the-secret-crusade-oliver-bowden

three offensives, picking up new wounds, bleeding profusely now,
limping, out of breath. Fear was no longer his weapon. That advantage
was lost to him. All he had now were long-dormant skills and instincts,
and he cast his mind back to some of his greatest battles: overcoming
Talal’s men, beating Moloch, defeating the Templar knights in the
Jerusalem cemetery. The warrior who had fought those battles would
have sliced these two dead in seconds.
But that warrior lived in the past. He had aged. Grief and seclusion
had weakened him. He had spent twenty years mourning Maria,
obsessed with the Apple. His combat skills, great as they were, had been
allowed to wither and, so it seemed, die.
He felt blood in his boots. His hands were slick with it. He was
swinging wildly with his blade, not so much defending as trying to swat
his attackers away. He thought of his pack, secured in the fig tree, the
Apple inside. To grasp the Apple would be to emerge the victor, but it
was too far away and, anyway, he’d vowed never to use it again; he’d
left it in the tree for that very reason, to keep its temptation out of reach.
But the truth was that if he’d been able to reach it he would have used it
now, rather than die like this and surrender the merchant to them,
surely condemning him to an even more painful and tortured death
because of Altaïr’s actions.
Yes, he would have used the Apple, because he was lost. And he’d
allowed them to turn him again, he realized. Long Hair came at him
from the periphery of his vision and he shouted with the effort of
fending him off, Long Hair meeting his parries with attacking strikes –
one, two, three – finding a way beneath Altaïr’s guard and cutting yet
another wound on his flank, a deep slash that bled copiously at once.