A Blood Red Horse (31 page)

“If either of you brothers believes the tittle-tattle put about by that man,” she said, “you will be unworthy of your father's name. This girl, my Ellie, is purer than a nun in paradise.”

Before she could say anymore, the abbot, running and smiling, appeared.

“My dear, dear sons,” he said, touching Hosanna's star. “Welcome home. You are heroes, and we want to hear all that has happened. What a time you have had! Did you see Jerusalem? Where is everybody else?” He caught the glance that William was giving Ellie and started to twitter. “We have had our troubles here while you were fighting for Christ, you know, but your return is the most important thing.” He smiled encouragingly. “Christ's enemies are not confined to overseas, as I don't have to tell you. But let us, at this happiest of moments, say only this, that all will be well now that you are back and that we must put all the unpleasantness that occurred here while you were away behind us. I am afraid I have not behaved very well.” He turned to Ellie. “I was too trusting of the constable. In the end it turned out that he knew—
or
he thought he knew—more than he let on to me. His motives in dealing with you, Miss Eleanor, have been less than pure.”

Gavin and William looked rather bemused. Neither could take in what the abbot was saying.

Unable to take his eyes off Ellie, William said the first thing that came into his head to shut the abbot up. “The
king is not back with us,” he blurted out. “We don't know where he is.”

“Oh,” Ellie said in tones of surprise, “but I do. The king is in prison in Germany. He was captured before Christmas.”

They all stared. “In prison?” William repeated. “How did you find out?”

“Because I can read,” said Ellie, pulling the parchment Old Nurse had given to her earlier carefully out of her belt. “And even write a bit, too.”

“I know,” said William.

The abbot coughed.

Ellie was embarrassed. “Well, never mind about any of that now,” she said, then ran forward to call for silence. The snow continued to fall steadily. Ignoring it, Ellie climbed on to the stone mounting block at the side of the horse trough, the one that had once, in another life, been the scene of William's humiliation. Then she spoke loudly and clearly so that everyone could hear.

“My friends,” she began, unrolling the letter. “We must give thanks for the return of the Hartslove crusaders, or what remains of them, from the Holy Land. But the king's journey home has not been uneventful. From the cell in which he is currently held by Duke Leopold of Austria”—the crowd gasped—“Yes, the returning crusader king has been betrayed. But anyway, from his prison cell King Richard has sent special greetings to his faithful knight William de Granville, now Earl of Ravensgarth.” The gasp turned into a roar. Ellie held up her hand to indicate that she had not finished and began to read slowly but clearly from the parchment. “‘The new earl has the right to build five castles on the lands formerly belonging to Bartholomew de Mortimer. He has earned his new status
through the gallantry of both himself and his horse Hosanna during the course of the crusade but particularly at the battle of Jaffa.' That's what this letter says.'

William started. “An earl?” he said. Ellie raised her eyebrows as he turned to Gavin, standing beside him. Gavin leaned heavily against Hosanna, his mind reeling. Here was the beginning of his new life. With the loss of his arm, he had lost everything.

Ellie cleared her throat. “I haven't finished,” she said, and continued reading. “‘I also bequeath to my faithful councillor Gavin de Granville, now Count of Hartslove, the horse that I won from Isaac Comnenus. He must come and claim it from me when I return home. Furthermore, I instruct him to come and be part of my household, for he has proved a valuable councillor and a true friend.'”

Gavin put his forehead against Hosanna's shoulder for a moment. He could feel the horse's warmth through the cold. Then he steadied himself and slowly raised his left arm. The crowd waited in some trepidation. Even with King Richard's kind words, would he be happy that his brother now outranked him? What could William have done that deserved such a great honor? Would Gavin be resentful? He had been such a hotheaded, thoughtless young man when he left for crusade. Maybe this would spell the end of peace at Hartslove. What a shame that Sir Thomas had died! What would this new arrangement mean? Without the crusade to unite them, would the two brothers soon be at war? And then there was the business of Ellie. What would she do now? It was with bated breath that the crowd watched Gavin, still leaning against the red horse. They shimmied forward, as he began to speak.

“I give you,” he said, his voice wavering only a little, “I give you William, Earl of Ravensgarth.” Then he repeated
it more strongly. “I give you William, Earl of Ravensgarth, a true earl, a true brother, and a true son to our father.”

The crowd broke into spontaneous applause. Gavin leaned against Hosanna again, and the horse breathed gently into his face. Gavin smiled. He knew what to say next. He held his arm up and once more demanded silence.

“But let him never forget,” he went on, suddenly fluent and not shaky at all, “that this honor is not his alone. From now on a chestnut horse will be incorporated into the de Granville coat of arms. For when the story of Richard the Lionheart's crusade is told, when our myths are made, let us remember that this is not just a story about men. Without our horses we would have been nothing. So, my friends, I commend to you not just my dead father, a fine crusader, and my brother, William, together with all crusaders living and dead, but also the memory of our horses. In particular I commend to you this horse here, this horse called Hosanna, who represents all that is gallant and noble and who has never been found wanting.”

At this the crowd set up a chant. “Hosanna! Hosanna!”

Gavin nodded and looked about him. The horse was being touched by everyone who could get near him. Hal had extricated himself from his mother's bear hugs and slipped up to Hosanna's head. Eventually Gavin found himself looking at Ellie. She looked at him, straight in the eye. All her past confusions died away. She knew just what to do. She knew, with all her instincts, that this man needed her. She was horrified by his arm. She was nervous about the future. But she knew that if Gavin's life was not to be ruined entirely, she must bind it in with hers. The next few moments, she felt, were of vital importance.

Moving away from William and Hosanna, she touched Gavin's shoulder. Tears mixed with the snow on her cheeks.
Gavin swallowed hard. Not pity, surely? He could bear anything but that. But it was not pity he saw in Ellie's eyes, or in the arms that were stretched out toward him.

Suddenly Gavin felt his terrors lift. He moved toward Ellie, and she did not shrink away. “Have you understood what has happened to me?” he said slowly and deliberately. “I am not sure you have got the right brother.”

“I understand exactly what has happened to you,” she replied softly. “And who's to say you have got the right heiress?” She began scrabbling around in her pocket. Triumphant, she brought out the little wooden dog Gavin had returned to her at their unsatisfactory leave-taking. “It has been right there since you left,” she said simply.

Gavin took it and shut his eyes for a moment. Then he clenched it in his fist as he turned to William and shouted in almost his old style, “A dunk in the horse trough for the new earl, and shake down a thick bed for his Great Horse.”

William threw back his head and laughed. Then, finally, he dismounted, and the two men clasped hands briefly before moving forward and going their separate ways.

Blood Red Horse
, set in the run-up to, and the aftermath of, the Third Crusade, clearly falls into the category of “historical novel.” But this is a term filled with mystery and ambiguity. What is fact and what is fiction? Did Richard the Lionheart really say any of the words I had him deliver? In all the blood and confusion of battle, could a medieval boy like Will really still have been thinking of his horse?

The answers to these questions lay in the inspiration for the de Granville Trilogy, which is an account of the Third Crusade written by a Norman poet called Ambroise. In his
Estoire de la Guerre Sainte
, he provides not only accurate information but also a wealth of historical detail and ambience. I left out much of his story to make room for my own cast of characters. This is inevitable in a historical novel. Nevertheless, Ambroise was essential to me, since not only does his poem race along at a pace very instructive to a first-time novelist, but he also tells you what was in men's hearts when they set off from Vezelay on July 4, 1190. It was from this source that the seeds of
Blood Red Horse
were sown.

I first studied Ambroise at my university. However, it was years later, after a rereading, when the full potential of the tiny passage in which he recounts how Saladin sent horses to Richard at the battle of Jaffa really struck me. What if one of the horses sent by
Saladin had belonged to a Christian knight in the first place? What if we met that knight as a child? What if a Muslim boy also loved the horse? It is not such fanciful stuff. Warhorses, being immensely valuable, were objects of very particular importance. The strong emotional ties that develop between Will, Hosanna, and, eventually, Kamil are not the most fictional thing in the book.

Once Hosanna began to obsess me, I set to work and found that there was one book I could not do without: John Gillingham's
Richard the Lionheart
. Gillingham's analysis of Richard's character was important, for though the king is not center stage like Gavin, Will, Ellie, Kamil, and Hosanna, if the book was to embody the period that it was set, I needed to know him just as well.

I did not just rely on Western or Christian sources to embody the period. Both “my” Richard, as it were, and “my” Saladin are also based on accounts written by Baha ad-Din, a real person as well as a character in
Blood Red Horse
. His chronicle, along with that of many other medieval Arab historians, appears in Francesco Gabrieli's
Arab Historians of the Crusades.
I read much of this book with great interest. You can smell the dust and taste the tension in Imad ad-Din's account of Saladin and his army entering Frankish crusader territory, for example. And while it would be nonsense to pretend that the descriptions of Saladin are balanced, there is much to read between the lines. It was not fashionable political correctness that encouraged me to make Richard and Saladin well-matched. Baha ad-Din tells us they really
were
well-matched. Who can argue with that?

I also have to apologize to Baha ad-Din for one deliberate plagiarism. On page 185 of
Blood Red Horse
, when Richard outlines to his knights the terms under which he believes that a temporary truce should be made with Saladin, I have requisitioned the faithful servant's words (even if I have put them in a speech instead of in a letter, as was really the case). I used the words because they were perfect, and I hope that wherever Baha ad-Din's soul lies, he has taken this as a tribute.

Life in medieval England, in a monastery or a castle, was almost too easy to research, and I found excellent publications from the English Heritage Gatekeeper Series and Teachers' Guides, quite apart from countless memories garnered through years of visiting ruins. But actually, while guides are exceptionally useful—helpfully listing the monastic offices, for example, or reassuring you that late-twelfth-century castles did have some elementary plumbing—sometimes they can restrict you.

It was up to me to add the human dimension to these locations and ruffle the feathers of these fact-based guides. Curiously, it took me a while to feel comfortable doing this. The habit of writing endless academic history essays for school took a while to beat down.

As a resident of Scotland, I found it much harder to write with confidence about life in the East than the West. I have never been to the Holy Land. I am not a Muslim. Yet I knew that Kamil was going to be the most troubled and complex of all the characters. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. To see him straight, I began reading the Koran, striving to understand what drove him. It was like a magic key. The physical things—the makeup of the Saracen army and the behavior of camels—could be found with ease in the Arab histories, and Gillingham introduced me to the Old Man of the Mountain. But to reach Kamil's innermost core I needed something deeper, and the Koran provided it. Coming from a family for whom beliefs have always been important, and being myself just as impatient as Kamil, it was not long before he was as easy to write about as Will.

And what of Hosanna? It was so important to let him breathe. This came best when I simply imagined myself back with my own chestnut horse, just as small and brave as Hosanna, racing over South Pennine moors or standing with her head heavy on my shoulder as she quietly licked the palm of my hand and nudged me for her supper. In
Blood Red Horse
, Will, Ellie, and Kamil all know the feeling that grows when horse and human come together.
I don't believe you can research this feeling. It has to be felt. Nevertheless, I remember as a child reading and rereading the
My Friend Flicka
series, crying for Thunderhead and Ken in equal measure, and I think Mary O'Hara did exert some influence on my writing. For the very particular medieval elements to horsemanagement—how they were loaded into boats and how the carcasses of the dead were disposed of—I used Ann Hyland's
The Medieval Warhorse
.

But the heart of this novel is not its research. I prefer to know what people are feeling to what they are wearing, and what was happening in the castle rather than how the castle was built. Yet it is obviously important for a historical novel to be set in context, because only in context can the characters be fully understood.