George just shrugged. But he handed me a gourd canteen, and I drank my fill. John the Turk gave me garlic sausage, good Italian sausage, and I sat there, surrounded by corpses and dying men, and ate sausage and drank water for as long as it takes a priest to say a quick Mass. Fiore joined me and we all ate and drank. The Hungarian could have killed the lot of us, but we were done in like knackered horses, and we had a little hole in the smoke in which to breathe.
But soon, too soon, I could feel the press of my fear for the legate.
We rode with the hot wind of the burning of Alexandria at our heels. We missed our way twice; once where the Avenue turned south and we should have taken a cross street. The second time, we missed the Great Mosque in the smoke.
But the city on fire reflected like dull bronze from the distant pillars of Pompey. We reached the wall in a huddle of hovels. We were nearly lost, desperate — and dawn was close. I was certain by then that Nerio and Miles and the legate were dead or taken.
Every decision I had made all evening came up like bad food.
George climbed the wall, cursed for a while, and climbed down. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘North, or south?’
I hate guessing. ‘North,’ I said. And probably something like, ‘Is that north?’
In the dark and smoke, even with the pillars, everything seemed wrong. Perhaps it was just fatigue. But I was hearing voices — Emile, Father Pierre, my sister. And the endless sound of signing, as if there was a choir in Hell.
Two miserable streets later, we crossed fresh corpses. We followed the trail of dead — there was a spearman, there and archer.
The Customs Gate rose out of the bloodshot murk. And in the relative safety of the tunnel was Nerio, his helmet off, and Miles, supporting the legate.
‘Never do that to me again,’ Nerio said. He threw his arms around me and tried to crush me — me, and Fiore too. ‘Leave me to die and ride away. It would be kinder.’ He spat, and handed me a canteen. I took a pull. It proved to be Malmsey, but it tasted like the nectar of the gods of Greece.
It also proved to be the last surprise of the night. By the time our exhausted column crossed the sand where the crusaders’ ships were beached, the sky was grey and we could see men asleep on the sand.
We didn’t stop. But neither did we gallop. We didn’t have a horse capable of the effort among us.
The Order’s admiral was awakened at once. I lay down in one of the Order’s tents and slept for perhaps ten minutes. It wasn’t much lighter when I was awakened and Fra Ferlino di Airasca ordered wine brought.
‘We know very little here,’ he said. ‘And the legate took most of the Order away into the city.’
I outlined the facts as I knew them, so tired by then that I was sick to my stomach. But two slaves brought food, fruit, and bread and cheese, and I devoured it.
The admiral said nothing while I spoke, except to curse when I said that Fra Peter Mortimer had been wounded.
‘How is the legate?’ I asked.
Fra Ferlino shrugged. ‘Well enough. Better when we can let him sleep. His eyes are better.’ Knights of the Order have a great many healing skills — the Hospital is as much part of their trade as the sword — and they tended to speak in tropes. But I knew from Fra Peter that a man with a bad blow to the head shows it in his eyes.
He looked at me. ‘Can the Cairo Gate hold? Where is the army?’
I shook my head. ‘The army …’ I was tempted to blasphemy. ‘The army is raping and looting the city. They man no towers, and they kill only-’ I snarled.
Fra Ferlino cocked an eyebrow at me. ‘You are a virgin of sieges? What did you expect? A parade?’ He held out a hand. ‘Yet we must hold those gates if we are to hold the city. And the army of Cairo?’
‘We went out with the king last night,’ I said. I stumbled in my speech — was it only last night?
‘We hear the king is in the Tower of Pharos,’ the Order’s admiral said. ‘But nothing more.’
‘He needs to know that the Cairo Gate is held, and the main enemy army retreated,’ I said.
‘I’ll see that he knows,’ the admiral said.
And then they let me sleep.
That lasted three hours. Perhaps a little more.
I was still in my harness. I had no squire to get me out of it, and I was too tired to touch the laces and buckles. I think I tried — I have the vaguest impression of scrabbling at an arm harness just before collapse and I woke to a variety of aches and pains that I would associate with the results of a torturer’s rack.
The man standing over me was the king. He looked as neat as a newly forged sword. His harness was clean and polished.
‘I’m so sorry, Sir William,’ he said. ‘But the admiral tells me that the Cairo Gate is held, and the enemy army has slipped away. I need to know.’
Muzzily, I told my story again.
The admiral had a quick conference with the king and I caught enough words to know what they proposed. My heart sank: I’ve heard that phrase used a hundred times, but then I knew what it meant.
They needed me to lead a column of reinforcements back through the city.
The king embraced me. I almost laughed. He wasn’t going.
When I got my harness cleaned up a little — the king’s squire came and helped me, bless him — I drank some water and pissed it away, drank some more, and stumbled out into the sun, which hit me like the blows of a deadly opponent. Two serving brothers armed me, and the metal going back over my bones was like the bite of weapons. But when I reached the Order’s parade — really, just a little area of gravel and old kelp in the centre of a three-sided wall of tents — there was Nerio, there was Fiore, and there was Miles.
I don’t remember if I cried. But I do now. By our saviour, we were …
We were. And Juan was dead.
‘Let’s get this done,’ I said.
We rode into Alexandria, and nothing waited for us but the rotting horror of the spectacle. No dogs, no wolves, no brigands prowled, and no feral Alexandrines slaughtered. The streets were dead. And littered with meat that had been men. And women. And children.
When we reached the site of the ambush, Maurice gave me a sign, a wave, and he and George and John rode away without further explanation. I assumed that they were looking for signs of our attackers.
I was wrong.
I rode under the arches of the Cairo Gate with nothing endangered but our sense of man as a redeemable sinner. John and his companions came back an hour later, or so I hear, but I was, thank God, asleep.
I slept in one of the Cairo Gate towers. I slept yet again in my harness, and woke to an alarm that proved false. Then I slept again.
When I woke for the third or fourth time, it was to the terrible realization that I had not unsaddled Gawain, nor seen to him in anyway. Only that would have dragged me from some dead Mamluk’s straw pallet — clean as a whistle, by the way.
Under my sabatons, my shoes were scorched and sticky with blood. My feet hurt — the arches ached. The armour was a worse enemy than the infidel. I felt I’d broken my hips while asleep.
Gawain was in the gatehouse stable, lying in clean straw, exhausted. He opened his eyes, snorted, and closed his eyes again, his derision for the whole of the human race clear to anyone who knows horses. Pressed against him was Fiore’s charger, also curried and clean.
‘Good knight, bad horseman!’ John the Turk said. ‘Jesus love animals. Knights not so much.’
I clasped his hand.
He nodded.
‘Thanks, John.’ I saw that he had Fra Peter’s Mamluk horse groomed. The animal had a headstall and two reins through ring bolts.
‘Stallion!’ John said. ‘Want.’
I’d have laughed, but all I wanted was sleep. John got my armour off me in the straw, and I collapsed by my horse as he told me that Fra Peter had been taken to the ships.
I slept again, guarded by a new Christian convert whose brethren were sitting across the river. Had John not been loyal to his word, I’d have been dead many times, that campaign.