Holy Warrior

by Angus Donald

  Cyprus was a rich land - like Sicily it abounded with fruit trees, olives, grapes and corn, but it was ruled by an evil tyrant, a upstart called Isaac Comnenus, scion of the ruling house of Byzantium, who was now calling himself the Emperor of Cyprus having seized the island by force a few years back with the help of Greek and Armenian mercenaries. King Richard was incensed because the Emperor had imprisoned some of the men from our ships, which had been beached there after the storm, though not the royal ship, thank the Lord, which was anchored unharmed in a small bay to the west of Limassol. The imprisoned men had been ill-treated, despite their status as holy pilgrims, and the Emperor’s men had seized the Great Seal of England, which had been carried by Sir Roger Malchiel, one of Richard’s most trusted knights, who had drowned when his ship was wrecked on the rocks of Cyprus. The Emperor had invited the royal women to come ashore but, knowing the fate of their fellow pilgrims, imprisonment for ransom, they had refused. The royal ship had two floating consorts, filled with crossbowmen, plus a handful of men-at-arms. When the Emperor had tried to board the three battered ships, his men had been answered with a barrage of crossbow bolts and forced to withdraw. Berengaria was already wildly popular with the men and they would have laid down their lives to protect her from the Tyrant of Cyprus. So it was stalemate: the three ships were too battered to leave the bay and venture into the open sea; and the Emperor could not force the women to come to the land. When the royal ship asked permission to send a party ashore to collect fresh water and provisions, the Emperor flatly refused.

  It was a bad mistake on Isaac Comnenus’s part. King Richard was not a man to accept an insult to his sister or his future Queen; so, quite casually, it seemed, he decided that we would take the island of Cyprus by force.

  ‘He’s gone mad,’ said Will Scarlet, as we shared a huge bowl of fish soup in a sea-front tavern in Rhodes harbour. It was Lent again, and meat had been forbidden to the entire army. ‘We must go to King Philip’s aid at Acre,’ Will continued, ‘and help him to take the city; beat Saladin, then on to Jerusalem. We can’t go off and conquer what is practically a whole country just because its ruler was rude to us. He should go and get his women, bring them safely back here and we’ll all set off for where God intends us to go: the Holy Land.’

  I understood his outrage. I was as keen as anyone to reach our destination, but I also knew that Richard was not going to take Cyprus just to avenge a slight. ‘Robin says the island is the key to recovering the Holy Land,’ I replied blowing on a spoonful of the rich, fragrant soup to cool it. I was pleased that the food was good, since I was paying for it. Will had always been poor, but he was even more so now that he had been reduced to the ranks and was living on a common soldier’s wage. What he did not know, and I did, was that he was about to have to get by on even less. Robin had run through the money given to him by King Richard, and was in debt again. Nobody in our division was likely to see wages in the near future, and I did not begrudge Will a bowl of soup: I still had most of the purse of gold that the King had given me.

  ‘Quite apart from the wealth of the island, which is considerable,’ I continued, ‘and the fact that Isaac has no genuine claim to be its ruler, if we take and hold Cyprus, we have a base from which we can attack anywhere along the coast of Outremer. If we lose at Acre, which is almost our last toehold in the Levant, we can still come back to regroup in Cyprus. Robin thinks that Richard had always planned to take the island, and that this disrespect shown to his women merely gives him a decent excuse to invade.’

  ‘But it could take months,’ protested Will. ‘If the local lords back the Emperor we could be in for a long hard and costly fight.’

  ‘Maybe, but Reuben tells me the Cypriot knights do not love Comnenus. With luck, Richard could take the island in one or two battles. If he shows that he’s winning, the local lords will quickly come over to our side.’

  Will still looked unhappy, but I was thinking that it might be very satisfying to meet the man who had denied my Nur fresh water and food, who was, as we sat here eating, torturing her with thirst and hunger. We finished the soup in silence.

  The coast of Cyprus lay before us like a naked whore: lush, inviting, but only to be won at a price. Below the pretty whitewashed houses of the town of Limassol, which clustered around a large church and winked at us gaily in the spring sunlight, there was a long stretch of yellow beach: fringed with trees, gently rising, smooth, and the perfect place to land shallow boats. Beyond the town were the rich groves of oranges and lemons, stretching away into the distance, and beyond them, field upon field of gnarled olive trees rising up the slope to the mass of low greeny-purple hills beyond.

  We had gathered the royal women in the night before and when they were suitably refreshed and cleaned, Richard summoned them to a feast on the deck; there he had publically vowed that he would avenge their honour, whatever it took. I had missed his speech as I was locked in a passionate embrace with my lovely Nur, in a dark corner of the King’s great ship, kissing her beautiful face over and over and promising that I would never leave her again. ‘I always know ... you will come ... for me,’ she said in her halting French. And it wrung my heart. I gathered her up in my arms and kissing her on the lips vowed that from now on I would always keep her from harm; and so we began to make love. Not once in the next half an hour did I think of a similar promise that I had once made to the Jewess Ruth.

  When our lust was expended, we lay in each other’s arms half-drowsing until I was started from her embrace by a call from William, who, breathless with excitement, told me that the envoy had returned from his embassy to the Emperor. I hauled on my braies and hose, and hastily pulled a tunic over my head, smoothed my hair, and went to hear the news on the upper deck, where a great crowd surrounded the King.

  I was just in time to hear the herald say ‘... and then, Sire, when I had relayed your formal demands of restitution to him, he merely looked at me as if I had crawled out from under a rock and said, ‘Tproupt, sir!’ and dismissed me.’

  “He said what?’ asked the King, his handsome face crunched with puzzlement. He had completely recovered from his illness and was clearly fizzing with high spirits.

  ‘“Tproupt,” I believe he said, “Tproupt, ir,”the herald looked slightly embarrassed. All around him knights were trying out this unfamilar word, it was like a chorus of doves: ‘Tproupt!’ ‘Tproupt!’ ‘Tproupt!’

  ‘And what is that supposed to mean?’ said the King. ‘Well, never mind. I suppose its some Griffon insult or other. Tproupt! How extraordinary. So, that’s that then: formalities over, now comes the fun part. Gentlemen ...’ And the King began to issue a gushing stream of orders to his men for the assault on the stronghold of Cyprus.

  There was scarcely room to breathe in the snake boat. The shallow craft was packed with Robin’s men-at-arms; seventeen big warriors in full armour in a vessel designed to take no more than ten. Robin, Little John and Sir James sat in the front, before the mast, and Will Scarlet and myself were crammed in the belly below the square grey sail with a dozen unhorsed cavalrymen. A grizzled sailor perched on the stem and guided us in with one hand on the steering oar.

  We were forced to make the initial attack on the beach with only a fraction of our force: a mere three hundred men. But the King had judged that it would be enough, and each commander had been required to choose his best warriors, and leave the rest to watch from the ships. We seventeen in that tiny boat were the cream of Robin’s force, and that thought gave me a great deal of pride. King Richard’s problem was a lack of small boats. Every snack, skiff, rowing boat and coracle in the fleet had been assembled for the assault; as only boats with a shallow draft capable of landing on the beach could be used. And all were filled with fighting men; knights and men-at-arms in the first wave, followed by a hundred of Robin’s archers in the second wave, plus two boatloads of sea-sick crossbowmen from Aquitaine.

  The low sides of the snake boat were dangerously near the water line, and if it had sun
k we would all have drowned immediately due to the weight of armour we wore. But, strangely, I felt no fear. Once again, the presence of the King, two boats along from us, inspired unreasonable courage in my heart. He had that wonderful quality, my King; of course, he was noble and brave beyond measure, but more than this he made all of us feel that, under his command, anything was possible. We were three hundred men attacking a whole island - and one that was well defended.

  The Emperor had been busy in the past few days. A huge barricade had been erected on Limassol beach to deny us a landing; it was constructed, it seemed, from anything that came to hand: huge rocks, sheep hurdles, the broken hulls of rowing boats, old planks and dead trees; enormous urns used for storing olive oil, too, were piled up along with every piece of wood in the town: tables, chairs, footstools, doors, even an altar from the church were stacked in a long line across beach barring our way in a surprisingly efficient and warlike fashion. And behind this formidable barrier stood nearly two thousand men: Greek knights in brightly polished round helmets, dark-faced Armenian mercenaries, Limassol townsmen armed with pikes and crossbows, Cypriot peasants conscripted from the fields wielding no more than make-shift spears and their grandfathers’ rusty swords. They had every advantage on their side: the barricade, the numbers, and their homeland to fight for. We were attacking from the sea with a handful of men, weary from travel, far from home and our clothes heavy, soaking wet from the spray. And yet, when I caught sight of King Richard’s eager face, as he crouched ready to spring ashore in the lead boat, I knew deep in my heart that we would be victorious.

  A hundred yards out from the beach, Robin turned to the boats behind us, shouted an order, and the arrows began to fly. The Welsh archers bent their massive yew bows, aimed high and with a sound like a ripping cloth, loosed a cloud of shafts that rose high into the blue sky and fell like the wrath of the Almighty on to the barricades. The first wave of arrows dropped in grey sheets like killing hail: the steel points of the yard-long arrows slamming through mail coats of the knights just as easily as through the homespun tunics of the peasants, punching deep into the defenders’ chests and shoulders and backs to inflict horrible wounds; the men behind the barrier cowered under the onslaught, those with shields holding them above their heads, those without suffering catastrophe as the missiles plunged into their defenceless bodies. The wounded staggered away from the barricade, gouting blood, sometimes from more than one wound. The dead were trampled under mail-shod feet as the thick line of men shifted and writhed under the first lash of our shafts. And then the second wave fell on them, arrows clattering on the wooden table legs of the wall, spearing into a rashly upturned face, even puncturing the cheaper kind of helmet, and dropping men all along the barricade by the score. The third wave slammed down upon them down, and a fourth. The pitiful cries of the wounded Greeks were heartbreakingly clear on the salty air but I could also hear Little John, clutching his great war axe and keening to himself, a high pitched drone that sent shivers down my spine, as we raced towards the shore.

  The arrows continued to do their grim work of thinning the enemy line. Our Welshmen in the boats behind us were now loosing their shafts at will, no longer in waves but in a looser but never ceasing cloud of falling death; and the Aquitainian crossbowmen, finding themselves in range, now added their bolts to the slaughter. Bodies lay draped across the barrier, leaking blood from many holes, and at the ends of the line, I saw the first peasants slipping away, running up the beach back into the fields to escape this barrage of death, their captains shouting after them. But the centre - the hard core of well-protected Greek knights around the Emperor and his golden standard - was solid as an iron bar.

  King Richard’s boat was the first to crunch up the slope of the beach, wedging itself into the sand. And with a shout of ‘God and Saint Mary!’ our sovereign launched himself out of the vessel, staggered slightly as he landed, and then stood tall. As he surveyed the enemy line, a mere thirty paces away, his bright helm, ringed with a golden crown, glittered in the bright light of noon; a crossbow bolt sliced past his face, and he shifted his shield, the two golden lions of his personal device proud on its red background; his huge sword was upright in his right fist and, without so much as a glance to see whether the rest of his men would follow, our King began to run straight up the beach directly towards the make-shift barricade and Emperor’s golden standard, towards the thickest part of the enemy line.

  There was no time to watch our noblest knight attack his enemy, as our own boat was driving up the sand, and I had to watch my balance as our craft left the smooth water for unyielding dry land. Robin was out first, leaping on to the sand and immediately sprinting up the slope to support the King, and I was tumbling after him, with the crossbow bolts whistling around me, just behind Sir James de Brus and Little John. In five heartbeats we had reached the wall, to the right of King Richard and the squad of hand-picked household knights that now surrounded him, and who were by now trading savage blows with their Greek opponents across the ramshackle defence. Robin shouted something to Little John that I didn’t catch. The blond giant dropped his great war axe and, protected by the swords and shields of Sir James and Robin himself, began pulling at a giant table that was wedged into the centre of the wall. He took a firm grip of a stout round table leg, bent his knees and hauled. There was a great tearing noise, and the table shifted a few inches; the Greek knights who had been engaging Robin and Sir James pulled back in surprise as the whole barricade seemed to tremble; a crossbowman popped up like a vengeful demon in front of Little John. He put his bow to his shoulder, aimed it at John’s back - so close that he couldn’t miss - and stopped. His head snapped back, a yard of good English ash growing suddenly from his eye socket, and he fell away behind the barricade. Our archers had reached dry land. I cut at a bearded face behind the hedge of wood, and forced it to duck away, and then a man lunged at me across the divide with a spear and I, in turn, had to dodge rapidly.

  To my left, Little John was still hauling at the table leg, rocking his body back and forward in short explosive heaves. He gave one final massive pull, the muscles of his great arms swelling and writhing, the sweat standing out on his forehead, and suddenly the whole table came grinding out of the barricade in a great rush, like a cow giving birth to its bloody calf, leaving a small ragged gap in the enemy defences. John lost his balance and tumbled into the sand, but dozens of eager hands began to tear at the enemy bulwark, ripping away chairs, planks and small boulders, and in a matter of moments a great hole had been ripped in the centre of the wall - through which our gallant King rushed without a moment’s pause or thought for his safety; and we all - Robin, Sir James, myself and a dozen of his bravest knights - came charging after him in a howling phalanx of steel and fury.

  I had my sword in my right hand and my poniard in my left; my head was covered with a tightly fitting dome of steel and my body from wrist to knee was protected with a hauberk of fine steel links, and I was determined to bring death to the men of Cyprus who had insulted my Nur. A Greek knight shouted a challenge at me and swung his sword at my head; I ducked and he slammed into me with his shield, but I was ready for this move, and rolled my body round his shield to his left, away from the sword, and hacked at the back of his knees with my own long blade. The blow did not break through his mail leggings but it dropped the knight to his knees, and I dropped my sword, grappled his helmet with my right hand, hauled it back to expose his neck and quick as summer lightning sliced through his throat with my poniard. The blood gushed hotly as I dropped his twitching body, and I immediately knelt to recover my sword - and saved my own life. Another sword slashed through the air above my head, I felt its wind on my neck, and I turned and lunged with my recovered long blade, almost in one movement, and catching the attacking man-at-arms neatly in the groin with the tip of my weapon. His armour consisted only of a boiled leather cuirasse and a kind of leather kilt and he stumbled away, hands cupped over his cock and balls, the blood leaking through hi
s fingers. We had burst through the line of Cypriots, and I saw to my left King Richard engaged with a mass of knights in rich armour, Robin beside him, hacking and lunging, fighting like a maniac; and there was Little John, cutting a knight from his horse with a great blow from his axe and a spray of gore.

  Another knight attacked me, a decent swordsman, it must be said, and we cut and parried three times, circling each other between blows, but his attention was not on me. He kept looking left and right, seeing to his dismay that his fellows were fleeing the barricade as more and more of our men-at-arms — and scores of Welsh archers who had abandoned their bows to fight with the short swords and axes - boiled through the gap that Little John had torn in their extraordinary defences. I wasn’t concentrating on my opponent fully either, for I too was astounded at how quickly the enemy were leaving the field of battle. And I nearly paid dearly for my lack of attention. The knight suddenly stepped in and chopped straight down at me with his long sword, a mighty blow that would have crushed my skull had it landed, and only just in time I blocked with poniard and sword crossed together, my arms almost buckling under the strength and savagery of his attack. Then suddenly, miraculously, his head flew from his shoulders; the square steel helmet with its leaking stump of neck rolling several yards over the ground. The body stayed standing for a few heartbeats and then the legs folded underneath it and it slumped to the bloody ground and I was left standing and facing Sir James de Brus, with his bloody sword, held double-handed and now extended above his left shoulder in the classic warrior’s pose.

  ‘Are you quite well, Alan,’ the Scotsman said, looking at me with a puzzled frown. ‘It’s not like you to take so long to dispatch just one man.’