The Long Sword (52 page)

‘If they are slaves, why do they fight at all?’ I asked. ‘Why don’t the Egyptians do their own fighting?’

Sabraham nodded. ‘Warfare demands horsemen, and Egypt is rich, but it is terrible country for horses – too hot, and too many insects. The rainy season kills horses by rotting their hooves and the dry season kills their forage and robs them of water. But the troubles in raising horses don’t effect the army horses – it is that there are not enough horses to raise a boy to riding from infancy. You cannot create a horse-archer overnight.’

I nodded my agreement. I knew how much effort it took to remain capable with a lance, or a longsword.

‘So they buy boys who were raised from birth with horses. Most of them are Kipchaks like your John. Some few are Turks, but they are not trusted with senior commands.’ He shrugged. ‘A Kipchak boy can rise to rule. All of them have fine armour, beautiful horses, superb weapons, any woman they want, and they live well.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m told that Kipchak boys have been known to compete to go to the slavers.’ He paused. ‘Do you know who Baybars was?’

It was like being asked who Satan was. ‘Yes!’ I exclaimed.

‘He was a Kipchak. You understand?’

I supposed that I did. I certainly understood why Sabraham was so pleased by John the Turk.

At any rate, Sabraham watched the shoreline as we approached; it was as flat as the fens around Boston and green as spring, even in early autumn. We made a rendezvous of which I had not been informed – Sabraham was very close with information about our meetings. Off a village to the west of Alexandria, we transferred, by prior arrangement, from the Order’s galliot to a Cypriote merchant of less than a hundred tonnes, a stubby, round-hulled ship with a crew of six men and holds that stank of fish guts.

Brother Robert saluted us and slipped away to the north, and Theodore, the captain of our new vessel, a Cypriote Greek, welcomed us aboard. It was immediately clear to me that he was in the pay of the Order or perhaps the king, but Sabraham insisted that the six of us – his own servant or squire, whose name was Abdul, his two silent soldiers, whose Christian names I had never learned, as well as John the Turk, Sabraham himself and I – stay well separate from the crew of the fishing smack. By his order we all wore our hoods at all times, and we bespoke no man.

In the last light of day, beautifully timed, I must say, Theodore entered the outer harbour under a shivering lateen very close-hauled. The broad harbour had four rows of ships anchored well off shore, but for some reason no vessel was anchored closer than a bowshot from the beach.

Our captain called to Sabraham and they had a brief conference.

Sabraham returned to me and shook his head. ‘He says the Porto Vecchio is so silted up that he cannot approach the shore. Why did he not tell me this earlier?’

‘I thought you had been here before?’ I asked.

‘Always from the land, with caravans,’ Sabraham said. He frowned.

Theodore made a signal and the ship turned south, deeper into the harbour. He appeared to mistake his anchorage, and passed the pilot boat. As we ran down wind, with the Arabic anger of the pilot boat in our ears, Sabraham gathered us in the stern. ‘The water under the keel will be less than two men deep,’ he said. ‘Swim up the beach and strip your clothes. We will be met.’

I touched the dagger at my belt. ‘If we are not met?’ I asked.

He frowned. ‘We improvise,’ he said.

He himself wore only a cheap wool gown over his braes, with a heavy basilard in his rope belt. I emulated him.

But the pilot boat had changed tack, and her rig was lighter and faster than ours.

Master Sabraham watched her in the dying light. ‘Too bad,’ he said. ‘We will have a long swim.’

Just then, the tubby fishing boat’s hull skidded on the sea’s bottom. We were a long way from shore; the city seemed close enough, with the lights of the taller buildings reflected in the still water of the Porto Vecchio, but those waters were still several hundred cloth yards wide.

Captain Theodore shouted commands in Greek and the helm was put up. Sabraham swore.

‘Look, we improvise,’ he said.

I was looking over the side. As we turned, I could see the bottom as clear in the failing light as I can see the floor of this room. It was right under our keel. Even as I looked, we touched, and Sabraham and I were thrown flat on the deck.

‘Shit,’ Sabraham said. Without any further imprecations, he rolled over the side into the water as the pilot boat came alongside with a swarm of Arabic imprecations.

The side at the waist was only three feet above the water, and the water was as warm as blood. But it stank of human excrement and dead fish. My hand brushed a dead cat floating like a bloated, matted fur hat, stinking of decay and I was all but paralysed with a kind of disgusted panic.

Fortunately, the water was shallow. It was so shallow that we were touching bottom before we were at a safe distance from our smack. Twice I had to force my face under the foul water to avoid detection, and by the time I was halfway to shore, I was only waist deep.

Despite that, I made it ashore. We all did. John spat and spat – I think that Kipchaks are very clean people – and two Alexandrines appeared out of the darkness. There was a muttered exchange of passwords and they provided us with gowns of linen and cotton.

Sabraham had spent the days of the passage briefing us, and I knew my role. It fitted my inclination and my training, so John and I left Sabraham almost immediately and walked along the beach front for more than an English mile, gazing with fascination at the sea wall above us. It was magnificent, as fine as the wall of Constantinople, tall, built of layers of pale stone that glowed like fine chamois in the dark and the sally gates we passed had marble lintels with Arabic inscriptions that neither John nor I could read.

The night was full of noise and foreign, intoxicating smells: smells of alien cookery, of plants, and spices, and garbage. The thin sounds of music, elfin, silvery and magical in the moonlight, slipped over the sea wall. Women laughed. Men laughed, too.

Over the walls towered the stele that marked the tomb of Alexander, and as we made our way west and south around the walls, we saw the twin pillars that Sabraham had pointed out from the sea – the columns of Pompey. We crossed the river at the great stone bridge, which was unguarded, to my astonishment, and made our way to the Cairo Gate, where Sabraham had ordered us.

It took us the better part of the night to walk around the city, and by the time we reached our first destination, I was drunk on the
foreignness and the wonder of Alexandria. It was gargantuan – thrice the size of Florence, or so it seemed in the darkness.

Eventually, we reached the gate that Sabraham had described and we lay down in a
caravanserai
with pilgrims and merchants and slept. I slept – I was young.

In the morning, we rose with the others. We made no pretence of being Moslems, which, if you consider, is odd, as John might easily have passed as one. But no one paid us any attention, and after their morning prayers, we purchased horses. They were the fine-headed Arab breed, and impossibly cheap; that is, in Italy I had never been able to afford an Arab, and in Egypt, despite the difficulty in raising them, they cost little more than a palfrey cost in France.

If dawn revealed a superb world of gilded minarets, veiled women and handsome, bearded men in all the colours of the rainbow –
par dieu
, the Egyptians were rich! – but as I say, if the sun revealed their riches in all their startling adornment and magnificence, it also revealed a level of horrifying poverty that was the more shocking compared to the opulence. Outside our
caravanserai
, there were two beggars, dead. They lay where they had died, and no one seemed to care. Beyond the market’s horse lines – we were outside the great customs gates of the city, and there was a market – a line of beggars sat in the dust. There were lepers, and men with their hands cut off: criminals, my Turk assured me. But there was a single leper woman with seven children, and every one of them was a leper; most of them were naked, so that every touch of the disease on their poor little bodies was on display. The leper woman and her seven children had much the same effect on me as the floating cat’s corpse.

Moments after we purchased our horses, John suddenly grabbed my arm.

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Don’t stare.’

A troop of horse, perhaps a hundred men-at-arms, came out the gate at a canter. The leader was mounted on the finest horse I had ever seen, a bright gold horse like Jack, years ago in France, with bronze mane and tail and dark legs and muzzle – I had never seen such markings. The horse’s caparison and tack was all of green and silver, there were jewels on his bridle, and his rider was in green silk. His helmet was a tall, peaked spiral with an open face and a superb aventail of tiny
links. His green gown seemed to cover more armour, and he carried a golden axe in his hand.

The guard at the gate turned out and saluted, more than two hundred men in maille and plate, with heavy bows of horn and sinew and heavy, curved sabres.

I noted that John’s advice had been exact – almost every man and woman in front of the gate was sitting. Most were silent, and all wore attitudes of respect.

I watched the men-at-arms, as they were the first Mamluks I had seen. They were well mounted. Most of them had light lances, like our boar spears, and all had a case carrying at least one bow, although some had two, and one big man had three bows. They all carried one bow strung.

I noted at once that they rode a different saddle from us. Of course I had heard this from Sabraham and indeed from Fra Peter, but their saddles were very small and had no back, and their caparisons, where worn, were only silk, with no mail underneath, though their armour and helmets were heavy enough, by Saint George.

An old woman sitting next to me in the dust spoke to me and cackled.

‘Say nothing,’ John enjoined me. He spoke low.

The woman’s eyes widened and she shuffled away.

‘I told she you are sick,’ he said.

The Mamluks waited in front of the gate through their lord’s inspection of the garrison. The troopers began to be bored, like soldiers the world over, and the men in the front rank began to examine the crowd.

The rightmost Saracen in the front rank was a big, heavy man with a henna-dyed red beard. His horse was the biggest there, almost as big as my warhorse and his eyes roved the beggars, and then the merchants.

I tried to make myself very small.

His eyes went right over me.

So did the eyes of the younger man to his left.

Their lord received the salute of the gate’s garrison, and returned it imperiously with his axe, then he turned and made his horse rear a little, and the crowd almost cheered. It was a curious sound, almost like a whisper.

He raised his whip – his axe was hung by his saddle bow – and called something in his tongue, and all the mounted men shouted.

The gates began to open, and the Mamluks began to form in a column with perfect discipline, all except the younger man, one file to the left of the old bastard with the dyed beard. The younger man put his heels to his mount and seemed to fly across the packed dirt. For a few horrifying beats of my heart I thought that he had chosen me, or John, but he went past us, almost over us.

I turned and saw a group of pilgrims. As it proved, they were a wedding party.

The young Mamluk rode in among them. He reached down and raised the veil of the bride and came riding back with her over his saddle. She was screaming and reaching for her husband but the young man lay face down in a pool of blood.

It had happened very quickly, as such things do. I’d seen it done in France.

I started to rise, and John struck me with his fist. I went down.

I rose on one knee, as Fiore taught, and John caught me. He wasn’t attacking me – so much for trust – he was restraining me.

‘Calm!’ he said. ‘Or we have been dead. All of us.’

Henna-beard shouted something, and the young man with the bride over his saddle laughed and waved his riding whip. Henna-beard shook his head in disgust and rode through the open gate. About half of the cavalry followed the Green Lord out of the gate and down the road to Cairo, and the rest formed by fours – a beautiful spectacle – and rode back in the gates.

Well. In those moments, I learned everything about the Mamluks.

The anger in the market was palpable. The Egyptians were not cowards, whatever my Italian friends said. But they had no weapons; no one I could see had more than an eating knife. There were men shouting, suddenly, and the wedding party was paralysed until one of the women burst into a wailing cry, and instantly it was taken up.

The garrison had begun to march inside when someone threw a paving stone, and a Mamluk soldier was hit and went down.

The garrison halted and began to reform. They were in some confusion about whether to reform inside the gate or outside.

The people in the market were working themselves up to a riot. I had seen it in London and Paris and Verona, and I found it fascinating, in a detached way, how much an Arab mob resembled a good English mob.

‘Run!’ John said.

We caught the bridles of our new horses and ran. The mob was solidifying around us; men were running up from the low shops and stalls along the market, and a farmer bringing produce to sell jumped down from his cart, seized his stick and ran to join the crowd. Men and women – even children – joined the crowd.

A hail of stones hit the soldiers.

They drew their bows.

And loosed. By the wounds of Christ, they killed fifty people in their first discharge, and they nocked and drew again, and the arrows flew. More died.

Arrows found their way past the front rank. We were fifty paces beyond the front of the mob, and an arrow went over my right shoulder and over my horse’s rump to kill a Jew standing by his stall. He crumpled, a look of consternation on his face. His son stared at me, face white. The boy was ten or eleven and he had no idea what to do with his father suddenly dead.