by K. M. Grant
Only ten miles away in the Saracen camp, Saladin was striding around his tent angry and worried. Baha ad-Din was standing by the flap, looking out and listening to messengers. Wounded soldiers were streaming past.
“Kamil had no business to get close enough to the Christians for them to charge,” said Saladin, his voice furious. “Hundreds of men have been killed. And for what?”
Baha ad-Din did not have time to reply before Kamil himself was galloping toward him. Saladin left his tent and stood, his hands on his sword, as the boy leaped off his horse and stood silently before him. He did not receive his customary smile of greeting. Instead, Saladin’s eyes were cold.
“Your bloodlust has caused us to suffer what the Christians will call a defeat,” he said curtly.
“The boy did what he thought Allah would want.” Baha ad-Din was hot in Kamil’s defense.
“Kamil did what Kamil wanted. Is that not so, Kamil?” Saladin was not to be pacified so easily.
“The Christians seemed an easy target,” Kamil replied. “We killed many before they turned to attack.”
“That is not the point,” said Saladin. “Their King Richard seldom makes a mistake. When he charges, we are always likely to lose hundreds of men. We also have a clear chain of command when it comes to provoking a battle, as you well know, Kamil. You are not yet part of that chain. Please remember that. I should punish you. This time I will not. But next time you will not be so lucky.”
Kamil left Saladin’s presence and sat in sullen silence in the outer tent. Saladin’s eternal lectures were beginning to make him more than impatient. The sultan was always so careful in his strategies, and the results were so slow. In Kamil’s estimation, he showed far too much tolerance and far too little thirst for vengeance. Maybe that was because Saladin’s family had not been cut down in cold blood. Feelings of resentment and frustration filled Kamil’s soul. Everybody thought Saladin was a hero. Well, maybe he was not such a hero after all. How could anybody who really hated Christians care so much for rules and chains of command when opportunities for slaughter presented themselves?
After pacifying Saladin, Baha ad-Din found Kamil and sat down beside him.
He noted the boy’s expression and chose his words deliberately.
“Be careful, Kamil,” he said, keeping his voice gentle. “I know your heart is warm and turns to Allah. But you must not let your wish to do Allah’s work allow you to forget that you are a boy in the service of the sultan.
When the sultan wishes to punish, he is not merciful. I repeat, be careful.” Kamil did not reply, and after a few moments, Baha ad-Din left him to his thoughts.
A tall man with sly eyes and a short black beard was also watching Kamil. After Baha ad-Din had gone, he came to sit beside him and began talking in a low voice.
12
Jaffa, early September 1191
Richard, meanwhile, gathered up his forces again, and in three days his army reached Jaffa. There, the knights experienced a side of crusading life they had not encountered before. Although the town itself had been destroyed by the Saracens, the orchards and suburban gardens had been left. The trees were heavy with fruit, and flowers filled the air with rich and exotic scents. Richard ordered camp to be struck in an olive grove. This surely was the Promised Land. The sun was still hot, but without their armor on, it was not unbearable.
Along with the other soldiers, William, Gavin, and Hal gorged themselves on figs, grapes, and pomegranates and flavored their tasteless dried beef with lemon juice. Before leaving the battle site at Arsuf, many men had cut slabs of flesh from the dead horses to supplement the biscuits and hard bread they were all heartily sick of. They had brought sackfuls of it with them, which they now proceeded to roast.
But although the smell of fresh meat sometimes made William’s mouth water, his stomach revolted at the sight. “Never, never will I let that happen to you,” he promised Hosanna, now tethered in a field where the September grazing was thick and juicy. “I will bury you if I have to, but I will never, ever, eat you.”
Hosanna, stamping his feet to get rid of the flies and occasionally neighing to Montlouis, gently pushed the boy to one side to get to a more attractive piece of grass. Then, in his old accustomed way, he stood with his head over William’s shoulder.
William stroked his nose. “At least we are still alive,” he murmured, and the horse stopped chewing for a moment as if in agreement.
With so much fresh food and water, everybody, from the common soldiers to the most aristocratic knights, felt refreshed and reinvigorated. Prayers were said for the dead. Horses were mourned as well as eaten. William, although he missed his father desperately, began once again to feel that the crusade was, if not splendid, at least a righteous endeavor. He practiced battle tactics on Hosanna, pretending to storm the gates of Jerusalem singlehanded. How sharp and agile the horse was! He could pull up from a full gallop in seconds, whipping round and galloping back the other way or in any direction William chose. His floating gait was William’s for the asking, and the horse went backward and sideways at the slightest touch of rein and leg. He was both proud and obedient, a perfect combination. Sometimes William got so carried away with Hosanna that he forgot where he was and turned round to shout to Ellie to watch. When he realized his mistake, he would blush and hope nobody noticed.
Richard alone seemed troubled. He had many things on his mind. First of all, he knew that some of his knights had already set sail back to Acre—only two days’ voyage if the winds were good—intent on bringing down wine and women to add fresh delights to the festive atmosphere. These would be a bad distraction. But worse than this, Richard could no longer ignore something that had been obvious, at least to him, since they had arrived at Acre and the geography of the Holy Land became clearer. Jerusalem, the object of such veneration, the reason so many knights had set out, was an impossible target for a crusading army with no regular reinforcements. Even if the Christians managed to take it, and even with Cyprus in friendly hands, how on earth could a city so far inland be supplied and defended?
As his knights relaxed, Richard spent many sleepless nights wondering if it might be possible to convince the men he was leading to forget about the holy places and settle instead for the coastal towns until a bigger force and, perhaps, more settlers who could help the army could be summoned from France and England. The king could see no easy way to persuade them. Jerusalem was the beacon that kept his men going through the heat, dust, horror, and discomfort. To remove the one goal they all had in common would be dangerous and might precipitate a revolt.
The king wrestled with this problem alone. One night he walked out in the early hours and found himself standing beside Hosanna, whose behavior over the Saracen prisoners the king knew about and found disconcerting. He spent hours looking at the horse, whose coat had a ghostlike sheen in the moonlight. Richard found him a peaceful companion. As Hosanna had once listened to Old Nurse, he now seemed to listen to the king, his dark eyes full of something Richard could not quite describe. It was not, he decided, wisdom. It was more like looking into your own soul. He told Hosanna as much, and Hosanna bent his head to scratch it on Richard’s arm, rubbing his white star against the king’s breast. “If only human beings were as forgiving as you seem to be,” Richard said as he finally bade the horse good night.
The king never told William of this conversation. But whenever he found himself riding alongside the red horse, the king had the uncanny feeling that somehow their destinies were intertwined. “Superstitious nonsense,” he told himself. Nevertheless, he too began to touch Hosanna’s star for luck, just as the sailors had on the voyage out.
Every day brought new frustrations for Richard. Much to his fury, and to William’s dismay, Gavin, who Richard hoped would forget his wild ways and turn into the useful adviser he had once been, was one of those knights who sailed back to Acre in search of amusement. He returned not only with a woman on each arm but also with something very curious.
“Will, look w
hat I came by!” he said to his brother, kicking open the flap of the tent the morning after he got back. The women giggled. “No, not you,” Gavin squeezed their arms, then told them to wait outside. He dropped a roll of parchment into William’s hands.
William unrolled it, then looked up at Gavin. “What is it?” he asked.
“It’s a letter, or so they tell me,” said Gavin. “There was a pouch of documents that arrived for the king. Other people had also managed to get things to the ship that brought it over. Apparently this is for you. Look! This, so they say, is your name. And just guess who it is from.”
“I can’t guess,” said William. “I don’t know anybody who can write. Oh, except Brother Andrew, Brother Ranulf, and Old Nurse—and I am sure she has forgotten how. Anyway, nobody I know would send a letter all the way out here.”
Gavin jumped up. “You are wrong,” he cried. “Quite wrong.”
He leaned down. “The letter,” he said, “is from Ellie. There. Little Ellie has learned to write, and she has written not to me but to you. Well, what do you think of that?”
William was dumbfounded. “Ellie? How do you know?”
“I got somebody to read it to me.”
“You read my letter?” William was outraged.
“Well, you can’t read it, can you,” Gavin retorted. “So would you like to hear what it says? It’s not long. One of the girls here can read. I’ll call her in.”
Before William could say anything, Gavin pulled one of his highly painted women into the tent.
The woman, winking at Gavin, took the letter from William and began to read.
“‘Dear William,’” she said in a heavy accent, clearing her throat. “‘It is a long time since you left. I have decided to learn to read and write. Brother Ranulf helps me. I hope you are being a fine crusader and have killed many infidels. I imagine you in Jerusalem with Hosanna lying on a bed of golden straw. We hear news of great victories. Not much has happened here, but I am sorry to say that Sir Walter has died. We buried him a week ago. Constable de Scabious is fussing about as usual. I don’t trust him. The roof has been leaking. Sacramenta is well, and Old Nurse is as fat as ever. She was drunk last week and fell into the fishpond. Please come home soon. I love you very much and dream about you every night’—”
William looked up, horrified.
Gavin roared with laughter. “I got Marcella to make that bit up,” he crowed. He pretended to spank her. “Now, Marcella, be a good girl and tell Will what it really says.”
The woman grinned. “It says, ‘Please send love to Sir Thomas and to Gavin. Your affectionate sister, Eleanor.’”
William snatched the letter back. Gavin leered at him.
“‘Your affectionate sister, Eleanor,’” he squeaked in an attempt to imitate Ellie’s voice. “‘Your affectionate sister, Eleanor.’” Affectionate sister, I don’t think.”
William, his cheeks ablaze, leaped up and tried to push both Gavin and Marcella out of his tent.
“Get out, get out!” he cried. “Ellie does not even know our father is dead. Get out.”
“Keep your hair on.” Gavin was still laughing, but a little more uncertainly now. “She’ll know soon enough.”
“Get out, get out before I punch you!” William shouted wildly. “How dare you allow one of those women to read Ellie’s letter and pronounce our father’s name! How dare you?”
Gavin sighed with mock remorse. “Marcella, we are not wanted here,” he said. “Come on, let’s go and find somewhere where we can talk in a rather more civilized manner.”
And with that Gavin spun the woman round and caused her to shriek with delight as he pushed his hand into the fold of her clothes.
William threw himself back on his bed and stared at the marks on the page. It seemed extraordinary that Ellie had made them. He traced the letters slowly with his finger, trying to remember which word must be which. Ellie said not much had changed. But it obviously had. For a start, Sir Walter was dead. Then after years of both of them avoiding doing either, Ellie was now good at reading and writing. He tried to imagine her sitting with Brother Ranulf, struggling with the alphabet. He wondered if she had gone to the abbey or whether Ranulf had come to the castle. But soon all he could see in his mind’s eye was the green of English pastures, the chestnut trees outside the home he loved, and Ellie’s face alight with fun as she told him of her latest ruse for teasing the monks. A terrible feeling of homesickness overcame him, and securing the tent flap so that Gavin and his women could not easily reenter, William, clutching the first letter he had ever received in his life, dropped on to his knees and wept.
13
Hartslove, 1191
Actually, Ellie had lied, not about Sacramenta being well or Old Nurse being as fat as ever, but about nothing having happened at Hartslove since the crusaders had vanished down the road on that May morning, now more than a year before. Crusaders’ castles were supposed to be under the special protection of God while their lords were away, but it was beginning to be Ellie’s experience that God did not always do His job very well. It was not Sir Thomas’s fault. His complete faith in the immunity from harm of a crusader’s domestic property had allowed him to leave Sir Walter de Strop and Constable de Scabious in charge without a moment’s hesitation. Non-crusading knights exploited the lightly defended castles of their crusading brethren on pain of hell. And as for servants who took advantage of their master’s absence in the Holy Land, well, the devil had special tortures lined up for them. So Sir Thomas never dreamed that his longstanding constable might prove an uncomfortable guardian for Ellie and Old Nurse. At first, Ellie could not quite put her finger on why constable de Scabious was making her uncomfortable. He was punctiliously polite and almost greasily pleasant. Nevertheless, by the time William actually read the letter in which Ellie said she did not trust de Scabious, she not only mistrusted the constable but was frightened of him as well.
It all started after they had buried Sir Walter, just before the first, dismal Christmas the crusaders were away. She found the constable looking at her in a way that he would never have dared had Sir Thomas been around.
Ellie was right to be nervous. Constable de Scabious had always harbored ambitions. While Sir Walter had taken Sir Thomas’s place, these ambitions had been kept in check. But now that Sir Walter was dead and, so de Scabious calculated, Sir Thomas himself was almost certain to take the constable’s shameful, cowardly secret to a foreign grave, the time seemed ripe to allow those ambitions to flourish a little. His flirtation with women’s clothing would not be revealed. He could concentrate on his future. After all, so he reasoned to himself, it was only luck that had made the de Granvilles powerful castellans and the de Scabiouses their servants. If the de Scabiouses had chosen to ride next to the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings, they might have ended up masters of Hartslove, with de Granvilles as lowly serfs. But the de Scabiouses were too humble for that kind of sword-wielding bravado. They had stayed with the baggage train as the Conqueror fought for his life, thus allowing others the opportunity to go for glory. With true generosity of spirit, the de Scabiouses confined themselves to dealing with more mundane matters. Now it was only fair that they should get their just rewards for not pushing themselves forward. Moreover it should not be overlooked (although it always seemed to be, which was another injustice) that crouching between two pack animals was just as dangerous as engaging the enemy. Why, one of Sir Piers’s ancestors had had his leg broken by a kicking mule, and very nasty it had been, too.
So, the constable reasoned as on the Twelfth Night he gave the orders for the Christmas holly branches to be taken out of the great hall and burned, should Gavin de Granville marry Ellie and end up master of even more valuable land while he, the faithful steward, had to make do with a common woman who would not even bring so much as a fishpond as her dowry? No. He would make Eleanor his. The man was not deluded enough to imagine that Ellie would choose to break her betrothal to Gavin and give herself willingly
to a man growing gray and heavy in middle age. The way to secure his prize was to compromise her in some way so that she felt lucky to find anybody to marry her at all. And if Gavin did return, well, he was not going to want to marry a girl with a reputation.
De Scabious took to watching Ellie and noticed that she often rode out with only one serving woman, a dumpy creature called Margery, for company and was away for three or four hours. Neither rain nor sleet seemed to put her off. Business always seemed to prevent him from following her, so de Scabious began to smile at Margery and eventually took to paying her a few compliments. The woman was delighted. Maybe the constable was looking for a wife. She took to washing her hair and rubbing her lardy face with rose water. By the time the spring flowers began to push through, de Scabious thought he had Margery just where he wanted her.
“Where do you and Miss Eleanor go when you ride out?” he asked one day, with a glutinous smile.
Margery winked conspiratorially.
“Now then, Constable,” she purred. “That is between me and the young lady.”
“Of course,” said the constable, cheekily tweaking her arm. “You young ladies and your secrets!” They both giggled. Then the constable seemed to become rather more serious. “It is just that I am in charge of security, and we wouldn’t want anything to happen to her now, would we?”
He spanked Margery lightly on the backside as he went off and called back to her, “You must keep Miss Eleanor’s counsel if that is what she has asked, of course. My only concern is that if anything were to happen to her, well, the penalties for you would be … Still, I am sure you know what you are about.” Then he vanished.
A day or two later, the constable came into the courtyard just as Ellie and Margery returned. Ellie slipped away before he could speak to her, but Margery fluttered her eyelashes, inviting him to help her. De Scabious went forward and was nearly flattened as, like a sack of potatoes, Margery slid from the horse and into his arms. As her fat fingers twisted round his neck and her foul breath warmed his face, de Scabious struggled not to choke. But it was worth the effort. Rubbing her cheek against his, Margery disclosed that Ellie rode to a small clearing near the abbey at least four times a week and sat either in a tumbledown forester’s hut or, now that the weather was better, out among the trees with Brother Ranulf, learning her letters.
