The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  The archers were more merciful, and took a tower full of soldiers alive. It is from those terrified prisoners that John learned why we had succeeded. The captain of the Customs Gate was not a soldier, but a customs official, as Coulanges had said. He had refused to allow the Mamluks to augment his garrison.

  He paid with his life. Thus perish all corrupt officials.

  In less time than it takes to say Matins, we had the gate itself open. Then Fra Peter led our horses in, and the banner of Jerusalem joined the banner of England on the gate.

  The Venetians poured in right behind the Cypriotes, and then the ‘crusaders’ came up, the mercenaries and routiers. They wouldn’t obey the king, they wouldn’t fight for him – but now they came like jackals when we had done all the fighting.

  I was kneeling by Juan, with my friends, and Fra Peter.

  What can I say? Juan was dead. I had lost people over the years, starting, I suppose, with my parents. I am a hard man. But I had been with Juan almost three years. He was my first friend in the Order. He was my brother in redemption, if you will. At an inn outside Avignon, we had wrestled naked to amuse our girls, and that evening we’d drunk wine with our heads pillowed in their laps and talked about God and women and wine and swords. I’d held his head when he wept after his girl died of the plague in Italy and he’d covered my back when d’Albret tried to kill me.

  He was dead. He seemed too small for his harness, and his smooth olive skin seemed impossibly alive. His body held the usual amount of blood, and it was on our feet, mixed with that of all the other poor bastards who’d died in the yard.

  The king was already mounted. He leaned down; Fiore was weeping.

  ‘Let women weep. It is for men to avenge,’ he said.

  Perhaps those words seem bold to you. To me, they rang empty. Revenge? I wanted Juan.

  And he was dead.

  We mounted and followed the king. It was not my finest hour. I was supposed to be a leader, and I couldn’t get much past Juan’s death. I don’t let people get too close – except a handful who take me by surprise. I like men, and women more, though I don’t want them under my skin. But Juan was under my skin, and his loss – Christ, gentles, I’m sure I didn’t pay him enough attention which he was alive, and that burns me now as it burned me in the streets of Alexandria. Fiore was the better swordsman, Nerio was far wittier, Miles was more holy.

  Juan was merely the one I liked best, but he had to die for me to know it. He was like my left hand – I don’t think about my left hand much, but by God, cut it off and I’d mourn it.

  We rode across Alexandria. We were the news of our arrival, herald and hammer both.

  Coulanges knew his way about. After a time, I was able to navigate by Pompey’s pillars to the west and Alexander’s obelisk to the east, but I would never have made my way through that web of streets. Coulanges, for all he was a fool – and that he was – was a good guide.

  We had two or three fights, sharp fights, with terrified men. We passed down a street, an avenue as broad as an English town and long enough that the whole stretch of the thing seemed supernatural.

  By Saint George and Saint Maurice, Alexandria was staggeringly big. It was growing dark by the time we were all the way across.

  Then we dismounted, and stormed the Cairo Gate from behind. It sounds noble that way, and there was some fighting, but nothing worth making a song of. Mostly, we were killing men trapped in their towers without hope of survival. They didn’t fight well and we were not giving any quarter. And I killed my share. I take no joy in it: when you are climbing a winding stair and the man ahead of you is burned with hot sand and you get some in your harness, too, then the virtue of mercy is a far country, and prowess is a word without meaning.

  We cleared the towers of the Cairo Gate. But the Breton knights misunderstood the king and set the gates themselves afire.

  The king was beside himself, and tired enough to vent his rage on de la Voulte. ‘Are you a fool, messire? Or do you crave glory so much that you wish to fight the Sultan’s army now? By Christ’s heavenly kingdom, by burning these gates you have cost us this town!’

  De la Voulte was contrite, but the Count of Turenne, who, as I hear it, actually ordered the gates burned, replied with equal heat, ‘Perhaps you are the fool!’

  He sounded like a man in the grip of a tremendous fear, his voice pitched high and wild. His knights took him and dragged him – I mean that exactly – away.

  And then we mounted again. The king was determined to break the bridge.

  Darkness had fallen. It was not an unkind darkness; the sky was still ruddy, and the stars were out, and there was still moonlight and when we rode out of the Cairo Gate, I could see enough to know that we had fewer than half the knights we’d had back at the Customs Gate.

  It may make you laugh to hear it, but I, the veteran mercenary, hadn’t even thought of loot. We were in the richest city in the world, and I was still following my king and Fra Peter. That is how far I had come in my life from serving Mammon.

  We had about eighty knights and men-at-arms; our horses were tired, and every man in that column had fought the day before, some for hours, then we had stormed the Customs Gate, crossed the city, and taken the Cairo Gate, too. We had faced fire and brimstone, burning sand, Saracen arrows, poison and naphtha.

  We rode along the Cairo road rode for less than a mile before we came to the river.

  There was an army there, and we struck the outposts in the dark before we knew what had happened. The entire ride, we had ridden through and over refugees, and the transition from terrified refugees to surprised Mamluks was too sudden. They were well mounted and suddenly we were in a tangle and I took a hard blow to the head before I had my sword out of its scabbard.

  Night is a terrible time to fight in armour. A night mêlée on horseback is one of the most desperate encounters a man can have. And in an ambush, when you are nigh dead with fatigue – that is when you have nothing but your training.

  I have lightning flashes of memory. I remember a Mamluk on Fiore’s back, straddling his horse, searching his armour for a weak place with a dagger, and I got my longsword around his neck and threw him to the ground. I remember cutting over and over at one man who parried and parried until Nerio killed him with a spear, and God only knows from whence that spear came.

  I remember the banner of Cyprus going down in the light of the city afire and Miles Stapleton raising it.

  I remember being knee to knee with de Mézzières, fighting in opposite directions.

  Someone won and someone lost, no doubt. We extricated ourselves. There were three Mamluks on the king, and Nerio and I cut them off the way you clear a swimmer of leeches and they rode away into the darkness, and so did we.

  We didn’t make it to the bridge.

  The king rallied us in the darkness and begged us to attack the Mamluks again.

  That was when I realised that Fra Peter was not with us. I made Gawain, who was badly knocked up, trot all the way around the huddle of Latin knights, but Fra Peter was gone. We had two dozen Hospitaller knights with us; Fra Robert Hales was there. And he, too, had lost Fra Peter.

  De Mézzières was begging the king to go back into the city.

  I found Nerio by his crest, a spray of peacock plumes as thick as a man’s wrist, and a coronet of gold. It’s amusing: he’d been censured for it on Rhodes, and Fra Peter told him to keep it, told him we’d all be able to find him.

  ‘Fra Peter,’ I said, or something equally fluid.

  We were only four. But we went back into the darkness and the Mamluks.

  I remember once, while hunting a stag in the east, I ran headlong onto a bear. The bear was as surprised as I, and instead of exchanging blows, we each fled as fast as our panic could carry us.

  I’m going to assume that this is what happened with our Mamluks. At least, when we reached
the ground of the ambush, the mutual ambush, I suspect, there were horses wandering and men on the ground and the only enemies were dead or wounded.

  Fra Peter was easily found. His horse was dead. He was not, and we passed some anxious minutes freeing him. The ever-practical Fiore retrieved his saddle and bridle.

  We got him over a Mamluk charger that did not think much of his smell or his weight. Nerio attended him with Miles.

  Fiore and I determined that we would scout ahead. We were already most of the way to the bridge, so we picked our way along the road, riding into the palms on the east side of the Cairo road. But the road remained empty, and our stealth was wasted. We rode all the way to the great stone bridge.

  It was empty.

  There was a great army on the other side of the bridge, but they were in motion – away. Abandoning their fires and their hasty camp, they were in full retreat.

  It was a miracle, if you like. If we had had fifty more men and a wagon of flammables – or some kegs of the alchemical powder that men call ‘black’, we might have accomplished something.

  If Turenne had not burned the gate …

  I am glad I went with the king that night. Glad I rode all the way to the bridge, and that we found Fra Peter. I only wish I’d stayed out of the city longer.

  Did I say that the tunnel behind the Customs Gate was hell?

  It was nothing but pain and terror.

  The city of Alexandria the night of the sack – that was hell.

  A city taken by storm is sacked. Those are the laws of war, the rules. Who, one might ask, makes these rules?

  When we attacked the barricades of the city of Florence with six thousand Englishmen and Germans, it was an article of faith to us that we could not do the city any great injury. I think, perhaps, we underestimated the criminal savagery of man.

  We had about seven thousand when we took Alexandria. Perhaps another two thousand in sailors and oarsmen. Perhaps yet another two thousand in armed servants. But I don’t think so. I think we were far fewer than ten thousand men.

  I will make no excuses. Machaut sings that we left not a man alive of the infidel.

  Perhaps. We certainly tried.

  Fiore and I found Nerio and Miles and Fra Peter waiting in the darkness outside the Cairo Gate. The darkness was full of refugees, screams and imprecations – and the sounds of combat and murder. Nerio wanted to go through the city, and Miles, rarely insistent, was demanding that they ride around the city over the broken ground to the north and east.

  I agreed with Nerio. Perhaps we were wrong, but we had drunk all our water and our horses were done, and I didn’t think we’d last for the ride around the city.

  We re-entered the burned Cairo Gate at midnight, I’m guessing, because the city was afire and there were no bells. Men were looting; men were raping; men were killing. The city was an orgy of destruction, a phrase used by chroniclers but now brought to horrific life. Fiore asked the guard on the gate – men of the Order – where we might find the king. They didn’t know.

  De Midleton had taken command of the gate. He was rallying all the Order’s men. We found Fra Peter, whose breathing was very difficult, a place to lie full length and we put him there as gently as we could manage. Miles and I were just looking at his wound when John the Turk appeared at the door – we were in one of the gate house towers, and it smelled like a charnel house. The smoke caught at our dry throats and made our stomachs burn, too – you know that feeling? When it feels like the smoke is in your gut?

  ‘Syr Midleton asks you!’ he shouted. But he had water – blessedly fresh water.

  We drank before we ran back into the yard. Sabraham’s squire was speaking urgently to de Midleton, who turned as soon as he heard our sabatons on the cobbles.

  ‘It’s the legate,’ he said. ‘I can’t spare a man. Will you go?’

  Marc-Antonio was still back at the ships. Or dead. Alessandro was with Nerio, and Juan’s squire, Ferdinando, was with his master’s corpse.

  On the other hand, I could lay hands on three veteran archers, and John the Turk.

  ‘I’ll go,’ I said. We had the Cairo Gate’s stables by us and in less time than it takes a man to get armed, we had beautiful local horses for all the archers, and we were mounted in the yard. Ned Cooper and his mates had all strung their bows, and John had a panoply of looted Mamluk equipment.

  We followed George.

  We had heard fighting in the quarter behind the gate, and the cry of the Order; on horses, with George guiding us, we were there as quickly as we’d got mounted. I was amazed that we reached the place at all – I was so tired that when my horse stopped, I almost fell asleep inside my helmet and I was sure I couldn’t have lifted my sword.

  We found a church, a Coptic church, a small, round church, unmistakably Christian. It was packed full. And on the steps outside stood the legate and Lord Grey and Sabraham and the two Greek knights, Giannis and Giorgos.

  At the bottom of the broad steps stood twenty ‘crusaders’. They were English and Breton, Gascon and French. Or they might have been.

  Two of the routiers were dead.

  Even as we rode up by a street, another rout of brigands appeared out the alleys.

  ‘Burn it! Burn it!’ shouted the crusaders. ‘Death to the infidels!’

  I saw d’Herblay and the Hungarian almost immediately. They were together, near the back of the crowd, and thus invisible to Sabraham, but the Hungarian’s long hair and the ribbon of pearls that confined it gave me my clues. And I knew d’Herblay. I would have known him anywhere, I think. And he was so arrogant he was wearing his surcoat.

  But Fortuna was against me, and no sooner had my fatigue-addled head slowly produced their identities than d’Herblay turned, as if warned by Satan. He elbowed the Hungarian and the man looked back at me. He had a steel crossbow in his hand, the weapon the Italians call a Balestrino.

  Three horse-lengths beyond the Hungarian, backlit by the lamps burning inside the church, the legate stood unarmed and unarmoured on the steps, with a wooden cross in his hand. He was shouting that these were Christians. In fact, I could see Moors and Moslems and Jews and Christians all huddled together on the portico, and more in the church behind.

  ‘Kill them all!’ roared the routiers. They pulled a man past the knights on the steps and butchered him, laughing.

  Leering crusaders killed a teenage girl.

  All this in two beats of my tired heart. The Hungarian raised his crossbow one-handed, but my horse was moving and he whirled – and shot.

  Fortuna is a fickle mistress at the best of times. I was leaning forward on Gawain’s neck, my longsword reaching for the Hungarian’s neck, when he shot. His bolt struck the blade of my sword – and glanced away.

  He parried my blow, which I confess was greatly weakened by the bolt, with the steel of his crossbow, and rolled off to my right, away from my horse.

  The legate, either unaware that I was at hand, or believing that we were more routiers, suddenly plunged into the crowd. Giorgos endeavoured to cover him with his sword but the legate strode down into the mercenaries.

  One of the bastards struck him with his spear haft – and he went down.

  That was it for Sabraham, and for Fiore, and for Lord Grey. The men on the steps began to use force and Fiore led our party right into the backs of the routiers, the so-called crusaders.

  They drove them from the square. I would not have imagined that I had more to give, that I could raise my sword. But I wanted d’Herblay.

  I lost him. I was exhausted, and thirsty, and I can make other excuses, but I lost him as smoke swept over the little square in front of the church. Fighting caused men with torches to drop them, and Fiore was like an angel of the Lord, glowing in the flames. He tried to cut his way to the legate’s side.

  Of course, we were killing crusaders, to save infidels and
heretics.

  I suppose we saved a hundred Greeks, and a handful of Jews and Moors. Many of them spat at me.

  I wanted d’Herblay, but in that dark and smoky place, with the inferno all around us as Alexandria burned, what I got was Father Pierre. I can’t say I cut my way to him. I can’t even claim that I bravely decided to save my commander instead of getting my own revenge on the man who nearly broke my body.

  I stumbled over him. All I can claim is that, God having given me this sign, I didn’t step over Father Pierre and try to shed d’Herblay’s blood. Instead, I looked down. But I knew – it’s hard to say why, with the smoke, the visor of my dented helmet, my fatigue – but I knew I had him. There was a flurry of violence – a man with a spear, and all I did was beat it away.

  And then I sheathed my sword, raised Father Pierre in my arms and carried him into the church. He was crying.

  I had seldom seen him cry. He had taken a bad blow, and his scalp was torn. But his face held more than suffering – I had never seen him without hope. His small face always beamed with something from inside, some special benison he brought to the world. But, that night in hell, it was gone.

  He knelt before the altar and spread his arms and fell face forward, saying, ‘Forgive them Father, they know not what they do.’

  Perhaps. But I had been one of them, and I knew exactly what they were doing.

  They were raping, looting, and killing. They were very good at these things.

  And d’Herblay and the Hungarian and his men were out there in the darkness, still probably looking to kill the legate, even though it was now too late. The crusade was victorious. We’d taken the greatest city in the world.

  The man lying full length before a ruined altar would be Pope.

  If I could get him home alive.

  Such is the life of arms. Or rather, such is one path on the life of arms.