“They’re evil, and we’re good,” the little Prince childishly suggested to the group of men gathered around the extraordinary box with the moving paintings.
By the little Prince's countenance the knight couldn't tell whether he was incredibly naïve, malevolently cynical, or just another morally obtuse tyrant. The knight had seen many men like him before, from Acre to here, infidel or Christian. They always awaken him with their self-righteous din.
"Don’t use the word ‘crusade’ again though, you might upset those you bomb," the Prince is jocularly counseled by a soft looking smirking man. They all laughed.
The knight thought them pitiless; and wondered if they had ever seen war, for they joked like squires, not considering those about to die.
The Hospitaler listened as he lay beneath the ground rotting, wishing his bones could rejoin.
"Oh how much longer must I stay?" the knight agonized in silence.
He is stirred again with phantom passion, feeling like he should be sweating even blood but he's still dry as dust; the only animation he perceives is his decomposition.
He tries to breath hard again, and had he blood would have broken through the earth like a mountain.
He shouts, but the desert is silent.
By the inscrutable God, he is nothing but ashes. He smiles at the irony.
God seems merciless to imprison him in these lifeless limbs, harassed by his own fierce soul; but the knight in his thousand years beneath the ground came to know God a little better and knew He was full of mercy…and justice.
“They hate us because we’re free,” the little Prince almost whispered.
The Hospitaler listened as the little Prince uses the word “free,” strangely, as a reason for conquest… over and over, forming it on his lips as if he were cursing.
The knight didn’t understand, and he settled back into the earth in his weariness, becoming more a part of it than he was before; more anguish coming with the new dust replacing his bones.
The knight feared for the little Prince, Jerusalem seemed lost forever. No man holds it long except by creed and blood, and these men seem only to believe in… chattel, veiled in courtier's clever words.
The infidel believes in more, the knight knew, and it will animate his spirit ’til death becomes his alms.
The knight wet his bones with a tear, his first in a thousand years, and then he saw a rider, framed by the sun, leading a stallion all saddled and coming for him… it seemed.
Like the man he once was, he arose and straddled the great horse.
Silently beside the austere Saint John, they road upward towards Jerusalem, and even beyond the Outremer… further than he ever rode before, and for him, the passionless whispers of all the little Princes finally died away.
May 20, 2003
