Crusade (39 page)

‘But he’s got what we need.’

Hereward looked elated; Sweyn had understood his intention.

Robert was still unsure.

‘And?’

‘We take it from him.’

‘How?’

‘A small force attacks as a diversion.’

Adela was quick to see the possibilities.

‘An even smaller force spirits away his baggage train, horses, goats and whatever else we can plunder.’

‘Exactly.’

There were smiles all round as spirits lifted for the first time in several weeks.

Robert then threw in some words of caution.

‘Everyone is in a bad way. We have to be careful; if the others hear that food and water and horses are just over
the next hill, there will be a mass exodus within the hour. The Crusade will be over.’

Hereward suggested a plan.

‘For obvious reasons, Robert must stay with the army to continue his duties. Estrith will stay with the sick and wounded. The attacking feint should be undertaken by the English contingent, led by Edgar and Edwin. I will pick a hundred or so of Tacitius’s Byzantines – he can be trusted, and I know his men – and Sweyn and Adela will lead them to capture Sultan Arslan’s baggage train from under his nose.’

‘And what will you do?’ asked Adela.

‘I’ll be right behind you two, keeping an eye on you. But first, we have to find Arslan. At first light tomorrow, Adela, Sweyn and I will slip out of camp with a dozen or so Byzantines who know this land and go in search of a Seljuk sultan.’

Three days later, the hunting party returned.

At what I suspected was Hereward’s prompting, Sweyn gave the news and repeated the detail of the feint.

‘Arslan is about thirty miles away to the north-east. It looks like he’s poised to strike. Men are arriving from the east all the time. Edgar, when can you be ready to leave?’

‘This evening, under cover of darkness; we don’t want to alert too many curious eyes. I’ll tell Robert. Estrith, will you carry on with your duties with the sick?’

‘No, where my family goes, I go. Besides, I don’t want to have to answer all the questions in the morning about where the English have gone!’

Robert gave us as many of the skinny Arabic horses
and surviving pack animals as he could spare to carry away our ill-gotten gains. He also granted us extra rations of food and water and provender for the animals.

By dawn the next morning, our small band had made excellent progress.

We found some shade and rested during the day, before travelling again at night. Nobody slept much in the heat of the day, but it was a time for reflection. Sweyn did most of the talking, usually in the form of questions and always aimed at Hereward.

‘How long did it take you to overcome the fear of battle?’

‘I never did, it is always there. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either a liar or a fool.’

‘But it must get easier to deal with?’

‘In a way, but the fear doesn’t go away, you just learn how to turn it to your advantage. Do you fear what we are about to do?’

‘Yes, I do, but I would only confess it to the Brethren.’

‘It’s a wise man who admits to his fears and anxieties – and also a strong one. Your fear will keep you alert and, when the time comes, you will turn it into the strength you need to do what you have to do.’

Edwin and I sat and watched as the great man bestowed his wisdom. Estrith was coiled around him in a loving embrace, while Sweyn and Adela sat at his feet, hanging on every word.

It brought back some fond memories from England, as well as many sad ones.

We launched our attack on Qilich Arslan’s camp in the dead of night.

After locating the baggage train and leaving Sweyn and Adela’s team in position, we attacked from the opposite side; fortunately, it was the dark of the moon. A group of junior knights found a hidden position in a dry river bed. They acted as a platoon of archers and loosed a storm of fire arrows into the black night. There was soon chaos as the fires took hold and thick smoke swirled around. We then rode through the Seljuk camp, making the kind of commotion worthy of several thousand horsemen rather than several dozen.

All in all, we made three sorties through the camp before the Turks got themselves organized sufficiently to inflict on us increasing numbers of casualties. We then withdrew and took up positions that would enable us to cover the escape of our bounty hunters.

Sweyn and Adela’s party worked by stealth; their mode was the way of the silent assassin. Sentries were attacked from behind, their throats cut by an English seax or the life strangled out of them by a Byzantine garrotte, picket lines were cut, corralled animals let loose, and our strings of horses loaded with as much food and water as they could carry.

Then, on Adela’s signal – a single fire-arrow shot horizontally into the air – Sweyn led his band away into the night, first at a trot, in the hope of not giving away their direction of escape, then at a canter, and finally at full gallop. I split my English group into three; we each let off several volleys of covering arrows before riding off as loudly as we could in different directions to confuse the Seljuks as much as possible.

Our agreed rendezvous point was the site of our last
camp. We reached it as dawn was breaking and, with it, the warm light of day brought a wonderful sight. There were dozens of swift Steppes ponies laden with all sorts of provisions – not enough to feed an army for long, but sufficient to gladden the hearts of our demoralized companions for many days.

We knew Qilich Arslan’s cavalry would be fanning out all around us, so we did a head count and moved off at speed. We had lost more than a dozen noble Englishmen, who had sacrificed their lives for their fellow Crusaders. It was yet another paradox to ponder: the vast majority of the Crusaders were Normans or Franks – the very same people who had conquered their English homeland and ruled it so ruthlessly – but such was the Crusader ideal, they had given of themselves willingly.

One of them was Algar, a righteous 31-year-old son of a thegn who had fought and died at Senlac Ridge, who slumbered in his mother’s womb at the time. Another was Storolf of Nottingham, a daunting man in his fifties, who had been with the Mercians who ambushed the Normans at the Malfosse on the night of the Battle of Senlac Ridge. He then joined King Harold’s exiled sons in Ireland but was disillusioned by their capricious behaviour and became a soldier for hire, wherever he could get paid. When he heard of the English contingent to the Holy Land, he joined in the hope that it would cleanse him of the sins of a lifetime of killing by day and debauchery by night.

We estimated that we were about three hours away from the Crusader column when a large group of Seljuks, perhaps 200 of them, crested the hill behind us.

Sweyn immediately swung his mount round and bellowed an order to the captain of Tacitius’s Byzantines.

‘Captain, take half the men and take our bounty on to the column. Everyone else, dismount.’

I looked at Hereward, who was already dismounting; he nodded his approval, so I issued my own order.

‘Edwin, take the horses on. I’ll stay.’

Sweyn had assumed command.

‘We must make a stand here to save the supplies. Form up as a phalanx of archers; keep the reins of your horses secure. Adela, give us the range. We shoot on her signal.’

I looked at Hereward again; he nodded, this time with a smile.

‘Now!’ was Adela’s shrill signal as we launched our first volley at a range of 300 yards.

We got two more away before the Turks were on top of us. Now we had to suffer their incoming volleys as they surrounded us.

‘Mount! Fight your way out! Follow Hereward’s lead!’

Sweyn beckoned to Hereward to clear a path for us. For the first time in many years, we saw the Great Axe of Göteborg wielded to murderous effect, cutting a swathe through the Turkish cavalry and leading the English contingent away. Sweyn was almost the last to mount, courageously ensuring that everyone got to their horse. It was then that Estrith was struck, taking a Seljuk arrow to her upper back. She was wearing mail, but the arrow cut through it. She squealed in pain, lost control of her mount and fell to the ground.

Adela used her eastern close-quarters bow with venom, wounding two Seljuks with successive arrows and giving
Sweyn time to leap from his horse, pull the stricken Estrith from the ground and lift her over his shoulder. She let out another shriek of pain. Adela then grabbed the reins of Sweyn’s horse and wheeled it round so that he could throw Estrith across its shoulders, remount and make his escape.

With his horse pirouetting in panic amidst the confusion of the moment and with the weight of two people on its back, Sweyn kicked his mount towards the north-east, the wrong direction, galloping back from whence we had come. Several Turks were between Adela and the route Sweyn had taken, leaving her isolated.

Thinking she was behind him, Sweyn continued his rapid exit.

Adela, realizing that several of the Seljuks were about to ride off in pursuit of Sweyn and Estrith, stood high in her stirrups, threw back her helmet to reveal feminine features and yelled at the Turks in Arabic, ‘It is I, Adela of Bourne, Knight of Islam!’, and charged at them, swinging her sword in wide arcs.

She was immediately surrounded by a circle of Seljuks. Some hesitated and blessed themselves, but the majority did not falter.

Hereward swung our horses round. We were over 500 yards away as a dozen or so Turks closed in on Adela, dragging her from her horse.

I looked to the horizon and could see Sweyn about to disappear into the safety of higher ground, oblivious to Adela’s predicament. More and more Seljuks were cresting the horizon all the time. Hereward looked at me and then turned to our comrades.

We all signalled our approval as Hereward hoisted the Great Axe above his head and issued the order.

‘Charge!’

The Turks saw us coming at about 100 yards and began to form a defensive wall of horsemen. They loosed a hail of arrows towards us but our momentum was prodigious, and Hereward’s awesome presence – his Great Axe glinting in the sun, his crimson cloak as a Captain of the Varangians flowing behind him – put them to flight.

Adela was safe, but had suffered a trauma all too reminiscent of the horror of her adolescence. Her armour had been pulled off her back, her shirt torn from her; she was rigid with terror, naked from the waist up. Hereward leant from his horse to offer her his arm. At that moment, he and Sweyn were the only men in the world for whom she would have moved. Without looking up, she stretched out her hand and Hereward swept her up behind him on to his horse’s flanks, covering her in his cloak.

Even then, she cared nothing for herself and kept repeating the same anguished questions: ‘Where’s Sweyn? Is Estrith safe?’

Our escape was a close call; only the speed of our horses saved us as we took flight through clusters of arrows launched high into the air, aimed to fall on to our path to safety.

As we neared the Crusader column, the Turks gave up the chase, but not before loosing one last cascade of arrows.

The projectile that killed Edwin was one of the last to land. It came out of the sky, almost at a right angle to the ground, and caught him close to his spine at the nape of
the neck. He rode on for a while, not uttering a sound, with a fixed stare on his face, but pain and failing consciousness soon combined to loosen his grip on his reins. He fell to the ground with a sickening crash, tumbling randomly like someone already dead. After coming to a stop, he did not move again. I was certain his wound was fatal; regardless, we could not stop to help him, but I made a mental note of his position in the hope of being able to retrieve his body later.

It was then that I saw Adela had also taken an arrow. Hereward told me later that he felt the impact, but that Adela had not let out a sound; she just winced and gripped him even harder around his waist.

The Seljuk threat had receded, so we slowed our gallop and I rode over to ask Adela about her injury.

‘It hurts a little … But what of Edwin? Did I see him fall?’

‘He’s gone, Adela. He took an arrow through the back of the neck.’

She sank her head into Hereward’s broad back and closed her eyes in a grimace – not for her pain, but for Edwin. She must have been in great agony; the arrow had gone through the fleshy part of her buttock and impaled itself in the saddle of Hereward’s mount, pinning her to the leather in the process.

Every lurch of the horse’s gait must have sent a jolt of torture through her entire body.

The journey back to the Crusader column seemed interminable. Adela was losing a lot of blood, but we thought it better to keep moving; attempting to move her and
extract the arrow without the help of the physicians would almost certainly have made her injury worse.

When we finally reached the column, joyous celebrations had already begun to greet the arrival of the Turkish provisions. We were hailed as heroes, as if we had returned with the keys to the gates of Jerusalem. Suddenly the English contingent, previously only an insignificant appendage to the great Norman-Frankish-Germanic host, had saved the day, even for their Norman masters.

Robert’s physicians were summoned to help Adela, but in her forthright way she made it clear what she wanted done.

‘Please lift me and the saddle off the horse as one and put me on a saddle stand. I would also like a shirt to cover me, please.’

She was placed on a tack stand, as requested, and one of the English knights gave her a shirt.

‘It’s a bit big.’

She tried to raise a smile, but she looked very pale and her voice started to quiver.

‘Let us help you.’

‘Thank you, Edgar, but there is only one way to do this.’

She and the saddle were soaked in blood, the colour matching Hereward’s cloak, which she now threw off, nonchalantly exposing herself, then put on the shirt. She asked Hereward to help her: ‘Would you break off the arrow?’

Hereward’s large hands made it look puny, and he snapped it with ease. It had entered Adela’s buttock, making a deep wound, but only appeared to be pinning soft tissue.