Soldier of Crusade Read Online Free PDF

weapons and hanging on to our stirrup leathers.’
    ‘And where are they now?’
    ‘Defending Civetot, Highness, which is why I have come on here and in haste, stopping not even to remove the blood and filth from my person. The town and the remaining pilgrims are at risk if the Turks keep advancing, for there is nothing of a fighting nature to prevent it. I have come to ask that you either provide men to defend the town or send ships to withdraw the people left behind, the women and children as well as those too old or infirm to fight.’
     
    They could smell Civetot long before any of the boats sent to bring off the remaining pilgrims ever sailed into the Gulf of Nicomedia,the great bight, on the southern arm of which the wretched town sat. Never a place of beauty it was ravaged now, the churches burnt shells and the homes of those who had lived here torn down into dust. Rotting carcasses of flesh leave a high odour in a warm climate, yet it was testament to the amount of slaughter that it could be discerned so far from the shore that there could be no doubt what the sailors would find when they set foot on the beach.
    Kilij Arslan had indeed come on from the massacre described by Sigibuld, to attack a settlement bereft of any means of resistance. There were survivors, but few, the kind who had rushed into the sea and managed to stay afloat as the butchery was accomplished on land. There were also those the Turks had thought dead, buried so deep in a pile of bodies that the fact of their still breathing was undetectable, a few dozens from the many thousands to tell the tale of what had occurred, about a host who had no interest in conversion to Islam but only in killing what they saw as a plague.
    There had been others who avoided the massacre: young women and boys who could be sold into carnal servitude, the few fit men who had not marched off with the army able to work as slaves aboard galleys or in quarries. For the rest they were killed; women not of tender years were of no use and neither were small children, infants and newly born babies. The old were despatched as a matter of course and the Turks had gathered those they had slain into a great mound of suppurating flesh that had left the ground around it, where their tuns of blood had leached out from the ferociously administered wounds, as soggy as a bog.
    Peter the Hermit had come as well and many wondered at his silent thoughts as he surveyed the death of both his hopes and his Crusade. Was his faith still intact? Did he think, like the victims overwhose bodies he prayed must have thought, that their dreams were delusions? Or did he believe these souls to be martyred and already in paradise? No one asked Peter and he was not speaking.
    ‘Go back to Constantinople,’ said the man Alexius had put in command of the ships, ‘and tell the Emperor that the People’s Crusade is no more.’

C HAPTER T HREE
    T he Apulian army was unaware of what had happened ahead of them and would have shown indifference if they had been told – what else could be expected of a force of peasants? Many were experienced mercenary soldiers who had previously marched along the ancient Via Egnatia, as were the mailed and mounted Norman knights who moved east with them, not least their leader. Just over ten years previously the then Duke of Apulia, Robert de Hauteville, had been obliged to curtail a second bite at conquest, required to go home to suppress an insurrection of his ever-discontented barons, whose natural bellicosity had been watered by Byzantine gold.
    Bohemund had been entrusted to continue his father’s invasion, and given that he had suffered an ultimate reverse, not all of his memories of this land were ones to be covered in a golden glow. The memory dimmed even more as he recalled that the deeper he had pushed into Macedonia and Thessaly the greater became the difficulties for theforces he had led, as much from the terrain as from enemy action to slow his progress, as