by Jack Whyte
The Saracens, so unmistakably jubilant and confident mere minutes earlier, were now reeling and eddying in confusion, unable to assert themselves in the face of what must have appeared to them as an absolute and unstemmable explosion of heavy cavalry. St. Clair had no knowledge of what had happened to the ranks of infantry between the knights and the Saracens, of whether they had been trampled in the charge or had managed to slip between the horsemen, but the Frankish forces rallied with every heartbeat. And then the Bedouin phalanx that had charged the rearguard simply shattered as the men broke and ran in all directions to escape the massive horses of the charging Hospitallers. But the Hospitallers permitted no escape. The fear and frustration they had been forced to undergo for so many hours resulted in an orgy of blood lust and slaughter. They slew men by the thousands in front of their positions as the madness spread southward to the right of the line and Saracens fled in utter panic and fear, leaving their Sultan impotent to stop them or even to try to rally them.
Now St. Clair could hear the difference in the sounds rising from below and he knew, from his eagle’s-eye view, that he was witnessing the greatest rout in the history of the wars of the Latin Kingdom. The masses of cavalry were bunching up, pursuing the fleeing Saracens towards the edge of the forest in the south, but even so, before they could enter the forest proper, the leading ranks were stopped and began milling about, already starting to reform. He would learn later that it was Richard himself who stopped the pursuit, aware even then of past lessons learned through overzealous pursuit of fleeing enemies, and he would hear many accounts of Richard’s personal heroism during the heaviest of the fighting following the breakout, none of which he would doubt for a moment. For the time being, however, he sat his horse alone up on the heights and watched the army reform and regroup along the road until he realized that they were about to march southward in good order to their intended destination of Arsuf. At that point, feeling uncharacteristically jubilant over the victory, he set spurs to his horse and set out down the hill, leading his mule, to rejoin his companions.
HALF AN HOUR LATER, frustrated and increasingly impatient, he was still far above the straggling army, headed in the wrong direction and unable to do anything about it. He had discovered the truth of the oldest adage among climbers—that it is far more difficult to climb down from a high elevation than it is to climb up there in the first place. The way the hillside fell away beneath him simply compelled him to keep moving northward, to his right. The alternative, to strike stubbornly southward and to his left, was simply too dangerous to contemplate. The two animals he was leading left him in no doubt about the folly of that, balking and refusing, stiff legged, to go anywhere near the precipitous southern faces, and although he was unaccustomed to noticing such things, he quickly came to see, quite literally, that everything about this hillside sloped downward, visibly, to the right. And so he gritted his teeth and concentrated on picking his way along with great care, forcing himself to analyze all that he could see going on below him, rather than allow himself to grow more uselessly angry than he already was.
Someone, clearly, had made a decision to keep the main body of the army moving southward along the road to Arsuf, and St. Clair acknowledged to himself that whoever had been responsible—and he presumed it was Richard himself—had made the correct choice, for their current position was clearly untenable, an elongated, cramped, and narrow stretch of hillside between the road itself and the sea. After the pressures they had undergone in that same place, he was unsurprised that they had no wish to remain there for a moment longer than they had to, and so now almost the entire army, regrouped and redisposed in clear formations, was winding steadily along the road to the south, and progressing far more quickly than they had since leaving Acre, secure in the knowledge that the Saracens would not soon be returning to engage them.
The road, until it disappeared beneath the overarching trees at the entrance to the forest, was crammed with marching men, and the largest area of land between it and the sea had been converted into a vast marshaling area where troop commanders and officers were organizing units to join the exodus, falling into place behind the passing ranks as space became available. The exercises were being carried out efficiently, André could see, and the evacuation was proceeding smoothly, but the single most significant and striking thing that he could see as he drew steadily closer to the battlefield was the extent of the casualties, and most particularly among the Saracens.
There appeared to be thousands of dead and wounded Muslim soldiers everywhere he looked, and as he scanned them, seeing how they had been mowed down in swaths, an image grew in his mind from his boyhood, of a cornfield outside his father’s home in Poitou, one remembered afternoon at harvest time, when everyone had stopped working to eat at noonday and the rows of corn, scythed but ungathered, not yet bound and stacked, had formed clear-cut patterns on the stubbled ground. He could see very few Frankish bodies among the casualties, which surprised him, for he was above the far left of the line now, the rearguard position of the Hospitallers, and their black-and-white colors were easy to spot from above, but it seemed to him that for every Hospitaller or other Frankish form he saw on the field, he could count ten or more Muslims.
He reached a stretch of hillside where, unusually, the lie of the land altered and he was able for a brief time to turn his mount and ride southward, back towards the battlefield. And then, quite suddenly, he was within hailing distance of the road below, where the lay brothers of the Hospital were fully occupied in doing what they did best, tending to the wounded. Several of the black-clad fighting monks, riding up and down in full uniform, were supervising the efforts of large, organized groups of infantry who were separating the living from the dead and the Christians from the Muslims, carrying the Frankish wounded to a cleared space by the roadside and the Muslims to a more distant spot, closer to the seashore. Down there, André could see, were more Hospital brothers, tending to the infidels as their brethren were tending to their own.
“You there! Templar! Stand where you are.”
St. Clair reined in and saw that the speaker, or the shouter, was a Hospitaller, flanked by a pair of crossbowmen, each of whom was pointing a heavy arbalest uphill at him. He dropped the reins on his mount’s neck and raised both hands above his head.
“Come down. Slowly.”
André lowered his hands and nudged his horse forward and sideways, picking the easiest route down and highly aware of the arbalests pointed at him. The knight probably thought him a deserter or a coward who had sought refuge high up on the slopes to avoid being killed, and thinking that, he would have no compunction about giving the word to shoot St. Clair down without mercy. Finally, he reached the roadway and moved forward to face the Hospitaller.
“Who are you and what were you doing up there? And be careful what you say.”
André made no attempt to smile or be engaging. “André St. Clair, and I was trying to get back to my unit. I was sent out last night by our Grand Master, de Sablé, to scout Arsuf and make sure it had not been occupied. He sent me because I speak Arabic and can pass for a Muslim. The clothing and weapons I wore out there are here, in the cases on the pack mule. Look, if you like.”
“And was Arsuf occupied?”
“No, it was not. But it makes no difference now.
Saladin’s people will not stop running until they are far south of Arsuf.”
“Hmm.” The Hospitaller nodded towards the mule. “Show me what is in the cases.”
Moments later, he sat frowning at the circular Saracen shield he was holding.
“Right. Well, I suppose I’m obliged to believe you, St. Clair, but I have to send you now to my superior, Sir Pierre St. Julien. You would have to do the same with me, were things reversed.”
“I would. Where do I find him?”
The Hospitaller turned to the man on his right, who had long since put down his arbalest. “Take him to St. Julien.” He glanced back at St. Clair. “God be with you, St.
Clair, and good luck.” He raised a hand briefly and swung away, already shouting at some of the men working nearby.
The knight called St. Julien accepted St. Clair even more quickly than the other had. As he was quickly checking the contents of André’s packs, a group of men moved past them, carrying five wounded Hospitallers on improvised stretchers.
“How many men did you lose?” André asked him.
St. Julien twisted his mouth. “Not nearly as many as I thought we would. Our Grand Master went to argue with King Richard, begging him to turn us loose, but Richard refused. When the charge did break out, it was because one or two of our own knights had simply had enough, and out they went … And everyone else went after them. It simply happened, and when it did, everyone joined in. I don’t know about the rest of the line of battle, but I would be surprised if we lost more than half a hundred men—knights and foot soldiers both.”
“You must have taken out ten men for every one you lost, then.”
“Oh, more than that, for by the time we broke out, the men were beyond anger. They showed no mercy, gave no quarter. Everything that moved in front of them went down. Ah! They’ve found something over there. God speed, Sir Templar.”
Thereafter, André St. Clair made his way along the road without being bothered again, and for the entire distance he was amazed at the disproportionate numbers of Muslim dead and wounded lining the road, with corpses piled in head-high heaps in many places. The crews whose task it was to clean up the carnage had nothing to say to him and little to each other. They were already listless and dull eyed, appalled into speechlessness by the awful, repetitive nature of the work they were doing and the condition of the mangled and dismembered bodies with which they had to deal, surrounded by the sounds and stenches of humanity in unspeakable distress. From time to time, he would pass a dead man who stood out as someone special by virtue of the clothing and insignia he wore, but for the most part, André was smitten by the sameness of it all and by the pathetic lack of dignity apparent in the heaped piles of discarded corpses. He had seen so many headless bodies and so many bodiless heads, arms, and legs that he thought he might never again be able to sit in a saddle and swing a sword, and it was while one such thought was passing through his head that something caught his attention from the corner of his eye, and he drew rein to look more closely.
But looking now at the carnage surrounding him, he could see nothing that struck him as being anomalous. There were living men among the fallen all around him; he could see some of them moving and he could hear their moans and cries, and somewhere almost beyond his hearing range, someone was screaming mindlessly, demented by pain. But whatever had caught his attention was no longer evident, and he dismissed it, gathering his reins to ride on.
He had traversed almost the entire line of battle by that time, and the cleanup crews had not yet reached this far. The section through which he was now riding had been the right of the line, occupied by the Templars and their supporting Turcopoles, and St. Clair had not realized before how closely the latter resembled the enemy they fought, for they were not uniformly equipped, and in many instances he could not tell, looking at the strewn bodies, which were which. But then, just as he began to turn away, he saw movement again, a flicker of bright yellow higher up than he had been looking before, just in front of the line of trees above him. He tensed, looking at it intently, knowing what it was but unable to say why it should be significant to him.
It was a Saracen unit flag, the equivalent of the colors carried by each of the Frankish formations, but whereas the Frankish troop divisions carried individual colors, each to its own, the Saracens bore only uniform yellow standards: large swallow-tailed banners on the end of long, supple poles, distinguished from each other by the varying devices used by each unit to identify itself and its leader. Now the banner moved again, not waved by the wind but stirred erratically, as though someone were moving against it, causing it to sway unevenly back and forth, and as it unfolded it displayed the device it bore, a number of black crescents, their leading edges facing right.
André felt his stomach lurch as he recalled the evening, months before, when Alec Sinclair had described the personal standard of his friend Ibn al-Farouch. “Remember,” he had said, “if you find yourself outnumbered or in danger of defeat, don’t go seeking death, for death achieves nothing but oblivion for fools. Go seeking life instead. Find the squadron with the five-moon pennant and surrender to its leader. That’s Ibn. Tell him you know me, that I’m your cousin, and he’ll find a comfortable chain to shackle you with.”
Five black crescent moons, Sinclair had said, their leading edges facing right. The brief glance he had had of the pennant had been too short to count the number of crescents. He had seen only a cluster, perhaps five, but it might as easily have been six or seven, and he knew that he could not now ride away without satisfying his curiosity, so he turned his horse around and nudged it forward, up the hill to where the yellow banner now sagged motionless.
Among the bodies of slaughtered Arab and Christian horses, three dead Templars lay in plain view, their red-crossed, white-coated bodies intertwined and surrounded by Saracen corpses. He spurred his horse closer, examining the individual bodies of the knights, looking for men he knew, but he felt the hair stir on the back of his neck when he saw that the dead man atop the other two had not died by a Saracen scimitar but had been stabbed through the neck with a long, straight Christian sword. The blade was still in place, thrust clear through the chain-mail hood that covered the dead knight’s head. The sole question in André St. Clair’s mind was why, in a fight to the death against Saracens, a Christian knight would aim such a deliberate and lethal thrust at one of his brethren.
The knight had sunk to his knees and died there, his lifeblood drenching the front of his surcoat, and the men who lay beneath him, and the upthrust angle of the sword that killed him, had prevented him from falling forward. His heart beating fast now, André dismounted and stepped quickly to the kneeling knight. He pulled the head back and looked into the dead face. The man was an unknown. André pushed him firmly, so that he fell sideways and rolled off the bodies beneath him.
The next man lay face down on top of the man below him, covering his head and shoulders, but the man beneath had been the one who thrust the killing sword, for it had been torn from his hand by the weight of the falling corpse when André pushed it. He stooped and seized the second knight by the armholes of his cuirass and heaved him up, rolling him to see that, again, the fellow was unknown to him. He had been killed by crossbow bolts, three of which projected several inches from his breast. As he turned now to the third knight, André gave a whimpering, childlike cry and fell to his knees, his face crumpling as he stared between his outstretched hands into the dead face of his cousin Alec.
How long he knelt there, struck dumb, he would never be able to recollect afterwards, but he remained there, rocking slowly back and forth in agonized disbelief as he watched the slowly welling blood ooze from the grim rent in the armor over his cousin’s left breast.
And only very, very slowly did it penetrate his awareness that dead men do not bleed.
When the realization did hit him, he whimpered again, and reached out with both hands to cup Alec’s face, and as he did so, Alec’s eyes opened.
“Cousin,” Alec Sinclair whispered. “Where did you come from?”
André merely sat, hunched forward, gazing at his cousin’s face, which was pallid and deeply graven with stark, blue-tinged lines. He knew he should say something, respond in some manner to his cousin’s greeting, but his tongue felt frozen in his mouth.
“Where is al-Farouch?”
The strangeness of the question snapped St. Clair back to full cognizance, and his fingers tightened on his cousin’s chin. “What did you say? Where is who?”
“Ibn al-Farouch. He was here but a short time ago. Where did he go?”
André sat back on his haunches but remained leaning forward, face to face wi
th his cousin, his hand still grasping Sinclair’s chin. “Alec, what are you talking about? Al-Farouch is not here.”
“Of course he is. What is that, if not his?” André looked up, following the direction of Sinclair’s gaze, and saw the yellow swallow-tailed pennant with its five black crescent moons.
“Quick, André, lift me up, quickly. Lift me up.”
The urgency in Alec’s voice provoked an instant response in St. Clair, and he rose immediately to kneel behind his cousin and grasp him carefully beneath the arms, cradling him as gently as he could. “How is that?” he asked. “Am I hurting you?”
“Aye, but not badly. I think I may be lying on top of al-Farouch, and if I am, he may not be able to breathe, so lift me up and move me to one side. Then I will need you to see to him—” Alec stopped, gasping for breath, but then continued. “Gently now, Cuz. Lift me straight up and step to your left. Can you do that?”
“Aye, I can manage that,” St. Clair replied, but as he moved to straighten up, thrusting powerfully but steadily with his thighs against the deadweight of Alec’s armored body, the agony of being moved, even thus slightly, ripped a tortured scream of protest from the wounded knight’s throat. André froze before he could straighten completely, so that he was left crouching. Alec’s weight seemed to increase in his arms and was growing insupportably heavier by the moment.
“Alec,” he hissed, straining the words through his teeth. “Alec, can you hear me?”
There was no answer, and he knew his cousin had fainted from the pain. He tensed again, drew a deep breath and expelled it noisily, then inhaled again, sucking the air into his lungs as hard as he could, and straightened up quickly, lifting Alec as far as he could and then walking backward very carefully for two paces.