by Jack Whyte
“It does, and that is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that it now appears that things may change radically from what we had expected. For three days now, the enemy has been making broad and massive changes to his troop dispositions, and it all appeared to come together today in a series of open maneuvers that they did not even try to hide. Richard is now convinced that they intend to confront us tomorrow, nose to nose, and to try to provoke us into fighting on their terms. Saladin stands in sore need of a victory, for his credibility, and some say his discipline and control of his troops have all suffered badly since Acre fell … and because Acre fell. So Richard believes we have come as far as Saladin can permit us to come without doing battle. That is why we are camped here tonight, with our backs to the swamp and safe against attack from there. It is also why the presence of the Saracen horsemen has become so visible all around us. Richard believes they will now press us increasingly and relentlessly until we give battle, no matter how unwilling we may be to play the Sultan’s game. There is no doubt he is hoping to provoke us into committing the same folly that de Ridefort fell into so often, charging vainly against the drifting smoke of his mobile brigades. But Richard will have none of that, you wait and see. He will not be provoked. He intends to proceed with great caution from now on.”
“I see. So what is the essence of this great caution Richard intends to exercise from now on?”
“Close-order, disciplined advance with no reaction to enemy provocation until Richard himself deems the time to be exactly right. The order of march will change immediately, split into five divisions.”
“Divided how?”
“The Templars still hold the van, so there will be no great changes involved for us. But we will be joined by the division of Turcopoles, moved up from the center, which can only be to our advantage.”
André nodded in agreement, for the Turcopoles were excellent troops, locally raised and trained in the same light, swift-moving cavalry techniques used by the Saracens. “And behind us?”
“Richard’s liegemen from Aquitaine, Poitou, and Anjou, and his levies from Brittany. He has placed Guy in charge of those.”
“Guy de Lusignan?”
“That’s the man. Apparently his tactical skills are improving. Behind them, in the center, now come the Normans and the English, with the main battle standard. And then the French have the rearguard, with the Hospitallers in support and a motley collection of Syrian barons and their levies behind them. Henry of Champagne commands there, and he has Jacques d’Avesnes with him, so there is no lack of backbone in the rearguard.”
“That is but four divisions. You said there were to be five.”
“Aye, the fifth will be small but highly visible. Richard himself and Burgundy, supported by a hand-picked cadre of outstanding knights from all the various commands. They will be mobile, riding back and forth the entire length of the line of march, showing their faces and offering strength and support.”
“So, if all this is true, why is there a need for anyone to go to Arsuf?”
“Because we have come sixty-two miles and have but six to go to reach our goal, and if we are forced to fight for every step from here onward, as Richard suspects we will be, then reaching Arsuf will take on a great significance, and the very last thing we will need or want is to arrive there and find the place strongly fortified against us. Hence the need to send someone there in advance, to assess the situation and report back to us. If the place is held and fortified already, we will accept that and make no secret of it. If it is not, on the other hand, we may then dispatch a special force to occupy it against our arrival, denying it to Saladin.”
“When must I leave?”
“Ideally, you should leave immediately and spend the night between here and there, and you should take someone with you, someone you can trust. Do you know someone suitable?”
“Aye, you, but you can’t come. Of all the others I would pick, none can speak Arabic and not a single one of them could pass for anything other than what he is, a Frank. So I will have to ride alone. But I am a big lad now, and it won’t be the first time I have spread my blanket alone beneath the stars.”
“You had better take one of them along with you anyway, for the first stage of the journey, at least, because you will want to transform yourself into a Saracen before you ride among them, and you will not want to go riding through the middle of this mob dressed as one of Allah’s faithful. So you’ll take your Arab clothing, weapons, and whatever else you need on a packhorse and change once you are safely out there. Do you have everything you need?”
“No, not here. I have my Arab clothing, but I left my Saracen weapons and armor with yours, in the cave among the stones.”
“Hmm. See Conrad, the armorer. He will give you whatever you require, from the captured supplies.”
“I will, but I won’t need to take anyone out with me if I have a packhorse. I’ll take an Arab mule with me. Then I can carry my own armor with me, for I’ll tell you plain, I would not care to risk galloping back into camp here tomorrow, perhaps in the middle of a fight, dressed as a Muslim knight.”
Alec Sinclair grimaced. “You have a point there. Very well, take the mule and carry your own gear. If you get caught with it, you’ll already be in trouble, so it will make no difference.”
“Pleasant thought … I thank you for it. When will you want me to return?”
“Tomorrow, sometime after noon. That will give you time to settle down and examine the place closely in the morning, and then, if it is not already garrisoned, to sit tight and ensure that no concerted move is made to occupy it in the course of the morning. Of course, if you find it occupied, then all you need do is assess the strength of the garrison and make your way back to join us as soon as you can. You will not have as far to travel on the way back, and I can assure you that you will have no trouble finding us. Reaching us might be another thing entirely, but finding us should be very simple.”
“Aye, I take your point. I had better be going, then.”
“And on the topic that you brought up, of passing for other than what you are, make sure you take one of our Arabian horses when you go, and not a Belgian destrier.”
“Well, my gratitude is overwhelming, Cousin. Had you not thought of that, I might have ridden into the Saracens, all unsuspecting that I had betrayed myself. Sleep well tonight, and if you are brought to bay tomorrow, look after yourself. Farewell.”
ANDRÉ ST. CLAIR LEANED forward, almost standing in his stirrups as he urged his horse silently to the last, steepest part of the ascent, and the uncomplaining mule surged up behind him. They had been climbing constantly for more than a mile towards the crest that now lay not a hundred paces ahead, and he looked along the ridge from side to side, watching for movement. Forming three-quarters of a circle like the rim of a broken bowl, the escarpment’s edge was bare, sharply limned and clear of vegetation, and he wondered for a moment what had formed it, for beneath it the valley it contained did resemble a large bowl and he was perched high on the left edge of the break, the sea at his back, a mile below where he now sat, stretching hugely north and south, vanishing into a haze in both directions. He had no intention of climbing to the crest, and had come this high only because the terrain itself had dictated where he must go. His only interest now was in making the traverse, with his animals, from the narrow, precipitously sided ridge he was on to the sloping meadows on his left, where he intended to ride parallel to the crest, keeping below it, yet far above anyone who might be below him on the slopes.
Arsuf lay more than two miles behind him now, and it had been abandoned when he had reached it soon after dawn that morning, he and his horse the only living creatures within sight or sound. The ancient fortress with its sandstone walls was roofless and open to the weather, and he could see at first glance that no attempt had been made to secure it or to make it defensible again. He had remained there for four hours, nevertheless, obedient to his instructions, and at one point he had even ri
dden into the woods behind the town, aware that they stretched for miles, but remembering, too, the rumors that had whispered of ambush and destruction among the trees. He had traveled for more than a mile along a well-marked path before deciding that there was nothing in there and the rumors had been but rumors after all. Then, back on the town walls as the day wore on towards noon, it had become clear that if Saladin had any plans to man the fort, he had in all probability left it too late, for even at their normal rate of progress, less than one mile an hour, the Christian army would arrive by mid-afternoon at the latest. Unless, of course, it failed to arrive at all.
Confident then that he had done what had been asked of him, St. Clair had saddled up again and struck out northward, leading his pack mule towards the advancing army, and when he had reached the closest point to the slope that stretched up towards the high ridge, he had steered his mount off the road, to the right, and begun to climb.
He reined in now, with barely more than his own height between him and the top, and bent forward in the saddle, gentling his horse with the flat of his hand against its neck until it regained its normal breathing speed. He dismounted and led both animals, one at a time, across what proved to be a very narrow, steeply sloping, and treacherous strip of ground that fell away into the deep ravine that edged the ridge, then remounted and made his way to the shoulder of ground ahead of him that masked his view of the valley below. The hillside ahead of him swept down gently for a hundred paces or so, then rose upward again to another, lower ridge, beyond which he could see nothing but sky. He prodded his horse forward gently to the other slope, and this time as he approached the crest he became aware of a sound, strange and unrecognizable, rising and falling in the distance. Curious, he spurred his horse more urgently, and it surged up to the top of the second ridge to show him a sight that took his breath away and left him staring open mouthed at the scene below him, with not a thought in his head of being seen.
A battle was being fought in the valley bottom, but even as he looked at it for the first time, trying to absorb the scope of it, he could see that there was something fundamentally lopsided about it. It took several moments for him to adjust to the new perspective, for now he was looking down from what felt like an immense height and everything appeared strange and different. Nevertheless, within a few moments he saw what it was, and understanding came to him in a flash, although it was a flash of disappointment. With a rising surge of disbelief he saw that Richard Plantagenet had blundered, for the first time in a lifetime of warfare.
It was clear that the Muslim troop movements he had identified that morning, with hundreds of riders moving far up on the high wooded slopes, had featured prominently in Saladin’s attack, and that the first attack had come from there.
The Frankish army stood directly below St. Clair with their backs to the sea, and from where he sat he could not believe the closeness with which they were all jammed together, or the savagery with which Saladin’s forces were attacking them from above, shooting arrows and crossbow bolts into the densely packed mass as quickly as they could launch and reload. So thick was the press down there that no aim was required from the heights above. Every missile fired, no matter how carelessly, found a target, and the raised shields of the Frankish knights formed a kind of roof against the downpour.
To St. Clair’s right, the straight and narrow Roman road stretched back to the ground beside the swamp where Richard’s army had spent the night, and he could see that it lay open, with no signs of trap or ambush to deter the Franks from retreating in that direction. On the other side, however, to the south, the roadway vanished into a tunnel of trees about half a mile from where the Franks had stopped their advance, and there were sufficient bodies, both human and equine, on the surface of the road to demonstrate that the Muslims had attacked from there, sweeping out of the tunnel and down through the woods above the road to stop Richard’s army in its tracks.
Everything looked small and compact from where he sat, but André St. Clair knew that the Frankish host that looked so strangely small and cramped from his viewpoint was the largest foreign army ever assembled here since Roman times, and it was surrounded on three sides by a force that greatly outnumbered it. So closely were the Frankish troops packed that certain of the various contingents appeared as solid blocks of color, the most noticeable of those being the redflecked white mass of the Templars on St. Clair’s left, holding the vanguard which had now become the right of the line, and the solid, black-garbed mass of the Hospitallers of the rearguard, now forming the left of the line. Between those were the blue and gold of the French knights, but it was the military orders of the Temple and the Hospital who stood out most significantly in the solid phalanges of color.
Richard had insisted from the outset of this drive from Acre to Jerusalem that he would not commit the same errors that had doomed his predecessors in their misadventures with Saladin. He had great respect for the Kurdish Sultan and he was determined that he would make no foolish or impulsive errors with his command that would present the Saracen leader with any undue advantage, and in Richard’s eyes the greatest and most consistent weakness that the Frankish armies had demonstrated within recent years was their tendency to charge headlong against the enemy and consider the costs afterwards, when the appalling price had been paid and tallied. Richard was under no illusions about those tactics and their origins. They sprang directly from the stubborn, headstrong arrogance of the Templars and the Hospitallers, who simply refused to believe that there might ever be a circumstance in which they, with God so firmly on their side and in their prayers at all times, should even hesitate to engage the enemy tooth and nail. That the enemy knew exactly how to provoke those charges, and then how to avoid them and wreak havoc on the suicidal Christians as they charged past, appeared to have no significance to the senior field commanders of either Order. Their quest was for glory—their own personal glory first, and the greater glory of God incidentally.
Richard had been determined to curb that zeal, and had kept all of his subordinates on a tight leash. He had been fighting ruthless, determined, and ambitious enemies throughout his life, beginning in his boyhood, and there had been none of them whom he respected more than Saladin. And so he had insisted on a slow, steady progress from the moment he left Acre, keeping his knights tightly in check, in compact defensive formations that were, he believed, invulnerable to Muslim attack.
Now, however, from where St. Clair watched, it appeared that the King had held them in too tightly, for his cavalry forces were so densely compressed that they had no room to maneuver or even to regroup. Hemmed in on every side by their own infantry formations and under constant missile assault from the slopes above, they had no other option than to sit massed together, with the ground falling away at their backs towards the sea, and wait to be chopped down. Their armor was the finest in the world, and it rendered them all but invulnerable, but there were always weak spots in armor and accidental exposures to what was an incessant hail of arrows.
Then, even as he watched, St. Clair saw another phase of the attack develop as a solid phalanx of the black-clad desert nomads called Bedouin—he quickly estimated at least half a thousand—charged down from concealed positions high in the woods and launched a ferocious attack on the tightly compressed forces of the Hospitallers of the rearguard, on the far left of the Frankish line. Incredulous, St. Clair watched as the Hospital knights were squeezed even more tightly, something he would not have believed possible by that stage, and the protective lines of infantry fronting their formations swayed and buckled.
“Charge them! Break out, or you’re all dead men!” He was shouting at the top of his voice, bellowing advice down to the beleaguered men who could neither hear nor see him, but even as he hurled down imprecations and exhortation, he could see that nothing was to be done. The scene was set for a bloodbath. The front line of the Bedouin charge approached the farthest edge of the rearguard formations and then the riders drew rein and leapt from their
horses to charge in a solid block towards what they must have identified, for reasons of their own, as the weakest part of the opposing front. St. Clair could visualize their dark, feral faces as they swept forward, brandishing their fearsome scimitars. Of all the warriors of the Faithful, the Franks disliked and feared the Bedouin above all others.
He was not aware of having dismounted, but André was pulling at his clothes, ripping off the Arab garments until he stood clad only in the white lamb’s wool loin wrapping of the Temple Knights. He crossed to the mule, moving slowly so as not to frighten the patient animal, and re-dressed himself as a Templar, complete with white, red-crossed surcoat, moving swiftly now that he had decided to die with his peers, and concentrating intently on wasting no time, not even to glance down at the scene below. Thus, engaged with the straps and lacings of his hauberk and cuirass, he missed the first few crucial moments of what next transpired down there, and it was only as he straightened up to slip his sword belt over his head and across his chest that he saw something had changed. Fully alert then, he stuffed his Muslim clothing and weaponry into the leather casings on the pack mule, then moved quickly to his horse and stepped up into the saddle, his eyes fixed on the scene below, to see a transformation that astounded him.
Whatever had occurred, he could clearly see that it had begun with the Hospitallers, for the knights had broken out there, surging through the defensive ranks of their own infantry to attack the Bedouin newcomers, most of whom were now afoot. But the breakout was not confined to the Hospitallers, for as St. Clair watched, rapt, the Frankish cavalry broke through all along their line in an irresistible rolling wave—and watching it occur he could think of no other term for it—that surged all the way to the right of the line and brought the Templars charging out and forward into the teeth of the enemy, who, judging from the way they buckled and recoiled from the assault, were obviously unprepared for anything of the kind. Even from as far away as St. Clair’s viewpoint, it was clear that the tables had been unexpectedly and completely reversed.
