But not against Ricardus Rex.
‘Kill them,’ he raps out to the adjutant beside him.
The young man’s face is white as chalk. With all his heart he wishes himself elsewhere. ‘But who, Sire? Who will do it?’
‘The Knights of the order of Saint John follow the butchers’ trade. Send them – and Rénier, tell them to make sure to kill them all.’
‘The women, Sire? The children?’
‘Have you gone deaf? Or am I speaking in some language you don’t understand?’
With one gloved hand, King Richard tugs at his silk-fringed reins, to turn Fauvel towards the hill of al-Ayadiyeh – again looks up. ‘Let’s teach the Infidel what happens when he breaks his oath. Kill them, kill them all! Destroy them root and branch!’
I saw the white-crossed Brothers of St John, the priestly knights, dismount and run towards the gate of the enclosure.
Over a line of helmets a blade flashed. Then another and another!
The prisoners understood before my mind could take it in. I cannot tell if what I heard first were their screams, or my own.
I don’t know if I called for help – can’t tell if I broke rank that instant. Or if I froze in horror. Or if my feet applied the spurs before I truly knew what I was doing. The first – the last thing I remember was ploughing through the armoured lines that blocked my way. Breath burning in my throat. Arms everywhere – voices yelling – my sword drawn in my hand.
I saw the chimneys of the kilns beyond. A glimpse of sky. I heard a woman’s shriek… Then something hard slammed shut the door on light and sound. On everything.
The demented young knight’s fall from his horse is unnoticed, by all except the men he’s barged aside and the young pikeman who runs up to drag him clear. His mare kicks free of the loose rope, regains her feet unharmed. His sword lies by his senseless body in the sand. His servant pushes through to kneel beside him, unties his aventail and searches for a pulse.
All eyes are on the Knights Hospitaller, as they advance into the prisoners’ enclosure.
At first they keep together, walking steadily towards the Moslem crowd.
Instinctively the hostages move back, move in to form a human barrier, the men outside, the women and the children in the middle, some holding hands. The shrieking has quietened to a sound like wind through trees, a murmuring of prayers to Allah, surahs from the Qu’ran, whimpers of mortal fear.
The military monks are not in need of any kind of skill to massacre bound prisoners by the thousand. They hardly need to aim, scarce need to look to know that they are slicing into flesh. The qualities they need for hours of butchery – the instincts men call base or primitive and spend their lives attempting to deny: brutality, barbarity, sadistic lust – are sadly not inhuman.
A Soldier of Christ who wears the white cross of the noble order of Saint John of Jerusalem is forbidden to allow his body, any part of it, to touch a living woman’s flesh. But by some perverse distortion of belief his sword is free to mutilate her. Through all their prayers to God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost the Knights Hospitaller have always been aware of their sadistic instincts; of wolves that prowl the deepest shadows of their beings waiting to attack. Their faith is pitiless; the Pope of Rome confirms it. Infidels deserve no mercy.
The monk who strikes the first blow, thrusts his sword so violently into the body of a prisoner that it impales the man behind.
It is the signal for the others to begin.
It makes no difference if they scream or pray or gape in silence, or try to hide behind the rocks. Or crouch, or kneel in supplication beneath the slashing blades. Or bolt like game towards their own destruction. It makes no difference to the Hospitallers if they die at once or slowly and in frightful pain.
Few reach the barriers, and those that do are picked off by arbalesters who surround them. A child who runs in terror from the swords is shot in the back before they separate his squealing head from his small body. A woman is released from bondage when her arm is severed at the shoulder. Babies have their soft skulls smashed on boulders, are stamped on, trampled underfoot.
Limbs thrash, alive and dead. The air reverberates with bestial sounds – with the high, inhuman cries of creatures in extremities of pain and terror – the shriek of a mother who sees her child struck down, the worst sound a human voice is capable of making.
As the afternoon wears on and sword arms tire, sliced throats become the favoured mode of execution.
It takes two hours of systematic butchery to kill two thousand seven hundred men and something over three hundred women with their children. King Richard sits his horse throughout, beneath the parasol his squire holds up to shade him from the glare – to view the carnage like some latter-day Caligula, with pitiless composure.
By the time it’s over, the arena has become a mass of raw, red flesh – of saturated fabric, clotted hair and offal. With blood in rivers – streams and pools of it. More blood than it seems possible for humans to contain. Most of the carcases have been eviscerated for the jewellery they have swallowed, and for the gall the nursing brothers of Saint John will later drain from their extracted bladders, for use in treating a variety of Christian ailments.
Clouded, sightless eyes stare out of bloodless faces. Contorted bodies crouch, embrace and sprawl in heaps – among them, webbed with the blackening intestines of another gaping corpse, something which once had been a woman named for the Holy Prophet’s most beloved wife. A small blue star imprinted on its skin is visible beneath the blood. Close beside, half-hidden by its outstretched arm, are the torn remnants of a female child.
Blown flowers and rotting fruit, viscous and congealing. Destroyed for what exactly? Revenge? Strategic gain? Or for something worse? Were they destroyed to satisfy a basic human need? A flaw within the beast that regularly, and in every age, drives it to slaughter its own kind?
Flies rise in clouds. The stench is so appalling that all within a hundred paces hold their noses.
‘So are avenged the blows and arrow shots of infidels,’
King Richard’s annalist is later to record.
‘Great thanks be given to the Creator!’
A spoiled child of a Creator who smashes His own toys? Is that the God he has in mind?
From Tel al-Ayadiyeh, the Sultan Salahuddin sees his brother’s archers sweep down from al-Kharruba. He hears their battle cry. Time and time again he sees them harrying the larger Christian army.
As daylight fades he sees their frantic sallies fail, and fail again to save their dying people.
It is the time for evening prayer.
‘Oh God Most High – I attest to thee there is no other God but Allah. I declare that Muhammad is the Prophet of God. Come to prayer! Come to the temple of Salvation! God is great; there is no other.’
The Sultan genuflects, looks west and east towards the angels who record men’s deeds, begs Allah to receive with honour the souls of those who have been, will be martyred, beseeches Him to help His servant to countenance and to accept.
‘When the sun ceases to shine, when the stars fall from the sky and the mountains turn to dust: then shall each soul be made aware of what he hath committed.
‘Ya-Allah kam minal-jaraaim turtakab bismik; Allah, what evils are committed in Thy name. Behold the soul of man in the mystery of its nakedness.’
The first to be found wanting on that Day of Judgement, God’s Shadow on the Earth believes, and takes what comfort he can find from his belief, is he who hath shed blood without due cause.’
It is already dark before the last Christian soldiers leave the monstrous scene. The Knights Hospitaller slump on their horses, slack-mouthed and glassy-eyed, flushed, foetid and polluted; men who have reached and then exceeded their own capacity for violence. Every now and then one leaves the ranks to vomit, or to sit his mount and stare into the darkness.
The King’s composure has deserted him. His face is hidden by a scented scarf. His body trembles as he rides.
Back in his palace, he ungloves himself, demands to be admitted to the Queen. But news of what he’s done has reached her, and it seems there is less steel bred into Bérengère than old Queen Eléonore supposed. The pregnant Spanish woman screeches through her chamber door for him to leave her be.
So Richard has them find the captive child, the thirteen-year-old princess he’s brought with him from Cyprus. Takes her to bed instead, and muffles her screams with a pillow.
In the early hours of the next morning, Queen Bérengère miscarries. Her maids are sworn to secrecy. But King Richard’s oaths are all it needs to spread the news from palace court to city street and through the gate into the Christian camp.
Two days later, the Queen appears in public, pale and silent, with wads of bloodstained linen rammed between her thighs. No one can read her face or tell what she is thinking. But Bérengère knows, and in due time her husband will discover, that in all but name their four-month marriage has already ended.
Later the same afternoon, with their hostage problem solved, the Christian armies leave the Plain of Acre, to march south for Joppa and Jerusalem.
CHAPTER SIX
It’s said that when God seeks to punish you, He grants you what you’ve prayed for. I prayed in the port of Tyre for victory and death to infidels, and was punished. How I was punished!
But not by God. Because it was as if a curtain had been wrenched aside to reveal an empty void. I realised that there was no God in heaven. No Allah or Jehovah. I saw the sky as empty of anything but clouds – saw the whole thing as a lie. There is no Day of Judgement. Payment for our sins is made in this world not the next. The Evil One is not in Hell, but here on earth in mortal form. The human masks we wear whilst prattling of love and of forgiveness are made in our own selfish image, not in God’s – the faces underneath them, those of snarling devils who kill for pleasure and delight in pain.
It’s said that man’s above the beasts. But I say he’s beneath them.
I saw their faces in my nightmares, endlessly repeated.
The mare’s fall and my concussion spared me the sight, but not the knowledge of the butchery – and night after night, I woke from shrieking, blood-filled dreams to see it happening again – and heard Alia’s screams – and shared her mother’s anguish. I saw the sword-blades fall. I felt them bite into their flesh, and mine, because I died with them in every dream.
And when I woke to recall where I was and what had really happened – to live again, dry-mouthed and desperate. That was even worse.
It was a march of more than twenty leagues from Acre to Arsuf. It took our Christian armies more than two weeks, with halts to rest along the way. We moved, as my Jos would have said, at a slow snail’s gallop – or so they told me afterwards, for I had lost all sense of time or reason. And but for John, I would have stayed behind, refused to move a further pace for their croisade – and likely had my throat cut for desertion.
So when I woke to the familiar sight of my old tent in Bishop Walter’s camp, and heard from John how he had led me back unconscious from al-Ayadiyeh tied across the saddle of my mare – and asked him what had happened to Khadija and the child – and saw the wordless truth of it in his contorted face. Well then I must have lost my senses!
I shouted, shouted anything to drown his words and block the truth in them. I felt the pressure of a wall of tears behind my eyes, a dam about to break – and something tightening around my head, and something in my throat I could not swallow. And then darkness pressing in, so close and stifling I could not breathe – and John’s voice in the tone he used for frightened beasts, soothing words devoid of sense – and John’s hands gripping both my wrists as I fought through the flood.
That night, the night before we marched, I woke again to griping pain and crouched between the tents to squirt out a stinking flux that splashed my braies and burned my arse and emptied me of thought and energy and all emotion.
I stank! I thought I never would be clean again. But next day, John washed me, dressed me in my helm and armour, sat me like a sandbag dummy on my horse.
‘Trust to me, Sir Garry.’ Was what he said, or something of the sort. ‘Now then, trust to me an’ jus’ do as I say.’
That journey is as unclear now to me as it was then. When I think back, few details of that time remain. My memories are all in fragments. I know we only travelled in the morning, from dawn until the summer heat made it impossible to march– and in the afternoons we camped beside the track or in the dunes or on the beach, while fresh supplies were landed from King Richard’s ships which kept pace with us down the coast.
Through the slit visor of my helm I see the sun, a fiery red ball veiled in dust. I see the smudge of distant hills, the salt lagoons, the sails of Richard’s ships against the blue-green of the sea – long winding lines of men and horses, floating and distorted by the heat. I feel the flies bite, hear the grunting of the camels, the clanking cooking pots beneath the carts – the tok, tok-tocking of the kettledrums, the disembodied calls to prayer to tell us we were not alone – that Sarsen horsemen matched us pace for pace and camp for camp.
We never knew when they’d appear, and when I saw them taking substance out of haze and dust – screaming out of nowhere, to shoot and hack and batter at our lines – I couldn’t tell if they were men of flesh and blood, or demons from my nightmares. Well no, that isn’t true. I could tell, but I had no interest, was indifferent to my fate. I couldn’t summon energy to care if I should live or die.