he left through the Damascus Gate, passing St. Omer and Montdidier with no sign of recognition and making no response to their shouts. Perplexed, but knowing him well enough to know they would earn no thanks by accosting him, his two friends stood and watched him walk away into the gathering dusk. The faithful Arlo, who had been searching frantically for his friend and master all day long, stayed up the entire night, waiting for him to return. They had assumed he would return to their encampment, but they were wrong.
Weeks passed, and everyone, including his three closest friends, believed that Hugh de Payens was dead. Arlo grew gaunt, for he alone of the remaining three friends had had time to dwell upon Hugh’s loss and to wonder what had befallen him. Godfrey and Payn had been kept mercifully busy by the demands of Count Raymond, who was well aware of the dangers inherent in the loss of a bosom friend. Arlo, lowborn as he was, expected and received no such consideration, and thus was left to his own devices. By the end of the third day, after making widespread enquiries, he had become convinced that Hugh had fallen among thieves and been killed, his body hidden in some hole. He had prowled the length and breadth of the city after that, searching every street and every empty house and cave for a sign of his master’s corpse before the chaos of the city’s sacking had been cleared away, the decomposing bodies gathered up and burned, and the thoroughfares cleaned up and made habitable again.
That initial cleansing, a leviathan undertaking by anyone’s estimate, had taken fifteen clear days of backbreaking work by every man-at-arms and every prisoner fit enough to ply a shovel or a broom, but still the stench of blood and death lingered in narrow, shaded places of the city, as though baked into the very stones by the intense heat. And when all his searching had led to nothing, Arlo had spoken individually to everyone in authority among the Pope’s armies. No one had seen Sir Hugh de Payens, and no one knew or appeared to care what might have happened to him.
And then one morning, without explanation, Hugh returned, walking into camp soon after dawn, dressed in rags beneath a tattered homespun robe, and leading a donkey piled high with bundled packages. He ignored Arlo’s stupefaction, merely nodding quietly to him as if he had seen him only moments earlier, then began unloading the donkey’s cargo, which transpired to be his chain-mail hauberk, his quilted tunic, his armor, and his mace and sword. He offered no word of explanation of what he had been doing, and when Arlo eventually asked him directly where he had been, he answered only, “By myself, thinking.” Arlo said nothing more, but he recognized that the Hugh de Payens who returned that morning was not the man who had led the charge into the breached city three weeks earlier.
Arlo immediately sent word of Hugh’s return to St. Omer and Montdidier, and both men came by Hugh’s camp within the hour, only to find that their friend was soundly asleep and that Arlo would not permit them to waken him, pointing out that his master must be exhausted, since he would never otherwise permit himself to be abed at such a time of day. Accepting that as self-evident, the other two demanded that Arlo tell them everything he knew. Arlo, of course, knew nothing more than they did. He told them of Hugh’s unheralded return, of his unusual reticence and quietude, but there was nothing more he could add.
That same evening, the two knights returned and found Hugh sitting quietly in front of a fire of horse and camel dung, wrapped in the homespun robe he had acquired and staring into the glowing embers. He greeted them cordially enough, but would respond to none of their questions, and when they became insistent, he would speak to one of them while plainly avoiding answering the other. They suffered it for an hour and then withdrew, shaking their heads.
They returned the next night to discover that nothing had changed, but Godfrey sat narrow-eyed, watching and listening and saying little, his mouth pursed. On the following evening he returned alone and sat in silence for more than an hour, staring into the fire beside his friend. Hugh seemed grateful for his companionship, and they sat in comfortable silence until Godfrey cleared his throat and spoke.
“I was angry at you, you know, the day the walls went down, and I’ve been angry at you ever since.”
The silence that followed was long, but just as St. Omer was beginning to think Hugh would not respond, the other man cocked his head and looked at him sideways. “Why?”
“Why? How can you even ask me that, Hugh? Why? Because I needed you, and you weren’t there—Crusty and I both needed you, more than we ever have. You are the only person we can trust without a doubt, and you vanished when we needed you the most. Where did you disappear to, in the name of God?”
Hugh de Payens straightened up in his seat as though he had been hit, and for a moment his face was transformed, his ears drawing backward and the skin over his cheekbones stretching tight in response, the crease lines by his eyes showing pale against the sunburnt bronze of his face.
“In the name of God? You ask where I went in the name of God? I went nowhere in the name of God. I ran in shame and terror from the name of God, out into the darkness of the desert to where I could no longer hear His name being screamed by madmen. I heard enough of the name of God that day to sicken me for a thousand lifetimes, and I never wish to hear His name again.”
St. Omer forced himself to sit quietly, counting from one to twenty, before he asked, his voice quiet, “What are you talking about, Hugh? I don’t understand what you are saying.”
The silence stretched again for what seemed like an age before de Payens responded, his voice softer than it had any right to be, considering the weight of what he now said. “God willed what happened in Jerusalem that day, Goff. God willed it. I looked in the face of a bishop for whom I had gone searching, to confess my sins for the first time since I joined our Order, and I saw blood matted in his beard and in his hair, and I saw the madness of the blood lust in his eyes and the slashed stain on his robe where he had wiped his blade clean of the blood he had spilled that day. It hung from a belt across his chest, a long, rusted old sword, clotted with gore, and I thought, This man is a bishop, one of God’s anointed shepherds, and he is stained and defiled with human blood … a priest, forbidden to kill! And then, and only then, I understood that I alone, of all the people in Jerusalem that day, saw anything morally wrong in what was happening, in what we had done and were doing. How could we be wrong? We were carrying out God’s will. Deus le veult!
“How many did we kill that day, do you know?”
St. Omer gazed down at his feet. “Aye, Hugh, I know. The number was made known. Everyone was very proud of it. The greatest victory in the history of Christendom … the redemption of Jerusalem from the hands of the Infidel …”
“How many, Goff?”
St. Omer sucked in a great, deep breath. “Ninety thousand.”
“Ninety … thousand. Ninety thousand souls …” Hugh turned and looked at his friend squarely. “Think about that, Goff. Think back. Do you remember how proud we were to belong to our splendid army on the day we set out from Constantinople into Turkey? That was four armies combined into one, and it was less than forty-five thousand strong … less than half the number killed in Jerusalem that day. Do you remember how vast it seemed to us then, that gathering of forty-odd thousand, with its four thousand, five hundred mounted knights and its thirty thousand infantry? Do you remember the sheer size of it, the awe-inspiring mass of it? And here were ninety thousand, a gathering twice as large as that great army but composed of men and women and children, all of them starving, frail and sick and ailing, walled up in one city, helpless and at our mercy. And we slew them because God willed it …”
His voice failed him and he stood up and crossed his arms, his chin sinking onto his breast, and when he spoke again he held one hand over his eyes, pinching them shut. “I knew the number had to be huge, because there were times when I was wading in blood and guts to my ankles … places where the drainage was poor and the walls were high … where there were houses full of wealthy people and family retainers, slaughtered in their homes. And I believe the screams I heard that day—and still can hear today—will never again permit me to hear silence.”
St. Omer raised his hands and then let them drop helplessly into his lap. “Hugh—”
“Please