The Making of the Morning Star/Afterword
AFTER-WORD
SIX months passed; and John of Brienne, thirteenth King of Jerusalem, and his court rested at Tyre, upon the seacoast, where the barons of the northern provinces had gathered in general council to discuss means of holding their ground against fresh inroads of the Saracens.
The Moslem power had grown during the long truce, and the Croises knew themselves to be unable to stand in battle against the armies of the caliphs and the Sultan of Damascus if these hosts should be launched toward the seacoast.
At this council were gathered the lords of Ascalon and Acre, and the Marquis of Antioch, with their peers, and the leaders of the Genoese and Venetians. And the council came to naught because the young king lacked the personality to hold men united in a cause and each baron thought for the most part of his own fief. Yet one curious and notable happening marked the assembly of the peers. A caravan entered the east gate of Tyre and passed through the wall coming from the valley of the Orontes.
The leader of this caravan was a strange figure. Garbed in the finest of Persian silks and the brightest of nankeen and cloth-of-gold, he rode a horse with trappings of silvered cloth. He was attended by a score of savage men armed with spears and bows, whose like had never been beheld in Palestine.
He bore with him a certain store of gold which he guarded carefully and was at pains to despatch by agents of the chief Venetian merchants to Egypt, there to be paid to the Moslem masters of Damietta. This gold amounted to two thousand broad pieces, and the bearer explained that it was the ransom of a knight, one Robert Longsword, so called, who had been thought slain on the border.
As to the messenger himself, when his mission was done he called for the best wine of the taverns and the most skilful of the musicians and held revelry from the Tower of the Sea to the Sign of the Broken Sword, in the French quarter. When he drank his tongue was loosened, and it was learned that he, who had been esteemed a wealthy lord, was merely Will Bunsley, a wandering yeoman.
And when his gold and silver was spent he took service among the archers of the king and in time went from Tyre on a galley to Rhodes and thence to France. Those who had listened at first, drawn by the gold he had in his purse, began to laugh at his tale and call him a lying knave. Some, however, remembered the strange riders who had escorted him to the gate of Tyre.
But these had turned back at once, and few men believed the story of Will Bunsley, of Khar and its treasure, and an emperor of Islam who fled before an unknown conqueror.
Yet in time his narrative returned to the minds of the barons who had been at the council, and chiefly one Hugo of Montserrat, who had held his peace when mention was made of Khar.
This was when tidings came over the border of defeats suffered by the Moslems. Of Herat stormed by a new race of conquerors called the Mongols, and Balkh lost to Islam, and finally Bagdad itself fallen. So it happened that the power of the Saracens was not turned against the crusaders.
And when the fear of invasion had passed, the court of the king waxed merry. The minstrels and troubadors had a new song, made from the talk of the caravans that came over the border, and they sang of a crusader who adventured into paynimry itself and waged war upon the great cities. This they called the Romaunt of the Longsword, and many a time in hall and woman's garden they related it for the pleasuring of the people of the castle who had ever an ear for something new.
This romaunt came to be known even in the courts of Europe, and some of the minstrels sang of a maid who rode in armor beside the knight.
It is the song of a man of high honor, though no more than a youth in years, who kept faith in all things. And now this tale, from which the song came to be, has been told.