I was using my sword to hack the arrow-shafts from my shield when the Templar next to me gave a shout.
‘They are bringing Greek fire!’ he yelled. I looked, and there in the ranks of Saracens, who had withdrawn a few yards, smoke was rising. Then the ranks parted and men dressed in long leather jerkins ran out, carrying earthenware pots in their thickly gloved hands. Smoke and flame poured out of the vessels’ mouths. Flanking the fire-carriers, other men bore large shields. Some stumbled as arrows and quarrels found them, and one quarrel hit a pot and the man holding it vanished in a column of fire. But most got close enough to fling their firepots at the barricade, and instantly the air was full of roaring, crackling flame and tarry stink of the burning liquid.
‘Damn them!’ cried de Sonnac. He couched his lance and charged the fire-carriers. Skewering one, he rode over the writhing body and flung himself, full-tilt, at the wall of Saracens. Behind him, a wedge of Templars followed, and I was among them, for my horse was a Templar beast and pushed itself to the middle of the pack, while I was too weak to turn its head. But the Saracens were indeed a wall of armoured flesh, and though we hacked at them we were forced back until we were fighting in the very heart of the burning barricade. Arrows were falling all around, some of them catching fire as they fell. I saw the Templar who had come to invite me into de Sonnac’s company go down with an arrow in his face. Another man’s horse stumbled and flung its rider into a pyre of flaming beams. The Grand Master, blood running from his eye socket, was thrashing about him with his sword, and shouting I urged my horse through the inferno. At that moment there was a deafening bang. The Grand Master’s horse reared and threw him backwards, over his cantle and onto the ground. There was another great bang, and a section of the barricade, still upright though laced with flame, vanished in a cloud of sparks and flying wood. Guillaume de Sonnac, who was struggling to his feet, clapped his hands to his face. Blood poured from between his fingers.
‘Oh, Christ my saviour, I am blinded!’ he cried.
Three Templars dismounted and rushed to him. There was another detonation and then another. My own horse was starting to dance and scream and so I swung out of the saddle and jumped clear of his flailing hooves. A dazzling flash, and I found myself grovelling on the burned-over ground, my ears ringing. As I picked myself up I caught sight of a tall figure pointing towards me. Next to him were two stout Saracens in the leather jerkins of fire-carriers. And they held clay pots, but these were small, and there were sparks, not flames, coming from them. As I watched, they hurled them, and a moment later two more detonations rang out among the Templars. The tall figure … What part of my mind was still thinking clearly in the middle of that hell I cannot imagine, but somehow I realised he was not a Saracen. And I knew him.
Ducking behind my shield, I ran at the nearest soldier, knocking him down and jumping over his body. Another man thrust his spear at me and I hacked off the point. A horse ran in front of me and I shoved my sword into the rider’s leg, ducked under the hooves and came up with my eyes full of dust. Another Templar was at my side, chanting something, some song, over and over again, as he slashed away. It was the Lord’s Prayer, and it broke up at the forgiving of trespasses, for an arrow had caught him in the throat and as he dropped to his knees, three Saracens rushed him and struck off his head. I swung at one of them, missed, and then an eddy opened in the seethe of men and horses and for a moment the battle shifted from where I stood, marooning me in a clearing surrounded by shrieking horror. And there at the other side of the clearing was the tall man who was not a Saracen, stooping over a large wooden basket.
Without thinking I raised my sword and sprinted, silently, though my breath rang in my ears like the bellowing of a gored bull. And as I ran I told myself that this could not be Remigius, the murderous fop, Isaac’s murderer. But I had glimpsed him in Damietta, and as he looked up and saw me nearly upon him I saw I was right. With a French curse he threw one of the infernal pots at me. It struck my shield and shattered harmlessly, but I was already jumping over the basket. The top edge of my shield, caught him under the chin and he went down like a dead man.
But he was not dead. I landed on his chest with my full weight and felt ribs give way beneath me. He bleated, opened his eyes and whinnied in pain and fear. Shaking off my shield, I put the edge of my sword against his throat.
‘Remigius, you fucking swine!’ I hissed in his ear. ‘This is well met, oh! Very well met!’
‘You Ghibbeline pox-master!’ he wheezed. ‘I thought I saw you die in Mansourah …’
‘Has the pope whored you to the Turk, then?’ I dug my knees harder into his ribs.
‘What do you know of the Holy Father? When the godly fight the godless there is no morality, you milk-fed usurer!’
‘Someone was coming to learn about the Drug,’ I hissed, pressing on the blade. ‘It was you, of course it was you. Doing Cardinal John’s bidding, even if it meant treason against a Christian king?’
‘Christian king! Christian king!’ parroted Remigius. ‘Your Christian king – I thought you were a heretic yourself, maggot – must needs be kept here so that he doesn’t meddle. And your emperor, that fucking lover of Mussulmen, is missing his cousin! If Louis Capet must die here so that Frederick von Hohenstaufen dies in Italy, then that is fair exchange, and God will know His friends!’
An arrow whistled and buried itself in the ground next to Remigius’s ear. He winced and turned his head, drawing his skin across the blade of my sword. A trickle of blood ran from under the steel.
‘And the Drug – was it worth dying for, my friend? A bang and a flash – not enough to make the world tremble, after all.’
‘The Drug … The Drug!’ mocked Remigius. ‘The Drug is a toy. I’ve been having fun. But your letter, eh, Zennorius? Do you still have it? When were you going to deliver it, lad? But no matter! I have spared you the trouble.’
Then I remembered the words of Matthieu d’Allaines in Damietta: Are you so prideful to think that the Holy Father placed this responsibility in no other hands but yours?
‘Ah, he sees!’ Remigius gasped. ‘You should have given your bank over to the pope with a bow and a smile, usurer! We did try to warn you—’
‘Warn me?’ I bellowed at him, and leaned on my sword.
Remigius did not answer. He was trying to force my blade away from his flesh, but the edge was biting into his hands. ‘Is that why you killed Isaac? Just to warn me?’
‘Yes, to warn you. But you spat on the Church. And look! Your dear friend died in vain, didn’t he? Because you are going to die here, and all your money, you heretic fuck, will be the Holy Father’s—’
An arrow struck my helmet with a tink; another grazed Remigius’s shoulder. A spent crossbow bolt hit my leg and pierced the mail, burying itself an inch into my thigh. I looked down at the man beneath me. The suave, loose-limbed dandy from Florence was writhing, groping with one bloody hand for the basket of exploding pots. I leaned down and whispered in his ear.
‘I might forgive you for being a traitorous serpent, because you were right about me: it takes one to know one. But I don’t forgive you for my friend Isaac, or William Longspée.’ And I put all my weight behind the blade.
The battle was flowing back, filling up the space it had made. I dodged a speeding horseman who did not notice me, and began to run back towards the pyre of the Templar barricades. My fingers were wound in Remigius’s hair; his head bounced against my leg. I had no thought but that I would show it to the king, and reveal the great plot against him. I slashed and bludgeoned my way through hedges of fighting men. There was Guillaume de Sonnac’s banner, just ahead …
There was a bang, and a horse reared up beside me and threw its rider. The man – Saracen or Christian, I did not see – landed across my back and we both crashed to the ground. I squirmed, sword trapped beneath me, and kicked at him in a frenzy, at last getting my feet between his legs and thrusting him away from me. Head singing, eyes dancing with smoke and sparks
, I staggered up. I was deaf. Where was my sword? I found it and picked it up. And the head of Remigius? I cast about me like a sleepwalker but only found that I was standing amid drifts of human jetsam: limbs, bodies, half-bodies, livers, lungs and lights … And amid this vast butcher’s stall, one man’s head was lost like a snowflake in a blizzard.
We had won another great victory, or so I discovered later, and we called it the Field of Fariskur. The Saracens were beaten back. They had lost great numbers, and had fled back to Mansourah. The camp was ringing with tales of courage and single combat, of hordes of infidels cut down by a single knight. But these tales were heard by far fewer than might have listened to them before the battle, because there had been a great slaughter among us as well. The Grand Master of the Temple was dead, blinded in his remaining eye and cut to pieces. In truth, there were almost no Templars left at all, and none who remembered that I was a hero, so that was a small mercy. The king spent the next week giving thanks to God, and as I watched the endless rituals, and saw that this was how Louis kept his courage stoked – for the King of France might have been a fool in matters of the soul, but he was as brave as any man, and suffered, without complaint, the same afflictions that tormented the lowliest of his army – I realised that I could not tell him about Remigius and Pope Innocent. I had no proof, and now that the lunacy of battle had worn off, it seemed a ludicrous story. I knew it was not, but how to make the most Christian king on God’s earth see that? I would be called a traitor or a heretic, no doubt – which the letter hanging round my neck would prove I was – or simply a Ghibbeline. And if I did press home my case, what then? Louis would not retreat. Nothing was stronger than the oath he had taken, not even the truth. God, save us from those who believe in You.
Besides, I had decided that I was not going to fulfil Remigius’s prophesy and die here. I wanted nothing more than to see Iselda again. What we would do, what would happen next, I put out of my mind entirely. For a week, as I tried to mend my wounds despite the best efforts of the camp surgeons, I thought of nothing more than the door of the Ca’ Kanzir opening, showing me the wall, the vine, the fig tree and the old stone bench, stairs that led up to the main floor, the ancient well in the centre of the courtyard, and leaning against it, Iselda, hair like a butterfly’s wing, holding out her hands to me. And again and again I threw my spirit into her arms, as the kites and the vultures feasted on the rich mulch of Mussulman and Christian flesh that ringed the camp, and the flags of the Saracen army waved, bright and confident, beyond the canal.
Chapter Eighteen
The Nile Delta, March 1250
The army was dying. The crusade was already dead. For weeks we had squatted in front of Mansourah – laying siege to it, so we told ourselves – without supplies, without news from Damietta, constantly raided and harassed by the Saracens. They knew the truth about us, of course. It was bloody obvious, as I would have told my English companions, had any of them still lived. We were, every one of us, sick with the scorbutus, or with the bloody flux. Quartan fever had struck us, and was carrying off anyone already brought low by other afflictions. Almost no one had come through the battle of Shrove Tuesday without a wound, and in the filth and heat of the delta, wounds festered, limbs blackened and men died. I could barely walk ten paces without my guts convulsing and voiding themselves, but I had managed to keep my wound clean and it was healing. Others were not so lucky: the sweet foulness of gangrene was ever present, wafting with the vapours of watery shit, unburied corpses and scorbutic breath. No one can get out of Mansourah, men would say to each other. And why would they want to? I said to myself. To get their feet dirty in our sewage? The Saracens were perfectly safe where they were. And if they stayed put for another month, we would all be dead where we stood. But the truth was plainer even than that. We were here on the bank of the Nile, huddled within our rough fortifications, while all around us the Saracen armies roamed at will. We were under siege ourselves, but not a man admitted it.
For a sort of madness had taken hold of the Christians. It seemed that no man opened his chapped and rotting mouth except to crow about the great victories of Shrove Tuesday and the first Friday of Lent, when it must have been plain to the dullest clodhopper that we had on both those days fought the enemy off with great loss to ourselves, and only narrowly avoided total disaster. It was as if no one had noticed that barely twenty men out of hundreds had come back from Mansourah alive. As one of those men I had tried to tell my story, but the truth had already been decided upon, and I was too weak and sickened to insist.
A few men had managed, by strength of will or character, to keep hold of their reason and humanity. The king was one of them. Louis had the scorbutus, and he was becoming as blotched and stinking as the lowest foot soldier, but he seemed not to care. In fact he told me his sickness was a blessing from the Lord, for it brought him closer to the suffering of his army. Because I had been in Mansourah when his brother was killed, Louis had made me one of his companions, so that I now belonged to the close-knit company of command, along with the king’s surviving brothers, Gautier de Châtillon, Jean de Joinville and the other men of high rank who had lived through the carnage thus far. It was an honour, but it did not mean much: slightly better food and slightly more of it; wine that was less sour. It was Joinville who made me welcome at first, for I was not known to most of the nobles save as an exalted sort of merchant, a man who had earned his money, forsooth. But soon I was just one more knight, a brother amongst brothers, and while this ridiculous honour had come just when it had ceased to have much meaning, I was glad of it, for it relieved the gnawing loneliness that had dogged me since leaving Damietta.
It was nine days after the battle for the camp. The sun was blazing down. There was a crowd of men down at the water’s edge, braving the badly aimed crossbow bolts that flew at them every now and again. They were fishing for eels, which along with the plump rats that infested the reed beds were the only meat any of us had eaten for a long while. The Nile was full of them, though, and eels are tasty food, so it seemed as though things could be far worse. I was cleaning my sword, greasing it with eel-fat, when there was a sudden commotion from the river. Men were crying out and cursing at the tops of their lungs. Sheathing my sword, I joined the crowd that was running down to see what the trouble was.
The men on the bank were pointing upstream. I shaded my eyes against the glare. Out in the middle of the river, in the sluggish brown wavelets, round shapes were bobbing. I saw one, then four, then nine. And then I lost count. It seemed as if great pale bubbles were coming up out of the riverbed, rising like marsh gas in a fen. They were drifting down towards the pontoon bridge that separated the two halves of the camp, and as they came nearer I saw what they were.
The men who had died in the battle for Mansourah, and those who had been killed beyond our lines in the battle for the camp, had been stripped and flung into the river by the Saracens, Christian and Mussulman alike. They had sunk in the slack water, but now, bloated with putrefaction, they were returning to the world. First one by one, then in clusters and finally in a wretched, stinking shoal, they drifted down and struck the low side of the bridge, and began to pile up, until by the afternoon a dog could have walked from bank to bank upon corpses.
But now, men were down on their knees, puking into the water, baskets of eels were tipped over, their contents squirming away between our feet. More eels were busy out in the river. Where the first corpses were catching on the bridge the water was alive, seething, and we were near enough to see what was making the ferment: a black, roiling legion of eels, some of them grotesque monsters as thick as a man’s arm, fought with countless tiny fishes and swarms of water-insects as they rushed to devour this carrion feast. Flies were swarming from every corner of Egypt, so it seemed, for in a few short minutes the droning of their wings became unbearable.
‘Mother of God, we’ve been eating those eels!’ gasped a man next to me.
‘Did you think they’d been eating honey cak
es, down there in the mud? Don’t be a fucking fool,’ snapped another, but I noted that he was pea-green under his sunburn.
The dead were hauled out by a troop of ruffians, the dregs of the Christian army, and the king paid them good money to do it, though if any of them lived to spend their reward back home I did not hear about it. It took a good week. The corpses were dragged up onto the bridge with bill-hooks and examined by men with tar-soaked rags wrapped round their noses and mouths. Those that were circumcised – should the cadaver be fortunate enough to have kept its wedding tackle from the teeth of the marauding eels – were rolled across and dropped into the river on the other side, where they were free to drift away. The Christian bodies were dragged to the bank and laid out in rows, and men could be seen walking up and down, pausing to look into a face to see if it was a friend, a father or a brother. But they all looked the same: tight, bulging sacks of corruption, each face a swollen, greenish-grey mass, like old pease porridge crudely formed into a blurred mockery of ears, nose, mouth. They might never have been men at all. A vile, dark liquor seeped from them, luring insects and other creatures that might have been conjured from the fevered dreams of we who still lived. The king went down to look for his brother, but death and the river had hidden the prince and the villain behind the same appalling mask.
I wondered if Longspée was lying amongst that putrid company. For I missed my friend. I could not mourn him – it is hard to mourn when the air is almost palpable with mortality – but I found myself grieving for his children, whom I had never met. They would be at home, drinking in life as children do, quite unaware of all this. I kept thinking of them, two girls and two boys holding hands, walking up and down the rows of melting dead men, searching for their father. And then I would remember how nearly the arrow had taken me and not Longspée, and think how much better it would have been if he had lived and I had died. I would have only left Iselda behind: Longspée had been cut out of a family.
The Fools’ Crusade Page 23