The Road to Damietta

  "What would you like?" I asked him.

  His eyes were closed, and after he opened them his lips were still moving in prayer. I repeated the question; only then did he recognize me.

  "A piece of the barley cake Signora Ubaldo has baked," he said. "I have always liked her wares. That and a small cup of water, if you have it."

  I brought Signora Ubaldo's barley cake and a small cup of water taken from the Nile and set them down in front of him. My hand was steadier than I thought it would be.

  "I note a blister on your thumb," he said, "and in your eye a little of the fear that danger brings. You failed to take my advice."

  "You're anxious to give me more advice, I can tell."

  "Not anxious. Not even tempted. Girls of your age, I am slow to learn, do not make mistakes. They come to us full-blown, nymphs from the founts of heaven, shedding not foam but wisdom. Sister Clare is a precious exception."

  Clare again. Now she was a precious exception.

  I bit my tongue and asked if he liked the barley cake, which he was munching absent-mindedly. He didn't answer; he drank the cup of brackish water from the Nile as if it were wine and asked for another barley cake. When I brought two instead, he had left the table and was standing in front of the tent, gazing off toward the city of Damietta.

  "I never pictured such a magical city," he said, "such a fairyland of spires and minarets. Little wonder that the sultan thinks of it as the most beautiful gem among all the gems of Egypt. It's a wonder to me how all this beauty could be created by people—and there are a hundred thousand of them behind those walls, it is said, misguided souls who worship at the feet of a false prophet. I wish that I could gather them all and explain how in the twinkling of an eye they could save themselves from damnation."

  Eagerly, after a sudden thought, he began his little dance, his eyes upon the city whose streets were hidden by high gray walls but whose minarets and domes caught the morning sun.

  "The sultan's word is law," I said, "or so I am told. Wouldn't it be better first to save him, then let him save his people?"

  "The sultan's not in Damietta. He's in a pavilion leagues away to the south, somewhere near the banks of the Nile."

  "And therefore easier to reach than if he were in Damietta, considering that Cardinal Pelagius has been trying for months to breach its walls."

  I still had the barley cakes in my hand. He took them and fed the crumbs to a long-legged bird, which he addressed by an Egyptian name he had conjured up, that had wandered up from the river.

  While he was talking to the bird, trumpeters rode by, announcing that the infidels had mutilated two crusaders they had taken prisoner weeks ago and thrown the severed parts over the walls into our encampment. Further enraged, Cardinal Pelagius had ordered that everyone halt whatever he was doing and prepare for an assault upon the city.

  "If you do talk with him," I said, "remember, sir, that I speak the Arabic language and can translate anything you wish. If you talk in your Assisi dialect and the sultan understands Italian, he'll think you're making fun of him. He'll have your head cut off."

  "I'll try to remember. I value my head but not nearly so much as my heart. But I'll remember."

  "You always speak with your heart and not with your head," I told him, aware of my own heart beating. I left him with his face turned toward the city of a hundred minarets.

  At dusk, messengers rode through the encampment and made known to all that Cardinal Pelagius had decided to attack Damietta within that week. He announced the attack at supper.

  With a hand on the golden hilt of his sword, he addressed the captains, prelates, knights, and nobles, his voice trembling in rage, shouting when he spoke of Moslem brutalities, cooing like a dove as he related how much he had done peacefully to make the enemy relinquish the Holy Sepulcher, which was not rightfully theirs. As he spoke he was often so overcome with emotion that tears ran down his cheeks. At the end he issued six grave warnings:

  "My first command, be it known: He that abandons the battle shall be tortured on the rack.

  "Secondly, if he is a knight, he shall lose his arms and his horse and all his possessions. If an infantryman, his hand shall be cut off and he shall lose all his things. If a merchant or a woman, of those who are in the army, he shall lose a hand and all his things.

  "Whoever, man or woman, shall be found without armor, unless he is sick or a child of those who look after the pavilions or gather stones, shall be excommunicated.

  "He that turns back while going up the scaling ladders or on the cogs and other ships to make the assault shall lose his hand and all his things.

  "All those who enter the city and find gold, silver, and all other things, alike shall put together all that they find in three or six houses that will be designated. If anyone steals, he shall lose his hand and the part of the booty that belongs to him.

  "And those who have been ordered to swear shall swear to punish all those who do not observe the prescribed rules."

  Frenzy gripped the crusaders. In the past, assaults upon Damietta were mere skirmishes except for the last battle, in which thirty of the Germans, thirty-two of the Hospitallers, and fifty Knights Templar had been captured and beheaded. The bishop of Belavio and his brother, the count of Belino, and the chamberlain of the king of France and his son had been killed. In all, more than a thousand Christians were taken prisoner and some four thousand fell.

  The night after Pelagius announced the new attack, everyone was wild with fury. At last the infidel city would be overpowered and stripped of its treasures! The following day, however, with victory in sight, the fierce hatreds the crusaders had brought with them from home burst forth. Knights began to fight with the men on foot, nobles with commoners, commoners with serfs.

  Pelagius put an end to these disorders. He banished six Roman nobles from the camp, decapitated a seventh, and after two days of hot consultations devised a battle plan by which one section of the army would defend the camp, another section would attack Damietta from the river, and the remainder of the army would strike by land.

  All women without armor or a horse to ride, including myself and an Italian marquesa and her three servants, were put to work collecting stones for the catapults. By noon, despite the urgings of our overseer, I had little to show for my labor except a handful of blisters.

  Late in the day, when the sea wind had died away and the heat was at its worst, a man came up the trail to the quarry carrying a bag and a walking staff. Something vaguely familiar about his striding walk caught my attention. I dropped the stone I held in my arms. The figure disappeared in the dancing heat.

  For a moment I thought that I had seen an apparition. Then the man appeared again, and as he approached me I saw that it was Raul de los Santos. The overseer, a stout Venetian, challenged him at once, so not even a greeting passed between us.

  "You carry a staff but not so much as a knife," the overseer shouted. "Two days ago a Spaniard, a spy, was caught selling bread to the enemy. He was attached to the tail of a horse and dragged through the camp. With your black eyes and swarthy skin, you remind me of him very much."

  The overseer stood with his stout legs firmly planted, waiting and anxious to take offense at something.

  "I am a Spaniard," Raul said, "but not a spy."

  "Why then are you in Damietta, without armor, with nothing but a lean and suspicious look? You are not a crusader, most certainly. If not, what?"

  I waited for Raul to say, pointing to me, "This girl standing before you is a runaway, to the great distress of her family. My name is Raul de los Santos and I am a tutor to this child. I have been sent by her father to take her home."

  And this is what he did say, in his best, most believable voice, but it was far from the truth. Truthfully, he had come to Egypt to plead with me once again to forsake my mad pursuit of Francis Bernardone.

  The overseer listened politely and then, despite my protestations, gave Raul into the keeping of a helper and had him marched to a
filthy barricade where Christians and Moslems, prisoners alike, were kept under guard.

  While the overseer was busy in another part of the quarry, I left and went to the camp. Cardinal Pelagius refused to see me but the man in charge of the barricade, a small Perugian dressed in armor, listened to me with a wandering eye.

  "Where are you from?" he asked.

  "Assisi," I said.

  "And your friend?"

  "Assisi also."

  "A pretty town teetering on a cliff. Sometime it will fall, swoosh, into the valley and kill all the scoundrels who live there," he said, digging up old hatreds, and closed the gate in my face.

  30

  In the depths of the night, while he prayed, on his knees for guidance, Francis was possessed by a vision. He saw clearly, as if it were written large on the door of his tent, that the Saracen infidel would be victorious in the battle to come.

  At dawn he went through the camp, recounting the vision. Most of the leaders were impressed with what he told them, but the soldiers, who had visions of their own and feared the loss of the vast treasures that lay in store for them, pelted him with rocks, shouting that it was foolish to believe a ragged mendicant, cursing all those who did believe.

  Cardinal Pelagius himself was one of the dissenters. Confronting Francis in the street, before a crowd of the leaders, he said, "Here we are ready to attack the infidel and you have a vision. Tell me, what does it propose?"

  I had no idea of what had happened between the two men before I arrived in Damietta. Surely the cardinal must have been shocked to see Francis. He must have wondered how, despite the long list of heresies he had so carefully drawn up, the pope had given Francis the right to preach wherever he wished, even among the barbarians. And the shock that the cardinal had undergone was still upon him, expressed now by hostility that he was at no pains to disguise.

  "Does your vision propose that while the sultan secretly calls upon all of his kingdom from Egypt to Syria, we sit and dream?"

  "Neither to sit nor to dream. I should go and talk to the sultan face to face. I saw this clearly in the vision."

  "The only talk he understands is the talk of catapults and sharp swords."

  "You are playing a deadly game," Francis said. "You gather a big army. He gathers a bigger army. You gather one twice as big. Then you threaten him and he threatens you. You're playing leapfrog with the sultan and both of you will suddenly leap into the fire."

  Pelagius scowled. "The sultan's camped beyond Damietta, far up the Nile, out of your reach."

  "I'll find him," Francis said.

  "You'll be captured and slain before you have gone halfway."

  Sensing the anger beneath the cardinal's fear, I felt that he hoped Francis would depart at once.

  A stout young man, Brother Illuminato, who had come to Egypt with Francis, said, "'Tis foolhardy. If possibly you reach the sultan's palace, what pledge do you have from this stranger, whom no Christian has ever set eyes upon, that he won't decree your decollation?"

  Brother Illuminato favored big words. What he meant by decollation was that Francis would have his head chopped off.

  "'Tis a wild thought," he persisted. "We'll all suffer decollation at the sultan's hands."

  Francis was unmoved. "I understand your anxiety. It was I, Bernardone, who saw the vision. It was Bernardone who was commanded to go. And it is Bernardone who shall go."

  Emboldened, I spoke. From my mouth came the words, "I'll go, too. You'll need someone to tell the sultan what you are saying—that is, what you are trying to say."

  Francis, excited as a child, cocked his head and studied me for a moment.

  "Of course, of course," he said. "We will go together and beard the lion. I'll speak to him and you'll make sense of my words."

  At early dawn the following day, after the trail had cooled a little in the night, we started for the palace of Malik-al-Kamil. It was located on the river, seven long leagues from Damietta. Francis and Brother Illuminato, Francis's shadow, insisted upon walking in their bare feet, but I chose to ride a shorn donkey. A donkey's coat, if long, can attract the sun and turn each hair into metal.

  We skirted the besieged city and saw no one on the parapets nor at the loopholes. The gates we passed, five of the twentytwo, were closed and no guards stood beside them. At the last gate, tossed down from the parapet, lay the severed heads of five crusaders, their helmets still strapped to their chins.

  It was time for food but no smoke rose from morning fires. Not a sound, not a voice, not the barking of a dog, came from beyond the massive walls.

  Illuminato said, "The silence sits heavy upon me. My skin crawls with the silence. What do you make of it, Brother Francis?"

  "The infidel prepares an attack."

  "If that is the case, we should return and not be caught here in the wilderness."

  "The more reason to press on," Francis said.

  He had been moving at a steady gait; now he increased it to a trot. The Nile swirled past us. Hot rain began to fall out of a sweltering sky. We came upon sheep grazing in the green rushes. Francis took them for a sign straight from heaven.

  "Place all your trust in God," he said, "for these words of the Gospel will be fulfilled in us: 'Remember, I am sending you out to be like sheep among wolves.'"

  The rain ceased, the sky cleared. At a place where the river had overflowed, the wolves—a pack of black-bearded Moslem warriors carrying knives—surprised us. We were to be slaughtered, it seemed, before a word could be said.

  Francis shouted to them, using the one Arabic word he knew, "Soldan! Soldan!" And I said that the sultan had invited us and we had accepted his invitation, and asked if they would be so kind as to escort us to his palace.

  They took a long time to digest this information, meanwhile menacing us with deathly threats. But my story was plausible. What might happen to them, they wondered, if they did kill the sultans guests?

  A closer look at the two unarmed, barefooted pilgrims and the frightened girl on a donkey must have reassured them. With deep bows and false smiles they bade us follow them along the roaring Nile toward the palace of their chieftain, Malik-al-Kamil, supreme ruler of Syria and the vast lands of Egypt.

  Brother Illuminato complained of the sun, which struck down upon us like a thousand burning spears.

  It prompted Francis to repeat parts of a poem he was writing, singing them to the rhythm of his springing steps.

  "All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made.

  And first my lord Brother Sun,

  Who brings the day and light you give to us through him.

  How beautiful he is, how radiant in all his glory!"

  Somehow his words made the sun more bearable, though I still wished the sun wasn't so terribly hot.

  The sultan's palace was not what I had imagined it would be, judging by the triple walls, the countless domes and lofty minarets of Damietta. Rising from an islet in the center of a small lake not far from the Nile, it was made of silk, a huge pavilion of rainbow hues, crowned by clusters of yellow flags.

  A beribboned boat, rowed by six men cooked black by the sun, ferried us to the islet. Guards came out to meet us and led the way through a maze of trees and flowering bushes. A vast curtain swished open and we were led to the pavilion and, as cymbals clashed and lutes wailed, into the presence of Malik-al-Kamil.

  31

  He was seated upon, a dais at some distance from us down an aisle between two ranks of guards who were dressed in purple gowns and green turbans and armed with jeweled daggers. The aisle was paved with rich Sihouk rugs like those my grandfather brought back from the Fourth Crusade, so deep that I sank to my ankles.

  Good manners suggested that I curtsy, as one would before any dignitary, but Francis approached within a few feet of the sultan, until he was stayed by guards, and stood staring at him, somewhat as if the man were Satan himself. The sultan returned Francis's stare but smiled at me, displaying dozens of white teeth. Swathed in sil
k, a winged turban on his head, a broad, curled beard flat on his chest, he was a strikingly handsome man.

  "Speak," he said, settling his dark gaze upon Francis. "Or make a noise—squeak, groan, whimper, chortle, laugh. Do anything so that I may know you're alive, not a homeless ghost who has wandered about in the sun too long."

  Covered with yellow dust, Francis did resemble a homeless ghost. Except for his eyes—they were alive. They burned in their sockets as he asked me to tell the sultan that we had come from a country far beyond the seas to save his sinful soul for Christ.

  The sultan showed no surprise at being told that Francis was concerned about his soul. Politely, I left out the word "sinful."

  "I thought it was the other way round," he said, again displaying a row of dazzling teeth. "I thought that you were messengers who longed to become Moslems."

  When I translated these words Francis contained himself and said in a scarcely respectful tone, "Moslems we shall never become, but in truth we are messengers, come from God to save your soul. If you believe in Him we shall commit your soul to Him. And we will tell you truthfully that if you die according to your own law, you will be lost and God will not accept your soul. This is the reason we have come here. If you wish to listen to us and to understand us, we shall show you—let the wisest men of your land also come, if it would please you to call them—that your law is surely false."

  The sultan listened intently to Francis, then to me.

  "Christians," he said, "I am familiar with. I have been fighting against them for years. Fine enemies, these Christians. Skillful with the sword. Quick with the spear. Clever with the bow. Hard to kill, wrapped up as they are in their steel carapaces. Determined and unafraid of death. But about this soul business I am astounded, for I never suspected that these same Christian enemies possess souls."

  "Souls we do possess," said Francis, "and I shall prove it."

  The sultan turned to the men about him, all of whom had black beards and, from where I stood, looked quite alike except for one—the executioner (as I learned later), who was situated directly behind the sultan and held a scimitar in both hands across his chest.