The White Cross

by Richard Masefield

  ‘You see the licentiousness of these foul unbelievers,’ he later writes. ‘I asked one of their courtiers to whom paternity would be awarded, and he said it will be the Queen’s child.’

  What’s more, by prior agreement Henri has reinstated Isabella as sole Queen of the Latin Kingdom, modestly declining to have himself crowned king.

  MAY 11th. Henri announces that he and the Queen, accompanied by the Duke of Burgundy and the remains of his army, will join King Richard in his proposed attack on the Muslim stronghold of Darum, ten leagues south of Ashkelon. Which in due course they do.

  My case, as they say, rests.

  At the very least, the murder of Conrad was fortunate for Isabella, for Count Henri – and most especially for King Richard, who was quoted as remarking afterwards that the Marquess’s fate had been predictable; adding, to account for his own cheerful mood, that excessive mourning was of no help to a dead man.

  Yet in the end, not even the removal of Conrad de Montferrat could save Richard from the humiliation of a negotiated peace, which achieved neither of the stated aims of his campaign.

  The city of Jerusalem remained, as Sultan Salahuddin had always sworn it would, in Muslim hands. So did the holy relic of the Cross – although, in much the way of Conrad’s timely death and of the emergence the magic sword Escalibor in time for the croisade – by some miraculous coincidence, two hitherto lost fragments of the One True Cross had come to light that very June. One surfaced from a bishop’s reliquary. The other, if you will believe it (and I’m sorry but I don’t) – from an inspired scrape in the sand. Two lucky (more than lucky) finds for Richard to present as evidence of his success as a redeemer. But Jerusalem was still too big a rabbit altogether for him to pull out of his pot helm. So when the other Christian leaders chose to demonstrate their loyalty to Henri and Queen Isabella by marching in a body on the Holy City, he told them wearily that they would never take it; and when they finally abandoned the assault, he left them for his palace up the coast in Acre.

  King Richard’s final months in Outremer were marked by bouts of sickness and ill-temper. In August he returned by sea to Joppa – to defend its Christian garrison against a Saracen attack, and provide his chroniclers with one last chance to praise him for his courage and heroic presence. Tricked out in silver armour on his fabulous Fauvel, he knew by then (and Sultan Salahuddin, whose reinforcements outnumbered his troops six to one, knew better still) that the Bellum Sacrum was already over bar the shouting.

  Early in September, Richard agreed a three-year truce to salvage something from the wreck of his croisade, granting Isabella and the Latin Kingdom a hundred mile strip of sandy littoral from Tyre to Joppa that excluded Ashkelon and Darum – and naturally the Holy City. The deposed king, Guy de Lusignan, was offered Cyprus as a compensation. In all its main essentials it was the deal the Sultan and King Philippe had agreed in Tyre two years before – to render Richard’s whole campaign unnecessary, his military failure absolute.

  We are at war. The war is over. How often have we trotted out those phrases through Man’s long and violent history – with always so much lost, so little gained between them?

  One condition of the peace was that Christian pilgrims should be given leave to worship at the holy places of Jerusalem; a privilege the Sultan had never actually withdrawn. Amongst the first to take advantage of the extended offer was Bishop Hubert Walter – and having knelt before the shrine that all the wretched fuss was over, he was received by Salahuddin, for what can only be described as a debrief. Inevitably the two men discussed the absent king, who had returned by then to Acre for his voyage home. But in the end they could agree on only one aspect of His Christian Majesty’s personality. His courage.

  The Bishop praised King Richard for his generosity. But God’s Shadow on the Earth, who’d buried what was left of three thousand Muslim hostages at al-Ayadiyeh, called him ‘precipitate and reckless’ – a more than generous understatement in the circumstance!

  ‘Thy King is far too careless of his own existence,’ remarked the Sultan, who in the recent skirmish over Joppa had felt obliged to send replacement mounts for Richard when Fauvel was shot beneath him. ‘I will go further and tell you for my own part that, however much I have achieved by conquest, I’d sooner rule my territories with wisdom and with moderation than indulge in arrogance and vain displays of valour.’

  The Sultan Salahuddin’s words to Bishop Hubert Walter, as recorded by his clerk, are likely to ring true. King Richard’s declamation from the deck of his departing galley three weeks later, as detailed in the Itinerarium, sounds more like spin.

  ‘O Holy Land, I commend thee to God, and if His heavenly grace shall grant me so long to live, that I may in His good pleasure afford thee assistance, I hope as I propose to be able some day to succour thee.’

  His annalists claim great achievements for King Richard in the mere sixteen months of his campaign. But if the King himself says anything at all when his new flagship, Franche-Nef, puts out to sea, I’d think it likely that he’s drawing on his extensive stock of oaths involving God’s most personal anatomies, while he lies bathed in sweat with a return of his old fever. He is the only man in Palestine who doesn’t welcome peace. Jerusalem has always been for him as much an idea as a real city built of stone and mortar – which is perhaps why he declined to visit it with Bishop Walter when he had the chance. In any case, he’s not the hero of the moment.

  I know the man I’d cast as hero of the Kings’ Crusade, and I think you do as well.

  It isn’t Richard, is it?

  In my book (which after all this is), the true hero of the conflict has to be al-Malik al-Nasir, Salahuddin al-Din Abu ’I-Muzaffar Yusuf ibn Ayyub ibn Shadi; Allah’s Deputy, God’s Shadow on the Earth, Defender of The One True Faith, Sultan of Egypt, Syria and Yemen, Ruler of Aleppo and Damascus, Prince of Believers, Commander of the Faithful, Giver of Unity and the True Word, Adorner of the Standard of Truth, Corrector of the World and of the Law. The man that we call Saladin.

  ‘I’ll march if you say march. But I’ll not… not fight!’

  I had already drunk too much to be sure if I spoke the words or shouted them. They just came out of me because they had to. And when they hauled me shambling, stinking of the tavern, to face our Bishop Walter in his tent, they came out backwards. ‘Fight – not, not fight…’

  ‘Suppose you tell me why then. You are a little young I think for full retirement.’ The bishop seemed more amused than angry – a long-limbed man with a slight stoop and steady way of looking at you underneath his brows.

  ‘Because I’ve come to see – you see, Your Grace,’ I told him blearily, ‘you see we only learn by lis’… by lis’-ening.’

  ‘You are extremely drunk, young man.’

  ‘I know. But doesn’ matter, does it – ’cos I wouldn’ fight if I was sober as a pope. ’Cos when you’re fightin’ you aren’ lis’-en-ing…’ I said it very slowly to be sure of being understood. ‘And when you kill, you kill y’er chance of uner’stanning, d’ye see?’

  For a moment he did not reply, perhaps to let me hear the slurring echo of my words – and even then, in my inebriated state, I saw myself as Bishop Walter must have seen me. Swaying gently. Trying to explain and sounding idiotic.

  ‘Come, you must know that a soldier doesn’t need to understand, needs only to obey,’ he said at last. ‘Is that not what you’ve trained for?’ (My father’s wretchedly demanding voice again: ‘A knight who isn’t skilled in arms can count for nothing in this world.’)

  ‘Right you are – you’re right.’ I nodded, a thick-headed fool with salt tears running down my face. ‘Trained to kill an’ can’t, an’ won’t. Haven’ drawn my sword since Acre. Won’ draw it now an’ never will. Useless as a soldier – useless!’

  I’d long since given up the struggle to stay sober, drinking steadily through the three weeks we spent in the green citrus groves which grew on three sides of the ruined port of Joppa – flagons of Burgundy from
Acre, al-yazil spirit, fermented date wine, anything that I could lay my hands on. I knew as well as any man that alcohol was not the answer. But it helped to drown the questions – even for a time to smother memory. And when the Bishop’s criers rode through the camp to summon us to join the force that was advancing on Jerusalem, it was the drink that helped me to deny them.

  ‘You’re standing on one foot, Sir Garon.’

  It surprised me that a man as great as Bishop Walter should recall my name, and even in my drunken state I sensed a kindness in him. God knows, I felt as old as Moses, but see that in the Bishop’s eyes I must have still seemed very young – and foolish, obviously.

  ‘When you came in I noticed you were limping,’ he told me as I slouched before him in his tent, one-legged like a stork.

  ‘I broke my toes.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘At Acre in the siege… My squire, my Jos and I, moving blocks under the Tower.’ I brushed my hand across my swollen eyes. ‘Killed him. The block that killed my squire crushed my own foot. But tha’s not why…’

  He gave me a measured look. ‘So you believe that fighting is the only gift you have to offer? Yet you have worked with stone?’

  ‘Yes in a way, but…’

  The Bishop raised a hand for silence. ‘Very well, I’ll hazard that ’tis best for you to stay at Joppa,’ he decided. ‘The Count de Châlons needs more knights with some experience of masonry to oversee the labour of rebuilding.’

  ‘But I know only how to pull down, not how to build…’

  ‘Which means you’ll find the process beneficial. Trust me, you will not feel worse when you have built a length of wall, far from it. The solace to be found in alcohol is false, my son, at best is temporary. But confidence to be gained from achievement – even from the simple task of rebuilding a stone wall – is real, and with God’s Grace is lasting.’

  Even in my parlous state, with dry mouth and splitting head, I could feel grateful for the understanding in Bishop Walter’s smile.

  They let me bring John Hideman with me. Which was as well because I couldn’t have survived without him. Steadfast John, my rod and staff. I’d always taken him so much for granted, and barely noticed until that time how much he had matured. He found me after Arsuf on the seashore like something washed up on the tide, slumped against the body of the mare. All through the drunken days, the torpid nights and mind-numbing headaches which had followed, he never left my side. He listened to me when I ranted, rambled, wallowed in the misery of my condition and woke me weeping from my nightmares. With the help of Guillemette and Maud – who were still washing shirts and braies, and men for aught we knew, in a makeshift laundry set up against a standing section of the old town wall – John saw to it that I was fed and decently attired.

  Without the drink, I was afraid to sleep. But John took the coin to buy it for me and held the bowl when I was sick. ‘That’s it, Sir Garry, take it steady now,’ he said. ‘That’s the way – jus’ let ’er come.’

  I was as much his child those weeks in camp at Joppa, as his master. And it was John who woke me, washed me, sobered me with quiet deliberation and led me through the ruins of the town to the rows of shallow mortar pits they’d told us to report to. On that first day, a master mason from King Richard’s stone-yards back in Caen showed us how pug was made. The mix was two parts sand to one part lime – watered, turned and watered twenty times between two shovels – to reach the masons in a pliant state no drier than well-kneaded dough, he told us, no wetter than a meat-fed turd.

  My office was to ensure a constant stream of barrows loaded with the perfect mix, to supply the men who worked up on the scaffolds round the walls. But as I soon discovered, it was not the kind of work a drunkard could perform. There were loads of sifted sand and lime in sacks to be ordered and unloaded from the wagons, reservoirs to be replenished, carriers and shovellers and gangs of captive Moslem barrow-men to supervise. If the pug we made verged either on the constipated or the dysenteric, it came back smartly from the masons with a range of rude suggestions. So in the end we found it best if I stayed by the pits to oversee the mixing, while John took orders to the wagoners and kept the masons happy.

  We were already halfway to being experts in the business, John and I, when autumn rain swept in across the site to force us under canvas, and long before we saw the citadel completed, I knew the Bishop had been right. The hard days of labour, dawn to dusk, were not the worst I’d known. My muscles were in want of exercise, and day by day and course by mortar-course, and stone by stone, the rising walls had the effect on me that he’d predicted. I felt the knots inside me loosen, the lethargy retreat. I drank less in the evenings and for a while slept better.

  Yet all it took was a chance word from a wagon driver to bring the nightmares back. He told us that the lime we used was brought by camel, every sack of it, from the quarries at al-Ayadiyeh – and that night I dreamt that they were burning hostages instead of lime in kilns beside the pits. Again I heard Khadija’s shrieks. Again I could not save her – and when the sacks were emptied by the mixing troughs, her severed hand lay coated with grey powder in the lime All but the red-stained fingertips, which moved still as in life. It was John’s living hand though, not Khadija’s dead one, that finally shook me awake.

  News came in January, that King Richard had abandoned his advance on Jerusalem in favour of re-fortifying the strategic port of Ashkelon a three-day journey to the south. The King was there already with his army – and on the eve of Candlemas, his criers summoned every man who could be spared from Joppa to help him in the undertaking.

  The harbour of Ashkelon was blocked with rubble, we were told, the sea too rough for landings. So we marched overland to gain our first sight of the city from the coast road to the north. We’d heard in Joppa four months earlier that Saladin had burned and levelled it, to save Ashkelon from falling into Christian hands. But nothing could prepare us for the sight of it in ruins. Or the rebuilding task that lay ahead of us.

  When we’d first come to work on Joppa citadel, the town was occupied by Christians, its streets part-cleared of debris. But here the scene was one of devastation. We’d heard that Ashkelon was famous for the fifty-three great towers which ringed its outer walls. But not a single one of them was standing. Their shattered battlements lay in the moat or in the harbour with the ruins of its piers. The houses, the bazaars, the mosques and hammans had been consumed in the great fire which had destroyed the city, and all that now remained of them were blackened fangs of masonry protruding here and there from deserts of grey ash.

  Down on the beach and in the littered moat, King Richard’s army – together with Hospitallers and Templars and the Duke of Burgundy’s French force – were loading stones with their own hands into the wagons. Or making ramps for winching larger blocks back into place. The King decreed that all who could, must work without distinction to carry stones to the skilled masons who’d rebuild the city walls. The blocks for their construction passed from hand to hand, from King to subject, silk-clad grandee to ragged peasant – from conqueror to prisoner, from son of God to child of Allah. From man to man.

  Not that King Richard had remained long in the workforce. For after two days of striding round the place, shouting encouragements and cursing failures, and lobbing the odd block himself into the transports, he’d departed with a company of Templars to reconnoitre further south. Before he left, we’d happened to catch sight of him down by the harbour wall, in the act of lecturing an engineer who doubtless knew already on how to gear a treadmill hoist.

  We were surprised how stout he looked without his armour.

  ‘Double-arsed and lardy as a flitch pig,’ was John’s comment. But I didn’t smile.

  I didn’t smile because…

  It must have been because it was right there and then. No, look this is important. It was there. Right there. Right then that I first understood what made a villain of the king I’d worshipped for so long. What I had always seen in him
was what I wished to be myself, a hero. But what I saw at Ashkelon was entirely the reverse. King Richard talked but wouldn’t listen. King Richard looked, but couldn’t see – had no idea of loyalties or commitments. Which meant he placed no value on the lives of others – took all we offered him. Gave nothing in return.

  Yet in the end was I much better – I who’d killed in Lewes and at sea, and on the River Belus and at Acre – and felt nothing at those times beyond a thrill of self-congratulation? A careless mummer with a real sword rather than a wooden one? Could I claim to be better than King Richard?

  It made me sick to realise that I couldn’t.

  And now? Am I much better now? (I’ll think about all that when I am done with this.)

  The King was next in Ashkelon for Easter, to find that we’d cleared most of the rubble from the moat, and deepened it to make the outward-battered glacis hard to climb. With so many expert masons there already, John and I worked with the common labourers who swarmed the site, and I for one was glad of work which exercised so little of my brain. The old city was constructed of a soft local sandstone known as ‘kukar’, which was easy to reshape. So by the time the King returned, its new walls had risen several courses, strengthened in places with the Roman columns we’d recovered from the ruins.

  Delighted with the progress, King Richard sent his criers to announce a feast for Lady Day outside the city, with all welcome to attend and mounted knights invited to display their skill at jousting à plaisance.

  John didn’t need to ask if I’d compete. Without a word I handed him my purse – and he returned, not with a horse or lance, but with a hogshead of red wine, which with unflinching application through the festival, I drank down to the dregs.

  On Easter Monday, the King came out as he had sworn to do, to labour with his own hands on the city wall. But he never could stay in one place for long, and three days later left for Gaza. In May, when they brought news of Marquess Conrad’s death, the King was in Ramula. In July he was in Acre, then in Joppa to repel an Infidel attack. In September, while his engineers at Ashkelon were letting in the sea to flood the city moat, we heard he was at Caesarea nursing a fever.