“That is why they still live. The Saracens knew they would die before they could be sold as slaves.”
She saw bedraggled women, their stomachs bloated with hunger, tending to men whose cries of pain rent the air. Her mare snorted and sidestepped a pool of blood. A man’s body, covered with a rag, lay alone at its center, blackened by the ferocious hot sun. She gagged, unable to help herself.
“How can this be our victory, Payn?”
He shrugged, weary and saddened. “It is worse than I thought. You, Joanna, and the other ladies will stay with Eleanor,” he said, pointing to a small stone house that lay ahead of them beneath the collapsed northern wall of the city. “That is Edward’s headquarters.”
Chandra followed Eleanor into the bare, derelict interior of the house. Wounded English soldiers lay on blankets along its walls. “Where is Jerval?” she asked Lambert, who was kneeling over a wounded soldier.
He raised his once-happy boyish face to her, and she drew back at the haunted look in his eyes. “He will return,” Lambert said, his voice dead.
She saw Graelam holding a gourd of water to the pinched lips of one of his squires, the look on his face one of fury mingled with despair. His eyes met hers briefly, and for the first time, it was Graelam who looked away.
Chandra stayed close to the women, praying for the sun to set on the misery. She heard Edward say to Eleanor, “If I had known that it would be so wretched, I would not have sent for you. We lost few men. But the people, by God, the people.”
Eleanor’s face was pale, her dark eyes dimmed with the suffering she had seen. “It is beyond anything I could have imagined,” she said, her hands against her swelled belly.
“You will stay within. I do not want you outside.”
Chandra helped Eleanor and her ladies prepare a small chamber in the back of the house for them, but she could not remain with them, hidden away. She stood in the doorway of Edward’s headquarters, awaiting Jerval. When he finally strode toward her, his surcoat drenched with sweat, she saw that he was carrying a small girl in his arms, one of her legs wrapped in the bloody hem of his surcoat. He nodded at her, and she felt suddenly like an outcast, her body clean and whole, her belly filled with food. He looked unutterably weary. She felt tears start to her eyes when the child looked at her, for she did not utter a sound or a groan, and her dark eyes were glazed with shock.
“I saw a Saracen hack at her leg,” Jerval said blankly, the first words he spoke. “He simply leaned low off his horse’s back and slashed his scimitar. I killed him, of course, but it was too late for the child.”
She remembered her glib words to Graelam the night of Ali ad-Din’s banquet, idiocy about glory and honor, and her meaningless words to Payn just hours before that war wasn’t pretty. She’d had no idea, none at all. They were just words she’d spoken, just silly words spoken by an ignorant fool. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Oh God, I’m sorry.” But her words meant nothing in the face of the horror that surrounded them, and she knew it.
She watched him lay the child tenderly down upon a blanket and force some water between her pinched lips. Her small head lolled to one side. He rose and looked about the wall at the English soldiers.
“You are all right?” she asked him.
“Nay,” he said, “I am not all right, but I am alive and healthy, which is more than I can say for these poor wretches.” He shook his head, as if to block out the chaos outside the house. “I wish that you had not come.”
“Is there nothing we can do?”
He ran his fingers through his matted hair. “Aye, many of the people are starving. I am taking some men to give them what food we can.”
“I would go with you, Jerval.”
She saw that he would refuse, and quickly added, “If I must be here, do not deny me a useful task.”
He seemed to struggle with himself for a moment, then shrugged. “Very well, but you will stay close beside me. I do not know if there is still danger. You can help us gather the food.”
It was late afternoon when they left the English quarters, and the sun still blazed overhead, making the stench almost unbearable. She would have given away all the bread she carried to the men and women huddled close by Edward’s headquarters had Jerval not stopped her, his voice grim. “Nay, there is much need. You must dole it out, else you’ll have nothing for the rest of the people.”
She just shook her head, but she heeded him and followed him through the labyrinth of rubble in the narrow streets. They saw women crouched down in the piles of waste, burrowing for food or clothing.
“The Saracens took pride, I think, in beggaring the Nazarenes,” Jerval said wearily. He turned to see Chandra leaning over a ragged woman in the doorway of a small house. She was shaking her, begging her to take a hunk of bread. Her voice rose, almost angrily, when the woman did not raise her head.
He felt a stab of impotent pain and touched his hand to Chandra’s shoulder. “She is dead, sweeting. Come, there is nothing you can do for her.”
Chandra raised angry eyes to his face. “No, you are wrong, Jerval. No, she isn’t dead, she isn’t. She’s merely sleeping. It is so very hot, you see, and there was such violence. Sleeping, aye, she’s just sleeping.”
He saw that she could not accept it and forcibly drew her to her feet. He said to one of the soldiers, “Tell the men that there is another for the funeral pyre.
“Come,” he said, forcing her away. “There are living who need our food.”
She said not another word throughout the rest of the afternoon, even when they passed one of the burning funeral pyres. When they had no more food, she raised glazed eyes to Jerval’s face. “What are we to do?”