‘There is no sultan,’ he replied, flatly.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘The sultan is dead.’
‘The new sultan Turanshah? But he is a young man …’
‘’Twas not age that killed him,’ called another Mamluk.
‘Our commander Baybars has rid Egypt of an ungodly tyrant,’ Aytmish said, and this time he did not hold back a grin. ‘Our land is now under the protection of the Mamluks.’
‘And is there a new sultan?’ I asked, aghast. No wonder Aytmish had been so distracted of late.
‘A sultana. Al-Malikah Ismat ad-Din Umm-Khalil Shajar al-Durr, may God smile upon her reign.’
‘Shajar al-Durr? Sultan Ayyub’s wife?’
‘The same. But it is the Mamluks who have power now. Aybak, the commander of all the Mamluks, is to marry the sultana – a string of pearls to adorn a mighty warrior,’ he added, evidently pleased with his wit, for shajar al-durr has the meaning of a necklace of pearls in the Arab tongue.
I looked at Nizam, but he just shrugged. I had learned that he was not very interested in the worldly affairs of his Mamluk followers. What would happen now, though? Louis was being taken down to Damietta to surrender the city and ransom himself and his army, but he had made a treaty with Turanshah, and now that the Mamluks were the new rulers of Egypt – for so Aytmish had just told me, if not in so many words – would they keep to their agreement? And I did not even know what that agreement had been. Ransom, surrender and the Franks to leave this land with their tails tucked between their haunches. Well, I seemed to be under the protection of the Mamluks myself, so that must be a good thing. I rode in silence, watching the ships go by, watching for signs.
And thinking of Iselda. I had not seen my wife for a year and a half, and many times I had not expected to see her again. Yet here I was, a day away from her. Under Nizam’s tree I had spent many long, slow hours trying to form her image in my mind, in the shrine behind my eyes where I had placed her that morning on the Molo in Venice. But try as I might, I could not quite see her. She formed and faded, faded and formed like a chimera. And then I found I could not even remember the smell of her hair or her skin. I began to wonder if I had faded in her mind too, and then I fell to wondering if, when she saw me for the first time in Damietta, she would even know me. She had diminished in memory, but I had done so in the flesh. I was thinking too much, I knew, but that was what one did here. Sometimes, worryingly, I found myself fading away altogether until all that was left was thought, and then even that … Coming to my senses, surfacing from a silent cascade of light flickering through palm leaves, I would wonder where I had been, I, Petroc of Sorrows, of the war, the bank. There had been a vast nothingness, silent, completely peaceful, empty – but at the same time full of some presence. I told Nizam the first time it happened, thinking I was going mad, but he had just smiled, and I knew what he was telling me: God. How strange. I had gone looking for Iselda but instead I had found God. Or was it the other way around? It was then, I think, that Nizam’s zãwiya entered my heart.
Two days of easy riding brought us to Damietta. Early on the second day we had joined with a larger force of Mamluks from Cairo, all of them in high spirits. Many asked for Nizam’s blessing, and as his companion I got numerous strange looks, not all of them friendly. By the time the gates of the city were in view, we had become an army, every warrior in his finest gear, green and white and golden banners flying overhead. We had overtaken a big Frankish galley flying the flag of Geoffroy de Sargines, and while we formed up in front of the gates the galley pulled in to the shore and Geoffroy himself, looking haggard and thin as a bulrush, came ashore. Aytmish had told me how it was Geoffroy who had saved Louis from being killed after they had been cut off from our rearguard, and how he had charged the enemy again and again until he could no longer sit upright on his horse. ‘A brave fellow, certainly,’ he had admitted, grudgingly. Now it seemed that Geoffroy had been entrusted with another test of courage. I was on the very far left with Nizam, but I got the gist of things: Geoffroy was surrendering Damietta to the army of the sultana.
The doors were opened, to reveal a sheepish band of Frankish merchants, and a company of men-at-arms all trying to look as harmless as possible. A Mamluk on a perfect white horse rode slowly past them, and if a horse can show disdain, this one did. The man was Baybars, the sultan’s killer. Behind him, the Mamluk army filed in through the gates. I brought up the rear with Nizam, but as we were passing inside Geoffroy de Sargines noticed me and ran through the mob of unarmed crusaders and country people that had begun to grow on the banks of the Nile.
‘Nizam, I will find you inside,’ I said, sliding from my horse.
‘Take this, my brother,’ he said, and untied a green scarf embroidered with gold script from the shaft of Aytmish’s spear. ‘Put it round your head – it will keep you safe, God willing.’ Then he was gone, swept up in the army that was pouring like water through a sluice into the city.
I knotted the scarf round my head in the manner of the fellahin when Geoffroy reached me.
‘I heard they’d killed you!’ he cried, and embraced me: we were two bags of bones rattling against each other.
‘You look like a Turk,’ he said, when we were done congratulating each other on being alive.
‘And you look like a corpse,’ I returned. ‘Now, where is the king?’
‘He is ten miles upstream or thereabouts. I have come ahead to—’
‘Quite,’ I said hurriedly, for the poor fellow looked as if the humiliation of surrendering the crusade’s only gain was about to finish him off. ‘Will you go in and see Queen Marguerite?’
‘That is my next duty,’ he said, sighing. ‘There is much to be done before His Majesty gets here – a very great sum of money to ransom his own person and that of his brother. The city must be evacuated.’
‘Where to?’
‘Acre. The king wishes to go to the Holy Land immediately.’
‘Christ! Why not France? Home?’
‘Duty, dear Petrus. Duty. He feels he must wait until every Christian prisoner is set free, and besides, there is work to be done in the Holy Land.’
‘What kind of work, Geoffroy?’ He shook his head. The poor fellow looked as if he could sleep for a month and still look half-dead, but there was a certain fire in his eyes. I had seen it so many times during this folly: the passion of the crusader. So not even Mansourah, or the defeat, or a month in the hands of the Saracens – who evidently had not lent him the services of an Ibn al-Nafis – had been enough to quench it. I clapped him, carefully, on the shoulder. ‘Enough time for that. Now, let us hurry. The queen will be wondering where you are.’
And Iselda, I was thinking. Geoffroy looked back at the galleys riding the calm waters of the Nile. ‘Our fellows are going directly to sea – the Turks will not let them into the city. I suppose I must go alone.’
‘Not quite alone, my friend.’ I gave my horse to a Mamluk squire and arm in arm with Geoffroy de Sargines, I went back into the city. It was nearly half a year since I had gone out in the company of all those jolly young men who were going to conquer the feeble land of Egypt, and instead ended up in the bellies of crocodiles and eels.
The streets were in an uproar. All the gates had been opened and the Mussulman population, all those families that had fled when the crusader army had landed, was pouring in. Smoke was rising from beyond the walls where the Frankish camp had been torched. The new bishop and his clergy had wisely fled, and the cathedral was already a mosque once again. The Genoese and Pisan merchants had also fled, and whatever they had left behind was being shared out among noisy looters or flung onto bonfires. I hoped Ya’qub bin Yazdad and his wife were safe.
The main body of Mamluk horsemen had ridden to the palace, and they were formed up in the paved space in front of the entrance. I found Aytmish among them by the long pheasant feathers he had stuck in his helmet, and led Geoffroy between the horses to where he stood in the second rank.
‘Ah, my brother,’ he said. He cast a less friendly look down onto Geoffroy, who was trying to look valiant and commanding in this forest of horses’ legs. ‘Our lord Baybars is treating with the emissaries of your queen. They are exceedingly old.’
‘Indeed. And one of them is a midwife,’ I told him. He gave me a strange look and shook his head. ‘The ways of the Franks …’ he muttered. ‘Frankish knight, you are the one who surrendered the city to us, are you not?’ he said to Geoffroy.
‘I am,’ he replied, stiffly.
‘If you wish to go into the palace, go now, with my brother here. You Franks are leaving this place, and if you linger you might be taken prisoner again. Or more likely, killed.’
‘My brother, may we meet again,’ I told him, taking his hand.
‘Insha’Allah,’ he replied gravely. ‘May we find each other again in peace.’
I left him and led Geoffroy out from the ranks. Now I could see what was going on: a stocky Mamluk in the robes of an emir, flanked by two others holding banners, was standing, fists on hips, in front of two ancient knights. One of them had a long, unkempt white beard and a small hump between his shoulders. The other wore a mail coat, and the hood hung loosely around his stubbly cheeks. We crossed the open space, footsteps echoing hollowly – it was very quiet here, despite the growing clamour from the rest of the town.
Geoffroy de Sargines had evidently remembered his station, for he drew himself up and marched across to the old men. Baybars’s men grabbed their hilts, but when they saw it was Geoffroy and that his companion wore a Sufi headscarf – and a strange sight I must have been, a Frankish knight with a dog on his surcoat and a fellahin’s turban on my head – they let us pass. Geoffroy bowed to Baybars and they fell into a clipped discussion about protocols. I turned to the hump-backed knight.
‘I am Petrus Blakke Dogge, and the lady Iselda de Rozers is my wife. Is she safe?’
The man’s rheumy eyes, sunk into a face planed by age and worry, came to life.
‘Ah! Dear God! Welcome, my dear sir!’
‘A welcome indeed, good sir …’
‘We have heard much about you. There has not been a great deal to talk about, two old men locked up with a brace of …’ Remembering himself, he rattled his withered jowls in embarrassment. ‘Let us go inside. Now that the good master of Sargines is here, I am happily made redundant in this unpleasant business. Standing around like a spare prick at a wedding while a Turk lords it over one …’ He shook his head again and took my arm.
I had spent a good deal of time inside the palace, and when the king had been here it had thronged with people. The halls had been full of merchants arguing over tariffs and rights, and soldiers speculating when the army would leave, and whining about how bored they were and how tedious their life in camp had become. Now it was hollow, empty, and the air smelled of mildew and abandonment. A serving woman, looking terrified, scuttled across my path and disappeared through a doorway. I knew the way to the royal quarters, and though I did not mean to, the old fellow was soon limping along far behind me. I took the stairs two at a time, though my body protested vehemently, and frightened another young woman at the top.
‘Iselda de Rozers!’ I called to her retreating back. ‘Where can I find her?’
‘She is here,’ came a clear voice behind me. I knew it, and yet it seemed more beautiful by far than anything I had heard before. She was standing close to the wall, a slender, dark break in the flow of twisting Saracen pattern. Her robe was dark, and her black hair was loose around her shoulders. But all I saw then was the pale heart of her face. And everything I thought I had lost, all that I had forgotten and battled to recall, came back to me in that instant. Like the first daffodil after an endless winter, the simple fact of her presence, there in that hallway, made everything else completely without meaning.
‘Oh, my darling,’ she said. ‘You’ve come back.’
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘But it’s you who’s come to me.’
This was a story I had told myself countless times in the stinking camp by the river, in Mansourah, and in the zãwiya. And now, though it wasn’t a story any more, I was still telling it, watching myself, as if in a dream, walking down the hallway, reaching for my wife, both of us collapsing against the wall as we kissed lips, cheeks, eyes and twined fingers through each other’s hair. It was as if my soul – if I had such a thing – could not agree that this was real, that Iselda was no longer a phantom dreamed up to comfort me through the torment of boredom and pain. It was flying away, as it had under the tree in Nizam’s clearing. Then I remembered the great peace that had come over me there, and in a flash I was whole again, and Iselda was astoundingly real in my arms.
‘I can’t tell you how much I love you,’ I whispered.
‘You can. But I know anyway,’ she said. And at that moment it was the crusade that became a dream, full of death and fear and stench but fading, slowly, into the waking day.
We deserved to stand there for a week, drunk on each other’s touch, but though I had fought my way out of one story, there was another going on around us, and as soon as the ancient knight had tottered up the stairs and found us in the hallway, we were rudely thrust into it once more. As he stood there wheezing for breath, Geoffroy de Sargines appeared at his shoulder.
‘My lady,’ he said curtly, bowing to Iselda. ‘I must speak to the queen.’
‘Who are you?’ she said, bristling. Ah, indeed this was the Iselda I loved.
‘This is Geoffroy de Sargines,’ I told her, trying to keep myself from laughing. ‘He saved the king’s life. His Majesty is coming, but he is some way behind us.’
‘And things need to be made ready,’ said Geoffroy. ‘Petrus, who is this woman?’
‘My wife,’ I said, simply. Geoffroy’s eyebrows went up, and he bowed a little more warmly than before.
‘A great honour,’ he said. ‘My deepest apology. But I’m afraid we are somewhat pressed for time …’
‘Of course, of course,’ said Iselda, warmly enough to show he was forgiven. ‘But the queen is not here.’
‘Then where is she?’ said Geoffroy, a little sharply.
‘She has left for Acre. Those of us who stayed behind while you …’ She bit her lip and cast a wry look at me. ‘Those left to guard Damietta – Sir Enguerrand and Patriarch Robert, chiefly – have had to make a treaty with the sultan, and as the Saracens are about to take the city, we thought it best that the queen be taken to safety. She is still not quite recovered from her ordeal, I’m afraid, although she will regain her health. Never fear: Marguerite of Provence is as strong as any man, and stronger by far than many. The king is going to Acre as soon as the treaty is done, and she will be waiting for him. There has been a great turmoil here the past few weeks – the Pisans and Genoese tried to leave with all the food, and Her Majesty made them see reason. The garrison has tried to murder the townspeople, and then the townsfolk wished to murder the garrison, and she has kept the peace despite everything. As well as, it must be said, bearing the king a healthy baby boy, with no midwife save for the worthy Sir Enguerrand here.’ The ancient knight blushed lightly and cleared his throat, but said nothing.
Geoffroy had heard Iselda out, his jaw slackening with every word. ‘We thought she was here,’ he stuttered. ‘I saw Patriarch Robert in Fariskur, when we were negotiating the … the …’
‘The surrender,’ supplied Iselda. ‘She left two days after the patriarch. She will be safely in Acre now. And her safety should be His Majesty’s main concern, is that not so?’
‘Well, yes, of course,’ said Geoffroy. ‘But there is, um, there are matters to be arranged.’
‘If you are talking about His Majesty’s ransom, then I’m afraid you will have to talk to me about that,’ said Iselda. I looked at her, amazed. Really? I asked her silently.
‘Really?’ said Geoffroy, aloud.
‘Yes. My husband, I did not put this in my letter because it happened only a few days ago,
but the queen has given me the authority to treat for her until such time as the king comes to Damietta.’
‘A woman? Dear God!’ Geoffroy blurted.
‘And so that my authority might have some weight, she also created me Comtesse de Montalhac.’
It was my turn to gape. ‘You are a countess?’ I squeaked.
‘I am. Hereditary. Like my grandfather before me. I had no idea, but the queen knew. She can name every fief in Provence and Toulouse, even those which the French – I mean no offence, Sir Geoffroy – snatched from us.’
‘This is all true and correct,’ Sir Enguerrand piped up. ‘The lady Iselda has been a great refuge of strength for Her Majesty. And I myself could not command the authority your wife has wielded these past months.’
‘You are too modest, dear Enguerrand. I could not have delivered Jean Tristram. I would have fainted.’
‘Nonsense, nonsense,’ he replied. Then he turned to us. ‘Sirs, it is as she has told you. The comtesse has the queen’s authority in Damietta.’
Geoffroy took a deep breath, bent his knee and bowed to Iselda. ‘Then I will serve you with all my strength, madam, however meagre that might be.’
‘Thank you, Sir Geoffroy. Now, what do you require from me?’
Iselda led us into the royal chambers. I found I had retreated into a sort of half-trance, and when Iselda slipped her hand into mine and whispered into my ear, things seemed to be becoming even less real.
‘Patch, that means you are, by the way, Comte de Montalhac. And I think you need some wine.’
She was right: I did need a drink after that, and as I had not drunk anything stronger than fruit sherbet since being taken by the Saracens, my head began to swim a little.
‘The sum agreed for the ransom is four hundred thousand livres tournois,’ Geoffroy was saying. ‘Half to be paid immediately, half when the king and his brother get to Acre. That is for the king, all the surviving nobles, knights and the army, what is left of it. Do we have that to hand?’
‘Something like it,’ said Iselda, frowning. ‘We have had to buy all the city’s stocks of food, to stop the people starving to death. That has used up some coin, but I believe … Enguerrand, what do you think?’
The Fools’ Crusade Page 30
