Hubert put the stone down gently. “A right proud city,” said Hubert, ignoring the woman following us, screeching, weeping. We both made a show of ignoring her, climbing stairs, hurrying along battlements, ascending towers, until we could not hear her cry.
The sea breeze from the top of the walls was sweet with salt. Galleys lined the harbor protectively, pennons fluttering, the scarlet-and-gold silk of Saint George or the blue, flowering lozenge of the Plantagenets. When I saw our camp, flags and peaked tents, the distant figures of Christian folk, I was swept with pride. How had the heathen dared to stand in our way?
Far to the east, Saladin brooded with his army. Word was that Saladin had been surprised at the fall of Acre, aware too late that he should have acted in force. Rannulf believed that Saladin would honor the surrender agreement, but join battle when he thought we could be crushed.
Dreaminess descended upon us again.
The heat filled the space around every man and every horse. Hubert and I spent time searching for shade among the tents, along the granary, the diminishing sacks of oats and bundles of hay.
Hubert was withdrawn, despite all I could do to distract him. I tried to bet him a button that one ant would beat another to the ant hole, or that Nigel would laugh before Rannulf would spit. Hubert thanked me for my effort in a gentle voice, but said that gambling was, after all, forbidden.
King Philip of France left the camp, borne by stewards and chamberlains. His fever had turned his skin yellow, and the hand he raised in valediction to us all was greenish in the sunlight.
“Of course he’s green,” said Nigel. “He has all the courage of a toad!”
Most of the Francomen remained, including one duke called Conrad, who claimed a corner of the city from the Templars. A group of Breton knights threw a battle standard into a ditch near the city walls, insulting the men of Anjou. The troops of Guienne quarreled with the soldiers of Lusignan, something to do with a woman. Quarrels broke out among every order of knight and man, clerk and chamber boy.
The hard-working bakers no longer filled our bellies with warm white flour cakes. Their broad wooden paddles brought loaves of maslin-bread from their domed, clay ovens. The loaves were like the earth-dark bread of the poorest peasants. Our prisoners ate horse cakes, bran and straw, the sort beasts of burden feed on.
The prisoners numbered two thousand seven hundred mouths. They accepted their defeat with no sound of complaint, waiting for the parleys that would agree on the price that would return them to their families and friends. The first emissaries rode out from Saladin’s camp, horsemen with silk and black leather armor, highly burnished appointments, studs and pommels.
An innkeeper-turned-soldier was caught with a pair of ox-bone dice, swore he was holding them for a friend he would not incriminate, and the entire army stood watch as a muscular summoner from Ghent gave him ten lashes with a whip. The Templars and the Hospitallers took quarters in the city, as did many other hand-picked troops. While that gave us more space, it did nothing to enrich our stores of food, and left Guy de Renne to police an army of former harvesters and woodsmen with a small corps of seasoned knights.
Sir Nigel and Rannulf made much of their experience with men, striding through the blizzard of flies to order new latrines to be dug, but the Duke of Burgundy and King Richard took to their tents, and day by day the heat grew worse.
The prisoners began to expire, their brothers-in-arms keening softly over their remains. The sight won little sympathy from most pikemen, who prayed for the hour all Mussulmen would swallow their tongues.
chapter THIRTY-THREE
The day began with a cool, gentle wind, and with the feeding and exercising of the chargers.
Then came the heat again, and the low-voiced final rites for the latest to die of fever, and an early afternoon meal of horsemeat and chaff bread.
Two pleasure women got into a fight over a pearl earring, a tearing, howling battle, and barely a voice was raised in cheer or derision. The women tore at each other’s hair and eyes, grew tired, dropped panting. The sentries prodded them with the staffs of their halberds, and they moved on.
The priests kept their prayer hours, and we joined them. The last wine turned to vinegar in the cup, and the guards slept standing up, leaning into their staves.
“I would fall down, if I tried it,” said Hubert. “As soon as I began to snore.” He did an instantaneous imitation of a sleeping guard pitching forward, fast asleep. He caught himself just before he landed on his face.
“It is the result of much art,” I said, pleased to see Hubert in good humor again. “You and I have yet to learn to sleep like fighting men.”
When King Richard strode from his tent that afternoon, the camp stirred, neighbor nudging neighbor. King Richard was in dress armor, the brightest mail, an indigo cape flowing nearly to the ground. The king, accompanied by his personal guards and Sir Guy de Renne, hurried over to the roped-off area where the prisoners hunched, heads down, twenty-seven hundred humans as quiet as sweltering beasts.
The camp was rising to its feet, man and knight, waterboy and fletcher, all wondering what could bring a monarch into such heavy sunlight, through the thick black flies. Richard reached to his belt, pulled out a bright broadsword, and sawed briefly at the hairy, taut hemp rope that marked the prisoners’ frontier.
Cut through, the cord fell hard, lifting curls of dust. The rope barrier slumped around the circumference of the prisoner herd. Foot soldiers seized their pikes. Yeoman soldiers picked up their axes. Men crowded close. A few of the knights loosened the blades in their scabbards, the camp intent on the king.
King Richard said, “All of them.”
Les tout.
And he made the unmistakable gesture, a finger across his throat.
Sir Guy de Renne hesitated for the briefest moment, making a show of freeing his own sword, turning to locate his clerks. Perhaps he was giving King Richard time to make his order more clear, or to amend it.
The king said, “Now!”
Sir Guy de Renne set his feet, like a man about to receive a blow, and caught the eye of Nigel and Rannulf. The two English knights looked on with no expression in their eyes. Sir Guy called for his chief clerk, an assistant with a leather pipe-roll crammed with scrolls. He completed the act of drawing his blade, and gave an order to the chief pikeman.
There was a space of time, three heartbeats, when nothing happened.
The first blow sent a wave through the prisoners, a gasp like a great wind. A few of the men struggled to rise, but the tethers around their hands and feet hobbled them, and they fell. A woman began to plead. The prisoners swarmed in place, trapped.
A child bawled, a noise like a crippled calf I had heard once, its hindquarters torn by foxes. The male prisoners cried out, one or two quick-thinking enough to argue in their incomprehensible tongue.
The pikeman did not hesitate, but some of the swordsmen looked back at the king, at Sir Guy de Renne, and then returned to their work.
Hubert called out, tried to arrest a pikeman hurrying to the butchery, and I had to drag Hubert away.
I kept Hubert from seeing it, held his face away from the sight, although the sloppy crunch of blade and ax, and the smell of blood and fresh-torn bowels could not be ignored. Or the cries of Christians calling out saint’s names, Saint George who slew the winged serpent, and the giant Saint Christopher who carried Our Lord across a wide river. A sword makes a butcher-shop whine across the bones and sinews of a neck.
The calls of the still-living prisoners must have reached the outriders, because soon an irregular attack streamed across the plain from Saladin’s camp. Our bowmen made easy work of keeping them at a distance.
A voice called out that each heathen killed was one less enemy to God. It was Father Urbino, his blond hair dark with sweat. He shook his fist, urging the pikemen at their labor.
Many knights did not enter the harvest. The few Templar men present turned away and left the rest to their work. Nigel
watched with a stony gaze. When I caught his eye he let his expression shift to one of stoic distaste. When the tide of fly-carpeted blood crept close to us, Nigel kicked up a dike of dust to keep it from our feet.
But many knights labored beside the pikeman, and many English knights, too. Rannulf grew tired of watching hackwork, and made his way through the scarlet-soaked corpses, and demonstrated a sword stroke, severing first one life, then another, each death quick. He quit the field, shaking his head.
Nigel and Rannulf stood beside each other, arms folded, and only moved when the red tide crept too close.
chapter THIRTY-FOUR
It was twilight.
A cool wind from the sea blew among the tents. It fluttered the pennons and standards overhead, a loud, percussive sound.
We could still nose the smell of slaughter, just a few hours ago.
Hubert and I had wandered to the edge of the camp, where the beach was guarded by a few Corsican spear-bearers, small, quick men who called out to each other jokingly, “Who goes there?” “Name yourself!” and many such things in their jaunty tongue.
The sea breeze was delicious. Crusader galleys and sailing ships clawed off, away from the shore, finding new anchorage in the distance. Saracen warships skulked, furtive beetles on the horizon.
“None of this—” Hubert began, and then fell silent.
I waited, feeling incapable of offering him consolation.
“Nothing is what I expected,” said Hubert at last.
One of the Corsican spearmen challenged us, in accent-warped English, mock-English, really, because many of the soldiers found the sound of our language amusing. “Password, if you please.”
Hubert did not seem to hear the little man.
“Password, English,” said the brightly garbed sentries, all red stripes and silk leggings.
Hubert looked at him without much show of interest.
“Identify, squire,” said the Corsican.
Hubert stared, his glance something close to insolence.
The sentry rose to his toes, sticking out his neck, uttering a stream of Corsican curses and challenges.
Hubert put his hands around the sentry’s neck, and shook the man’s head on its stalk.
Sentries came running, tired of watching the choppy surf, as I stepped between the two.
I gave a little speech, in Frankish, English, and as much Latin as I could squirrel out of my memory. We didn’t know the password, I tried to explain, but were pleased that the sentries were taking such strong precautions.
I wished them all well, thanked them for their patience, and kept a strong grip on Hubert’s collar all the way back to Sir Nigel’s tent.
Sir Nigel exploded. “I forbid it!”
“I will return to England,” insisted Hubert. “My father will pay you in gold for my passage.”
“He can pay me in pickled testicles!” said Nigel. “You stay with me.”
Hubert began to say more, but Nigel cut him off with a gesture.
The two were quiet, Hubert steadfastly waiting in the center of the tent, Nigel pacing from one corner to another. The tent was large, shifting subtly with the wind outside. The tent ropes hummed with the breeze, and sand hissed quietly against the canvas. Wenstan polished Sir Nigel’s shield, working intently, as though none of us were present.
The candlelight simmered. “Did you think it would be easy?” Nigel said at last. “Did you think it would be a game for boys, wooden swords and warriors stuffed with hay?”
Hubert stood still, and only now did I let myself experience the shame-I had stood by while good men scythed the heathen, and I had done nothing to help. Sir Nigel could indulge himself, believing, apparently, that he should not blacken his sword on a woman. But I had betrayed my king, and, I began to believe, Heaven.
“Do you think I’ve been joyful every day,” continued Nigel, “in this dry hole? But I have done my duty, Hubert, before God.”
The candles fluttered and nearly went out. The tent flap opened, and Rannulf entered the light.
“Hubert is going home, my lord,” I told Rannulf in a whisper.
“And you, Edmund, have no doubt poured ideas into Hubert’s head,” said Nigel.
I kept silent.
“Your Edmund displeases me, Rannulf,” said Nigel. “He needs scoring with an ox whip, or I am a witch.”
Rannulf wore the expression of a man very sorry he had come in out of the night. He began to speak, but did not have the chance to make a sound.
“I am thirty-seven years old,” said Nigel. “And tired in my marrow. Who knows how many more years God will grant me? I am not an abbot or a priest—I’ve always envied those godly men of books, each morning winning Heaven’s ear with a prayer. It’s so easy for those gentlefolk. I am an ordinary fighting man, Hubert. A worthless man—and I have been called to wear my shield for the Queen of Heaven.”
Hubert took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.
Rannulf was standing the way men do when they are full of news. He had said nothing critical of my refusal to join in the slaughter, but Rannulf was one of those who make others guess his thoughts.
“What is it, Rannulf? What has our wise lord king decided now?” barked Nigel. “Maybe there is a girl’s choir he would like us to carve into chops.”
Rannulf took his time, now that he had Nigel’s ear. He found his cup, sipped carefully through his scarred lips, and said, “We are breaking camp.”
“You are not funny, Rannulf,” said Nigel, kicking a wrinkle in the carpet.
“The order has already been given,” said Rannulf. “All women are to leave the camp immediately”
Nigel gave a silent laugh, a throaty sound, shaking his head in disbelief. “We’re taking to sea,” he said. “We’re following the Frankish king, like cowards. Like Hubert here. Retreating to our ships. Am I right?”
Rannulf gave us all a smile with his eyes. “We will march south, along the coast, and seek battle with Saladin’s army.” He relished his tidings, draining the last of his wine.
“Unless, of course,” Rannulf added, “you prefer to stay here.”
No one slept that night.
Looking like rabble, we worked, knight and man. The king’s guard struck his tents and set up a spear wall around the royal baggage. Nigel ordered the ostlers to gird and saddle our horses.
Before dawn the carts were greased and loaded, horses pressed into service under bundles of tents and cords of tent pegs. Bowmen paced ahead to protect the landward flank of an army that already stretched south down the beach.
Donkeys were now a part of our army, odd, stumpy-legged animals. These beasts made wheezing, laughing complaints as the men packed them. As the entire army creaked south it looked like a crawling miracle. So much that had been inert and fetid was now on the move.
But so much was left behind, axles and crates, worn leather buckets and fittings, huge bonfires streaking flames and black smoke. Our siege engines had been broken into parts, and only some of the dismantled sections were loaded onto gray horses. Much was fed to the fires, including Sir Skin on his wooden frame.
The treasure had been broken up, stones pried from their settings, silver mauled and melted into bricks. Richard had given the orders that no pleasure women were to follow, and vicious arguments among the women greeted this news, women refusing to listen, spitting, cursing, and following the army in disregard to the king. Even the washerwomen were to be left behind, in theory. Rannulf said they would smell us in Jerusalem days before they saw us. The Burgundians said that they would slit their own throats rather than ride in squalor.
The king relented; washerwomen rejoiced. Pagan scouts rode under light guard, spearmen shielding them from revenge, and from any impulse to return to their brethren. The army made a churning chorus of groans and gristle, leg joints and phlegmy lungs of man and beast, making an impressive noise even from well ahead of the army, where Hubert and I rode the leading edge. He carried one of Nigel’s battle lances, a fl
uttering scarlet pennon at the point.
Soon, the wind sang.
Soon Saladin’s army would move to stop our progress, and there would be the great, open battle we had all dreamed about.
I was convinced that I longed for pitched battle as well as any man. Caught up in the hubbub of the march, I felt no fear.
Winter Star capered beneath me, kicking like a goat, my hammer sleeping heavily in its leather boot. Hubert’s horse Shadow caught the mood, jigging and snorting, Hubert unable to keep from smiling at his steed’s eagerness. But soon all the horses were shaking their manes, rolling eyes, even Sir Nigel having trouble gripping the bridle. Hubert and I steadied our horses while the knights and squires caught up with us. Sir Guy de Renne reined in his horse until the beast foamed at the bit.
“There’s something troubling them,” said Rannulf, a note of compassion in his voice.
“They act like they smell bear,” said Nigel.
“Or lion,” said Rannulf.
He took it upon himself to ride east, pausing for me to follow.
chapter THIRTY-FIVE
The air was perfumed with spice, the sort sold to the richest ladies, pinch by pinch, on the spicer’s scale.
“We march south, with the Infidel ships on our seaward side, the Saracen army between us and Jerusalem,” said Rannulf. “How long do you think we will keep from starving?”
Late morning sun filled the grass, each shaft glittering. The dew was long since gone. We rested our horses under the tall, plumed date palms, big fronds like huge brittle feathers under the horse’s hooves.
The Book of the Lion Page 14