The Book of the Lion (18 page)

When Rannulf beckoned for me to follow him, I did, and Rannulf passed easily through the king's men, spoke with a Breton guard in a slurred half Frankish, half English, and entered one of the counting tents.

“The treasure of Acre,” said Rannulf. Guards, tall men with handsome, butter-blond leather belts, and gold fittings, nodded to my knight.

Rannulf picked up a leather helmet, set with pink-hued pearls. I examined an amulet interlocking gold inlaid with blackest enamel. Each spur, each silver bridal necklace was a dowry prize or some virgin's gift from her mother. Even a pair of shoes was cunning, fine leather, so supple it hung from my hand like silk.

“We make an inventory,” said the king's chamberlain in stiff, oblong English. “Every household, every lord and maiden in Acre, must empty every coffer. The lord king does not desire to be cheated.”

Chamberlain's servants sorted the leather from the silk, the stone-inlaid from the unadorned. More carpets heavy with riches arrived, and were dumped on the growing array of weapons and plate, clothing and jewels.

“These are rare gems,” said Rannulf in a low voice.

“My master Otto was an expert at such things. That quail's egg made of green glazing is an emerald, or I'm a heathen. That is amethyst,” I said, indicating a bracelet set with lavender jewels.

“They come from the Far East,” said Rannulf.

“And this glass, starlike stone. I cannot guess its name—”

“A diamond,” said Rannulf. He pronounced it
diamant.
“I saw such once in my life, on the finger of a Moorish knight at a great tournament in Provence. An unexampled thing is hard to value. I must think of some worthy advice to offer the king, or he will melt down all this finery in a great pot, and pour it into ingots.”

“That would be a sin!” I gasped.

“Oh, King Richard is a great sinner,” said Rannulf.

 

 

 

 

The prisoners arrived.

The entire garrison, and most of Acre's inhabitants, emptied into our camp. Stripped of their multicolored clothing, their head cloths and their sword belts, they looked diminished, their faces pinched with hunger. These fighting men were reduced to a long, creeping line of ordinary humans, silent, eyes to the ground. Some of the men had families, women huddled close to their men, children dull-eyed and silent.

Following the orders of their own marshals these warriors filed into a field between our camp and the beach. The area had been cleared with difficulty, and several men in priestly raiment argued with the king's guard, annoyed that their tent pegs had to be uprooted. They were forced to move to a remote corner of the camp, their reasoning went, so “this army of Christ-offending rats” would have a safe place to set their haunches.

Pikemen looked on, in full agreement with the priests, spitting and muttering curses.

Nigel watched as the shuffling defenders of Acre sat, shoulder to shoulder. An infant began to wail.

“How will they eat?” said Hubert.

“Through their teeth,” said Nigel, “in the same manner as you and I.”

 

I entered the city through the great main gate, Hubert at my side. The gash in the walls, the heap of fractured stone, were all the more ruinous viewed from within.

The castle of Acre had been built by the Franks after the early Crusades, decades before my birth. The capture of this noble citadel by the heathen had been bitter news in the guildhalls of Christendom. The gloried domes and archways of the fortifications struck me dumb, the scars of swallows' nests stippling the inner curve of the domes high above. The holy sanctuaries had been sown with wool carpets, and festooned with gold-leaf symbols of pagan faith.

Christian priests and their men labored even now to unload the churches of this insult, carpets rolled up, and clean straw rushes strewn about. A Latin prayer drifted through the alternating sun and shadow, ardent
in nomines
driving the Devil from the naves. Frankincense perfumed the air.

The side streets were denuded, every latchstring and window curtain of a groat's worth having long since been taken. Up some stone-paved lanes Frankish squires and footmen were celebrating, bare haunches rutting on the thin, splayed forms of pagan women.

 

If this sight shocked me for an instant I quickened my pace. The dead were arranged in the deep shade of a side street. A woman in a dark shawl looked up at us, her face tear-stained. She cursed us—there was no mistaking her message.

Hubert was trailing behind, not paying the woman any mind. He picked up a stone absentmindedly, a pretty thing, half quartz, which had probably been used to dress some wealthy man's dwelling. I could see the stages of Hubert's impulses, free to throw the stone in any direction, at any material or living thing. Or to keep it. The woman's voice interrupted Hubert's thoughts, challenging him to go ahead and knock her on the head with the rock.

 

Hubert put the stone down gently. “A right proud city,” said Hubert, ignoring the woman following us, screeching, weeping. We both made a show of ignoring her, climbing stairs, hurrying along battlements, ascending towers, until we could not hear her cry.

The sea breeze from the top of the walls was sweet with salt. Galleys lined the harbor protectively, pennons fluttering, the scarlet-and-gold silk of Saint George or the blue, flowering lozenge of the Plantagenets. When I saw our camp, flags and peaked tents, the distant figures of Christian folk, I was swept with pride. How had the heathen dared to stand in our way?

Far to the east, Saladin brooded with his army. Word was that Saladin had been surprised at the fall of Acre, aware too late that he should have acted in force. Rannulf believed that Saladin would honor the surrender agreement, but join battle when he thought we could be crushed.

 

Dreaminess descended upon us again.

The heat filled the space around every man and every horse. Hubert and I spent time searching for shade among the tents, along the granary, the diminishing sacks of oats and bundles of hay.

Hubert was withdrawn, despite all I could do to distract him. I tried to bet him a button that one ant would beat another to the ant hole, or that Nigel would laugh before Rannulf would spit. Hubert thanked me for my effort in a gentle voice, but said that gambling was, after all, forbidden.

King Philip of France left the camp, borne by stewards and chamberlains. His fever had turned his skin yellow, and the hand he raised in valediction to us all was greenish in the sunlight.

“Of course he's green,” said Nigel. “He has all the courage of a toad!”

 

Most of the Francomen remained, including one duke called Conrad, who claimed a corner of the city from the Templars. A group of Breton knights threw a battle standard into a ditch near the city walls, insulting the men of Anjou. The troops of Guienne quarreled with the soldiers of Lusignan, something to do with a woman. Quarrels broke out among every order of knight and man, clerk and chamber boy.

The hard-working bakers no longer filled our bellies with warm white flour cakes. Their broad wooden paddles brought loaves of maslin-bread from their domed, clay ovens. The loaves were like the earth-dark bread of the poorest peasants. Our prisoners ate horse cakes, bran and straw, the sort beasts of burden feed on.

The prisoners numbered two thousand seven hundred mouths. They accepted their defeat with no sound of complaint, waiting for the parleys that would agree on the price that would return them to their families and friends. The first emissaries rode out from Saladin's camp, horsemen with silk and black leather armor, highly burnished appointments, studs and pommels.

An innkeeper-turned-soldier was caught with a pair of ox-bone dice, swore he was holding them for a friend he would not incriminate, and the entire army stood watch as a muscular summoner from Ghent gave him ten lashes with a whip. The Templars and the Hospitallers took quarters in the city, as did many other hand-picked troops. While that gave us more space, it did nothing to enrich our stores of food, and left Guy de Renne to police an army of former harvesters and woodsmen with a small corps of seasoned knights.

Sir Nigel and Rannulf made much of their experience with men, striding through the blizzard of flies to order new latrines to be dug, but the Duke of Burgundy and King Richard took to their tents, and day by day the heat grew worse.

The prisoners began to expire, their brothers-in-arms keening softly over their remains. The sight won little sympathy from most pikemen, who prayed for the hour all Mussulmen would swallow their tongues.

 

 

 

 

The day began with a cool, gentle wind, and with the feeding and exercising of the chargers.

Then came the heat again, and the low-voiced final rites for the latest to die of fever, and an early afternoon meal of horsemeat and chaff bread.

Two pleasure women got into a fight over a pearl earring, a tearing, howling battle, and barely a voice was raised in cheer or derision. The women tore at each other's hair and eyes, grew tired, dropped panting. The sentries prodded them with the staffs of their halberds, and they moved on.

The priests kept their prayer hours, and we joined them. The last wine turned to vinegar in the cup, and the guards slept standing up, leaning into their staves.

“I would fall down, if I tried it,” said Hubert. “As soon as I began to snore.” He did an instantaneous imitation of a sleeping guard pitching forward, fast asleep. He caught himself just before he landed on his face.

“It is the result of much art,” I said, pleased to see Hubert in good humor again. “You and I have yet to learn to sleep like fighting men.”

When King Richard strode from his tent that afternoon, the camp stirred, neighbor nudging neighbor. King Richard was in dress armor, the brightest mail, an indigo cape flowing nearly to the ground. The king, accompanied by his personal guards and Sir Guy de Renne, hurried over to the roped-off area where the prisoners hunched, heads down, twenty-seven hundred humans as quiet as sweltering beasts.

The camp was rising to its feet, man and knight, waterboy and fletcher, all wondering what could bring a monarch into such heavy sunlight, through the thick black flies. Richard reached to his belt, pulled out a bright broadsword, and sawed briefly at the hairy, taut hemp rope that marked the prisoners' frontier.

Cut through, the cord fell hard, lifting curls of dust. The rope barrier slumped around the circumference of the prisoner herd. Foot soldiers seized their pikes. Yeoman soldiers picked up their axes. Men crowded close. A few of the knights loosened the blades in their scabbards, the camp intent on the king.

King Richard said, “All of them.”

And he made the unmistakable gesture, a finger across his throat.

Sir Guy de Renne hesitated for the briefest moment, making a show of freeing his own sword, turning to locate his clerks. Perhaps he was giving King Richard time to make his order more clear, or to amend it.

The king said, “Now!”

Sir Guy de Renne set his feet, like a man about to receive a blow, and caught the eye of Nigel and Rannulf. The two English knights looked on with no expression in their eyes. Sir Guy called for his chief clerk, an assistant with a leather pipe-roll crammed with scrolls. He completed the act of drawing his blade, and gave an order to the chief pikeman.

There was a space of time, three heartbeats, when nothing happened.

The first blow sent a wave through the prisoners, a gasp like a great wind. A few of the men struggled to rise, but the tethers around their hands and feet hobbled them, and they fell. A woman began to plead. The prisoners swarmed in place, trapped.

A child bawled, a noise like a crippled calf I had heard once, its hindquarters torn by foxes. The male prisoners cried out, one or two quick-thinking enough to argue in their incomprehensible tongue.

The pikeman did not hesitate, but some of the swordsmen looked back at the king, at Sir Guy de Renne, and then returned to their work.

Hubert called out, tried to arrest a pikeman hurrying to the butchery, and I had to drag Hubert away.

I kept Hubert from seeing it, held his face away from the sight, although the sloppy crunch of blade and ax, and the smell of blood and fresh-torn bowels could not be ignored. Or the cries of Christians calling out saint's names, Saint George who slew the winged serpent, and the giant Saint Christopher who carried Our Lord across a wide river. A sword makes a butcher-shop whine across the bones and sinews of a neck.

The calls of the still-living prisoners must have reached the outriders, because soon an irregular attack streamed across the plain from Saladin's camp. Our bowmen made easy work of keeping them at a distance.

A voice called out that each heathen killed was one less enemy to God. It was Father Urbino, his blond hair dark with sweat. He shook his fist, urging the pikemen at their labor.

Many knights did not enter the harvest. The few Templar men present turned away and left the rest to their work. Nigel watched with a stony gaze. When I caught his eye he let his expression shift to one of stoic distaste. When the tide of fly-carpeted blood crept close to us, Nigel kicked up a dike of dust to keep it from our feet.

But many knights labored beside the pikeman, and many English knights, too. Rannulf grew tired of watching hackwork, and made his way through the scarlet-soaked corpses, and demonstrated a sword stroke, severing first one life, then another, each death quick. He quit the field, shaking his head.