The Long Sword(192)

            His eyes went right over me.

            So did the eyes of the younger man to his left.

            Their lord received the salute of the gate’s garrison, and returned it imperiously with his axe, then he turned and made his horse rear a little, and the crowd almost cheered. It was a curious sound, almost like a whisper.

            He raised his whip – his axe was hung by his saddle bow – and called something in his tongue, and all the mounted men shouted.

            The gates began to open, and the Mamluks began to form in a column with perfect discipline, all except the younger man, one file to the left of the old bastard with the dyed beard. The younger man put his heels to his mount and seemed to fly across the packed dirt. For a few horrifying beats of my heart I thought that he had chosen me, or John, but he went past us, almost over us.

            I turned and saw a group of pilgrims. As it proved, they were a wedding party.

            The young Mamluk rode in among them. He reached down and raised the veil of the bride and came riding back with her over his saddle. She was screaming and reaching for her husband but the young man lay face down in a pool of blood.

            It had happened very quickly, as such things do. I’d seen it done in France.

            I started to rise, and John struck me with his fist. I went down.

            I rose on one knee, as Fiore taught, and John caught me. He wasn’t attacking me – so much for trust – he was restraining me.

            ‘Calm!’ he said. ‘Or we have been dead. All of us.’

            Henna-beard shouted something, and the young man with the bride over his saddle laughed and waved his riding whip. Henna-beard shook his head in disgust and rode through the open gate. About half of the cavalry followed the Green Lord out of the gate and down the road to Cairo, and the rest formed by fours – a beautiful spectacle – and rode back in the gates.

            Well. In those moments, I learned everything about the Mamluks.

            The anger in the market was palpable. The Egyptians were not cowards, whatever my Italian friends said. But they had no weapons; no one I could see had more than an eating knife. There were men shouting, suddenly, and the wedding party was paralysed until one of the women burst into a wailing cry, and instantly it was taken up.

            The garrison had begun to march inside when someone threw a paving stone, and a Mamluk soldier was hit and went down.

            The garrison halted and began to reform. They were in some confusion about whether to reform inside the gate or outside.

            The people in the market were working themselves up to a riot. I had seen it in London and Paris and Verona, and I found it fascinating, in a detached way, how much an Arab mob resembled a good English mob.

            ‘Run!’ John said.

            We caught the bridles of our new horses and ran. The mob was solidifying around us; men were running up from the low shops and stalls along the market, and a farmer bringing produce to sell jumped down from his cart, seized his stick and ran to join the crowd. Men and women – even children – joined the crowd.

            A hail of stones hit the soldiers.

            They drew their bows.

            And loosed. By the wounds of Christ, they killed fifty people in their first discharge, and they nocked and drew again, and the arrows flew. More died.

            Arrows found their way past the front rank. We were fifty paces beyond the front of the mob, and an arrow went over my right shoulder and over my horse’s rump to kill a Jew standing by his stall. He crumpled, a look of consternation on his face. His son stared at me, face white. The boy was ten or eleven and he had no idea what to do with his father suddenly dead.