The Sacred Scroll

by Anton Gill

  ‘How will the city be divided once we’ve taken it?’ Boniface wanted to know.

  Dandolo had considered that. ‘We are attacking from the seaward side. We will occupy the port and the southern districts. You take the northern.’ He looked at them. ‘Do you agree?’

  Did they know that the southern part of the city was by far the richer? But he knew what their answer would be.

  ‘We do,’ the leaders replied, unhesitatingly.

  On Sunday they went to Mass, though the bells in Zara remained silent. There was some activity on the walls, but otherwise little movement within the city. On Monday 18 November, at dawn, they went to war.

  The catapults hurled rocks at the battlements as the Crusaders stormed the walls from the landward sides and the Venetians attacked the seaward fortifications. The engineers dug under the foundations, working with picks and shovels, sweating under the cover of canopies of wet hides, which protected them from the worst of the boiling oil, fire and rocks thrown down from the battlements on to them. Three times during the first two days the attackers were repulsed. The people of Zara had good archers and there were plenty of able-bodied young men in the city who had not neglected their military training. They couldn’t ride out, but they could push away scaling ladders, and they defended with such ferocity that the attackers couldn’t bring in the assault towers.

  But the weather held. If it had rained, the wheels which supported the towers would have slipped on rock or sunk in mud. But the battle was fought under a mild, late-autumn sun. Winter was tardy here.

  The comfort was that the governor hadn’t ordered the city itself set on fire. But, Dandolo had reasoned, if the governor destroyed the place, where would his people flee to? If he didn’t, he might believe that he could negotiate for their lives, if he lost. It was for that reason that Dandolo had not chosen to try his power on the governor. That, and the need to see how the Crusader fought. But it had been a calculated risk.

  At the moment it looked as if the governor had no intention of losing. Or of facing the inevitable. For the city would fall.

  52

  On the third day one of the south-western towers, where the sea-wall met the western-landward wall, came down, collapsing on itself and killing all within it, as well as perhaps fifty of the sappers who’d undermined it. One breach was enough. The panic of the defenders was palpable, and that day the attackers pushed the assault towers right up to the walls on all the landward sides. The fighting on the battlements was furious, and many of the attackers who climbed up never returned. If they did, it was minus a hand or an arm.

  As far as Dandolo was concerned, they might as well have been dead. Maimed, what good were they to him?

  That night, fires started in the city.

  ‘We must take it before it kills itself,’ Dandolo said to Leporo. ‘How are our people doing?’

  ‘Frid says we’ll be inside the city by tomorrow at dusk. If he isn’t exaggerating. They’re cutting off the heads of the dead defenders who’ve fallen outside the walls and catapulting them back inside tonight. Weakens morale. Plenty of husbands, fathers, brothers and boyfriends there.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘The fires aren’t spreading. They’re controlled. They’re burning away rubbish so they can clear the streets when it comes to fighting in them.’

  ‘Frid will break in from the south with our forces. I have every faith in him.’

  ‘Swordplay is what he excels at,’ agreed Leporo, hoping the Viking would be cut down in the first assault. He would watch the battle tomorrow with interest; it would be good to see the kind of power he himself would one day wield, once Frid was out of the way and Dandolo, lacking his protection and increasingly infirm, dead.

  The fury unleashed on Thursday was without pity. This day, the battlements were taken, the attackers and defenders both using axes and maces. No room for the finesse of swordplay here, or time. The Venetians had an easier task, as most of the defenders were occupied with the larger Crusader force attacking from the other three compass points. The smell of blood, burning flesh and hot oil, and the smear of smoke and flame, blended with the screaming of injured animals and the anguished cries of women and children as they tried to escape, seek hiding-places in cellars or sanctuary in the churches, whose bells rang defiantly until they were silenced by the crash of a projectile into a steeple.

  And as Frid had promised, by sunset the Venetian Navy and the Army of the Holy Fourth Crusade commanded the battlements and the gates, and what was left of the walls and towers of the proud city of Zara.

  Friday was the worst day. Dandolo summoned Frid personally to make his report.

  The Viking, unused to talking much or for long, spoke slowly and deliberately. He stood at uneasy attention before Dandolo’s table, the two of them alone in the room. Leporo was busy elsewhere, supervising the loot that had already been seized. Dandolo had not wanted him at his elbow every waking minute.

  ‘The fighting in the streets was hard and vicious, this day,’ Frid began. ‘Our men kept losing themselves in the tangle of narrow streets and finding themselves cut off or ambushed; and the defenders were a people living at the broken edges of what, a week earlier, had been a tranquil life. Now they were fighting with the ferocity of people who have nothing to lose.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘My platoon was cut off from the rest of the Venetian force. We’d taken a wrong turn and found ourselves penned in a little square with a well at its centre. Some of my men are professionals, but the bulk’s made up of seamen and volunteers who’d taken the Cross because of you.’

  ‘Because of me?’

  ‘You inspired many when you had that blue-and-gold watered silk crucifix sewn on to your cap by the archbishop of Venice in St Mark’s cathedral, shortly before the fleet sailed.’ Frid hesitated before continuing. ‘But that enthusiasm was wearing off, and weakened further as they saw that taking Zara wasn’t the walkover they’d been led to believe it would be.’

  ‘You speak plainly.’

  ‘It is the truth.’

  Dandolo laced his fingers. The plain truth would not hurt.

  ‘As the enemy closed in from the streets which led into the square, I told my people to close ranks,’ Frid continued. ‘I had a dozen crossbowmen with me, armed with pull-lever weapons which were quick to reload, and iron bolts, though only twenty or so of each.

  ‘I ordered them to form a ring round the well and to fire volleys.’

  ‘Evidently you were successful.’

  ‘Altissima.’ Frid bowed stiffly. ‘The first fusillade brought down a dozen men – a hit-rate which made the attackers recoil, and left their dead and wounded scattered in their blood on the floor of the square. One man had taken a bolt to the neck, another full in the sternum. I heard the crack when the bone shattered as the bolt smashed its way home. Two others were hit in the thigh, another in the belly. One poor bugger had caught it in the groin, and his screams drowned out almost every other sound. Those killed were the lucky ones.’

  Dandolo nodded. There’d be no prisoners, no patching up by the Venetian barber-surgeons, and he knew Frid wasn’t going to waste time on coups de grâce.

  ‘My men wanted to break out after the foe, but I told them to hold firm. I watched the Zarans to see what weapons they had. Swords, axes, daggers, but no bows. We were lucky. It’s hard to use bows in street fighting anyway, but they might have had men on the roofs. I watched the roofs but there was nothing. How many of the bastards were left, I didn’t know.’

  Frid took a breath. He was getting old for this. His knees still ached, and his chain-mail had irritated him, despite the buckram tunic he’d worn beneath it.

  ‘Then I saw a movement on the roof on the west side of the square, then another. They had short-bow men there after all.

  ‘“The roofs! Aim at the roofs!” I yelled, as a first volley rained down on us, the arrows taking out five of my men, but luckily none of the soldiers with crossbows. The Zarans were shoot
ing ragged.

  ‘“Break up!” I told my lads. “Hand-to-hand! Bowmen, target the roofs!”

  ‘We ran fast to grapple with the regrouped enemy in the square, cutting at hands, wrists, legs and faces. Soon the whole narrow space stank of blood and sweat. I stayed by the well, bracing myself against its low wall. I watched the progress of the fight. My volunteers were being sliced apart by the Zarans, but the Venetian seamen and professionals held fast, and there were still more than twenty of them in the melee.

  ‘But more of the enemy were pouring into the square.

  ‘I made a decision. “Get some of our people up to the roofs,” I said to the sergeant at my side. “As many of the crossbowmen with them as you can muster.”

  ‘The sergeant ducked his head in acknowledgement and went about his business. Before long the fight had broken out above their heads and I could see that it was going our way. A Zaran bowman, his guts spewing out behind him in the air, crashed heavily to the ground, falling on two of his fellow citizens who were stabbing a crouching Venetian – a good, brave lad; I knew him well – in the square below. More followed, and then the hail of fire from above changed its aim. Now, more Zarans were falling, picked off by crossbow bolts.

  ‘I saw our advantage and pressed it, bellowing to my men to close with the faltering defenders.’ Frid felt a rush shame at the memory. ‘As I did so, two young, burly Zarans closed on me. My sergeant was gone, supervising the action on the rooftops; the rest of my men were heavily engaged, cutting down those of the defenders who were not already dead, wounded or fled. The battle was almost over, but these two weren’t going to leave without taking me down.

  ‘“Fucking Viking pig,” one of them spat at me.

  ‘“Say your prayers, granddad,” the other sneered. And without warning he swung his sword and knocked my helmet from my head.’

  Frid paused, remembering what he did not say. He did not tell Dandolo because, for a moment, the clear belief he had in his leader had left him. What had he said to the Zarans? “Only obeying orders”? He was ashamed. And he couldn’t drive away the memory of his shame:

  His red hair, streaked with white, was still thick, and the sword had struck a glancing blow. He’d felt the flat of its blade, though, and that sent him reeling. He clutched the well wall to stop himself from falling. But he still went down on one knee.

  His attackers roared and moved in quickly. Men of maybe twenty-five years old. One kicked him hard in the face.

  ‘I saw you at the north gate. You sent my wife and children out, penned me in here. You’re going to die slow!’

  ‘Shouldn’t have done that,’ said the other.

  Frid was breathing hard, but he was back in control. These two talked too much, and moved in too close. Still braced on one knee and with his back against the wall, he pretended to be more badly injured than he was.

  ‘Take pity,’ he begged. ‘Only obeying orders.’

  ‘What pity do you show, fuckface?’ said the second young man. He was younger and lighter than his companion, and looked less cocksure despite the advantage he thought he had. Frid lunged forward, grabbed his legs under the knee and, once he was off-balance, tipped him over his massive shoulders and into the well. The man didn’t even have time to yell. It must have been five seconds before they heard him crash into the water at the bottom.

  The other man, recovering from the unexpected shock, dropped his sword and grappled a mace out of his belt, a solid one, not on a chain, and took half a step back, raising it. Frid might have been an old man now, but he was still fit, and the tip of his little finger knew more about fighting than his opponent had in his whole muscular young body. He had a seax at his side, an old Viking machete, its heavy iron blade worn by use to half its original width, but the edge sharp enough to shave with. There was room to manoeuvre to cut with it, which would have been its best use; but Frid had seen that the man wore only a mail tunic and leather leggings. His lower belly and his private parts were protected by just a wooden codpiece. As the young Zaran raised his mace, the tunic he was wearing lifted, and then Frid pushed himself up and forward from his bent knee, which screamed in pain and protest, and thrust hard, just above and to the right of the man’s prick. The seax would have gone right in if he’d wanted it to, for the flesh was soft there and he’d avoided hitting bone, but Frid let it penetrate only eight centimetres before pulling it out and, as the man dropped his mace and brought both hands down to the wound and bent his broad back as well, in the instinctive gesture of defence Frid had expected, the Norseman stood up, stepped back, and raised the seax to swipe through the nape of the neck and sever the head from the body. The head rolled away and the body jerked convulsively for a long moment before it fell to its knees and then, still writhing, to the ground.

  ‘What happened then?’ Dandolo cut in.

  ‘When?’

  ‘After you lost your helmet,’ prompted the doge.

  ‘I got them in the end. Then I looked round. There must have been fifty corpses in the square. The only men still standing were my own. I led them in a cheer, raising my seax, dripping blood, above my head. Then I wiped it and sheathed it, shoved my fingers through my beard to untangle it, wring some of the blood from it, shook myself. So much for Zara, I thought.’

  The rest was easy, though how Dandolo got the French to do it was a mystery whose secret was fully known only to Frid, and knowing it did not mean that the Norseman understood it. Leporo, for himself, kept his counsel.

  The women, the children and those too old to have fought, and the surviving warriors of the city, were pulled out of the looted churches and the cellars and wherever else they’d been hiding, brought down to the beach and corralled in pens constructed of tightly woven withies. There were a thousand of them, and it took a day and a night to slaughter them. The Crusaders and the Venetians did it with spears. Then they threw brushwood over the bodies, seasoned it with naphtha and set fire to the makeshift pyres. Black smoke rose. The fires didn’t burn out until Sunday evening, and the stench was appalling. By then, Zara, that vile, treacherous bitch of a city, was theirs, and most of it was intact.

  But it wasn’t over.

  53

  ‘They’ve done what?’ Dandolo snarled at Leporo. Three days had elapsed since the victory.

  ‘It wasn’t the fault of our men. The French started it.’

  They were standing in the reception hall of the governor’s mansion in the south-east quarter of the city, Dandolo’s interrupted morning meal spread out on a table under one of the windows overlooking the harbour.

  ‘The Pilgrims think they’ve got a raw deal.’

  ‘So they started fighting us?’

  ‘Some of the men only. Their leaders are putting down the insurrection.’

  ‘Send for them,’ Dandolo growled. ‘I turn my back for one night, and this happens!’

  Baldwin and Boniface, shamefaced, arrived an hour later. Everyone had been billeted according to his rank, and patrols had been sent out to scour the hills to the north for young men and women suitable for the purpose to which they were to be put, in repairing the walls and servicing the men of the Fourth Crusade. Everything had seemed calm. The plan to overwinter in Zara and in the meantime assess and divide the spoils had been agreed. But then fighting had broken out between some of the French and the Venetians over loot from the principal church, and it had spread to the streets.

  ‘Frid’s been out there too, and it’s dying down now,’ said Boniface.

  Dandolo was aghast. Why had there been this disobedience? Had the tablet failed him? Had he lost concentration? It was a shock to discover that to exert his will over this army of what he was beginning to think of as his slaves, he could not relax for one moment.

  He clutched the tablet tighter. It seemed to nestle in his hand of its own volition, as if it were a living thing. Did he really have power over it, or had he gone too far – was it beginning to have power over him?

  He shook the notion off. It w
as preposterous. He was in control, and he alone.

  ‘But that’s armies for you – especially ones made up of nations that won’t agree,’ Geoffrey de Villehardouin said to Leporo later, when the fighting had died down and the two men were alone together.

  ‘I saw little of it,’ said the monk. ‘What happened?’ During the brief skirmish between the allies, Leporo had been cloistered with Dandolo in the mansion, making an audit of the city’s assets.

  ‘Baldwin and Boniface set about restoring the peace almost as soon as the trouble broke out. But as soon as they managed to put a stop to it in one quarter, it broke out in another. Three hundred men have died needlessly. And that in fighting which took place on a single night!’

  ‘May God preserve us!’

  ‘It’s over now. The ringleaders on both sides have been arrested.’

  ‘That much I do know.’

  ‘And do you know what punishment will be meted out to them?’

  ‘There are fifteen main troublemakers. The doge in his wisdom had determined that their punishment be exemplary. He has ordered them taken to the shore at dawn, and crucified.’

  Geoffrey breathed hard. But he said nothing more than ‘Let us pray to God that our internal conflict is now over for good, and that we can go forward on the great enterprise we have before us with renewed vigour in the spring.’

  ‘There’s enough work to do to keep the men busy until then,’ said Leporo. ‘We have to rebuild the damage done in taking this place.’

  ‘And rest. And divide what we have gained. Then we will have our fleet fully paid for.’

  Leporo smiled. Dandolo and he had calculated that, dividing the spoils fifty-fifty, the Crusaders’ share was still not enough to cover their outstanding debt. They would still be in the power of Venice, and they could not rebel.

  ‘Let us pray that it is so,’ he said.

  54