‘Come, you must know that a soldier doesn’t need to understand, needs only to obey,’ he said at last. ‘Is that not what you’ve trained for?’ (My father’s wretchedly demanding voice again: ‘A knight who isn’t skilled in arms can count for nothing in this world.’)
‘Right you are – you’re right.’ I nodded, a thick-headed fool with salt tears running down my face. ‘Trained to kill an’ can’t, an’ won’t. Haven’ drawn my sword since Acre. Won’ draw it now an’ never will. Useless as a soldier – useless!’
I’d long since given up the struggle to stay sober, drinking steadily through the three weeks we spent in the green citrus groves which grew on three sides of the ruined port of Joppa – flagons of Burgundy from Acre, al-yazil spirit, fermented date wine, anything that I could lay my hands on. I knew as well as any man that alcohol was not the answer. But it helped to drown the questions – even for a time to smother memory. And when the Bishop’s criers rode through the camp to summon us to join the force that was advancing on Jerusalem, it was the drink that helped me to deny them.
‘You’re standing on one foot, Sir Garon.’
It surprised me that a man as great as Bishop Walter should recall my name, and even in my drunken state I sensed a kindness in him. God knows, I felt as old as Moses, but see that in the Bishop’s eyes I must have still seemed very young – and foolish, obviously.
‘When you came in I noticed you were limping,’ he told me as I slouched before him in his tent, one-legged like a stork.
‘I broke my toes.’
‘How so?’
‘At Acre in the siege… My squire, my Jos and I, moving blocks under the Tower.’ I brushed my hand across my swollen eyes. ‘Killed him. The block that killed my squire crushed my own foot. But tha’s not why…’
He gave me a measured look. ‘So you believe that fighting is the only gift you have to offer? Yet you have worked with stone?’
‘Yes in a way, but…’
The Bishop raised a hand for silence. ‘Very well, I’ll hazard that ’tis best for you to stay at Joppa,’ he decided. ‘The Count de Châlons needs more knights with some experience of masonry to oversee the labour of rebuilding.’
‘But I know only how to pull down, not how to build…’
‘Which means you’ll find the process beneficial. Trust me, you will not feel worse when you have built a length of wall, far from it. The solace to be found in alcohol is false, my son, at best is temporary. But confidence to be gained from achievement – even from the simple task of rebuilding a stone wall – is real, and with God’s Grace is lasting.’
Even in my parlous state, with dry mouth and splitting head, I could feel grateful for the understanding in Bishop Walter’s smile.
They let me bring John Hideman with me. Which was as well because I couldn’t have survived without him. Steadfast John, my rod and staff. I’d always taken him so much for granted, and barely noticed until that time how much he had matured. He found me after Arsuf on the seashore like something washed up on the tide, slumped against the body of the mare. All through the drunken days, the torpid nights and mind-numbing headaches which had followed, he never left my side. He listened to me when I ranted, rambled, wallowed in the misery of my condition and woke me weeping from my nightmares. With the help of Guillemette and Maud – who were still washing shirts and braies, and men for aught we knew, in a makeshift laundry set up against a standing section of the old town wall – John saw to it that I was fed and decently attired.
Without the drink, I was afraid to sleep. But John took the coin to buy it for me and held the bowl when I was sick. ‘That’s it, Sir Garry, take it steady now,’ he said. ‘That’s the way – jus’ let ’er come.’
I was as much his child those weeks in camp at Joppa, as his master. And it was John who woke me, washed me, sobered me with quiet deliberation and led me through the ruins of the town to the rows of shallow mortar pits they’d told us to report to. On that first day, a master mason from King Richard’s stone-yards back in Caen showed us how pug was made. The mix was two parts sand to one part lime – watered, turned and watered twenty times between two shovels – to reach the masons in a pliant state no drier than well-kneaded dough, he told us, no wetter than a meat-fed turd.
My office was to ensure a constant stream of barrows loaded with the perfect mix, to supply the men who worked up on the scaffolds round the walls. But as I soon discovered, it was not the kind of work a drunkard could perform. There were loads of sifted sand and lime in sacks to be ordered and unloaded from the wagons, reservoirs to be replenished, carriers and shovellers and gangs of captive Moslem barrow-men to supervise. If the pug we made verged either on the constipated or the dysenteric, it came back smartly from the masons with a range of rude suggestions. So in the end we found it best if I stayed by the pits to oversee the mixing, while John took orders to the wagoners and kept the masons happy.
We were already halfway to being experts in the business, John and I, when autumn rain swept in across the site to force us under canvas, and long before we saw the citadel completed, I knew the Bishop had been right. The hard days of labour, dawn to dusk, were not the worst I’d known. My muscles were in want of exercise, and day by day and course by mortar-course, and stone by stone, the rising walls had the effect on me that he’d predicted. I felt the knots inside me loosen, the lethargy retreat. I drank less in the evenings and for a while slept better.
Yet all it took was a chance word from a wagon driver to bring the nightmares back. He told us that the lime we used was brought by camel, every sack of it, from the quarries at al-Ayadiyeh – and that night I dreamt that they were burning hostages instead of lime in kilns beside the pits. Again I heard Khadija’s shrieks. Again I could not save her – and when the sacks were emptied by the mixing troughs, her severed hand lay coated with grey powder in the lime All but the red-stained fingertips, which moved still as in life. It was John’s living hand though, not Khadija’s dead one, that finally shook me awake.
News came in January, that King Richard had abandoned his advance on Jerusalem in favour of re-fortifying the strategic port of Ashkelon a three-day journey to the south. The King was there already with his army – and on the eve of Candlemas, his criers summoned every man who could be spared from Joppa to help him in the undertaking.
The harbour of Ashkelon was blocked with rubble, we were told, the sea too rough for landings. So we marched overland to gain our first sight of the city from the coast road to the north. We’d heard in Joppa four months earlier that Saladin had burned and levelled it, to save Ashkelon from falling into Christian hands. But nothing could prepare us for the sight of it in ruins. Or the rebuilding task that lay ahead of us.
When we’d first come to work on Joppa citadel, the town was occupied by Christians, its streets part-cleared of debris. But here the scene was one of devastation. We’d heard that Ashkelon was famous for the fifty-three great towers which ringed its outer walls. But not a single one of them was standing. Their shattered battlements lay in the moat or in the harbour with the ruins of its piers. The houses, the bazaars, the mosques and hammans had been consumed in the great fire which had destroyed the city, and all that now remained of them were blackened fangs of masonry protruding here and there from deserts of grey ash.
Down on the beach and in the littered moat, King Richard’s army – together with Hospitallers and Templars and the Duke of Burgundy’s French force – were loading stones with their own hands into the wagons. Or making ramps for winching larger blocks back into place. The King decreed that all who could, must work without distinction to carry stones to the skilled masons who’d rebuild the city walls. The blocks for their construction passed from hand to hand, from King to subject, silk-clad grandee to ragged peasant – from conqueror to prisoner, from son of God to child of Allah. From man to man.
Not that King Richard had remained long in the workforce. For after two days of striding round the place, shouting encouragements and cursing failures, and lobbing the odd block himself into the transports, he’d departed with a company of Templars to reconnoitre further south. Before he left, we’d happened to catch sight of him down by the harbour wall, in the act of lecturing an engineer who doubtless knew already on how to gear a treadmill hoist.
We were surprised how stout he looked without his armour.
‘Double-arsed and lardy as a flitch pig,’ was John’s comment. But I didn’t smile.
I didn’t smile because…
It must have been because it was right there and then. No, look this is important. It was there. Right there. Right then that I first understood what made a villain of the king I’d worshipped for so long. What I had always seen in him was what I wished to be myself, a hero. But what I saw at Ashkelon was entirely the reverse. King Richard talked but wouldn’t listen. King Richard looked, but couldn’t see – had no idea of loyalties or commitments. Which meant he placed no value on the lives of others – took all we offered him. Gave nothing in return.
Yet in the end was I much better – I who’d killed in Lewes and at sea, and on the River Belus and at Acre – and felt nothing at those times beyond a thrill of self-congratulation? A careless mummer with a real sword rather than a wooden one? Could I claim to be better than King Richard?
It made me sick to realise that I couldn’t.
And now? Am I much better now? (I’ll think about all that when I am done with this.)
The King was next in Ashkelon for Easter, to find that we’d cleared most of the rubble from the moat, and deepened it to make the outward-battered glacis hard to climb. With so many expert masons there already, John and I worked with the common labourers who swarmed the site, and I for one was glad of work which exercised so little of my brain. The old city was constructed of a soft local sandstone known as ‘kukar’, which was easy to reshape. So by the time the King returned, its new walls had risen several courses, strengthened in places with the Roman columns we’d recovered from the ruins.
Delighted with the progress, King Richard sent his criers to announce a feast for Lady Day outside the city, with all welcome to attend and mounted knights invited to display their skill at jousting à plaisance.
John didn’t need to ask if I’d compete. Without a word I handed him my purse – and he returned, not with a horse or lance, but with a hogshead of red wine, which with unflinching application through the festival, I drank down to the dregs.
On Easter Monday, the King came out as he had sworn to do, to labour with his own hands on the city wall. But he never could stay in one place for long, and three days later left for Gaza. In May, when they brought news of Marquess Conrad’s death, the King was in Ramula. In July he was in Acre, then in Joppa to repel an Infidel attack. In September, while his engineers at Ashkelon were letting in the sea to flood the city moat, we heard he was at Caesarea nursing a fever.
By then we knew our King had signed a treaty with the Sultan. But what happened in the world beyond the walls of Ashkelon was of less matter to us at that time than the great walls themselves. We worked all day out in the sun, squint-eyed. We carried, rolled and levered building stones until our skin took on the colour of tanned hide, our hands its leathery texture. Worked anywhere that we were needed – even took our turn in treadmills lifting cranes. Then in the evenings while the sun sank back into the sea, we stood together in our filthy, sweat-soaked clothing, John and I, to admire the rising lines of dressed and interlocking blocks, dyed indigo in shadow, crimson where they caught the dying light…
But wait. I have forgotten something earlier, much earlier than that!
John found it growing in a crevice of the old foundations of the Moslem wall. A bird-borne seedling from some garden which had long since disappeared beneath the ash, he knew it from the blossom as the rose he’d watered by Khadija’s pool – and took a deal of trouble to uproot it, tend it for me, plant it in an earthen crock.
And although he never voiced it in so many words, I understood the point that John was making: ‘If a rose can grow out of a ruin, so can you and so can I.’
The truce between the King and Sultan was set to last three years, three months and three days, on the sound principle that a thrice-ravelled rope is the most difficult to break; and long crocodiles of troops trekked north throughout that final summer, in the hope of taking ship from Joppa or from Acre before the autumn storms.
By the beginning of September, the outer walls of Ashkelon were near complete. Without their scaffolding, they rose sheer thirty foot from skirted glacis to crenellated parapet, reflected in the waters of the moat to seem still higher. Massively unyielding, voluptuously curved between stiff ranks of barrel towers retreating into distance, we saw them as our gift to Palestine. Something salvaged, something positive that we had made with our own hands to leave behind us.
So when they told us that by the terms of our King’s treaty with the Sultan, the walls of Ashkelon were once again to be destroyed – and when we saw the first stone crash into the moat and sink from view – we knew that it was time to go.
BOOK FOUR
CHAPTER ONE
Mmm, yes. What a relief! It isn’t until you squat to use the pot, that you know how much you needed to!
He’s still asleep, my little lamb. You’d think he’d wake, the moonlight through the window is so bright – and surely will at any moment now to start bawling for his feed!