Shield of Three Lions (48 page)

But I forgave the Scot, for whatever his motives, he’d saved me from even greater mortification by protecting me from the king. ’Twas true that Enoch’s nose was as sensitive as a wolf’s, but Richard, too, was exceedingly aware of odors, as Sir Gilbert had warned me often enough.

How would I ever survive this Crusade? What antic god had put me with the king?

WE DRIFTED SLOWLY down the Ladder of Tyre, our oarsmen abetting the dying Arsur wind while most of our fleet still lay becalmed in Tyre’s harbor. Gradually the rocky line of mountains along the shore receded inland and we reached Acre’s plain, close upon the actual city. By late afternoon our year of travel came to an end, for ahead a great stone promontory thrust into the sea like a hand beckoning us to enter its deadly port. High on its ramparts tiny white figures gazed down, the enemy at last.

We turned out to sea to avoid a welcome of Saracen arrows, then inland again just south of the fortress-city where the Christians held the field at the mouth of a river. The
Trenchemer
listed to port as we all crowded the rail to behold the welcoming army, lords and knights who’d been fighting since the pope first issued his call.
Swarming like bees atop one another, waving, cheering Crusaders rent the skies in a roar of welcome to the king who was to bring victory at last. Richard stood on the forecastle, a scarlet extension of his scarlet ship, and shouted assurances of what he would do. “We will take Acre in a month! Jerusalem before the rains come! Be home by Christmas!”

No one ashore could hear him, but we did and my own heart bounded in hope at those words
home by Christmas.
Was it possible? Would I be gathering fir and holly for Wanthwaite’s hall this year? Enoch deflated me.

“’Tis the ferst time I’ve heard the king speak with swich nicetee,” he remarked caustically. “He mun have quaint crekes up his spangled sleeve yif he thinks he can do in four weeks what others couldna in four years.”

“Four years!” I exclaimed. “You must be wrong. I’ve heard two.”

“Acre fell in ’eighty-seven, this be, ’ninety-one. Do ye need my abacus?”

“Why? Are the Crusaders outnumbered?”

“There be six thousand Saracens in Acre, a hundred thousand Crusaders with more coming all the time. No, the king may think the battle’s safe in a poke, but ’tis the world that will pipe. Besides, ’tis a bad omen to crack boast.”

Just then there was a rustling on the shore to make way for a mounted party and King Philip arrived. All our faces turned to King Richard: his eyes narrowed, his lips twisted, but he waved and simulated a broad smile. King Philip flourished his banner in reply, his white face a blur. Then the two kings were lost as Richard descended to his bark and the crowd took over. The waves were alive with swimming Crusaders who threatened to pull the king to the bottom of the sea in their enthusiasm. Music struck from various parts of the shore in a competition of sounds, clerics waved holy banners and held silver chalices high, many knelt and wept, others waved jugs and staggered in joy as the whole world went mad! Now Richard was held aloft, laughing, touching, making the sign of the Cross, then was lowered onto his courser, the great stallion Fauvel, captured from Isaac Comnenus.

He leaned forward to kiss King Philip. The horses turned and they walked slowly toward Toron Hill where the kings were camped.

Meanwhile, I was arrested by the unexpected presence of women on the shore. Dressed in noble tatters of silks and satins, ermines, sporting gold brooches and jewels, they also carried bows on their shoulders and walked on bare feet. Their unkempt hair floated free in every shade of yellow, brown and red indicating that they were Europeans, and their shameful cleavage showed skin that had once been pale but was now brown as leather. Several carried falcons, and hounds swarmed at their feet.

“Who are all those women?” I asked Enoch.

“By my skull, Alex, ye have a keen eye. They mun be refugees from the fall of Acre, but take care. Aye, I’ve noted the glintin’ in yer gray eye and know ye mun have nightspills, but watch yerself here, boy, and stay chaste. Venery in these parts and ye may wish yerself a lipper.”

By the time Enoch and I joined the royal train, the kings were far ahead and most of the crowd with them. Roderick attached himself to a knight with Lord Mortimer’s army and we lost sight of him. Well, finally we were in the Holy Land—treading its “streets” paved with cracked earth, breathing its sullen haze with the malodor of rotten eggs.

From the empty slope of the beach we climbed to a haphazard improvised city built in the style of an ant colony. Hundreds of artisans plied their trades in clay holes: iron-mongers, hammering carpenters, doctors and women in hospitals, shepherds guarding sheep in pens. It took so long to wend our way through this labyrinth that the sulfurous sky had darkened to brown by the time we emerged on the other side.

There we found Roderick leaning wanly against a pile of earth, his face twisted in pain.

“Here, lad, ye’ve attempted too much,” Enoch said. “Alex, take my wrist, there, and the other one as well. Cum, Roderick, we’ll carry ye.”

With faint protest, the poor knight had to accept our hammock seat as we struggled up the rise to Toron Hill. E’en though Enoch
took almost all the weight, I staggered and we were slowed to a crawl. I became aware of rats scurrying in dry palm fronds, occasional sharp cracks around us. We could now look downward on a hollow area dotted with bonfires, torches and tapers, each surrounded by a cinnamon glow cut by long shadows of skeletal Crusaders dancing deliriously to syncopated drums and fife. From somewhere ahead rose the solemn swell of “The Crusaders Hymn”:

Enoch tugged on my arm and we pulled Roderick with us into the dark, for the Scot had seen someone he knew from Paris. Soon we stood behind King Richards pavilion where another Scot told Enoch in broad dialect how we should protect ourselves in this wilderness. Enoch translated: we were to keep a fire going night and day in the center of a ring of sharp stones, for the swamp below was infested with poisonous vipers which might crawl into our mouths by night; however, our stone islands would attract scorpions and we were never to thrust our hands into shadow or walk with bare feet. For water, dig about a foot down almost anywhere, but never drink anyone else’s water for all was contaminated. Don’t bathe in the river which is full of crocodiles (two-and-a-half Crusaders were devoured last week). Sleep with a dagger at hand lest the enemy try to kidnap you in the night. Watch food and drink, for both are oft poisoned. (His own face gave truth to his list of horrors, for the famine fever had taken all his teeth, his breath would make a camel blanch, and his sunburned eyes peered from dark shriveled sockets.) He also gave us the shocking news that both Ranulf de Glanville and the Archbishop of Canterbury had died of fevers because they’d not followed the rules. As for the battle, the chivalrous Saladin had held back this day because of King Richard’s arrival, but wait till the morrow.

When I finally lay down to sleep later in our own sharp circle, I was stiff as a plank and gazed with wild fear at the fuzzy burr-stars floating above Acre’s pall, listened to slitherings in the dark. Since I was bleeding, I trembled with dread. Would serpents be attracted to my menstrual flux as those red-bellied lizards had been? Then there was panic in the horse quarters—doubtless a Saracen had sneaked by. Blood puddled between my legs but nothing would make me venture into that darkness. I wondered how long I could live without sleep.

Or just how long I could live.

I MUST HAVE SLEPT, FOR I WOKE WITH A START. THE stench of nightearth had sent me into a fit of coughing and I sat upright to get my breath, thereby releasing the flood again. Objects were barely visible in this predawn hour and nobody stirred. Cautiously I moved a few feet from our tent to take care of myself.

I’d barely finished when the sun hurtled like God’s thunderbolt across the sky and exploded at the foot of our hill.

“Judgment Day!”
I howled.

Wild with terror, I leaped on top of the sleeping Scot.

“Wake and ask to be forgiven!” I screamed. “We’re going to Hell!”

A second sun with a tail of foul gas shrieked through the air. Shadowy forms rushed by, a steady pounding began, shouts, drums rolling, somewhere the skirl of a bagpipe, everywhere a chaos of din and disaster.

“Greek fire,” said Enoch, pushing me aside. “Best eat a farl and drink a little sour wine. Micht be yer last chancit.”

“You mean we’re going to die?” I cried, grabbing him again.

“I mean we’re about to crusade and, aye, ’tis a risky business.”

He forced Roderick and me to swallow his cakes, whereupon the
knight saw one of Mortimer’s men in the distance and bid us a hasty farewell. By now Enoch was strapping his wooden shields fore and aft.

“You’re not going to fight!”

“I’m going to study the situation. Ye stay put till I cum back.”

“When?” I yelled into the mists as he ran away.

Suddenly he turned, grabbed my cheeks in his greasy hands and kissed me on the forehead. “By my faye, Alex, betimes I’d rather have a schitten kite fer a brother than ye, boot we’re stuck twaye and twaye. And I do love thee.”

Again he was gone. Nothing he’d done since I’d known him had ever so alarmed me. Never would he have shown affection if he e’er expected to see me alive again. I sat paralyzed by the ramifications, then was knocked out of my sorrow when a leather bucket dropped into my lap. I looked up at Sir Gilbert.

“Collect piss and bring it back to soak hides,” he said. “King’s orders.”

“Collect piss? How? Where will I find it?”

He smiled malevolently. “You milk a man as you would a cow. As to where, in the battlefield below. The trenches are filled with bladders just waiting for you. Hurry now, for the king has already assembled his war tower, Mategriffon, and wants it covered with piss-soaked leather by day’s end. ’Tis the only way to guard it against fire.”

As he left, I saw that he, too, carried a pail. What a woodly assignment, necessary of course but hardly heroic. Still, if the king had said I must …

I gripped my leather bucket uncertainly, disoriented by the noise and bursts of light above, unable to make out forms in the dust clouds below. Finally I retraced our route of the previous night and when I reached the point where Roderick had been lying against the mound, I saw a path twisting into the battlefield. Foot after foot trotted past me, quivers filled with arrows, crude wooden shields in place. I edged to the top and stared downward.
Benedicite
, a field potted and trenched as if a thousand moles dug there, filled with dusty heaps and mounds that at first I couldn’t identify, then saw they were corpses. Aye, fat bloated horses, men in all stages of decay, smelling
of glue and rancid butter and burnt sugar combined. I held my breath and slipped into line.

Immediately I was hit from the rear and fell in a frightened heap atop a knight whose eyes and tongue were gone, his body streaked with kite-shit that made him look like a marble idol.

“Be ye daft? Get into a trench!”

I looked around, dazed.

A bowman was shaking his fist. “Don’t get in the line of bowshot, boy! Stay down!”

I wormed my way across a carpet of corpses to the nearest trench, then bumped down on an uneven stair of crumpled bodies. For a time I sat in my macabre hole not remembering why I was there, then pulled myself upward by a bone-shank and approached a busy bowman. I tapped his shoulder timidly.

“Do you have to piss, sir?”

He brushed my hand away and took another shot.

“Because if you do, I’d appreciate it if you’d give me your piss.”

He turned in disbelief. “What did you say?”

“I’m collecting piss, sir.”

“And I’m the King of England! Heigh, Joe, come here!”

Another varlet struggled along the trench.

“This lad here wants your piss, Joe. I told him that you piss pure honey and he wants a suck!”

A knot now grew around us.

“I need piss,” I said desperately, “to use against the Greek fire.”

“Nothin’ like it,” one nodded sagely, “and if that fails, try spit.”

And they all guffawed.

“Tell you what, we’ll form a pissing brigade. Ready now, one, two, let her go!”

He pissed on another varlet’s feet.

“That’s not funny, Bob!”

“Why, you’re an ungrateful fellow that says so, when I’ve saved your stinking feet from the fire!”

“It’s for King Richard!” I cried. “The king needs it to protect his war machines!”

There was an uneasy silence.

“He do wear the king’s colors.”

“And I have heard of pissing on hides.”

One by one they each contributed a few drops, but I saw that ’twould be weeks at this rate before the king’s huge tower was covered. I went the length of that trench with little luck, then hesitantly peered over the edge to the next. To my astonishment, I saw Enoch. I sat by a decayed chest to consider. I had about three cups of piss now, hardly enow to count, so I might as well use them to the best advantage. I waited till there was a momentary lull, then ran to Enoch.