The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  Gawain was close; I knew him, and was sure he wouldn’t leave me. I needed a few seconds in the press to get him.

  That was the time of the longsword.

  The men around me were mostly Bedouin – unarmoured men with small shields, daggers and spears. Interspersed with them were Sudanese Ghulami, men as black as Richard Musard, or blacker, with heavy spears like the ones we’d use for a foot combat or a passage of arms. I cut hard, a long, flat cut from right to left, clearing a little space and severing a man’s fingers. He fell back, and I killed another with a flick of my point: I was spending my spirit the way Nerio spent ducats.

  But by God, I was fighting well.

  Fiore reached me first, angling into the enemy from my right and killing his way like a ship under sail cuts the water. His charger dropped a big spearman whose heavy shaft was absorbing my blows. I caught his stirrup and his good horse hauled me ten paces through the press and I was hit twenty times. I was bruised, and I took a wound in the back of my right bicep under the spaulder, but when the pain forced me to relinquish the stirrup leather, I was close enough to the crusaders to see their crests and their coat armour.

  I could see Mézzières, forty feet away. He had one foot on either side of the king, who was lying flat in the sand.

  I thought of de Charny.

  I prayed.

  I was hit. And I stumbled.

  And then Juan was there – Juan, who’d been knocked unconscious in the first action. He was tall in his saddle, his seat firm, his back straight, and his arm rose and fell like a man threshing wheat, and Saracens died. Because of him, I finally had a moment to gather Gawain, who should have followed me like a loyal dog.

  My horse was nowhere to be seen.

  I believe that I cursed.

  Miles had our banner, and now he was close to me, and behind him I could see Nerio and the scarlet coat armour of my volunteers. The Saracens were screaming – the keening came through my helmet – and the dying were screaming a different tune and the cry ‘On, on!’ thundered out, grunted from the mounted knights.

  The world balanced and the balance held, like two combatants when both make a strong pass and their blades lock. We were locked. Mézzières, Nerio, Fra Peter. Somewhere out on the bay, Carlo Zeno leapt into the water. A ship full of Genoese discharged a heavy volley of arbalest bolts into the flank of the Naffatun.

  I saw none of this, you understand. Nor had I seen d’Albret unhorsing me, or trying to kill me and being driven off by Juan. In the helmet, you just don’t see.

  Where I was, there was only the grit in between my teeth, the heaving of my sides as my lungs begged for air that my breastplate denied, the sweat that wept into my eyes from my hairline and the soggy padding of my cervelliere, and the sword I held in both hands.

  Listen, then.

  I got my sword up into a high guard – rare enough, on the battlefield – but something came to me, in the locked moment, some grace, whether from God or Fiore I leave you to guess. But I took up the guard called Window with my hands crossed, and my adversary was an armoured Saracen in light mail. He had a scimitar and a buckler with five bosses and verses of the Koran inscribed in gold.

  I cut. I rotated my hands and cut between the bucker and the scimitar, rotating forward on my hips.

  Like many men against whom I trained, the space between his sword and his shield was less guarded than it ought to have been. My sword touched both his sword and his shield. And continued through his helmet and into his head. My hand was so fell, so heavy, that the blade went through helm and head, down and down.

  He fell, and I pressed forward one full step, cutting the reverse line up. I felt as if the very power of God had filled me. By Christ, all my life I have heard men claim to have cut through a helmet, but I have seen it done with a sword only three times, and that was one.

  My rising cut broke a man’s wrists and half severed them and I threw him to the ground with my knee and my left hand and finished him with my knee while I cut flat and low against an unarmoured spearman. His spear thrust was weak and skidded on my breastplate and I cut into his leg and probably fractured it with the same blow and he too was down.

  And then I was face to face with Mézzières, across a horse-length of beach. My friends were clearing away the front of the Cypriotes, and they had their ring of steel reformed.

  The army of the Alexandrines shrieked their dismay. And then, like fools, they turned and ran.

  The ‘crusaders’ were finally landing, all along the beach, many in boats provided by their ships, and some captains had run their small craft ashore. The Venetians and Genoese knew the harbour and came in close, well away to the right, and their landing cut many of the fugitives off from the open gate.

  I saw none of that. I leaned on my sword and panted, and my breath was all I could breathe inside my helmet, and somehow I got my visor up.

  De Mézzières stood there in the sun with the banner of Jerusalem in his hand. Then he raised his visor. He had a ring of dead at his feet.

  Our eyes met.

  What can I say? You know what we both thought.

  The man at his feet coughed, and coughed again, and in a moment we were on him the way the pursuers were on the Saracen fugitives. I had assumed the king to be dead, but we got his bassinet off his head and his blue eyes fluttered open.

  He rolled to his hands and knees and spat blood into the sand.

  ‘Ah,’ he growled. ‘Ah, Mézzières. I gather we are not in heaven?’

  Most of the men who won that day will tell you that the charge of the Order won the day. Listen, Chaucer, you’ve heard Hales tell it, have you not? Fifty years those men had waited for their day, and when they charged, their lances were tipped with fire.

  The Alexandrines had no idea we had a second force, and the Order showed them what a few mounted knights could do. And Fortuna – or God’s will – gave us everything: the Casteleto, the error of the Mamluk’s charge.

  But by Saint George, it was a glorious day, as great a day as any I have seen.

  The crusaders – no, the routiers, let us call them – slaughtered the Saracens. And the pity of it is that they did not just slaughter their army. Thousands of Alexandrines, including women and children, Jewish street vendors and Christians who had come out to see their brothers rescue them – they were by the gates – and our army killed them. This is the monster that is war, a monster that devours everything in its path.

  And still the men of Alexandria got the gates closed. They left brothers and sons to die and slammed the gates in their faces to keep us out. And the routiers who had played no part in the victory roamed the beach, killing unarmed men.

  Fra Peter gathered us again under the legate’s banner, but not before King Peter made Steven Scrope, one of the blood-covered figures at de Mézzières’ shoulder, and Miles Stapleton kneel and the sand, and he knighted them both. He knighted a dozen other men.

  He took his own collar, a magnificent thing of silver gilt and jewels made of swords and roses from around his neck and he broke it with his sword, and gave half to de Mézzières.

  He gave half to me.

  He made me one of his Order of the Sword while our army of mercenaries murdered the innocents who had come to watch the battle.

  I am a knight, and the business of my Order is war.

  Do peasants sicken of the plough? Do priests tire of saying Mass?

  I was twenty-five years old, and Alexandria was my sixth great battle. In the fighting, each was different, as one lover is from another. In the aftermath, there is a sameness that defies description – foul, cruel, evil.

  The king never regained control of the host of mercenaries we’d brought from Italy and I will not lie: what follows is dark and there’s little chivalry in it.

  The routiers ranged along the walls. To them were added most of the marines and many
of the sailors. The captains brought their ships off the shoals and sands of the Old Harbour and rowed or sailed around Pharos Castle into the Pharos Harbour and the Venetians attempted an escalade on the Pharos castle before sun set. The governor’s lieutenant resisted manfully, and threw them back with losses.

  I was sitting on an upturned boat at the end of the sea wall while a Venetian surgeon probed my shoulder with a knife fouled from cutting ten other wounded men. Then he sewed the flap of separated skin back down. I promise you that it hurt!

  Marc-Antonio had three arrows in him. Carlo Zeno pushed the surgeon aside and cut them out with his own hands. Of our army of five thousand, only a thousand had been engaged, but that thousand had enough wounds for ten. Yet we had very few dead. Our harnesses were so good that most men lived at least to see the dawn, and many are still with us.

  It was growing dark when Nerio found Chretien d’Albret. Nerio’s squire Davide fetched me, and we rode across the sand. John the Turk had found Gawain and restored him, and had landed our little Arab horses, who shied at blood but nonetheless were firm footed and well-rested; Gawain had ten cuts, one so broad that his red muscles showed like a gap in a curtain. John gave him opium and then sewed him up like the doctors were doing to men.

  Much later, perhaps a year or more, when I was telling the Count of Savoy about the fight – his nephew was there, but the Green Count was not, of course – John was fletching arrows by the fire, and I saw him grunt and shake his head while I told this story.

  Later that night, I went to him. By then we were old friends and I asked him why he had sneered at my story. He laughed mirthlessly, in his Tartar way. ‘All battle the same,’ he said. ‘Young men sing. Old man grunt.’

  I thought he was posturing. ‘John, you were a hero – you saved us. I saw you save Marc-Antonio. You earned glory—’

  His Tartar eyes burned with sudden anger. John is seldom angry, but he stepped forward at me although I am a head and more taller. And I suspect I stepped back.

  ‘I save friend!’ he spat. He reached his left hand behind him and wiped his arse elaborately and then brought the hand up to my face. ‘Worth more than glory, is my shit,’ he said.

  I tell you gentles this, because not everyone agrees on what we saw and did at Alexandria.

  We rode to Chretien d’Albret.

  He was dying. Listen, in paintings, saints die with serene faces, whether on the rack, or full of arrows, or like Christ on the cross. But men do not go that way, and most especially when they have been burned across most of their upper body with naptha.

  The fire had done something to d’Albret. He thought he was going to hell. In fact, he thought he was already in hell, burning alive.

  Well.

  The poor bastard.

  Flesh came away whenever he moved, charred strips like bad meat. And he screamed and screamed until you’d think he’d have had no voice left. His eyes were gone.

  Christ, I can’t tell this …

  He raved.

  To most men on the beach, his raving sounded like the last words of a man in torment. But I knew what he was saying. He was saying that d’Herblay had paid him to kill me.

  I stood and listened.

  Nerio was better than me. He made a little sound like pfft and killed d’Albret, drawing, thrusting, wiping his blade and returning it to the scabbard so fast that it was as if his hands were full of silver fire in the moonlight.

  ‘I hope one of you will do the same for me, if my turn is like that,’ Nerio said.

  But we had all heard what we had heard. It wasn’t just me d’Albret was after. D’Albret had died screaming that he had been paid to kill the serf. The Serf.

  A man in agony cannot be interrogated or questioned or threatened or begged. He screamed d’Herblay’s name. He screamed his repentance at the sky, and was killed.

  God have mercy on his soul, and the souls of all those who died in the sand.

  We went back and slept on pallets of straw in a rough camp that the sergeants and lay brothers of the Order had prepared. But before we lay down our horses were groomed and fed, their wounds tended, their tack stripped away and cleaned. It took me, I swear, half the night.

  Marc-Antonio’s habit of getting wounded when there was work to be done was remarkable! But with John’s expert help and my friends and their squires, we got it all done. We made the Gascons d’Albret had brought do the same, though they complained and complained. I might have raged at them – you could see Fra Robert Hales and Fra Ricardo and a dozen other older knights patiently currying horses in the moonlight while a handful of young Gascons proclaimed themselves too nobly born for such work, but I was too tired for rage. And I wanted them where I could see them.

  The legate was tireless. He went from wounded man to wounded man, and late, when the moon was high, he came to us. We prayed, and I told him about d’Albret.

  He shrugged. ‘My life is worth nothing,’ he said. He smiled his simple smile and went off to find other men worse off than we. Later, he spent an hour protecting a huddle of Moslem survivors from the routiers.

  I was asleep.

  We rose to pain. I was under my military cloak – Egypt’s nights can be cold – with Nerio pressed close to me on one side and my wounded squire pressed close to the other. He had the fever we all dreaded, and he was so hot I thought he was done. All three of his wounds were red.

  So was my shoulder.

  I have little memory of that day. Fra Peter ordered us to horse, and we tacked and bridled and we were mounted in the dawn, and our horses were as stiff as we were ourselves. But not an arrow did we receive from the walls. The king awoke late, mounted, and rode the whole circuit of the walls before noon with the Order as his bodyguards. Two hundred knights, and the greatest city on earth.

  They might have laughed us to scorn, but they had their own troubles.

  King Peter sent them a cartel, summoning the city to surrender. Their commander returned a defiance.

  We rode from point to point, and everywhere I looked for d’Herblay and asked me if they had seen him.

  He was nowhere to be found. Most ‘crusaders’ rose late and began to prowl around the walls like dogs searching for food. They were not an army. I know, because the king stopped many times, trying to reason with men. He stopped Sir Walter Leslie, who was with his brothers and some other Scottish knights and asked them to rejoin the army.

  Sir Walter bowed deeply. He was in his harness, as were his brothers and all their men, and they were stripping some houses in the suburbs by the Pepper Gate.

  ‘You Grace, we came here to be rich, and if we cannot take the city, at least we can loot these towns,’ Sir Walter said.

  Gascons, French, Scots – they ran riot over the countryside, looted a caravan they caught coming in, killing the animals where they stood. The Venetians stormed the Pharos again, and found it empty. The town’s lieutenant had stripped it of men and valuables and slipped away after the attack the night before, convinced he could not hold it.

  As I say, the Saracens had troubles of their own. One was that the lieutenant was himself shattered by defeat. I have seen this in other places; he had a larger army and a magnificent defensive position, but defeat robbed him of his will to resist.

  And we had neglected the most simple precautions, and so the Alexandrines were able to send messengers to Cairo. On the other hand, with all the harbour castles in our hands, the Venetians and Genoese were suddenly sanguine. Their ships were safe, and any ships that remained in the old harbour were rowed around to the New.

  By mid-afternoon, the king had perhaps two thousand men-at-arms under his hand. He had all the English – perhaps the habit of obedience was better among the English, but I think it is that there were more lords and fewer routiers. At any rate, the English stayed together as a body, and the Scots, despite Leslie’s comments in the late morning, c
ame back to the beach and remained part of the ‘army’. But the French, the Gascons, the Bretons, the Savoyards and the sailors were uncontrollable.

  Nor were they the only ones uncontrolled. In the town, a riot set the Christian quarter afire and the heads of a dozen Christian men appeared on spikes over the Sea Gate that the locals called Bab al-Bahr. The French routiers got barrels of pitch from the Venetians and tried to burn the gate and the garrison drove them off with heavy losses.

  No one knows what happened in those hours. But we saw the smoke rising in the town, and as the French threw themselves against the Sea Gate, we covered their flanks. Parties of Saracens would emerge from the sally ports along the waterfront to kill the attackers, and we – mounted – would trap them against the walls. In fact, mostly we trapped air and sand because they were too quick for us.

  Late in the afternoon, the Scots had a go at the Sea Gate. Sir Walter Leslie led them forward, and they rolled barrels of flammables to the base of the gate. But the Naffatun had come, and they rained fire on the earth. Sir Norman Leslie died in his harness, so burned that the plates buckled, and many another Scot died with him. But they got the gates afire, or possibly the naptha that killed the Scots also caught the gate.

  The infidels made a mounted sortie, trying to clear the gate so that they could put out the fire and we charged them, and for the first time we were sword to sword with Mamluks. I was by the king for he did me the honour of riding with my contingent of volunteers, and we had a sharp fight, but the Mamluks didn’t linger. We pressed them hard into their sally port, but they got away.

  Mostly I remember being tired, hot, and miserable.

  Sunset was close when the king summoned all his counsellors.

  ‘Well, my lords,’ he said. ‘Here we are at the walls of Alexandria.’ The smell of smoke was everywhere. There was a fire inside the city, still burning. We didn’t know that Janghara, the cowardly lieutenant, had ordered the Christians killed and then snuck out of the city. We had no idea that there were more Alexandrines fighting the fire than fighting our armies.