Now the entire chessboard had been overturned. Gérard de Ridefort was a mortal enemy of the regent Count Raymond. All plans to bring the Templars and the Hospitallers closer together would now probably come to naught. As if he felt some warning about the future, Arn sensed that he was seeing only the beginning of evil changes that were in store for the entire Holy Land.
When he returned to Gaza he could at least look forward to seeing his Norwegian kinsman Harald Øysteinsson, who by this time was heartily tired of singing hymns and sweating all day long in a remote fortress in the baking sun. The little that Harald had seen of war in the Holy Land had not been to his liking; the tedious daily life time in a fortress during peacetime must seem even worse.
Arn then realized that as fortress master he would be able to order the brothers and sergeants who could swim and dive to continue practicing those skills. If Gaza’s harbor was ever blockaded by an enemy fleet and the city was simultaneously under siege, the ability to swim at night through the enemy blockade would be of great importance. Since Arn himself and Harald were the only ones who could really swim and dive, this new exercise would be more for their own private pleasure than any serious preparation for war. The Rule forbade them to practice together on Gaza’s jetties, since no Templar knight could show himself undressed before another brother, nor could anyone swim solely for the sake of pleasure. So they would have to take turns swimming, but their enjoyment in partaking of this alleged practice for war would surely be considerably greater than its military usefulness to the Knights Templar.
Some years earlier Arn would never have dreamed of twisting and turning the Rule so wantonly. But now that he felt his remaining time in service to be more of a waiting period than a holy duty, he surrendered much of the gravity that had previously marked his behavior. He and Harald began to speak of traveling together; as fortress master Arn could relieve Harald at any time from his duties as sergeant. They agreed that such a long journey to the North was something they would prefer to do together.
Yet it was difficult to imagine how they would get together enough funds for the journey. During his almost twenty years of being personally penniless Arn was no longer accustomed to thinking of money as a problem. On reflection, however, he found that he could certainly borrow enough traveling money from one of the worldly knights he knew. In the worst case, he and Harald might have to go into service for a year or so, for instance in Tripoli or Antioch, before they could afford to leave.
Once they began talking about the journey, it made them long for home even more. They dreamed of regions they had long ago pushed out of their minds; they saw faces from the past and in the silence heard their own language. To Arn a special image from what had once been his home grew stronger than everything else. Each night he saw Cecilia, each night he prayed to God’s Mother to protect Cecilia and his unknown child.
Occasionally he received news from travelers going between Gaza and Jerusalem, and his feeling was reinforced that everything was sliding downhill when it came to the Holy Land. Now in Jerusalem no prayers were permitted except by Christians, and no Saracen doctors or Jews could work for either the Templar knights or the worldly ones. The enmity between Hospitallers and Templars had grown worse than ever, since the two Grand Masters refused to speak to each other. And the Knights Templar seemed to be doing whatever they could to sabotage the peace that the regent, Count Raymond, was trying his best to maintain. One warning sign was that the Knights Templar had come to be close friends with the caravan plunderer Reynald de Châtillon of Kerak. As Arn understood the situation, it was probably only a matter of time before that man would venture out on new plundering raids. When he did the peace with Saladin would be broken, and that was what the Knights Templar clearly wanted to happen.
But nowadays Arn was thinking about his journey home and was more interested in counting his remaining days in the Order of the Knights Templar than he was concerned about the black clouds he saw looming over the eastern horizon of the Holy Land. In his own mind he defended this attitude by thinking that he could no longer do any useful work since God had taken away all his power within the Order. Nor could he blame himself for his new indifference.
During this uneventful year in Gaza he devoted more hours than necessary every day to riding his Arabian horses, the stallion Ibn Anaza and the mare Umm Anaza. They were the only property permitted to him; if he found the right buyer they would pay for both his and Harald’s trip home to the North several times over. But he had no intention of voluntarily relinquishing these two horses, because he judged them to be the best steeds he had ever seen, much less ridden. Ibn Anaza and Umm Anaza would definitely come home with him to Western Götaland.
Western Götaland. He said the name of his country to himself now and then, as if to get used to it again.
When he had ten months left of his service, a rider came with urgent news from the Grand Master in Jerusalem. Arn de Gothia was to ride immediately to Ashkelon with thirty knights to serve as part of an important escort.
Obviously he obeyed at once, and arrived with his knights in Ashkelon that same afternoon.
What had happened was momentous but not unexpected. The child king Baldwin V had died in the care of his uncle, Joscelyn de Courtenay, and the body now had to be accompanied to Jerusalem along with the funeral guests Guy de Lusignan and Sibylla, the apparently not very sad mother of the child.
On the road between Ashkelon and Jerusalem Arn had already realized that the import of the journey was much greater than grieving for and burying a child. There was a power shift in the making.
Two days later in Jerusalem, when Joscelyn de Courtenay proclaimed his niece Sibylla as successor to the throne, the plans of the conspirators of the coup were made clear.
In the Templars’ quarter where Arn was now living in the guest rooms for the lower knights, he met a dejected Father Louis, who told him everything that had happened.
First Joscelyn de Courtenay had come rushing to Jerusalem. There he met with the regent, Count Raymond, and told him about the death of the child king Baldwin. He suggested to Raymond that he summon the high council of barons to meet in Tiberias instead of in Jerusalem. In this way they could avoid interference from the Grand Master of the Templars, Gérard de Ridefort, who did not feel bound by any oath to obey King Baldwin IV’s last will, and the patriarch Heraclius, who also tried to get his fingers in everything.
Count Raymond had thus let himself be duped into leaving Jerusalem. At that point Reynald de Châtillon came thundering into the city with scores of knights from Kerak; then Joscelyn de Courtenay at once proclaimed his niece Sibylla the next successor to the throne. This would mean, if the plan were carried out, that the incompetent Guy de Lusignan could soon be King of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Count Raymond, the d’Ibelin brothers, and all the others who could have prevented such a move had been lured away from Jerusalem. All the gates and walls around the city were guarded by the Knights Templar, so no enemy of the conspirators could slip into the city. It seemed that nothing could stop the evil that was about to befall the Holy Land.
The only one who made any attempt to avert this calamity in the following days was the Grand Master of the Hospitallers, Roger des Moulins. He refused to betray the oath he had given before God to the late King Baldwin IV. The patriarch Heraclius, however, did not feel bound by any oath, and the Grand Master of the Templars, Gérard de Ridefort, pointed out that he himself had never sworn such an oath; the promise that a dismissed Jerusalem’s Master had made on his behalf could not be considered valid.