by Dan Davis
Perhaps I should have hurried on ahead before William could get further beyond my grasp. Instead I convinced myself that crossing paths with the English crusader army was a sign from God that I should travel with my countrymen.
And my fight with Rollo had reinforced the impossibility of my sworn task. Against one of his men, a man much weakened by hunger and age, I had barely survived. With the rest I stood no chance. I would break out in a cold sweat at the thought of facing the terrible power of Hugo the Giant or the lunatic fury of Roger the Reaper.
But the true reason for staying in Sicily was that, within my first week, I saw Alice.
“In the name of God,” I said to my new friend Reginald outside our favoured tavern in Messina. “Tell me who is that woman.” Many men sat around us, eating and laughing.
The day was once again dry with no more than the slightest chill in the air. We had a good view of the main road through the city. I was content to sit and watch the lords and ladies and servants walking to and fro. We sat between the waterside, the castle, the market and the countryside beyond where some of the richest lords had taken over houses. Children ran everywhere. The English, French and local Normans mixing together as friends and falling out as enemies just as their parents did.
The woman walking down the street with her companions stood out from the world around her like a sunbeam piercing a black cloud. She wore a dark green gown that was demure and respectable and yet it seemed to emphasise every line of her full body beneath. I do believe I gasped when I saw her. I was never before struck in such a way.
“What woman would that be?” Reginald asked, airily.
“You know what one,” I said unable to drag my eyes from her.
I watched the way her hips lifted up and down as she walked. She went over to a small group of women in the open courtyard of a large house off the side of the road. Children ran squealing around them. Stray hair fell from all around the front of the woman’s cap. Those wisps of hair were as golden and as bright as the dusty Sicilian sunlight. She looked happy. And yet from the restrained way she smiled at the others who were talking and the way she kept herself apart from the group I sensed that was also was a sadness about her. A sadness that felt familiar.
In that moment I wanted more than anything to be able to take her sadness away. Her smile was wide and her lips full. Her face was white but flushed from walking. When she glanced round to light-heartedly curse a child that had bumped into her, I saw her eyes flashing with sudden joy. I wanted to feel the happiness that she felt and I wanted to make her laugh so.
“Do not even think about it,” Reginald said wagging a finger at me across the table. “That is Alice de Frenenterre. She comes from Poitou. Her husband was Roger de Sherbourne. He died of a summer fever and he has no surviving relative. She has family in Outremer. Jaffa or somewhere close to Jerusalem, so she’s not going back to Poitou.”
“Well if her husband is dead, why should I not think about it?”
“The king was swyving her,” Reginald said, leering. “Before his betrothed arrived, of course. Wouldn’t want the future Queen of England finding out you are a bedswerver. But I tell you King Richard was ploughing her furrow ten times a day.”
Reginald was from a wealthy enough family somewhere boggy in Norfolk but he had gone on Crusade as penance for some unspecified disgrace. Over the few days I kept his company I became convinced it had been a crime against a woman. At least one.
“I’d wager that’s an exaggeration,” I said. I watched her full lips twist together at some joke that had her noble companions suddenly laughing themselves silly. I watched the way she seemed to be the centre of those women’s attention and yet a woman with her own mind. Strong enough to not fake a laugh simply because it is expected of you.
Though I had listened to stories of chivalric romance at Duffield. In the few moments I had observed her I awarded to her every virtuous trait in the world.
“She’s better than you,” Reginald said, intruding into my fantasies. “That is all there is to it. She is several places above you. She’s a well-bred lady, from a proper family.”
I stared Reginald down. “I am of good stock,” I said. The group began to walk through the courtyard toward the door to the house.
“No doubt you top it the lord where you come from,” Reginald said, nodding. “But you are piss poor and from some tumbledown shit hole no one outside of Derbyshire ever heard of. But that lady there has royal blood. Or an Austrian cousin married into the Holy Roman Emperor’s family. I do not recall.” He looked annoyed and drank down his drink, cuffing his mouth.
“It’s not her Austrian cousin I want.” I could not drag my eyes from her as she swayed away, her body shifting under her gown, drawing the cloth tight across her hips and arse and chest.
“She’s got two children,” Reginald pointed out. “A boy called Jocelyn and a girl barely out of swaddling. You wouldn’t want to burden yourself like that.”
“That’s true,” I said, staring at her as she finally disappeared from my sight. It was like a light going out. “But it would be worth it.”
“But she’s ancient,” Reginald spluttered. “She must be at least twenty-three years old, Richard. You want to find yourself a nice fresh girl, thirteen or fourteen at the most. Fifteen would do, I suppose, if she’s lovely and plump and has good teeth.”
“All good advice,” I said, turning to him. “You know an awful lot about this lady, Reginald. So tell me, how many times has she turned you down so far?”
“She has never so much as agreed to see me,” Reginald wailed. “Whenever I call on her she sends word through some damned servant that she is engaged or out riding in the country. The lying bitch.” Reginald turned and spat on the floor. “And if she never saw me then she will never see the likes of you, not never.”
Reginald was correct that I had nothing to offer Alice. My land was inconsequential, my inherited manor cursed and my wealth so meagre I could not even afford a proper war horse.
I resolved on the spot to become rich.
“Dear God,” I prayed. “I will fight the Saracens in your name. Please grant me glory in battle and riches and let me know that woman’s love.”
God heard me.
After a few weeks of waiting around, drinking and getting fat, word got about that the storms were lessening. Our winter in Messina would be over just as soon as the weather turned. In preparation for the fighting that was to come I went to get my hauberk properly repaired and the rust scrubbed away with sand and my sword and daggers sharpened. My coin had dwindled in Messina but every penny paid to an armourer was a penny toward the defence of your life. For soon I would be making a name for myself. A name I could use to find William.
I strolled back to my tiny room in the city through the crowded streets dressed as if for war. I had not bothered to purchase a horse I would only have to sell before setting off. There was no way I could have paid for the passage of a horse which could be ten times the cost of carrying me to Outremer. Messina was a lovely city, with wide streets lined here and there with decorative olive and lemon trees. Even under Norman rule and packed with stinking knights from the north, it retained an air of exotic luxury.
A young boy ran hard into my leg and fell down on his backside.
The boy looked to be about five or six years old and he looked up in fear until I winked at him. The boy grinned.
He had been playing Knights and Saracens with a much bigger boy. A boy who proceeded to stomp over and yank the little one up by his ear and clout him about the head.
“You stupid oaf,” the big boy said. He had the idiot fat face of a noble. He was carrying a real sword, forged small enough to fit his hand. I hated the child on sight. “If you go running into a man during a real fight and you will die upon the battlefield. You die puking your innards out into the dust. You will be crying for your whore mother while you bleed all the blood out of your body and shit yourself to death.”
The litt
le one looked furious and close to tears in equal measure, gripping his little wooden sword to his chest as if it were a doll.
“Don’t listen to him,” I said to the younger lad. “He’s never been on a battlefield in his life. He’s talking out of his arse. Why don’t you try fighting me, then, you horrible little twerp?”
The younger boy grinned up at me again.
“How dare you,” the fat one shrieked, his face turning a sickly scarlet. “How dare you speak thus, you ignorant peasant. Do you know who I am? Do you? I shall have you executed for this.”
“And do you know who I am?” I asked him.
The boy stuck out one of his chins. The top one. “Tell me your name,” he commanded.
“Get out of here before I rip your guts out,” I said and knocked his sword down, spun him around and kicked his arse hard enough to pitch him onto his belly. Men walking around us laughed and he ran away in tears to the sound of jeering.
“Bohemund will be angry,” the little boy said as we stood watching him go.
“Well, I had better teach you how to fight properly then, hadn’t I,” I said.
He nodded solemnly, his eyes huge and round.
I ripped a spindly dry stick from an olive tree and we fought a few mock battles until he had killed me two or three times and was smiling from ear to ear. “Right, be off with you, lad,” I said. “And stay away from fat Bohemund. I know his type. Get some better friends.”
“He’s not my friend,” the little lad said, with a viciousness quite startling in one so young. “I hate him. Mother says I have to play with him so that I have proper acquaintance when he inherits.”
“What’s that fat shit going to inherit?”
“Sicily.”
“I see.” My guts churned over. “And what’s your name, lad?” I asked.
“I am Jocelyn de Sherbourne,” he said.
“So,” I said, the name catching me off guard. “Your mother is… Alice?”
“That’s her up there,” Jocelyn said and pointed to a figure in a high window above the street looking down at us. She was bareheaded and those golden hairs blown by the wind caught the sunlight like sparks from a flame. I locked eyes with her and I saw the corner of her mouth twitch upward.
She invited me inside for refreshments. There were other ladies in the room, of course, and we conversed of topics that held no interest for me. Just being near to her made my heart race and I could not meet her eye for more than a moment at a time. I mumbled and stumbled my way through and I was certain that she thought me an utter fool.
“It would please me if you were to return tomorrow evening,” she said as I left. “But perhaps wearing something more suitable.” She laughed at me horror when I looked down and realised that a hauberk was not appropriate dress.
“My lady,” I said, ready to offer a thousand apologies.
She laughed again and pushed me out. “See you tomorrow, Richard.”
We met a few times and each time I grew more comfortable in her presence until I could hold her gaze. My heart still raced to be near her.
Soon enough, one day as I left she placed her fingers gently upon my arm to delay me at the door. She whispered up at my ear as I bent down, her breath upon my face.
“Return after dark.”
The sweetest words that ever were spoke.
There was a strange feeling among the army and the followers while on Crusade. It reminded me of the high excitement of the shire fair or a celebratory holy day, when all of the normal rules are suspended for the duration. It was as though we existed outside of the true world. Love affairs bloomed and died many times over between men and women who would never conversed in England. But we slept in strange houses in strange cities in strange countries. It mattered nothing if the servants or local people saw goings on. We would be gone from those places before the whispers could do damage. Coitus outside of marriage was against the law, against God and against common decency and it was so ingrained that most couples ensured they were discrete.
“People will talk,” I whispered to Alice in the night.
“Not if we are careful,” Alice replied. Even when she whispered, her voice sounded as though it came from deep inside of her.
“The men look on me with loathing,” I said proud beyond words that they suspected where I had been spending my nights.
I heard the smile in her voice. “Think what the women say of me. Taking a lover in my widowhood. They say I am mad with lust.” She pinched my chest. “And they speak truth.”
Neither of us were breaking any vows spoken in the sacrament of marriage but it might blacken her good name.
“Should we not marry?” I asked.
Alice sighed. “And what happens to me when you are killed by the Saracens? Twice widowed in my youth. No man shall want me for fear of death.”
It was a strange answer. “I know that I am very much beneath you,” I started to say.
“You are beneath me,” she whispered in my ear and slid her leg over me and sat up across my loins. “Right where I want you.”
It was April 1191. We had spent the coldest nights of winter in each other’s arms and every day of spring we knew our time together was coming to an end.
When the fleet set off from Sicily I saw her no more.
I swore to her on our last night together that I would think of her every day and every night.
“I know you will, Richard,” she said.
The fleet spread out over hundreds of sea miles, calling at the ports of Italy and Greece on different days. Being apart from her felt like a blade through the guts. I could not wait until we reached Acre. I was going to win back the Holy Land single handed and become a lord and marry Alice and we would raise some fine boys. Boys who would become knights and make us proud with fine deeds. And I would ride down William and his men from the back of my horse. I pictured a huge grassland and two dozen knights in service to me riding with me. We would dispatch William and Hugh of Havering and Ralph the Reaper and Hugo the Giant and the all rest to Hell with a lance to the spine. Such are the fantasies of a lonely young man.
Alice was in the fine, seaworthy ship that carried the future queen whereas I was slung inside a rotting sponge that had once been a galley. The only reason it floated at all was because woodworm are buoyant.
And yet when the great storm hit, the royal ship that Alice and her children were in ran aground upon Cyprus whereas ours survived to limp on to Rhodes. I thought the ship from Dartmouth had been through bad weather but it was nothing like that storm. The wind seemed to come from every direction, one direction after the other and the waves were a chaos of choppy great peaks. When it passed our galley was so low in the water that should a single man on board have sneezed we would have immediately rolled over and sunk.
The Byzantine ruler of Cyprus had treated King Richard’s shipwrecked family discourteously. There was a rumour that Richard’s sister and his betrothed were kidnapped, or threatened or imprisoned then released. Whatever had happened, it was a serious affront to his authority. Richard the Lionheart dealt with challenges by charging at them headlong and battering them into submission.
He decided to conquer Cyprus.
I feared that Alice was hurt also and I threw myself into the conquest.
“Don’t get all worked up about this stuff, son.” A knight said to me while we crouched behind a field boundary wall. We were awaiting the horns sounding the attack. We were going to capture the city of Limassol on the south coast of the island. The walls of the city bristled with defenders and we were close enough to smell them.
Cyprus was hot; hotter even than Sicily had been and it grew hotter every day. When the sky was not full of storm it was blowing up dry dust and scorching heat. I shared the last of my water with the knight beside me so he felt as though he offered me something in return. Sadly, all he had was advice.
“The king’s wife was never in any danger. That was an excuse. Richard has planned to take Cyprus for years.
Ever since he took the cross back, three years ago. Or is it four now?”
“How do you know what the king planned?” I asked him.
“Everyone knows,” he said.
“I did not know,” I replied.
“And who are you, son?” the knight asked, scoffing. He was old, forty or so, but he looked tough. And he had a good point.
We picked up the long ladder along with half a dozen other men and ran forward under a hail of crossbow bolts. Limassol’s ancient walls stood defended by thousands of men and we were hundreds. But our leader was Richard the Lionheart.
I was fighting for a chance of a life with Alice. I was fighting for riches enough to fulfil my oath.
So I was one of the first to scale the wall. Stones and arrows pelted my shield. It is difficult to scale a long, unsound ladder under such conditions. But I reached the top, threw myself over the crumbling wall and drew my sword.
The first man I ever killed died by the thrusting point of my sword entering his throat. His blood gushed out onto the dusty wall and mixed with the blood of the men dying around him as my fellows reached the tops of the ladders all along the wall. He was very slim, with a short and trimmed beard and I watched as the man died, his eyes wide and confused, as if he was shocked that this could happen.
I did not know those men. If I had never arrived on their island they would have never done me harm. If I had held back in the rear ranks as many knights do then I would not have had to kill them. And yet I was screaming with a mindless hate as I hacked down the defenders on the walls.
They fell back. Into the edges of the city, between the walls of houses, we found walls of men arrayed against us.
I had been training for war since I was seven years old. Day after day of grappling, riding, sword, shield, footwork. Thirteen years of practice and it finally became useful. My sword was like lightning flashing in a cloudless sky. I hacked up and down on shields and hammered at men and clashed against their raised weapons. I watched myself ducking and swerving around blows, as if every other man was blind and I alone could see.