The White Cross (31 page)

‘You could be killed or gelded in the conflict,’ Eléonore told Richard baldly. ‘You never know in warfare, Dickard; and if you’ve the sense God’s given you, you’ll go to work on her this very night.

‘Then seal the contract later,’ Eléonore advised, ‘when you are sure the mare’s in foal.’

Which was precisely how her son had acted, in despite of his own taste. For Bérangère was rather too brown and mature to suit his appetite. So far from home and unprotected, the Spanish princess had no choice but to submit; and when in Cyprus six weeks later her maids reported that she’d missed her monthly course, King Richard married, crowned, and left her – all within a single day. God willing, they’d be in the Holy City of Jerusalem for the child’s deliverance, he told her. Meantime she would be wise to rest and keep it safe within her womb. Her husband smiled on Bérangère indulgently, then waved a meaty hand and rode away from matrimonial drudgery to amuse himself amongst the youngest of his captive Cypriots – female and otherwise.

The royal smile is once again in place when Richard’s Genoese war galley,
Piombone
, comes into view at last around the sea wall of Saint Jean d’Acre. Victorious in its encounter with a Saracen troop-ship in the roads to Tyre just sixteen hours before, the galley’s decks have since been cleared of wood-splinters and Arab blood, its bows and gunnels scalloped with gold and scarlet silk to match the colours of the royal banner. Long ranks of oars sweep it ashore. King Richard’s born for great occasions. He shares with other charismatic conquerors of Acre – with Julius Caesar and before him, Alexander – a genius for personal display. As with his coronation at Westminster, as with all his entries and arrivals, he comes to demonstrate that kings are not as other men.

But if he seems a god to those who crane over each other’s shoulders to see the English King, some hours at anchor up the coast and out of sight have something certainly to do with his magnificent appearance. His entourage of groomsmen, hairdressers and keepers of the royal vestments have all worked ceaselessly that afternoon to massage, to manicure, and to enrich the rosy tints in Richard’s hair. To polish, perfume and bejewel him. Shirt him in silk. Envelop him in velvet – rings on his royal fingers, bells to his royal toes. Over his silver-link parade hauberk (which since Vézelay has come to seem a trifle tight), he wears a supertunic brocaded in the eastern manner and signed with a white cross. His crown’s an areola in the sinking sun. Gilt threads woven in the French style through his tinted hair and beard ensure that they too glitter, underlit by their reflection in the waves. Despite the heat, a cloak of Lincoln scarlet ripples from King Richard’s shoulders, blazoned like his escutcheon with guardant leopardés.

The reborn Once and Future, now very present King, who’s sold Escalibor in Sicily for twice its weight in gold, now flourishes a new sword as a symbol of his own invincibility. He stands, legs wide-astride (the boastful pose that men adopt to show the muscles of their thighs, and maybe the uncommon bulk of what’s between) – rampant in the prow of
Piombone:
Richard as Redeemer!

The King’s reception on the strand is as his chronicler describes – although it’s doubtful if the words of triumph and encouragement he shouts across the water are audible to anyone above the cheers, the drums, the blaring horns. Thousands on the shore applaud him in a fever of delight. A little short of sight, and as ever focussed inwardly upon his own achievement, the King sees those who await him simply as a moving blur. The picture that he makes with sword upraised and legs astride; larger than life, dressed gorgeously to maim if not to kill – backed by a fleet of white-crossed sails against a gold leaf sky – is just the image history needs to confirm his legend as a Christian saviour.

Seagulls circle
Piombone
through the warm salt air.

No bats this time for Richard.

CHAPTER TEN

So many people on my travels, hearing that I was in Acre, have begged me to tell them what I saw there, and how I managed to survive. But always I refused to satisfy them, said it was too painful to remember.

Until the Bérgé dal becce taught me otherwise.

The whole world knows how King Richard came like Joshua to trumpet down the walls of Acre and win the city back for God. But that was how it ended. Not how it was to be there.

Guillaume, the arms-master at Lewes who taught us all we knew of warfare, ticked off the crucial stages of siegecraft on his fingers – beginning with Blockading on the smallest, and counting through Bombardment, Escalade and Mining, to finish with
Terms for Surrender on his stubby thumb. He was a hard taskmaster who punished inattention with the knuckles of same five fingers clenched into a fist. And yet, perhaps because he had so little use for it himself, Guillaume quite failed to mention what we needed most at Acre – which was Patience.

After the grain arrived that spring, we had been ordered out of Toron, Jos, John and I, to join the Salisbury bishop, Hubert Walter on the plain – although even after four more months of service, we were still novices in the pursuit of siegecraft. For there were many thousands in the Christian camp who had already waited for three summers and two winters to starve the city to submission. On our first tour of the lower camp we were astonished by its scale. It had become a canvas city through the years; its occupants a plague of locusts who’d long since consumed the fields and gardens of the port. In districts beyond the reach of missiles from the Moslem garrison, King Guy had set the tents in squares, with roads between for horses and wheeled traffic. The outer camp was bordered on three sides by earthen ramparts, with sentry posts at intervals to warn of Saracen invasion. But closer to the walls of Acre, the army had moved underground.

Everywhere amongst the rubble, tunnels led into a labyrinth of dugouts, reinforced with bolsters of bagged sand and cribbed with olive wood. Soldiers and Pullani squeezed past each other in narrow, rush-lit passagways, connecting caves where everything was sold from water skins and salvaged weaponry, to rows of human ears on strings – even Sarsen heads with eyes and brains removed, hung by their hair as Christian trophies.

Jos said he’d like to take one back to Haddertun, to use as a lantern to frighten maids with at All Hallows. But I forbade him such a gruesome souvenir.

Compared with many on the plain, the Bishop of Salisbury’s encampment near the eastern ramparts was orderly and clean. A tall man, dressed more like a soldier than a churchman, His Grace saw to it that any of his men caught fighting, gambling, sodomising or consorting with Pullani whores were flogged and sent to work a fortnight on the shit carts. He personally called the rolls and supervised the rotas for sentry, siege and mining duties, refuse disposal, earthworking and water-carrying. He sent round barbers to ensure that we were trimmed and shaved. He issued combs and jars of horse-sweat to counter lice and fleas, and made it his daily business to inspect his laundry and infirmary and the latrines, to satisfy himself that all was as it should be for his soldiers.

It was at the washing lines outside the Bishop’s laundry that we ran into our old friend, the washerwoman Guillemette. Not that I knew her at the first, so thin and lined she had become. Her plain old face was hung with empty sacs of flesh, the mountains of her breasts and belly flattened into molehills underneath her homespun gown.

But – ‘Guilly, my treasure!’ Jos cried out the moment that he set eyes on her. ‘I’d know ye anywhere, you pretty thing!’

‘An’ bless ye, Tiddler. I’d of picked that ruddy comb o’yours from any flock o’ roosters!’ The old woman flung the shirt that she was pegging back into its basket, and ran across to sweep my squire into a crushing hug that lifted little Jos a clear foot off the ground.

‘Show up? I’ll tell ye, that red knob ’ud stand out like a cock-stand in a convent. An’ prove as welcome too, I wouldn’t wonder!’

If they’d been made of sugar, the pair of them could not have found each other sweeter – and were off to risk a Bishop’s flogging in the laundry van as soon as I gave them the nod. In return, we were allowed, all three of us, to bath in the grey suds of Guillemette’s last wash. But when Jos whispered later that she’d be willing to relieve me of a little more than sweat and grime, I found that I was able to resist. For somewhere in the deprivations of our Toron winter I’d lost my carnal inspiration, and even Fisty Flora found it hard (or actually the other thing) to get a grip.

John Hideman made his own arrangements for relief, I never quite knew how – although there was one laundress by the name of Maud, who sometimes helped us when we bathed and was a shade less ugly than the rest. I saw her wash John’s back for him. But if she ever moved round to the front, he never mentioned it, and I was careful not to ask.

There weren’t too many chances for us to to flex our military muscles either during those final months of siege. Sometimes I rode with other knights at cavalry manoeuvres in one or other of the camp parade grounds. Sometimes before the sun was up too high for comfort, I’d find someone – if not a knight then ever-faithful Jos – to help me practice swordplay and tone my muscles as I put on weight. But there was little room between the tents, and bouts ended all too often in some kind of an unpleasantness involving severed guy ropes and torrents of abuse.

On Lady Day towards the end of March, the bishop sent me off with Jos for sentry duty on the outworks, and for fourteen days and thirteen nights we strained our eyes for signs of movement in the scrubby hills. From behind a hedgehog fence of sharpened stakes, we scanned the Saracen positions – prepared for, even hoping for an action of some kind. But we saw little other than cloud shadows in the daylight, or passing squalls of rain. At dawn we watched the sunrise. At sunset there were wisps of smoke. Each night while the cicadas shrilled, an arc of red sparks in the hills encircled galaxies of Christian campfires on the plain. But that was all.

At the end of our guard duty we marched back into camp with nothing to report.

Another fortnight brought the French fleet into Acre, and with it a disturbing rumour. We heard from Guillemette, who had it from the Bishop’s chaplain, who’d spoken to a merchant, who by chance had overheard a conversation in the harbour – that suggested Sultan Saladin was treating with the King of France behind King Richard’s back. They had a plan – the sailor told the merchant, who explained it to the chaplain, who boasted of the knowledge in the laundry – to cede the ports of Tyre and Acre with some other coastal towns to the French King and his vassal Conrad, in exchange for their agreement to abandon the croisade and leave Jerusalem in Moslem hands.

‘Which even if it’s quarter true could mean we’re home by Christmas,’ Jos said cheerfully. ‘Or Shrovetide at the latest.’

‘How could it possibly be true? Why would the King of France come all this way, simply to trade the Holy City for a handful of old ruins and a port we occupy already?’ I demanded. ‘And wouldn’t you expect Conrad de Montferrat to come to Acre, if he thought….’

‘…That it was ready to surrender?’ Jos helpfully supplied. ‘I think he will, My Lord.’

But when we heard that Conrad had indeed left Tyre for Acre, and that King Guy de Lusignan had gone to meet King Richard on the Isle of Cyprus, I had felt bound to draw my squire’s attention to the siege engines King Philippe was assembling outside the walled city.

‘Now why would he do that,’ I asked, ‘if he already knows the garrison is close to a surrender?’ (And as I asked it, hoped to heaven that he didn’t.)

In May, the three of us were sent down with the rest of Bishop Walter’s force to the mine workings, where sappers burrowed constantly like moles to undermine the city walls. Duke Leopold, who’d led the siege before King Philippe took command, believed the city’s weak point to be the gate-tower known as ‘Maledicta’, which jutted like a ship’s prow from an angle of its wall, and could be mined from both directions. The ditch which once made an island of the place, had been drained early in the siege. In course of time the tunnels on the Christian side were deepened, lined with timber and pushed out beneath the putrid heaps of refuse and disintegrating bodies which filled the empty fosse, until they reached the footings of the tower – where picks in place of spades were needed, and fresh teams of miners with arbalesters in support. Which was where we came in.

But if we’d hoped our tour of duty at the city walls would coincide with some fresh action on the part of the French army, we were soon disappointed. The King of France’s illness still confined him to his tent. His trébuchets flung rocks at Acre’s towering walls, inflicting no more damage than a few more pocks and pits to add to their already pitted surface. In retaliation, the Moslems’ petrary – nicknamed ‘God’s Evil Cousin’
–
tossed blocks of masonry the size of cottages down on the Christian camp. But since its range was known and it was far too cumbersome to move with any kind of stealth, its missiles almost always fell in areas already cleared for their reception. Otherwise exchange of fire was limited to crossbow bolts; and by and large the casualties were slight – a tent destroyed with those inside, a bolt that found its way to earth through human flesh, a cry behind the merlons of the curtain wall – and cheers were far more often for near misses than for strikes.

Early in the year, when the Saracens had broken through our cordon in the night, they’d flayed two Genoese alive, and suspended a Pisan soldier from the city wall as a target for Christian archers who thought to end the fellow’s misery. From the target’s point of view, that hadn’t worked too well – and in revenge, a group of his countrymen had burned a captured infidel alive in sight of the Pisan’s perforated corpse. But on the whole such acts of cruelty were exceptions. At Christmastide, to mark the birth of Jesus which even Moslems honour, they’d flown a flag of truce and let down some little Saracens in baskets from the walls to run races and hold wrestling matches with Pullani urchins from the camp. And then on Easter Sunday, while Jos and I were on the outworks, we’d heard that the Bishop of Évreux processed barefoot to the Maledicta Tower bearing a silver cross and chanting psalms, and that the enemy had set their bows aside to call out friendly greetings from the pentises above.