Tortosa, Syria
Month of November
Year of the Lord 1300
With a shuddering groan, the stallion crashed to the sun-baked earth like a boulder, breath exploding from his mighty lungs.
“Melchior!” Ewan cursed and clenched his teeth as the dead weight of his mount pinned his left leg to the ground. The Templar charge was within reach of the Mamluk arrows, but Ewan saw no evidence his horse had been struck. Yet the beast lay silent and unmoving amid the chaos of battle, his magnificent white coat already turning to rust as the dust settled upon him. To drop lifeless, mid-stride, implied the animal’s courageous heart had likely failed.
“Melchior,” Ewan repeated, this time in anguish as the loss of a brave and noble friend became absolute in his mind. Choking on dust, he set his sword aside, and bent to grasp his trapped leg at the knee. All around him, the Templar charge continued. A horde of hooves thundered past, shaking the ground and raising clouds of Syrian sand. If that were not enough, enemy arrows rained down from above.
“Damn their Saracen bones,” Ewan bellowed and sucked dust-laden air through his slatted helm. At any moment, he was apt to be trampled to death or skewered. To die fighting in Christ’s name was a great honour. But this… this was death by misfortune. And it did not sit well with him.
“Come on, you bastard!” Ewan’s lungs burned as he tugged at his trapped limb. As the last of the Templar chargers moved past, the hail of arrows moved with them, many finding their targets. The cries of man and beast joined the cacophony of hooves and war drums.
Enveloped in a thick swirling cloud of sand and grit, Ewan could neither see nor breathe. Near suffocation, he pulled off his helm and cast it aside, coughing till tears tumbled down his cheeks.
The continued sounds of combat saturated the air. Still gasping, Ewan squinted into the sandstorm of battle and cursed his helplessness.
“Baucent!” came the familiar cry from the Master. Ewan roared his frustration as battle-fever pushed the blood through his veins. He placed his free foot against Melchior’s back, gritted his teeth again, and pushed till his head throbbed. All to no avail.
Then another cry went up, spreading across the battlefield like a rash. “Fire pots!”
A terrifying and familiar shriek filled the air as the burning missiles rained down all around. Another shout, close by, found its way to Ewan’s ear. “On your right, Brothers!”
Still blinded by dust, Ewan continued his struggle for freedom. He did not fear death, but he was not yet ready to surrender his life. “Come on,” he cried, tugging on his trapped limb, tears of sheer effort washing the dirt from his eyes. At that moment, something hit the ground nearby with a muted thud, and the surrounding air seemed to glow as if alight. Then he felt an impact against his mail coif on the side of his face by his left eye. At first, he barely flinched. The blow had been soft, like being hit by mud.
A moment later, fumes of burning pitch made his eyes weep and his nostrils flare. The viscous, flaming tar leached through the loops of his mail coif and bit into his flesh like white-hot teeth. The coif, meant to protect, now served as an instrument of torture. Ewan let out a howl and clawed at it, writhing as he struggled to peel it off. At last, it came away, taking burnt flesh with it, yet still his skin blistered as flecks of embedded pitch gnawed at his face like fiery leeches. Blinded and half-mad with pain, Ewan rolled over. He twisted his trapped leg and pressed his face against the dry earth, seeking to suffocate the terrible heat. But the agony remained, and that, combined with the stench of burnt flesh and hair, made him retch.
The shout went up again. “Baucent. Templars, to me!”
As the sounds of battle faded away, Ewan turned his head and looked to the dust-laden sky. Veiled by that devilish fog, the harsh, Syrian sun appeared as a perfect, fiery sphere. Yet Ewan felt cold, as if death had already taken him in its embrace. An arrow fell from the sky and thudded into the earth beside him. Then another, and another. He was a captive target, he realized, and crossed himself.
“I commend to your keeping, Lord,” he whispered, “the soul of your servant.”
No sooner had the words been spoken than the cloaked figure of a man loomed up, the sun forming a golden halo around his head. The man spoke, his voice blessedly familiar, yet somehow mystifying. “Not today, Brother,” he said. “Not today.”
Ewan tasted salt on his tongue and breathed in a lungful of cool, sweet air. As delirium pulled a merciful curtain across his consciousness, he thought of a land far away and capitulated to a blessed darkness.