The Road to Damietta (21 page)

"He wanders about, preaching, tending the sick. You never know. He's sort of a clown, but most of the men like him and the women love him. Myself, I think he's crazy, but not so crazy as my husband. Did you ever eat any of the bread he bakes? Yes? Well, the loaves with seeds in them, the caraway seeds—when he ran out of caraway he put mouse droppings in the dough. And he did other crazy things, too."

I remembered that her last name was Ubaldo and that everyone thought both the Ubaldos were strange. "You must be happy; you're in Africa now, far away from Alberto."

"Not far enough," she said. "We're having stewed lamb for supper. One of the young nobles—he's from Nimes in France—he and his men captured a flock of sheep this morning on the other side of the river. They're Moslem sheep so I don't know how they'll taste."

She reached into the iron pot and forked out a steaming morsel. "Try it and tell me what you think."

The morsel was scalding hot, but having eaten little for days, I swallowed it.

"Can you taste Moslem?" she asked me.

"It's delicious, signora."

"Good. I tasted it myself and wasn't so sure."

She stepped back to get a better view of me. "How long have you been here?"

"Since noon today, and I'd like work."

"Have you tended table? By the look of your hands I should say you've never done much of anything. I have three helpers, but I can use another."

There were more than thirty thousand crusaders ranged before the walls of Damietta, she told me, all of them cooking for themselves.

"I only cook for the nobles," she explained. "Knights and priests and such. But there are near two hundred of them, counting our friend Bernardone, who shouldn't be counted because he eats like a sparrow.

"You never know what he'll eat. Usually something we haven't got. Last night he wanted an egg. Nothing else. Just an egg cooked for a long time. What kind of egg? Chicken, duck, crocodile—it didn't matter. We gave him what we had, a seagull egg. Don't let him bother you. Serve him the lamb stew and tell him he's lucky that it isn't horse, which I understand is highly prized among the Moslems. But don't wait upon him if you'd rather not."

She put me to work peeling a sackful of withered turnips. When I was through there was another sackful to peel. The long tables were filled, as I finished, with hungry men—marquises, dukes, counts, bishops, princes, Templars, and Hospitallers—so she gave me a great iron bowl of soup.

Dizzy from the heat, I stopped at the first table I came to and ladled it out. Moving along from place to place, I glanced about for Francis Bernardone. 1 searched everywhere in the tent, taking my time. He was not in sight, but at the head of the table I was serving 1 caught a glimpse of a man whose face was familiar.

I served two more crusaders and glanced again. He now was talking to a companion, his domed head turned in profile, his hawkish nose thrust out. I could be mistaken. Then I remembered Raul had told me that Pelagius was no longer a bishop but a cardinal-legate, that he had been sent to Damietta to speak for the pope himself.

Pelagius in Damietta, at my table, gave me a start. I did not wish to talk to him, to listen to the lecture I would receive, for
he would surely know why I was here. I started for the kitchen, hoping to find someone to take my place.

I took one hurried step. My name sounded above all the clamoring voices. I thought of fleeing, pretending that I hadn't heard, but my name sounded again and a serving woman grasped my arm and pointed at the head of the table where Pelagius sat, waving his big eating spoon at me.

I walked slowly, and when I reached him he let me stand for a moment or two while he finished saying something to his companions. When at last he decided to speak to me, it was in a hearty tone, but in his eyes, which sometimes looked gray and sometimes green but always cold, lurked a glint of anger.

"How pleasing it is to have you with us in Damietta," he said, "heeding the pope's call for help against the infidel dogs. How courageous of you! How proud your father, my dear friend Davino di Montanaro, must feel!"

He knew that I had not come at the pope's call; he knew it well. His companion, a handsome youth in a steel cuirass, which was fast roasting him to death, rose to offer me his seat.

"Thanks be," I said, "but there are hungry warriors waiting for food."

"How thoughtful," Cardinal Pelagius remarked, fixing his gaze upon my shaking hands. "How noble of you!"

I made a small curtsy and was backing away as a man in full armor brushed me aside and spoke to the cardinal.

"Commander," he said, near speechless from excitement, "the infidels are preparing a machine to launch against us. A towering geremite. They are working at it now."

The cardinal, munching on a piece of Signora Ubaldo's tough bread, put it back on the table.

"What is your pleasure?" the messenger asked. "Shall we attack or wait until the machine is launched? Kindly give me orders, Captain Pelagius. My men are waiting on the river. On both sides of the Nile."

Captain Pelagius!
My knees shook at the name. Cardinal Pelagius, Pope Innocents legate, was now a captain, the high commander ot the Fifth Crusade, giving orders to an army of thirty thousand men and women.

"How near finished is the geremite?" Pelagius asked.

"They could launch her in a week," the messenger said.

"Then we'll wait. Let the dogs put everything they have into the machine. Stack it high as the city walls. We'll attack the moment she's launched. Keep watch."

The messenger sped off with the orders.

"What do you have there?" Pelagius asked, eyeing the bowl I held in my arms.

"Soup," I said.

"Looks watery."

"It
is
watery."

"At your mother's table, thick soup was served, as I recall.
Vegetables freshly gathered, larded with pork. What do you have in the kitchen?"

"Lamb."

"Stringy, this Egyptian lamb, and ill-flavored, but I'll try some of it, well roasted."

In the kitchen I repeated his orders and comments to Signora Ubaldo.

She shrugged. "I can't be blamed. I can only cook what I'm given to cook. If it's stringy Moslem lamb, then that's what he eats."

She carved off a double portion of the meat and set it on a platter. "The captain eats for two," she explained. "Sometimes four, it seems."

I was still shaking. My impulse was to flee. But where to? Cardinal-Legate Pelagius, friend of Pope Innocent, captain of the crusade, had the power to place me under lock and key, to send me back to Assisi.

Fearfully I picked up the food and, trying to smile, went in to serve him. He didn't look up as I set the plate before him, but he cut a piece of the lamb, tasted it, and nodded to show his approval.

"What do you intend to do while you're here in Egypt?" he asked. "Some of the women are in the army, half a thousand or more, dressed in full armor and carrying weapons. From what I have seen of them in a skirmish or two, they equal the men
in bravery, if not in the skills of warfare. But you come unequipped."

"I can work as a translator," I answered. "As you know, Arabic is familiar to me. I've spoken it since I was seven and written it since I was ten. I could help when you talk to the Moslems."

"I never talk to the Moslems, but if I do talk it will be in Latin. If they don't understand Latin, then all the worse for them."

As if I weren't there, he placed his bowl to one side and set his knife and spoon and his companion's knife and spoon behind and in front of the bowl. I gathered from what he said to the young man that the bowl represented the city of Damietta and the rows of utensils the Christian army.

I curtsied and left, but as I made my way to the kitchen I felt his eyes fixed upon me.

That night I slept in the tent, as far from the kitchen fires
as possible, for the night had not cooled much after the terrible heat of the day. I would have slept outside under the stars, save for the stream of carousing men that poured past the tent until the eastern sky was aglow.

Up early, I started the fires to show the signora that I was not helpless, chiefly to be ready when Francis arrived. What would he ask for? An egg? A small piece of fish? A morsel of the leftover lamb? Whatever it was, I would prepare it myself and stand over him to see that he ate it.

He didn't come to breakfast. No one came to breakfast.

At dawn, as the first light crossed the river, watchmen saw that moving down the Nile from Damietta were four great geremites, floats piled high with wood, straw, and brushwood mixed with tar. When they approached our ships, which were moored side by side from one bank of the Nile to the other,
forming a solid wall between the city and the sea, the floats were set afire.

Watchmen had given the alarm with a call of trumpets. At once, Cardinal Pelagius had ordered everyone to make ready for an attack. A guard came for me and the rest of the women in the tent. All the women who were not in armor and prepared to fight were rounded up and hustled off to a quarry, where they were set to work gathering stones for the catapults.

Smoke trailed through the quarry all that day, hiding the river. There were no sounds of fighting and we saw no fires until night came and the sky was lit with a sickly glow. I heard nothing of Francis Bernardone.

The battle ended that night with five of our ships having been burned to the water. The infidel Moslems were repelled, but angered by the loss, Pelagius had a full two dozen prisoners decapitated at dawn and the severed heads flung over the walls by catapult into the streets of Damietta.

But that night, late, three infidel spies were captured while attempting to ford the river. Jugs of the mysterious Greek fire and homing pigeons with secret papers tied to their legs, ready to fly, were found in their possessions. Enraged, the cardinal had the spies' arms and noses cut off, as well as their ears and lips. One of each spy's eyes was also gouged out. These bloody ghosts were then put on display near the Moslem walls so all their infidel friends might see them and take heed.

Breakfast was a sullen affair of threats and anger. I had given up all hope of seeing Francis that day when he appeared, delivered a short prayer thanking God that none of our crusaders had been killed in the foray, and sat down to eat.

"What would you like?" I asked him.

His eyes were closed, and after he opened them his lips were still moving in prayer. I repeated the question; only then did he recognize me.

"A piece of the barley cake Signora Ubaldo has baked," he said. "I have always liked her wares. That and a small cup of water, if you have it."

I brought Signora Ubaldo's barley cake and a small cup of water taken from the Nile and set them down in front of him. My hand was steadier than I thought it would be.

"I note a blister on your thumb," he said, "and in your eye a little of the fear that danger brings. You failed to take my advice."

"You're anxious to give me more advice, I can tell."

"Not anxious. Not even tempted. Girls of your age, I am slow to learn, do not make mistakes. They come to us full-blown, nymphs from the founts of heaven, shedding not foam but wisdom. Sister Clare is a precious exception."

Clare again. Now she was a precious exception.

I bit my tongue and asked if he liked the barley cake, which he was munching absent-mindedly. He didn't answer; he drank the cup of brackish water from the Nile as if it were wine and
asked for another barley cake. When I brought two instead, he had left the table and was standing in front of the tent, gazing off toward the city of Damietta.

"I never pictured such a magical city," he said, "such a fairyland of spires and minarets. Little wonder that the sultan thinks of it as the most beautiful gem among all the gems of Egypt. It's a wonder to me how all this beauty could be created by people—and there are a hundred thousand of them behind those walls, it is said, misguided souls who worship at the feet of a false prophet. I wish that I could gather them all and explain how in the twinkling of an eye they could save themselves from damnation."

Eagerly, after a sudden thought, he began his little dance, his eyes upon the city whose streets were hidden by high gray walls but whose minarets and domes caught the morning sun.

"The sultan's word is law," I said, "or so I am told. Wouldn't it be better first to save him, then let him save his people?"

"The sultan's not in Damietta. He's in a pavilion leagues away to the south, somewhere near the banks of the Nile."

"And therefore easier to reach than if he were in Damietta, considering that Cardinal Pelagius has been trying for months to breach its walls."

I still had the barley cakes in my hand. He took them and fed the crumbs to a long-legged bird, which he addressed by an Egyptian name he had conjured up, that had wandered up from the river.

While he was talking to the bird, trumpeters rode by, announcing that the infidels had mutilated two crusaders they had taken prisoner weeks ago and thrown the severed parts over the walls into our encampment. Further enraged, Cardinal Pelagius had ordered that everyone halt whatever he was doing and prepare for an assault upon the city.

"If you do talk with him," I said, "remember, sir, that I speak the Arabic language and can translate anything you wish. If you talk in your Assisi dialect and the sultan understands Italian, he'll think you're making fun of him. He'll have your head cut off."

"I'll try to remember. I value my head but not nearly so much as my heart. But I'll remember."

"You always speak with your heart and not with your head," I told him, aware of my own heart beating. I left him with his face turned toward the city of a hundred minarets.

At dusk, messengers rode through the encampment and made known to all that Cardinal Pelagius had decided to attack Damietta within that week. He announced the attack at supper.

With a hand on the golden hilt of his sword, he addressed the captains, prelates, knights, and nobles, his voice trembling in rage, shouting when he spoke of Moslem brutalities, cooing like a dove as he related how much he had done peacefully to make the enemy relinquish the Holy Sepulcher, which was not rightfully theirs. As he spoke he was often so overcome with emotion that tears ran down his cheeks. At the end he issued six grave warnings: