Templar's Acre

CHAPTER SIXTY

Edgar woke again that evening. He felt muzzy, distressed to find himself in a strange room, lying on an old palliasse that seemed to have more broken straws sticking into his back than a stook. He would give much for a good English palliasse.

Then his eyes snapped wide as he recalled his last interview with Philip Mainboeuf’s household. He had been thrown out like a beggar. If he saw that steward in a dark alley, he’d take a stick to the man’s head. God’s blood, but the fellow evicted him when he had been injured in the service of their master. When Mainboeuf got back. .

That was the point, he recalled. There was no telling when, or whether, Mainboeuf would return. It was a dangerous journey, especially now, with the rumours of war apparently justified. Edgar groaned. The thought of having to start again from scratch appalled him. For the last months he had worked hard, ensuring that his master was safe, and reaping the rewards. He had enjoyed expensive clothes, decent food and other luxuries he had only dreamed of before. He wanted them again.

He sat up and gasped, pain lancing through his skull. A hand to his head, he slowly sank back to the palliasse, and moaned.

A light step, and then a soft rustling of material at his side, and when he opened his eyes, he found himself staring up at Lucia’s face.

‘How are you?’ she asked.

‘I feel considerably better at this moment,’ he croaked. ‘I know you — you are the woman we rescued from the mob.’

‘Yes. Your head was broken.’

‘Someone didn’t like me,’ Edgar agreed. ‘I think it was the way I stabbed his friend.’

‘You killed him?’

Edgar shrugged. ‘He was attacking my master. I had to stop him. His companion did this to me.’

‘You must rest.’

‘I should be going,’ Edgar said, but without conviction. The thought of rising made the nausea return. He felt sick at the mere thought of walking.

‘You can go nowhere today. It is late, and if you try to walk the streets, you will be prey to any cut-purse. You must sleep here tonight.’

‘If you are sure,’ he said with a relieved grunt. He let his head gently down on the pillow, feeling her cool hands on his head. ‘That is good.’

‘Sleep, Master. Sleep.’

She heard his meandering thoughts and dreams, and guessed much of his story. It was sad, she thought. He was another like her. Used while the whim took his master, and then, as soon as a fault was perceived, discarded. He too was little better than a slave.

* * *

Baldwin was exhausted. There had been a delivery of fresh timber, and he and his men had been ordered to go and unload the great baulks of wood and move them nearer to the walls. In the absence of a great Muslim army appearing at the top of the plain before the city, there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm among his vintaine.

‘Come on, haul!’ Baldwin bellowed. He eyed his dog with jealousy. Uther lay panting in the shade of an awning while he and the vintaine worked and sweated.

Hob and Anselm pulled with Baldwin on ropes near the head of the horse, while others pushed from the back of the cart as they manhandled the timbers up the hill towards the castle. It was hard, hot work in the rising humidity.

‘Be grateful it’s not full summer yet,’ Baldwin snarled when Thomas complained that the day was too hot, but he knew how they felt. It was impossible to get any citizens to help. People were living in a limbo, in which they could persuade themselves that the Muslim army would not come. Many of them believed that the embassy would be able to talk the new Sultan into agreeing to an extended peace. Where was the profit in destroying Acre, after all?

Baldwin, who could still recall that ant-hill of men outside Cairo, was unconvinced. So many men needed an occupation. He did, too. Perhaps he could become a merchant, as Sir Otto had suggested, but so often it seemed that everything he undertook came to naught. He wanted to marry Lucia, but could not; he had come all this way to help recover Jerusalem, but there was no bid to recover the Holy Land.

Baldwin had these bitter thoughts as he strained and hauled. They finally manoeuvred the cart and the sweating, panicky horse, to the top of the hill, and there they all stopped, a block under the tyres of the cart, while the horse bent to a drinking trough, and men sank to the roadway, panting and groaning to themselves.

‘What’s the point of a city on a hill like this?’ Thomas muttered.

‘Swyve me if I know,’ Anselm said, wiping his brow with a scrap of shirt. He looked about him. ‘Who picked it?’

‘The man who didn’t want to see the city washed away every time the tide came in,’ Hob commented drily. ‘Perhaps he was born able to use the brain in his head, unlike you lot.’

Baldwin gave them a little longer, but when all were recovered, he had them on their feet and continuing up the roadway.

At the gatehouse, they offloaded the cart, complaining nonstop, while he walked to a tavern in the shadow of the walls. There he bought two gallons of thin ale. He sent two of the men to collect the ale in jugs, and the team drank deeply, before returning the jugs to be refilled. When all twenty had slaked their thirst, he had them continue, and soon the timbers were stacked moderately neatly, without blocking the street. Then they must go back to the harbour for more. Baldwin could understand their gripes. This kind of work was more suitable for labouring peasants, rather than free men, but there were not the men available to do such work. And besides, Baldwin was all too aware of Sir Jacques’ injunction to keep the men busy. It was better that they were occupied than that they sat about drinking without purpose.

He was about to follow the men, when he heard a shout from on top of the tower. Looking up, he saw a watchmen pointing urgently towards the south. Baldwin glanced at his men. Hob was watching him with a cynical look in his eye.

‘Hob, get the men back to the harbour’, he said. ‘You begin on the next load. I’ll join you shortly.’

‘Oh. Right. Shortly,’ Hob said, and spat into the road.

Baldwin felt his hackles rise at what sounded like simple insubordination. He was about to shout at the man, but before he could draw breath, Hob had turned to the rest of the men. ‘So? What you lot gawping at? Think those logs are gonna get up here without help? Maybe they’ll roll themselves up the hill, eh? Now get your miserable, swyving arses back down there, and fetch the next lot.’

And the men moved off, apparently content now someone had cursed them. He heard Hob damning their souls, eyes and arses as they moved off down the hill again, but by then Baldwin was already halfway up the first set of stairs to the wall. He hurried to the tower’s door and climbed inside, past the machinery of a catapult, and into the hoarding. Uther followed him. The timbers were slick from the rains of the previous night, and his leather soles almost slid away, but then he caught hold of the wall, and stared out in the direction the guard had indicated.

There, in the haze, perhaps a mile along the bay, he made out a black dot. With fear stabbing at his heart, he peered behind it, then studied the lands to the east and south, searching for the line of black, for the inevitable fluttering of banners and pennons on the horizon — for dust in the air, anything indicating an army. Seeing nothing, he felt a sudden loss of tension that showed how anxious he had been.

‘What is that?’ he asked the guard.

‘Single rider, I think, sir. Can’t tell more at this distance.’

Baldwin nodded, looking about the plain. The shanty town was gone, and in its place there had been efforts to dig a trench to make assault more difficult, but the work had not proceeded efficiently. Too few thought there was a serious threat. That was down to Philip Mainboeuf and the contempt he had publicly shown for the promoters, as he saw them, of war.

The man on horse back was moving sluggishly, and Baldwin frowned. ‘I will go and see if he needs help,’ he said. ‘That rider looks exhausted. He may have run out of water.’

He took his time descending the stairs, not wanting to slip, with Uther pelting down ahead. He would ask for gravel to be spread on the wood later, he decided, so that in battle the men could stand securely.

At the bottom he spoke to the porter at the gate, and found a stable where he was able to borrow a sturdy rounsey. On that, he rode out to the south with a fresh waterskin, cantering gently, Uther panting to keep up.

The man was a dark stick on the edge of the horizon when he started out, but soon he was able to discern a horse and man, and then the fact that the man had a turban wound about his head. In the midst of the turban a shining steel spike sparkled, almost blinding Baldwin.

‘Friend, are you well?’

‘I have travelled far.’ His voice was hoarse.

Baldwin peered. ‘Do you need water? I brought you some to ease your last mile.’

‘I am thankful for that,’ the man said. His lips were broken and scabbed from dehydration, and his eyes were so narrowed that it was apparently difficult for him to open them more than a small amount.

He was oddly familiar, and Baldwin found himself running through the various Muslims he had met, trying to jerk his memory. Nothing struck him, and he was forced to ask at last, ‘I know your face, I think. Do you remember me?’

The man tipped a little water into his hand and wiped it over his face, then more over the back of his neck. ‘In Cairo last year, when you were meeting with my master, the Emir al-Fakhri.’

‘Of course,’ Baldwin said with a smile. ‘I hope your master is well? You have come from Cairo on your own? It is a weary long way for a man alone.’

‘My master bade me come, and not to rest,’ the man said. ‘I have news for Acre.’

‘It is not secret?’

‘No. The embassy sent to speak with the Sultan al-Ashraf has not succeeded.’

‘Not succeeded? You mean that they didn’t reach Cairo?’ Baldwin said. Sometimes the Bedouin would attack people, he knew, but rarely a Templar or Hospitaller. That was curious, certainly, and he was about to ask more, when the man gave a hacking cough and continued.

‘No, the men reached Cairo, but the Sultan refused to see them and had them thrown into his cells.’

Baldwin felt the news as a punch in the belly. Then his shoulders sagged. He had wanted a clear and unequivocal response to the embassy, he recalled.

‘So it is war, then,’ he breathed.