Now, unaware of how much time had passed, he awoke at mid-morning, feeling rested, fit, and hungry enough to eat his own horse, only to find that they would not yet let him out of bed, and so he was forced to remain there while they brought him bowl after bowl of hot, nourishing stew with crusty, fresh-baked bread. He was aware that everyone was watching him closely, but no one made any attempt to question him further than they had on the day of his rescue.
Towards mid-afternoon, he was visited by de Payens and St. Omer, and he knew from the outset that they had come in their official capacities, because they asked Gondemare and Roland, who were visiting him when they arrived, to leave. Stephen greeted the newcomers with a nod, then eased himself up until he was sitting erect, his back against the wall of his small cubicle.
“It is good to see you are become yourself again, Brother Stephen,” de Payens began, “because for several days we have been considering an exorcism to cast the evil spirits out of you. The Patriarch visited you himself at that time, however, and he decided that what you required was merely sufficient time in which to recover yourself. It pleases me to see he was correct.” He paused. “We have been making enquiries based upon what you told us when you first returned, and we now agree that you were abducted. That appears obvious now, and there is no mystery there. But even so, we have been unable to discover where you were held, or anything at all about the why of it, and that presents us with more mysteries than we can count.”
St. Clair frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“No more do we, Brother, but the mysteries are there.” De Payens began to tick off items on his fingers. “You were abducted. But why? Certainly not for ransom, because no demands were made and no one was informed you had been taken. And your disappearance most certainly had nothing to do with your high station, since you are no longer Sir Stephen St. Clair but a penniless monk, newly sworn to poverty. So why else would anyone wish to abduct you? Clearly not for revenge or punishment for some wrong, fancied or real, else you would be dead in truth.
“And you were tortured. You have burns and broken ribs and your entire body is a mass of bruising. Your wrists and ankles bear the scars of chains and manacles, too, yet there is mystery even there, for you had been missing for a month and more and yet, according to the physicians who examined you on your return, there was no injury or blemish on your body that appeared to be more than ten days old.” He shook his head. “Even more than that, however, you were clean.”
St. Clair’s eyes went wide in astonishment. “What d’you mean, clean?”
“I mean clean, as in recently washed, laved, bathed … Saracen clean.”
“Recently? That is impossible. I last bathed at Easter, with everyone else, as part of the Easter Rites. You are mistaken.”
De Payens shrugged. “I am not mistaken. It was the physician who examined you when you first returned—he was set to the task in person by the Archbishop—who remarked upon it. He said that you bore the scars of torture, but that your body had plainly been bathed and … what was it he said, Godfrey? Pampered, yes, that was it. Your body had been bathed and pampered mere weeks agone. When we asked him to explain, he told us your toenails and your fingernails had been pared and tended to—‘polished’ was the word he used—and that all dirt between your toes and in your body crevices had been washed away.”
“But that is impossible, Brother Hugh! I would remember such an outrage being committed upon me.”
De Payens shrugged again, but not unsympathetically. “How can anyone explain such things, Brother Stephen?” He held up a warning hand. “I pray you, do not be angry. Denial is acceptable, but bear in mind that you also have no memory of anything that happened during all those days when you were gone. Nothing at all. No memories. No awareness. And yet you were clearly alive somewhere, and presumably awake throughout that time.
“Thus I must ask you again, and beg you to be patient in obeying: can you think of anything that might help us find an answer to these questions? It might be something of which you have lost awareness, or something in your memory that you ignore for some reason, or even some thought, some image or idea that you have dismissed as insignificant.”
St. Clair sat silent for a count of five and then began to speak, nodding his head as if in agreement with what he was seeing in his mind. “Abduction. Yes, you’re right. I remember now what happened … or some of it. I was in the marketplace, walking among the stalls, going nowhere special … A thief stole a merchant’s purse, right in front of me, and he saw me seeing what he did. He stood there looking at me, the purse in one hand, a little knife in the other, and then he turned and ran. He had a limp, and I ran after him, into an alley. It was dark in there, but I could see him ahead of me, still running, and then I saw other shapes moving on each side of me, coming at me, and something hit me hard … The next thing I remember is waking up in the alley, perhaps the same alley, the day the sergeant brought me home.”
“And you can remember nothing else? Think hard. Anything you can recall might be important.”
St. Clair shook his head. “No, nothing else. Except the woman, and she was only a dream.”
“How do you know she was nothing more than a dream?”
“Because she wasn’t there when I opened my eyes and turned to thank her. I was alone in the alley.”
“But she had led you there.” St. Clair merely shrugged, neither confirming nor denying, and de Payens harried him. “What? You doubt that? If she did not, then how did you get there? Or do you think it was the same alley and you lay there for an entire month before being discovered?”
“Wait.” St. Clair held up his hand, frowning in thought. “There’s more … I remember her coming to me more than once. Yes. I was on a cot of some kind, the first time, in a dark room, and I could not move. I was in great pain, I recall … or I think I do. She carried a lamp and she leaned over me, peering into my eyes, and then she wiped my face with a cold cloth and went away, but I saw her nodding as she went, as though to someone on the other side of the room, someone beyond my sight. I remember I tried to turn and look, but the turning caused a pain in my back, so intense that I lost awareness of everything.”
“And she came to you again, like this?”
“Aye, once more, when she roused me up and took me away. There was no one else there on that occasion, and all the doors were unlocked. She led me directly out of the place, wherever it was, and through a wending maze of tunnels to the alley where the sergeant found me, and as soon as we arrived there, while I was sun-blinded, she must have slipped away again, back to where she had come from.”
“Sergeant Giacomo will remember where you were found, so we should find your escape route if we explore every entrance to the alley. The sergeant will take us back.” De Payens and St. Omer, who had not spoken a single word, rose to their feet, and de Payens bent forward to clap St. Clair on the upper arm. “Stay well and rest easy. We will find the place, and that will lead us to your abductors.”
Sergeant Giacomo remembered the exact location where he had found the young knight, but a painstaking search of all the surrounding buildings produced nothing positive that anyone could use to find either Brother Stephen’s abductors or the place where he had been confined. After a time, as month followed month, other matters emerged to claim the monks’ attention, so that the mystery of St. Clair’s disappearance eventually dwindled to become a part of the lore of the new brotherhood, forgotten by everyone save on odd occasions when it would resurface and be discussed briefly, before sinking back into oblivion.
CONFESSIONS
ONE
Hugh de Payens stopped moving for a moment and used the back of a gauntlet-clad hand to wipe away the annoying bead of sweat that hung from the peak of his eyebrow. His eyes were already smarting from the steady trickle of sweat that ran down his temples from the mailed cowl covering his head, and inside his heavy, metal-backed gloves, his hands were hot and slick. The skin of his chest and back seemed afire, h
otter than he could ever remember, and he could feel one stream of perspiration running down the center of his chest and another trickling in the groove of his spine and pooling at the top of his buttocks. He cursed silently and blinked his eyes rapidly, knowing he was beaten, but refusing to admit that he was too old to be fighting this hard in the full sunlight of mid-afternoon.
Across from him, having grounded the tip of his long sword, Stephen St. Clair had also stopped moving, patiently waiting for his superior to collect himself and start advancing again. The two men had been exercising together for almost an hour, in full armor, with swords and heavy shields, but de Payens noted, to his chagrin, that St. Clair seemed scarcely aware of the heat or of the length of time they had been pounding at each other. Ah, God, to be young again, he thought, and impulsively threw away his shield, grasping the hilt of his sword with both hands and springing directly towards his younger opponent, hoping to take him by surprise and win a momentary advantage.
St. Clair saw him coming and raised his shield high above his head to block the great two-handed chop that de Payens aimed at him, but even as he did so, he dropped to one knee and lunged forward, sweeping his blade around in a silver arc to bring the flat of it crashing against the older man’s knee with sufficient force to bring de Payens down, then pushing himself back and up, in a mighty heave, to regain his feet. He was on his toes again as quickly as his opponent fell, and stepped forward to press the point of his sword against the other man’s mail-covered neck.
“Yield,” he said.
De Payens lay glaring up at him for long moments, and then nodded. “Aye, and gladly. Help me up.”
Moments later, they had both thrown down their weapons and heavy gauntlets and removed their mailed cowls and were scrubbing their fingers in their sweat-matted hair, the shaven squares of their tonsured scalps gleaming white in the sunlight. When they had set their pates a-tingling, they subsided, side by side, against a horse-sized boulder and sat staring up the hill to the entrance to their stables. Where once the paired entrances had been gaping holes in the lower wall topping the hill, demanding the eyes’ attention, their obviousness had now been lessened by a nearby cluster of blockhouses and barracks, built over a period of several years to accommodate the lay brothers known as the Sergeants of the Order. There were sergeants everywhere de Payens looked now, all of them involved in matters of their own, and none paid any attention to the two knights sitting in the full glare of the sun. There was no shade where they sat, staring up the hill, but it was still too soon, the distance too great, for de Payens to contemplate climbing all the way up there to the coolness of the darkened stables. He would do it, eventually, but not until his breathing had slowed down and the fiery, prickling heat had lessened on his skin.
Neither man made any attempt to speak, and within moments de Payens became aware that his companion was nodding off, his chin sinking low on his chest, as though he were too tired to hold up his head. Frowning, de Payens was on the point of reaching out to prod St. Clair when the younger man started and snapped his head up, looking about him wide eyed.
“I need to speak with you, Master Hugh,” he said, “if you will grant me the time. It is a matter of grave urgency, and I have been intending to approach you now for a long time, but I have always found some reason conveniently to hand for not doing so.”
De Payens narrowed his lips, wondering what could be coming, but he was not really surprised. He had been aware for some time that all was not well with the youngest of his brethren, and St. Clair’s use of the term “Master” spoke volumes, for although Hugh was the bona fide Master of their fraternity, appointed to that status by the Seneschal of the Order of Rebirth in Sion, the title was seldom spoken aloud within their brotherhood.
The young knight sniffed and wiped away another bead of sweat with a curled finger.
“Then we should go up to the stables,” de Payens suggested. “It’s cooler up there and we will be able to talk in comfort and in privacy. Besides, we’re being disgracefully slothful sitting here in the sun. God may smite us both with sunstroke. Come on, then, up with you, and let’s away.”
Once on their feet again they gathered up their weapons and gear, then made their way up the hill into the shadows of the cavern that housed the stables, pausing just inside the entrance until their eyes adjusted to the darkness. The cavern had undergone great changes since the knight monks had first moved in, almost eight years earlier. Where there had once been two roughly equal divisions under the arching stone roof, there now appeared to be only one, on the right of the entrance, and it was divided into neat rows of well-made stalls for horses, with a sturdy platform hayloft above the stalls that was reached by stairs made from thick, solid planking—no small achievement in an environment where wood of any kind was hard to come by, and where finished lumber was a precious and sought-after commodity.
It was the area on the left of the entrance, however, that had seen the greatest changes. What had been a vast, empty space in the beginning was now a maze of roofless rooms, all of them open to the soaring stone vault above them and all solidly built, with thick, strong walls made from stone fragments mixed with mortar. Most of these rooms were used for storage, although some provided sleeping quarters for the nine brothers—Spartan and bare and without creature comforts, in the tradition of monkish cells. There was also a spacious chapel there, and a refectory, although the kitchens, for obvious reasons, were housed outside the cavern, in a stone building constructed specifically to hold them. At the rear of the place, close by the chapel, was another, more spacious room, equipped with tables and chairs and shelving, that served as a scriptorium and records-keeping center for the Master and his clerics. The rear wall was blank, save for a single door that was covered in heavy curtains of thick, felted wool that served to muffle any errant sound that might emerge from behind it. This was the sole entrance to the excavations that had been going on here now, without pause, for eight years, and those excavations were the source of the plentiful supply of stone chips and fragments that had been used to build the walls inside the cavern and to construct the sergeants’ barracks buildings on the sloping ground outside.
The two men went directly to the records room where most of the clerical affairs of the small community—and of the Order of Rebirth—were carried out. There was no one there at this time of the day, and de Payens waved the younger man towards a chair, while he himself opened a cupboard and brought out a large jug of water and two cups, and poured for each of them. They sat and drank attentively for a while, concentrating on the enjoyment of their refreshment as de Payens downed two full cups and St. Clair emptied his third. Then, relaxing visibly, de Payens stretched and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his flattened palms against his armored belly.
“Very well then, Brother, speak. You have my full attention.”
St. Clair sat thinking for a time, then raised his head. “I am beset by demons.”
“You are beset …” De Payens’s voice died away almost completely. He had expected nothing close to what he had heard. “Demons?”
“Devils … a devil.”
“A devil. I see … What kind of devil, do you know?”
“Aye. A succubus.”
“Ah! A succubus … That is … That is a very common devil. A female devil.”
“Aye, I know. Too well do I know that. I am possessed.”
“Well, Stephen, I do not think I would go so far as to say that.” De Payens knew this conversation was beyond his experience, but he knew, too, that he could not avoid it, and so he tried to lessen the importance of the issue by being placatory. “We are all of us, as men, and celibates, troubled by the succubus from time to time.”
“I know that, Master de Payens. It has always been thus, and I have been as aware of it as everyone else is, from the age at which I first became a man. But that seemed normal, somehow, something that happened once a month, or sometimes twice, and was forgotten almost as it happened. This curse that pla
gues me now is different.”
“Different … How so?”
“In every way. Before this began, I would have dreams on certain nights, dreams vaguely remembered and formless, unknowable save that they left evidence of having happened. Spilt seed.” He shrugged, managing to convey both awkwardness and embarrassment in one movement. “But all of that has changed … Now this is a nightly occurrence. Every night. And I have dreams that I remember, sometimes very clearly, with places I can almost recognize although I know I have never been in any of them … and sensations so intense that I can feel the reality of them. Every night, Master Hugh. Prayer has no effect on it, nor does tiredness, and yet I struggle every night against falling asleep. But then I do sleep, and I dream. And I am close to despair.”
There was a long silence during which de Payens sat gazing at the younger knight, seeing his obvious and genuine misery, and in the course of it another of their number, Archibald St. Agnan, came to the door and hovered on the threshold, looking from one to the other of them and clearly realizing that there was something going on between them that was not for his ears. He raised an eyebrow at de Payens, who shook his head gently and sent him on his way with a wave of the hand. De Payens turned back to St. Clair.
“You said ‘before this began.’ Do you remember when it began? Is there a specific date or event in your mind associated with its onset?”
St. Clair sighed. “No, nothing that clear. But it began after my … illness.”
“You mean your abduction.”
“Aye, abduction, illness. Whatever we call it. But it was after that that this began to happen to me.”
“But that was nigh on eight months ago. When did these dreams begin?”
“I don’t know, Master Hugh, but I think now it was perhaps three or even four months after my return. I was aware of … certain things, certain inconsistencies in my body’s functions. As time passed by, I grew more and more aware of them, because the incidence increased, from once or twice a month to three or four times, and then to once a week, and twice a week. Now, as I have said, it is nightly and I have no control over myself. I am possessed.”