‘Alan,’ said Robin, ‘ride up to the King and inform him of the situation; tell him we are in grave danger of leaving the French behind, and that we must slow the march. Go on, quickly. I don’t like the look of those Saracen horsemen.’
I guided Ghost between two of Little John’s walking spearmen and put my spurs into her sides. As I galloped up the left-hand side of the army, I looked over to the East and I could see what Robin was concerned about. A river of horsemen, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, was spilling out into the coastal plain roughly opposite Robin’s force - but they were heading towards the gap in the column. If they got between the main body of our army and the French they could surround the wagon train and cut it up at their leisure. I put my head down and raced Ghost as fast as I could towards the royal standard, a rippling splash of wind-tossed gold and red that fluttered half a mile ahead; and, in what seemed like only a few moments, breathless, sweating like a slave, I was calling out to the household knights to let me pass and, suddenly, I was in the presence of the King. He looked older than when I had last seen him this close to, on the beach in Cyprus, and more careworn, and I knew I was about to add to his worries.
‘Greetings, sire, from the Earl of Locksley, and he says that the French and the baggage-train are being left behind and we must slow the march or abandon them. Also, it looks as if a large body of Saracen horse is on the verge of getting between us and that same division.’
‘Are they, by God! William, Roger, Hugh, you three come with me; the rest of you keep the column going. Blondel,’ I smiled with pleasure at the King’s use of his personal nickname for me, ‘how many cavalry does Locksley have, about four score, isn’t it?’ I nodded in agreement. ‘Right, let’s see if they are any good.’
As we cantered back down the column, the King, his three bravest knights and myself all riding abreast, I saw that we were already too late. Three or four hundred Saracens in loose formation were galloping their scrubby little horses straight at the leading knights of the French division. All had their short bows in their hands, and as we watched, they let fly a cloud of arrows, which sailed high, came down, and rattled against the knight’s shields and chainmail coats. Without slowing their horses, the Saracens plucked fresh arrows from quivers on their saddles, nocked and loosed again; and again; and again. I was astounded, their rate of fire was faster even than our own Sherwood bowmen, and they were accomplishing this from the back of a galloping horse! Just as the Saracens must surely smash into the ranks of the French knights, who had levelled their lances, and were trotting forward ready to receive them, the Saracens swerved away from the line of knights, rode swiftly along the face of the division shooting another shower of arrows, skewering horses and men at close range, and then curved away back the way they had come, turning in their saddles to give the French one last parting volley from their short bows. It was an amazing display, and I doubted if anyone in our army could match their skill on the back of a galloping horse.
As they rode away from the knights, I noticed something strange: although many of the Frenchmen were stuck with arrows, some even had three or four shafts jutting from their mail, there were only a handful of empty saddles; far too few for the volume of arrows loosed at them. And then it dawned: the arrows might come thick and fast, but they had little power to penetrate proper armour, unless the horsemen were close. Certainly their weapons did not have the immense power of a Christian war bow, which could smash an arrow head through the interlocking steel rings of a hauberk, through the felt padding underneath and on deep into the body of a knight.
The King was now very close to Robin’s men, and we were still a good half a mile from the French division, but I swear I heard the roar that the French knights gave as they dug their spurs into their horses flanks and began to enthusiastically pursue the fleeing Saracen cavalry.
The King shouted: ‘No, you fools, no!’ And we pulled up, panting, next to Robin and his marching men, as five hundred of the finest knights in France galloped madly across the field in front of us, the giant destriers bearing heavy, fully armoured knights, chasing the bouncy little ponies that skipped away into broken scrub-land to the east. The knights charged in a compact mass, but on reaching the broken ground they split up into knots of twos and threes, chasing after Saracens like a pack of terriers dropped into a rat-infested barn. And worse than this - no sooner had the knights charged than another smaller force of Saracens, perhaps two hundred or so warriors, emerged from behind a low ridge and headed straight for the now-unguarded, open face of the wagon train. With stunning speed, they charged straight through the gaggle of crossbowmen who had hastily assemble to bar their way, cutting down men with their scimitars and shouldering the footmen aside with their ponies, and began slaughtering the unarmed drivers of the ox-carts with their blades, and leaning low in the saddle to hamstring the draught beasts. Within a dozen heartbeats, the whole baggage train had been brought to a standstill. The French knights at the other end of the third division were too far away to help, and although a handful of unhorsed men-at-arms and spearmen fought valiantly, they were no match for fast-moving men on horseback. In front of our eyes, the Saracens butchered the foot soldiers, slicing unprotected into faces and warding hands with their cruel curved swords, and begin to loot the wagon train. It was sheer carnage, footmen reeling back, blood jetting from terrible face wounds, others simply running to the rear, oxen bellowing in pain, drivers trying to hide beneath the heavy carts to escape the fury of the marauders - and the Saracens, almost unchallenged, helping themselves to goods, clothes, valuables, food and trotting away at their leisure with their plunder hanging heavy from their saddles.
We had not been idle, however. Robin’s cavalry force of eighty tough, well-trained men had turned around and formed up in two ranks, lances raised, and at the King’s command of ‘Advance!’ we trotted towards the bloody chaos of the French division.
The men advanced in perfectly straight lines. At a command from Sir James, the lances of the first rank came down in unison and forty horsemen leapt forward as one man. The first line covered the ground to the wagon train in ten heartbeats and crashed into the handful of Saracens who had been particularly greedy or just tardy in making their getaway. Moments later the second line followed them in. Sir James de Brus’s hours and hours of patient training had showed their worth. The lines of mail-clad riders surged forward like a rake through long grass, and the long spears plunged deep into the disordered enemy, skewering them in the saddle, and hurling their punctured corpses to the ground. However, only a few dozen raiders were caught by our sharp lances; most had seen our approach and were galloping eastward, heads turned back to watch us, as fast as their laden horses could carry them.
And then, having swept the enemy away from the wagons, and taken as many as we could on our spear points, we did the proper thing. We halted the charge with exemplary control a few hundred yards past the strewn wreckage of the lead ox-cart, and returned to the safety of the division. I had killed no one; in fact, I never came within twenty feet of a Saracen; but order had been restored to the wagon train in a short space of time, and the marauders had been seen off.
‘Neatly done, Locksley,’ called the King to Robin. ‘Very neatly done.’ And my master bowed gravely in the saddle at his sovereign, but I thought I caught a flicker of intense relief crossing his face, as brief as summer lightning.
‘Blondel,’ my King was calling to me.
‘Sire?’
‘Get back up to the head of the column. Go and tell Guy de Lusignan to rein up - I beg your pardon, I mean kindly request His Highness the King of Jerusalem to halt the march at my request. We will camp here today and try and get this mess sorted out. Off you go. Quickly now.’
And so I went.
The French knights drifted into the camp very late that afternoon in ones and twos, exhausted, thirsty, on lame, sweat-lathered horses. Their charge had had no impact on the enemy, as they had not been able to bring their lances to bear on him. They had achieved nothing; and lost more than half their number in the bloody spread-out skirmish that followed. After the charge had petered out, the knights found themselves scattered, alone, in unfamiliar territory, and they had been swiftly surrounded by swarms of Saracens, who appeared as if from nowhere; their horses were promptly killed beneath them, stuck with dozens of arrows, and then the unfortunate noblemen were either taken prisoner, or briskly slaughtered by enemies who outnumbered them ten to one. No more than two hundred of the knights who charged so boldly that afternoon made it back into the camp that evening, and many of those bore grievous wounds that would ultimately bring them face to face with their Maker before long.
I got all this from Will Scarlet, who watched some of the surviving French knights come limping in, and had spoken to their sergeants. Will had done well in our brief charge against the looters of the wagon train. He had killed a man with his lance, goring him through the waist above the hip as the Saracen was trying to escape with two great sacks of grain, which were so large that they had significantly slowed his horse. Will was excited at having, as he put it, ‘struck a proud blow for Christ,’ and I was pleased for him. I could not remember why I had ever suspected him of being Robin’s potential murderer. Looking at his honest face, with his cheerful gap-toothed grin, as he told me yet again about how he had directed the lance-head for the killing strike, I realised that he was a true friend, and a good man to have by my side when we were so far from home in an enemy land. I felt a wave of sheer misery when I thought of England; I longed for the cool air of Yorkshire, for Kirkton; I longed to see my friends Tuck, Marie-Anne and Goody once again; for a brief self-indulgent moment, I wished for nothing more than to be home once more.
The next day we stayed where we were, within a morning’s brisk ride of Acre, but we saw nothing of the enemy save for a few lone scouts on the skyline. The King had decided to re-order the divisions, much to the shame of the French. From now on, Richard decreed, the Knights Hospitaller and Templar would take turns in guarding the baggage in the wagon train. It was the position of maximum danger and, correspondingly, the most honour, and he was relieving the French of that duty. It was a slap in the face for Hugh of Burgundy, of course, but Richard was angry that his orders had been disobeyed on the first day of the march and he wanted to punish the Duke.
The King also comprehended that, in the heat of late summer - it was by now the end of August - we could not march in the middle of the day, so he ordered that the next day we all rise in the dead of the night, so as to be ready to march at break of day. And that is how we proceeded from then onwards: stumbling out of our blankets while the moon was still high; saddling horses largely by sense of touch, shuffling into our positions in the dark and moving off as the first pink streaks stained the eastern sky above the mountains. We halted each day before noon, made camp, and fed and watered the horses, before collapsing exhausted in any shade we could find to sleep away the afternoon.
Even travelling only during the morning, it was a very hard march; the problem for me was not so much my mail hauberk, which was heavy enough, but the thick felt under-garment that I needed to wear beneath the mail to serve as padding and give me sufficient protection against the arrows of the Saracens. It was almost unbearably hot to wear, and yet I dared not take it off while we were on the road, for we were under threat every day.
We were attacked somewhere along the column almost constantly, small harassing raids on a place where the enemy perceived there to be a weakness. A couple of hundred Saracens would swoop in, riding like the wind, swing past our marching line, shooting arrow after arrow into our ranks and then gallop away, still firing their short bows as they retreated. It was humiliating, rather than truly dangerous, at least to the mounted men-at-arms.
Unless shot from very close, the arrows would not penetrate through our mail and felt under-jackets, but stuck in the metal rings leaving us looking, after a prolonged cavalry attack, like human hedge pigs. Each arrow strike was no harder than a slap from a man’s hand but it was still unnerving and painful to feel a weapon strike your body, even if little damage was done. The real danger was to the archers - who built themselves makeshift shields from old wicker baskets or empty wooden boxes and who wore as much extra padding as they could in the searing heat - and to the horses: clad only in a cloth trapper, these brave animals were especially vulnerable to the arrows. Although they penetrated only a hand’s breadth into the animal’s muscles, half a dozen arrows could drive a horse mad with pain, and several animals went berserk during the march, killing men of our own side by kicking and biting like demons, until they were put out of their misery by a brave knight with a sword or, more often, a crossbow bolt or arrow from a few yards away.
Robin’s company fared better than most. The Saracens soon learnt that if they came to close to our ranks, and the great Wolf’s Head banner that we marched under, they would lose scores of their men from the sharp arrows of our bowmen. In fact, we were seriously attacked only three times over the next ten days as we marched through that heat-blistered terrain.
We marched past Caesarea, which had been razed to the ground by Saladin, and did not even pause for a drink at this once-proud Biblical city; but we did not lack for supplies, even though the baggage train was attacked on an almost daily basis. In the early evening, food, supplies and sometimes great barrels of fresh water and ale were brought ashore from the galleys of the fleet. And, on the whole, we ate well in the cool of the dusk. One evening, the King asked me and several of the other
trouvères
to come to his fireside and sing, but, while we pretended some jollity, drank his wine and made verses together, it was an uncomfortable meal. Sir Richard Malbête was there and he spent the whole meal staring at me across the fire with his feral, splintered eyes, but saying nothing. I imagined that I could see the mutilated face of Nur hovering above his shoulder, and it put me off my versifying. The King had received a spear thrust in his side during one attack on the column, not a serious wound, but enough to give him pain when he moved too quickly, and he was not in the best of form as a musician. And, on top of all that, it felt somehow wrong to be singing witty ditties about fair ladies and their elegant games of love, when we were in the middle of a desert, with the cries of the wounded breaking the night, and with a vast army of pagans somewhere out there in the darkness who would be trying to kill us in the morning.