Sir Richard stared at my master. ‘That’s all? You have killed twenty good men; decent, noble knights for the sake of a little money. And you say: that’s all? God will surely punish you for the foul deeds you did today,’ he said thickly. ‘I leave you to your conscience and God’s judgment.’ And then I saw him begin to pray, muttering the familiar words: Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum… under his breath.
‘You’ve seen my face, Sir Richard; I cannot let you live. Go to your God, I truly hope he receives you with open arms. John…’ And he nodded at Little John, who I saw with horror had a long unsheathed knife in his hand.
Those next few moments are graven on my mind, and will be for all eternity. The blade in John’s hand gleamed as it caught a last sunbeam, then his hand slashed quickly from left to right, abruptly cutting off Sir Richard’s mumbled prayers. And I seemed to be frozen, a stone statue. I saw Sir Richard fall, in that awful twilight, his hot blood spilling thickly down his neck into the pure white surcoat, and then pooling on the desert sand. And suddenly I was released. I screamed ‘No!’ and hurled myself towards John, too late, but determined to make my protest. I was screaming incoherently at John, and then I turned, appalled, as the other two knights died also before my eyes, and I turned again and began to shout and swear at Robin like a lunatic; weeping and wailing and shaking my fists and cursing him to the sky as a murderous villain, a man of no honour, a God-damned cur.
Through my spittle-flecked raving, I heard Robin look past me and say calmly: ‘Shut him up, John, will you,’ and something heavy smashed into the back of my skull and I knew no more.
I awoke once again in the sunlit dormitory of the Hospitallers’ quarter. But this time there was no Nur, no smooth white hand on my fevered brow, no cool drink of water served by a dark-haired angel. Instead there was William, looking plain and worried, and holding out a cracked earthenware beaker of ale.
I cautiously felt my head; there was a large knot at the back the size of a hen’s egg, and an ache like a bar of red-hot iron behind my eyes. My friends had at least carried me back to Acre, it seemed. My body was covered in sweat, and I was freezing cold. I took the beaker of ale, and swallowed it down in one draft. Then I pulled the rough blankets around me and tried to control my shivering.
‘Where is Nur?’ I asked my anxious-looking servant.
‘Oh sir,’ he said. ‘Oh s-s-sir, I do not know. I have not seen her for three da-da-days, since you rode out with Robin on the exercise. She is not in the women’s qu-qu-quarters; Elise has not seen her either. We think she may have run away, gone ho-home to her village.’
‘I have been here three days? And Nur has been gone that long?’ My head was spinning with this news; I could not believe that she would leave me without saying anything. A hideous fear began to creep into my head.
‘Yes, sir. You have been ra-raving something awful sir, about blood and sin and Go-God’s judgment. Saying terrible things, sir, about the Ea-Earl.’
Even through the fever, and the accursed headache, I could feel a rising tide of panic, filling my soul with mortal terror for Nur’s life. And the name of my terror was Sir Richard Malbete. I tried to suppress the fear that the Beast had laid his foul hands on her, but I could not.
‘Where is everybody else?’ I asked, for I had noticed that the dormitory was almost empty. There were no Hospitaller brother-knights about either. The place was almost deserted.
‘Everyone has gone to se-see the ex-executions,’ said William.
‘The executions?’
‘Saladin has failed to hand over the ransom and the Tr-True Cross, and so King Ri-Richard has ordered that all the Saracen prisoners be ex-executed.’
‘All of them?’ I said incredulously. ‘But there are hundreds, thousands of them. He can’t kill them all.’
‘Sir Richard Malbete has taken on that du-duty, sir,’ said William, with a perfectly straight face. ‘They will be ex-executed outside the city walls in fu-full view of the everybody, today, sir, at no-noon.’
‘You’d better help me to get dressed, William.’
The battlements of Acre were packed with folk and it was only by way of a good deal of squeezing, jostling and shoving that William and myself found a place to the north of the main gate where we could see what was happening below. On a wide area of sandy plain, beyond the trenches that had been dug during the siege of Acre, were row upon row of Muslim prisoners, each bound tightly and forced to kneel with their heads extended. I found out later from my friend Ambroise — who was writing an account for the scene for his History of the Holy War, and who liked to give exact numbers, even if I sometimes suspected that he made them up — that there were two thousand seven hundred prisoners on that plain of death. And they were all to die. The condemned prisoners — men, women and even children — were making a hideous noise, wailing, moaning and chanting the name of their false God, and were hemmed in on three sides by the ranks of our army, so there could be no hope of escape. Far to the south I could see Robin’s bowmen in their distinctive green cloaks, and behind them row upon row of our cavalry. I could even make out Robin sitting perfectly still on a horse in front of the first line of archers, only twenty feet from the nearest prisoners. There were occasional jeers, catcalls from the troops in our army, and I could see that a few were making wagers amongst themselves, but most stood and watched the slaughter like yokels watching a cattle sale at a country fair.
Malbete’s men had already begun their grisly task, and they worked in twos: six pairs of men-at-arms, each pair taking a row of prisoners. The first man-at-arms would strip any headgear or any scarves or turbans from the prisoner, then clear the way for the sword blow and then he would hold the victim steady by his hair while the second man-at-arms hacked at his neck until the head was free. It was slow, bloody work and the scarlet and sky blue surcoats of the soldiers soon became a sopping uniform scarlet. Sometimes it took as many as four blows to cut the head from the body, and many a victim lived for many moments after the first slicing blade had chopped into his neck. Of course, the easiest to kill were the children, who were quite often dispatched with a single blow. One pair of executioners was particularly inept, regularly chopping at the neck and missing completely, whacking into backbone or sliding off skull to the laughter of the crowd. Malbete oversaw the whole operation, occasionally striding up to a pair of his men who were making a meal of a victim, his boots sloshing in the puddles of gore, pushing the men-at-arms roughly out of the way and hacking through the wretch’s neck with his own long sword to finish the job.
From our vantage point high on the battlements, William and I could see the whole gruesome display clearly; but the people seemed like dolls, and the whole thing a piece of macabre theatre. As I watched, a pair of blood-splashed men finished a row of two hundred victims; they cleaned the red filth from their swords with glistening hands, and calmly began on the first victim in a new row. Hack, hack, a great spurt of gore and the victim falling headless on to his side, neck still pumping blood, the head rolling a little way away, casually stopped by a man-at-arms’s boot.
‘What has happened to the world?’ I said silently to myself. ‘Have men all run mad? Why does God not stop this? Why do we all not stop this? Am I trapped in some hideous nightmare in a world without mercy, a Godless universe of indiscriminate blood and death?’ And yet even while I thought this, a worse idea was crawling out of its slimy pit deep in my skull. ‘You feel nothing,’ said the dark maggot’s voice in my head. ‘You see true horror, appalling brutality, blood being shed on a massive scale — hundreds of men, children even, slaughtered in front of your eyes — and you feel not a thing. Are you still human? Have you lost the power to feel anything?’