The Lute Player (39 page)
Authors: Norah Lofts
‘It’s possible, you know,’ he said when he had closed the sack, ‘that this apparently inanimate mould has a life of its own. If you leave a mouldy biscuit long enough it is consumed, becomes a mass of soft fluff. Is it feasible, do you think, that the mould is vigorous and voracious and
eats away
the sore as it eats away the biscuit?’ He looked at me sideways, a little shamefaced. ‘It’s very unorthodox to talk of an inanimate thing having life. I should be in bad odour if it were known; it does savour of heresy, doesn’t it? But frankly, that is the only explanation that occurs to me.’
‘Rotten cheese is alive,’ I said, trying to be helpful.
‘Umm’—he nodded—‘even on the Pope’s own plate! And if rotten cheese can develop an undeniable life of its own, why not a rotten biscuit? Thank you, Blondel. That was an argument which I had not thought of. You see, I wanted—after one or two further confirmatory experiments—to send news of this discovery back to my colleagues in Valladolid. Sores—not sand sores but other kinds—are very prevalent there, especially amongst the poor and especially in summer. I would like them to know that a mouldy ship’s biscuit—On the other hand, I have no wish to lay myself open to charges of superstition or heresy. We doctors, you know, work between the flesh and the devil while the churchmen stand between the flesh and God. Dear me, what am I saying?’
‘A very profound truth, I suspect,’ I said. And at that moment a man, labouring in the dust, clutched my stirrup and said:
‘The King is asking for you. He sent me back to find you.’ He spoke gruffly—rudely, in fact—but, looking down at his dusty, sweat-streaked face, I could feel no resentment. He had come back on foot and would have to hurry to regain his place. He had a right to be sour. And I had noticed lately that many men looked at me a little askance. I rode, they walked. They fought, I played a lute and wrote letters.
Blind, blind innocent fool that I was.
I hurriedly detached my waterskin and held it towards Escel. ‘If we find water by midday,’ I said, ‘pour this into your sack of mystery. If not, drink it. I’ll come back for the skin.’ Then I turned to the fellow who had been sent to fetch me.
‘Hop up behind me,’ I said, ‘and I’ll ride you back to your place in the column.’
He gave me a queer look.
‘No, thanks,’ he said, ‘I don’t want my mates laughing at me.’
Perhaps he would have lost dignity, bumping along on a pillion like a market woman behind a farmer.
‘You ride, then,’ I said after a glance towards the head of the column, shrouded in dust and probably by this time a mile ahead, for as the day passed the column stretched out. Poor man, he’d had to cover the same mile three times on my account. ‘The horse is meek as a sheep,’ I said, ‘and I’ll ride behind you.’
‘And His Majesty’d ride me all right,’ he retorted, and some genuine consternation showed on his face. But he said less gruffly, ‘No, you get along fast as you can. I’m a man. I can walk.’
Later I understood the significance of that encounter. At that moment I merely thought: Very well then, walk if you prefer it. I pulled my mount out to the left and, making what speed I could over the bad road, pushed forward and fell in in my usual place, just behind Richard. He beckoned me forward and eased his horse over so that I could ride beside him.
‘Where have you been?’
‘Back with Escel, my lord. Talking to him.’
‘What about?’
‘Mouldy ships’ biscuits.’
‘There’s no need for that,’ he said sharply, casting me a cross glance. ‘The march has taken longer than it should; and they harry us so that we can’t live off the country as we might do. But I was prepared for that and if anybody has to eat mouldy ships’ biscuits there’s something very wrong somewhere.’
‘He isn’t eating them,’ I said, and I would have gone on to tell him about Escel’s, experiments, for that was the kind of conversation in which he delighted, and we might have gone on for an hour worrying out the possibilities of mould on ships’ biscuits. Then I could like him; then I was at ease with him, could see him in a form that was acceptable to me. But he cut me short.
‘Just ahead,’ he said, ‘there’s a narrow defile and Sir Raife, who rode out scouting, says that it is ambushed. There may be some real fighting for a change. Now listen. The safest place for you is with the baggage wagons. They’re well defended. So pull out now and wait for them. When they stop, dismount and stand between a wagon and your horse. Then nothing much can happen to you. Keep your head down.’
He might have been speaking to his grandmother. ‘Sire,’ I said gently, ‘you forget. You left your womenfolk in Acre!’
There was silence that had the same taste as the silence with which he had received my remark about Lyard being his to give. Then he asked sharply:
‘Have you any weapon?’
‘Sword and dagger,’ I said, not without pride.
‘Look to yourself, then! God keep you!’ He turned as far as his mail allowed, raised an arm and with a shout,
‘A moi!’
set spurs to Flavel. The armed and mounted men thundered past and into the defile.
It is a fact, and I challenge anyone to refute it, nobody who has ever taken part in a battle can describe it satisfactorily. If a man could sit suspended between earth and heaven and be endowed with a hundred eyes, he might afterwards give an account of the pattern, the movements; but his account would lack the noise, the confusion of reality. By the same token the single-minded, single-sighted man who is down in that noise and confusion can only tell you what happened to himself.
I found myself between the charging knights and a group of archers and I remember thinking: This is the worst place of all for me; I shall get a Christian arrow in my back. And with that I saw a slim brown man on a slim brown horse making straight for me. He had one of the curved Saracen swords, called scimitars, in his hand and I could see that in a flash of time it was coming down to slice through my neck just where it joined my shoulders. So I raised my sword, clumsily, desperately, I thought, in a way that was at odds with all Godfrey’s teaching. And I was surprised to feel the jolt which shook my whole arm, surprised to see the slim brown hand, still clutching the scimitar, fall off, severed. Just before they reached the ground the fingers of the hand relaxed and released the scimitar. Blood from the Saracen’s wrist spouted out over me.
So lucky a stroke would, I suppose, have made a soldier of me if anything could have. It just made me sick. I saw that hand, so complete and ordinary-looking, falling through the air in that fantastic fashion; and I leaned forward on the brown mare’s neck and was sicker than I have ever been in my life. My whole stomach turned inside out and fell back like an empty sack. I could hear the arrows hissing over me but I felt too ill to feel fear. Then, quite suddenly, while my eyes were still misted with the water of sickness, I saw another brown man lying on his back on the ground with blood pouring from a wound in his head. He had a dagger in his hand, though, and he was just about to stab up and strike the brown mare between the forelegs. I gulped in a chestful of something that seemed more like thick flannel than air, lifted my sword again and set it, point downward, on his neck. And I pressed, felt the sickening crunch as the blade went through flesh and bone but saw with vast satisfaction the hand which held the knife fall limp and harmless. Two, I thought, two.
And with that the battle was over.
The dust cleared and there were a few horses without riders, a few men in armour on the ground side by side with some white-turbaned bodies. And there was Richard on a wildly prancing Flavel. The edge of his great axe was bloody.
When Richard marched through Holy Land
The infidel dared bid him stand,
But with his great axe, fearless, he
Did cut his way to Bethany.
Every time I hear that example of the minnesingers’ art of simplification I think: Yes, if the crusade had been just a long series of battles, small, like the one at this ambushed pass, great, like the Battle of Arsouf, Richard would have cut his way. But there were so many opponents against which even that great axe was impotent, worthless as a reed.
Sunstroke was one: the old biblical “destruction that wasteth at noonday.” We bound our heads, Saracen-fashion, with old clouts, bits of linen, pieces ripped from our garments—even the handsome helms were so covered—but every day men would stagger out of line or drop as they marched with swollen, plum-coloured faces which all too often changed suddenly to the shrunken pallor of the dead. Often the men who walked beside the stricken ones would step out of line, too, and with the precious scanty supply of water they carried and sometimes with the incongruously pretty little fans they had picked up in Acre they would attempt to revive their comrades. As they did so, as the column passed on, two or three of the Saracens who hung on our flanks, as wolves might hang about a flock of sheep, would swoop down from the hills; arrows or the light lances which they flung with such deadly precision would whir through the air and the sound man would fall beside his friend. Few of those who stepped out of line ever joined it again and finally Richard gave stringent orders that no man must step aside to help another. It was a ruthless, logical order, not invariably obeyed, and it resulted in Escel’s demand that as the stores carried by the pack animals and the baggage wagons were lessened by consumption the transport should be used for slightly sun-struck men who had a chance of recovery. But that led to trouble, too, for it was difficult even for the physicians to decide in a moment whether a case was slight or likely to be fatal.
We suffered, too, from myriad fevers. There was the one which attacked almost everybody soon after his arrival in the Holy Land and then recurred in a mild, nagging way at shortish intervals. Richard suffered from that himself and it was that which had sent Philip of France home. It meant that a man sat his horse or was helped along in a daze of pain and fever for a day, sweated profusely during the night and rose, weak but on the way to recovery, next morning. But there was another, more virulent kind which twice went through our ranks like fire through a dried cornfield and struck so many men into unconscious stupor or raving lunacy that movement was impossible. We all camped until it was over, the recently recovered staggering about, tending the lately stricken.
And there was the one most horrid ailment which was with us all the time. The polite, physicianly name for it was “water in the bowels”—the ranks had many other words for it. It was painful, weakening and disgusting and in extreme cases as fatal as sunstroke or the virulent fever. It became so prevalent and so many men were pounced on by the Saracens during their necessary fallings out—and it could make twenty or thirty fallings out imperative for one man in one day—that Richard commissioned a band of horsemen to ride ten arrow lengths behind the main body in order to cover the sufferers. Our invisible attendants soon learned that it was not safe to venture forth to shoot or cast at the cursing, squatting crusaders as it had been at the sun-struck and their friendly helpers.
There were, too, always with us the sores which made such demand upon Escel’s supply of mouldy biscuits. Either the heat or the dust seemed to prevent the natural tendency of the skin to heal; a sore would be as small as a seed of corn today, tomorrow the size of a groat and on the third day as large as the palm of one’s hand. Then the centre of it would suppurate and grow hollow, as though the sound flesh beneath were being consumed. After that, unless the blue-green biscuit worked its magic, there was small hope. Still we pressed on and though it was a sadly weakened, much-winnowed force which approached Arsouf, it was yet an impressive one. Once indeed Richard did say, ‘There was a time in Messina when I thought I had too many men. May God forgive me that thought and forget it.’
XII
At Arsouf, which stands guard across the road leading to Jerusalem and Jaffa, the Saracens did not wait to be attacked; a great army of them met us and simultaneously a second force bore down on our left flank and a third closed in behind. It was plain from the first that this would be a day for killing or being killed. I determined not to be sick and not to be sentimental. As it transpired, I was given no chance to test these resolutions. I am a little sorry, especially now that I come to write this history, that I saw nothing of the Battle of Arsouf. It was one, if not the greatest, of Richard’s victories and the one where he struck such terror into the Saracens that afterwards they spoke of him as Christians speak of the devil.
For one fantastic moment I thought my experience at the past skirmish was to be repeated. Having no armour save a short, sleeveless jerkin of leather sewn over with flat metal rings which the friend of a sun-struck yeoman, having no need of it himself, had sold me for four aurei (there was a flourishing market in such things), I was not set in the front with the fully armed knights for the forward charge but put on the defensive as cover for the baggage and the sick; an honourable if not glorious task which I shared with sundry fully armoured men who had lost their horses and had not been able to replace them, a few fully armed mounted men who had been lightly wounded in the previous small battle and one or two very young knights who, for lack of experience, might have been more hindrance than help in the charge.
If that first charge had been successful we should never, in our position, have seen action at all. But the Saracens met Richard’s onslaught with equal fury and at once they and the crusaders were mixed, infiltrating one another’s lines and fighting small singlehanded engagements all over the place. A Saracen, this time a very stout, heavy man, holding his scimitar in exactly the same fashion as the man whose hand I had sliced off, bore down on me and I tried to repeat my slicing action, sweating and wildly praying for a similar result. But he swerved, my sword whistled ineffectively through the air and before I could raise it again the scimitar struck me just where the sleeveless jerkin ended. My shirt sleeve and a great flap of flesh from the thick part of my arm fell over and hung to my elbow and the blood came pouring down to my fingertips. I felt no pain at all. I felt nothing save surprise—and, in a second, pleasure when I saw the sword of one of the young knights pass with a beautiful thrust clean through the body of the man who had struck me.
How long I should have sat there staring I do not know but all at once the knees of my brown mare buckled and as she fell I shot forward over her head. And there I stood for a moment after I had disentangled myself and scrambled to my feet. I was angry, not because my arm had been sliced; but because my brown mare had been slain. After this, I, thought, I’ll kill and kill and kill…
But there was no sword in my hand and when I bethought myself of my dagger and moved to draw it from my belt, there was no power in my arm. The noise of the battle seemed to recede and everything I looked at ran away from me into blackness.
Then there was pain. Someone was slowly and deliberately slicing into my arm. I moved it and the pain struck sharper. Then I lifted my left hand to defend myself and struck my hand against something very hard and yelled out and opened my eyes.
I was lying on my back with my head and shoulders under a baggage wagon, wedged tightly between two other wounded men, for since shade was so rare and precious every inch had been used. My arm had been tightly tied up with a strip of canvas and hurt excruciatingly and I was so thirsty that the longing to drink was an added agony. Turning my head this way and that, however, I very soon perceived that I had reason to be thankful. The man on my left had been pierced clean through the jaw by an arrow and the lower part of his face was a horrible mess of torn flesh, splintered bone and broken teeth; the one on my right had been spitted by a lance through his belly—but he was dead and his misery ended. The smell of blood, of dust and of dust soaked in blood hung on the air.
I turned my head back so that I was looking up at the floor of the wagon, lay still for a moment and then carefully raised my head to peer out under the wagon’s edge. My head felt enormous, the size of a barrel, with a loose mangonel stone smashing about in it; my neck felt long and over-pliable, like a piece of thread. But I looked out long enough to see that the sky was a lake of rose colour with islands floating in it, some dusky-gold, some the purple of the grape. Sunset, I thought, letting my head fall back on the blood-soaked dust. And quiet. There was no noise of battle; just the ordinary sound of the camp and the groaning of men in pain. The day was over and so was the battle.
And oh, if someone would only bring along a drink of water, however dirty, stinking or full of little dark wriggling things. I shut my eyes and thought about water; of buckets coming up out of deep wells, spilling silver drops; of raindrops dancing into muddy puddles; of ditches brimming when the snow melted.
Presently from a great distance I heard my name spoken. I opened my eyes and saw Escel’s face, unstable and wavering as a weed under water.
‘Water,’ I said.
‘They’re bringing it.’ He crouched down and I could see him more clearly: his face drawn with weariness and whiter than the tabs on his collar, his hands under the rolled-back sleeves as red as a butcher’s. ‘I’ll loosen your bandage,’ he said. ‘I had to tie you tightly, you were bleeding like a stuck pig. Luckily I soon reached you.’ I saw him glance across me to the man who lay on my right.
‘It hurts,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he said quite gently but in a voice that was empty of pity because pity is expendable and too many demands had been made on his that day. As he loosened the bandage I felt a slight relief, quickly forgotten in the maddening throb and tingle with which the numbed limb came to life again.
‘You’ll mend,’ he said. ‘It was the best kind of wound, a good clean cut. Here is the water…’
He straightened himself and sighed like a tired horse and moved on. In his place was a water carrier with a full skin and a little cup. He began to pour and some water spilled over and I cried out. Never again, I thought, should I see a drop of water wasted without protest.
When I had drunk I said, ‘What of the battle?’
‘Oh, we won. We’ve taken Arsouf.’ The water carrier moved on to my neighbour with the shattered jaw.
‘Water?’ he asked; and then when the man did not answer he stirred him, not roughly but callously, with his foot.
‘Do you want water now? It’ll be gone in a minute.’
Did he? Behind those mangled lips and broken teeth and splintered jaw, did there rage a thirst as urgent as mine had been? Could he hear the torturing question and the threat? And have to lie there, powerless to answer, unable to drink?
‘Wait, wait,’ I said. ‘Couldn’t you pour a little just a drop—into where—Perhaps he might swallow a drop.’
‘Waste of water,’ he said quite cheerfully. ‘He’s past it!’ But it might be you in similar case tomorrow, I thought, and I suddenly remembered a conversation I had once had with Anna Apieta on the subject of pity how far is it tainted by fear for ourselves?
Then I thought: and this is only one dreadfully wounded man whom I can see. There may be others, worse.
I cried a little then, lying on my back so the welling tears ran down the sides of my head and into my ears. And then I was glad of the pain in my arm. I have something to bear too, I thought, and was crazily glad and relieved, leaning back on my own pain for comfort from the pain of all the others.
Presently I was conscious of a smell of boiled mutton mingling with and then overpowering all the other smells. I opened my eyes again and saw two men, one carrying a great steaming bucket, the other a ladle and a number of bowls. ‘Who’s for mutton stew, fresh mutton stew?’ cried the man with the bucket.
‘Dead,’ said the one with the bowls, peering at my right-hand neighbour and moving on to peer at me. ‘The next is all right. Hi, boy, want some fresh mutton stew? Put you on your legs in no time.’
‘No, thank you,’ I said, and ridiculous fresh tears came into my eyes as I thought how welcome, how wonderful, fresh mutton stew would have been last night; to me with an unsickened stomach, to the man on my right who would never enjoy anything again, to the man on my left who last night had had his teeth and his lips and his tongue as God made them.
