Along the way we passed the empty houses and mud walls of villages. If we were told their names I have forgotten them long since. They were deserted all of them, but for a mangy dog that ran out barking, to die on someone’s spear. Green melons from their fields were kicked about as footballs in the ranks. Until the scouts Count Henri sent ahead to Caiffa, returned to spoil their game with news that the Sultan’s ships had been and gone already. The port was empty of supplies, and long before we reached it, we saw and smelled the evidence of its destruction. Clouds of acrid black smoke cloaked Mount Carmel, drifted out across the water. Anything the townsfolk could not herd or carry they had burned.
Faced with nothing but a smoking ruin, we had no choice but to retrace our steps.
For all that afternoon and night and most of the day following, the Turcomans circled and tormented us like hordes of stinging gadflies in pursuit of hapless cattle. During the day, we’d had to push up in the stirrups and contrive to piss without dismounting – as if it wasn’t difficult enough arranging our soft bits to suit the saddle – and Raoul disliked it, flinching every time he felt the splash of urine on his flanks.
During the hours of darkness, the enemy set brushwood fires to light us for their arrows. And when the sun rose from the mist, it showed us we were riding through our own excrement. Or worse, through the bodies of our dead – men, horses, mules and camels – attracting carrion birds and multitudes of flies.
‘Bring any of the wounded who can walk or may be tied to saddles,’ had been the order that came down the lines. ‘Collect the weapons of the fallen. Leave corpses where they lie.’
By then we rode bloodshot and bleary. Our limbs were stiff, our thighs rubbed raw. Our horses tripped and stumbled underneath us, dozing as they walked. And half awake and half asleep, I dreamt of Sussex – of the green depths of the forest, the scent of wild thyme in the downland turf, the dusty, chalky roadways and long summer twilights. I saw Elise’s face and smelled her hair. I touched her milky skin. And saw her at the manor gate too proud to raise her hand.
It was at the Belus river in sight of Acre and the hill of Toron, and while the centre of our column stopped to water horses, that the Sarcens, shrieking like women and ignoring the first rule of warfare, mounted their attack.
It was a sharp encounter and a bloody one, armed as they were with falchion blades like cleavers, which in one flashing stroke could joint a horse or separate its rider’s head and shoulders. Up on the bridge and in the river shallows, in water churned to mud and red with gore, mules brayed. Men shouted hoarsely. Weapons clashed, destriers reared screaming, cannoned and collided. I snatched a javelin from someone in the pandemonium and hurled it at the nearest Infidel with scarce a pause to aim. No time for anything but instinct. I was the hunter, he the quarry.
And YES!
– a
score, a kill! The Moslem’s name was on the weapon and he was skewered like a capon. An exultant surge of triumph pieced my vitals as the javelin pierced his. I felt elation, if that’s the word? – and heard a bellow, deep and animal. And realised that it came from me.
But if I killed a single Moslem at the river, his fellows took a terrible revenge. We lost more infantry and mounted knights in a single hour that morning, within sight of our own camp, than in three days of fruitless quest.
Among the dead was one from Haddertun in Sussex – a balding veteran who had survived one bridge disaster, only to fall victim at another. As Jos related it, before they reached the bridge and in the act of stooping to reload his arbalest, Bertram took an arrow through the neckbone between his helmet and the plated collar of his gambeson.
He died before Jos reached him, and like the others was abandoned where he fell – like a dead sheep on a bostal, to be torn by crows and vultures. To have his guts pulled out and fought over by jackals. To be reduced at last to little more than shreds of flesh and a jumble of stained bones.
As if poor Bert had never lived and breathed and eaten food and dropped his turds as we do.
Five manor squad men, if I count myself. Five brothers called to Christ – reduced to four, and now to three, with more deaths still to come.
Had I learned anything from Caiffa or from Bertram’s death, when I prayed for his soul? I’m sorry to admit I hadn’t.
CHAPTER NINE
The Hill of Toron; November 1190
QUIETUS
One further casualty of the ill-fated enterprise to raid the port of Caiffa results, not from a Moslem shaft, but from the final loss of one old man’s belief.
It may be that Baldwin guessed the outcome of the war. Certainly he knew the price that men and women, children and dumb beasts on both sides of the conflict would have to pay for a croisade confronting a jihad, to set one aspect of divinity against another.
In any case, somewhere on the long march back from Caiffa – bone-weary and cadaverous, supported by his chaplain on one side of his mule and Bishop Walter on the other – the old archbishop lost the will to sanction human suffering, or to stand as judge to any man; and with it he lost any wish to see King Richard Ramsbollocks arrive at Acre as the embodiment of Christian virtue.
The will to live (or on that coin’s reverse, the fear of dying;
timor mortis
, the thing that makes us cling to our mortality at any cost) has slipped away from Baldwin before he’s borne into his tent at Toron. He’s urged so many men to join him in a just and holy war – has bribed them with the offer of salvation. And has lied. The knowledge strikes the poor old man with a greater force than any of the inspirations he’s received in all his years of service to the Church. He sees men suddenly as children, nothing more – occasionally loving, more often greedy, violent and confused. He’s led them and betrayed them, threatened them with Hell and Doomsday, as if he knew for sure that they existed, and seen them fed to Moloch.
Now Baldwin understands that hell is what men make of places like the hill of Toron; and Doomsday, now that he approaches it, no longer seems appalling. As we’ve already seen, it’s not the first time he has lost his faith in the Almighty. But given his condition, it has to be the last.
It comes as a relief to Baldwin to know he will not have to go on seeking proof of Christ’s divinity, or explanations for God’s uncaring nature. All is illusion. Death holds neither fear nor the anticipation of delight. He has dispensed with Christian fortitude, with grace, humility and love, and simply seeks escape from pain. A place to sleep, to be enveloped in the warmth and safety, the soft darkness of the womb he’s left so many years before.
He feels only regret for what has passed and a deep longing for oblivion.
‘When My Lord of Canterbury saw Christ’s army in retreat his spirit was afflicted greatly,’
is how his secretary, Anselm, chooses later to describe his dying master’s state of mind.
‘He complained of cold and stiffness in his limbs, as if the vital flame of life had left them. Within but a few days of returning to the camp, His Grace received the Body of Christ and yielded up his soul.’
What Anselm has omitted to record are the Archbishop’s final words. So I’ll supply them.
At the very last, it seems to Baldwin that he has no body; nothing but a shrinking skull, a gradually reducing brain with everything drained out of it but his remorse.
‘My fault, my fault, my own…
‘I am so sorry.’ He struggles desperately to force a smile for the benefit of those about him. ‘l must… You see I must – I have to leave. No please…?’
He dies apologising.
When I recall our sodden winter in the camp of Toron, with so little to mark one day from another, it seems that time itself has seeped into the mud.
The rain began in earnest on the day they buried our Archbishop, lashing our leaking tents, fouling the lanes between them with sewage overflowing from the shit carts. The River Belus, swollen to a torrent, washed rotting carcases into the coastal marsh to spread their stench across the plain. Damp penetrated everything. Our stores. Our clothes. Our very bones.
The Marquess Conrad took his chance when Baldwin died to get the Bishop of Beauvais to marry him to Princess Isabella – a girl much less than half his age, forced to the altar by her mother. That’s what they said in Toron. They said the Marquess laughed at King Guy’s challenge to a combat, to decide who’d rule Jerusalem when it was taken from the Turks – laughed at his emissary and returned his gage, and from that day refused to send supplies from Tyre to feed his army on the plain.
By January, our rations were reduced to a handful of dry beans, a spray of millet and a small loaf of twice-baked Toron bread per man. The waterlogged camp gardens had been stripped of greens. The last of the salt meat had gone and flesh of any kind was at a premium. Without the provender to feed them, asses, camels, sumpter beasts and even riding horses were being killed and eaten. Duke Henri’s destriers and hunting dogs were under constant guard. Knights with peregrines and goshawks flew them tirelessly until the rainy skies above the plain were empty of small birds – then wrung their necks and plucked the hawks themselves for roasting. When we could bring them down, we even ate the carrion crows which hoped to pick our bones.
In February, when they were least expected, one moonless night a force of Saracens had swept down from the hills. They killed the guards before they could alert the camp, and entered by the Maledicta Gate to reprovision Acre. By then a hen’s egg sold in Toron for as much as sixpence. Rats and seagulls or a bunch of netted sparrows cost two shillings. Destriers were making higher prices dead than living, and most of us existed on a dreary diet of millet porridge, and boiled carob beans that made our farts smell foul. The only thing we had enough of was wine that tasted like horse liniment, and a raw spirit called ‘al-yazil’
that was rough enough to strip the paint off a church saint, and doubtless killed as many men as it consoled. Jos, John and I drank it to heat the blood and held competitions afterwards to see how far across the tent lanes we could piss.
Cooped in by rain, we festered in our tents for weeks of misery, defending our beasts and our remaining silver, playing dismal games of dice and backgammon with Dickon Waleys’ men across the way, picking at our flea-scabs, juggling our balls inside our braies, and moving on to Fisty Flora when that itch wanted scratching.
‘Or maybe Fisty Fatima
if you’re Sarsen?’ Jos joked to cover my embarrassment when once he caught me throttling the thing. ‘An’ never worked right-handed like a decent Christian, eh Sir Garry?’
At night we dreamt of banqueting – of all the courses in the hall at Lewes, only to wake with empty bellies.
And if up here I can’t recall exactly how it felt to starve, I do remember how it felt to shiver under dripping sailcloth, because I’m trembling now.
They say it’s a lean common where ne’er a goose can find a bite, and John said he’d heard that Friesian soldiers on the plain were eating tallow, and stewing leather harness up with worms to fill their aching bellies.
‘Take my word, they’ll even scrape a camel’s guts for what’s inside when all the rest’s picked clean,’ he told us. ‘Tragical. An’ worse’n that, Sir Garry – ’tis held if you will credit it, they’re payin’ the Pullani to pick the grain from jackal shit to use for makin’ bread.’
Out of the damp and filth and meagre rations, came dysentery and fever to take their daily toll. Until it became impractical to bury anything less than a dozen corpses piled into a grave-pit at a time. Amongst the great men who died, were Ranulf de Glanville, along with Theobald of Blois and his brother, Stephen of Sancerre. Frederick of Swabia, who led the German forces, fell sick the twelfth night after Christmas and gave up his soul soon after. Even our Commander, Count Henri of Toulouse, seemed like to follow – confined to bed with leeches stuck all over him and raving like a madman. Some men turned renegade, deserting to the Moslems when they heard that Saladin had given orders for his Christian captives at Kharruba to be fed as much as his own soldiers.
Meantime, we ate what we could find, shat goat pellets, and somehow managed to survive until we had to kill first one mule then the other – bartering their guts and hooves for millet seed and mouldy chaff in the camp market. We lived off those old mokes for longer than we ought, and sinned by eating flesh in Lent, supposing we’d already done our fasting one way or another.
‘But
’
though I’ve smoked ’em ’til they’re black, I reckon that we’re chewin’ worms now more’n hide,’ John told us ruefully in Engleis. ‘An’ when they’re gone, Sir Garry, I’ll swear there ’ent enough in camp to keep a mouse alive.’
‘Aye,
’
tis cruel to all dumb beasts,’ said Jos.
‘Leave alone enough to feed a big ol’ horse,’ John added quietly. At which the pair of them turned pointedly to stare at Raoul.
‘NO!’ The first word I’d spoken for awhile – it came out frayed, much louder than expected and for once without its echo from my squire. ‘No listen both of you, it makes no sense,’ I told them. ‘The winter’s almost over. They say the grain ships may already be at sea, and after them the royal fleets with everything we need to leave this cursed place, and…’
‘Occupy the city? ’Tis not what we’ve heard blowed about, Sir Garry.’ The flesh had melted from poor Jos’ face. His blue eyes looked enormous. ‘What we’ve heard tell, is that our precious kings have been a deal too busy picking fights and fornicating along the way, to spare a thought for Acre and us poor starvelings outside it. They’re saying in the French camp that a priest’s hair turned as white as chalk last Advent, when our King Dickard came to make confession on the Isle of Sicily. The man’s too happy adding to his score of sins, is what they’re saying, to be in any haste to get here.’