Juan died there. He’d taken a wound the day before, and worse, been knocked unconscious, and he was slow and pale, as I’ve said. He got a spear under his aventail and down he went. Fiore stood over him, and his sword flew and he killed men the way a housewife kills flies.
And then the king was with us, the banner of Jerusalem charred in his fist, and de Mézzières and de Coulanges and a dozen other of the king’s knights, and we burst out of the gate house and into a courtyard. I realised we were between the walls and had it all to do again, but … the far gate was open and there were no more than forty Saracens between us and the city and not a Mamluk in sight.
There was no time to mourn Juan. I knew he was dead – I’d seen the spear and the sheer amount of blood.
The Saracens charged us, trying to put the djinn back in the bottle as they might say themselves. And there was a flurry of archery from the inner towers and we were like rats in a trap, surrounded by towers full of enemy archers.
But the far gate was open and Alexandria, the richest, biggest city in the world, beckoned.
I suppose I killed my share, but I only remember the late afternoon sun slanting down on the street beyond the gate. That site filled my visor.
Something was happening beyond my helmet. It took me time, perhaps three exhausted, desperate blows with my longsword, before I realised that the enemy archery had stopped. Had I looked up, I would have seen the cross of St George, the banner of England, flying from the outer towers of the Customs Gate.
The boy and the thin Italian had got a line over the wall, and the Venetians and the English had taken the towers even as we cleared the yard and occupied the attention of the defenders. John said that they cleared the first tower by running in an open door and all the garrison were shooting down at us, their backs to the door, and John and Ewen stood in the doorway and killed them with arrows.
About that time, the last men in the yard threw down their scimitars and their spears. And died. We gave no quarter. Chaucer, you have been in a storm. There is no quarter. Sir Walter Leslie killed the kneeling men.
The archers were more merciful, and took a tower full of soldiers alive. It is from those terrified prisoners that John learned why we had succeeded. The captain of the Customs Gate was not a soldier, but a customs official, as Coulanges had said. He had refused to allow the Mamluks to augment his garrison.
He paid with his life. Thus perish all corrupt officials.
In less time than it takes to say Matins, we had the gate itself open. Then Fra Peter led our horses in, and the banner of Jerusalem joined the banner of England on the gate.
The Venetians poured in right behind the Cypriotes, and then the ‘crusaders’ came up, the mercenaries and routiers. They wouldn’t obey the king, they wouldn’t fight for him – but now they came like jackals when we had done all the fighting.
I was kneeling by Juan, with my friends, and Fra Peter.
What can I say? Juan was dead. I had lost people over the years, starting, I suppose, with my parents. I am a hard man. But I had been with Juan almost three years. He was my first friend in the Order. He was my brother in redemption, if you will. At an inn outside Avignon, we had wrestled naked to amuse our girls, and that evening we’d drunk wine with our heads pillowed in their laps and talked about God and women and wine and swords. I’d held his head when he wept after his girl died of the plague in Italy and he’d covered my back when d’Albret tried to kill me.
He was dead. He seemed too small for his harness, and his smooth olive skin seemed impossibly alive. His body held the usual amount of blood, and it was on our feet, mixed with that of all the other poor bastards who’d died in the yard.
The king was already mounted. He leaned down; Fiore was weeping.