Pillars of Light (34 page)

1190

I
t was October before we reached the Holy Land. Half a year to cross what felt like half the world—it seemed about right. Putting into the port of Tyre, everyone was keen to get ashore. You could feel the heat coming off the land, as if it had been stored up all summer and was now warding off the coming winter. There was spice in the air and the aroma of fried fish—our noses twitched like dogs’.

Ezra tugged at my sleeve. She was at my side all the time now. “What’s that bird there, John?”

It looked to me much the same as any bird back home—brown feathers, beady eyes. “I’ve no idea.”
The Moor would know
, I thought for the hundredth time.

“And that one?”

“Seagull, Ezra.”

“I knew that.” She grinned. Freckles peppered her nose. She looked like the cheeky boy she purported to be. Ashore, she wolfed as much food as any man, and drank as much ale.

But in Tyre, except for wine, there was no alcohol to be found,
much to Quickfinger’s dismay. “What, no ale? What sort of shithole is this?”

The twins, Hammer and Saw, chattered away like jackdaws, sometimes in their own language that none of the rest of us could understand, staring around at all the dark-skinned and dark-eyed robed and turbaned men.

“Damn me,” Ned said, charged more than he liked for food so spicy it burned his mouth. “I thought we’d come to fight these buggers, not get fleeced by them.”

Quickfinger kept his hand on the hilt of the fine sword he’d won at dice in Marseille, where we’d missed King Richard by some weeks. He’d cheated to win it, of course, and the next time he tried the same trick got into a fight and nearly ended up in gaol again. He’d given me his old weapon for saving his skin, but it was not much recompense—a clumsy old falchion, all the weight near the tip for hacking, like a butcher’s blade. No finesse there, nor in me as a swordsman: the combination was not pretty.

Besides, I had no zeal to fight the Saracen. The idea of killing another man was not something I’d given much mind to, and I intended to put it off as long as possible. But they had us out of Tyre faster than you could say God’s teeth. A fleet full of men who’d been at sea for long weeks—who’d want us in their town for longer than was necessary? I’d barely shaken my sea-legs before they had us marching out again. In my foolishness I was thinking we’d be marching straight for Jerusalem, but instead we found ourselves heading for a town called Acre—or Akka, in the local tongue—a march of a day or so south down the coast. It was a port like Tyre, but held by the Muslims, despite a siege by Christian forces that had—according to Will, who hung on the knights’ every word—already lasted a year and more. A siege. I remembered Robert de Sable speaking of such at Lisbon. “The will,” he had said. It was all about the will.

“How have they held out for so long,” I asked Savaric, “against the flower of Christendom?”

He waved his hand dismissively. “We have God on our side, and King Richard coming any day. We shall prevail in no time. And then it will be on to Jerusalem, where we shall sweep all before us, and the pickings will be rich.”

We set out just after dawn, and our company made for a brave sight with the knights astride their big horses, the beasts all caparisoned in bright colours, the men in shining plate and mail, banners flying above. Robert de Sable rode with the Archbishop of Auxerre and the Bishop of Bayonne, talking in French too fast to follow. Ahead of them rode Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Hubert, Bishop of Salisbury, the one bearing the sigil of Saint Thomas à Becket, the other a great jewelled cross.

“Bet that’s worth summat,” Quickfinger said quietly, eyeing the cross.

“Wouldn’t like to see you trying to prise that out of the bishop’s grasp.” I grinned. Hubert Walter looked more like a soldier than a man of the cloth. “He’d pick you up and snap you in two.”

“Aye, and eat me for breakfast when we run out of that lot.” Quickfinger hiked a thumb back over his shoulder to where a mile of ox carts trundled, piled high with tents and equipment, supplies to feed thousands: cheeses and hams, flour and salted beef, ale and wine, beans and barley and an entire flock of sheep bought in Tyre’s huge market.

We sang as we marched:

Even we foot soldiers had polished our helms and honed our weapons, said our prayers and washed our faces. We looked like God’s army, clean in body and spirit, even though the wood of the Cross lay in the hands of the heathen.

But our first sight of the siege city the next day was not auspicious. Black birds were circling: crows? I knew what attracted carrion-eaters. And it was telling that Ezra didn’t ask me what birds these were; indeed, within minutes, as we approached closer to the tawny-walled city, all our words had ebbed away.

“What is this place?” Red Will turned a horrified face to me, as if I should know. He had caught the sun in just a few hours’ march and his face was already beginning to peel.

He might well have asked. We were marching through a wasteland: acres of turned earth, pitted and burned and stinking. Was this what we were fighting over, this ruined ground? Everywhere there were rags and shards and rubbish mashed into the earth. Looking closer, I saw scattered bones and nameless pieces of rotting flesh where bodies had been rooted up by some rummaging creature.

And the stench—my God, the stench. It hurt the nose.

“What is this hell?” asked Little Ned.

“Who are these people?” asked Ezra.

These people regarded us dourly as we passed, faces weathered to the colour of old wood, more like the infidel we were there to fight than the flower of Christendom we thought to join. They were gaunt and sullen-eyed; their filthy clothes hung on them like rags on scarecrow-sticks. We had thought to have cheers and welcome, but all we heard were catcalls and insults. They laughed at us, sneering at our bright banners and our clean surcoats, at the knights
sweating in their armour in the hot sun, at the pennanted lances and our well-ordered marching. But there were other expressions, too, even less pleasant. Avid eyes followed the passage of the warhorses and the ox carts piled with provisions.

As far as the eye could see this wasteland stretched, studded with ragged tents and makeshift lean-tos, striped with earthworks and barricades, spiked palisades, tatty enclosures. Men sat listlessly on the bare ground playing dice and knucklebones. And there were women here too, though it took more than one glance to ascertain their sex, for they were as scrawny and ill-kempt as the men, even those with their dugs out on show. Though our lads had been relishing the chance of a visit to the brothels of Tyre and, due to our swift departure, had never fulfilled their wish, none of them made a lustful comment, but instead looked away in horror. “Women, Jesus,” Hammer breathed. He made some odd folk-gesture to ward off evil.

They gave us the filthiest quarter in which to pitch our tents. Savaric protested, and was derided by the lords who presided over the camp. He muttered, “Just wait until King Richard arrives,” as if the king were some living saint who could command miracles at will. Well, perhaps he could. For the time being, we pitched our tents where we were told, and set guards on the animals and the provision wagons.

Within days, of course, one of the horses went missing—the mount of a French noble from Aquitaine—along with the lad whose job it was to guard it. The man was almost in tears, for without his horse, what was a knight? As Hammer put it, “Just a fool rattling around in a tankard.”

Questioning of the lords in charge of the camp did not go well. The Bishop of Auxerre preached a furious sermon on the subject of theft, exhorting the horse-thieves to confess. Since it had just been announced that any man caught whoring, drinking or thieving would be hanged, unsurprisingly no one stepped forward.

A few hours later and there was still no sign of horse or boy. Savaric sent for me. With him was a man I had not met before, tall, gaunt, with dirty yellow hair and beard, and equipped with more weapons than I’d ever seen on one man. Savaric said he was one of the
“raptores,”
which did not fill me with confidence, for in Latin that meant “plunderers.” The man—Florian—told me he preferred the French term
“routier,”
man of the road.

“A sell-sword?” I asked.

“We don’t use that word. Or mercenary, either.”

Ordered to make a search, we trudged along in silence for a while after that, looking over the few horses left in the camp, but there was no sign of a dappled grey with feathered fetlocks and a plaited mane.

The
routier
snorted. “We should inspect the roasting spits, and not just for the horse.”

I stared at him, and he gave me his quick, feral grin, part of his face static where a sword had at some time bisected his left cheek.

“Is it really so bad here that men have to eat horses?”

Florian turned to me. “What, you never ate horsemeat?”

My expression answered him.

“My God, you people have no idea. There are men here who haven’t had a proper meal in weeks. They’ve been eating frogs, seagulls, rats, anything they can lay hands on. Oh, the nobles do all right, but they don’t give a damn about their own people. And the merchants are making a killing. A bushel of wheat for thirty, even forty gold bezants. And with a horse’s intestines selling on the black market for eight soldi, can you imagine how much an entire horse is fetching?”

That gave me pause.

“Why do you think I’m working for your lord now?”

I didn’t try to answer his question; he was going to tell me anyway.

“Paying me twice as much, and he’s brought fresh supplies.” He smacked his lips. “Mutton, God’s bollocks, I’ve missed the taste of mutton.”

We passed a particularly grim camp and Florian’s nose twitched. He pulled me away. “Flux,” he said. “If the air begins to smell sweet to you just keep walking. Ain’t no horse in the world worth catching the bloody flux for. It’s a killer. Twelve thousand Danes and Frisians came out here a year ago.” He turned to me. “You know how many are left now?”

I shook my head.

“Maybe two hundred. The flux is doing Saladin’s job for him. All he has to do is sit up there in those hills and wait till it kills us all.” He nodded towards the horizon, a ragged, tawny line punctuated by far-off banners and the pointed tops of tents. He strode on, pointing out the landmarks of our own camp: a banner here, a banner there.

My eyes wandered to the hills. It was hard to imagine your enemy when they were so far out of sight. The garrison soldiers who manned the walls of the city, we saw them every day, they held no terror for us. But an invisible foe was a different matter.

We passed a heavily guarded enclosure with a fine tent in the middle of it flying a flag with five gold crosses—one large, surrounded by four small—on a white background. Florian nodded towards it.

“The King and Queen of Jerusalem,” he said. “Guy de Lusignan and Sibylla, the sister of the Leper King. Once we take Acre they’ll make it the seat of their kingdom. Your lot are supporting them.”

“My lot?”

“The English, the Angevins.”

“Who are they supporting them against?”

He laughed. “You don’t know much, do you? Conrad of Montferrat, of course, from the Piedmont—he’s claiming the Jerusalem crown.
He’s the very devil, is Conrad. A cunning man, brave, too. He held Tyre against the Arabs, against Saladin himself—and that’s some feat, for the sultan is another wily man. He took Conrad’s father, old Marquis William, and called to Conrad that he’d have the old man killed if he didn’t give up the city. But Conrad, he took up his crossbow and pointed it at his father and cried back, ‘Stand aside, I’ll kill him myself and save you the trouble!’ Conrad’s a bastard. Well, they both are, but Conrad’s a hard bastard and Guy’s a weak one. He’s only king through his wife, but he’s one of your King Richard’s vassals and some sort of cousin, so your lot are bound to support his claim. The French and the Germans, they’re behind Conrad.”

I’d seen a fight already between some German soldiers and some men I recognized off one of the ships that had sailed with us, but I had put it down to traded insults. Now I wondered if this was the cause.

“I thought we were here to win Jerusalem back for Christendom,” I said. “Not to get involved in some fight between rival kings.”

Florian shook his head wearily, as if he had been saddled with a halfwit child. A sword for hire had to be alert to all manner of allegiances and manoeuvrings, I supposed. He had to be well enough informed to choose the noble most likely to survive and prosper in order to pay the best wages. But I had little hand in my own destiny, and so I let my mind wander, my eyes upon the grand tent with its gold-and-white banners set amid the same mud and shit as the tents of the commonest soldier. Imagine being the King of Jerusalem, reduced to this. It seemed to me that if God existed he had surely abandoned these people.

I said as much around our campfire that night, and Florian said, “You aren’t wrong. What with the flux and the weather and empty bellies and the sheer bloody pointlessness of the whole endeavour, me and the boys would have cleared off long ago if it weren’t for the booty.”

“Booty?” Quickfinger stopped poking the fire with a bone and his eyes fixed on the
routier
’s scarred face. “What booty?” This was what the troupe had come for, what they had been promised.

“All sorts, if you’re up for it.” Florian pulled the neck of his tunic aside to reveal three gold chains, each bearing a chunky crucifix.

Ezra pursed her lips; Hammer and Saw exchanged a glance. Ned sucked his teeth thoughtfully. But Will—ever the innocent—could not stop his mouth. “You mean you rob our own dead?” His outrage was almost comical, but no one laughed.