That was the time of the longsword.
The men around me were mostly Bedouin – unarmoured men with small shields, daggers and spears. Interspersed with them were Sudanese Ghulami, men as black as Richard Musard, or blacker, with heavy spears like the ones we’d use for a foot combat or a passage of arms. I cut hard, a long, flat cut from right to left, clearing a little space and severing a man’s fingers. He fell back, and I killed another with a flick of my point: I was spending my spirit the way Nerio spent ducats.
But by God, I was fighting well.
Fiore reached me first, angling into the enemy from my right and killing his way like a ship under sail cuts the water. His charger dropped a big spearman whose heavy shaft was absorbing my blows. I caught his stirrup and his good horse hauled me ten paces through the press and I was hit twenty times. I was bruised, and I took a wound in the back of my right bicep under the spaulder, but when the pain forced me to relinquish the stirrup leather, I was close enough to the crusaders to see their crests and their coat armour.
I could see Mézzières, forty feet away. He had one foot on either side of the king, who was lying flat in the sand.
I thought of de Charny.
I prayed.
I was hit. And I stumbled.
And then Juan was there – Juan, who’d been knocked unconscious in the first action. He was tall in his saddle, his seat firm, his back straight, and his arm rose and fell like a man threshing wheat, and Saracens died. Because of him, I finally had a moment to gather Gawain, who should have followed me like a loyal dog.
My horse was nowhere to be seen.
I believe that I cursed.
Miles had our banner, and now he was close to me, and behind him I could see Nerio and the scarlet coat armour of my volunteers. The Saracens were screaming – the keening came through my helmet – and the dying were screaming a different tune and the cry ‘On, on!’ thundered out, grunted from the mounted knights.
The world balanced and the balance held, like two combatants when both make a strong pass and their blades lock. We were locked. Mézzières, Nerio, Fra Peter. Somewhere out on the bay, Carlo Zeno leapt into the water. A ship full of Genoese discharged a heavy volley of arbalest bolts into the flank of the Naffatun.
I saw none of this, you understand. Nor had I seen d’Albret unhorsing me, or trying to kill me and being driven off by Juan. In the helmet, you just don’t see.
Where I was, there was only the grit in between my teeth, the heaving of my sides as my lungs begged for air that my breastplate denied, the sweat that wept into my eyes from my hairline and the soggy padding of my cervelliere, and the sword I held in both hands.
Listen, then.
I got my sword up into a high guard – rare enough, on the battlefield – but something came to me, in the locked moment, some grace, whether from God or Fiore I leave you to guess. But I took up the guard called Window with my hands crossed, and my adversary was an armoured Saracen in light mail. He had a scimitar and a buckler with five bosses and verses of the Koran inscribed in gold.
I cut. I rotated my hands and cut between the bucker and the scimitar, rotating forward on my hips.
Like many men against whom I trained, the space between his sword and his shield was less guarded than it ought to have been. My sword touched both his sword and his shield. And continued through his helmet and into his head. My hand was so fell, so heavy, that the blade went through helm and head, down and down.
He fell, and I pressed forward one full step, cutting the reverse line up. I felt as if the very power of God had filled me. By Christ, all my life I have heard men claim to have cut through a helmet, but I have seen it done with a sword only three times, and that was one.