Eventually, we reached the gate that Sabraham had described and we lay down in a caravanserai with pilgrims and merchants and slept. I slept – I was young.
In the morning, we rose with the others. We made no pretence of being Moslems, which, if you consider, is odd, as John might easily have passed as one. But no one paid us any attention, and after their morning prayers, we purchased horses. They were the fine-headed Arab breed, and impossibly cheap; that is, in Italy I had never been able to afford an Arab, and in Egypt, despite the difficulty in raising them, they cost little more than a palfrey cost in France.
If dawn revealed a superb world of gilded minarets, veiled women and handsome, bearded men in all the colours of the rainbow – par dieu, the Egyptians were rich! – but as I say, if the sun revealed their riches in all their startling adornment and magnificence, it also revealed a level of horrifying poverty that was the more shocking compared to the opulence. Outside our caravanserai, there were two beggars, dead. They lay where they had died, and no one seemed to care. Beyond the market’s horse lines – we were outside the great customs gates of the city, and there was a market – a line of beggars sat in the dust. There were lepers, and men with their hands cut off: criminals, my Turk assured me. But there was a single leper woman with seven children, and every one of them was a leper; most of them were naked, so that every touch of the disease on their poor little bodies was on display. The leper woman and her seven children had much the same effect on me as the floating cat’s corpse.
Moments after we purchased our horses, John suddenly grabbed my arm.
‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Don’t stare.’
A troop of horse, perhaps a hundred men-at-arms, came out the gate at a canter. The leader was mounted on the finest horse I had ever seen, a bright gold horse like Jack, years ago in France, with bronze mane and tail and dark legs and muzzle – I had never seen such markings. The horse’s caparison and tack was all of green and silver, there were jewels on his bridle, and his rider was in green silk. His helmet was a tall, peaked spiral with an open face and a superb aventail of tiny links. His green gown seemed to cover more armour, and he carried a golden axe in his hand.
The guard at the gate turned out and saluted, more than two hundred men in maille and plate, with heavy bows of horn and sinew and heavy, curved sabres.
I noted that John’s advice had been exact – almost every man and woman in front of the gate was sitting. Most were silent, and all wore attitudes of respect.
I watched the men-at-arms, as they were the first Mamluks I had seen. They were well mounted. Most of them had light lances, like our boar spears, and all had a case carrying at least one bow, although some had two, and one big man had three bows. They all carried one bow strung.
I noted at once that they rode a different saddle from us. Of course I had heard this from Sabraham and indeed from Fra Peter, but their saddles were very small and had no back, and their caparisons, where worn, were only silk, with no mail underneath, though their armour and helmets were heavy enough, by Saint George.
An old woman sitting next to me in the dust spoke to me and cackled.
‘Say nothing,’ John enjoined me. He spoke low.
The woman’s eyes widened and she shuffled away.
‘I told she you are sick,’ he said.
The Mamluks waited in front of the gate through their lord’s inspection of the garrison. The troopers began to be bored, like soldiers the world over, and the men in the front rank began to examine the crowd.
The rightmost Saracen in the front rank was a big, heavy man with a henna-dyed red beard. His horse was the biggest there, almost as big as my warhorse and his eyes roved the beggars, and then the merchants.
I tried to make myself very small.