The White Cross

by Richard Masefield

  ‘Do you not see it, man? We either have to take ’er on together as a fleet, or run three ways at once and pray to Christ that two of us can find the speed to shake ’er off. Porco Madonna! We stand no chance against that bugger on our own!’

  By then the other vessel’s massive size was obvious, with turbaned figures in her waist and on her castles visible to give her scale. But none of us that day, the shipmaster included, had credited our leader with a quarter of the courage he possessed. Ignoring the profanity, Archbisop Baldwin raised his head to look around him at the sailors, at knights and squires awaiting his instruction, and gave a gentle smile. ‘I do believe King Saul may have suggested something similar to David,’ he said, ‘when that young optimist stood up to face Goliath with nothing but a pebble in a leather sling.

  ‘Never place a limit on the power of God!’ His voice, restored to sermon pitch, reached all on deck. ‘Our Blessed Saviour has brought us here to crush the infidel, my friends, for His own greater glory,’ the old archbishop cried. ‘So let us do so in His name. We are in God’s hands now!’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A hundred bare feet thudded on the larchwood boards. Red-capped sailors ran in all directions, scaling ladders, reefing canvas to the master’s bellowed orders, cursing in Italian. Galèriers struck oars. Knights and squires collided, locking weapons, jostling for places at the rails.

  ‘Here, Sir Garon. Here my lord!’ Jos panted up with my new shield, my sword, my arbalest, my cocking belt and two sac-quivers stuffed with quarrels. ‘I guessed the bow?’ he said just as it slipped from his sweating fingers to clatter down between us on the deck.

  Before I could retrieve it, the shayan opened fire. We heard the chok and whistle of the mangonels. Then something no bigger than a flying fist hurtled past our heads to splash into the water.

  ‘Grenades! Look out on deck!’ a voice cried harshly through a hailer. As two more missiles plummeted into the sea, I knew where I had heard the name before. A sailor in our first week out from port had warned of Sarsen bottle-bombs made out of clay to look like pomegranates, and called ‘Granadas’ or ‘grenades’ after the place in Moorish Spain best known for growing those strange fruit. Another struck the belfry of our forward castle even as the thought passed through my mind. Struck, shattered and ignited! With a sound like gusting wind, a blossom of dazzling blue and yellow flame exploded where it landed.

  Fire flooded the forecastle, splashing onto clothing and bare limbs. Dripping through the hatches onto the naked oarsmen. Burning, even on the metal surface of the bell. A squealing rat, its fur on fire, lay writhing on the deck. Men shrieked and thrashed, danced in the flames’ embrace. Flesh hissed and shrivelled. Others ran to aid them, stamping on the fires which lapped the upper deck before they could consume the mangonel that armed it – efforts which, if anything, made matters worse. For nothing, as we all had heard, could quench Greek fire, but camels’ piss or…

  Vinegar! I suddenly recalled the raw taste of the wine I’d spat onto the deck that morning, a vintage now so acid that few of the company could stomach it. ‘Wine! Fetch wine!’ I heard my own voice, and then Jos’s, shouting wildly. I thrust my squire toward the forward hatch. ‘Now, now! As much as they can find. The wine will…’

  ‘Put it out, Sir Garry?’ Jos hazarded

  ‘Yes, God willing, so it will.’

  And so it did. In less time than I could have hoped, a tun of sour Bordeaux was hauled onto the deck and broached, its contents slopped in buckets hand-to-hand to quench the fire in clouds of evil smelling steam.

  We were too late to help one wretched human torch, who in his agony leapt from the rail to flounder screaming in the burning water, before his own weight dragged him down. But through the steam the mangonel appeared unscathed. The mangonel was saved.

  By then the ships were closing, and the bombardiers lost range. As it bore down on us with single-minded purpose, the Saracen shayan looked more like a devouring monster than any kind of ship, with double banks of oars for fins, a wrinkled skin of canvas sagging from its prow – and above, what else but the great gaping head of an infuriated dragon!

  ‘Christ’s plague, the bugger’s moving! They can move its head!’

  Behind the shield he held for me, my squire’s blue eyes grew rounder. ‘Next thing they’ll have it belching fire,’ he breathed, as unbelievably the segmented serpent neck dipped forward.

  Somewhere behind it in the vessel’s prow a turban moved.

  A red spark gleamed.

  Then with a mighty roar, a jet of living yellow flame shot from the dragon’s mouth – to prove Jos right and set the water blazing in its path!

  For me the time was past for horror or surprise. The fire, the wine, the screams, the sulphurous smoke had brought me up to a killing pitch. Then when I heard the shrill whinny of an excited horse from somewhere down below, I knew it instantly, and felt a surge of pride to think of Raoul straining in his sling to join the action. With taut nerves and tauter bowstrings, we waited only for the order to loose bolts. I needed action too. My target was the man directing the fire-breathing creature – and I could see his gore already sprinkling its painted head. I needed blood!

  Archbishop Baldwin standing close behind, was looking in the same direction. ‘What is it underneath that man,’ he called up to the master in the smoking prow, ‘I mean the platform he is perched on?’

  ‘Yer Grace, we must change course or we’re roast meat!’

  ‘When we’re opposed, Saint Gregory instructs us to regard it as a test of faith. Is it some kind of a receptacle, the platform? A reservoir perhaps for feu grégeois?’

  ‘Most likely ’tis, yer Grace. They use a pump and siphon, so they say, to spray out the petra’olea an’ naptha an’ whatever else they ’ave in there. But mark me Sir, they’ll ram us on this course. We must, we ’ave to…’

  ‘Of what construction is it, would you say, this reservoir?’

  ‘Iron for sure under the timber cladding. But yer Grace you must allow…’

  ‘And would I be correct in thinking that the liquid it contains is volatile, combustible, a mixture that is likely to explode on impact?’

  ‘’Tis ’ow they use it in grenades Sir, an’ why they seldom move it but by water.’

  ‘So if we were to strike this metal reservoir a heavy blow? Say with a sling-stone or ballista bolt, fired broadside at the closest range? Could the effect be that of a grenade of many times the size and power? To blow the Philistine apart?’

  I saw the master stare at the old man in silence. And whether in his heart he thought the risk was justified or no, he acted with the swiftest resolution. In the bare time it took to shout the order, he had our steersmen hauling on the rudder, and the larboard side galèriers increasing strokes to help bring round our prow.

  A warbling, ungodly battle cry rose from the decks and walkways of the other vessel, to raise the small hairs on a hundred Christian necks. Already hordes of arbalesters lined its gunwales, withholding fire as we came up in range – and then the drums, a rapidly increasing beat, as with a surge of power, the shayan’s oarsmen jerked her up in four short strokes to ramming speed.

  Archbishop Baldwin’s order to loose bolts came late, and through a hail of Sarsen darts. They sizzled inboard like giant hornets.

  Steel points splintered woodwork, thudded into human flesh.

  Trusting Jos’ skill to shield us both, I kept my eye fixed on the man behind the dragon’s head, ignoring the blood pulsing in my own. My breath was short, but nothing trembled. Remembering my practice at the butts, I aimed unhurriedly. I raised the trigger to release the string and was already bending with my right foot in the crossbow’s stirrup to reload, already lining up the backsight with the head of my next quarrel – before I saw the first had missed.

  Unharmed, the man behind the fearsome mask was turning its demonic face towards us. Behind him on the turret reservoir two others worked the handles of the force-pump. Perched by the dragon’s arching
neck a fourth man held the touch-torch ready to ignite the spurting fluid…

  With a new target in my sights, I fired again and watched the spiral-feathered quarrel drill the air to find its mark – and felt a vaulting, savage thrill of conquest, as my victim with the torch still clutched in his dead hand, plunged head-first into the sea.

  ‘Well shot, Hadderton!’ My friend Sir Mark le Jeune clapped me on the back as he ran by.

  ‘Clear the decks!’ the master bellowed through his hailer while I stooped to load again. ‘Up on the castles lads or in the hold, wherever there’s a space.’

  Below us we could hear the bos’n’s mate withdraw the chains which linked the oarsmen’s shackles.

  The infidels shot running Christians like foxes bolting from a stand of corn. Above me on the poop-deck ladder, a dart passed through the body of a man to burst out from his belly in a fount of blood and yellow fluid. It was Sir Mark. Another missile struck the side-rail of the ladder, barely missing Jos’s hand. Even before we reached Archbishop Baldwin’s ragged awning, to see our straining oarsmen through the hatch, it seemed that nothing could prevent our little ship from being crushed.

  Two shrills of the bos’n’s pipe were all it took to show my perfect ignorance of sea warfare.

  At the first short whistle, every oarsman on the steerward side raised his blade clear of water, as those to larboard executed one more powerful stroke in perfect time. To send the ship about so violently that half the men on deck were thrown onto their knees. At the second and protracted whistle, the larboard rowers to a man leapt from their benches, knelt and shipped their oars. Surprised, the Saracen had no time to warn her crew before our bronze rambade ripped through the canvas draping of her hull, snapping banks of oars like twigs, to crush the bodies of the oarsmen between their jerking looms.

  Up on the foc’sle of the tarida, and through another hail of darts, the bombardiers were bringing round our mangonel for the close broadside that we needed to explode the reservoir. It was a chance that would not come again. Six men strove frantically with ropes and levers to move the heavy engine. Two more worked the winch and windlass, to drag its beam into position. Another slid the heavy fifty-pounder stone into the sling spoon. But even as they cursed and fumbled, a second torch was lit behind the dragon’s deadly gape – and it moved round to find them.

  No time to pray or wait another instant. The first to reach it, tripped the mangon’s slip-hook. But too late! Our vessel in that very moment gave a lurch to steerboard. The catapult’s great beam flew up, to strike its padded stop and shoot the stone too high, too wide. To miss the reservoir by yards.

  The wounded dragon roared and took its vengeance. A terrifying flood of liquid fire engulfed our bombardiers in an inferno. To bring them death in dancing agony – and to destroy the Christian catapult completely.

  Bombarded, burning, helplessly adrift, our tarida had but one chance more to save herself from immolation. Mounted at the taffrail, a pivoted ballista in form much like an outsized crossbow, waited for a last shot at the shayan’s reservoir, before the fire that lapped the poop deck ladder swept up to consume us.

  The range of the machine was upward of two hundred paces. So when the shayan’s forward turret swung into its sights across mere feet of water, it hardly could have missed.

  We saw a glint, rotating vanes of brass attached to steel. We heard the violent clang of one metal in collision with. We even had the time to judge the thing a failure… before a mighty fist of light and heat punched through our ship. To send us scudding landward like a leaf across a pond.

  It’s curious the way explosions work. You feel them when they happen as a single blinding force. Then afterwards they seem to do it all again, but at a slower speed. Send wood and iron and bits of human flesh cartwheeling through the smoke. Set fire to hair. Scorch skin. Blind vision. Deafen hearing. Shoot red-green colours through your brain!

  Is it the sound that hits you first? Or the searing heat? Or the choking blast of sulphur? And how long does it take? How long before you know that you’re alive? How long before you see that what is blocking out the light is your own hand?

  How long before the pain comes as you work to quench the flames about you?

  How long before you’re able to thank God in Heaven for arms that work, and legs that bear you up, and all that’s still intact between them?

  Away to stern, the dragon lay without a head. Billows of black smoke, coiled through with brilliant sapphire flame, rose from its shattered hull to cloud the evening sky.

  ‘Deo gratias, the day is ours!’

  My Lord Archbishop’s face was smudged with soot, and without his eyebrows he looked mightily surprised.

  ‘Aye, an’ thank The Good Man while we’re at it for sending our mangon stone well wide,’ the ship’s master recommended from behind his shoulder. ‘For if we’d ’ud struck ’er broadside as we meant to, I’m ’ere to tell yer Grace we’d all ’ave flown to heaven, or the other place, already cooked an’ jointed!’

  It had taken every man who could still stand, and all our barrels of Bordeaux, to douse the fires on deck. And even then, long snakes of flame continued to dance round us in the water while the sun sank slowly back into the sea.

  That night it was impossible to sleep for the unceasing cries of those who had been burned. The archbishop with his chaplains moved quietly round the ship – salving wounds with goose fat, offering last rites and giving comfort where they could – while Jos and I sat in the poop beneath the remnants of his awning, hands clasped about our knees, to talk and talk through all the hours of darkness.

  Too thoroughly excited to take heed of his burned foot or my raw neck and shoulder, we kept recalling for each other our first sight of the shayan, the first grenades, the dragon’s moving head. Comparing our reactions at each moment of engagement. Re-living every movement to the point of our explosive victory.

  ‘Except for you remembering the wine, My Lord, we’d none of us be here to tell the tale.’

  I’d saved us all, Jos told me proudly, Archbishop, chaplains, knights, squires, crew and horses. All who could be saved. It was a thing to wonder at, Jos said – and I agreed.

  The way I saw it on the poop that night, I’d just survived the greatest triumph of my life!

  Soon after Tierce next day, in a flat calm, our charred and tattered tarida was rowed to shore. At dawn, Conrad de Montferrat, the Governor of Tyre, had sent out fresh water in two skiffs. Archbishop Baldwin and his chaplains were invited to return with them into the city. But our gallant little leader had insisted on remaining to see our vessel safe to port.

  ‘Oh Lord, we come unto the Land of Promise, which Thou hast given us through Moses and our dear Saviour Jesus Christ,’ he cried out from the prow. ‘We pledge our lives this day to its deliverance!’

  Built on an island joined to shore by a long causeway constructed by the Greek King Alexander, Tyre was one of few seaports in Palestine remaining still in Christian hands. Which meant that refugees were packed like herrings in a barrel in every souk and church and bagnio in the city, with those who could not get inside spread out in camps along the white sand beach. The people who came out to stare, the mongrel offspring as we understood of Christian settlers and Arab women, were bare above the waist, their women cloaked, their children naked or in rags. We’d often heard that Outremen had dogs’ heads on their shoulders. Or but a single eye set in between their nipples. But these folk they called ‘Pullani’, were formed much as we were ourselves, except that for the most part they were small and slender with dark skin and jet black hair.

  The outlines of the rocks and trees, the blue smudges of the distant hills already shimmered in the morning heat. To disembark, we berthed in the deepwater basin on the south side of the causeway, its stone flags rolling as it seemed beneath our feet as we set them on terra firma.

  My Raoul, thank God, was not one of the horses that had died at sea. But if I’d pictured him descending from the ship with any of th
e force he’d used to enter it, then I was disappointed. I barely recognised the animal that Jos led through the hull port, blinking at the glare. No longer fearful of the ramp and near too weak to stumble down it, he moved stiff-jointed like a blindfold well-horse.

  ‘Poor old bugger might as well be stuffed and drawn on hobby wheels,’ Jos said as he led out a beast with jutting bones, and weeping sores attracting flies in places where the sling had chafed his belly and the skin behind his forelegs.

  A black-robed deputation from Josias, the Tyrian archbishop whose pleas to Christendom had launched the Kings’ Croisade, was waiting for our own archbishop before a huddle of low buildings on the causeway. Long trains of donkeys bore our freight to where a strange group of ‘jamal’ (or as the seamen called them, camels) squatted in the sand like huge dun-coloured geese, their long mule faces set in haughty sneers.

  John Hideman must have seen us limping into port and ran out along the harbour wall to meet us, a sunburned and familiar figure. He spoke at first so fast that all his words were jumbled, although we gathered he and Bert were lodged already in the stables of the Bishop’s Palace with all our baggage and the mules. But all the talk in Tyre, he told us as we fell in line to march into the city, was that the Christian Queen of Jerusalem, a cousin to our own King Richard, had died of fever in the siege of Moslem Acre a day’s ride down the coast.

  ‘Ye may be sure King Guy, who lays siege to the place in our behalf is fair beside hisself with grief,’ John said, ‘whiles Saladin sits laughing in his camp up in the hills at the dear man’s misfortune.’

  The colour of the water on either side of Alexander’s causeway was a fierce blue. The heat pressed in around us like a cloak. Laden camels stalked ahead on knobbled feet, their thin heels chafing as they moved. Ahead of us, the white walls of the city had been daubed from base to battlement with a limewash of crushed sea-shells which glittered in the sun.

  After so long at sea I walked wide-legged at Raoul’s tail. I could have wept to see him scrape and stumble on the even road, and might have thought him finished as a destrier – but for the clarions that sounded to announce our entry.