CHAPTER TWO

Richard lingered in Acre only long enough to see the prisoners buried and the garrison secured. Then he began the march toward Jaffa. If he traversed those two dozen leagues through the armies of Islam, defeated those armies and took the city, he would rule the coast; then, with the strength of his fleet in back of him, he would drive his own armies inland and the sultan’s ahead of him, until he took Jerusalem.

This would not be a march for women or camp followers. The queens remained in Acre, secure in the palace, and the lesser women—ladies or otherwise—were given quarters in the city.

The men were considerably less than delighted to leave their life of luxury, but Richard bade them remember why they had come to this country. “You think this city is rich? You thought Cyprus was loaded with loot? You haven’t seen Caesarea yet, or Jaffa, or Ascalon. You haven’t seen Jerusalem. Come with me and we’ll take them all, and you’ll be richer than kings. God’s arse, men: you might even be richer than I!”

That won a roar of laughter. He grinned at them. His looks were marred by the sickness that had felled him when he began the siege of Acre; he had been as bald as an egg for weeks, and his hair and beard were still hardly more than stubble. The effect above those massive armored shoulders was rather alarming, and rather imperfectly human.

And yet, thought Mustafa, any man in that army, in that moment, would have followed him anywhere. Even the French troops whom he had bullied and cajoled into staying when their king sailed home in a snit, and the Germans who had survived their emperor’s death and the onslaughts of the Turks to come so far, were captivated for once, and their differences put aside.

It was a gift. The sultan had it, too, but without the Frankish king’s sheer physical authority. Sometimes in the king’s presence Mustafa could not breathe, it was so strong. Still he kept coming back, because he could not help himself. He had been the king’s slave in more than simple fact since the day Richard caught him spying on the camp during a raid outside of Acre. One look at that big ruddy face, one roar from those giant’s lungs, and he was conquered as thoroughly as any city.

The march began in the dark before dawn. Richard could dally about endlessly, but when there was a prospect of battle, no one was quicker off the mark than he. And maybe, Mustafa reflected, he was not sorry to see the last of the women for a while. Richard was deeply fond of his sister Joanna and he worshipped his mother, but they wore on him—especially since he had married that whey-faced princess from Spain. Her he could forget, for the most part, except when his mother forced him to visit her, but the others flatly refused to be ignored. They were at him day and night: do this, do that, look after this, look after that, and above all, incessantly, put his body as well as his mind to the production of an heir.

Once he was safe in the manly world of war, with his farewells all said and the half-ruined, half-rebuilt bulk of Acre dwindling slowly behind, Richard heaved a long sigh of relief. His head came up, his shoulders straightened. The light came back into his eye.

Mustafa did not hang about hopefully like a dog looking for a bone. He left that to Blondel the singer. He amused himself with riding up and down the column, admiring the beauty of the king’s plan.

They had no baggage train, no endless lumbering ranks of mules and oxen, packhorses, carts and wagons—there are not enough of those to be had in Christian hands. Instead the foot soldiers carried the baggage. There were two armies of them: one marched free but marched a mile or two inland on rough and tumbled tracks under constant attack from the enemy; the other marched laden, along the shore, with the fleet to guard them from the sea and the cavalry to guard them on the land. The two lines curved together as night drew on, and camped together; they took turns from day to day, so that neither half could claim to be more burdened than the other.

On the first day, the beasts of burden were the king’s own, his Angevin peasants and his sturdy English yeomen. He knew he could trust them to do their best for him, and they were making a game of the labor: vying to see who could carry the most without collapsing, and passing bawdy verses from company to company.

They greeted Mustafa with fair good cheer. They called him Richard’s dog, meaning no insult by it, and they seemed to find him tolerable, for an infidel. He had been learning their different dialects for amusement; words were his pleasure and languages his delight. It was a grand game to address each man in his own accent—startling some of them into making signs against evil, but then they laughed, because everyone knew that the king’s dog was harmless.

When that amusement palled, Mustafa rode his little Arab mare between the land and the sea, splashing through waves. The spray was cool on his cheeks. It was very hot; the Franks wilted as the day grew brighter, and their singing and chaffing died to silence. The only sound was the clash of arms on the road above, and the shrilling of the enemy as raiding parties fell on the lines again and again.

They never did much damage; their purpose was more to vex and harass than to wreak mass slaughter. But they were a great nuisance, and now and then they killed a man. They could afford to lose a dozen, a hundred, maybe even a thousand, but Richard who had come from across the sea—Richard needed every man he had.

 

It was a crawlingly slow march. The road had been built by the Romans a thousand years ago; it was crumbling badly. The feet of so many men broke and tore it, and turned it into a wilderness of shattered stone and treacherous slopes. Then, before they had gone an hour out of Acre, the attacks began. Swift onslaughts fell down on them from the heights to the eastward, raiding parties of Turks that swept in, emptied their quivers of arrows, wrought what havoc they could, then retreated as swiftly as they had come. They avoided the ranks of crossbowmen and the armored knights, striking at gaps in the ranks and driving wedges of steel between portions of the long winding column.

The rear guard had the worst of it, between the broken road, the thick clouds of dust, and the slowness of the advance. But Richard had foreseen that. He had begun the march in the van, marching under his standard on its great iron-sheathed mast; by full morning he was in the rear with a company of picked knights. The dust that trapped and confused his rear guard also served to conceal him from the raiders, until he loomed out of the murk and fell on them with a lion’s roar.

 

“Clever as well as ruthless,” Ahmad observed from the vantage of the hills. The clangor of battle was faint, the fighters like chess pieces on a board. Richard in scarlet and gold was as unmistakable as ever, but today Ahmad was taking count of the rest of the army, reckoning the banners and the men riding under them. Templars in the van, Hospitallers in the embattled rear. English behind the Templars, then the French with their banner of lilies, and the men of Outremer behind, divided between their rival kings: Guy whose folly had given the kingdom into Saladin’s hands, and Conrad whose strength of will had sustained what was left of it until the Crusade should come.

“He’s only one man,” the sultan said, “however strong a ruler he may be. If he wavers or fails, the whole war collapses.”

Ahmad raised a brow. “Would you do that? Insure that he was disposed of?”

His brother’s glance was sulfurous. “Not in this life. This is holy war—honorable war. We do not use the weapons of dishonor.”

Ahmad sighed faintly. He had known what the answer would be; he knew his brother. But it had to be said. “You know that he won’t be so honorable.”

“Do I?” said Saladin.

“Franks have no honor, even to each other.”

“That one does,” the sultan said. “His servants, his kin . . . no. But that one is true to himself. I want you to understand him, brother; study him. Know him. Use that knowledge to help me win this war.”

Ahmad bowed without speaking.

That should have been enough: he was an obedient servant. But Saladin searched his face with care. “You may refuse,” he said. “I won’t force this duty on you. There are others who can do it, though none as well—none with as finely honed a sense of what is fitting. I’ll make do with them if need be.”

“You know I won’t refuse,” Ahmad said. “I’ll serve you in this as I always have.”

“Good,” said his brother. “Good. We’ll give him time; wear him down. We’ll prepare a battlefield. But if we can win this without excessive bloodshed, I pray we may. War is holy, but peace is holier. Remember that when you speak with him.”

Ahmad bowed lower than before. This time he was not given leave to refuse. He was bound—but then he always had been, by bonds of blood and kinship.