Behold the Dawn (9 page)

It had been years since he had fought shoulder to shoulder with other knights in a legitimate battle. Some part of him sang with joy in expectation, even while another part, somewhere deep within him, was louder yet with its grim silence. This battle would not be a pleasant one. The Mohammedans would fight and die with a fierce vengeance despite the inevitable weakening of a two-year siege.

“You know,” Marek said, “now would be a good time to be changing your mind about taking that Crusading oath.”

Annan shook his head. Marek had been told all there was to say on the subject. Long before the war could reach an end, he and the lad would be gone from here. Even were absolution possible through this Holy War, breaking the oath would do little to increase their chances of receiving it.

God’s Own Sling rebounded in the distance, and the crash that followed thundered louder than all that had come before. Stones tumbled to the ground, opening great spaces in the wall. On the ramparts, dark specks of men dashed to steadier footing, shouting to one another in their heathen tongue.

“They’re almost through,” someone said.

Annan straightened up, pushing his shoulders back to their full breadth, feeling the links of mail smoothing into place over his chest. The silence in the camp, save for the clatter and crash of the catapults, droned in his ears. He lifted his tongue to the roof of his mouth, allowing saliva to well in the dry crevices.

He had battled so many times in his life. And yet his sword arm still quivered with expectancy, his nostrils flared in impatience, his shoulders ached with restrained eagerness.

As the catapults hammered on, he lifted his helm and settled it onto his head, narrowing his vision to slits of light. His breath echoed against the iron faceplate and came back warm against his mouth.

At the behest of a last gift from Evil Neighbor, the wall tottered and fell, crumbling into a cloud of dust and disintegrating into nothing. For one long moment, there was silence. No one moved, no one breathed.

Somewhere in the rear, a horse jangled its bit.

And then, as if that were a signal, all of Christendom bellowed the call to battle.

“St. George! St. Denis! For the Holy Sepulcher!
Dieu veut ça!
”

As one, they surged forward, men-at-arms at the fore, footmen following, and, somewhere in the rear, the siege tower trundling after them all.

From the breach in the wall, the men of Acre poured forth, blades lofted above their gaunt bodies. The pounding of hooves and running feet destroyed the mere length of a bowshot that had separated the ragged defenders from the might of the West. The two lines smashed into each other, faltered, then continued on, mingling beyond any distinction save
livery
and accent.

Annan lost all sense of time and place. In the mad joy of it all, he forgot Marek, struggling somewhere behind him. He forgot he did not belong here among the holy armies. He forgot the clank of the Templar’s gold, delivered only that morning and rattling in his purse even now.

All that had happened last night vanished amid the storm. What did it matter now? Perhaps this would be his final battle. And then there would be no more question of Father Roderic or the Baptist or St. Dunstan’s.

He rode straight in his saddle, the strength of his arm pounding onto the upraised swords of his opponents. They fought with ferocity, with courage, but they could not match the strength of the mounted knights. Ahead, through the dust of the fallen wall, he could already see the hazy outline of the opening. The Crusaders would be through shortly, and the slaughter would begin.

Then, from behind, came a sound he should not have heard: the renewed clangor of arms against arms, the confused cries of French and English soldiers, and the cheers of the Moslems.

With one swing of his arm, he struck the sword from the hand of his nearest adversary and spun his destrier around. To the far west of the engagement, a dark mass of enemy cavalry converged on the hapless ranks of French footmen. Saladin, still entrenched beyond the Christian lines, had sent reinforcements. It looked to be a mere skirmishing party, but its mounted archers swept through the startled Christian ranks.

Annan gritted his teeth within the confining heat of his helm and laid his spurs into his horse’s sides. With a grunt, the animal lunged, galloping through the tangled conflict, headed for the infidel horsemen.

“Annan!” Marek’s voice, choked with dust and muffled by exertion, barely floated above the tumult. But Annan recognized its urgency.

He yanked his horse back around, toppling two bloodied Moslems and impaling a third. Arrows spattered into the ground all around him and clanked against the horses’ mail-draped haunches. He gritted his teeth and shifted his head back and forth, trying to see enough through his narrowed line of vision to decipher the swirling patterns amidst the dust and struggling bodies.

Some dozen paces nearer the city, the faceted edges of Marek’s
mace
flashed against the swords of the Moslems surrounding his palfrey. One of the Mohammedans rolled under Marek’s horse, knife in hand, and raised it to the animal’s belly.

Another volley of arrows hit the ground, sounding like giant raindrops against a sod roof, and Annan’s destrier shuddered, its hind end nearly dropping out from under him. Annan spurred it again. He could waste no time to check for the arrow that had no doubt found its mark in the horse’s hindquarters.

Stumbling forward next to Marek, he laid out two of the attackers with one sweep of his sword and thrust the blade into the man on the ground before he could disembowel the horse.

“I thought I told you to follow me!” Without waiting for an answer, he twisted around to jerk the arrow, imbedded some six inches, from his destrier’s croup.

“They’re cutting through the French like barley at harvest!”

“I know it!” He cast aside the arrow and spun around, searching through the dust for the dark ranks of Moslem horsemen. What had, only moments before, been the last blows before victory was quickly degenerating into a desperate brawl. The western ranks would be lucky to escape with their lives.

Saladin’s forces galloped through the faltering troops, clinging to the backs of their war mares, guiding them with their knees alone, and wielding their blades with a dexterity unknown among the heavier Western fighters. Behind them, riding in a fluid line, came the archers. They had found the range.

Just ahead of Annan, a knot of English footmen, locked in battle with the defenders of Acre, fell beneath the rain of wood and iron.

Annan lifted his buckler to shield his left breast and sent his mount lunging into their midst. He threw himself into the fray, knowing from the way his destrier stumbled that he would have little time to reach safety before he was left dangerously afoot.

An arrow struck him, piercing through his mail shirt as only an awl-tipped
bodkin
could, grinding past flesh and bone. His left shoulder exploded in white-hot pain, and he choked as his breath caught deep in his chest. He squinted against the black fog that threatened to blind him, and his fingers instinctively sought the arrow.

The clash of battle faded in his ears, the thrashing bodies of the footmen grew dim. He rasped, and bile grated in the back of his throat. Pain washed over him again, turning his vision to white light and burning him with the heat of his own wet blood.

“Annan!”

From the corner of his helmet’s eye slit, he saw the approach of a dark enemy shadow, and he raised his sword to meet its blade.

“Annan, beneath you!”

Too late, he realized the intent of Marek’s cry. As a Moslem blade found its mark in the destrier’s bowels, Annan was thrown free of the thrashing animal. He smashed onto his wounded shoulder, and the back of his helm hammered into the ground. He tried to reach his sword, to quell the wave of Moslems breaking past him, but he found he could not lift his arm.

The world began to fade. He blew out a long, aching breath... and accepted the cool nothingness of darkness.

Chapter VI

ALL DAY SHE had stood near the boundary of the prisoner camp, watching the dust of the distant battle beneath Acre’s walls, listening to the muted cries of the combatants.

But now it was growing too dark to see, and as Lady Mairead drifted back toward the tent that had been set apart for her husband, William of Keaton, she watched the Mohammedans usher their latest prisoners through the cordon of guards.

They had brought back only a few today. In the long, sultry weeks since the capture of Lord William’s ship by the infidel blockade, Mairead had watched countless prisoners dragged or shoved into the camp. Thousands of people were confined here already: men, women, and children—mostly
Frankish Syrians
, the European natives of Jerusalem. By the count of one of Lord William’s servants, Saladin had 2,500 prisoners in this camp alone.

Holding the folds of her shawl to her breast with one hand, she crossed the dust of the camp to where the Moslems had dumped their score of prisoners in the midst of the growing crowd.

A Frank stepped aside and allowed her to stand at his shoulder. “If that is the extent of their prisoners, God be praised. The Christians will take Acre.”

“It is already taken,” said another. “You can hear that the battle is over.”

She scanned the bloodied faces. Most were French, most were wounded. The Turks threw the last of them into the group, then shouldered their way back through the crowd, shouting to one another in their own tongue. Immediately, the prisoners began their call for water.

Mairead sighed. It was always thus.

Pulling her linen shawl free, she went forward to bind the arm of a man—an archer by his livery—who held his hand to a shoulder wound. His arm was red down to his fingertips, and he swayed where he stood. His face had the blanched look of one who was slowly bleeding to death.

He stared ahead, unseeing, as she knotted the shawl over the wound. “God be with you.” She placed a hand on his grimy cheek, then moved aside to allow a Knight Hospitaler to take over.

She stood still, one hand trying to hold her long dark hair from her face, watching as the prisoners ministered to the wounded among the new captives. So many wounded, so many dying. The priests decreed that a Crusader’s death was only the unhindered passage of a redeemed soul into blessed Paradise and should be cause for rejoicing. But all she could see were the falling tears of faraway loved ones and the contorting pains of those who had not yet made it quite across Death’s threshold.

She did not often come to this part of the camp. Lord William, grievously wounded during their capture, preferred her to remain with him, sequestered from the heat and the throngs of strangers. Whenever the infidels brought forth their prisoners, she always watched from afar as other women tended their wounds.

But she had ached to be here, to staunch the endless flow of blood, to hold in her lap the head of a soldier whose wounds she might heal, unlike those of Lord William, who the monks whispered would never recover.

She drew in a deep breath, biting her lip to forestall the tears, and turned away. She had come to the Holy Land to escape her fears. But she should have known better. They had followed her here. They would always follow her.

She started forward, but trudged only a few paces before the sight of another knight arrested her. He lay on his back in the trampled sand, while two brethren of the Hospital struggled to remove his blood-crusted armor.

He was a giant of a man, easily head and shoulders above most in the camp, and the breadth and depth of his chest and arms bespoke a terrible strength. He had a strong, square chin, barely cleft, and a set to his mouth, even in sleep, that revealed an iron will. A white scar rived his right cheekbone and disappeared into the fair hair above his ear.

The blood-blackened hole in the mail above his left breast showed what it had taken to bring him down. The bodkin that had inflicted the wound was gone, pulled from his flesh by his Moslem captor or perhaps by his own hand. His face was pale, his breathing shallow, his body still.

She drew nearer and stopped at his feet. “He lives?”

The Knights Hospitalers turned to look at her. The one on the left inclined his head. “He lives, Lady.” His accent was unfamiliar, possibly from the southern regions of France.

The other, undoubtedly English, laid a knife to the knight’s tunic and slit it up the middle. “For now, he lives. He’s lost much blood.”

“That is why he sleeps?”

“Aye.”

“He is English?”

“I know not. His surcoat bears no symbol, not even a cross.”

She watched their ministrations in silence, feeling once more the bitter cold of anguish rise in the pit of her stomach. They tended so many! Why could they not save Lord William?

As the moon rose full and bright against the murky sky, she knelt and reached out her arms to the Hospitalers. “Please—let me help.”

In the days following the rout of Acre, Roderic slept but little. Between his own gnawing fears and King Richard’s growing impatience with Saladin’s lack of haste in acquiring the ransom money demanded for the prisoners of Acre, Roderic’s hours of rest were precious few.

He stood in the anteroom of the king’s tent and glowered at his lieutenants. “If Richard wants to slaughter the prisoners, that is his affair. I care not, so long as it gains us Jerusalem the faster.”

“My lord bishop,” Brother Warin ground out, eyes sparking, “the king is under oath to deliver the prisoners in clear exchange for those of Saladin. Whether this delay in the gold payment is a deliberate tactic on the part of the Saracens or not, we are still Christian knights. How can we support this in good faith?”

Lord Hugh spat. “You argue that infidels deserve to live?”

“I argue only that we do not condemn our souls by breaking the treaty!”

Roderic waved an impatient hand. “We shall all be absolved.”

“
If
we take Jerusalem,” Warin said. “The armies are weak, the leaders are feuding. King Philip is returning to France.”