The Long Sword(214)
I stood and listened.
Nerio was better than me. He made a little sound like pfft and killed d’Albret, drawing, thrusting, wiping his blade and returning it to the scabbard so fast that it was as if his hands were full of silver fire in the moonlight.
‘I hope one of you will do the same for me, if my turn is like that,’ Nerio said.
But we had all heard what we had heard. It wasn’t just me d’Albret was after. D’Albret had died screaming that he had been paid to kill the serf. The Serf.
A man in agony cannot be interrogated or questioned or threatened or begged. He screamed d’Herblay’s name. He screamed his repentance at the sky, and was killed.
God have mercy on his soul, and the souls of all those who died in the sand.
We went back and slept on pallets of straw in a rough camp that the sergeants and lay brothers of the Order had prepared. But before we lay down our horses were groomed and fed, their wounds tended, their tack stripped away and cleaned. It took me, I swear, half the night.
Marc-Antonio’s habit of getting wounded when there was work to be done was remarkable! But with John’s expert help and my friends and their squires, we got it all done. We made the Gascons d’Albret had brought do the same, though they complained and complained. I might have raged at them – you could see Fra Robert Hales and Fra Ricardo and a dozen other older knights patiently currying horses in the moonlight while a handful of young Gascons proclaimed themselves too nobly born for such work, but I was too tired for rage. And I wanted them where I could see them.
The legate was tireless. He went from wounded man to wounded man, and late, when the moon was high, he came to us. We prayed, and I told him about d’Albret.
He shrugged. ‘My life is worth nothing,’ he said. He smiled his simple smile and went off to find other men worse off than we. Later, he spent an hour protecting a huddle of Moslem survivors from the routiers.
I was asleep.
We rose to pain. I was under my military cloak – Egypt’s nights can be cold – with Nerio pressed close to me on one side and my wounded squire pressed close to the other. He had the fever we all dreaded, and he was so hot I thought he was done. All three of his wounds were red.
So was my shoulder.
I have little memory of that day. Fra Peter ordered us to horse, and we tacked and bridled and we were mounted in the dawn, and our horses were as stiff as we were ourselves. But not an arrow did we receive from the walls. The king awoke late, mounted, and rode the whole circuit of the walls before noon with the Order as his bodyguards. Two hundred knights, and the greatest city on earth.
They might have laughed us to scorn, but they had their own troubles.
King Peter sent them a cartel, summoning the city to surrender. Their commander returned a defiance.
We rode from point to point, and everywhere I looked for d’Herblay and asked me if they had seen him.
He was nowhere to be found. Most ‘crusaders’ rose late and began to prowl around the walls like dogs searching for food. They were not an army. I know, because the king stopped many times, trying to reason with men. He stopped Sir Walter Leslie, who was with his brothers and some other Scottish knights and asked them to rejoin the army.
Sir Walter bowed deeply. He was in his harness, as were his brothers and all their men, and they were stripping some houses in the suburbs by the Pepper Gate.
‘You Grace, we came here to be rich, and if we cannot take the city, at least we can loot these towns,’ Sir Walter said.
Gascons, French, Scots – they ran riot over the countryside, looted a caravan they caught coming in, killing the animals where they stood. The Venetians stormed the Pharos again, and found it empty. The town’s lieutenant had stripped it of men and valuables and slipped away after the attack the night before, convinced he could not hold it.