War had also brought an unexpected master. Henry, the distant English King – who had a hundred times the shrewdness and sagacity of his eldest son – had elected to buy off the Pope with a hefty pledge of money rather than abandon his kingdom for the sake of some damn foreign crusade. The money was to be used to hire mercenaries, for Henry was not keen to lose his knights to the enterprise, either. Little did he realise, his own son and heir – who had learned the power of money but the value of nothing – would, one day soon, abandon everything, kingdom and all, for the chance to spill Saracen blood in that distant desert.
And so it was that Guy of Gisburne and Robert of Locksley found themselves upon this parched rock, fighting side by side under the banner of Henry II of England.
XXXIII
THERE WAS SOMETHING primal, something animal about the way Locksley drew a bow. It seemed to possess his entire body, every muscle stretched to bursting point, his hands heaved apart across his chest as if ripping it asunder. It was like an act of violent destruction – like watching a bear tear a man in half.
But there was also a curious grace, in that continuous, unrestrained movement. There was no hesitation, no thought, no pausing to aim. The instant the bowstring reached its apogee, it was loosed.
Gisburne had seen it more times than he could count. Still it fascinated and astounded him. And never more so than today.
Locksley flexed – one, long, powerful gesture – not breathing, squinting along the arrow’s length, bow and bowstring creaking in protest as if being taken beyond the limit of their capabilities. As he did so, a great clamour welled up to the left of them, amongst their own ranks. Urgent shouts and stamping horses. Locksley did not hear it. He eased back as he drew, giving the arrow height, adjusting for the southerly breeze.
The barbed point of the arrow stopped against the yew bowstave, and was gone.
Gisburne – desperately blinking his desert-dry eyes – saw Salah al-Din flinch, and turn towards the clamour. A figure behind him flung up one arm and fell. The Sultan wheeled around, glaring straight at Gisburne and Locksley’s position, and two huge men – his Mamluk bodyguards – leapt in front of him, obscuring him from view.
Locksley howled in frustration. “Find me arrows, boy – I don’t care how or where!” But the cowering boy simply pressed his hands over his ears and rocked back and forth, whimpering at the growing noise.
Locksley ripped a Saracen arrow from the flank of a Flemish crossbowman and shot wildly at the Sultan’s tent with a horrifying roar, as if willpower alone could drive the bloodied tip to its mark.
But there were other, greater moves afoot – the very actions, in fact, that had turned the Sultan’s head just seconds before.
To their left, Gisburne now saw, a party of Christian knights – those few who still had their horses and their lives – had formed up and were preparing to charge the Saracen lines. It seemed a futile act. But before Gisburne had realised what was happening, the tiny remaining force had thundered full tilt down the slope, smashed through the front lines of the astonished Muslim army and beaten and battered its way almost as far as the Sultan’s tent.
He felt a kind of visceral thrill shudder through what remained of the army; there were cries of “God wills it!” – every man about him emboldened by the cavalry charge. Locksley gave a great laugh, raising his fist in the air and straining forward like a dog on a leash as if ready to rush down and join them. Chest-deep in men, stabbed with lance and spear and lashed at with every kind of flailing weapon, the knights’ horses were finally overwhelmed. Some fell. Others withdrew, not yet ready to give up the fight. Finally, with a blast of trumpets, Salah al-Din’s army, no longer content to simply let the Christians die, surged up the slope with a terrible roar as the knights regrouped and were upon them again.
The clash was terrible. Fresh flights of arrows flew. In the right flank, still dozens of yards from the advancing horde, Gisburne gripped his sword, ready to fight to the last. As he did so, a young knight – his head bloody, and a look in his eye that he tried to fashion into defiance, but which Gisburne knew to be terror – rode between him and the enemy. He drew his blade – then jerked horribly as two arrows struck him almost simultaneously in the neck and chest.
Locksley did not hesitate.
“Time to become a knight!” he hollered, and, dashing forward, hauled the still twitching figure off his mount. Gisburne shuddered as the knight hit the ground heavily, head first, his neck twisting and cracking as he did so. Locksley flung himself into the vacated saddle, and then, in that moment – with all Hell breaking loose and himself a heartbeat from death – took the time to give a wry shrug and say, almost with a note of apology: “God wills it...” With that, he grinned at the big, bearded infantryman, who stared back at him, dumbfounded, and made as if to doff his cap. “See you again, John Lyttel – in this life or whatever follows!” And he was gone, bow slung over his back, sword drawn, plunging down the slope towards the heaving mass of men and blades.
Gisburne – who, in recent weeks, had wanted nothing more than to get away from Locksley – now felt, with a kind of perverse indignation, that he was buggered if he was going to let the bastard leave without him. He wheeled around, his blood fired with a new, crazed energy, knowing exactly what he was looking for, but with no expectation of finding it. But there, no longer bucking but stamping in circles, was a Saracen mount. It had lost its saddle, but that hardly mattered. “If it’s got four legs and a mane, you can ride it,” de Gaillon would say. “And I wouldn’t be too picky about the mane.”
Gisburne ran, sword still in his hand, grabbed the horse’s reins and somehow scrambled onto its steaming back. He tried to turn the horse with his knees. It went left when he urged it right, and right when he urged it left – but there was no time to take up the matter now. He’d go with whatever the horse wanted.
Ahead of him, infantry and cavalry had become mixed in the mêlée – but to the right, in the rapidly advancing Saracen lines, there was a weak point. Only footsoldiers. He could make a decent mark in that. It was an act of madness – little more than a final gesture of stubborn defiance. A gobbet of spit in the face of a charging, fully armoured foe. But anything was better than nothing.
He spurred the horse. It leapt forward, seeming to go straight into the gallop. And Gisburne rode out, wading into the surging ocean of flesh and metal, an unrestrained cry in his throat, flailing at faces, lances, hands, anything, with a strength he did not know he had.
XXXIV
WHEN GISBURNE CAME to, he was lying with half his face buried in hot sand and grit. He had no memory of what had happened, but his left arm, stretched out above his head, burned as if on fire – and the hand felt wet. The realisation made him start. His right hand went to his head. There was a swollen gash there, on his forehead, now dry and gritty. Something had struck him, although he had no memory of it. Perhaps as he fell; or perhaps it was what caused him to fall.
One eye was open, the other crusted with what he supposed was blood. He blinked, forced the lids apart, and looked at his raised limb. His forearm had been skinned on the upper side. Still wrapped around his wrist, pulled tight, was his horse’s rein, now soaked in his blood. It had since clotted and dried, sticking the leather strap to the bloody, sand-flecked crust of his exposed flesh. The remainder of the rein lay on the sand, trailing off to a broken end.
Slowly, the realisation came upon him that he must have fallen, and been dragged. How the rein had become detached from his mount, and what had become of the beast, he could not guess. But it had probably saved his life – what little of it there was left. His left hand, he now understood, was not wet. Not any more. It was cold. Numb. Beneath the dried blood and grey grit he saw it was deathly pale, and drawn into a claw. Tentatively, he flexed the fingers. They moved slowly, with a kind of agonising remoteness, like something no longer fully part of him – something in a dream. As they straightened, a sensation like needles made him wince.
; He went to lift himself up, and a sickening pain shot through his left shoulder. It felt like it had been pulled from its socket. Quite possibly, it had. Pushing against the ground with his right fist, he raised himself inch by inch, leaning into the rock at his back. He lifted his head and looked about him. His was just one of dozens of bodies dotted about, both Saracen and Christian, some whole, many mutilated. One, just a yard or so away – a handsome Muslim foot-soldier who could not have been more than eighteen, his staring eyes now dead and glassy – was crawling with scorpions. Gisburne shuddered at the sound of their movements. They mingled with the groans of the dying that drifted on the hot breeze. As he raised himself further, he saw the bodies repeated, over and over. He heaved himself up onto unsteady legs, swaying, gazing about him. Hundreds. Thousands. He could not see to the edge of it.
A movement made him start – an upright figure looming nearby. Not twenty paces away, an Arab passed, steadily picking some small objects from the bodies strewn about – Gisburne knew not what – and placing them in a leather sack. He took not the slightest notice of Gisburne.
He was alive. It made no sense – could only have been by the most bizarre fluke – but he was alive. For now.
Examining his injured arm, he picked at the twisted strips of leather wound round the bloody wrist, his own skin bunched up before it. They resisted, stiffened by blood, stuck fast to his flesh. He knew he had to remove the rein or else lose his hand. And so he clenched his teeth and began to unwind. It pulled away, taking skin and dried blood with it, the pain like a red hot iron raking across his forearm. The cry stuck in his dry throat. Fresh blood gushed. Sweat that he did not know he had broke out on him, making him shudder with sudden violence. But he was free. He threw the bloody scrap to the gore-strewn ground, his heart pounding in his chest, panting with wheezing lungs, and flexed his hand.
Yes, he was alive.
He stared into the west. Behind him, he knew, was the unimaginable carnage of battle, and the victorious army of the Sultan. Ahead, nothing but desert. But beyond it, Saffuriya. And beyond that, Acre. The sea. England. It was an impossible, absurd dream. But the pain had awakened something within him – some spirit that refused to acknowledge impossibilities.
He took a single faltering step, staggered, and swayed. He had no water, no food. Barely the strength to stand. He knew the wise move was to turn around, back to the east – to surrender to Saladin’s men, to make himself their prisoner. He at least stood a chance that way.
Then, with a will that seemed to come from some other place, he began to walk slowly into the west.
XXXV
Somewhere in France – December, 1191
THERE WERE THREE knights blocking the fork in the road. Templars. At first, Gisburne thought they must have been from the ship. Yet his common sense told him this was impossible. But for a brief stop in the woods to dress and safely stow the skull – during which Galfrid, on watch atop a pinnacle of rock, had seen not a single horseman for a mile about – he and Galfrid had been riding at the gallop all the way. Their pursuers would have to have taken wing to overtake them, and even Templars did not have that power. Not yet, at least – though Gisburne did not doubt that Llewellyn was working on such a scheme. Then, as they drew up their horses, he spied a familiar shock of red hair and beard upon the central figure.
Tancred’s men.
Word had spread fast. Far faster than he had imagined. And somehow, Tancred had anticipated his move – had known, perhaps, that the skull was threatened, and if taken would be transported north. Nothing would surprise him. He was proving himself a formidable opponent; a skilled player of the great game. Perhaps he had such groups of men on every road leading out from Marseille. But now the one eventuality Gisburne had wished to avoid – direct, open conflict with Tancred de Mercheval – was irrevocably upon them.
Galfrid glanced nervously at the wooden reliquary box hanging from the cantle at the back of Gisburne’s saddle, then back at the distant trio upon the road.
“Have they seen us?”
“They’ve seen us.”
“So what this time?”
“Remember Paris?”
“Vividly,” said Galfrid. “But so will he. And, if you remember, I was knocked off my horse and almost killed.”
“You will have learned from that,” said Gisburne. He nodded in the direction of Fulke. “But my guess is, this one won’t.” He drew his sword. Even if they got past, they could not outrun them; they had to put them out of action. “Are you a scholar, Galfrid?”
Galfrid looked at him as if this were the most ludicrous question he had ever been asked. “Yes...”
“You know the battle of Cannae?”
“Of course, but...”
“I’ll take the right flank.” Then Gisburne’s mount reared up at the touch of his spurs, and leapt to the gallop. Galfrid groaned, spurred his horse and thundered after him, Gisburne’s pilgrim staff whirling about his head, everything now pinned on the strength of his master’s guess.
Gisburne’s guess was based on two factors. First, what he had seen of Fulke and knew of such men. Second, a more tenuous fact to which he had alluded outside Paris: Templars aren’t what they used to be.
For months after the news had reached England, it seemed there was but one word on everyone’s lips. Hattin. Hattin. It was uttered quietly, fearfully, as if the word itself had the power to infect and spread disillusionment and destruction. It was spoken with shock, and with awe. With anger and disbelief. Amongst ordinary people it was customary, when some disaster struck, to treat the terrible event with a kind of black humour. Thus, it was tamed. Made safe.
But there were no jokes made about Hattin. On that day, the whole Christian world had changed. It had faltered and shifted on its axis. From it, all sensed, there was no going back. The complacent now saw their terrible error. The fearful found justification for their paranoia, and began to see enemies everywhere – in every dark face, foreign custom and unfamiliar tongue.
Twenty thousand men had faced Salah al-Din’s army that day – twelve hundred and fifty knights mustered from Jerusalem, Tripoli and Antioch, plus many thousands of serjeants, Turcopoles, mercenaries and regular infantrymen drawn from the local population and beyond. Perhaps three thousand finally escaped the battlefield. Of those captured, some had been ransomed, others sold into slavery. The Turcopoles, as deserters from the Muslim faith, had been slaughtered where they stood. Salah al-Din had, of course, afforded King Guy himself the respect deserved by a king and fellow general. The Muslim leader had sense of decorum. But Reynald de Châtillon, upon whom he had sworn revenge and who spat insults to the last, he personally beheaded. Many across Christendom would have breathed a secret sigh of relief at that news.
Widely known as a humane ruler, Salah al-Din was also a supremely practical man. He had understood that the elite knights taken prisoner that day – some two hundred and thirty Templars and Hospitallers – were far too valuable a military resource to simply release. Ten years before, his army of twenty-six thousand men had been smashed by a far smaller Christian army at Montgisard, and all because of a contingent of just five hundred Templar knights. He had learned his lesson. And so, he had the Templars and Hospitallers taken at Hattin executed. In the space of a day, the Christian military orders had been decimated – almost to a point of collapse.
They had not collapsed. Doggedly, they had fought back from the brink. But in building up their numbers over the past four years, they had perhaps not been so choosy. So it was that a number of dubious characters – many of them ambitious bullies unworthy of the title “knight”, let alone the honour of wearing the red cross – had found their way into the Order.
Men who knew force, but not strategy – who believed that victory was found in the exertion of muscle and sinew, not of the mind. Men who had plenty of experience of fighting, but little of waging war.
Men like Fulke.
As Gisburne and Galfrid charged towards the three knights
, Gisburne saw that Fulke had learned a lesson. He had ordered the three into a tight defensive formation, allowing no gap between. He would not have his attackers break him this time. It was no surprise to Gisburne that Fulke also put himself at the centre. He smiled, holding his sword high, so close he could see their eyes glint beneath their domed helms, Galfrid now almost level on his left side.
“Hah!” he cried and wheeled suddenly to the right. Galfrid veered left.
Gisburne switched his sword from his right hand to his left and drew it back.
Galfrid, meanwhile, brought the staff round in a sweeping arc. His opponent struck out at him as he passed, but the staff was far longer in reach than the knight’s sword. The blade missed Galfrid, struck the whirling staff, but could not hope to stop its forward momentum. It struck him full in the chest with a horrid crack, pitching him backwards over the cantle of his saddle to sprawl awkwardly on the ground.
On the right flank, as he closed, Gisburne had seen his enemy’s eyes widen in alarm behind the faceplate of the man’s helm. The last-minute switch of hands had taken his adversary completely by surprise – and put him at a fatal disadvantage. The knight – right-handed – had limited reach and power on his left side. Gisburne, meanwhile, now had the full sweep of the sword to his left. The knight raised his blade, knowing he could not strike Gisburne, hoping only to parry the blow. At the last moment Gisburne dropped his own, then brought it sweeping upward. It bypassed the knight’s blade completely and connected with the faceplate of the helm, striking so hard it jarred Gisburne’s shoulder and bent the faceplate out of shape. The knight lost his weapon, reeled backwards in his saddle, righted himself, fighting with the helm which was now jammed upon his head; the faceplate pressed against his cheek, half blinding him, his horse tottering in confused circles.
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