Pillars of Light

by Jane Johnson

  As they neared the Najib house, Nathanael was filled with trepidation. Would Zohra answer the door? They reached the door just as it was thrown open and out came Baltasar with a tall man in a white cotton robe. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing pale scars beneath the curling, dark hair of his forearms. His hair was slick from the hammam. His gaze swept over Nathanael—from the skullcap, to Sorgan’s grip on his arm, back to the skullcap—then locked onto Nat’s eyes. His expression was not exactly unfriendly, but watchful and curious.

  “Malek!” Sorgan cried happily.

  Behind Zohra’s eldest brother came two other men, also dressed in their Friday best. They were tall and handsome, well built and prosperous-looking. He did not like the look of them at all.

  “I’ve brought Sorgan home,” Nat said quietly.

  Baltasar was in a mellow mood: clearly, he had forgotten the traumatic day on which he had last seen Nathanael, or, as became increasingly clear, he did not recognize the young Jewish doctor at all. Reaching out, he engulfed both of them in an embrace. “We’re going to the mosque to give thanks for our good fortune.”

  Nathanael smiled uncertainly. “It really is marvellous about the Greek fire,” he said.

  Baltasar frowned. “Greek fire?”

  “The destruction of the Franj siege towers.”

  The old man appeared uncomprehending, then said, beaming, “My lovely daughter Zohra has this very day been married to her cousin Tariq.”

  22

  Malek returned to the Muslim camp in a much calmer state of mind. It was good to see some family matters settled and his sister safely married. Tariq would move into the Najib house, so that meant his father and Sorgan and Aisa would be better looked after: Tariq’s work at the citadel brought him in a good wage and access to provisions. It might not be fair that his cousin profited from his safe administrative job when others in the city were suffering, but Malek’s first care was for the welfare of his own family.

  The destruction of the Franj siege towers had added an air of frantic optimism to the wedding celebrations. People said the siege would soon be over, that the marriage represented a better future, that the couple would be blessed with children who would grow up in safer times, with the wicked foreigners expelled from the region and Akka restored to its proper place in the caliphate. Malek found himself carried along by the hectic mood, as long as he did not look too long at his sister’s face. Zohra seemed to drift through the whole ceremony, the feast and the dancing, as if she were absent from her body. She did not wail or fight or cry. She just seemed to … go away.

  The memory of her vacant eyes returned to him on his dawn ride back to camp, tempting him to doubt. But he was determined to believe in the best possible future. His optimism, however, was not to last. The resumption of his duties for the sultan coincided with the return of Baha ad-Din from his expedition to Baghdad and a summoning of the sultan’s inner council to his war tent. Gathered there with Salah ad-Din and his qadi were the sultan’s secretary, Imad al-Din, and his nephew, Taki ad-Din.

  Malek watched Salah ad-Din break the seal of the letter Baha ad-Din had brought back from the caliph, unroll the missive and scan the contents. The sultan said nothing, but his knuckles whitened as he tried to master his temper.

  “Twenty thousand dinars?” he said at last, his voice deceptively quiet. “The caliph offers me a loan—a loan, mind you—to be taken from any merchants in the region and charged against the Baghdad treasury.” He angled the scroll towards his scribe. “I spend twenty thousand a day conducting this siege! A day! They gave me a million towards the siege of Damietta—gave, not loaned. By the ninety-nine names of God, what is he thinking to offer such an insult? The Redbeard’s German army approaches our northern borders and he offers me twenty thousand dinars!” He threw the scroll aside, where Imad al-Din picked it up and gazed at it earnestly, as if close scrutiny might reveal some previously concealed zeros.

  The German army. At the door of the war tent, Malek’s heart dropped like a stone. Amid the glee of their recent successes, he had forgotten about Barbarossa and his advancing horde.

  The sultan sat back amongst his cushions, massaged his forehead. At last he turned to Baha ad-Din. “Send orders to have Latakia and Beirut dismantled.”

  “Dismantled, sire?”

  “Razed to the ground. It is the only way. We cannot afford to let such strategic cities fall into enemy hands.”

  The look that passed between the qadi of the army and Taki ad-Din was eloquent. “My lord,” Taki said, going down on one knee before his uncle. “Let me take the men of Hama and ride north to intercept Barbarossa’s horde. We will cut them down like summer corn before they ever set foot upon our lands.”

  The sultan gave him a wintry smile. “You are brave beyond courage, nephew. But I think even the flower of Hama cannot survive the trampling of a Christian army two hundred thousand strong. No—” he held up a hand to forestall Taki’s retort. “I must think upon this longer. Akka remains the key, so I cannot spare you from the siege. The city is the anvil and we the hammer, and the enemy is the sword we must beat into horseshoes.”

  The war had to be fought on two fronts. It was decided that Taki ad-Din’s son would take the troops of Aleppo to intercept the German force, rallying the faithful to his banner as he went. By the time they reached the northern borders it was hoped that their numbers would have swelled sufficiently to make a stand against the enemy horde and hold them at bay long enough for reinforcements to arrive from other parts of the caliphate.

  Malek watched them ride out with their apricot banners fluttering and their spears glinting in the hot light and almost wished he were going with them. Anything was better than staying in camp, mired in dread.

  Fighting resumed at Akka, as if the Christians had gained heart from seeing the departure of the Aleppans. It was a fierce, bloody affair. At night, bodies were piled high among the Franj trenches, the stench of decomposition rising even to the sultan’s camp. So horrible was the smell that Malek set incense burners outside the pavilion as well as within, but nothing could be done about the clouds of black flies that rose, angry and buzzing, from the corpses whenever they were disturbed. Soldiers returning from the front line complained that sometimes you could hardly see an enemy coming at you for the black blizzard of insects.

  The fighting lasted for a week, then ceased, a storm that blew itself out. For a month after that there was nothing to be done but rest and bury the dead.

  Then one day a Christian woman came into the Muslim camp, weeping and claiming that raiders had carried off her child. No one believed her: what would anyone want with a squalling infant? As it was, the presence of women in the Franj camp was a matter of considerable discussion. Malek and his friend Ibrahim, the Nubian, now promoted from the mamluk ranks to the burning coals, had talked about women late into the night while they stood their watch. Ibrahim boasted of having three wives: “A big one, a small one and one in between—and many, many babies!” How this was possible when Ibo, as he called himself, was constantly away at war Malek did not know. He thought it best not to ask.

  “But how do they manage, your family, without you there to fend for them?”

  Ibo looked surprised. “They are women, they look after themselves. Women are amazing. Stronger, I think, than men!”

  Malek was nonplussed. Then he grinned. “Do not tease me with your strange African humour. You’ll be telling me next that your big wife is as tall as you and can lift an ox!”

  Ibrahim’s grin lit up the darkness. “She is not tall, my big wife, but broad.” He stretched his hands apart. “Her hips are as wide as the desert and her mind is as deep as the sea. You do not understand the strength of such a woman, my friend, until you have been crushed between her thighs or tried to best her in an argument. Never argue with women, Malek, for they are always right and they always win. They are as twisty as snakes, with the memory of elephants and the sting of a scorpion. Dangerous creatures, my friend, very da
ngerous. I swear, if there were armies of women they would sweep the world beneath their skirts and we would all be their slaves.”

  Malek shook his head, amused. “But they cannot fight like men, with arms and armour. So maybe that is just as well.”

  Ibo shrugged. “Where I come from, some wield a spear as well as any man. It is not the strength of the arm that counts,” he tapped his head, “but the strength of the will. And women have immense strength of will. It comes from bearing children, I believe. They say the pain of that is worse than any wound, and yet they do it again and again.”

  None of this fitted with how Malek saw the world, but he reasoned that women in Africa were probably different.

  In the end, word of the Franj woman reached the ears of the sultan as she wandered the Muslim lines, seeking her child.

  “Go fetch her to me,” he instructed Malek. “I would hear her grievance.” And so Malek went in search of the woman.

  He was astonished to find her flagrantly unveiled. Seeing all that yellow hair reminded him with sudden force of the whore in Jerusalem, and so his manner with her was brusque. She was barely older than his sister, he thought as they walked back to the war tent. What was she doing here, and with a child, too? He wondered if she was married to one of the enemy soldiers—he had heard that their wives sometimes followed them on campaign. Then it occurred to him that she might be one of those who took money for the use of their bodies. The idea roused him fiercely.

  Salah ad-Din, courteous as ever, rose and greeted the woman, called for cushions where she might sit, for a goblet of iced sherbet, and watched as she sipped it wonderingly. He took no umbrage at her brazen appearance, at the dirt on her face and clothes, or the scratch marks on her cheeks where she had torn at herself in her grief. Quite the opposite: he treated her as if she were Queen Sibylla herself.

  Having coaxed her tale from her, by way of Imad al-Din’s halting translation, he dispatched men to search everywhere, within the camp and beyond, to look for the infant. And still the woman wept, more quietly now, gazing fearfully around the tent as if expecting these foreign men with their neat black beards, inquisitive black eyes and unnerving courtesy to transform themselves suddenly into the ravening beasts she believed them to be.

  At last, one of the guards returned with a bundle in his arms. Salah ad-Din laid a hand on the infant’s head. “A war camp is no place for a child,” he admonished its mother. “It does not do for children to be exposed to such horrors at an early age, for fear they will become inured to them and think that life is cheap. The taking of a life should never be done without consideration. It is a great shame to us all that we must resort to such wars.”

  Then he ordered that a guard accompany her back to the Christian lines under white flags of truce, and all the while the woman looked at him in astonishment.

  Looking back, it was almost as if this act of grace was directly rewarded, Malek thought, when two days later an exhausted courier on a sweating horse rode in. The messenger gave his name as Theophilus.

  “I have been sent by Isaac the King, emperor of Constantinople,” he croaked, “servant of the Messiah, crowned by the grace of God, ever glorious and victorious, the invincible conqueror, the autocrat of the Greeks, Angelos, who extends to His Excellency the Sultan of Egypt, Salah ad-Din, sincere affection and friendship—”

  “Yes, yes,” cried Imad al-Din impatiently, “but now to the nub of the matter!”

  “The German army crossed into Cicilia,” Theophilus continued with a frown, annoyed that the formal protocols had been curtailed. “The Holy Roman Emperor Barbarossa was pushing ahead of the main body of his troops with his scouts and a small vanguard. They came to the River Saleph, but rather than wait for the army the emperor was impatient to continue and insisted on fording the river at once. In the deepest part of the current his horse lost its footing and threw the old man over its shoulder. It was the hottest day of the year but the water, streaming out of the mountains, was deadly cold. It may be that the emperor’s heart gave out, for he was not a young man, or that he could not swim, weighed down by his armour. Either way, all attempts to revive him failed—”

  “What, the Redbeard is dead?” Salah ad-Din cried, rising from his chair. “The greatest king in Christendom?”

  Theophilus inclined his head. “We had the news of his demise on the best authority, for Isaac the King, servant of the Messiah, God praise his name and ever lengthen his days, has spies embedded within Barbarossa’s army, and all this was witnessed by one of those men.”

  Since this tumultuous event, he said, a confusion had fallen over the Germans, whose number had already been greatly reduced by disease and hardship. And although it was thought that they would continue south into Syria, the threat they posed was not as insurmountable as it had previously appeared.

  Malek could hardly believe what he was hearing: it seemed too momentous, too fortuitous to take in. It was only when the sultan fell to his knees to give thanks to Allah, and the rest of the inner council followed suit, that it sank in. A black cloud had been lifted. He felt like shouting in exultation. But of course he knelt like the rest and touched his forehead to the ground and thanked God for his grace.

  Salah ad-Din sent a pigeon to Akka, but since the Christians had taken to shooting them down whenever they could, he sent a boy to fetch “the swimmer.” Malek smiled. For once, Aisa would be able to carry good tidings home. What celebrations there would be!

  Aisa, arriving some minutes later, fell to one knee before the sultan to accept the message. He already wore, wrapped tight around his waist, the otterskin bags containing the wages to take back to the garrison. At the sight of his little brother, whose shoulders were beginning to fill out with muscle gained from these regular exertions, Malek’s heart swelled with pride.

  Salah ad-Din gave him the message he had dictated to Imad al-Din and watched as Aisa tucked it carefully in with the money. “You will be hailed a hero for delivering this,” he said, with tears in his eyes.

  The smile the lad returned to the sultan was rapt, and Malek found his own eyes swimming with tears.

  The news of the loss of the German horde seemed to stir up a ferment in the Christian ranks, and waves of men carrying pikes and axes beat uphill against their own army. The attacks seemed random and disorganized, the provocateurs from the lower orders.

  “Desperation?” Ibrahim asked Malek on the third morning of unrest, as they armed themselves on the sultan’s orders.

  Malek shrugged. “Who can know the mind of the unbeliever?”

  “Our lord must think there is an advantage to be gained, if he’s sending us out with Ala al-Din.” The sultan rarely risked his burning coals for no good reason.

  Malek went to the farthest picket lines to saddle up Asfar. She nickered at the sight of him, and when he mounted her she danced and spun around and around. Malek looked at the range of hills to the south, sere and brown, baked by the sun, and above them a hawk making slow, graceful sky-circles, the light turning its wings to a blur of golden-red against the unbroken blue. How lovely, Malek thought, to be up there away from the stink and the noise and the flies, the excrement and sickness and death. But then the hawk folded its wings and stooped, faster than the fastest arrow. It disappeared from sight, but a sudden piercing shriek marked the death of its prey. The sound went through Malek like a shaft of ice. Was this the day he would die? Had it long been written? Unshielded by his usual concerns about keeping the sultan safe, he rode into battle sure that something terrible was about to happen to him.

  He lost track of the number of enemies he faced that day—of the nameless men who rose up before him, of the number of times his sword rose and fell, of the blows he struck, the cries of horses and men merging into one long, drawn-out death-scream that became a blur of noise in his head. His world had shrunk to this burning arena in which the sun beat down and the enemy became increasingly trapped between the walls, the ocean and the closing pincers of the Muslim troops.
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  The chroniclers would write of this battle that the bodies of the Franj stretched in nine lines between the sand dunes and the sea, and that in each line lay a thousand corpses. Malek knew nothing of this: all he saw was what was before him—details etched into his memory, to be replayed in jerky, formless repetitions in the dead of night or during unguarded waking moments. And the worst of the nightmares was to come in his final encounter of the day, when he was barely strong enough to wield his scimitar.

  If there was anything different about his final opponent of the day, Malek did not notice it. If the figure was slighter or shorter than others he had faced, he did not register the fact. If the blow the Franj landed on his shield failed to jar his arm as he would have expected, he did not mark it, but pushed back with his shield to unsteady the soldier and swung down with his curved blade with all the strength he could muster, catching the fellow a disabling blow on the shoulder, the honed scimitar shearing down through the flimsy layers of cloth and leather, through skin and muscle and bone, where it grated and stuck, threatening to unhorse him.

  The scream the man emitted was terrible. Malek yanked the scimitar up and back with all his strength till it came free and was about to ride on when the trumpets blared out the signal to desist.

  Wearily, Malek turned to scan the field, only to find none standing but Muslims and mamluks. And then he knew they had taken the day. All around, men lay corpse-still or writhing. Already, soldiers were scavenging, removing weapons and valuables from the fallen. There was booty to be found: it was a practice shared by every victorious army under the sun. Maybe it was the sight of such mutilated humanity, or superstition at being too close to death in case it rubbed off on you in some way, or the fear of dead men’s spirits hovering, or the djinns that swarmed over battlefields like crows. Or maybe he was simply weak of stomach. Whatever the reason, Malek could not bring himself to join them.