The dispassionate words, striking at all the established teaching of her lifetime, turned her dumb. The Holy Sepulchre, centre of Christian hope and faith, holiest of shrines, from which Christ had risen to redeem all mankind, and this heathen coldly called it an empty tomb!
The clash of cymbals, throbbing of drums and weird cries swelled again as the hooves thundered down. Shafts sang like hornets, and she distinctly heard the ring and thwack as they struck steel or wood. One bounced and rattled just beyond Marco. One of the Englishmen she had overheard disparaging the King of France’s leadership, the grey badger who commanded, suddenly fell forward onto his knees and then dropped flat, blood pouring from his mouth. Then the attackers were at the ditch, scrambling over the tumbled bodies and up the battered scarp.
Giacomo the flesh-monger leaped down into the trench, wielding his adze two-handed like a flail among the screeching Saracens, his red mouth roaring gleefully in the thicket of his beard. Skulls and ribs crunched like trodden egg-shells, and he bounded along the ditch hurling brown men aside and bellowing with grim appropriateness a wine-treading song of Italy. Landry was shouting orders to the leaderless English, bidding them fight in pairs, one to shoot and one to reload his arbalest, and to the capering ribalds to stand fast in line and keep behind the ramparts. Somehow he steadied that ill-mixed mob into a fighting force, and the enemy recoiled. Giacomo, finding no upright foe before him, heaved himself up the scarp to Landry’s side, grounded his uncouth weapon and mopped his gleaming scarlet brow. His bull’s voice carried clearly to Rodriga.
“Join your command, sir knight?”
Rodriga saw her father grin and nod assent. He should have been properly outraged by his thrusting himself upon fighting-men, but Landry was not lofty-stomached, and such a smiter must be a welcome recruit to any hard-pressed company. The giant turned and came thrusting back, bellowing orders to his flock of wenches to serve the men along the trench while they had respite. He gave Marco a searching look as he passed, and received a bleak nod in acknowledgment. Plainly they knew each other, as was to be expected; each was in his way a landmark of Acre. Just as plainly, they were something less than friendly. The girls trotted to and fro, combining the service with professional advances. Rodriga watched the play of eyes and mouths, breasts and hips, with a little wonder that even in this moment they should further their trade of darkness. They were all young and pretty, but in the pitiless sunlight their harlots’ attire and invitations seemed garish and unreal.
The men liked them; they laughed and joked, snatched kisses, fondled them, and made assignations with a freedom and wealth of bawdy comment that should have driven any gently nurtured demoiselle headlong from sight and earshot. Rodriga, who would have daggered any man who laid a hand on her against her will, ignored them, shading her eyes with her hand to watch the movements of the Turks on the edge of the sandhills. Marco stood rigid beside her, and she noticed that all the girls walked widely round him without so much as a wink or a giggle. Even harlots and panders, then, had no stomach for the renegade.
“Will you stand aside and watch better men like Giacomo fight?” she demanded. “Do you only slay strangers for payment?”
“Do valiant Christian knights like your father not fight for payment?” he asked coolly. “Or are they always acquainted with those they kill?”
“God in Heaven, do you dare compare them?” she blazed.
“I ask what is the difference, my lady.”
She choked over the measure of truth in his outrageous suggestion and the impossibility of explaining to this creature the nature of a knight’s obligations to his lord, however temporary and for whatever recompense. What should he know of the bond imposed by homage, who had neither faith nor honour? It was madness to dispute with him; she did all Christian knighthood wrong by even listening to his blasphemous arguments.
She turned her shoulder on him, and he stood back a little and waited silently. Then the voice of her conscience struck through her anger, and the memory of the cripple’s proposal. Whatever his motives, the renegade had done them a service in the sand-dunes. Though her father had declared that they should not meddle between knaves who might justly be left to destroy each other, she could not allow even Marco to be falsely sworn to his death. It was her Christian duty to warn him. Besides, of the two she disliked the underhand cripple the more, and it would be a pleasure to foil him. She glanced aside surreptitiously at Marco’s smooth black head, his straight body in the clean tunic of coarse grey linen, and knew she infinitely preferred his trim and wary grace to the cripple’s malignant repulsiveness. She let impulse rule her.
“Marco!”
He stepped forward instantly. “My lady?”
He listened without comment to her brief account of Robert de Veragny’s plan to silence him, his bright black eyes gravely intent on her face. Then his mouth twitched in a faint smile. “I never thought of that,” he observed.
“Of what?”
“Of being killed with words rather than knives, my lady.”
“They may be spun into a rope stout enough to hang you!”
“Knives would be preferable. My lady, you put me even deeper in your debt.”
“What else was I to do?” she demanded, flushing a little under his steady gaze.
“Let one knave destroy another, of course.” Her expression must have betrayed her, for his white teeth flashed in the blackness of his beard. “Was not that your first intent, my lady? Now I know there is a Christian in Acre.” Then the mockery was gone from his face, and he regarded her soberly. “My lady, I am grateful.”
“You need not be,” she answered, savagely honest. “I could not stomach that recreant’s asking me to commit perjury.”
“Oh, I did not flatter myself it was any regard for me,” he replied coolly, accepting his ostracism with an indifference that suddenly appalled her. She could find no answer to that harsh truth but agreement, and neither could any other soul in Acre.
Diego behind them uttered a smothered yelp, and all else was driven from her thoughts but the enemy. The sandhills were boiling over with horsemen, dropping down their flanks in a golden haze of spurned sand; scores, hundreds, thousands of them. The hot heaven filled with brazen clamour, the earth shuddered under the impact of hooves. Banners and standards flashed and dipped as the host advanced, above the sea of dark faces, bright mail, gay robes and dusty horsehides. They were gathering momentum, and Rodriga’s midriff became a sickening void as she heard their skirling cries. Her hand shook on her bow.
Landry was shouting again; to the steady, vengeful English on his left, to the ribalds in the ditch, scrabbling for loot to the last moment. The wenches were scuttling from the ramparts. Giacomo spat on his hands and braced his great body on the edge of the scarp. Arbalests and bows were raised and sighted, and Landry yelled to the bowmen to hold their shots. He waited until the features could be distinguished in the brown faces; then he flung up his sword-arm, and the strings all spoke together. The second rank of crossbowmen stepped forward and loosed, and a gap broke in the rushing wave as men and horses went down together. Landry’s voice rang through the clash and shouting, the screams and neighs and the snarl of trumpets. “Help, help, Holy Sepulchre!” The Christian battlecry was echoed all along the trench. Then the ditch was alive with bounding, agile figures, and slanting arrows slashed the sky.
Rodriga shot and shot again, over and between the defenders wherever a gap presented, until her quiver was empty. She was scarcely aware of Marco, standing before her and on her left as a shield. Giacomo was roaring his wine-press song, and swinging his adze at the full extent of his ape’s arms. To win fighting-room he had leaped down the scarp and found footing among the heaped dead, where he chopped impartially with edge or spike, while Landry and the Catalans covered his back and sides. He was at once comical and magnificent; no Saracen who felt the weight of the adze rose from where it hurled him, and the mere sight of that joyful giant daunted them. They dodged and circled l
ike dogs about a bayed boar, seeking an opening in his guard, while he thwacked at them and sang.
Bolts and arrows were exhausted; archers were grabbing at enemy shafts, or snatching up stones to hurl whenever a brief breathing-space offered. The Turks came as though they sprang full-armed from the sands, and the defenders were battling dourly hand to hand along the embankment, their warcries dying for want of breath in that broiling heat. Here and there men were clawed down or thrust back, and the desperate line began to waver. Rodriga’s heart beat with heavy thuds at her ribs, and despite the heat she was shivering as she threw down her bow and seized her javelin. Diego was reaching for stones. There were other boys amid the confusion, sprung from nowhere as boys always did, and throwing everything they could reach. Even women had left off tending the wounded to hold the line. An enormous virago was standing astride a wounded man not far from Rodriga, doing grim execution with a washing-paddle and a long knife. Rodriga set her teeth and started forward, and Marco went beside her.
An appalling clamour on her right checked her, in time to see the reeling line sway back from the rampart and break. The crest was immediately a mass of mail, robes and half-naked bodies that hurtled at the faltering defenders and divided right and left to sweep the trench clear. Taken in the flank, the hard-pressed Christians recoiled, widening the gap that filled with more and yet more jubilant Infidels. Then Rodriga was looking into a yelling white-fanged mouth, into gleaming black eyes under a red turban, at the blinding blade of a curved sword slashing down at her, and was swinging her javelin in an underhand thrust like a dagger for a naked greyhound belly.
Marco the killer leaped from her side. A flurry of indistinct movement, grey linen and brown flesh writhing in brief contact, and then a bare arm flapped across Rodriga’s toes and the curved sword was in Marco’s hand, slashing with murderous skill and speed. She struck past him, and felt her point slide into flesh and jar on bone, before it was almost wrenched from her grip by a heavy weight dragging down. The lean grey back filled her vision, but she watched for openings past that shield and lunged shrewdly, cool and steady and no longer afraid, into legs and bodies and inhuman faces.
Landry’s voice was shouting close by, the pressure slackening as the defenders rallied to squeeze shut the gap. Then the Saracens were fleeing, many voices roaring, “Help, help, Holy Sepulchre!” and newcomers swarmed from the camp. King Richard’s knights, belatedly taking a hand with their mesnies; grooms and scullions and serving-men; camp-followers, cut-throats, all the ribalds and pimps and thieves of Acre crowded to the rescue, threw back those who had forced the defences, reinforced the battered ramparts and hurled back the Infidels who came in unwearied waves. The gap was closed, and no living Saracen was left inside the line.
Rodriga gazed down at the little barricade of dead that had piled before them, at the gouts of blood blackening on her gown and the dripping blade of her javelin. She thrust it again and again into the earth to cleanse it, staring tight-mouthed at the empty flesh that had been living men, and from which she had helped to rip the souls. She could have done nothing else, but there was naught of glory in the doing, nor in the fiendish fray still locked on the ramparts not twenty yards away. Marco wiped his curved sword on a dead man’s garments and straightened. She looked up into his calm dark face. Killing to him was of course neither a glorious display of prowess nor a grim duty, but a mere task easily accomplished. She remembered hideous stories of what Turks had done to women in battle and sack, and forced herself to the galling acknowledgment that was his due.
“I thank you for my life, Marco. They would have ripped me up but for you.”
He nodded soberly, no trace of triumph in his face. She met his eyes, and realised the incredible truth.
“Mother of God!” she burst out. “You came to guard me, not to see the battle!” He reddened slightly, but still met her angry, astonished gaze as her memory presented for this new interpretation the encounters which had puzzled her. “So that was it! You have been haunting me for that—the chance to quit you of a debt! Now it is repaid, and the debt cancelled, so go!”
“No. That debt can never be cancelled, my lady.”
“What devil now has possession of your wits?”
“Is not gratitude a Christian virtue, my lady?”
Sheer fury filled her at his insolence, and she found herself lifting the javelin to thrust him through. But he did not flinch, and there was no mockery in his calm face. “And it is my turn to show it?” she demanded grimly, lowering her point.
“My lady, that was not my meaning, nor aught of offence. However you regret it, you saved my life. It is henceforward at your service.”
She spluttered incoherently in her haste to reject that offer, but before she could frame adequate denial, Diego uttered a cry of alarm and bolted past her to the line. One glance, and she followed him, her heart hammering. Pablo was hobbling towards them, leaning on his bow. Blood dripped from his right hand, and an arrow had transfixed his right leg, just above the ankle. His face was grey with pain under the dust, but he managed a crooked grin as they supported him to the ridge and eased him to the ground.
“Nailed me in the hand,” he croaked ruefully, “and just as I got that one out, another lamed me. Hey, Lady Rodriga, never waste wine that way!”
“Could have been worse,” choked Rodriga, ignoring that protest. “Could have been your head.”
“B—but then the arrow would have b—bounced off,” Diego declared, blinking away his tears as he stared at the blood and wine mingling on his brother’s hand. The wound looked worse than it was; neither bones nor tendons were damaged, though the hand was temporarily paralysed and acutely painful. Pablo clenched his jaws as she bound it up, and then doggedly shook his head, drew a hard breath and straightened himself. As Rodriga turned to the remaining arrow, Marco stooped, shifted Pablo’s leg so that the protruding point was steadied against the ground, and struck off the head with one light blow of his sword. Pablo jerked it out and cast it from him with a grunt, glanced up and recognised the helper.
“You?” he said, mildly surprised.
“Why not?” asked Marco curtly.
“Seem to have been useful,” answered Pablo, who, as the eldest of five unruly brothers, had always found enough trouble coming his way of its own accord without need to go forth in search of it. He nodded at the piled bodies, and stifled a yelp as Rodriga pinched open the wound to dribble wine into it. “Feel happier knowing you have an eye to our lady,” Pablo added, proving again to Rodriga that her foster-brothers were seldom so busy that they were unaware of what befell her, and exasperating her almost beyond bearing by encouraging that unwelcome guardianship. She tied off the bandage, ignored the pair of them, and looked at the fighting. The slackened noise had already told her that the Saracens were drawing off.
“Diego, back to the camp for more arrows, all you can find,” she ordered. Only a scattering of shafts followed the enemy; most of the Christian archers were in the same case as she was. Diego trotted away. Now that the defenders had leisure for it, they were rescuing their wounded from the piles of bodies and carrying them back, while the lightly hurt who had fought on now sought bandages and tending. All at once Rodriga was very busy, on her knees in a welter of blood and dust.
When Landry laid his hand on her shoulder she was binding up an ugly gash in a muscular and unclean thigh, whose owner, a broad and hairy sergeant with a crooked nose and a villainous Breton accent, was utilising the opportunity by offering her a place in his bed and at his board, a share in his loot and his temporary devotion.
“A knight’s daughter is not so cheap a bargain,” Rodriga answered crisply and went on with her task, after a swift welcoming glance at her father. The Breton, in the midst of declaring that such considerations were but minor obstacles to the irresistible force of his passion, also looked up. He knew an insuperable obstacle when he saw one in the shape of an indignant father looming over him clutching a bloody sword in a bloody hand, a
nd accepted defeat. He heaved himself up, winked outrageously at Rodriga, and hobbled away, propping himself on his spear.
Landry bestowed a swift kiss on her, assured himself that she was unhurt, and lifted his eyes to the Accursed Tower. “Lord, what men these Infidels are! Half the day they are at it, and their banners still flying! French Philip will never do it!” He shrugged and took off his helmet to mop his brow, uttering a deep grunt of fatigue.
One of the wenches from Giacomo’s pleasure-house, a small plump fair girl, came to him with a pitcher and a cup, smirking invitingly as she offered wine. He growled thanks and drained the cup in one gulp. The girl was very pretty, even in the hard daylight, which was not Rodriga’s common experience of harlots, but then she was young, no older than herself. Landry returned the cup with the smile he used to all who served him, and Rodriga saw with amusement how the girl contrived to touch his fingers and brush against him as she received it. Giacomo bellowed something, and she went with a petulant pout and a swing of her skirts, flashing a smile at Landry over her shoulder.
Landry grinned and settled his helmet firmly over his coif. “Indefatigable little trollop, that,” he observed, “wasting her charms on an old ruin like me.” He cocked an eye at the sandhills and started back.
Giacomo, his clothing clinging to his huge body as though he had been dipped in water, had been carrying wounded men up from the trenches in his powerful arms, and harrying his wenches to serve the fighting-line with refreshment while the respite lasted. Now he slouched by Rodriga on his way to the ramparts, wrestling with left hand and teeth to tighten a bandage just above his right elbow. She watched him struggling for a few moments, and then went to him.
“Let me!”
He gaped at her with dropped jaw and starting eyes, palsied with astonishment. “Donzella!” he gasped, his experience of virtuous maidens being that they reckoned themselves dishonoured if such as he lifted eyes to them. “This—this is not—”
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