I was also wise enough to see that Fra William was more shattered than I. Even while I stood there in my harness, besmottered with blood and offal, I was growing stronger, as young men do. ‘Let me see to it,’ I said.
He spread his hands. ‘Be my guest,’ he said. ‘I need to sleep.’
We had forty Hospitaller knights in various degrees of fitness at the gates, and another fifty sergeants and turcopoles. By the odd flow of the currents of war, we also had Lord Grey’s retinue without the man himself; Miles Stapleton had taken command of them. That included Ned Cooper and his archers, who had ridden back with us.
‘I ain’t leaving you till I see my ducats,’ Ned Cooper said. The wound in his thigh, so devastating in the heat of the fight, proved to have barely penetrated the skin to the muscle of his leg.
From Ned and John – and Maurice and George, now much less taciturn than they had been before – I learned more of the ambush in the dark. At the same time that John feathered one of the spies following us, Ewan had seen the rose hedge and made the correct assessment. He’d dismounted and put a heavy arrow into the hedge.
The night had exploded, but the Hungarian’s hastily laid trap had failed to touch the legate, who’d ridden past without a scratch. Maurice and John had tried to counter the ambush from behind and everything had degenerated into a smoking tangle of chaos, in the best tradition of war and complex plans.
At any rate, in addition to my people – well, really the legate’s and Lord Grey’s, we had a dozen of the surviving Scots, including the Baron of Rosilyn, who outranked me, and we had most of Contarini’s oarsmen, a disciplined body, under Carlo Zeno.
This was less a miracle than it seemed. In battle, men follow men they know. We all knew each other: the Scots followed the Hospitallers, and the oarsmen followed the English archers. But it gave us a good garrison, and when Fiore and I found Master Zeno, we quickly came to an agreement about employing his oarsmen to fortify the gate.
He made a wry Italian face. ‘I wish I could send to the admiral,’ he said. ‘We have carpenters and tools. But that city …’
‘Hell come to earth,’ I agreed.
Outside the walls of our gate castle, men continued to behave like animals. And, as I had seen in France, perhaps the worst of it was that local men joined the riot, killing their own, or the Jews – always the poor Jews – only to be massacred by our brigands and crusaders. Men set fire to their own houses. Men slaughtered their own families in despair.
And that was by day.
Night was worse.
Nonetheless, we worked by torchlight. Zeno was tireless, and if he was a mocking villain in the streets of Athens, he was a hero in the Stygian dark of Alexandria.
We made the courtyard behind the first gate a trap. We dug up the cobbles with pickaxes and trenched it, raised a rubble wall and put palm palisades atop it. We relit the fires, made food, and served it to our soldiers.
In the midst of all this, we were interrupted by a terrible dilemma. A Greek patriarch came to the gate and begged us to admit several hundred Greeks.
It was clear that the enemy was coming, and Fra William’s sense – and he was a good soldier – was that the Mamluks and their infantry were coming across the river and striking against any Christian they could find. But we couldn’t feed the Greeks. And the riot of the sack continued, so that we had the threat of Mamluks from the south and the threat of our own crusaders from the north.
Syr Giannis went to Fra William and knelt and begged him to save the Greeks. Fra William was standing on the walls, watching the city burn – and watching a small army of looters approaching.
But he was a Hospitaller. He opened a side gate, even while he sent a sortie – me, of course – to order the looters away.