by Angus Donald
And then, one day, we came over a rise and I looked down at the largest assembly of souls I had ever seen. I stood breathless; stunned that there could be so many people in the whole world, and all crammed into such a small area of land. Between the arms of the rivers Saône and the mighty Rhône was massed the chivalry of Western Europe; more than twenty thousand souls, the population of a large city, was encamped there in a gigantic heaving sprawl of gaudy tents, glinting steel, mud and humming humanity that stretched almost as far as the eye could see. Horse lines, fluttering pennants, burnished shields, rough buildings of turf and wood, bright striped pavilions for the knights, blacksmiths in canvas tents beating out helmets, barbers pulling teeth, squires bustling about their duties, heralds in particoloured tunics announcing their lords with a brave squeal of brass. At the edge of the field a horse race was in progress, watched by ladies and gentlemen in their finest clothes. Knights in full armour practiced combat with each other, men-at-arms sat drinking outside makeshift taverns in the summer sunshine, whores paraded about in their finery seeking trade, priests preached to gatherings of the faithful, mendicant friars in brown robes begged alms for the poor, dogs barked, beggars whined, children played tig around wigwams of stacked lances ...
We were in the presence of the greatest, most powerful army the world had ever seen. Surely, with this vast assembled might, Saladin and his Saracen army of infidels was doomed and Jerusalem, the blessed site of Christ’s Passion, would soon once again be safe in Christian hands.
Chapter Eight
The Messina strait was a sheet of pure dark blue water, only wrinkled by a few petulant white-capped waves. I had been told by the sailors that in ancient times, it was home of two monsters called Scylla and Charybdis, but they were full of such ridiculous tales, as I had discovered over the past few weeks, and it seemed altogether too harmless a stretch of water for such an evil reputation. The late September sun smiled down with a friendly warmth, the sky was untroubled by a single cloud, and a fair wind pushed our massive fleet of ships swiftly across the channel between the scuffed toe of Italy and the golden island of Sicily - the rich land of oranges, lemons and grain and sugar cane, of Norman kings and Greek merchants, of Saracen traders and Jewish money-lenders, of Latin priests and Orthodox monks living side by side in a colourful mix of creeds and races. Sicily was where the fabulous East began, and it had been chosen by our sovereign lords as the launching off point of our great and noble expedition.
King Richard’s mighty force - more than ten thousand soldiers and seamen, with more men expected to join him in the coming weeks - was packed into an armada of more than a hundred and thirty great sea-going ships. There were scores of big, lumbering busses - great fat-bellied craft used for transporting bulky stores, some fitted with special berths for the war horses; dozens of smaller cogs that carried men-at-arms and their mountains of equipment; swift galleys packed with knights, with ranks of chained Muslim slaves at the oars; there were flat-bottomed boats that could be used for landing men and horses directly on to beaches, and snacks, or snake boats as they were sometimes called, the slim, elegant descendants of the Viking longships; and a host of smaller fry, fast with low, triangular sails, which zipped between the large craft and communicated the King’s commands to the fleet. The whole sea-bome pack of us, perhaps the greatest force ever assembled, was advancing in one great colourful, cacophonous swarm towards the ancient harbour of Messina. Pennants were flying from every masthead, trumpets and clarions blared, and drums beat out the time for the slaves at the galley’s oars. It must have been a daunting sight for the thousands of local people who lined the Sicilian shore to watch our approach.
The city of Messina was laid out on the coast roughly on a north-south axis and we approached it from the sea to the east. The famous harbour, the source of Messina’s wealth, lay snug inside a curled peninsula at the southern end of the city, where it gave precious protection to the shipping from the winter storms. As we turned south to begin our approach towards the harbour’s narrow mouth, I looked west and saw the great stone palace of Messina, one of the residences of Tancred, the Norman King of Sicily, where Philip of France and a handful of his knights, at Tancred’s gracious request, had set up their headquarters a week before. My heart gave a little skip of excitement as I saw the royal lilies of France on the banners fluttering over its battlements. The palace lay on the edge of the city, slightly to the north of the great Latin cathedral of Messina, blessed by the Virgin herself in a famous letter, with its tall square stone tower and long, high nave.
Beyond the palace and the cathedral, higher up the slope and slightly to the south, was the Greek monastery of San Salvatore, low but stoutly walled and with a fine reputation for producing illuminated copies of great and rare books. The old town of Messina, the kernel from which the city had grown, lay to the south of the palace, the cathedral and the monastery. Curved around the harbour but set slightly back from the water’s edge, it was surrounded by strong stone ramparts, pierced by several gates and defended by many towers - but it looked prosperous rather than formidable. It contained many large houses, some two or even three storeys high, and at least half a dozen well-maintained churches in both the Greek and Latin styles. Its merchants had a reputation for being rich but frugal and its women were said to be both beautiful and lecherous - but woe betide any man who dishonoured them, for their fathers and husbands were as vengeful as scorpions. Three stout wooden gates opened out from the town wall on to jetties that ran out into the harbour, so that rich, exotic goods could be unloaded and easily transported into the safety of the warehouses in the old town itself. Beyond the sprawl of the city of Messina, high in the west soared the grey mountains of Sicily, brooding like a gathering of huge, disapproving churchmen over our triumphant arrival.
As we swept through the narrow mouth of the bay and into the harbour, I was standing at the prow of the Santa Maria, an ancient sixty-foot cog with a single square sail that had been my home for the past six weeks. It was also home to forty-seven tired, wet, seasick archers, a dozen crew, and a scattering of the soldiers’ women - all of us crammed as tight as an egg into the little ship so that there was no space anywhere to lie down at full stretch.
I knew every inch of the old Santa Maria — from her sharp beaky prow and leaky clinker-built wooden sides, to the round stem with its long, scarred steering oar tended by her craggy master Joachim - and I was thoroughly sick of her. I could not wait to disembark in Messina and end this stage of a seemingly interminable, tedious and uncomfortable journey.
After a week of feasting, and jesting and resting our tired bodies in Lyons, and many conferences between Robin and King Richard, to which I had not, of course, been privy, Robin’s force had set off again southwards with the rest of the King’s army. King Philip and the French host, which was less than one third the size of Richard’s force, had marched east to take ship with the Genoese merchants in their fine city. The two armies were to rendezvous in Sicily and proceed from there to the Holy Land. Under King Richard’s personal command, his huge force - Englishmen, Welshmen, Normans, as well as Angevins, Poitevins, Gascons and men from Maine and Limoges - had marched south along the valley of the Rhône to Marseilles. We sang as we marched and were cheered by Provençal villagers, who lined the roads to throw flowers at us and watch our great, slow-moving procession. We waited another week at Marseilles, for the King’s ships and yet more knights and men-at-arms to arrive, as a goodly number had travelled via the long route from England by sea. But on the eighth day news reached us, carried by local fishermen, that the grand fleet had been delayed in Portugal. The men-at-arms had run riot in Lisbon, killing Jews, Muslims and Christians and had sacked the city in a three-day orgy of destruction. The word ‘York’ leapt into my mind.
King Richard was furious. The shouting from his royal apartments in Marseilles, the commandeered inn of a local nobleman, could be clearly heard fifty paces down the street. And ever the impatient man, Richard immediately h
ired, borrowed or bought every ship he could lay his hands on in Marseilles and the neighbouring ports, and dispatched one half of his force, under the command of Baldwin, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Ranulf Glanville, the former Justiciar of England, directly to the Holy Land. Their task was to relieve the Christian forces there, which, we had heard, were engaged in a desperate struggle against the Saracens at the great fortified port of Acre.
The rest of Robin’s army, with myself and forty-eight archers berthed in the Santa Maria, began a leisurely crawl eastwards along the coast, round the gulf of Genoa and down the Italian seaboard. We were deliberately travelling slowly, stopping each evening to weigh anchor in a convenient bay and scare up supplies and fresh water, dawdling and waiting for the main fleet to come round the Spanish peninsula and catch us up. I had suffered terribly at first from seasickness, as had almost all the archers, and the beginning of the voyage had been accompanied by the sound of dozens of big men taking it in turns to retch over the side, when they were not lying moaning and praying in the bottom of the ship. When it rained, we were soaked to the skin, when the sun shone, which was most days, we burnt in the strong unfamiliar Mediterranean light. The food was execrable, casks of salted pork most of which had already gone rotten, mouldy cheese, make-shift bread of flour and water cooked like pancakes on a griddle, sour ale, and wine that tasted salty. And the smell was appalling: the constant stink of unwashed men, of damp salt-rotted clothes, of black and evil bilge water, wafts of rotting fish from the store rooms in the stem, and the occasional whiff from the faeces that streaked the outer sides of the cog where the archers did their latrine business. I soon began to long for the sun to sink, just for the chance to get off the damned ship and stretch my legs on God’s good, clean, dry unmoving land.
Going ashore was dangerous, though. One of our men was murdered by villagers near Livomo: they caught him alone near a farmstead and, being suspicious peasant folk, they accused him of being a thief and beat him to death with sticks and stones. The King would not allow us to take revenge and Robin, unfairly I thought, rebuked me for allowing one of his men to wander off alone.
At Salerno, where we tarried for several days, we finally had good news. The main fleet had reached Marseilles, it had refitted for one week and was now fast approaching Messina. We set out from Salerno with our hearts high, and as the fast spy boats reported sighting the main fleet, cheering burst spontaneously from all our lips. We were united with all our strength, and I assumed that after a quick stop at Messina for fresh food and water we would be heading on to the Holy Land. I hugged myself. I might even, I thought, with God’s good grace, celebrate Mass this Christmas in Jerusalem. As it turned out, I could not have been more wrong.
It took the best part of two days for the whole fleet to disembark at Messina and for King Richard’s quartermasters to allocate accommodation for fifteen thousand men. King Richard was determined to make his presence felt on the island and almost immediately after landing he occupied the monastery of San Salvatore, claiming it as his main headquarters and as the store dump for his vast army. The bewildered Greek monks were removed kindly but firmly by the King’s household knights, and the place began to fill with bundles and boxes and stacks of weapons and the cries of large confident men.
Robin’s troops were allocated a large field to the north of the palace as a campsite, close to the rocky shoreline, where there was a convenient stream for drinking water and washing. We pitched our tents and dried our salt-wet clothes as best we could, spreading them out on bushes and scrubby olive trees; we oiled our weapons, shaved for the first time in weeks, and washed the salt from our long hair. Some of the men wandered down to the old town to buy bread and cheese and olives and fruit, some went in search of women, some killed the time gambling, drinking and sleeping while we all waited for orders. It was the last week in September and a disconcerting rumour had began to circulate among the men: we had missed the sailing season; there was no way our fleet could safely make it across the stormy Mediterranean this side of spring. So there would be no Christmas in Jerusalem this year.
Our camping field began to change overnight — timber was cut and hauled in and the men began throwing up more permanent shelters than our thin canvas tents: huts with walls of woven branches, plastered with mud, roofed with turf or double layers of canvas which had been smeared with oil and wax; lean-to shelters and even small cottages with straw-thatched roofs and wooden plank walls. In less than a week, our field began to look like a village, and the same was happening all over the area to the north of Messina, where along the shore line other contingents of the army were making their temporary homes more weather-proof. Firewood was in short supply, and the men soon had to travel miles up the steep slopes of the mountains to find even a small bundle of sticks to cook their pottage. As the first autumn rain lashed down, the mood in the camp began to change: the shopkeepers in the old town had doubled the price of bread and wine, much to the anger of the men; dried fish now sold for a shilling a pound, an outrageous price; even fresh fish became scarce as so many men were trying their luck with baited lines from the ships in the harbour. There was little to do, although John did organise battle practice at least once a day for his spearmen, the archers set up butts to shoot at and Sir James took his cavalry out each morning for a couple of hours of exercise in the mountains. But most of the time the men were idle and spent the days foraging for food or firewood or gambling in the old town. Three men were flogged on Little John’s orders for brawling in the old town. There were two fatal fights between Robin’s soldiers and local men over dice before the beginning of October. Reports of men being insulted or even robbed by the locals were common.
I was lucky: Robin had taken over one part of the monastery of San Salvatore, and William and I were soon snug in a monk’s cell, myself sleeping on a stone ledge padded with cloaks and a wool-filled paliasse, William on a pile of straw on the floor. Little John, Owain and Sir James de Brus had similar accommodation in the cells next to mine, and each had been allocated a soldier-servant to look after them. Reuben had taken up residence in the old town. He knew of some Jews who lived there, merchants of some sort, and he had wangled an invitation to stay with them. I believe he had the most comfortable lodgings of all of us. Although, Robin had a proper chamber to himself in the monastery, with a fire to warm the cold stone, a small bed and a big table where his officers would meet to eat and discuss our plans. And I saw to it that he always had at least two men-at-arms keeping an eye on him at all times - whoever had tried to kill him with the adder in Burgundy might well try again.
To be honest, like most of the men, I was very bored. I practiced weapons skills with Little John every day - he was teaching me the finer points of the flanged mace - and attended as many services in Messina’s beautiful cathedral as I could. I was bitterly disappointed that we were to stay in Sicily all winter. And I had a nagging feeling that I was not worthy to set foot on the holy soil where Jesus Christ had walked, that I was too mired in sin, and that God was delaying my arrival in Outremer until I had fully repented of my transgressions and cleansed my soul. The weight of the souls of the Christians I had killed at York hung heavily upon me. But I could also sometimes hear my empty promise of salvation to Ruth echoing in my ears at night, mocking my failure to keep my word. So every morning at before dawn I would rise and attend Matins in the cathedral and every evening before I slept I attended Compline, and I went to as many services in between as I could. But, despite the ethereal beauty of the cathedral, its glorious coloured-glass windows, and its exquisite golden paintings of the Christ child and his mother on the walls, which I gazed at in humble devotion, nothing seemed to shift my deep feelings of guilt. I prayed for long, uncomfortable hours on my knees in front of the great altar, asking the Virgin for forgiveness, but still I could not shake the bad thoughts from my head. I wished Tuck were with us; he would have eased my conscience, of that I was certain.
‘God’s great fat oozing haemorrhoid
s! What you need is a good fight,’ said Little John, when I complained about my mood to him one afternoon. ‘Or a good fuck. Sort you out in no time.’ But the prospect of either seemed very remote.
And then, in the midst of all this gloom and guilt, King Richard decreed that he would host a day of joy and music in honour of his royal cousin Philip of France - they were not getting on at all well, so the scuttle-butt went, and this was an attempt to mend fences — and, Robin told me, I was to perform in front of two kings in the fragrant herb garden at the back of the monastery, if the weather was kind. He took me aside one drizzly morning under a covered walkway where the monks had once met for chapter and told me about the musical event and my part in it. ‘Stick to the loveydovey stuff, and maybe something traditional; nothing at all political - we are supposed to be soothing Philip’s feathers, not ruffling them,’ he said. Before I could protest at his calling my beautiful, finely wrought cansos ‘loveydovey stuff’, he shocked me into silence with his next words. ‘And, by the way, Sir Richard Malbête is here, with our lord King Richard. He arrived last night from Marseilles.’
I goggled at him. The Evil Beast was here, in Messina, with the King? ‘He was in dire disgrace after the blood-bath in York,’ continued Robin. ‘The King did not take kindly to his Jews being killed. I’m told he was really quite upset; he relies on them to lend him money for his military adventures.’ He smiled at me a in a lop-sided way. This was Robin’s financial position, too, in a nutshell. ‘So Malbête lost his lands in the North and has come on this Great Pilgrimage as a penance,’ Robin grinned at me, and then said jokingly, ‘Under your Christian logic, to cleanse his soul from the foul sin of killing Jews, Malbête must kill an equal number of Saracens.’