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He perceived that Melicent at least respected sorcery, and had tricked him out of Flamberge by playing upon his tetchy vanity. Her adroitness pleased him. Demetrios did not laugh when he found the Christian fleet had been ingloriously repulsed at sea by the Emir of Arsuf, and had never effected a landing.
At dusk on the night of September 18th the orange-groves began to erupt, and for eight hours horse and foot in orderly columns marched silently forward, the infantry to their battle positions and the cavalry to the beach between Arsuf and Jaffa, there to wait till the breach had been made.
So far as I have gone along with you I have done reasonably well. Did I scatter the heathen at Arsûf? No thanks to you, Burgundy, but I did. Did I hold a safe course to Joppa? Have I then brought you so near, and myself so near, for nothing at all? If I have been a fool in my day, I am not a fool now. I speak what I know. With this host I can save the city.
But they did not take King Richard unaware, for indeed he was as watchful as he was brave. I will now set forth as briefly as may be the order of the army as it was set out for battle at Arsuf. On the right hand of the army was the sea, its front being set towards the south.
The 157th Brigade got all the high ground about Arsuf, and thus prevented the enemy from obtaining a long-range view of Jaffa. A few rounds of shell fired by a naval gun at a range of nearly twenty miles fell in Jaffa some months afterwards, but with this exception Jaffa was quite free from the enemy's attentions.
H.M.S. Grafton, with Admiral T. Jackson, the monitors M29, M31, and M32, and the destroyers Lapwing and Lizard, arrived off the coast and shelled Jelil and Arsuf, and the 52nd Division, advancing on a broad front, occupied the whole of their objectives by five o'clock in the afternoon.
None but the light horsemen showed near at hand, and their tactics were to sting like wasps, and fly never to join battle. At last, in the swamp of Arsûf, where the Dead River splays over broad marshes, and goes in a swamp to the sea-edge, he saw his chance, and took it. Here a feint, carried out by Gaston of Béarn with great spirit, brought Saladin into the open.
Richard led the army on an expedition against Ascalon, defeated Saladin on his march thither at Arsuf, and advanced amid incessant skirmishes and single combats, into which he recklessly plunged as though he had been a simple knight-errant. Accordingly his progress was so slow that Saladin had destroyed the town before his arrival and rendered its capture worthless to the Christians.
But it was glorious folly, for which a man might well die. He was ready to die, though he hoped and believed that he should not. Saladin, once bitten, would be shy: he had been badly bitten at Arsûf.
And the tale tells how the King of Cyprus was defeated at sea by the Emir of Arsuf; and how Perion came unhurt from that battle, and by land relieved the garrison at Japhe, and was ennobled therefor; and was afterward called the Comte de la Foret. Then the King of Cyprus made peace with heathendom, and Perion left him.