by Angus Donald
Her boots were crusted with snow, and her shawl was white-dusted too, and I wondered whether we were in for a very hard winter as I waited for her to speak. I called for the hall servants to throw another log on the fire, to bring a stool for Sarah to sit upon, and to bring another mug of ale.
Marie showed that she was angry at these small courtesies by banging dishes down hard on the long table as she cleared away the remains of supper. But I ignored her and said: ‘Get up from the floor, Sarah, and sit. Tell me what it is you want - why do you disturb my peace on this cold night?’
‘Oh sir, it’s my old fool Dickon. He is drunk again on Widow Wilkins’ strong mead, and cursing you something horrible, and he is ...’ she halted, and I encouraged her to continue. She took a sip of ale. ‘Oh sir, he is talking of slitting his own throat. He says you will send him to the King’s court and they will hang him ... and he vows he will not die that way. He says he would rather die by his own hand, like a soldier, and risk eternal damnation, than be hanged as a common felon. I tell him you would not send him to the judges, not for a piglet or two, and that it will just be the manor court and a fine. But he is mad, sir, and he sits in our cottage muttering and swearing foul oaths and drinking yet more and sharpening his knife. Oh sir, tell me you will not send him to the King’s court.’
‘He stole from me,’ I said, as coldly as I could manage. ‘He admits it. Year after year, he took my property and laughed while he robbed me. What would you have me do? There must be justice in Westbury.’
She broke down into another fit of violent sobbing that seemed to rack her very soul. And like the soft old fool that I am, I was moved by her tears. ‘Come, Sarah,’ I said. ‘This is no good. Go home now and tell Dickon that he must present himself to me tomorrow morning, sober and clean, and remorseful, and we two men will discuss this matter then.’
When the woman had gone, I went over to the big chest where I keep my most precious possessions and rummaging in the deepest recesses I found what I was looking for: an ordinary old sword in a battered leather scabbard. I pulled the blade from the scabbard and gazed down at the grey metal, my own tired face reflected back at me. How many men had I slaughtered with this weapon, I wondered - too many to count, surely. And yet it was an age-old symbol of justice; in the King’s hands it signified the power to kill in the name of the law. I made a cut in the air, just as an experiment, and the blade sliced cleanly through the drifting smoke of the hall; my right arm was unaccustomed to the weight of the sword, and my once-broken wrist gave a twinge, but it felt good in my hand. I cut again, and again, my feet moving smoothly in the old patterns, drummed into me by my old friend Sir Richard at Lea, as I lunged and parried, fencing with an imaginary foe.
‘What in the world do you think you are doing?’ said a sharp voice. It was Marie. ‘Put that thing away before you do yourself a mischief. You’re not twenty years old any more. Nor even twice that!’
For a brief moment, just a heartbeat, the Devil inspired me with a wild urge to strike down my daughter-in-law for those disrespectful words. For a moment, I honestly wanted to turn and hack at her neck and leave her twitching in a pool of blood. I saw myself clearly standing over her corpse, gory blade in hand, my body once again filled with the vigour of battle, the power of youth. And then I regained my senses, God be praised, and I slid the old sword back in its sheath, put it away and sat back down once again by the flickering fire.
Marie came over and draped a thick woollen shawl around my shoulders. ‘It’s cold tonight,’ she said kindly. But I did not deign to reply. I merely took another sip of my warmed ale. There was honey in it.
A bright strip of luminous yellow hovered in front of my eyes; an angel, perhaps, showing me the path to Heaven? Not an angel. And too painful to look at. It took me a very long while to recognise that it was hot sunlight, spilling on to a whitewashed wall. I closed my eyes. When I opened them the yellow strip had moved, and broadened at the base. Gradually I became aware of noises, too: the scurry of sandaled feet on stone; a gentle murmur of conversation; occasionally a cry of pain or the splash of liquid in a bowl. My mouth dry as sun-bleached bone, my tongue rough as a pine log, I closed my eyes again and slept.
This time when I awoke, there was someone leaning over me: dark glossy hair framing a white drawn face with huge sorrowful eyes. The strip of sunlight was now a block of gold on the wall, and I thought: evening. A cool wet cloth was applied to my forehead - it felt wonderful - and a little water was trickled into my mouth. A single word came into my head, a single beautiful, loving syllable: Nur.
She trickled more water between my parched lips, and I swallowed painfully, blinked at her and struggled to sit up, but a small white hand pushed me down with ease.
‘Where am I?’ said a harsh, croaking voice, which hardly I recognised as my own.
‘Shhh, my darling,’ said Nur. ‘Drink, don’t speak. You are in Akka, in the Hospitallers’ quarter, in a dormitory. You have been sick, very sick. But the fever has passed. You are safe now. I am here.’
‘Acre?’ I whispered, and Nur poured a little more water into my mouth. ‘Don’t speak; drink,’ she said. ‘Drink and sleep.’ Her lovely face went away and came back with a clay bowl filled with a bitter liquid. She guided the cool rim to my mouth, supporting my head, which strangely seemed to weight more than a boulder, and I sipped the rank liquid, and with some difficulty swallowed most of it down. The effort exhausted me, and I let my head flop back on to the pillow and dropped into a bottomless hole.
When I awoke again it was grey morning, Nur was gone. I turned my head and looked left and right: I was in a large cool stone chamber, in a bed in a row of similar ones, all but one occupied but sleeping men. At the far end of the row of beds, a large, plain wooden cross was fixed to the wall and below it an old man wearing nothing but a chemise sat upright on his cot; he was skeletally thin and almost totally bald; a mere few whisps of white hair covered his pink scalp. He saw that I was awake and smiled and nodded at me but said nothing. I smiled back and then looked away. My head felt clear: Acre, I thought; in the care of the Knights Hospitaller, a monastic order famed for healing the sick and fighting the paynim in the name of Christ. I was safe.
Shards of memory began to roll and tumble through my head; I remembered Sir Richard Malbête; his feral smirk as he shot me with the crossbow. And I recalled a tossing bunk in the belly of a foul-smelling ship, a great pain in my right arm, and a feeling as if my stomach were on fire; and raving, cursing at Reuben as he tended to my wounds, and trying to strike at him. And I remembered a large tent of white canvas on a windy hilltop, and the cries of wounded and dying men around me mingling with the shrieks of seagulls; and Robin’s eyes, filled with care, staring down at me and saying: ‘Don’t die on me, Alan, that is a direct order.’ And I remembered more pain, and the shame of vomiting and voiding myself uncontrollably - and Nur, always there; my sweet angel caring for me as if I was a baby, and washing my loins and limbs, and trying to feed me, and holding me tight when I thrashed in my fever. And most of all I remembered my beloved weeping for me. And how it made me want to die.
I must have slept again, for when I awoke it was full morning and Little John was standing at the foot of my bed, looking about ten feet tall and as wide as a house, suntanned, bursting with rude health and grinning at me. He was holding up a kite-shaped object; a stout wooden frame around thin, overlapping layers of wooden slats, faced with painted leather, round at the top and tapering to a point at the bottom. It was four and a half feet long, and nearly two foot across at its widest; a familiar image of a black and grey wolf’s head on a white background snarled at me from the front.
‘This,’ said Little John, rapping the object with his knuckles, ‘is a shield. It’s quite old-fashioned, but they built them to last in the old days. You are supposed to carry one of these when you go into battle. How many times do I have to tell you - all your fancy mincing around with sword and poniard is fine in a one-on-one fight, if you like
that sort of thing, but in a proper battle you need a shield.’
He began speaking very slowly and loudly to me, as if to a child or an idiot: ‘If you carry a nice big shield, then nasty people won’t find it so easy to shoot you with their nasty crossbows.’ And he thumped the shield down at the foot of my bed. ‘I’ve also brought you another sword, since you seem to have lost yours. God’s greasy armpits, you youngsters, next thing I know, you’ll be fighting stark bollock naked!’
I wanted to laugh, but my stomach was still paining me, so I merely grinned back at him and said: ‘You are one to talk: I’ve seen you rip the shirt from your own back when the battle-fire is burning in you. Anyway, I’m not much good at using a shield ... don’t really have your craven skill at hiding from my enemies behind a piece of wood.’
He laughed. ‘Well, that is easily remedied. When you’re on your feet, I will teach you. Somebody has to. It looks like we’ll be here for a few weeks, so you’ll have plenty of time to get strong. But, I swear on Christ’s bones, Alan, if you go into a proper battle again without a shield - I’ll damn well shoot you myself!’ And he turned and stomped out of the dormitory.
The next day, when Nur had fed me some gruel and washed me from head to toe, Robin came to see me. He was holding a bunch of grapes somewhat awkwardly in his hands, and he seemed not to know what to say or what to do with the fruit. Finally he placed them on the small table beside my head, sat down on the bed and said: ‘Reuben says you must eat green fruit. Apparently, it is good for ridding the body of evil humours. Green fruit reduces the amount of bile - or is it phlegm? - it reduces something bad anyway.’
I thanked him for his gift and again there was a slightly uncomfortable pause. I noticed that he looked tired.
‘Well, you seem healthier,’ he said after a while, ‘almost human again, in fact.’ And he smiled, which lifted the lines of worry from his face. I told him that I was feeling much better but terribly weak. ‘Reuben was certain that you would die,’ he said, ‘and I was very worried - worried that I’d have to go to the trouble of finding myself another trouvère.’ He smiled at me again and his silver eyes sparkled with something like their old mischief. ‘Reuben said that mending your wrist was the easy part,’ he continued - and I obligingly flexed my right wrist for him, which was stiff, skinny but mobile and had a fresh purple scar running up the forearm - ‘but the old Jew said the crossbow bolt in the belly would kill you, and when it didn’t, he was convinced that the fever you contracted after that would finish you off. I told Reuben, I told him, that you were made of strong stuff and that I didn’t believe a single raggedy Griffon crossbowman could put you in your grave but ...’ he tailed off.
‘It wasn’t a Griffon,’ I said quietly. ‘It was Sir Richard Malbête.’ Robin stared at me for a few moments, his luminous eyes probing mine for the truth.
‘Now that is interesting,’ he said at last. ‘Sir Richard is very much our preux chevalier these days. Since he captured the Emperor’s standard in Cyprus, he has become the golden knight in the King’s eyes; he can do no wrong. So what really happened?’
I told him, and his mouth opened in surprise. ‘That fox-faced shit needs killing, if anybody ever did,’ he muttered when I had finished my tale. ‘But we have a little problem, Alan - nobody is going to believe you if you claim that Sir Richard, the golden knight, that shining example of chivalry, tried to kill you. You’d better keep that to yourself while we work out how to fix the bastard. Don’t go off trying to take him on your own, we’ll do it together. But it’s not going to be easy; he’s with the King a good deal these days, part of his household now...’
I had come to a similar conclusion myself. It would not be simple but, easy or hard, I was also determined to kill Malbête one way or another - for my own personal safety, if for no other reason. Although there were more than enough other reasons to put the Beast down: for Ruth, for the Jews of York, for Nur, and those butchered slave girls in Messina ...
We sat in silence for a while. I took a grape; they were delicious: cool, firm and sweet as honey.
‘Robin,’ I said, slightly hesitantly, ‘can you tell me what happened; how we got here, how we took Acre. I don’t even know what month this is.’
He stared at me. ‘Yes, of course, has nobody told you? Well, it’s July; we took Acre a week ago, not without some trouble, but the garrison surrendered in the second week of July, the twelth day of the month, I think.’ He paused and looked at me. ‘I’d better start at the beginning.’ He reached over and tore off a cluster of grapes and popped them in his mouth. When he had finished chewing, he said: ‘We found you, and Ghost, in the dawn after the night battle in the olive grove, and we took you down to the beach where a hospital had been set up. The Emperor took to his heels again in the middle of the battle, which was lucky for us, because if he had rallied his troops they would have crushed us like a man stamping on an ant. But he fled, and we won, and your foxy friend Malbête came out of it looking like a hero, the golden standard in his proud right hand. He presented the standard to the King as a wedding present for his marriage to Berengaria in Limassol, a few days after the battle. He’s a wily bastard, Malbête; it was exactly the right move to make, and the King was delighted.
‘Anyway, we chased the Emperor around the island for a while, but the local barons had turned against him and finally he had to surrender - oh, and you’ll like this,’ he took another grape, ‘the Emperor gave himself up on the strict condition that King Richard would not bind him in iron chains. Richard agreed, and when Isaac Comnenus came in, Richard had silver chains forged and had him bound in those. He’s got a nasty sense of humour, our royal master, very nasty.’ And he laughed with, I believed, just a touch of bitterness.
‘So we had Cyprus, and Richard then set off at last for Outremer, and we ended up here at Acre. The siege was in full swing but going nowhere: the Muslim garrison inside the walls still defied us, and the Christian troops outside were themselves surrounded by Saladin’s forces. Of course, King Richard’s arrival changed all that. He started building siege engines immediately, great monsters that can knock holes in stone walls, you should see them, Alan, much more formidable than a mangonel. Anyway, we smashed a few holes in the walls, but every time we tried to make an assault, Saladin would attack us from behind. Eventually, after a lot of bloody fighting on two fronts, and when the holes in the walls were big enough, the garrison surrendered - first having received their master’s permission, of course. And, as part of the deal, Saladin withdrew as well. We’ve been lucky, though; I managed to keep our men out of the worst of the fighting...’ He gave a sour smile. ‘That is to say we were not invited to join in the bloodiest assaults.’
There was a tiny pause. I knew what a great dishonour this simple statement meant. He straightened his shoulders and looked me in the eye. ‘The truth is, Alan, I’m not in favour at court, for one reason or another. I believe the King has taken against me and that some members of his circle are whispering against me ... spreading rumours about my family ... If I knew who it was I’d slaughter the mealy-mouthed sons of whores. But I don’t.’ He looked at his boots for a few moments, and then pulled himself together. ‘No matter,’ he said. ‘On the bright side, we haven’t lost too many men, and you are clearly on the mend. But I’m not sure I shall be staying in Outremer all that long, the way things are going. I have a few matters that I need to arrange, and then I may well go home and look to my affairs there.’
I couldn’t meet his eye. I knew what these rumours were suggesting. That Marie-Anne had made him a cuckold, and that baby Hugh was not his son.
‘We may all have to go home soon. I think the whole expedition may be coming apart at the seams,’ he continued. ‘Our gallant King Richard seems to have managed to quarrel with everybody here. King Philip, well, you know how things are between them, and they’ve got worse. Philip feels that Richard stole his thunder by taking Acre when he couldn’t manage it alone. So that’s an irritant. But did you know tha
t there are now two men claiming to be the rightful King of Jerusalem? Guy de Lusignan and Conrad of Montferrat - neither has a very good claim, as it happens, only through their women, and as Jerusalem is in Saladin’s hands you might think the point moot. But no, it’s the cause of another royal quarrel: Philip has declared his support of Conrad of Monferrat, and Richard has taken the side of Guy de Lusignan. So there’s more bad blood between them. The word is that Philip is thinking of going back to France anyway. He’ll blame his departure on Richard but he just wants to go back so he can snatch some land in Flanders.’
I must have looked puzzled, for Robin went on. ‘I beg your pardon, I was forgetting that you wouldn’t know. The Count of Flanders died during the siege here, and now that he’s dead, Philip has designs on his land, which is directly to the north of his own territory. He’d no doubt like to have a crack at some of Richard’s holdings in Normandy, too.’
Robin paused for breath. ‘I haven’t told you the worst,’ he said. ‘As well as quarrelling with Philip and the French, King Richard has alienated the German contingent, too. Have you heard about the fuss over the flags? No? Well, it’s just another piece of arrogant stupidity. When we took Acre, Richard and Philip naturally hung their banners over the city, but the Germans, who fought under Leopold, Duke of Austria, felt that they deserved to have their banner up there too, and they had every right to, in my opinion - they had been fighting and dying here long before Richard arrived. So they hung up Leopold’s banner next to Richard’s. And Richard was furious - have you ever seen him lose his temper? It’s quite a sight. He went storming up to the battlements and personally kicked the Duke’s banner off the wall and into the ditch below. He said that, as Philip and he were kings, and was Leopold a mere duke, he had no right to fly his flag beside them as if they were equals. Now Leopold is furious with Richard and he, too, is threatening to go home. In a month there will be no Christian army left, at this rate.’