The Long Sword(233)

            I shook my head. ‘The army …’ I was tempted to blasphemy. ‘The army is raping and looting the city. They man no towers, and they kill only—’ I snarled.

            Fra Ferlino cocked an eyebrow at me. ‘You are a virgin of sieges? What did you expect? A parade?’ He held out a hand. ‘Yet we must hold those gates if we are to hold the city. And the army of Cairo?’

            ‘We went out with the king last night,’ I said. I stumbled in my speech – was it only last night?

            ‘We hear the king is in the Tower of Pharos,’ the Order’s admiral said. ‘But nothing more.’

            ‘He needs to know that the Cairo Gate is held, and the main enemy army retreated,’ I said.

            ‘I’ll see that he knows,’ the admiral said.

            And then they let me sleep.



            That lasted three hours. Perhaps a little more.

            I was still in my harness. I had no squire to get me out of it, and I was too tired to touch the laces and buckles. I think I tried – I have the vaguest impression of scrabbling at an arm harness just before collapse and I woke to a variety of aches and pains that I would associate with the results of a torturer’s rack.

            The man standing over me was the king. He looked as neat as a newly forged sword. His harness was clean and polished.

            ‘I’m so sorry, Sir William,’ he said. ‘But the admiral tells me that the Cairo Gate is held, and the enemy army has slipped away. I need to know.’

            Muzzily, I told my story again.

            The admiral had a quick conference with the king and I caught enough words to know what they proposed. My heart sank: I’ve heard that phrase used a hundred times, but then I knew what it meant.

            They needed me to lead a column of reinforcements back through the city.

            The king embraced me. I almost laughed. He wasn’t going.

            When I got my harness cleaned up a little – the king’s squire came and helped me, bless him – I drank some water and pissed it away, drank some more, and stumbled out into the sun, which hit me like the blows of a deadly opponent. Two serving brothers armed me, and the metal going back over my bones was like the bite of weapons. But when I reached the Order’s parade – really, just a little area of gravel and old kelp in the centre of a three-sided wall of tents – there was Nerio, there was Fiore, and there was Miles.

            I don’t remember if I cried. But I do now. By our saviour, we were …

            We were. And Juan was dead.

            ‘Let’s get this done,’ I said.

            We rode into Alexandria, and nothing waited for us but the rotting horror of the spectacle. No dogs, no wolves, no brigands prowled, and no feral Alexandrines slaughtered. The streets were dead. And littered with meat that had been men. And women. And children.

            When we reached the site of the ambush, Maurice gave me a sign, a wave, and he and George and John rode away without further explanation. I assumed that they were looking for signs of our attackers.

            I was wrong.

            I rode under the arches of the Cairo Gate with nothing endangered but our sense of man as a redeemable sinner. John and his companions came back an hour later, or so I hear, but I was, thank God, asleep.



            I slept in one of the Cairo Gate towers. I slept yet again in my harness, and woke to an alarm that proved false. Then I slept again.

            When I woke for the third or fourth time, it was to the terrible realization that I had not unsaddled Gawain, nor seen to him in anyway. Only that would have dragged me from some dead Mamluk’s straw pallet – clean as a whistle, by the way.