‘Where am I?’ said a harsh, croaking voice, which hardly I recognised as my own.
‘Shhh, my darling,’ said Nur. ‘Drink, don’t speak. You are in Akka, in the Hospitallers’ quarter, in a dormitory. You have been sick, very sick. But the fever has passed. You are safe now. I am here.’
‘Acre?’ I whispered, and Nur poured a little more water into my mouth. ‘Don’t speak; drink,’ she said. ‘Drink and sleep.’ Her lovely face went away and came back with a clay bowl filled with a bitter liquid. She guided the cool rim to my mouth, supporting my head, which strangely seemed to weight more than a boulder, and I sipped the rank liquid, and with some difficulty swallowed most of it down. The effort exhausted me, and I let my head flop back on to the pillow and dropped into a bottomless hole.
When I awoke again it was grey morning, Nur was gone. I turned my head and looked left and right: I was in a large cool stone chamber, in a bed in a row of similar ones, all but one occupied but sleeping men. At the far end of the row of beds, a large, plain wooden cross was fixed to the wall and below it an old man wearing nothing but a chemise sat upright on his cot; he was skeletally thin and almost totally bald; a mere few whisps of white hair covered his pink scalp. He saw that I was awake and smiled and nodded at me but said nothing. I smiled back and then looked away. My head felt clear: Acre, I thought; in the care of the Knights Hospitaller, a monastic order famed for healing the sick and fighting the paynim in the name of Christ. I was safe.
Shards of memory began to roll and tumble through my head; I remembered Sir Richard Malbete; his feral smirk as he shot me with the crossbow. And I recalled a tossing bunk in the belly of a foul-smelling ship, a great pain in my right arm, and a feeling as if my stomach were on fire; and raving, cursing at Reuben as he tended to my wounds, and trying to strike at him. And I remembered a large tent of white canvas on a windy hilltop, and the cries of wounded and dying men around me mingling with the shrieks of seagulls; and Robin’s eyes, filled with care, staring down at me and saying: ‘Don’t die on me, Alan, that is a direct order.’ And I remembered more pain, and the shame of vomiting and voiding myself uncontrollably — and Nur, always there; my sweet angel caring for me as if I was a baby, and washing my loins and limbs, and trying to feed me, and holding me tight when I thrashed in my fever. And most of all I remembered my beloved weeping for me. And how it made me want to die.
I must have slept again, for when I awoke it was full morning and Little John was standing at the foot of my bed, looking about ten feet tall and as wide as a house, suntanned, bursting with rude health and grinning at me. He was holding up a kite-shaped object; a stout wooden frame around thin, overlapping layers of wooden slats, faced with painted leather, round at the top and tapering to a point at the bottom. It was four and a half feet long, and nearly two foot across at its widest; a familiar image of a black and grey wolf’s head on a white background snarled at me from the front.
‘This,’ said Little John, rapping the object with his knuckles, ‘is a shield. It’s quite old-fashioned, but they built them to last in the old days. You are supposed to carry one of these when you go into battle. How many times do I have to tell you — all your fancy mincing around with sword and poniard is fine in a one-on-one fight, if you like that sort of thing, but in a proper battle you need a shield.’
He began speaking very slowly and loudly to me, as if to a child or an idiot: ‘If you carry a nice big shield, then nasty people won’t find it so easy to shoot you with their nasty crossbows.’ And he thumped the shield down at the foot of my bed. ‘I’ve also brought you another sword, since you seem to have lost yours. God’s greasy armpits, you youngsters, next thing I know, you’ll be fighting stark bollock naked!’
I wanted to laugh, but my stomach was still paining me, so I merely grinned back at him and said: ‘You are one to talk: I’ve seen you rip the shirt from your own back when the battle-fire is burning in you. Anyway, I’m not much good at using a shield… don’t really have your craven skill at hiding from my enemies behind a piece of wood.’
He laughed. ‘Well, that is easily remedied. When you’re on your feet, I will teach you. Somebody has to. It looks like we’ll be here for a few weeks, so you’ll have plenty of time to get strong. But, I swear on Christ’s bones, Alan, if you go into a proper battle again without a shield — I’ll damn well shoot you myself!’ And he turned and stomped out of the dormitory.
The next day, when Nur had fed me some gruel and washed me from head to toe, Robin came to see me. He was holding a bunch of grapes somewhat awkwardly in his hands, and he seemed not to know what to say or what to do with the fruit. Finally he placed them on the small table beside my head, sat down on the bed and said: ‘Reuben says you must eat green fruit. Apparently, it is good for ridding the body of evil humours. Green fruit reduces the amount of bile — or is it phlegm? — it reduces something bad anyway.’
I thanked him for his gift and again there was a slightly uncomfortable pause. I noticed that he looked tired.
‘Well, you seem healthier,’ he said after a while, ‘almost human again, in fact.’ And he smiled, which lifted the lines of worry from his face. I told him that I was feeling much better but terribly weak. ‘Reuben was certain that you would die,’ he said, ‘and I was very worried — worried that I’d have to go to the trouble of finding myself another trouvere.’ He smiled at me again and his silver eyes sparkled with something like their old mischief. ‘Reuben said that mending your wrist was the easy part,’ he continued — and I obligingly flexed my right wrist for him, which was stiff, skinny but mobile and had a fresh purple scar running up the forearm — ‘but the old Jew said the crossbow bolt in the belly would kill you, and when it didn’t, he was convinced that the fever you contracted after that would finish you off. I told Reuben, I told him, that you were made of strong stuff and that I didn’t believe a single raggedy Griffon crossbowman could put you in your grave but…’ he tailed off.
‘It wasn’t a Griffon,’ I said quietly. ‘It was Sir Richard Malbete.’ Robin stared at me for a few moments, his luminous eyes probing mine for the truth.
‘Now that is interesting,’ he said at last. ‘Sir Richard is very much our preux chevalier these days. Since he captured the Emperor’s standard in Cyprus, he has become the golden knight in the King’s eyes; he can do no wrong. So what really happened?’
I told him, and his mouth opened in surprise. ‘That fox-faced shit needs killing, if anybody ever did,’ he muttered when I had finished my tale. ‘But we have a little problem, Alan — nobody is going to believe you if you claim that Sir Richard, the golden knight, that shining example of chivalry, tried to kill you. You’d better keep that to yourself while we work out how to fix the bastard. Don’t go off trying to take him on your own, we’ll do it together. But it’s not going to be easy; he’s with the King a good deal these days, part of his household now…’
I had come to a similar conclusion myself. It would not be simple but, easy or hard, I was also determined to kill Malbete one way or another — for my own personal safety, if for no other reason. Although there were more than enough other reasons to put the Beast down: for Ruth, for the Jews of York, for Nur, and those butchered slave girls in Messina…
We sat in silence for a while. I took a grape; they were delicious: cool, firm and sweet as honey.
‘Robin,’ I said, slightly hesitantly, ‘can you tell me what happened; how we got here, how we took Acre. I don’t even know what month this is.’
He stared at me. ‘Yes, of course, has nobody told you? Well, it’s July; we took Acre a week ago, not without some trouble, but the garrison surrendered in the second week of July, the twelth day of the month, I think.’ He paused and looked at me. ‘I’d better start at the beginning.’ He reached over and tore off a cluster of grapes and popped them in his mouth. When he had finished chewing, he said: ‘We found you, and Ghost, in the dawn after the night battle in the olive grove, and we took you down to the beach where a hospital had been set up. The Emperor took to his heels again in the middle of the battle, which was lucky for us, because if he had rallied his troops they would have crushed us like a man stamping on an ant. But he fled, and we won, and your foxy friend Malbete came out of it looking like a hero, the golden standard in his proud right hand. He presented the standard to the King as a wedding present for his marriage to Berengaria in Limassol, a few days after the battle. He’s a wily bastard, Malbete; it was exactly the right move to make, and the King was delighted.
‘Anyway, we chased the Emperor around the island for a while, but the local barons had turned against him and finally he had to surrender — oh, and you’ll like this,’ he took another grape, ‘the Emperor gave himself up on the strict condition that King Richard would not bind him in iron chains. Richard agreed, and when Isaac Comnenus came in, Richard had silver chains forged and had him bound in those. He’s got a nasty sense of humour, our royal master, very nasty.’ And he laughed with, I believed, just a touch of bitterness.
‘So we had Cyprus, and Richard then set off at last for Outremer, and we ended up here at Acre. The siege was in full swing but going nowhere: the Muslim garrison inside the walls still defied us, and the Christian troops outside were themselves surrounded by Saladin’s forces. Of course, King Richard’s arrival changed all that. He
