He had no business there, though his business was innocent enough; but she could not tell him so now.  The girl was dejected, ill, and very nervous about herself.  Moreover, she had suffered from sea-sickness.  She could not hide her comfort to have him; so he took her up and kissed her as of old, and ended by settling her on his knee.  There she cried, quietly but freely.  He stayed with her till she slept; then went back to the shore and walked about the trenches, thinking out the business before him.  The dawn light found him at it.  In a day or two, having got his tackle ashore, he began the assault upon a plan of his own, without reference to any other principality or power at all.  By this time King Philip lay heaped in his bed, and had had his distempered brain wrought upon by Montferrat and his kind, Saint-Pol, Des Barres, and their kind.

* * * * *

Richard had with him Poictevins and Angevins, men of Provence and Languedoc, Normans and English, Scots and Welshry, black Genoese, Sicilians, Pisans, and Grifons from Cyprus.  The Count of Champagne had his Flemings to hand; the Templars and the Hospitallers served him gladly.  It was an agglomerate, a horde, not an army, and nobody but he could have wielded it.  He, by the virtue in him, had them all at his nod.  The English, who love to be commanded, hauled stones for him all day, though he had not a word of their language.  The swart, praying Italians raved themselves hoarse whenever he came into their lines; even the Cypriotes, sullen and timorous creatures, whom no power among themselves could have driven to the walls, fixed the great petraries and mangonels, and ran grinning into the trap of death for this tawny-haired hero who stood singing, bareheaded, within bow-shot of the Turks, and laughed like a boy when some fellow slipped on to his back upon the dry grass.  He was everywhere, day after day—­in the trenches, on the towers, teaching the bowmen their business, crying ‘Mort de Dieu!’ when a mangonel did its work, and some flung rock made the wall to fly; he crouched under the tortoise-screens with the miners, took a mattock himself as indifferently as an arbalest or a cross-bow.  He could do everything, and have (if not a word) a cheerful grin for every man who did his duty.  As it was evident that he knew what such duty should be, and could have done it better himself, men sweated to win his praise.  He was nearly killed on a scaling-ladder, too early put up, or too long left so.  Three arrows struck him, and the defenders, calling on Allah, rolled an enormous boulder to the edge of the wall, which must have crushed him out of recognition on the Last Day.  ‘Garde, sire!’ ’Dornna del Ciel!’ came the cries from below; but ‘Lady Virgin!’ growled a shockhead from Bocton-under-Bleane, and pulled his King bodily off the ladder.  The poor fellow was shot in the throat at the next moment; the stone fell harmless.  King Richard took up his dead Englishman in his arms and carried him to the trenches.  He did no more fighting until he had seen him buried, and ordained a mass for him.  Things of those sort tempted men to love him.