Pillars of Light

by Jane Johnson

  He turned Asfar to return to the camp, but a detail snatched his attention. His last opponent lay there, helmet askew, the nose-guard knocked sideways. He glimpsed the whole, naked face now—so pale, and growing paler. The fair skin of these people never failed to amaze him, like dough taken too soon from the oven. But this one had skin so pale it was almost luminous, and the exposed throat was smooth, the veins a shadowy blue.

  Something was not right; it clutched at his gut, the dread he had been feeling all day long. He felt compelled to go closer. He found himself swinging down out of the saddle, drawing the mare with him as he stood over the fallen Christian soldier. He went down on one knee and pulled the helmet fully off and a mass of red-gold hair spilled out. Hot iron in his palm; cool hair slipping like silk across the back of his hand: a contradictory image he had difficulty holding in his mind, like opposing magnets. And then the fallen soldier’s eyes opened and they were blue, a violent, dark blue like the heart of a storm, yet fringed by golden lashes.

  The mouth twisted and uttered a word he could not understand. And then the soldier tried to sit up, rising with immense effort onto one elbow. The ruined leather of the soldier’s jerkin—soaked in scarlet, already drying to brown in the baking heat—fell away to reveal an impossible wound—an arm hanging by sinew and shattered bone—and a single, perfect, small white breast.

  He had committed a terrible sin: he had cut down a woman.

  Malek lurched backwards, appalled as the figure tried once more to rise. He watched, gripped by a sort of terror. Her eyes locked on his, and then blood gushed from her mouth and she fell back and did not move again, but lay there, her hair fanned out, just like the hair of the Jerusalem whore against the mattress on which he had taken her, her blue eyes staring sightlessly into the blue eternity above.

  Malek buried his face in his hands and wept, and wept, and wept.

  23

  Zohra woke suddenly with her heart thundering, her robe tangled around her legs. She lay there, disoriented, sweat pooling between her breasts, trying to remember where she was and what had happened. She had been running from something—or maybe towards something—something terrible, something world-breaking. Running, but unable to move, screaming silently.

  Beside her, Tariq stirred, raising his head a little off the mattress. In the darkness she stared at him, willing him not to wake, and a moment later he grunted and turned away from her, and his gentle snoring resumed. It was the only gentle thing about him. Her thighs were chafed from his attentions: he was not a thin man, or a tender husband. Sometimes she thought she would break apart under his weight. “God give me the strength to endure this marriage,” she prayed. “I am doing my best, but you are not making it easy.”

  It had come as no surprise that she did not enjoy all that was required of her as a wife. She had always found it hard to accept, as others seemed to without question, that it was natural that her fate be parcelled out by men. She had at first faced the travails Tariq inflicted on her with cold disdain, but that had just made him crueller. When she tried to fight him off, he laughed and seemed to enjoy it all the more. She had learned to give the appearance of compliance but took herself away from him, into a locked room in her head that smelled of amber and herbs, of inks and vellum.

  She lay there a while longer, trying to recover the nightmare, but all that was left in her grasp were dark tatters of threat and danger. She ran through all those she loved, one by one, to reassure herself.

  Her father had a summer cold and a hacking cough she did not like the sound of, but whenever she mentioned it he brushed her concerns away. “What do you expect when I spend my days knee-deep in pigeon feathers and bird shit?” Every other day he lost a pigeon, either shot down by the Christians or lost because he was reduced to sending out inexperienced birds. It made him permanently bad-tempered.

  Her cousin Jamilla had become Zohra’s only ally. It was with some shame that Zohra recognized her meanness toward her cousin before, mistaking her determined positivity for ignorance, her care for interference.

  Sorgan was like a huge, overgrown toddler, dogging her footsteps, concern for her brimming out of his trusting dark eyes. It was clear he knew she was unhappy but did not know what to do for her. His childlike distress made her feel like weeping all the more. Better to distract him with whatever food came to hand. It was a ploy that worked with heartbreaking ease.

  As for her younger brother, she wished fervently that Aisa had not taken it upon himself to swim messages back and forth between the two commanders. He was so young. Every time he left the house she was terrified she would never see him again.

  “Promise me you’ll send a pigeon from the Hill of Carobs from now on whenever you arrive at Salah ad-Din’s camp,” she had asked him.

  He had laughed at her. “Don’t fuss so. Anyway, there may not always be a spare pigeon to send.”

  Instantly furious, she’d caught him by the arm. “Don’t give me that, or I will personally send a message-bird to your sultan demanding that he stops using a boy to do a man’s job.”

  “There are no men left to do this,” Aisa said quietly. “And I think if I am doing a man’s job that makes me a man too. Besides, no one makes ‘demands’ of the sultan. But if you are so worried, I will ask Malek to ask him.”

  And now, of course, a bird arrived each time Aisa safely crossed the water to the Muslim camp. At this moment at least she could rest easy, knowing he was upstairs in the room with Sorgan, sleeping soundly.

  Which left Nathanael …

  Shivering despite the heat, Zohra pushed that fear away.

  As she moved silently down the stairs, she felt like a ghost in her own house, a shadow of herself, barely even a person. How had it come to this, that she—Zohra Najib, once described as “a lioness” and “a wildcat”—should be so reduced? They were at war: everyone was reduced. There was no time for such small complaints when they were all fighting for survival, when everyone had to make sacrifices. Hadn’t that been what the governor had declared in the central square last week? “Keep strong your faith in God and each other and we shall prevail.”

  But sometimes faith was sorely tested.

  In the kitchen she pottered about, lighting the stove, pouring water from the ewer, setting it to boil. There was no tea left: that luxury had long since run out. They sometimes used chicory, roasted dandelion root or date pits, but herb tea was less acrid—lemon balm and chamomile picked fresh from the garden, sweetened with a teaspoon of honey from Nathanel’s hives. There was not much left.

  She went out into the courtyard, where the cockerel regarded her balefully. “Beat you to it,” she told him. “What use are you if you cannot even crow the time? Perhaps we should put you in the pot and have done.” She didn’t mean it, but he turned his back on her anyway, shaking his wattled head as if insulted. Then she let the goats out and watched them gambol into the pre-dawn street.

  Zohra made her tea and drank it in the courtyard, surrounded by burgeoning life. More aubergines had ripened, and capsicums and chilis shone like jewels among the dark-green foliage. The garden was thriving, but still it could not provide for them for long, especially with an extra mouth, and that a particularly greedy one, to feed. She picked the aphids off the vines and prodded the bean pods, but their contents felt like little stones. Later she would water them with the wash-water from the house. Plants were always thirsty, but they had been told to try to keep water use to a minimum; already a number of the city’s wells had dried up in the hot weather. But people had to eat, and creating gardens wherever they could find waste ground or abandoned land had been a great success. Working in the gardens was one of the things that kept her sane.

  The muezzin’s dawn call sounded across the city. Zohra went inside and washed, then laid out her prayer mat and knelt and prayed that whatever it was in her nightmare that had woken her had no basis in fact and that all the people she cared for—her father; her brothers Malek and Aisa; Jamilla and her aunt and u
ncle; Nathanael, the son of Yacub—would be kept safe. Then, as she always did, she added a short prayer for her lost brother Kamal, wherever he might be.

  Kamal Najib stood amongst the other fida’i in the mountain fortress of Masyaf, known as the Eagle’s Nest. Like the other adherents, he wore a white robe. Like the rest of them, his expression was impassive. Emotion was nothing but personal weakness: the Almighty had no use for it; it got in the way of the tasks for which they were appointed. As did thought. “You are here not to think, but to obey,” the Grand Headmaster had informed them. “Only through me can you find Purification, Enlightenment and Paradise. You are the tools of God, and tools do not question. Tools do not worry. Tools do not doubt. Tools work only in the hand of the craftsman: until they are picked up to be used they have no purpose. I am the craftsman, and you are the tools I employ as I do God’s work. What are you?”

  “We are the tools of God,” they chanted obediently.

  Kamal slid a glance to his right to where Bashar stood, face forward, completely focused on the Grand Headmaster. Except that his friend was “Bashar” no more, just as he himself was no longer “Kamal.” And neither were they “friends” in any accepted sense, but members of a shared brotherhood that superseded all other connections. None of them had names, or families, or pasts, or a future beyond the task they were allotted. Tools—as the Grand Headmaster told them over and over again—had no identity of their own but were interchangeable, each there to be made perfect for the work it must perform. It was his job to make them perfect, he said: to file away their flaws and weaknesses, to temper them in fire and douse them in water, to harden them and hone them to a perfect, steely point till they were fit for purpose. And that purpose was to kill. “You are the hashshashin, the foundation of the faith, God’s assassins.”

  Every day they rose before dawn, washed in cold mountain water and prayed for long hours. Then they studied the Qur’an, learning the hidden (batin) meaning that lay beneath the apparent, or zahir, text, a level of meaning only the hashshashin could fully grasp after years of application, guided by the imam known as the Speaking Qur’an, rendering passages by heart, consuming the words like food. They ate actual food sparingly; they were hungry all the time—for a tool must have discipline, the power of the mind exerted over the base needs of the body.

  It was flesh that made men different to one another, the Grand Headmaster said, flesh in which individual character expressed itself, so flesh must be eroded away, worn down to the bone. Kamal had lost a third of his body weight, and he had never been fat. They all looked the same now, their faces masks of skin over bone. The greatest variations came in height and eye colour, which you could not change. But there was much more that you could. During the year in which he had been in the mountain stronghold, Kamal had learned to vary his gait, his posture, his stance. He had learned to blend into the background, to stay still for hours on end. In a niqab, he could walk like a woman; in a tattered robe he limped like a beggar; in a leather jerkin he marched like a soldier. He knew how to add mud to his features to fake leprosy sores, to add lines with the charcoal of a burned stick; with ash, his hair became grey; he was growing a beard, but if it was shaved off, he could pass for a girl.

  Other skills he had learned: to wield a pen and a dagger with his left hand as well as he could with his right. To climb even the most perpendicular surfaces by applying strength and balance and a refusal to consider consequences. He could go for days without food, even without water. He could throw a blade with his eyes closed and hit his mark. He could walk across glowing coals and feel no pain—for pain was no more than an illusion conjured by the fleshly body to trick you from the righteous path into laziness and disobedience. He had learned words and sentences in a dozen languages not his own, even Christian prayers and songs.

  “You must be your enemy to understand your enemy,” the Grand Headmaster said. “How can you come close to that which you do not comprehend? For to kill with the hand, you must be close to your foe, as close as a breath, as close as clothes on skin.”

  One day there had been a small act of rebellion. Someone had stolen a loaf of bread and eaten it in secret. No one admitted to the theft. The Grand Headmaster had taken all the fida’i outside the castle, up the winding mule-track that led to the summit. Up there, on the topmost peak, was built a small white cell, a hermit’s retreat or a marabout’s tomb. “This is where I come to hear the Word of God,” he told them. “Up here, where there is nothing but air to separate us and I hear his voice without distortion, hear the instructions he has for me: the tasks for which you are trained.” Then he went inside the tiny room and did not re-emerge for many hours, until the sun had passed the zenith and was descending towards the desert that lay below them.

  From where Kamal stood, it had seemed as if the rippling undulations of the earth stretched into infinity, that there was nothing in the world but the mountain, the castle on its slopes and the wide, barren desert plain; as if the world had been wiped clean of humanity and all its mess and complications, as in their own way had all the fida’i.

  When the Grand Headmaster emerged he beckoned to a young man to climb up to the rocky ledge beside the white cell. The adherent scaled the cliff at once.

  “Jump,” the Grand Headmaster said. He signalled with his hand the yawning void below.

  Kamal sucked in his breath, felt his eyes widen, saw the expression he felt forming on his own face mirrored across those of his fellows. But showing not the least emotion, the adherent stepped off the ledge into thin air and plummeted silently past them. All they heard was the distant thud of his body as it hit the cliff far below, then nothing at all but the high, thin call of a jackal.

  “That is perfect obedience, perfect fidelity, absolute loyalty. That is what I expect of each one of you.” And with that the Grand Headmaster led them all back down the mountain again.

  There had been no more thefts.

  Now, Kamal repeated the words of the promise of the hashshashin—to honour God, to do his bidding, to follow the path of “dai,” to purify their souls so that when they died it would be in glory and they would attain Paradise as the martyrs they were destined to become.

  He had heard the words so many times, repeated them so many times, they had become ingrained. Repetition led to serenity, serenity to the ultimate peace of the soul. He was no one; he was the tool of God. His mind was as free and as blank as a clean page on which the Word might be written.

  All he waited for now was the Word.

  So why, when he slept at night, did he dream of another who looked just like him—another boy of the same height, with the same shade of golden-brown eyes, the same wiry build and quick regard? Who ran and laughed and swam through sparkling water, calling his name, “Kamal, Kamal, Kamal …”?

  Aisa swam on, each stroke a repetition of the stroke before. His arms ached, but he pushed the pain aside. You could not afford to think about such things, for if you did, your muscles would tense and harden and your body would grow heavy and start to sink, and that was how people drowned.

  Getting out of the harbour was always the worst—diving beneath the keels and ropes, holding your breath and your nerve, coming up for air only in the lee of a vessel, where a head breaking the surface would be less obvious. Sometimes when he came up through the water he would hear sailors on the foreign ships talking, laughing. He had got used to the sound of their voices all these weeks, could even distinguish one from another, although he could not understand what they were saying. What he did understand was the sound of their dice falling, the shout of the victor, the groans of the rest. It was a comfort to hear them, to know they were occupied, unlikely to spy the pale shape gliding beneath the waves.

  Once past the ships, the sea was suddenly colder. You could feel the depths beneath as a sort of inverse weight, pulling you towards it. It was that sensation, that knowledge—all those dark fathoms below you—that made your muscles heavy and tense. It was out here, in the deep sea,
where men drowned.

  Aisa streamed all his strength into his arms and legs and breasted the water with determination. At least it was calm, the seas flat. When the big rollers rumbled in it took a terrible effort to swim through them, to arrow yourself down through that muscular, solid swell to where the water was more fluid. Worst was when the wind was up, whipping streamers of foam off the tops of the waves, cross-currents sending them clashing together into a chaos that was almost impossible to swim through. And you could not see where you were. It was easy to get turned around, disoriented. He’d only once experienced such conditions and it had been terrifying; he’d been lucky the tide was running with him or he’d have been carried away, never to set foot on land again.

  On he strove. It would be harder coming back. Then he’d have the garrison wages to carry. Packed in sealed packets all around his waist, heavy and cumbersome. Don’t think about that, think of something else …

  There was a girl he’d been getting to know, down at the docks. When he’d first met her she’d been helping her father with his crab-lines, her long, thin brown fingers clever at untangling knots and weed. When he’d passed, she’d looked up at him with laughing dark eyes, and when her father when to reset his lines she’d given him a big crab out of the bucketful. “Hold him like this.” She spread her fingers wide across the knobbly shell, pinching the beast behind its waving claws. “Then he can’t nip you.”

  He’d run all the way home with his prize so that no one could rob him, and Zohra had boiled it for dinner: a rare treat. The next day he’d gone back to the dock with some aubergines and peppers from the garden, but the girl wasn’t there, and he hadn’t dared give them to her father in case he got her into trouble. Instead, he’d swapped them for a loaf of bread straight out of the oven, which he’d wolfed down till his stomach ached, and only then had he felt guilty for his greed—it wasn’t as if he was starving, not like some people.