Pillars of Light

by Jane Johnson

  Ned was an odd one: never popular, being a bit secretive, shifty, unforthcoming, always on the outside of the group. Now we felt guilty that we had not thought of him sooner, distracted as we had been by Saw’s demise. I remembered the beating I gave him after he thieved the steward’s purse back in Somerset. It seemed a thousand years ago.

  We asked around; we visited the hospital tent. God, there were sights in there I never wish to see again. But of Little Ned there was no sign

  It struck me later, as I tried, and failed, to sleep, that of the eight of us who had set out with glad hearts to gull the willing populace of England to sign for the cross and come fight on this hellish expedition, there were only four left. I could only hope that Plaguey Mary and the Moor were still alive, in a safer place than this. But I couldn’t help but feel that we were paying a heavy price for cozening the poor folk of our land into paying a part in this infernal war.

  The supply run to Haifa having failed, conditions in the camp worsened daily. By comparison with many, we were living well: there was still some cheese left, salted beef and flour. But our cook had died of the flux, and Savaric’s Welshman had been deputized to do his best with the meagre contents of our provisions wagons. He’d been surprisingly creative: we found ourselves eating better than we had before, though when Savaric asked him what was in a particularly tasty stew he’d served up he was evasive.

  Quickfinger stared at the pale meat in his bowl. “You don’t think—?” He picked out a bone, held it up. It was about the length of his little finger. He wiggled it as if it had come off his own hand, then made us all dig the tiny bones out of our own bowls.

  “Definitely not human,” I said. I could have sworn he looked disappointed.

  The next day we found out exactly what we had eaten. The falconer was in the hospital tent, slowly expiring from wounds he had sustained at the Spring Head. The two birds he kept with him had vanished.

  We were detailed to take turns guarding the wagons. Every morning and every night Savaric’s steward took an inventory of what we had left. Even so there was pilfering. Men had been hanged. The usual punishment was a thrashing, which proved to be an insufficient deterrent; after that, the loss of a hand. But what was the point of keeping a man who couldn’t fight? He was just an extra mouth to feed. Every day we heard of men who had climbed the earthworks and gone over to the enemy, “turned Turk.”

  “They say it’s better to be taken captive by Saladin than to starve to death here,” grumbled Savaric’s horse-caparisoner. “They’ve got all sorts up there in those hills: deer and sheep and goats and swans and cameleopards; fresh cakes baked with honey, new flour and fruit from Damascus.” I watched a globule of saliva drip from the corner of his mouth.

  “They cut your cock off if you go over to them, the Saracen,” Quickfinger offered helpfully.

  The caparisoner quailed. “What?”

  “Aye, they do.” He turned an earnest face to the man, then a dissembling face to me, a discreet wink. “Summat to do wi’ their religion.”

  The caparisoner went pale and took himself off to rethink his future. I could not help but think of my own gullibility concerning the eating of babies.

  Famine continued to bite and the rain continued to fall. Death stalked the Christian camp, picking victims at will: a lord here, a peasant-soldier there; camp-followers, servants, archers, cooks. One day we heard a terrible wailing from the camp of the Latin Kingdom. Florian went out to investigate and came back with the news that the two small daughters of the king and queen of Jerusalem were dead in the night, succumbed to the bloody flux, and that their mother, Sibylla, would not let their bodies be buried, but clung to them weeping with no thought for her own well-being.

  Two innocent children brought into this hell to suffer and to die, for nothing. What sense was there in a world where such things happened?

  One night, a week or so later, I was sitting with Ezra on guard duty. We didn’t often find ourselves on the same watch, and maybe that was because I had been avoiding being alone with her these past weeks, after that almost-kiss. Of course I’d said nothing, and neither had she, but I felt her eyes on me all the time when we were in company, as uncomfortable as a touch. In the dark, sitting our watch, it was easier to bear.

  We talked about nothing in particular—about the weather, the food, the general discomforts; about poor Queen Sibylla, who had herself now sickened of the same disease that carried off her girls—and then she said to me, quite out of the blue: “When the war’s over and we go back to England, we should marry. Each other, I mean. Get a little piece of land, some animals. I can look after them, make butter and cheese and suchlike. Have some chickens, for the eggs, raise some up, sell some chicks at market, that sort of thing.”

  There was a long, panicked pause as I tried to think how to respond to this proposition, and into this silence she added, “Because I know, you see. We’re like each other more than you think. I don’t want babies and you don’t want a wife, or any woman, really. We’d suit one another well enough and no one would fuss us.”

  I stared out into the darkness, where the fires of a thousand campfires like our own burned in the night. Had she seen to the heart of me, just like that, Ezra-who-was-Rosamund, with her solemn, unremarkable brown eyes?

  “I … ah …” I could not frame the words.

  “I saw the way the Moor looked at you,” she went on. “And how you looked at him. And Mary said something once—”

  “What? What did she say?”

  ‘ “They’re made for each other, those two.’ That’s what she said. ‘Made for each other and they don’t even know it, or at least John don’t. The Moor, he knows all the world has to offer: he’s seen it all, just one look at him and you can tell. But he’s waiting.’ ”

  My mouth was so dry I could hardly speak. “Waiting? Waiting for what?”

  “For you. To know yourself. That was what Mary said. And I’ve been watching you too. How you don’t go after the whores. I saw your face when Savaric pushed that one at you in Lisbon, and it was right about then I remembered what Mary said. And …” She paused, then said in a rush, “I’ve seen your drawings, your secret sketches of him—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”

  There was a distant agony inside me, worse than any arrow wound: an emptiness, a loss. I shook my head in the darkness. “Then why would you ask me? Knowing what I am?” It was the first time I had made such an admission, even to myself.

  I could feel her smile, but when she replied her tone was melancholic. “People are contrary, en’t they? Not being able to have something doesn’t make you want it any the less.”

  We ran out of words then; the weight of thoughts hung heavy between us. We were still sitting glumly silent when Savaric chanced by. He sat companionably by our fire, warming his hands. After a few minutes Ezra excused herself for a piss.

  “When will King Richard come?” I asked Savaric.

  “Not till the spring now. They say the storms that ravage the coasts of the Middle Sea in winter can be severe, and we wouldn’t want to lose him to shipwreck. But when he comes …” He made an expansive gesture. “When he comes we’ll bring this damned siege to a close in no time. The whole world goes in fear of our Lionheart.”

  And then we can go home from this dreadful place, I sighed to myself. “And no sign of Philip Augustus, either,” I said aloud. “Florian says the French nobles are fretting, and some are even talking of leaving.” I wondered how important this war could be that we were here and those two potentates were wherever they were, attending, no doubt, to matters more important in the eyes of a king.

  “What was that?” Savaric was suddenly intent, looking around.

  “What? I heard nothing.”

  We sat in the flickering light, listening like a pair of owls. Then I heard it, a rustle, a distant thud against the hollow wood of a wagon. I made a sign to Savaric—quietly, come with me—and drew my dagger. Together we crept around the back of the stores, in
time to see a faint glow and the shapes of two men, one inside the wagon handing what looked like a side of cured gammon down to a fellow outside.

  I gestured to Savaric—stay here, meaning, catch them if they run. Then I hurled myself at the back of the nearest man, hauling him down into the mud. He landed in a heap and my fist connected solidly with his head, and he groaned and stopped struggling. But the second man leapt out of the wagon and pushed past us, dodged away from Savaric and was gone into the night before either of us had a chance to give chase. I held on to the first robber, thinking that Ezra would have had the runaway down in no time; she was both tough and quick, whereas our master had spent too long sitting on his backside eating the same stores we were trying to guard.

  I dragged the miscreant closer to the fire so we could get a better look at him. When the light fell upon his face, Savaric roared: “You!”

  I stared at the man for some seconds before it came to me: Geoffrey de Glanvill, thinner than last I’d seen him, riding around the camp in his Templar surcoat with his brother at his side, as if the pair of them had come to conquer the world and divide it up between them.

  Savaric grabbed him by the throat. “Steal my food, would you? So you’re a thief as well as a rapist, are you?”

  De Glanvill blinked up at him, frowning. “What did you say?”

  “You raping, thieving bastard! Just wait till de Sable hears about this, I’ll make sure you swing for it, so help me God!” Savaric was raging now, unaware of the implications of what he had just said. Too late, I tried to head him off.

  “Yes, you thieving villain!” I cried, emphasizing the “thieving” with all my might. But Savaric was too furious to take my meaning. And then, if it were not enough that our master had made it clear that he knew all along that de Glanvill had attacked the young woman in Winchelsea, and that Savaric therefore must have had words with her, hidden her and lied about it, “Ezra” appeared, bareheaded, the light from the fire burning rosy across her face.

  De Glanvill’s eyes widened in disbelief. “You! You’re the little whore who tried to murder my cousin!”

  Ezra snarled and flung herself at him, lacerating his face with her nails.

  “Christ!” Savaric hauled her away before she could rip his head off, and thrust her in my direction.

  She was a handful, fighting me with every ounce of her strength. I remembered a jackrabbit I’d once caught on Dartmoor, every fibre in its body bent on escaping me. Eventually I’d let it go, appalled by its will to live. But Ezra I hung on to.

  Then suddenly there was a blur of movement and a cry, and Savaric was swearing. Over Ezra’s shoulder, I saw him fall, clutching his side, and then de Glanvill was running, stumbling through the mud and away.

  “John! Get after him! If he gets back to his brother, Rosamund is lost.”

  I ran. As a foot soldier I was used to the mud; De Glanvill, a horseman, was less so. His feet slipped and he fell to his knees, then hurled himself upright again. More surefooted, I made up the ground between us. I saw him twist his head round, his face pale through the gloom, then he was dodging sideways, heading for the tents, splashing heedlessly, making poor progress. He was a lord, been brought up in castles lit by a thousand candles, but I had spent my early years as a feral creature, the stars my only light in darkness. I saw the guy rope he tripped over even before he did, and then I was on him, hand clamped hard over his mouth to stop his noise. My dagger went in under the ribs, and beneath my hand a long moan escaped, like the lowing of a cow.

  It never fails to surprise me how fragile we are, we human beings, our soft outer skin so inadequate, so vulnerable. That first stroke was almost certainly a killing stroke, but I couldn’t stop. I withdrew the dagger from the sheath of his flesh and plunged it in again, and again, the memory of what he did to Ezra making me savage.

  I don’t know how long I was there, on my knees, stabbing and sobbing till long after there was no more moaning but my own and at last I became aware of rain pattering down on me. Then thunder rumbled overhead and the rain fell harder, each drop like a stinging rebuke from Heaven.

  Back at Savaric’s pavilion, I found him in the chair he called his throne, naked to the waist, with Florian applying a field dressing to his wound. They both stared at me in horror as I entered. I was all over mud and blood, like some demonic creature.

  “Is he dead?” Savaric asked.

  I nodded.

  “Well, it had to be done,” Savaric said. You could tell he wasn’t badly wounded. “He’d have gone straight to Ranulf and told all, and after what happened in Lisbon it wouldn’t only have been Ezra’s neck at risk.”

  Florian looked at him curiously, and I wondered how much, or little, he knew. Then Savaric turned to me and laughed. “So, you’re a proper soldier now!”

  A proper soldier, yes—a red-fisted murderer who had not only taken a man’s life, but relished the deed. The bile that had been threatening now scoured the back of my throat and came pouring out.

  The horrible irony was that I needn’t have killed Geoffrey de Glanvill after all, for the next day word reached us that his brother Ranulf had died of the flux. Some days after that, Archbishop Baldwin’s ancient life ebbed away, to be followed by half a hundred other nobles. How many of us commoners perished I could not tell you. Death walked amongst us, swinging his scythe: it was a high harvest field day for the minions of Hell.

  26

  Nathanael watched the man close the door behind him and move off down the street. Tariq walked with his shoulders hunched and his hands curled inwards, a man guarding the generous swell of his belly from jealous eyes. Even if Nat had not known who he was, he would have hated him for his self-satisfied swagger. Imagine, feeding yourself out of the citadel stores and bringing nothing out to feed your wife, her father and brother. The man was a monster on that count alone. Nathanael wished him dead.

  He waited until Tariq was out of sight, checked to make sure there was no one marking his presence, then crossed the road and rapped on the door, once, twice, a pause, then once again. Footsteps on the tile floor, then the door opened and he stepped quickly inside.

  “Did he see you?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  Nat handed the covered basket over and Zohra took it. Inside was the very last of their store of tea, some lentils and chickpeas scraped from the cellar floor, a small packet of rice that would make maybe two meagre meals, some raisins from last summer’s grape harvest and a handful of the final dried onions. There was hardly anything left to give. Soon they would be like the very poorest folk, forced to boil old hides and shoe leather for broth, to search for weeds among the ruins, to lie in wait for the few rats or wild birds left within the walls. Some people had made a sort of tea out of ground-up palm fronds, which proved to be poisonous. He watched Zohra move quickly towards the kitchen with her treasures.

  “You must not live in fear of him,” he chided, following her into the kitchen. “He cannot forbid you to go out.”

  Zohra sighed. “It’s easier to do as he demands. Don’t be angry with me, I can’t bear it.”

  Ever since Aisa had drowned, something had gone out of her, some essential spark. Little sign of the lioness now, more like a feral cat that snatched at food then ran away. Tariq, noting this, had pressed his advantage, every day taking greater control of the household, and of his wife, introducing rules governing her behaviour—not to venture beyond the communal oven at the end of the road, not to walk abroad without either himself or Rachid, not to allow anyone beyond the immediate family into the house when he was not there, to go veiled at all times, never to look any man directly in the eye.

  “He never said anything about other parts,” Nat had teased upon hearing this, and Zohra had promptly burst into tears. So now he tried not to add to her burdens by making remarks or jokes, though it was difficult to see Zohra so reduced. And gradually, once the storm of grief over the loss of poor Aisa had lost some degree of its force, he had t
ried increasingly to bring a little kindness into her life—a pot of honey, packets of herbal tea put together by Sara, some grain for the pigeons begged from a merchant in exchange for his services, a piece of turquoise silk he had found in a chest at home with which Zohra might bind her hair beneath the hood of her djellaba. He had never seen her wear it, no doubt out of fear her husband would demand to know where it had come from. He seemed to take pleasure in denying her.

  “Little bird,” he said now, “you haven’t been eating.”

  Zohra shook her head. “I eat enough.”

  “Enough to survive, not enough to thrive.”

  “There’s not enough to go around. The men need more than I do.”

  Nathanael cut off the bitter words that welled up inside him. “Sorgan gets little treats up at the garrison, and Tariq gets fed at the citadel,” he pointed out. “You must not let them take your share. What would they do without you if you were to fall sick?” He watched as Zohra took this in. He took Zohra’s hand in his own, turned it over. “See how every bone is visible? That’s too thin.” It was a thrill to touch her, even innocently. “If ever you run out of food you must come to me, there is always something I can find. You will, won’t you?”

  Zohra looked down at her hands and said nothing.

  How had she become so passive? To see her like this gave him a physical pain, a pang of loss. Little wraith, he thought, little ghost.

  “Promise me.”

  “Your first duty is to your mother and Nima,” Zohra said quietly.

  Duty? The word love teetered on Nathanael’s tongue but he bit it back. Each day a little more, he vowed to himself. I will win you back. I will save you. He hoped his fervour didn’t show in his eyes.

  “There is always honey, little bird. Always honey for you. And when that is gone, there is always me.”

  Zohra looked confused. “What?”

  She does not remember, Nat thought. She does not remember that afternoon when I offered my whole self to her, to love, to destroy, to be devoured—eaten if ever she was starving. The remark had been made half in jest, but he meant it fully now. Perhaps she does not remember how we were, he thought again. Perhaps she doesn’t remember any of it at all.