Song of the Eight Winds - An Epic Tale of Medieval Spain

by Peter Kerr

  Pedrito tried to excuse himself by saying he’d seen enough of death and butchery for one day. But the king would hear none of it. He was giving an order, not extending an invitation, so Pedrito had better look sharp and do what he was told. In the coming days, there would be many missions much more gruelling than the one Pedrito had just completed, and no lethargy or lack of commitment to the cause would be tolerated. King Jaume was being typically uncompromising in his resolve.

  ‘You there, Lorenç!’ he shouted to his armourer, a fawning little man, with a permanent, though humourless, smile on his face. ‘Have a horse saddled for Master Blànes. A nice, docile hack will do, as I doubt our fine helmsman here will be doing any charging.’

  ‘But I’m not even armed,’ Pedrito objected. ‘And even if I was, I wouldn’t know how to use a sword or –’

  ‘And another thing, Lorenç,’ the king cut in, ‘fetch Master Blànes a shield and a “morning star” as well.’ He chuckled quietly to himself. ‘Sí, that should do him nicely!’

  The ‘morning star’, when it appeared, turned out to be a wooden ball studded with metal spikes and attached to a short handle by a chain.

  The king laughed when it was handed to Pedrito, who was already making himself as comfortable as possible astride his allotted horse, while looking markedly uncomfortable to be in this position at all. He was well accustomed to ambling along a farm track on a mule’s back, but it was something else entirely to go galloping into battle on a real horse, albeit an allegedly ‘nice, docile’ one. Pedrito wasn’t relishing the prospect.

  Alongside him sat the king, duly mounted on his charger. ‘There you are, Little Pedro,’ he muttered through a mischievous grin, ‘– you don’t need any soldierly skill to handle that subtle instrument. Just take care not to hit yourself on the head when you’re trying to bludgeon a Moor with it. Those spikes would do no good to that leather helmet I lent you. Old and scruffy it may be, but it holds great sentimental value for me nonetheless.’

  Pedrito clearly wasn’t sharing the king’s sense of levity about this. ‘Really?’ he replied dryly.

  ‘Sí, it was the one I was wearing when I took a life for the very first time.’ Pensively, the king stroked his cheek. ‘Hmm, only fourteen I was – maybe even just thirteen.’

  Pedrito cast him what almost passed as a reassuring look. ‘Don’t worry, senyor, I’ll do my best to make sure it isn’t the one I’m wearing when someone else takes my life.’

  King Jaume, becoming more excited by the second at the thought of impending action, laughed heartily – and a tad manically, Pedrito thought. He was witnessing first-hand the young king’s infamous impetuosity, and he could only hope that the results wouldn’t be too disastrous. His hopes weren’t bolstered when it quickly transpired that only twenty-five equally-impulsive young knights were ready (and willing!) to join the king in his impromtu foray into enemy territory. Even allowing for the huge casualty count resulting from the morning’s encounter with En Guillen de Muntcada’s men, there was still a vast number of Moorish troops on the island – forty-two thousand in the capital city alone, according to Ali – so it struck Pedrito that King Jaume might just be biting off a little more than he could chew here.

  Pedrito considered the ‘morning star’ which had been thrust at him by the hurrying, scurrying Lorenç. It was now occupying his right hand, while his other was gripping a shield. To Pedrito’s non-equestrian way of thinking, this left him two hands short of being able to control the horse on whose back he was about to gallop off.

  ‘With due respect, senyor,’ he said to the king, ‘I think I’ll manage better without this weapon.’

  King Jaume frowned. ‘Are you mad, Master Blànes? Going into battle unarmed?’

  Pedrito handed the ‘morning star’ back to Lorenç, then pulled a length of braided twine from his pocket. ‘This will serve my purpose better. At least I know how to use it.’

  ‘A piece of string?’ the king scoffed. ‘What’s that for? Are you going to dismount and strangle every Moor we come across?’

  This induced an outburst of laughter from those within earshot.

  With a polite little smile, Pedrito rolled up the cord and returned it to his pocket. ‘I’m sure it won’t come to that, Majestat. Well, I certainly hope it won’t come to that.’

  ‘And so do we all, Master Blànes. And so do we all.’ Laughing lustily again, the king set the butt of his lance into his right stirrup, then stood up and shouted, ‘Follow me, brave lads! Let us hunt down those sickly Saracens and give them another dose of Christian medicine! Ava-a-a-ant! Onward, men! Onward for Spain and for God!’

  Luckily for Pedrito, the king set out at an easy trot, which seemed to be to the liking of the heavier warhorses, as well as to Pedrito’s hack, which did indeed appear to be a docile beast, without even a hint of the wilful tendencies typical of the mules he was more accustomed to handling. Apart from having the encumbrance of a shield on his left arm, he actually felt quite at ease atop his mount, and would probably have been looking forward to the ride had it not been for the nagging thought that he might well be riding to his death.

  With the king beside him at the head of the little troop, he took the same route by which he had returned earlier while bearing the weight of Rafael’s litter on his shoulders. Instead of going straight ahead through the scene of so much carnage, however, he skirted the battlefield by what he considered to be a respectful margin. But respectful though the distance may have been, it still wasn’t enough to allow even the most insensitive of nostrils to escape the stomach-turning smell of death that was spreading ever wider with the rising of the warm September sun. And this wasn’t the nebulous smell that had been sensed before the so-called battle. This was the unmistakable stench of putrefying flesh. The stench that oozes from a rat lying dead in a trap – but magnified here to a nauseating intensity.

  Retching, the king covered his nose. ‘Jesús!’ he gasped as he paused to survey the site of the massacre from the crest of a hummock they were traversing. ‘I’ve seen the aftermath of more battles than I care to remember, but I’ve never seen anything to compare with that.’ He blessed himself, then muttered, ‘Holy Mother of God! There could be as many as fifteen hundred dead strewn over that small stretch of land!’

  ‘Maybe not all dead yet,’ Pedrito said. ‘And the thought of that is even more sickening than the smell.’

  But if the king heard him, he gave no such indication. ‘Es coll de sa batalla. The vale of the battle,’ he murmured, staring stony-faced at the gruesome legacy bequeathed by just one small unit of his army. ‘Es coll de sa batalla…’

  ‘The vale of one-sided butchery would be more like it,’ Pedrito blurted out without thinking.

  But again, the king appeared not to have been listening. ‘Es coll de sa batalla,’ he repeated absently. ‘And the fate of those who perished here will be the fate of every Saracen who rejects the one true faith.’ He blessed himself once more. ‘May God help us in our quest to rid this land of the infidel hordes.’

  ‘Look there, Majestat!’ one of his companion knights called out. He was pointing to a hill some way off to the north. ‘Moors! Three hundred of them, maybe four – and nearly all on foot!’

  ‘God has answered my plea even more quickly than I could have hoped,’ King Jaume murmured. He stood high in his saddle again and shouted to the waiting column of cavalry, ‘Brace yourselves for the kill, brave boys, for there skulks the pack of foxes!’

  And off he set at a brisk canter, a long streamer fluttering from the head of his lance, his small squadron of mounted men-at-arms and their retinues in close pursuit. To Pedrito’s great relief, his horse seemed to know its place, which happened to be several lengths behind the rear of the column. As a hack, his mount’s purpose in life was to carry its master to a battle, but not into it. That was when the heavier chargers took over, and they could now get on with it while the hack provided emergency backup in case any unhorsed knight should require his ser
vices for a quick getaway. Anyway, this was the theory as Pedrito interpreted it. Horse sense, so to speak, and he was happy to go along with it.

  As soon as the Moors saw the Christian party heading in their direction, they took flight and made for a tree-mottled hill a short distance farther north from their present position.

  ‘We’d better waste no time if we’re to overtake them, my lord,’ one of the king’s suite urged. ‘If they reach the cover of the woods on that second hill…’

  But before he could complete his sentence, King Jaume was away at a hot gallop, with three other knights chasing close behind, and the remainder of the company left to catch up as best they could.

  Pedrito knew nothing of the accepted procedures of going into battle, but the same horse sense that told him it was prudent for him to be bringing up the rear of the column also told him that the king was currently letting his fighting spirit rule his head. And possibly to the point of total recklessness at that.

  By the time Pedrito reached the base of the second hill, which had already been dubbed Es Puig del Rei, the King’s Mountain, by a waggish element within this swashbuckling band of young cavallers, it was apparent that the majority of the Moors had, in fact, made it to the cover of the woods. Pedrito estimated that no more than a hundred remained on the open lower slopes to face the Christian onslaught. And although this depleted Moorish rearguard still outnumbered their attackers, it was obvious even now that they would be capable of offering little resistance.

  Pedrito could see that the king and his three consorts had already slain four or five foot soldiers (if, indeed, they were any kind of soldiers at all), while those Christian cavalrymen following on were dispatching the other scattering remnants of the Moorish infantry by sword, axe or lance as the opportunity arose.

  The oft-vaunted policy of attempting to convert their Muslim adversaries to Christianity was clearly no more on the agenda now than it had been during the wholesale bloodletting of earlier in the day. Which prompted Pedrito to recall some words of advice put to him by al-Usstaz, ‘The Professor’, during one of his nocturnal discourses aboard the pirate galley:

  ‘Never mistake a religious war for a holy one, my friend.’

  The king and his three companions were deep in conversation as Pedrito ascended the slope towards them. From the way they were pointing in different directions, it looked as though they were assessing the number of Saracens already killed, while also taking a few minutes to give their horses a rest. There wasn’t another living soul in sight, as the rest of the royal contingent had now taken off in pursuit of all the Moors still capable of running. All the Moors, that is, except one, and the direction he was running in was directly at the king.

  Pedrito would have been about a hundred paces away when he noticed him, mounted on a handsome Arab stallion, breaking from a clump of trees at the gallop with his lance aimed at the king’s back. From his attire, it was obvious that this was no pseudo soldier, but a member of the Moorish military elite, and a skilled horseman to boot.

  Pedrito shouted a warning to the king, but the clamour of men killing and being killed in the adjacent woods drowned out his voice. Apparently, the noise had also masked the sound of the the Arab stallion’s hooves thundering down the hillside behind the king’s little group, who, blissfully unaware of the impending danger, continued to survey the scene below them.

  With not a second to spare, Pedrito jumped down from his horse and took from his pocket the length of cord which King Jaume had made fun of before setting out on this raid. Picking up a pebble about the size of a small egg, Pedrito couched it in the little leather cradle that was attached mid-way between the two extremities of the twine, gave the device three rapid overhand whirls, then let go one end to released the stone in the direction of the charging Moor. It hit him square on the front of his steel helmet with such force that he was propelled backwards out of his saddle.

  The first the king knew of this little drama was when he saw the riderless Arab stallion racing past him down the hill. Instinctively, King Jaume wheeled round to witness the stunned Moorish cavalryman getting to his feet with his lance held menacingly in his right hand. No sooner had Pedrito arrived on the scene than King Jaume told him to ask the Moor to surrender. His reasoning was that, as this Moor was clearly a knight himself, he deserved to be treated as such. The Moor’s response to this chivalrous invitation, however, was to tilt at his opposite Christian numbers.

  The king and his men were still on horseback, and he quickly let it be known to his subordinates that the welfare of their mounts was his primary concern.

  ‘Horses are in short supply on this this campaign, brothers,’ he said. ‘The vast majority of our knights have only one apiece, so take care that this Saracen’s lance does no harm to yours. Sí, never forget – the life of one horse is worth that of twenty Moors.’

  Thereupon, he proceeded to instruct the members of his party on how best to treat this particular twentieth fraction of a horse’s life.

  ‘Let’s surround him, and when he thrusts at one of us, the one immediately behind him can strike him down in such a way that he’ll pose no further threat to anyone.’

  While this delicate manoevre was being set up, another knight, whom Pedrito recognised as one of the king’s entourage called En Pedro Lobera, came galloping out of the woods and ran straight at the hapless Moor, who reacted by plunging his lance deep into the horse’s chest. Although the animal was done for, the impetus of its charge knocked the Moor back to the ground, where the king and his men fell upon him with the points of their swords at his throat.

  ‘We’ll give him one more chance,’ King Jaume declared. ‘Tell him once again to surrender, Master Blànes!’

  ‘Lé!’ the Moor growled, his negative body language obviating the need for King Jaume to ask Pedrito for a translation. ‘Lé!’ he snarled again, then went to draw his sword, which determined that his one-word declaration of defiance had been the last word he would ever speak.

  ‘By my reckoning, that makes something like eighty Saracens killed on this outing,’ the king remarked as he wiped the blood from his sword with a leaf from a handy fig tree. ‘And that isn’t counting those still being done away with by our lads in the woods there.’ He gave En Pedro Lobera a comforting pat on the shoulder. ‘So, amic, this tally should more than compensate for the loss of your horse, no?’

  ‘I’m responsible for one of those deaths,’ Pedrito admitted, but with a distinct lack of pride. He was too preoccupied with his own thoughts to take any notice of what En Pedro’s reaction to the king’s questionable words of comfort had been. ‘Responsible – at least in part,’ he added as an afterthought.

  ‘How so, Master Blànes?’ the king queried. ‘You’re talking in riddles again, I fear.’

  Pedrito took what the king had called ‘a piece of string’ from his pocket and dangled it from his fingers. ‘Remember this, senyor? You thought I might use it for strangling Saracens?’ He then pointed to the dent on the front of the dead Moor’s helmet.

  The king nodded his head slowly as he put two and two together. ‘I’ve heard stories of the great prowess of the slingers from these Balearic Islands of Mallorca, Menorca and Ibiza in ancient times. The legendary Balearic Slingers – the pride of the Roman legions, weren’t they? Indeed, it’s said that Mallorcan mothers wouldn’t give their little sons a morsel of bread to eat until they’d knocked it from a branch with a slingshot.’ A grin spread across his lips. ‘Did your mother also treat you in this cruel way, Little Pedro?’ he teased. ‘Is that how you gained such skill with your piece of string?’

  ‘She didn’t have to encourage me,’ Pedrito replied matter-of-factly. ‘No, us kids around Andratx had listened to tales about the Balearic Slingers since we were in the cradle. Los Honderos were our heroes. And, by the way, they were the pride of Hannibal’s Carthaginian army long before they fought for the Romans.’ Only now did a faint look of pride come to his face. ‘Sí, senyor, we could make a sl
ing and hit moving targets a hundred paces away when we were still only knee-high to a gecko.’

  ‘Well, it was playtime well spent,’ the king pronounced, ‘for today you and your piece of string may well have saved my life!’ His congratulatory thump on the back was hearty enough to make Pedrito cough. ‘Come, lads,’ King Jaume laughed, ‘let’s round up the rest of our band and make our way back to camp. A good day’s work has been done, and we must give our thanks to God for that.’

  *

  It was late afternoon by the time they’d covered the three miles back to Santa Ponça. After dismissing his company, King Jaume told Pedrito to stay close by him. He was now to be a fully-fledged member of the king’s train, and as such would be required to be on call at all times for whatever duties might be required of him.

  They dismounted at the edge of the clearing which had been established as the royal compound and walked towards the king’s tent, from where two figures emerged to greet them.

  King Jaume nudged Pedrito with his elbow. ‘En Guillen and En Remon de Muntcada. Something tells me that my two eminent military counsellors won’t be too pleased with me for having set off on that little unplanned mission.’ He wasn’t wrong.

  En Remon’s face was a picture of utter exasperation. ‘What in heaven’s name have you been doing?’ he barked at the king, prompting Pedrito to surmise that this young monarch’s impetuosity had become such a thorn in the flesh of his more cautious generals that this one at least was prepared to risk a royal backlash by berating him as he would a wayward child. Even more significantly, En Remon was prepared to bring the king to book in front of Pedrito, a bottom-of-the-heap underling in his aristocratic eyes. ‘Did you want to kill yourself and all the rest of us as well? If luck had gone the other way and you’d lost your life – and I’ve no doubt you ran the risk of it – then your army and all that’s been put into this crusade would have been lost. You are the figurehead and inspiration – irreplaceable! How often must you be told?’