The Book of the Lion (16 page)

Torches were set alight, sputtering with rancid fat, and the black water was chased with gold and silver from the fires. Every man who could stand lined the beach, praising God, as at last a large galley, a dark shape, groaned against the sandy bottom, its keel cutting deep. An anchor splashed under the starlight.

Men disembarked, shadowy shapes. The wedge of knights and lords strode heavily through the water, and despite the throng an odd silence fell over us, thousands of men taking a deep breath.

The knot of men in gray and brown Norman wool stepped onto the shore, wet up to their waists. They fell to their knees.

All eyes were on one individual, a broad-shouldered, yellow-haired man, with a thick, muscular neck, and a face set in pious thanksgiving, or weariness, or some inner brooding. He prayed a long while, as an army of men watched, firelight flickering.

He rose to his feet, looking around at us, like a man surprised to see his servants still awake so late. He smiled, his eyes sweeping all of us, looking into the face of each fighting man and squire at a glance.

The king of England drew his sword. In the brilliant light, and in the thunder of our cheers, we could not hear his words.

 

 

 

 

Before our cheers faded King Richard sheathed his sword with difficulty, his bodyguards closing ranks around him. The king made way toward the camp, bonfire sparks snapping. And as he left the sand and reached the solid ground, he staggered.

King Richard leaned into one of his guards and did not take another step. The army fell silent. Something about our camp displeased the king, we thought. And what was worse, as Philip, the king of France, made his appearance, Richard slumped, his knees buckling.

The king of France waited, while the king of England's men propped him up.

King Philip was a royal presence we rarely actually saw, a man who had fretted his days, waiting for the arrival of his English counterpart. The French king began to speak, some royal formula of greeting, but King Richard bent over with a groan, his knees giving out from under him.

 

At dawn the day was already hot.

The foot soldiers put their shoulders to their catapults, the mangonels, and the crossbowmen counted out their quarrels.

All the soldiers, Florentine and Brementine, Bourdeaux and Breton, worked with new faith, in the growing sunlight. The magnificent devices creaked and swayed to a predetermined line at the edge of the bare ground.

The machines began to hurl their projectiles not at the towers full of watchful sentries, not at the gate bruised and divotted from a hundred strikes, and not at random places in the walls. The catapults pounded a single point—the large, patched crack.

Blow after blow crumbled the new masonry, each strike crushing stone to grit. The chief builders of the city hurried across the battlements, ducking whenever a projectile soared. They took their positions again after the boulders punched yet another weak place in the groin of the crack.

The laboring men of Acre hurried, their heads in white cloths visible over the battlements. The catapults sighed, grunted, held their strength, tense and hard. And snapped, the boulders streaking toward their target. Wall stone rose into the sunlight, transformed into so much flour, crumbling to nothing. All day new yellow mortar clay was trowled into the huge crack that snaked, ever lower, down the face of the wall.

 

A whippet, newly arrived, hunted nervously from tent to tent. I reached out, and the trembling dog's nose touched my fingers. Evil Neighbor groaned like a ship in high seas, and then it was silent—the taut, prime silence that sent a thrill of anticipation.

With a heart-stopping crack the boulder spun upward, stopped spinning, high in the sky. And began a counterspin, a graceful pirouette, as it fell with a crunch against the wall.

Wenstan began to sing again, as he went upon his chores, beating the carpets, instructing the servants, inspecting the washerwomen's efforts. At first he merely hummed, the lay of the turtle dove, pining for the love of a cock-hawk. Then he sang entire verses, the song of the Battle of Jericho.

For over a week King Richard did not leave his tent. His bodyguard wore long skirts of fine wool past their knees, over dark, fine-mesh mail. The men sweated in the heat, unmoving when flies searched their faces, although not one of them could stand still when these fierce, hungry insects approached their eyes.

Surgeons left the tent with samples of the king's watery stools, and the army was alive with rumors—that the king was black with boils, that the king was paralyzed by an ague, that an angel with a sword of snakes and green fire had strode through the camp, calling King Richard's name.

Each day Evil Neighbor and God's Own Sling powdered the walls, and all night the brickmen and the expert builders repaired the damage. A warhorse belonging to a Corsican nobleman collapsed in the hot sun, and had to be butchered, his flesh roasted, rib and haunch, over a fire.

The outriders killed a Sicilian lord who made the mistake of giving a three-year-old horse its head, rode too far, and made it back to camp pincushioned with barbed arrows. One morning before dawn a raid of Saracens nearly drove off our mounts. Two sentries were wounded. Priests hurried into their tents where surgeons tried to muffle their groans. The two guards died before sundown the next day, and Hubert said that the Saracen spears were poisoned, and their arrows barbed so they could not be extracted.

The camp bent to its work, no one resting in the shade, the whetstone wheels singing, the armorers' fires glowing. Acre was intent, too, its sentries no longer calling challenges.

Saladin's army took a new position, closer to ours. The red and blue tents were rich hued in the afternoon sun, and the outriders rode closer, riding along our line, counting us. Sometimes two or three of them stopped well within bowshot and gazed at the distant sea, as though our tents, our horses, our entire army had already vanished.

 

 

 

 

Heathen men began to escape from Acre.

Their shapes half fell down a rope, or climbed as careful as spiders. The deserters huddled in the moonlight, and then sprinted, full-out, all the way to our camp.

Our sentries threw them to the ground, trussed them. Word seeped through camp that the citizens of Acre were boiling sandals and chewing the cart frames for nourishing glue.

 

“Look what I found!” Hubert whispered one hot noon. Evil Neighbor was taking a rest, and the dust of the camp was settling, a fine, white second skin over every surface.

I was washing my hands and my feet, a habit I could not break. Hubert carried a copper bowl, and set it upright in the dust.

“What do you think I have here?” he asked.

“A piece of poor work,” I said. “I could smith a better copper bowl with my eyes shut.”

“What's inside?” he said, moving the bowl just out of reach.

“A Saracen's ear,” I suggested.

Hubert spilled the contents of the bowl onto the ground, and a black, jet-shiny creature, all hook and claws, skittered forward.

I gazed at it with curiosity. Hubert laughed.

“Wenstan says the scorpion is a good omen,” said Hubert.

“Omen of what, exactly?”

“The scorpion stings itself to death—everybody knows that,” said Hubert.

“I'll bet you a penny,” I responded, “that your fine scorpion will not sting itself.”

“Soon it will die of its own poison,” said Hubert.

The creature twitched, stinging upward, stabbing the air. Scorpions and spiders, vipers and centipedes were created when God cast Adam and Eve from the Garden. The sun multiplied such beasts from rot, decaying wood, and flesh. In God's innocent, unfallen Creation, no such creatures existed.

“What does it mean,” I asked at last, “when the scorpion does not die?”

Hubert stepped on it, pressing hard.

 

Richard Lionheart went forth from his tent.

The king looked up at the sky, as though he had commanded it to stay where it was, and he looked at the earth, as though he had likewise ordered it to remain. He gave a nod—all was as it should be. The sight of him quickened some confidence in me I had not been aware of lacking.

He reviewed the horses, hoof and bridle, and the ostlers, the axelwrights and the joiners. He sifted the dwindling bread flour through his fingers, and examined the heap of sling stones with which the city had peppered us. A Saracen envoy had been skinned one night, long before our arrival, and his hide was stretched out, leathery and monstrous, on a frame of wood. King Richard stood before this ornament and mocked it in Frankish.

All the camp chuckled when they heard of this interview between the envoy's hide and the King of England. “Feeling hungry for a taste of pork, Sir Skin?” he said.

Something about King Richard lightened men's hearts, and made the songs more tuneful.

“Feeling well this morning, Sir Turd?” Hubert laughed, wipmg his shoe.

The crack in the wall widened, and other cracks, like tributaries to a river, stretched out on either side. A faint chime reached our ears—chisels, masons feverish, fitting new stones. The sound recalled my boyhood, carters unloading bluestone while the mason's apprentices climbed the castle scaffold.

King Richard observed the catapults at work, and pointed out weak places that could be further punished. The wall broke into sections that crumbled like bread crust, but did not fall. Each blow fragmented an already broken wall, and the men of Acre no longer poured sand and mortar into the fissures.

As King Richard returned from inspecting the crossbowmen, his glance fell upon me, exercising the hammer, swinging it around my head. I was embarrassed to be seen wielding such a lowly weapon, but the king made a comment and his men smiled and nodded in my direction.

The good wines were gone, and even Sir Nigel had to be satisfied with thin, yellow stuff from Malta, and a sick-sweet drink from Samos. The Templar bread was richer than ever with baked weevils, their golden husks like seed. The whippet had vanished, and one of the king's men said he would cut off the right arm of the man who sliced his prize bitch into a saucepan.

But there was no whippet-stew-not in our tent. We had no meat, except for an occasional leathery horse steak. It's too bad, said Nigel, that horses can't feed on flies.

Sometimes at night the sentry's challenge woke me, and the next morning we would hear the news—we had captured more deserters from Acre.

 

Emissaries from our army, a Templar, and three of Richard's men, rode forth under a fluttering gold-and-scarlet flag of Saint George. They vanished into the Saracen camp that blocked the horizon to the east.

Soon all this would be over, our army camp believed—surely the siege would break. “They will not talk,” said Hubert, “and make war at the same time.”

When Wenstan sang while the parley was underway, his song was about the River Exe, how beautiful it flowed.

The emissaries rode back through a sea of mirage. They were carrying something, but we could not make out what. As they approached it was clear that they returned carrying dishes shrouded in silk brocade. When the silver platters were uncovered we marveled at the heaps of ice, the peaches and plums.

“Snow,” said Nigel, “from Mount Hermon.”

King Richard shared the fruit with King Philip, the Duke of Burgundy, and Guy de Renne, and with his own personal guard. These men ate the fruit, the juice running down their chins, laughing like boys.

A steward to the king passed to a chosen few, handing out a fistful of the pure snow. Rannulf was offered a handful, and he touched it to his face, cautious, like most fighting men, about washing with any variety of water. He offered me a remnant of glistening ice, and I accepted with surprise and gratitude.

“Saladin has refused to meet with King Richard,” said Rannulf. “He says it is unwise for leaders to confer before a battle.”

I felt a thrill at this news, the snow already so much water on my hands. The presence of King Richard meant that real battle would begin soon, and the prospect caused me much less dismay now. My master Otto had said that some men are so lucky that good fortune sweats out of them, through their pores. In a battle we would all want to ride near the king, and follow him.

 

The catapults went to work again, and I helped Rannulf into his mail shirt, buckled his belt, and gave his helmet a final polish.

“This will be no game for a swordsman,” said Nigel, looking on. “Killing hungry men should not be difficult,” he said. “But when you line up your best men, and ride hard into your enemy's best—that's a real pleasure, Edmund, and I pray we live to see it.”

My own armor was more complete, now, a heavy chain mail skirt down to my knees.

 

A single swallow darted and circled. The sky was blue and empty.

Trumpets sounded, bleating, the horners dry mouthed. I gripped my hammer, and we took our places in the line of battle.

The bare ground before us winked and shimmered with mirage, and the city floated, shivering in the great round heat of the sky. An English standard-bearer collapsed, and his companions were quick to keep the battle flag from dipping. His squire pulled him from the line, and I sensed the impatience of the knights, even more than the pikemen, forced to face battle on foot.

Black birds with broad wings circled high above. When I touched the iron bands of my helmet, my fingers burned.