So much for Templar complacency.
But there was now nothing between him and his prize. Lowering the rope into the gloom, he swung himself down, flambeau in hand, burning away what remained of the web of taut threads as he went.
His feet touched the floor. He knelt before the box, his pulse racing. The hasp was sturdy, but not impenetrable. It would yield. He looked around for somewhere to put the flambeau, and jammed it upright beneath the dead knight’s chin. Hardly dignified, but the man was past protesting. Then he drew out the crow, inserted its tip beneath the hasp, and pushed.
With a harsh metallic sound, the hasp broke.
Gisburne did not wait. He flung the lid of the box open. Nestled within was a bundle of blood-red silk. His fingertips went to it, felt the curved, cold mass inside the bundle, then impatiently parted the wrapping.
Gisburne had often heard of people gasping at the mere sight of something, but had never thought it real. It belonged to ballads and stories, or to play-acting children. But now he heard himself gasp – felt the involuntary intake of breath as the thing was revealed.
It was just as Albertus had described. Just as the manuscript had shown. But no description could do justice to its grim, otherworldy beauty. As he drew the flambeau closer, he felt his face light up with the warmth of reflected gold. Gemstones glistened and cast coloured light all about, as if not merely reflecting it, but magnifying it tenfold. And from the heart of this splendour, haloed by the wealth of centuries-old kings, the hollow, lifeless, bone-rimmed eyes of the Baptist stared up at him, into him – the eyes that had looked upon Christ, staring into his soul out of some timeless abyss.
A sound in the darkness made him start. A click. Then another, from his other side. And then a third – directly before him, this time.
Raising his torch, he saw in the fluttering light that the hold was not completely empty of other objects. There were several more boxes of wood and iron, spaced equally around the central one, and pushed back almost to the walls. Each was barely large enough to hold a cat, but those he could see appeared to have metal grilles at their fronts which were hinged open, like small doors. He thought, with an odd detachment, that whatever was meant to go inside must need air. There was a fourth click behind him. He whirled around just in time to see the grille of the last remaining box flip open.
A sudden feeling of dread gripped him. He felt a cold sweat condense upon his skin. A sound in the shadows – unidentifiable, almost imperceptible – made his flesh crawl as if in response to some deep instinct, some nameless horror. Every fibre of his being yelled at him to get out.
Then he knew why. In the light, he could see something moving... Glinting. Black, like obsidian. Almost too late, he recognised the shapes that scuttled towards him in the dark.
Scorpions. Hundreds of scorpions.
The floor darkened about him as they swarmed forward. Desperately, he heaved the skull out of the box and tried to shove it into his bag. The neck of the sack wouldn’t open. The metal resisted the wet material, sticking to it. He wrestled with the skull awkwardly, almost dropped it, finally forced it in and slung the bag over his shoulder.
Something touched his bare foot. He kicked it away with a shudder, slammed the lid of the box and climbed on top of it.
As he looked down, lowering the flame, he saw with horror that the horde of shiny creatures was flowing about it on every side, their legs clacking against the boards, against the box, against each other. He had recognised the type – an Arabian variety, highly venomous and extremely aggressive. Gisburne felt his toes clench and draw back from the edge of the box as they piled up against it and crawled over the arms, face and neck of the guard. They picked at the exposed flesh, began to devour it. As the blood flowed, more joined the frenzy. But the body on which they teemed was also slumped hard against the box upon which Gisburne’s naked feet stood.
One of the milling creatures had already found its way onto the box. It sensed him, stopped, arched its back, its sting quivering. Gisburne kicked it to the far wall with his big toe before it could move. But more were coming.
He had to get out. But now he could not reach the rope. It hung at least three feet distant from his outstretched hand – too far for him to reach even with his shortsword. Had he been wearing boots, he might risk stepping on them. He might survive one or two stings, but any more would paralyse him. Then they would eat him as he lay there, still alive, tearing off shreds of his flesh as the burning poison coursed through him like acid.
He had to jump. If his hands failed to meet the rope in the dark or slipped on it, he would fall among them. But he could not hesitate.
He gripped the flambeau between his teeth, crouched low, and sprang for the rope.
One hand caught it. The other flailed and grabbed. The rope gave under his weight. He lifted his feet as they dipped close to the writhing mass of horny, stinging tails.
He hauled himself back up the rope, the flambeau in his teeth, and flung himself onto the deck, panting. As he watched in silent horror, the starved creatures swarmed over the body of the guard, until every part of him was obscured by their clacking, black bodies. With a shudder, he dropped the torch into the open hatch, slipped over the port side and plunged back into the freezing water, leaving behind a rising trail of smoke, and the horrid sound of scorpion bodies popping in the flames.
He did not look back. He did not think beyond the need to keep swimming. The skull hung heavily about him, seemed to want to drag him under. But he kept swimming.
He was about a hundred yards from the shore when shouts went up in the Templar camp. Then he saw, reflected on the rocks, the glow of flames, and all Hell broke loose on the beach.
He tried to look around, swallowed water, gagged and coughed. Two boats were already in the water – but they were not heading his way. All their attention was now focused on the ship, on trying to rescue the skull which they believed was about to be consumed by fire. Little did they realise how far it was from that fate, submerged beneath the waves.
If he could just keep going... It felt as if the skull was pulling him down, sinking like an anchor, the strap of the bag dragging, cutting into his shoulder. He almost laughed at it – the idea of the Baptist pulling him under the water. It was strangely appropriate, but he wasn’t ready for that baptism just yet.
He grabbed at the rocks. A wave thrust him hard against them, and he felt the barnacles grate the skin off his elbow. The pain was distant – as if someone else’s. With his heart thumping, a new thrill rising in him, he scrambled ashore, the flames of the ship now leaping high into the night air.
The climb back was quicker than his descent. His limbs moved without thought, hand and foot moving from rock to rock. The skull no longer seemed to weigh upon him. Nothing did. He felt light as air – as if he could float up the cliff. It hardly seemed possible that the mission had succeeded. Yet it had. He had done it. And they would not catch him. He was not yet to safety, he knew, but they would not catch him. It was something that he felt, beyond conviction. It was a certainty. A fact.
Galfrid’s hand grasped his as he reached the top, and hauled him the last few feet.
“You really don’t like ships at all, do you?” said the squire, trying and failing to hide his relief.
Gisburne simply laughed – a full-throated, hearty laugh, such as he had not experienced in years. He did not stop to pull on his clothes, but flung himself upon his horse and thundered off with Prince John’s prize, closely followed by Galfrid, so buoyed by his success that he did not even pay heed to the single dark figure on horseback, some distance along the road.
IV
MÉLISANDE
XXX
Hattin, The Holy Land – 4 July, 1187
GUY OF GISBURNE stared out across the shimmering, heaving plain and knew all was lost.
Exhausted from lack of sleep and water, his soul crushed by the lifeless desolation of that rocky slope, he blinked against the ocean of heat and dust gen
erated by the seething multitude of Saracen soldiers surrounding the doomed Christian army.
With a sick and aching heart, hands shaking, he hauled off his helm and flung it down into the grit. Saracen arrows still whistled and hissed above and about them. But he no longer cared. His brain felt cooked, the helm’s metal as hot as a baker’s oven. He would have at least some relief before he died.
But there was no relief. Blinking hard, he staggered and stumbled against the big man to his right, steadying himself with a handful of the oblivious soldier’s sweat-reeking tunic. The big man turned his bearded face – a face shrouded with the curious calm of defeat – hooked his hand under Gisburne’s arm, and hauled him up.
Gisburne looked, but said nothing. Thanks were superfluous. Absurd. The bearded man knew it. He gripped his spear and turned back to the horde, as if only waiting for them to make their final charge, and finish him.
Gisburne screwed up his bleary, bone-dry eyes in an attempt to clear his vision. They burned as if rubbed with hot sand. Not even tears were left now. His head swam. Somewhere overhead, he had the strange impression of a great, swirling cloud of black birds – but could no longer tell whether this was delirium, his failing sight, or some worse, dark thing.
Meanwhile, from the boiling, tempestuous sea of blurred approximation stretching away before him, unexpected, hallucinatory details leapt and flashed out with horrible, piercing clarity: iron-tipped lances glinting like stars; streaming yellow banners and standards red as anemones; feathered bows blue as birds; crescent swords and Yemeni blades polished white as streams of water; an ocean of hauberks glittering in the sun like the carapaces of a million gilded beetles. And all about, drums beat, weapons clashed, chargers whinnied, voices screamed and cursed, trumpets blasted out their taunting, triumphant calls – a demonic chorus of sounds so great, so incessant and so endlessly multiplied that all merged into one terrible, throbbing tumult, creating in his feverish mind the weird impression that this teeming army were somehow a single gargantuan beast – great Leviathan, whose vast engulfing shadow had come to stamp out the dwindling band of Christian knights.
Immediately about him jostled a dispirited, disordered rabble of infantry, lips swollen and cracked from thirst, their supplies of arrows and crossbow bolts almost exhausted, their fellows fallen at their feet. Among them were unhorsed knights, their mounts abandoned in prickly, arrow-stuck heaps, and here and there dusty, riderless horses bucking and snorting wildly in panic, foam flying from their mouths. All clung to this bare, sun-baked pinnacle of grey rock like ants to a mound, scurrying uselessly in the cold shadow of the great wave that was about to claim them.
He, too, wished only for it to be over now. But their enemy was denying them even that. The Frankish army had been twenty thousand strong at the onset of battle. How many remained alive, huddled here on this high ground, Gisburne could not guess – it seemed to him he had already seen ten times that number broken against this lifeless rock. And yet, when a gap had opened between the two armies as the Christians withdrew up the hill, the Saracens had not pressed home their advantage. In that gap, now, defiant Saracen cavalrymen wove incessantly to and fro, swinging their blades with wild-eyed fervour, and now and then, crouching low, small boys darted out across the disordered field, collecting arrows to bring back to their masters. Gisburne understood their restraint. The crusader army was in a state of collapse from thirst – cut off, now, from every source of refreshment – and he knew that Salah al-Din would have camels bringing his men a constant supply of clear, fresh water from nearby Lake Tiberias. They had no need for haste. They had only to wait.
The momentary ebb of the tide had revealed the full horror of the battle. Beyond their ragged line – and some way within it – the dry, ash-grey earth was littered with the hacked limbs and torsos of the fallen. They were scattered in pieces, lacerated, disjointed and dismembered, cast naked on the field of battle – tunics torn off, bodies cut in half, ribs smashed, stomachs disembowelled, throats split, spines broken, heads cracked open, eyes gouged out, teeth knocked in, hair coloured with blood. Gisburne had seen rivers of blood running between the rocks. They were soon sucked up by the thirsty desert, leaving its dust stained red.
This place upon which they had been forced to make their final doomed stand was called The Horns of Hattin. Already there were those calling it The Horns of Satan, and wondering of what great sin they must be guilty to have deserved such a fate. Death, when it came, would be a relief.
If there was indeed a Hell, Gisburne could not imagine it was worse than this.
They should have stayed at Saffuriya. There had been good water there. The wells at Turan – the supply upon which they had depended, once committed to this folly – had been inadequate for so large a force of men. Others along the route had been poisoned or filled in. And so Salah al-Din’s plan had been slowly revealed.
Control the battlefield. That was what Gilbert de Gaillon used to say. He would sometimes give the example of a wild boar. You could not guess what was in its head. You could not tell it where to go. But you could close one escape route and leave another open. This, Salah al-Din had done. Gisburne was vividly reminded not of a boar hunt, but of the chasing down of deer – of powerless animals herded into a killing zone. It was not battle they had marched to, but slaughter. Worse, by the time they were committed, they’d realised they were marching into a trap. But then, there was no going back. The means of retreat was closed off. They could only move forward, deeper into the jaws of the beast, knowing that this was exactly what Salah al-Din wanted.
Gisburne had no doubt that it would make for a tragic but stirring tale some day. Whether any would remain alive to report what actually happened was another matter. It had begun with the attack on the town of Tiberias by Salah al-Din’s forces. The great army of King Guy of Jerusalem, mustered by royal decree, was then at Saffuriya, two days’ march away across a waterless desert.
KING GUY WAS by nature a cautious man – not one to hurl his men into danger, nor to ignore other possibilities than conflict. The King had not always proven popular, but Gisburne admired these qualities in his namesake. He had also learned from Osric – one of the squires who had attended upon their masters during the councils of leaders at Saffuriya – that Raymond, Count of Tripoli, had argued vociferously for staying put. Salah al-Din clearly wanted to draw them out by attacking the town of Tiberias. And what their enemy wanted was what their enemy must be strenuously denied. Raymond said this, knowing that his own wife, Eschiva, was in Tiberias.
There were those who read Raymond’s circumspection as weakness – even cowardice – but Gisburne knew it was simply a different kind of courage. A better kind. It was easy to win respect as a warrior, to impress the impressionable by roaring into battle. Richard the Lionhearted had proved himself an expert in that – but in truth one did not even require competence for it, merely a bit of luck. It was far harder to do so as a statesman or peacemaker, no matter how skilled one was. And there was clear strategic wisdom in Raymond’s words, which King Guy – more subtle than most of his contemporaries – had understood. This, despite his past history with Raymond, for when Guy – then Guy de Lusignan – had been installed as King of Jerusalem by his supporters, it had been the Regent, Raymond, Count of Tripoli, whom he had ousted.
That last night at Saffuriya, Gisburne had slept soundly, believing, from what Osric had told him, that wisdom would prevail.
But, come the next morning, everything had changed. For reasons that Gisburne did not know or understand – which, perhaps, would now never be understood – King Guy had listened to the hotheads; to Templar Grand Master Gérard de Ridefort, to Reynald de Châtillon. Gisburne shuddered at the thought of Reynald – at the memories he evoked. They had advocated a rapid dash across the desert to relieve Tiberias. It could be done in a day, they said. He later heard that a key lever in de Ridefort’s argument had been the money that King Henry of England had given for the campaign – money that had, in
fact, bought Gisburne’s services, among others. The Templar’s implication had been that if they did nothing, this money – already spent – would be wasted, thus causing mortal offence to the English King. Whether this had been the deciding factor, Gisburne did not know, but it was a sly argument. In truth, had Henry himself been here, he would have seen far greater risk of waste in committing his army to a forced march across a dry, unprovisioned wasteland to a battleground of his enemies’ choosing. Henry would have stayed at the sweet, fresh wells of Saffuriya, and forced Salah al-Din to come to him.
But the hotheads had prevailed.
They had done exactly what their enemy wished of them. In doing so, they had also allowed their enemy to deny them what they most wanted: water.
They did not reach Tiberias in a day. The march had become a descent into an abyss. All that day, as the lack of water had begun to bite, Salah al-Din’s cavalry harassed them until nightfall. At night, thirsty and demoralised, camped on a plain amongst stunted trees, they had lain awake listening to the drums and distant jeers of their enemy. When they set off again next morning, hoping to reach the wells at Hattin, Salah al-Din had lit brushwood fires along the route of their march, blowing choking smoke into the crusaders’ faces. Saracen warriors – so close they could see their expressions – taunted the thirsty Christian soldiers by pouring water onto the dry ground about them. The Christian army carried before it the Holy Cross as divine protection – the very cross upon which Christ himself died. But Gisburne would have traded it on the spot for a fresh well, or another thousand knights. Several nobles and serjeants deserted to Salah al-Din; the news spread as rapidly as the brushfires, plunging the whole army into yet deeper despondency.
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