The Templar Knight Read online

  “We were waiting for you…we wish to thank you…” said Yussuf in a semblance of Frankish that he hoped the other man would understand.

  The man who was called Al Ghouti in the language of the faithful gazed at Yussuf steadily as his face slowly lit up with a smile, as if he were searching his memory and had found what he sought. This made Emir Moussa and Fahkr, but not Yussuf, cautiously, almost unconsciously, drop their hands to their weapons beside their saddles. The Templar knight quite clearly saw their hands, which now seemed to be moving of their own accord toward their sabers. Then he raised his glance to the three on the slope, looked Yussuf straight in the eyes, and replied in God’s own language:

  “In the name of God the Merciful, we are not enemies at this time, and I seek no strife with you. Consider these words from your own scripture, the words which the Prophet himself, may peace be with him, spoke: ‘Take not another man’s life—God has declared it holy—except in a righteous cause.’ You and I have no righteous cause, for there is now a truce between us.”

  The Templar knight smiled even wider, as if he wanted to entice them to laugh; he was fully aware of the impression he must have made on the three foes when he addressed them in the language of the Holy Koran. But Yussuf, who now realized that he had to be quick-witted and swift to take command of the situation, answered the Templar knight after only a slight hesitation.

  “The ways of God the Almighty are truly unfathomable,” and to that the Templar knight nodded, as if these words were particularly familiar to him. “And only He can know why He sent an enemy to save us. But I owe you my thanks, knight of the red cross, and I will give you some of the riches that these infidels wanted. In this place where I now sit, I will leave a hundred dinars in gold, and they belong by rights to you for saving our lives.”

  Yussuf now thought that he had spoken like a king, and a very generous king, as kings should be. But to his surprise and that of his brother and Emir Moussa, the Templar knight replied at first with a laugh that was completely genuine and without scorn.

  “In the name of God the Merciful, you speak to me out of both goodness and ignorance,” said the Templar knight. “From you I can accept nothing. What I did here I had to do, whether you were present or not. And I own no worldly possessions and cannot accept any; that is one reason. Another reason is that the way around my vow is for you to donate the hundred dinars to the Knights Templar. But if you will permit me to say so, my unknown foe and friend, I think you would have difficulty explaining that gift to your Prophet!”

  With these words, the Templar knight gathered up his reins, cast a glance back at the two horses and the two bodies he had in tow, and urged his Arabian horse on, as he raised his right hand with clenched fist toward the men in the salute of the Templar knights. He looked as if he found the situation quite amusing.

  “Wait!” said Yussuf, so quickly that his words came faster than his thoughts. “Then I invite you and your sergeant instead to share our evening meal!”

  The Templar knight reined in his horse and looked at Yussuf with a thoughtful expression.

  “I accept your invitation, my unknown foe and friend,” the Templar knight replied, “but only on the condition that I have your word none of you intends to draw a weapon against me or my sergeant as long as we are in one another’s company.”

  “You have my word on the name of the true God and His Prophet,” replied Yussuf quickly. “Do I have yours?”

  “Yes, you have my word on the name of the true God, His Son, and the Holy Virgin,” replied the Templar knight just as quickly. “If you ride two fingers south of the spot where the sun went down behind the mountains, you will reach a stream. Follow it to the northwest and you will find several low trees near some water. Stay there for the night. We will be farther west, up on the slope near the same water that flows toward you. But we will not sully the water. It will soon be night and you have your hour for prayers, as do we. But afterward, when we come in the darkness to you, we will make enough noise so you hear us, and not come quietly, like someone with evil intentions.”

  The Templar knight spurred his horse, again saluted in farewell, got his little caravan moving, and rode off into the twilight without looking back.

  The three faithful watched him for a long time without moving or saying a word. Their horses snorted impatiently, but Yussuf was lost in thought.

  “You are my brother, and nothing you do or say should surprise me anymore after all these years,” said Fahkr. “But what you just did really surprised me. A Templar knight! And the one they call Al Ghouti at that!”

  “Fahkr, my beloved brother,” replied Yussuf as he turned his horse with an easy movement to head in the direction described by his foe. “You must know your enemy; we have talked a great deal about that, haven’t we? And among your enemies, isn’t it best to learn from the one who is most monstrous of all? God has given us this golden opportunity; let us not refuse His gift.”

  “But can we trust the word of such a man?” objected Fahkr after they had been riding for a time in silence.

  “Yes, we can, as a matter of fact,” muttered Emir Moussa. “The enemy has many faces, known and unknown. But that man’s word we can trust, just as he can trust your brother’s.”

  They followed their foe’s instructions and soon found the little stream with fresh cold water, where they stopped to let their horses drink. Then they continued along the stream and, exactly as the Templar knight had said, came to a level area. There the stream spread out to a small pond where low trees and bushes grew, with a sparse pasture area for the horses. They unsaddled the animals and took off the packs, hobbling the horses’ forelegs so that they would stay close to the water and not go in search of grazing land farther away, where none existed. Then the men washed themselves, as prescribed by law, before prayers.

  At the first appearance of the bright crescent moon in the blue summer night sky, they said their prayers of mourning for the dead and of gratitude to God for sending them, in His unfathomable mercy, the worst of their foes to rescue them.

  They talked a bit about this very subject after prayers. Yussuf then said that he thought God, in an almost humorous way, had shown His omnipotence: revealing that nothing was impossible for Him, not even sending Templar knights to rescue the very ones who in the end would conquer all Templar knights.

  Yussuf tried to convince himself and everyone else of this. Year after year new warlords arrived from the Frankish lands; if they won, they soon returned home with their heavy loads.

  But some Franks never went back home, and they were both the best and the worst of the lot. Best because they did not pillage for pleasure and because it was possible to reason with them, making trade contracts and peace agreements. But they were also the worst because some of them were fierce adversaries in war. The worst of them all were the two cursed devout orders of competing monks, the Templars and the Hospitallers of St. John. Whoever wanted to cleanse the land of the enemy, whoever wanted to take back Al Aksa and the Temple of the Rock in God’s Holy City, would have to conquer both the Knights Templar and the Hospitallers. Nothing else was possible.

  Yet they seemed impossible to conquer. They fought without fear, convinced that they would enter paradise if they died in battle. They never surrendered since their laws forbade the rescue of captured brothers from imprisonment. A captured Hospitaller knight or Templar knight was a worthless prisoner that they might just as soon release or kill. So they always died.

  It was a rule of thumb that if fifteen of the faithful met five Templar knights out on a plain, it meant that either all or none of them would live. If the fifteen faithful attacked the five infidels, none of the faithful would escape with his life. To ensure victory of such an attack, they had to be four times as many and still be prepared to pay a very high price in casualties. With ordinary Franks this was not the case; ordinary Franks could be defeated even if there were fewer men on the side of the faithful.

  While Fahkr and Emir
Moussa gathered wood to make a fire, Yussuf lay on his back with his hands behind his head, staring up at the sky where more and more stars were appearing. He was pondering these men who were his worst enemies. He thought about what he had seen right before sundown. The man called Al Ghouti had a horse worthy of a king, a horse that seemed to think the same thoughts as his master, that obeyed instinctively.

  It was not sorcery; Yussuf was a man who ultimately rejected such explanations. The simple truth was that the man and the horse had fought and trained together for many years, in the most serious fashion, not just as a pastime to be taken up when there was nothing else to do. Among the Egyptian Mamelukes there were similar men and horses, and the Mamelukes, of course, did nothing but train until they were successful enough to obtain commissions and land, their freedom and gold granted in gratitude for many good years of service in war. This was no miracle or magic; it was man alone and not God who created these kinds of men. The only question was: What was the most crucial characteristic for attaining that goal?

  Yussuf’s answer to this question was always that it was pure faith, that the one who wholeheartedly and absolutely followed the words of the Prophet, may peace be with him, regarding the jihad, the holy war, would become an unconquerable warrior. But the problem was that among the Mamelukes in Egypt it was impossible to find the most faithful of Muslims; usually they were Turks and more or less superstitious, believing in spirits and holy stones and giving only lip service to the pure and true faith.

  In this case it was worse that even the infidels could create men like Al Ghouti. Could it be that God was demonstrating that man uses his own free will to determine his purpose in life, in this life on earth, and that only when the holy fire separates the wheat from the chaff will it be apparent who are the faithful and who are the infidels?

  It was a disheartening thought. For if it was God’s intention that the faithful, if they could unite in a jihad against the infidels, should be rewarded with victory, why then had He created enemies who were impossible to defeat, man to man? Perhaps to show that the faithful truly had to unite against the enemy? The faithful had to stop fighting among themselves because those who joined forces would be ten to a hundred times more numerous than the Franks, who would then be doomed, even if they were all Templar knights.

  Yussuf again recalled the image of Al Ghouti: his stallion; his black, well-oiled, and undamaged harness; his equipment, none of which was merely for the pleasure of the eye but for the joy of the hand. Something could be learned from this. Many men had died on the battlefield because they couldn’t resist wearing their stiff, new, glittery-gold brocade over their armor, which hindered their movements at the crucial moment, and thus they died more from vanity than anything else. Everything they had seen should be remembered and learned from, otherwise how were they going to conquer the devilish enemy that now occupied God’s Holy City?

  The fire had already begun to crackle. Fahkr and Emir Moussa had spread out the muslin coverlet and were starting to set out provisions and drinking vessels of water. Emir Moussa squatted down and ground up his mocha beans to prepare his black Bedouin drink. With the descending darkness a cool breeze came racing down the mountainside from Al Kahlil, the city of Abraham. But the cool air after a hot day would soon give way to cold.

  The westerly direction of the wind brought Yussuf the scent of the two Franks at the same time as he heard them out in the darkness. It was the smell of slaves and battlefields; no doubt they would come unwashed to the evening meal, like the barbarians they were.

  When the Templar knight stepped into the light of the fire, the faithful saw that he was carrying his white shield with the red cross before him, as no guest ever should. Emir Moussa took several hesitant steps toward his saddle where he had stacked up their weapons with the harnesses. But Yussuf quickly caught his nervous eye and quietly shook his head.

  The Templar knight bowed before each of his hosts in turn, and his sergeant followed his master’s lead. Then he surprised the three faithful by lifting up his white shield with the loathsome cross and setting it as high up as he could in one of the low trees. When he then stepped forward to unfasten his sword and sit down, as Yussuf invited him to do with a gesture of his hand, the Templar knight explained that as far as he knew, there were no malicious men in the area, but you could never be certain. For that reason the shield of a Templar knight would probably have a chilling effect on their fighting spirit. He generously offered to let his shield hang there overnight and come back to get it at dawn when it would be time for all of them to move on.

  When the Templar knight and his sergeant sat down near the muslin coverlet and began setting out their own bundles—dates, mutton, bread, and something unclean were visible—Yussuf could no longer hold back the laughter he had tried so hard to suppress. All the others looked up at him in surprise, since none of them had noticed anything amusing. The two Templar knights frowned, suspecting that they might be the objects of Yussuf’s merriment.

  He had to explain, saying that if there was one thing in the world he had never expected to have as night-time protection, it was in truth a shield with the worst emblem of the enemy. Although on the other hand this confirmed what he had always believed, that God in His omnipotence truly was not averse to joking with His children. And at this he thought they could all laugh.

  Just then the Templar knight discovered a piece of smoked meat among the items his sergeant was setting out, and he said something harsh in Frankish and pointed with his long, sharp dagger. Red-faced, the sergeant removed the meat while the Templar knight apologized, shrugging his shoulders and saying that what was impure meat for one person in this world was good meat for another.

  The three faithful now understood that a piece of pork had been lying in the middle of the food, and thus the entire meal was unclean. But Yussuf quickly whispered a reminder about God’s word in those cases when a man finds himself in need, when laws are not laws in the same way as when a man is in his own house, and they all had to be content with that.

  Yussuf blessed the food in the name of God the Merciful and Gracious, and the Templar knight blessed the food in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Mother of God, and none of the five men showed any disdain for the beliefs of the others.

  They began offering each other food, and finally, at Yussuf’s invitation, the Templar knight accepted a piece of lamb baked in bread, slicing it in two with his gray, unadorned, extremely sharp dagger. He then handed half of it on the tip of his knife to his sergeant, who stuffed it into his mouth, hiding his distaste.

  They ate in silence for a while. The faithful had placed the lamb baked in bread along with chopped green pistachios baked in spun sugar and honey on their side of the muslin coverlet. On their own side, the infidels had dried mutton, dates, and dry white bread.

  “There is something I would like to ask you, Templar knight,” said Yussuf after a while. He spoke in a low, intent voice, the way his closest friends knew he always talked when he had been thinking for a long time and wanted to understand something important.

  “You are our host, we have accepted your invitation, and we will gladly answer your questions, but remember that our faith is the true faith, not yours,” replied the Templar knight with an expression as if he were daring to joke about his own faith.

  “Doubtless you know what I think about that matter, Templar knight, but here is my question. You rescued us, we who are your foes. I have already acknowledged that this is true, and I have thanked you. But now I want to know why you did it.”

  “We did not rescue our foes,” said the Templar knight thoughtfully. “We have been after those six bandits for a long time. We’ve been following them at a distance for a week, waiting for the right moment. Our mission was to kill them, not to rescue you. But at the same time God happened to hold a protective hand over you, and neither you nor I can explain why.”

  “But you are the real Al Ghouti himself?” Yussuf persisted.

 
“Yes, that is so,” said the Templar knight. “I am the one the unbelievers in their own language now call Al Ghouti, but my name is Arn de Gothia, and my mission was to free the world of those six unworthy men, and I completed my mission. That is the whole of it.”

  “But why should someone like you do such a thing? Aren’t you also the emir of the Knights Templar in your fortress in Gaza? A man of rank? Why should such a man take on such a lowly mission, and a dangerous one at that, setting out for these inhospitable regions just to kill bandits?”

  “Because that was how our order came into being long before I was even born,” replied the Templar knight. “From the beginning, when our troops had liberated God’s Sepulcher, our people had no protection when they went on a pilgrimage down to the River Jordan and the site where Yahia, as you call him, once baptized the Lord Jesus Christ. And back then pilgrims carried all their possessions with them, instead of leaving them in safekeeping with us, as they do now. They were easy prey for bandits. Our order was created to protect them. Even today it is considered a mission of honor to offer protection to pilgrims and kill bandits. So it is not as you think, that this is a lowly mission we give to just anyone; on the contrary, it is the heart and soul of our order, a mission of honor, as I said. And God granted our prayers.”

  “You are right,” Yussuf concluded with a sigh. “We should always protect pilgrims. How much easier life would be here in Palestine if we all did so. By the way, in which Frankish country is this Gothia located?”

  “Not exactly in any Frankish country,” replied the Templar knight with an amused glint in his eye, as if all his solemnity had suddenly vanished. “Gothia lies far north of the land of the Franks, at the ends of the earth. But what country do you come from? You don’t speak Arabic as if you came from Mecca.”

  “I was born in Baalbek, but all three of us are Kurds,” replied Yussuf in surprise. “This is my brother Fahkr, and this is my…friend Moussa. Where did you learn to speak the language of the faithful? Men like you do not usually end up in long captivity, do they?”