01 - Murder in the Holy City

by Simon Beaufort

  The crowd in the street was becoming larger with each passing moment, despite the searing heat of the early afternoon sun. Geoffrey saw his soldiers’ increasing alarm: two had unslung their bows and had arrows at the ready. He overrode the indignant protestations of the fig seller and heaved John’s blanketed body onto the cart. Seizing Melisende by the wrist, he shouted orders to his men and set off, the disconsolate fig seller trotting along beside them, bewailing the fact that his fruit was being crushed.

  The crowd parted to let them through, but Geoffrey sensed a resentment that had not been there earlier. A small child darted forward and tried to press a knife into Melisende’s hand. People became ominously silent, and Geoffrey was aware of his soldiers preparing themselves for a fight. Here and there, a flash of steel caught the sunlight as men in the crowd drew an odd assortment of concealed weapons from their clothing—kitchen knives, sticks, and even a discarded horseshoe. The silence of the crowd was now a tangible thing, sinister and menacing.

  “Let me go,” said Melisende in a low voice to Geoffrey. “It is because you are taking me that these people are angry. Let me go, and you will be allowed to leave unmolested with your men.”

  “If you are innocent of this knight’s murder, as you claim, then you have nothing to fear,” said Geoffrey, not slowing his pace.

  The woman snorted in derision. “Who at the citadel will believe me?” she said. “You do not.”

  This was true, Geoffrey reflected: he did not. One of his men gave a sharp yelp and put his hand to his head.

  “Keep moving,” said Helbye in a calm voice to the jittery soldiers. “They are only throwing stones. You are wearing mail; they cannot harm you.”

  “Not much!” muttered the soldier with the bleeding head, but he kept walking. Geoffrey handed Melisende to Ned Fletcher, a slow but reliable soldier in his forties, and drew his sword. The crowd was following them along the street, hurling a hail of stones and other missiles after them. As the soldiers rounded the corner, the throng broke into a trot, and Geoffrey yelled for his men to run. His dog, true to character, had sensed the menace in the onlookers and had long since fled. Several of the soldiers fumbled to fit arrows to their bows, but Geoffrey ordered them to stop. Such an incident could turn into a bloodbath within moments, and he had no wish to be responsible for a skirmish that would cause the deaths of the women and children he could see among the crowd, or of his men.

  A stone struck him hard in the chest, and a roar of approval went up from those at the front of the advancing mob. His chain mail and padded surcoat protected him from injury, but the force of the throw made him stagger. He collided with Helbye, who was close behind him, and before he could right himself, his leather-soled boots had slipped in some of the figs that had fallen from the cart, and he was down. With a howl of delight, the mob rushed forward, and Geoffrey struggled in vain to clamber to his feet. He yelled to Helbye to run, but saw him stand firm with his weapon drawn, preparing to protect his fallen leader.

  Geoffrey closed his eyes in despair. What a stupid way to end his life, after the trials and torments of the gruelling three-year journey to Jerusalem from England! He did not usually dwell on the manner of his death, but on the few occasions when it had come to mind, he imagined himself falling in battle or dying peacefully in bed in his dotage. That he would be ripped from limb to limb by a horde armed with sticks and stones after he had slipped on some figs had never occurred to him.

  The sun was blocked out as the furious citizens converged on him, but just as quickly returned. Geoffrey felt, rather than heard, the thud of horses’ hooves on the beaten earth of the road, and the street erupted into chaos. Yells and screams combined with the terrified whinnies of war-horses as the crowd and the mounted monk-knights of the Order of St. John Hospitaller clashed. Geoffrey covered his head with his hands to protect it and tried to stand, but was knocked down again by a man racing to escape the Hospitallers’ whirling swords and maces.

  As quickly as it had started, it was over, and the commotion faded away. Geoffrey felt someone take a firm hold on the back of his surcoat and haul him to his feet. Dusty, bedraggled, and deflated, he was not pleased to find himself face to face with Edouard de Courrances, a man Geoffrey detested above all others. Courrances was trusted adviser to the Advocate—the man who had been crowned as official ruler of Jerusalem the previous year.

  “My men?” Geoffrey gasped, peering through the clouds of settling dust to try to see whether any were injured.

  “Running away, as ordered by their leader,” replied Courrances nonchalantly, sheathing his sword. “You were lucky we happened to be passing, or you would not now be alive to rally your motley gang together.”

  Geoffrey said nothing, irritated that it had been Courrances of all people who had witnessed the ignominious skirmish and who had effected his rescue. The monks of the Order of St. John Hospitaller ran the great hospital in Jerusalem for needy pilgrims, but recently, some of the monks had abandoned their policy of nonaggression and had taken up arms to protect themselves and their property. Over his monastic habit, Courrances wore a surcoat of black with a white cross emblazoned on the back, and Geoffrey had seldom seen him without the arsenal of weapons he carried. Ten or so similarly clad warrior-monks were with Courrances now, mounted on sturdy war-horses and armed to the teeth.

  Geoffrey glanced about him and saw that several of the mob lay dead or injured, and were being carried away by friends and relatives. One was the small boy who had tried to press the knife into Melisende’s hand. The Hospitallers sat astride their restless horses, their weapons still unsheathed, clearly itching to fight again. The crowd gathered their fallen comrades and slunk away, hatred and fear burning in their eyes.

  “These were unarmed people,” protested Geoffrey, turning to Courrances angrily. “We are under orders to maintain the peace, not massacre civilians!”

  “Oh, well said, Sir Geoffrey,” responded Courrances with maddening serenity. “Would you rather I let them kill you? And let us be honest about this—you had antagonised them into rioting long before I arrived on the scene, so do not seek to blame me for the deaths of these people. If anyone was at fault, it was you.”

  Geoffrey scowled, aware that Courrances was right. He should have let Melisende go, and then sent soldiers for her later when there was no crowd to witness her arrest.

  “John of Sourdeval has been murdered,” he said, changing the subject and squinting against the sun to look Courrances in the eye. He was gratified to see the soldier-monk blanch. “Stabbed in the back. That is how Sir Guido of Rimini died three weeks ago, is it not?”

  “A second knight murdered?” asked Courrances in a low voice. He drummed his long, well-kept fingers on the pommel of his saddle. “This is grave news indeed.”

  “Did you see Guido’s body?” asked Geoffrey, watching as his men, under Helbye’s direction, began to reassemble on the opposite side of the street. Fletcher still had Melisende in tow, and John was still wrapped in his blanket on the cart. The fig seller was nowhere to be seen, and Geoffrey felt sorry: the cart was probably all the man owned, and its loss would have serious consequences for him. Geoffrey’s fat, cowardly dog, back again now that the danger was over, began to gorge itself on the unattended fruit.

  “I saw it,” said Courrances. “And I am told that the weapon used was a great carved dagger with a jewelled hilt—you know the kind I mean? Wicked looking things, but cheap and gaudy. They can be bought in the marketplace.”

  Geoffrey rubbed his chin thoughtfully and looked at Courrances. “Almost as if the murderer did not want to use his own weapon?”

  Courrances gazed back at him. “Quite. As if he wanted to ensure that there was nothing that could connect him to his victims.”

  “I trust you were suitably grateful to Edouard de Courrances for his timely arrival,” said Sir Hugh of Monreale, settling himself more comfortably by the small fire in Geoffrey’s quarters. It was not cold, even within the dank, thick walls of
the citadel, but Geoffrey liked a fire when he was in his chamber: it provided him with light should he want to read, and it offered some degree of homeliness in a room devoid of most comforts.

  Geoffrey snorted in disgust. “He killed unarmed people.”

  “There is no such thing as an unarmed person,” mused Hugh. He flexed his fingers at his friend. “Hands that can punch, twist, gouge, and scratch.” He gestured to his legs. “Feet that can kick and trample.” He pointed to his mouth. “And sharp teeth that can rip and puncture. There is no such thing as an unarmed person. You are a soldier, Geoffrey—you should know that. Anyway, from what you say, those unarmed people were going to kill you.”

  Geoffrey studied Hugh through half-closed eyes. They had met on the long, gruelling journey across the deserts outside Constantinople. Hugh, like Geoffrey, was a landless younger son of a Norman noble. He had been born in Sicily and had been in the service of Bohemond, one of the leaders of the Crusade, since childhood. Unlike Geoffrey, Hugh was still bitter at the twist of fate that gave his eldest brother more lands and wealth than he knew how to handle, but had left Hugh empty-handed. But Hugh was not a man to languish in self-pity, and like many Normans, he saw the Crusade to the Holy Land as an opportunity to take for himself what had been denied by his birth. And there had been plenty of opportunity to amass a fortune as the great Crusading armies had sacked and looted their way from the West into the Holy Land. Most knights had chests of booty in their possession, and Hugh, who was not given to drinking, whoring, or gambling, had a chest that was larger and fuller than most.

  “A letter arrived for you today,” said Hugh languidly. He held it up. “It is stained with grass, and the handwriting is appalling, so I draw the inevitable conclusion that it is from your father at his noble castle on the manor of Goodrich in England.”

  Geoffrey scowled at him and snatched the letter from his hand. The parchment bore signs of its long journey from the Welsh borders, and the spiky, ill-formed handwriting was that of his father’s clerk—a man whose employment depended on the fact that Geoffrey’s father was illiterate and wholly unable to tell good script from bad. Geoffrey broke the seal with a mixture of foreboding and curiosity, for his father had written to him only twice since he had been sent away to commence his knightly training almost twenty years before—once to tell him that his younger sister had died, and once to inform him that a new flock of sheep was thriving on the manor.

  He smoothed out the cheap parchment and strained to decipher the words, reading them aloud to Hugh. “My son Godfrey,” he read. Geoffrey sighed and wondered whether it was really too much to ask that between them, the clerk and his father might get his name right. Hugh spluttered with laughter.

  “What news from the land of sheep and rain?” he enquired, his eyes glittering with amusement. “Are all the ewes in fine breeding form? Are the slugs still a trial to the cabbages? Does your mother still wail that you failed to become a priest as she intended?”

  “My brothers send me their greetings,” said Geoffrey, turning the letter this way and that in the firelight, trying to read the spidery text.

  “I should hope so!” exclaimed Hugh. “You did them a great service when you allowed yourself to be dispatched to France in the service of the Duke of Normandy at the age of twelve! Had you stayed in England, your avaricious brothers would be in constant dread that you would be attempting to wrest their paltry inheritances from them!”

  Geoffrey shot Hugh another unpleasant look, but knew he spoke the truth. Geoffrey’s mother had determined that the youngest of her four sons should become a monk, but while Geoffrey enjoyed the study, he proved himself wholly unsuited to a life of monastic obedience. Seeing that Geoffrey at twelve years of age was taller, stronger, and distinctly more intelligent than his older brothers, his father hastily dispatched him to France to train as a knight. This had the twofold advantage of providing Geoffrey with a vocation, and of keeping him away from home—Geoffrey’s father considered he had enough trouble with three sons waging a constant battle over the eventual division of Goodrich manor, and he was more than relieved to rid himself of a fourth.

  “My sister-in-law has died,” said Geoffrey, peering at the letter. “But he does not say which one. And the black bull called Baron has also gone to meet his maker …”

  Hugh roared with laughter again. “Your family are priceless! They describe the bull and give its name, but do not provide the same service for your sister-in-law! You owe your father a great debt of gratitude by sending you to Normandy, my friend. Or you might have ended up like your brothers—greedy, petty, and thinking only of livestock!”

  “I did not want to become a knight,” said Geoffrey, looking up from his letter and watching the humour fade from Hugh’s face. “I wanted to go to Paris—to the university to study. I ran away from the Duke of Normandy several times, but was always caught and taken back.”

  “A scholar?” asked Hugh, shaking his head and smiling indulgently. “So you would rather be living in squalid, cramped quarters in some seedy hall, teaching snivelling youths about Aristotle than enjoying life as a Crusader knight?”

  Geoffrey eyed him askance and gestured around his chamber. “Where lies the difference? Here are squalid, cramped living quarters, and there are snivelling youths aplenty among my men. And yes—I would rather be teaching them about Aristotle than how to set up an ambush. At least in Paris, I would not be forced to kill anyone.”

  “Rubbish!” spat Hugh. “There is nothing so dangerous as a man of learning, and the streets of Paris are more treacherous by far than the streets of Jerusalem. But this is reckless talk, Geoffrey. What would our fellow knights think if they heard of your qualms?”

  Geoffrey shrugged. “I do not care what their opinions might be. Most of them have held me in deep suspicion ever since I chose books over gold after the siege of Antioch. That these texts are worth ten times their weight in gold anyway—quite apart from the brilliance of the learning contained within them—seems a concept quite beyond their grasp.”

  “I have often wondered what led you to choose to come Crusading in the first place, given that you seem to abhor killing and are indifferent to looting. You must have guessed how such a venture might have ended.”

  Geoffrey stared into the fire, his letter forgotten as he remembered the events leading to the day when he had learned of the Crusade. “Once I realised I would not escape from the Duke of Normandy to become a scholar, I settled down to life as a knight in training. I still read as much as I could find, and eventually was sent as tutor to Lord Tancred in Italy. He was fifteen and far more interested in developing his physical abilities than his intellectual ones, but despite our differences, we came to respect each other well enough.”

  “You are too modest,” said Hugh. “Tancred does more than respect you. He trusts your judgement absolutely, and thinks highly of your skills—both as a knight and a scholar. You have been invaluable to him throughout this entire Crusade, and he considers you his most worthy adviser.”

  “Hardly,” said Geoffrey, startled. “He mocks my learning constantly, and his uncle, Bohemond, is actively hostile to it.”

  “But Bohemond is no fool,” said Hugh. “As you know, I have been in his service since I was a child, and I have come to respect him like I respect no other man, except perhaps you.” Geoffrey looked away, embarrassed at Hugh’s blunt expression of friendship. Hugh saw his discomfort and smiled before continuing. “Bohemond might gripe and bluster, but he knows how useful you have been to his nephew. He is quite resentful that the Duke of Normandy assigned you to Tancred, and not to him—he would dearly love to have you in his retinue. But all this has not answered my question. Why did you agree to come on Crusade in the first place?”

  Geoffrey sighed as he recalled events that had occurred three years before. “Tancred and Bohemond were besieging Amalfi—a wealthy merchant town that had found itself on the wrong side of Bohemond. One day, Tancred and I saw groups of men riding past wi
th red crosses sewn onto the backs of their surcoats. Tancred’s brother was among them, and he told us that the Pope had called for all Christians to set out for the Holy Land to free it from the infidel. Bohemond and Tancred alike saw an opportunity to gain a fortune and lands beyond their wildest dreams. They abandoned the siege of Amalfi that same day and set about raising their troops so that they might lead the Crusade. You, I take it, were among them?”

  Hugh nodded. “I was on Bohemond’s business in Germany at the time. But when I heard the Pope’s call, I knew Bohemond would rally to it. I hastened to him as fast as I could get a horse to carry me, and we were off toward the Holy Land within the month. But you are being obtuse with me, Geoffrey. Why did you follow Tancred? Surely he would have agreed if you had asked to be left behind in Italy?”

  Geoffrey gave him a look of disbelief. “He most certainly would not! When young Tancred left his home in Italy, he knew he would never return. It is his intention to carve out a kingdom for himself in the Holy Land—just as Bohemond means to do and Tancred wants me with him. And I was willing enough, because I had read a little of Arab philosophy and medicine, and I saw it as an opportunity to learn more.”

  “So that was your motive?” asked Hugh. “Learning and books?” He smiled suddenly. “I had guessed as much, knowing you as I do. And have you discovered what you hoped to find?”

  “I have not!” said Geoffrey vehemently. Hugh looked startled at the force of his words. “I have found bloodshed, massacres, disease, flies, dust, and hatred. And we are so concerned with the basics of our survival here that there is little time for learning.”

  “Come now,” said Hugh, still smiling. “It is not so bad. You are learning Arabic, I heard, so you are at least achieving something! But we are growing maudlin here, by your fire. We need some diversion. Continue reading your father’s letter. That should suffice.”