall, but he was unable to tell if his friend was wounded or not, because it was Sinclair’s horse that he actually saw topple, its chest and flanks bristling with arrows. Sinclair he merely glimpsed as the white-mantled knight pitched forward behind the animal’s rearing bulk, disappearing from view among the rocks as his Templar companions fought to control their terrified mounts and to bring the fight to the elusive enemy.

Moray himself was already bewildered, having suddenly found himself the only survivor of a knot of six knights making their way towards King Guy and his party. They had been isolated for a moment, separated from the King’s retreating party by a steep, stony slope, and before they could catch up to the others they had been singled out by the enemy’s bowmen. Moray had never seen anything remotely like the volley of arrows that struck them; it had been almost opaque, a sudden darkening of the air as the lethal missiles landed upon them like a swarm of locusts, and before he could grasp what had happened, he had found himself alone, his companions swept from their saddles into death. Miraculously, although he would not think of it that way for some time, both he and his horse remained uninjured. He had been hit by only one arrow, and that had glanced off his shoulder harness, knocking him back in his saddle but doing no damage.

Moray was alone and vulnerable and he knew he would be dead before he could urge his mount up the stony scree above him. Remembering Sinclair’s words, he turned to look below for him, just in time to recognize his friend and see him go down. Cursing, the Scots knight spurred his mount hard, looking about him in vain for an enemy to strike as he hurtled down the slope. But no enemy warrior came within reach of his sword, and he flung himself down from the saddle beside Sinclair’s dead mount, making no attempt to tether his own and noting that the Temple Knights who had swarmed there moments earlier had moved away.

He scrambled to the first fallen knight he saw and crouched above him, using the bulk of a dead horse for protection. But the corpse was not Alec Sinclair, nor was the man lying beyond him, in a sprawl of armored limbs. Farther away, two more men lay, pierced by many arrows, but he could see they were too far away to be his fallen friend. He could see no sign of Alec Sinclair. In the meantime, his untethered horse, unnerved by the smell of blood, had cavorted away. He considered chasing after it, thinking that Sinclair must somehow have escaped on his own, but he stifled the urge quickly, for an unmanned horse was no target, but a running man was. And so he let the beast go, hoping that it would stop soon and wait for him.

Moray rose to a crouch and looked about him, aware in the back of his mind that he appeared to be in no danger, at least for the moment. He spotted a crevice in the rocks close by, a shadowed cleft between the boulder nearest him and the one directly behind it. He stepped towards it quickly and saw an armored leg thrusting up from a narrow rift that was wider than it had at first appeared. Two more running steps and he was close enough to crouch and peer into the hidden space. The body there was lying face up: it was Sinclair. To Moray’s relief, his friend appeared to be uninjured, for there was no blood visible on or about him. He was deeply unconscious, however, and Moray quickly climbed into the crevice and bent over him. His left shoulder was unnaturally twisted, and the limb attached to it had been wrenched up behind his back where nature never intended it to go. Moray dragged him farther into the crevice, to where he could lay him flat in what turned out to be a tiny, cave-like shelter formed by three large, wind-scoured slabs of stone, one of them forming an angled roof above the other two.

The left side of Sinclair’s flat steel helmet was scratched and crusted with a residue of gray dust that matched some deep scrapes on the rock he had clearly struck head-first in falling. Thinking quickly now, and gratefully aware that he could hear nothing threatening happening close by, Moray stretched the other man out at full length and attempted to adjust the twisted arm. It moved, but not to its original position, and he knew that the shoulder had been wrenched out of its joint in the fall. He could not tell, however, whether the arm was broken, and so he sat down with his back against one side of their shelter, laid his unblooded and unused sword down by his side, then braced his legs against Sinclair’s body and hauled brutally on the injured limb, twisting it hard until he felt it shift and snap back into place. The pain would have been insufferable had Sinclair been conscious, but it failed to penetrate his awareness, and Moray sank back, exhausted.

He began to look about him. They were completely hidden there, he realized; the only thing he could see in any direction was an expanse of sky above the cleft through which he had entered. He listened then, concentrating intently. There were sounds aplenty out there, the noises of battle and the screams of dying men and animals, but they were far away and he suspected they were coming from the hillside high above them, although he knew he might be misinterpreting sounds deflected and distorted by the surrounding stones. Cautiously, after glancing again at the unconscious Sinclair, he crawled back to the entrance and slowly raised himself up, keeping his head in the shadow of the sloping boulder above him, to where he could look out at the surrounding terrain.

There was not a living soul in sight for as far as he could see. He raised himself higher, careful to make no sudden movements, until he could see up the hill, beyond the side of the great stone in front of him. Even then he could see little, because of the boulders littering the ground behind their shelter. All the noise was definitely coming from up there, however, and the silence surrounding their refuge seemed ghostly by comparison. Emboldened, he moved out slowly from his hiding place, keeping his head low and creeping forward between massive stones and around outcrops of rock until he found a vantage spot that allowed him to observe without being seen.

There were people everywhere he looked now, all of them Saracens, and all making their way swiftly up towards the top of the ridge that had drawn King Guy and his supporters, and the crest itself, when he was finally able to see that far, swarmed with mounted warriors. He caught sight of the True Cross in its magnificent jeweled casing, held high above the surging throng, with King Guy’s great tent rearing behind it, marking the center of the Christian forces. But at that precise moment the upright Cross swayed alarmingly, then righted itself briefly and finally toppled from sight. Moray shivered with horror as the King’s tent collapsed and disappeared from view, its guy ropes evidently cut. The immediate, swelling howl of triumph from the heights above him told its own story: the victory at Hattin had gone to the Followers of the Prophet.

Stunned and sickened, unable to believe how quickly the army of Christendom had been destroyed, or even to begin to imagine what would follow on the heels of such a conquest, Sir Lachlan Moray turned away and looked down at the slopes below the rocks that had sheltered him. Bodies lay everywhere, both men and horses, and few of the dead wore the desert robes of Saladin’s warriors. In the distance, where the Frankish infantry had made its futile charge, the corpses lay in overlapping heaps, a long, thick caterpillar of death stretching from where they had begun their doomed advance to the point at which the last of their twelve thousand had fallen. Frowning and dry mouthed, shaking his head yet in disbelief, the thought came to him that he ought to be weeping at such loss. Ten thousand corpses in a single place. His next thought told him he ought not to be alive, and he wondered briefly why he had been spared, but he knew now that it was merely a matter of time before he and Sinclair would be discovered and killed like the others, for the Prophet’s faithful seemed to be taking no prisoners. He swallowed hard, his throat parched, and crouched there in his hiding place, staring down the hillside.

Vultures were already spiraling downward, landing in increasing numbers to feast on the dead, and as he watched them, time slipped away from him and he lost all awareness, for a spell, of who and where he was. But he straightened up in shock, vibrantly alive again, when a loud, keening wail of agony told him that his friend Sinclair was no longer oblivious. Moments later he was scrambling back towards their rocky hiding place, keeping his head low and almost whimpering in terror at the thought that the enemy might hear the noise Sinclair was making before he could reach him and stifle his cries. But the noises suddenly stopped, and the silence that followed them, broken only by the scrambling clatter of his own booted feet on the rocks, seemed a blessing.

Moray crouched spread-legged in the entranceway to the shelter, peering in at Sinclair, his heart still pounding with fright. He was relieved to see his friend was still alive, for he had begun to have doubts, so abrupt had the transition been from wailing to stillness. But now he could hear for himself that Sinclair was breathing stertorously, the labored rise and fall of his chest visible even beneath the bulk of his armor. Then, before Moray could move closer to him, Sinclair tossed an arm out violently and began to keen again, his head thrashing from side to side. Moray reached him in a single leap and clamped his hand over the unconscious man’s mouth, and the moment he did so, Sinclair’s eyes snapped open and he fell silent, staring up at the face that was bent over him.

Moray saw the intelligence and sanity in those eyes, and he removed his hand cautiously. Sinclair lay unmoving for a few moments, still gazing up at his friend, and then he glanced up at the weathered boulder that roofed their hiding place.

“Where are we, Lachie? What happened? How long have we been here?”

Moray sagged back on his heels and grunted with relief. “Three questions. That means your head’s still working. I suppose you want one answer?”

Sinclair closed his eyes and lay for a while without responding, but then he opened them again and shook his head. “The last thing I remember is rallying some of my knights and turning them to ride uphill, towards the others on the slopes above us. Before that, we had watched our infantry being slaughtered.” He coughed, and Moray watched the color drain from his cheeks as pain racked him from somewhere, but then he gritted his teeth and continued. “I know, too, that had we fared well in the fighting, you and I would now be surrounded by friends. We are not, so I assume you came seeking me as I bade you. Where’s Louis?”

“I’ve no idea, Alec. I’ve seen no sign of him since the start of this. He might have made his way up onto the crest with the rest of them…but there was no safety up there, high ground or no.”

Sinclair stared at him. “What are you saying? They lost the high ground?”

Moray pursed his lips, shaking his head. “More than that, Alec. They lost everything. I saw the True Cross captured by the Muslim. I saw the King’s tent go down, mere moments later, and I heard the howls of victory. We lost the day, Alec, and I fear we may have lost the kingdom itself.”

Shocked into speechlessness, Sinclair made to sit up, but then the breath caught in his throat. The color drained instantly from his face as his eyes turned up into his head, his body twisted, and he lapsed back into unconsciousness.

Moray could do nothing for him, with no certain knowledge of what was causing his friend’s pain. But Sinclair recovered quickly this time, and although his face was still gray and haggard when he opened his eyes, his mind was lucid.