by Tuvia Fogel
Galatea nodded in Frutolf ’s direction, more in thanks for his readiness to be her champion than to confirm Bois-Guilbert’s claim to have meant no offense. She knew he had. The moment passed, but Frutolf ’s impulse convinced Yehezkel that the German was the answer to the nun’s mistrust of the Templar. In the humblest tone he could muster, he turned to Frutolf and said, “Honorable knight, I seek your protection for two women headed to Jerusalem. If you will see to it that they reach Acre safely and find a caravan to the Holy City, God will surely reward you for it!”
Frutolf readily accepted to look after the women, to Bois-Guilbert’s immediate scorn. “I’ll vouch for the pilgrims myself, Master Ezekiel! Mother Galatea needn’t worry her pretty head about them. Instead, she should worry that her own head remains attached to her neck in the infidel’s camp!”
Frutolf was doing what he did best, feeling sorry for himself. “I’m committed to looking after two pilgrims while the Jew sails to Egypt with the lady of my thoughts! Perhaps one day I’ll slit open the belly of this verbose Jew for the liberties he takes with the queen of my soul. Surely killing a Jew is no more a sin than killing a Mohammedan: they’re both infidels!”
The German’s spark of knightly honor mitigated Galatea’s misgivings at the thought of Gudrun and Albacara at the mercy of those ghouls. In any case, leaving the women in Cyprus, albeit with Rustico and Garietto, was worse than entrusting them to the knights. After all, these two had crosses on their mantles!
When food—after a final, glorious blancmange—stopped coming, musicians started to play. Wine flowed freely, and the dancing was wild. It was a hot night, and girls fanned themselves, opening the necks of their blouses and holding cool metal dishes to their cheeks. Galatea went out for some air. Light from inside poured all the way to the lane. Big earthenware oil lamps sat among the columns, and shadows danced on the walls. The yard smelled of meat, mingled with the fragrance of mint, cinnamon, and hot wine spices. People came and went, and she heard muffled laughter, music, and occasional imprecations.
“Ezekiel is simply too big,” she thought suddenly, a bit tipsy. “He takes up so much space when he moves. He’s like an untamed falcon that cannot open its wings in a room without knocking over a chair or a jug.”
Finally, on the 30th of July, the galley heading for war embarked both its conscripted passengers and the few eccentrics who needed no coercion to join the armies—that is, the friars and Galatea.
For two weeks, Gudrun and Albacara were torn between relief at not joining the abbess on a journey to possible martyrdom and sheer terror at the thought of completing their pilgrimage without her. Not to mention the abbess asked them to find storage for her trunk in Acre.
The adieus on the quay were heartbreaking. At the last moment, faced with Gudrun’s desperation, Galatea was on the point of changing her mind and sailing to Acre, but in the end she reminded Gudrun of her vow of obedience, and that she was her Mother Superior, even in Cyprus.
Aillil was beside himself with joy for three reasons: first, his father might be outside Damietta and his dream of a lifetime about to come true. Second, they were joining an army besieging an infidel city—with war engines and real kings! Third, and possibly most exciting, they were about to board a galley, the kind of ship he always dreamed of sailing in.
Six months earlier, when he’d left Montréal, he’d been truly tired of being too young for everything and wondered when he would acquire the confidence that adults showed when faced with threatening developments. Now, he was probably the only thirteen-year-old in Christendom to have single-handedly sunk a pirate ship, and the thought of his father teaching him to look after himself on a battlefield filled him with elation. Back in Montréal, he would have his own tales to tell in front of the fire.
The last to show up were the Italian friars. When everyone was on board, Yehezkel watched the galley’s Genoese crew prepare to cast off. He heard Francesco’s voice soar as he and a knight from Provence sang a French ballad. The friar couldn’t resist taking a few dance steps across the deck as a few knights clapped their hands. They looked like anything but a galley sailing to war.
They cast off and slowly rowed out of the harbor. Then the rhythm of drums and oars picked up; the galley surged forward. Even Galatea, by now undaunted by waves and slippery decks, was thrilled by the speed of the slender ship whose prow threw spray all the way to the quarterdeck. With Cyprus shrinking on the northern horizon, she asked Yehezkel, “This is a roundabout route to Jerusalem, isn’t it? How long will it be before we set course for the Holy City again?”
“Actually, I did some calculating last night, madame. It so happens that we spent precisely forty days on Crete and precisely forty days on Cyprus. I don’t look forward to them, but I fear it will be forty days again before we leave Damietta. You know how much they like that number, up there . . .”
THE SAME DAY, IN JERUSALEM
Just as the Templar galley exited Limassol harbor, in Jerusalem a young Bedouin sheikh of the tribe of Saud advanced on his knees along an endless carpet leading to the slipper he would have to kiss.
The slipper was that of Haj Abû Haydjâ’ al-Hadhbânî’s, a Kurd who was Jerusalem’s vizier by appointment of al-Mu’azzam ’Isa, caliph of Damascus and brother of the Sultan. Five months earlier, when al-Mu’azzam ordered the demolition of Jerusalem’s walls—in case the city was ceded to the Franks to get them to leave Egypt—the vizier’s residence moved from the patriarch’s palace. The carpet was now in the fortress of King David, next to the main gate in what was left of the city’s western wall. Al-Hadhbânî sat on a raised platform on cushions covered in Damascene silk. On his head was the white turban that is the privilege of those who have been on the Haj. The Saudi sheikh he summoned was the director of the restoration work ordered by al-Mu’azzam ’Isa on the Esplanade where the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock rose. In the last week or two strange events had been frightening the workers there.
“What’s happening on the Haram al-Sharif?”*41 barked the vizier.
The foreman was already on his knees but now bent down until his forehead touched the carpet. “Peace be with you, Your Excellency. May God grant you a life as long as time itself!”
The vizier gestured impatiently for him to answer the question. The sheikh went on, “Your humble servant sent stone masons twice to fix a section of the paving about three hundred steps north of the dome. Both times, the workers fell sick the day after they began work in that spot.”
“From what did they suffer?” asked al-Hadhbânî.
“Fever, vomit, vertigo, nightmares . . . and visions. One of them is dead, and another two are moribund. The city is murmuring, Your Excellency. They say Allah doesn’t want that spot touched.”
“And since when is Allah’s will determined by people in the souk’s alleys?” snapped the vizier. He stood up, irritated. “Call my ulema!”*42 he shouted to the guards around the platform.
Three bearded old men wearing white turbans walked in and listened to the foreman carefully, asked many questions, and then stepped aside to whisper among themselves. Finally, the eldest one stepped forward. “Your Excellency, the Qu’ran says that Shaytān†5 hides even under . one’s nails . . .”
Al-Hadhbânî stopped him right away. “I’ve no time for qu’ranic derivations! Are there ruah’in‡1 on the esplanade or aren’t there?”
“There are, Your Excellency,” answered the alim. “A small dome will have to be erected there in honor of the Prophet, who must have chased away a ruah in that spot. The workers will have to be changed every day, and when the work is done, it will be best to just stay away from there!”
Fifth Crusade, 1217–1221
CHAPTER 18
HA-HOSHECH
The Darkness
OUTSIDE DAMIETTA, IN THE EASTERN NILE DELTA, 2ND AUGUST 1219
The man was on his knees on the riverbank, hands tied behind his back. He shouted a war cry again.
“Allah-Huu . . .”
Before he could say Akbar, a knight standing behind him kicked him between the shoulder blades with an iron-clad foot so violently his neck snapped. The man fell forward, lifeless.
Galatea gasped in shock. It wasn’t the first death she had witnessed, and the man had been an infidel, but the casual brutality took her breath away. On that bank of nothing but sand and reeds, the scene had the frozen starkness of one of her visions. All she could think was, “Thank God Gudrun isn’t here.”
Yehezkel, standing beside her, remembered the premonition he’d had outside Carcassonne ten years earlier, that other wars were in store for him. “And that God would see me through them alive,” he murmured to himself.
Francesco, who had seen battle in Italy, recognized the look of pained surprise on a man struck by a deadly blow, and felt pity for the Saracen. He heard his brothers mumble a prayer for the man’s soul and wondered briefly if Jews and Mohammedans also prayed for the souls of infidels, as he had taught his friars to do. He would have to ask Master Ezekiel.
Aillil held his breath in fear and excitement, happy to feel Galatea’s hands on his shoulders.
They had made landfall at dawn in al-Jiza, a small fishermen’s village on the coast. The Christians were digging a canal from the shore to the Nile to bring vessels closer to the camp, but it wasn’t completed yet, and the village had no harbor, so the galley dropped anchor half a league offshore, and overloaded rowboats crawled to and fro from first light, carrying men and provisions. Serfs hurried to load timber for war machines, iron for new blades, sacks of grain, and quarters of salted meat on carts so they could reach the camp before the sun rose much higher.
Saracen children tugged at the knights’ clothes, avoiding Christians from the camp, by now inured to their pitiful near nakedness, concentrating instead on the newcomers, more likely to be moved to pity. Young girls offered their bodies with smiles frozen by embarrassment, only to be chased away by shrieking Italian and Frankish whores, who had set up shop in the camp over a year before.
The new arrivals marched in the sand with their carts for over an hour when suddenly, after climbing the back of a high dune, the entire fresco of the fifth holy war for Jerusalem was unveiled before their eyes.
The Nile’s eastern branch filled the horizon under a giant half sun the color of egg yolk. On an island in the river near the closer bank stood the tower whose capture had cost hundreds of Christian lives a year earlier. Beyond the river, a league from where they stood, a narrow strip of land separated the Nile from the huge Menzaleh lake beyond. In the middle of the strip rose the city of Damietta, smaller than they imagined it, but with fabulously high, impregnable walls.
They rested briefly on the dune’s crest as a sergeant described Christ’s Army, laid out south of the city across the strip between river and lake. The tents stretched without end, beyond anything any of them had ever seen. From west to east, the sergeant pointed out the standards of John of Brienne, the king of Jerusalem, followed by those of Frankish and Pisan counts. Then came the encampments of Templars and Hospitaliers, and further still Spaniards and Provencals. Finally, at the eastern edge of that sea of tents, nearly on the shores of the lake, was Pelagius with the Romans and the Genoese.
Sliding down the steep side of the dune, they made their way toward a bridge of planks laid over flat boats that crossed the Nile upstream of the city. After crossing it, the column finally entered the camp, already crawling with activity. They stumbled as if lost, mouths agape in wonder at unknown coats of arms and weapons they’d never seen in their countries. The heat was fast becoming unbearable, the trunks made heavier by the burning sand in which their feet sunk at every step.
They were walking past a smith’s tent, the hammers already singing on the blades, when they heard shouts from the river. Knights and sergeants emerged from tents and ran toward the source of the noise. The group joined them and a few moments later stood in a rapidly growing crowd along a stretch of riverbank where eight Saracen spies had been caught in the nets an hour earlier as they tried to bring Greek fire and bread to their besieged brethren by swimming underwater.
Galatea knew war would not be pretty but had not been able to watch the spies being tortured, as everyone around her seemed happy to do. Two of them were flayed alive, right there on the sand. She asked Yehezkel, voice shaking, why they didn’t just kill them. The spies, he conveyed grimly, may have possessed information on the true situation inside the city, obtained through pigeons, but it was more likely that what they were witnessing was pure revenge, the anger of the besiegers taken out on some brave but unfortunate men.
Then the last of them was forced to his knees, tried to shout defiance toward the kuffar,*43and earned his martyrdom.
The crowd dispersed slowly.
By now the newcomers heard of the disastrous toll, especially on the Templars, of the mamluk attack two days before, on the 31st of July. Yehezkel heard loud moans emerge from some tents, and as they entered the Templar section, he realized the wounded must be so many he would be lucky to secure a refuge for the night before he was compelled to start performing duties as a medicus.
Galatea asked about nuns in the camp and was advised to seek out the bishop of Acre, Jacques de Vitry, who supervised the activities of clerics with the campaign. As luck would have it, Francesco of Assisi and Jacques de Vitry had met five years earlier in Provence, when the latter was not yet a bishop. The Frenchman was preaching against the Cathars, while the Italian was on the pilgrimage to Spain on which he’d met a disciple of al ’Arabi. Each was taken with the quality of the other’s faith, and Francesco had been happy to hear of Jacques’s rapid rise to bishop of Acre, as well as principal preacher of the first real effort in thirty years to retake Jerusalem from the infidel.
The moment he heard Jacques was in the camp, Francesco asked where his tent was and set off to greet his friend, dragging everyone along. The tent was not far from Cardinal Pelagius’s, which meant they had to trudge to the eastern edge of the camp. As they passed Frankish, Italian, and Spanish tents, a vague anxiety crept over the strange couple, as if coming to Egypt instead of going on to Jerusalem was a mistake, and the spectacle they had just witnessed an omen of things to come.
They crossed the city in the sand for an hour. By the time they glimpsed the pennant on the cardinal’s tent, knights, squires, and artisans from the ship had dispersed to quarters where their mother tongues filled the air. Catching their breath, a new, different company of seven—now comprising Yehezkel, Galatea, Aillil, Francesco, and his three friars—approached the bishop’s tent.
Jacques de Vitry, despite not having returned to Europe since his arrival in Acre three years earlier, had heard of the near miraculous success of Francesco’s mendicant order. When a page announced the Italian friar was asking to see him, he jumped up joyfully from the letter he was writing. “Francesco of Assisi is outside my tent? Bring him in immediately! And whoever is with him, too!”
Jacques and Francesco embraced like old friends. Then the bishop, who was nearly sixty, held the little friar’s face in his hands, more like a father than a friend, and said, his voice cracking with emotion, “Francino, didn’t I tell you that your friars would fill the earth like the stars fill the heavens? Didn’t I? How many friars have you got today?”
Francesco blushed but didn’t answer. A moment later Brother Elia, unable to contain his pride, blurted out, “Almost five thousand, Your Excellency!”
Francesco’s next words surprised everyone, as his words often did. “You know, Jacques, a little after we met, the way people chose to follow my example, the fact that so many wanted to join me . . . it made me afraid the devil might have a hand in it. I asked myself, ‘Has Satan sent these multitudes to distract me from the love of Christ?’”
The bishop laughed. Francesco introduced the new company to him. The bishop had a short, white beard and kind, intelligent eyes. Yehezkel noticed his welcome, warm even to the Jew among his guests. As he’d expected, his
medical skills were foremost in Jacques’s thoughts.
“Master Ezekiel, it must be God’s work that you arrived today! Surely you heard of the way Pedro of Montaigue saved the day on Wednesday?”
“We heard that the sultan’s mamluks entered the Templar section of the camp, Your Excellency, but that’s all we know,” said Yehezkel.
“I’ll tell you everything. But first you, Francino, must tell me what you’re doing here!”
“I came here to stop this carnage,” asnwered Francesco, quietly.
Jacques stared, incredulous. “How do you propose to do that?”
“Once I’ve preached to the sultan and he has seen the light of Christ, there will be no need for war.”
For a few moments, the bishop was speechless. Then he gathered his wits and said, “God can do anything he pleases, Francino. At the end of days, He will convert Satan himself. But we both know how unlikely it is that al-Kamil will accept baptism, which makes your enterprise sound more like a quest for martyrdom than an inspired mission.” Jacques paused and then cleared his throat. “We’ll speak of it later, my friend, when we’re alone. Now to the grim situation in this cursed desert. What do you know of recent events?” he asked his guests, gesturing for a page to bring refreshments.
“In February the Franks . . . I mean the Christians,” stumbled Yehezkel, “took the sultan’s camp at al-Adiliyah, where we are now, when he rushed to al-Kahira to deal with a treasonous sheikh, and his new camp is at Färiskür, four leagues upstream from here. After that, I heard no more for months because we were mostly at sea or stranded on Crete.”
Galatea rolled her eyes. Jacques sat down on the stool behind his scriptorium and invited them to do the same wherever they could, in the relatively spartan tent.
Yehezkel went on. “Then, in Limassol, which is where we met Brother Francesco piccolo, I was forcibly recruited, along with a hundred others, by a Templar knight.”