Navigator

XXIV

On the parched plain before the walls of Seville, Saladin woke inside his leather tent.

Hanse had died during the night. It had been the fever, of course. Hanse had fallen asleep coughing and puking. Now he was a shapeless, unmoving lump under his sweat-sodden cloak.

And Saladin had slept in a tent with a dead man. With a sudden terror he pushed his way out into the open air, panting.

The sun was still low, but Saladin could already feel its heat on his face. The camp of the Christian army stretched away all around him. Horses wandered apathetically between the rows of tents, and cross-bearing pennants hung limply over a land long stripped of anything edible.

Inside Seville, the muezzins were calling. The pinkish light of day, scattered through the dust rising from the desiccated landscape, reflected from the city walls.

Near the tent, Michael sat cross-legged before the remnants of the night's fire, resting his back on a heap of weapons and chain-mail coats. He was sipping a cup of water and eating dry rice. 'This isn't so bad for soldiering,' Michael said in his coarse shopkeeper's Latin. 'Not so bad.'

Saladin sat heavily beside him. 'What do you mean, not so bad? Hanse's dead. Is that his rice?'

Michael grinned and finished off the food. 'Well, he won't be needing it, will he?'

Saladin reached for the flask that contained the last of yesterday's water. There was hardly any left. He felt unreasonably resentful that a third of it had been wasted on a man now dead.

They sat without speaking.

When he had taken the Cross – he wore it proudly on his sleeve even now – and volunteered for Fernando's army, Saladin had joined a company formed from many nations, Christian warriors drawn here from across Europe by the Pope's granting of crusader indulgences – that and the chance to liven up your life by cracking a few Muslim heads. Hanse and Michael were typical, Hanse, blond and a bit frail, from the Low Countries, Michael from England.

It had been curious for Saladin to come up against the Moorish armies, the elite warriors with their quilted light armour, the hard-eyed horsemen from the desert. They were not much like the Saracen troops he had witnessed in the Outremer. Brother Thomas had told him that the Moors of Spain had absorbed the traditions of those who went before them; there were echoes of the post-Roman Visigoths in their cavalry and their colour.

But there had been no serious fighting for months, not since the spring when the siege had been set. There had been deaths among Fernando's forces, a steady stream of fatalities from drought, accident, and especially the plagues that coursed through the polyglot army. It didn't matter much to the generals, Michael said. There were always more volunteers willing to come and join an army on the brink of victory, trickling here from across Spain, indeed across Christendom. And a smart general always factored in the likelihood of losing a proportion of his army to disease. You planned for it, said Michael.

It wasn't really a surprise that Hanse was the first of the three of them to succumb, for he had fried in the Spanish sun. Michael, though, had darkened, his face turning leathery. Saladin wondered if he had a bit of Trojan blood in him, for it was said that it had been Trojans who were the first to colonise England.

'He had been talking of joining King Louis,' Michael said now. 'Hanse, I mean.' King Louis of France was generally believed to be the most pious and accomplished crusader king since Richard the Lionheart. 'Louis is sailing about now, for Cyprus, then on to Egypt.'

'He should have gone,' Saladin said. 'Better than this, sitting around in your own filth for month after month.'

'Maybe. Well, the poor bastard has missed out.'

'On what?'

'The city, when we get into it. They know some tricks, these Saracen women.'

'They are Moors, not Saracens.'

'The emir's whores are the best, if you can get hold of one the other lads haven't been up first. They'll know some tricks.' He laughed lazily. 'If the emir hasn't eaten his women by now. Try to find a whore without a bite taken out of her tits, ha ha!'

'I thought you said Moors eat babies.'

'Everybody knows that. But they'll have scoffed them all down by now, mate.'

Michael had never, in fact, met a Muslim in his life, save for a few mudejar farmers who had fled at the advance of the Christian army south from Cordoba. He knew nothing of Islam save the name. And yet here he was participating in a world-wide war against it.

Saladin had learned not to express such thoughts. He had had a difficult enough time being accepted by these western Christians without coming across as a Moorish sympathiser.

Their sergeant came by. He was a blunt-spoken Englishman called George, whose father had once fought with Richard the Lionheart, or so he claimed. He carried a big water flask, and an armed soldier watched his back to make sure none was stolen. 'Daily ration for you two arseholes,' he said, pouring the water out into their own flask. He glanced around. 'Where's the other arsehole? Pulling his cock?'

'He's dead,' Saladin said. 'He's a dead arsehole.'

'What, the sickness?'

'I think so.'

'Fair enough. Take him over there.' He pointed to a site near the base of the city walls where units of the army were gathering.

'Why?' Saladin asked.

'New orders. Captain says we're to catapult any dead arseholes over the wall. Let the Moors get the benefit of it.'

Michael laughed. 'They'll probably eat him. Poor old Hanse. He came a long way to be eaten by a starving Saracen whore.'

'Just do it,' the sergeant said, and he moved on.

It took the two of them to shift Hanse out of the tent, Michael at his shoulders, Saladin at his feet. Hanse's guts had emptied before he died. His tunic was crusted with vomit, and pale shit dribbled out of his trousers when they lifted him. What a waste of water, Saladin thought. He tried not to touch Hanse's flesh, or the shit.

'This isn't so bad,' Michael said, grunting as he worked.