The Codex Lacrimae: The Book of Tears

Chapter 27: Two Warriors of Mecina

Aurelius remained where he'd fallen in the muddy flats before the Krak des Chevaliers. The pattering of raindrops on puddles was the only remnant of the deluge that had wreaked chaos on the contest between the Hospitallers and Saladin's force. Aurelius awakened to the squelch of feet in mud, as well as the low-toned mutter of Arabic-speaking men. Returning to full awareness, he pushed himself onto one arm.

Too late, he heard the sounds of men suddenly alarmed, and realized that his movement had drawn attention. Given the corpses that lay in the mire around him, it seemed that he'd been counted among the dead.

"Bring him with the others," a man ordered, and then hands grabbed him roughly by the shoulders.

That jerking motion, and his instinctive resistance to it, cleared some of the mud from his face, and he saw clearly again. Saladin's troops so filled the battlefield before the Krak that the youth felt as if he were in a sea of muddied abas. The soldiers ignored the rain, clearing the dead combatants, horses, and gear from the center of the wide road, and making room for the arriving siege engines. His captors led him to a place where twenty Hospitallers knelt in the mud. A few raised their downcast heads at his approach, but quickly lowered their faces when they recognized him, the action masking their surprise.

I took two hundred with me, and only twenty survived? The thought seared into his mind as he knelt beside the others.

"Brother, you live!" a nearby Hospitaller hissed, smiling through battered lips.

"Oui," Aurelius replied, not knowing what else to say. He felt a failure, a feeling compounded when he recalled that Clarinda must be alone with the caskets. He wouldn't make any excuses, but how could the knight—Brother Richard, if he recalled correctly—how could he stomach the sight of Aurelius? The planned sortie to shock the enemy had failed, and he knew that the Krak's engineers couldn't have had enough time to fortify the ruptured curtain wall and gate.

"I'm alive," he continued, "but it seems that the enemy's troops have established themselves here, in spite of the rains."

"And that's as far as they'll get, Brother!" Another knight exclaimed, having heard Richard's words. The other three knights looked up too. "Let the Saracens fill this plain with all the men they can, they'll not soon be getting past the siege-works Arcadian's put inside the main gate. I tell you, by Jesu, they'll not make more of a breach than that hole in the wall."

Aurelius looked hard at the man, confused by the warrior's ebullience. Not daring to hope, he again scrutinized Saladin's army. It was true! Very few black or red-robed Hospitaller knights were being dragged to the side of the road— the majority of corpses wore white caftans.

"How many did we lose?" Aurelius asked in a low tone.

"I saw none fall besides ourselves, Brother," Richard whispered enthusiastically. "We were captured, but the castle's safer than it was ... at least, for a little while."

None died? None lost in a raid against thirty times those we started with.His elation remained even as he realized that they should count themselves as casualties—they couldn't expect to survive as hostages. Saladin was known to be a merciful ruler, but he held a particular dislike for Templars and Hospitallers. Aurelius looked at the fifty or so dead bodies of the Arabic enemy. No, Saladin might not show clemency to members of a raiding party that had inflicted such a blow to his forces.

Still, we live. An idea formed, and he let it develop. Sí, sí—Saladin won't show clemency unless he were offered an irresistible bargain.He rose to his feet and turned with a bow to the nearest guard, speaking quickly to him in Arabic. "We have valuable information that will interest your leader. We need to see him."