If dawn revealed a superb world of gilded minarets, veiled women and handsome, bearded men in all the colours of the rainbow — par dieu, the Egyptians were rich! — but as I say, if the sun revealed their riches in all their startling adornment and magnificence, it also revealed a level of horrifying poverty that was the more shocking compared to the opulence. Outside our caravanserai, there were two beggars, dead. They lay where they had died, and no one seemed to care. Beyond the market’s horse lines — we were outside the great customs gates of the city, and there was a market — a line of beggars sat in the dust. There were lepers, and men with their hands cut off: criminals, my Turk assured me. But there was a single leper woman with seven children, and every one of them was a leper; most of them were naked, so that every touch of the disease on their poor little bodies was on display. The leper woman and her seven children had much the same effect on me as the floating cat’s corpse.
Moments after we purchased our horses, John suddenly grabbed my arm.
‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Don’t stare.’
A troop of horse, perhaps a hundred men-at-arms, came out the gate at a canter. The leader was mounted on the finest horse I had ever seen, a bright gold horse like Jack, years ago in France, with bronze mane and tail and dark legs and muzzle — I had never seen such markings. The horse’s caparison and tack was all of green and silver, there were jewels on his bridle, and his rider was in green silk. His helmet was a tall, peaked spiral with an open face and a superb aventail of tiny links. His green gown seemed to cover more armour, and he carried a golden axe in his hand.
The guard at the gate turned out and saluted, more than two hundred men in maille and plate, with heavy bows of horn and sinew and heavy, curved sabres.
I noted that John’s advice had been exact — almost every man and woman in front of the gate was sitting. Most were silent, and all wore attitudes of respect.
I watched the men-at-arms, as they were the first Mamluks I had seen. They were well mounted. Most of them had light lances, like our boar spears, and all had a case carrying at least one bow, although some had two, and one big man had three bows. They all carried one bow strung.
I noted at once that they rode a different saddle from us. Of course I had heard this from Sabraham and indeed from Fra Peter, but their saddles were very small and had no back, and their caparisons, where worn, were only silk, with no mail underneath, though their armour and helmets were heavy enough, by Saint George.
An old woman sitting next to me in the dust spoke to me and cackled.
‘Say nothing,’ John enjoined me. He spoke low.
The woman’s eyes widened and she shuffled away.
‘I told she you are sick,’ he said.
The Mamluks waited in front of the gate through their lord’s inspection of the garrison. The troopers began to be bored, like soldiers the world over, and the men in the front rank began to examine the crowd.
The rightmost Saracen in the front rank was a big, heavy man with a henna-dyed red beard. His horse was the biggest there, almost as big as my warhorse and his eyes roved the beggars, and then the merchants.
I tried to make myself very small.
His eyes went right over me.
So did the eyes of the younger man to his left.
Their lord received the salute of the gate’s garrison, and returned it imperiously with his axe, then he turned and made his horse rear a little, and the crowd almost cheered. It was a curious sound, almost like a whisper.
He raised his whip — his axe was hung by his saddle bow — and called something in his tongue, and all the mounted men shouted.
The gates began to open, and the Mamluks began to form in a column with perfect discipline, all except the younger man, one file to the left of the old bastard with the dyed beard. The younger man put his heels to his mount and seemed to fly across the packed dirt. For a few horrifying beats of my heart I thought that he had chosen me, or John, but he went past us, almost over us.
I turned and saw a group of pilgrims. As it proved, they were a wedding party.
The young Mamluk rode in among them. He reached down and raised the veil of the bride and came riding back with her over his saddle. She was screaming and reaching for her husband but the young man lay face down in a pool of blood.
It had happened very quickly, as such things do. I’d seen it done in France.
I started to rise, and John struck me with his fist. I went down.
I rose on one knee, as Fiore taught, and John caught me. He wasn’t attacking me — so much for trust — he was restraining me.
‘Calm!’ he said. ‘Or we have been dead. All of us.’
Henna-beard shouted something, and the young man with the bride over his saddle laughed and waved his riding whip. Henna-beard shook his head in disgust and rode through the open gate. About half of the cavalry followed the Green Lord out of the gate and down the road to Cairo, and the rest formed by fours — a beautiful spectacle — and rode back in the gates.
Well. In those moments, I learned everything about the Mamluks.
The anger in the market was palpable. The Egyptians were not cowards, whatever my Italian friends said. But they had no weapons; no one I could see had more than an eating knife. There were men shouting, suddenly, and the wedding party was paralysed until one of the women burst into a wailing cry, and instantly it was taken up.
The garrison had begun to march inside when someone threw a paving stone, and a Mamluk soldier was hit and went down.
The garrison halted and began to reform. They were in some confusion about whether to reform inside the gate or outside.
The people in the market were working themselves up to a riot. I had seen it in London and Paris and Verona, and I found it fascinating, in a detached way, how much an Arab mob resembled a good English mob.
‘Run!’ John said.
We caught the bridles of our new horses and ran. The mob was solidifying around us; men were running up from the low shops and stalls along the market, and a farmer bringing produce to sell jumped down from his cart, seized his stick and ran to join the crowd. Men and women — even children — joined the crowd.
A hail of stones hit the soldiers.
They drew their bows.
And loosed. By the wounds of Christ, they killed fifty people in their first discharge, and they nocked and drew again, and the arrows flew. More died.
Arrows found their way past the front rank. We were fifty paces beyond the front of the mob, and an arrow went over my right shoulder and over my horse’s rump to kill a Jew standing by his stall. He crumpled, a look of consternation on his face. His son stared at me, face white. The boy was ten or eleven and he had no idea what to do with his father suddenly dead.
They were a horse-length away. Before I had gone another step, two Fellahin, the local Arab peasants, grabbed the Jew’s stall table and overturned it and began to rob it.
‘Run!’ said John.
Men looked at John. He had shouted in Italian. But another flight of arrows came in, and more of the onlookers fell.
At the forefront of the riot, a woman was screaming in Arabic. She had an arrow in her gut, and she pointed at the Ghulami and shrieked.
A tide of rioters rolled forward at the thin line of archers, and they shot hurriedly. Most of their arrows carried over the rioters and struck in the market where I was. My horse took an arrow in the muscle above her right front leg but by the grace of God, it went all the way through, and it was a moment’s work to cut the head and extract the shaft while she bit at me the while.
By the time I had her calm, John was in the saddle.
There was a cloud of dust where the Ghulami had stood with their bows. And no more arrows.
They were bad men, and had shot into a crowd of their own people, but they died horribly, and God have mercy on their infidel souls.