The Long Sword (57 page)

‘Abide!’ he called.

I was too eager.

We walked along the sands. In my memory, our formation was perfect.

To my right front, where the king was, the banner of Jerusalem wavered. And fell.

The hosts of Alexandria let out a great roar that rang from the walls, and the people of the city echoed their cheer.

Fra Peter leaned back. He was speaking to the legate.

Chretien d’Albret cursed. ‘The fucking serf! He’s going to let the king die. Charge, Gold! Lead us!’

He began to push his mount forward.

We were formed very close. I turned and thumped the butt of my lance against his chest. ‘Abide!’ I shouted.

Fra Peter made a set of hand signals with his bridle hand – to the southernmost wedge. To me, he held up his hand – flat.

Halt.

I could not imagine why we should halt.

But Fra Peter and Fra William had been very clear about obedience, and despite d’Albret shouting that I was a coward, I raised my lance and reined in. My whole command halted. Horse shuffled – somewhere close at hand, a horse let out a long fart.

The southernmost wedge plodded along the sand.

The Mamluks let their horses have their heads, took up their bows, and loosed their first arrows. They were at long bowshot, perhaps three hundred yards. A light cane arrow fell from the sky and hit me in the helmet.

Oh, armour!

There was a sharp
ping.

Fra Peter’s gauntleted hand closed on air and pumped, once.

‘Walk!’ I called. I put my weight forward.

‘Now what? Gold, for the love of the Virgin! The king is down!’ D’Albret’s voice had an odd ring. He’d been an excitable boy and he’d spent too long with Camus, who imagined himself Hell’s emissary on earth.

As if Hell needs an emissary.

I looked, and the circle of the crusaders on the beach had been broken.

The three bodies of the Order were now in echelon, the southernmost slightly ahead, then the centre body with the legate, and then mine. Our angled line of three wedges was like a barbed scythe.

And Fra Peter’s fist pumped, once.

I heard the change in the hoofbeats as the arrows screamed in. I touched Gawain with my spurs – and he leapt forward.

The Knights of St John have been fighting in the Holy Land for two hundred years. One of their many tricks is this change of speed as the first serious arrow volley is launched. In three strides, Gawain and I were at a gallop, still with Nerio and Fiore leaning into me, their armoured knees behind mine. We were an arrowhead, a battering ram of horses and steel.

The Mamluks rode in close, trying to break our formation. By Christ, gentles, they were brave! They came right in, almost to our lance tips, to loose their arrows, and it seemed to me that in one beat of my heart they were impossibly far away and the next they were right atop us.

Deus Veult!

One shout, like a crack of thunder. This, too, we had practiced since Venice.

Our lances came down.

And they turned away. They had neither the formation nor the horseflesh for mêlée
and they turned and shot over the backs of their saddles.

One man down – one at the front of the wedge – and the whole force would be dissipated into a wreck of falling horses and broken men.

God did not will that.

I do not remember closing my visor. But my whole world was limited to a single man, his beard dyed red, his armour gold and silver in the brilliant sun, his horse’s rump shining with sweat and the back of his saddle just two horse-lengths from me.

His arrows struck me. The first slammed into my breastplate like an axe blow, thrusting me back in my saddle like a good hit in a joust, and the second hit my visor – and penetrated it. I felt my death slide across my cheek.

But as I was not dead, I rode on.

Then everything changed.

The Saracen’s Mamluks charged us from under the walls, and moved diagonally to cross our front. But when they failed to break our formations, they evaded straight away instead of galloping lightly away from our impotent lances – and slammed into the rear of their own infantry.

In my memory, I pursued my hennaed Mamluk for hours across an infinite plain of sand. But then, in one beat of my heart, I caught him, and my lance struck him in the back. I imagine I killed him instantly – his coat of plates and mail failed against the force of my charge. My point went in, and the whole of my lance penetrated him: his horse had balked.

I lost my lance.

In two more heart beats I was deep in the Saracen army. Gawain was killing more effectively than I; he danced, his iron-shod feet like four iron maces. Weapons struck me – and it is in moments like this that you discover your training. I drew the Emperor’s sword without a conscious thought; it flowed into my hand, and I cut. I do not remember fighting men, only cutting at a mob. Gawain was still moving forward.

I had one thought, then, to cut my way to the king. If I raised my head at all, I could see the last of the crusaders on the beach, perhaps three hundred, now, the brilliance of their armour showing where they stood through the press of foes.

And next to me was Fiore, his arm rising and falling like an executioner’s axe, and on the other side of me, Nerio and his superb horse left a wake of red ruin. Miles was at Fiore’s left knee and Juan at Nerio’s right, and the five of us were the point of the Christian spear thrusting for the king.

And yet, as we slowed, I had time to be afraid.

Usually, in combat, there is no time to be afraid. Fear comes earlier, when you prepare, and wait, and later, when you consider, and shake. But on the beach at Alexandria, we took their foot so completely by surprise that we were at their backs, and I saw bearded, shouting faces suddenly turning to me. I had time to consider whether my four friends and I could, by ourselves, best the greatest city in the world.

I had no idea what was happening elsewhere. I spared no thoughts for the legate, unarmoured, in the midst of the press, or for Fra Peter or Fra William or any of the other knights. They were off to my left and they might have been in other spheres.

Ahead, I saw the flash of armour.

Now I was using my sword two-handed in fatigue, and desperation. The danger is hitting your own horse. As the horse moves its head – and horses move their heads often – you can catch the back of the neck above the mane, killing your own mount.

Fiore had no wasted his time.

At some point – hours? Days? We struck the Naffatun
.
They were veteran Mamluks armed with grenadoes of naphtha, a sticky stuff like tar that ignited on contact and burned armour and human skin, the very stuff of hell brought to earth. They had pressed far down the beach and burned two galleys that they’d caught aground, and now they hurled their bombs at us and charged with their swords.

Imagine that you see this through the narrow slits of your visor while your lungs struggle to pull in enough air through the tiny holes in your helmet. Imagine the stink of your own sweat on a sweltering day, wearing eighty pounds of armour, fighting for your life.

Something caught me from behind. I was taken by surprise, and in a moment, I was unhorsed. You always imagine that this will take time – but by Saint George, one moment I was horrified by the Naffatun and the next I was off my near side, down in the sand.

Men caught fire, and died horribly. Horses panicked close by me – hooves were everywhere as our dense formation exploded in a rout of burning men and terrified horses.

But as we were surrounded by the Army of Egypt, our own near destruction only served to thrust us again at our foes. Panicked horses exploded into the serried ranks of the foe.

Truly, God willed it.

Not that I was aware, particularly. I was more aware of the hooves, everywhere, and the ranks of enemy infantry.

The Naffatun were well armoured and had shields of some horrible beast with a knobby hide. I got to one knee and hammered one with my sword one-handed and failed to penetrate it, and my adversary slashed at me with a heavy sabre from the shelter of his buckler and his sabre had no more effect on my harness than the Emperor’s sword on his shield.

On the third or fourth exchange I remembered a play of Fiore’s and, as my weapons struck the face of his hide buckler, I rotated my hand up and leaned forward. My point slipped past his shield and
down
into his face, and he fell backwards, my sword deep in his guts.

And I went with it. By luck or practice, I used the collapse of his body to drag me off my knee and to my feet.

Gawain was close; I knew him, and was sure he wouldn’t leave me. I needed a few seconds in the press to get him.

That was the time of the longsword.

The men around me were mostly Bedouin – unarmoured men with small shields, daggers and spears. Interspersed with them were Sudanese Ghulami, men as black as Richard Musard, or blacker, with heavy spears like the ones we’d use for a foot combat or a passage of arms. I cut hard, a long, flat cut from right to left, clearing a little space and severing a man’s fingers. He fell back, and I killed another with a flick of my point: I was spending my spirit the way Nerio spent ducats.

But by God, I was fighting well.

Fiore reached me first, angling into the enemy from my right and killing his way like a ship under sail cuts the water. His charger dropped a big spearman whose heavy shaft was absorbing my blows. I caught his stirrup and his good horse hauled me ten paces through the press and I was hit twenty times. I was bruised, and I took a wound in the back of my right bicep under the spaulder, but when the pain forced me to relinquish the stirrup leather, I was close enough to the crusaders to see their crests and their coat armour.

I could see Mézzières, forty feet away. He had one foot on either side of the king, who was lying flat in the sand.

I thought of de Charny.

I prayed.

I was hit. And I stumbled.

And then Juan was there – Juan, who’d been knocked unconscious in the first action. He was tall in his saddle, his seat firm, his back straight, and his arm rose and fell like a man threshing wheat, and Saracens died. Because of him, I finally had a moment to gather Gawain, who should have followed me like a loyal dog.

My horse was nowhere to be seen.

I believe that I cursed.

Miles had our banner, and now he was close to me, and behind him I could see Nerio and the scarlet coat armour of my volunteers. The Saracens were screaming – the keening came through my helmet – and the dying were screaming a different tune and the cry ‘On, on!’ thundered out, grunted from the mounted knights.

The world balanced and the balance held, like two combatants when both make a strong pass and their blades lock. We were locked. Mézzières, Nerio, Fra Peter. Somewhere out on the bay, Carlo Zeno leapt into the water. A ship full of Genoese discharged a heavy volley of arbalest bolts into the flank of the Naffatun.

I saw none of this, you understand. Nor had I seen d’Albret unhorsing me, or trying to kill me and being driven off by Juan. In the helmet, you just don’t see.

Where I was, there was only the grit in between my teeth, the heaving of my sides as my lungs begged for air that my breastplate denied, the sweat that wept into my eyes from my hairline and the soggy padding of my cervelliere, and the sword I held in both hands.

Listen, then.

I got my sword up into a high guard – rare enough, on the battlefield – but something came to me, in the locked moment, some grace, whether from God or Fiore I leave you to guess. But I took up the guard called Window with my hands crossed, and my adversary was an armoured Saracen in light mail. He had a scimitar and a buckler with five bosses and verses of the Koran inscribed in gold.

I cut. I rotated my hands and cut between the bucker and the scimitar, rotating forward on my hips.

Like many men against whom I trained, the space between his sword and his shield was less guarded than it ought to have been. My sword touched both his sword and his shield. And continued through his helmet and into his head. My hand was so fell, so heavy, that the blade went through helm and head, down and down.

He fell, and I pressed forward one full step, cutting the reverse line
up.
I felt as if the very power of God had filled me. By Christ, all my life I have heard men claim to have cut through a helmet, but I have seen it done with a sword only three times, and that was one.

My rising cut broke a man’s wrists and half severed them and I threw him to the ground with my knee and my left hand and finished him with my knee while I cut flat and low against an unarmoured spearman. His spear thrust was weak and skidded on my breastplate and I cut into his leg and probably fractured it with the same blow and he too was down.

And then I was face to face with Mézzières, across a horse-length of beach. My friends were clearing away the front of the Cypriotes, and they had their ring of steel reformed.

The army of the Alexandrines shrieked their dismay. And then, like fools, they turned and ran.

The ‘crusaders’ were finally landing, all along the beach, many in boats provided by their ships, and some captains had run their small craft ashore. The Venetians and Genoese knew the harbour and came in close, well away to the right, and their landing cut many of the fugitives off from the open gate.

I saw none of that. I leaned on my sword and panted, and my breath was all I could breathe inside my helmet, and somehow I got my visor up.

De Mézzières stood there in the sun with the banner of Jerusalem in his hand. Then he raised his visor. He had a ring of dead at his feet.

Our eyes met.

What can I say? You know what we both thought.

The man at his feet coughed, and coughed again, and in a moment we were on him the way the pursuers were on the Saracen fugitives. I had assumed the king to be dead, but we got his bassinet off his head and his blue eyes fluttered open.

He rolled to his hands and knees and spat blood into the sand.

‘Ah,’ he growled. ‘Ah, Mézzières. I gather we are not in heaven?’