The Fools’ Crusade

by Pip Vaughan-Hughes

What now? I could ride back to Damietta, take the first ship back to Venice and whisk Iselda away before anyone was the wiser. But something held me back. I was playing a game, secret to those around me but quite public to a few powerful watchers back home. If the crusade was about to succeed, it would be best for me if I played the game to the end, so that there would be no doubts as to my loyalty. How could I slip away, when the Mussulman throne was already empty and the crusader army was moving so quickly towards victory? And then – I cursed myself, bitterly – there was something else. I could not leave the army now. Pride is the bane of man, and pride stopped me from turning tail. Pride … But something more. Because amongst this horde of blustering fools I had, to my alarm, made friends. What would Joinville think if I vanished one night? What would Longspée make of it? They would call me coward. My name would drip like spittle from one end of Christendom to the other if I went back to Italy now. And then the dogs would be unleashed. So I persuaded myself, so easily, to stay a little longer, to march into Cairo with the others and have my name put into the songs. I would return with some lustre to my name, and vanish with Iselda when no one expected it. That seemed the easiest thing to do, or so I convinced myself.

  A few idle days passed, in which only four crossbowmen died, two of drowning, two of the flux, and then we came to a sudden halt. Across our path lay water. Not another of the countless ditches and culverts of that fenny region, but the Nile itself, or so it seemed. The barons, full of pride that they had already mapped out this conquered land, called it the Rosetta Branch. Alas for their pride it was not the Nile but the Ashmoun Canal, but Nile or not it was deep and wide, a long bowshot across to the other side, where a walled town stood. It was called Mansourah, and there, waiting for us, was the entire Saracen army.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘We shall dam the river,’ the king said, one foot resting jauntily on the rotting, spongy trunk of a fallen palm, elbow on knee, a long-fingered, beringed hand inclined delicately towards the expanse of brown, muscled water that roiled, two bowshots wide, at the foot of the muddy bank.

  ‘Of course, Your Majesty,’ said Jocelin de Cornaut, and sniffed efficiently. He shaded his eyes and squinted across the Nile. Over there, between the walls of Mansourah and the water’s edge, stood the Saracen camp, at this distance looking like nothing more sinister than the display of a Parisian sweet-maker. Peaked tents, domed tents, banners and awnings were lined up, gaudy as butterflies, their flags and pennants snaking in the faint breeze from the sea. Small detachments of horsemen galloped up and down the far bank. Further downstream, some of our men were yelling revolting words at them.

  It was a week before Christmas. We should have been at the gates of Cairo by now – or inside them – according to the camp tongue-waggers, but instead we had fetched up here. I had been in the advance guard late in the evening two days ago, and when we had burst through the last thicket of reeds, tall as young trees, that grow everywhere in this low and dismal country, and saw the brown water ahead, I had cursed, shrugged, and guessed we would be turning south-east to find a ford or a narrower place where the army might cross. But when Louis had joined us, the circlet on his sweat-matted head wreathed with a whining halo of biting flies, I knew by the way he set his jaw and frowned at the water that he had decided on something else. By the next morning the enemy had made camp across from our own great straggle, and the king went into his tent with the great nobles and the Templar lords, and did not emerge again that day. The Saracens had rowed into midstream and shot arrows at us, killing two mules and blinding a pikeman, but the flies had been more of a nuisance, and by the second morning my skin was a red mass of welts. So when the king’s herald found me I gave him no more than a tight-lipped nod, pulled on my hauberk and followed him, muttering imprecations to myself that were drowned by the low hum of flies from the towering acres of reeds all around us.

  Jocelin de Cornaut was the king’s engineer, a tall, bow-legged Flanders man with large ears and sandy hair. His eyebrows and beard were sandy too, and what with the sun and the flies he had begun to look somewhat flayed. But he was a nice enough soul, a soldier who had spent the last few years in the service of God, designing the cranes and winches that served the builders of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. Now he was back in the field. I wondered what he preferred: raising the delicate, skeletal spires of King Louis’s great shrine or the gross work he had now: siege engines, crude bridges and now this.

  ‘How will you do it?’ I asked him, offering him my flask of thin, vinegary wine. He took it and sipped, making a face, before handing it back with a grateful nod.

  ‘Causeway,’ he said bluntly. ‘There’s enough mud hereabouts …’ He trailed off, measuring the ruffled waters with his eyes.

  ‘Won’t …’ I paused and considered my next words. ‘That might be a lengthy undertaking,’ I finally said. ‘And you will be building your causeway straight at the infidel. Did the king not wish to search for a more auspicious crossing?’

  Jocelin shrugged. ‘Cairo lies yonder,’ he said, chopping the side of his hand down as if dividing the Saracen camp in two. ‘I think that the king does not want his army trailing about in these bloody fens. They are a maze – we have only just begun to advance, and already we have wasted days. Better to cut straight through. Besides, the infidel will have the crossings guarded.’

  I decided not to point out the festeringly obvious: that the infidels were waiting for us directly across the river. ‘I should have thought you liked fens,’ I said lightly. ‘Being Flemish and all.’

  ‘Beer, my good Petroc,’ said the engineer with a great sigh. ‘My country has mud, reeds, quaking bogs, flies, same as here. But Flanders has beer. And Egypt does not.’ He closed his mouth with a mournful snap and went back to studying the river banks. I left him there and went off in search of shade.

  The camp set to work building two siege towers and a pair of movable, covered walkways, to protect the poor sods whose ill-luck it was to be chosen as causeway-workers. The men who laboured in these cat-houses, as they were known, had to put up with endless mud, leeches, flies and rotting feet, and the sporadic but accurate fire from the enemy’s stone guns – great catapults, sixteen of them, all lined up on the far bank. The king ordered Jocelin to build eighteen of our own guns, and in a couple of days these were banging away, hurling stones across the dirty water, though more often than not our missiles splashed harmlessly into the river or the mud. But steadily, Louis’s causeway had begun to creep out into the Nile.

  The causeway was, in effect, a big dam cutting off this arm of the great river. It might even have worked had our enemy been an army of simpletons or idlers. They were neither, however, and as fast as Jocelin thrust the arm of his causeway out into the stream, the Saracens dug away the bank opposite, so that our men, despite their toil, never came any closer to the far shore. I had little to do, for along with the rest of the gentry I was not required to soil my hands. We fenced, and some men jousted. We gambled and quarrelled.

  In the end it was the boredom of the camp which sealed my fate, for we all shared the routines and the rituals, the danger, such as it was; boredom bound me to the army. We were comrades in idle discomfort, and one does not abandon a comrade.

  Advent came, and brought me a letter from Iselda. Old Doge Tiepolo had died, it told me, and there was a new doge: a spectacularly mediocre old priest called Marin Morosini. A mermaid had been sighted off Chioggia. The son of an acquaintance had run off with a courtesan. I wrote back, about sunsets across the Nile fens, biting flies and idleness.

  I tried to wander off whenever I could, past the belt of trodden reeds and shit-piles that marked the boundary of the camp, to explore the little streams and deserted fields beyond. I fished, and brought back eels for my tent-mates. There were hoopoes and gaudy kingfishers to watch, and once I saw the scaly back of a young crocodile slipping into the water. I drew my sword, but the monster did not reappear. More dangerous were the snakes, as long as a man and with
strange, flattened necks. If a man was bitten he died in an hour, and not a few of our soldiers perished that way, locked in frozen agony.

  It was not hard for me to leave the camp. Apart from Joinville I hardly knew any of the French contingent, and while I was part of the little knot of English knights, I had resigned myself by now to the fact that they regarded me as an interesting oddity: a Cornish knight with a foreign lilt in his voice, with powerful allies at court, with a mysterious past. I tried to steer clear of them when I could, for – typical Englishmen – they were a gaggle of sunburned complainers, most of them, save for Longspée himself who had kept his cheerfulness and had a certain grace about him. True, it was sometimes diverting to join them in their endless ritual of cursing everything under the Egyptian sun, but they were prone to work themselves into a dense and bitter gloom that usually turned to anger.

  Twice a party of them set out to look for Egyptians to kill, and if they had found some bedraggled peasant and his family they would no doubt have slaughtered them, but both times they returned, shame-faced and fly-bitten, without the blood of innocents on their hands. And each time, Longspée scolded them and sent them slinking off to their tents. Once my page, Warren, had been among the malefactors, and I had added some stinging words of my own to Longspée’s tirade. He had blinked at me, his eyes too blue for this land, freckles joining up across his face, and I knew that the poor lad was so far from Gloucestershire that nothing he saw or did made much sense to him. But he was a good soul, not very bright but agreeable, and I did not want him becoming a murderer. Besides, he was good with horses, and Tredefeu liked him.

  I would sometimes go fishing with Longspée, who knew how to catch all sorts of fish and loved to share a jug of wine while we remembered the hills and woods of England. One thick, humid day we had managed to slip off after setting the English lads to complete a morning’s much-needed sparring. We pushed through the forest of reeds until we found a wide, deep-looking stream where I had had some luck a few days before. We had encountered nothing more dangerous than a heron on the way, and the fens were quiet, so we trampled out a comfortable place for ourselves and set about baiting our hooks.

  Longspée had found a nest of fat, pallid worms in the rotten crown of a reed clump, and was threading a writhing tangle of them onto his hook. He flicked the spidery mass across the stream with a practised nonchalance and settled back into the bank.

  ‘I’ve never asked you,’ he said. ‘Black Dog. Strange name. How did you come by it?’

  I scratched my head absently. There were a dozen answers I had concocted over the years, and I grabbed the first one that sailed past in my head.

  ‘Aha. When I was born – and this was in Cornwall, mark you, where such things are given much credence – my wet nurse was wrapping me in my swaddling bands, and being caught by the sudden urge to piss, she set me down and went into the corner where the piss-pot was. My mother was in her chamber, still laid up from bearing me, and the menfolk had been driven out by the midwife, who, so my mother told it, was pitched forward and snoring into my mother’s bedsheets. As the nurse squatted in the corner, there came a snuffling and a padding at the door, which gave out onto the open yard. And then, in padded a huge black hound. Black, so said my nurse, as the devil’s lampblack, save for its eyes, which were as big as saucers and glowed like the setting sun through red stained glass.’

  ‘Cry mercy!’ chuckled Longspée, stretching, and giving his line a twitch.

  ‘She did, sir. That woman had a tongue on her, I can assure you. But the great black hound took no notice of her, and padded over to me, helpless as a maggot in my bands, and not two hours old. It gave me a sniff, and then another, and touched its black snout to my brow. And then, before my nurse could heave the full piss-pot at the creature, it gave her a look which, she declared, set the blood in her veins as hard as granite, and slunk out. I needn’t tell you that my father and the other menfolk, addressing a hogshead of scrumpy out in the yard, saw not one hair of the beast, but rushed in to find my wet nurse, her skirts tucked up around her waist …’

  Longspée gave a soldier’s laugh. ‘A young thing, was she, this nurse?’ he enquired, eyebrows cocked.

  ‘Not a bit of it. Gnarled as a blackthorn tree that grows at the edge of a sea cliff.’ I grinned. ‘Now, as you know, in Cornwall and in Devon, the country folk believe in terrible black hounds. Some call them Yes Hounds, some Wish Hounds, and some give them the name Gurt Dog. They are ill-omened, no matter what they are named. Not a soul could agree what my visitor signified, save that it must portend either great good or great ill. And for most of my life I would have thought the former were true.’

  ‘Until you fetched up in the marshes of Egypt,’ finished Longspée. He brushed a platoon of flies from his face.

  ‘Indeed.’

  We fished on for a while. Longspée’s worms were taken by a pike, who spat out the hook. I caught a brace of small, perchlike fish. My friend took a decent-sized catfish. I got tired of fishing and started to look for the crayfish traps I had put down the day before. I found one – there was quite a welter of beasts within it, snapping their claws.

  ‘Gurt Dog … Gurt Dog? Somehow it seems I have heard that name before,’ said Longspée. He was threading more worms on his hook, the end of his tongue touching his moustache as he concentrated. ‘A song, perhaps? Not for a long time, though …’

  ‘Salisbury is not far from Balecester. There was a song called “The Gurt Dog of Balecester”. But I cannot remember what it was about.’

  ‘Nor I. No, wait – foul murder in the cathedral. A man-beast who ate a bishop on his own altar?’ Longspée flicked his hook distractedly into the water, brow furrowed. Then he brightened. ‘I have it!’ he cried. And to my horror, which I managed to conceal as I juggled a spiky ball of crayfish into my sack, he began to sing:

  The Bishop he sits him down to dine

  Cold runs the river, o

  He cuts him some meat and he pours him some wine

  Cold and deep she runs, o

  When in comes a man with white face all a’quiver

  Cold runs the river, o

  And the wailing he makes sets the candles to shiver

  Cold and deep she runs, o

  ‘Lord Bishop, Lord Bishop,’ the poor wretch he wept

  Cold runs the river, o

  ‘For to thy cathedral a black beast has crept.’

  Cold and deep she runs, o …

  … something, something, something …

  ‘D’you remember it now? You could hardly pass a wineshop without hearing it, a few years back. “From the door of the minster a gout of black blood …” Good stuff !’

  ‘Ah, yes. The monstrous black hound rips out the bishop’s throat on his own altar,’ I said, ruefully. ‘And vanishes into the night. Do you know the Bishop of Balecester? The real one? He would scare the fur off any black dog, gurt or otherwise.’

  I myself knew the bishop quite well. And I knew the song, word for word. And so I should, because it was about me. I was the Gurt Dog. It hadn’t been the bishop’s throat that had been slashed in Balecester Cathedral, but that of his deacon, and the murderer had been the bishop’s bastard son, though I – Petroc of Auneford as I’d been then, novice monk and inattentive scholar – had been blamed and was chased across land and sea for my supposed crime. Still, I had revenged myself upon the bishop and, such is the play of fate, had saved the wretched man’s life at the Battle of Saintes, though I had not intended to. By then the world knew me as Petrus Zennorius, of course, for I had long buried young Petroc under many layers of untruth and forgetting. Meanwhile, in the taverns of England, a hapless young monk had suffered an alchemical transmutation into a great hell-hound, several innocent men had been caught and hanged, and I had become a creature that mothers used to scare their little ones into obedience.

  ‘Ha! Yes, I know Balecester, of course,’ Longspée was saying. ‘A creature ruled by his ambitions, but I will say that he keeps a damn
fine table and cellar. He told me about you himself, as a matter of fact: how you dragged him through a vineyard after some Frenchmen had knocked him off his horse.’

  I shrugged. ‘The bishop has been … I was about to say kind, but as we both know the man …’ Longspée laughed, and I joined in, glad that I had, once again, juggled the knives of my past life and remained unbloodied. But it was high time I changed the subject.

  ‘Sir, I hope we know each other well enough for me to ask you this, but …’ I shook a crayfish off my finger and tied up the sack. ‘I fear I am always on the brink of giving offence, for some of your men call you Earl of Salisbury and some do not, yet you seem easy with both camps. If you will allow a commoner to ask, how can that be?’

  It was Longspée’s turn to look uncomfortable, and I felt a flicker of guilt, but not much, and besides, I did want to know the answer. He winced and I thought I had overstepped the mark, but after he had fiddled with his fishing pole for a moment or two, he shook his head and sighed.

  ‘The great question of my life,’ he said. ‘I was born … That is, my father, when he died …’ He set down the pole and laced his fingers, stretching them until the knuckles were white. ‘The truth is, I am earl in deed but not in name, and as to why, only our good King Henry knows that. I inherited the name Longspée,’ he said, ‘and little else. Our ever-wise Henry …’ He flicked at his line. ‘The king decided that my estate, and my earldom, had reverted to the Crown, and as I was only fourteen at the time, and my mother had locked herself away in an abbey, I could do nothing about it. Still I cannot blame the king. He—’ There was a commotion in the water and Longspée jerked his line, but the hook flew out empty. He cursed good-naturedly, and baited it with some more worms. Seeing I was looking at him expectantly, he sighed and went on with his tale.

  ‘My father, the third earl, was a loyal friend to Henry, and helped put him on his throne. Yet the story goes that he was poisoned by the king’s favourite, old Hugh de Burgh. If that is true no man has proved it. And yet for no reason that I have been able to divine – and I have spent my life trying, do not doubt it – the earldom of Salisbury seems to have reverted to the Crown. I say seems, because the king has never flat-out admitted that he has stolen that which is my due … You know all this, though? Every man in England knows it.’