The Long Sword(225)

            And then I sheathed my sword, raised Father Pierre in my arms and carried him into the church. He was crying.

            I had seldom seen him cry. He had taken a bad blow, and his scalp was torn. But his face held more than suffering – I had never seen him without hope. His small face always beamed with something from inside, some special benison he brought to the world. But, that night in hell, it was gone.

            He knelt before the altar and spread his arms and fell face forward, saying, ‘Forgive them Father, they know not what they do.’

            Perhaps. But I had been one of them, and I knew exactly what they were doing.

            They were raping, looting, and killing. They were very good at these things.

            And d’Herblay and the Hungarian and his men were out there in the darkness, still probably looking to kill the legate, even though it was now too late. The crusade was victorious. We’d taken the greatest city in the world.

            The man lying full length before a ruined altar would be Pope.

            If I could get him home alive.

            Such is the life of arms. Or rather, such is one path on the life of arms.



            We got the legate back to the Cairo Gate on a horse. The church to which the legate had gone to save its congregation was only six turnings from the gate, and yet those six streets seemed full of menace. And getting there seemed to take half the night.

            I reported to Sabraham. He was wounded, and he shook his head. ‘I wish you’d got him,’ he said. He was watching the rooftops. ‘I want the legate out of here.’

            As it proved, the legate wanted to be quit of the city, too. He was slow to recover, but when his eyes were open, he demanded – begged – to be taken to the king. He had decided that he could convince the king to stop the ‘crusaders’ from raping the city.

            Our men had a small fire in the courtyard, and torches. Tired men were at least taking the corpses out of the towers, and a dozen captured slaves were washing the blood off the tower steps.

            ‘I thought that I was done,’ I said, a little bitterly.

            The legate blessed me. ‘You sleep, my son. I will ride back to the ships.’

            Sabraham shook his head. ‘I’ll take him,’ he said. To me, he said, ‘D’Herblay is out there. Waiting for us to move him.’

            When you imagine yourself as a knight, what you imagine – if you are like I was as a boy – is that moment when the Knights of St John charged the infidel. A windswept beach. Three hundred brave men in brilliant scarlet and steel. That seems to you what knighthood will be.

            But this, my friends, is where I think we find chivalry – when our throats are so parched we cannot swallow, when the smoke from a thousand fires cuts our lungs, when our armour seems to hurt us more than an enemy can, when our jupons are heavy with our sweat and our blood, and our hands won’t close properly on our swords. When all we want is sleep. Or death.

            That is when we find what makes us knights, I think.

            I looked around in the firelight at my friends. None of us had even dismounted. Sabraham had blood flowing over his cuisses – he’d taken a wound in his armpit. A real wound.

            ‘You stay,’ I said. I didn’t want to. I wanted to sleep. But: ‘We’ll take him to the ships.’

            Miles leaned out across his horse’s neck, hands crossed in fatigue. ‘We should go out the gate and ride around,’ he said for the second time that night.

            But de Midleton wouldn’t hear of it. ‘There’s Sudanese Ghulams out there, and Mamluks,’ he said. He pointed to where a dozen of the Order’s brother-sergeants were improvising a barricade. ‘I expect an attack at dawn. I’m not sending the legate out into that.’ He took me aside. ‘Let me put some food and water into him. And your poor horses, gentles. But I agree he shouldn’t stay here. If this tower falls …’