“Leave me alone. I am no warrior, and not fit to serve any lord in arms. I would rather be a clerk, and leave fighting to my betters. Anyway, I won’t promise anything; all I want now is sleep.” He put his forehead on the table, and shook with sobs.
Robert was annoyed; he had misjudged the correct dose, and now it looked as though he might antagonize a prospective recruit. He filled his cousin’s cup again, made him drink it off quickly, and took his arm to lead him to his hut; the cold night air took away the remnant of Roger’s senses, and he never remembered how he stumbled into bed.
He awoke next morning with a sick headache, and his stiffness was worse than ever. Anne’s face was unsmiling, and she did not talk; but she took trouble to make him comfortable; she got hold of a large tub of hot water from the Duke’s cooks, and after his bath gave him enough wine to quieten his nerves; all with the barest minimum of words. He was relieved that there was not to be another angry scene, and he was in no mood for talk. But how were they ever to become friends again? Only if he redeemed his honour by hard fighting.
In the afternoon Robert called round and asked him to come out for a walk.
“We could go and look at the new castle that is building on the mound before the Bridge Gate. Bring your sword and shield; it is quite close to the enemy and a few arrows come over, but I don’t think they will sally out to-day, after the beating they got yesterday; you need not put on armour over your bruises.”
They strolled across the camp bridge, and down the north bank of the Orontes until they reached the mound. Footmen and camp followers from all the contingents in the host were carrying stones and timber, to build up the cemetery wall where the crossbowmen were sheltered; when the castle was finished no one would be able to issue from the Bridge Gate of the city without being shot at, and the north bank of the river would be safe in the possession of the pilgrims.
“Of course, this was the Count of Taranto’s idea,” said Robert proudly. “It should have been done long ago, but now we are really starting the siege. He is building another castle to block the Gate of Saint Paul, on the east, and Count Tancred is enlarging his little fort on the west. The enemy won’t be able to pasture their horses outside the walls any longer, nor to run convoys into the town; they will soon begin to feel hungry, and then they will ask for terms, as they did at Nicaea. When the city is taken, it will be thanks to Count Bohemund.”
“Do you see those men with javelins and leather tunics?” he went on. “They have been sent by the Marquis of Armenia to help in the siege, and they are as good as crossbowmen at close quarters; the Count fixed that up too. It’s all nonsense to say that he doesn’t get on with the natives. They admire him all the more because he stands up for his rights to the Greek Emperor.”
“I thought a Marquis guarded a March for his lord,” said Roger. “If this ruler of Armenia has to keep back the Turks in the east, and defies the Greek Emperor in the west, then all his land is a March, and he will be raided from both sides at once. That is not my idea of a useful ally.”
“Don’t be fainthearted, cousin. He will have the pilgrims on the south, when we found a kingdom of our own, and anyway his highlanders are raiders themselves, and they must have hostile cities to plunder. If you live on top of a mountain, enemies on both sides only make you richer. We learnt that in Sicily.”
They cautiously approached the bridge, holding their shields before them, until a Turk on a gate-tower shot an arrow that fell at their feet, as a hint that they had come close enough. “That wall is within easy reach of machines on the mound,” Robert said, as though thinking aloud. “But it is so strongly built that we shall never batter it down. If we did, there would be time for them to build another behind it. Mines are impossible, with all this water on our side, and solid rock to the south. No, we shall have to starve them out. I wonder how much the Turks really want to keep this city. If they make up their minds to eat their saddles before they surrender we shall be here for months. But, after all, they are savages who live by plunder, and they can’t like being shut up here, growing poorer day by day. We may come to some arrangement.”
They continued to gaze at the wall, which frowned, square and solid and sharp-cut, up to the blue spring sky; then they turned and withdrew out of arrow-shot, since it was stupid to take risks without armour. The drystone walls of the Bridge Castle were rising swiftly behind them; the workers had smashed the infidel temple, and were amusing themselves by digging up the corpses in the cemetery, adding the old skulls to the heap of severed heads that had been erected to mark the victory of the day before. As they stood watching the men at work, Robert looked sidelong at his cousin, drew a deep breath, and began a set speech.
“I made a proposal to you last night, but I think you were too tired and upset to appreciate it properly. In any case, I realize that it was not the right sort of scheme for a high-minded knight like you; it may not be quite honourable to swear secretly to obey the Count of Taranto, without telling your rightful lord. But I have another offer to make, and this comes from Count Bohemund himself; I spoke to him this morning. These three castles are all close to the walls, and they will have to be held by something better than crossbowmen; they will need plenty of good knights. Now it isn’t easy to get knights to volunteer to man stone walls, when they might be riding and plundering in the countryside; but you, cousin, have no horse, and it seems an excellent employment for you. The Count of Taranto is afraid the Turks may surrender suddenly, after secret negotiations, as they did at Nicaea, and that some other leader may take the city for his own property, as did the Greek Emperor. Therefore he wants men in all the castles who will watch what is going on. His own followers are known, and any secret traitor would keep his designs from them; but if you will find out all you can, say in this castle here, and promise to tell it to the Count, he will pay you a regular sum once a week. There is nothing in that against your duty to the Duke, and I am sure the money would come in very useful just now.”
Roger paused before answering. It was certainly a good idea for a dismounted man to offer to serve in a castle, but the part about reporting to a leader who was not his own lord seemed on the face of it an underhand trick. What exactly was his duty to the Duke? In his mind he ran through the terms of the ordinary oath of fealty and allegiance.
“You spoke well, cousin,” he answered at last, “and for the sake of our grandfather I know you would not try to dishonour me. But one of the duties of a vassal is to keep his lord’s counsel, and it would be wrong to tell his secrets to the Count, and even more wrong to do it for money. I must refuse your offer.”
“You are more innocent than I supposed,” laughed Robert. “If after serving him for more than a year on this pilgrimage you think Duke Robert might take a city for himself, to keep it from the other leaders. Nobody is plotting against your Duke, or expects him to plot against anyone else. The man we are all afraid of is that foxy old rascal, the Count of Toulouse. Count Bohemund thinks he is trying to get Antioch for himself, when he has done nothing to take it except lie in bed. Surely you can keep an eye on his followers without doing anything against your duty to your lord?”
“The Count of Toulouse is a good knight,” said Roger in surprise. “We all know he fought the Moors in Spain, and no one has spent more treasure on this pilgrimage, or brought a better following. He is an old man, and may have been really sick.”
“Then if he does nothing secretly you will have nothing to report; but the Count of Taranto will pay you just the same,” Robert answered quickly.
Roger had to make up his mind; there was no getting away from the fact that he was being asked to do something sly and underhand, or there would have been no need for secrecy; on the other hand, it was not disloyal to his own lord, and there was nothing in his oath to prevent him spying on a third party. The strongest reason of all was that he had been miserably poor since he lost his first warhorse in Anatolia, and money would make all the difference to Anne’s comfort during the sieg
e. He told his cousin that he had decided to agree, subject to an adequate recompense, and they spent an enjoyable afternoon bargaining about terms. Eventually they agreed on one gold piece every Sunday; which would have been an enormous sum in Sussex or Apulia, but would not go very far in this camp, where the Emperor’s gold still circulated freely, and supplies were scarce.
Roger found no difficulty in joining the garrison; knights were not eager to sit behind walls for the months of a long blockade, and the Duke of Normandy was quite pleased to get rid of a dismounted man, who was a liability to his following. In three days the castle was finished and he was ready to move in. He would have to live there permanently, and that meant leaving Anne alone; that was the only difficulty. Their relations had now settled down into a sort of guarded friendliness, made up of duty and politeness combined. He loved his wife, and hoped wistfully that soon they would be back on the old terms of comradeship, as they had been on the march. But he could not bring himself to apologize for his failure in battle, and she could not forgive it. Perhaps his absence would in time heal the breach, and in any case he was going into danger to earn money for her, as a true knight should.
He was afraid to leave her alone in the hut, not only because the camp was full of robbers, but also for fear of damage to her reputation; the pilgrims in general were not leading a very holy life at that time, and Provencal ladies were well known for their love-affairs. Father Yves was unwilling to take her in; he was not an old man, and many clerks were living in open concubinage with women of the country; no one would believe in the honesty of his motives if he took a young lady to share his quarters. Robert de Santa Fosca offered to solve the difficulty, so that nothing should stand in the way of the service of his Count; he made arrangements for her to share the lodging of an Italian baroness. She would still be fed by the Duke of Normandy, and otherwise could pay her way from her husband’s secret wages, so she would not be in a degrading position of dependence.
There was danger that she would make too much of her new freedom, especially as she had no waiting-lady to keep an eye on her. Roger gave a good deal of thought to this, and in the end he told her that she must obey his cousin Robert in all things, as her husband’s representative. After all, Robert shared in the family honour, and he would be shamed also if his cousin’s wife caused gossip in the camp.
Life in the Cemetery Castle, as it was called, was uncomfortable and dangerous. The castle itself was not a strong work; the mound had been scarped by the pioneers, and a ditch dug below it; running round the crest was a seven-foot wall of unmortated, unshaped stones, supported by timber framework, and pierced low down by loopholes for crossbowmen; three feet below the parapet was a wooden staging for the defenders to fight from; the only entrance was a wooden gate in the rear, too narrow to admit more than one person at a time. Just across the river, within extreme arrow-range, was the mighty Bridge Gate of Antioch, whose towers were furnished with balistas. The garrison of the city should have been able to smash it to pieces with stones from their engines, but the Turks were barbarians who knew little of siege-craft, and their Christian subjects, who hauled on the ropes, were disloyal; most of their missiles went wide of the mark. Still, the castle was at very close quarters to the enemy, who could mass behind their gate unobserved, and charge across the Bridge at any moment. Unexpectedly, the Turks had left the Bridge undestroyed when they lost the cemetery, probably to intimidate the pilgrims by threatening a sally; the besiegers were unwilling to break it down, since it might be used for a surprise assault on the city-wall. This meant that the Christians in the castle were exposed to a sudden attack every moment of the day and night, and never knew when a stone or a bolt from a ballista might arrive in the unroofed interior. But they were really getting on with the siege at last, after all the weary months of winter, and hope kept them at their posts.
One afternoon in May Roger sat on the staging of the fighting-gallery behind the drystone wall. His head showed over the top, and he could see if there was any activity round the Turkish balistas, and duck if an arrow or a stone came over. Below him a crossbowman, his fully wound weapon at his shoulder, stared without blinking through a loophole, along the Bridge at the closed gate; the rest of the garrison were lying in the courtyard, asleep in the sun, for the nights were cold and wakeful. He was comfortably replete, since the men in the advanced posts were better fed than the mass of the pilgrims in the camp, and the warmth of the spring sun made him drowsy; but it was vitally important to keep awake, and he muttered to himself what he could remember of the penitential psalms. He heard steps on the wooden ladder that led to the fighting-gallery, and looking round, saw Father Yves climbing up to him.
“Good afternoon, Messer de Bodeham,” said the priest. “It is a long time since I have seen you, and I thought I would pay you a visit. I forgot that most of you have to watch at night, and I am glad to have found you awake.”
“Come and tell me all the news, father,” said Roger eagerly, for in that isolated place they did not hear much of the camp gossip. “Lie down beside me, and keep your head low. It is tempting the enemy to show an unarmed head above the parapet.”
Father Yves propped himself on one elbow, and squinted into the sun. “This is not a bad place in warm weather,” he said. “It seems that your hardships have been exaggerated.”
“You ought to be here on a nice dark night, with cold rain, and the gale making a noise like Turkish ponies,” Roger answered. “But tell me how they are getting on at the castles by the other gates.”
“I believe things are going very well. Tancred’s castle now blocks Saint George’s Gate, and the Count of Taranto is building another near Saint Paul’s Gate, called Bohemund’s Castle. We are shutting the Turks in nicely, and they must be beginning to feel hungry. But I really came to have a quiet talk with you; can you get away and come for a walk by the river?”
“I am supposed to be on watch till suppertime,” said Roger, “but anyone would be glad to change places with me, and sleep at night instead of in the daytime. Go and wake Messer Hugh de Belmont over there, the fat knight in a green cloak, and when he comes up here I shall be free to go out for an hour or so.” He was feeling uneasy; priests didn’t call you out to tell you good news in private.
Soon they had squeezed through the narrow wicket-gate, and were walking side by side on the river-bank. “We seem to have got ourselves into a very silly position,” Roger said. “We came out here to help the Christians of the East, and our knights are a force of charging cavalry such as they never possessed before, ideal for winning pitched battles; but in all the time we have been overseas, and it seems to be most of my life, we have only fought one really big battle, at Dorylaeum; and we have sat at this siege all winter and spring. Meanwhile those Greeks, who can’t fight a big battle but are really clever with their machines, mess about in western Asia, taking towns by capitulation, when they could be really useful here. If the Emperor would send us food, and thousands of engineers and workmen, we could protect them while they batter down the walls. After all, they built the damned place, and they must have men in their army who garrisoned it only fifteen years ago. They could find a way in, if only they would come and help us.”
“They might come and take the city,” said the priest, “but would that be helping us? Everyone fears that if the Greek Emperor got his men inside he would keep it for himself, and never allow any of us inside the walls.”
“But I thought it was all arranged, that Antioch was to be held by the Count of Taranto as a fief of the Empire?” said Roger in surprise.
“That may have been arranged at one time,” Father Yves said with a sigh, “but the arrangement doesn’t seem to be valid at the moment. I am told there was a Greek army hovering about near Cilicia in the winter, but the Armenians didn’t encourage them and Count Tancred wouldn’t have them on his land, and I believe they went home again. The Emperor doesn’t really think we can take this city, and he is seizing the opportunity to finish off th
e Turkish towns nearer his capital, while we hold the frontier for him.”
“That is very unknightly and unChristian.”
“The Emperor is not a knight, and I am not so sure that he is really a Christian. Some of his clergy, at least, prefer the infidels to us.”
“But we are really going to take the city now, at last. I assure you, father, that while we hold these castles they can’t get any food in, and Turks can’t starve as we can.”
“Well, Messer Roger, are you sure that we can hold the castles? They can’t get any food in, but they can always get messengers out over the south wall up in those mountains. There are rumours that they are raising an army of relief among the infidel barons to the east, and if that army gets here we shall have to pack up and retreat to Saint Simeon. We could not carry on here with the city untaken and an army on the north bank of the river.”
This was the first Roger had heard of the rumoured army that was gathering at Mosul. It was very serious news, and his heart sank.
“For God’s sake, father, we must do something at once. We can’t beat a new army in the field, unless we leave this position, and if we do that the garrison will get in more provisions, and we are back at the beginning again. Did you hear what plans the leaders have made?”
“The leaders are too busy quarrelling to make plans,” the priest answered bitterly. “Some people would rather the infidels continued to hold Antioch, than that it should go to some Count they are jealous of. I really came to tell you this news, and ask if you had any commands for Domna Anne. There will be a panic soon, and the women would be better off on board the ships at Saint Simeon.”
“What does she think?” Roger inquired.
Knight with Armour Page 19
