Odo sat staring at the young knight through narrowed eyes, fury simmering inside him hotly enough to scald his throat, although he allowed nothing to show on his face. He knew he was being offered a way out, but he was still unable to grasp it, to see the route he had to take. And finally it came to him that Alice herself would be the one best suited to resolve this entire charade.
“There is … a lady,” he began. “A lady whom I know. A patroness of great wealth and influence who is … desirous of meeting with you, to discuss matters of mutual interest.”
“That is not possible. I am a monk. There can be no mutuality of interest between me and any woman.” St. Clair had known instantly who the woman was, because he clearly remembered de Payens remarking, the very first time St. Clair had ever seen Bishop Odo, that the cleric spent much time in the company of the King’s second-eldest daughter. It had seemed to St. Clair at the time that there might even have been a suggestion of too much time attached to the comment, but he saw no point now in naming the princess. Even as he spoke, however, Odo was already shaking his head.
“Believe me, Brother Stephen, you need have no fears on the grounds of propriety. The lady to whom I refer is—”
“I know exactly to which lady your refer, my lord Bishop, but not even the Princess Royal can claim exemption from the laws of God. I am surprised to hear you suggest otherwise.”
For the second time in the brief course of this interview, Odo was stunned into slack-jawed speechlessness, and St. Clair realized he might have said too much. Clearly the bishop knew nothing about his abduction by the princess, and he, as the simple monk he professed to be, could have had no plausible reason for his assertiveness. He pressed on, giving Odo no time to recover either his wits or his wind, recalling the few occasions when he had met the princess harmlessly in public, and explaining, with a sheepish smile that felt as false to him as a wooden mask, why the princess’s name had come to him so unerringly. Odo had spoken, he said, of a woman of wealth and influence, and the princess and her mother were the only Christian women of wealth and influence whom St. Clair had seen since his arrival in Jerusalem. In fact, he added shyly, should the truth be known, the princess was the only woman of rank that he had ever met since leaving his home in France as a boy, to travel and soldier with his liege lord. Thus hers was the only name in his mind when Odo spoke of a lady of influence and he had assumed … He allowed his voice to fade out, then mumbled that he could not imagine what the lady could conceivably wish to discuss with a simple, unwashed knight monk.
The bishop frowned, then nodded, too intent upon salvaging his own situation to be suspicious of the other man’s motives, and when he spoke, clearing his throat self-consciously to give his voice its most commanding timbre, his words were somber and measured, his delivery pompous and unconvincing.
“I can understand your mystification, Brother Stephen, but perhaps it might relieve your mind to know that there is nothing personal involved in the lady’s desire to speak with you. To the contrary, in fact, the princess has the utmost faith in your goodwill and in your honor and integrity.”
St. Clair marveled at the way in which this bishop could so easily spout one thing at one moment and then turn completely about and say the very opposite mere minutes later. It was clear to him that the man assumed, simply because he was speaking to a knight and not to an educated cleric, that he had no need to deal with intelligence and even less need to consider his listener’s ability to differentiate between falsehood and flattery.
“The princess is deeply perturbed because of certain matters … certain information that has been brought to her attention recently. I have no knowledge of what, precisely, is entailed, nothing, in fact, on which to base my judgment other than my own observations of the princess herself. I gather, however, from what I have seen and heard, that there are strange but … unspecified goings-on, occurring within the confines of the stables in the Temple Mount. I suspect it may have something to do with the foundations, although I know not what that might entail.
“Whatever it is, whatever is involved, the Princess Alice now finds herself in a dilemma of great urgency. Her natural wish, and indeed her filial duty, is to present these reports to her father the King, but such is her regard for your superior, Brother Hugh, and for yourself, that she is hesitant to proceed without making some enquiries of her own, aware that such a report, unsubstantiated and anonymous as it is, could provoke a host of troubles for you and your brethren, and most probably without need. Therefore she charged me with the task of questioning you, rather than summoning you directly into her presence. I, unfortunately, knowing nothing of the background to this affair, chose to conduct my task, as I now see, improperly and inappropriately. It would have been better, I now understand, to have been open with you from the outset.”
“Aye.” St. Clair’s tone was as dry as the bishop’s was orotund, but he said no more, and Odo hesitated.
“Aye, indeed …” He then rushed on, before St. Clair could say anything more. “Would you be willing to come with me right now and put the lady’s mind at rest on these matters?”
St. Clair covered his mouth with his hand, thinking furiously. Odo’s mention of the foundations had distressed him. Anything else the knight could have taken in stride, for it was common knowledge that everyone was interested in the strange knight monks of the Temple Mount and their apparently bizarre life in the stables there, but the specific mention of the foundations of the stables was of great concern. A face-to-face encounter with Alice might have been something he would welcome, given sufficient time to prepare himself for it, because he had been thinking deeply about her during his last few days in the desert with Hassan, and about what she represented to his life in the future. The dreams that had haunted him were now a thing of the past; he had not had a single recurrence of the incidents since the night he recognized the truth and fled from Jerusalem. And so he felt, with some small degree of confidence, that he might be able to confront his fears by confronting Alice herself. It was, however, and he had admitted this to himself wryly and frequently during the preceding few days, a very small degree of confidence. Nevertheless, he had been willing to face the possibility of one more, final encounter with the princess.
This specific mention of foundations and the temple, unexpected as it was, had pushed all such considerations aside and filled his mind to capacity with thoughts of danger, interference, and betrayal. Odo’s mention of the brotherhood’s most closely held secret had set every warning bell in St. Clair’s mental watchtower jangling discordantly, because he understood immediately that if Alice, and by extension this creature, Odo, knew of the activities beneath the stables, that meant, beyond doubt, that someone, one of his own brethren, had betrayed the Order of Rebirth, and the entire world might find out about their activities at any moment. Even in his momentary panic, St. Clair did not believe for an instant that anyone had deliberately betrayed them. One of the brothers must simply have been careless in some way. That was the only reasonable explanation he could imagine, because it was plain that despite all of their secrecy and their meticulous and painstaking precautions since beginning their excavations years earlier, their activities had been noted, and with sufficient precision to specify the underground location of their work: the foundations.
The how and why of it, to his surprise, were insignificant beside the disastrous consequence that the clandestine efforts of the Jerusalem brethren on behalf of the Order of Rebirth in Sion were about to come to an abrupt end, with foreseeable catastrophic effect upon the Order itself.
Unless—and there he had to stop and brace himself physically, tightening his belly muscles—unless he were somehow able to convince Princess Alice, and through her Bishop Odo, that her suspicions were groundless. The prospect made him want to groan aloud, for he knew precisely how inept and pathetic his previous behavior had been around the princess. To hope for anything different now would be folly. It was far too late to defer to de Payens and St
. Omer; matters were much too far progressed for anyone to hope that those two could go in and face the princess unprepared, without knowing in advance what information she had received and how she had chosen to interpret it. He, at least, had an existing relationship with Alice, shameful and degrading as it might have been, and so he found himself considering, much to his own ludicrous disbelief, that there might be some hope, some magical possibility, that he might be able, despite the inherent impossibility of any such thing, to put that former association to use, and to disarm or defer Alice’s suspicions for as long as would be required for de Payens and St. Omer to evolve a counterstrategy based upon what he could report back to them. And so he simply had to try—he had to face Alice, and then face her down, no matter what became of him and his newfound resolution of chastity. He shook his head in disbelief as the thought came to him that this final encounter with the woman who had abducted, detained, and debauched him would probably be the most important interview in the history of the Order of Rebirth in Sion.
“Very well,” he said. “Take me to the princess.”
FOUR
St. Clair stood alone in an anteroom, staring vacantly at an enormous tapestry covering one entire wall that depicted a deer hunt in some wooded valley in Christendom. His stomach rumbled uncomfortably and sent hot bile spurting up to burn the back of his throat. He had no idea how long he had been waiting since Bishop Odo had ushered him into this room and closed the door behind him while he went in search of Princess Alice. Since then, he knew only that he had examined every detail of the tapestry—the only object in the room other than a few ungainly pieces of furniture—deciding almost immediately that the composition of the piece was ill conceived and poorly executed, and although he looked at it still, it no longer occupied any portion of his awareness.
He was also acutely conscious, for the first time that he could ever recall, of not being clean, and that was a consideration that troubled him greatly, because cleanliness was not something that a man of his kind concerned himself about. In truth, cleanliness, in the sense of washing oneself in order to render oneself odorless and inoffensive to others, was regarded by some as a weakness almost akin to effeminacy and by others as being sinfully effete and hedonistic. St. Clair had not washed since the day by the water hole in the Syrian desert where Hassan the Shi’a had found him, and on that occasion he had done so only because Hassan refused to lend him any of his clothing until he washed the encrusted filth from his body, which had been fouled with refuse and excrement during his captivity. Even so, he thought now, that had been mere weeks before, and as a monk he was required to wash no more than two or three times in any year.
His discomfort, he knew, was caused by his knowledge of the Princess Alice and her habits. Alice loved to bathe, he remembered, and had always done so, from the days of her earliest childhood. She had been raised by servants in her parents’ household in Edessa, and as servants will with small children, they had spoiled her outrageously, lavishing love on the child and making sure she had the best of everything that life could provide. They were of mixed races, these servants, from a host of differing tribes and nationalities, but all of them were Muslim, and they had imbued in the child a love of cleanliness, encouraging her to use the magnificent baths in her father’s city that had been built by the Romans many centuries earlier and used by the Arabs ever since. In consequence of that, Alice had grown to womanhood as a sweet-smelling rose among foul-smelling men, and St. Clair knew, because he clearly remembered now how and when she had confided in him, that she refused to have unwashed people about her. Even her guardsmen were clean and fresh smelling, although they did stop short of being perfumed.
His thoughts were interrupted when the doors at his back swung open and Bishop Odo re-entered, accompanied by the princess herself, who stopped dramatically on the threshold and gazed imperiously and questioningly at St. Clair, her chin held high, one eyebrow slightly raised, her expression unreadable. She was wearing a shimmering robe of the most beautiful fabric St. Clair had ever seen, so flimsy and diaphanous that it appeared to be made of mist. It was of palest purple—he had seen the precise color before, somewhere, in a flower, he thought, but could not remember where or when—and beneath it she wore another garment altogether, this one of denser material in a glorious pink. She paused there only for a brief moment, but to St. Clair it seemed to be an age, for not a single word of greeting suggested itself to him and he felt his face and neck begin to redden.
“Upon my life, it is the celebrated Brother Sir Stephen, in the flesh! I confess I am flattered and delighted both, even if incredulous. When my lord Bishop here told me you had come a-visiting, I thought he must surely be mistaken, for it is said that only the shy desert fox is more elusive and more hard to spot than this noble knight monk … albeit I am told that the fox is not quite as adept at vanishing from view, run as he might.”
There was no trace of humor on her face or in her eyes, but St. Clair knew she was twitting him, referring to the time they had met in the marketplace, and he felt his face flush crimson. “Well, Brother Stephen, have you no greeting for me? No surly grunt to warn me of my place?”
St. Clair cleared his throat, and as he did so he had a vision from years before, when he had witnessed the first meeting of one of his cousins and the woman who would become his wife. “I rejoice to meet you again, my lady,” he said smoothly, recalling his cousin’s words. “Your presence brightens even the sunlit morning.” There, he thought, even as the princess’s eyes widened in surprise, that was easy. “Bishop Odo told me that you wish to speak with me, and so I came at once.”
She blinked at him, once only. “Yes, I can see you did, and I am grateful. Come, if you will, accompany me.” She turned and led the way back towards the chamber she used as a reception room, walking quickly, straight backed and square shouldered, while Odo and St. Clair followed her. A single armed guard at the entrance opened the door and stood at attention beside it until they should pass through, but on the point of entering, Alice stopped and looked at Odo.
“My thanks to you, my lord of Fontainebleau, you have been of great service, as you always are, but I am sure you have other matters to attend to and so I will not keep you. You may return to your affairs. Brother Stephen and I have much to discuss.”
The bishop nodded, stone faced, but the knotted muscles in his jaw betrayed tightly clenched teeth, and St. Clair sensed that Odo was seething with anger, having no doubt expected to sit in on the conversation between him and the princess, and he half smiled, enjoying the realization that Bishop Odo of Fontainebleau was not one of the princess’s favorite people.
As Odo stalked away, his heels thumping angrily, Alice crooked a finger at St. Clair, and she swept through the door and into the beautifully appointed rooms beyond. He swallowed nervously and entered close behind her, his nostrils filled with her perfume, then moved to the chair she indicated, where he remained standing, waiting for her to seat herself. She smiled at him and sat down, and he lowered himself carefully onto the chair, noting thankfully that a substantial space now separated them and that he could no longer smell the scent she was wearing. And that reminded him, inevitably, of his own odorous condition, for he realized that Alice had seated herself far enough away to avoid the unwashed smell of him.
They sat without speaking for a count of perhaps ten heartbeats, each of them looking at the other, and then the princess cleared her throat gently.
“I was being truthful when I said how surprised I am to see you here, Brother Stephen. I would not have believed you would come here.”
What does that mean? he thought. Does she mean voluntarily, and if she does, does that mean she expects me to remember having been here before?
Alice continued in the same tone. “It has been my impression that you and your brethren prefer to keep yourselves and your concerns close held among yourselves.”
He knew he had to say something, so he attempted to look as though he had no notion of wha
t she meant as he replied, “Well, my lady, we are monks, bound by our sacred vows to abjure the world and the things of the world.”
“You mean the people of the world, do you not, sir knight? Your vows I will accept—for the moment at least—because they are common knowledge, but the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ are a different breed of monks, are they not? Monks who fight and kill are scarcely like other monks. That, to me, is a profound distinction.”
She would accept his vows, for the moment? He had no idea what she meant, but he nodded, surprised that the tension fluttering in his breast had largely died away. “That is true, my lady. We are different, and dedicated to a new purpose—a purpose that has never existed prior to this time and place.”
“And a laudable purpose, no?”
He shrugged, sensing a trap somewhere. “In the eyes of the Patriarch Archbishop and your father the King, that would appear to be the case.”
“Aye, laudable indeed. To fight and kill men in the name of God, and beneath His own banner, in clear, but somehow suddenly justifiable, defiance of the clarity of His commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”
St. Clair gave a brief jerk of the head. “Your point is clear, my lady, and barbed. But the men against whom we fight—the Muslim infidels—despise our God and would drive His presence from this land.”
“Not so, Brother Stephen. That is not true. In fact it is specious. No devout Muslim despises our God, for He is the same God to whom they pray. They call Him Allah, whereas we call him God—le bon Dieu—the Good God. But He is the same deity. He is the sole deity.” Alice’s face had grown pinched with disapproval, and St. Clair found himself watching her closely, seeing how her eyes narrowed with a passionate belief in what she was saying, and he felt a stirring of admiration for her intensity, in the light of the journey he had just undertaken with Hassan the Shi’a and the conversations they had shared in the course of it. But she had not yet finished. “The hatred and the killing, all of it, Brother Stephen, from the first moment our most Christian armies descended upon this land under the leadership of Geoffroi de Bouillon and with the blessing of the Pope in Rome, has been carried out in the name of God, but for the convenience and enrichment of the men who believe themselves entitled to interpret God’s holy will. And my father ranks highly among them.”