The Crescent and the Cross

by S. J. A. Turney

  The guard was good. His lithe form danced out of the way, his sword clanging down against Arnau’s and knocking it aside. Had the Templar been unprepared, the blow might well have knocked him off balance and put him at the guard’s mercy. Fortunately, Arnau had anticipated this as a natural reaction, and he allowed the sword to be knocked away, swinging it to the side with the force of the motion. Again, for a moment, he heard that bone-chilling rasp of metal against metal.

  As the two men separated once more, he peered down at the blade in his hand, and then across at the enemy’s scimitar, and an idea formed in his head. Instead of pulling away from the enemy’s reaction…

  He gritted his teeth and gave the guard a nasty smile, waiting. The Moor narrowed his eyes for a moment, watching Arnau carefully, but the Templar made no move, and as he waited patiently, he saw the guard tensing. A battle of wills. Arnau had to crack first, but only once the man was as tense as he could be. Tense and uncertain men reacted instinctively, and that was what Arnau needed.

  Arnau broke first.

  His attack came as a swing at the guard’s side. Through natural instinct, just as Arnau had hoped, the Almohad threw his own sword into the way to parry, and the two met with another crash and then scraped, blade-edge to blade-edge. Under normal circumstances, Arnau would pull aside, ready for another strike, or the Moor would back off. This time, though, Arnau stepped in with his attack. Rather than the two blades bouncing apart, they stayed locked, sliding closer and closer to the hilt along the blade. Arnau put all his strength into pushing his sword, the shrieking of tortured metal making his skin prickle. The Moor panicked, uncertain what his opponent was trying to do.

  Then the two weapons reached the hand guards, having slid all the way along both blades.

  Arnau’s sword was of a fairly standard design, with a solid cross guard that jutted out to each side longer than his longest finger at right angles. The scimitar, conversely, had a narrow cross guard, just an inch or so out from the blade, of some golden-coloured metal and curved into a delicate arc.

  The Moor’s blade hit Arnau’s cross guard and stopped dead while Arnau’s blade, given a slight jump by a tiny flick of the wrist, leapt across the scimitar’s guard and sliced through the knuckles of the hand wielding it.

  The Moor was wearing gloves of a light, flexible leather, and they afforded insufficient protection against such a strike. Arnau’s blade tore the flesh from the knuckles along with the leather. The man bellowed out in pain, miraculously maintaining his grip on the scimitar despite the wound.

  Arnau smiled. He had the man now.

  Another swing and the Almohad managed to parry it with a hiss of agony at the pain this brought to his damaged hand. Not allowing him any time, the Templar struck again, a lunge that the guard had no hope of parrying. The man danced back out of the way. He was on the retreat, defensive, unable to counter Arnau’s blows without intense pain in his hand.

  ‘For the Lord loveth the just, and shall not forsake his faithful,’ Arnau said through bared teeth, stepping three paces forwards and swiping out with his sword, cutting downwards from left to right. The Moor stuttered something desperately from his own holy book and tried to parry, but his hand could not take the pressure and his sword was easily bashed aside as the man desperately tried to avoid falling, staggering back. Arnau snarled, looking ahead.

  ‘The just shall be kept without end.’

  Another swipe, this time cutting up from right to left, gripped with both hands. The panicked, desperate, pained Moor thrust his sword in the way once again, but his hand was numbed from the wound, and the Templar’s blow just too forceful. The sword was torn from the guard’s hand, and he staggered back once more, jabbering away in Arabic so fast that Arnau couldn’t catch a word of it.

  Almost there…

  ‘Unjust men shall be punished,’ Arnau spat, ‘and the seed of wicked men shall perish.’

  His last blow was a lunge directly at the man’s midriff. The Moor, now disarmed and clutching his wounded hand, could do nothing but attempt to dodge the blow. He leapt back and realised his error all too late as his calves smashed against the low parapet, and his momentum carried him over the edge. He screamed only briefly before the sound of his body smashing into the stone flags of the street silenced him.

  Arnau stepped to the edge and looked down. The man was a mess, lying twisted in a growing lake of dark liquid that glistened in the moonlight.

  He turned. Tristán and the other guard were clearly closely matched and their own contest was ongoing, both men sporting bloodstains yet clearly whole, for they fought with snarls of rage and the strength of lions. Arnau hefted his blade and marched towards them. He raised his sword to strike, helping the squire, but Tristán yelled ‘No!’

  Arnau held back his blow, as the squire lunged and sliced, cut and stabbed, chopped and parried, each blow met with a block or a dodge and returned only to be turned aside by Tristán’s blade. He watched for several heartbeats as the contest continued, and then, suddenly, it ended. The Moor lunged, but his blade dropped as it lanced out, and the squire stamped down, his foot slamming the blade to the floor even as his own sword jabbed, taking his opponent in the neck.

  As the Moor slid away, gurgling, Arnau nodded appreciatively.

  ‘Well done. I thought you too evenly matched to predict the outcome.’

  ‘I was wearing him down. Early on, I got him in the arm. Not a crippling blow, but as we fought, I could see him getting weaker and weaker. I just had to keep him going and avoid dying until his arm failed him.’

  Arnau grinned. ‘You remember your lessons better than I expected.’

  Tristán sighed and straightened, stretching. He looked around and frowned.

  ‘Where’s Calderon?’

  Arnau’s own brow furrowed, and he looked around at where they’d left the stricken knight seated, screaming from his ordeal at the parapet. There was no sign of him.

  ‘God’s bones, where has he gone?’

  They spun around, trying to spot him, perhaps hiding among the roof terrace’s potted plants.

  ‘The guard’s sword has gone,’ Arnau said suddenly, noting the absence of the blade he’d torn from his opponent’s grip. He must have only just gone, then. He held up a hand to silence the squire, who was cursing quietly, and listened.

  Pounding footsteps on the stairwell below.

  ‘He’s running. Come on.’

  10. Disaster

  1 July 1212, Cordoba

  Arnau pounded down the stairs with Tristán at his heel, the squire cursing like a sailor. Things were rather spiralling out of control. It had been bad enough that they had more or less been forced to kidnap the man they had been hoping to rescue and had then seemingly driven him into madness. Then they had imposed upon a good man, only to be sold out by his sons. Now, those sons had apparently reported them to the Almohad authorities.

  If word had spread from there, then it would now be known around the city’s military that a small bunch of Christians were in town, and they would naturally be presumed to be spies or saboteurs. Any time now, the entirety of Cordoba would be looking for them. The boys would have tried to preserve the innocence of Farraj in their denunciations, but the corpses of two city guards on his rooftop terrace would almost certainly land the man in trouble regardless.

  Now, on top of all of that, they had been forced to leave most of their gear behind when they ran after Calderon. Their horses were in a stable down the street with Yusuf, but one of the brothers, along with a guard, was headed there, so there was a very good chance that they were about to lose not only the horses and the rest of their gear, but also a good friend.

  And all of this was beyond their control, for now they had to concentrate on the broken-minded former knight who was racing through the archway and out into the street. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, they burst out into the house’s courtyard. Arnau caught a brief sight of one of Farraj’s sons in the doorway at the far side, his expressio
n a mix of hatred and fear, for seeing them appear, the young man must have realised that the guards he had summoned were dead. There was no time for the boy, though, and so Arnau and the squire spun round into the passage and out into the street.

  The Templar’s head snapped left and right, but it was not hard to locate Calderon. He was running along the street to the left, the wrong way entirely for the stables, sword in hand and bellowing like an enraged bull. Arnau found himself wondering whether Tristán had been right that they would have been better leaving him alone.

  They were catching up with the running knight now, not because they were moving any faster, but because every time Calderon reached a side street or a junction his head switched this way and that, looking down each of them. Some distance from the house, he seemed to see what he was looking for and turned, heading downhill to the left and issuing a fresh barrage of noise. Arnau, heart thundering in time with his feet, caught odd words, though they made no sense. The man’s verbal diatribe was seemingly a weird mix of Arabic and Castilian, part prayer and part curse in both tongues, as though his brain was a churning combination of both, throwing up random splashes as it roiled.

  ‘What… in God’s name… is he doing?’ rasped Tristán as they reached that same corner and hurtled round it without pausing.

  But what he was doing quickly became apparent.

  The side street they had taken seemed to run down to the city’s walls, somewhere near the river if Arnau was able to judge his directions. At the end of the street lay the heavy Moorish defences, a tower rising square and strong directly in front, with what appeared to be a postern gate beside it. Calderon had to be fleeing the city.

  Did that mean he had remembered? Had he broken free of whatever they had done to him? Possibly, but in doing so it seemed worryingly likely that his mind had broken with it. Arnau clenched his teeth. If the city’s military were not already looking for them then they soon would be, for it would be difficult to miss the bellowing lunatic wielding a sword and running for the gate, two more armed men in close pursuit.

  As they neared the end of the street, Arnau’s frown returned. The postern gate was closed, as one would expect in the hours of darkness, and men stood there on guard. If Calderon really expected to leave the city through it, then he was hopelessly deluded, and his mind had truly gone. Unless…

  Arnau tried to pick out what the man was bellowing as he ran and realised his error now. Fragments he heard from the man’s bellowing told him all he needed to know. ‘Ye know not, nor do ye understand, that ye go in darkness,’ and ‘ye shall die like men die, and ye shall fall like any of the princes,’ both from the eighty-second Psalm, were hardly light and hopeful passages. And though he had no frame of reference for the Arabic fragments he heard, he assumed they were from that heretical Moorish book and were of a similarly dark and violent nature.

  Calderon was not intent on escape. He was intent on battle. He was running for the walls because that was where he was guaranteed to find a guard. A whole new level of panic settled into Arnau. If Calderon started a fight at the postern gate, it would draw more and more men from the walls and the adjacent tower. He, and by extension the Templars too, would very quickly be overwhelmed.

  Fresh horror lent his stride an extra turn of speed, and Arnau sheathed his blade now as he ran. Huffing, pounding, blood thundering in his ears, he desperately chased down Calderon. He reached the berserk knight just before they burst out into the wide thoroughfare that followed along the inside of the city walls and threw himself at Calderon.

  The Templar hit his prey heavily, arms wrapping around his thighs and gripping tight as the two men slammed to the ground, hard. Arnau could hear Tristán just behind him, too. They were hardly subtle. Just fifty or so paces from the tower they were in plain sight of anyone looking their way, and given the noise they had been making, everyone would be looking their way. He didn’t have time to consider them, though. He had to act, and now.

  Calderon had had the wind knocked from him as he hit the ground. His hand still gripped that sword, but his bellowing had ceased, and he was momentarily still. Arnau lifted his weight off the man, yanked at him, rolling him onto his back, and delivered an almighty slap to the man’s cheek. He had no idea whether it would do good or further harm, but it was what you did for people in a panic, and so it seemed appropriate.

  Tristán was there now, crouching beside them as Calderon stared, wild-eyed, at the two Templars, a growing red handprint on the side of his face.

  ‘We have to get out of here,’ the squire hissed.

  ‘The gate is guarded and barred,’ Arnau replied absently, examining the man beneath him, preparing for any move, in case Calderon suddenly attacked him.

  ‘Not out of the city, Brother,’ Tristán grunted, ‘away from here. The guards are coming.’

  Arnau looked up. The two Almohads in the shadows of the postern gate had now become four, and they were in discussion about what to do, fingers pointing along the street to this odd display. Arnau felt his pulse speed up once more. Danger was rising again and Tristán was right.

  ‘Grab him.’

  Prepared as they were for Calderon to struggle and attempt to fight them off, Arnau and Tristán managed to pull him up to his feet with relative ease. The knight, eyes still bulging madly, looked off towards the gate, his mouth opening and closing, biting down on soundless words. Arnau could not tell whether he was looking at the guards with a berserk desire for blood or fear of them attacking. It was too hard to read this near-insane expression.

  ‘Calderon, come on.’

  The man did not resist as the two Templars started urging him back along the street. At the gate, someone hollered for the three men to stop and stay where they were. Arnau ignored them. Speeding up, he half expected Calderon to fall, or to come to a halt and turn, but what he did was to run. Moments later, rather than dragging him away, Arnau and the squire were racing to keep up with him again.

  A little ahead, Calderon, now free of their grasp, turned right into a side alley. The other two followed him close, and they pounded down the narrow, shadowed lane, taking another left just as the guards reached the end behind them, still shouting for them to halt.

  Arnau hoped Calderon was thinking straight now, that he knew what he was doing, for the Templar was hopelessly turned around and had no idea where to go. Instead, he trusted to fortune and the will of God, and ran on after Calderon, the squire right behind him. They turned again and again, always with the small knot of Almohad guards not far behind them calling for them to stop and shouting for any other soldiers in the vicinity to join them.

  At one point a second Arabic shout added to the calls, coming from off to the left, and Arnau and Tristán both turned to look down another side alley in the direction of what had to be a second group of guards. When they turned back there was no sign of Calderon. They were alone.

  ‘Ballocks,’ snapped Tristán in loud Aragonese, heedless of any danger now.

  As the pair stumbled to a halt, spinning, looking this way and that to try and identify where the knight had gone, the sound of their pursuers grew, the guards approaching the last corner, about to fall upon their prey.

  Arnau felt the arms of panic begin to embrace him again, and let out a yell of shock as something grabbed him and jerked him backwards, a hand slapping over his mouth and muffling the cry even as it arose.

  As he was let go and stumbled into the pitch darkness, his assailant grabbed Tristán in a similar fashion and pulled him out of the alley into the gloom, then swiftly shut the door through which he’d stepped. The place smelled musty and dusty, old and disused, with an overtone of rotting vermin. Arnau could hear nothing over the pounding of his own blood, but as he calmed his breathing and the pulse slowed, he gradually became aware of what was happening.

  Wherever they were, they were in total darkness, and it had to have been Calderon that pulled them to safety from the alley. He could hear two people breathing in the tight confin
es, both with that stifled aspect that told him both men were trying to keep their laboured breaths as quiet as possible.

  Shouts and calls in Arabic washed in through the door. Arnau listened carefully. Two groups of guards had met and seemed to be standing in the alley just outside, not more than ten feet from them. There was some argument going on out there, the two groups each blaming one another for losing the fugitives. Angry words were bandied about and Arnau heard the distinct sound of tussling as men shoved each other. He heard the rasp of a blade part-drawn, but what was about to boil over into a full brawl was suddenly halted by the arrival of a third party. A man with an authoritative tone snapped at them to stop.

  Arnau held his breath for a moment as everything went silent and was grateful that the other two had decided to do so as well. There was a long pause, and then the officer barked at them, issuing orders to continue the search. Listening, he heard the group split into two, heading left and right from the door.

  Arnau remained silent for some time as the sounds of the search parties faded, and he shivered. A new sound arose now, that of someone fumbling carefully in the dark. Not sure what to say or what to do, he stood still, breathing slowly, as a door was opened on the far side of the small room. Calderon stepped through into moonlight and gestured for the others to follow. Arnau and Tristán shared a look, hard to see in the darkness, and then emerged into a small, impoverished courtyard. This place was no lavish arcaded home, but a rarely used and very poor place, old boxes and empty sacks lying in the dust, weeds attempting to turn the place into a jungle.

  Arnau opened his mouth to speak, but Calderon placed a finger to his lips, hushing the Templar. He crossed to the far side of the courtyard, where there was another plain and ancient door, and tried it. It opened with a low creak and a jarring shudder. The man held up a warning hand and then slipped into the darkness beyond. There was half a minute of shuffling and scraping noises within, and then the darkness inside retreated in the face of a low, silvery light. Calderon reappeared and beckoned.