The Green Count Read online

  By the sweet Lord, and with the help of a slip of a girl, we had escaped.

  Dawn found us waiting at Montjoie, the first sight a traveller has of the Holy City. Some of the stones there are worn smooth by the knees of ten thousand Christians dismounting to pray, and I added my knees to the multitude. And I must say, after captivity, however mild, and the theft of the horses and fatigue of the night, the city rising above us on the great ridge was like a heavenly vision. We all dismounted, and knelt; the Armenians were pilgrims as much as I, and we prayed, each in his own tongue. As soon as it was light enough to see, I found that the Armenians were smiling, and that the girl was taller and older than I had imagined – not a slip of a girl at all, but a full-grown woman, perhaps twenty, with a heart-shaped face, slanted green eyes and a smile that would have made goodwives in England speak of elves and fairies. In truth, she was almost too much – beautiful in an exotic way, and never more so, I suspect, than covered in dust, wearing a man’s gown, and kneeling with her face towards God’s city.

  She was, however, a mortal woman. When her brother told her, in French, to cover her face, she stuck out her tongue.

  Then we rode cautiously, because as the light came up we were exposed, but we were in sight of Jerusalem and my spirits rose, and in fact we made it to the Jaffa Gate without any incident except Arnaud’s growing exasperation with his sister, who I gathered from his repeated admonitions was Eugenia, a Greek name.

  The last bit of raillery brought two guards to the gate – both of them men-at-arms. They called for a knight of the Order, and before the red ball of the sun crested the far horizon, we were in the city.

  Fra Daniele was younger than Fra Peter – Italian and easy to talk to, for a knight of the Order. We were lucky he was on the gate; twice lucky, in that he knew all the men and knew I’d been taken. He sent us straight on to Fra Peter, and before Matins was sung we’d told him our tale.

  We went and prayed in the Franciscan church together with the other knights; I was still dusty and probably smelled, but I was warmed to the very core by my reception.

  But Fra Peter believed in the same maxims I did – at the gallop, or with planning, or not at all. In this case, he mounted me and Arnaud as guides, gathered about half our total force and remounts, and before the sun was high, we were moving back down the great ridge on which Jerusalem sits, across a dozen deep valleys. A dozen of our English archers were in the van with our Greek cavalry, and we spread out to avoid making a dust cloud – the Holy Land requires all kinds of discipline that you do not have to practise in the green fields of Provence.

  I rode in front, with Syr Giorgios and Ewan, and Marc-Antonio close behind me. I had embraced that boy when I saw him, and, rare for me in those days, apologised for striking him in front of a dozen other gentleman. It is a small thing, an apology, but he flushed, stammered – and perhaps loved me better than if I had never struck him.

  Because men are odd beasts.

  We caught the Turks gathering horses. It was clear they’d been at it all day; half of them were still afoot, in the valleys east of Ramalie, and we caught them afoot, many without arms, and killed them. So much for my attempts of the night before; Fra Peter meant to break the bandits.

  It is odd – a thing of war. They had treated me well enough; indeed, they might have killed me, and didn’t. I didn’t like killing them. But I did – although I begged the stradiotes and the archers to keep an eye out for John, and I managed to take a pair of prisoners and handed them to Marc-Antonio: young men.

  I rode from small fight to small fight, looking for John, and Ewan, bless him, did the same, but I needn’t have bothered. After our initial surprise, the Turks ran, and even on foot they were hard men to catch. And we were spread over a mile of broken country. The Turks were not fully routed; Uthman led those in the town in a sally to buy his men time, like a good leader; the sunset saw a dozen of our saddles emptied by their terrible, fierce archery, and then we charged them, rather than lose more men and horses.

  That caused one of the most confusing fights I can remember: a red sunset, dust everywhere on the plain of Ramalie, and two hundred men milling in utter chaos, arrows, dying horses, and no notion of ‘sides’ or ‘order’. I might say it reminded me of mounted tournament mêlées, except, to be honest, at the time it reminded me of nothing, because I had no thought in my head except to stay alive. I had no maille, no brigantine, no helmet, no bow and no javelins. I had a fine long sword, which, despite being my favourite weapon, is probably the worst weapon I can imagine in a swirling mêlée with horse archers.

  Or perhaps not – it is still deadly. But the encounters I remember: a young Turk who made his horse rear and shot me from perhaps five paces – he missed; – another who rode by me, out of a wall of dust, as surprised as I was, and past me, and put an arrow into the rump of my mount in the two breaths he had to shoot. I cut at him and was so late that I almost fell off.

  My poor mare slumped down, spent, and with blood pouring from her back off leg – something vital cut, and nothing to be done. I’m sure if I had an astrologer, he’d have told me that my star was in a bad house for horses.

  I ran to a rock. I got my back against it and tried to breathe. For perhaps the first time in my adult life, I considered hiding in the midst of a mêlée.

  The next man out of the haze of battle was John. He had an arrow on his bow, a sabre back over his right hand and back along his draw arm, and he cantered up, arrow aimed at the centre of my chest. He nodded, perhaps ten paces out.

  I thought he was going to kill me. I’m ashamed to own it, but that smile seemed to say I was done with this world and should say my prayers.

  But he turned his little horse on her front feet and cantered away into the gathering gloom, leaving me feeling more and more like a spectator. But he was back in no time, with a big mare’s reins in his fist and, with a little help, I got up on her.

  Then I drew my sword.

  ‘Thank you, John,’ I said.

  He grinned. ‘Always my pleasure,’ he said in passable French – clearly a phrase of Jean-François’s that he had memorised. ‘Turks,’ he said with contempt.

  For the rest of that fight, he was the knight, and I was the squire. By which I mean, he rode, and shot, and killed Turks, if any of those bandits were truly Turks and not just the broken men of three faiths. He did miss; I can remember two arrows he loosed that went awry, and both times, regardless of the danger, he cursed as if we were in some archery match and not a desperate cavalry fight. I followed him, and collected the horses of the men he shot. If they had arrows, I passed their quivers to John. Once, he threw the entire quiver on the ground in disgust.

  I will amuse you, I hope, to say that our third horse had a bow in an open holster, and several quivers of arrows, and I took the strung bow, got an arrow on it …

  And almost fell from my mount. The bow was incredibly difficult to draw – as heavy as Ewan’s, and I had never tried drawing a bow on horseback.

  But the dead man had a case of javelins, as well. And late in the fight, as the sun finally set, and Uthman rallied his best men around him on the Damascus road, I came up with him. He had perhaps twenty riders around him; one of them was the angry boy I’d dismounted twice. The road was stonier than the countryside, and there was less dust – we rode into them. That may sound foolish, but in a fight like that, every man for himself, fought at the best speed of your horse, no order and no orders either – well, you either turn turtle and wait for other men to do the fighting, or you fight anything that comes under your horse’s nose.

  Everyone was equally surprised, and I flicked a javelin into the man who’d broken my nose. He crumpled around it like a crushed doll, and I was in the middle of Uthman’s rearguard. I cut with my long sword, two handed, made a cover, lost my reins, guided my stolen horse with my knees, took a blow in the back and was out – galloping free, my mount s
till fresh between my legs. The one advantage of getting your mount killed and replaced.

  John threaded through the enemy perhaps ten paces away. Without any plan but a single glance, we split. I rode north, and my mare jumped the roadside ditch I hadn’t seen – I was shocked, and almost lost my seat again, and bit my tongue of all things, and then we were turning wide at a canter.

  John went the other way, south. I will never forget one sight. There was a ditch on his side of the road, and I was looking back, or perhaps jolted from my own jump, and there was John, his horse at full jump, front feet high, like some mythical flying man-horse, shooting back over his shoulder at the men on the road.

  I turned into the heavier dust apurpose – I had no armour, and any arrow was the end for me. But I saw Uthman, and he saw me, and waved his fist at me.

  That was the end of the fight, for me. I probably went too wide, trying to stay alive, and then darkness fell, more suddenly than I expected.

  I imagine that Chaucer has heard about this fight from Scrope and Stapleton. I know that, ever since, I’ve heard how every one of them killed a dozen Saracens – the greatest triumph of the crusade. I know that no one who tells this mentions that they were bandits – that Uthman was a Turk and not a Mamluk – and I promise you that no one mentions that the next day, when we scoured the fields around Ramalie for our own wounded and dead, we saw a great many Turks with arrows in them, but hardly a one killed with a lance. The men-at-arms did well in rounding up and massacring the dismounted bandits, I suppose. But the archers and Greeks did most of the fighting. I know that when I rode back to find Fra Peter, he had most of the knights together, ready to charge, and they were two full bowshots behind the action.

  And in truth, I suspect that one lone Kipchak put about half the Turks down.

  For me, it left a bad taste in my mouth. I wanted them to be Saracens – cruel, hard, bad men. In fact, they struck me as nothing but Moslem routiers – more of the same. I was glad that my first captive, Salim, was not among the dead.

  And yet, when I found that Turkish boy who’d broken my nose, lying with a bad wound and both his legs broken, I cut his throat without a qualm.

  And then I collected my light harness from the corpses of the men wearing it, took my share of the loot and horses, and rode back to Jerusalem, to worship at the Holy Sepulchre.

  That’s the life of arms.

  The Franciscans try to control everything you do or see in the Holy City. I would like to rail against them, but with a hundred former routiers, swollen with pride, full of the release from fear of the day after a sharp fight, and rich with the gold and silver of dead bandits, I saw why the Franciscans wanted us kept separate from the people of Jerusalem.

  To most of our soldiers, all the people were ‘infidels’ and they could not tell the difference between Armenians, Franks, Jews and Moslems. They wanted wine, and women, and while I suppose that both could be had somewhere in the Holy City, their manner of looking for either was offensive and dangerous.

  Controlling your people, off duty, can be as difficult and draining as combat itself. We’d lost almost a dozen men – heavy losses for such a small fight. I’ve seen this enough to know that losses like that make men angry and afraid; even in victory, they can be violent. For the whole of the next day, from stabling our horses until I fell, exhausted, on a pallet in the Orthodox bishop’s house, I did nothing but chase down men-at-arms and archers.

  One encounter I remember better than the others – it was Sir Steven Scrope. He was drunk, slurring his words, in a Jewish wine shop. He was threatening the owner.

  Thanks to God, I had Nerio and Fiore at my heels. Fiore stripped his sword out of his hand while he was arguing with me and the poor wine shopkeeper’s wife screamed.

  ‘Fucking paynim! Worms of infidels!’ Scrope shouted.

  ‘Jews,’ I commented. I was tired and Scrope annoyed me.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. All heretics.’ Scrope did not add to his theological argument, but stopped to throw up.

  Nerio paid his bill.

  Fiore shook his head. ‘No, none of them are heretics,’ he said. ‘The Greeks are heretics – they do not hold orthodox views about the words of our Saviour. The Jews are Jews. They don’t believe in our Saviour at all. Moslems, by contrast, believe that Jesus was a great prophet – not quite so great as their Mahomet, but a fine man.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Scrope spat.

  Fiore arched an eyebrow. ‘Not whatever at all. These distinctions matter and it is you, sir, who are ignorant. To a good Moslem, we are the heretics – we invest our Jesus with godhood, and that is against the will of God.’

  ‘Just shut up,’ Scrope said. ‘They’re all the same – the enemy. They make me sick.’

  He said many such things as we manoeuvred him through the narrow streets. I was going to ignore him; Fiore, of course, debated his every comment with precision and brilliance and sobriety – possibly enough punishment for anyone, really.

  But finally Scrope whirled on me. ‘Make this stupid foreign clerk shut up, Gold! I hate them all. I don’t want to know about them, or their evil religions, or their satanic rituals. I just want to kill them.’

  ‘You might learn something by listening,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want to learn anything! I don’t want them to be people!’ Scrope spat the words, but his voice caught on the second sentence.

  ‘They are, though,’ I said. Poor bastard. I understood his disease, then. He didn’t like the killing. It was eating him.

  ‘How do you do it, Gold?’ he asked. ‘You like everybody, and you kill them anyway. You think I’m wode? Look at yourself!’

  Scrope shook Fiore’s arms off. ‘Let me go,’ he said.

  ‘Only if you give me your word not to kill anyone,’ I said.

  ‘How do you do it, Gold?’ he asked again.

  ‘Swear, and I’ll tell you,’ I said.

  So he swore, on Saint George.

  I nodded, accepting his oath. ‘It’s war,’ I said. ‘It is my profession. Like farming, or being a priest. No need for hate or anger.’

  Nerio, of all people, nodded. ‘Strictly business,’ he said.

  I shook my head. ‘Killing is never business,’ I said. ‘I imagine that perhaps, someday, maybe in the kingdom of Heaven, there will be no killing. Until then – if you must be a butcher, be a good butcher. Learn your trade, do an honest job, and never trouble to hate the cow.’

  Scrope was shaking.

  I wanted to say, This is not for you. You should be a priest. But you cannot tell a knight this.

  When we walked away from him, Nerio put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I think maybe you are a great man.’

  Fiore nodded. ‘That was a good speech, about the butcher and the cow,’ he said.

  ‘Sir Steven’s problem is that he is afraid,’ I said.

  Nerio nodded. ‘And he thinks that you and I are not afraid. He thinks his fears justify his actions.’

  It might have become a great discussion on chivalry, but then a ‘woman’ screamed, and we found a pair of Gascons trying to buy, or beat, a man-whore. I find life is often like this – from flights of God-sent thought to the most sordid in a single tangle. But that man screaming was a signpost from God.

  My friends were my salvation. Stapleton had ridden with us, although I never saw him once the fighting started; Fiore and Nerio had stayed with the ‘garrison’, if a city of fifty thousand could be garrisoned by seventy men. But they all three stayed with me that night, and when we came upon the man-whore, or boy, two of our ‘pilgrims’ were trying to force him. Fiore dropped one, and Miles tripped the second.

  I was behind them in the alley. The pathetic boy had been beaten, and he was kneeling, blood flowing from his mouth. I knelt by him, feeling squalid, and as I knelt, a crossbow bolt passed over my head. By the will of
God it passed the length of that stinking alley without touching Marc-Antonio or Achille and struck the wall of a stable and exploded in fragments.

  It was dark. It took me a long moment to realise what had just happened.

  ‘Crossbow,’ shouted Marc-Antonio.

  I shot to my feet. A heavy crossbow takes a bit to span; whether you use a belt hook, a lever, or your hands, it’s a process. I ran forward down the alley. It was narrow – the path of the bolt down the alley …

  In one glance I had it; I saw the window and light behind it. Jerusalem is full of towers; many houses are three storeys and look like keeps in Scotland. This one was a little different, but I could see the man backlit against the lamplight of the room behind. He raised his weapon, the bolt flashed out, and struck me. But I was wearing my reclaimed brigantine over maille; the bolt cracked a rib, but it didn’t penetrate.

  You don’t feel pain in these moment. You feel it later.

  The building entrance wasn’t off our alley. So I tried to climb the building – easier in Jerusalem than most places – but the same brigantine that had just saved my life was now too bulky for climbing, and I slid ignominiously off the wall and into the dust.

  Fiore was ahead of me all the way. He passed me, bounced off the alley-corner, and ran for the front of the building. The assassin had, by then, decided that his plan wasn’t going to work, and he’d vanished from the lit window.

  I followed Fiore.

  We missed him.

  Then we went into the tower, which was owned by a Moslem family. I tried to be polite, and John the Kipchak came and helped me, but if they knew anything of the man who’d hired their room, they didn’t say. Mayhap there was nothing to know.

  He left nothing but a linen bag that had probably covered his crossbow, and the weapon itself. It was a plain military weapon, Italian, with a yew bow and a steel stirrup for loading.