The Long Sword(239)

            Nerio shook his head. ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘I have him on the galley. Wrapped in a shroud. He’s not the only dead knight.’

            I shook my head. ‘He died in the Holy Land,’ I said. ‘Surely …’

            Fiore looked down. ‘We’re leaving, Will,’ he said.

            Nerio wouldn’t meet my eyes.

            I sat. I don’t think I decided to sit. My knees just gave.

            Nerio finally looked at me. ‘The king tried. The legate tried.’ He shrugged. ‘Listen, William, Admiral Contarini tried. He has been against this attack from the beginning, and he argued that now that we had raped the city and broken it for trade, the least we might do is hold it and march on Cairo.’

            Zeno was drinking our wine – or, given that it was Venetian wine, possibly we were drinking his. ‘Cairo?’ he asked. ‘Christ on a cross, this army!’ He spat. ‘Every fighting man in this army is right here,’ he muttered.

            Nerio made one of his Italian faces. ‘We are leaving.’ He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘For you, I’m sorry.’ He shrugged. ‘For me … I never want to see this place or these animals again.’ He flicked his eyebrows up, and shrugged. ‘Perhaps I am a banker at heart, but what have these infidels ever done to me? Nothing. But our crusaders?’



            I was not the veteran captain then that I am today, but that city could have been held.

            Instead, our crusaders made a real effort – not to fight, but to enrich themselves. You’d have thought, from the charnel house of death, that every living thing in the city was dead, but some people had been rescued – to be made slaves.

            When we sailed away – with the loot of a rich city, ten thousand slaves, and two shiploads of Alexandrine Greeks who begged not to be left to the counter-sack of the Mamluks – when we left, the Egyptian Army had stopped attacking because they’d lost a thousand men for nothing.

            We killed a great city.

            Also – for nothing.



            Two days later we landed in Cyprus. The ‘crusaders’ were eager to trans-ship their plunder and there were men sailing for Italy before Mass on Friday.

            I have nothing more to say, except that those days, the voyage from Alexandria to Famagusta, and the days that followed, were perhaps the blackest of my life.

            Nerio had saved his Greek girl. He was well enough. And he and Fiore tried to comfort me. And Miles, who was as disconsolate as I.

            What do you make of the ruin of all your hopes?

            What is knighthood, when crusade is but a word for rape?



            We buried Juan in the cathedral of Famagusta. You can still see his arms there, in alabaster, painted. I have been to visit him a few times. Sometimes I sit on his tomb, and talk to him, though I realise this is foolish.

            Sometimes I weep.

            I certainly wept that day.

            It was Nerio – Nerio, for whom religion was an inhibition on his carnal pleasures – who saved me. The four of us we standing over the tomb, no alabaster yet, and we went to the altar to pray.

            And Nerio said, ‘Let’s go to Jerusalem anyway.’

            The four of us rose, and swore – four swords on the tomb.

            The crusade broke up with frightening rapidity. The English were gone in less than a week, and the French immediately began to spread a rumour that the English and the Hospital had deserted the walls first.

            I got to listen to the process by which a military disaster that was a catastrophe of cowardice, indecision and greed was transformed into a Christian victory, a blow to the infidel. I got to hear black told as white, the admiral of the Hospital called a coward for attacking the Pharos Harbour, the Hospital accused of deserting the king on the beach.