The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  Oh, it sounds like nothing, but I still flush to tell it.

  ‘When you sail,’ she said softly, ‘I must stay here. The comte is here.’

  There was no time to question her. We moved apart. But Father Pierre told me that the non-military pilgrims and the women would stay at Rhodes while the crusade attacked, and when we had seized Jerusalem, we would send for them.

  I wanted to see her again. Her face was before me all the time, and she was only six streets away. Finally, I summoned my courage and sent Marc-Antonio to the nuns with a note. He had a way with nuns – it was his innocent countenance.

  Thanks to that note, we began to plot our meeting. Emile suggested a church – Rhodes is full of churches, and some nearly deserted, especially after compline. We sent back and forth a date, a time, a place. It was delicious to correspond every day. I would fly home from the drill field, strip my armour and look for a note. Sometimes Marc-Antonio would put it into my gauntleted hand while I was still mounted. Some days there was no note at all.

  One day she sent ‘Be careful – you have more to lose than I.’

  That seemed odd.

  But her notes seemed to promise everything, and I became less inclined to secrecy and more to romance.

  Fiore hit me in the head a great many times that week.

  We chose the Monday night as the most private, the most secret. By Friday, I had fine castile soap and a little Hungary water and my clothes were cleaned and brushed. Repeatedly. Marc-Antonio was beginning to show his irritation with my new level of personal beauty.

  On Saturday evening, we had two tables of piquet at the inn. The knights did not forbid gambling: with wine, it was an ‘allowed’ vice. I was playing with Fra William when the legate came in. We all rose.

  He glanced at the cards with unhidden disapproval. ‘We are so close to Jerusalem that a man might reach out and touch her,’ he said. ‘The centurions diced at the foot of the cross, I suppose.’ He looked at me. ‘I need you.’

  I bowed. ‘My lord.’

  He took me to one of the snugs, where Marcus, his archdeacon and sometimes his secretary, served us wine.

  ‘Sabraham will sail tomorrow,’ he said.

  That didn’t surprise me. Many of the ships had water aboard and all had their full compliments of sailors and oarsmen. We, that is, Nerio and Juan and I, thought that the expedition might load on Friday and sail on Saturday week.

  ‘He desires you to support him,’ the legate said.

  I had no choice but to agree. I owed Sabraham my life, and I owed it to the legate as well.

  ‘You hesitate,’ he said.

  I shrugged.

  ‘You may tell me anything!’ he said.

  May I tell you that I have an amorous meeting in a church with the woman I love, where I hope to woo and win her, to make love among the pillars of the nave? May I tell you that, Father?

  ‘I’ll be ready,’ I said.

  ‘You go to scout beaches for the crusade,’ he said.

  I confess, I was proud to have been chosen by Sabraham.

  Proud … and devastated.

  I sent Marc-Antonio with one last note.

  My dear,

  I sail in the morning. Only the orders of God’s Vicar could keep me from you. Pray for me, and know that you have all my love.

  Your knight

  He came back an hour later. ‘No note,’ he said. He sounded puzzled and angry and handed me a packet.

  It was no packet. It was a piece of blue silk, and on it was picked out a passage of the Gospels, in pearls. It took me a long time, too long, to realise that it was a favour, meant to replace the old one.

  A slow, strong smile filled my face – and my heart.

  On Sunday morning, just about the time we were leaving Mass, the Cypriote fleet entered the harbour – almost eighty sail. The king’s brother was there, and all the rest of his nobles and officers who had not seen him in two years. I understood from what I heard in Venice and on Rhodes that the king feared that if he went home to Cyprus, he would never leave. As it proved, I think he knew his people well. I never saw him on Rhodes – later I learned why – but the coming of the Cypriotes doubled our army and our fleet, and made the whole empris seem possible. With eight thousand men-at-arms and almost two hundred ships we might actually take Jerusalem. Surely it was the largest Christian host in a hundred years.

  In fact, the last two weeks we were at Rhodes the Turkish emirs of the coast hastened to send submissions and surrenders to the King of Cyprus and even to the Order. Fra Ricardo was heard to joke that the Order should gather a hundred ships every autumn because we had them scared. The naval victory in the north had paralysed the two largest Turkish emirs, and now the smaller fish were wriggling.

  I went back to my friends and embraced them, one by one.

  ‘Leave some Turks for us,’ Fiore said.

  I carried my harness down to the seaport in a state of inner confusion. I had not seen Emile. I was not taking my friends.

  At the pier, Sabraham looked at the wicker hamper containing my harness and smiled, his teeth bright in the torch lit dark. ‘You won’t need that,’ he said. ‘I’ll see that it gets loaded onto the correct ship with your horse and the rest of your equipment.’ He nodded at Marc-Antonio. ‘Better yet, send your squire with your war gear. All you need is a dagger.’

  We sailed in one of the Order’s own ships, a galliot or light galley commanded by a Brother Sergeant. She was a fine ship, and we had beautiful weather. We were two days at sea while Sabraham explained to me just how we would choose the beaches where we would land. I had John and no one else – my friends would sail with the main fleet.

  We had no warhorses, no armour, no surcoats.

  ‘We will swim ashore,’ Sabraham said.

  In private, he asked me if I trusted John.

  ‘No,’ I answered.

  Sabraham smiled. ‘Then you can take him. Don’t trust him – never let him be more than an arm’s length away. You can swim?’ he asked again.

  We swam by the ship while she rowed until Sabraham was satisfied and he taught me a few words of Arabic.

  Six days at sea. We sighted Cyprus. My geography is stronger now than it was then, but I could see through a brick wall in time. I watched the coast of Cyprus growing larger for two days and then slipping astern as we weathered Cape Salamis.

  My navigation was non-existent then, although Sabraham, who seemed to teach rather than talk, was showing me the rudiments of open water navigation, and I had begun to stand all of Brother Robert’s watches with him. Brother Robert had been a small English merchant until his wife died on pilgrimage. He was a fine seaman and my first real teacher about the sea – I suppose that Lord Contarini should have pride of place here, but Brother Robert was patient. He taught me well enough that a day after Cyprus went under the rim of the world, I turned to Sabraham at the edge of dark.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked. It had taken me two days to ask.

  He looked forward to where Brother Robert was teaching John better Italian with the aid of a book of Psalms.

  Then he frowned. ‘Alexandria,’ he said.

  Alexandria. Founded by the conqueror. Some men said it was the greatest city in the world and Fra Peter said it had forty gates.

  I had guessed the answer, and yet my breath caught in my throat.

  Alexandria.

  Alexandria is said to be the largest city in the world. Now, I have been to Baghdad and Constantinople, and Barcelona and London and Paris and Prague and a few other cities. Baghdad, they say, was much larger before the Mongols sacked it. Constantinople is perhaps the largest of all these cities, but it is almost empty – fifty thousand people inside walls that have held twenty times as many. Rome is a ruin of a ruin.

  But Alexandria is mighty. It stretches all along the shore of
the sea on a set of sand spits and islands, much like Venice, or I think it was when first laid down. Alexandria has a great double wall like Constantinople’s, pierced with more than forty drum-shaped gated towers, and each pair of towers at a gate was like a small fortress with a garrison, able to be locked away from the city and held. The city has two great harbours, which some men call the old and the new but we called Porto Vecchio and Porto Pharos, after the ancient lighthouse. Porto Pharos was defended by two superb castles, both so new that you could smell the mortar from a mile away – the Casteleto, the little castle, was on the eastern arm of the spit that defended the great harbour, and the Pharos Castle, which has an Egyptian name I never learned, guards the western spit and overawes the city which had more than a hundred mosques as well as twenty Christian churches for the various schismatics there – Nestorians and Gnostics and Greeks. The Porto Vecchio was full of ships, including Genoese and Cypriote ships while the Pharos harbour held privileged visitors and the Sultan’s navy.

  ‘Egypt has a weak Sultan, very young,’ Sabraham said. ‘Al-Ashraf Sha’ban. The regent rules him. He is a Mamluk and holds the title atabak al-’asakir or as we say, Constable. Commander. He is called Yalbugha. Repeat the name.’

  ‘The Mamluks are a kind of Turk, yes?’ I asked. I probably massacred the name, as he made me repeat it and the title that accompanied it. That was part of my lessons, too. I also learned to say ‘Allahu Akbar’ or ‘God is Great’.

  ‘The Mamluks are Kipchaks and Circassians,’ Sabraham said, ‘taken as slaves – sometimes as war captures, but sometimes sold by their own parents. The Genoese bring them by the hundred, and the Egyptians buy them as soldiers. Sometimes they are called “Ghulami” or “slaves”.’

  ‘If they are slaves, why do they fight at all?’ I asked. ‘Why don’t the Egyptians do their own fighting?’

  Sabraham nodded. ‘Warfare demands horsemen, and Egypt is rich, but it is terrible country for horses – too hot, and too many insects. The rainy season kills horses by rotting their hooves and the dry season kills their forage and robs them of water. But the troubles in raising horses don’t effect the army horses – it is that there are not enough horses to raise a boy to riding from infancy. You cannot create a horse-archer overnight.’

  I nodded my agreement. I knew how much effort it took to remain capable with a lance, or a longsword.

  ‘So they buy boys who were raised from birth with horses. Most of them are Kipchaks like your John. Some few are Turks, but they are not trusted with senior commands.’ He shrugged. ‘A Kipchak boy can rise to rule. All of them have fine armour, beautiful horses, superb weapons, any woman they want, and they live well.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m told that Kipchak boys have been known to compete to go to the slavers.’ He paused. ‘Do you know who Baybars was?’

  It was like being asked who Satan was. ‘Yes!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘He was a Kipchak. You understand?’

  I supposed that I did. I certainly understood why Sabraham was so pleased by John the Turk.

  At any rate, Sabraham watched the shoreline as we approached; it was as flat as the fens around Boston and green as spring, even in early autumn. We made a rendezvous of which I had not been informed – Sabraham was very close with information about our meetings. Off a village to the west of Alexandria, we transferred, by prior arrangement, from the Order’s galliot to a Cypriote merchant of less than a hundred tonnes, a stubby, round-hulled ship with a crew of six men and holds that stank of fish guts.

  Brother Robert saluted us and slipped away to the north, and Theodore, the captain of our new vessel, a Cypriote Greek, welcomed us aboard. It was immediately clear to me that he was in the pay of the Order or perhaps the king, but Sabraham insisted that the six of us – his own servant or squire, whose name was Abdul, his two silent soldiers, whose Christian names I had never learned, as well as John the Turk, Sabraham himself and I – stay well separate from the crew of the fishing smack. By his order we all wore our hoods at all times, and we bespoke no man.

  In the last light of day, beautifully timed, I must say, Theodore entered the outer harbour under a shivering lateen very close-hauled. The broad harbour had four rows of ships anchored well off shore, but for some reason no vessel was anchored closer than a bowshot from the beach.

  Our captain called to Sabraham and they had a brief conference.

  Sabraham returned to me and shook his head. ‘He says the Porto Vecchio is so silted up that he cannot approach the shore. Why did he not tell me this earlier?’

  ‘I thought you had been here before?’ I asked.

  ‘Always from the land, with caravans,’ Sabraham said. He frowned.

  Theodore made a signal and the ship turned south, deeper into the harbour. He appeared to mistake his anchorage, and passed the pilot boat. As we ran down wind, with the Arabic anger of the pilot boat in our ears, Sabraham gathered us in the stern. ‘The water under the keel will be less than two men deep,’ he said. ‘Swim up the beach and strip your clothes. We will be met.’

  I touched the dagger at my belt. ‘If we are not met?’ I asked.

  He frowned. ‘We improvise,’ he said.

  He himself wore only a cheap wool gown over his braes, with a heavy basilard in his rope belt. I emulated him.

  But the pilot boat had changed tack, and her rig was lighter and faster than ours.

  Master Sabraham watched her in the dying light. ‘Too bad,’ he said. ‘We will have a long swim.’

  Just then, the tubby fishing boat’s hull skidded on the sea’s bottom. We were a long way from shore; the city seemed close enough, with the lights of the taller buildings reflected in the still water of the Porto Vecchio, but those waters were still several hundred cloth yards wide.

  Captain Theodore shouted commands in Greek and the helm was put up. Sabraham swore.

  ‘Look, we improvise,’ he said.

  I was looking over the side. As we turned, I could see the bottom as clear in the failing light as I can see the floor of this room. It was right under our keel. Even as I looked, we touched, and Sabraham and I were thrown flat on the deck.

  ‘Shit,’ Sabraham said. Without any further imprecations, he rolled over the side into the water as the pilot boat came alongside with a swarm of Arabic imprecations.

  The side at the waist was only three feet above the water, and the water was as warm as blood. But it stank of human excrement and dead fish. My hand brushed a dead cat floating like a bloated, matted fur hat, stinking of decay and I was all but paralysed with a kind of disgusted panic.

  Fortunately, the water was shallow. It was so shallow that we were touching bottom before we were at a safe distance from our smack. Twice I had to force my face under the foul water to avoid detection, and by the time I was halfway to shore, I was only waist deep.

  Despite that, I made it ashore. We all did. John spat and spat – I think that Kipchaks are very clean people – and two Alexandrines appeared out of the darkness. There was a muttered exchange of passwords and they provided us with gowns of linen and cotton.

  Sabraham had spent the days of the passage briefing us, and I knew my role. It fitted my inclination and my training, so John and I left Sabraham almost immediately and walked along the beach front for more than an English mile, gazing with fascination at the sea wall above us. It was magnificent, as fine as the wall of Constantinople, tall, built of layers of pale stone that glowed like fine chamois in the dark and the sally gates we passed had marble lintels with Arabic inscriptions that neither John nor I could read.

  The night was full of noise and foreign, intoxicating smells: smells of alien cookery, of plants, and spices, and garbage. The thin sounds of music, elfin, silvery and magical in the moonlight, slipped over the sea wall. Women laughed. Men laughed, too.

  Over the walls towered the stele that marked the tomb of Alexander, and as we made our way west and south around
the walls, we saw the twin pillars that Sabraham had pointed out from the sea – the columns of Pompey. We crossed the river at the great stone bridge, which was unguarded, to my astonishment, and made our way to the Cairo Gate, where Sabraham had ordered us.

  It took us the better part of the night to walk around the city, and by the time we reached our first destination, I was drunk on the foreignness and the wonder of Alexandria. It was gargantuan – thrice the size of Florence, or so it seemed in the darkness.

  Eventually, we reached the gate that Sabraham had described and we lay down in a caravanserai with pilgrims and merchants and slept. I slept – I was young.

  In the morning, we rose with the others. We made no pretence of being Moslems, which, if you consider, is odd, as John might easily have passed as one. But no one paid us any attention, and after their morning prayers, we purchased horses. They were the fine-headed Arab breed, and impossibly cheap; that is, in Italy I had never been able to afford an Arab, and in Egypt, despite the difficulty in raising them, they cost little more than a palfrey cost in France.

  If dawn revealed a superb world of gilded minarets, veiled women and handsome, bearded men in all the colours of the rainbow – par dieu, the Egyptians were rich! – but as I say, if the sun revealed their riches in all their startling adornment and magnificence, it also revealed a level of horrifying poverty that was the more shocking compared to the opulence. Outside our caravanserai, there were two beggars, dead. They lay where they had died, and no one seemed to care. Beyond the market’s horse lines – we were outside the great customs gates of the city, and there was a market – a line of beggars sat in the dust. There were lepers, and men with their hands cut off: criminals, my Turk assured me. But there was a single leper woman with seven children, and every one of them was a leper; most of them were naked, so that every touch of the disease on their poor little bodies was on display. The leper woman and her seven children had much the same effect on me as the floating cat’s corpse.