The Lute Player (43 page)

I am, I think, as little given to superstition as any man but it seemed to me then, and still seems as I look back across the years, that a blessing rested upon that short time between the Austrians’ departure and the day in Bethany when Richard called all his commanders together to issue orders. During those few weeks there was sense of unity throughout the whole company, a crusading spirit, a feeling of high endeavour. In many men the awareness of dedication, frayed and worn thin by delays and doubts and constant concern with petty mundane matters, sprang up again, renewed and vital. And in no man more than in Richard who now, for the first time, found himself in undisputed control of a united force. With Leopold’s going the rallying point of opposition and criticism seemed to have been removed and even Hugh of Burgundy, who had been disputatious and lukewarm before, now treated Richard with friendly respect, took his orders without questionnand carried them out energetically. Despite our lessened numbers and sad lack of horses we were, in spirit at least, a more formidable army when we set up headquarters in Bethany than at any time since our landing.

Richard knew it. He said once to me, ‘We have been winnowed out; the husks have flown and the good grain remains.’ It was rare for him to speak in metaphors, though he used them well in his songs. Rarer still for him to mention the past, as he did now. ‘It reminds me,’ he said. ‘I once had a chaplain who knew many stories and one day he told me about a commander who was about to take a city and had too large, too faint-hearted an army, so he set them a test—something to do with how they drank from a running stream.’ He frowned in an effort to remember. ‘No matter! The point of the story was this—those who failed the test were sent home and with the small army the man took the city. So pray God, may it be with us.’

With a little shiver—apprehension, superstition, romantic appreciation—running over my shoulders I said, ‘Sire, the man was Gideon, the town he took was Jericho, a stone’s throw to the north, and it might well be that the stream where he tested his army is that which runs here below us.’

‘Say you so?’ he asked, and looked thoughtful for a moment.

I remembered Gideon again when it came to the matter of sending out spies, not mere scouting knights as hitherto but serious, well-disguised spies.

The idea was Raife’s. ‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘I know the language and all the small things by which another might betray himself. With a donkey and a pannier of stuff to sell I wager I could get into the city itself.’

‘Mummery,’ Richard said in the harsh voice with which he did occasionally address his favourite. To him, the knight of Western chivalry, such procedure smacked of trickery.

But Raife persisted. ‘Send out your scouts with a fanfare of trumpets to announce them if you choose but let me go in my own fashion.’

They argued for some time; Raife reminded Richard of the number of Saracen spies that had been taken in our various camps and Richard reminded Raife of what treatment had been meted out to them.

‘I shall not be taken,’ Raife said. ‘And if I were, remember, sire, my late master, the Emir of Damascus, was one of the two who rode safe out of Acre. I have it in mind that an appeal to him would not be disregarded!’

This speech, for some reason hidden from me at the time, made Richard very angry. His face turned purple and the whites of his eyes shone red; in a voice vibrant with fury he forbade Raife to set foot outside the camp. Yet overnight, in some interview at which I was not present, Raife persuaded him and gained permission to go so long as he did not go alone. He chose another man who had been a prisoner for a long time to accompany him and they set off so well disguised that on the edge of our camp a guard arrested them and, disregarding their protests, called for his commander, saying, ‘Here’s two Saracens with a crafty brand-new story.’

There was no building to do in Bethany and I wondered that Richard did not himself ride out to look on the defences of the threatened city. The more so when the mounted knights who went scouting came back with sorry-sounding tales. They said that not only did the city appear to be heavily armed and defended but that all round it lay a wide belt of fortifications. The Saracens had dug trenches and ditches, planted them with pointed stakes, arrows and lances and covered them with turf and small bushes. A full mile from the city two of our knights had fallen into one of these traps: one, with his horse, had been killed; the other escaped to take his place with the unmounted men. ‘It looked like a meadow,’ the scout who reported said, ‘green grass and those little pink flowers like pigs’ snouts just coming into bud. We saw a camel train coming in from Jericho and guides ran out from the city to lead them through. Evidently they have dug such traps on all sides.’

‘While we, to make our flank safe for Leopold’s satisfaction, wasted time at Ascalon,’ Richard said bitterly

Every scout brought in a similar tale. One reckoned that thirty thousand men were in camp outside the city itself, between the walls and the outer fortifications.

‘Thirty thousand,’ Richard said incredulously, ‘more than Saladin commands when all are mustered.’

But the old Count of Algenais, whom Richard trusted completely, broke in: ‘Sire, not Christendom only has united for this battle; Moslems, too, have come in from the four quarters of the earth. Seljuks, Arnibnians, Kurds, my lord, Egyptians and night-black men from the outer lands. As Christ has called up His crusaders, so the devil has gathered his own! But when did God value an easy victory?’

After some days Raife of Clermont came in. He bore out every ill report that we had heard and added his own. Every store and granary in Jerusalem, he said, was stuffed to bursting; thousands of sheep and goats were penned between the ruins of Solomon’s great temple and the viaduct the Romans had made; soil had been carried in and spread thick upon every flat roof so that in time of siege the gardens thus contrived could grow vegetables and corn. The curious rock dwellings; caves, where the poor of Jerusalem had lived in time past, dwellings cut into the rock and reached only by flights of steps, had all been emptied and mangonels, flame throwers and arbalests had been set on their terraces with the men who worked them snugly housed in the rock behind.

Raife said all this and then with immense self-satisfaction went on: ‘But ill news is not all I have brought back. Wait a moment, my lord.’ He stepped briskly out and returned bearing in his hand the piece of soiled and tattered canvas which, being a Christian and a merciful man, he had laid across his donkey’s back before fixing the panniers. The canvas was deep buff in colour and one had to look very closely to see upon that dark rough surface the lines and dots and blobs of darker brown which to any but the keenest eye would look like dirt on dirt.

‘Now I must explain this,’ he said. And then, with his finger on a blob, he lifted his head, looked Richard straight in the face and said, with his tittering laugh, ‘This is my blood which was shed for you.’ Richard gaped at him. ‘Well,’ Raife said, ‘a donkey-driving huckster couldn’t produce quill and inkhorn but why shouldn’t he wipe his bloody thumb on his donkey’s saddle cloth? And wipe I did, to good purpose!’ His strange high laugh rang out again. ‘The trouble was to keep this wound open. These accursed shoes blistered my heel and that wound will not mend, but my thumb—twenty times a day I must break it open and squeeze! But look, sire, I have here, accurate and marked, all the safe approaches on the south and west sides of the city. These lines are the trenches and ditches of which you have heard. The other marks are reminders of objects from which I took my reckoning. Thumb again, top joint fifty paces. For instance, this spot tells me of an old olive tree and see, half the length of the top joint of my thumb—that is, twenty-five paces away from it on either side—these ditches begin. So for a width of fifty paces after the tree is cut down there is solid ground for your horsemen. I can translate every mark on this cloth and map out our safe passage.’

And well might he look so pleased with himself, I thought. And well might Richard put his arms about him and kiss him warmly.

Who, at such a moment, could have caught and been concerned over that casual reference to a blistered heel?

We settled down together, Raife and I, to make the information on the dirty canvas into intelligible maps. We worked hard because Richard deemed it imperative to move before the information it brought us was outmoded by alteration. By evening we had them finished and clear, with a hand’s span as the unit of measurement for fifty paces instead of a thumb joint, and with separate maps for the south and west. And then Richard sent—in the very civil way which he now used towards his fellow commanders—to request the presence of Hugh, Duke of Burgundy, and the two Grand Masters, one of the Templars and one of the Hospitallers, of Hubert Walter, of the Count of Algenais and one or two others, in his tent for a final conference. He himself put on a clean shirt and tunic and the plain circlet that served him as a crown; and he ordered candles and torches and good wine, thin wafers flavoured with precious ginger, sweetmeats of pounded almonds, figs, pressed dates and oranges. Raife, with the precious maps rolled up and ready for presentation, went and sat amongst the company. I stole out. During the day a courier had arrived bringing letters from Acre and there was a letter for me. Not from my lady but from Anna Apieta. Busy with the maps, I had had no time to attend it; and now by torchlight, squatting by the guards’ brazier—for the spring evenings were still cold—I read it.

Dear Anna! Forgive me if that offends you; none shall see this history but you, who ordered it, and I expect and intend that when you read it I shall have toppled, drunk, into my grave. So what matter? Dear, dear Anna Apieta, that was the letter in which you told me that every one of my letters had reached
her
and saved her from distress. After Arsouf, after Jaffa, I had sent back my reports, hoping that they might outrun the racing rumours. And they had. And you told me. I was very grateful to you.

But that letter, reaching me across all the dusty miles, penned probably in a room where Berengaria breathed and moved in her beauty, had an unsettling effect on me. I looked over the past with all its misty memories, the present with its strangeness and uncertainty, the future which, if it existed at all, was blank and hopeless. And it was odd to think that only a little while ago I had been quite busily and happily engrossed in making maps. And of course for the wretch on the rack nothing much has altered; a handle has been given a slight twist. That is all.

I sought my solace where I knew it was to be found and, presently, through the pleasant gathering haze of not feeling, not caring, I became distantly aware of commotion in the space outside Richard’s tent. His guests were leaving. The light glinted on Hugh of Burgundy’s plum-coloured mantle, on the Grand Master of the Templars’ long white cloak. I got up and moved forward. Richard was used to me by this time and seemed not to care whether I entered his presence drunk or sober.

I saw old Algenais’s face, grey and hard as stone, with slow difficult tears creeping along its furrows; I saw Hubert Walter’s, dusky purple and twisted with rage. Then I saw Richard’s and his was the face of a man who has been dealt a mortal wound too deep for agony, who realises his stricken state and waits, feeling nothing save, perhaps, a mild surprise that the blow should have fallen in such a way, at such a moment and with such finality.

The Count of Algenais put out his hand and laid it on Richard’s arm and said shakily, ‘My lord, would that I could find words to comfort you.’

Just so might one man speak to another whose wound is plainly beyond comfort or aid.

‘All that was to be said has been said,’ Richard replied dully. He moved clumsily past the table where the candles were guttering amongst the wine cups and the sweetmeat dishes and the maps which we had made and cast himself upon his bed. As his head touched the pillow the gold circlet tilted, stood on its rim for a second and then rolled to the floor and lay on the bare stamped earth. Hubert Walter stooped and lifted it. Holding it between his hands as though it were a symbol in some ritual, he said harshly:

‘The curses have yet to be spoken. “Whom thou blesseth, he shall be blessed, and he whom thou curseth, he shall indeed be cursed.” Almighty God, by Whose word and power such charge was laid upon me, Walter of Salisbury, on the day of my appointment, bring now Thy judgment to bear upon Philip, King of France and the henchman that does his bidding, Hugh, Duke of Burgundy. Together they have conspired to turn back at the moment when all true men would move together to liberate the holy places where Thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, worked His miracles and shed His holy blood. Almighty God, let the curse of all traitors lie upon them forever. Afflict them, I beseech Thee, in mind, body and estate; let their flesh rot, their vitals wither, their wives be unfaithful, their daughters turn harlot and their sons work rebellion. Let sickness and poverty come upon them and the Father of Lies take them into his keeping both in this world and in the world hereafter so that they tread the lowest pavement of hell through all eternity.’ He paused and breathed deeply and some of the purple colour left his face. ‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.’

Richard neither moved nor spoke but Algenais and Raife said, ‘Amen,’ and my slow, wine-bemused assent added itself afterwards.

There was a slight awkward pause after that. Algenais and Walter stood and looked at their King; Raife stared at the painstaking maps, whirled about suddenly and went and flung himself down by Richard’s couch, clutching at his knees.

‘My lord,’ he said, forgetting to keep his voice low and screeching out like an hysterical woman, ‘let us go on! All the lukewarm, the cowards and the traitors have gone now and only the best remain. You shall lead them to victory.’

‘With the Saracens twenty to our one, Raife? And virtually no horses! Should I lead those who do trust me to certain death? Whose cause would that serve save that of my declared enemies?’

‘That,’ said Algenais heavily, ‘is wisely spoken, sire. With you and the flower of England and Aquitaine mown down outside Jerusalem, Philip would be all-powerful in the West.’