The White Cross (30 page)

‘For God’s sake Jos, you know as well as I do that such falsehoods are spread about by spies and infidels to undermine morale.

‘And if you think…’ I turned to John. ‘If you think for a moment that I’d sacrifice the horse I’ve brought here at such cost to ride in battle with my King – then I can only say you’ve failed to grasp what this croisade’s about!’ We were standing as it happened in the rough stall that he’d shared with the two mules. So I laid one hand protectively on Raoul’s bony neck, and scowled at the two men I’d brought with equal thoughtlessness into the living hell of Toron.

‘Then we shall have to scratch hard, Sir, I’m tellin’ ye, ’afore we find another scrap to swallow,’ had been John Hideman’s last word on the subject.

I sat unmoving in the dripping stall for the third part of an hour, listening to the patter of the rain – then spent the other two thirds sharpening my dagger on a whetstone. I’d seen Raoul born at Haddertun one Easter on a visit from the fortress – recalled his wobbly legs, his small hammer head, his soft pelt black and shiny as a chessboard knight – recalled him later on another furlough, racing madly round the paddock, rolling like an outsized puppy, sidling flat-eared to snuffle in my collar with a velvet nose. He was a beast without a soul, yet seemed to me a person I had loved and brought to ruin. And stood for me already hobbled, slack-hipped and with drooping head – trusting me, the poor old bag of bones.

‘Now then, I’ll do it for you Sir an’ gladly,’ John offered without his usual pause for thought. But I shook my head, and frowned and clamped my mouth tight shut to stop my teeth from chattering. I felt my horse’s skin twitch as I stroked him with light fingers. I felt the hard scar of his tourney wound, his ragged ear. Poor Raoul, if only I had left him to cover mares on the green meads of Sussex, instead of dragging him across the world, to starve and suffer an ignoble death.

‘I know. I know you’re weak, old fellow, weak and weary.’

His ears flicked, listening – as quietly, very gently I secured his halter – feeling for the artery with my left hand – murmuring with the soft voice I’d used to tame him, calm him, win his confidence when we were both still colts.

But Raoul the high-bred, Raoul the temperamental, no longer had the fight in him to pull away. The poor beast simply stared at me with patient and defeated eyes.

‘Head up – that’s it, old friend. That’s it.’ I had to blink to see what I was doing, make sure that I had the place. With trembling right hand clenched hard on the dagger hilt, I wrenched the blade across his throat. Deeper than I needed to be sure.

A violent jerk! Surprise and terror. Pain. Betrayal. A buckling collapse – and blood, so much of it!…

It was the hardest, hardest thing I’d ever had to do, hard even to recall it. But there was worse to come.

RELIEF

Near the end of March, when native chrysanthemums spring up between the tents to cast a golden net across the Plain of Acre, the first sail is spotted out to sea; and the first Italian grain ships anchor in the bay to end the famine in the camps.

Duke Leopold of Babenberg, another cousin of the King of France, sails in soon afterwards to take command of the siege army, while Count Henri lies sick abed. Then, as a further insult to King Guy perched on his mound at Toron, the French King himself makes landfall at the Port of Tyre – to set his own seal of approval on the union of its Governor, the Marquess Conrad, with the hereditary Princess Isabella. Although in truth, Philippe’s support for Conrad in place of Richard’s vassal, Guy de Lusignan, has more to do with his contempt for Richard than any special virtue in the Governor of Tyre.

When they rode out so splendidly from Vézelay, the Christian kings had sworn a public oath to act as friends and allies for the course of the croisade. But nine months later when they separated at Messina, their oaths were of a different kind and their intentions every bit as hostile as the Sultan Salahuddin predicted. In Genoa they’d argued over transport for King Philippe’s troops. Later both fleets were delayed in Sicily, where Richard started a small war in defence of his sister, Jehanne, the widow of the island’s king. He demanded her return into his keeping – and crucially her dowry; receiving both eventually by conquering Sicilian Messina, and (I mention this in passing) by selling its new ruler the onetime talisman of his croisade: King Arthur’s fabled sword,
Escalibor
.

By then the Kings of England and of France had spent the winter bottled up together in the harbour of Messina, playing chess – dynastic chess with princesses for pawns.

Following his cousin’s unsuccessful ploy to secure the Latin princess Isabella, King Philippe’s first move in the game had been to offer for King Richard’s widowed sister, Jehanne of Sicily, together with her dower lands of Agenais and Quercy. When Richard, who had other plans for her, countered by moving Jehanne across the straits to the Italian mainland, King Philippe challenged him again to honour his betrothal to his own sister, the Princess Alys. At which point the King of England coolly introduced a new princess into the game – the queen’s pawn he had up his sleeve.

‘The world is full of delusions, Philippe, and my marriage to your sister’s one of them,’ he put it to the French King in his lodgings by the harbour. ‘There’s no other way to tell you, Cousin, but to say plainly that the Queen my mother is on her way here as we speak – to bring me for my bride the Infanta Berenguela of Navarre. The ladies have already crossed the Alps to spend the Christmas festival in Pisa.

‘Perhaps I should have mentioned it before?’ He raised his sandy brows. ‘At any rate, as soon as we’re betrothed I plan to send the girl before us into Palestine, to wed her at the altar of the Holy Sepulchre when we’ve secured it from the Turk. From what His Grace of Canterbury reports, I hear we have no time to lose.’

The muscles in the French King’s cheeks showed that he’d clenched his jaw. ‘The Holy Father has expressly forbidden women en croisade.’ Startled into speech, it is the first thing he can think of.

‘A sick old eunuch in a gilded palace?’ We hardly need to consider his opinion.’

‘And I hardly thought you’d break your contract with my sister?’ Philippe countered bitterly.

‘Ah, did you not?’ King Richard’s turn to show surprise. ‘Hell’s bells man, did you really think that Eléonore would let her within a half-league of the throne? A girl who’s borne her husband’s bastard?’

‘I warn you, Richard – if you scorn Alys for marriage with a Spaniard, you’ll forfeit any claim on Gisors, Châteauroux, Graçy or Isoudun, and with them the goodwill of France. My word on that.’

‘Which brings us back to that other word of
incest
, does it not?
Dear man, you know as well as I do that Henry’s is not the only prick that stands between me and your sister. Or if it comes to that, between you and my dear sister’s quim.’ King Richard showed his teeth. ‘We have an interesting history, Philippe, you and I. And have you thought – maybe this Advent we should go further than avoiding drink and bum-boys, and purge our souls of sin before the bishops? The Pope has spies in every port, the Sultan too I hear – we’d have the ears of all the world to hear us in confession, Cousin.’

‘You wouldn’t dare!’

They weren’t the best words Philippe could have chosen to respond to someone of Richard’s reckless reputation; and within a day the King of England proceeded to make good his threat – by summoning a group of French and English bishops to the harbour chapel for a sensational performance. Dramatically stripped naked for the scourge, crowned with a garland of blue periwinkles to denote repentance, he’d beseeched their Graces at the altar to absolve him of the sin God abhorred above all others – the act of sodomising a young man in Paris three years earlier.

It was a statement he’d be willing to repeat in public from the steps of the Cathedral, Richard said – and in the next breath (with more frankness than was strictly necessary) supplied the co-respondent’s famous name.

The embarrassed bishops hastened to lay on the whip (backhanded and slack-wristed to spare the great man pain), to smother the unpleasant nature of the sin in euphemistic Latin, and grant the royal repentant absolution. Queen’s pawn checks king in other words – to leave Philippe with no choice but to retract all his objections to the Spanish marriage

To all appearances the two Kings parted amicably in Sicily when Philippe left for Tyre. But no one aboard his flagship could fail to gauge the King of France’s temper on the long sea voyage. Bleary-eyed and seasick, hunched in his cabin like a moulting pullet, he plotted his revenge on Richard – spitting chips.

In April at his camp of al-Kharruba, the agents of the Sultan report the arrival of King Philippe at the port of Tyre with near three thousand men and fifteen hundred horses. In the guise of a silk merchant, Salahuddin’s trusted emissary, al-Harawi, gains audience with the King of France and his cousin, Conrad de Montferrat, in a closet of the Tyrian Palace. No witnesses are present to record their conversation. No documents are signed. But four hours later, al-Harawi leaves without the heavy chest he carried in with him (supposedly containing samples of silk fabric); and it’s further notable that when he moves his army down to Acre ten days later, King Philippe seems in no great haste to prosecute the siege – remaining mostly in his tent, due it is said to a recurring sickness.

In his celebrated masterwork, ‘
Discussion on the Stratagems of War’,
al-Harawi is later to record: ‘
A Sultan may beguile his enemy by offering whatever he most earnestly desires, and guaranteeing its accomplishment with oaths upon his honour’
–
a
nd as he writes, the secret bargain struck between the Sultan Salahuddin and the King of France is what he has in mind.

In effect, the Sultan’s offered to spare Philippe the effort and expense of a long campaign by guaranteeing its fair outcome in advance. He will support Conrad de Montferrat as ruler of the Latin kingdom, in place of King Richard or his vassal Guy de Lusignan. He will allow the Arab caravans from Egypt and Damascus free access to the port of Tyre, from which Conrad may readily supply the court of France with all the eastern dyes and spices, gems, cotton and brocade they need within a mutually beneficial alliance. Alas, the Sultan cannot yield the Holy City of al-Quds the Christians call Jerusalem. But he will continue to extend protection to any Christian pilgrim who may wish to worship at its shrines. Then, after Richard has exhausted his resources taking Acre, he will negotiate with both kings for a lasting peace.

To honour his part of the bargain, all Philippe is required to do is to delay the siege until the English King arrives, and when the city falls to ensure a fair exchange of prisoners as part of an agreement to cede further territory to Conrad de Montferrat and Princess Isabella.

It’s not a bargain that will suit King Guy de Lusignan of course, and on the very day he hears from his own spies of Philippe’s dealings with the Marquess and the Sultan, he sails to intercept the King of England on his way to Palestine and beg for his support. They meet offshore, where Richard is already making headway with his conquest of the Holy Land by capturing the strategic isle of Cyprus. And while they fight to bring the Cypriots to heel, King Richard and King Guy agree their own plans for the resolution of the Kings’ Croisade.

In the words of his official chronicler, the very hills rejoice the day that Richard comes to meet his destiny in Outremer.

‘Pen could not write, nor words describe the people’s rapture,’
the annalist enthuses, before proceeding to describe it anyway in vivid purple prose.
‘Horns resounded, trumpets rang out and pipers added their triumphant sounds,’
he scribbles in his notes for the Itinerarium of King Richard’s Palestine campaign – and then improves the line with an alliteration (cross out
triumphant
and add
shrill – ‘Shrill sounds’
is plainly better.
‘…pipers added their shrill sounds. Drums were beaten, the deep booming of war clarions were heard. But it was as though all these discordant notes combined in perfect harmony; and there were few indeed who did not add to the general tumult of praise and jubilation. To show the gladness of their hearts they toasted one another in the wine that was distributed among them, recounting tales of ancient heroes.

‘In unalloyed delight,’
writes Richard’s chronicler,
‘they sang and danced the night away, lighting the darkness with their fires and torches, until the Turks believed they’d set the Plain of Acre all aflame.’

The spring flowers have long since faded and summer entered its fifth week of drought, before the English fleet put into Acre. One of the first barges to drop anchor in the bay contains King Guy and the royal ladies, sent on ahead as entrées for the pièce de résistance that’s to be King Richard.

The Sicilian Queen, Jehanne, coined from the same mint as her brother – large, roseate and handsomely well-padded – sails down the jetty in her flamboyant samite silks and muslins and her feathered turban, with King Guy de Lusignan himself to hold her parasol and shade her from the sun. A child of eleven or twelve summers trots to keep pace with the Queen’s ladies; identified as Béatris, Damsel of Cyprus, daughter of the island’s former ruler and now captive to the English king.

To the general disappointment of the multitudes who’ve come to see her land, the fourth member of the royal party, Queen Bérengère, is glimpsed but for a moment in the distance as she’s carried in her stockings from the ship to her conveyance on the quay – which some might say was the best way to view her. For although the decorations of her curtained litter suggest a form within to match the loveliness of her new Latin name of Berengaria, the Queen’s in fact a stocky, broad-hipped woman with a dark complexion and a long Basque chin, selected by Queen Eléonore less for her looks, than for her stamina and childbearing potential. The romance which has preceded them to Acre, tells of King Richard’s passion for his Spanish bride; an infatuation which compels him to marry her in haste on the enchanted seat of love itself – on Cyprus, birthplace of the Goddess Venus. The truth is more prosaic. His mother is the only woman Richard loves or ever listens to; and in the days she spent with him in Sicily, Queen Eléonore impressed upon her son the need to bed the Princess of Navarre as rapidly as possible to seed in her an heir for Aquitaine and England. She hadn’t brought a royal mare for him across the Alps, she said, to see the royal stallion baulk at mounting.