The White Cross

by Richard Masefield

  I counted up to five before the thunder followed, and was already on the downhill track, before the next flash lit the gleaming roofs of Lewes.

  The storm retreated, thumping and bumping as it went – and the rain had settled to a steady drizzle by the time I crossed the river to duck in through the Saxon Gate. I closed my ears to what the sentry shouted after me and hurried up the hill. The normal bustle of the place was dampened by the weather. But there were others sloshing through the puddles, or wrapped in cloaks like me and sheltering in doorways.

  All of them with predatory stares and grasping hands. All capable of violence!

  I kept as far away from them as possible, sticking to the centre of the road. I had rehearsed what I would say to those they’d set to guard the fortress. But when it came to it, there was but one old porter in the fortress gate-house – an aged individual in a gleaming kettle hat with brows like besoms and a forest of white bristles on his chin.

  Quite as repulsive as the rest!

  ‘If you’re the one ’as got away I’d like to see the other feller,’ he said in French, when he had taken in my draggled hair and bruised, discoloured face. His teeth were rotten. I smelt his evil breath – thought suddenly of Hugh above me open-mouthed. Began to shake.

  ‘I am Elise of Haddertun,’ I said as steadily as I could manage. ‘The Countess of Warenne will vouch for me if you will send her word. I wish to be admitted.’

  ‘Wish all ye like. My Lady’s off abroad, an’ won’t be back ’til Hallowmas.’ The porter spat into the moat. ‘Constable ’as charge ’til then, an’ ’e won’t vouch for no one.’

  I stared at the rude old man in silence. In all my haste to get away it had never crossed my mind that the Warennes, who always came to Lewes in the summer, might this year have made other plans.

  ‘So what ye got in there? T’other feller’s head?’ The porter pointed with his pike at the wet bundle I still clutched under my wet cloak.

  And why is it men imagine that a joke is all you need to set the world to rights? Why are they so convinced of their own cleverness that they can’t see the pain they inflict on women with their endless subjugation. With their taunting jibes and noxious, thrusting bodies? That’s what I thought of the old porter at the fortress gate.

  But here alone? Am I so sure they’re all the same?

  The rain had stopped by then. The porter added something risible about a butcher’s shop and brawn. But I had turned across the wet boards of the bridge, to cross the street and make my way between the puddles to the alley where the moneylender lived. The one man in the town that I could trust.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Emir’s Palace, Acre: August 1191

  ABLUTION

  In fact King Richard’s bathtime.

  Of all the many decorated courts and cabinets inside the palace of Saint Jean d’Acre, the most exquisite is a first floor chamber, once used by the Byzantine princess, Maria Comnena, and more recently by Emir Baha-uddin Karakush. The King has allocated smaller, plainer apartments within the palace to his wife and sister and the little maid from Cyprus, to save this architectural jewel for his own use.

  Mercifully undamaged by the Christian bombardiers, its walls are tiled in turquoise, terre verte and carnelian, in an endlessly repeated pattern to signify God’s infinite capacity. Friezed in gold with calligraphic surahs from the Qur’an, they’re set at intervals with polished copper mirrors framed in porphyry, reflecting sunlight from the chamber’s gilded dome. Its floor is an elaborate mosaic composition of green fronds and lily pads, with swollen buds surrounding an enormous open lily flower. Enclosed within the lily’s petals carved in marble, are forty gallons of hot water, perfumed with spikenard and sweet basil – with at the very centre of the blossom, singing cheerfully and lounging like an outsized worm in an exploded bud, the nakedly pink person of Ricardus Rex.

  Wallowing and wreathed in steam, as he has been each morning since he first occupied the emir’s palace, King Richard in a high good humour entertains his usual press of courtiers and minions with one of his great-grandfather, Guilhem de Poitou’s, obscenely graphic chansons.

  ‘Eight days I fucked them at a frantic rate

  One hundred times and eighty-eight!’

  The King’s bass voice, roughly in tune, reverberates around the chamber.

  ‘My tackle afterwards was in a state;

  Sweet Jesus it was sore!

  And I was shagged and shattered to the core –

  Shagged and shattered to the core!’

  An exhibitionist like Richard is bound to shock, and to take pleasure in the shocking. So, singing still, he stands to soap his testicles; then poses with one foot on the mounting stool for ewerers to rinse him – just as his English Bishop, Hubert Walter, is announced.

  ‘Hubert, greetings!’ he booms expansively with water deluging from acres of clean pink flesh. ‘Come in, come here man. Don’t just stand there like some randy novice gazing at my bollocks!’

  The bishop does as he’s commanded, concealing his alarm at being granted quite so much of the royal presence, and carrying the smell of horse sweat though the perfumed chamber.

  ‘So tell us, has the old fox finally agreed our terms? Come Hubert, spit it out.’

  ‘My Liege, the Sultan Saladin of Egypt and Syria begs leave to wish you long life. He sends you salutations from his camp at Ayadiyeh with the gift of a fine ruby.’

  The Bishop, with his companion envoys, de Quincey and de Préaux, makes his obeisance, whilst trying to ignore the lowest of the three thick mats of reddish fur that still shed moisture from his monarch’s gleaming body.

  ‘He bade us inform you, Sire, that a further fourteen hundred Christian captives have reached his stronghold of Kharruba, to add to those he has already freed.’

  ‘God’s teeth, I knew it!’

  The King, descending to a pool of water on the lily tiles, holds up his arms for pages wielding towels to mop beneath. ‘Did I not say the dog would come to recognise his master given time?’

  He nods complacently at the large gemstone Walter holds before him and signals for a servant to receive it. ‘So what of the ransom? Tell us in plain speech, does Saladin accede to that as well?’

  ‘He does, Sire. We are assured that payment of a hundred and twenty thousand bezants, which must account for more than half the total, has already been collected at Kharruba.’

  ‘It is well done.’ The King emerges from the towels to stride across the chamber in a rude state of nature and shake his bishop by the hand. ‘I knew if anyone could carry it with Saladin ’twould be his Grace of Salisbury!’

  ‘You have not heard it all, Sire.’

  But Richard is already acting for a wider audience. ‘Did I not say that Acre was the key to our success?’

  He stands before his courtiers in naked triumph, head back, hands on hips, wet feet wide apart; an emperor in all but name. ‘Its hostages have bought us all we need to take Jerusalem,’ he boasts, ‘the men, the funds, the Holy Relic of Christ’s Cross to bear before us into victory – and Saladin can’t do a damn thing to prevent it!’

  ‘My Liege…’

  The bishop dares to interrupt the sycophantic court’s applause. ‘With the greatest of respect, Sire, I beg to point out that we have but half the hostages we need for the exchange. The Marquess holds the balance up in Tyre.’

  The King’s heroic rearview freezes. ‘But I have asked de Montferrat for their return,’ he says with slow precision.

  ‘I fear that he will not relinquish them. The Marquess says he cannot trust you with their lives, Sire.’

  ‘Conrad says what?’ The moist cheek of one royal buttock twitches.

  A tall man, Hubert Walter’s face is less remarkable for handsome features than resolute composure. He’s of an age with Richard and hasn’t Baldwin’s habit of apologising for displeasing facts. ‘The Marquess says he cannot trust you with the Moslem prisoners’ lives, or with his own life if he should choose to deliv
er them in person. He says there is no man on earth he fears as he fears you, my Liege.’

  ‘As well he might, the craven cur.’

  King Richard’s gratified to be feared by such a famously brave foe, and pads back to the mounting stool to have his feet dabbed dry. ‘So then we’ll send Duke Robert up with a detachment,’ he shouts over his shoulder, ‘and make it clear to Conrad that neither he nor his French cousin will see a bezant of the ransom until all their little Moslem lambs are safe here in our fold.’

  ‘My Liege there’s more, you have not understood. The Sultan has agreed to pay the first part of the ransom and release his thousand common prisoners. But he refuses to return the Relic of the Cross, or all the noble prisoners we’ve named, until we have set free the entire Moslem garrison from the Emir Karakush down to the smallest child.’

  ‘Are you telling me that weasel-turd would break the terms agreed for the surrender of the city?’

  The King half turns in disbelief. A kneeling page receives the full force of his naked foot and sprawls across the tiles

  ‘The Sultan claims the terms were offered by his emirs, Sire, without his confirmation.’

  ‘He dares to say so after five weeks of prevarication?’

  ‘My Liege, these people measure times in other ways to ours.’

  But Richard is no longer listening. ‘I know what they’re about,’ he growls, ‘the Sultan and the Marquess and King Philip; I see that all those sons of vipers mean to do is play for time. They think that with their Venice whores and Tyrian wine-ships and their endless arse-numbing delays they’ll weaken and unman our Christian armies, until they’ll as soon crown Conrad and forget Jerusalem, as follow our command.’

  King Richard spins round suddenly to face his envoy. Forgetting to brace back his shoulders or hold in his paunch, he glimpses something moving in the nearest mirror. At first sight fails to recognise his own reflection – but when he does so, is appalled.

  The image in the copper is of a fat man with an open mouth and glaucous, bloodshot eyes. A ripple in the metal drags down one eyelid – distorts a powerful body run to lard through gluttony and want of exercise. Top-heavy, wider at the waist than hips, its chest sags like a matron’s. Its genitals, grotesquely puce, are dwarfed by the pregnant pod of the great paunch that juts above them.

  In the moment he is forced to claim the ruin as his own, King Richard starts to shout. He’s managed to believe himself a naked Hercules, a Jupiter, a Mars. The mirror shows him his age and ugliness, the spectre of his father’s gross red body on a slab; and he reacts as any self-deceptive man is apt to when confronted by his mortal failings – with fury.

  ‘They dare, they dare defy me! A shrivelled Turk, an upstart bigamist!’ he rants.

  The veins stand out on Richard’s brow. His face turns purple. His bass voice rises to a roar. ‘Blasted, spit-licking, fuckwit sons of whores!’

  The King’s barber, who’s just walked into the bathroom, walks out again. His courtiers and servants shuffle backwards, hunch their shoulders, show a sudden interest in shoe leather. (You’d do the same if you were there.)

  ‘I’ll fucking murder them, the swine! D’ye hear me, Bishop? I’ll split them lousy head to crabby tail! I’ll pull their festering guts out, wrap them round their scrawny throats!’

  ‘GRRAHRR!! AARRGH!!’

  The King’s howls of frustrated rage sound through the twisting streets outside the palace. The labyrinth contains a monster, bellowing for human blood!

  The monster snatches from a squire a priceless silken robe, to drag it on and wrap it round his traitorous body.

  ‘From the devil I have come,’ he roars ‘and to the devil I will send them!’

  Which said, with all about him shocked to silence he’s no further need to shout. In a measured and deep-throated monotone – which is if anything still more alarming – King Richard issues his instructions.

  They trained me to bear pain, but not how to forget it. And so it all begins again. I feel as I once felt in Lewes waiting for the tourney charge. Or in the silence at Arsuf before the battle. I’m shivering.

  ‘Three things make thy heart live long,’ she recited from her holy book, ‘to look on water, on green leaves, or on the face of woman.’

  But I look down in darkness from another world, and my heart’s empty. Nothing in it.

  We spent six weeks in Acre, John and I. So short a span. Yet looking back, the time we spent at ease within Khadija’s house seems limitless. Two men, a woman and a child. We lived, not as a captor with his captives, but as a family, contentedly.

  ‘Every day muhibb, a page of story.’ Yes, that’s how she put it: ‘Yesterday is flown, tomorrow is Allah’s to order.’

  Can one man’s life be seen as pages in a book, and by someone who has never learned to read?

  I accepted all she gave me. Not as Adam snatching stolen fruit from Eve. Not as our Church saw men and women. But as a son of nature taking only what was owed. Six weeks of paradise – of lovemaking, of water, greenery and beauty – and of a woman’s beauty, found in a soft curve, a movement, an expression in the eyes. But what is love? Do joy and true affection have to reach a certain pitch before you call them by that name?

  She said, ‘Al-Qalb al’Ashiq Yawa,’ and told me what it meant: ‘A loving heart will find love where it may.’ Was that too from Khadija’s Qur’an? I only knew that I’d discovered someone in me who talked more freely, laughed more, limped less, played children’s games, felt strong affections. And was happy.

  With autumn fast approaching, it seemed less likely every day that we would siege Jerusalem that year. Most of our men in Acre were sleeping in the open on the quays, or in the crowded khans, and weren’t in any haste to leave them. The news John Hideman brought us from the harbour was that the Queens of England and of Sicily had come to join King Richard in the palace, along with the little maid from Cyprus whom he favoured over all. The Sultan, it was said, was holding back from sending us his Christian captives with the ransom payment.

  ‘’Tis held that when he heard that Sallydin won’t pay a bezant of it ’til he sees our hostages with his own eyes,’ John said, ‘King Dickard cursed the man nine ways to Sunday. An’ now he’s sent the Duke of Burgundy to Tyre to fetch the French king’s prisoners. An’ tells the Sultan to be ready in a week for the exchange.’

  Khadija heard the news in silence – and of course I should have known our time with her in Acre couldn’t last. But when a few days later John strolled in to tell us that the hostages from Tyre had come – that all the taverns and the brothels had been closed, that all leave was cancelled – it still came as a shock.

  King Richard’s criers, shouting through the streets, summoned his soldiery to join their units at the outer harbour in the hour of Prime, and ordered every member of the captive garrison to report at first light to the Maledicta Gate.

  ‘They have King Philippe’s hostages already penned up in the pits at Hadyah where they quarry lime,’ John reported, ‘and plan to march the rest out there to join ’em.’

  ‘But not you and Alia, they can’t mean you,’ I told Khadija. ‘You are civilians, not defenders.’

  ‘ALL, is what they’re sayin’.’ John either missed or wilfully ignored my shaking head. ‘Men, women, children too.’ He looked from face to face. ‘’Tis true, Sir Garry. The orders are for all of the families who garrisoned the city, bearin’ only what they can hold.’

  The little girl was sitting cross-legged by the leathern cloth her mother spread for our repast, and Khadija bent to smooth her curly hair. ‘We are ’ayla – family,’ she said quietly. ‘Abdallah, brother of my husband, is at Tel al-Ayadiyeh. Is as God wills, we go.’

  Which meant that in a few short hours it would be over. Khadija and the child would be taken to Damascus, while John and I were bound for home. Or else to Jerusalem, if our King was still convinced that he could siege it.

  On the last night before I left Elise, I’d forced myself on her. No,
why mince words? I raped her! – to exchange a state of tension for worse feelings of remorse. But in Acre that last night, there was no time for dalliance. While Alia slept behind the curtain, her mother piled supplies onto a blanket – dried fruit, some beans, a loaf, a melon and a knife to cut it, a copper pan, a stoppered pot of oil. She filled a water skin. She packed a long cloth bag with all that it could hold. She looped a dozen silver chains and strings of beads around her neck beneath the collar of her gown, then brushed the tangles from her long dark hair and plaited it into a single braid. For our part, John and I prepared our arms and armour for campaign, fixed straps or cords to everything we planned to carry and bundled up the rest in leather sefras to be stored in camp.

  Most of what was said that night concerned possessions and containers. What to take and what to leave behind. But when the sky began to lighten and the time came for her to wake the child, Khadija spoke as I had never heard her speak in all our weeks together – as if she doubted Allah’s favour after all.

  ‘We live as married, but are not. Is written of adulterous woman she must stay in house to death,’ was what she said. ‘Allah is merciful. I pray that for a widow who hath mourned four months, it may be no offence in war to lie with an unbeliever.’

  ‘Offence?’ She took me by surprise.

  ‘But you believe that God approves of men and women finding joy in one another, you said so. And why would He make us like you, with the same feelings, if He saves all His gifts for Moslems?’

  ‘Incha-Allah – as God wills. As He kneads us from clay, He sees our weakness.’ She smiled. But something in the sadness of her smile made me afraid. ‘Nothing is but as God wills,’ she said. ‘And all return to earth when is appointed.’

  There are moments when you would stop time if you could do it. When I recall Khadija talking of incha-Allah with her hand upon my sleeve, I see three versions of myself – the Garon of the moment, gripping her and feeling fear. Another Garon staring past her to a future that will hold the memory forever in his mind.