The Fools’ Crusade

by Pip Vaughan-Hughes

  ‘I am a Venetian, sir. My affairs in England do not go beyond my dealings with the Earl of Cornwall. I’m sorry I asked, though. It obviously brings you much pain.’

  ‘Nonsense. If a Christian man, and an English lord, cannot bear a little suffering, then he should call himself neither Christian nor Englishman.’

  ‘Amen! So you are indeed both earl and not earl.’

  ‘I am, or … Ha! I am not. Neither fish nor fowl. But still I am Henry’s most loyal servant – out of all his unruly, quarrelsome, grasping, venal lords, I hold myself ever at his service, and thank him for every scrap he sends my way.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it is my fate.’ He let out a deep sigh and leaned forward, his head drooping glumly towards the turbid water. ‘Ach, not so. I’m beginning to sound like a Mussulman, eh? No – and this will remain between ourselves, eh? Can I trust you, Black Dog?’ I nodded gravely. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I have difficulty remembering, sometimes, that you are not “one of us”, and that I can trust your friendship. Well, now you can be my confessor – you told me you were a cleric, once upon a time.’

  ‘Never ordained – and I’m a long way from being a holy man these days, William.’

  ‘Oh well, never mind that. Now, you have no children, Black Dog, but I have four – two daughters and two sons. Do you remember your father?’

  ‘Yes, very well,’ I said, startled. ‘But he died when I was a boy.’

  ‘So did mine, but I hardly have any recollection of him,’ said Longspée. ‘He was in exile, or fighting in France, or mired at court. He rebelled against King John, and so, even though no man would blame him for that nowadays, he was never trusted again, by the regent, or by Henry when he gained his majority. I knew him through rumours and stories, and the tales I heard weren’t always kind. No, they were often of the whispered sort: your father the traitor. You can imagine, yes?’

  ‘I can. And you wish your children to have better.’

  ‘You are an excellent confessor, Black Dog! Indeed: I wish them to have a life free of whispers.’

  ‘Will you tell me about them?’

  ‘Go on with you! Nothing is duller than tales of other people’s children!’

  ‘Very true. But not quite: the fens of Egypt are duller.’

  ‘Ha! True, my friend. So: Ida, Ela, William and Richard …’ He heaved a sigh. ‘Ida is twelve years old, and the rest are two years apart, save for Richard, who is two. Now, I am saying this to you as my friend and confessor, but I have come to believe that men are fools. When my Ida was born, my friends and companions all rallied around me to offer their condolences, because she was a girl. But do you know? I held her little form in my arms, and stroked her silky yellow hair, and I thought: the devil take you all, because she is perfect. And perhaps I was also thinking, Why do I even need an heir? Heir to what – an earldom that doesn’t exist? In time I had my sons, and they were perfect too.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked, sceptically.

  ‘Aha. You’ll have to find out for yourself, when we sail away from here. I have missed three of their birthdays. And my wife …’

  ‘My own wife’s birthday was last week,’ I muttered.

  ‘Tell me about her,’ Longspée insisted. I could see that thinking of his family was giving him pain, so I conjured Iselda up as best I could for him, and as I did I found my own spirits turning the dismal brown of the stream before us. My friend told me of his own wife, Idoine, though it was plain that he thought more of his children than of her – strange, but then not so strange. He had not married out of love – men of Longspée’s station seldom do, and it is one of the many curses of nobility – but he spoke of her in a way that encompassed pride, kindness and even friendship, and although there was no passion, none of the heat I felt for my Iselda, I found I could not blame him for that, although once I would have. William Longspée was a good man, I had discovered – good by anyone’s measure, not merely by the miserable standards of his fellow noblemen. He cared for his children, and for his wife. He felt the hopes and frustrations of the men who served under him. Though he felt God’s presence keenly, he somehow managed not to be a pious bore.

  Longspée had another bite. His cane quivered and bent into a trembling arc, and without ceremony he hauled on it and a large silver shape, dripping rainbows, sailed over his head and landed, thrashing, in the reeds behind us. It was one of the huge and vicious pike-like creatures that patrolled these muddy streamlets, big enough to take off a man’s finger. As Longspée jumped up to knock his catch on the head, the sadness, the heaviness that had settled on him as he thought of his children vanished. There was a brief struggle, and then my friend stood up, knife in one hand, the toothy head of the pike in the other. Fish and man were both grinning.

  Just like that, action had swept away melancholy. Longspée was a soldier, and he had been one all his life. Someone would have put a little sword in his hand while he was trying to grab his nurse’s teats. And the soldier finds refuge in action. Why sit and mope about your family when you can saw the head off something? It was a useful lesson, and many times I had wished, as my life had taken its unsettled course, that I had been able to take it to heart. But somehow I had left a part of me behind in the monastery library where I had passed my young days. I felt a flash of envy as Longspée waved his bloody trophy at me.

  ‘Saracens with scales, these monsters, eh? Got you, you heathen bugger!’ He squatted down next to me and began to gut the fish. ‘I took Richard fishing for the first time just a few days before I left England,’ he said, suddenly quiet. ‘There’s a stream near to the castle – runs clear over chalk. The boy caught his first fish – a rudd. Lovely golden thing. He wanted to throw it back, but …’

  ‘Bad habit,’ I agreed.

  ‘I think so,’ he said, ‘but he was quite upset. Then I showed him the kingfishers, how they were spearing minnows. “God made the fish for us,” I told him, and then he cheered up. I must have done the same thing, I expect, when I was his age.’

  But not with your father, I thought. Longspée could have been catching rudd with his boy now, throwing maggots to tempt the little golden creatures flashing in the weeds like bezants. And then I understood his sadness: he knew he had sacrificed his life, and he had made his sacrifice in the name of doing the right thing. He had always acted out of a sense of what was right – not according to God, or to his own lights, but to what his fellow noblemen, and his soft-headed king thought was best. To be a good subject, and not an object of suspicion like his father; to be, in his turn, a good father to Ida, Ela, William and Richard, even if that meant leaving them to go off on crusade so that England could feel proud.

  ‘Don’t you wish for an heir, Black Dog?’ Longspée was winding the pike’s guts round his hook.

  ‘I’ve not been married two years, man!’ I protested.

  ‘I was married nine months when my first child came,’ said Longspée, eyebrows arched. ‘’Tis how it is supposed to work, you know …’

  I wasn’t about to tell him that Iselda knew all the wise-women’s tricks for avoiding just such a thing, or that we had spent the first years of our love under the thick, black cloud of Montségur’s destruction. We had seen little children, stiff and blue, stacked like masonry while their mothers, too starved to weep, stood and watched with empty eyes. Somehow we had never actually decided the matter, but if we were childless, it was because we had decided to be.

  ‘I’m not saying there aren’t Black Dog pups running around somewhere,’ I said, to stop him looking at me like that. And for all I knew it was true – I thought about it quite often. A boy with my face in Constantinople, perhaps? Some unlucky girl with my nose in Paris? ‘But I came to marriage late,’ I went on. ‘Sometimes it takes more than luck and God’s grace, you know. I’ve … I’m not young. Nor are you, but you, sir, started out younger. I’m more of an ageing stallion – and as with old stallions, things are slowing down. They need time and patience, and though I s
hould be in my lady’s bed I find myself in Egypt. Which hasn’t helped.’

  ‘No more it would,’ said Longspée hastily. Then he smiled, and reaching out, he patted my shoulder with a gut-daubed hand. ‘But, Black Dog, I will see to it that you get back to your lady’s bed. You will make a good father, man. A good father.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ I asked, suddenly moved almost beyond measure. He nodded.

  ‘I do,’ he said.

  ‘I’m honoured …’

  ‘Honour be damned. We are friends. Are we not?’

  ‘We are. Indeed we are.’

  The subject was dropped, to the relief of us both, and we spent the rest of our morning gossiping lazily. When we finally wandered back to the encampment, we had a good string of fish apiece, which we shared out amongst the other Englishmen. Some Frenchmen carried the body of a soldier in from a picket. Bitten by a viper, they said as they passed, sweating and sullen. The long Egyptian afternoon settled upon us, heavy as a lead coffin.

  That night, as I lay keeping watch on the causeway, the trails of fire-arrows cutting lazily through the thick air, I pulled the amulet from my tunic and slipped the cord from round my neck. I dangled it over the water. I was about to let go, hoping that drowning Richard’s letter would exorcise the reek of betrayal I felt was rising from me, but the pasty, choleric face of Father Matthieu came into my mind and as if a finger were tapping me on the back of the head, I had a thought. The letter was a weapon. Now that it had been rendered useless against the crusade, could it be turned against its author? If I got out of this, if I ever made my way back to what I now thought of as life, could my letter be a talisman to ward off Innocent? This was something I understood, at last. Why, I wondered, as the sluggish water oozed through the blackness below me, had it taken me so long to think of it?

  Meanwhile, Saracen arrows were proving even more deadly than snakes. They rained down upon the causeway, and any man not sheltering in the cat-houses risked being struck by arrows that came straight down out of the sky with such speed that even helmets were not always proof against them. They did not often fall in the camp, but the hollow drumming of their iron points upon the wood and hide of the cat-house roofs became, along with the rattle of wind in the rushes and the croaks and squawkings of the marsh-beasts, a strange, disjointed music that began to prey upon our minds as we trudged towards Christmas. Saracen patrols on our side of the water had begun to test our defences, and as had happened outside Damietta, we found ourselves caught up in the draining work of keeping them at bay.

  Christmas Day came with hazy sunshine, thick and muggy air and the discovery of one of the king’s page-boys, dead in his blankets with a snake nestled against his breast. I took myself off fishing, to avoid the piety I knew Louis would unleash upon the camp, but an alarm sounded and I ran back to find myself in the midst of a skirmish. The Saracens had attacked and, as I found out later, had captured Pierre d’Avallon, who was having lunch with Jean de Joinville. But he was recaptured, not too badly shaken, and after the wounded were seen to and the dead – not many, thankfully – were buried, I had to find a new excuse to get away from the outpouring of grateful prayer. This was the Lord’s army, and the priests and friars that Louis had brought with him strove to outdo the flies themselves in their attendance upon us. Being of no religion whatsoever, I did not mind play-acting, and as I had once been a cleric myself I could outdo many a professional God-botherer, but I found that it lowered my spirits, and so I tried to be as busy as I could to avoid too much prayer, or to slip away with my cane, line and hook whenever the incense began to smoulder. After the battle, new defences needed to be dug, and so I volunteered to lead a work party. I have always found digging ditches preferable to the drivel of priests, even at Christmas.

  The causeway edged forward inch by inch, but the Saracens were getting stronger and more organised. There were more attacks by day, and I would ride out with Longspée and the English lads to see off the enemy knights, though not much harm was done by either side. Tredefeu seemed to enjoy these diversions, though I did not. Many nights I spent guarding the causeway, lying on my belly in the muggy darkness with the water rippling all around me and big bolts from a heavy crossbow whispering past like malevolent bats. But I was not on duty the night the Saracens brought Greek fire and shot it from a catapult, setting fire to the towers and almost roasting Jean de Joinville alive. We managed to save the towers, but the fire came every night, and stone shot by day, and in a few days’ time the work was in smouldering ruins. We had nothing to show for our labours save a pile of charred wood and a mud bank slipping slowly but certainly into the canal. Jocelin de Cornaut began work on another covered way, but at the end of January that too was destroyed.

  Two days before Shrove Tuesday I received a late invitation to dine with Joinville. I had not seen a great deal of Jean since we had left Damietta. He had been spending most of his time with Louis and the king’s brothers, and I hoped he was enjoying himself: the conversation must be dull stuff, I reckoned, for what else was there to talk about but how to get the bloody army over the river and launch it at Cairo? No answers were forthcoming, and we were still here in the mud. So it was without much relish that I tramped through the complaining army to his tent. But to my surprise I found him pacing about, all bright-eyed like a man in love.

  ‘Petrus!’ He slapped me on the shoulder and, grabbing me around the neck, beckoned for wine to be brought. ‘We are on our way, sir!’

  ‘Oh, yes? Where to?’

  ‘Cairo! I have just heard, from the king himself.’

  ‘And how are we to get there, Jean? The last I saw, our causeway was underwater.’

  ‘Aha.’ He looked mysterious for a moment, but obviously could not contain himself. ‘Someone – a Christian, a … what do they call themselves? A Copt from around here came into the camp and offered – for a price, mind you, five hundred bezants paid there and then – to show the king a ford across this bloody canal. It is upstream aways, behind Mansourah. We will go across tomorrow night, and take Mansourah in the morning. And then, my dear fellow, Cairo!’

  It all sounded suspiciously easy, but I decided not to spoil the evening with gloomy prophesy, and instead sat down to a good meal of grilled bustard. We talked about the coming battle, and Jean was all on fire to crush the Saracens and take Egypt once and for all, but mostly we let ourselves slip into a pleasant nostalgia for home, which, for the sake of politeness, I took to be north-eastern France. But it was not so unpleasant to wander back to my own tent with thoughts of those gentle green hills in my head. As for the coming battle, I had heard it all before. Nothing would happen, and we would still be here in the kingdom of the eel come next Christmas.

  But as it turned out, I was dead wrong. Next day, the army began to muster as the sun went down, and by nightfall we were riding south on a narrow farm track, the Ashmoun Canal somewhere to our right. Louis rode in front with his three brothers and the Grand Master of the Temple. I rode with the English contingent, just behind William Longspée, and ahead of us rode the Templars, their white surcoats glimmering, phantom-like, in the dim starlight. Beside me, I could hear Warren’s teeth chattering. It was cold, but the poor lad must have been scared out of his wits. As for myself, perhaps it was the long weeks of constant but slight danger, but I was barely worried. At the back of my mind lurked the shadow of fear that had been with me since we had landed at Damietta, but I had pushed it so far into the recesses of my waking life that I paid it no heed. We had paid the helpful Copt five hundred bezants to show us the ford. He had the money already, and I would have wagered, there and then, a great deal more than those bezants that there was no ford at all, and all we would see was our Copt galloping away into the reeds. So I was less than pleased when, sometime after midnight, we came to the place and the scouts found that there was indeed a shallow place in the canal. The leaders rode up to the front to confer. Tredefeu seemed to quiver beneath me, as if he knew what was coming and could not wait to get s
tarted. I ruffled his mane and told him to calm down, but he kept on stamping and fidgeting. Word came back to us that Robert of Artois was going across first, with the Templars and the English as well as his own men, and the king would cross after us with the main body of the army and the crossbowmen. We would form up and wait for the king, and then take Mansourah.

  It was very early dawn when Count Robert mounted his horse. There was an odd pinkness to the sky. It seemed somehow chalky, not luminous, and the remaining stars did not twinkle, as if they were dots of white paint spattered across the heavens. It was going to be hot, and already the midges and flies were rising up from the rushes all around us. Warren gave me a leg up into the saddle, handed me my lance, and then swung lightly onto his own mount. My helmet felt loose so I tightened the strap. Now I could not open my mouth, so I loosened it again. In front, Longspée was talking heatedly with Count Robert. Finally both men laughed and Longspée slapped the king’s brother across the shoulders. Then he trotted back to the English ranks.

  ‘We are going across now,’ he announced. ‘The Copt says it is deep at first, then sandy. We’ll be swimming our horses, lads, but then they’ll find something under them. When we’re across, we are forming up on Count Robert’s standard. The king has given the honour of leading the army to the Templars. Well then, may God go with you all. You are the flower of England, men – let us ride for King Henry and Jesus Christ!’

  The first horses were already in the water, downstream on the right. I could see Jean de Joinville’s pennant near the royal standard. Horses were slowly being engulfed in the ruffled brown water as they waded forward. But already Tredefeu’s hooves were slithering as we descended the bank. Count Robert’s horse was swimming, drifting slowly downstream as he tried to pull its head round to the left.