Envoy of Jerusalem

by Helena P. Schrader

  In short, Eschiva had no answers, and was reduced to cooing meaningless reassurances. “I’m sure he just needs time. No matter what our husbands pretend, Hattin and the subsequent imprisonment has been traumatic for them. Aimery still has nightmares so terrible he thrashes about violently or groans and cries out in his sleep.” None of this explained why a healthy young man like Humphrey should disdain his nubile young wife, however—so Eschiva found herself saying, quite against her better judgment, “You are probably right that being here under your mother and stepfather’s gaze isn’t the right atmosphere. Humphrey must feel constantly watched. Going to the siege of Acre is probably the right thing, after all.”

  Isabella at once pulled free of Eschiva’s embrace to fling her arms around her instead. “I knew you’d understand!” she declared with great relief and a surge of affection. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. I’m so glad you came. Promise you’ll pray for me—pray that I get with child soon. If that happens, I can come right back here!”

  “Of course, sweetheart,” Eschiva assured her, glad to have something she could honestly pray for.

  Acre, October 4, 1189

  The worst thing was the flies. Isabella had gradually become accustomed to the stink, and by never venturing beyond the cluster of baronial tents, she could avoid unwanted encounters with whores and their customers. She had even adjusted to the plain fare and sour wine, but she could not get used to the flies.

  They were everywhere and they were persistent, tenacious, cloying. Even moving was not enough to shake them off, and swatting at them only drove them away for a second. If Isabella lay down to sleep, they lighted on her face and clustered in her eye sockets and the corners of her mouth. Sometimes they tried to crawl up her nose. She hated that so much she had taken to wrapping a gauze shawl around her face when she went to bed. That in turn made it hard to breathe and made her sweat, so that after a few moments she tore it off again, a process that was repeated again and again until she eventually fell asleep—always conscious of Humphrey patiently suffering beside her without once making any attempt to help, much less take her in his arms.

  The whole thing was an utter disaster. Humphrey was no more interested in her here than he had been in Tyre. Why should he be? She hadn’t had a bath since they’d arrived, and her clothes were washed by camp followers in a muddy stream. The results were shifts that came back damp, crumpled, and hardly cleaner than before. Isabella swore that her “clean” clothes smelled worse than her dirty ones. Meanwhile, her hair was oily and hung in strands if she removed her wimple, and her lips were chapped from chewing them so much.

  Her self-pity was so great that she wanted to cry or scream half the time, and the other half of the time she was frantically trying to think of some way to return to the safety and comfort of Tyre without actually admitting to her mother and Uncle Balian that they had been right. If only Sibylla would decide to return home, or some other miracle would happen . . .

  Instead, after food supplies had run so low that the common soldiers started fighting among themselves and covetously eyeing the horses of their betters, Geoffrey de Lusignan had convinced his brother King Guy that they should attack the Saracen army that was now besieging the besiegers. Salah ad-Din had sent an army to hem them in, and they were surrounded by some twenty thousand Saracen fighting men. As a result, they were unable to forage and hunt in the surrounding countryside and were instead utterly dependent on the trickle of supplies that arrived by sea.

  The Saracens had made several attacks on the camp, forcing the Franks to dig trenches around it and build palisades with the masts and beams of their ships. The Saracens’ favorite tactic was to attack the outer perimeter and, after the Franks rushed to repel the attack, to sortie out of the city to attack the inner perimeter—or vice versa. Either way, the Franks ended up fighting on two sides at once, and Isabella, Sibylla, and the other ladies could only cower in their tents, listening to the screams, shouts, and clanging of weapons as the fighting swirled around them.

  Sibylla tended to become hysterical if the sound of battle came too close, an emotion that rapidly transmitted itself to her infant daughter, who then started squealing two octaves above normal human speech. Admittedly that was unlikely to happen today, because King Guy and both his brothers had remained behind to guard the camp. On the other hand, Isabella disliked both Guy and Geoffrey too much to spend time with them when Humphrey wasn’t with her. That’s why she’d chosen to remain behind in their own tent.

  Things had gone well at first. She’d been able to clearly decipher a shout of “Dieu St. Amour” as the Templars led the attack, and even a dull roar of surprise from the Saracen camp as the Knights of Christ struck just after dawn. Isabella gauged the continued success of the Frankish attack by the simple fact that the sounds of battle rapidly receded. After about an hour Edith, the girl Isabella had hired to run errands for her (especially to take her clothes to the laundresses), arrived, stuffing flatbread into her mouth. “We’ve completely overrun their camp!” she declared enthusiastically, her mouth still full. “Dietrich says there was more food and plunder there than in all of Hamburg!” (Dietrich was the German pilgrim Edith was sleeping with at the moment.) “Mounds and mounds of hot bread, just out of the oven!” She held up what was left of the bread she was eating, and then opened her apron to show more. “Can I store this here where no one’s likely to steal it?”

  Isabella nodded.

  “Dietrich nabbed some chickens, too,” she next told Isabella proudly. “Can I bring them, too?”

  “No! I don’t live in a henhouse!” Isabella answered irritably.

  “I didn’t think so,” Edith grinned. “Just asking. But we have some other stuff. I’ll go get it.” Then she was gone again.

  When Edith didn’t return quickly, Isabella started to get nervous. She tried to convince herself that plundering took time, but the longer she waited, the more Edith’s absence seemed ominous. Isabella’s discomfort was reinforced by the sound of horns and trumpets yowling in the distance. Isabella cursed. Her mother could read trumpet signals, but she had never taken an interest in the art. Now she would have given her favorite book for that knowledge. As it was, she couldn’t tell if the Frankish lords were rallying their troops for a new assault, blowing retreat, or begging for assistance.

  Unable to stand the suspense, Isabella pushed aside the tent flap and stood in the entry, trying to figure out what was going on. To her dismay, she saw men running around and shouting in what looked suspiciously like panic. She was momentarily reassured by the appearance of a Templar galloping up to the royal tent, but when King Guy, his older brothers, and their knights left the royal tent to mount up a moment later, she realized the Templar had brought a plea for assistance.

  Isabella liked to think of herself as brave, but the sight of the King and his knights galloping through the camp in the direction of the external perimeter sent a chill down her spine. Obviously something had gone terribly wrong, and now she and the other women were defenseless.

  Automatically she looked toward the city walls. What she saw froze her blood. The defenders of Acre were ululating as if in victory. Apparently from their higher elevation they could see what was happening, and it was clearly to their liking; in short, it was not going well for the Franks. Worse, a great deal of activity soon unfolded that suggested the garrison had no intention of watching passively. Drums started pounding inside the city, and something about the rhythm made Isabella’s blood run cold. “Oh, my God,” Isabella whispered to herself, “they’re going to attack us now that the King and his knights are gone.”

  Screams answered her. Not shouts of command or challenge, but blood-curdling screams of terror, rising in pitch until they were cut off abruptly. Women were squealing like stuck pigs. Isabella heard, or imagined she heard, someone crying out, “Help! Help us! God—”

  She fled back inside her tent, but the sounds of the assault followed her. Isabella looked frantically for someplac
e to hide. There was no place. Flee! She had to flee! How? Where? They were completely surrounded! The ships! She had to get to the ships drawn up on the beach, those few that hadn’t been dismantled to build the palisade. . . .

  Isabella grabbed her purse, the functioning part of her brain telling her that money was her best, indeed her only, weapon. Money could buy her protection, perhaps, and passage. Nothing else mattered.

  As she stepped outside again, however, the sounds had changed subtly. The pitch of the screams was lower, the tone more angry than terrified. She caught the clang of weapons on the wind. Someone was offering resistance after all.

  But was it enough? Isabella hesitated, a little ashamed of her instinct to flee. She glanced toward the royal tent. There was no sign of Sibylla fleeing. Surely if they were in great danger, Sibylla would be the first to flee? But maybe she just hadn’t heard what was going on. Sibylla often got herself into a frenzy of hysterical prayer that blocked out all other sounds.

  In confusion Isabella looked in the direction of the beach, then toward the city and back again. She was concentrating so hard on trying to make sense of the sounds ahead of her and decide what she should do that she was taken by surprise when loud shouting erupted behind her. Spinning around with her heart beating in her throat and a cry on her lips, she saw four men staggering toward her tent, carrying a fifth between them. The man leading was the man she thought of as Uncle Balian’s “watchdog,” the aging Sir Bartholomew. She was certain he had been sent to keep an eye on her and she’d resented his presence from the day she had discovered him in the camp. In the next instant, the realization that he and his companion Sir Galvin were carrying a limp Humphrey between them negated all her resentment at being spied upon.

  “Oh, my God!” Isabella cried out, rushing forward.

  “He’s not dead!” Sir Bartholomew assured her—but if that was so, he was so badly wounded he was unconscious. Two squires were following the knights, each carrying a leg. Humphrey not only hung limply between them, his surcoat was soaked in blood, dripping a trail of it behind him.

  The four men pushed their way into the tent, almost tearing it down in the process. Something crashed inside as they knocked it over. Sir Bartholomew was giving orders to “put him down there” and Sir Galvin was shouting for “wine and water.” As Isabella entered, Sir Bartholomew was drawing Humphrey’s helmet off and opening his aventail to make it easier for him to breathe.

  Isabella choked on the stench of shit and the sight of blood. For a moment she quailed. She knew what her duty was: to kneel beside her wounded husband and clean him up, bandage him, nurse him back to health. Indeed, she wanted to do that. Yet as she watched, Sir Galvin pulled up Humphrey’s hauberk, exposing a long, vicious wound running down his ribcage to his side, leaving his entire abdomen awash in blood. Isabella felt faint. For a moment she found herself thinking, “I can’t deal with this. I can’t!” She had never wanted her mother more than she did just then.

  But her mother was a hundred miles away, and Humphrey’s lifeblood was pouring out of his side onto the floor of the tent. “How do we stop it?” she cried out to her stepfather’s knights in despair, instinctively bunching up the front of her outer gown to press it against Humphrey’s wound.

  “That’s a good start,” Sir Galvin remarked dryly. “Do you have linen here? Heavy linen?”

  “There!” she nodded with her chin. “In that trunk. That’s where all our table linens are.” Idiot that she had been, Isabella had brought table linen with her, imagining life in a siege camp was similar to a grand hunt, where you had a fine meal at the end of each day. Twice, in that distant age before Hattin, she’d accompanied the court on a lion hunt, and she had always loved those evening meals alfresco. . . .

  Meanwhile, she found herself almost gagging on the smell of her husband’s shit and sweat and blood. Only her shame at her reaction made her swallow down her revulsion.

  Sir Galvin had found the linen and brought back a large cloth, still neatly folded and pressed. He gestured for Isabella to pull back, taking her now blood-soaked surcoat away from the wound. Then he bent and pressed the linen cloth firmly onto Humphrey’s side. After a moment he looked over his shoulder at Isabella and urged, “Hold this firmly in place.” After she had taken over, he demanded of his squire, “Did you find any wine?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Bring it here,” he ordered. Then he turned again to Isabella to assure her, “It may look bad, but it’s unlikely to be fatal. Unless he starts frothing at the mouth, his lung wasn’t punctured. Watch for that, but meanwhile hold that cloth in place until we can sew him up and stop the bleeding.”

  Numbly Isabella nodded, grateful to the older knights for their instructions. She would not have known what to do on her own. In a daze, she simply did what she was told, all the while keeping a fearful eye on Humphrey’s mouth for the telltale sign of frothing blood. Later she remembered no specifics of what she’d done—just the smell, the sweat dripping down her face, the horrible clammy feel of Humphrey’s skin, and the flies. Always the flies.

  Isabella didn’t come to herself until she heard Sir Galvin bark at Humphrey’s squire, “Don’t just stand there! Remove his soiled braies and clean him up!”

  A moment later she felt powerful hands under her armpits, and Sir Bartholomew was dragging her to her feet. She had been on her knees so long that they were stiff, and her feet had gone to sleep. She cried out in surprise, but Sir Bartholomew seemed to know what had happened, for he carried her to a chest and set her down. Sir Galvin handed her a goblet brimming with wine. Isabella was shaking so badly that she sloshed half the wine down the front of her gown, but what difference did it make? The gown was completely ruined with blood, some of which had already dried and crusted, some of which was still wet and a vivid red.

  Only then, as she sat on the chest, clinging to the goblet with both hands to try to steady them, did she realize the tent was full of men. Indeed, half the barons of Jerusalem appeared to have gathered here, still wearing sweat-soaked surcoats and chain mail dull with dried blood. As she stared at them in a semi-daze, Scandelion pushed into the tent, asking about Humphrey. Isabella registered with a degree of wonder and shame that although these men were often critical of her husband, they appeared to care about his survival, too. Assured that Humphrey was not fatally wounded, Scandelion nodded and then announced, “Ridefort is finally on his way to meet his Maker.”

  “Dead?” asked William de Hebron the Younger, wanting absolute certainty.

  “No doubt about it! Decapitated. The Saracens are parading his head on the end of a lance.”

  “May God forgive him his sins, for I cannot,” Caesarea exclaimed without dissembling. “Today was the third time his idiocy cost the cause of Christ dearly!”

  “May God grant the Templars the wisdom to elect someone of better judgment and character,” added Haifa, thinking ahead already.

  William de Hebron was more hot-tempered, adding angrily, “He wasn’t the only one responsible for today’s disaster! Where the hell was our king?” The word ‘king’ was said with so much derision and sarcasm that it was obvious he did not consider Guy de Lusignan deserving of the title. “The Templars may have rushed too far too fast and fallen into the age-old trap the Saracens always spring on the foolhardy—but if the rest of the army had maintained discipline rather than disintegrating into mindless, plundering rabble, we could have fought through to the Templars’ relief. We might then have taken the day after all!”

  “You can’t blame half-starving men from seizing food when it is offered them on a silver platter—sometimes literally!” Bethsan noted wearily.

  “Nor do I! Not when there was no one leading them. But I do blame our king for staying back in camp rather than providing that leadership!”

  “What I don’t understand is how King Guy could first justify not taking command of the attack by the need to defend the camp against a possible sortie from Acre—and then abandon the camp whe
n it was most vulnerable! If he’d done what he’d said he was going to do, it might have been unsatisfactory, but it would have been conscionable. Instead, he changed his mind in the middle of everything, and we damn near lost the camp as well as the battle.”

  “Just like Hattin,” Haifa observed. “He vacillates, changes his mind more quickly than a rabbit, and cannot carry through any plan at all.”

  “How many more defeats are we going to let that man—that usurper—jam down our throats?” William de Hebron angrily asked the other men in the room. “How much more can we afford to lose?”

  The tent flap was pulled open, and Aimery de Lusignan stepped in. The look he cast William de Hebron suggested he had overheard his treasonous statement, but he refrained from comment and simply remarked, “I’ve come to inquire after my lord of Toron.”

  “He’s lost a lot of blood, my lord,” Sir Bartholomew answered with a glance in Isabella’s direction, “but he should pull through.”

  “I am glad to hear that. He fought bravely, if foolishly.” Aimery’s gaze fell on Isabella. “My lady, the Queen asked if you needed any assistance—and I must say, with all due respect, that you look very much like you could use some sisterly care. May I escort you to the royal tent?”

  Isabella was in no state to protest. She might detest Sibylla, but she did desperately need a change of clothes and at least a sponging down, as her husband’s blood had blackened her fingernails, smeared her forearms, and dirtied her face and neck when she’d wiped away sweat with her bloody hands. She set the empty goblet down on the chest and got unsteadily to her feet. Sir Bartholomew took her elbow and helped her across the tent to Aimery, who took her other elbow and led her out.