The Crusader

by Michael Eisner

  I had lost my footing in the collision. I crawled toward the wounded German. I leaned over him. My hand passed over a large stone. I picked it up and felt its edge. The German was moaning. A bloody gash covered his forehead. I raised the rock and brought it down with all my strength. His face shattered. The moaning ceased.

  When I looked up, the remaining Germans had fled. My comrades were standing at the front of our shelter. Salamago and Manuel carried the three bodies in our shelter to the common walkway. I rested against the rock wall. My limbs weary, I slumped to the ground and fell asleep.

  I was waked by a rasping noise. It sounded like fabric ripping. I saw Salamago sitting up. He had cleared the mud from the ground and was gazing down at the mosaic. Andrés and Manuel were sleeping. The bodies from the walkway had disappeared.

  “Did they bury their dead?” I asked.

  “No,” he responded.

  The sour scent of blood wafted through our shelter.

  “Flesh eaters,” Salamago said. “Even the Christians are heathen down here.”

  Stubborn limbs were torn unhurried, frayed and split. The bones snapped like twigs. The tough meat was chewed methodically. The sound, grating and unholy, reverberated through the cave.

  After that perilous escape, we held to the same routine—sleeping in shifts, upgrading our arsenal by digging for bigger and sharper stones. They never attacked us again, though. Not the Germans. Not any group.

  The balance of power shifted after the assault. We had killed five Germans. The three remaining men could not defend the antechamber or their wood supply. Within hours following our battle, the Venetians ventured from their rock fortress and evicted our neighbors. The Germans did not even put up a fight.

  Thenceforth, the Venetians rotated their contingent between the two shelters. Salamago liked to say that the Venetians had a castle in the city—the fortress in the middle of the cave—and an estate in the country—the antechamber next to our camp.

  Four more Venetians entered the prison some weeks later. With the additional members, the Venetians had sixteen men, more than twice as many as any other group—a superior fighting force with control of the wood supply.

  They used their power to improve their situation and the conditions in the prison. Once a month, the Venetians levied a tax on each faction. They divided the responsibility of collecting the fee amongst themselves. The nature of the charge varied from group to group, depending on the current supplies of the Venetians, the group’s resources, and the mood of the tax collector.

  Salamago befriended our tax collector—an old sailor named Giovanni. He had been the captain of a merchant ship, an old man who claimed to have seen every port in the world. In the cave, he was one of the leaders of the Venetian faction. Salamago and Giovanni spoke Catalán to each other. Giovanni seemed to speak every language invented by man.

  Giovanni would usually ask Salamago for one or two stone cubes from the mosaic. The haggling could last the better part of a week—neither man in a rush to return to the dark monotony of our lives in the prison.

  “You joke, old man,” Giovanni would say, after perusing our offering. “Perhaps you mistake us Venetians for Genoans. Our cousins might be fooled by such crap, but not Venetians. We are sophisticated, world travelers. Show me some turquoise from the mosaic’s river.”

  “Walking between your shelters in this cave,” Salamago would say, “does not make you a world traveler, Giovanni.”

  Their conversations would steer to which one had seen more of the world, or which country produced the finest mariners, or any other vaguely related topic. They would not return to the matter of the tax for several hours or even days. Andrés and I listened to their exchanges. In rare moments, their banter helped us forget our situation. Occasionally, Giovanni would turn to Andrés or me, as if he had just noticed our presence.

  “Who are these people, Salamago?” Giovanni would say. “Your King Jaime sends boys into battle?”

  “I am twenty-one years,” I said, more than once.

  “And I am twenty-one also,” Andrés would follow.

  “Forgive me, then,” Giovanni would say. “I remember when I was that age.” Then he would launch into some tale from his travels—a whore he fell in love with in Sicily, a battle with a pirate ship off the coast of Cyprus, a gray pearl he found on some beach in North Africa.

  After recounting numerous stories and grumbling a couple of hours, Giovanni always ended up accepting Salamago’s initial offer.

  “The problem,” Giovanni would say, “is that I am too generous. From now on, I will send Paolo to collect your taxes. You will like him. He bites the heads off live rats. Good luck, Salamago. And you too, Knights of Calatrava.”

  Giovanni returned every month, though.

  The Venetians gradually asserted control in the cave, imposing an order governing various aspects of prison life. Periodically, Giovanni would stand in the middle of the walkway to proclaim new regulations. He would usually give examples and cite the punishments for various offenses. Then he would repeat himself in at least five different languages.

  To improve hygiene, the Venetians supervised the digging of latrines at the edge of the cave.

  “Contrary to the perception of the infidels,” Giovanni declared, “you are not animals. Although you sometimes live like them—walking and sleeping in your own excrement. No more. Henceforth, you will relieve yourselves in latrines—and only latrines.”

  First-time violators received a fine—a cockroach, a rat, a snake. Second-time violators received ten lashes from a wooden stick.

  The Venetians also forbade the eating of human flesh, dead or otherwise. They instructed each group to bury their dead. The Venetians provided a priest—Father Gabrio—to recite a few prayers during the burial.

  You did not need to have monastic training to recognize that Father Gabrio was no father. Not in the clerical sense. His brawny forearms seemed more suited for raising a mast than distributing the bread of communion. He walked precariously, unbalanced, as if he was not quite comfortable on land.

  The prisoners did not mind, though. Father Gabrio knew a few Latin phrases and the general rhythm of the prayers, even if he butchered most of the liturgy. Giovanni confided in us some months after the establishment of Father Gabrio’s ministry that the prison priest had been a servant in a monastery outside of Venice when he was a boy. That’s where he had learned to mimic the monks’ prayers.

  “At sea,” Giovanni said, “Gabrio used to cry out in his sleep. I once asked him what dark visions had visited him. Gabrio said that every night he dreamed that he was a shepherd, trying to steer his flock back home in a blinding storm.

  “A man can sail the world,” Giovanni continued, “but eventually he must face his destiny.”

  Despite his lack of training, Father Gabrio’s words lent an air of solemnity to the proceedings, as if the Lord took note of the life and death of each prisoner in the cave. Eventually, almost every prisoner attended the burials, no matter the identity of the deceased, just to hear Father Gabrio’s mumbled service.

  The Venetians also prohibited fighting between and within the factions. When conflicts arose, the parties were to submit the problem to the prison court, which meant Giovanni. He donned a black robe for the mediations. He would listen to the disputants patiently, then render a decision. There was no appeal. If the losing party resisted the execution of Giovanni’s ruling, sixteen Venetians armed with rocks and sticks would soon convince them of the wisdom of Giovanni’s judgment.

  The Venetians welcomed new arrivals, fed them, tended to any wounds, and explained the prison rules. After a week or two, they would introduce and transfer the new prisoner to the group of his countrymen or religious cohorts.

  Giovanni announced the institution of a criminal code for the prison—banning stealing, assault, and murder. Depending on the seriousness of their crimes, the perpetrators were subject to severe punishment, including amputation of fingers or hands, even death
.

  Only one murder took place after the Venetians asserted their control in the cave. A Turk killed a German in a dispute over food. The trial was held in public view, next to the spring. Each group brought a torch to the proceedings. The accused stood on a stone platform surrounded by guards recruited by the Venetians from different factions.

  The Turk stated that his victim had tried to steal a snake he had captured. After the Turk’s explanation and its translation into various languages spoken in the cave, the gallery of prisoners turned their attention to Giovanni, who mounted the platform and faced the defendant.

  “Death by hanging,” he pronounced.

  One of the Venetians immediately began to climb the rock wall. He had a rope coiled around his shoulder. A short distance up, he looped the rope around a rock that jutted out of the wall. He dropped the other end toward the ground. It had already been tied in a noose. One of the guards placed it around the neck of the condemned. Then he pushed him off the platform.

  The rope had apparently been twisted. The Turk’s body twirled in a circle. He knocked into the rock wall several times. He was kicking frantically, trying to gain a foothold. When the struggle ended, the body swung gently. The flames glistened against the wet stones. The trickle of water was the only sound in the cave.

  The rope had been acquired several weeks earlier from the Sultan’s guards. After a feeding, Giovanni had lined up behind the other prisoners seeking to exchange a precious stone or chunk of valuable metal for a scrap of food. When Giovanni’s turn came, he placed a golden goblet in the bucket. One of his countrymen had discovered the object while digging a latrine. Giovanni had showed it to us the previous day. It bore the Latin inscription “Citizen of Rome, citizen of the world.”

  As the guards perused the strange item, Giovanni shouted up to them in Arabic. He later reported the substance of the negotiations.

  “Five blankets,” he said.

  At first, the guards laughed at Giovanni’s presumption.

  “You will receive what we give you,” one of them shouted down, “if we decide to let you live.”

  “We have discovered other treasures,” Giovanni shouted back. “We will dig for still more. That is, if you wish us to.”

  The laughter stopped. The guards studied the goblet, conferring amongst themselves.

  Eventually, they gave Giovanni two blankets and the rope that was used to hang the German. Giovanni did not receive exactly what he had asked for, but he had established a new practice, a new commerce for the prison. Soon the Venetians were able to acquire many other useful items—cups, clothes, shoes, small knives, even flint rocks to help start a fire and oil to make a torch.

  “For the right price,” Giovanni said, “I could spend the night with the Sultan’s daughter.”

  The Venetians would barter many of the items received from the infidels to the other prisoners for gold, silver, and precious stones. Then the process would repeat itself. With the chance to gain access to goods outside the cave, the other groups increased their efforts to mine the old palace for its treasures.

  When I wasn’t sleeping or hunting for rodents, I spent my time scooping the earth with my hands into a pile of mud next to our shelter. We sifted through the dirt for several weeks before finding anything of value—small pieces of gold and silver. Subsequently, Salamago found a statuette adorned with red rubies—perhaps the Virgin Mary or maybe just a pagan idol.

  We did not have the rapport with the infidel guards that Giovanni and the Venetians had established. Nor did any of us speak Arabic. Instead of taking our chances with the guards, we traded our discoveries and the mosaic stones to Giovanni and the Venetians for goods they had received from the infidels. Giovanni’s monthly visits became opportunities for bartering, interspersed with the usual stories concerning his past life as a sailor. Soon he stopped collecting a tax altogether.

  We had been in the prison for seven months when winter came. Giovanni said it was the coldest few months he had ever experienced in the Levant. No frost covered the earth, no ice on the spring. But the raw dampness seemed to pierce my skin and sow a chill that spread down to the bone. Drinking the frigid water caused my temples to ache.

  Despite the suddenness of winter’s arrival, we were well prepared. We had spent the fall months trading for supplies of warmer clothing, blankets, and boots. Most important, we had accumulated enough wood to enable us to maintain a fire through the coldest days. We wrapped ourselves with every piece of clothing we possessed.

  Food was scarcer. We had little to trade. We no longer dug for treasures—the earth was too hard. And Salamago insisted on conserving the better part of the mosaic for future use. We continued to hunt, and we learned from the Turks how to set traps for rodents using the smallest morsels of food. Cockroaches seemed to comprise the staple of our diet, though. They entered the cave from every crevice and seemed to feel at home amongst the prisoners—at least until they found themselves between someone’s teeth.

  Andrés became sick toward the end of winter. Dysentery afflicted each of us, but Andrés’ case was more stubborn. For several weeks, whatever he ate or drank would pass through him immediately. He lay immobile on the ground, sweating or shivering, sometimes both. He never complained, though.

  Salamago said that Andrés’ illness would wane.

  “Your cousin,” Salamago said, “is strong. Have faith, Francisco.”

  “Faith in what, old man?” I responded.

  Salamago was right, though. Andrés gradually recovered. He lost much of his bulk, but he survived.

  We witnessed our first ransom that winter. I was standing at the falling water, filling a cup to take back to Andrés, when the hatch opened unexpectedly—the guards had fed us only hours before. Normally, the other prisoners would stream toward the light in anticipation of the distribution of food. Not then. Every prisoner froze. Conversations ceased in midsentence.

  “Michel Gilbert,” a guard shouted into the cave.

  The only movement—one man rising in the French camp, walking cautiously towards the light. He stopped only a few feet away from me.

  “Je suis Michel Gilbert,” he said, barely above a whisper.

  “Michel,” a man said, looking down from the edge of the opening, “I am Louis of Toulouse, a loyal vassal to your father. He sent me to Aleppo to pay your ransom.”

  The guards lowered a rope. It had a thick knot tied on the end. When it reached the ground, the Frenchman grabbed it and stood on the knot. Tears stained a path down his dirt-covered cheeks.

  Several guards helped pull the rope. The attention of every prisoner was riveted on the figure ascending, my own eyes staring jealously at another man’s future. Like a full moon gleaming against a black night.

  I was watching the two Frenchmen embrace when the hatch shut.

  Five other prisoners were ransomed that summer. Three Turks, another Frenchman, and an Englishman.

  Oftentimes it seemed as if our existence in the cave spanned one long twilight, interspersed with moments of lucidity when the guards opened the hatch. We could not see the sunrise or sunset. We did not know if it was day or night.

  Somehow time moved forward, though. We measured it by the feeding schedule—every other day—as if counting the time would make our sentence a tangible distance, a finite duration.

  That duration was mostly consumed with the tasks of survival—hunting, sleeping, digging for gold and silver, trading with the Venetians and other groups.

  But there were still many empty hours to fill. Questions that repeated themselves. Questions without answers. Would Andrés and I ever leave that cave? How long could we survive in that prison? Would I ever see you again, Isabel?

  The questions resonated against the rock walls, circling back against each other. Sometimes I held my palms against my ears to block out the echo.

  Salamago once asked me why I was covering my ears. I told him about the questions.

  “Evil spirits,” he said. “They have visite
d me too.”

  Sometimes conversation could keep the spirits at bay. We would try to prolong Giovanni’s visits, his tales of exotic ports and women. When he left, we would exchange our own stories. Never about home, about Aragón. Those intimate details strained painfully against the uncertainty of our predicament. To hear in words what we might never see.

  Instead, we talked of battles we had fought in the Levant—repeating anecdotes until we each knew every part by heart. Eventually, we ran out of stories and would tell the same ones over again, changing a fact or two, so that our audience would remain engaged. Two infidel soldiers became three, then four. A straight staircase became steep and winding.

  We told Manuel and Salamago about Toron, the execution of infidel soldiers, the massacre of civilians. We told them about the Krak—the castellan Don Lorgne, our successful sortie against the Muslim catapult. About our journey to Aleppo and the procession through the streets of the city.

  In turn, Salamago and Manuel described many battles. They had fought in the Levant for five years before their imprisonment. They never spoke of their capture, though.

  I was dozing when Andrés asked Salamago how he and Manuel were captured. I opened my eyes and sat up, anxious to hear his response. It did not come. Salamago stood up and walked toward the other end of the cave. Andrés never asked again.

  We did learn the circumstances of their capture, though. Salamago was foraging for insects in another part of the cave when Manuel whispered the story, pausing several times when other prisoners ventured near our shelter, continuing only when the intruders were well beyond earshot.

  “Salamago and I commanded a twelve-man team of Templar knights,” he said. “We were based at the Order’s fortress in Antioch. Princes and sultans had reached agreement to allow for the safe passage of Christian pilgrims to Muslim-occupied Jerusalem. The leaders of both communities had forged an uneasy peace in the region. Our company escorted pilgrims to the Holy City, acting as guides and protectors from the thieves, Christian and Muslim alike, that preyed on civilians.