Jesse Bullington - The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart

“I want him-”

“You want him what? Alive and pained stead a at his reward? Want him to suffer long with us? Selfish, that,” said Manfried, still gripping Rodrigo’s hair.

Rodrigo’s scalp peeled back a little as he went for Manfried’s throat, stopping when his perforated hand tried to close around the Grossbart’s neck. Then the young man slumped and Manfried released him.

“Think on it. He’s gone where we all will, Mary be praised. You think to imply other than he’s better now than fore and I’ll prove you wrong. Course, heretics don’t never reach where he’s at, meanin if you do wanna see him and the rest a your morally skint kinfolk again you’d best straighten your mecky ass out.”

“You know nothing!” Rodrigo screamed, his face shining. “Nothing! He was sick of mind when you came, and you made him worse! I knew you’d bring his end!”

“Men bring their ends on themselves,” said Manfried.

“He listened to you!” said Rodrigo. “Years I obeyed him as a son obeys a father, and for what? You come into our house and suddenly it’s you and not me he trusts!”

“Way the wheel spins,” said Manfried, with what he assumed was a sagacious air. “Maybe if you’d been a better son to ’em he’d never a set foot on that boat. Maybe he’d a listened to you.” The Grossbart did not look at Rodrigo as he left, his satisfied smile unseen by all but Her.

In the sea-bound stable, Al-Gassur showed the bundled relic he had begun to think of as his brother’s heart to the horses, which stomped and whinnied whenever the item left his cloak. He regaled the steeds with the legend of Barousse and whispered in their long ears how he would sell the Grossbarts to the first Bedouin slavers they encountered. Then eastward for him, to find a sea containing a bride of his own, and perhaps to meet his brother again under the waves.

When they sighted the coast Hegel and Manfried slapped each other and King Peter on the back until welts rose. At dawn they coasted into the harbor of Alexandria and the Grossbarts led the charge down the docks, armor and weapons glowing in the autumn sun.

The massacre that ensued is well documented elsewhere, neither women nor children spared from butchery. The unsuspecting citizens fled as best they could but not before the waves splashing the quays were crimson and the gutters filled with blood. Unlike many of the Hospitallers and Cypriots, the Grossbarts and Raphael took no pleasure from the slaughter, going to task as men have always toiled-with bored disdain. Al-Gassur followed the Grossbarts from a safe distance, liberating bottles and coins from the dead and the dying left in their wake. Rodrigo refused to partake or even watch, creeping back onto the ship and drinking himself into a miserable stupor.

Breaking into a multi-domed manse, the Grossbarts found their way to the larder and wiled away the twilight hours drinking syrupy wines and gorging on strange meats and fruits. There they spent the night, Raphael forced to take first watch and Al-Gassur shoved outside until daylight. At dawn they wandered the vacant streets, idly making toward two monoliths rising in the distance. Standing before Cleopatra’s Needles, the Brothers yawned.

“What you make a all them shapes etched on there?” Hegel peered at the black obelisks. “Reckon there might be someone under them?”

“Might be.” Manfried pressed his cropped ear to the side of the less worn monument and banged with his mace. “First let’s see if there’s some kind a door up here.”

There was not. Disgruntled and sweating, unable to find portal or crease, they sat between the two, chewing their beards. Before they could resume their efforts one of the Hospitallers in Martyn’s service spotted them and brought them to the cardinal and the king, who had established themselves in a palace.

The Grossbarts would look back on the time they spent with King Peter as if recalling a fairy tale, with embellishments added only through a failure to recollect the specifics. They characteristically avoided the bridge over the canal leading to the battle lines, where the city’s inhabitants successfully held off the crusaders, instead surreptitiouly crossing in quieter quarters to vainly prowl for tomb-cities. They were undeniably sloshed for the bulk of their stay in Alexandria, which ended up being only a few days. After their unsuccessful attempt to pry open the solid stone of the Needles, they shunned the column of Diocletian towering nearby and so never discovered the Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa or the Christian and Jewish cemeteries thereabouts.

Their innate gold-hunger led them at last to the alabaster tomb of that mighty city’s mighty founder, but his gold casket and bejeweled scepter had been pinched long before. They were impressed by the quality of workmanship but annoyed their predecessors had not marked the grave in some way to denote its hollowness, which would have saved them time and toil.

Finally, at long last, the red glimmer of evening revealed to them the grand graveyard of Chatby, and both were struck mute by the sheer volume of stone markers and crypts. A number of other crusaders were already at work, and rather than risk drawing Mary’s disfavor by associating themselves with amateurs they returned to the palace to coerce the king into putting a stop to the looting so that they might do it properly.

The next morning, however, word arrived that the Mamluks, those slaves-become-masters who ruled all of Gyptland, had a massive army approaching the city by sea, land, and river, and despite Peter’s protests the fleet prepared to abandon its conquest. Standing on the dock that final morning with the hordes of the Infidel entering the rear of the city, the Grossbarts dismissed Peter’s pleas to accompany him back to Cyprus.

“Shit, sure we got plenty a gold, notwithstanding that what the cardinal donated.” Manfried shot a glare at Martyn. “But that’s missin the point.”

“Yeah,” Hegel explained, “you gotta have faith there’s still more gold locked up in them heathen tombs.”

Peter nodded at Raphael’s translation that faith was indeed more valuable than physical wealth, and through the interpreter Peter gave his assurance that he would return with a larger army. This the Grossbarts agreed to be the sensible option, there being no way they could transport all their loot in a canoe as Hegel had originally theorized. So king and Grossbarts parted as allies and almost equals, neither party knowing what Mary held for them. Before he could rally another crusade King Peter would be assassinated by papal schemers eager to suppress what would become known as the Grossbart Heresy, and as for what befell the Brothers themselves, one must press a little further into Gyptland.

Rodrigo’s attempt to stow away back to his captain’s bones was thwarted by snooping knights, and he was escorted back into the Grossbarts’ company. Al-Gassur beamed at the ships, waving his brother’s swaddled prize as they slipped out of harbor. The ten Imperial Hospitallers resolved to stay with the cardinal after the Grossbarts convinced Martyn his aim of returning to Rhodes might be unsound. The winking reminder that perhaps word had come from Venezia regarding the future of the papacy convinced Raphael to stay as it did the cardinal.

Having little interest in meeting the Mamluk host, the sixteen men boosted a small galley and set off down the canal leading to the Nile and the tombs of legend; the defenders on the bridge retreated to join their reinforcements and thus allowed the Grossbarts to slip away. Only as they whisked down the canal and passed the enormous eastern necropolis did they realize how ripe with graves was Alexandria. The remorse such an epiphany brings might cripple a lesser graverobber, but these were Grossbarts, and after the initial cursing the disappointment instead honed their gluttonous appetites.