“So what was it about the Christian you killed that made his death more sinful than that of other Christians you may have killed?” asked Father Louis, clearly baffled.

“One of our most important rules of honor goes like this,” replied Arn with a hint of sadness in his voice: “ When you draw your sword—do not think about who you must kill. Think about who you should spare.I have tried to live according to that rule, and it was in my thoughts when I confronted the three foolish new arrivals who for the sake of their own pleasure intended to attack and kill defenseless women, children, and old men who were under the protection of the city of Gaza. I was the master of Gaza then.”

“Surely you must have had the right to defend your wards even from Christians. Didn’t you?” asked Father Louis, relieved.

“Yes, most certainly. And I did try to spare two of the knights. The fact that they died anyway is not my sin; that is something that can easily occur when riding with drawn weapons against one another. But with the third knight it was worse. First I spared him as I wished and should have done. He rewarded me by killing my horse right before my eyes. Then I killed him at once and in anger.”

“That was bad, of course,” sighed Father Louis, who saw the hope for a simple solution vanish. “You killed a Christian man for the sake of a horse?”

“Yes, Father, that is my sin.”

“That was bad, truly bad,” Father Louis nodded sadly. “But tell me one thing that I perhaps do not understand. Aren’t horses particularly important for you knights?”

“A horse can be a closer friend to a knight than his friends among other knights,” said Arn sadly. “To your ears, Father, this may sound strange or even blasphemous, but I can only tell you the honest truth. My life depends on my horse and our camaraderie. With a lesser horse than the one that was killed before my eyes, I would certainly have fallen in battle long ago. That horse saved my life more times than I can count, and we had been friends ever since I was young and he was young. We lived a long warrior life together.”

Father Louis felt strangely moved by this childish declaration of love for an animal. But from his brief sojourn in the center of the world, he had already understood that many things were different here; some things that were sins back home might not be found sinful here, and vice versa. So he did not want to be hasty, and he asked Arn for time to think over what he had heard until the next day. In the meantime Arn should again seek God in his heart and pray for forgiveness for his sin. With that they parted. Arn, moving as if carrying a heavy burden, had to go and take care of matters that could no longer wait.

Father Louis remained out in the arcade, pondering with a certain satisfaction the interesting problem that had now been handed to him. Father Louis enjoyed cracking hard nuts.

The men who were indeed Christians had been about to murder women and children—Father Louis was not aware that the women and children were Bedouins, since Arn had not mentioned it, because he did not find that fact significant in the same way a newcomer would.

But God would hardly want to protect such criminals, Father Louis went on. The fact that God put a Templar knight in the way of the criminals was no cause for surprise. Two of them had undoubtedly received the punishment they deserved. So far, no problem.

But to kill a Christian man for the sake of a soulless horse, and in a fit of anger at that? Perhaps Father Louis might better understand the problem if he tried like the philosopher to weigh the usefulness of such action that God might have placed in the balance trays.

If he accepted Arn de Gothia’s account about the horse, and clearly he had to do so, then the horse would have been pleasing to God because it had helped its master kill hundreds of God’s enemies. So wouldn’t the horse be worth just as much as a mediocre worldly man who had taken the cross and journeyed to the Holy Land for both noble and less noble purposes?

Theologically the answer would obviously be no. However, by killing that particular horse the criminal had actually damaged God’s cause in the Holy Land just as much as if he had killed a knight. This sin had to be weighed in the balance trays. Add to that the fact that the criminal intended to murder innocent women and children solely for the sake of his own enjoyment. It was easy to understand that God had sent His punishment in the form of a Templar knight against such a sinner.

That was the objective side of the matter. But greater difficulties arose when one approached the subjective side. Arn de Gothia knew the Rule and he had broken it. He was no ignorant sinner; he was educated and he spoke perfect Latin with an amusing Burgundian accent that reminded Father Louis of his friend Father Henri, which was no surprise. It was impossible to escape the fact that Arn de Gothia’s sin was great, and it could not be diminished by pointing to a lack of understanding.

But this time there was a third side to the issue. Father Louis had been secretly dispatched as the Holy Father’s informant in Jerusalem. The Holy Father had a big problem on his hands because all the men of the church in the Holy Land were constantly reporting complaints against one another. They demanded that the others be excommunicated, or they requested that certain orders of excommunication be lifted; they accused each other of all sorts of sins, and unquestionably often lied in doing so. It was a particularly vexing problem because the Holy Land had more bishops and archbishops than other countries. And it had become almost impossible to sit there in Rome and try to dissect what was true and what was not in all these counter-accusations. So Father Louis had been given the assignment by the Holy Father to serve as the Holy See’s eyes and ears in Jerusalem, but preferably without revealing his role to anyone.

In this case he had to ask himself what would be best in terms of this task he had been assigned: to retain Arn de Gothia as Jerusalem’s Master in the Holy Father’s own blessed army, or to replace him with some boorish and ignorant man?

This question seemed easy to answer. It would serve the holy mission best if Arn de Gothia received forgiveness for his sins and continued as host for Father Louis. In view of the much greater task ordered by the Holy Father, even the sin of having killed a Christian villain paled in comparison. Arn de Gothia would receive forgiveness for his sins the very next day, but Father Louis would also describe this interesting dilemma in his first letter to the Holy Father himself, so that he could give the absolution his papal blessing. With that the problem could be dismissed for good.

When Arn met Father Louis at the same place in the arcade just before lauds the next morning, he was given absolution in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Virgin. But just as they knelt to pray together in thanksgiving, Father Louis was disturbed by a great wailing in the midst of the pre-dawn silence. He had heard the sound before but had not yet asked what it was.

Arn, who saw his concern, calmed him by telling him that it was only the muezzin of the unbelievers calling his faithful to morning prayer by assuring them that God was great. Father Louis was then completely distracted in his prayers when he realized that the enemy unbelievers seemed to assume that it was the most natural thing in the world to hold their blasphemous prayers in the midst of God’s most holy city. But at the moment he did not want to address that problem.

Arn thanked God for His grace. Yet he did not seem so overwhelmed or even surprised that he had so easily received absolution for such a grave sin, and with only a week’s penance on bread and water.

In the past, Arn’s spiritual father Henri had seemed to forgive serious sins of that type with equal nonchalance. This was now the second time that Arn had received absolution of sin after having killed a Christian man. The first time, when Father Henri had forgiven him, Arn had been very young, hardly more than a child. Back then he had been consumed by fear, and because of his lack of experience when he defended himself against two peasants who were trying to kill him, he ended up slaying them both. It was explained to him that the sin could be forgiven because it had been the fault of those who were killed, and the Virgin Mary had intervened to save a young maiden’s love. There were other details that Arn could now hardly remember, but he had indeed been forgiven.