The Fools’ Crusade

by Pip Vaughan-Hughes

  ‘There should be sufficient,’ he said, but he did not look entirely certain.

  We talked for some time, Geoffroy laying out the various stipulations of the treaty and explaining what had happened to the sultan Turanshah, until we were interrupted by the palace guards, escorting a terrified boy who told us, in a thick Genoese accent, that the king’s galley had landed, that the Saracens had found the wine supplies and were getting vilely drunk, and that His Majesty and his brother and a load of other dukes and such were staying on their ship, being in fear of their lives. Would we join His Majesty, please, before the Turks made an end of us all? That seemed reasonable, and Iselda gave orders to evacuate the city. In half an hour we were marching, flanked by the whole remaining company of palace guards and a dozen Mamluks on horseback, towards the gates.

  The city had changed. Saracen flags hung from every tower and a bonfire was smouldering in front of the mosque, where everything that had made it a cathedral was being put to the flames. There were groups of Mamluks everywhere, though none seemed to be drunk, unlike the Jewish and Christian Damiettans, who were noisily celebrating the humiliation of their Frankish oppressors. A few onions flew at us, but our Mamluk escort yelled at the throwers and they left off.

  ‘All the Turks seem very impressed by your turban,’ Iselda muttered to me. ‘Are you going to tell me about it?’

  ‘However strange it sounds, the Comte and Comtesse de Montalhac are under the protection of Sheikh abd’ al-Azeem al-Ansari,’ I whispered back. ‘Which is very fitting.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The Montalhac past. Your father’s blessings, Iselda. When you meet the sheikh, you will see.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I didn’t tell her more, for we had passed through the gate and were walking down to the Nile, where a large galley was tied up. The banner of France was hanging from the masthead, limp in the dead, scalding air of mid-afternoon. A great gang of crossbowmen, not much less than a hundred of them, were drawn up in rough but purposeful lines on the bank in front of the ship, and small knots of Mamluks were watching them, silently, from a distance.

  King Louis Capet was sitting on a pile of cushions in the shade of a tent set up in the stern. He was thin, shockingly thin, his limbs wasted, the knobs of elbows and knees painfully visible beneath his loose robes. His golden curls had thinned, and the skin on his face was yellowed and tight. Unnervingly, he still looked like a very young man, but one who had suffered horribly, and as I looked at him it was hard not to think of innocence violated. But the king was not innocent, and he knew it very well.

  ‘Geoffroy … and Petrus! My dear, my very dear men!’ He struggled upright, and the emaciated man at his side, whom I suddenly recognised as Philippe de Montfort, hastily bent to steady him. ‘So many are dead that it is such undeserved joy to find that some friends are still with us!’ He began to cough, and de Montfort held out a cup for him to spit into.

  ‘Lord, I am weak, but there is no time for weakness. Is it done, Geoffroy?’ the king asked, and when Geoffroy nodded, he let out a funereal sigh. ‘Then let us settle this. I would not ask my men to suffer one more minute for my sake. They have set many of us free, but the rest must wait until the ransom is paid, and they are keeping my poor brother Alphonse as surety … Is the emir waiting for us?’

  ‘He is,’ said Iselda. Louis gave her a courteous, puzzled look.

  ‘My lord, this is Iselda, Comtesse de Montalhac, whom the queen has appointed her representative,’ said Geoffroy quickly.

  ‘And my wife,’ I put in. Louis looked at both of us, almost pathetically confused.

  ‘Representative?’ he said, plaintively.

  ‘The queen has gone to Acre, Your Majesty,’ said Iselda, curtseying elegantly. ‘For her safety and that of your son, Jean Tristram, of whom I wish you the greatest joy.’

  ‘The queen … What? Marguerite is not here?’

  ‘No, Your Majesty. But rest assured she left only when everything possible had been done for the safety of your subjects and dependants.’

  I stood, wishing I could sit in the shade next to Louis, while Iselda coolly laid out before the king exactly what had been done to protect Damietta since he had ridden off to take Cairo. Poor Louis, I thought. He had been waiting for his wife to come and soothe his brow, only to find she was in another country. Had Louis clung to his memories of the queen while he sickened and his men died? While he was captured and humiliated? I would never know, of course. We were almost done with Egypt now. Some money to be handed over and we would set sail. But to where? There had been no time to ask Iselda what had happened in Venice, or to tell her about Father Matthieu or Remigius. And I had failed Earl Richard. We did not have a business any longer, or a safe home. So were we to be the Count and Countess de Montalhac now? One more odd game to play, another mask to hide behind? Dear God, we couldn’t hide any longer, could we? It would be mummery, play-acting the lord and lady in some French backwater, dancing the rigid steps of court life, being obliged for ever more …

  ‘Petrus!’ I blinked. The king was speaking to me, an indulgent smile on his withered boy’s face. ‘We are rowing out to the ships. Sit down, man. Share our food.’

  We all sat under the tent and ate vile fritters made of hard, piss-tasting cheese – ‘All the Turks had for us,’ as Philippe de Montfort explained – while the galley slipped down with the current, out between the sandbanks and into open water. There was the fleet, what was left of it, for many transports, under contract from Genoa and Pisa, had abandoned the army and gone back home, and others had sailed off to Acre with the queen. But there was the royal ship, and near it the galley of the Templars, and even the vessel that had brought the English company across from Cyprus.

  ‘That’s ours,’ muttered Iselda, pointing out a well-built galley anchored a little way off the port side of the Templar ship. It looked like a Venetian war galley rejigged for merchant life, and it flew no flags.

  As we came alongside the king’s ship, the royal standard broke out from the top of the mast. There were already some knights aboard, and they rushed to help Louis over the side. Iselda went up after him, and I followed. As I struggled up the rope ladder, marvelling at how old I felt, voices were rising on deck. Heaving myself over the rail, shamefaced but glad of a young sailor’s helping hand, I saw the king and Geoffroy standing before a tall Mamluk. Baybars had got here before us. Behind him stood six armed warriors, an imam in dark robes, and a figure in simple white who towered above everyone.

  ‘Nizam!’ I shouted before I could stop myself. He grinned and raised a gigantic hand.

  ‘Dear God’s tears!’ breathed Geoffroy, coming up behind me. ‘Who in Beelzebub’s name is that?’

  ‘Sheikh abd’ al-Azeem al-Ansari,’ I said.

  ‘No! I don’t believe it!’ Iselda grabbed my arm. ‘Is that really the sheikh?’

  ‘But it is,’ I said. ‘Let’s see what’s happening here, and then you shall meet him.’

  The Mamluk commander had come to collect the ransom money. On the deck, the Mamluks began to set up a huge balance scale. Baybars was standing, arms folded, feet apart, listening sceptically to Louis, who was trying to explain that everything was in order.

  ‘Then, O king, bring out your coin,’ said Baybars at last. He seemed singularly without humour, except that his eyes, the only animated thing about him, were sparkling and full of life. The other Franks were bristling at the disdain being shown to their ruler, but I understood. Baybars was not being unmannerly out of spite. Louis was powerless, just another man, and not even a believer. What Baybars had come for was money, and that was what he expected: no less, and no more. Meanwhile, one of the younger knights had been sent off to the strongroom with an old man who turned out to be the Patriarch Robert. There was a long pause, in which the only sound was the grunting of the men fitting the long, heavy balance beam to the scales. The pause grew longer, and longer still. Finally the patriarch emerged, leading two red-faced se
amen lugging an iron-bound chest between them. They set it down with a bang next to the scales. The Mamluks made some final adjustments, and then began unceremoniously to shovel silver coins from the chest onto the hanging pan. It took a surprisingly long time, but at last they nodded and began to pour the silver into another chest.

  ‘Ten thousand livres,’ said Baybars in good French. ‘Are we agreed, gentlemen?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Louis.

  ‘Ten thousand? We’ll be here all night,’ I whispered to Iselda.

  We were there much longer than that, as it turned out. Two hundred thousand livres tournois is a great amount of coin, and it had to be dragged up from the hold, weighed, and lowered down into the Saracen felucca tied alongside us. Other galleys were bringing more nobles and knights out to the ship: the king’s brother, Charles of Anjou, arrived with Philippe de Nemours, Henri du Mez, Nicole d’Acre, the Ibelin brothers, Baudouin and Guy, plus Imbert de Beaujeu, Constable of France, the Counts of Flanders and Brittany, and Jean de Soissons. And all the time we stayed standing, drawn up in our awkward rows, the balance between us like a small gallows. I kept catching Nizam’s eye, and it was hard not to burst out laughing. I wanted to take him aside and have him meet Iselda, but the weighing went on and on, until, when night began to fall, Baybars called a halt.

  ‘We will return at dawn,’ he said, and without another word the Mamluk party climbed over the side and were gone. We watched their little galley, riding very low with her belly full of silver, crawl back towards Damietta.

  Jean de Joinville came aboard that night, with a few others, but so many were dead, and it was a sombre reunion. Joinville was even thinner than the king.

  ‘I had a tumour in my throat,’ he told us, his voice still raspy, ‘but some Mussulman knight cured me. I couldn’t swallow a thing, and then this fellow, bless him, made me gargle with some vile liquid. In two days the thing began to shrink away to nothing, and lo! I am cured.’

  ‘You need to fatten yourself up, my friend,’ I told him. ‘If you’ve had nothing to eat these past weeks save those foul cheese pies, it’s not surprising the wind is whistling between your ribs.’

  ‘And you do not look all that bad,’ said Joinville. We had set up a small camp in the prow of the ship, with a pile of carpets and a brazier, and were feasting on salt pork, of which we had a vast supply, for the Saracens had insisted we remove it from Damietta. Iselda was cutting a slice for herself with Thorn. Joinville had been amazed to learn that my wife was here, and that she was a new-made countess – and I a count, of course – but far stranger things had happened to all of us, and like old soldiers do, we abandoned good manners in favour of warmth and food.

  ‘He has been looked after by a holy man,’ said Iselda. ‘And he will not tell me anything about it.’

  ‘Fate,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders. ‘Insha’Allah, as they say.’ I told him what had happened after we had last seen each other in the burning camp, but I knew that Joinville, being a straightforward, pious fellow and as Frankish as they came, would not understand about Nizam and his followers. So I said I had been captured by a Saracen knight I had fought at Mansourah. The holy man, I said, had lived in this knight’s house. He enjoyed speaking to me of the places I had been, and in return for stories had made sure I was well cared for. Joinville was full of tales. He had passed through many dangers, nearly died a dozen times, and had won through in the end by keeping his head and his faith in the Lord. He told a good story, did Jean de Joinville. To this day I do not know how many of his tales were true, but I will warrant they have grown stranger over the years. He was weak, though, and left us before it grew too late. And so, for the first time in what seemed an entire life, Iselda and I were alone together, or as alone as one can be on the deck of a warship anchored in enemy waters.

  ‘My darling,’ I said, as soon as he was gone. I grabbed her hands and pressed them between mine. ‘Was it all true? Everything in your letter?’

  ‘Yes. Alas, all true.’

  ‘And is everything – the wealth of the bank, I mean, really on board that cob?’

  ‘With Dimitri, therefore safe.’

  ‘So … what now?’ I wanted to ask her everything, to tell her every minute of my life since we had parted. But suddenly I had no words but these.

  ‘My dear love, we have a ship full of silver and gold, and nothing else. The Inquisitors drove everybody out of the Ca’ Kanzir and the deed now belongs to the Church. I have my spies in Venice. I’m sure the priests cannot hold on to our property – any good lawyer would see them off. But meanwhile …’

  ‘And what about Florence?’

  ‘The Banco was destroyed. Burned to the ground. They say it was the Ghibbelines – they are getting the blame for everything in Florence these days. But it’s nonsense, of course.’

  ‘Of course. What a waste. And I liked Blasius.’

  ‘Don’t worry about him. He’s gone to Paris. I told him to wait things out.’

  ‘Yes, there’s Paris, and Lyon. What about all our branches?’

  ‘Closed. There wasn’t any point in keeping them open – and who wants to leave money with a bank whose heretic owners have vanished?’

  ‘I didn’t vanish! I went on crusade, for fuck’s sake! How many heretics do that?’

  ‘The confused ones, I suppose,’ said Iselda, and kissed me.

  ‘Well, Father Matthieu won’t bother us any more, at least,’ I said, after a while. ‘You were right: he was a vile little man.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ And I told her how the priest had made his way through the Saracen barricade, only to be caught up in our retreat. ‘He tried to take me with him,’ I muttered. Remembering the stifling hut that had been our prison, I pulled a blanket around my shoulders and hunched towards the brazier. There was the priest’s face as he cursed me, and there it was, lifeless, in its own blood.

  ‘Did he just want the money?’ said Iselda, wonderingly. ‘To go through all that …’

  ‘And he was a priest. We have a pope who sends priests to ruin people and steal their fortune, so that he can spend it on destroying a Christian emperor. And much worse than that.’

  ‘It could hardly be any worse!’ she protested.

  ‘No, it could. A pope who sends his creature to help a Mussulman army defeat a whole crusade.’ Iselda listened, her mouth a circle of disbelief, to the tale of Mansourah and what Remigius had done there.

  ‘So I don’t know if it’s really worth going home,’ I finished.

  ‘No. It’s the end of the bank,’ she sighed, and leaned against me. ‘But I’m not sad about that. We always hated it, didn’t we?’

  ‘We did. To be driven out, though …’

  ‘Do you really care about that? Bloody men!’ She kissed me again, in case I didn’t know she was joking. ‘We’ve got lots of money, though.’

  ‘But how much of it is ours?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been bored enough here in Damietta to go over the books. Everything on deposit from merchants has been sent back to them. Likewise small customers. We have some big deposits from churchmen of one sort and another, and’ – she lowered her voice to a whisper – ‘I say fuck ’em.’

  ‘With a mooring post, as the Greeks say,’ I agreed.

  ‘Because apart from anything else the Curia has borrowed some fat sums from us, and that’s gone for ever,’ she went on.

  ‘So what’s left?’

  ‘More than …’ She shook her head. ‘A lot. And Louis Capet owes us a great deal, don’t forget. Do you think he’ll ever pay it?’

  ‘Yes. I do, actually,’ I said. ‘He is many things, including a God-bothering fool who’s killed an entire army, but he’s also the most honest man I know.’

  We carved off some more salt pork. It wasn’t that pleasant: very salty and as tender as damp leather, but we were sharing it, and that alone was miraculous.

  ‘What about your title, Comtesse? Is it real?’

  ‘’Course i
t is,’ said Iselda, digging a string of pork from between her teeth. ‘Turns out that my grandfather was the Comte de Montalhac. One of the great old Languedoc families – not very rich, but cultured. The old man was a troubadour himself. Strange, isn’t it. Did my father ever mention that?’

  ‘No, he never did. But your grandfather wouldn’t have been an old man, my love. He died young. I do know that story, but I won’t tell it now. So Queen Marguerite knew about Montalhac? That’s extraordinary.’

  ‘The queen honestly knows the name of every fief in Provence, every troubadour who ever sang at her father’s court … so Montalhac – of course she remembered Montalhac. I did not tell her that my father spent his life selling fake relics to the cream of Christendom, mind you. I said he died on crusade when I was a wee girl.’

  ‘I expect that helped matters.’

  ‘It did.’ She chewed thoughtfully.

  ‘So … can we live there?’

  ‘Ah. Unfortunately the actual fief is held by the French wolf who stole it from … from Grandfather, as I’ve taken to calling him.’

  ‘So we have the title only. Never mind. It’s wonderful. Your – our father would be glad, I think. It’s justice.’

  ‘To get back the stolen title but not the stolen land? Not much justice there.’

  ‘Oh, Christ. You really are his daughter. And you’re right, it doesn’t mean very much.’ I shook my head. ‘So we’re homeless.’

  ‘Not really, Patch! You make it sound as if we’re landless villains stumbling from hayrick to chicken house. We could buy a small princedom tomorrow if we wanted to.’

  ‘But I don’t. Do you?’

  ‘No. I like this: no bank, no ledgers. We can be out on the road again, or the water.’

  I sighed. ‘All those weeks by the river, when I thought I would never see you again, I thought about home. All I wanted was to sit with you under the old fig tree in the courtyard of the Ca’ Kanzir, and do nothing. Listen to the boatmen, and the wasps. Just be home.’