He nodded. ‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘I speak Arabic and if he takes me, the Order will ransom me. If he takes you, your best course would be to confess Islam and become a Mamluk.’ He grinned.
I grinned back. ‘I’d be a terrible Mamluk,’ I said.
We both laughed.
As it proved, the military governor of Acre was, in fact, an Italian Mamluk. Or rather, a half-African, half-Italian Mamluk. His mother had been a Genoese, and he spoke Italian better than he spoke Arabic, and he welcomed us with a dozen well-equipped cavalrymen on horseback, carrying torches so that we could more easily find the gate. He put most of us in two hostels, but he took Sabraham and Ser Arnaud to his castle, and feasted them. Sabraham cautioned me against showing that I was an officer; he was still concerned that we were in danger.
In fact, we took every precaution. We had watches – just as if we were in a camp – and a constant flow of our men went back and forth to the citadel, so that Sabraham and Arnaud were visited all the time. We kept our watch both armed and hidden from prying eyes.
Acre was still a prosperous town, and they were in daily expectation of a pair of Genoese traders who were overdue. I met the Genoese bailli the next morning, and he begged to be introduced to ‘The Countess,’ whose pilgrimage was already being talked of in Jerusalem. It was in Acre that he discovered that we were quite famous – both for being wed in the Holy City, and for defeating Uthman Bey.
The bailli was named Giovanni Doria, a small member of a very important clan, and on his way to riches, I thought. He owned a warehouse and he and the Mamluk governor were on a first name basis. He came and made his bow to my lady, who received him right graciously, and he sat with the two of us in a good inn and shared wine and olives, spitting the pits in a way that would not have been acceptable in England. And later he returned with his own wife, a scion of one of the Pisan families that have traded on the Levantine coast for four hundred years, and Nerio joined us, and the three of them needed only a Venetian to represent every alliance and every rivalry Italians had ever had in the Holy Land.
Domina Angelina, the Pisan lady, told Emile that her husband said Uthman Bey was hunting us in the hills.
We stayed two days, waiting for the Genoese ships. With Uthman Bey hovering, and with the richness of the prizes at hand, Sabraham and I became very wary, and thought we’d just take a ship to Cilicia, especially as the bailli assured us that the Genoese itinerary would be either up the coast to Tyre if the wind was favourable, or over to Famagusta. I was not fond of the idea of returning to Famagusta, but it was better, I felt, than risking my own lady or the Lady Eugenia.
But two days didn’t reveal so much as the nick of a sail on the horizon, and I thought about what the Venetian captain, Bembo, had said about sailing in early spring and trying to go north.
So on the third day, I walked up to the citadel. The Mamluks on duty were half-breeds – the ‘sons of Mamluks’ who were used as auxiliary cavalry. I was learning all about fighting in the Holy Land.
Mind you, they were a likely lot of men: all tall, all well-muscled, in silk and leather, with magnificent weapons, and they themselves in every colour of the rainbow from Mongol yellow to dark African black. And they were not suspicious of us, and in fact were, as far as I could see, better behaved and better disciplined than most of our knights.
I knew no Arabic beyond ‘friend’ and ‘thank you’ but I employed both, looked them all in the eye, and got some smiles, and Jesus-Maria passed their questions to me; most of them were about my sword, which they all handled and admired, and then I was admitted and given a pass. I still have it; it describes me as the Mamluk of the Emir Sabraham, which is tolerably accurate and rather flattering, all things taken together.
When I was alone with Sabraham, we talked in platitudes. I made the sign we had for asking if we were private, and he shook his head ‘no’. So we went for a walk on the castle’s battlements, which might as well have been French, and in fact, once were, and then out through the gate and into the lower town. We visited the tower with the arms of the Knights of Saint John, now occupied by a family of Christian Arabs on the first floor and another family of Jews on the second floor.
‘Do you think it is possible that the bailli and the governor are trying to hold us here?’ I asked him.
He cursed. I’d never heard Sabraham blaspheme before, and I was a trifle shocked.
‘Of course you are right, Sir William,’ he said. ‘By the grace of God …’
I told him of what the Venetian captain had said of the sailing season. He pulled at his beard.
‘I should have known,’ he said. ‘And it is a long ride to Tyre.’ He shook his head. ‘We’ll have to leave. And that will cause trouble.’
‘And we can expect to get hit by Uthman Bey,’ I said. ‘Who has no doubt been gathering troops. But I take heart in knowing that we must be expected to enjoy the hospitality here for a week or two before getting angry. I propose we simply leave tomorrow and eat dates. I’ll buy food in the market today and give no reason – we’ll load the mules in the dark and leave by the main gate at dawn.’
Sabraham was looking at the young woman on the first storey of the tower, who was hanging her laundry where once the Grand Master had said his prayers. ‘It could get nasty at the gate,’ he said. ‘And what of Uthman Bey?’
I looked out to sea. ‘I may be dead wrong,’ I said, ‘but as long as they try to hold us here, I assume Uthman Bey either has no troops or is off in the north gathering Turcomans.’
Sabraham laughed. ‘You are very good at life in the Holy Land, Sir William,’ he said.
‘I’ve had all the best teachers,’ I said.
By late afternoon, I’d bought a lot of dates and biscuit in the market, and tried to do it in small lots and pass it into the stables. And George, one of Sabraham’s ‘angels’, reported to me that he’d gone for a pleasure ride along the beach and happened to take a detour into the hills, and that there was no dust to the east.
There’s courage, my friends. A Christian, riding alone.
You’d think that the bailli and the governor would have guessed it all, but the first, apparently, that they knew was in the morning when our column, including my not-so-very pleased wife, appeared at the gate. And since we had a pass, the gate guards let us go. Too easily, I feared – but before Sabraham, who had the rearguard, cleared the gate, an alarm bell rang and the Mamluks appeared on horseback.
They were brave men, and the more so because we outnumbered them. Almost all the professional soldiers had been withdrawn; it was clear to me that the half-Italian ‘governor’ of Acre was self-appointed, possibly almost as much a bandit as Uthman Bey.
He came down to the gate in person, and his guise of helpful servant vanished in two tirades about our ingratitude, the danger of the desert, and the likelihood of the advent of the Genoese ships. But Sabraham had played this game before, and I listened to them through the gate while John the Kipchak fingered his bow and my Greek knights looked thoughtfully at possible handholds in the wall by the gate. But the gate opened, grudgingly, and we were free, and riding, before the sun was three fingers above the horizon.
And if Emile thought I pushed the column hard on the ride to Acre, the ride to Tyre was harsher, and I knew we would have to camp. When the sun was high in the sky, I left Sabraham in command and took John and Jesus-Maria, and five of the stradiotes and Syr Giannis, and we all took a spare horse and rode quickly, cantering and trotting, until we reached the forested heights that mark the border of the country we Franks call Lebanon.
There was water, although it wasn’t abundant. It was a chilly day, and was going to be a cold night, but we marked a campsite, and I sent John back to push the column along while we set up the tent we’d brought. I made a fire, and we began to build little shelters with a roof and no sides. We built them the English way, which none of the Greeks had ever see
n, because their climate is so kind – two shelters facing each other, with a fire in the middle. We built six of them, and I was standing stripped to my shirt and hose in the cool air, so hot that steam all but came off me like an overworked horse, when my beloved rode up with the main body. She laughed, slid off the horse, and said. ‘Show me’ in a tone of wonder.
I took her into one of the little low shelters, and we were kissing like … Well, like lovers.
She patted the cedar boughs. ‘I will not lie down in the cedar,’ she said. ‘because of what I’m quite sure would happen.’ She licked her lips. ‘But I will mention that my Lady Eugenia is a heavy sleeper, and perhaps …’
It was delicious playing at illicit love in a camp of soldiers, when in fact, we were wed.
And as the fates would have it, I drew the middle watch, so that I rose from my blankets and tended the fire with John and Marc-Antonio. We went well out into the darkness, two at a time with the third man keeping the fire, and watched the hills and the road. The moonlight was strong, and made strange shadows, but any veteran knows that moonlight plays strange tricks.
But when we were done with our duty and had carefully awakened our relief, I went quietly to the wall of the Berber tent and scratched, and almost immediately my wife came and took my hand.
We walked into the cedar trees a way, in the moonlight, and we kissed from time to time.
And we found a place where someone had made a pallet of cedar boughs. She laughed. I thought her the most wonderful woman who’d ever lived. I still do.
All my life I’ve heard of the wonders of moonlight, and really, it is all true.
The next morning, I was little the worse for wear, and my lady was as bright as a songbird. I helped her to mount, and she smiled through her riding veil.
‘You are very beautiful this morning,’ I said.
‘I had the most pleasant dreams,’ she said.
It was as well that she was in a fine fettle, for we had almost forty English miles to ride, and we had two horses who were the worse for a night in the cold air, and Maurice was sure he’d seen movement on the next ridge, and went to scout.
If the salt swamps before Acre had been challenging and the causeway unrepaired, the road over the Heights of Lebanon was worse. After the old road split to go down to Krak de Chevaliers to the east, the coast road became a track that was often blocked with fallen trees – some small, a few giants that were as long as a ship and could not be crossed, even on horseback – and all day we cleared the trail. In a way it reassured me; no one was laying an ambush ahead of me, and there was no one on my flanks.
But we were not going to make Tyre, and again we had to camp. We were very low on food, and unlike a forest in England, there were no king’s deer to poach. In fact, Ewan had that very thought and walked off with his friends to see what he could bring home. The results of all their efforts were two rabbits that made a very delicious-smelling dinner for my lady and Lady Eugenia, while the rest of us ate old bread and dates and contemplated which horse we’d eat first.
We rose, hungry and very glad it hadn’t rained, and moved off again. That day we were riding downhill all the way, and had occasional glimpses of the coast and the sea, and by evening we made Tyre.
On the causeway, Sabraham pointed at the ground. ‘Alexander built this,’ he said.
That’s the Holy Land for you – in all of Outremer, history is waiting under every rock, and sometimes in the rocks themselves.
I remember that night passing well, mostly because that was the night that Emile discovered that I didn’t read Latin and wanted to learn; or rather, that I read Latin very badly – I had, after all, read the Gospel at Rhodes, and in fact I had been a reader in London. But years of blows to my head had driven much of my Latin out, if very much had ever entered in.
And Sister Marie and my wife immediately determined to improve my Latin, and they began, that very night, in the courtyard of the best inn we’d found in Outremer – although, being Moslem, it had no wine – to teach me better Latin by reading the Vegetius I had purchased in Famagusta, what seemed like a lifetime before.
And very quickly, the verbs began to return to me, and in fact, Messire Vegetius was not so very difficult. And that made a pleasant way for me to have an hour each evening with Emile, and a rest from the cares of command.
And Sister Marie enjoyed it thoroughly, almost as thoroughly as she enjoyed swaggering sticks with Fiore, which the two of them did almost every evening, to the delight of many of our men-at-arms and the mortification of Lady Eugenia, whose ideas of womanly behaviour did not encompass hiking one’s skirts with one hand and fighting with the other.
Tyre was no one’s city; it had about three thousand inhabitants, and they were as surprising a mixture of refugees as you might find anywhere in the world, with Greeks and Franks and Arabs and Turks and Mongols all together in one town. Tyre had been sacked twice, and was almost exactly on the border between the Mamluk empire and that of the Turks, if fifty squabbling princes can be called an empire.
But they were perfectly happy to receive us when we offered a peace bond and some money, and we used a market outside the walls to buy food. I did not blame a town of three thousand from refusing fifty Franks with weapons the right to enter altogether, and instead we stayed at an inn outside the wall, a caravanserai, and we were only allowed in the town unarmed, five at a time.
We kept men armed and by their horses all the time, but we needed the sleep – the good sleep – and the plentiful food, and we took two days to rest. Sabraham took his two angels and rode off headed east, and I feared for him – and I wanted a glass of wine. And Lent began, and so there was neither wine nor fornication, and I admit that I wished that Sister Marie had not accompanied us. And Nerio grew frustrated, because apparently Lady Eugenia had given him up for Lent; she stayed by Sister Marie and they prayed together a great deal, and Fiore’s sword practices grew more sustained and more ferocious as various tempers frayed.
I had a great deal to look after. And this, mind you, was only fifty men, and those of good heart.
But on the third day we mounted, gathered all our donkeys and a few new we’d purchased, and we rode for Beirut. The Tyrians had helped us, but at exorbitant prices, and we could not afford to stay another day, or to anger them. Sabraham returned to say that the hills seemed empty.
‘I think we’re lucky,’ he said. ‘Uthman Bey should be back by now.’
‘Or we were seeing ghosts in Acre and there was no threat,’ I said.
Sabraham had the good grace to smile. ‘Always possible,’ he admitted. ‘Perhaps you are merely infecting me with your fears, young sir.’
The journey from Tyre to Beirut was very easy compared to what we’d just endured. It was a bigger town, and claimed a certain independence; they had, in fact, had an Egyptian garrison until just a month before.
They did not want to admit us, and so we camped under the ruined walls, all of Crusader work – good French and Italian stonework. It was Lenten, indeed – we ate a porridge made of lentils because that’s all we could buy, and it rained, and most of us were wet.
On the other hand, our horses were mostly under cover and we got grain for the chargers, so we were, as a party, stronger and not weaker.
At Beirut we heard, again, the rumour of two Genoese ships coming along the coastline, but no one knew very much, and there was no Genoese bailli, although several people claimed there was such a man at Ladiquiya.
And we were warned, and well warned, even by Moslems, that there were Turks everywhere, since the Mamluk garrison was withdrawn, and one middle-aged man admitted to me that he didn’t dare even ride out to his farm.
Thus began a small adventure in my path to knighthood.
The old man sold us chickpeas, two days running, and seemed an honest man, and Sabraham and I had just decided to spend one more night and then go f
or Ladiquiya. He was one al-Haji’Abdalah ibn Abu Bakr, which, let me tell you, seems to be the name of every older gentleman in Arabia. And Hajj, or Haji, I had already learned, was their name for a pilgrim who had made the sacred voyages, usually to Mecca, their Jerusalem – although most of them, except some Sufis, hold Jerusalem holy as well.
Don’t try me, Chaucer, or I will bore you with my fascination by all the sects of Islam – Ismailis; Sufi mystics; Shia looking for their missing imams; Sunnis discoursing endlessly on their Sharia. John and Sabraham and Jesus-Maria (who proved to have an Arabic name as well) were not precisely ‘teaching me Arabic’ but it was all around me, and I’ll tell you a strange thing – with Sister Marie teaching me Latin, it was almost as if I was being trained to learn Arabic, or that’s how it felt. And Sister Marie, I’ll add, was as interested in learning Arabic as I was.
But I have gone far from my path. As I said, Monsieur Abu Bakr complained to me that he couldn’t even ride out to his farm, and I asked him, without thinking, if he’d like me to take him. And he would have kissed my leather boots, which I found a little difficult to accept.
I knew it might be a trifle dangerous, so I took John and Marc-Antonio, and at the last moment, Maurice joined us with his crossbow cocked.
‘Boss says if you want to do the evening scout, I’m to bring you back alive,’ he said. He didn’t smile.
I went and kissed my wife, a familiarity she allowed. She touched my face. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
‘To help the Arab gentleman,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘Very chivalrous,’ she said.
I didn’t think much about that comment, at the time.
We put him up on a mule and we rode out in mid-afternoon. I had my light harness on – brigantine and maille and leg harness. Marc-Antonio wore the same, and John wore a kaftan and a shirt of maille he now prized, taken from a corpse after the Ramalie fight, much different from ours.
The Green Count Page 19