But they weren’t going to make it. The enemy was advancing too fast.
They could not risk being run over from the side.
Ibelin flung out his left arm toward the enemy to indicate they had to turn into the attack. He could not take the time to look over his shoulder to see if his knights understood him. Instead, he reached forward and with his left hand took hold of the bridle directly behind the bit. Then he leaned with all his weight on his shield arm and pulled Centurion around—more by the strength of his will than his arm. He barely managed to sit back in the saddle before the lines of horses clashed.
Centurion was thrown on his haunches by the impact from the first lance, and Balian felt blows raining down on his shield, helmet, forearms, and thighs. As the enemy swept past him, each Saracen within range tried to kill him without actually stopping.
That was what saved his life. After their lances shattered, the slashing strokes of the Saracens’ swords as they swept by could not penetrate his chain mail. It took a direct, piercing blow to penetrate the linked steel rings, and none dared slow long enough to deliver that kind of thrust.
Ibelin huddled behind his shield, his head down to protect his face and eyes, making no attempt to fight until Centurion recovered his balance and began staggering and stamping his way forward, with a dogged determination that testified to the stallion’s own will to survive. At once Balian straightened, and screaming to reawaken his own courage, he started fighting—even if this consisted of little more than warding off the blows still directed at him, using both his shield and his sword.
Finally the wave of Saracen cavalry rolled over them, and the knights of Ibelin and Nablus emerged from the clouds of dust billowing up behind the enemy. Like islands in the swirling dust, clusters of mounted fighting men emerged. They were scattered across three hundred yards. Immediately beside and behind Balian, the knights of Ibelin still made up a coherent body of men, while the knights of Nablus formed a half-dozen distinct clumps.
But there were also a score of unhorsed men staggering out of the clouds of dust, stumbling, coughing, holding their hands to their bleeding wounds or cradling broken wrists, dislocated elbows, and wrenched shoulders. As the dust settled further, the trampled corpses of horses and a half-dozen other men emerged, while the piercing screams of a wounded stallion struggling to get to his feet despite two broken legs blotted out all other sounds.
Dawit was down before Balian could stop him. He personally put the injured horse out of his misery with a quick slash to his jugular. This action brought Balian to his senses. Behind them the Saracens had fully engulfed the King and his body of knights. This was no time to sit around staring.
“Get those men mounted!” Ibelin ordered, gesturing for the dazed squires behind him to pick up the unhorsed men. “All of them! Take them back to camp!”
“Wait!” Sir Bartholomew countermanded, laying a hand on Balian’s arm. The gesture had a calming effect, and the older man’s troubled eyes met Balian’s. “Have the wounded that still have horses take the unhorsed men. We need every unharmed fighting man we have—even the squires.”
“Yes,” Balian recognized the wisdom of the older man’s advice and smiled his thanks. “Any of you not fit to fight, take a rider behind you and return to the camp. Everyone else, form up!”
As the remaining fourscore knights and their squires formed a conroi around him, Ibelin saw Lusignan arrive from the northeast and start fighting his way through the enemy to reach the King. They would have to do the same thing. “A Ibelin!” Balian roared as he asked the now drooping Centurion for yet another charge.
Around him they answered “A Ibelin!” and “A Nablus!” even “Jerusalem!” and started forward at a lumbering, weary canter.
If they’d had lances, it would have been comparatively easy. The Saracens were focused on the King and Lusignan, not expecting cavalry to attack them from the rear. But without lances they could not cut a swath through the enemy; they had to fight their way through. The only good thing was that they were fighting cavalry; there were no Saracen foot soldiers stabbing at the bellies of their horses or trying to drag them down. Ibelin and his knights could drop their reins and urge their horses forward with their legs as they used their shields and swords to clear a path through the enemy to the compact body of knights around the King.
It seemed to take forever to kill their way forward, but they had almost made it. No more than two or three Saracens still separated Ibelin from the King when one of the Saracens, an exceptionally large man, stood in his stirrups and brought his sword down on Sir Tancred’s head so hard that it sliced open the helmet. Blood spurted like a fountain, coating and temporarily blinding his assailant, but as Sir Tancred’s heavy body fell sideways off his horse it fell upon the shoulder of the King’s stallion, causing him to rear up and spring sideways just as he had done in the last engagement.
Balian saw the King lean forward in an attempt to stay seated, but now the enemy was stabbing Lightning in the belly and the stallion flailed out with his front hooves, squealing in pain and terror. The King didn’t stand a chance; he lost his stirrups and fell backwards onto the ground.
The knights of Ibelin and Nablus burst through the enemy and turned to face the Saracens to shield their lord as he jumped down and dragged King Baldwin into his arms.
“We’re lost!” Baldwin gasped, dazed and bewildered.
“Not yet, we aren’t!” Ibelin answered stubbornly. He pulled Centurion close and urged the King to mount. Baldwin, however, could grab neither the reins, the stirrup, nor the pommel with his lifeless hands, and the blood-mad stallion danced away from the strange rider again and again.
Ibelin was aware of men around them grunting, cursing, killing, and dying. Young Sir Adrian let out a blood-curdling scream as a Saracen sword gutted him. Blood spurted and then spilled in a stinking gush over Ibelin and the King. It was only a matter of seconds before their protection would be slaughtered. Balian had to get the King off the field, but he could not hold Centurion still and lift Baldwin up at the same time.
Suddenly Daniel was beside him on the ground. “I’ll carry him off!” the squire shouted.
Ibelin didn’t have time to think, much less contradict. Daniel was pulling the King’s lifeless arms around his own neck and hooking his arms through the King’s knees. Then he jogged away in a crouch, slipping almost unnoticed between the horses as the horsemen struggled with one another.
Balian grabbed Centurion’s reins, pointed his foot in the stirrup, and hauled himself back into the saddle, but he’d lost his shield in his efforts to help the King. The next instant he looked death in the face as a turbaned horseman charged at him, pointing his sword at his unshielded chest.
Then the hand holding the sword spun through the air with the longsword still in its grasp. The bleeding stub hit Balian in the chest before the rest of the body slumped down and fell between their horses. The knight who had saved him wore Sidon’s livery.
Sidon had been left holding his castle of Sidon. If he was here now, it meant he had reinforced the Christian forces with fresh knights. Indeed, Sidon’s knights, most of whom still had lances, were pushing the Saracens back, giving the exhausted men of the King’s bodyguard—and Ibelin—a chance to escape.
Ibelin had no illusions about his ability to fight effectively any longer. He had no lance, no squires, and no shield. The best he could do was live to fight another day, and as he turned a weary Centurion away from the battle, he was followed by what remained of his troop: some threescore knights and less than half a hundred squires.
The muffled sound of screaming coming from the surgeon’s tent suggested that one of the survivors was having a limb amputated or cauterized. Balian thanked God it wasn’t he. He could not move his left arm without sharp, crippling pains shooting up through his shoulder socket. He was covered with bruises and had a gash in one leg, but no serious injuries. That was more than he could say about the rest of his surviving men. Of the roughly
170 knights and squires of Ibelin and Nablus who had survived the battle, more than a dozen had broken bones or dislocated joints, including Sir Walter, whose thigh was broken. While these men would recover to fight again, there were seven who had lost (or were losing) limbs, five with internal injuries that were likely to prove crippling if not fatal, and Sir Lucius had a gaping hole in his abdomen that wouldn’t stop bleeding. Sir Galvin’s squire had lost an eye, and the distraught Scotsman had only just managed to still the youth’s whimpering with wine—and then taken to drink himself. Balian was badly shaken.
Objectively, the engagement had been a Christian victory. The Syrians, who had been burning and plundering inside the Kingdom of Jerusalem, had been forced to withdraw across the Litani. Furthermore, the casualties on the Saracen side were, as always, significantly higher. But Ibelin did not feel like he had just won a victory; this was no Montgisard.
Although the Christian losses were numerically lower, they were more damaging, because Jerusalem had fewer manpower reserves. On a personal level, moreover, the losses were devastating: of the fifteen knights of Ibelin, four were dead and two were seriously wounded, while the casualties among the squires had been even higher: seven. To be sure, Walter would recover. But Sir Adrian had been very young, standing in for his aging father for the first time, and Sir Lucius was his father’s only son. Balian did not look forward to the grim task of facing their fathers with the merciless news.
And then there was the uncertainty about his brother’s fate. Neither the Lord of Ramla nor any of his knights had returned. They had been too far to the east to regroup behind Sidon’s knights and fall back to Sidon with the rest of the Christian army. Barry was either dead or captured—and with him some fifty knights and an equal number of squires. The Kingdom as a whole might have manpower reserves, but Ramla-Mirabel’s strength had been decimated—and Balian dreaded telling Eschiva that her father was sitting in a Saracen prison, or dead.
At least her husband had survived, Balian noted, as the Constable poked his head inside the tent inquiring, “Ibelin?”
“I’m here,” Balian answered, struggling to sit up.
Lusignan ducked into the tent, stepped over the wounded stretched out on mats on the floor, and dropped wearily down beside Balian on the bed he had been lying on. To cool off his overheated body, Ibelin had stripped off not only his armor but his filthy undergarments as well.
Lusignan, on the other hand, was still wearing his armor, although his head was bare. Blood stained his surcoat and coated the lower arms of his hauberk; hardened mud clung to the chain mail of his leggings. His hair was encrusted with salt, and he smelled rank.
“I thought you’d want to hear the news,” Lusignan explained his presence. Ibelin just waited warily for him to continue. “A Saracen herald just rode in to ask whether the King would receive an emissary empowered to negotiate an exchange of prisoners.”
“He wants Farrukh-Shah back that badly?”
“He does, and apparently he thinks he has the right bargaining chip.”
“My brother?” Balian asked hopefully. That would be the grace of God indeed: if Barry had not only survived, but the Sultan was also willing to release him in exchange for his nephew.
“Maybe,” Lusignan admitted. “We don’t know, but the messenger suggested that the Saracens had a number of high-born prisoners. I think there’s a chance Ramla is one of them. He was easily recognizable by his armor as a valuable prisoner. The Saracens would have tried to avoid killing him.”
Balian nodded; that was his hope, too.
“The King will receive the Sultan’s emissary shortly. I presume you want to be there?”
Ibelin nodded. “Give me five minutes to dress.” He signaled to Dawit to bring him a complete change of clothes.
The King, too, had changed into court attire for the Sultan’s emissary. He wore white silk hose and shirt, over which he wore a short-sleeved robe belted at the waist with broad bands of gold embroidery at the collar, cuffs, and hem. Ibrahim had washed his hair as well, so although it was damp it was fine and drying to bright blond. He wore the crown on his brow and was seated in an armed chair with a baldachin over it bearing the arms of Jerusalem. Given the situation he was in and what he had just survived, he looked remarkably good, Balian thought, as he slipped into the tent and bowed his head to his sovereign.
The King smiled at Balian across the other men crowding the room, then leaned over and whispered something to Ibrahim, who at once gestured Balian closer. Balian pushed his way through the crowd with murmured apologies. When he reached the King’s side and went down on one knee, Baldwin leaned forward. “I wish to reward your squire for rescuing me. I have asked the Constable to knight him.”
Ibelin nodded. “He deserves it.”
“And you will retain him?”
“I have need of every knight I can get,” Balian answered honestly.
There was no time for further discussion. Outside the horns were blowing, announcing the Sultan’s emissary. With a flashy display of horsemanship, a Kurdish Mamluke galloped up, halted, and vaulted to the ground. His turban was gold brocade, as were the sleeves and skirts of the tunic that emerged below the hem and sleeves of his scaled leather armor. Camel-leather boots came up over the knee to disappear below the folds of his tunic. His belt was jewel-encrusted—not something he wore in battle.
The royal knights flanking the entrance to the King’s tent drew back the flap and admitted the emissary, and the men inside the tent parted to make way for him. He strode forward with the confidence of a victor, and made a flourishing bow before the King of Jerusalem. As he righted himself, his eyes fell on Ibelin and he smiled. Switching to Arabic he announced, “Ah, Balian Ibn Barzan, I have a message for you as well.”
With dismay Balian recognized the man he had bargained with over the release of three Saracen youths captured at Montgisard. His stomach churned as he realized he was going to pay a high price for his earlier greed.
“But first, your excellency.” The Kurdish emissary switched back into French and bowed again, if a little less formally, to King Baldwin. “I have come with greetings from the Sultan Salah ad-Din.” He proceeded to list off all the Sultan’s many titles before finally continuing, “The Sultan congratulates you on your success today. He regrets that he did not arrive at the party a little sooner, but hopes you will forgive him.” The emissary was smiling genially, but the men around him were not amused. Only the King inclined his head slightly in acknowledgment. “The Sultan was delayed by the Knights of the Temple, as they call themselves, who blocked his way,” the emissary continued conversationally. “Now the Grand Master of the Knights Templar is enjoying the Sultan’s hospitality.”
A shocked rumble of exclamations surged across the tent as men turned to their neighbors, asking how that was possible. Templars were expected to die for their faith. Certainly it was against the Templar Rule to pay ransom. It was unthinkable that a Grand Master had let himself fall into the hands of the Saracens alive.
The Saracen emissary understood the shock of his audience and was clearly enjoying it. As the flurry of exclamations died down, he continued, “The Templar leader was knocked unconscious in a fall from his horse. A half-dozen of his men died defending what they thought was his corpse, but when we removed his helmet, we discovered—to our astonishment—that he was still alive.”
A new rumble of murmurs swept the room, while the emissary continued, “We also took several other prisoners of note.” He smiled significantly in Ibelin’s direction. “But however much my master enjoys the company of these gentlemen, he would rather dine with kin. So he suggests that you return to him his beloved nephew Farrukh-Shah in exchange for the Master of the Temple.” The emissary bowed again.
“For the Master of the Temple alone—or for all the prisoners of note?” the King asked sharply.
“For the Master of the Temple, your excellency.”
“Templars cannot be ransomed,” Tripoli protested angril
y.
“This isn’t ransom; it’s a prisoner exchange,” the King corrected his mightiest vassal, and looked pointedly around the room. “Does anyone here think we could have won Montgisard without Master Odo de St. Amand?”
Balian wanted to point out that they couldn’t have won Montgisard without his brother, either, but he didn’t quite dare shout it out; it would have sounded too selfish and self-serving.
The King looked pointedly at the Count of Tripoli, who stood just behind his left shoulder. “What say you, my lord? Has Odo de St. Amand ever left us in the lurch when we needed him?”
Tripoli pressed his lips together in obvious disapproval, but under the gaze of the young King he capitulated. “If that is your wish, your grace,” Tripoli answered stiffly. “But shouldn’t we listen to the names of the other prisoners first?” He glanced significantly at Ibelin.
“No,” the King insisted firmly. “We cannot decide based on whom we love best. Salah ad-Din has made us an offer. We take it or leave it.”
Tripoli shook his head in disagreement, but Lusignan, Sidon, and other barons spoke up at once in favor of Odo de St. Amand. The King called for silence and turned back to the Sultan’s emissary. “We agree to these terms.”
The emissary bowed deeply in acknowledgement and came up smiling to turn his gaze on Ibelin. Still speaking French for the benefit of the audience, he announced, “My lord of Ibelin, your brother sends his greetings and assurances of his well-being, while the Sultan sends his compliments on your courage.”
Ibelin dutifully acknowledged the compliment with a nod of his head and waited for the ax to fall.
“Such a brave and noble prisoner is of great worth to the entire Kingdom,” the Mamluke continued, bowing to the King and smiling to the others in the room, “but to no one more than his beloved brother, I am sure.”
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