For go to war Guiscard and his little band did, so completely had they turned from pilgrims into crusaders. King Amalric had issued an urgent call to arms to all the Franks in order to prevent the Arab general Nur-ad-Din, who had marched into Egypt, from uniting the Moslem world against Christians.
“A great warrior, Nur-ad-Din, and a great bastard. It seemed to us, then, you see, that in joining the King of Jerusalem’s army, we were also joining the King of Heaven’s.”
They marched south.
Until now, Adelia noticed, the man next to her had spoken in detail, building for her white and golden domes, great hospitals, teeming streets, the vastness of the desert. But the account of his crusade itself was sparse. “Sacred madness” was all he had to say, though he added, “There was chivalry on both sides, even so. When Amalric fell ill, Nur-ad-Din ceased fighting until he was better.”
But the Christian army was followed by the dross of Europe. The Pope’s pardon to sinners and criminals as long as they took the cross had released into Outremer men who killed indiscriminately-certain that, whatever they did, they would be welcomed into Jesus’ arms.
“Cattle,” Rowley said of them, “still stinking of the farmyards they came from. They’d escaped servitude; now they wanted land and they wanted riches.”
They’d slaughtered Greeks, Armenians, and Copts of an older Christianity than their own because they thought they were heathens. Jews, Arabs, who were versed in Greek and Roman philosophy and advanced in the mathematics and medicine and astronomy that the Semitic races had given to the West, went down before men who could neither read nor write and saw no reason to.
“Amalric tried to keep them in check,” Rowley said, “but they were always there, like the vultures. You’d come back to your lines to find that they’d slit open the bellies of the captives because they thought Moslems kept their jewels safe by swallowing them. Women, children, it didn’t matter to them. Some of them didn’t join the army at all; they roamed the trade routes in bands, looking for loot. They burned and blinded, and when they were caught, they said they were doing it for their immortal souls. They probably still are.”
He was quiet for a moment. “And our killer was one of them,” he said.
Adelia turned her head quickly to look up at him. “You know him? He was there?”
“I never set eyes on him. But he was there, yes.”
The robin had come back. It fluttered up onto a lavender bush and peered at the two silent people in its territory for a moment before flying off to chase a dunnock out of the garden.
Rowley said, “Do you know what our great crusades are achieving?”
Adelia shook her head. Disenchantment did not belong on his face, but it was there now, making him look older, and she thought that perhaps bitterness had been beneath the jollity all along, like underlying rock.
“I’ll tell you what they’re achieving,” he was saying. “They’re inspiring such a hatred amongst Arabs who used to hate each other that they’re combining the greatest force against Christianity the world has ever seen. It’s called Islam.”
He turned away from her to go into the house. She watched him all the way. Not chubby now-how could she have thought that? Massive.
She heard him calling for ale.
When he came back, he had a tankard in each hand. He held one out to her. “Thirsty work, confession,” he said.
Was that what it was? She took the pot and sipped at it, unable to move her eyes away from him, knowing with a dreadful clarity that whatever sin it was he had to confess, she would absolve him of it.
He stood looking down at her. “I had William Plantagenet’s little sword on my back for four years,” he said. “I wore it under my mail so that it should not be damaged when I fought. I took it into battle, out of it. It scarred my skin so deep that I’m marked with a cross, like the ass that carried Jesus into Jerusalem. The only scar I’m proud of.” He squinted. “Do you want to see it?”
She smiled back at him. “Perhaps not now.”
You are a drab, she told herself, seduced into infatuation by a soldier’s tale. Outremer, bravery, crusade, it is illusory romance. Pull yourself together, woman.
“Later, then,” he said. He sipped his ale and sat down. “Where was I? Oh, yes. By this time we were on our way to Alexandria. We had to prevent Nur-ad-Din from building his ships in the ports along the Egyptian coast; not, mind you, that the Saracens have taken to sea warfare yet-there’s an Arab proverb that it is better to hear the flatulence of camels than the prayers of fishes-but they will one day. So there we were, fighting our way through the Sinai.”
Sand, heat, the wind the Moslems called khamsin scouring the eyeballs. Attacks coming out of nowhere by Scythian mounted archers-“Like damned centaurs they were, loosing arrows at us thick as a locust swarm so that men and horses ended up looking like hedgehogs.” Thirst.
And in the middle of it, Guiscard falling sick, very sick.
“He’d rarely been ill in his life, and he was all at once frightened by his own mortality-he didn’t want to die in a foreign land. ‘Carry me home, Rowley,’ he said, ‘Promise to take me to Anjou.’ So I promised him.”
On behalf of his sick lord, Rowley had knelt to the King of Jerusalem to beg for and be granted leave to return to France. “Truth to tell, I was glad. I was tired of the killing. Is this what the Lord Christ came to earth for? I kept asking myself that. And the thought of the little boy in his tomb waiting for his sword was beginning to trouble my sleep. Even so…”
He drank the last of his ale, then shook his head, tired. “Even so, the guilt when I said good-bye…I felt a traitor. I swear to you, I’d never have left with the war unwon if it hadn’t fallen to me to see Guiscard home.”
No, she thought, you wouldn’t. But why apologize? You are alive, and so are the men you would have killed if you had stayed. Why feel more shame for leaving such a war than pursuing it? Perhaps it is the brute in men-and dear heaven, it is certainly the base brute in me that I thrill to it.
He had begun organizing the journey back. “I knew it wouldn’t be easy,” he said. “We were deep in the White Desert at a place called Baharia, a biggish settlement for an oasis, but if God has ever heard of it, I’ll be surprised. I intended to head back west to strike the Nile and sail up to Alexandria -it was still in friendly hands then-and take passage to Italy from there. But apart from the Scythian cavalry, assassins behind every bloody bush, wells poisoned, there were our own dear Christian outlaws looking for booty-and over the years, Guiscard had acquired so many relics and jewels and samite that we were going to be traveling with a pack train two hundred yards long, just asking to be raided.”
So he’d taken hostages.
Adelia’s tankard jerked in her hand. “You took hostages?”
“Of course I did.” He was irritated. “It’s the accepted thing out there. Not for ransom as we do in the West, you understand. In Outremer, hostages are security.”
They were a guarantee, he said, a contract, a living form of good faith, a promise that an agreement would be kept, part and parcel of the diplomacy and cultural exchange between different races. Frankish princesses as young as four years old were handed over to ensure an alliance between their Christian fathers and Moorish captors. The sons of great sultans lived in Frankish households, sometimes for years, as warranty for their family’s good behavior.
“Hostages save bloodshed,” he said. “They’re a fine idea. Say you’re besieged in a city and want to make terms with the besiegers. Very well, you demand hostages to ensure that the bastards don’t come in raping and killing and that the surrender takes place without reprisals. Then again, suppose you have to pay a ransom but can’t raise all the cash immediately, ergo you offer hostages as collateral for the rest. Hostages are used for just about anything. When Emperor Nicepheros wanted to borrow the services of an Arab poet for his court, he gave hostages to the poet’s caliph, Harun al-Rashid, as surety that the man would be returned in good order. They’re like pawnbrokers’ pledges.”