The Fools’ Crusade

by Pip Vaughan-Hughes

  A long shadow ducked up a side street. Keeping my hand on my sword, I doubled back and peered round the corner, but there was nobody in sight.

  The curio merchant was not at home, or not answering his door, and I couldn’t blame him for that. So I followed my nose to the souk, where some nervous traders had set up their stalls, though there were few customers. But a man was grilling spiced mutton on skewers; I bought a few and made sure to pay more than I owed, and to speak to him in his own language. He did not say a word to me, but did not spit on the meat, for which I was grateful. I wandered through the souk for a while, trying to find someone I knew, and making small-talk with the traders, doing my best to put them at their ease. King Louis was a just king, I said, even for a Christian, and they shouldn’t worry about their safety. Not one of them was convinced, and why should they be? I went in search of Warren, feeling like what I was: a conqueror, a Frankish, barbarian conqueror. Men cross oceans and risk death in all its forms to have that feeling, but I would not have given the dirt from beneath one toenail. I made up my mind, somewhere between the souk and the governor’s palace, to get out of Damietta as soon as possible, find the important men in the spice trade and work out some way to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Earl Richard’s wishes would never be fulfilled. Strange to have such a task: to prove something impossible and not the other way around, but at that moment I felt so wretched, such an impostor, that I would have saddled a crocodile and ridden it all the way to Cairo just to be done with this crusader play-acting.

  Warren – or the bag of gold I had entrusted to him – had procured me a fine house near the palace, with a long view over the shore and the great green plain of the Nile’s mouths. The merchant who lived there had a wife and several daughters, and had seized this profitable opportunity to remove them to safety. I paid his servants – Abbi, the major domo, and his family – to stay with me, and when they realised I was not a boorish, dangerous Frank but someone who could speak their tongue and understood their ways, they served me well, even though they must have hated me. Money can buy respect and even a man’s soul, but it can never buy his heart. It is a strange thing about Frankish conquerors: they destroy everything in their path, and then they expect their dispossessed, bloodied victims to fawn over them like besotted dogs. I did not want my throat cut while I slept and nor did I wish my new household to fear me, so I went about with kind words and a smile for all, and slept with my door locked.

  That first night, I waited until the street door was locked and the servants had gone to bed. After closing the shutters tight I took Thorn and, squinting in the guttering light from one little oil lamp, cut the silk band that held Richard’s letter, inside its leaden tube, against my upper arm.

  In the dim light I took up a penknife and broke open the seal. The letter was unharmed, the vellum not even foxed. There was the confident, slashing hand of Richard’s scribe, the ink still slickly, gleamingly black. The pope’s seal was as solid and incriminating as it had been when I had hidden it away.

  If any other man in Damietta found this thing, I was done for. The French are not kind to traitors, and to one who had planned to betray a king and God Himself … I would be tortured for days, with all sorts of refinements like burning sulphur poured into my wounds. Then I would be torn limb from limb by horses, and what was left of me – they would make sure I was still alive, in some hideous manner – would be burned. Then they would find Iselda and do the same to her. So I must hide it well. But it could only be hidden in plain sight.

  In amongst my baggage was a small leather purse. Battered, unassuming, held shut with an old bronze buckle that was going green, it had once belonged to Gilles de Peyrolles, and held the distilled essence of the craft he had taught me: how to make a holy relic from whatever one might have to hand. There were a few delicate tools of the kind used by jewellers and a couple beloved of thieves; two little boxes with sliding lids that held, in glass-lined compartments, various powders; another box that held vials, some of glass, one of lead, of powerful liquors; and some odds and ends rattled around in the bottom of the purse, seemingly random. From these I selected a hard, shiny black cube. A Moorish amulet I had bought that morning lay nearby. I prised it open, shook out the concoction of coloured threads and scribbled-upon old parchment inside, and with a little effort managed to get Richard’s letter to fit into the cavity. Then I closed it up and, holding the black cube in the lamp flame until it began to melt, caught a drop on the end of a silver pick, and let the black liquid seep into the join between the amulet’s two halves. Two more drops, and the thing was sealed so tightly that it would need to be cut open. But just to be sure, I had already cut a thin strip from a piece of rawhide I’d bought and let it soak in a dish of water. Now I bound it three times round the silver, knotting it so that it looked like fellahin work. Then I hung the amulet round my neck and went to bed.

  When I woke up the next day, the heat of my body had dried out the rawhide and bound it fast to the silver. Yawning, I brought out my forger’s kit and, while the town came to life outside, set to work. By the time the servants had set my breakfast out in the little shaded courtyard below, my trinket looked like a piece of ancient sorcery, ominous enough to be treated with caution, but plain enough that no eyes would seek it out. Suddenly I felt much safer. Now I had only to slip out of Damietta, make my way to Cairo in one piece, convince the sultan – should I manage to get an audience – that although I was plainly a miserable traitor to my people and my religion, I was worth trusting, and finally, to convince the Defender of the Mussulman Faith that he should enter into an alliance with, of all people in this teeming world, the pope in Rome. The whole thing seemed so absurd that I burst out laughing, and sprayed yoghurt over the floor tiles. Then I calmed down. Was I really going to deliver the letter? In all honesty, I was not. The Saracens did not look as if they intended to put up much of a fight, which meant that something was wrong in Cairo. Promises from an infidel would not mean much if the sultan was not easy on his throne. But it occurred to me that I should be seen to at least try, for I could not be the only papal spy in Damietta, and the German crusader who had found me in Cyprus had more or less told me I was not. Perhaps I could vanish for a while and reappear … No matter. The opportunity would present itself. And the letter itself held a power of its own, although I was not yet sure how, or indeed if, that could be used to my advantage. Meanwhile I had kept myself alive so far: it seemed best to use my energies to make sure I stayed that way.

  In those early days the king surprised us all by turning his back on tradition and keeping the goods we had captured in Damietta – large stores of corn and rice – for the Crown, and not giving up two-thirds to the army, as was the custom. There were rumblings in the camp over that, but by then the Saracens had begun their attacks, and there were other things to worry about. The army was itching to get moving – upstream, to lay siege to Cairo, or along the coast to Alexandria – for as far as they were concerned the Egyptians were no match for the cream of French knighthood and it would be an easy job to take their country. But Louis, who had two of his brothers with him – Robert, Count of Artois, and Charles of Anjou – was waiting for the third, Alphonse, the Count of Poitiers, who was bringing the rest of the French army across from Marseille. Jean de Joinville kept me abreast of things in the palace: some bickering between brothers, I gathered, and the king growing more and more anxious. On top of everything else, Queen Marguerite was with child. Joinville was proving to be a useful friend at court: he was clever and had a sharp eye, and seemed to have taken me under his wing, although all we had in common was a shared memory of Louis’s court in a simpler time. I tried to teach him the language of the Saracens, and in return he made sure I dined often at the royal table. The king was always in good spirits, although his men were often ill-tempered, and the queen would sit apart, kept company by the few other noblewomen who had followed their husbands to Egypt. As time went on her belly began to grow, but still the king p
aid scant attention to her, at least in public, and I wondered, when I saw this, how such a kind and pious man could be so cold towards the wife he was supposed to love. It was a strange thing, and not pleasant to witness, but since we had left Cyprus, Louis seemed to have turned away from her. He reminded me of a little boy, lured away from the girl who has been his playmate by other boys who promise games full of noise and violence. Now the king dressed in chain mail and spent every minute between waking and sleep either with his priests or his commanders. If I saw the sad, confused glances that Queen Marguerite gave her husband when they were seated together at dinner, or when the court was assembled for some proclamation or decision, others did too, but there was nothing to be done. I wondered, all the same, if I was the only one who found it shameful that a man who put the love of God above all else should throw over the love of his wife for the doleful amusements of war.

  Because I missed my own wife, I liked to sit in the courtyard of my lodgings writing letters to Iselda, and twice a supply ship brought me a letter in return. The letters spoke of little things: gossip in the market, the cook’s nephew’s new son, some bank news from Florence. The world seemed to be getting on quite well without me. But for the most part I spent my days exercising with the English knights and making enquiries amongst the remaining merchants, trying to get a sense of the trade routes and who controlled them. My Jewish friend Ya’qub bin Yazdad appeared after a few days, and some other Christian merchants too: they had been hiding in attics and cellars, expecting to be burned out at any moment, but when that didn’t happen they began, so they told me, to wonder what profit might be made from the situation.

  None, alas for them: the crusaders, denied their customary pillage, began to strangle the businesses that remained in Damietta by charging them outrageous rents for their own properties. Damietta had become a Christian city by then, the mosque was a cathedral, and the Frankish occupiers, as they had done in Constantinople, had begun to squeeze the juice from the conquered townsfolk. It was good to have Ya’qub to talk with: he was a sharp-eyed old rogue with a beard the colour of a wolf’s mane, and though his stock-in-trade was silk, he sidelined in the sort of curios that the captain had found very profitable amongst the richer prelates, particularly Roman cardinals. A Swedish bishop had bought the first one I had seen, two little ivory figures, a man and a woman, with broad, painted smiles and no clothes, who had fitted together in a charmingly lustful and intricate way. The captain had liked Ya’qub, and Ya’qub had fond memories of the captain, who had lined his pockets many times, he would tell me, patting his robes with a wolfish grin. I would drink wine with him in the evenings, and he would show me his wares: scrolls from Cathay showing a thousand ways a man might roger a woman; plump bronze dancers from Madurai; strange wooden pizzles from God knew where; exquisite ink and gold miniatures from Persia which were as beautiful as they were filthy; and even clay vessels of the ancient Greeks and Romans around which beasts went at it with languid girls, and men and boys did things that would get you burned at the stake in a heartbeat, though they went on in every monastery. He was quite crestfallen when he learned that I was in a different line of business now, but I promised to keep him in mind should the need arise, for after all, I did know a great many cardinals.

  As soon as I had found my feet in Damietta I had decided to conduct an experiment. One morning I rose early, dressed in some nondescript Saracen clothes I had bought in the bazaar, and slipped out of the camp. The enemy patrols were easy to dodge, but I had gone no more than a quarter-mile when I realised that the flies were draining me of my blood as rapidly as if I had just opened a vein, and that the land was a maze of canals and irrigation ditches. I could not take the main causeway that led southwards, that was plain, and if I set off into this pest-ridden swamp on my own without a map, I would not last a day. So I slipped back into the town and made enquiries about finding a boat. That proved impossible as well: not that boats could not be found, for an exorbitant price, but Ya’qub assured me that the boatmen would slit my throat and leave me to the crocodiles. He knew them all, and none of them were to be trusted. Besides, the countryside was teeming with Saracens, and a lone Frank would not get very far. I could probably have passed myself off as a Greek, but they would be looking for spies and I did not fancy getting my throat cut for no real reason. My curiosity was satisfied. To make my way south towards Cairo would be an act of suicide. There was no point in leaving Damietta on my own.

  Weeks passed. One night in Ya’qub’s house I took myself off to the privy and as I stood there, watching the moon rise through the smoke of the camp beyond the walls, the baleful realisation that I was trapped here in this place, with this army, hit me in the pit of my stomach like the first pangs of the flux. Like it or not – and I did not, by God – I was a crusader, and whatever these Frankish buffoons decided to do next, I would have to go with them. The only way out of Damietta, if I still meant to reach Cairo, was with the army.

  To fill my time I liked to wander in the bazaar, and as the traders came to know me they began to talk more freely. One day, four months or so after we had taken the city, I was admiring a rug that a Circassian merchant had spread out on his stall.

  ‘Where has your shadow gone?’ he asked, as we were bantering.

  ‘Shadow?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly. There was another Frank – though you are not so much like a Frank yourself,’ he added politely. ‘Everywhere you went in the bazaar, he would come after. Was he a friend of yours?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said, puzzled. ‘Who was he?’

  ‘A Frank.’ The man shrugged.

  ‘And … ?’

  ‘Well.’ The man squinted, trying to atomise the differences between one Frank and another, minute though they might be. ‘Tall – he was taller than you, my friend. And he had a funny way of walking.’ He started to squirm and flutter his hands.

  ‘Dear God! Like a woman? Not much like me, I trust?’

  ‘No, no!’ The Circassian laughed indulgently. ‘Not like a woman! More like a snake. And …’ He thought some more, then brightened. ‘Here!’ He pointed to his eyes. ‘This one looks straight, this one wanders.’

  I felt a little breath of cold air on the back of my neck. Remigius, Isaac’s murderer, in Damietta? But then I remembered what the German knight had told me: someone had been sent to learn about the Drug. Had Cardinal John really sent Remigius to Egypt? I spent the next day chewing this over, but decided, at last, that the merchant had been describing some Pisan or Genoese, sneaking about in search of a trading concession. Such people tended to attach themselves to anyone with a claim on the king’s ear, and perhaps this snaky fellow had just been too timid to tap me on the shoulder.

  It took six months for Count Alphonse to arrive with the rest of the army. Six months stuck in Damietta, listening to ludicrous court intrigues and, by the end, looking forward to the Saracen attacks, for then at least I could ride Tredefeu and breathe the open air. There was no danger, for the enemy would ride up, shoot off arrows and perhaps spear an unlucky soldier out foraging beyond the defences, and when the knights appeared, turn tail and run. It was calculated to exhaust and dispirit us, and it succeeded. So when the sails of the count’s fleet appeared one Thursday morning at the end of October, the camp and the court went half mad with excitement. But it took another month of arguing in the governor’s palace before the army set out, and besides, ships full of crusaders were still straggling into port. The barons wanted to attack Alexandria, a rich prize and not far along the coast. The king’s brothers, especially the blustering Count Robert, argued for a direct assault on Cairo, as it was the sultan’s capital and, as Joinville – who was of the king’s party in this – told me, if one wishes to kill a serpent, one must crush its head. I hardly need to say that I was desperately hoping we would go against Alexandria, for no other reason than that it was nearby and would not take many leagues of toil through pestilential marshes to reach. And as an erstwhile sail
or I knew that one can always escape by sea. But I was not a sailor any longer, I was a horseman, and when Jean de Joinville came to rouse me out of bed very early on the eve of Saint Nicholas’s feast, I knew before he even opened his mouth that we were bound south for Cairo.

  Later that day I was returning from the camp, where I had been part of a tourney – there having been no Saracen attack that day, we must needs attack one another. I was not in the best of moods, having been knocked off Tredefeu by an insolent young Breton, and was planning to cheer myself up with Ya’qub’s company. I had gone to my quarters to get out of my armour, and as I was washing my face, one of the serving girls knocked on the door of my chamber.

  ‘There’s a Frankish priest to see you,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Please tell him I’ll be with him directly.’ And feeling a ripple of foreboding, I tucked my knife, Thorn, beneath my robe.

  But it was not Remigius. Indeed, it would have been hard to conceive of anyone less like Cardinal John’s knifeman. Waiting for me on the doorstep was a Latin priest in travel-stained black robes. I guessed he had come ashore that morning, on the French ship that had put in from Marseille bringing letters and the very last, the very tardiest crusaders. He was short, almost squat, with a rubicund, slightly pimpled face and a sharp nose with a white scar, that jutted from the roundness of his features as if someone had taken a ball of dough and pulled out a fleshy point from it. There had been no hardship in his immediate past, as he was as round as a dumpling and radiated self-satisfaction.