Christian Cameron - The Long Sword

But, like climbing a mountain, every bit helped. I began to gain control of my limbs, and I rolled to my feet like a badly wounded man. I was not. To crown the miracle of the taking of Alexandria, my fevered wound had closed and gone cold. I think — I like to think — that when I lifted the legate, his flesh healed mine.

Say what you will, Chaucer.

It was almost fully dark outside when I was dressed and armed, filthy, tired, and afire with the pains of two days of combat. John armed me in silence and sent a boy for Fiore. I found Fra William de Midleton in the yard.

‘We are ordered to hold,’ he said heavily.

The city was oddly silent. No cock crowed. No music, no muezzins. Of course. And yet, the silence was terrible.

I think you need to know that despite the encounter in the smoke, I didn’t give a rat’s arse for the Hungarian or d’Herblay in that hour. Essentially, I forgot them. Holding the gate became our goal — there was nothing else. You’ll see.

I looked at the open gate. ‘We should rebuild the gate. The ships have carpenters-’

Fra William shook his head. ‘There is a Moslem army just over the bridge.’

‘Not any more,’ I said. ‘My lord, did no one tell you?’

Fra William started. ‘How do you know?’

I was too tired to argue. ‘Fiore and I rode to find Fra Peter. Then we went and looked at the bridge. The Saracens were fleeing.’ I paused. ‘That was — a day ago? Hasn’t the bridge been burned?’ I asked.

Fra William shook his head heavily. He was as exhausted as I. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Scouted?’ I asked.

‘No, Sir William!’ he said. ‘Nothing has been done. They say that the king is surrounded by counsellors who say the city must be abandoned.’

I think I ignored him or didn’t believe him. I knew, I, a young knight, a Corporal, that by taking Alexandria we had cut the Sultan off from all his trade, shattered his resources, and severed his main link with Palestine and all his garrisons. Saint Louis had never struck such a stroke. Indeed, since the taking of Jerusalem herself, no Crusade had ever accomplished as much. With the fleet in the harbour and possession of the walls, in effect, we had crippled Egypt. And when the rest of Europe heard, when the Green Count came at our backs, we would have the whole of Egypt, and the Holy Land as well. King Peter’s strategy was solid. We had won.

I was also wise enough to see that Fra William was more shattered than I. Even while I stood there in my harness, besmottered with blood and offal, I was growing stronger, as young men do. ‘Let me see to it,’ I said.

He spread his hands. ‘Be my guest,’ he said. ‘I need to sleep.’

We had forty Hospitaller knights in various degrees of fitness at the gates, and another fifty sergeants and turcopoles. By the odd flow of the currents of war, we also had Lord Grey’s retinue without the man himself; Miles Stapleton had taken command of them. That included Ned Cooper and his archers, who had ridden back with us.

‘I ain’t leaving you till I see my ducats,’ Ned Cooper said. The wound in his thigh, so devastating in the heat of the fight, proved to have barely penetrated the skin to the muscle of his leg.

From Ned and John — and Maurice and George, now much less taciturn than they had been before — I learned more of the ambush in the dark. At the same time that John feathered one of the spies following us, Ewan had seen the rose hedge and made the correct assessment. He’d dismounted and put a heavy arrow into the hedge.

The night had exploded, but the Hungarian’s hastily laid trap had failed to touch the legate, who’d ridden past without a scratch. Maurice and John had tried to counter the ambush from behind and everything had degenerated into a smoking tangle of chaos, in the best tradition of war and complex plans.

At any rate, in addition to my people — well, really the legate’s and Lord Grey’s, we had a dozen of the surviving Scots, including the Baron of Rosilyn, who outranked me, and we had most of Contarini’s oarsmen, a disciplined body, under Carlo Zeno.

This was less a miracle than it seemed. In battle, men follow men they know. We all knew each other: the Scots followed the Hospitallers, and the oarsmen followed the English archers. But it gave us a good garrison, and when Fiore and I found Master Zeno, we quickly came to an agreement about employing his oarsmen to fortify the gate.

He made a wry Italian face. ‘I wish I could send to the admiral,’ he said. ‘We have carpenters and tools. But that city …’

‘Hell come to earth,’ I agreed.

Outside the walls of our gate castle, men continued to behave like animals. And, as I had seen in France, perhaps the worst of it was that local men joined the riot, killing their own, or the Jews — always the poor Jews — only to be massacred by our brigands and crusaders. Men set fire to their own houses. Men slaughtered their own families in despair.

And that was by day.

Night was worse.

Nonetheless, we worked by torchlight. Zeno was tireless, and if he was a mocking villain in the streets of Athens, he was a hero in the Stygian dark of Alexandria.

We made the courtyard behind the first gate a trap. We dug up the cobbles with pickaxes and trenched it, raised a rubble wall and put palm palisades atop it. We relit the fires, made food, and served it to our soldiers.

In the midst of all this, we were interrupted by a terrible dilemma. A Greek patriarch came to the gate and begged us to admit several hundred Greeks.

It was clear that the enemy was coming, and Fra William’s sense — and he was a good soldier — was that the Mamluks and their infantry were coming across the river and striking against any Christian they could find. But we couldn’t feed the Greeks. And the riot of the sack continued, so that we had the threat of Mamluks from the south and the threat of our own crusaders from the north.

Syr Giannis went to Fra William and knelt and begged him to save the Greeks. Fra William was standing on the walls, watching the city burn — and watching a small army of looters approaching.

But he was a Hospitaller. He opened a side gate, even while he sent a sortie — me, of course — to order the looters away.

I went out with a borrowed poleaxe in my fist, and walked along the so-called ‘street of pepper’ with Fiore and Miles and Nerio and Syr Giannis until we reached the main avenue, where the looters were coming.

They had a dead Moslem’s head on a pole, and they were carrying a woman — or what was left of her. They were all drunk, and they looked like souls basking in the warmth of hellfire.

The five of us didn’t even cover the street.

Fiore had his visor open. ‘What do we intend to do with these dogs?’ he asked.

They were slowing. Behind us, the Greeks were filing into the Cairo Gate fortress, but they could only go single file. We had archers on the wall, and Fra William was preparing a sortie.

It was all too slow to save the Greeks. And the looters — the crusaders — were numerous and well armed.

The Count d’Herblay shouted my name.

‘ Bon soir , William the Cook!’ He laughed. He had his armour on and his hose down by his ankles. He had a poleaxe in his armoured fists and fresh blood on the knuckles of his gauntlets. He didn’t look like the angry, weak man of Genoa. The one who’d flinched from my beating.

In fact, he looked drunk, and insane.

I was in some way pleased. I admit this. It made what I intended easier.

I raised my axe. ‘Halt,’ I said. ‘You may not come further, on pain of death.’

‘Who the fuck pretends to give us orders?’ asked a Gascon.

‘I do, in the name of the Hospital. Go rape children somewhere else,’ I said. In that moment, I hated almost all the men on earth.