MILES CHRISTI

Chapter Sixteen - Part Three - The Fight

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MILES CHRISTI

Part Three – The Fight

Chapter Sixteen

The heat steamy. Unnaturally hot for this time of year. The East in a fever, unwelcoming. It refused them – Curthose’s army. Convulsed from them. Amidst the marshlands on the old Byzantine Road, the Normans sweltered in their mail. That and a plague of flies released no doubt by the Lord of the Flies to pester them. Anatolia no longer a Christian land and possessed by the Devil as he would a person. A land of biting worms. What else could it be? Would it be so if Anatolia was back in Christian hands? It would be fat and green . . .

Tìbald swatted flies as rivulets of sweat stung his eyes. They bit and harried. The same for Fulk and Joceran, Marin, and every man-at-arms. All miserable . . . Except for Aile, who miraculously, rode behind him dry in her blue gown still marked with Tìbald’s blood (was that her talisman?). How long ago that night that drove them to it when werwolves roamed about . . . If they were ever about . . . Her iron and helm had been tossed in a cart and her hair washed, combed, plaited. A silken wimple covered her from head to shoulders as sheer as a breeze and soft as a breath which she wished would rustle. Blow.

Carts moaned and tact jingled and in Aile an overarching thought – Tìbald, no longer a dolt, will fight valiantly. What is fighting valiantly? A genteel way to hack a man to death? To do it with skill and mercy?  He practiced all the time – him and Fulk and Joceran. Fierce contests, all being cut and bruised many times. She smacked her cheek hoping to kill a fly. Tìbald will fight valiantly . . . And  all  will  happen.

The army made its way inward from the coastland, bearing all manner of material sent by Alexius for the three armies sieging Nicaea, bread being one in short supply as the Franks were as likely to starve as the Turks penned up in the city. Curthose had detached a cohort to link with Alexius’ navy and Turcopoles dragging ships overland – Nicaea’s western face stood on the shore of the great Ascanian Lake, twenty miles long, ten miles in width. Though besieged on all sides of land, its Seljukid garrison still received victuals from Saracen barges on the lake and in turn sent messages to the sultan to come in relief. The sultan would not tarry. His wife and children were there.

The army moved into the foothills some miles from Nicaea. The hillocks naked as the flocks that should have been grazing on the slopes were gone. So too the dogs that should’ve barked their warnings. In the distance rose charred remains of manor houses. Pieces of debris spotted the fields: a table, a chair, pottery chards, leather sandals, rusting pruning hooks and broken threshing rods. The wave of flies thickened like black sea grass. They swarmed over some carrion and covered it so that it wriggled like a resurrecting creature. And with the coming of the Normans, to the flies – live meat.

Tìbald batted heatedly, then lowered his head to cover himself. On the ground a human foot. It lay on its arch cut above the ankle and despoiled of all flesh save for a strip running up from the top of the big toe. His eyes opened quickly to other human parts scattered about. Skulls – whole skulls, half skulls, skulls with jaws missing, skulls without their crowns, arrows embedded in their orbs, holes in the craniums and temples, skulls split from pate to nose. Ribcages with desiccated flesh. Tibias. Fibulas. Femurs. Male and female hips. Finger bones. No whole bodies as if a god-sized bag had been tossed into the air and its contents flew hither and thither. That, and rags which once had been clothing. As they rode further into the Dracon Valley, the road vanished beneath remains.

Forty thousand left where they fell. The People’s Army. Too much carrion for one sitting. What the vultures and flies could not eat froze that winter and with spring they returned to feast. Wood crosses marked the path every hundred yards, staked no doubt by advancing armies. Crows perched on the heaps picking at them . . .

Son of man, dost thou think these bones shall live?

Nay, not these. Let them remain carrion . . .

“Phantoms prowl here,” said Joceran, his voice a quiver, clutching tight his buckler and spear.

Would the bones speak? Rather, would they scream – calling good evil and evil good and acting upon it to make the world better?

“We must not be frightened by this,” Tìbald said. “Poor wretches---”

“No,” Marin said. “Be frightened. Fools dancing in the Lord---”

“What fool knows he’s a fool?”

“Butchers. They’ve now become meat---”

Forty thousand.

“Pray for them.”

Eight million bones.

“Pray for those they murdered---”

“But not for those who murdered them---”

A rise in their guts. It pressed their throats. No control here. What could they do but wave their swords and battle the very air? They no longer wanted to speak. Jiggling tact and the crows feasting.

Esmé, at Marin’s side, wept.

“Dómini,” Fulk’s low voice over Tìbald’s shoulder. “The lady, your wife, needs you.”

Aile in her fine attire shook.

“Take me out of here,” she whispered as if her words might stir the dead.

Before her a lopped-off head with patches of scalp covered in fungi, that, and a course of dark hair, long and stringy, entwined with a single leather ear. Arrows bristled from the torso nearby in a tattered gown stained with dried blood.

“I want to go . . .” She could not say, she would not say, ‘home’.

“Where’s your iron,” Tìbald curt, “you made me buy for you?”

A rider cantered up at that moment, his mount kicking up bones and dust. “Tìbald fils de Goscelin?” he inquired. Tìbald nodded in relief. “The lord, duke, is assembling his escort to ride ahead to Nicaea. The seigneurs are to meet under his standard now.”

******************

Curthose’s entourage road onto the plain and there Nicaea, the great fortress city, a bear set upon by dogs.

It roared. Tongues of fire spat from its walls. Black plumes of smoke ascending. Stones and bolts and pots of flaming naphtha. Siege towers to be rolled up for the great assault filled with crossbowmen to keep the defenders on the palisades low. A sound of a thousand hammers as they struck parapets. The hiss of boiling water poured out on the attackers.

They rode along Godfrey de Bouillon’s Burgundian lines set up at the north end of the city who plied their trade gleefully. A smile as they loaded the mangonels and trebuchets (stone-throwing engines). That men could so enjoy war. And death all about them. Death was but a state – to the pilgrim warriors an entrance to Heaven, to the heathen Hell and their rightful fate. A goodness to it. And this after traversing the valley of bones. Such a horror. It echoed the pain of death. All transitions consist of pain, even unto glory. The bones bespoke none of this, only terror. A black, vacuous space – terror. But here in the light of day they shot their arrows and flung their stones. Fighting and killing fresh after so many months on a long road. And delivered by their hand.

Curthose et al proceeded to loop around the four miles of walls to where the Provençals made their attacks on the south end. There, the aftermath of a fierce battle. The earth soaked with blood till the dirt was sienna red. Men on the ground: dying, wounded, dead, as Provençal soldiers, undaunted from missiles from the walls above, cleared the field – to the surgeons or the hospice, many were stacked to be burned.

“Where are Count Raymond and the Bishop de Le Puy?” Curthose asked a captain of archers.

“At le petrarie, dómini,” replied the captain, pointing to the siege engines.

Behind the artillery a pile of Muslim dead and a firepit beyond within and enormous ditch. Foot soldiers with covered faces waded through the heaps in pairs, one with a basket and the other taking heads. They piled them at the base of the trebuchets while the torsos were pitched into the flames. Heads, in fact, laid like fieldstones. Many stuck atop a protective fence which stretched before the catapults, their expressions entreating those in the city – I am thee. Some were paraded on spear points, while others were kicked about within circles of laughing men. Most were placed in a steady stream of baskets. From there they were loaded into the buckets and sent flying over Nicaea’s walls.

The Count of Toulouse sat on a barrel and nodded whenever heads cleared the wall. “ça va les faire frissonner,” he muttered (“that should make them shudder”). He stood without ceremony at the duke’s approach, greeting him like a brother, and inviting all to gather round, he called to the bishop not far from view.

Adhémar de Monteil, decked in iron tall and hard, could only be distinguished from any seigneur by the miter atop his head. Instead of a crosier, he held a wooden mace, the customary weapon of clergy in battle and more symbolic except in his case as it was marred and pitted from many hard blows. Curthose et al knelt and kissed his ring.

“At last, we’re complete,” the bishop said, his southern French strange to Norman ears.

“Praise God,” Curthose’s reply.

“Praise God,” Raymond seconded.

And there they were, brothers in Christ. Adhémar led them in prayer---

You think it irony . . . Think again . . . as you’ve heaped calamity on those you thought evil – that the world would be better if not for Them . . . You are different?

---In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti---

With your utopias? . . . Get rid of Them . . . You are Them . . . They are Them.

---Amen.

“We bring with us imperial greetings,” Curthose said, “and supplies from the imperial stores.”

Raymond nodded and returned to the barrel. He moved deliberately, gnarled and scarred from a hundred battles. He had but one eye, having lost the other on pilgrimage to Jerusalem two years ago. By its sacrifice he gained an inner vision. This war was, in part, his child, and Jerusalem his grave.

“We’ve lost as many from starvation as from fighting,” the bishop said. “Women and the poor mostly. This has been a test.”

“It was a fierce battle on this exact spot,” Raymond said over the moan of the engines being cocked into place. “There fell Baldwin, Count of Ghent, impaled by arrows coming to our aid,” in his voice the very action. “The sultan, Suleiman, had returned with a great force. We fought until sunset when the sultan withdrew over those hills. God’s true victory. Look at the heathen dead. If not for God Almighty, it would be us.” He meant it, an old man who’d believed many things over the shifting years that he would’ve died for. They now seemed vain. How little he controlled. Christ, he wanted only Christ, and Mother Church who guarded the fact of Him; orthodoxy, in his mind, was at best adequate and the least harmful betrayal of the truth. “The sultan had been away when we came upon the city. He had left his wife and children here thinking them safe as he had destroyed Little Peter’s army. And what reason had he to fear? He thought Alexius his ally – the foolish boy.”

Indeed, Kilij Arslan (Sword of the Lion) ibn Suleiman, an Alexander of the East at eighteen, saw Alexius as a wise father figure. The basileus, his enemy-friend-mentor, had helped secure ibn Suleiman’s power three years ago, warning that ibn Suleiman’s own father-in-law, Tzachas Chaka Bey, Emir of Smyrna, planned to seize his kingdom.

The names! O’, the names!

‘Most Illustrious Sultan Kilij Arslan,’ Alexius had written to the then fifteen-year-old, ‘you know that the dignity of the sultan is yours by right of inheritance. But your kinsman Tzachas, although apparently preparing for war against the Roman Empire (for he calls himself emperor) is in reality using this as a pretext – an obvious pretext, for he is a man of experience and knows perfectly well that the Roman Empire (Byzantium) is not for him: it would be absolutely beyond his power to seize a throne so exalted . . .’ The intrigue! – that was Tzachas’ plan and soon he’d have Constantinople surrounded . . . ‘The whole mischievous plan is directed against you. If you are wise, you will not endure this. There is no need for despair, but rather for vigilance; otherwise you will be driven out of your sultanate. For my part, I will with God’s help expel him from Roman territory and as I care for your interests, I would advise you to consider your own authority and power, and quickly bring him to heel by peaceful means or, if he refuses, by the sword.’

A gift from God to have an enemy/ally of bloody fourteen. Kilij Arslan marched full force to Smyrna, held a feast in his father-in-law’s honour and got Tzachas so drunk, ibn Suleiman himself killed him with a sword. Better rivals of political aims than religious ones. Men you can work with . . . unless their politics becomes their faith . . .

Kilij Arslan had left a strong garrison that could hold out for weeks, and with the lake in Turkish hands, the resupply was endless. But before them the combined forces of Franks and the Romans; the Basileus himself had crossed the Bosphorus to direct actions from Pelecanum. Even with the fighting, Alexius’ envoy, Manual Butumites, admiral and diplomat, had the garrison ready to concede – “Look at these killers come from the West in zeal for God. Better to surrender to the Basileus’s mercy than suffer their attack. The Basileus fairness is known. He is honourable. For once the Franks breech the walls, they’ll be no stopping them. The fighting won’t stop till all are dead. There will be no slave or ransom. Only death.” But when word came of the sultan on a forced march back, the Turks kicked Butumites out and sealed themselves in. Kilij Arslan would wipe them out as he did the People’s Army. The siege and sorties increased. When the sultan’s army came over the hills the seigneurs, though outnumbered, charged out to meet them – the measure of their resolve. A crash, the Franks pressed together in a shield wall, the Seljukid horsemen racing within lance tip to loose their arrows point blank. And before the Franks could recover, they came again with javelins. Wave after wave till the shields, weighted from missiles, could barely be held level. It was then the Seljukids decided to engage hand-to-hand. At last. The seigneurs couched their lances and drove into them – a shock that carried them through the Seljukid ranks till the pilgrims were in their midst several companies deep.

“---Never had they received such a charge,” Raymond said. “Their eyes popped out of their heads. Our lances split their shields apart and spitted them two and three at a time. If that be not God’s Hand . . .”

Allāhu Akbar. Allah is Greater.

“In close quarters our war horses trampled their little steeds and killed as many of the heathen as the miles they bore. It was their greater numbers that checked our momentum. They surrounded us like a whirlwind, cutting us down with their arrows. But those within our reach could not prevail. We hacked our way about in ever widening circles. But the sheer weight of them pushed us back. They pressed us against the very walls where the defenders threw hot rocks and sand down on our heads. We were in peril. But Robert of Flanders came to our aid with five lines of mounted seigneurs driving into the pagan right. The heathens wavered and fell back. We rallied and charged them again . . . Know that a fight with the Turk will always be desperate---”

Of the princes’ armies’, the Turk said the same.

“We found these tied to the belts of the heathen dead.” Raymond motioned to a servant who placed a rope coil in his hand. “Over ten thousand to bind us and lead us into captivity. Suleiman thought he’d have a fortune in slaves – that he could show his enemies he was the Great Lord and all would bow down to him. They bow now because they have no heads. We’ve launched five thousand into the city,” he said, looking at the engines. “Butumites is back again to convince Nicaea to surrender. We will attack all the same now you’re here. The ransom for the sultan’s family alone is worth a kingdom.” He rubbed beneath the patch over his missing eye. An itch for when his world had dimension. “But there’ll be no need to negotiate victory. I will take the city tonight.”

The Gonatas Tower anchored Nicaea’s walls on the south end. Directly before it a petrarie in constant motion hurling stones at the walls. At the tower’s base a wood and leather testudo over one hundred feet long. A trench out its tail with sappers going in and out. To the defenders’ eyes, it was like a hellish worm up from the bowels of the earth shitting out hampers of dirt. Amid the whistling bolts and spread of flying projectiles, the defenders tried to break the testudo’s back with heavy stones but the sod and timber roof held. How long before the Franks mined the tower? A matter of when, not if, for the tower would fall. Then a worse sight for the Turk – sails on the horizon of Lake Ascanian, war galleys with stone-throwing engines under Alexius’ banners.

The seigneurs observed it too.

“I do not see the imperial barge,” said his eminence, Adhémar.

“He is here,” Curthose said. “It is not dignified for the basileus to take the field himself---”

Raymond with a blasé huff. “I take the field. His eminence takes the field. As do you, Duke of Normandy . . . If ever a suzerain should, it’d be Alexius. Nicaea is a Christian city with Saracen overlords---” Though, in truth, Raymond distrusted Normans more than Saracens, certainly more than Greeks. Pirates, the Normans, and only steps from their dragon boats. While their grandfathers were slaughtering children and priests, Raymond’s were in the Pyrenees fending off the Moor. How the poor suffer from Norman hands; Raymond had given to Toulouse’s needy from his personal stores while Curthose had stripped his duchy bare and still went abegging.

“Observe the mine,” Raymond invited them. “A masterful work. Many a great engineer have built sturdy towers, but Provençals know how to bring them down.”

The seigneurs followed the chief engineer into the tunnel’s maw. At first a smell of fresh cut earth but then of compost. Urine came next, made worse by sweating men hauling buckets of flammable fat to wet the walls foundation. Above through the trellised ceiling of timbers and compacted dirt the tromp of footsteps, the muffled shouts of men, the spring of the mangons. The roof shook with debris clinking off their helms in a cloud.

Tìbald coughed. Dust in the firelight. The passage narrowed, at least to him. He coughed again hoping for a decent draught of air. The heat of his fingers against his nose. That it should rile him while above in the open air all calamity. The tunnel sloped downward. He could go no further and turned and clutched the shoulder of a sapper passing, jostling the bucket in the man’s hands. Sticky fat splashed on his shoes as he pushed against the oncoming line. Give me sunlight, qouth the Bard.

He popped from the earth, his lungs seizing. O’ for a suck of pure breath.

“Pauvre gars (poor fellow),” said a Provençal soldier of Tìbald, who paused loading up a mangon with heads. “Le sous-sol n’est pas pour tout le monde (below ground is not for everyone).

“Yes,” Tìbald said.

The soldier grabbed a head from the pile and tossed it into the mangon bucket. Two soldiers approached with a basket and dumped more heads. When the bucket was brimming, the triggerman jerked the rope and the arm sprang with a whip. The engine jumped, as did others down the row. Heads flew in arcs. They splat the walls with splotches as would a casaba leaving its guts. Bright red sunbursts in pleasing patterns the way you’d tattoo a pretty Indus girl on her hands, her arms. But the sound – a crunch and a fwop, though it might be musical if tintinnabular. The heads bounced like served balls on an alleyway wall. They fell and bounced again. Teeth sprang out. Jaws stretched on sinews till they flew off. Run away. A head may bite you if it doesn’t kill you or knock you out. Twenty to thirty in a cluster. The lucky clear the battlements to land on roofs, knock on doors. A shower of watery blood as they splashed into garden fountains. The stock running low. Make more heads. Nicaea in polka dots. The mangon’s arm was cocked back in place.

The soldier bent over the pile rooting through the heads as if to score a good apple. A particular face caught his eye. He held it up to Tìbald like a trophy. “Ea? Ea? Se bien? Handsome fellow,” he said – a young man, a boy really, Fulk’s age, whose ruddy skin turned ashen from the blood drained away. “Come, pretty face,” the soldier said and spat on the forehead to shine it with his sleeve. “Do your duty.” And tossed it in the bucket. “Ah, dómini, watch this.”

He motioned to the guards on a line of captured Seljukids, horse archers from the battle, bound ankles to wrists. He pointed to the man at the end of the line. The guard brought him over and the Provençal lopped off his head. He picked it up and pinched the cheeks. The eyes blinked. “See you, Hell?” he asked the dying face. “Whisper to me now that your God is greater.” And put his ear to the lips. They moved. The Provençal shrugged and flipped it in the bucket. He gestured for the next prisoner – a slight man void of expression, all sinew and gristle with a deformity in the shoulders, an archer’s distinctive muscular form. With a nod from the Provençal, the comrades took the prisoner by the arms and hoisted him up to the mattress of heads in the bucket. “Allahu Akbar,” the prisoner chanted, not for others, but for himself as he curled on the faces of those he knew . . . Though what cruelty he would’ve meted out if the Turks won, exquisite cruelties. The mangon sprang. He flew amidst the tumbling heads and over Nicaea’s walls. That he save many lives to come.

 The Seljukid defenders rained down hampers of large stones on the testudo covering the tunnel, then heaved enormous boulders that could only be lifted by three or four men. They smacked the wood covering with a crack. The testudo shuddered with a broken back.

A Provençal centurion and cohort rushed forward with upraised shields; Raymond and Curthose were still underground. Stones and arrows pummelled them, yet they made no cry as they dropped. They repaired the break and shored up the walls. The Turks peppered them from on high till the last one fell. The arrow is a slow death unless struck just right. Many wriggled in the dirt hit time and again. Clearly, they would die as no comrades dared retrieve them. The Turk didn’t care and kept shooting as a display of plenty, during which time, they lowered a rope and hook and grappled onto a still squirming Provençal and hauled him up and over the battlements. After some moments, they erected his bloody and naked corpse with a javelin up his rectum. His eyes were plucked out. Nose and ears lopped off and castrated genitals stuffed in his mouth. The Turks waved his arms to his comrades and hoisted him up and down like a puppet – a happy dance – come join me. They then grabbed him by the hair from the back of his head and tipped his head forward as if surveying the ground. They shrugged his shoulders and lunched him out as if it was him leaping off the wall. He hit with a bounce, driving the javelin out his chest.

See you, Heaven?

It was then the seigneurs emerged from the testudo dusty and nodding, only to see another body grappled and lifted off the ground. Another cohort dashed to them with upraised bucklers. The Turks were not interested other than the show. More puppetry. Then a shower of ropes and hooks lifting all bodies up like the Rapture.

For the pilgrims’ part, more heads were shot from the mangons and the Provençals surrounded the decapitated heaps and pissed on them.

Soon, naked bodies were suspended along Nicaea’s battlements. Many with their heads nailed between their hands. How festive Nicaea’s facia with its bloody polka dot and garland of pilgrim dead.

The Franks set the Seljuk corpses afire, smoke rolling off the heaps black and thick with a look of velvet, caught by the wind and blown towards the city in a poison of burning fat and burning hair.

Count Raymond ordered the sappers to burn out the tower’s foundation as well as the tunnel. Puffs of smoke feathered from the ground until the tower was enclosed in a haze. The princes sat drinking. Flames licked the base. The defenders douse them with water, but the wood foundation hissed at them. The foundations stones began to smoke. The princes nodded. It would come down . . . Though not till after sunset for dusk was coming on and to the west the lake waters darkened.

Tìbald also watched.

“You left the tunnel.” A voice at Tìbald’s shoulder though not so approving. Gìrard de Gournay, a seigneur in Curthose’s retinue, took him aside. Tìbald regarded him with little consideration. “I said, you left the tunnel.”

“I did.” And what of it, he dare not say.

“Tìbald fil de Goselin, the duke, by his good grace, has taken you into his service, but he is concerned that you are to be counted on when he needs you.”

“Why should he not?”

“Did you not break from the escort in Constantinople to speak to a whore?”

Then silence between them. They knew each other. De Gournay was of a higher status. And both knew, in a melee, Tìbald could throck his head. They were not on in a melee, not of that kind.

“I humbly request an audience with the duke . . . To apologize.”

“Not necessary.” De Gournay said, the authority in this matter. O’, that Aile not hear. “But the Duke of Normandy must be assured you can be relied upon.”

Tìbald nodded humbly. “I am the duke’s man.”

“Good.”

A snap, a crack, and a shudder. The Gonatas Tower, like a decapitated man, collapsed on itself, taking down with it a company of defenders. It crush them, so quick its fall. The heads on the ground flew again.

The pilgrims cheered and prepared to attack, but the flames were higher than the once standing tower. That, and a camouflage of smoke through which the Turks shot blindly. Amidst the crackle – zip, zip, zip – they flew in all directions, the fire now in their favour. It would burn through the night while they construct new defenses.

Duke Robert returned to his forces coming onto the field to organize them. Tìbald solid in the retinue with Gìrard de Gournay. To his right and to his left carnage. What would Aile do after seeing this when a valley of bones could so shake her? Nicaea would have a bloody fall.

Action at last.