Men caught fire, and died horribly. Horses panicked close by me — hooves were everywhere as our dense formation exploded in a rout of burning men and terrified horses.
But as we were surrounded by the Army of Egypt, our own near destruction only served to thrust us again at our foes. Panicked horses exploded into the serried ranks of the foe.
Truly, God willed it.
Not that I was aware, particularly. I was more aware of the hooves, everywhere, and the ranks of enemy infantry.
The Naffatun were well armoured and had shields of some horrible beast with a knobby hide. I got to one knee and hammered one with my sword one-handed and failed to penetrate it, and my adversary slashed at me with a heavy sabre from the shelter of his buckler and his sabre had no more effect on my harness than the Emperor’s sword on his shield.
On the third or fourth exchange I remembered a play of Fiore’s and, as my weapons struck the face of his hide buckler, I rotated my hand up and leaned forward. My point slipped past his shield and down into his face, and he fell backwards, my sword deep in his guts.
And I went with it. By luck or practice, I used the collapse of his body to drag me off my knee and to my feet.
Gawain was close; I knew him, and was sure he wouldn’t leave me. I needed a few seconds in the press to get him.
That was the time of the longsword.
The men around me were mostly Bedouin — unarmoured men with small shields, daggers and spears. Interspersed with them were Sudanese Ghulami, men as black as Richard Musard, or blacker, with heavy spears like the ones we’d use for a foot combat or a passage of arms. I cut hard, a long, flat cut from right to left, clearing a little space and severing a man’s fingers. He fell back, and I killed another with a flick of my point: I was spending my spirit the way Nerio spent ducats.
But by God, I was fighting well.
Fiore reached me first, angling into the enemy from my right and killing his way like a ship under sail cuts the water. His charger dropped a big spearman whose heavy shaft was absorbing my blows. I caught his stirrup and his good horse hauled me ten paces through the press and I was hit twenty times. I was bruised, and I took a wound in the back of my right bicep under the spaulder, but when the pain forced me to relinquish the stirrup leather, I was close enough to the crusaders to see their crests and their coat armour.
I could see Mezzieres, forty feet away. He had one foot on either side of the king, who was lying flat in the sand.
I thought of de Charny.
I prayed.
I was hit. And I stumbled.
And then Juan was there — Juan, who’d been knocked unconscious in the first action. He was tall in his saddle, his seat firm, his back straight, and his arm rose and fell like a man threshing wheat, and Saracens died. Because of him, I finally had a moment to gather Gawain, who should have followed me like a loyal dog.
My horse was nowhere to be seen.
I believe that I cursed.
Miles had our banner, and now he was close to me, and behind him I could see Nerio and the scarlet coat armour of my volunteers. The Saracens were screaming — the keening came through my helmet — and the dying were screaming a different tune and the cry ‘On, on!’ thundered out, grunted from the mounted knights.
The world balanced and the balance held, like two combatants when both make a strong pass and their blades lock. We were locked. Mezzieres, Nerio, Fra Peter. Somewhere out on the bay, Carlo Zeno leapt into the water. A ship full of Genoese discharged a heavy volley of arbalest bolts into the flank of the Naffatun.
I saw none of this, you understand. Nor had I seen d’Albret unhorsing me, or trying to kill me and being driven off by Juan. In the helmet, you just don’t see.
Where I was, there was only the grit in between my teeth, the heaving of my sides as my lungs begged for air that my breastplate denied, the sweat that wept into my eyes from my hairline and the soggy padding of my cervelliere, and the sword I held in both hands.
Listen, then.
I got my sword up into a high guard — rare enough, on the battlefield — but something came to me, in the locked moment, some grace, whether from God or Fiore I leave you to guess. But I took up the guard called Window with my hands crossed, and my adversary was an armoured Saracen in light mail. He had a scimitar and a buckler with five bosses and verses of the Koran inscribed in gold.
I cut. I rotated my hands and cut between the bucker and the scimitar, rotating forward on my hips.
Like many men against whom I trained, the space between his sword and his shield was less guarded than it ought to have been. My sword touched both his sword and his shield. And continued through his helmet and into his head. My hand was so fell, so heavy, that the blade went through helm and head, down and down.
He fell, and I pressed forward one full step, cutting the reverse line up. I felt as if the very power of God had filled me. By Christ, all my life I have heard men claim to have cut through a helmet, but I have seen it done with a sword only three times, and that was one.
My rising cut broke a man’s wrists and half severed them and I threw him to the ground with my knee and my left hand and finished him with my knee while I cut flat and low against an unarmoured spearman. His spear thrust was weak and skidded on my breastplate and I cut into his leg and probably fractured it with the same blow and he too was down.
And then I was face to face with Mezzieres, across a horse-length of beach. My friends were clearing away the front of the Cypriotes, and they had their ring of steel reformed.
The army of the Alexandrines shrieked their dismay. And then, like fools, they turned and ran.
The ‘crusaders’ were finally landing, all along the beach, many in boats provided by their ships, and some captains had run their small craft ashore. The Venetians and Genoese knew the harbour and came in close, well away to the right, and their landing cut many of the fugitives off from the open gate.
I saw none of that. I leaned on my sword and panted, and my breath was all I could breathe inside my helmet, and somehow I got my visor up.
De Mezzieres stood there in the sun with the banner of Jerusalem in his hand. Then he raised his visor. He had a ring of dead at his feet.
Our eyes met.
What can I say? You know what we both thought.
The man at his feet coughed, and coughed again, and in a moment we were on him the way the pursuers were on the Saracen fugitives. I had assumed the king to be dead, but we got his bassinet off his head and his blue eyes fluttered open.
He rolled to his hands and knees and spat blood into the sand.
‘Ah,’ he growled. ‘Ah, Mezzieres. I gather we are not in heaven?’
Most of the men who won that day will tell you that the charge of the Order won the day. Listen, Chaucer, you’ve heard Hales tell it, have you not? Fifty years those men had waited for their day, and when they charged, their lances were tipped with fire.
The Alexandrines had no idea we had a second force, and the Order showed them what a few mounted knights could do. And Fortuna — or God’s will — gave us everything: the Casteleto, the error of the Mamluk’s charge.
But by Saint George, it was a glorious day, as great a day as any I have seen.
The crusaders — no, the routiers, let us call them — slaughtered the Saracens. And the pity of it is that they did not just slaughter their army. Thousands of Alexandrines, including women and children, Jewish street vendors and Christians who had come out to see their brothers rescue them — they were by the gates — and our army killed them. This is the monster that is war, a monster that devours everything in its path.