A flash fiction story about the Battle of Hattin in 1187. Experience the final, desperate hours of the Crusader army under the relentless sun, leading to their decisive defeat by Saladin.
The dust was the first to die, settling thick on the tongues of the men. Then the grass, as the Saracens lit the scrub before them, until the very air was a furnace breath. For two days, Saladin’s horse-archers had harried them, a swarm of wasps under the pitiless sun.
Now, on the Horns of Hattin, the True Cross was just a gilded stick in the hands of a trembling priest. The last of the water was gone. The last of the shade was a memory.
Sir Guy de Ridefort stared through the shimmering heat, his throat a leather strap. He saw the green banners of Islam rippling around the Sea of Galilee, a taunting vision of the water they would never reach. His knights, the pride of Christendom, knelt on the cracked earth, their mail shirts become ovens.
A final, desperate charge. A ghost of their former glory. They crashed into the Saracen lines, but the fight was gone, boiled out of them. They were pulled from their saddles, not with fury, but with a weary efficiency.
They brought Guy before the Sultan’s tent. Saladin sat in the shade, cool and composed. He offered a goblet of iced rosewater to the parched king. Guy drank, the cold a shocking pain in his gut.
“A king,” Saladin said, his voice soft, “should not have such a thirst.”
His eyes then fell upon the fanatics of the Cross, the men who had plagued his coast. He did not offer them water. He offered them the sword. And as the scholars stepped forward to do the work, the only sound was the dry, rasping wind, sweeping across the Horns, scouring the stone clean of kings and of God.
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