The day after that abomination, the Muslims drove away the jackals, vultures, rats and crows with carrion, with parts of men and women, bits of children in their jaws. There was not time for them to wash or to enshroud the bloating bodies, or separate them male from female, or position them correctly before the setting of the sun. But the Sultan and his brother stayed to see them shovelled into hastily-dug trenches, aligned to face Medina – to see corrosive quicklime shovelled in to speed them on their journey. To hear the Imam, Umar, beg Allah the Compassionate to receive their souls with all due honour in His green gardens of delight.
But now is the time, at Arsuf, for Allah’s Shadow on the Earth to send down the faithful, with cries of
Itar! Itar!
,
Vengeance! Vengeance!
To stall the rearguard and leave the white-crossed and red-handed Hospitallers in no doubt of why as instruments of death they in their turn must die.
For reasons of diplomacy, the King who ordered the slaughter of the hostages, is to be spared to settle his own account with Allah at some future time. And later in the day, when both armies have sustained losses (significant enough, but a great deal smaller than the exaggerated claims of the Itinerarium) – when a group of inoffensive refugees from Joppa lies massacred by Christians – and when a boil on the face of the Sultan’s firstborn, al-Afdal, is recorded in the Muslim records to have burst – the tears which Salahuddin sheds are not for a defeat.
The Sultan’s tears are rather for the follies of mankind – for the unending conflicts of the People of the Book, and for his own part in the bloodshed.
It isn’t hard to act the hero, if you don’t care whether you live or die – and from this place and in this frame I see my attitude that day, less as heroic, than as reckless, selfish, typically mortal. I knew I was unfit for battle. But I charged anyway at a stretch gallop. Charged not to victory or glory, but to oblivion.
And yet it ended in the last way I expected, or could possibly imagine.
Ahead of us, dark savage faces, bristling spears, a hail of bolts and javelins. The thunder of the hooves. The rising tempo of the drums. The blare of native shawms and crash of steel on steel. A thousand hammers beating on a thousand anvils!
Something struck my helmet. Through the long slot of its visor I saw Sir Dickon fall, and then the blade that felled him, wet with blood. I heard the mare scream underneath me, as another slashed her neck. The animal was panic-stricken, plunging sideways, impossible to hold in line…
I dropped the lance to haul her back. Fell hard against the cantle of my saddle, as someone slashed the reins. Then we were in amongst the grey-leaved oaks. As I came up, I hit a branch. Lost a stirrup and regained it. Cast a gauntlet for a purchase on the horse’s mane. Came up again in time to duck another sweep of leaves…
Figures in the glade beyond fought grimly, as they fought in every other glade, and on every yard of hillside all the way down to the sand cliffs and the sea. The mare flew through them, heedless of the steel, to leap the body of a fallen horse – careered off through the trees.
Immediately ahead, a group of Christian riders galloped with drawn swords and cries of ‘Dix nous aid!’ toward a solid wall of mounted Turks. Their leader was a massive man, helmeted, armed to the teeth and mounted on a brilliant copper-coloured horse. His standard showed the forked tails and spread talons of yellow lions on scarlet silk – identified him to friend and foe. He was the King!
If I had dreamt what happened in that wood, it couldn’t have been stranger.
‘Al-Malik Rik! Al-Malik Rik!’ The words swept through the ranks of turbaned Moslems as a chant.
Then in the moment that I leant to catch the trailing rein and bring the wounded mare into control, the wall of Saracens began to open and draw backwards like the waters in the Moses story. To melt away into the wood. No shot was fired. No spear was thrown – as they retreated.
The King and his escort wheeled and wheeled about, blank faced in their steel helms through clouds of rising dust.
‘Fight, damn ye! Fight, you cowards!’ His helm muffled the King’s deep voice. His waving sword became a gesture of bravado, for there was no one to oppose him.
I watched him wheeling, shouting, flourishing his sword.
Furious! Impotent!
And when at last he stopped, the only sounds within the grove were those of the cicadas and the rustling leaves.
The encounter was fantastical. Unreal.
But later it seemed less so – when we were told the Sultan Saladin had ordered that at any cost, and wherever he might be upon the field, King Richard’s life must be preserved.
Which was of course why I was spared. Riding in the shadow of the King, I lived – not by the grace of God, but at the pleasure of the Sultan.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It’s warm in bed, too warm. I’m sweating and I need the pot. In just a moment I’ll get up and use it. But not quite yet…
What woke me? Was it the boy? Did he cry out for Mother in the dark?
But listen. He’s still deep asleep…
Except for Sara, I would not have known about the baby. Or not at least so early in the piece. Yet even so – it was six weeks before I could be sure I was with child. Six weeks of waiting to petition the Warennes. Six weeks of hiding like an outlaw in the attic of the moneylender’s house.
When they came in together from the market, the old couple found me sitting in a wet heap on their doorstep, and hurried me at once into the warm. At the sight of my bruised face Sara exclaimed, and fussed around me just as Hod had done, to make me something hot to drink and set a fire to dry my clothes. Then following a whispered conference with her husband, she led me up two flights of stairs to a small chamber underneath the roof, where I was brought clean things to wear. They were too large and smelled of cloves – and by the time I’d sashed and gathered them to clear the floor, I must have looked like something lumped up in a net to feed a horse!
His wife would not allow the Jew to see me comb my hair before the fire downstairs. But when it was near dry, she covered it with a silk veil, and called him in.
I told them everything – and the more they shook their heads and clucked their tongues, the more I found to tell.
When I had done, the old man Jacob looked as if he would have liked to pat some part of me, if it were not forbidden by his faith. But as it was, he asked me to forgive him if we talked of practicalities.
‘I take it you seek justice from My Lord and Lady of Warenne for the injury Sir Hugh has done you?’
‘Yes and I will have it too!’ I said. ‘Except that they are both abroad.’
‘But will return to Lewes in due season,’ the old man pointed out. ‘Meantime, perhaps you fear Sir Hugh will find you first? Or reach My Lord the Earl with a tale of his own that might entitle him to some claim on your property and person?’
It was exactly what I feared, and a relief to hear it put so clearly into words.
Old Jacob clasped his hands when I agreed, and looked at me across them. ‘The first thing you must know,’ he said, ‘is that you have canonical authority on your side. Your Christian Pope has stated that no claims may be made against the property of a crucesignatus, until it’s certain he will not return. Depend on it. Unless it can be proved he’s dead, the Crown Court will uphold Sir Garon’s bond with me for the five years of the heskem – for all that it is with a Jew.’
‘But you said when I signed the bond, that English laws exclude your people from croisade usury.’
‘In word, but not in deed.’ The old man smiled. ‘It may be that I stretched the truth a little, Lady. “Hameyvin yavin,” we say. It is the way that we arrange things.’
‘So will it help if I continue to pay interest?’ I asked. ‘I have with me what’s due this month, and for the quarter following as well.’
He shrugged as if it was the last thing on his mind, and said we’d talk of such things later. ‘For now ’tis best if you stay here in safety until My Lord and Lady come.’
It was without a doubt the kindest offer anyone had ever made me, and looking back I see how brave those two old people were, and what a risk they took. God only knows what Hugh de Bernay would have done to them, if he had found me there.
But even so, six weeks is long enough – a deal too long – to be shut into a box-coffer of a house that treats fresh air as something dangerous. And by the end of it, I no longer wondered why its occupants were both of them as yellow and as wrinkled as stored apples!
There was scarce space in my small chamber in the roof to take as many as three steps without pressing your nose against a wall! And for several days I suffered headaches in the mornings which I felt sure were caused by lack of air. A window in the thatch offered a view of dingy rooftops. Or if I climbed onto the bed and leaned out far enough, a glimpse of the river threaded like a silver ribbon through the meadows. The first time I opened it, a great mess of moss and cobwebs fell onto the bed, the casement had been sealed so long. But after that I seldom thought to close it, except when it was raining. Given a choice, I told myself, I’d rather freeze to death than suffocate!
I sometimes think the view from that small window was the only thing that kept me sane. I sat up there for hours on end to watch the summer wear itself away. To watch the pigeons on the roofs, the boats slide up and down the river, and re-live all that happened in the wood.
Plotting my revenge!
For five days out of seven, men and women from the town – merchants, burgesses, monks even from the Abbey, came to knock on Jacob’s door to beg for loans or pay him interest. I often heard the murmur of their voices, but never ventured down until after dark. On Saturdays and Sundays no one came and we were quiet. And when I found that on their Sabbath Jews were not permitted to so much as lift a hand, unless it be to eat and drink, I gladly took on all the cooking and pot-scouring for that day. Old Sara showed me the way. It wasn’t difficult – and at least when I was laying fires and stirring pots, I wasn’t sitting on my own and feeling sorry for myself!
The old lady’s French was nowhere near as fluent as her husband’s. But she often blessed me in her language, grasping handfuls of her bunched-up skirts to stop herself from taking me into her arms. I learned from her that people of her race may not cook meat in any vessel they have used for milk or butter – that Jacob bought his ducks and chickens live, and killed them in his own way in the yard behind the house. I discovered that their favourite dish was chicken broth. But on the third or fourth Sabbath, had turned away from stirring it, because I found the smell repugnant.
‘Is new for you? You like before?’ Sara asked me with an anxious face.
Then, when one morning some days later she heard me vomiting into my chamber pot, she came to sit beside me on the truckle. To cast all caution to the winds and wash my face with her own hands.
‘Yakirati, you feel it here and here?’ She set the wet cloth down to place both palms on her breasts and rattle the gold chains which lay across them, to show me what she meant.
‘They have the itching here? And here?’
‘I thought it was the weather or the fabric of my shift?’
The old dame sighed and shook her head. ‘No, no, is herayon, Lady.’ Then seeing that I’d failed to understand, she told me frankly that I’d make a baby.
‘In springtime, is for sure.’
So just when you imagine that things can’t get any worse, they absolutely do!
If I’d felt sick before – I felt a good deal sicker when I realised that the devil Hugh was STILL INSIDE ME, threatening to sicken and distort and tear my body, and make sure that I never, ever would be free of him, or what he’d done to me! More than once I thought about the morning following our wedding, when I first saw Garon naked, and thought of his male member as a force of life. Then thought about the other man’s, and how I’d like to see it shorn from him with rusty shears!
But others saw it differently even from the first. Old Sara took my hands, both hands, in hers, to cross another barrier between her race and mine while I sat rigidly with staring eyes beside her on the bed.
‘Baby is blessing, she make you happy.’ An idea which represented her experience, not mine. Because next thing she told me in her halting French, was that she’d left a daughter and grand-daughter back in Normandie, when she and Jacob crossed to Sussex in the Old King’s reign.
She missed them every day, she said with tears in her dark eyes. And it was not too long before the dear old thing began to act as if I had been sent direct from heaven to take their place in her affections.
She served me strengthening and kosher food, to purify the blood which nourishes the womb. She cooked me fish in place of the poultry I found nauseating. She brought me quinces and ground almonds, eggs beaten up in milk, insisted I abstain from spiced meats, salt and onions. I must stay quiet, she said, suppressing thoughts of anger or revenge which might affect the growing child. I must not look upon a horse, a pig or any unclean beast, not even from a distance. I should recite Psalm 20 every night, and put my trust in God to ease my pain and grant my heart’s desire.
Although, if old Sara had but known it, my heart’s desire just then was to be rid of the intrusive spawn – expel the cuckoo child and scream her little house down in my rage and desperation! But then how could I bring myself to hurt the poor woman’s feelings, by telling her I’d almost as soon die as give birth to a rapist’s child!