Defender of Jerusalem

by Helena P. Schrader

  Beth sat down primly, careful not to touch the man on the bench next to her. It wasn’t just innate modesty; the man was crawling with lice, and his breath was so foul it made her want to gag. In fact, the entire complex was laden with unpleasant odors, from the latrines along the south side of the compound under the hospital wards to the smoke from a fire in which old bandages and other rubbish were being burned. Beth shuddered a little as she realized that for all her will to help, she was not very well suited to work in a place such as this.

  Beth turned her thoughts away from her surroundings to her mission. She had not been able to sleep for nervousness and excitement. Jerusalem seemed so large and strong that she refused to believe it could not be defended. She knew what her father-in-law said, and she knew that the Baron of Ibelin had sent his wife and children to safety. But Beth was certain Jerusalem could be defended.

  Ibelin town had been overrun because it had no proper walls, just earthworks, she told herself, but the castle of Ibelin had not even been attacked. Kerak had not fallen to Salah ad-Din either, she reminded herself, and all the unpleasantness during the siege resulted from overcrowding and limited water in the middle of the desert. Jerusalem had plenty of water, and just this morning Dawit had told her the Lord of Ibelin would be making armed foraging sorties into the surrounding countryside to round up the herds of cattle and sheep abandoned by their owners in the initial panic.

  Beth had to believe that Jerusalem was defensible, because she could not face the alternative: capture by the Saracens. It was not death she feared so much as what they would do to her before they deigned to kill her—and what they would do to Dawit when he tried to protect her and little Menelik. She had told Dawit more than once that she would prefer he killed her with his own hand rather than let her fall into Saracen hands, but she did not think he would have the heart to actually do it.

  No. They had to defend Jerusalem, even if it meant surviving a two-, three-, or four-year siege until the Christian princes in the West came to their relief. It had to be possible!

  A pretty young Hospitaller sister was in front of her. “You asked to see Sister Adela?” she asked Beth.

  Beth nodded vigorously and sprang to her feet to follow the Hospitaller nun. She was led across the huge courtyard, through the billowing and evil-smelling smoke, past a large and bustling kitchen complex that opened on to the Street of Vegetables, and into a narrow, cobbled alley flanked by St. Mary Major and St. Mary Minor. Finally she was led through a low dog-toothed portal into a lovely little cloister around a blooming garth with a bubbling fountain in the center. It was like an oasis in the desert, Beth thought.

  Sister Adela was talking to a Hospitaller lay brother who nodded several times, bowed, and then withdrew with only a short glance at Beth. Then Beth was led forward, and Sister Adela turned to her expectantly.

  “My lady,” Beth started eagerly but nervously. “I don’t know if you remember me. I’m in the household of the Dowager Queen, the Lady of Ibelin, and we met several times in Nablus. I—I used to help in the orphanage.”

  “Of course I remember you!” Sister Adela assured her with a smile. Beth had not only been good with the children, her story had greatly impressed not only Sister Adela but the other nuns as well.

  “I—have come because I—I wanted to offer my help.”

  Sister Adela smiled. “Of course! You must have heard about the one hundred orphans that were abandoned by their caretakers and brought here—”

  “No,” Beth corrected her, her nervousness making her bold. “I was told Lord Balian had asked you to organize the women to help defend the city.”

  That took Sister Adela back a little, but she didn’t show her surprise, suggesting instead, “Come, let’s sit in the shade.” She indicated a bench under the cross vaulting of the cloister. As they settled themselves Sister Adela continued, “It is true that Lord Balian has asked me to organize the women—”

  “What are the things we can do?” Beth broke in eagerly.

  “Well,” Sister Adela started, “we will need women who can look after the children in a collective place so the other women are free to do other tasks.” She paused and looked expectantly at Beth.

  But Beth didn’t want to do what she had always done. She wanted a more active role. She asked, “What else?”

  “We’ll also need women who can administer first aid to the wounded and then send them back here.” Beth tightened her lips.

  She knew she wasn’t suited to that, and Sister Adela read her expression correctly and continued. “And we’ll need women who can cook hot meals.” Still Beth did not respond, so Adela added, “We’ll also need women who have the courage and strength to take drinking water to the men manning the ramparts, and women who can soak cotton in oil and wrap it around arrows so our men can fire flaming arrows at the enemy—”

  “I would like to do the last!” Beth declared, breathless with excitement.

  “Prepare arrows for being set alight?” Sister Adela asked skeptically.“

  Yes,” Beth declared firmly, lifting her chin.

  “Why is that?” Sister Adela asked, puzzled.

  “Because the Muslims believe that if they are killed by a woman, they will not go to Paradise! I want to make the arrows that will kill as many of them as possible! If I could, I would shoot them myself!” Beth admitted, with so much passion that it took Sister Adela aback for a moment. But then, on second thought, she understood, and she laid her hand on Beth’s and nodded to herself. For the first time in her life, Beth saw a chance to take revenge on the men who had so brutally humiliated her—and all their brothers-in-faith, who despised her simply because she was not their sex.

  August 12, 1187

  During the public muster, Heraclius had melodramatically placed himself (and so the entire organization of the Church) under Ibelin’s command, but already the Patriarch was regretting it. The first thing Ibelin had done after knighting eighty-one youths was to order all decorative gold stripped from the facades, domes, and even the altars of the churches. “Gold,” Ibelin told the shocked Patriarch, “will not protect you from the arrows of the Saracens; men who have been paid in gold will.”

  “You would defend this city with mercenaries?” Heraclius asked back, in a voice vibrating with moral indignation.

  “No. But even the soldiers of Christ need to eat and drink—and they need to pay for both, and for their arms and their armor, too. The knights I made yesterday have nothing but what we give them, and where should we better find the means to pay them than from the churches they have vowed to defend with their lives? Strip the churches, your eminence!” Ibelin had ordered, and it was being done. While the senior clergy, with long faces, set about carrying out Ibelin’s command, the more humble parish priests and monks were charged with the comfort of men’s souls and the burial of the dead. When the siege came there would be many dead, and there would be no access to the cemeteries beyond the walls. The dead would have to be interred in catacombs or crypts. After much discussion, it was agreed that the dead would be placed in the deep, cavernous chambers that ran under the Temple of God and were presumed to have been part of the Temple of Solomon. The Templars had used these chambers as stables for their horses, but the bulk of the Templars’ mounts had been with their masters at Hattin, which meant they had been slaughtered or captured. There were almost no Templar horses left in Jerusalem, and the few remaining beasts could easily be stabled elsewhere.

  Once this had been decided, the Templars agreed to let lay brothers from other religious orders enter the Temple to clean out the stables and prepare them for use as a mass morgue. Father Michael was one of many priests who volunteered to assist in this operation.

  With the Ibelin children gone, Michael’s days were empty except for saying morning and evening Mass for the Ibelin household and hearing his lord’s daily confession. The empty hours left him far too much time for imagining what was to come—and truly, “idle hands were the devil’s playground.
” Michael preferred to keep busy.

  If he were honest with himself, he was also curious about the mysterious “Temple” that had been guarded so assiduously by the fierce militant monks. Although he had been to Jerusalem many times since taking service with the Baron d’Ibelin, he had not once before this set foot across the threshold of the Temple.

  The first thing that struck Father Michael, along with the other priests and monks with him, was that the Temple was empty. Not literally, of course, but it was so much too large for the few men remaining that it felt as if they were entering an abandoned complex. Everywhere was evidence of the Order’s former strength: a massive refectory that could easily serve five hundred men at a time, dormitories of similar dimensions, a parade ground long enough for knights to joust on, an armory with lances still stacked against the walls, and bins full of arrows (which would be distributed, a Templar sergeant assured them, as soon as the siege commenced). There were tattered black-and-white banners hanging from the roof beams as well; a Templar sergeant proudly identified each banner by the great victory at which it had been carried. The Beauséant was apparently only carried once and then retired here.

  And then there were the stables themselves, deep and dark, not the kind of stables Mathewos (now Sir Mathewos) would have wanted for his horses, Michael noted with amusement. These stables had vaulted ceilings ten feet high, and the stone arches stretched deep into the bowels of the mountain, but the air was stale and the atmosphere gloomy.

  Father Michael found himself working beside a middle-aged Syrian priest deep inside the stables. The Syrian was wiry and dark with an impressive beard. They raked the straw together and then loaded it on a handcart to take it out. The straw had once been dirty, but the manure had long since dried out; it was disintegrating and almost odorless. Michael did not find the work particularly unpleasant, but there was something intangibly creepy about the place. He felt the weight of history and the eyes of the dead upon him. The feeling was clearly shared by his colleague.

  “My grandfather was a young man during the last siege,” the Syrian abruptly announced in a low voice.

  “When the Great Armed Pilgrimage liberated the city?” Michael asked, amazed, stopping his work so the scraping of his rake on the stone floor did not drown out a single word.

  The Syrian nodded, and he too stopped to rest on his rake.

  “What brought him here?” Michael asked.

  The Syrian shrugged. “We have always lived in Jerusalem. Probably since it was taken by King David. My grandfather used to joke that one of our ancestors was probably in the crowd calling, ‘Give us Barabbas!’ to Pontius Pilate.”

  That seemed an odd thing to joke about, and Michael frowned.

  The Syrian smiled faintly. “He said that to explain why we have never had much luck, although our forefathers were converted by St. Peter himself and my family belonged to the first Christian community that met here”—he stamped his foot on the rock as if he meant this very place—“at the risk of their lives under the Romans.”

  “Do you mean you met here, under the Temple of Solomon?” Michael asked, looking about him at the echoing chamber.

  “After the Romans destroyed the Second Temple of the Jews, we met here,” the Syrian insisted. “And elsewhere,” he added, “until Constantine became Emperor and we could build churches and meet openly. But then the followers of Mohammed came, and the church bells were silenced and the churches desecrated. We were humiliated and taxed, and again could not meet to read the Mass in public.”

  “But aren’t there churches throughout the lands held by the Saracens?” Michael asked, surprised. “I mean, I know Christians are subject to persecution, but surely you could remain Christians, couldn’t you?”

  The Syrian shook his head. “Only at a very high cost! My grandfather used to tell us stories of what it was like before Palestine was liberated by the Latins. He said that in addition to the taxes, Christians were subject to extra duties, and whenever some misfortune befell the city, whether it was drought or floods, snow or pests, the Christians were blamed. Sometimes they would take the priests and drag them through the streets so the followers of Mohammed could spit and throw filth at them. Sometimes the priests were imprisoned and their parishioners were forced to pay huge ransoms to set them free. He said no Christian woman was safe in the streets because the followers of Mohammed, if they knew the woman was Christian, would seize her and use her like a whore for their own pleasure, without remorse or mercy, because only women of their own faith are considered virtuous and worthy of respect. For that reason, in his day the Christian women also went about completely veiled, and dared not show even an ankle in public.”

  Michael was so fascinated by his companion’s story that he completely forgot the work they were meant to do.

  “When he learned about the Christian army coming to our relief, my grandfather says he was not at all glad—he was frightened. He says he did not believe that any Christian army could ever cross through the territories held by the Turks, and he was sure he and his fellow Christians would be punished for the effrontery of the Westerners. He says the Egyptians took pleasure in telling them how the armed pilgrims were obliterated, crushed, and utterly destroyed—first near Nicaea, and then near Dorylaeum, and again at Antioch. The Egyptians told the Christian community in Jerusalem that the Western pilgrims had all starved to death in Antioch. By then, however, after being told the Christians were ‘slain to the last man’ three times, my grandfather and other Christians had come to believe that the Latin pilgrims truly came from Christ, because they had been able to rise from the dead not once but three times!

  “Meanwhile, however, each time the Christian armies were ‘destroyed,’ the anger among the Egyptians grew greater and the taxes increased. When the Christian army actually appeared and set up camp before the walls, the Egyptians gave up all pretense of legality and broke into our houses at will to take anything of value. They abused the women as well.”

  “I thought the Christians had been expelled from Jerusalem before it was taken,” Michael broke in.

  “After the first Christian assault failed, the Egyptian commander ordered all the ‘useless mouths’ to depart, and so the women and children and old people were sent out of the city even if—as in the case of my grandfather’s old parents and his sister—they had no place to go. But the young men, like my grandfather at the time, were forced to remain and work on the defenses of the city. They were watched over by men with whips, just like slaves.”

  “So he was in the city when the final assault came?” Michael asked anxiously.

  The Syrian nodded sadly. “Yes.”

  “And he survived?”

  “He and the other Christians knew about these chambers,” he gestured to the echoing arches overhead. “We all shared the tradition of the early years. When the Egyptian defense broke and people started fleeing for their lives, he and many other Christians came here.” Again he tapped the solid stone floor with his sandalclad foot.

  “And they were not discovered?”

  “No; they stayed here until the light of day had faded, and then they waited again for the dawn before they dared to show themselves. By then the blood lust of the conquerors had turned to frenzied piety and the Latins were wandering the streets of Christ’s passion, shedding tears of gratitude and kissing the paving stones—if they could find any. For you see, when the native Christians emerged from these chambers, they found a city paved with corpses and severed body parts, the gutters clogged with drying blood, and a sky filled with vultures, crows, and flies. It was, my grandfather said, worse than any image of hell he had ever imagined.” The Syrian stopped speaking. For a moment both priests were lost in images of carnage, colored luridly by the knowledge that they were likely soon face the same again.

  Michael shook himself free of the mental pictures first. “Will your family seek refuge here again—I mean, if the dead are here. . . .” Michael looked around and shuddered.

&n
bsp; “Now you understand why the Syrian Patriarch was so reluctant to agree to the plan. But then, last time, we knew that once the invaders’ blood lust had cooled and they were willing to listen, all we had to do was identify ourselves as Christians and they would embrace us as brothers. As they did. This time it will do us no good to survive the first onslaught. Even if we hide for days or weeks, our fate will be the same when we emerge: slaughter or slavery.”

  “But you lived under the Saracens before. There are still Jacobite communities living in Salah ad-Din’s territories,” said Michael, returning to his earlier point.

  The Syrian shrugged and resumed his raking. “They live as my grandfather says we lived before the liberation of Jerusalem: oppressed, taxed, despised, and humiliated. They can endure it because they have never known any other fate. But we have known freedom, and we will have defied the Sultan. He will not forgive and forget. Remember what he did to the Nubians who rebelled against him?” The Syrian seemed to concentrate on his raking, but he was thinking about something, and he nodded to himself. Then he looked up at Michael with a faint smile. “Why do you look so distressed? Don’t you believe in the Resurrection and the Life? If He so wills that we should have the privilege of dying in the same city where He, too, was killed by nonbelievers, shouldn’t we rejoice? Death is not such a terrible thing, for it is the gateway to Paradise for those who live and believe in our Lord Jesus Christ.”

  Father Michael felt compelled to answer “Amen!” but he couldn’t help adding, “Yet for many who have sins on their conscience, death will mean the gateway to everlasting hell. And who among us has not sinned?”

  “That is where we come in,” the Syrian priest answered with a smile, “for we can give absolution of sins and assure the dying that they have nothing to fear.” He leaned on his rake and considered the man-made caves. “The men brought here will be the lucky ones, for they will be those for whom we have had the time to pray. In the final slaughter there will be no time for us to do our offices, but we must believe that He himself and his ever merciful Mother will give absolution to all who truly repent. That is what I will tell my flock.”