The legate came on deck and blessed us. We gathered with our blackened faces and all our fears on the corsia, the gangway amidships, and Father Pierre passed along, blessing every man. Many he confessed. It took time I didn’t feel we had, and my heart was in my mouth, so much so that I couldn’t breathe, and when Father Pierre reached me, I could barely speak.
But I knelt, confessed, and was absolved.
‘Deus Vult!’ the legate whispered.
‘Deus Vult! ’ we growled.
We went down the stern on ropes, our ladders being already stowed in the galia grossa’s longboat. We packed eighty men into five ship’s boats and, with muffled oars, we pulled for shore.
Ahead, a city woke. It was not yet dawn, but we could hear shouts and marching.
In the stern of the lead boat, Sabraham turned to me. I could see nothing but his nose and his teeth. ‘They’re alert,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said, with far more confidence than I felt. But I had a career of taking castles by coup de main. In this, at least, I was the old hand.
We rowed to the east, putting the spit of land on which the smaller castle stood between us and the city, and then we turned back south and west.
‘Lay out!’ I growled at the rowers. They were free oarsmen, and most of them had helmets and maille shirts, javelins and axes. It says something about the importance of volunteers to the Order that we were to go first, and only call for the oarsmen if we were successful.
Now the low boats moved like dolphins across the mirror of the water, so still it reflected stars and moon. We shot into the moon shadow of the Casteleto, and then slowed. We were under the very walls of the castle. Our oars were muffled and yet we seemed to make more sound than I could bear: the drip of water, and the Gascons would whisper – oh, sweet Christ, in that hour I almost put my basilard into one bastard from Poitou just to silence him, and all my newfound strategies of calm maturity were tried. And then we could see the low pier of the Casteleto’s dock before us.
Brother Robert brought us alongside the dock without touching.
I leapt on to the stone pier and ran for the stairs, my shoulder blades tense for an arrow, my ears cocked for a sudden sound. Up and up … I believe there were but twenty steps to the sally port, but I thought it took me half my life … up and up, my feet pounding on the stone, the soles of my leather shoes slapping too loud, too loud …
Dawn was close. I could smell the change in the air, and hear the birds.
Fiore was by me, and then Nerio and Miles and Juan. Right behind them were our Greeks, Giannis and Giorgos. And then another six men with our ladder, which struck the walls of the stone stairs like the sound of a trebuchet loosing its payload, and we all flinched. And then they did it again, so loudly that the sound echoed off the city walls, and the men, English and Gascon, carrying the ladder, cursed in shame.
Sometimes, the worst part of an escalade is that you cannot shout ‘Shut up!’ at your troops.
Somewhere inside the Casteleto, a door slammed.
‘Now or never,’ I whispered.
Thirty pairs of hands raised the ladder. We had one. One.
The moment the feet of the ladder were braced, I was on my way up.
I hate ladders. I hate heights, have no head for them, and when a sailor goes out on the yard of a ship to brail up a sail, it makes me queasy on the deck.
But there are things you must do yourself. You cannot lead an assault from the back.
I went up and up, and as I climbed, I was going from night into day. Our ladder was just the height of the wall – and I only knew that ten feet from the top. And as I climbed the last few feet, winded, and terrified by the creaking and cracking sounds the ladder made as my weight bore on the whole length, a sentry on the Pharos Castle across the harbour entrance saw us.