The White Cross (24 page)

The Sultan’s camp is sited on a high and largely treeless ridge a little to the south of the plain of Acre. A well-ordered settlement; it is a place in which drunkenness and loose behaviour are accounted sins, where all kneel five times a day to thank Allah for his continued favour. Laid out in streets like a small town, its lines of tents are interspersed with limestone huts; their doors and windows canopied against the glare. One houses Salahuddin’s falcons, another his Egyptian hunting cats. Behind, a partially submerged ice-house is packed with mountain snow to cool the Sultan’s drinks. Asses and riding camels are roped in groups wherever there is space. Ponies are picketed. Chickens scratch for beetles. Sheep graze the grey sages and ratams which sprout between the rocks.

A warrior who’s weathered more than thirty seasons in the field; a man of legendary piety who knows a good deal more than most about the human state; heir to the ancient wealth of Egypt, ruler of an empire twice as large as those of the English and the French King set together, the Sultan’s appearance lacks any kind of ostentation.

The face of Salahuddin Yusuf ibn Ayyub is the colour of oiled walnut, narrow and deep-lined, with the almond eyes and long beaked nose of a true Kurd. A slight figure in a qaftan of bleached cotton, he wears a turban made from pleated lengths of snowy muslin, wound round a small felt toque and pinned with a single aigrette feather, also white. His brows are dark and heavy. His thin moustache and neatly parted beard, both trimmed symmetrically, have had the grey dyed out of them with litharge and burnt lime. His hands are scrupulously clean. His feet are neatly shod in buskins. All of his eight fingers and both his thumbs are innocent of rings – the austere effect he seeks, spoiled only by the large, untidy, wildly weeping female who’s attached herself to the crossed ankles of God’s Shadow on the Earth.

His eyelids droop. But when he lifts them, the Sultan’s eyes, black as obsidian, are lively and alert.

‘Assure the woman that her daughter shall be sought and found, if she has not been sold,’ he tells his dragoman interpreter. ‘If God so wills, the Christian child shall be restored into her mother’s care.’

He speaks with quiet authority. His voice is light but clear. ‘And tell her she shall have our gentlest mare to bear them both in safety to the unbelievers’ camp. The compassion of Allah is universal,’ he concludes while two plump eunuchs prise the woman from his legs and lead her sobbing from the tent.

The Sultan Salahuddin Yusuf ibn Ayyub has acts of cruelty in his past. But in his sixth decade he has discovered mercy. By any standards he’s a fair man and I think you’re going to like him.

‘Now, let us hear the latest tidings of the Frankish kings.’ The Sultan claps his hands just once; to have admitted to his presence a broad Cilician Turk, turbaned and trousered with a bright emerald sash to span a well fed belly. The man makes his obeisance; touches heart, lips, brow, then kneels to kiss the carpet three times by the Sultan’s nearest slipper and wordlessly to place a leather cylinder in the hand extended to receive it.

The Sultan breaks the seal, extracts a parchment and unrolls it. His moves are those of a trained soldier, rapid and precise; much as they had been three years earlier, in the same tent at Hattin, when with the same slim hand he’d expertly decapitated the double-dealing Christian, Reginald de Châtillon.

God’s Shadow on the Earth studies the Turk’s report while those about him stand or kneel in silence; the only sound within the tent, the faint creak of its cedar poles .

With courts to govern from Tunisia to the Arabian Ocean, with vital trade routes and supply lines to maintain and enemies of Islam to forestall, the Sultan’s network of informants is reaching ever outwards, year by year, around the Middle Sea, across the Straits of Africa and up through Moorish Spain as far as Gascony and the Atlantic seaboard. ‘My agents are my eyes and ears,’ is how he’s put it to his viziers to justify the cost of maintaining spies across three continents, together with their homing birds and donkeys. ‘They are as keys to the unknown.’

‘So?’ The Sultan Salahuddin surveys the kneeling man across the parchment. ‘Thou hast assembled the intelligence thyself? This is thy transcript?’

‘It is, Sayyid.’

‘The work is good.’

Within a single sweep of his free hand Allah’s Deputy receives a bag of silver dirhams from the shadows at his back, to drop it on the mat between them. It is
sadaqa
, an act of generosity pleasing to God. Man and master understand each other; the one too mannerly to lift the sac and weigh its contents, the other too considerate to keep him waiting.

‘
Allah yessallemak.
Felicitations and the Peace of God be with thee.’ The Sultan signals for the agent to accept his payment and depart.

‘Our scouts inform us that five further vessels have put in to Tyre with Franks, with al-Firinjah aboard.’ He speaks to all assembled in the tent as he returns the parchment to its case. ‘Yet neither of the kings who’ve sworn to drive us from this land has yet embarked on their sea crossing. We hear the King of France lies sick in Genoa. The English king sails south from thence to meet the body of his fleet in Sicily, to refit and perhaps to winter there if this dispatch can be relied on.’

‘Which shows us that they’re craven.’ The Sultan’s eldest son, al-Afdal ’Ali ibn al-Nasir Yusuf; a dark youth with an eruptive skin, dressed splendidly in Alexandrian silk brocaded with the gold crescents of Islam, steps forward to address his father. ‘They sniff and dawdle at the wayside, like the dogs and progeny of bitches that they are, knowing they’ll be beaten if they fight.’

‘Not from the evidence we have.’ The Sultan looks upon the eldest, best beloved of all his sons, the prototype for sixteen more, and sees in place of his tall figure a small boy flourishing a wooden sword and doing all he can to prove himself.

He smiles indulgently and thinks how little Ali’s really changed, despite his height and blemished skin. ‘From all we’ve heard of him, my son,’ he says, ‘it seems unlikely that a lack of courage is what delays the King of England. Our man in Gascony reports that the old queen his mother has already left Bordeaux to cross the Pyrenees and fetch a Spanish princess for his bride. They are to meet in Sicily when she completes the journey. It is for her, we gather, that Richard al-Malik’s waiting.’

‘Sayyid, may I speak?’ An old man with his back against a tent pole; a stooped, grey-bearded Imam clad like his Sultan all in white, presumes to do so on the Sultan’s nod. His voice has been ground down to a hoarse whisper from years of calling men to prayer. Nor is the fact that he is toothless any kind of help.

‘How can we credit this report,’ he rasps, ‘when all the world knows that the two kings are united by the King Richard’s pledge to take the French king’s sister as his queen?’

‘All the world does not have agents in Pamplona and Bordeaux as we do, Umar.’ The Sultan smooths his very black moustache.

‘But why insult his ally with another bride? It cannot be good policy, Prince of Believers.’

‘We’re told the old queen, Alienor, believes the French king’s sister was her husband’s mistress, has even borne his bastard child. If that is true, their Church must rule her marriage to King Henry’s son unfitting and incestuous.’

‘These filthy al-Firinjah pigs!’ Al-Afdal’s eyes are slanted like his father’s, but wilder, less humane. ‘May God confound them and destroy them! May their black souls be cast into the pit of hell for their vile fornications! May they be scourged! May they be singed and scalded, seethed in pitch to roast in everlasting torment!’

‘I would advise you to seek out the metaphors and melodies concealed within the Holy Revelations before you take them all at face value,’ remarks his father, who privately believes that Allah the Compassionate agrees His Prophet’s range of recipes for roasting unbelievers to be both tedious and wastefully severe.

‘In any case it’s not as fornicators, but as invaders that they will be judged. But to answer Umar’s question, the tainted French woman is past her best years and may be unable to bear further children, whilst naturally the King of England needs an heir.

‘In this report,’ the Sultan taps the leather cylinder, ‘a servant of the old queen boasts that she has chosen for her son a princess from the warlike Kingdom of Navarre; a hardy woman from the Spanish marchlands who is likely to withstand the rigours of a military campaign. It seems King Richard would have wed his cousin, Princess Isabella, to claim the Latin Kingdom for himself, if she had not been promised by her mother to the Governor of Tyre. Instead, if our report is true, he means to bring the Navarrese with him on his jihad and make her queen instead.’

‘The King of France will never tolerate it, Sayyid,’ old Umar whispers through the silence which has fallen in the tent, making sure the sigh he gives to end the sentence is audible to all.

‘But that, my old friend, is the point exactly.’ Their eyes meet and a faint nod of agreement passes between the Sultan and his Imam. ‘Allow me to remind thee, venerable uncle, that the first rule of success in any conflict is to seek knowledge of thine enemies, be it official, covert, or even anecdotal. The second to make use of any weaknesses they may show as a means of…’

‘Allah u Akbar, Allah u Akbar! God is Great, God is Great!’
The ululating voice of Islam summoning the faithful to the Temple of Salvation, cuts through two layers of tented goat hair and the Sultan in mid-sentence.
‘Ash-hadu al-la llaha ill Allah! I bear witness that there is no Divinity but Allah!’

‘Enough, enough.’ God’s Shadow on the Earth rises at once to set aside his spy’s report and cleanse himself for prayer. ‘Allah reminds His children it is time to put away the toys.’ He swiftly demonstrates why slippers are so named, and standing barefoot, signals for the tent flap to be lifted and his attendants to disperse.

They leave without a word; and when the rest have hurried off to pray in other lamplit tents and huts, or to perform the Maghrib litany beneath the stars, only the Imam remains as he is bidden to lead the Sultan and his son in their devotion.

‘Allahu Akbar
, Subhanna rabbiyal ‘Azeem, Subhanna rabbiyal ‘Azeem…’ The old man intones, as first they stand with thumbs behind their ear lobes, with right hands over left above their genitals, then bow with palms on knees.

The three men, equal in the eyes of Allah, stand close together side by side with arms pressed to their thighs. They kneel to touch the Turkey carpets with foreheads, noses and with hands. They look westward over their right shoulders to seek the angel who records their good deeds, look east to he who debits sins – until at last, exhorting God to hear them and receive their prayers, they rise to greet each other in the certainty of His forgiveness.

During the month of Ramadhan, no nourishment may be consumed until the time of Maghrib, sunset; fasting being one half of endurance according to a Prophet who enjoyed his food; endurance one half of true faith. So when the drum is beaten to end fast, and their repast is set before them, few words pass between the three men in the tent until the sharp edge of their hunger has been blunted.

They lie at ease on low divans strewn with silk cushions, drinking iced sherbet, eating fruit, enjoying roasted fowls and skewered mutton. Although the days are hot, the nights are cold here in the hills. A brazier of charcoal has been lit for comfort on a square hearth of tiles. It casts a warm glow round the tent, illustrating on its panels some of the other pleasures denied in Ramadhan during the hours of daylight.

Al-Afdal in the silence is studying a panel that depicts in beaten bronze a group of priapic sons of Islam and happily receptive daughters, performing four of the eleven recommended attitudes for copulation – before he realises that both the older men are watching him and smiling.

‘Allah is beneficent. They take their pleasure without guilt, which is as He intends.’ His father’s tone is playful. ‘Praise be to God, who hath directed husbands to take their pleasure in the natural parts of wives, and hath designed their
zabbs
to give equivalent delight. Wherefore He blesses fleshly union as the source of life, and at its climax bids us to behold His face. It is the moment, is it not, that every worthy man would choose to enter Paradise?’

‘Thy speech before Maghrib was of a dispute between the Kings of England and of France.’ Al-Afdal’s rapid change of subject, reflects the distaste of the young for any idea of their elders still engaged in carnal recreation. ‘Thy thought is that this quarrel could be helpful to our cause?’

‘Truly it is said, that knowledge is chief of all things, my son. It allows us to see clearly what we may achieve. Conjecture is no substitute for fact.’

The Sultan Salahuddin tosses his wooden meat skewer into the brazier to watch the flames consume it, the planes of his thin face suffused with rosy light. ‘Empires are built on the imperfections of mankind, not on its virtues. We learn that Richard Malik al-inkitar is a violent and ambitious man who fought his father to the death. He treats war as a sport and has forgotten all the peaceful preaching of the Christ whose cause he claims to represent. He is concerned with glory in this world and is indifferent to the next. King Philippe on the other hand is Christian and pious.’

‘Can anything be done about it?’ the Imam enquires.

‘Everything we can discover of the Frankish kings will be of use in our campaign,’ the Sultan says. ‘If all we hear of him is true, the King of France is also sickly, cold in temperament and acute of mind, which renders him the more dangerous of the pair.’