The Lute Player (38 page)

I was actually at work on a sultry evening finishing off the corner where the lilies of France bloomed on the map intended for His Majesty of France. Raife was putting arabesques round another and Richard, brooding over the original, was counting wells and streams and endeavouring to arrange so that each day’s march would end near fresh water.

‘It cannot be contrived,’ he said at last, laying down the map and pushing back his sweat-soaked hair with his hand.

Without pausing in his work Raife of Clermont said, ‘The route was planned for the spice caravans to Egypt, sire. All camels. And spices are not bulky. Those camels move swiftly and if they fail occasionally to rest by water, it does not matter.’

‘Well, there was a fund,’ said Richard with a grin, ‘for providing camel transport. I spent it on mules. Camels carry, they don’t haul—at least I never saw one harnessed. Did you? And anyway where, at this hour, would I muster a sufficiency of camels for our baggage? We must arrange to carry some water. Casks for the beasts and—Raife!’

‘Sire?’

‘Stop scribbling. Go take ten men and gather together every wineskin and waterskin in Acre. And what about new ones? Wait, write out an order, address it to the governor and I’ll sign it. Tell him to slaughter every goat and lamb he can lay hands on, salt the flesh—Rolf the Dispenser can see to that for him; take Rolf with you—and have the hides made into waterskins with all possible speed. I want as many men as possible to carry one—Oh, what have we here?’

Four French nobles, dressed in their best clothes, stood hesitant in the doorway. Guillaume of Pontigny, who vied with the Count of Algenais for the title of ‘Oldest Crusader,’ for their birthdays fell on the same day, stood little ahead of the others and carried a little silver casket in his hands.

Richard, with a quickly suppressed sigh of impatience, stood up. He had cast off all but his shirt and drawers and they were soiled and sweat-stained. The thick black ink which the Arabs used, which Conrad of Montferrat had likened to tar had, although it was impervious to cold water, a tendency to smear and melt when touched by sweaty hands and the map Richard had been handling had been heavily lettered on its underside. He had brushed his soiled hands over his clothes and his face and in contrast with the neat clean Frenchmen with their freshly oiled hair and beards he looked dirty and bedraggled.

‘Come in, my lords, and be welcome. And forgive my attire. Had I known of your visit I would have been more fitly arrayed.’ Then his cheerful, boyish grin lit his face. ‘I stand before you as I stood at my crowning.’ He pushed back his hair again, sullying his face anew and, turning, gave orders for seats to be brought forward and wine served.

Not one of the French lords spoke a word. They advanced solemnly and in silence to the trestle table and my lord Pontigny, when he reached it, looked at the maps that were spread there and quickly looked away and quickly set down—as though it were burning his fingers—the silver casket he carried.

Richard, made uneasy by the silence and by the manner of the lords’ approach, which in truth very neatly resembled the conduct of mummers at a funeral, said in a voice that rang out very loud and boisterous:

‘What is this, my lord Pontigny? You bring me a gift? From my brother of France. Well, by the glory of God, I have one for him too. A lantern to light him on his way to Jerusalem.’ He reached over and took up the map I had been making.

Old Guillaume Pontigny raised his eyes, looked at the map, looked into Richard’s face and then, turning his head away, lifted his arm and brushed his face with his sleeve. He was weeping.

‘In God’s name,’ Richard shouted, ‘what ails you, my lord?’ He dropped the map and came round from behind the table and would have set his hand on Pontigny’s shoulder but the old man took a hasty step backwards and jerked out, in a voice thickened with tears:

‘My lord, we were sent to tell you, the King, our master, is going home.’

‘Home?’ As he repeated the word in a stupefied voice Richard’s face went crimson and then, just as suddenly, deathly pale. He sucked in his cheeks and bit hard on their inner sides, released them and drew in a great breath through his mouth.

Then he said quietly, ‘Raife, go do as I bade you. My lords, pray be seated.’ He sat down himself.

‘You have come to tell me that Philip of France is abandoning the crusade?’

‘My lord, he is going home. He is a sick man. He has ailed constantly since he landed and he feels that on the march he would be a hindrance.’

‘I was sick a while back,’ Richard said in that same quiet voice. ‘No tears were shed for me. Why do you weep, Guillaume?’

Pontigny did not answer. One of the others said:

‘Our master lacks the vigour that is your good portion, my lord.’

‘True. The same might be said of thousands of others. However, my lords, I can see that he sent you on an errand little to your taste; we will say no more about it.’ He reached out his arm and lifted the silver casket and threw open its lid. His fingers fumbled and brought out a crucifix slung on a thin gold chain. He gave it his meticulous attention, as though he had never seen such an object or even anything remotely like it in all his life before. Then he laid it down on the map that lay in front of him, bent his head and stared and looked up.

‘Many men,’ he said, ‘would take that for an omen. It fell squarely on Jerusalem. My lords, carry my greetings and my thanks to my brother of France and tell him that I will carry his emblem until I can lay it to rest in Christ’s tomb.’

Something like awe checked the tears in old Pontigny’s eyes.

‘Sire, all the French are not retiring. Five thousand men remain.’

‘Under the command of my lord of Burgundy,’ Richard said; not as a question but in the voice of one completing the recitative of a lay.

Pontigny nodded.

What a pity, I reflected. For Hugh, Duke of Burgundy, had a sharp wit and a talent for parodying songs. Immediately after the taking of Acre, when a new song about Richard’s prowess has been on every tongue, he had amused Philip’s supper table by a version in which every compliment had been twisted into an insult. ‘Where he strikes, death follows,’ can be easily made into amusement for the silly if “strikes” is replaced by a simple word for a physical action which even kings must perform. The crude parody appealed to the primitive sense of humour of the very men who had earnestly sung the original song and was soon to be heard all over the camp. Richard listened, laughed and retaliated in kind. It was all very silly and childish but it showed how the land lay. Better for everyone, I thought, if Hugh of Burgundy had gone home with his master.

Richard, however, merely said, ‘Burgundy is a good soldier.’ And when the deputation had taken their leave he leaned over my shoulder and said, ‘Wash out the lilies of France and paint in Burgundy’s sign,’ in a voice which seemed to deny that the change had any significance.

The reluctant admiration with which I was becoming familiar moved in me. I could have taken the hand which he had laid on my shoulder and kissed it and choked out some words of reverence. But, as always, something withheld me.

Later in the evening I heard Hubert Walter, discussing the matter, say: ‘You take this very lightly, my lord.’

‘How would you wish me to take it? It is to his everlasting disgrace, Walter, not mine. And truth to tell, I can bear Philip’s disgrace with equanimity!’

And yet, with the King of France’s going something was broken and something was ended. He and Richard had taken the Cross and made their vows together and however much and however bitterly they had quarrelled amongst themselves, they had always stood together as joint leaders of Christendom against Islam. Now there was not even the pretence at unity.

There is always a moment at the merriest, most blazing feast when the candle in the windiest corner gutters and fails. The others burn brightly, a new one is lighted but there has been that little patch of gloom, that momentary reminder of the engulfing night.

XI

We left Acre at the beginning of July and reached Arsouf in the second week of September and those ten weeks, though they were marked by no major battle, constituted, I think, a test of endurance unmatched in the whole crusade. The well-beloved song,
When Richard Marched through Holy Land
, always rouses rancour in me because although it takes count of the Saracens—indeed, I think, exaggerates their part in the story—it ignores the other, more insidious enemies: the midday heat blazing down on breastplate and helm, dazzling the eye, drying the throat; the sudden, astonishing chill which comes with darkness, turning the clammy sweat-soaked clothes into cold shrouds and waking a need for blankets which no man, however determined, however foresighted, could have carried through the hot day; the flies, the perpetual torture of the swarming flies, bluely iridescent, bloated ghouls that moved as we moved, lighting now on the steaming mule dung and then on the piece of bread you stuffed into your mouth—and often accompanying it to its destination so that the squeamish, feeling the living, wriggling thing in their mouths, spat out food and fly and the stouter fellows said, ‘All grist to this mill,’ and swallowed both.

There was the dust, too. Mounted men in armour rode in the van, in a long protective column on the inland side of the toiling foot soldiers and at the rear. If you had stood on one side to watch this army pass you would have seen with some clarity the first dozen knights and then a long grey-brown, earth-hugging cloud through which a multitude of ghosts moved. All but that first dozen or so lived, day after day, with dust in their nostrils, dust in their eyes, dust filming and roughening their skins, gritting and souring their mouths. I never turned in my saddle and looked backwards without thinking of the “pillar of cloud” which by day had guided the Israelites across this very land, nor without wondering whether it had indeed a supernatural origin or whether it had been mere dust kicked up by the heels of Moses and Aaron and the dozen favoured ones who walked ahead. So blasphemous a thought would at one time have set me crossing myself contritely; but not now!

I can speak of the dust—and certain other torments—without indulging in self-pity, for I moved “with Richard through Holy Land” more easily and more comfortably than almost any other man. I was mounted but not armoured. I rode as lightly as the Saracens who kept pace with us through the hills on the landward side and swooped down every now and then to make little harrying raids.

I rode the grey horse, Lyard, to begin with. And I rode near Richard in the van where the dust was thin and bearable. But after a day or two Richard said to me civilly indeed, almost apologetically;

‘Blondel, I wish you would change mounts with Raife of Clermont. He is heavier than you are; his mare falls behind every day towards the end. And he knows the country; he is useful to me. Moreover, though lately unpractised, he is a knight and bears arms. I would he were better mounted.’

Very sound arguments. They would have sounded better in my ears, however, if Raife of Clermont had not sought me out at our first halting place, expressed great admiration for Lyard, and asked me where I had obtained such a steed. His envy was as obvious as Mount Carmel.

Neither Richard, who had given, nor Raife, who envied me the grey horse, could know that every time I saw or touched Lyard an old, unhappy memory woke and stabbed me and that, the exchange was welcome. My common sense told me the change was reasonable, yet something in me—pride? the feeling of having been outwitted?—
something
made me resentful.

‘Sire,’ I said coolly, ‘Lyard was, and is, yours to give.’

Richard looked at me hard for a moment without speaking. Then he said with an underlying savagery in his voice, ‘You don’t understand.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘the useful, arms-bearing man should have the better horse. Anyone could see that.’

(Even if he goes sneaking round, asking for favours, saying, ‘After all, I
was
a prisoner all the best years of my life!’) I did not mention that I had got myself a sword and that Godfrey of Angers was schooling me in its use and said that my father and my abbot had been wrong in their judgment of my wrist. A born sword wrist, he called it, naturally flexible and capable of becoming strong with practice. Riding in the van with Richard, armed with sword and dagger, I had been prepared to be at least independent, self-defensive, nobody’s responsibility. But now, relegated to the plodding brown mare which had been Raife’s mount and which was, in truth, incapable of keeping pace with Flavel, I fell back and generally rode with one of the few other mounted, non-armoured men. Sir Escel, the physician.

One morning as we rode through the burning heat and the stifling dust he began to talk about a fact he had just dredged. up from the vast uncertain seas of old sailors’ lore—the fact that sores which stubbornly resisted all other treatment often healed under the application of a mouldy ship’s biscuit.
*

‘Now that sounds like a superstition, does it not?’ he asked. ‘But I have proved its worth. The biscuit must be mouldy and the more mouldy it is, the quicker it works. Why that should be passes my understanding. What are ship’s biscuits made of, would you know?’

‘Dead men’s bones and mud,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘No, seriously. There’s nothing in them but flour and water, is there? Dried out, baked hard. And, but for the omission of yeast, similar to bread. The virtues of a bread poultice are well known but that is mainly because the bread retains the heat long enough to reduce the inflammation. And yet a mouldy ship’s biscuit will heal a sore which a bread poultice leaves untouched.’ He pondered and then reached out his hand to a great sack strapped to the back of his saddle. ‘I have a supply here; I keep them damp, hoping to make them mouldy. The trouble is that in this heat they will dry out so quickly.’ He pondered again. ‘Isn’t it fortunate that His Majesty found me this horse? I should find it almost impossible to
carry
this sack. Strange to think that I made a little model which kills men, ergo the King mounts me, ergo I can carry a sackful of healing. If only I can keep it damp.’ He turned in his saddle and felt the sack. ‘As I thought,’ he muttered. He took his waterskin from the front of his saddle, untied the string which closed the neck of the sack and poured all the water over the biscuits within. I could hear the little snappings and hissings as the dry hot biscuits drank in the water. I hoped that on the midday halt we should find water near. That didn’t always happen.