The Knights of Dark Renown Read online

  The Knights of Dark Renown

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Disclaimer

  Dedication

  Principal Characters

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Aftermath

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Read More

  Copyright

  The Knights of Dark Renown

  Graham Shelby

  This book contains views and language on nationality, sexual politics, ethnicity, and society which are a product of the time in which the book is set. The publishers do not endorse or support these views. They have been retained in order to preserve the integrity of the text.

  For Ann and MAW, BZM, DCH, and many others with the gift of encouragement

  Principal Characters

  The Factions within the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1183

  REYNALD OF CHATILLON Lord of Kerak

  STEPHANIE OF MILLY Lady of Oultrejourdain, chatelaine of Kerak

  HUMPHREY IV OF TORON son of Stephanie, stepson of Reynald

  BALIAN OP IBELIN Lord of Nablus

  MARIA COMNENA widow of King Amalric I, Lady of Nablus

  ISABELLA Princess of Jerusalem, daughter of Maria; stepdaughter of Balian

  FOSTUS Constable of Nablus

  ERNOUL Squire to Lord Balian

  KING BALDWIN IV OF JERUSALEM

  AGNES OF COURTENAY, ex-wife of King Amalric I, mother of King Baldwin IV and Princess Sibylla of Jerusalem

  JOSCELIN OF COURTENAY Seneschal of the Kingdom, brother of Agnes

  AMALRIC OF LUSIGNAN Constable of the Kingdom

  HERACLIUS Patriarch of Jerusalem

  PASHIA DE RIVERI draper’s wife

  RAYMOND III OF TRIPOLI Lord of Tiberias

  ESCHIVA OF BURES Princess of Galilee, Countess of Tripoli

  GUY OF LUSIGNAN brother of Constable Amalric

  SIBYLLA Princess of Jerusalem

  BALDWIN son of Sibylla

  BALDWIN OF RAMLEH brother of Balian of Ibelin

  WALTER OF CAESAREA

  REGINALD OF SIDON

  ARNOLD OF TOROGA Grand Master of the Temple

  ROGER OF LES MOULINS Grand Master of the Hospital

  GERARD OF RIDEFORT Templar

  ERMENGARD DE DAPS Hospitaller

  The Force without

  SALADIN Sultan: Salah ed-Din Yusuf, al-Malik un-Nasir

  AL-AFDAL Saladin’s eldest son:

  ALI, AL-MALIK AL-AFDAL KUKBURI Emir of Harran

  TAKEDIN Emir of Hamat: Al-Malik al-Modaffer Taki ed-Din Omar

  LULU Egyptian Admiral: Husam ed-Din Lulu

  Tell of the Lord, tell of the Lady,

  Tell of the King with his robe and crown;

  Tell of the Dancer, tell of the Juggler,

  Tell of the Knight of bright renown.

  Sing out, speak out, link hands and run,

  The daylight’s gone and supper’s on,

  The fire’s alight and winter’s come.

  CHILDREN’S SONG

  Chapter One

  The Red Sea

  April 1183

  From a distance the long war galley looked deserted. The pine masts were bare, the twin rows of oars dipped, unmoving in the water. It was as though the crew had lowered the heavy linen sails, bound the rudder bar, filed out of the rowing benches and dived overboard, leaving the vessel to the vagaries of wind and current.

  But from a distance it was not possible to see the open decks below the bulwarks, or the benches that traversed the mid-section of the ship, or what lay beneath the small canopy draped across the bows. For a more detailed assessment of the galley’s fate the curious sailor or fisherman would have to move closer. However, at this time, in the dawn of one of the last days of April 1183, there were no other craft in the vicinity. The galley was alone, isolated by choice somewhere in the northern expanse of the Red Sea.

  She had neared her present position an hour earlier, having run all night before a fleet of high-prowed Saracen butas. Through a combination of great good fortune, the cover of darkness and the desperate skill of her captain and crew she had eluded the enemy warships and limped north into the day.

  Although there were no signs of life aboard, the crew were still there. They were sprawled flat on the decks, slumped over the benches, huddled against the bulwark rails. Eight of the sixty rowers were dead, but no one had dared tip the bodies over the side for fear they would float and mark the passage of escape. The five-strong team of steersmen had been reduced to three, while the contingent of armed men who crouched between the midship benches had lost a quarter of their number. The captain, a thin-faced Sicilian pirate named Camini, was alive and nursing the crudely bound stump of a severed wrist. Throughout the latter part of the chase he had laughed bitterly to himself, since it was one of his own men who had swung a short sword too wildly and chopped off Camini’s left hand. The man had been killed during the subsequent hours of the pursuit, so the Sicilian’s sense of justice was satisfied.

  The butas had come upon the galley at dusk and attempted to drive it east toward the coast of Arabia. Camini had anticipated the manoeuvre and the galley had broken free heading north. The chase had continued in that direction for several hours, while the Moslem ships clung tenaciously to the wake of their prey. The Saracen archers fired hundreds of black-feathered arrows, some tipped with iron, some with lumps of flaming tar. Twice the stern of the galley was set alight, and twice members of the crew swarmed over the huge rudder to hurl vinegar and sand on the flames. In this way, standing unprotected, they had presented the archers with an easy target, and most of the casualties had been incurred there.

  Eventually, taking advantage of the approaching darkness, Camini had ordered that the dun-coloured sails be lowered and extra men sent to the rowing benches. He commanded his own archers to hold their fire, while all aboard the galley were told to maintain the strictest silence. He made his way round the stern, knelt once to cut the throat of a wounded soldier who would not stifle his moans, and whispered directions to the steersmen. The galley moved north-west, then north-east, then due west and round again in a wide northward arc. The butas fanned out and the Saracen bowmen fired blazing naphtha high in the air in an effort to trace the fleeing vessel. The harsh white flares illuminated a ship ploughing east from Nubia, but by the time the Moslems recognized it as a merchantman, the galley had vanished.

  Now she lay silent, a fire-scarred nest of shame and fury.

  Despite Camini’s profession, the galley was not the property of some common corsair. Her name had been erased from the prow and she carried no insignia, yet the Saracens had committed their entire first fleet to the pursuit of this single ship. They had learned who she was and, more important, who beside Camini rode aboard her. This knowledge strengthened their resolve to capture the vessel and to treat those who survived the fight with the vicious disgust usually reserved for poisonous yellow scorpions, or the hairy spider called tarantes. The Saracen navy regrouped and continued the search.

  The vessel they were so determined to destroy was the Cru
sader war galley Ter e Mer. She was the flagship of a sixteen galley fleet, all of which had been constructed in the Christian countries of Moab and Ascalon, test-sailed on the Dead Sea or the Mediterranean, dismantled and carried hundreds of miles overland to the Gulf of Aqaba. There, they had been re-assembled, armed and crewed, then sent south in search of the black devils of Islam. For three months Ter e Mer and the other fifteen had served as floating castles, from which the Crusaders issued forth to burn and pillage the coastal towns of Arabia and Nubia, to make landward sorties against merchant caravans and to threaten Mecca itself.

  The man they sought to destroy was now asleep under the bow canopy. He was the Frankish suzerain, Reynald of Chatillon, Lord of Kerak of Moab. Known to his friends as Prince Reynald and to the Saracens as the Red Wolf of the Desert, he was regarded by his Christian allies as the most dangerous man in Palestine.

  He lay on his side, his spine pressed hard against the oak planks that curved round to the prow post. In one hand he held a broad stabbing knife. The other was curled over the pommel of his massive sword. Because he could not swim, and would rather risk taking an arrow in the chest than falling overboard, he had stripped off his full-length ringmail hauberk. Now he wore only a long-sleeve leather gambeson, a broad, stained belt and sword-hanger and high felt boots with sewn-on leather soles. His flat-topped helmet – again too dangerous to wear as it would drag him head first under water – a crossbow and a sackful of quarrels were piled near him under the brown canopy.

  He had fought ferociously, not only during the past hours, but almost without respite since early February. He had personally killed more than seventy Moslems, men, women and, on five occasions, children. So, whenever he slept, he enjoyed the tranquillity of mind that comes to a man who has done his work well. Yet he slept in the shallows and as Camini advanced in silence toward the prow he came awake and twisted to a crouch.

  ‘You,’ he snarled, ‘don’t you play the dancer with me.’ He made a sharp sideways movement with the knife, then pointed it at the pirate’s bandaged stump. ‘Creep up on me like that again and you’ll hold your wine mug with your feet. You understand? Well, what news?’

  Camini, who had earned himself a reputation as one of the most ruthless men in the eastern Mediterranean, had been forced into second place by Reynald of Chatillon. The corsair had responded to Reynald’s call for good pilots, men who knew the Red Sea and were not afraid to trespass on it, and he had presented himself at Kerak in January. By the time the Crusader’s raiding column had swept south from the fortress and captured Aqaba, Camini realised that he was hardly more than an apt pupil in Reynald’s school. When the port had been taken the two men had disagreed over some trifling detail and Reynald had used his sword pommel to club in three of Camini’s teeth. Since then the Sicilian had limited his observations to nautical matters and Reynald had left him alone.

  Now the pirate held up his good hand, gestured to the Crusader to hold his temper and said, ‘We are well clear, Prince.’ He whistled through the gaps in his teeth, and it amused him to see Reynald smile. When he killed the Lord of Kerak, as he had promised himself he would, he hoped to devise a way of death that would also make Reynald whistle.

  Reynald nodded and pushed himself to his feet, stooping until he had moved clear of the canopy. He sheathed his dagger and asked, ‘How many men have we lost?’

  Camini shrugged. ‘Until they wake I cannot tell the living from the dead. Twenty-three I know of, but more may have died in the night.’

  ‘You did well to get us free, Sicilian. At one time I thought we would be taken.’

  ‘Yesss,’ the captain sibilated, ‘when they made the circle round us.’ With sadistic care he added, ‘On the subject, Prince, have you heard the news of the others in your fleet?’

  ‘What news? I know we still have a ship off Aqaba.’

  ‘Yesss, that’s so. But I mean the others, those you sent south. Did you know Lulu has them?’

  ‘What? In God’s name, cut-throat, who’s Lulu?’

  ‘In the Name of Mohammed,’ Camini corrected, his eyes bright with malice. ‘He is the Egyptian Admiral, Husam ed-Din Lulu. Saladin sent for him to take command of his new navy. Ah, yesss, did you not know? It was launched some days ago. Did you not think it strange that Emir Saladin could afford to send an entire fleet after us and risk leaving your other ships at liberty? He now has two fleets, an old and a new. And has destroyed yours, I hear.’ He paused to let Reynald assimilate the first part of the report, and carried out an inspection of his grotesque wound.

  They both knew that the Moslem leader, Salah ed-Din Yusuf had been as stunned as his people by the savage efficiency of the Red Sea raids. But he had recovered quickly and thereafter matched Reynald move for move. Where the Lord of Kerak had had ships built and dispatched from Moab and Ascalon, Saladin had commissioned his own fleet and had had it transported from Alexandria and Damietta.

  Unable to secure the support of his fraternal overlords, who were deeply shocked by his boast that he would raze Mecca, holy place of Islam, Reynald had been content to hire bloody profiteers like Camini. For his part, Saladin chose the highly-trained sailors from Maghrib to man his ships, and Admiral Lulu to command them. In this way he was able to send a competent and disciplined navy against a pack of sea wolves, whose only advantage, surprise, had long since evaporated.

  ‘You say this Lulu has them?’ Reynald thundered. ‘All of them?’

  ‘Perhaps one or two escaped. He surrounded them near al-Hawra. It’s said he sank five ships and seized the rest. Before long Saladin’s two fleets will become three, because he will use our own galleys, your galleys, against us. It would seem wise to return quickly to Aqaba, yesss?’

  Reynald felt the devil’s talons bury themselves in his neck.

  He was a large man for the age; heavy-set, with sagging shoulders, bowed legs and thick, corded arms. He had red hair on his head, jaw and upper lip, and his face and body were stitched with the jagged scars of combat, or drunken misjudgement. His mouth was filled with teeth the width and colour of his thumb-nail. He was not a man to be shaken easily, but he shook now, jerked this way and that by the invisible claws, his spine twisted by the pressure of the satanic force. But if one did not believe that the Prince of Demons could find the Lord of Kerak where the Saracens had failed, then Reynald’s contortions equally well fitted a man who had been fed poisoned salt.

  Camini needed no explanation. He had seen many men dance like this, some with pain, some with anger, some because they had been born with a snake in their intestines. Whatever the cause, they were all dangerous. He drew back and slid his hand inside the folds of his robe. He felt safer when his hand closed round the hilt of the Turkish dagger he wore slung across his chest.

  Blood trickled from Reynald’s mouth as he gasped, ‘All save two? You say we lost all but two!’

  The captain allowed the pain of his severed wrist to dictate his expression. Piously he said, ‘The report may be exaggerated, but you have heard what I have heard.’

  ‘And when did you hear it? What proof have you?’

  ‘None, save that we know our ships were near al-Hawra. I also heard that many of the captives are to be given in sacrifice at Mecca and Cairo.’ He pushed words about in his mind, hunting for a way to repeat that they were Reynald’s men and that al-Hawra was Reynald’s defeat. Nobody, not even the Lord of Kerak, could snap Camini’s teeth with impunity.

  Then suddenly, a voice from the stern screamed, ‘Captain! Oh, sweet Christ, Captain! See behind us, in plain sight!’

  The pirate spun round. Reynald spat blood and moved beside him. They stared beyond the waking mass of oarsmen and soldiery, beyond the littered stern deck and high-scarred rudder to where, moving toward them from the horizon, was the silhouette of a three-masted ship. There was no wind, so the scarlet and yellow sails hung limp, but the long, double banks of oars drove the vessel steadily closer. Even if she were not moving on a pursuit course, the colours marked her
as a Saracen craft.

  Camini leapt to the rail that separated the forward deck from the rowing pit. By now most of the oarsmen were awake, pushing their companions to see if they had survived the night, or shouting at the steersman who had first raised the alarm, or at Camini, or at the men-at-arms who crowded the central gangway, or at each other with growing panic. Some rose from the benches and decks to see for themselves the approaching vessel. Others reached for oars, spears, crossbows, then gesticulated angrily, indicating the corpses that lolled in the pit.

  ‘Tip them out!’ Camini shouted. ‘Clear the decks! Down there, help on the benches!’ He caught the attention of the three remaining steersmen and commanded them to set a course due north.

  Reynald moved level again and said, ‘No, we will not run. We will take this ship.’

  ‘Are you insane? Take it with what? You see the size of it. It will have catapults, hook ladders – Look at it! It sits twice as high—’

  ‘I said we’ll take it. Turn the galley.’

  Camini dragged down the corners of his mouth and shook his head with finality. ‘Ah, no, Prince. I will not turn. I command Ter e Mer. It is why you brought me from Sicily. That may well be a warship, with Lulu himself at the helm—’

  ‘Just so,’ Reynald grated, his lips stained with blood. ‘Lulu, the man you say destroyed the Christian fleet, my fleet. You think I would not take my chance with him?’

  ‘What chance? We have no chance. He will crush us with his oars, pour fire down on us, run across us and—’ He stopped and let the air whistle through his broken teeth as he felt the blade of Reynald’s knife against his spine.

  ‘Turn the galley, Sicilian. If you don’t like the way it goes, swim to Aqaba! Make haste and give your orders. Do it now!’ He jabbed the point of the blade into Camini’s back. ‘Now, I say! We must face them before they reach us.’

  The captain winced with pain. ‘Cover your blade,’ he hissed. ‘You’ll get your way. Our deaths too, for the same price.’ He wrapped his handless arm in a fold of his soiled robe, then leaned forward against the rail. The corpses from the previous skirmish had been dumped overboard, their places taken on the benches by sullen men-at-arms. He told the steersmen to pull the rudder hard over, then gave the order to row. A wave of protest rose from the exhausted crew. It was one thing to use the last of one’s energy in a bid for freedom, but quite another to expend oneself rowing toward certain destruction. Camini breasted the wave of complaints, then drew his own curved knife and repeated the order. Even with his left hand slashed away he was too dangerous to cross.