There is an enormous difference between killing helpless townspeople and fighting a knight. I hope d’Herblay learned that when I broke both his hands with one blow. The steel of his hourglass gauntlets protected him from the edge, and he didn’t lose the hands.
He just lost their use.
His spear clattered to the cobbles. He didn’t growl – he screamed, and I put my axe head behind his heel and pulled, dropping him with a clatter.
I put the spike atop my weapon to his unvisored face. I stepped on his broken left hand. He screamed.
‘I am not killing you,’ I said. ‘I do not want to kill another man. Not today. Go. All of you.’
Something in me was broken. Or had never been right. I wanted to kill him. In fact, I wanted to kill them all. I wanted to kill all the bad men, on and on.
But I had listened to enough of Father Pierre to begin to doubt if killing them was the way.
D’Herblay lay in the road and screamed. I ignored him. In Gascon French, I said, ‘Are any of you knights? Are you not ashamed? Is this your war for the gentle Jesus? Is this all we are? Go hold a tower. Go and fight the enemy. The armed enemy. Or we are nothing but reivers and bandits?’
I suppose I thought that they would turn away, ashamed.
Instead, they simply attacked.
Fiore laughed. ‘Well done,’ he said, as his pole arm flicked out.
We were five against twenty, and from the moment the blue and white in front of me came forward, I remember little. But I remember passing my iron between a man’s legs and lifting him, and his screams. I remember slamming my poleaxe two-handed, a full blow like a man splitting wood, into another.
I confess I put another down after he had turned to run.
They still talk of that fight, in the Hospital. They could all see us from the walls of the gate castle.
Of course, they lie, and say that the five of us fought a hundred Mamluks. When in fact, we fought twenty men-at-arms who wore the same cross as we wore ourselves.
And then it was done. The survivors ran like rats, leaving their loot on the road.
And then – I’m not ashamed to say – John the Turk and Maurice and George shot them down. As they ran.
And I confess, too, that killing d’Herblay would have given me more pleasure than any of the poor devils of infidels I killed in Alexandria. But I did not.
I walked back to him, and someone had killed him. On the ground, his hands broken, as helpless as a babe.
And Nerio said, ‘You are too good to be a mortal man, William Gold.’ He raised an eyebrow. And flicked his sword at me like a salute.
The next morning, we fed the Greeks – and their Jewish and Moslem friends – what food we had. About an hour after sunrise, we were probed by Bedouins. They came in close but we were silent as the grave and we didn’t allow them into the courtyard through the gate: Ewan and John and Ned Cooper saw them off, leaving a dozen corpses.
Then John followed Fra William and twenty turcopoles out the gate on his little Arab. They were gone an hour, and then John took the English archers and they were gone another hour.
The next troops to come at us were Sudanese. They were not well-disciplined, and I suspected they were being used to count our swords, so to speak. But they were fanatics, or possibly full to their eyeballs with opium. There were several hundred of them.
They died in front of the towers, and then they died in the gate tunnel, and then they died in our fortified trap in the courtyard, and they never stopped stabbing and chanting and screaming their name for God.