We were going ashore right away. The king had ordered that Damietta was to be taken without delay. We all let out a great cheer, of course, two hundred English voices raised in murderous jollity, and myself joining in out of politeness. But there was a somewhat strained hush when Sir William announced that we would be attacking on foot, for our deep-draughted ship, like most others in the fleet, could not get close enough to the beach for our horses to be brought off. Longboats would take us in, and we would wade ashore, all for the greater glory of the Lord.
‘Will the ’eathens give us a hand up out of the water?’ called a Yorkshire voice. There was muffled laughter and the bark of a sergeant-at-arms. Not a bad question, though Sir William pretended not to have heard it. The Mussulmen were in plain sight, a huge army of them clustered under the walls of the town. There were several thousand men, on foot and in the saddle – even at this distance I could see their close-packed ranks and the dart of horsemen racing up and down the strand. So this was a crusade, I thought to myself. No wonder they never succeeded.
Warren helped me into my suit of mail, silent, busy with straps and buckles, trying not to look me in the eye. Bad luck, was it, to meet the gaze of a doomed man? My armour had survived its journey well, but it reeked of the oil that had kept it supple. The hauberk settled on my shoulders, and I staggered for a moment, letting the weight sink into my muscles and joints. The hood went over my head and I slipped my surcoat over it, red cloth blazed with a black hound seated on its haunches, snarling, one paw raised. I went and leaned, fidgeting, on the rail, getting used to the drag of the mail on my limbs.
A minute passed, a quarter-hour. But all too soon I found myself clambering down a ladder into a longboat, shield slung across my back, helmet hanging from my neck by its strap. It felt a little as if I were being garrotted. The sea was calm, though a deep swell was riding in towards the shore and the boat rose and fell slowly against the side of the ship. All around me, other men were leaving other ships. The fleet was loud with confused sounds: the hollow thump of smaller boats jouncing against bigger ones; curses and cries of fear; shouted commands. Over us all rose voices raised in song: every priest and friar, it seemed, was chanting or singing a hymn to the Lord, but from every ship came a different song, and there was no sense to it, no order, nothing but a golden vibration that hung above the toiling men in their little boats. It was strangely beautiful, all those voices weaving in and out of harmony into discord, while a great flock of gulls, attracted by the commotion, added their own harsh counterpoint.
I got my balance in the pitching boat and made my way to the prow, picking up a lance from the pile that lay across the benches. My reasoning, so far as I had any, was that as we would doubtless be coming onto the beach into the teeth of an arrow storm, it would be better if I could get out quickly rather than get tangled up in panicked men or dead oarsmen. And it would be easier, I told myself, to escape if the boat capsized. The sea was calm but the swell was collapsing onto the beach in heavy plunges of spray. The lads at the oars were wide-eyed with fear, their faces the colour of fish bellies, and I doubted they had much skill. I rested the point of my shield against the wood of the prow and hunkered down behind it. Behind me, Guy Curtbac and John of Motcombe were jostling for position on the stern bench. Guy gave me a wink, and I gave back a mirthless smile. The boat was full now, and yet another knight was clambering gingerly down the ladder. One of the oarsmen called up anxiously, and someone cursed and swung his leg back over the rail. There was a splash nearby, and shouting: a man had missed his footing and fallen from the ship next to us. Everyone seemed to be yelling at the spreading ripples, but no head appeared. The poor bastard: weighed down with his mail coat and helmet, he would be heading for the bottom like a bar of lead.
Over the confusion a horn gave a blast, then more joined in the blare. It was the king’s vessel giving the signal for the attack. My companions in the longboat tugged out their rosaries and kissed crosses or pressed them to brow or heart. For form’s sake, next to Iselda’s stag I was wearing an old golden Greek cross I had found in Constantinople years before, and I waved it before my face and moved my lips silently. No prayers for me, no magic armour, only Richard’s letter, strapped against my arm with a length of silk. I rarely wished for the solace of the Christian faith, but at times such as this it seemed that the men winding strings of beads about their wrists or tucking little vials of holy water into their chain mail might have some small advantage over me. No, to hell with it: my shield was good English oak, and that would have to do. I thrust the cross back inside my armour as the lads bent their backs and the longboat pulled away.
Out from the shelter of the great ships came the crusaders, cautiously, little dark shapes on the bright water edging away from the fleet, which as I looked back at it seemed like a long, forested island. But as the oarsmen found their rhythm, our flotilla began to gather speed. Now we were in open water I saw with a surge of relief that I was in the midst of an army, for it had begun to seem as though I were attacking Egypt with only the eleven men in this boat. There were galleys as well as longboats, hurling themselves forward, pennants flying, men cheering. On the shore, the Saracens had begun to form up in the dunes behind the beach. It still seemed as if we were hopelessly outnumbered. I had a brief vision of myself running up the sand, waving my letter to the Sultan. Hold on, you fellows! I’m supposed to be on your side!
We were low in the water, weighed down with armour and weapons, and the rowers were sweating, bending and heaving, but with each stroke we surged towards the enemy. The lances that each man held were waving slightly in the wind. The sun was blazing down and I was already bathed in sweat myself. I could feel it running down my back and my legs. But my tongue was as dry as a sepulchre. The fear eating me was not that I would be wounded or killed, but that I would be hurt and the people tending to me would discover the letter. That would be the end of everything. I didn’t care so much for myself – though as the beach drew nearer my flesh was cringing, as if the steel was already in it – but for Iselda.
I pushed back my damp hair and drew up the hood of my hauberk, fumbling with the laces that secured the flap across my mouth and jaw. My helmet was broad-brimmed and open-faced, a chapel-de-fer as the Franks call them, and when I had put it on and tightened the strap beneath my chin I felt oddly comforted. To keep my spirits up I rapped on the crown with my knuckles. Just then there was a sharp tap, sharper than skin on steel, and I looked to find an arrow hanging from the face of my shield. Arrows were sailing in all around, but the Saracen archers were far out of range and the barbed points could not do much damage. We were getting closer, and it seemed we were moving much faster now. The swell was lifting us and pushing us on. To our left, the long shape of a galley overtook us in a slapping and churning of oars.
There was cheering from the galley, but on our longboat every man was crouched in white-lipped concentration, save for the toiling rowers, who were grunting with exertion, veins standing out on their necks and temples. Every stroke took us a boat-length nearer. I caught Guy’s eye. He nodded as if I had asked him a question. I shifted my wet-palmed grip on the shaft of my lance and fought off the urgent need to piss. An arrow sang past and buried itself in the scuppers. Every man had his shield up now, and the men behind me were holding theirs up to protect the rowers. There was a lurch and we were into the surf. The longboat pitched, the prow reared up wildly and fell, and I clung on, knees braced against the sides as there was another surge and the prow rose again, higher, higher, and as it dropped the yellow sand of the beach flashed past in a blur. A gout of spray struck me in the face and as I blinked it away, eyes stinging, the stern sank, there was a roar and a hiss, and the longboat ran aground.
‘Deus vult! Deus vult!’ God’s will! Guy was yelling, John was yelling, I was bellowing something into the pad of chain mail that covered my mouth. Grabbing the rail, I stood up, planted the heel of my lance in the sand and jumped. I landed ballock-deep in cold water, and at
once the undertow was sucking around me, almost jerking me off my feet. I must get onto the beach! Heaving against the undertow, I took a step, agonisingly slow as if in a nightmare. My helmet had tipped forward over my eyes and I shoved it back to find a patch of bare sand just ahead of me. I dragged another leg forward, the freezing water surging through the rings of mail, each footstep sinking into yielding sand. And then I was free, wading ankle-deep through foam, Guy Curtbac beside me.
‘Where are they?’ I yelled at him, and he turned to me, eyes ringed with white.
‘Don’t know!’ he shouted back. From where we stood the enemy was nowhere to be seen, though arrows were falling on us, arcing up from behind the dunes which rose sixty or so paces ahead. To left and right the foam was filled with staggering figures. The galley had run aground further out and men were struggling chest-deep. And suddenly the first horses appeared on the crest of the dunes, over to the right, then the left. I looked up and there in front of me a dun-coloured horse was standing, and astride it sat a man in white, the sunlight shining from silver arm-guards and greaves, and from the high point of his helmet. He carried a spear from which fluttered a green pennant. There was a skirling of unseen trumpets, and in a few heartbeats, which were pounding in my ears like a ram against the gates of a besieged town, the dunes were crowded with horsemen. They stood poised for a moment and then like the waves collapsing behind us they began to drop down the face of the sand hills, shrieking as they came, sand flying up in tawny clouds all around them.
Up and down the line of the surf, men were calling to one another, shouting, and out of the confusion I found I had become part of a line of men standing shoulder to shoulder. The man next to me ran forward onto the dry sand and dropped, kneeling, behind his shield, shoving the heel of his lance into the sand behind him, point levelled at the dunes. The first line of Saracens had reached the foot of the dunes, checked their horses and charged. I dropped down next to him, and as I lowered my own lance a thousand others wavered and steadied. The ground was shaking beneath us from the beat of hooves. I braced myself for the shock, searching the blur of men rushing at me for a target. On they came. ‘Deus vult! Deus vult!’ the men beside me were shouting. Everyone was shouting. My lips drew back in a mindless snarl.
And suddenly the Saracens turned. A spear’s throw from our line, they reined in and wheeled, some to the left, some to the right, and began to ride across our front, shooting arrows at us and jeering at the tops of their lungs.
‘Jesus Christ, why don’t they come on?’ said Guy. As he spoke another cry went up from the crusaders: ‘Saint Denis! Saint Denis! Montjoie et Saint Denis! ’
‘The king has landed!’ croaked Guy. ‘They fear him – the Turks fear our king!’ And he joined in the clamour.
The Saracens were hesitating. They had turned again and were urging their horses back up the slope of the dunes, sand billowing, hooves slipping, beasts squealing in panic. Over on the right, the great white and gold standard of France was flapping, pointing towards the town like a weathervane. And there was Louis, kneeling on the sand, arms raised in prayer. A party of Saracens, five hundred or more horse, reared on the lip of the dune and raced down, and it seemed that the king, one man alone or so it looked to every drenched, sweating crusader crouched behind their shield, must be swept under their hooves into the sea. The king picked up his shield and couched his lance as if he meant to charge them alone. But again, as we all gave tongue and ‘Saint Denis!’ burst from two thousand throats, the surging troop wheeled and retreated. In a long ripple the army rose to its feet and cheered. The Saracens were milling nervously above us, some riding along the crest, others appearing and disappearing as they rode down the reverse slope. Still we held, and still Louis Capet stood out in front of the shield wall, sword thrust into the sand before him, hands raised in prayer. And it must have seemed to most men that God had answered their king and delivered up the land of the Mussulmen to the army of Christ.
By the time the crossbowmen and foot soldiers had come ashore, the enemy had vanished. We formed up and charged the dunes, tearing up the gently collapsing slopes, feet slipping, shields and spears keeping us on the edge of balance, but somehow we knew the Saracens were not there and so our charge was little more than a sun-roasted dance, for what was our great army to do, all riled up and full of the anger of God? And indeed when we reached the clumps of grass at the top, we found nothing but horse-dung and flies, and the flat vastness of Egypt spread before us. At our backs, noble lords were already having their pavilions raised on the beach.
Louis sent a party towards the town to see what had happened, and before long a lone knight rode back, bareheaded, a foolish grin pasted across his face. The Saracens had gone, gone from Damietta. They were flying back towards Cairo. The town was ours. The priests were gathered there on the dunes and the army sang the ‘Te Deum Laudamus’.
Chapter Thirteen
Even now I shake my head when I remember that eight months passed from the day the crusaders rode into Damietta to when we set out again on our way to attack Cairo. Time, we are told, is immutable, but in Damietta it seemed to defy the laws imposed upon it by philosophers and trickle by as tediously as the brown waters of the Nile seeped past the city walls.
Saracen raiders were killing our soldiers every night, raiding the camps outside the walls and cutting off the heads of their victims because, it was said, the sultan was paying a bounty for every dead Christian. We found out later that the sultan had been poisoned as he campaigned in Palestine, and he had been too sick to give any orders to his army the morning we had landed. If he had been in Damietta that day, things might have been very different for us. The first charge of Saracen cavalry would doubtless have thrown us back into the sea and we would have been slaughtered. I could only bear to think about this after I had woken up the next day in a real bed. As I had knelt on the sand, as the Saracens in their silver helmets and silk robes had pranced and then charged, my head had been empty of thoughts save for the ones preparing my body for pain. So in the strange distortion of battle I had not felt relief but disappointment when the enemy had pulled back, for I had been ready to suffer. Instead, here I was, spared so that I might learn the tediums of life in a garrison town.
The king’s first act was to order an encampment to be made outside the walls for the crusader army. The king himself took over the city’s largest palace, and his brothers and their retinue joined him, but most of the lesser nobility pitched their tents in the camp. But I had never intended to live in a tent. Let them whose faith had brought them here wake up with scorpions and snakes in their beds: I would have four stone walls around me. The day we entered the town I had sent my lad Warren off to find me decent lodgings while I went with William Longspée to help the king set up a temporary court. The streets were teeming with frightened townsfolk, and the crusaders were bullying and insulting them and calling them infidel and Turkish dog, though all the Mussulmen had fled and the people who remained were Greek and Coptic Christians. But their dark skins, foreign garb and the fact that they smelled of rosewater and vetiver and not a year’s worth of sweat meant that they were, along with everyone else in this country, not really human. I had been here before, though: the captain often stopped in Damietta to trade for the strange items that sometimes arrived here from the mysterious vastness of Africa. We had bought ancient cloths painted with unreadable script and symbols, wonderful jewellery and carvings in gold and ebony and blue stone, but most of all we had bargained for mumia.
Mumia: if ever there was a reason to avoid doctors and surgeon-barbers, it would be that dark, ominous-looking powder with the smell that stings the linings of one’s nose. For the notion that drinking a solution of the ground-up corpses of long-dead, embalmed Egyptians might not kill one on the spot, let alone cure one’s apoplexy or murrain or the hundred other maladies for which the doctors would have us believe that mumia is sovereign – that has long seemed utter madness to me. Granted, it had been my good fortun
e to have Isaac of Toledo as my physician, a man who had some real knowledge of the body and its hidden workings, and who regarded those who peddled bat-shit and mustard poultices, cat piss and the rest of it as little more than paid assassins – paid, moreover, by their willing victims. We did not need to buy the scraps and corpse-clinker that looked somewhat like sea-coal, for we were not in the business of medicine, though people paid a fortune for those sorry leavings when they had been pounded into mumia. Instead, we hunted for whole cadavers or recognisable limbs or appendages: fingers were always good, as were toes, and even a shrivelled pizzle or pap could sometimes be found. All so that a bishop in Denmark might buy himself a breast of Saint Catherine, and one of the many manhoods of Saint Christopher might end up in some newly built cathedral in Spain. An entire corpse was, of course, the biggest prize, but these came on the market rarely, though the captain had spoken once or twice of a fabled source of mumia somewhere beyond Cairo. We had been going to find it one day, the captain and I, when he retired from the sea and the relic trade. It was a jest of ours: we would gather an army of ancient corpses and send them out hither and yon over the face of the credulous world to do our bidding. Did we talk of it when we were besieged in Montségur? Perhaps, but we ourselves were the walking dead then, and soon enough death came for Captain de Montalhac.
Damietta was not a very pretty town: fifty years ago another crusade had taken it and the Franks, as they are wont to do, had knocked the place about. Since then there had been much rebuilding in the airy, elegant Saracen fashion, but the walls, and the people, knew all about infidel soldiers. I went and paid my respects to Louis, and then took myself off to the merchants’ quarter to see if any of my old business acquaintances were still here. The first two doors I knocked upon seemed to belong to empty houses, and I was making my way to a third house, an old palace close to the walls where a Jewish dealer in silks and curios lived and worked, when I heard footsteps behind me. Ordinarily this would not have been a surprise, for these streets were usually teeming with people. But today the place was sepulchral, and all the noise was coming from beyond the walls, where the camp was being set up and the soldiery were toasting their victory. Louis had not let the army inside the walls, for I had heard that he intended to distribute the spoils in an orderly fashion, without the usual looting. So when I heard footfalls I turned quickly and loosened my sword, expecting to find an angry Damiettan looking to settle his score with one of the invaders.
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