The White Cross (35 page)

In view of Conrad’s popularity and Isabella’s royal status, King Richard’s own next move is to propose a division of the Latin Kingdom, with de Montferrat in control of Tyre and all the northern ports, and Guy de Lusignan to rule in Acre and any land the Christians might succeed in capturing to the south. Half for France in other words and half for England – with in the English half (are you surprised?) the great prize of Jerusalem itself.

It is a scheme which Philippe knows and Conrad knows and Sultan Salahuddin knows (but Richard stubbornly refuses to accept) is doomed to failure from the outset – assuming as it does that the crucesignati will not only agree to spending two more winters on the far shores of the Middle Sea, but will somehow gain the strength and funds to siege Jerusalem and hold it in the future against the full might of the Arabian empire.

Meanwhile, King Philippe leaves hard on the heels of Leopold and his Imperial troops, to signal to the rest the folly of remaining, while at his camp at al-Kharruba the Sultan plays strategically for time. The French King sails by way of Tyre with twelve hundred of the Moslem captives, including the emir Baha-uddin Karakush. He’s heard that Richard slaughtered near eight hundred Saracens aboard a captured troop ship on its way to Acre, and thinks his hostages will be safest with the Marquess up in Tyre.

Conrad de Montferrat agrees, and says he fears a dagger in his own back every time he’s close enough to hear King Richard laugh.

The soft bell-music from the fold sings to the moon, brings out the stars. The sound of it is comforting when I think how we buried him, at dusk during the Moslem call to prayer – a kind of music too, that last long call to prayer before the mu’adhdhin were silenced.

I am your man, Sir Garry, that’s the shape of it, an’ ever will be I daresay so long as God’s above the devil.

We fetched Jos back to camp. John found the strength, as I could not, to deal with what was left of his poor head and tie it in his gory shirt to keep it with the body. I wouldn’t have him taken in a tumbrel with the others to the grave pits, but hired a camel-sledge to draw him to the grave. Old Guillemette was there to see him into it, dabbing with a kerchief at the streaming ruts and wrinkles of her face. For it was she who washed the blood away and fitted Jos into his grave-bag – she who handed me the silver coins she’d found sewn in his tunic.

‘Poor Tiddler, he’s in heaven with the angels now,’ she sobbed, ‘God bless ’is spotty little soul!’

But that’s not where I saw him. By then I’d seen so many corpses, knew death and thought I knew the way it worked. How could I not at Acre? I wouldn’t have Jos thrown into the pit, but saw him lowered gently in the boots I bought for him in Lyons and he’d worn ever since.

A lizard on a heap of soil beside the grave gave a quick jerk like something on a string, then disappeared from view. (So strange the things you see and you remember when your mind thinks it’s no room for aught but grief.) I listened with the rest to all to the rites of burial.

I saw the sappers shovel in the lime and earth, but couldn’t think of Jos as just another body that would rot and stink. I couldn’t picture life without him. I couldn’t tell where he had gone or how his soul departed – couldn’t see him up in heaven dressed in white; couldn’t think of Jos, my Jos, as unable to react or swear, or bounce about and make a joke of his own lack of brain or loss of face.

‘Am I so…?’

‘ Obvious? No Sir, not by any means.’

Would God appreciate the mischief in him? I couldn’t see that either.

Behind us the Christian camp was celebrating victory. But I could not. Victoire, my chosen motto. How empty of all meaning it seemed now!

Afterwards I bought a two-pound beeswax candle to light for Jos at the re-consecrated church of Saint Andrew inside the city walls – and did my best while it burned down to hope that it would bring him to salvation.

But later, that was later and again I’ve jumped ahead…

When it was first agreed that Bishop Walter’s troop would be housed in the city, one of his chaplains climbed onto a bloodstained tumbrel to broadcast His Grace’s orders.

‘Hear this, men,’ he shouted. ‘You’ll find quarters to the south of our King’s palace, and will be shown which streets are in your bounds. You will not loot or rape, but treat inhabitants with due respect. The families who house you will be issued with supplies. But gold, silver, jewels, fine fabrics and the like are now King’s Property, to be collected by his agents. Any man caught stealing or concealing valuables for his own profit will be severely dealt with. You may have heard that Musselmen revenge themselves on thieves by cutting off a hand.’ The chaplain smiled unpleasantly. ‘His Grace leaves you to guess what they’ll take off to punish rape. He looks to you to follow God’s Commandments, to be steady and keep discipline as Soldiers of the Cross.’

‘Sayin’ we can live with ’em but musn’t think of fittin’ ends. Is that what Bishop’s sayin’?’ a man behind me muttered. ‘So what the nation does ’e think we’re goin’ to do with ’em, play blindman’s buff?’

‘Only if they’re fearsome top and bottom, boy,’ another voice remarked. ‘Otherwhiles, fuck any that ye fancy as know where to put it, there’s the rule. So long as they’ve been married, it can’t ’ardly count as sin. As for the maidies – we’ll just ’ave to ask ’em nicely won’t we ’afore we take a dive. That’s all the bugger’s sayin’.’

My own thoughts as we entered Acre, had been less concerned with theft or rape than with the simple competence of placing my right foot before my left. I managed it by limping on my heel to keep my swollen toes clear of the ground, but couldn’t manage to avoid the feet of all the others surging through the ruins of the gate.

Each time they trod on me I yelped with pain, and would have fallen twice, but for John Hideman’s steady hand.

Beyond the inner gate, a broken honeycomb of streets led north to where the King and Bishop Walter lodged in the old emir’s palace. Or south down to the harbour. Every street and alleyway was dusty, potholed, strewn with splintered wood and fallen stonework. Skinny, black-eyed urchins scrambled through the ruins or perched on mounds of rubble, to watch us pass. Flies clustered round the crevices between the stones to show where corpses lay beneath. The city’s dogs and cats, its rats, its pigeons and its sparrows had all been eaten in the siege. Only the flies still prospered in the blazing heat, to pester every living body and breed maggots in the dead ones.

A supply sergeant we recognised set us to following a flock of fat-tailed sheep inside the gate on their last journey to the butchers. The folk on that road to the harbour had already been supplied, he said, and knew how many soldiers they must feed. ‘Then once ye’r billeted, ye’r free to fetch in what ye’ve left in camp.’

He showed us on a rough map where our quarters lay.

‘How many to a house?’ I asked.

‘Depends.’

The sergeant shrugged his chubby shoulders. ‘Some of ’em’ll take two dozen. Quartermaster’s ruled one sheep to feed six men. So they’ve ’ad four.’

‘Sounds friendly,’ John observed in careful French. ‘How many to a bed?’

But by then the man was talking to Sir Rob de Pierpoint, who was behind us in the press. So, following the flock, we took a road that that led in shallow steps toward the city harbour.

‘I’m sure that we’ll do very well, John,’ I said hardily. My function to pretend that all was for the best.

‘Aye, Sir Garry, well as ever.’ John Hideman’s to support me in the lie.

I turned to him, the last of my brave manor squad, to show a cheerful smile – tripped on a step and fell, full-length amongst the sheep shit – flat on my cheerful face!

Even with bruised knees and broken toes, it’s amazing how rapidly you can spring upright from a ridiculous position. (The cringing cur again, you see, who hated being mocked.) And I was on my feet and turning from the thoroughfare through a dilapidated arch, before the laughter even started.

I suppose I should be grateful that John managed a straight face – asked how my foot was, handed me the cloak and bedding roll I’d left in my need to be elsewhere.

‘Well. I’m very well,’ I said as I limped off at breakneck speed. ‘Let’s take a squint down here then shall we? See if we can find a billet?’

The arch was one of several buttressing the blank walls of houses, with a drain that reeked of sewage running through the alleyway between them. At the far end where the sun lit on a flaking, parchment-coloured wall, there was a wooden door. It was the only one. Which didn’t leave much choice.

‘We’ll try this one,’ I said, and knocked on it with with a clenched fist.

Some doors in Acre had grills for looking through, but not this one. This one was blank, and there was no way that we could know what was beyond. But all doors lead to somewhere – and thinking back, I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t fallen on the steps and turned into that lane.

If I had found another door in quite another place?

As it was, it opened in the very moment I’d decided that it wouldn’t – first a crack and then a handsbreadth.

We glimpsed a face, a pair of anxious eyes.

‘Madame…?’ Before I could say more, the door swung in to frame a second door beyond it. A magic trick. A frame within a frame. A view into a garden with green shrubs and a reflective pool – a view into another world!

After the dust and the destruction of the siege, the crowds of men, the stinking alley, the blank wall – a cool green garden was the last thing I expected.

No, not the last. The last thing I expected was Khadija.

Although I’d learn her story later, in that first moment I knew no more of the woman hidden by the door than that she was a Sarasine.

‘Dost thou seek shelter? Dhall, Malja’ Ma’wa,
here in house?’ The voice was low-pitched for a woman, blending her native tongue with the accented French the Pullani used in camp – and something fascinating in the way the Arab words turned in her throat with a soft hissing sound like tearing silk.

‘If you will give us leave,’ I asked the door. ‘Your house has room?’ I never have been good at introductions.

‘Yes, yes Seigneur please to enter. As-Salam Alaik, all comes from Allah,
peace and welcome.’

The woman stepped back to admit us. ‘Thou art ithnan?’ She glanced behind us down the alley before she closed and locked the outer door. ‘Two men?

‘Yes for the present,’ I said guardedly. ‘There may be others later.’

‘Insha-Allah.’ If she was afraid of us, she hid it well. The shapeless cloak which covered her from head to foot could not conceal that she was tall, and thin. Who wouldn’t be in Acre? But in the moment she turned from the door and put the cloak back from her face, I saw she was unveiled.

And there she stood exposed to view. A whole live female – and there stood I, a man who’d been without one for a year!

But how should I describe her as I saw her first? Can I do better with Khadija than Elise? All faces have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, a chin, arranged in much the same positions. How different can one face be from another?

I saw that she was older than I was. I saw that she was thin. I must have noticed dusky skin and straight black brows, feathered where they all but met above her nose – a wide mouth with a cushioned lower lip and deep lines either side. Teeth crowded, less than even. But what I see most clearly when I think of that first meeting, are fingernails stained brilliant copper-red, exposed as she put back the cloak – a mass of dark hair falling loose, and eyes… great lustrous eyes, enlarged and elongated, smudged around with some kind of an inky salve. The gentlest eyes I’d ever seen.

And in that moment, in the soft depths of the woman’s eyes, all my fixed opinions of Moslems as sons and daughters of perdition were unfixed for me.

The square flagged room in which we stood was bare of furniture, lit by the open door we had already seen into the garden, and containing only what was useful. From a roof beam, the flayed remains of one of our Quartermaster’s gifted sheep hung wrapped in muslin to protect it from the flies. From others were suspended sacks and herbs. Stacked neatly round the walls were copper bowls and earthenware containers, with wooden trays, neat stacks of faggots and dusky heaps of charcoal – nothing out of place. At the end furthest from the sheep, a barrier of matting hid a covered drain, which, as we discovered later, was for bodily relief.

The woman must have seen me limping as we entered, and pointed with one red fingernail at my right foot. ‘Qadam? Pain, yes?’

I nodded, ‘Just a little.’

But did she know? Was she resigned already to what would happen next? Looking back I find I cannot tell. All I remember is the way she clicked her tongue in sympathy.

‘We find something to make it easy.’

She rummaged for a bowl, a cloth and a small jar from the assemblage round the walls. ‘Thou wilt come, yes?’ She motioned us to leave our burdens in the vestibule and follow her into the open court – and when she walked, she seemed to glide. Her feet just barely grazed the surface of the bricks.

Bounded by narrow paths, the garden the court enclosed was sunk below the level of the house, its small space filled with pomegranates and pistachios grown round an oval pool – a cool escape from dazzling light. An ancient fig tree trailing vines cast deep green shadows, with here and there amongst the leaves, pink blossoms – roses twice the size of our sweet briars and eglantines and of a deeper hue.