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Chapter Fourteen: The Combat on the Bridge
Chapter Fifteen: The Flight to Emesa
Chapter Sixteen: The Sultan Saladin
Chapter Seventeen: The Brethren Depart from Damascus
Chapter Eighteen: Wulf Pays for the Drugged Wine
Chapter Nineteen: Before the Walls of Ascalon
Chapter Twenty: The Luck of the Star of Hassan
Chapter Twenty-One: What Befell Godwin
Chapter Twenty-Two: At Jerusalem
Chapter Twenty-Three: Saint Rosamund
Chapter Twenty-Four: The Dregs of the Cup

"Two lovers by the maiden sate, Without a glance of jealous
hate; The maid her lovers sat between, With open brow and equal
mien;--It is a sight but rarely spied, Thanks to man's wrath and
woman's pride."

Scott

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Standing a while ago upon the flower-clad plain
above Tiberius, by the Lake of Galilee, the writer gazed at the
double peaks of the Hill of Hattin. Here, or so tradition says,
Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount--that perfect rule of
gentleness and peace. Here, too--and this is certain--after
nearly twelve centuries had gone by, Yusuf Salah-ed-din, whom we
know as the Sultan Saladin, crushed the Christian power in
Palestine in perhaps the most terrible battle which that land of
blood has known. Thus the Mount of the Beatitudes became the
Mount of Massacre.

Whilst musing on these strangely-contrasted scenes enacted in one
place there arose in his mind a desire to weave, as best he
might, a tale wherein any who are drawn to the romance of that
pregnant and mysterious epoch, when men by thousands were glad to
lay down their lives for visions and spiritual hopes, could find
a picture, however faint and broken, of the long war between
Cross and Crescent waged among the Syrian plains and deserts. Of
Christian knights and ladies also, and their loves and sufferings
in England and the East; of the fearful lord of the Assassins
whom the Franks called Old Man of the Mountain, and his fortress
city, Masyaf. Of the great-hearted, if at times cruel Saladin
and his fierce Saracens; of the rout at Hattin itself, on whose
rocky height the Holy Rood was set up as a standard and captured,
to be seen no more by Christian eyes; and of the Iast surrender,
whereby the Crusaders lost Jerusalem forever.

Of that desire this story is the fruit.

PROLOGUE

Salah-ed-din, Commander of the Faithful, the king Strong to Aid,
Sovereign of the East, sat at night in his palace at Damascus and
brooded on the wonderful ways of God, by Whom he had