They were a horse-length away. Before I had gone another step, two Fellahin, the local Arab peasants, grabbed the Jew’s stall table and overturned it and began to rob it.
‘Run!’ said John.
Men looked at John. He had shouted in Italian. But another flight of arrows came in, and more of the onlookers fell.
At the forefront of the riot, a woman was screaming in Arabic. She had an arrow in her gut, and she pointed at the Ghulami and shrieked.
A tide of rioters rolled forward at the thin line of archers, and they shot hurriedly. Most of their arrows carried over the rioters and struck in the market where I was. My horse took an arrow in the muscle above her right front leg but by the grace of God, it went all the way through, and it was a moment’s work to cut the head and extract the shaft while she bit at me the while.
By the time I had her calm, John was in the saddle.
There was a cloud of dust where the Ghulami had stood with their bows. And no more arrows.
They were bad men, and had shot into a crowd of their own people, but they died horribly, and God have mercy on their infidel souls.
I got a leg over my wounded horse, and we were away. We rode in a long, curving path out and away from the Cairo Gate and back along the shore of the inner harbour.
I looked back in time to see the mounted Mamluks re-emerge from within the gate to charge the crowd. The roar of the rioters rose to become a scream.
The Mamluks had sabres in their fists, and they were killing every rioter they caught.
I didn’t look back again.
Like most other cities, Alexandria is surrounded by suburbs and some of these are small towns or villages of their own. We entered one, watered our horses, and purchased food; bland food, with no meat or even chicken. And we had an odd bread that seemed to be made of chickpeas that was highly spiced. There was no wine, and heavily sugared hot water with spice was the only beverage.
We had outrun the news of the riot, but John returned to me after some discussion and shook his head. ‘The man who cook the food say the Mamluk Ghulami they do bad thing every days,’ he said.
It occurred to me that under other circumstances, with some gold, I could make trouble for the Sultan here. I resolved to say as much to Sabraham.
I was also learning that I needed to learn to speak Arabic. I endangered us every moment by my failure to understand what beggars and street people and grandmothers and tea-sellers shouted at me. The combination of being mounted – and thus rich or powerful – and not understanding the language should have led to our instant unmasking, except that the city and its environs couldn’t imagine that they had a foe at all, so rich and powerful were they; and further, although I didn’t know it, many people imagined I was a Mamluk. There were ‘Franks’ among them, Italians and Gascons. Conversion to Islam was not a serious matter to men who had already turned their backs on God and his angels. Nor did the Mamluks make many demands on their soldiers as to religion: so long as a man professed Islam, all was allowed.
Be that as it may, we rode unharmed out of the riot, broke our fast under palm trees in a small taverna, and then rode along the beach east of the great city.
After all our trouble, my actual mission took less than three hours. We found the sand of the beaches firm and wide enough to form our army. John found a path that broke the line of dunes and we went inland – to find an open space of mudflats and dry gravel that was large enough to make a camp for the Hosts of the Phalanx of Archangels and all the Company of Heaven, much less our little force.
We were thorough. This was a task I knew from serving Sir John in Italy, and I knew that a good camp with secure access to the ships would make the siege possible. We found a line of wells, each with a small farm about it, and I confess to some pity for the unbelievers who were about to be driven from their farms or killed so that my crusaders could have water. But not much.