For the garrison at Acre was very unlike the defenders at Limassol. From every tower and slit in the walls the arrows poured down, deliberately and carefully aimed, seldom missing their mark. And the one storming tower which had by luck almost reached its position that day had been burned when the defenders had flung out, in the space of two minutes, forty short staves with bundles of flaming tar-soaked tow bound to their heads. Men pushing the tower had been horribly burned and fled screaming; the tower had flared up, a monstrous outline of red fire.
That evening Richard said, ‘Tell Gilles to cut the throats of the thirty worst mules and keep the hides whole.’
The hot fit was on him then and I thought that he was raving so I replaced his covers and said some of the senseless, soothing things one does say in such circumstances.
‘Don’t be a fool, Blondel,’ he said, pushing the covers away. ‘Go do as I say. Do you imagine that you are the only one ever to have a good thought? I want thirty mules’ hides, stretched flat. And don’t look at me as though I were crazy! Go and tell Gilles.’
But mules, I knew, were precious. Thirty mules—God pity and strengthen them—carried an immense amount of baggage. If he were now even ever so little out of his mind and came to clarity to find thirty mules killed with my connivance… But he began to struggle out of bed and I thought: Better at this juncture thirty mules than the King of England—and went and gave the order.
Next day, when the road-making started in earnest, men had been up at first light tearing down the harbour houses and carrying material up to the town—there was fought the short, sharp civil war over the matter of armour.
It was plain from the first moment that the garrison at Acre was not going to stand by tamely and see those roads made. Down came the arrows; out in great flaming arcs came the fire-headed staves.
‘Sound the retreat,’ said Richard from his mattress to the bugler who stood beside him. ‘This road must be made by men in armour.’ He gnawed his thumb. ‘At least hauberk and helm.’
Later on we were all to see armoured men whose horses had died or been killed ploughing along through sand and dust, over rocks; but at that time, when the war was young, an armoured man was a mounted man; and a mounted man was a knight or the son of a merchant or, at lowest, some yeoman’s eldest son whose armour and steed had been bought at the price of his family’s penury for five years; and all such were privileged and proud.
Few of those who had shouted, ‘Richard has come. All will be well,’ had reckoned on a scorching day when he would issue the ultimatum that the armoured men must build the road or lend their helms and hauberks to the unarmoured men. But he gave that order and there was a great confusion.
His understanding was limited and highly eclectic but he did understand men.
‘I have two coats of mail,’ he said, raising himself on his elbow. ‘Blondel, choose me from amongst those buff-coated fellows one about my size.’
‘A difficult task, sire,’ I said without any intention to flatter.
‘The nearest, then. Where is the man who caught the burning brand by its handle and flung it back? He was a stout fellow and I’d lend him my mail with pleasure.’
He noticed everything—within limits.
I found that man—six inches too short and four inches too narrow—and we dressed him.
‘Now help me into my other harness,’ Richard said. And he stood up, donned hauberk and helm and, wobbling like an unweaned pup, went out to the road’s beginning and took up the hammer which one of the men had laid down when the retreat was sounded and began to beat a slab of stone into its bed of sand. An arrow hissed down, struck his helm—the Saracens are marksmen of a quality matched only by the English at their best. Richard, hammering away with his right hand, waved his left with a gesture that said, ‘Ha, missed, you see!’
And within the space of time that it takes for a man to strap on his harness all the choicest knights in Christendom, the very flower of chivalry; men who had never handled any tool save those of war, never done a menial task in all their lives, were out there in the sun and the dust, working like villeins.
Having no mail and failing to borrow, I joined myself to the gang of men who carried stones and timbers up from the demolished houses. I broke all my nails, which are essential for the playing of a lute, and so bruised and lacerated my fingers that it was with pain and difficulty that I wrote my daily report to my lady that evening. And if the bad penmanship was compensated by a somewhat hysterical enthusiasm, I hope I may be forgiven. For I had helped to unharness him. He had risen from his sickbed and worked in hot heavy armour for eight hours. The sweat gathered about his feet in pools as we unlaced him—one would have thought that he had stepped undried from a bath—and he trembled like a poplar. Even hatred and jealousy had, perforce, to give way to admiration.
The hard narrow tracks were made more speedily than seemed possible. And then I saw why he had ordered the hides. Nailed slantwise to the edge of the lowest platform of the storming tower, they afforded almost complete protection for the men who pushed. They were hard enough to repel an arrow and green enough not to flare up under the touch of the flung torches. Fifteen on each side, they gave sufficient shelter and as each “bad neighbour” rolled into position under the walls of Acre the hides were ripped off and nailed onto the next. And the day came when I watched men climb those ladders, muster on the platforms and leap upon the walls, while the mangonels thudded and the arrows darkened the sky.
Twice during the attack the Saracens from the camp in the hills swooped down in an attempt to relieve the pressure on the city. And twice Richard, turning gladly to a form of warfare more to his taste, led the force which drove them off. Those repulses doubtless added to the despair of the besieged and on the eighteenth day after the completion of the roads they hauled down their flags and sent out emissaries to discuss the terms of surrender.
An awed silence fell as the gate of the city opened and closed again behind the three men who emerged. Two were Saracen emirs, turbaned and dressed in fresh white clothing; the third was a Frank with hair so sun-bleached that it was almost as fair as mine. From shoulder to heel he was covered by a long scarlet cloak of a hue so vivid that in the blazing sun it afflicted one’s eyes with pain. When they first emerged he walked a little behind the Saracens but as they drew near to the spot where Richard stood, awaiting their slow and dignified approach, he ran forward suddenly, dropped to his knees at Richard’s feet and seized the hand extended to him, bowing his head over it. The action had enormous significance, the eloquence of the mummer.
Had Richard been wise or tactful or even ordinarily cunning he would have sent men running to bring out the other commanders or made the gesture of taking the emissaries to the tent where Philip nursed his little fever. As it was, he beckoned to Hubert Walter and to the old Count of Algenais and thus, companied by the two men he most trusted, stood in the sun and personally accepted the garrison’s surrender and personally dictated the terms. The man in the cloak stood up, straight and arrogant, and acted as interpreter. It was arranged that the garrison of Acre, about twenty-four hundred men, were to go unharmed in return for a similar number of Christian prisoners; until the Christians were brought in the garrison would be held as hostages.
It was the briefest, most straightforward bit of bargaining and when it was concluded one of the emirs drew a piece of cloth from his sleeve and signalled towards the tower that overlooked the city gate. Immediately two mounted men, each leading another horse, magnificently caparisoned, came out. The Saracens, with a final obeisance and some speech which the fair-haired man translated scornfully, stepped back, mounted and, accompanied by their grooms, galloped away to carry the terms to Saladin whose camp lay in the hills. As they left the man ripped off his bright cloak and flung it after them in a gesture of final repudiation. He stood for a moment quite still. He was naked save for a piece of cloth about his loins and his body was beautiful, slender, muscular, sun-tanned—and yet delica
te, capable, in some strange day, of conveying things other men need words for. At this moment it spoke of pride and triumph, release, repudiation, scorn. Then he fell to his knees again and I saw his shoulders move as he sobbed.
Richard, looking a little confused, stretched out his hand and then touched him on the shoulder. ‘Sir,’ he said courteously, ‘I know not your name nor your degree but I bid you welcome in the name of all Christendom.’ The man sobbed on and Richard’s confusion became embarrassment.
‘Come, man,’ he said, ‘tears on such a joyous day!’ And ‘Come,’ he said, ‘you must be clothed and fed.’ And then, ‘Be of good cheer, sir; you shall come with us to Jerusalem.’
But the man went on kissing his hand and sobbing and I could see impatience prick the King. He looked about and saw me.
‘Boy, take this good man and make him welcome to our own tent. Give him of our best.’ To the man he said:
‘There, there, weep your fill—and this evening we will make merry together. You are the first of the many! We will all rejoice in due time. At the moment I have much to do…’
He turned away to complete the taking of Acre which he did with as little fuss as he would have brought to the plucking and eating of an apple.
So I was left to deal with Raife of Clermont while Richard went on to make the first of his deadly blunders.
It is true that he had laboured like a serf on the road-making, true that he was actually exchanging blow for blow when the garrison hauled down its flags, true that he was out in the sun glare and the dust when the emirs walked out to make the surrender. And nobody could deny that at that moment Philip of France lay on his bed and that Leopold of Austria was with him, eating peaches and pomegranates. But there had been Frenchmen on the storming towers and Austrians. And one would have thought that Richard, with his curiously tender consideration for the common soldier’s feelings, would have refrained from tearing down the Austrian flag which those who had fought had proudly set up on the section of wall they had captured. But moving round, satisfied, triumphant, on the evening of that day, he said, ‘What is that flag doing there? Take it down.’
Leopold never forgot the insult; never forgave it.
The ordinary men-at-arms, oddly enough, did. And both French and Austrians began to try to sidle into Richard’s company. Leopold and Philip spoke of desertion and of bribery but I, moving about amongst the men, heard other words. ‘I joined the crusade and I follow the man who most ardently leads the crusade,’ reasoned the man capable of lucid statement. ‘He fights, they don’t, and he’s the leader for me,’ said others.
And I would think of William of Tyre, who had preached this crusade in Europe, and of His Holiness, who had blessed all wearers of the Cross. To them the crusading army was just one great closely welded company where individual nationalities, preferences, talents, achievements and ambitions were melted down into the common cause. But men never are thus melted into a mass. Out of the womb they come, separate and dissentient, and until the greedy grave engulfs them, separate they remain. Even the cause of the Holy Sepulchre can hold them together in spirit for no longer than it takes to make that evening call.
One day when all the idealists are discouraged, an army of mercenaries under a single leader—But I digress.
VII
After the taking of Acre the ladies were moved from their wretched lodging by the harbour into a small white palace beside the blue-minareted mosque in the centre of the town. Hubert Walter found time to make a formal visit to the Queen, whom he had never seen before, and Richard sent her kind messages but he was too busy to go himself. There were three days, loud with recrimination, insult, explanation and excuse and then old Algenais suggested that there should be a feast—in honour of the victory, in honour of the ladies and in honour of the first released prisoner, Raife of Clermont.
During these three days I had been much in this man’s company for he slept and ate, as I did, in Richard’s tent and had been entrusted to my charge. I had heard his curious history. He had been taken prisoner when he was an esquire fifteen years old and had spent ten years in captivity. He had been circumcised against his will and sent as slave to the Sultan of Iconium—the man who was reputed to have fallen in love with Eleanor of Aquitaine when she was on crusade. He had been set to work as a gardener. Once the Sultan’s second wife had walked in the garden and desired a certain flower. Raife had cut it for her, trimmed off its thorns and put it into her hand. The Sultan had seen him, been moved to jealousy and had ordered that he should be castrated. ‘But the man who was to do the job was a—friend. There was some mutilation and I suffered the pains of Purgatory but he spared me.’ When the Sultan’s daughter married the Emir of Damascus, Raife had gone with her; and although he hated all Saracens and had never a good word for one of them, I gathered from one or two things that he let slip, and also from his omissions, that his new master was reasonable and humane. In his service Raife had risen from groom to steward, an office which in included some secretarial work, and in that capacity he had come to take part in the defence of Acre.
Although he was so little older than I and had spent so many years in circumstances little conducive to the development of personality or the cultivation of intelligence he was, compared with me, mature, worldly-wise, immensely gifted, confident, complete. The Count of Algenais who, after the first flush of sympathetic enthusiasm, came to regard him with slight disfavour, once said that he had lived so long in the East that he had become as subtle and wily as a Saracen.
‘And that,’ Raife had retorted in an easy, unabashed way, ‘accounts for my long survival and my early release.’
Richard had laughed. He liked Raife of Clermont both for himself and for what he represented. He was the first fruit, an earnest, a token of the deliverance that this crusade would bring. And he had many things to commend him to any leader—he knew the enemy; he spoke and wrote Arabic; he knew the Saracen way of life, customs, prejudices, trend of thought. He would be very useful.
And as Richard doted on Raife as his first recapture, so Raife doted upon Richard as his deliverer. With everyone else he was almost fantastically proud and touchy, insolent, sharp-tongued and hasty-tempered. Once I mildly expressed astonishment at the disrespectful way in which he answered some question asked him by the Duke of Burgundy. He had laughed in his bitter fashion and said, ‘I have lived, Blondel, where the flicker of an eyelash at the wrong moment could result in torture you never dreamed of. What could Burgundy do to me?’ But towards Richard, who would avenge his lost years, his many wrongs, he was different. Not meek, not subservient even there for many a heated argument, many a sharp exchange of verbal buffets took place between them; but he did regard Richard as a person apart; he was prepared to be the lion to Richard’s Androcles.
On the evening of the celebratory feast the tables—and again I detected old Algenais’s tactful hand—were arranged in a great circle, without head or foot, and the most important guests were spaced out with considerable discretion. No one had refused the invitation and everyone had donned his best clothes and finest jewels. It was a high coloured, a magnificent scene; a little awesome if you chose to see it as the gathering of the very flower of Western chivalry, apparently united. I took my place behind the Queen, ready to play at a sign from her; and to keep my thoughts from straying I worried deliberately about my broken nails and the fact that I had not touched my lute since we landed. Her hair, now that she was married, was gathered into a great knot that seemed to tilt her head pridefully. She was lovelier in her hyacinth-coloured gown than even I remembered her. All the old hungers woke and stirred.
Resolutely I turned my attention to the conversation at the table.
Somebody had mentioned the Old Man of the Mountain. By this time we were all familiar with the name and dreadful reputation of this mysterious potentate. He ruled in a mountain fastness in the Lebanon and his subjects were murderers by profession. They were known as Assassins and the word was beginning to make
its way into the everyday polyglot language of the crusading army. ‘A real old assassin, you are,’ one man would say to another, or to a mule or even to an unhandy tool. In the same way the title Old Man of the Mountain had crept into common use. ‘Savage as the Old Man of the Mountain,’ as a measure of ferocity, or: ‘Oh, tell that to the Old Man of the Mountain,’ as an expression of incredulity.
Yet despite his penetration into our consciousness and our talk, the Old Man was wrapped in mystery, in legend, in doubt. Nobody had even seen him or one of his Assassins and most people believed that he was a figure in Saracen folklore and that the stories about him may have had their origin in some far less picturesque tyrant who had terrorised the land long ago. Certainly very few people actually believed that if they could search Lebanon thoroughly they would come across the Old Man, his tribesmen who murdered for pleasure, his turreted castle or his fabulous pleasure gardens, comparable with Paradise, where lovely, scented, jewelled houris wandered amongst the fountains and the flowers.
But it was interesting to talk about him, idly, speculatively, as the feasters were doing now.
Suddenly Raife of Clermont laid down his knife, leaned forward and spoke. Except in moments of excitement, he usually took pains to mask the certain shrillness of his voice and spoke with a deliberate gruffness. Now his words reached even the far side of the circle of tables, though he looked only at Richard.
‘Would it surprise you very much if I told you that I have seen the Old Man and his establishment?’
There was the expected murmur of surprise, interest and disbelief, out of which Philip of France’s precise ‘Indeed, yes, it would both surprise and amuse me,’ sounded very clearly.