The Days of Miracles and Wonders
An Epic of the New World Disorder.
Somerville House, Toronto, Canada; Canongate, Edinburgh, U.K. 1997
Canongate paperback 1998. Interlink Books USA, 1999 (paperback).
Some comments on military strategy: It is imperative,
when marchingone's army in hostile territory, to deploy the proper
defensive configu-ration. I arranged the troops in three main divisions,
the entire host hugging the coastline, with the sea and our fleet protecting
that right flank. One part of the foot soldiers marched between our
mounted knights and the sea, keeping them fresh to reinforce the second
section, marching between ourselves and the hinterland, which was swarming
with the Saracen horsemen. The essential strategy to keep close order
and avoid provocative assaults by the Moslems from breaking up our
phalanx. The Turcoman horse-men, lightly clad and mobile, harassed
us, charge after charge, shooting off their bows at close quarters,
though our soldiers' chain mail prevented casualties, so that we often
remarked the somewhat humorous look of our footmen bristling with arrows
like so many hedgehogs, but still keeping the discipline of the march.
Nevertheless, the ferocity of the attacks forced us to peel off sections
both of foot and horse to press the Turcomans back to their camps.
At the end of the day we had to stop and fight them, at Arsuf, where
Saladin deployed a vast army on the plain coming out of the pine and
cypress forest. I knew this battle would be decisive, so placed the
Templars and Hospitallers, our most seasoned knights, in the vanguard
and the rear. In the main force, the knights of King Guy of Lusignan,
and my own men of Breton and Anjou, bearing the dragon standard. The
Turcomans charged towards us, their banners and flags flying, but we
held firm, revealing the iron determination of our knights to overcome
impetuousness and impulse. Then, as stout hearts and rising blood decreed,
two knights of the Hospital broke forth, and I, seizing the time, hastened
to call up the charge: The Frankish knights, armoured upon their fortified
steeds, the banners, the pennons, the crash of our onslaught, the turf
flying beneath the horses' hooves, the massed lances... Our cavalry
charge, calculated and withdrawn untill the right moment, sweeping
all opposition before us, on that day of glory...
Dust, ashes and burnt earth. Only memory survives. We took Jaffa, whose walls
Saladin had destroyed in his retreat, lingering there, among the orchards and
gardens, pomegranates and persimmons, as the summer heat gave way to autumn.
I had decreed, as I had since setting out on this mission, that the only female
personnel to accompany the expedition would be the washerwomen and cooks. But
men's appetites are ever eager. Down from Acre and Tyre came the women, a ravening
horde of harlotry and lasciviousness, sapping the men's strength and will. I,
too, could not make my lizard rest. It darted and played, in the enchanted caves.
I was enraptured, and enticed, too, by the miracles and wonders of the Orient,
the gateways of Faith, the seven pillars of Wisdom, the visions and revelations
of the Saints: The Holy Lance in the dreams of Peter Bartholomew, the sacred
places of the prophets and seers, the holy footsteps of Christ, the divinity
and the numenon, which resound far beyond the limited canons of the church. The
foundations of mystery, the gnosis that awaits the pure in blood and heart...
Now my heart is in a jar in Rouen and my entrails, too, gone, so that the cafe
food and beverage sloshes uselessly about my empty stomach. Jaffa.The town in
which Saint Peter had his vision of tolerance of the uncircum-cized: And I saw
a certain vessel descend, as it had been a great sheet, let down from heaven
by four corners, upon the which, when I had fastened mine eyes, I saw four footed
beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowl of the air.
And God commanded Peter to slay and eat these creatures, which were forbidden
by the Hebrew Law, for God said: What God hath cleansed, thou canst not call
unclean. For it is God, and not Man, who is the true Law, and those to whom He
speaks, are true.
And from Jaffa Jonah took ship, to flee from the presence of the Lord. But the
Lord would not release Jonah, from the embrace of His commands.
I sent away the impure women. I ceased my banter with the infidel Sultan, my
offers of cease fires and alliances, my pleas of the impove-rishment of the country
by the pestilence of wars. Peasants dispossessed, women widowed, children orphaned,
fields laid waste. Inflation, devalua-tion and ruin. One weeps, but one cannot
abandon the True Path. The mystery and glory of Jerusalem, a Lady of the Lake
that could not be ignored. I marched on, from Jaffa towards the Holy City. Choirs
of angels led me on my way. Rays of sun, beaming from the heavens through the
scudding dark clouds bathed our heads in balls of light. But a premature winter
bogged us down, slowing our advance, so that we seemed to move sluggishly through
an ocean of mud. The Turcomans continued to harass us, but I sallied forth on
my patrols, never failing to bring back at least two or three heads to show our
enemies were bleeding. Nevertheless, the army council decided to withdraw, before
the storms of hail, sleet and torrential rain that slowed our advance to a crawl.
I turned back, the angels shrieking in my head, whether lamenting or laughing
I could not make up my mind.
Jaffa, Ascalon, Acre... Our quest bogged down in petty, mundane cares and squabbles...
Provisioning, defence against disease, politics. I ached again to speak with
my opponent. Saladin, Sultan of Egypt and the Levant, the warrior of another,
fearsome God... Who were these people, who laid down their lives as nobly and
joyfully as any warrior of the Cross for their faith and their commander? I had
the burden of our own "nobility", the squabbling Lords of Outremer:
A choice to be made between two Kings - Guy of Lusignan or Conrad of Montferrat,
the gallant loser or the fickle success. As men do, we chose the latter, only
to find him struck down by assassins ten days later. Two men, in monks' habits,
fellon him as he rode to dinner. They stabbed him and he escaped into a church,
where they stabbed him again. Immediately they were caught and questioned, confessing
that they were servants of the Old Man of the Mountain, Sheikh Sinan, sent from
his far northern fortress at Masyaf...
No end to intrigue, in that country. We tore those men's skins from their bones.
But they confessed happily, for they were assured of Paradise by their sinister
lord. Imbibing a potent brew, they were shown images of enchanted gardens in
which they would spend eternity when they fell in the service of their master.
They were feared by everyone in the East, for they regarded Saladin himself as
an infidel, and he slept for years in a wooden cage guarded by his most trusted
lieutenants, and even they, some tales told later, could not be vouched for,
in the end...
I was enmeshed in rumours. Since I had favoured Guy, some dared accuse me behind
my back of Conrad's murder. I had to dispel the mists of confusion decisively
and quickly. We gave the crown to Henry of Champagne, marrying him to Conrad's
widow, Isabella, a lady happy to be shot of her grim spouse. Councils, politicians,
monks' poisonous whispers. Throughout the world, they foul the air. But in May
I was on the march again, taking the war south, to Darum. Nevertheless, messages
from Europe, telling of the treacherous antics of my brother, John... Now who
would want a king's crown?
I had just one more chance to execute my holy oath... Up we marched, in June
sunshine, from Ascalon towards the Holy Grail. Again, the choirs of angels. We
reached Beit Nuba in five days. But I could wait no longer. I rode, with my best
Lieutenants, William of Barres and Mercadier, to the top of the hill of Montjoie,
which looked out across the Valley of Aijalon, through the parting of the trees,
over the brown, parched hills, to the walls and turrets which shone and glinted
on the horizon...
Jerusalem! I thrust my shield up before my face, for I did not wish to look upon
the City of my dreams unconquered. But the light burned, through my shield, and
I cried out, as fire seared through my skull, and my companions had to support
me as I dropped to my knees. I had seen, in that moment, the glowing, incandescent
spark of what might otherwise have been. The numenon, flaring in a world beyond
our fears and desires. The burning bush, that cannot be consumed. But, like Moses,
I was not to be allowed into my Promised Land. I would return, across the mountains
and oceans, to a life of ordinary tribulations and travails. Captivity in my
own exile, my purgatory, released after a year to the grind of small battles
in my own lush, gentle lands... The mundane birthright, untilChalus-Chabrol,
the crossbowman's dart...
No heart, no guts, no staying power.
The slow trudge back to Acre, in parched summer to the coast. The merciless sun
of that country that gives no quarter to the weak. The troops, laden down with
their baggage, armaments and disappointment at this second withdrawal from the
goal. A convoy of sighs and frowns. In Jaffa, to perk us up, one final battle,
as the Sultan conceived one last spurt to try and dislodge us from our gains.
The cleaving of heads, the rending of limbs, the despatching of souls. Deeds
of courage and nobility, carnage and desperation. Immediately after the battle
I fell ill with a familiar distemper of campaigns. My hair and finger and toenails
began to fall out. My mouth was full of boils. I sent to the Sultan for his snow
and fruits but was told he too had been struck down. This country had exhausted
us both, he, after a lifetime of struggle and strife, myself after a mere two
years. We lay, in our separate beds, our deliriums comingling in an opiate sphere
of hashasheen-like dreams:
We rode, together, alone, without our satraps, lieutenants or flag bearers, up
the melting, molten coastline. The sea, the dunes and beach scrub. Thorns tore
the ankles of our steeds. Sweat poured down our necks into our chain mail. The
sun was at its merciless August peak. We reined in our beasts on a small hill
overlooking the curve of the coast leading south. There, coming up from Gaza,
we espied a mass, hazy as a fata morgana at first, but then hardening into a
still shimmering army of men at arms marching north, dressed and appointed with
apparel and weaponry that seemed to us wondrously strange. They marched in close
order, sweating like pigs in thick woollen blue jackets, trouser suits and cloth
hats, although without armour or mail. Over ten thousand strong, with a thousand
more men at horse, they dragged after them forty massive metal tubes, borne on
great wheeled carts. Camel trains of baggage and boxes followed in their wake,
and each man appeared to carry, apart from the vast pack on his back, a thin
long tubular weapon, with a knife fixed at its end. Ahead of them rode an odd,
impressive figure, a stumpy, bullet headed man whose eagle gaze shone out from
under a black, bicornered hat. His squat torso wrapped in a thick black cape
under the sun, rather like those desert Arabs who absorb the intense rays in
their clothes. We looked back towards Jaffa. A pall of smoke rose from the city,
and the Sultan, whose gaze was more piercing than mine, pointed out to me the
mounds of corpses the blue clad army had left behind. "Another slaughter
of prisoners," he said in his soft, sad voice. "The West, with its
poisoned gifts again."
A strange bounty, indeed, hung on the saddlebags of the squat general's armies:
Astrolabes, compasses and measures and other instruments of science, with scribes
on horseback scribbling on parchments, noting the progress of the horde. Camels
bearing boxes of various plants, cages with the Levant's fauna: Jackals and porcupines
and hyenas, wild foxes and deer, even a brace of leopards, and smaller cages
of birds: Hoopoe and owls and griffons, hooded crows and sullen, trapped eagles.
But one species they need not and could not cage, the vultures travelling over
the host...
Onwards they marched, around the Carmel, to Acre. But the city stood unbreached
before them, in the majesty of its walls. The Sultan nudged me with his arm,
pointing out the Saracen flag and banners over the minarets and turrets behind
the buttresses and embrasures. Clearly, command of these fortresses ebbed and
flowed with fortune's tides. The pull and push of combat and politics, the constant
recapture of old, blood soaked ground. One would think the earth would be fertilised
by so much human manure, but no, it remains parched as ever...
The city is surrounded on three sides by the sea. On its fourth, a massive ditch,
running the entire land length of the wall, protects the inner fort. The invading
force bivouacked below this rampart and deployed its cannonades, firing large
metal balls into the city by means of an explosive mixture. As a substitute for "greek
fire", they appeared to induce less terror and panic among the defenders,
though they were heavy enough to crack the stone bulwarks. The French troops,
for I could now hear their cries in the familiar, though somewhat degraded tongue,
poured bravely into the breaches, and closed in hand to hand fighting with the
Turks. Saladin and I, overlooking the affray, could hardly restrain ourselves
from joining in. Our chargers pawed the earth, but their kings were too weary,
the distemper still wracking our flesh. The little caped commander, spurring
his horse, galloped ferociously up and down the line, urging his troops on and
cursing his captains with all the verve of a born field general. A man after
my own heart. Even Saladin, I could see, was impressed by that boundless energy.
And valour, for the Turks were firing their own explosive charges at the invaders
from the ramparts. Soldiers at the front of the assault were cut off and surrounded
by the defenders, who decapitated them with their swords, displaying the severed
heads on their lances, or flinging them by catapults into the midst of the invader's
ranks.
Meanwhile, a miasmic wind was drifting up from the south: Contagion of the plague,
born in the rotting entrails of the dead the little general had left piled on
the coastal plain. A foul breeze of mutilation and death, covering the contending
armies like a shroud and striking down attacker and defender alike. Vast tent
cities of the sick sprang up in the invading camp, and the putrid air reverbrated
to the groans of the diseased and the dying, only partly drowned by the martial
airs played by military musicians to lift their spirits, as doctors moved among
the sick, distributing opium and hasheesh.
In vain the little general raved and roared. The Turks waved and laughed at him
from the battlements, and blew, with vast cloth fans, the contagion of their
own sick back into the attackers' camp. The lament of mourners nevertheless sounded
from the cemeteries, mosques and minarets. The air of suffering and affliction
was like a thick, dripping phlegm. The little general could not withstand it.
He pulled and pushed at his drooping troops: "Cunts! Ladies in uniform!
When did you last see your balls?!" Defeat does not bring out the best in
men. Nor victory, often, for that matter... A character is tested in extremes.
The entrails burn, but the heart - does that beat true?
The little general could not prevail. He gathered his troops, his sick, his wounded,
his dejected horde and marched back south, abandoning the walls. On foot, ceding
his horse to an injured adjutant, he trudged away from his Zion. The remnants
of his men of science, his botanists, his philologers and philosophers, his musicians
and his scribes, dragging their bleeding feet through the midsummer sands. The
khamsin wind slapped and scraped at their faces. The gathering dead shrouded
and pushed out to sea. The Turkish banners drooping but unstruck on the walls
of Acre.
But can the idea be consumed...?
The tentative couple had risen from their cafe table and wandered off in the
direction of the Abbey. The T-shirted girls had deserted the golden haired young
man but he remained, his white shirt dimming in the lengthening afternoon shadow.
The German family had been replaced by a short stocky man of Mediterranean appearance,
dressed in an expensive looking suit and tie, accompanied by two tall casually
dressed men in dark glasses. The stocky man eyed me strangely. Exhaust fumes
from the arriving and departing cars were taking their toll on my lungs. I called
the waiter and settled my little slips of bills, using the small purse of notes
and coins I had taken from the Abbey exhibition's cash desk. I rose and walked
back up the Fontevraud high street, against the flow of the returning tourists,
but the short man and his tall companions also rose and followed at a distance.
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