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TWO

By the following afternoon, with less than an hour remaining between him and the test he must undergo, Hugh de Payens was beginning to doubt that he knew anything at all, more than half convinced that he must be suffering some kind of dementia, since his mind seemed to him to be no longer the one he had grown up with. Faced with what seemed like an interminable wait before he was hauled in to face his inquisitors, he had attempted to distract himself by reviewing the answers to the questions he would be asked, but to his horror he was unable to recall a single word of what he had fought so hard, and for so long, to learn. Not only was he unable to remember any of the responses, he was unable even to recall the basic catechism of questions that his father and grandfather had been hurling at him for months. Frustrated and suddenly close to panic, he imagined he could feel his entire skull, immense and empty, vaulted and grotesquely domed between his ears, too large and hollow, like an empty, echoing cavern. He wanted to weep, and a small voice inside him was telling him insistently to run away, but he did neither. He simply sat where he was, staring straight ahead and trying to empty his mind of everything that occupied it, as he waited to be summoned to the Gathering.

He became aware that he was no longer alone and raised his eyes to see Payn Montdidier, one of his closest friends and a cousin on his mother’s side, smiling down at him, his amber eyes gentle and filled with humor. “Ready?” he asked, and Hugh stood up, blinking in mild disbelief.

“Crusty! I didn’t expect to see you here! You can have no idea how glad it makes me, my friend—a familiar face. I have been dying here, by inches, of anticipation, mixed with terror.”

Montdidier laughed. “I’ve come to know that mixture well since yesterday, so perhaps we may help each other.”

Hugh frowned. “I don’t follow. What d’you mean, since yesterday?”

“Anticipation and terror. It hit me for the first time yesterday, when I saw your sister’s new friend. Who is she?”

Hugh’s eyes went wide with surprise. “You mean Margaret? Louise’s friend from England?”

“From England?”

“Aye, the tall, dark-haired girl.”

“Wearing a bright yellow gown?”

“She was wearing yellow when I saw her yesterday, with her father and Louise. Is that the lady you mean?” He saw Montdidier’s wide-eyed nod, and grinned. “She’s the Lady Margaret St. Clair, daughter of my godfather, Sir Stephen. What nonsense are you spouting about anticipation and terror?”

Montdidier’s face had fallen at the mention of St. Clair’s name, and now he shook his head. “Anticipation of meeting her, and terror that she might ignore me … And if she’s the daughter of Sir William St. Clair, she will ignore me, most undoubtedly.”

For the first time in days, Hugh had completely forgotten about the ordeal that lay ahead of him, captivated by the look on his friend’s face and the emotions that were there to be read by anyone who cared to look. He was about to laugh, then realized that his friend might take his wonderment as ridicule and be hurt. “Crusty, are you smitten? And after seeing the lady only once? I have known Margaret for years. She is no beauty, but—”

“She has beauty enow for me, Hugh. Those eyebrows, that forehead, and that long neck. I have to meet her.”

Now Hugh laughed aloud. “Well, that’s easily arranged. You shall meet her tomorrow, and I will not permit her to ignore you … not that she would be tempted for a moment to do such a thing. And I won’t even tell Louise that you asked me to present you to her.” Then his face grew somber again. “But in the meantime, there’s tonight. Will I live through that?”

Montdidier grinned his old grin again. “By God, if my meeting Lady Margaret St. Clair depends upon that, then I’ll fight to the death for you myself. But we are expected, and I have kept you standing here talking into tardiness. Shall we go?”

Hugh nodded, swallowed hard, and followed his friend. Payn Montdidier was known as Crusty to all his friends for two very fine reasons: Crusty was a word applied to bread, and the local word for bread, pai-yin, sounded very much like Payn, which, in its turn, was almost exactly similar in sound to Hugh’s last name, de Payens. That similarity of sound had often led to much confusion before some wag started calling the young man Crusty several years earlier. The name had been amusing, and had stuck, and the confusion had been annulled.

The public functions at the Gathering were always held in the flagstone-floored hall directly beneath the main reception floor, at the foot of the castle’s great spiral staircase, and as Crusty led him into the assembly, Hugh was surprised to see the size of the crowd. There must have been two hundred men in the vast room, perhaps more, not counting the army of servants and scullions who were moving around everywhere, and none of them paid the newcomers the slightest attention as Hugh followed Payn the length of the hall, to a table set for twelve that had been laid lengthwise in front of and abutting the very center of the head table. The table was already filled, but for a pair of vacant, high-backed chairs that sat empty, and as he approached, Hugh paid close attention to who would be sitting with them. There were two St. Clair brothers among them, Robert and Vincent, and that made him feel better immediately, although he could not have explained why. Robert, the elder of the two, was twenty-three, five full years older than Hugh, and yet he was his favorite among all the St. Clair brothers, the senior of four sons, the youngest of whom, Stephen, was fifteen, the same age as Hugh’s sister, Louise. Vincent, sitting beside his elder brother and directly across from Hugh, was two years junior to Robert, and the remaining brother, William, named after the late king of England, was barely seventeen, still too young to attend the Gathering.

Hugh had been wondering for some time now whether Robert St. Clair might be one of the brotherhood, and as Sir Stephen’s firstborn son, it had seemed likely to Hugh, in his ignorance, that he would be, but Robert’s own father had said the night before that being firstborn did not entail membership in the fraternity, and so now Hugh bit his tongue, stifling his curiosity. Another of Hugh’s friends was at the table, a nineteen-year-old cousin of some description. Hugh had never been able to come to an understanding of the varying degrees of kinship and consanguinity among the Friendly Families, as their clans were known, but Godfrey St. Omer and Hugh had been born less than a year apart and had been bosom companions since early childhood, when Hugh, incapable of pronouncing Godfrey’s name, had called him Goff and the name had stuck. Now they did not even need to speak. Godfrey, lounging in his chair and listening to something his nearest neighbor was saying, merely smiled at Hugh’s approach and closed one eye lazily in a long, welcoming wink.

The dinner passed quickly, and Hugh remembered little of it, even though it was the first Gathering dinner in which he had ever participated and, in its own way, the most important assembly he had ever attended. He met and spoke with all the other people at his table, most of whom were familiar to him by sight, and all of whose names he knew, although there were four of them, visitors from other regions, whom he had never actually seen before.

The meal seemed to end before it had time to get started, and as soon as the tables were cleared off, the entertainment began, with musicians, bards, jugglers, mummers, and dancers assembled from the great duchies of Anjou, Aquitaine, and Burgundy, and even a family of tumblers from the court of the King of France. The entertainers, however, were present only to provide an amusing and diverting background to the other activities that were now beginning throughout the hall, most of which involved copious drinking, the placing of wagers, and the setting of odds governing the real entertainment of the evening, which would be provided by the diners themselves.

Fully one quarter of the men in the hall, all of them young, had eaten sparely and drunk not at all during dinner, for they were to be the focal point of this night’s activities. Their names had been chosen by lot, to the chagrin of their less fortunate peers who had not been picked, and when they were called upon later to step forward, they would fight against each other, singly and in groups, as though their lives depended upon the outcome, which, in one minor respect, at least, they did. They were the real entertainers here, but their performance and the abilities they demonstrated would be watched closely and critically judged by their peers and companions, for the competition among knights was always fierce and belligerent, and no aspect of anything they ever did could fail to reflect upon their reputations for competence and dependability.

Technically speaking, the combat in which they would engage was for sport alone, with wooden weapons and dulled practice swords so that there should be no risk of injury or death. The reality was, however, that many a knight had died in such events, trying too hard to snatch a victory from a stronger and more able opponent. Hugh was fully aware of the importance of the combative stage of the banquet, and he was unhappy that he himself would not be able to participate, or even to watch the fights, but he said nothing to anyone because he had no way of knowing who belonged to the brotherhood and who did not. And he knew, too, that it was during this stage of the activities that the real business of the Gathering was carried out in the secret chambers far below, while the attention of all the uninitiated was tightly focused on the contests being waged here. Most of the older knights had already begun to leave the hall after the meal, before the fighting began, although they would all have been welcome to remain and enjoy the activities, but this part of the night’s festivities had been carefully designed, and was now generally accepted, as the purview of the younger attendees at the Gathering, and tradition dictated that they be left to enjoy it without the inhibiting presence of their elders.

There was nothing casual or accidental about the regularly scheduled Gatherings and the activities that took place there, nor was there anything coincidental about the physical similarity of all the men in attendance. They were all knights, and that single distinction set them apart from other men in a number of ways that were plainly visible. They were all well born, for one thing, although no law or requirement stipulated that a knight must be of noble birth. It simply happened that the vast majority of knights were born into aristocratic, land-owning families. Of course, had they been born in different circumstances, they would have had their lives and all their working days laid out for them from the moment of birth, and they would have spent their days on earth as common working men, bound by the laws of feudalism to serve the owner of the land on which they lived, and struggling every day to provide for the families with which they would have been encumbered early in life.

Among the wealthy, land-owning families, under the law of primogeniture the holdings of the family, its land and wealth, passed from the father to the oldest surviving legitimate son. Other sons— younger and therefore lesser—were expected to make their own fortunes and were faced with selecting one of two professions: knighthood or priesthood. Most became knights and fought for their livelihood, espousing the causes of their feudal overlords; others, physically weaker, or disabled in some way, or even intellectually inclined and gifted, joined the Church, where, as clerics, they could live out their lives, often usefully, without being a burden on their families.

The vast majority of well-born young men, however, hundreds of thousands of them throughout all the countries of Christendom, were knights, and as such, they were trained to fight from their earliest boyhood. They were encouraged to fight, and expected to know everything that could be known about weaponry, horses, and armor, as well as to be proficient in every kind of fighting and warfare. The awareness that physical prowess is the only valid measure of a man’s worth was hammered into them at every stage of growth from infancy. Paradoxically, however, under the stern and unyielding eye of the all-powerful Church and its ubiquitous clerics, they were simultaneously forbidden to fight, or even to brawl in public, and could be rigorously, even savagely, punished if they flouted the law. There was a very real need, therefore, for formal occasions like the Gatherings, at which young knights could fight among themselves legally, venting their pent-up frustration and energy while measuring themselves, publicly, against the best among their peers.

Hugh looked about him again, his eyes seeking the men who would fight that night. They were easy to find, for they were all sober, their demeanor serious, each of them withdrawn into himself, contemplating the strategies he would employ in the contest ahead, and as Hugh saw how they all resembled each other, his lips quirked in a tiny grin, for he knew that he himself, seen from behind, would have been indistinguishable from all of them, and yet instantly recognizable as a knight.

A knight was defined and could be instantly identified, in any country of Christendom, by his musculature; Englishman, German, Frank, Gaul, or Norman, it made no difference. All knights used similar weapons, wore virtually identical armor and trappings, and fought the same way, so that the only advantage any individual could gain over his peers was through constant and unflagging training and practice, involving the endless repetition of drills and exercise, hour after hour, day after day, month after month without respite, trying to go further, to endure more, and to last longer than any other man possibly could under the same circumstances. To do otherwise, to fail to train, was to die eventually on some field, your stamina and strength ground down and undermined until you fell, bested and beaten by someone who had simply worked harder and trained for longer and with more dedication and discipline than you had. And so no knight worthy of his title would ever contemplate allowing a day to pass without at least six hours of grinding, disciplined training of some kind.

A steel-hilted broadsword with a four-foot-long, three-inch-wide blade could weigh fourteen pounds. An unhorsed knight, afoot and encumbered by a sixty-pound coat of chain mail and all the padding and reinforcement that went with it, might have to stand and swing that sword one-handed, fighting for his life without rest and for minutes at a time. Thus the physical phenomenon known as the knight’s build: neck and shoulder muscles, heavy and corded like ships’ ropes, sloped down to enormously wide shoulders and gigantically muscled arms that projected sideways, pushed forward and into prominence by the massive bulges of chest, back, and torso; waists and hips were usually narrow and tight, above gargantuan thighs and tightly muscled calves that appeared to be constructed of slabs of meat. There were more than a hundred and a half such men gathered here in the banquet room, the only real difference between them being that some were longer of leg, and therefore taller, than others. Most of them could neither read nor write, preferring to leave such foolery to clerics, but without exception, they could all be relied upon to fight unflaggingly, at any time and without provocation, until their great strength had been exhausted and they collapsed senseless.

Looking about him now, Hugh saw that the crowd was good-natured and relaxed, the wines and ale were excellent and plentiful, and everyone in attendance was anticipating a marvelous night of entertainment. His father and grandfather had already left the hall, among the first to vanish, and they were now being followed by others, and although Hugh had been warned by his grandfather that this would occur and would not be remarked upon by anyone, it seemed to him at first that the exodus of elders and prominent knights was too obvious to go unnoticed. Fortunately, however, he also saw that their departures were masked, to a great extent, by a general pattern of movement as men began to change seats and to circulate among the tables, visiting friends and exchanging wagers on the outcome of the fights that would soon begin. After that, he was even able to relax slightly and breathe more calmly, until it dawned upon him that the time of his own inquisition was rapidly approaching.

It was his cousin, Godfrey St. Omer, who stood up eventually and clicked his fingers to capture Hugh’s attention, and moments after that the two of them were headed down into the bowels of the castle, the din of the banquet hall fading rapidly behind them. Godfrey, normally irrepressible, was a silent, vigilant escort on this occasion, and he led Hugh quickly through the preliminary approaches to the secret assembly area and through the first set of doors, to stand in the circle of identical doors in the octagonal vestibule. He rapped on one with the hilt of his dagger, and when it swung open he stepped forward smartly and whispered something to the guard there, and then they both waved to Hugh to come forward. He did, and they asked him jointly for the password he had learned on his previous visit. He repeated it, resisting the urge to smile at their boyish earnestness, and they solemnly passed him forward alone from that point, to find his own way along a narrow, darkened, twisting passageway. At the end, Hugh found himself in a small room lighted by a single lantern and containing only a kneeling bench used for prayer that was draped with a drab-looking cloth that turned out to be a mendicant’s robe. Hugh, remembering what he had learned from his two previous visits, dropped his own rich clothing to the floor and pulled on the beggar’s threadbare tunic. Then, dressed more poorly than he had ever been in his life, he sat down in the bare wooden chair to await whatever might come next.