The Lute Player (37 page)

‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Prevarication leads nowhere. You refuse to be honest with me but I will be honest with you. Blondel, I want you to go straight back to the camp and stay there. I know you live—as he does—in great discomfort and there is danger and you see horrid sights. But please go back. When he was ill, Blondel, your letters saved me from going distracted. No message from any courtier—no, not from the King of France himself—could have brought me such comfort.’

She began to pace about the room, taking long jerky strides and working her hands together. ‘They all hate him,’ she said. Joanna muttered something and she rounded on her. ‘Why shouldn’t I say it? Blondel can be trusted—he wouldn’t tattle—and, for that matter, I’d say this in the open any day. They hate him; they’re jealous. Did you mark Philip tonight, doing his utmost to provoke, to whip up his temper so that he can turn round and find an excuse for his own perfidy? Blondel, if you can imagine what it is like to be a woman, to know these things and yet to be locked away, shut out. Did you hear him tonight? When he leaves Acre we are to stay here. There will be weeks, months of waiting and not knowing the truth about anything. That is not to be borne.’ She stopped in her pacing, close to me, and laid her hand on my sleeve. ‘Do you realise,’ she said violently, ‘that when he was ill they said he was dead? If I had not had your letter, Blondel—’

‘Dear Berengaria,’ Joanna said, putting an arm about her and beginning to cry again, ‘you must not excite yourself. You will make yourself ill. And it is to Richard that you should say—’

‘Joanna, just for once let me have my say. Blondel, listen. Before ever you came to Pamplona I dreamed about you. Yes, that is true. I never told anyone save Anna and I told her that first day when you came and played. Do you remember? I dreamed I was in an oubliette and you got me out. When you came back from England I thought that dream was broken, fulfilled, done with, and I almost let Anna carry you off to Apieta—but I dreamed the same dream again and that was a warning. I dared not let you go and now you see. When he moves out towards Jerusalem and I am left here, that is my oubliette. Only you can help me because you are the only person I trust to keep watch and tell me the truth. Blondel, if my brother Sancho had come it would have been different. As it is, there is only you. Do, please, I beg of you, go with him, stick close to him, keep watch and ward over him and from time to time, as chance offers, let me know how he fares.’

I stood there and looked at her and she looked back at me pleadingly. Not for me to hurt her who had been so much hurt already.

‘If it would make you happy,’ I said at last.

‘It would make me more comfortable in my mind.’ She sat down suddenly on the stool and clasped her hands in her lap. ‘At supper when the marquis was speaking of careless servants—did you hear? I thought that you—you sleep in his tent. Pages and servants are careless and open to bribery but you… Not that you shall lack reward, Blondel. I promise you. When we go home from this crusade I’ll give you whatever you ask, anything you desire.’ She leaned forward and pointed one hand at me, palm upwards. ‘There! That is what I mean, Blondel, when I say that you can be exasperating. I asked you a great favour, I open my heart to you, I even tell you about my dream. Then when I promise you a reward you put on a mocking, scorning look as though you didn’t believe a word I was saying. Why do you look like that? Don’t you believe that if you do this for me I’ll give you anything you ask?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Of course I believe it.’ And I wasn’t looking mocking or scornful at you, only at my thoughts; at the great discrepancy between what I desire and what you could give me.

‘And you will go back and stay?’

‘I will go back and stay,’ I said.

‘And keep watch and ward?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then God bless and keep you, Blondel.’

IX

The King had missed me so soon because he wanted to entrust me with a task, an interesting one and to my taste—the making of the preparations for the reception of the three thousand Christian prisoners who were expected within a fortnight.

Acre yielded up fourteen Christians in all, Raife of Clermont and thirteen others. Four of these had been captive for a long time, nine taken recently. Richard had had the outwardly reasonable notion of letting them help me to make arrangements for the reception of the others but the plan did not work well. The ordinary man who has known neither captivity nor liberation may imagine that these fourteen men with a shared experience would make a closely knit, intensely friendly group. But that was not so. Raife had been chosen as interpreter at the surrender and Richard, on the impulse of the moment, had taken him into his tent, taken him into his table and introduced him into the highest company of the crusaders. He had been, for few days, a rarity. The other thirteen, coming in later, housed in a tent together and regarded with less astonishment or curiosity, resented their more ordinary treatment. They vied with one another in the comparison of hardships endured, experiences sustained, in the demand for luxuries, most of them unobtainable, and in their jealousy of Raife.

I chose a palace, larger than the one which housed the women, and set it out, so far as possible with the means at my command, like a castle in the West. We made stools and tables and beds of ordinary Christian height from the floor; we put spits in the kitchen. We sent out petitions throughout the whole camp asking for contributions of spare clothing and equipment. By the end of ten days we had so arranged it that every returned prisoner, though he might not be fitted out completely, could at least feel his welcome and have enough to inform him that he was home at last and amongst his friends.

Some of the gifts were rather touching. A man from Suffolk, an archer, arrived one evening with a smallish bundle wrapped in canvas. He spoke English and that in a dialect which two of the returned English prisoners failed to understand. But at last we found one who understood him and this was the theme of his speech.

‘Years ago I was fighting with his late Majesty in France and had the mischance to be wounded. Twelve days I lay a-raving and a-starving and then I come to and all I wanted was a bit of Suffolk ham and there wasn’t a bit to be got anywhere, naturally. So this time, before I set out from home my owd mother, she cured a ham for me, killing the pig special, and she say to me, “Johnny, my boy,” she say, “keep hold of this against the time when you want it most particular.” But now I’ve sawn him in half and if so be there’s a Suffolk man amongst them chaps that’s coming in, do you give him this, for to a Suffolk man there’s nowt like a bit of Suffolk-cured ham, as I can give my word for. But if so be there ain’t no Suffolk man, do you be so good as to give it back to me. For I shall need it myself before this is over and if any but a Suffolk man et it my owd mother would never forgive me.’

Unwrapping the canvas, he revealed a half-ham, black as pitch on the outside, browny-pink within and the whole as hard as a stone. I set it carefully on a shelf in the storeroom and later on I took great pains to search through the whole of the army and to give that Suffolk archer back his treasure.

For no prisoner came in.

Why, I never knew nor, I think, did anyone else. Saladin had agreed to the exchange and it seemed to me that the garrison of three thousand men from Acre would be of more value to him than a similar number of Christian prisoners scattered throughout his domain, many of them old and decrepit, all of them unwilling. Moreover, Saladin had proved himself and was to prove himself again and again a chivalrous enemy, a scrupulous keeper of rules and treaties. Nevertheless, the stipulated fortnight passed and neither prisoners nor excuses arrived and Richard began to worry the matter over in his mind. After a few days he sent messengers in search of Saladin but they returned with the news that the camp in the hills was deserted and had been for some days; there was a rumour that Saladin had gone to Damascus, another that he had gone south. Richard chose to believe the latter and lashed himself into a rage.

‘Very clever!’ he exclaimed. ‘He knows that these prisoners are a clog on my leg; I can neither feed and transport them when I leave nor afford men to stand guard over them, so he thinks I shall sit here playing watchdog while he looks to his defences in the south. Little he knows! I give him three more days…’

In Palestine in summer there are two lovely hours in the day, one just after sunrise, one just before sunset. In the morning the sky is the colour of a hyacinth, the sun is pleasantly warm and everything is drenched and sparkling with dew. In the evening, after the heavy, sultry heat of the day, a little breeze springs up, the cool shadows lengthen, the earth shakes itself and smiles.

In the lovely morning hour of the day after the expiration of Richard’s last time limit, 2,844 Saracen prisoners were mustered in the enclosure in front of their place of captivity, gravely giving thanks to Allah because they thought that the exchange had been made and the day of delivery had come. And in the lovely evening hour of that day they all lay dead in their blood on that field. No, I lie when I say all, for towards the end of the day the swordsmen whom Richard had picked to be executioners had grown weary, hasty, careless and stabbed and clubbed their victims instead of cleanly striking off their heads as he had ordered. So here and there a wounded man moaned and cried, and here and there amongst the mounded dead one yet living stirred, so that the satiated vultures rose, flapped heavily and then settled again to the feast.

And Richard Plantagenet, looking across that scene of horror, said, ‘Now I can begin my march on Jerusalem.’

On the great and dreadful day of Judgment that sentence will be heard again, quoted either as accusation or exoneration. And the Judge on that day will be impartial, disinterested, just. We none of us were, so our verdicts are warped and invalid.

The great mass of opinion in the camp was that Richard had acted sensibly and expediently. ‘We are here to kill Saracens, and if three thousand of them can be wiped out in in day without loss of a single Christian life, that is all to the good,’ summed up the attitude of the ordinary soldier on crusade. Those who most loudly professed their horror of the act all too often revealed during their denunciations that it was not the mass murder but the man who ordered it whom they detested. ‘We always said he was bloodthirsty and treacherous and this proves it,’ was what they said. But it should be remembered that the massacre lasted for a whole day and that no effective steps were taken to stop it. The grumblers let him deal with the prisoners as they had let him take Acre—singlehanded. If Philip of France had actually felt that day as later he said he felt—that Richard was a bloody-minded homicide, crazed by his lust to kill—surely on that day he should have done something to restrain him. Richard always swore that he informed him overnight of his intention and that Philip said, ‘Those who take prisoners are responsible for them.’ That sounds like Philip; “responsible,” used thus, has a delicate ambiguity which a more subtle man than Richard might have noted and paused over. Richard simply took it as a recognition of his authority in the matter; a justifiable assumption since Philip spent that whole day on a picnic in the foothills where the weather was cooler and the view more pleasing.

My own feelings about the massacre I dare hardly examine. I was shocked and horrified but then I was a novice to the art of war and any sort of killing, even in the heat of battle, shocked and horrified me and if I am honest with myself I am compelled to admit that if Richard had been a kind and loving husband to Berengaria I should have accepted more readily the three facts to his credit which even those who hate him must admit. He had waited a long time and made an effort to make Saladin keep his bargain; the problem of the prisoners was a real and pressing one; the method of execution was the swiftest and most merciful one known.

And now that I have seen so many die of slow disease, of wounds which will not heal, of starvation and thirst, I sometimes ask myself whether there are not worse ways of dying than to come out into the sunshine, happy in the belief that you are to be free and meet the sharp swift edge of a sword. Even the untimeliness of death—for many of those men were in their prime—was no sorrow to them. It was the will of Allah that they should die that day and they accepted their fate with Eastern imperturbability.

But I was young then and I was shocked and it was a long time before I could look on Richard with anything but abhorrent hatred.

X

With the prisoners disposed of and a garrison installed in Acre, Richard made ready for the long march to the south.

Amongst the things taken when Acre was captured was a bundle of maps which were not only superb examples of draughtsmanship but miracles of accuracy compared with those formerly in the crusaders’ possession. Richard, with a perspicacity which proved that, inactive as his imagination could be at some points, there were others where it was lively and keen, had suspected these maps at first. ‘They may have been left there in order to mislead us.’ So he had taken one of the maps of a surrounding district and with Raife of Clermont, who had first-hand knowledge of the terrain, had ridden out and spent a day checking the pictured detail with the actual, visible scene. He returned, satisfied, and set me to work copying certain of the maps so that each commander might have his own. ‘As a compliment, Blondel, and a precaution in case any should have the misfortune to be separated from the main body.’

Raife, who had some skill in his fingers, helped make the copies and we amused ourselves by copying the scrolls and what he called ‘arabesques’ which decorated the borders of the originals. The followers of Mahomet, for some inscrutable reason, took literally the injunction laid down in the second commandment, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, nor the likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” So there were no birds or flowers or leaves in their borders, merely flowing curves, angles, triangles—but pleasing and decorative.

As a matter of frank confession I will say that Raife, who had experience in the manner, did the arabesques better than I did, so I conceived the pretty fancy of reserving one corner of each map and there drawing and colouring the standard and insignia of the commander for whom it was destined.