But I knelt, confessed, and was absolved.
‘Deus Vult!’ the legate whispered.
‘Deus Vult! ’ we growled.
We went down the stern on ropes, our ladders being already stowed in the galia grossa’s longboat. We packed eighty men into five ship’s boats and, with muffled oars, we pulled for shore.
Ahead, a city woke. It was not yet dawn, but we could hear shouts and marching.
In the stern of the lead boat, Sabraham turned to me. I could see nothing but his nose and his teeth. ‘They’re alert,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said, with far more confidence than I felt. But I had a career of taking castles by coup de main. In this, at least, I was the old hand.
We rowed to the east, putting the spit of land on which the smaller castle stood between us and the city, and then we turned back south and west.
‘Lay out!’ I growled at the rowers. They were free oarsmen, and most of them had helmets and maille shirts, javelins and axes. It says something about the importance of volunteers to the Order that we were to go first, and only call for the oarsmen if we were successful.
Now the low boats moved like dolphins across the mirror of the water, so still it reflected stars and moon. We shot into the moon shadow of the Casteleto, and then slowed. We were under the very walls of the castle. Our oars were muffled and yet we seemed to make more sound than I could bear: the drip of water, and the Gascons would whisper — oh, sweet Christ, in that hour I almost put my basilard into one bastard from Poitou just to silence him, and all my newfound strategies of calm maturity were tried. And then we could see the low pier of the Casteleto’s dock before us.
Brother Robert brought us alongside the dock without touching.
I leapt on to the stone pier and ran for the stairs, my shoulder blades tense for an arrow, my ears cocked for a sudden sound. Up and up … I believe there were but twenty steps to the sally port, but I thought it took me half my life … up and up, my feet pounding on the stone, the soles of my leather shoes slapping too loud, too loud …
Dawn was close. I could smell the change in the air, and hear the birds.
Fiore was by me, and then Nerio and Miles and Juan. Right behind them were our Greeks, Giannis and Giorgos. And then another six men with our ladder, which struck the walls of the stone stairs like the sound of a trebuchet loosing its payload, and we all flinched. And then they did it again, so loudly that the sound echoed off the city walls, and the men, English and Gascon, carrying the ladder, cursed in shame.
Sometimes, the worst part of an escalade is that you cannot shout ‘Shut up!’ at your troops.
Somewhere inside the Casteleto, a door slammed.
‘Now or never,’ I whispered.
Thirty pairs of hands raised the ladder. We had one. One.
The moment the feet of the ladder were braced, I was on my way up.
I hate ladders. I hate heights, have no head for them, and when a sailor goes out on the yard of a ship to brail up a sail, it makes me queasy on the deck.
But there are things you must do yourself. You cannot lead an assault from the back.
I went up and up, and as I climbed, I was going from night into day. Our ladder was just the height of the wall — and I only knew that ten feet from the top. And as I climbed the last few feet, winded, and terrified by the creaking and cracking sounds the ladder made as my weight bore on the whole length, a sentry on the Pharos Castle across the harbour entrance saw us.
Up until that moment — despite my terror, the burning in the back of my throat, the feeling of lassitude that threatened me from fatigue and fear, the spike of pain at the base of my guts, and the annoyance of finding that my unscabbarded sword was cutting into my hose — despite all of that, time had passed very slowly.
After the sentry across the water sounded his gong, everything seemed to break apart like a dropped glass, and my memory of the rest is fragments.
I got a leg over the wall and jumped. It was farther than I expected, a man’s height or more, to the catwalk and I landed hard.
There were no enemies on the walls. Instead, a dozen men were blinking in the grey light, standing in muslin shirts and skullcaps on the pavement of the courtyard, and they saw me about the time I saw them.
They had bows.
I remember running down the inner face of the wall — there were steps, and by God’s mercy they ran the right way, so that I was shielded from their archery.
One of them paused to point up where I had come. I assumed Nerio had made the wall. I was in the courtyard, among hen-houses and a pile of wood that in daylight turned out to be the castle’s palings and hoardings. I moved behind it.
Arrows were loosed.
I found that there was a crawl space behind the palings. And I moved along it.
I suppose I charged the archers. My next memory is fighting. I do not know if I fought well or badly; somehow, the archers had lost track of me, or never knew I came down the wall. Or, like soldiers the world over, they engaged the enemy they could see, the men coming up the ladders.
But the grace of Our Lady was with us, and none of my friends took a hit, and then the archers were dead and Fiore was by me, and Nerio and Sabraham and Juan and Miles and Marc-Antonio and John the Turk and we were clearing the galleries at either end. Men came out of doorways and died, or leaned out of towers and loosed one arrow before the men on other catwalks ran them down.
The only moment in the fight that I remember is when Fiore killed an archer by throwing his sword. It was incredible.
Then it was over.
We moved through the castle like an ill wind. The last watch in their barracks were waking, and we slaughtered them at the doors and by their pallets. We gave no quarter. There is no other way, in a storming action.
It was a military castle and had, thank God, neither women nor children. Fiore had the admiral’s great banner, and he carried it to the top of the central donjon.
From there, we could see the morning.
I would have said that it had taken us an hour to land and storm the Casteleto, but when we looked, the sun was still low in the pink and gold sky. Over to the west of us, we could clearly see the white and red sails of the crusader fleet, many marked with crosses as big as whole ships, as they entered the Old Harbour in two lines. Closer, almost at our feet, lay the magnificent tower of Pharos just across the mouth of the New Harbour, perhaps a long bowshot away.
To our right, out to sea, lay the Order’s fleet — four galleys and ten transports as well as a few of the smaller galliots and round ships.
More than a hundred crusader ships were trying to make enter the Old Harbour. The great lines stretched like frayed rope out to sea, and there were gaps — the galleys needed no wind, and made better time, and many ships had left their place in the line and proceeded, so that there were collisions. But that was not the worst of it: even as we watched, ships attempting to go into the beach struck the shallows. A Venetian galley rolled her mainmast overboard.
Still the king’s great red galley crept closer and closer to the land. Aboard the king’s ship, someone was conning them through the deepest channel.
But ahead of them waited the army of Alexandria.
Perhaps if we had landed as soon as we arrived, we might have surprised them, but by the morning after our sails were sighted, every soldier that the governor’s lieutenant could spare was standing in close array on that beach.
Why didn’t they man their walls?
Perhaps it was a day in which Christian and Moslem sought to rival each the other in bravery — or in foolishness. Or perhaps the governor’s lieutenant felt, as our king did, that they could not garrison the whole of a ten mile circuit.