The Lute Player (33 page)

He swung round and hurried away. I ran and found Guy de Lusignan, the man whom Richard had unavailingly supported in his candidature for the crown of Jerusalem. When we reached the beach it was, to the lay eye, a scene of complete chaos but Richard was moving about there as unruffled yet as watchful as a housewife in her kitchen. With exactly the same air—ah, here is a pan just on the boil, I will attend it—he turned to De Lusignan and said, ‘Guy, it’s a poor substitute for Jerusalem, I grant you, but Cyprus is yours. And at least not subject to the surveillance of the three blind mice! The water supply in this town—and probably all over the island—should be looked to. And this harbour needs dredging. Isaac’s brother Fernando is still at large; deal with him how you will. If I were you I’d bargain with the Archbishop of Nicosia—he’s a cousin; he might be useful. If he’ll crown you, well and good; if not, have no truck with him, get him out of the way. Good God, man, I don’t want your thanks; I want your loyalty behind me—you’ve always had mine, you know. And while I think of it,
my
wife is Queen of Cyprus, don’t forget! So if you think of marrying again—Hi, there, you son of Satan!’ He turned to pursue an archer who was forcing his way into a boat already overladen.

Having watched a kingdom thus casually given away, I went back into the palace to make my bundle and offer my services to the ladies. And there I learned that generosity was in vogue that day.

‘Oh, Blondel,’ said my lady, ‘the King and I were speaking together last evening after you had played and since we cannot hope always to be together in the Holy Land, and since he has no minstrel of his own and since the Princess of Cyprus can always play for us when we desire music, I told him that he could have your services in future.’

Sire, would you accept this dog? It fetches and carries and is a reliable guard. Sire, would it please you to own this monkey? It has several amusing tricks.

I stood silent for a moment. Anna Apieta said into the silence:

‘Perhaps you should add, Berengaria, that the King begged and beseeched you…’ There was something more in her voice than a desire to soothe my feelings and whatever it was flicked something tender in Berengaria’s memory.

‘I could add that. I could also say with truth that you put the idea into his head, Anna.’ She waited and then went on: ‘None of that matters. I have had time to consider it and now think well of the plan.’ She came a step nearer and laid her narrow white hand on my sleeve. ‘It isn’t only a question of making music, Blondel. You can look after him; see that he doesn’t sit down in sweat-soaked clothes and take a chill or go out bareheaded into the sun. Or neglect to eat. You know, the small but yet important things.’ Her small secret smile which never disturbed the grave sweetness of her eyes shone on me for a moment as her hand dropped away. ‘And, Blondel, you could always bring me news of him.’

How pleasant! How convenient! ‘To do thy bidding is my chosen task.’ I had meant that each of the many times I had sung it in the past. And I had enjoyed every one of my stolen visits to Richard’s camp, every moment of the time I had spent in his company. Even now as I stood there not saying a word, a feeling of freedom and excitement was rising in me like yeast. But I hadn’t come back from London, I hadn’t come this far on my way to Palestine just to be given away like a pair of old gloves! They were both waiting for me to say something. I said it.

‘Perhaps my new master,’ I said, ‘will give me a collar with his name on it. It is convenient to know to whom one belongs.’

Some devil in me had made me want to hurt her. But the shaft misfired. She looked at me blankly and said:

‘Don’t talk nonsense, Blondel.’

It was Anna Apieta who, suddenly and for no reason I could see, burst into tears. Dear Anna, why?

V

So I sailed on the
Trenc-la-Mer
as we sped to the rescue of the French and Burgundian troops who had surrounded Acre and then, in their turn, had been surrounded by Saracens and were now in grave danger of being cut off from the sea.

We found the harbour still in Christian hands, however, when we sailed in on the evening of St. Barnabas’s day. But the danger had been real enough for every thinking man in that great company to look upon Richard’s arrival as the end of a great peril and to behave towards him as children, terrified of the dark, would behave towards a grown man who arrived bearing a torch. Indeed the welcome accorded him would have turned the head of any other man, however modest and self-effacing he might be. French, Burgundian, German, Spanish, Norwegian and Italian, they crowded about him as though they owned no other leader; the trumpets shrilled out their notes of welcome; every musical instrument in the camp gave of its best; a great avenue of torches lighted his way from the shore to the place where his tent was being reared. Richard is here! The Lionheart has arrived! All will be well! It was a crazy, intoxicating welcome.

It evoked in Richard Plantagenet a most typical response.

‘This is an undisciplined mob, not an army. Suppose Saladin struck now! By God, in his place, I would.’

The shouts, the plaudits, the trumpets, the torches meant nothing to him. They hindered rather than helped the crusade. And how far they hindered only God could say. For there were four men at least in that camp on that evening who thought themselves the Plantagenet’s equal or better. ‘The Lionheart has arrived. All will be well!’ sounded ill in the ears of Philip of France, Leopold of Austria, Conrad of Montferrat and Hugh of Burgundy. The danger inherent in that glorious, spontaneous welcome to the newcomer lay not in well-timed sudden assault from Saladin, that most generous foe, but in the slow, sour rancour, the fatal jealousy that it fostered in Richard’s own allies.

But of that, too, much has been sung already. The tale of jealousy can be told by those who have never left their own hearthside. Let me tell of what I saw.

I saw Acre on a brilliant sunny morning. It looked like a posy of flowers wrapped in a stiff white napkin and set down on a squashed dung heap. The town had white walls and within their circling whiteness were the roofs of the houses, the minarets of the mosques, rose-pink, lemon-green, primrose-yellow, hyacinth-blue, the bright ochre of marigolds all shining in the sun and, from a distance, beautiful.

Between the white walls and the crusaders’ camp lay a wide, desolate belt of filth and ruin. Once there had been gardens there and vineyards and fruitful orchards but every tree had been cut down, every bush uprooted for fuel and now in all that space there was no single blade of green, no living thing save the vultures and the rake-ribbed dogs pecking and grubbing in the dust, the dung and the rubbish, the ashes, the bones, the bits of broken harness.

This girdle of desert had been laid about Acre and steadily widened during the last two years for the siege was no new thing. An army of Germans and mercenaries, ill organised and of late virtually leaderless, for Barbarossa had died, had been camped there for two years. But the siege had never been hard pressed and until the arrival of Philip of France and his fresh army the Saracens in the town had never been completely cut off from their fellows in the hills. Philip, newly arrived, ardent, had closed the gap and Saladin had retaliated by besieging him and by making repeated attempts to take possession of the harbour and so cut off the Christian army from the sea. It was this threat which had brought Richard hot-foot from his bridal bed.

He was now riding around the camp alone, save for me, and he had curtly forbidden me to speak until I was spoken to. He had refused all other company. ‘I think better when I am alone,’ he had said. He had come out of his tent, looked at Flavel, the yellow horse which awaited him, and asked:

‘Where is the grey?’ They told him and he ordered it to be brought and then bellowed for me.

‘Look, boy,’ he said, ‘I never rewarded you for your invention. When Escel’s model worked I knighted him but I regretted it. A knight without armour is neither flesh, fowl nor good red herring. But here’s a mount for you. Hop up and see how you like him. You can ride around with me. But don’t talk.’

That was how I came into what proved to be a pretty brief possession of a trained battle charger.

I was sorry that Lyard was grey. A grey horse still had a place in my dreams and in the even more horrible hours of lying awake in the night and though there was a world of difference between this gaily caparisoned entire and the gentle old monastery palfrey, there was a likeness too. However, this was no moment to think of that. I was suddenly the owner of a horse so good that when the King of England had had to choose between him and the one he rode he had been puzzled and had simply chosen Flavel because he had fought him, being worse-tempered. And I was riding round with Richard on his first inspection of the camp and that was a thing that many great and important men would have been glad to do, because first impressions are so sharp and durable and a word here, an excuse there, the apt word at the right moment can be so very effective.

I realised within ten minutes that the only camp I had ever seen—the clean-swept, austere collection of tents at Messina—hadn’t been a camp at all. This was a camp—this disorderly jumble of tents, dung heaps, broken casks, drinking booths, quarreling idle men, heaps of rotting food, women half-naked lolling in the sun.

Later on, when I walked through the poor quarters of Acre, Arsouf and Jaffa and saw the filth and degradation, I wondered whether there might not be such a thing as spiritual contagion. For throughout the whole campaign it seemed to me that the filthy foulness of these Eastern towns which looked so pretty from a distance and which, in closer contact, were so shocking and offensive to eye and nose and ear had spread out and affected, not by imitation or contact but by some imponderable means, the manners and morals of the crusaders.

Even Richard never succeeded in making a good clean camp in Palestine. He tried, by precept and example and finally by savage punishments. He closed the drinking booths but they sprang up overnight and often numbered one to every six tents. He issued endless orders against women—but as soon as we had settled for a week, there they were, drabs and doxies of all kinds, the dregs of the European seaports, the survivors of rape and massacre of the Eastern towns. He organised small armies of dung carriers and refuse collectors and set the great stinking fires alight on the outskirts of every camp but still the filth mounted and still the crusaders lived in circumstances exactly comparable to those of the lowest of their enemies. Even in the consumption of that product of the poppy which we were beginning to call opium we copied the Saracens, more and more as time went on, and men suffered from wounds which would not heal, from recurrent fevers, agues, open running sores which the heat and the dust exacerbated. As soon as a camp was established, there on its outskirts were the furtive pedlars of the drug which could banish pain, cradle the spirit in soft peace, delight the mind with rare bright visions, all for the price of the hard-earned coin, the sick awakening, the tremor in the bones, the despair of the soul.

However, this was a bright morning and all these things were still to be learned. Richard was vastly disgusted but cheerful. ‘All armies rot in disuse,’ he said. ‘When we rear our ladders against those walls there’ll be no time for drinking and whoring.’ He rode on, his intent glance marking this to be altered, this to be mended, until we came to the place where the Archbishop of Canterbury, Baldwin, had his headquarters. He and Hubert Walter, Bishop of Salisbury, had come on with a force of Londoners and men of Kent while Richard was in Messina.

Over the buff-coloured tent the Leopards of England flew side by side with the standard of Thomas à Becket whose murder Richard’s father had ordered in a fit of passion. A man ran forward to take Flavel’s head and the yellow horse immediately reared.

‘Leave them. They are trained to stand,’ Richard said. And I took that as sufficient invitation to dismount and follow him into the tent. I was curious to see Baldwin—one of the few men who had gained a reputation for saintliness while pursuing a career of worldly activity.

A narrow bed stood just within the doorway and on it, propped high with many pillows, lay an old man. His eyes were closed and he might have been dead but for the fact that his dark, cracked lips were moving and a stream of words, uttered in a low husky voice, issued from them. A young cleric, hunched on a stool near the head of the bed, was scribbling rapidly, leaning down to catch the words which went on without any of those pauses so necessary to the scribe who takes down dictation. Standing a little apart was a short, thickset man wearing a coat of mail covered by a rough canvas jerkin. He was watching the man on the bed and listening to his words with an expression of sorrow and yet of contempt.

On Richard’s entry this expression gave way to delight and surprise. He came forward, dropped on one knee and took Richard’s hand between his.

‘My liege lord, I had not hoped to see you so soon.’

‘I looked for you last night,’ Richard said.

‘And gladly would I have been there,’ the man said. ‘But’—he nodded towards the bed—‘he was violent. He wished to speak with you the moment you arrived. I had to stay and restrain him. This morning he is calmer. He is writing what he wishes you to know.’

The husky voice murmured, ‘Evil can never be overcome by evil and do not think that drunkards, lechers and blasphemers can take the Holy City. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in His holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully…’

The poor scribe, having given Richard a distraught glance and a dip of the head, went on scribbling for dear life.

‘They told me he was sick,’ Richard said. ‘What ails him?’

The man in the canvas coat shrugged his shoulders and his mail rattled.

‘Nothing they have a name for. He should never have come, the saintly, gentle old fool!’ He spoke with the anger of hurt affection. ‘What did he expect to find? A company of militant angels? My lord, soldiers guzzle wine, they steal, they swear and if on a hot day an infidel girl comes to the camp with a donkey and two panniers full of cool melons and pears, they buy her wares and then, given a chance, tumble her.’