And still the men of Alexandria got the gates closed. They left brothers and sons to die and slammed the gates in their faces to keep us out. And the routiers who had played no part in the victory roamed the beach, killing unarmed men.
Fra Peter gathered us again under the legate’s banner, but not before King Peter made Steven Scrope, one of the blood-covered figures at de Mezzieres’ shoulder, and Miles Stapleton kneel and the sand, and he knighted them both. He knighted a dozen other men.
He took his own collar, a magnificent thing of silver gilt and jewels made of swords and roses from around his neck and he broke it with his sword, and gave half to de Mezzieres.
He gave half to me.
He made me one of his Order of the Sword while our army of mercenaries murdered the innocents who had come to watch the battle.
I am a knight, and the business of my Order is war.
Do peasants sicken of the plough? Do priests tire of saying Mass?
I was twenty-five years old, and Alexandria was my sixth great battle. In the fighting, each was different, as one lover is from another. In the aftermath, there is a sameness that defies description — foul, cruel, evil.
The king never regained control of the host of mercenaries we’d brought from Italy and I will not lie: what follows is dark and there’s little chivalry in it.
The routiers ranged along the walls. To them were added most of the marines and many of the sailors. The captains brought their ships off the shoals and sands of the Old Harbour and rowed or sailed around Pharos Castle into the Pharos Harbour and the Venetians attempted an escalade on the Pharos castle before sun set. The governor’s lieutenant resisted manfully, and threw them back with losses.
I was sitting on an upturned boat at the end of the sea wall while a Venetian surgeon probed my shoulder with a knife fouled from cutting ten other wounded men. Then he sewed the flap of separated skin back down. I promise you that it hurt!
Marc-Antonio had three arrows in him. Carlo Zeno pushed the surgeon aside and cut them out with his own hands. Of our army of five thousand, only a thousand had been engaged, but that thousand had enough wounds for ten. Yet we had very few dead. Our harnesses were so good that most men lived at least to see the dawn, and many are still with us.
It was growing dark when Nerio found Chretien d’Albret. Nerio’s squire Davide fetched me, and we rode across the sand. John the Turk had found Gawain and restored him, and had landed our little Arab horses, who shied at blood but nonetheless were firm footed and well-rested; Gawain had ten cuts, one so broad that his red muscles showed like a gap in a curtain. John gave him opium and then sewed him up like the doctors were doing to men.
Much later, perhaps a year or more, when I was telling the Count of Savoy about the fight — his nephew was there, but the Green Count was not, of course — John was fletching arrows by the fire, and I saw him grunt and shake his head while I told this story.
Later that night, I went to him. By then we were old friends and I asked him why he had sneered at my story. He laughed mirthlessly, in his Tartar way. ‘All battle the same,’ he said. ‘Young men sing. Old man grunt.’
I thought he was posturing. ‘John, you were a hero — you saved us. I saw you save Marc-Antonio. You earned glory-’
His Tartar eyes burned with sudden anger. John is seldom angry, but he stepped forward at me although I am a head and more taller. And I suspect I stepped back.
‘I save friend!’ he spat. He reached his left hand behind him and wiped his arse elaborately and then brought the hand up to my face. ‘Worth more than glory, is my shit,’ he said.
I tell you gentles this, because not everyone agrees on what we saw and did at Alexandria.
We rode to Chretien d’Albret.
He was dying. Listen, in paintings, saints die with serene faces, whether on the rack, or full of arrows, or like Christ on the cross. But men do not go that way, and most especially when they have been burned across most of their upper body with naptha.
The fire had done something to d’Albret. He thought he was going to hell. In fact, he thought he was already in hell, burning alive.
Well.
The poor bastard.
Flesh came away whenever he moved, charred strips like bad meat. And he screamed and screamed until you’d think he’d have had no voice left. His eyes were gone.
Christ, I can’t tell this …
He raved.
To most men on the beach, his raving sounded like the last words of a man in torment. But I knew what he was saying. He was saying that d’Herblay had paid him to kill me.
I stood and listened.
Nerio was better than me. He made a little sound like pfft and killed d’Albret, drawing, thrusting, wiping his blade and returning it to the scabbard so fast that it was as if his hands were full of silver fire in the moonlight.
‘I hope one of you will do the same for me, if my turn is like that,’ Nerio said.
But we had all heard what we had heard. It wasn’t just me d’Albret was after. D’Albret had died screaming that he had been paid to kill the serf. The Serf.
A man in agony cannot be interrogated or questioned or threatened or begged. He screamed d’Herblay’s name. He screamed his repentance at the sky, and was killed.
God have mercy on his soul, and the souls of all those who died in the sand.
We went back and slept on pallets of straw in a rough camp that the sergeants and lay brothers of the Order had prepared. But before we lay down our horses were groomed and fed, their wounds tended, their tack stripped away and cleaned. It took me, I swear, half the night.
Marc-Antonio’s habit of getting wounded when there was work to be done was remarkable! But with John’s expert help and my friends and their squires, we got it all done. We made the Gascons d’Albret had brought do the same, though they complained and complained. I might have raged at them — you could see Fra Robert Hales and Fra Ricardo and a dozen other older knights patiently currying horses in the moonlight while a handful of young Gascons proclaimed themselves too nobly born for such work, but I was too tired for rage. And I wanted them where I could see them.
The legate was tireless. He went from wounded man to wounded man, and late, when the moon was high, he came to us. We prayed, and I told him about d’Albret.
He shrugged. ‘My life is worth nothing,’ he said. He smiled his simple smile and went off to find other men worse off than we. Later, he spent an hour protecting a huddle of Moslem survivors from the routiers.
I was asleep.
We rose to pain. I was under my military cloak — Egypt’s nights can be cold — with Nerio pressed close to me on one side and my wounded squire pressed close to the other. He had the fever we all dreaded, and he was so hot I thought he was done. All three of his wounds were red.
So was my shoulder.
I have little memory of that day. Fra Peter ordered us to horse, and we tacked and bridled and we were mounted in the dawn, and our horses were as stiff as we were ourselves. But not an arrow did we receive from the walls. The king awoke late, mounted, and rode the whole circuit of the walls before noon with the Order as his bodyguards. Two hundred knights, and the greatest city on earth.
They might have laughed us to scorn, but they had their own troubles.
King Peter sent them a cartel, summoning the city to surrender. Their commander returned a defiance.
We rode from point to point, and everywhere I looked for d’Herblay and asked me if they had seen him.
He was nowhere to be found. Most ‘crusaders’ rose late and began to prowl around the walls like dogs searching for food. They were not an army. I know, because the king stopped many times, trying to reason with men. He stopped Sir Walter Leslie, who was with his brothers and some other Scottish knights and asked them to rejoin the army.
Sir Walter bowed deeply. He was in his harness, as were his brothers and all their men, and they were stripping some houses in the suburbs by the Pepper Gate.