The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  The night had exploded, but the Hungarian’s hastily laid trap had failed to touch the legate, who’d ridden past without a scratch. Maurice and John had tried to counter the ambush from behind and everything had degenerated into a smoking tangle of chaos, in the best tradition of war and complex plans.

  At any rate, in addition to my people – well, really the legate’s and Lord Grey’s, we had a dozen of the surviving Scots, including the Baron of Rosilyn, who outranked me, and we had most of Contarini’s oarsmen, a disciplined body, under Carlo Zeno.

  This was less a miracle than it seemed. In battle, men follow men they know. We all knew each other: the Scots followed the Hospitallers, and the oarsmen followed the English archers. But it gave us a good garrison, and when Fiore and I found Master Zeno, we quickly came to an agreement about employing his oarsmen to fortify the gate.

  He made a wry Italian face. ‘I wish I could send to the admiral,’ he said. ‘We have carpenters and tools. But that city …’

  ‘Hell come to earth,’ I agreed.

  Outside the walls of our gate castle, men continued to behave like animals. And, as I had seen in France, perhaps the worst of it was that local men joined the riot, killing their own, or the Jews – always the poor Jews – only to be massacred by our brigands and crusaders. Men set fire to their own houses. Men slaughtered their own families in despair.

  And that was by day.

  Night was worse.

  Nonetheless, we worked by torchlight. Zeno was tireless, and if he was a mocking villain in the streets of Athens, he was a hero in the Stygian dark of Alexandria.

  We made the courtyard behind the first gate a trap. We dug up the cobbles with pickaxes and trenched it, raised a rubble wall and put palm palisades atop it. We relit the fires, made food, and served it to our soldiers.

  In the midst of all this, we were interrupted by a terrible dilemma. A Greek patriarch came to the gate and begged us to admit several hundred Greeks.

  It was clear that the enemy was coming, and Fra William’s sense – and he was a good soldier – was that the Mamluks and their infantry were coming across the river and striking against any Christian they could find. But we couldn’t feed the Greeks. And the riot of the sack continued, so that we had the threat of Mamluks from the south and the threat of our own crusaders from the north.

  Syr Giannis went to Fra William and knelt and begged him to save the Greeks. Fra William was standing on the walls, watching the city burn – and watching a small army of looters approaching.

  But he was a Hospitaller. He opened a side gate, even while he sent a sortie – me, of course – to order the looters away.

  I went out with a borrowed poleaxe in my fist, and walked along the so-called ‘street of pepper’ with Fiore and Miles and Nerio and Syr Giannis until we reached the main avenue, where the looters were coming.

  They had a dead Moslem’s head on a pole, and they were carrying a woman – or what was left of her. They were all drunk, and they looked like souls basking in the warmth of hellfire.

  The five of us didn’t even cover the street.

  Fiore had his visor open. ‘What do we intend to do with these dogs?’ he asked.

  They were slowing. Behind us, the Greeks were filing into the Cairo Gate fortress, but they could only go single file. We had archers on the wall, and Fra William was preparing a sortie.

  It was all too slow to save the Greeks. And the looters – the crusaders – were numerous and well armed.

  The Count d’Herblay shouted my name.

  ‘Bon soir, William the Cook!’ He laughed. He had his armour on and his hose down by his ankles. He had a poleaxe in his armoured fists and fresh blood on the knuckles of his gauntlets. He didn’t look like the angry, weak man of Genoa. The one who’d flinched from my beating.

  In fact, he looked drunk, and insane.

  I was in some way pleased. I admit this. It made what I intended easier.

  I raised my axe. ‘Halt,’ I said. ‘You may not come further, on pain of death.’

  ‘Who the fuck pretends to give us orders?’ asked a Gascon.

  ‘I do, in the name of the Hospital. Go rape children somewhere else,’ I said. In that moment, I hated almost all the men on earth.

  They didn’t like that.

  No one does.

  D’Herblay laughed, but it was hollow. His face was a terrible thing of rage and pain, fatigue and fear. He had lines that made him look like a damned soul, and his face was near black with smoke. He came forward without troubling with his visor or his hose. God only knows where his leg harness was.

  Conversationally, he said, ‘You know, Camus will kill me if I kill you. He wants you so badly.’ D’Herblay laughed. His laugh was – terrible. Even – sad. ‘But he’s not here and I am. If you run away, we won’t kill you.’ He shrugged. ‘Or we will.’

  ‘Last chance, my lord,’ I said. ‘I’m tired of killing. Aren’t you?’

  He stopped, just out of range. Then he spat. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘All my life, I have been afraid. All my life, I have wanted …’ He frowned. ‘Do you know what I’ve found here? Nothing matters. It’s all just shit. You … my whore of a wife … the king … Camus …’ He croaked his laugh. ‘Here, it just doesn’t matter. I can be … anything.’

  I didn’t think that I was talking to the Count d’Herblay. There was no vanity, none of the puffed up crap. No sarcasm. His voice was stark – and horrible.

  ‘I don’t even want to kill your damned legate any more,’ he said. ‘But it is all blood and smoke. Isn’t it?’

  He was shifting his weight.

  I tried one more time. ‘Disperse!’ I shouted. Or perhaps I merely coughed it. ‘Turn back, or be the enemies of God.’

  ‘I am the fucking enemy of God,’ D’Herblay said. ‘So save your sanctimonious shit.’

  One of his blue and white men at arms laughed at that – and then they all came forward at us.

  There is an enormous difference between killing helpless townspeople and fighting a knight. I hope d’Herblay learned that when I broke both his hands with one blow. The steel of his hourglass gauntlets protected him from the edge, and he didn’t lose the hands.

  He just lost their use.

  His spear clattered to the cobbles. He didn’t growl – he screamed, and I put my axe head behind his heel and pulled, dropping him with a clatter.

  I put the spike atop my weapon to his unvisored face. I stepped on his broken left hand. He screamed.

  ‘I am not killing you,’ I said. ‘I do not want to kill another man. Not today. Go. All of you.’

  Something in me was broken. Or had never been right. I wanted to kill him. In fact, I wanted to kill them all. I wanted to kill all the bad men, on and on.

  But I had listened to enough of Father Pierre to begin to doubt if killing them was the way.

  D’Herblay lay in the road and screamed. I ignored him. In Gascon French, I said, ‘Are any of you knights? Are you not ashamed? Is this your war for the gentle Jesus? Is this all we are? Go hold a tower. Go and fight the enemy. The armed enemy. Or we are nothing but reivers and bandits?’

  I suppose I thought that they would turn away, ashamed.

  Instead, they simply attacked.

  Fiore laughed. ‘Well done,’ he said, as his pole arm flicked out.

  We were five against twenty, and from the moment the blue and white in front of me came forward, I remember little. But I remember passing my iron between a man’s legs and lifting him, and his screams. I remember slamming my poleaxe two-handed, a full blow like a man splitting wood, into another.

  I confess I put another down after he had turned to run.

  They still talk of that fight, in the Hospital. They could all see us from the walls of the gate castle.

  Of course, they lie, and say that the five of us fought a hun
dred Mamluks. When in fact, we fought twenty men-at-arms who wore the same cross as we wore ourselves.

  And then it was done. The survivors ran like rats, leaving their loot on the road.

  And then – I’m not ashamed to say – John the Turk and Maurice and George shot them down. As they ran.

  And I confess, too, that killing d’Herblay would have given me more pleasure than any of the poor devils of infidels I killed in Alexandria. But I did not.

  I walked back to him, and someone had killed him. On the ground, his hands broken, as helpless as a babe.

  And Nerio said, ‘You are too good to be a mortal man, William Gold.’ He raised an eyebrow. And flicked his sword at me like a salute.

  The next morning, we fed the Greeks – and their Jewish and Moslem friends – what food we had. About an hour after sunrise, we were probed by Bedouins. They came in close but we were silent as the grave and we didn’t allow them into the courtyard through the gate: Ewan and John and Ned Cooper saw them off, leaving a dozen corpses.

  Then John followed Fra William and twenty turcopoles out the gate on his little Arab. They were gone an hour, and then John took the English archers and they were gone another hour.

  The next troops to come at us were Sudanese. They were not well-disciplined, and I suspected they were being used to count our swords, so to speak. But they were fanatics, or possibly full to their eyeballs with opium. There were several hundred of them.

  They died in front of the towers, and then they died in the gate tunnel, and then they died in our fortified trap in the courtyard, and they never stopped stabbing and chanting and screaming their name for God.

  After their attack, we watched from the tower as three or four thousand soldiers, the Sultan’s professionals, made camp on the other side of the suburbs.

  I won’t say we were smug. But we had a good garrison and a fine position. The courtyard trap was better than a gate, because we could sortie whenever we pleased and the Venetians and the English – and John – gave us a power of archery I’ve seldom had in a siege. We were going to run out of shafts in a few days, but we had the largest city in the world at our backs. I was no more worried than an exhausted soldier in a siege usually is and Fra William de Midleton was positively exuberant. He’d led the counter-attack on the Sudanese, axe in hand, and now seemed … bigger.

  That was evening of the third day.

  By then, Fra William had organised watches. I no longer had a command – my group of volunteers was spread to the winds. We had casualties; Juan, of course, and others; and we were missing men. Volunteers of the Order were as likely to loot as others. And Nerio had taken men with him when he took Fra Peter back to the galleys. More had escorted the legate that hellish night.

  Fiore and Nerio and I served with the Scottish knights. They were good men, and they followed Baron Rosilyn. He was no older than I, and very proud, but a fine fighter. I’d like to say we got along, but in fact, we never spoke beyond ‘That wall’, and ‘Here they come’.

  On the morning of the fourth day, Nerio took a patrol all the way to the ships, and returned in the evening with twenty Knights of the Order and all the rest of the available turcopoles and volunteers. They marched in just in time, for we had the first probing attack from Mamluks at dusk. We repulsed it easily.

  Nerio had canteens of wine, and he shared them with us, so we were sitting on our haunches like beggars in armour, drinking Venetian wine from canteens. Nerio shook his head.

  ‘Turenne, that man of steel, says this gate cannot be held. He is demanding that the city be abandoned.’

  I shrugged, having heard the same. There were brigands and crusaders trying to join us by then. Fra William sent them to hold other gates. A few even did. We admitted none of them to our towers.

  Nerio shook his head. ‘No, I mean it. Most of the crusaders wish us to sail away. There was a rumour today that these gates had fallen.’ He looked at me. ‘The legate is in a bad way, my friend.’

  I nodded.

  Nerio frowned. ‘Someone has told the king that you attacked d’Herblay and other crusaders – that you are a secret pagan, a traitor.’

  Fiore grunted.

  ‘I wish I had a better quality of foes,’ I said. ‘Camus and d’Herblay – ugh.’

  Nerio’s eyes slipped past Fiore. I was going to say more, but Fiore turned his head to look. It was a Greek girl, bringing water to the soldiers.

  Nerio rose. ‘Sabraham wants to speak to us. He said something to me,’ he said, ‘But I forget what it was.’ He laughed, and went to chat to the Greek girl, apparently untouched by the horror around us.

  The next day, the Mamluks prowled for a weaker gate.

  The king came and told us that we were the pillars on which the crusade rested.

  He had a complete collar of the Order of the Sword, and he put it on me. He waited with us for the daily visit by the Sultan’s army, but it did not come, and eventually he rode away. He looked tired, and harried – we all did.

  But de Mézzières had a conversation with Nerio and Fiore while I was invested with the order.

  And when the king was gone, I put a hand on Nerio’s shoulder. ‘Brother,’ I said, ‘we need to bury Juan.’

  Nerio shook his head. ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘I have him on the galley. Wrapped in a shroud. He’s not the only dead knight.’

  I shook my head. ‘He died in the Holy Land,’ I said. ‘Surely …’

  Fiore looked down. ‘We’re leaving, Will,’ he said.

  Nerio wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  I sat. I don’t think I decided to sit. My knees just gave.

  Nerio finally looked at me. ‘The king tried. The legate tried.’ He shrugged. ‘Listen, William, Admiral Contarini tried. He has been against this attack from the beginning, and he argued that now that we had raped the city and broken it for trade, the least we might do is hold it and march on Cairo.’

  Zeno was drinking our wine – or, given that it was Venetian wine, possibly we were drinking his. ‘Cairo?’ he asked. ‘Christ on a cross, this army!’ He spat. ‘Every fighting man in this army is right here,’ he muttered.

  Nerio made one of his Italian faces. ‘We are leaving.’ He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘For you, I’m sorry.’ He shrugged. ‘For me … I never want to see this place or these animals again.’ He flicked his eyebrows up, and shrugged. ‘Perhaps I am a banker at heart, but what have these infidels ever done to me? Nothing. But our crusaders?’

  I was not the veteran captain then that I am today, but that city could have been held.

  Instead, our crusaders made a real effort – not to fight, but to enrich themselves. You’d have thought, from the charnel house of death, that every living thing in the city was dead, but some people had been rescued – to be made slaves.

  When we sailed away – with the loot of a rich city, ten thousand slaves, and two shiploads of Alexandrine Greeks who begged not to be left to the counter-sack of the Mamluks – when we left, the Egyptian Army had stopped attacking because they’d lost a thousand men for nothing.

  We killed a great city.

  Also – for nothing.

  Two days later we landed in Cyprus. The ‘crusaders’ were eager to trans-ship their plunder and there were men sailing for Italy before Mass on Friday.

  I have nothing more to say, except that those days, the voyage from Alexandria to Famagusta, and the days that followed, were perhaps the blackest of my life.

  Nerio had saved his Greek girl. He was well enough. And he and Fiore tried to comfort me. And Miles, who was as disconsolate as I.

  What do you make of the ruin of all your hopes?

  What is knighthood, when crusade is but a word for rape?

  We buried Juan in the cathedral of Famagusta. You can still see his arms there, in alabaster, painted. I have been to visit him a few times. Sometimes I sit
on his tomb, and talk to him, though I realise this is foolish.

  Sometimes I weep.

  I certainly wept that day.

  It was Nerio – Nerio, for whom religion was an inhibition on his carnal pleasures – who saved me. The four of us we standing over the tomb, no alabaster yet, and we went to the altar to pray.

  And Nerio said, ‘Let’s go to Jerusalem anyway.’

  The four of us rose, and swore – four swords on the tomb.

  The crusade broke up with frightening rapidity. The English were gone in less than a week, and the French immediately began to spread a rumour that the English and the Hospital had deserted the walls first.

  I got to listen to the process by which a military disaster that was a catastrophe of cowardice, indecision and greed was transformed into a Christian victory, a blow to the infidel. I got to hear black told as white, the admiral of the Hospital called a coward for attacking the Pharos Harbour, the Hospital accused of deserting the king on the beach.

  There was worse to come. But luckily, in the atmosphere of recrimination, I took my leave of the king and de Mézzières in a rose garden. I didn’t have to listen to the French, the Bretons, the Savoyards or the Gascons justify themselves.

  King Peter looked drawn, his face pinched. Men said that he had come home to a cold bed and a distant welcome. Men said all sorts of terrible things. I saw the queen at a distance – but more on that later, if we sit together another night.

  King Peter, true to his word, made me put my hands between his and accept a barony. Men told me it was a fine piece of land, would support ten knights and I swore to be his man and to serve him with three knights whenever he desired.

  It did not lift the black fog entirely, but I had never held any land before. I was a lord.

  By the grace of God.

  The king gave me his leave to depart; not that, as a volunteer of the Order, I needed his leave. And he gave me his passport to Jerusalem.

  He put a hand on my shoulder and sighed. ‘Some of the English go to Jerusalem. My people say that the Sultan is so discomfited by the overthrow of his army at Alexandria that he has withdrawn his garrison.’ His eyes met mine, and they were red. ‘Where did we fail?’ he asked.