Knight of Jerusalem

by Helena P. Schrader

  The King, like the rest of them, had been in the field for three days now. His surcoat was filthy. The bright white-and-gold arms of Jerusalem were smeared with reddish stains from dust soaked by showers and dried again. His chain mail had lost its gleam, and even his crown seemed dulled from exposure to the elements. But he sat straight and looked sharply at the Grand Master. “We do not want Salah-ad-Din to slip away in the dark as he did once before. We will attack at once.”

  The secular knights, Balian included, greeted this announcement with a cheer and turned to get their horses. The Templars, however, disdained such a show of enthusiasm. Instead, Odo ordered his knights to kneel, and together they said the Lord’s Prayer before turning to mount up in silence.

  Mathewos brought Gladiator and held the off stirrup as Balian mounted. He passed up the last lance they had with them, and then stroked Gladiator’s neck affectionately. “May the Lord be with you, my lord.”

  “And also with you, Mathewos. Were it not for your courage, we would not stand a chance.”

  “It was a privilege, my lord, to serve Christ in this way. Now, ride with St. George beside you!”

  Balian had to canter a few hundred feet to catch up with the body of knights, who were advancing at a purposeful trot. Reginald de Sidon rode back and fell in beside Balian. “The Templars have taken the van, as usual, but your brother insists on commanding the center.” Balian started slightly. That should have been the King’s position. “He says it is his right because we are in his barony,” Sidon explained, “and the King conceded the position to him, but he wants you beside him.”

  Balian nodded, and their eyes met. “God help you, Balian. He may ride like a centaur, but he’s utterly defenseless—and God knows if Sibylla’s child will be male, if it will live at all, or if it might not kill them both in the process of coming into the world!”

  Balian had not even considered that possibility—and this was not the time to think of it, either, he told himself. So he raised his hand in a gesture of salute or farewell and sprinted forward to catch up with his King.

  As Balian drew up beside him, Baldwin looked over and smiled. The smile seemed a bit strained to Balian, but God knew what his own face expressed by this time. “Sidon said you wanted me here,” Balian explained.

  “On my right, Balian; you are my lance. Sir Tancred is my shield.” He nodded to the other knight, whom Balian had met briefly at Ascalon. Tancred was considerably broader, though shorter, than Balian, making him as good a shield as any. He nodded to Balian as the latter took up his position.

  It took them almost an hour to reach the shallow valley west of Tell Jezer. Here the Templars suddenly fell into a walk, and Baldwin cursed. “What are they doing? We’re losing the light,” he snapped irritably.

  “We have to let the infantry catch up with us,” Balian explained. Baldwin sighed audibly, and Balian knew the King’s nerves were reaching the breaking point.

  Finally the infantry came up, and the Templars, who had been waiting in disciplined silence beside their grazing horses, remounted and started to form up, preparing for the charge. The Templar knights and sergeants formed up in near-perfect lines, broken or bent only by the contours of the land, gullies and large rocks. Ramla, with the other barons—Edessa, Sidon, Hebron, Blanchegarde, and Oultrejourdain—formed up directly behind the Templars in a larger and more colorful formation—but one that lacked the Templars’ discipline and order, making it look ragged and unruly. Last of all came the King’s division. It was the smallest of the mounted divisions, no more than two hundred fighting men, with no barons at all. The royal household knights formed up around the King while the squires were sent to the back.

  Although the infantry was still straggling in, Balian was comforted by their presence. After the shock of the charge wore off and the knights were bogged down in hand-to-hand fighting, the risk was always greatest. That was when the enemy’s superiority of numbers would tell most. They would be able to swarm around and kill the horses or drag the knights off their backs. The Christian infantry was their best hope of preventing that; they could come between the enemy and the knights’ horses with their shields and swords.

  The Templars advanced at a walk to the very top of the crest and then, amazingly, over it as well. “Why don’t they charge?” Baldwin demanded furiously.

  Balian didn’t have a clue. Ahead of them, Barry could be heard cursing. Some of the other knights surged forward, but then were forced to draw up and follow the Templar example, until the center also slowly disappeared over the ridge amidst growing plumes of dust.

  At last the rear guard crested the ridge and could see both the enemy and the Templars descending at a controlled trot, their formation almost perfect—while the main force, evidently unable to rein in their eagerness, cantered and veered to the left around the Templars, outflanking them, with the apparent intention of falling on the enemy first. The banner of Oultrejourdain pulled up beside that of Ramla even as Balian watched, and he guessed that Oultrejourdain (and Henri) were challenging Barry for the lead, forcing him to charge or lose command.

  The Saracen camp was in complete disarray, as men and horses ran every which way without apparent purpose. Men were shouting and drums were beating, but the entire host looked to Balian more like ants on a disturbed anthill than an army.

  The King’s squadron took up a trot on the downward slope, giving their horses long reins to find their own footing and bracing themselves in the stirrups. Meanwhile the Templars had reached the bottom of the ravine, and shouting “Vive Dieu St. Amour!” they sprang forward with lances couched. Beyond them, Ramla and the other barons were already through the shallow stream and starting to roll up the valley from the west with their lances lowered.

  It was a beautiful sight—much more satisfying and devastating than his own attack on the plunderers at Ibelin, Balian thought. The barons of Jerusalem just rolled over the confused Saracen army, cutting down anything that got in their way, while the Templars smashed into them from the side, causing greater confusion—particularly as they cut through the horse lines, slicing their tethers, so that panicked horses fleeing wildly across the battlefield soon added their whinnies and the thundering of their hooves to the general chaos.

  This left the rear guard little room to maneuver, and the King turned his horse right toward the less glamorous baggage train with its rows of kneeling camels, tents, and field kitchens. Less glamorous, Balian registered, and less dangerous for the crippled King as well; it was an intelligent decision for his lion-hearted King.

  The camels took the arrival of hordes of horsemen with equanimity; only one or two even felt compelled to get to its feet, while the others remained kneeling and slowly chewing as the strange horses and riders crashed among the field kitchens. The cooks and slaves scattered in all directions in open terror, some of them screaming out loud as they ran. They were hardly worthy opponents, and Balian let them go, his eyes focused on the bright tents beyond, thinking there might yet be an emir or two over there.

  Only because he was focusing on these tents did he see a flurry of commotion around one of them, as several men in glittering armor and brightly-colored silk turbans and sashes emerged, gesticulating decisively. A moment later, drums started beating.

  Balian saw a man in a yellow turban run forward with his scimitar drawn; his mouth was wide open as he tried to make himself heard above the chaos engulfing the rest of the camp. For several minutes, it seemed, this man tried to bring some order to the chaos, but then the yellow turban turned and started toward the camel lines, with the other emirs clustered around him. Balian decided the man in the yellow turban must be Salah-ad-Din himself.

  “There!” He drew the King’s attention. “In the yellow turban! It’s Salah-ad-Din!” And as he spoke, he spurred Gladiator forward in a dash to cut off the Sultan from the camels.

  Some of the men around Salah-ad-Din spotted the approaching squadron of Christian knights. Shouting furiously and drawing their swo
rds, they sprang forward.

  The threat to the Sultan had attracted the attention of the Sultan’s bodyguard as well. These men had been camped in front of the Sultan’s tent, which was to the left of Jerusalem’s squadron. Although they were dismounted, these slaves now hurled themselves as a massed body of men into the flank of Jerusalem’s troops.

  The desperation of the Sultan’s bodyguard made it more effective than footmen usually were. Swinging their swords in great figure eights, they began to bring down the horses of Jerusalem’s knights with sickening efficiency. The bulk of the King’s squadron had to turn to bring their lances to bear against the Mamlukes before they could kill any more horses.

  This left the King almost alone, with Balian and Tancred still charging to cut off Salah-ad-Din’s escape. One of Salah-ad-Din’s emirs reached the closest camel and started kicking it to its feet, to the loud protests of the ornery beast. Tancred, who was closest, spurred forward shouting “Jerusalem!” in one last desperate effort to cut off Salah-ad-Din’s escape, thereby exposing the King’s left, and at once a half-dozen young men on foot raced toward Baldwin with raised scimitars shouting “Allahu Akbar!”

  Balian cut sharply to the left, crossing in front of his King, who was trailing by a length, and met the attackers. He skewered the first with his lance, but he could not pull it out in time for a second thrust. He grabbed his sword as the other Turks closed around him. Two of them tried to drag him off Gladiator, while the others were getting in each other’s way as they wielded their scimitars in a furious attempt to kill him or Gladiator or better yet, both of them.

  Balian bent his knees and touched his spurs to Gladiator’s belly, and the stallion reared up on his haunches, waving his hooves like weapons. With one powerful kick, he sent one of the attackers backwards with a shattered face. Then he broke the shoulder of a second as he brought his hooves down on top of him and stamped a second time for good measure. By then, Sir Tancred had ridden up and pierced a third with his lance.

  “Salah-ad-Din!” he shouted as he drew up beside Balian, the immediate danger past. “He’s getting away!” He pointed after a man in a magnificent brocade tunic, hunched over the back of a camel he was flaying into a gallop.

  Balian turned Gladiator to pursue and felt him lurch. The stallion’s hip dropped away, and Balian nearly fell backwards out of the saddle. He looked down and back and saw the horrible gash that had cut open the stallion’s flank. Blood was pouring out of the wound, and Gladiator would not put weight on his hip. Tancred and other knights of the King’s squadron were flying after the fleeing Sultan, but Balian could not join them. He paused to catch his breath and looked around the battlefield.

  The floor of the ravine was littered with Saracen dead, scattered equipment, trampled tents, toppled field kitchens, and panicked horses still running this way and that. Here and there, at the fringes, the Templars were still slaughtering, but there was no organized resistance, only pockets of desperate men determined to sell their lives dearly. Others, however, were on their knees begging the secular knights for mercy, while farther away, the Christian foot soldiers were trying to stop some of the fleeing Muslims.

  Ransoms! Balian thought with sudden clarity, now that the danger was past. The young men who had rushed to Salah-ad-Din’s defense were surely men of quality. If he could take just one or two of them captive, he would be a made man: maybe even rich enough to marry a dowager queen. He flung himself down from Gladiator and strode back to the men Gladiator had so effectively cut down, his sword drawn.

  Three survivors were still there. The man who had taken a hoof in the face was sitting cross-legged, holding a blood-soaked cloth to his face and swaying back and forth in pain. Beside him, the man with a broken shoulder was hunched over in pain, while a third man, or youth really, tried to bind it in a sling. They looked up at Balian’s approach, their eyes widening in alarm, and the youth who was not wounded leaped to his feet and brandished his sword.

  Balian raised his sword over his head and addressed him in Arabic. “I’ll kill you if you want, but your army is destroyed, your Sultan has fled. Throw away your sword and surrender to me, and you will live to grow a beard.”

  The young man hesitated, but the man with the broken shoulder called out between clenched teeth, “Enough widows and orphans of Believers have been made this day. Let be.” Turning to Balian, he declared, “We are your prisoners. All of us.”

  Just then the King trotted up beside Balian. “I think,” he declared cautiously, still not daring to believe what he saw, “I think the day is ours.”

  Chapter 11

  Ibelin, December 1177

  THE FIREPLACE WAS SMOKING BADLY. IT had been raining for days, and since the castle was flooded with nearly a thousand homeless, they had already used up their dry wood. They were also going through other supplies at an alarming rate, or so it seemed to Richildis. She looked anxiously at the records her clerk had put in front of her and tried to make sense of the figures. Mathematics was never her strong point, but today she was also distracted because a fever had broken out among some of the homeless children. With everyone crowded together in too little space and the garrison latrines overflowing, she feared an epidemic, while the stench of so much miserable humanity was starting to penetrate to the solar and chapel.

  If only we could rebuild some of the houses, Richildis wished, but she knew the cost of wood was prohibitive. Ibelin, as the steward made clear to her, could not possibly pay for the necessary timber, which would have to be imported from Cyprus, from its own revenues.

  “The glass factory was gutted, my lady,” the steward reminded her. “The structure is sound enough, but none of the equipment survived.”

  The potters, too, another important source of revenue, had lost all their wares, senselessly shattered and crushed in willful acts of destruction. The distinctive regional pots, glazed on the inside, were popular with pilgrims and sold well in the markets of Jaffa and Jerusalem—but months of work had been destroyed in a single night, impoverishing twenty families without even enriching the men responsible. The little community of weavers, however, had suffered most, because their homes had been near the eastern gate, and it was here that the fire had started. The untreated wool, kept in a central warehouse, had been put to the torch, creating a gigantic fire that rapidly spread, consuming first the bolts of finished cloth and then the looms themselves. In the weavers’ quarter the fire had been so intense that the beams of the houses had caught fire and collapsed. Richildis shook her head for the thousandth time; she could not understand senseless destruction, any more than she could understand cruelty.

  “Mama! Mama!” The sound of Eschiva’s excited voice broke in on her thoughts, replacing her despair over the past with fear for the future. She wished she could keep Eschiva away from the sick children. But how could she teach her Christian charity if she forbade contact with the ill and less fortunate?

  Eschiva’s clog-shod feet clattered loudly on the dais before she burst into the solar. “Mama! A herald just rode into the outer ward, and he’s wearing the arms of Jerusalem!”

  “A herald?” Richildis could not remember the last time a herald had come to Ibelin—certainly not since she had lived separate from her husband. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I saw him! He’s from Jerusalem, Mama! Maybe he’s from my husband?” All the twelve-year-old’s hopes were in those breathless words and her flushed face. Richildis had not approved her husband marrying her daughter to a grown man. She had not approved of Aimery de Lusignan, either, but her word counted for nothing anymore. Eschiva had been married—not just betrothed—to Lusignan before her eighth birthday. To his credit, Lusignan had flattered Eschiva by treating her like a lady at the wedding, kissing her hand and dancing with her, impeccably polite and gallant. Eschiva had fallen madly in love with him, and she lived for some word or letter from him. But it was no surprise to Richildis that Lusignan rarely gave a thought to his child bride—certainly not since he’d been m
ade Marshal of Jerusalem.

  Richildis opened her mouth to warn her daughter not to get her hopes up, but then closed it again. Why not let her hope another few minutes? So she tried to smile and took her daughter’s hand, saying simply, “Let’s go see what it is he wants.”

  Minutes later the herald bowed deeply before the Lady of Ramla, his wet cap in his hand, and announced, “The Queen of Jerusalem bade me ride ahead and request the hospitality of your house, my lady.”

  Eschiva deflated with an audible, “Oh!” while Richildis was filled with panic at the thought of such an exalted guest in the middle of all their misery. She found herself sputtering, “The Queen—oh! Agnes de Courtney!” The last thing Richildis needed was to have her sister-in-law gloating over her failed marriage! Agnes had never brought anything but misery to the Ibelins, Richildis thought bitterly—and she would undoubtedly find it satisfying to crow over her new “royal” status.

  “No, my lady: Queen Maria Zoë Comnena,” the herald corrected her.

  “Queen Maria Zoë?” Richildis asked, disbelieving. What on earth could the haughty Greek princess want with the likes of Ibelin or her? “But why—what—” She broke off her silly questions. How was a mere herald supposed to know the motives of his mistress? Furthermore, Richildis knew better than to think a royal herald was requesting hospitality; he was giving notice of what was to come. The Queen of Jerusalem had the right to the hospitality of any baron in the realm, let alone the soon-to-be-discarded wife of a baron. Richildis forced herself to focus on practical issues. “How many people are in her party?”

  “The Queen is traveling with her maid, her almoner, her confessor, two squires, four grooms, and ten sergeants, my lady.”

  At least that wasn’t overwhelming, even if it was more than they had room for at the moment. Well, the stables were all but empty, she corrected herself, and the sergeants could sleep there or in the great chamber of the keep, so it was just a matter of Eschiva and herself moving to the top floor of the keep and turning over the comfortable apartment above the solar to the Queen and her lady. The priests would have to stay with Father Vitus, she concluded. She nodded to the herald. “Of course, Sir Herald; the Queen of Jerusalem is always welcome at Ibelin.”