The Seal(23)
The man made a series of nods.
‘Catalan!’ Delgado came to him. ‘Pull the quarrel from that leg.’
The Catalan smiled at the prospect and went to his task with a relish that made Iterius whimper like an animal begging for mercy. The Catalan turned a deaf ear and put his probing fingers to work, digging into the flesh of the man’s calf, twisting his fingers in a corkscrew fashion until they grasped at something. He pulled hard and the quarrel came out with a gush of blood behind it. The Egyptian sergeant gave so high-pitched a cry that Etienne thought it might be heard even in Famagusta, then Iterius rolled his eyes into his head and lost his senses. The Catalan threw the quarrel into the day, nodded in recognition of his fine accomplishment and, taking the cotton shirt from a mutilated body, wrapped it tightly around the bleeding leg. This additional abuse woke the Egyptian and he howled again.
‘Put him on his horse. We have to keep him alive,’ Etienne said.
With all of them saddled they made a gallop over that dry, parched road with the sky droning a hot sun over every living and dying thing.
Etienne took a look behind, to the blood and flesh cooking in the heat. The smell would soon bring a natural order to everything – the flies and ants at first, then hawks and wild dogs would come to feed upon the fresh-killed meat. This was the natural order of things. As commonplace as death was to Etienne, such a thing among brothers in Christ did not seem to him natural, it made no sense to his mind.
He put spurs to his horse and turned his thoughts to the moment, riding away from such a logic and onwards to the hopes of saving his Grand Master’s life.
7
SALAMIS
Launch your vessel, and crowd your canvas and ’ere it vanishes over the margin, after it, follow it, follow The Gleam.
Tennyson, ‘Merlin and the Gleam’
At the end of a long fertile plain between two mountains lay the ancient city of Salamis. To the eye there was no memory of the Roman city except that on the landward side two banks, one to the north and another to the south, marked the line where the walls had once stood. From the southward bank, which grew one with the mudflats at the mouth of the river, the reach of sand and grass and weed stretched to a main harbour bordered by a great breakwater of stone that ran from north to south parallel to the shore. The northern part of it extended to a long reef, which protected the seafront of the city. The northernmost part of the seawall closed onto the southern breakwater of a second harbour. It was in this second harbour that sat a galley flying a Venetian flag.
That afternoon, upon boarding the galley with Jourdain, the mercenaries and the injured Iterius, Etienne took himself to the Grand Master and found him in his sickbed. An illness had come upon him, the doctor said. Etienne had not wished to believe the Egyptian’s story and was angrier now that he was forced to. He fetched the man with his leg wrapped in blood-soaked cloth, and brought him before the ship’s doctor. He had the sergeant by the collar and was staring into his eyes. ‘If the Grand Master dies, I will take my time in preparing you, Egyptian, as fitting food for sea serpents.’
Iterius cowered and whimpered and promised promises, and following his indications the doctor was able to make the unction, which he gave to the Grand Master while he lay covered in sweat.
Etienne then told the ship’s captain to send a slave to taste the food and water for poison, and in the meantime he ordered the Norman Aubert to guard the larder.
After that he sat with Jacques de Molay.
Despite the poison, there were no changes upon that face – the mouth, the eyes and brow retained their former dispositions. Only the flush that crept over the scarred cheeks and the yellow colour over the beaded lips that took on the hue of ash denoted the struggle for life occurring in the soul.
Etienne pondered this countenance and saw in it that same steadfastness he remembered as a young man being received into the Order more than twenty years before. At that time Etienne had seen reflected in the lines of the face, in that thin-lipped mouth, a soul built to survive all temptation and misfortune – a soul larger than the body in which it dwelt.
Etienne leant his head upon Jacques’ chest. Beneath the skin the heart beat strongly in its cage. The Grand Master was fighting something greater than the poison, he told himself. He hoped it was not beyond his powers to surpass it.
Then came the groan of the ship’s movement and the sound of activity on the decks and Etienne found himself overcome with fatigue. He realised he had not eaten since the night before, nor had he taken rest in two days. Seeing that he could do noth¬ing more for Jacques he left him in the care of the doctor and Jourdain, posting the Catalan Delgado and the Norman Gideon at the door to the cell. After that he took himself like an old man to the bulwarks where he stood, staring outwards to that dimming bay and the blackened mountains, then to the sea the colour of stone beneath a rosewater sky. This was a backward glance at the unhappy island that despite all its difficulties had been the last bastion of the Order in the east. It had been, he recognised, a foothold, but one too distant to allow it a good reach to the Holy Land. And if leaving Acre had seemed to him the beginning of a devastation from which the Order would never recover, then this now was the end of that beginning.