The Seal(2)

‘I know they will.’ Jacques turned his old eyes on him. ‘It is the way of men to find blame.’

‘Well then, it would seem to me a fine thing to remain upon this wall,’ Etienne said to them.

‘What!’ Marcus gave a snort. ‘Even the Hospitallers have deserted their own castle! See how they run with their skirts between their precious legs? The towers are left to fall! How may you fight, one man against the world?’

‘One man or a thousand, is it not the same?’

‘Well, for my part I shall not join you to die for this sorry lot, these are a conquered people and I have heathen souls to kill!’ Crouching, he gathered his weapons to him. But he was sent down upon his belly by the sound of thunder as balls of fire were shot from the black oxen over the walls. They exploded in the streets and set the world aflame.

‘Look!’ Jacques said. ‘The marshal has signalled our retreat . . . this is not a day for fancies. Tonight Commander Thibaud will take a galley to Sidon. He will need good men.’

Ahead of them the knights of the Order began to move for the stairs.

Etienne did not immediately make to follow but stood straight instead upon the rampart with his face to a world swallowed up into the darkness of Mahomet. Into the cold throat of the enemy, that menace lit by a throng of torches, Satan’s body

– that much he was sure of – covering the plains and the mountains of the land. He had felt this one time elsewhere, standing on the lip of another rampart, gazing over a world in ruins. Now it was his wish to tempt an arrow or a dagger, or to bend over the wall and allow his body to fall into that field of battle. To die among the heathen, in that elegant moment, a champion of Christ! Such would be a worthy end after a lifetime, it seemed to him, of war.

He was paused only a moment considering these whims of his will and of his heart and the spell was broken by the call of his brothers on the stairs, and with it his spirit was returned to him and he was prevented from making good his sinful thoughts of disobedience. ‘My will is not my own!’ he yelled over the drums to the vast enemy, by way of apology.

By the time he was on the ground, ducking arrows and making his swift way through smoke and burnt bodies, Marcus and Jacques had already drawn together with the brothers of his Order.

At that point there arose a despondent cry from the inhabitants and troops of the commune of Acre that remained upon the walls. They knew that a Templar retreat served better than a blowing of the horn or a ringing of bells. It was a silent mark of the hopelessness of their condition.

The Templars were not halfway down the street that ran to the quays when trumpets deafened their ears and a voice was shouted into the night behind them: ‘The wall is breached! The wall is breached, God help us!’

But the brothers, having orders to abandon the fight, walked southward, unhurried and without a backward glance, while all around them lay remnants of a city abandoned in haste. Only two days before there had been merchants, pilgrims, artisans, diplomats and their families stumbling over one another with their belongings falling from their hands. Behind them the scribes of king and regent had dropped parchments and scrolls that now lay scattered about the streets to be trampled upon.

Jacques stooped to take a scorched one in his hand and looked at it squinting as he walked. ‘Look at this . . . and to think how closely they guarded their secrets! A divided city, one side against the other, each defending only its own castles and quarters, each side suspicious of its neighbour, could never conquer a force such as this!’ He let the parchment fall.

Marcus’s voice was full of sneer, his short legs marking a pace beside Jacques. ‘Days ago they gave chase to their own shadows, that was a merriment to see! Today most are drowned in the bay and tomorrow what is not dead will go to the markets at Damascus. The only good thing to come of it, my brothers, shall be that in a week a slave will fetch no more than a drachma!’

Etienne took a glance at Marcus’s smoke-stained face. Such words were spoken for the most part of Christians at the hands of infidels and this grew a burden upon his heart. But a greater burden pressed upon him – the knowledge that all things were changed, since to walk away from this battle was to admit defeat, and this defeat, added to every other, meant that soon they must walk away from Christ’s kingdom, as they were now doing, upon His blood-soaked soil in which lay buried all who had struggled and died to secure it. He looked around him at the darkened corners. These are strange thoughts for a knight of the Temple! he told himself and looked instead to his task of walking, one limb after another, with his brothers beside him, mere shadows scraping iron feet over the cobblestones.