LITMIR.BIZ

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to see the way ahead.”

      In the hushed silence at their backs, Arlo’s voice, counting in cadence, sounded ludicrously loud, but it provided a necessary discipline. In the normal scheme of the bombardment, the next projectile should arrive before his count had reached eighty, but he reached eighty and counted on through one hundred before Hugh nodded. “Good, they’ve stopped. My lord Count, welcome. Do you wish to take command?”

      Count Raymond, who had silently joined them, shook his head. “No, Sir Hugh, you appear to have it well in hand. Carry on.”

      Hugh nodded again and slowly raised his mace over his head, signaling the crowd behind him to make ready. “Right,” he said, his voice almost conversational, “the barrage has certainly stopped now, so we can go. Another minute or so, to let the dust clear. Mind where you step, now, but keep your heads up—they’ll be waiting for us and you don’t want to die looking down at your feet. Steady now … wait for it …” An eddy of wind sprang up and whirled the dust aside, revealing a break in the formerly even line of the wall’s top. “There! It’s a breach, sure enough, so here we go, up and over. With me, now!”

      They broke out of the dust cloud right at the top of the piled rubble in front of the break in the walls to find the city’s defenders waiting for them. Hugh, in the lead, found himself alone for the briefest of moments, gazing down at the swarthy faces of the massed defenders below, all of whom appeared to be glaring up at him with hatred in their eyes. He was aware of a feeling of calm detachment, a sensation of silent unreality, and yet conscious at the same time of the insecurity of the rubble beneath his feet as he fought for balance, and then an arrow pierced his shield, sudden and jarring, punching the device solidly back against him and sending him reeling off balance. His heel caught on something and he sat down, hard, his backside jarring painfully on a sharp-edged stone, and then his hearing returned and he clambered back to his feet, aware of the chaos of sight and sound around him and slightly surprised by how many scores of his own men were ahead of him now, having surged by him when he fell.

      Ignoring the sharp pain of his bruised buttock, he leapt nimbly down the rubble slope inside the walls and found himself face to face with an armored, grim-faced Muslim swinging a bright-bladed scimitar. Hugh blocked the swing with his shield and swung his mace in a short, chopping arc, plunging the spike on its end through the Muslim’s helmet. The man fell away, and Hugh barely felt the tug as he wrenched his mace free again and jumped to his left, swinging an overhead chop at another defender who was on his knees over a Frankish soldier, struggling to stab him with a hooked dagger. The point of the spike crunched into the exposed nape of the man’s neck and killed him instantly, but before the fellow could even begin to fall, Hugh sensed another presence lunging towards him from his unprotected right and knew he had no time to free his mace.

      He released his grip and spun away to the left, turning hard on his heel and swinging his shield down and inward in a desperate attempt to cover his side as he drew his dagger with his right hand. He heard a quick intake of breath close to his ear, a muttered curse, and then a whiff of some fragrance he had smelled before, and someone’s back came hard against his own. He dropped instantly to his left knee and turned again, hard, sweeping his dagger in a tight arc outwards and up until he felt the blade sink into yielding flesh. And then, in a weltering crush of grappling bodies, hearing the clang and grating of blades and the heavier thuds of blows from other weapons, all mixed with the sobbing, grunting, hissing, screaming sounds of men in torment, he sensed a looming shadow—had no time to really see it—and felt a rushing pressure of air as something swept down and smashed into his head, hammering him into blackness.

      HE FOUND THAT he could not move his body and it hurt almost beyond tolerance when he tried to open his eyes, and so he lay still for a while, allowing his head to clear and collecting his thoughts. A short time later he tried again to open his eyes, cautiously this time, and was able to do so, but the pain was no less intense than before, and although he could see light this time, he could discern nothing else that made sense to him and he still could not move. And so he slowly closed his eyes and willed himself to lie still and breathe steadily, fighting the urge to panic, until his heartbeat returned to its normal pace. He flexed his fingers slowly, happy beyond belief that he could and that they worked, and then he braced them and pushed hard, straightening his arms. Something yielded at his back and he pushed harder, and whatever was on top of him fell away suddenly. And then he opened his eyes for the third time. It still hurt abominably, but this time he could see, although everything was heavily blurred.

      It took him several moments longer to extricate himself and twist his body into a sitting posture, but by then he understood that he had been lying head downward, near the base of the rubble pile behind the city wall, his shoulder caught on a fragment of broken masonry and his face thrust into the debris surrounding it. His eyes were full of dust and grit, and the weight pinning him in place had been contributed by two dead men, one of them Muslim, the other Frankish. The fighting had passed him by—he could hear the sounds of it in the distance—and he became aware of a steady flow of Frankish warriors, knights and men-at-arms, all filing quickly down from the top of the breach in the wall and dispersing into the streets and alleyways of the city ahead of him, moving rapidly as though they feared the fighting might be over before they arrived. None of them paid him the slightest attention.

      Hugh rose to his feet but quickly discovered that he was not yet ready to go anywhere, for the world tilted alarmingly sideways and he fell back to his seat again. In falling, however, he felt the heavy weight of his water bottle banging against his side. He pulled a kerchief from inside his mail coat and soaked it from the bottle, then washed the sand and grit from his eyes, hissing against the pain of it yet feeling the relief and improvement immediately. He repeated the treatment with fresh water, and now that he could see better, he looked around the spot where he had fallen, seeing bodies everywhere. He noticed that there appeared to be an equal division of defenders and attackers among the corpses, but he was relieved that he saw no one among the casualties whom he recognized, and he wondered where St. Omer and the others were, and why they had left him behind. The only explanation he could think of—and he suspected it must be accurate, since Arlo had never quit his side before—was that they had lost him in the whirl of the original fighting, which had been utterly chaotic. They must have thought him ahead of them and gone surging forward in search of him.

      Knowing he was in no danger here, he removed his flat steel helmet, loosened the thongs at his neck and pushed the chain-mail hood back from his head, grateful that he could feel no obvious rents in the mail with his bare hands. He then soaked his kerchief thoroughly one last time and wiped his face, head, and hands. His skull was pounding from a massive headache, from the blow that had struck him down, he assumed, but there had been no blood on his kerchief and the remainder of his body felt surprisingly well, its various parts responding when called upon to move. He rinsed out his mouth and spat out the dislodged grit, then swallowed a mouthful of water, sealed the bottle, and replaced his hood and helmet, refastening the ties at his chin before he rose once more to his feet, his arms outstretched for balance. Beyond a tiny sway on reaching his full height, this time he was stable.

      His sword was where it should be, still in its sheath, but his shield and his dagger were nowhere to be seen, and he stood blinking for a moment, looking around for them before he saw the well-known painted shaft of his spiked mace. Its spike was still buried in the spine of the last man he had struck with it, and he tried not to wonder who the fellow had been as he twisted and pulled at the weapon until it ripped noisily free. He looked at the clotted spike, then struck it into the ground, cleaning the worst of the gore off it, and glanced around in search of his dagger. Realizing that it could be anywhere, hidden under any of the bodies littering the scene, he abandoned trying to find it and drew his long sword from its sheath instead. Then, clutching the mace firmly in his left hand and the long sword in his right, Hugh de Payens stepped forward and finally entered the Holy City of Jerusalem.

      He carried both weapons all day long, but he was never even tempted again to use either one of them, except, on three separate occasions, against his own people, when he found them committing atrocities against people who could never, by any stretch of anyone’s imagination, have taken any part in the defense of Jerusalem—old and young women, some of the latter pregnant, and helpless, terrified children.

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