Daughter of War Read online

  Daughter of War

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Preface

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Three

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part Four

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Historical note

  Also by S.J.A. Turney

  Copyright

  Daughter of War

  S.J.A. Turney

  Preface

  The Templars have gone far beyond a historical group of Catholic warriors founded to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land. They have become part of legend and, like all legends, the truth is often nebulous or distorted. Despite their importance, they were only around for two hundred years. To put that in perspective, the Plantagenet family provided monarchs for a century longer. In the sweep of history, it is little more than the blink of an eye, yet they have made their mark on the human consciousness.

  Over the years, this strange and impressive organisation has been the subject of endless treatises, novels, films and more. They appear, sometimes as heroes, occasionally as villains. Sometimes they are shown as rigid soldiers of God – monks with swords protecting the pious from the heretic. Sometimes their trials and the many accusations made against them by wealth- and power-hungry crowns are brought to the fore and they themselves are depicted as heretics, occultists and more.

  I have attempted in this book to avoid such temptations. To make the Templars neither exemplars of rigid piety nor secretive heresy. I have attempted to produce a tale based on a realistic appraisal of the order. True medieval characters rather than heroes or villains.

  With this in mind, I will state from the outset that the very existence of female Templars, though not well documented and perhaps not officially sanctioned, is very real. The two female characters I have used are historically attested people, for all the seeming flight of fancy that such women might have existed.

  Cartularies have survived that document admissions and transactions within the Templar order, and it is from these documents that the characters have come.

  The Templars were much more varied and complex than simply knights with white cloaks and red crosses.

  Welcome to the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon.

  Welcome to Spain.

  Part One

  Loss

  Chapter One

  Ebro Basin, Kingdom of Aragon

  Year of Our Lord 1198

  Summer

  Arnau de Vallbona spied the enemy at the same time as the rest of the company of Santa Coloma, a roar of righteous ferocity rising from every throat, audible even above the deafening thunder of hooves. The mail coats of the waiting Moors gleamed in the searing Iberian sun with a brilliance that Christian chain shirts never seemed to achieve – a shimmering piscine argent that rippled beautifully. Their lines were an explosion of colour, their banners fascinating – an illegible scrawl of Arabic script beneath images of swords and crowns and crescents and stars. Their helms, combined with chain coifs, revealed so little of their swarthy faces they might easily have been Christians, but for their banners and the quality of their mail. White, hungry eyes shone out from the darkness flanking their helmets’ nose guards as they levelled their maces, hammers, swords, lances – a challenge, a threat.

  The arid umber-coloured ground rumbled away beneath Arnau and his companions as the small mounted force of knights and men at arms bore down on the Moorish raiders who had plagued the region this past year and more. The border with the Almohads who controlled Valencia had created a fluid and dangerous region, ever mobile and changing, and raiders were far from uncommon, but this particular force had drawn Aragon’s ire upon the brutal burning of a church in the spring. Pedro II, King of Aragon and Count of Barcelona by the grace of God, had commanded three of his more belligerent nobles to gather a force with which to bring the raiders to justice.

  Three companies had rolled south to seek the enemy – that of Pero Ferrández d’Azagra, Lord of Albarracin; of Don Atorella; and of Arnau’s own lord, the aged warrior beloved of Christ, Berenguer Cervelló de Santa Coloma. The ego of the Lord of Albarracin had led him to assume he would achieve overall command of the force, and his pride had been somewhat dented when the king brushed the arrogant noble aside and sent someone entirely different to lead the campaign – a glorious figure who now rode at the head of the cavalry and had drawn Arnau’s eye throughout the ride, inspiring him and quelling his doubts and fears.

  The army had chased around the dry, brown borderlands for two weeks, often catching wind that the raiders had been seen in the area recently or were tantalisingly near. Twice, they had even caught up with the enemy, only to lose them again as they deployed the mass ranks of foot soldiers. The raiders were an entirely mounted force, far too quick and manoeuvrable to trap into a full fight with infantry, and on each occasion they melted away into the hills and valleys, whooping, before the Christian force could be brought fully to bear against them. Consequently this time, when the enemy had been spotted, the bulk of the infantry had been left with the wagons and the horses issued forth to join battle or chase the raiders into the swift waters of the Ebro to drown. Albarracin had been scathing, displeased with the peril of matching only cavalry against cavalry, which would cancel out all the advantage in numbers the Christians could claim, though the army’s leader had simply straightened and proclaimed his faith in God and their sureness of victory.

  The enemy was not a force of organised, devout Almohad warriors. The Almohads, who had crossed the straits from Africa and imposed a powerful caliphate upon the previously fragmented Moorish taifa states of Iberia, were truly a force to be reckoned with. Zealous and clever, they had all but halted the Christian reconquest for half a century now. Yet it was not they who awaited the cavalry, but a rabble of vicious Moorish raiders who had taken advantage of the rough borderlands.

  Arnau had tried throughout the ride to hate the men they would face, and had found that he could only do so if he focused on that aspect. Not that they worshipped a heresy, but that they were raiders who killed and thieved as a matter of course. That they had burned a church with the priest still inside. That made them bad men.

  Arnau was as God-fearing a young man as could be found in the county of Barcelona, and he kissed the feet of the Virgin’s statue in the village chapel every day. He had sat vigil in that same sanctuary. He took the Eucharist, and believed with an undying passion in the divinity of the trinity. But he had been born in the days when the Moor’s dominance of the region was still fresh in the minds of all. When the after-effects of four centuries of Moorish control were still being unpicked from society, largely unsuccessfully.

  The streets still often carried their Moorish names. The land was irrigated with their ingenious systems. The arches to be seen in grand buildings were still distinctly theirs. Even their delicate bath houses still functioned, though few God-fearing Christians would trust their flesh to such a place, with their cloying steam and rough masseurs. But that great fall of a culture in the region as the Moor had been driven back south had created a strange rift between Christians young and old. Those who had spent their lives under the dominion of the Moor, which had bee
n lifted less than half a century ago, were often still fervent and spiteful in their denunciations. To them the Moors were the soldiers of the Antichrist walking the Earth, who had imposed their twisted beliefs upon the true people of Iberia. Men like Arnau’s father, in fact, seeking a final end to the musulmán and his ways. Men like the French and English lords who sought repeatedly to take sharpened steel to the Holy Land and wrest Jerusalem from the clutches of the Saracen.

  Those younger men like Arnau, though, who had been raised among the ashes of that world, lived a more complicated life. They watched the Moors who had remained living as little more than slaves in the new regime, being beaten for failing to adequately farm land that their families had cultivated as free people for hundreds of years. It was hard to hate them. So much easier to pity them. After all, as the fifth Book of Matthew preached:

  You have heard it said ‘an eye for eye, and a tooth for a tooth’. But I tell you not to resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.

  Arnau hardened his heart. Blessed Matthew could afford clemency. He had not been burned in a church by such men. Forget the Moorish boys begging for a crust on street corners, a cross carved in their forehead with their own thumbnail to deny their origin and encourage passing Christians to help them. Forget the grave of the gentle imam in Vallbona that was still spat upon daily, despite his having been a kindly old man who had helped Arnau’s own grandfather to ease his pain in his last years. Forget that Aragon and Catalunya had been their homes for more generations than any man could remember. These men were raiders and priest-burners, beyond pity.

  ‘Who is your master?’ cried the man leading the charge.

  ‘God is our master,’ roared every voice in the company of Santa Coloma on the left flank, as well as those beyond in the other two units that formed the army. And well they might. A man might turn from God’s grace on a drunken night when he thinks he might get away with it, and he may think he serves no master but himself in the half-light of dawn. But riding into battle, truths were hammered home into the heart and mind, and never more so than when a man like this one led the fight. For, even beleaguered as they were, and with diminished numbers after the disastrous defeat at Alarcos, the Templars were ever the heart and soul of the fight against the infidel.

  And more so than the fact the men they faced were murderous raiders, he was what cast aside all uncertainty in Arnau… the Templar. All thoughts of charity for the Moor turned to dust as the man leading the charge in the white tunic with the eye-catching red cross couched his lance and roared a passage from the Psalms.

  ‘A sinner beholdeth a just man and seeketh to slay him. But the Lord shall not forsake him in His hands!’

  When such a man bellows such a glorious thing it flows through the veins, setting light to every nerve. The blood is up, riding into battle, whether a man be sword-virgin or blood-soaked veteran, and it takes little to turn a pious and thoughtful man into a berserk butcher. Thus was it for Arnau. The mass of Moors charging them could have been Christians. They could have been Jews. They could have been women and children, and he would have gleefully released his sword on the word of that glorious man with the red cross who led them.

  Battle was joined a moment later. The unnamed Templar disappeared into the colourful melee of Moors ahead of any Christian companion, heedless of peril, his soul entrusted to the Lord. Arnau felt the righteousness of their cause at the sight. All the more so because the man was an impregnable, impervious, soldier of God. Even ahead of the army and surrounded by the enemy, he was alive and delivering divine justice with the edge of a blade. Arnau could hear the Templar singing his devotion to God as he cleaved limbs and hacked flesh and broke bones.

  Arnau was consumed. Gone was the young man who had felt sorry for the Moor of the street corner begging for scraps. Here was Arnau de Vallbona, warrior of Christ and son of the righteous reconquest. He noted only at the last moment that he had, in his glorious pursuit of the Templar, strayed from his own company and towards the army’s centre. Still, there was no chance of altering direction at this point, and an enemy was an enemy, after all.

  Horse hit horse and man hit man. A spear clacked off his shield and took several links of mail from his arm in passing. Arnau raised the mace that was his weapon of choice. His arm came up and then down sharply, the heavy points of the iron head carrying brutal death. The weapon struck, smashing and bending the corner of the Moor’s hastily raised circular shield. He saw that shield fall away, accompanied by a scream that was muffled by layers of leather and chain. The shield arm had shattered under the blow. The Moor lifted his sword in desperation, still wailing at his broken arm, but he could not deflect Arnau’s second blow. The mace came down again and this time crunched into the meeting of shoulder and neck. He felt bones break again under the weight of the dreadful weapon, and the enemy’s chain veil was ripped aside in the process, revealing bared white teeth, caging in the ongoing scream.

  The Moor could do nothing. His shield arm dangled, the weight of the iron disc dragging it down, and his curved blade toppled from the fingers of an arm broken at the shoulder. The man was almost past Arnau already, his horse driving on despite the impending demise of its rider, and the young soldier had to turn and reach hard to swing the mace once more. It struck the man in the face, and while Arnau was spared the view of the damage he inflicted as the man was carried away by his desperate horse, as the mace came round seeking a new target, the horrific mess on the iron points told its own tale.

  A lance with a perfect point came from nowhere and passed by Arnau so close that he felt the breeze of its movement. A sword came down. His shield went up, the black lion of Vallbona catching that curved blade. The Moorish sword skittered across the face of the shield, defacing that proud animal, and Arnau roared some unintelligible imprecation as he smashed the blade away and brought round his mace in a wide arc, slamming it into the man’s unprotected chest, the points digging deep into the mail shirt, snapping ribs, crushing lungs.

  The rider lolled to one side in his saddle and Arnau moved on. He cast his gaze about, trying to take stock of the situation in a split second. The forces were more or less evenly matched in numbers, as far as he could tell, but the Aragonese and Catalan cavalry clearly had the edge. He could still see that glorious figure in the red cross amid a sea of steel, bellowing out the Psalms as he killed and maimed with brutal efficiency. Further across the field on the left flank he could see his own lord, Berenguer de Santa Coloma, with other knights of his household, cleaving their way through the enemy, the old man still virile and strong, every bit the match of any man on the field. Silently Arnau cursed himself for having paid so much attention to that glorious Templar that he had veered off and allowed himself to become separated from his lord’s men.

  Another sword came from nowhere, scything round, and Arnau only managed to get his shield in the way at the last moment, the keen curved edge carving a chunk from the edge of the wooden board, a shockwave rattling up his arm from the blow. Arnau’s mace rose and fell, the Moor’s shield catching the blow, the metal points driving deep dents into the disc. Again and again they struggled, Arnau’s breathing hot and loud in the confines of his mail coif and steel helm, the enemy’s white eyes staring out from the shadows of his own helmet. The Moor’s sword clattered against and bit into Arnau’s black lion shield while his heavy mace battered and dented the enemy’s metal disc. The man was good. There was never an opening and, with a heavy heart at being driven to do such a thing, the young warrior took the only course of action he could. His mace swung into the horse’s head with a crack – a blow that would kill in moments. Had already killed, in fact, though it would take the beast’s wrecked brain precious moments to register the fact that iron points were lodged in it. Then, as Arnau wrenched his weapon free, the horse fell, pitching forward. The surprised rider was flung from the saddle, though one of his mailed feet was still caught in a stirrup and the leg broke horr
ibly as he fell.

  Arnau ignored him and took the opportunity of the slight opening the fallen horse had created, urging his own beast back towards the flank where the company of Santa Coloma fought like demons, struggling, since it seemed the enemy had weighted that flank heavily.

  The young man at arms saw the next blade coming, but had little time to react. His shield was on the other side and his mace, while brutal and deadly, was a poor parrying weapon. He leaned far to his left, yanking on the horse’s reins to try and lurch out of the sword’s path. The sharp edge scythed across the edge of his saddle, missing him by inches at most, but the tip scored a deep line down the horse’s flesh. Arnau felt the beast’s muscles and weight shifting and knew what was coming. Desperately, horribly aware of the danger posed by the man who had almost done for him, Arnau ripped his feet from the stirrups. The animal bucked, pain coursing through it, blood slicking down its flank, and the young soldier toppled gracelessly from the back, tucking into a ball as best he could. He hit the dirt and rolled painfully for a moment, then lurched backwards and tried to stand, watching the wounded horse’s kicking hooves with wide, wild eyes.

  Then he was up, struggling with the weight of the mail shirt, shield and mace as a spray of blood, mud and unmentionable stuff flew through the press of men, churned and lifted by jolting hooves. His world became a place of horse’s legs and mail-clad feet, dancing and stamping, kicking and flailing. A battlefield of mounted men was no place for a foot soldier, for every beast carried more danger than its rider here on the ground. Arnau gripped his mace and kept his shield close and high as he pushed into the mass, dodging horses and sweeping weapons with desperation and speed as he tried to move closer and closer to the flank where his lord was fighting and where there might be more room.

  They were winning. Even from Arnau’s rather restricted point of view, he could identify more Christian horses and legs and surcoats than Moorish.