Pillars of Light

by Jane Johnson

  A shadow fell across her and she looked up and caught her breath. Then Aisa moved so that the sun hit his face. Like hers, it was gaunt with sorrow. “Come to the wall with me,” he said.

  She stared at him. “Why?”

  Aisa held a hand out to her and she took it and hauled herself upright.

  “It’s our story,” he said. He sounded odd, older. “History’s being made here, just as it was at Hattin. In years to come, we will be the ones to tell the story of Akka and say we were there. We must bear witness.”

  And so she let Aisa pull her through streets and alleyways towards the northern ramparts. They ran past the ward where the Templar knights once had their headquarters, past the citadel walls, past the foot of the looming fortress known as the Accursed Tower, the place where had been minted, it was said, the silver coins Judas Iscariot was paid to betray the prophet Isa Christ to the Romans.

  “This way!” Aisa climbed without fear up a broken part of the wall to the north of the keep as only a fourteen-year-old boy could do, and Zohra followed stiffly, testing every hold, the sun hot on her back, her heart pounding. At the top Aisa pulled her over onto the ramparts, where quite a crowd had gathered, craning their necks all along the battlements.

  The Christian horde was masked by dust clouds and heat haze. Then coloured banners and mounted knights came into view, the horses’ hooves a rumbling thunder on the sun-baked ground. Infantry and archers, then hundreds of wagons, and finally massive timbers pulled on carts that could surely only be the makings of siege engines.

  “See the blue banners bearing the great gold cross? Those are the banners of the King of Jerusalem!” someone cried, only to be shouted down by others: “There is no King of Jerusalem. He’s just some jumped-up poulain bastard!”

  Others swore they picked out Conrad of Montferrat and the Master of the Temple, Gerard de Ridefort, but in truth it was impossible to pick out any individual. Aisa wormed his way between two burly men and shouted back to Zohra, “Their horses are wearing armour too! I didn’t know horses wore armour. They are huge!”

  Zohra, suddenly feeling weak, sank down to the hot stone. She did not know why she had allowed herself to be led here at all. To see the Franj was to put a face to the foe, to make real what until now had been only rumour. Her chest felt tight with dread. All she wanted was to run to the house on the Street of Tailors, to crawl beneath the covers on Nathanael’s divan and burrow her head against his hot skin and pretend that time had stopped. But she knew there was no going back to the little paradise they had made between them, the heat and the honey, the sweat and groans and kisses. She had to make amends for her sins of the flesh; she had to keep what was left of her family together. It was the biggest sacrifice, the greatest submission she could make, to Allah.

  But she realized with a force that shocked her that the vast army moving to encircle the city, the disappearance of Kamal, the death of her mother and all the chaos and horror that was about to ensue was as nothing in the face of the loss of Nathanael.

  On the Street of Tailors, Nathanael greeted the news of the siege with a sort of mental shrug. What difference did it make if he could not leave the city? He felt more trapped inside his own skin than by Akka’s walls. After her mother’s death, Zohra would not open the door to him, would not read the messages he scrawled and left for her beneath the pot of basil outside the door. She had once walked past him where he waited for her at the end of the street, with her veil up and her head down, not even glancing at him, as if he did not exist. He felt his world had ended, but all around him everyone went about their business as usual. He did not care whether he lived or died, and people in Akka seemed determined to ignore the siege, as if by doing so they could make it go away. “All is written,” they said. “Allah will protect us.” He wished he could believe in a benign fate. But he was beginning to feel that his love for Zohra was cursed.

  The next day he was called upon to tend to a defender who had taken a stray arrow in the shoulder. The distant strains of a Latin hymn drifted up over the walls, and he remembered quite sharply passing the Church of St. Anthony one summer morning four or five years before Salah ad-Din had retaken the city and hearing the same song sung by the congregation inside. He wondered how many of those the sultan had allowed to walk free were outside the walls with the enemy army. There was such a thing as too much mercy, he thought bitterly.

  He looked out over the wall. In the hazy distance he could make out the tents and banners of the Muslim army on the hills, encircling the besieging Christian army but apparently doing no more than surveying it. There didn’t seem to be much evidence of conflict. In fact, the only sign of action around the vast enemy encampment appeared to be hundreds of men with shovels producing enormous mounds of earth. A man wearing a striped camel hair robe leaned on the wall next to him. “They’re digging in,” he said. “They’re planning on being here for a long time.”

  “Till they starve us out,” another man added.

  Nathanael went straight home and found his mother in their courtyard garden amongst the herbs they cultivated for medicines, a handful of lemon balm held to her nose. Her eyes were closed. She looked sad, yet serene, with the light falling gently on her face through the leaves of the vine that twined overhead. Bunches of fat black grapes weighed down the branches; no one had yet harvested them. Better do that soon, Nat thought.

  His mother’s eyes were the same deep, languorous brown as his own. She smiled up at her loved and much-indulged only child. “How are you today?”

  Nat shrugged. He knew what she was asking, but he could not talk about it. “Where’s Abi?”

  “Up at the citadel, as usual. The emir’s been struck down by one of his headaches.”

  “I saw his headache,” Nathanael said. “Outside the walls. Stretching for miles and miles. People say this siege will go on for months.”

  Sara’s smile faded. She looked around at their lush little garden: at the orange trees laden with fruit, at the fragrant spikes of thyme amongst which the bees made themselves so busy, at the hives and the vigorous chili plants. At the rows of herbs that would be rendered down to tisanes to treat all the little everyday maladies that people suffered from under normal conditions. But these were not normal conditions. They were at war.

  “Perhaps we should go to the market,” she said. “A bit more flour and rice wouldn’t go amiss.”

  The market was so thronged it was almost impossible to enter the narrow paths between the stalls. Of course, everyone had seized upon the same idea, and were out trying to buy whatever they could stock up on. Already there were stallholders shutting up shop, their goods sold out.

  “Balak, balak!” The grocer’s boy struggled to get through the press of bodies. “Make way, make way!” He pushed his handcart against people’s legs till they grudgingly gave way and let him through, only to surge forward like a wave in his wake, all trying to gain an extra inch or two of ground towards their goal.

  Sara shook her head. “This is hopeless. Maybe we should wait until tomorrow.”

  “If we wait till tomorrow there will be nothing left,” Nat said firmly, and he pressed ahead, making his body a shield behind which his mother could shelter, weaving as best he could through whatever gaps he could find. People trod on his feet. Hardly anyone acknowledged the trespass or said sorry, which was unusual.

  Some obstacle had presented itself up ahead: the crowd came to a sudden standstill. Nathanael found himself pressed up against the rough raffia basket and ample buttocks of the woman in front of him; someone else elbowed him painfully in the side, spitefully, he thought, as if they blamed him for the holdup. The crowd was so tight that he could not turn to deliver a sharp rebuke or a sardonic look. He could not move at all.

  We could die right here, trampled underfoot, and never have need of the flour we are queuing for, he thought.

  16

  From the Muslim camp up on the hills above Akka, Malek surveyed the infidel host. The sultan and h
is personal guard had ridden to the edge of the escarpment so that the commander could assess the deployment of the enemy forces. For now the Muslim army might have outnumbered the enemy Franj, but the Christians were being reinforced every day as ships put in up the coast or anchored offshore and sent troops in by smaller boats between Akka and Haifa in the south. They came from all over the world, from throughout what they called the Latin Kingdom—from Poitou, Aquitaine and Anjou; from Pisa, Genoa and Naples; from Denmark, Holland, Swabia and Thuringia—places Malek had never even heard of. And they stood between him and his family.

  For weeks now, they had watched the enemy setting up their trebuchets and ballistas around the Accursed Tower and pounding the walls, to little obvious effect. Every so often one of the engines was scorched by fire pots hurled from the city, or the engineers were picked off from above by the garrison archers. The Christians had dug their trenches and diverted into them the streams that had once fed the orchards and sugarcane fields that surrounded the city, creating moats and pits to impede the sultan’s cavalry. It was frustrating to sit up here above them, doing nothing but watch. Malek itched to charge down the hillside at them, wreaking havoc. Their general was a cautious commander—he would do nothing until he had considered the possible outcomes of any action. But today Malek could sense the tension in Salah ad-Din’s taut stance as he sat his horse beside him, watching the enemy with his hawk’s eyes.

  Malek knew that despite his straight back and unwavering attention he was in intense discomfort. For the past few days the sultan had been afflicted by a malady that had produced painful swellings the length of his torso, to the extent that off his horse he found it impossible to find a position in which he could rest. The doctors were perplexed. They had tried everything from leeches to tisanes, all to no avail. At the best of times he was a frugal eater, barely taking meat at all, but now he ate hardly anything. Word had spread, though as yet no further than his personal guard. They were all worried about him, but it was important their anxiety did not infect the wider army, or reach the ears of his officers, who bickered constantly amongst themselves.

  The Lord of Sinjar was apparently similarly afflicted; he lay in his tent, moaning and calling upon God to end his woes.

  “I’ll end his woes myself,” Malek’s comrade Hicham said tightly, “if he doesn’t shut up.”

  They were generally unimpressed by the Sinjar and Dyar Bakr troops, who had come unwillingly to the sultan’s summons and spent their entire time complaining about the heat, the flies, the long trek over the hills to water the horses, the distance from their wives, the tribal unrest in their own region. But they were Kurds, as was the sultan himself, so perhaps that made them feel they had special licence to voice their complaints.

  The Franj had begun to form up their battle lines, from the shore to the north of the city to the River Belus in the south. Salah ad-Din watched and said nothing, though his mouth was drawn down hard, the lines graven deeper than ever. Already the sun was beating down. Malek put a hand to his helm and found it hot to the touch—hardly the best conditions for a man with a fever, even without a heavy mail coif and the steel helmet above it.

  “They will attack today,” the sultan said at last.

  They waited for him to say more. He did not. At last his son Al-Afdal asked, “What shall we do, sire?”

  “We will let them attack us,” Salah ad-Din said. He had consulted the Qur’an the night before in expectation of an assault, and now he set about arranging his forces. He would himself command the centre, with his sons to the right, and beyond them, carefully placed within view, the levies from Dyar-Bakr and Mosul, reaching almost to the sea. On the farthest right he set the troops of Hama under his dashing nephew Taki ad-Din. These men would not run, no matter what happened. To the left he stationed the Lord of Sinjar, the Emir of Harran and the other Kurdish forces. When their hearts were in it, they were fierce fighters, tempered by innumerable tribal wars. But out on the far left wing, to be sure the formation held steady, he placed his North African mamluks—the best of all his troops, the men with whom he had conquered Egypt. They lined up with their scarlet turbans and their fierce white grins, and Aibek al-Akhresh waved his scimitar in the air, keen for the fight. “Let us send them to their god, boys!” They cheered back.

  Now Malek and the burning coals milled around the sultan as he rode back and forth, delivering his orders, and with them rode pages trying fruitlessly to hold a canopy over the commander’s head to keep the worst of the sun off him. At last, Malek thought, we shall see some action.

  At that moment Salah ad-Din’s horse shied as a ground squirrel ran beneath its hooves. Malek noted the sultan’s hastily disguised grimace. Worrying about his master took his mind off the battle to come. He was a veteran now, despite his youth. He had seen much, and sometimes knowing the dangers made them harder to bear. It was easy to charge into battle blithe in your ignorance; true courage came from knowing the worst and standing your ground anyway.

  Thus far, Malek had been lucky. Or, rather, his time was not yet written, insh’allah. He had his own ways of taking his mind off the inevitable fear. They all did. Some prayed, seeking oblivion in the comforting repetition of the sacred words. Some sang softly to themselves. Others talked with loud bravado of past heroics, to reinforce a sense of their invulnerability. One or two furtively put out offerings to the djinns, to persuade them to fight alongside them; it was understood that a well-bribed djinn might throw dust into an enemy’s eyes or unsettle a horse at a crucial moment.

  Malek did none of these things. Instead, he took the sultan’s sword and honed it to a lethal edge. This is the sword of Islam, he told himself. This is the blade of Allah. The sultan was unlikely to use it, for he rarely fought in the thick of the battle but instead directed proceedings at a distance, where he could best assess the movement of the opposing forces. When Malek returned the weapon he watched as his commander took the sword and examined it, saw the small smile of appreciation as he ran a thumb along the edge. For Malek, that was the finest thanks of all.

  Four hours after sunrise the Franj army began to advance, the archers and crossbowmen out in front, then a vanguard of foot, the huge mounted knights, and the rest of the infantry at the rear. In the centre the banners proclaimed the presence of Conrad, the Count of Montferrat and Lord of Tyre; to his right, preceded by a canopy of white silk over what must have been some holy object, came the man who had been ousted from Jerusalem, Guy of Lusignan. Malek remembered him being taken prisoner after his war tent had been overrun at the Battle of Hattin—a blustering man with frightened eyes. Hard to believe such a man could be King of Jerusalem. And to his left the Templars were arrayed under their great banners of white emblazoned with red crosses. These were the men who had cut down pilgrims on the road to Mecca, who had slaughtered women and children without mercy. That they called themselves “warriors of God” filled Malek with disgust.

  Salah ad-Din raised his fist. Behind them the drummers started to pound out a battle rhythm, and then the long brazen trumpets joined them to produce a cacophony of sound. An attack was imminent.

  Malek watched as orders were dispatched to the Prince of Hama and his column charged down the hillside. The Franj surged to meet and then apparently engulf them. For a moment it seemed the Muslim cavalry would be overwhelmed, but then Malek smiled. This show of weakness was an age-old tactic. As Taki ad-Din’s force appeared to give way before the Franj, the enemy were drawn out of their disciplined formations, whooping and screaming. Down into the sea marshes the Christians pressed them, surging with violent glee, unleashed from their weeks of tedium behind their stagnant moats full of hungry mosquitoes. Swords and axes, maces and halberds flashed in the bright sunshine, and the cries of the wounded carried faintly on the hot currents of air drifting up from the shore like the cries of seabirds. Perhaps their frailty was more than show, and beside him, Salah ad-Din’s brows drew together in consternation. He turned to his son. “Go support your cousin.
” Al-Afdal signalled to his troops, and they galloped down the hillside.

  The sultan’s bay pirouetted, unnerved, and almost unseated him. Salah ad-Din was a fine horseman, but Malek heard him stifle a groan. He spurred his chestnut in close to the bay and laid a hand on its bridle. It was not something he would normally have considered doing, but compassion drove him beyond thought of courtly custom. “Sire, your horse is out of sorts. Take Asfar. She has a gentler temperament and will not jar you so.”

  The sultan’s mouth became a long, flat line. “Thank you, no.” He set his heels to his horse’s barrel and urged it up the slope, the better to view the scene below.

  Down there, Al-Afdal’s cavalry clashed with the Franj, laying into them without mercy, forcing them sideways and separating them from the rest of their forces, while the sultan’s archers shot down upon the foe, picking off the lightly armoured infantry. But from his elevated vantage point, Malek could see that the central block of the Christian army was still advancing, taking advantage of the perceived weakness of the gap left by Al-Afdal’s men, a solid wedge of knights and infantry. The first rank of crossbowmen ran before them, stopped and shot uphill. Their quarrels skimmed the ground before the Muslim army, but the second rank had their range. To the left of the sultan a man screamed and fell, clutching his cheek. Blood spurted around the shaft protruding from between his fingers. At once, Malek put himself between the sultan and the enemy. Now the lug-bowmen were taking aim, shooting into the sky. Their arrows arched upwards and then rained down. It was hard to know where to put his shield—over his head or across his body. Men were falling to left and right, horses too, screaming and tumbling.

  Malek turned to make sure the sultan was unscathed and saw how sweat beaded on his face from the effort of raising his shield, but there was no time to say or do anything because now the archers and infantry had parted and the armoured knights were upon them, thundering up the slope on their huge chargers.