The Book of the Lion

The day began with a cool, gentle wind, and with the feeding and exercising of the chargers.

Then came the heat again, and the low-voiced final rites for the latest to die of fever, and an early afternoon meal of horsemeat and chaff bread.

Two pleasure women got into a fight over a pearl earring, a tearing, howling battle, and barely a voice was raised in cheer or derision. The women tore at each other’s hair and eyes, grew tired, dropped panting. The sentries prodded them with the staffs of their halberds, and they moved on.

The priests kept their prayer hours, and we joined them. The last wine turned to vinegar in the cup, and the guards slept standing up, leaning into their staves.

“I would fall down, if I tried it,” said Hubert. “As soon as I began to snore.” He did an instantaneous imitation of a sleeping guard pitching forward, fast asleep. He caught himself just before he landed on his face.

“It is the result of much art,” I said, pleased to see Hubert in good humor again. “You and I have yet to learn to sleep like fighting men.”

When King Richard strode from his tent that afternoon, the camp stirred, neighbor nudging neighbor. King Richard was in dress armor, the brightest mail, an indigo cape flowing nearly to the ground. The king, accompanied by his personal guards and Sir Guy de Renne, hurried over to the roped-off area where the prisoners hunched, heads down, twenty-seven hundred humans as quiet as sweltering beasts.

The camp was rising to its feet, man and knight, waterboy and fletcher, all wondering what could bring a monarch into such heavy sunlight, through the thick black flies. Richard reached to his belt, pulled out a bright broadsword, and sawed briefly at the hairy, taut hemp rope that marked the prisoners’ frontier.

Cut through, the cord fell hard, lifting curls of dust. The rope barrier slumped around the circumference of the prisoner herd. Foot soldiers seized their pikes. Yeoman soldiers picked up their axes. Men crowded close. A few of the knights loosened the blades in their scabbards, the camp intent on the king.

Sir Guy de Renne hesitated for the briefest moment, making a show of freeing his own sword, turning to locate his clerks. Perhaps he was giving King Richard time to make his order more clear, or to amend it.

Sir Guy de Renne set his feet, like a man about to receive a blow, and caught the eye of Nigel and Rannulf. The two English knights looked on with no expression in their eyes. Sir Guy called for his chief clerk, an assistant with a leather pipe-roll crammed with scrolls. He completed the act of drawing his blade, and gave an order to the chief pikeman.

The first blow sent a wave through the prisoners, a gasp like a great wind. A few of the men struggled to rise, but the tethers around their hands and feet hobbled them, and they fell. A woman began to plead. The prisoners swarmed in place, trapped.

A child bawled, a noise like a crippled calf I had heard once, its hindquarters torn by foxes. The male prisoners cried out, one or two quick-thinking enough to argue in their incomprehensible tongue.

The pikeman did not hesitate, but some of the swordsmen looked back at the king, at Sir Guy de Renne, and then returned to their work.

Hubert called out, tried to arrest a pikeman hurrying to the butchery, and I had to drag Hubert away.

I kept Hubert from seeing it, held his face away from the sight, although the sloppy crunch of blade and ax, and the smell of blood and fresh-torn bowels could not be ignored. Or the cries of Christians calling out saint’s names, Saint George who slew the winged serpent, and the giant Saint Christopher who carried Our Lord across a wide river. A sword makes a butcher-shop whine across the bones and sinews of a neck.

The calls of the still-living prisoners must have reached the outriders, because soon an irregular attack streamed across the plain from Saladin’s camp. Our bowmen made easy work of keeping them at a distance.

A voice called out that each heathen killed was one less enemy to God. It was Father Urbino, his blond hair dark with sweat. He shook his fist, urging the pikemen at their labor.

Many knights did not enter the harvest. The few Templar men present turned away and left the rest to their work. Nigel watched with a stony gaze. When I caught his eye he let his expression shift to one of stoic distaste. When the tide of fly-carpeted blood crept close to us, Nigel kicked up a dike of dust to keep it from our feet.

But many knights labored beside the pikeman, and many English knights, too. Rannulf grew tired of watching hackwork, and made his way through the scarlet-soaked corpses, and demonstrated a sword stroke, severing first one life, then another, each death quick. He quit the field, shaking his head.

Nigel and Rannulf stood beside each other, arms folded, and only moved when the red tide crept too close.