The Long Sword (56 page)

But we got Juan through the trap door. Miles got him to me and I threw caution to the winds because the steps were cracking and jumped to the second storey floor, cradling his head. I dropped him, but we were down.

A piece of the roof fell, a corbel.

‘Down!’ I yelled. ‘All the way out of the tower!’

In fact, we might have taken our time. The roof didn’t fall in for three days. But the next rock split the tower the way an axe splits a big billet of wood.

Juan recovered his wits in the galliot. He threw up twice, drank some water, and shook himself. For as long as it took us to reach the beach, he could only speak his native Catalan. The ways of the mind are strange.

Behind us, the Admiral’s banner continued to fly from the Casteleto, and the machine on the tower of the Pharos threw great stones at it. But most of them fell short, and they loosed very slowly.

We left the oarsmen and sailors as a garrison, with Fra Ricardo as castellan. My part in that battle was done.

I landed almost dry shod, and I had had the whole run down the harbour to don my harness with Marc-Antonio working like an automaton at my side. As soon as my breast and back were closed, he went to the others. Juan armed last, when the stern of the galliot was drawn well up the beach and the horses were going over the sides on the transports.

Oh, yes. The horses.

There was my Gawain, shining in the sun of Outremer.

There seemed no hurry at all. Men came and shook my hand, and the legate embraced me and Saracens came to the walls of their town, just half a bowshot away. Guillaume Machaut says we were showered with arrows, and Nerio was hit, so I suppose that this must be true, but I have no memory of darts or arrows. I only remember the feeling of calm, of confidence, that Father Pierre inspired in that hour. He wore no harness, only a fine gold and silk stole over one of his Carmelite robes. He had no weapon in his hand, but held a simple wooden cross. The only order he gave was to demand that the Knights of the Order would maintain the sanctuary of churches in the event we broke into the city, that we kill no women or children, that we behave as soldiers of God.

And then the Knights of the Order were mounted – a hundred of them, a block of scarlet. I’m not sure when the world had seen a hundred Knights of the Order all together on their chargers – perhaps not since the fall of Acre. The sight was so noble as to steal my breath.

I got up on Gawain. Marc-Antonio got me a lance, and I began to form the donats and the volunteers. We had lost a good number of men at the Casteleto. Their ranks were filled by d’Albret and his Gascons and Savoyards, who were, strictly speaking, crusaders and not volunteers or Donats, but they were there and had their mounts. I still did not question what they were doing with us.

I had formed my volunteers in a wedge at Fra Peter’s command and D’Albret came up behind me. He pushed right in, his visor open. ‘I like this better,’ he said. ‘Ah, monsieur, now perhaps we will see some fighting.’

He was grinning ear to ear.

It was not at all like being pounded by stone balls.

Ser Nerio brought his destrier up so that his right knee tucked behind my left. Ser Fiore brought his charger to where his left knee was behind my right. In the next rank, d’Albret was pinned between Miles and Juan. And do on, until our last rank was ten wide.

Off to my right, by the water’s edge, the men-at-arms and turcopoles, the Order’s light horsemen, were arming as fast as they could. John and Marc-Antonio, having got us into our armour, were now pulling maille shirts over their own heads and trying to find their own mounts in the herd of horses now swimming or walking on to the beach. There seemed to be horses everywhere.

Miles’ uncle advanced the papal standard.

Fra William got his turcopoles formed. He had about a hundred squires and ‘light’ cavalrymen and they did not form a wedge, but instead cantered out to form an open line to our front.

Fra Peter rode out of the central wedge and rode along our front.

‘Christians!’ he called. ‘For this you have trained. For this you have endured the penance of your harness and the taste of your own blood. Now is your hour!’

Four hundred voices roared. And were silent.

Four hundred men.

The legate was in the centre of Fra Peter’s wedge. As safe as the knights could make him, and our three squadrons began to ride along the foreshore, toward the keening sounds of combat.

The sun was high.

It was just noon.

Fra William took the turcopoles up the beach, formed at an order so open that there was twenty yards between horsemen, but that meant that his hundred covered almost the whole width of the beach and the sandy plain below the city walls. I had seen them practice this ‘screen’ on Rhodes, and I had assumed it was a matter of deception because even a very thin line of horses raises enough dust to cover most movements.

But the screen covered more than movement. Because the men in the screen had bows and crossbows, they could deter enemy light cavalry. They could also see and scout obstacles and could react far more quickly than we armoured knights to changes in the field or sudden sallies. Best of all, they were themselves very difficult to hit; at twenty yards apart, each horseman was an individual target. A single horseman can slow or speed, angle left or right, and if he knows his business, he can tie down a good amount of archery. You might argue that the archers could simply shoot over him or past him at the serried ranks of knights behind, but that is not the way of men in war. Men in war shoot at the target closest to them and most immediately dangerous.

At any rate, the confidence and calm of the Order was so great, and I think that Father Pierre’s presence had something to do with it, that I had time to admire the precision of our formations, and the advance of the line of light horse was splendid.

As we moved west along the beach, the sounds of fighting grew louder. When we came to the spit of land on which the Pharos castle stood, well out in the bay, the line of rocks that supported the spit made a wall. In fact, I have learned since that it
is
a wall, built in ancient times by Great Alexander and has since silted over to form dry land.

But along this wall came part of the garrison of Pharos.

Our turcopoles changed direction like a flock of starlings in the air. One moment they were a line across the beach, and then they changed front to the north, and formed to our right flank, facing the new threat from the garrison.

It was one of the day’s most important fights, and I missed it. I saw a little of it and it gave me a taste of how warfare in the Levant must be conducted – utterly different from the protracted armoured mêlées of Italy and France. The garrison of the Pharos Castle was part mounted Mamluks and part infantry archers. They moved very quickly along the top of the rock wall, seeming to walk on the sea. Our turcopoles changed front to meet them, as I have said, and both sides ended up on the sand at the sea’s edge, loosing a cloud of arrows as they closed.

The end of the Saracen line was only a hundred paces from me, and I gathered my reins and looked at Fra Peter.

He rode to me from his wedge. ‘Absolutely not,’ he said. ‘You will
not
charge until I command you. Do not betray my trust in you, William.’

Well.

I saw Marc-Antonio go down under his horse, and I saw John’s horse leap my downed squire even as John loosed his bow with perfect control, leaning well back, head thrown back. He feathered a Mamluk at a range of perhaps one pace, and his horse reared, at his command, I think, and he had
another
arrow on his bow and loosed it
down
into a man close enough to have been struck by his sword. He shot and shot and I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

And the whole time, we were moving. We passed
behind
the mêlée, or shot-stour, or call it what you will. We left our turcopoles to hold the garrison, and we rode west.

And now we could see the battle.

In the centre, King Peter’s
galia grossa
had made it close in to shore. I was told later that there was a single channel, the width of a ship, that came within half a bowshot of the beach, and the king’s ship was piloted to the end of the channel, bow first, and not stern first. So the king and his knights had to go into the water over the bow, and they leaped into the waves in three feet of dirty seawater.

The army of the city loosed thousands of bolts, shafts, arrows, and stone at them. This I saw with my own eyes and the gentle surf carried shafts ashore for days, but even more wondrous was the forest of fletchings that rose out of the flat waters where arrows had buried themselves in the shallow bottom.

When the arrows had minimal effect, when, in fact, the king’s galley disgorged most of his retinue, the king and his knights began to wade ashore. Guillaume of Turenne, Sieur Percival, Simon de Thinoli, Brémond de la Voulte, Guy la Beveux and Sir John de Morphou all formed close by the king and followed him as he waded, heavily armoured, through the sea.

They began to fight their way ashore – surely, messieurs, one of the greatest feet of arms ever by Christian knights, as there were fewer than seventy of them, and they fought their way to the water’s edge against ten thousand men.

Other ships tried to emulate the king’s feat. But, as we had seen from our tower, they ran aground too far from the king’s ship to succour it, and their men-at-arms had to wade neck deep towards the shore, exhausting in armour – and a misstep could mean death. Then the king’s brother, the Prince of Antioch, hit on the notion of running the stern of his galley against the stern of the king’s galley, and making a bridge.

By this time, the king was surrounded by Bedouin and Berber auxiliaries. Jean de Rheims told me that the king killed fifty men before he fell, and I can well believe it, having seen the dead. Percival de Coulanges, who is, believe me, no friend of mine, was yet a very pillar of valour, and his sword was like that of an avenging angel. Brémonde de la Voulte had a poleaxe, and with it he cut a tunnel through the infidels.

For an hour, the sixty or seventy knights held a section of beach against ten thousand men. Finally, the Prince of Antioch’s retainers boarded the king’s galley and ran the length of it, using it as a sort of pier, and other ships began to follow suit. Ships full of crusaders laid alongside the king’s galley, or crossed her stern, or grappled themselves to the Prince of Antioch’s galley.

Imagine, then, as the whole of the crusader fleet roped itself into a great floating dock from which to land men, how it would have fared had the machines on the Pharos Castle still been able to engage them!

Truly, it was all God’s will. It certainly was
not
good planning or brilliant tactics.

By noon, Prince Hugh was ashore with six hundred more men. The king was still fighting, and would not retreat. Nor were six hundred knights, however brave, enough to defeat the whole number of Alexandrines.

The rest of the army, the crusaders, either hung back or could not get ashore. I mean no dishonour to those who tried – men
drowned
leaping over the sides of ships in frustration, into water just over their heads. But many ships hung back, the Genoese, and, I confess it, the Venetians, much as I love them. I was not aboard Contarini’s flagship when he was finally informed that the target of the fleet was Alexandria, but I have been told he swore to sink the King of Cyprus’s ship himself.

He did not. But neither did he land.

The city garrison began to close in on the knights on the beach. Now, the annals of chivalry are full of tales of one man defeating ten, or a hundred, and that with God’s help. But any man trained to arms knows that if ten untrained peasants are brave and have sharp sticks and do not fear death, they can bring down an armoured knight, aye, and kill or take him. Perhaps it would take twenty to bring down a de Charny or the Black Prince. But the odds of ten thousand against six hundred could only be held so long.

The circle of Cypriote knights was wavering when de Mézzières got his round ship in close and leaped into the surf. The water came up to his neck – I have heard this from a hundred witnesses – and he had the banner of the King of Jerusalem in his fist, which had not flown in Outremer in a hundred years. And he walked slowly out of the waves, the white banner of Jerusalem trailing on the dirty water behind him, and twenty knights followed him. De Mézzières raised the banner of Jerusalem, and the knights of Cyprus and the handful of crusaders ashore shouted.

And the admirals of Genoa and of Venice, cursing, no doubt, began to manoeuvre to land their knights.

They were half an hour behind the action.

The king was doomed.

When we passed the sea wall, it was, as I have said, noon. The Egyptian sun, even in autumn, was impossibly brilliant, and the air was as warm as an English day in high summer. The dazzle of the noontide sun on the water of the bay was like a thousand-thousand points of light, so bright they burned the air like daggers.

The army of Alexandria lay before us on the dirty white sand. Now, I have heard men say that Alexandria was undefended, and they lie. This is the foolish jealousy of men who, having missed a great battle, seek to deride all those who were there.

They had a great army, and the governor’s lieutenant had the whole garrison of the Pharos Castle, and there was another lord under the walls with a strong force of cavalry.

But the very impetus that was about to win the battle for Islam, the sheer force of ten thousand against six hundred, had drawn them out of all formation into a great clump, a heaving, desperate mass at the centre of the bay of the old harbour’s arc. They had no formation, and the Mamluk bowmen, the Al-Halqua, non-Mamluk, troops of the garrison (as Sabraham later identified them) and the Sudanese spearmen – good troops, as I would have reason to know – were packed in like glasses in woodchips.

When the lord under the walls saw the Order, he led his cavalry at us. He had more horse than we, but not many more, and their horses, while beautiful, were small. Nor were they in wedges. He led his Mamluks forward, and again I gathered my reins short, and Fra Peter turned; his visor was still up.