by Dan Davis
The first man I ever killed died by the thrusting point of my sword entering his throat. His blood gushed out onto the dusty wall and mixed with the blood of the men dying around him as my fellows reached the tops of the ladders all along the wall. He was very slim, with a short and trimmed beard and I watched as the man died, his eyes wide and confused, as if he was shocked that this could happen.
I did not know those men. If I had never arrived on their island they would have never done me harm. If I had held back in the rear ranks as many men-at-arms do, then I would not have had to kill them. And yet I was screaming with a mindless hate as I hacked down the defenders on the walls.
They fell back. Into the edges of the city, between the walls of houses, we found walls of men arrayed against us.
I had been training for war since I was seven years old. Day after day of grappling, riding, sword, shield, footwork. Thirteen years of practice and it finally became useful. My sword was like lightning flashing in a cloudless sky. I hacked up and down on shields and hammered at men and clashed against their raised weapons. I watched myself ducking and swerving around blows, as if every other man was blind and I alone could see.
But all the rage I had saved up over that time came pouring out. All my grief and fear and I lost myself in the fighting.
It is strange to experience the part of you that is your reason, your goodness and your soul sit to one side. You watch the animal rage take control of your body.
Somehow, I cut my way through a line of Byzantine soldiers. I found myself far from my companions, cut off and surrounded by the enemy. I had no choice but to keep moving through the city. If I stopped moving I would die. I kept laying about me, cutting and snarling at anyone who came close. At some point, I lost my shield.
Finally, I found myself trapped down a narrow street. The faces around me twisted in anger and fear but they hesitated. My sword dripped with blood onto the dusty street. Blood and chunks of flesh drenched my hauberk and surcoat.
I had time to wonder whether my own men had abandoned me intentionally. I had been lost in my rage and could not remember what had happened. I waited, sweating and attracting flies. They were afraid to attack me. And no wonder. Soaked in the blood of their friends, I must have looked like Satan himself.
Shouting filled the street behind them and the Byzantines ran. There were Englishmen everywhere, slapping me on the back and laughing. Soon, cheering started.
The old knight from before the battle found me afterwards. He threw his arm about my neck as we walked through the streets of Limassol.
“What was your name again, lad?” he asked.
Later that day the king himself approached me.
I sat on a low wall with my head in my hands before the administrative building near the highest point in the city. The man sitting beside me jabbed my ribs with his elbow and dropped down to his knees. When I looked around I saw that everyone else nearby was kneeling.
King Richard stood over me, smiling down with regal condescension. Dust and red sunlight filled his fair hair. His face was sunburned red but otherwise it was fine and full of heartiness. I remembered that he was said to have lain with my Alice and I felt a moment’s desire to run him through.
Instead, I knelt.
“Get up, lads,” the king said. His voice was loud, friendly and clear as a summer sky. “Richard of Ashbury? Stand up, son.”
He called me son, even though I was over twenty years old and he was barely into his thirties. I stood. Few men were of a height with me back in those centuries but Richard was able to look me straight in the eye.
“I heard you charged right through their lines,” he said, chuckling. “And you kept going and they chased after you, leaving the way open for the rest of us.” He laughed a full-throated laugh. “And you went running all the way to the palace and the bloody idiots chased you all the way.”
“I did not know what else to do,” I said.
The king threw back his head and roared with laughter. His men, some of the greatest men in Christendom, laughed with him.
The king raised up my hand my hand before our tired army and called out to everyone around.
“Listen up, boys. This is Richard of Ashbury,” the king yelled. “The knight who won us Cyprus.”
Everyone laughed and cheered. The truth was I had gone charging off like the arrogant, idiot boy I was. If the enemy had been of quality, I would have been hacked to pieces in moments.
But at least my blundering had caught the attention of the king. That was the start I needed to speed me on my way to a fortune. For soon we would make the short voyage from Cyprus to the city of Acre on the coast of Outremer, long besieged by the Saracens.
And it was beneath the walls of Acre, wading through blood and horror, that I would find William.
***
Alice sent for me. Later, we lay in her bed in her new apartments in Limassol.
She stroked the tips of her fingers down my face and whispered into my ear. “If you continue to win such favour from the king then you won’t be beneath me much longer.”
“Then you would marry me?” I asked, as subtle as a kick to the face.
She sighed and stretched out like a cat. “The Holy Land presents great opportunity for a man who can fight.”
“I shall fight well,” I promised. “I shall win renown. When I have enough men I shall find William and bring him to justice.”
Alice scoffed at my quest for vengeance. “William de Ferrers is a great lord,” she said. “He could have dozens of men, perhaps a hundred.”
She was quite right, of course but I had no wish to hear reason. “I have no quarrel with any men other than those who massacred my brother’s family.”
Alice sighed. “You think those other men will stand idly by while you kill their lord? Or that the other great lords who are his friends will allow you to get away with murder?”
“It would not be murder,” I started to protest.
“Yes, yes,” she said, running her finger over my bottom lip. “But justice to you will seem a crime all its own to those bound to de Ferrers.”
“I care not,” I mumbled, petulant and irritated by her good sense.
“If you were my husband,” she said, making my heart race. “Would you not care that your crime would destroy my reputation also? And darken that of my son?”
In truth, I cared little for Jocelyn then, who was nothing but a reminder that Alice had loved and lived with a man well before I had slunk into her bed.
“Well, what am I to do, then?” I snarled, sitting up away from her.
“Precisely as you are doing,” she said and drew me back down.
We landed at Acre in June 1191; almost two years after the struggle for the city had begun. King Guy of Jerusalem had surrounded the city entirely. Saladin and his vast armies were in turn besieging the Franks for all of those two years, cutting the Christians off from the rest of Outremer. The sea there was the bluest thing I had ever seen and sun was hotter and whiter even than in Cyprus. But it stank. It stank of the sewage from thousands of men encamped and trapped for such a long time.
King Philip had arrived weeks before us but his thousands of Frenchmen had no impact on the struggle. It was a mighty tough city; well protected. Acre sat on the coast at the end of a short peninsula. The landward side blocked by two great defensive walls dotted with towers.
Only when King Richard and the English landed did the Franks mount any serious assault on the city.
I did not find William.
There was little chance to move about amongst the besieging armies. The English were on one side of the peninsula, the French on the other. Between were the forces of Jerusalem and the barons of Outremer. I asked after William and his knights but I could find no word of them. It was a huge disappointment as well as a relief.
The Holy Land presents great opportunity for a man who can fight.
So I put myself in the thickest of the fighting. For a month I fought for t
he walls. I climbed ladders and manned siege towers while under desperate attack from the garrison. There were thousands of Saracen knights inside the city but they were still merely a tenth our number. Still, they fought with the knowledge that losing the city might mean their slaughter. Many of the Saracens had their wives and children with them. I have no doubt that without those families to protect the garrison would have surrendered years before.
We also came under attack from outside where Saladin redoubled efforts to crush us before we could retake the city. I fought there, too, manning the palisades with my shield held high to block the endless shower of arrows.
Outremer was nothing like Messina or Cyprus. The feeling of a country fair was long gone. The social rules were not suspended. If anything, they became amplified in the cramped, hungry camps and ships. Jealousies raged and petty scores settled between men and women who were sick of the sight of one another. I could not see Alice. I knew that nobles and wealthy knights were wooing her with promises of security and a bright future for her son.
Often, I thought of my brother Henry. He never spoke of his time in the Holy Land, not in the whole time between his returning home and his death at William’s hand. But I imagined him here, fighting and wondered if he had fought well, or even fought at all.
I killed many Saracens at Acre. But there were thousands of other mad, prideful and ambitious Englishmen and I did not stand out from the crowd.
A month after the English landed, terms were agreed and Acre was handed over to the Franks. We took the brave Saracen garrison and their families as prisoners. Saladin was to pay a vast sum of gold in exchange for their freedom. But Saladin delayed his end of the bargain. Payment was promised by a certain date and then he would beg for more time when that day arrived. Saladin was gaining time to build up his forces while the Franks ground to a halt at Acre, unable to take advantage of our victory.
All Saladin’s previous Frankish opponents had been weak. But Richard was not like those other men. Common decency, fairness and charity were as nothing when compared to King Richard’s lust for greatness. Since his youth he was known as the Lionheart and he had a lion’s instinct for violence.
Richard ordered that the three thousand Saracen prisoners - all of the men, many of their women and even some children - be taken to a hill in full sight of Saladin’s camp.
And there be executed.
We men imagined that it was a gesture to force Saladin to pay up so I made sure I volunteered to carry out the act. It was a confusing jumble of shouting and angry Christians and Saracens who gathered outside the walls of the city. Everyone poured out to watch, unable to believe that Richard was truly going to do it. It was a scorching day and the sun burned my skin.
We marched the three thousand prisoners to a low hill just a little way from Acre across the stony plain.
And there, in full view of the Saracen armies and with Saladin’s distant banner fluttering above them all, we cut off three thousand heads.
The prisoners lined up in columns, stepping forward to the row where they had to kneel and have their heads struck from their bodies. The screams came down the line as hundreds of us began hacking into the kneeling prisoners. The first few hundred bodies were dragged away but then those men gave up because there were so many corpses and the bodies piled up. The dusty ground became saturated with blood.
The Saracens accepted their fate. Some stood silent, many prayed under their breath as they shuffled forward. Just a few wept and sobbed. I saw none at all trying to fight or escape and although to do so would have been useless, it struck me as strange that thousands could be so utterly resigned to their terrible fate.
Sergeants walked up and down behind us, shouting. “The king wants every head cut right off. So do it properly. When did you last sharpen that blade? Go get an axe, son.”
A young man, emaciated from captivity, knelt before me. He was mumbling a prayer and though his brothers were cut down either side of him, he did not so much as shake. I sent my own silent prayer to God and hacked down. My blow broke his spine and he died immediately. But King Richard had ordered three thousand heads be cut from three thousand bodies, so I hacked it clean off.
By my third man, I could no longer see through the tears and my hands shook too much to continue. Men willing and able to take my place jostled me aside, sloshing through the blood and laughing at the madness of it all. To work up the will to do such things many men had drunk themselves halfway senseless. It felt like something between the joyous anarchy of a village fair, a battlefield and the fervour of a special mass. It was as though we had allowed ourselves to lose our minds
The horror of that day was like nothing I had ever seen and have rarely seen since. Three thousand necks pumped blood out from their bodies in arcing spurts. If each Saracen lost as little as three or four pints of blood then we had shed well over a thousand gallons of the stuff. I watched it pouring over that hillside, running in rivers down the sides into gullies, pooling in hollows and soaking into the dry earth.
I staggered away shaking and covered in blood, stepping over the dead and dying, the screams ringing in my ears.
And there was William.
Earl William, as bloody as I and standing there clear as day.
Through the press of soldiers and prisoners, he was staring at me as if he had been waiting for me to notice him. He was grinning. His teeth red with blood.
William wiped chunks of flesh from his face. And then he sucked them all up into his mouth, chewing and swallowing them down.
Roger of Tyre, one of his most loyal men, brought William a cup and he threw it back. Blood poured down his cheeks and neck. He cuffed his mouth and smacked his lips, tossing the cup back to Roger who laughed and went to get more.
I looked around but no one else seemed to notice the knight gulping down the blood of the enemy like it was wine. But then, who could possibly have noticed such a thing? The only Franks upon that hill were drunk madmen intent on hacking even women and children in two.
Around the hill were groups of mounted knights and ranks of crossbowmen who stood ready to defend us should the Saracens decide to break the truce and attack. The distant armies of Saladin seemed to be working themselves into a fury of vengeance and it seemed as though they would soon attack. No doubt our knights would share my disgust that an English Earl was drinking human blood and even eating raw human flesh. But none of them would have helped me take him.
William saw me looking all around and he laughed.
“We do God’s work, my dear Richard,” William shouted, his voice powerful and clear through the screams of those dying and the prayers of those waiting to die. William sucked more blood from his fingers and licked his hands.
His knights were with him. They were nudging each other and jeering me. Hugo the Giant towered over them all, his face as blank as it ever was.
“I killed the Beast Rollo,” I shouted.
They were surprised. William, I thought, was impressed. The others were angry.
I readied myself, loosening my sword arm. Surely they would not attack a fellow knight where all could see?
Men fell all around us and the blood flowed underfoot.
William smiled and spoke to his men, who laughed.
“Who’s looking after your whore, Richard?” Hugh of Havering shouted.
“Should not leave a lady undefended, my lord,” Roger of Tyre cried. “I hear there are bad men about.”
I turned and ran through the blood back to Acre, their laughter ringing in my ears.
***
Their threats were nothing more than mockery. Alice was alive and well inside the walls of Acre.
But they knew about her. She could pay no knights to stand guard over her and so I raged at her to flee to somewhere that she could be safe.
“I will not run,” Alice said, scorning my fears. “What could he possibly do to me here? I am under the protection of King Richard.”
We were in her living quarters.
She had ordered the servants from the room when I burst in straight from the massacre. It was a fine, compact home that she had found. The city and a smear of sea was out the window over her shoulder.
She was under the protection of King Richard. “And everyone knows exactly what you had to do to gain his protection.”
Alice pierced my heart with a look of contempt. “I shall not defend my actions to you.”
Running to her chambers to find her alive and her children playing had given me such relief that it took me a while to understand why she was angry. As far as the nobility was concerned, she and I could have no reason for being together whatsoever. Charging into her home crying her name was idiotic. It was dangerous to her position and her continued good name. If that name was ruined, if she was known to be having intimate relations with a penniless knight, a powerful lord could never marry her without himself becoming tainted. Rumours could denied but common knowledge would be a disaster.
We had not lain together since Limassol and I knew that she may never lay with me again. But I was willing to risk my own happiness and her future position if it meant she would understand that William was dangerous.
“I am so sorry that I said that,” I said, although I wasn’t. “But even the King may not be able to protect you.”
“And you can?” She looked at me with such pity that my soul withered. “I never realised what a child you were until this moment.”
“You do not understand.” I strode across the room and loomed over her. “William is evil.”
“Evil? I know what is happening outside the city. Is that not evil?” she said, backing away from me. “I know that you demanded a place for yourself. Tell me, how many women did you kill before you came running to me? How many children?”
“I killed merely a few soldiers,” I said, wincing. “Saracen soldiers. Killing them is no sin, the Pope has said so. And anyway, I did it for you.” I told her proudly, like a cat who brings home a dying rat for its owner.