“I give to you and your men, your Frankish men, safe passage. But not to those traitors to the true faith and the jihad who are working for you for silver. You may all ride out without a single arrow being loosed upon you. You are free to ride wherever you like, to Ashkelon or Jerusalem or to one of your fortresses farther up in Palestine or Syria. Those are my terms.”
“I cannot accept your terms; as I said, this will be a brief negotiation,” replied Arn.
“Then you will all die, and a warrior such as yourself should know that, Al Ghouti. You of all people should know. My high opinion of you—you alone, and for reasons that only you and I know but no one else in this room—requires me to make you this good offer which my emirs find entirely unnecessary. The rules say that he who refuses such an offer cannot expect any quarter if he is defeated.”
“I know that, Yussuf,” said Arn keenly aware that he was addressing the greatest commander of the faithful solely by his first name, “I know that. I know the rules as well as you do. You must now take Gaza by force, and we will have to defend ourselves until we can do so no longer. And those of us who afterward, wounded or not, become your prisoners cannot expect anything other than death. I don’t think we have anything else to say to each other now, Yussuf.”
“At least tell me why you are making such a foolish decision,” said Saladin, his face almost contorted with sorrow. “I don’t want to see you die, and you know that. Therefore I have given you an opportunity that no one but you would have been given when our force is so much stronger than yours, as you have seen. Why are you doing this when you could save all your men whom you now doom to death?”
“Because there is something greater to save,” said Arn. “I believe, as you do, that if you stay here in Gaza and lay siege to us, you can defeat us in a month and I will end up dying here, unless God wills it otherwise and sends us salvation of a miraculous nature. But so be it.”
“But why, Al Ghouti, why?” persisted Saladin, obviously distressed. “I am giving you your life, and you refuse to accept it. I give you your men’s lives, and you choose to sacrifice them. Why?”
“It’s not so hard to figure out, Yussuf, and I believe that you do understand,” replied Arn, suddenly feeling a faint hope begin to glimmer inside him. “You can take Gaza, I believe you. But it will cost you half your army and it will cost you much time. And in that case I die not for any small cause; I die for the only thing I truly must die for, and you know very well what I’m talking about. I don’t want your mercy to save my life. I would rather die if my death will cause your army to shrink to a size that makes it impossible for you to proceed. Now I have told you why.”
“Then we have nothing more to say to each other,” Saladin agreed, nodding sadly. “May you go with the peace of God and say your prayers this day. Tomorrow there will be no more peace.”
“I too leave you in God’s peace,” said Arn, getting up and bowing deeply and respectfully to Saladin before he turned and left the tent.
On his way back to the city gate he met Saladin’s brother Fahkr, who reined in his horse and asked how things now stood. Arn replied that he had said no to Saladin’s offer, which, he had to admit, had been less harsh than he might have expected.
Fahkr shook his head and muttered that he had told his brother the exact same thing, that even the most generous proposal would be met with a flat refusal.
“I say farewell to you now, Al Ghouti, and know that I, like my brother, feel sorrow for what now must come to pass,” said Fahkr.
“I feel the same way, Fahkr,” said Arn. “One of us will die, it seems. But only God knows which one of us it will be.”
They bowed to each other in silence since there was nothing more to say, and then they each rode slowly away in opposite directions, pondering.
As Arn neared the city gate, he harbored a bright hope that Saladin might have been so humiliated in front of his own emirs when his generosity was contemptuously refused that now he would have to eradicate the affront by truly taking Gaza. That, in turn, would prevent him from continuing on toward Jerusalem. But it was true, as Saladin had said, that such an action would lead to the eventual death of all men at arms within Gaza’s walls, and of all the infidels who worked for the Christians—including Arn himself. It was a certainty imbued with sorrow, because the thought that he’d had ever more often in recent years of one day returning home now seemed impossible. He was going to die in Gaza. But his joy was greater than his sorrow, because he would die to save God’s Grave and Holy Jerusalem. That much was crystal clear. He could have died in any minor battle with less important foes in the past years, and it would have made no difference at all in the Holy Land. But now God had granted him and his brothers the grace of dying for Jerusalem. In truth it was a worthy cause, a favor that was granted to few Templar knights.
He would do as Saladin suggested, spend the evening and the night in prayers of thanksgiving. All his knights would have to prepare by taking Holy Communion before the next day dawned.
The following morning Saladin’s army broke camp and set off in column after column north along the coast in the direction of Ashkelon. They did not leave even a small siege force behind.
The populace of Gaza stood on the city walls and watched the enemy moving off. They thanked their gods, which were seldom the true God, and they moved in long queues past Arn, bowing to the knight who stood up by the tower at the city gate. He was filled with ambiguous feelings, but the people wanted to thank him for their salvation. A rumor had spread through the city that the master of the fortress had somehow managed to scare Saladin with magic tricks or by threatening vengeance from the evil friends of the Knights Templar, the Assassins. It was a rumor that caused Arn to snort when he heard it, but he made no effort to refute the lies.
His disappointment was greater than his relief. Saladin’s army, which had gone unchallenged, was now large enough to take Ashkelon, a city far more important than Gaza. And many more Christian lives were sure to be lost. In the worst case, Saladin’s army was even large enough to take Jerusalem.
So Arn felt more like a failure than a victor. Nor was there any wise choice to make when it came to Gaza’s force of knights. First they needed to know what was happening to the north, perhaps wait for orders that would soon arrive by sea. With good winds it didn’t take many hours to sail from Ashkelon to Gaza.
While waiting for the right time to make such momentous decisions, Arn applied himself to a multitude of smaller problems. All the refugees who had taken shelter behind Gaza’s walls now had to be sent back to their villages as soon as possible. They needed to start rebuilding as much as they could before the winter rains came. They also had to be supplied with livestock and grain for bread so that they could resume the routines of their everyday lives. For a day and a half he busied himself mostly with these matters, working together with his head of ordnance and his scribes.
But on the second day a messenger came sailing into the harbor, giving Arn a reason to summon all the high brothers to the parlatoriumat once.
The young leprous king of Jerusalem, Baldwin IV, had ventured out with the cavalry force he had scraped together—500 knights, no more—from Jerusalem toward Ashkelon to meet the enemy on the open field. It was not a very wise thing to do; the flat landscape around Ashkelon was all too well suited to Mameluke warriors. It would have been better to concentrate on defense at the walls of Jerusalem.
When the Christians discovered what a superior force they would have to face, they hurried to flee behind the walls of Ashkelon, and there they now sat, trapped inside. Saladin had left a siege force to keep them in place. In the flat landscape around the city the Mameluke riders would have no difficulty destroying a heavily armored force of knights, which was also much smaller than their own.