PRAISE FOR JAMES BECKER’S NOVELS

ALSO BY JAMES BECKER

SIGNET

Prologue

Acre, Palestine

May 1291

“We have no choice. We agree or we die. All of us. It’s that simple.”

Pierre de Sevry, the marshal of the Knights Templar in the Holy Land, rested his left hand on the pommel of his sheathed battle sword and looked around at the assembled company. His white tunic, bearing the unmistakable symbol of the order, the bloodred croix pattée, which had been used in various forms since 1147 to signify membership of this illustrious company of warrior monks, was ripped and torn and heavily stained with blood, some of it his own. His plate armor was dented, holed, and scratched from the almost continuous close combat that had been a daily feature of the siege of Acre since the first Mamluk attack on the city.

The Mamluks—an elite caste of warrior slaves who had fought for the Egyptian rulers for over a century—had assumed power in Egypt a short time earlier, ending the reign of the descendants of the great Muslim leader Saladin. Thirty years earlier they had utterly destroyed a Mongol army at Ain Jalut, south of Nazareth, and had been undefeated ever since. By any standards, they were formidable opponents.

A deep voice cut across the suddenly silent chamber.

“For myself, I would be happy to give my life in this glorious mission.”

De Sevry looked at the knight who had spoken, a man he knew had acquitted himself with conspicuous valor over the last few days, and nodded.

“None of us doubt either your courage or your resolve, my brother, and all of us have been prepared to give our lives for the honor of God every day since we arrived in this place. But I have no wish to sacrifice myself or any of this company to no purpose. We are a mere handful of men, less than two hundred strong, and by our latest count the sultan Khalil has mustered an army of over one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, not to mention his siege engines and catapults, and his miners who are probably even now tunneling somewhere in the ground under our feet. Even if each of us in the coming battle managed to slay five hundred of the enemy, there would still be well over fifty thousand of them left. This is a fight that we simply cannot win, no matter what we do or how courageously we conduct ourselves. If we decide to fight, then it is inevitable that we are also deciding to die. And if we die, then the only chance the forces of Christendom have of regaining the Holy City will die with us.”

De Sevry paused in his grim recitation and again looked around at the company of his most senior knights, a bare dozen men whom he considered his brothers in Christ as well as his most trusted comrades in arms. All of them looked haggard and wearied by over six weeks of unrelenting and utterly brutal hand-to-hand combat, facing the teeming hordes of Mamluk attackers who had thrown themselves, wave after wave, against them.

From the very beginning, the sultan’s siege engines and catapults had been raining missiles down on the city, their target the massive outer wall surrounding Acre. The wall was studded with ten separate and formidable towers, the principal entrance tower possessing walls almost thirty feet thick, a huge structure that had looked utterly impregnable to some of the inhabitants. But that hadn’t proved to be the case.

As well as the knights of the Templar order, the beleaguered garrison included Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights, and a joint force of Templars and Hospitallers had barely repelled a determined attack by the Mamluk soldiers on Saint Anthony’s Gate on May fifteenth. But already the writing had been on the wall: the siege was only ever going to end one way, and all of them inside the fortress knew it.

Three days later, a sound like distant swelling thunder had echoed off the old stones of the city walls as all the war drums of the Mamluk attackers had been sounded simultaneously, the noise growing rapidly until people within the city were almost deafened. And then with a suddenness that was almost shocking, the drumming stopped and there was the briefest of instants of total silence.

And then the screaming had started, the awe-inspiring sound of tens of thousands of voices bellowing their battle cries to the heavens. Then line upon line, wave upon wave, of Mamluk soldiers had begun running headlong over the rough ground toward the fortifications, converging on the battered structure from all sides simultaneously, their unsheathed swords glinting like a sea of silver in the rays of the morning sun. Above them, the sky had darkened as tens of thousands of arrows had flown overhead, the archers targeting the soldiers waiting on the walls. It had been the beginning of an unrelenting and all-out assault on the city.

And of course it wasn’t just the Mamluk soldiers that the defendants faced. The sultan had assembled an array of siege engines, massive catapults, and trebuchets that could hurl rocks ranging from the size of a man’s head up to massive boulders three or four feet in diameter that might require a dozen or more men to lift into position on the weapons.

The moment the war drums had fallen silent, the siege engines had fired, the rocks arcing up into the sky before plummeting to earth with devastating force, obliterating anything they hit. For a whole number of reasons, the weapons were inaccurate, but there were so many of them that accuracy was not really an issue. Even the handful of boulders that had smashed into the inner wall of Acre’s defenses had been enough to cause significant damage, and most of the rocks that missed this target had slammed into the area beyond the defenses, causing utter carnage among the soldiers and civilians who were unfortunate enough to find themselves in the impact area.

The first breach on one of the towers—the so-called Accursed Tower—had occurred that day, and immediately the attackers had swarmed through the opening driven into the wall, forcing the beleaguered Christian defenders to retreat to the next line of defense, the inner wall, fighting all the way.

And it had been on that very same day that the tragic event occurred, which had unexpectedly thrust Pierre de Sevry into the position of commanding the few remaining Knights Templar.

Guillaume de Beaujeu, the grand master of the order, had been taking a brief rest from the fighting when he was told that the Mamluk attackers had actually forced their way inside the city. Without pausing to don all his plate armor, Guillaume had immediately rushed out and taken his place at the forefront of the defenders, as was the norm for Templar grand masters, wielding his double-edged battle sword to lethal effect against the swarm of Mamluk besiegers.

In the heat of the battle he had raised his weapon to strike down another attacker when an arrow slammed into his body underneath his upraised arm. His full armor would probably have stopped the missile, but the mail he was wearing was insufficiently strong to deflect it. The arrow had delivered a fatal wound, and he had died within the day.

The next most senior officer was de Sevry, and when Guillaume de Beaujeu had drawn his last breath, the marshal of the Knights Templar reluctantly assumed the mantle of leadership. But it was clear to all the knights that there was very little chance de...