‘It’s simply, I’m sorry – but it’s simply that I’m getting old, Monète,’ he tells his riding mule; an animal that’s busily employed stripping a sallow of its shoots and at the other end in making an unpleasant smell.
‘I am too old in body for a military adventure.’
Adventure?
Baldwin glances back to see if anyone beside Monète has heard him use that word. ‘
A just and holy war. A service to all Christendom. An enterprise to win back the Holy City for Christ’s own greater glory!’
is what he should have said, and how he’d always put it in his sermons.
Just then his eye alights on a small group of men and sumpter beasts led by a mounted knight; a group advancing to the line exactly like a thousand others, except for the squire’s red hair. So typical, so much the same as all the others, chattering like starlings on a roost, excited to be on the move, bright-eyed with expectation.
God bless them for their simple faith,
their Primate thinks benignly stifling a yawn. The tall knight with the malformed ear looks strong and energetic.
But young, so young – why hardly out of boyhood;
his ardent face the face of all such innocents. The face of the croisade.
As Baldwin stoops to rub his aching knee, he thinks of Richard’s face in Anjou and Westminster. Alight with pride. Consumed by greed. At Fontevraud Duke Richard spoke of guarding trade routes, building a new empire great as Alexander’s, boasting he’d annex the Latin Kingdom for himself. There is a rumour circulating in the camp that in despite of his betrothal to Ays of France, Richard plans to wed the Palestinian Queen’s younger sister, Isabella.
And if that’s true
, thinks Balwin,
it would suggest we’ve all been duped – me in my sermans, the crucesignati in their faith and trust. To make of us tools in the hands of those intent on gain, not for Christ’s glory but their own.
The Kings’ Croisade is on the move, unstoppable in its intent.
But is it God’s design or that of an avaricious prince? Am I naive to think that Christ is with the enterprise,
the old archbishop asks himself.
Or even
(terrible suspicion)
that He is here at all?
With a feeling of dismay Baldwin acknowledges a lapse of faith; one of those abrupt descents from firm belief to honest doubt which all too frequently assail him. Sometimes he feels that he knows less about himself and his relationship to God than when he was a novice no older than that tall young knight, with a full head of hair still and a young man’s embarrassingly carnal inclinations.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa…
Baldwin signs the cross, puts up his cowl and takes a breath; a little ritual that he’s evolved which sometimes seems to help. ‘Oh Lord, sustain me in my faith!’ he cries fervently, to the surprise of all in earshot and the flat-eared consternation of Monète the mule.
CHAPTER TWO
‘Oh Lord, sustain me in my faith!’
You’d have thought a man who was first-cousin to a saint could never doubt his calling. But if what the old archbishop cried surprised us, I’ve learned since then that faith can be stretched – stretched until it breaks.
Our journey south to the seaport of Marseille took us four weeks including the delay at Lyons. On the first day we covered less than a league, which hardly seemed to justify the effort. ‘If you and I had lain abed to Vespers an’ then doddled on at a slow snail’s gallop,’ I overheard Jos telling Bertram, ‘we’d still have caught the yellow-crosses at their breakfast.’
We none of us saw either of the kings that side of Lyons. Nor any of the preux chevaliers of Christendom, save for the old archbishop on his mule. What we saw chiefly were a line of horses’ arses moving through a pulp of mud and dung and trampled vegetation. Smashed copses. Flattened fields of rye and buckwheat. Ruined harvests. Wasted hamlets. Mutilated cats and dogs. Every poultry house was silent by the time we reached it, every barn stripped of its hay. The fields of Burgundy were empty of their cattle, its woods of game and swine. We saw our Christian armies cut a swathe of devastation through the land, yet all the time thought only of ourselves. It’s true. To be a part of that great enterprise, to make a gift to it of everything we had, was all we wanted in the world. That’s what I told myself. I told myself that anything I still felt for the wife I’d left behind was no more than a distraction from my destiny to serve. They say that absence strengthens bonds. But with each league I put between us, I could feel Elise’s hold loosen. Away from the sight and smell of her my feelings ebbed and slackened like a watercourse in want of rain. Even the guilt I felt for what I’d done on our last night had dwindled to a trickle.
Horns sounded night and morning up and down the line, to tell us when to halt and when to rise, and most days we sang as we broke camp the best of all the croisade hymns, bellowed high into the summer morning air:
‘Wood of the True Cross before
Royal gonfanons of war!
Christian trumpets proudly sound;
Never have they given ground,
By their oaths of honour bound,
Strengthened in God’s Holy Law!’
God smiled upon the enterprise. Or so it seemed to His believers.
My forty days’ knight service ran out while we were still at Chinon. So from thenceforth, like the men I led, I was paid as an archbishop’s soldier.
My little Manor Squad were on the whole a cheerful band who belted out the verses of the hymn as readily as I did. Along with other ruder songs in Engleis. They trusted me and I was proud to be their leader, finding tasks for each of them that met my expectations. Beyond his duties as a squire, Jos shared the cooking with John Hideman and helped him with the horses. The ploughman’s natural gift, his reassuring whistle, made him the best groom for Raoul – a thing decided after my high-tempered destrier had bitten Albie and stamped on Jos’s toes more times than anyone found helpful. Alberic and Bertram pitched the tents and picketed the mules. The elder giving orders, the younger doing most of the hard swearing. It also fell to Bertram as the senior man to guard our coffer of four-hundred shillings, all in silver pennies, marching beside the mule that carried it with one hand on the coffer-lid, the other on his dagger.
When was it that it rained so hard?
I think it must have been on the third or fourth day of the march that the heavens opened – and opened wide enough as Jos would have it to wash away our sins twice over! The dyes ran in the nobles’ priceless garments, to stain them underneath we all supposed, all sorts of interesting colours. Our own were plastered to our bodies. Water trickled down our necks, sucked at our horses’ hooves. Ruts cut into ruts, and in no time the way was churned into a mire that forced us into detours through the fields.
It was on the outskirts of the town of Nevers that we happened on a laundry van embedded axle-deep in mud. While John and Alberic and Bertram set shoulders to the wheels to push it back into the road, the old laundresses shouted their encouragements from beneath its looped-up canvas. The stoutest of the sisterhood came from the port of Deal in Kent, where fifty years before she told us she’d been baptised Guillemette. In addition to a hairy mole on her flat nose and grey brows thick as ropes, she had three chins – one hammocked in a tight barbette with two more underneath. To call the woman pot-bellied would do the pot a favour. But she had some good features – two of them, a massive pair of breasts networked with purple veins, and resting on the tailboard of the cart like pumpkins on a shelf.
Young Jos, who’d always been as randy as a rabbit, blew out his cheeks and whistled at them rudely. ‘Give us a feel, old love,’ he begged when they had set the cart aright. ‘You never can tell lest ye feel if the fruit’s ripe or blown.’
‘Ye want to feel? Raw as a peeled onion, that’s how you’ll feel when I’ve adone with you!’ the washerwoman gave him back in Engleis.
‘Then here’s a chance to wash my braies out, mother. I’ll whip ’em off, shall I, to show you where they’re marked.’ Jos flashed a smile at her, and then his woollen hose, straddling short legs to thrust his stained crutch up at her obscenely.
‘Belike I’ll scrub ’em with you still inside, ye raddle-pated tiddler – an’ see if we can’t shrink what you have there to somethin’ even less worth lookin’ at!’ And when she laughed, fat Guillemette’s best features quivered in the lacings of her bodice like jellies in a net.
‘Then pull it out and wring it dry? I’m ready if you are, my flower.’
My squire had never been too nice about a woman’s looks above-the-girdle as long as he could come to terms beneath it. So none of us were much surprised when he crept back that night with a grin on his freckled face that squeezed his blue eyes into slits.
‘She let me do it for a bishop’s shilling,’ he told us proudly. ‘Managed it by covering her head up with a sheet. But take my word she still came close to swallowing me live. I swear I barely touched the chapel walls, an’ took the Sacrament ye may believe a long sight from the altar!’
It wasn’t quite the tale I would have chosen for my bedtime. Not with the image I still carried of the town whores of Varzy at the roadside two leagues back, hoisting their skirts to show us what they had to sell… Well, anyway it wasn’t long before I felt the need to part my cloak while I lay on my bedroll and shake hands with a faithful friend. Then afterwards when I had fumbled for release, to fumble for forgiveness in my prayers. To put it to The Lord and any saint who might be listening, that such a thing was less a vice than a handy means of keeping vice at bay. Handy is the word. Jos had a name for it. He made it female – called it
‘Fisty Flora’.
And in my own defence I have to say that at such times it was my wife’s soft body I imagined. Upside down and back to front in every possible position. (Less. I said I thought about her LESS; I didn’t say not ever.)
Somewhere about the sixth day of our march we reached the great beech forests of the Bourbonnais. A sea of treetops stretching to the far horizon. For hours we wound between their dappled trunks, and afterward through scorching heathland which grew hotter with every league we journeyed south. We found water for the horses where we could, slept where the column halted. Built fires. Cooked meals. Crept off into the brushwood for a shit. Breakfasted at sunrise to be ready for the onward march wherever and whenever it began.
We’d all grown beards by then to shield our lower faces from the sun – excepting Jos who still shaved daily, boasting that when he wanted something red and curly round his mouth he’d find himself a ginger whore. Many of the host, including John and Albie, rode stripped to hose and breeches. My nose and Bertram’s burned and peeled. Jos’s freckles multiplied. But John Hideman’s weathered skin had simply darkened. At Thiers the skies scummed over and the heat became oppressive. Through silent villages, through rocky granite country, boulder-strewn and shrilling with cicadas, we hauled ourselves across the Massif. A place as old as God. And then we came to Lyons.
Lyons-sur-Rhône was founded, someone told us, by the Romans, standing on a goose-necked pendulum of land where two great rivers met to flow together to the sea. I’m not sure even now what made me want to view it from between Raoul’s ears. Unless it was a premonition of disaster?
The wound my destrier sustained at tournament had healed long since. It barely showed beneath his glossy coat, and I remember something of the pride I felt astride his back, cheered through the city streets by crowds of Lyonnais. Its chief thoroughfare, the
Mercière
, was crammed with men and horses. Marshalls shouted from the pavements, even from the first floor windows of the houses either side. But in the end there was no choice. We had to wait while those ahead edged slowly forward to the bridge across the Rhône.
Of all the watercourses the kings’ armies have to cross, the Rhône’s by far the most impressive. Supplied by Alpine streams from distant parts of Barbarossa’s empire, swollen by melting glaciers and recent summer storms, it moves past the city’s quays and through the arches of its bridge at frightening velocity. The latest in a series that have served for a millennium to link Lyons to the eastern trade routes, the bridge consists of thirteen spans supported by enormous oaken piers. But if its architects assumed the greatest threat to its stability was represented by the Rhône in flood, then I’d suggest that no bridge in the city’s history (not even in the days of Constantine and Hadrian) had been designed to bear a burden comparable to that of the great cavalcade of hooves and wheels and stamping feet that cross it now – and are to go on crossing it for three days in succession.
Six spans behind Archbishop Baldwin’s plodding mule, Monète, an eight-wheeled oxen dray transports the beams and armatures of a dismantled
mangonel á tour
; a huge siege-catapult which on its journey down from Rouen has managed to exhaust four teams of bullocks, destroy a shrine near Moulins and demolish most of the old bridge walls at Balbigny. Now as it lumbers out across the central, seventh span of the far wider bridge, the weapon inflicts its worst damage yet, in peacetime or in war.
One iron-shod wheel is all it takes to crack the forward brace of an oak pier, just as the bells of the basilica of Saint Martin d’Ainay at the ramped entrance of the bridge begin to ring for Prime.
The sound of splitting wood is hardly louder than a whip crack. The mangonel moves on, to leave the rest to gravity and those who follow it across the weakened span.