The Dagger and the Cross (30 page)

“Which is rather a pity,” Amalric said. “If you were evil
enchanters, you could call up a horde of devils and sweep the enemy away.”

“Why not an army of angels?” asked Guy.

“We’re hardly so well connected,” Aidan said dryly. “Are
you, your excellency? Maybe if you put in a word with the Almighty, Saint
Michael would send a wing or two.”

The bishop signed himself with the cross. Before he could
burst out in rebuke, Gwydion said, “Peace, brother.” And to the council at
large, with great and kingly patience: “We will do what we can. I regret that
it is so little. Your strength will decide the day; ours will but bolster it.
If you will accept it.”

Guy glanced about. Everyone was looking at him, waiting for
him to decide. He shifted nervously. “No spells on any of us. Promise us that.”

Gwydion’s face was quiet, his voice touched with the merest
whisper of stiffness. “None but what you yourselves ask for.”

Guy was still not persuaded, even though he had been the one
to do the asking. “You can fight, too? While you’re doing—that?”

“My brother can,” Gwydion said.

“Then do it,” Guy said all at once, gasping as if he had run
a race. “Do what you can. Help us get out of this trap.”

This trap into which he had led them. Gwydion bowed his head
a fraction and rose to go. No one ventured to stop him.

o0o

Aidan stayed until the council wound down. He found Gwydion
in front of their tent, lying on a pallet, staring sleepless at the stars. He
did not turn when Aidan hunkered down beside him, but said, “They didn’t decide
much.”

“They never do.” Aidan wriggled. He had been in mail for two
nights now; it was past being uncomfortable and into excruciating. Gwydion,
reckless, was down to his shirt and braies. He looked cool and comfortable and
almost clean.

Aidan decided abruptly. He shed his chausses and his coif,
and after a moment the mail-coat and the sweat-sodden gambeson. The air was
heaven on his skin. He wished futilely and desperately for a bath; though if he
had had one he would have drunk it dry. He settled for a scrubbing with a twist
of grass, and the clean shirt and breeches which Aimery, owl-eyed but wide
awake, brought him. The boy stayed when Aidan lay down, crouched by the tent
pole with his chin on his knees. Aidan let him be. He would sleep soon enough.

“If your patience weren’t a legend already,” Aidan said, “tonight
it would be. What kept you from blasting that idiot where he sat?”

“Nothing,” said Gwydion. “That’s why I left. Am I a fool, do
you think? Should I have stayed and given my temper its head?”

“No,” Aidan said after a moment. “No, you were wise, as you
always are. And clear-sighted. There really is a warding on the enemy: I
searched it out while the barons wrangled. It’s subtle. How did you find it?”

“By being a witch,” Gwydion answered. “Hunting for ways to
win us free of this. The sultan is better warded than Guy ever was.”

“Yes,” Aidan said. He was silent for a while. Stretching his
power; touching the edge of a ban, a dome of air and darkness over the armies
of the enemy. Then at last he said it. “I know who it is.”

“So do I.”

Aidan rubbed his hand over his face, tugging viciously at
his beard. “Of course she would be there. I’m here, aren’t I? She was fighting
for Islam before we were even born.”

His eyes blurred. He blinked, furious. He had no water to
spare for tears. “And I didn’t know. I didn’t—even—know.”

Gwydion held him till he finished shaking. It was more shock
than grief. And joy, though that was mad. She was there. Fighting for the
enemy, hating him, but there. Maybe he would die; maybe she would kill him. But
he would see her again.

“God,” Aidan said. “God, God, God.” He pulled out of his
brother’s arms. “I wish we hadn’t gone prowling. Then we’d still be merely
desperate, instead of hopeless.”

“There is hope,” said Gwydion.

“I don’t know if I want any.” Aidan flung back his head. The
stars stared down. He glared back. “Damn her. Damn both of us.”

o0o

Around midnight, as the camp lay in uneasy sleep, the enemy
moved. More sorties; more flights of arrows. None found a target. None was
meant to. For with them came a clamor to wake the dead. Trumpets; kettledrums;
the clatter of the nakers that were the sultan’s alone; the blare of brass and
the shrilling of pipes, and all the hideous tumult of the Saracens’ battle
music. And voices with it, war-cries, shouts and mockery and the ululation of
the faithful:
Allah-il-allah! Allahu akbar!

They swept in upon the camp; they brought the Christians to
their feet, swords in hand, braced for battle. And then abruptly they stopped.
No attack came. The camp subsided slowly, shaking with reaction. Horses needed
to be soothed, men to be bullied back to what rest they could muster.

Just as they settled, it came again. Again they were beaten
out of sleep; again they braced for an assault that never came. Again the enemy
ended it and withdrew.

And so it went, all night long. Aidan’s senses, keen as they
were, were in torment. After the third feint he gave up any hope of sleep and
struggled into his armor again, hating the way it weighed upon him. It did not
stink as a human man’s would; but that was little comfort when everyone about
him, except for Gwydion, was human and filthy and reeking to high heaven.

By the dark before dawn, the Franks were too exhausted even
to stir when the enemy burst shrilling out of the night. Saladin let them be
after that. He had gained what he wanted, which was to add sleeplessness to
thirst and hunger. What little rest they could manage between the end of his
last sortie and sunrise was hardly enough to go to battle on.

When the sun was full up, promising a day as scorchingly hot
as the one before it, the trumpets roused the Franks to choke down what they
could of dry rations, and to arm and break camp. Word went among the
commanders: They would try again for the wells at Hattin.

The army gathered together as well as it might on the broken
ground. The ridge was empty of Saracens. The plain was ringed with them, camped
at their ease in their bright tents, idling about and, no doubt, laughing at
the poor driven sheep of unbelievers.

The trumpets sang the command to march. The army seemed to
take life and strength from the sound and from the prospect of battle, with
water to be won at the end of it. They took the formation which was most deadly
to the enemy: a shield-circle of infantry, bristling with spears, and the
cavalry within, to be flung like a dart when it was most needed. Like one
great, deadly creature, they began to move.

Saladin was waiting for them, a wall of men and horses
athwart the way to the wells. The Franks barely paused. They came on at a
steady pace, step by step.

The clamor that had driven them mad all night, began again
under the sun: a booming of drums, a braying of trumpets, a skirling of pipes.
The great line of Islam began to move. The center held its place with the
sultan in the back of it, settled on an eminence with a canopy over him, ruling
the battle. The wings closed upon the Franks, with a hail of arrows before it
and a thunder of hoofs and the cries of men and horses.

The Franks ground to a halt. Arrows gave way to flung spears
and then to swords, as the Saracens closed in. The infantry dug in their heels,
standing like stones in the millrace of Islam.

The first to reach them was one from the very center: a man
alone, all undefended, in the yellow coat of the sultan’s mamluks. He came
singing, gloriously reft of his senses, emptying his quiver and then flinging
his spears and then, with a clear cry to his God, drawing his sword and falling
on the line. A spear spitted his horse. A Christian sword hewed him down.

His army descended, howling for revenge.

The knights, penned in, broiling slowly in the sun, were
like to go mad with idleness. The Master of the Templars sent again and again
to the king.
A charge,
he begged.
Let us make a charge.
Again and
again the king sent back:
No. Wait. You’ll have your time.

The sun crawled up the sky. The footsoldiers fought against
wave after wave of Saracens. Each broke, poured round the army’s flanks, sought
gaps and hollows, flooded past the rear and then away, back to their sultan on
his hill. A full third of his army, his own picked men, had not fought at all.
They rode their horses up and down, easily, or leaned on their spears, or drank
often and deeply from flasks which were refilled as often as they emptied.

Some of the Franks had hoarded wine from God knew where. It
was potent without water to thin it, and the more so for that they were so dry,
but those who had it were stronger than those who did not.

Horses could not drink wine. Aidan feared for his mounts:
the grey that carried him on the march, the bay that was his battle charger,
the remounts in their herd with the others under the heaviest guard. He held
the grey’s bridle himself, waiting out the battle, while Aimery stood with the
bay. Both were livelier than some: they nosed at the sere brown grass, and
nibbled at it without pleasure.

His men were in good order. None of his foot had gone down,
though there were wounds. Gwydion tended those under a tent made of spears and
someone’s cloak. The field surgeon, passing by, had taken a long look at the
king’s ministrations, crossed himself, and gone away muttering. Men who came
under the Elvenking’s hand did not come away simply dosed or bandaged. They
came away healed, able to fight unless the wound had been very bad, and then
all they needed was sleep and—worse—water. Gwydion had a skin of wine for
those, which he was rationing out as tenderly as if it had been the elixir of
life.

Someone tried to steal it. Once. Gwydion looked at him.
Simply looked. He fled empty-handed.

Aidan glanced back. Aimery’s face was white under the dirt,
but he was steady. This was his first battle. He shied a little when a stray
arrow went over; more than that, he did not do. Aidan smiled at him. His
answering smile was more a grimace, but brave enough.

There was little enough to smile at. The infantry, driven
mad with thirst and beaten down by wave on wave of fighting, broke at last and
ran. The cavalry stood alone, stripped bare. Knights and mounted sergeants
scrambled together, snatching horses, goaded by drum and trumpet.
Form
ranks. Hold the line.

It was meant for the foot as for the horse; but the foot had
reached their limit. They would die if they had no water. Water was before
them, a whole blue sea of it. They clumped together at the run, heedless of
rank or file, scrambling and struggling up one of the Horns of Hattin.

The king’s trumpets bellowed at them, commanding them to
come back, form ranks, defend the horsemen. There on the hill, ringed in
Saracens, they threw down their weapons and would not fight.

Still the king would not allow a charge. The lion of battle
was become a hedgehog, a tight, bristling circle. Aidan worked his way to the
outside of it, though the knights were bidden to hold back, to let the
Turcopoles and the light horsemen defend them as the infantry had refused to
do. He had had enough of waiting. His foot-soldiers had held, but they were
pitifully few; he ordered them back to guard the remounts. They went none too
reluctantly, but keeping their heads up, for they were no cowards and now the
world knew it.

Aidan’s mamluks, set on guard where the foot-soldiers had
been, were hardly delighted to spend their arrows from a standstill, but it was
better than nothing. At Aidan’s command they took turn and turn about: one of a
pair on guard with lance couched against the onrush of the enemy, the other
sending forth a volley of arrows; then the lancer would reach for his bow and
the archer lower his lance, and so they spelled one another, sparing their
strength as best they could.

The sun touched the summit of noon. The enemy stopped, every
man of them, and drew back, and bowed to pray. The latest of Ridefort’s
messengers went past, looking heartily sick of his round. Even before he
reached the king’s banner where it was set in the center, a trumpet rang.

Raymond already had his command. He had not passed it to the
Rhiyanans, or to the lord of Millefleurs. Even without them he had tenscore
knights, and among them Balian of Ibelin and Reynaud Prince of Sidon, who
shared his name if not his spirit with the lord of Kerak. They were ahorse
already, straining at the leash. The trumpet’s note had hardly begun when they
moved. The infantry who guarded the van folded back with an audible sigh. The
knights sent up a shout. “Holy Sepulcher!”

The charge was always slow at first, as the horses found
their feet, as the men fell into place, as the sheer weight of them transmuted
from hindrance into unstoppable force. The enemy knotted and tangled before
them, scrambling up from prayer, snatching at bridles, sweeping out swords.
Their commander’s banner was one which Aidan knew well: a pair of trousers,
gold on white. It was nothing to smile at. Taqi al-Din, brother’s son to
Saladin, was a great lord of Islam, a king indeed, and high in the sultan’s
counsels. His troops were mamluks of his royal uncle, nigh a thousand strong
under yellow banners, and for each company its own pennant: scarlet, blue,
green, black, white, russet.

Proud though they were in their golden coats, they folded
back before the power of the charge. But they took toll with their archery, and
it was high. Aidan saw knight after knight go down, killed or taken.

Raymond, under the banner of Galilee, broke free. A bare
handful of men rode with him.

He reined in his horse. There was no telling his expression
behind coif and helmet; no reading his mind through the wards that were on the
infidels.