Word: saracens
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...SARACEN BLADE (406 pp.)-Frank Yerby-Dial...
During the siege of St. Marcel in the year 1212, says Frank Yerby in The Saracen Blade, a dead horse was mounted on a trenchbut. This instrument, a huge catapult, flung the horse clear over the city's parapets and dropped it in the public cistern...
This time Yerby's missile is dressed in full medieval caparison. The Saracen Blade tells the life story of a peasant who was born at the same time, same place as a prince. Pietro di Donati is therefore presumably controlled by the same stars as Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor. Author Yerby says, but hardly bothers to show, that their careers run as parallel as the two sides of a coin. Yet certainly Pietro must have had more girls; they fell for him in domino-rows...
Willie made out all right. In The Saracen's Head, London Daily Express Cartoonist Osbert Lancaster thrusts greatness upon his unwilling hero in a bland satire that good-naturedly kids the iron pants off the whole profession of medieval arms. Written as a juvenile, it is the kind of literary fare that parents will gobble up if they can get it away from the kids. The Saracen's Head can be read in an hour, but in that brief time Willie runs his shaky lance through El Babooni, the infidel champ, is knighted by King Richard I himself...
Figures (TIME, Jan. 17), the sly charm of Saracen's Head will come as no surprise. Lancaster's own illustrations, in color and black & white, are so pointed that those too lazy to read can join him in his laugh at the age of chivalry by merely turning the pages...