by Jane Johnson
He treated the boy, examining his tongue and his eyes, but found little sign of recovery. If he was honest, he did not think the lad would survive the summer, war or no war. But you couldn’t take people’s hope away from them, and so when Rana’s father asked he said he was no better but no worse, which was the truth.
“Perhaps they’re right to surrender,” the crabber said, shocking him.
“What?”
The man shrugged. “A swimmer left for Salah ad-Din’s camp this morning with another message from the commanders asking that they be allowed to call a truce and discuss terms.”
“Another?”
“That’s at least the second message. He sent back a flat no last time, and I don’t suppose it’ll be any different this time, more’s the pity.” The crabber paused. “I just hope the lad makes it, he looked so tired and thin—” Too late he stopped, and his daughter’s face was closed and still.
To hear of the commanders of the city discussing the possibility of surrender filled Nathanael with a righteous fury: they had no right to decide the fate of the inhabitants of a city in which neither had lived for any time, to which they had no emotional ties. But to hear the crabber welcoming the idea sobered him. Perhaps, he thought—a rare admission—he was wrong.
On the way back to the Street of Tailors, he barely paid attention to Nima’s chatter, and so wrapped up in his thoughts was he that he did not respond at first when his name was called. It was Nima who cried out, “It’s Zohra, look, it’s Zohra!”
Zohra Najib had obviously left the house in a hurry, for she came bare-headed, her black hair snaking like the Medusa’s. She clutched Nathanael’s arm. “You have to come, quickly. You have to help me, Nat. There’s no one else I can ask.”
It was immediately clear that there was no doctor on earth who could do anything for Tariq. He lay in a heap at the foot of the stairs on the first landing, his neck at such an angle that it was obvious it had been broken. Sorgan sat at the top of the stairs like a statue.
“We have to get him out of here, hide him,” Zohra said.
“I killed him,” Sorgan added, with what seemed to Nathanael to be gloating satisfaction. “He hurt the pigeons. He hurt Zohra, too.”
Nat felt the old fury fire through him. Damn the man: he wished he’d killed him himself.
“Hush!” Zohra implored her brother. “You can’t say that! What have I told you?” She gazed helplessly at Nathanael. “They’ll take him away, put him in gaol, maybe even hang him. After Mother and Aisa, and Kamal …” The amber eyes welled with tears. “People go missing all the time,” Zohra said. “They slip out over the walls, giving themselves up as prisoners to the enemy, or trying to make it to Salah ad-Din’s camp. And Tariq was never known as any sort of hero.”
“They’re going to ask questions anyway, my love.”
“Yes, but without a body …”
Nat rubbed a hand over his face and sighed. “Let me see what I can do.”
The area of the city near the east gate was worse than anywhere he had yet been. The houses were cratered, burned-out ruins, and in the midst of them a pair of huge mangonels had been set up, broken masonry from the houses used as ammunition to fire at the enemy over the walls. The sound of the enemy bombardment was loud here, and sometimes he could see clouds of mortar-dust blooming above the walls as their missiles struck.
“I’m looking for the smith, Mohammed Azri,” he shouted to one of the soldiers on duty, but the man shook his head, and so did the next dozen people he asked.
But farther down the road he found the ruins of a forge and a young man salvaging bits of pig iron.
“I’m looking for Mohammed Azri,” Nat said.
The man straightened up, extended a hand. “I am his son, Saddiq. We’ve moved the smithy to a safer place.” He was young and tall, gaunt in the face. The way his robe hung on him suggested he had been well-muscled before the famine took hold.
He led Nat through alleys towards the centre of the city, to a street that led onto the bazaar. Of old, it had been a tranquil area, occupied by bookbinders and perfume-sellers. The minaret of the Friday Mosque rose up behind it. Now, there was the usual array of boarded-up doors and stalls and a strong smell of burning. They made their way through a throng of folk and workers ferrying barrows of wood and charcoal.
In the space occupied by the new smithy, soot-covered boys fed the fires and wielded the bellows while a group of men heated metal and hammered it out. A pile of household pots, horseshoes and braziers were being fed into the fires to emerge as arrowheads, swords and spearheads, which were, as they cooled, gathered eagerly by waiting soldiers and garrison volunteers. They did not look like people ready to give up the fight, Nathanael thought; they looked impatient and determined. He recognized the tallest of the hammering men as the one who had carried an unconscious Nima back to their home after the missile strike had killed her mother at the baker’s.
Nat hung back, waiting for a chance to speak with the smith, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of the hammers, the searing brightness of the fanned flames. But after a while one of the men missed his blow and stood swaying; then he went down like a felled ox. Others dragged him away from the heat of the furnace and the hammering recommenced.
Nathanael gathered himself. “I’m a doctor, let me through.”
The man was not unconscious, but he was groggy. “Have you eaten anything?” he asked him at last, and the fallen man cocked an eye and croaked out, “Have you?”
There was not much humour to be had in the midst of the siege, but that provoked some laughter. Someone brought the man a piece of flatbread and some lentil paste, another gave him water, and soon he was back on his feet again.
Mohammed Azri came to Nat’s side. “I recognize you,” he said. “You’re the doctor’s son.”
“I’m the doctor now.”
“Have you come to claim the favour I owe you?”
He admitted as much. “You may not want to do it when I tell you what it is.”
Mohammed Azri led him away to the back of the smithy where a small brazier bore a steaming samovar, and he poured out a bowl of some pale brown liquid. It did not taste like any tea Nat had ever drunk, but he sipped it gratefully. He kept his explanation to a minimum and the smith asked few questions.
“I will do this thing because it is you who asks,” he said at last. “I will meet you by the Little Mosque in the small hours.”
Nathanael had straightened Tariq’s limbs before they stiffened, but even so it took all five of them to move the body, they were all so weak and the corpse so heavy.
“He has not stinted himself during this siege.” Saddiq grimaced.
Zohra gave a bitter laugh. “No. Tariq did not believe in stinting himself.”
Baltasar, wakened by noises that echoed off the tiled walls, cried out from his bed, and Zohra ran to give him more of the valerian Nathanael had brought to quieten him. After that he slept till past first prayer, by which time the shrouded corpse of Tariq Assad was in its final resting place, the open grave near the east wall where all the poor dead were being interred. Nat stared into the mass grave, then around at the desolation, feeling a long-denied anger. This was his city, his home. These were good people, decent people, who had not sought conflict but were simply caught in the middle of two warring forces.
As they came away, the smith bowed his head and intoned, “O Allah! Grant this man protection and have mercy on him, and pardon him, and wash him with water and snow and hail and cleanse him of faults as a white cloth is cleansed of dirt.”
Nathanael gazed at Zohra, who held his glance for one piercing moment, then looked down at the shrouded body. “I am a widow,” she whispered. She started to tremble.
Then Sorgan’s stomach grumbled loudly. Saddiq clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s the trouble with being a giant,” he said. “It sounds so much emptier than anyone else’s stomach.”
“It is emptier,” Sorgan complained.
&nbs
p; Mohammed Azri turned to Zohra. “I will bid you farewell, lady.”
She clasped his hand. “I do not know how to thank you.”
He looked at her hulking brother, then back to her upturned face. “I do. We are in desperate need of help at the forge. Could he help us sometimes?”
“You should ask him.”
The smith smiled at Sorgan. “Tell me, young man, do you like fire?”
Sorgan’s eyes lit up. “I love fire.”
28
They had been telling me about Hell all my life. From those first weeks when I entered the Priory of St. Michael on the Mount as a wild boy, they’d set about beating it into me. In the book of Saint Matthew, Hell is described as a place where both soul and body could be destroyed. Acre defined the idea of Hell for me now.
Outside the walls there was a constant background noise of souls in agony, always an unquenchable fire was burning, and at night a storm of darkness. What it was like inside, God alone knew. We had been battering at the walls by night and day, hurling Greek fire over the battlements. If it went on much longer soon there would be nothing left of Acre but a burned-out shell. And maybe that was what they wanted, those kings we fought for: for, like angels armed with savage weapons, they were merciless in their destruction.
King Richard was so determined to take the city before the French king, Philip, that he was defying even the illness that ravaged him and had risen from the bed to which he had been banished by his doctors. He’d had a kind of hurdle-shed constructed for himself, and from there—too weak to stand upright—he would lie on his back to fire his mighty crossbow, and thus claim the glory. Meanwhile, King Philip’s diggers had burrowed almost through the thickness of the wall beside the Accursed Tower, and, having set fires below the tower, they had weakened the structure. But still it had not fallen, and still the defenders held firm. And so the bombardment went on.
Our king declared that he would personally pay a week’s wages to any man who brought back a stone from the wall with his own hands. Four gold bezants! The heralds who brought the decree were almost trampled in the rush that ensued. Of the troupe, only Quickfinger succeeded in the task—by stealing a stone from a man who was having trouble dragging his boulder out of the trench with him, and running back through the smoke to claim his reward. Ezra was stationed with the other bowmen, and so I had seen little of her these past weeks; Little Ned spat at the idea of putting himself in harm’s way—“You can’t spend your wages in Hell, can you?”; and Hammer had stared at the herald as if he wanted to kill him.
I just remembered what the Moor had once told me. “In the end, habibi, money has as little value as the dust of the earth.”
I was assigned to supply boulders to God’s Stone-thrower, the massive trebuchet King Richard had taken over. It was trained exclusively on the wounded area around the Accursed Tower, while the other two great machines—in the control of the Templars on one side, and the Hospitallers on the other—weakened neighbouring parts of Acre’s walls. Some of the stones we brought were huge Sicilian boulders that had come off the king’s ships. It took several men to roll and to load them. It was easier but less effective to bring the rocks out of the damaged walls themselves, those that had been wrenched by hand by the reckless and the desperate and piled up in the king’s camp, worth more than their weight in gold.
One way or another, we kept up a constant barrage, but the city’s garrison maintained their defence: we had to shelter from arrows and bolts, from stones from their own machines, and worst of all from the fire pots they lobbed. Time and again we beat out the flames and avoided getting the sticky substance on us. When men were set afire there was nothing anyone could do save to save them from torment. Their corpses burned on and on, like wickless candles, till there was nothing left of them but stench. I had also seen others, still burning, fed into the trebuchet bucket and hurled over the walls along with the other missiles. The first time I’d witnessed this, I could not believe my eyes, but within a week I was inured to it: just another atrocity among so many others.
A man could not take too much of this. I had seen men go mad and run for the sea, tearing off their armour and clothes, shouting that they would swim home. I would have joined them, had I been able to swim. I had also seen figures hurl themselves from the walls of the besieged city. God knew what the conditions in there were like that they would choose to destroy themselves so.
But then the next day the strangest thing happened. In the middle of the day, quite without warning, the sun disappeared and darkness fell across the battlefield: an unsettling, penumbrous light like no other I had ever experienced. Some men fell to their knees and started praying. Others, who had been watching the sky as this odd phenomenon occurred, were struck blind. People were crying out—on the walls, as well as down in the field—calling on their gods for mercy.
“God is angry with us!”
“We are all damned!”
But then, just as quickly as it had left us, the light returned, flooding the heavens. The Bishop of Salisbury raised his hands to the skies. “And the sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the coming of the great and awesome day of the Lord!”
Hammer screwed his face up in disgust. “Moon of blood tonight then, lads.”
We were reluctantly resuming our trebuchet duties when a page came running to fetch me. “John Savage. His lordship, Savaric de Bohun, demands your presence.”
It was almost with relief that I followed him to Savaric’s tent.
Unfortunately, the relief was not to last for long.
“Come with me, John,” Savaric said. “We’re going to see the king.”
If you had presented the man in the great pavilion as King Richard of England to me I would have laughed in your face. That hale, dangerous lion who had crowned himself in London, where was he? The man who sat there, hunched among cushions, looked half his size, his eyes too bright in their hoods of bone, the bright red hair lank and dark. He stared at me when I followed Savaric inside his pavilion, and when given my name he leaned forward and gripped my arm with a clammy hand. Ginger hair sprouted from huge knuckles.
“You have to go into Acre, John Savage,” he told me in a hoarse whisper, and when he drew his lips back to pronounce the city’s name I could see the blood leaking from his gums. We were all ill, all reduced in body and spirit, but to see this monster of a king in such a state was a shock. I had to force myself back to his words.
“The darkness—it was a sign, a sign that the Saracens are preparing to destroy the True Cross. We have been sorely tried, but this is the great test. If we do not save His cross we will all be damned, and our war will fail. The Church does not pray for the damned soul, did you know?” He was rambling. I was terrified.
“I have a spy who comes from the city, and he knows where they keep the cross. He will guide you to it, won’t you … boy, boy, what’s your name? Come and meet John Savage.”
A slight, dark lad came out of the shadows at the back of the pavilion and prostrated himself to the king in some strange oriental fashion. Then he got tidily to his feet and stood, hands at his sides, unblinking.
“Kamal, my lord. My name is Kamal.”
He had large, black eyes and a delicate bone structure, and just the lightest fuzz of beard. In the chancy candlelight there was something about him that was unsettling: he looked more like a girl than a boy.
What could I say? You can’t refuse a king—not to his face—and expect to survive it. I managed to bow and mumble some nonsense. But as soon as we were out of that tent again, I turned on Savaric.
“I’m not going into Acre to fetch out some old relic.”
“You could make yourself a rich man, John.”
I folded my arms. “I’m not doing it.”
“I didn’t want to resort to this, John, but … well, I would hate to have to explain to the king what happened to Geoffrey de Glanvill.”
“It’s hardly as if I was alone in that … ventu
re.”
“And whose word do you think they will believe, if it comes to that, John?”
I closed my eyes. I was a dead man, one way or another.
To my great surprise it was not difficult to persuade the troupe to go on this fool’s mission: they’d all heard the tales of the gold squirrelled away by the Saracens in the city treasury, the jewels and coins. Such an audacious mission restored their sense of being the canny outsiders conning the gullible and the slow. After that, the talk was all of treasure and what they’d do with it: the women they’d buy, the land they’d own, the houses they’d build and, most of all, the food they’d eat.
“Roast ox, every night,” Ned said. “Smoking and hissing over a fire with two well-built wenches to turn the spit.”
“Four,” grinned Quickfinger, “stripped to the waist, because of the heat.”
“Swan,” said Will. “Stuffed with all sorts of other birds, like the king’s feast you told us about.”
I was made to rehearse yet again the entire contents of those laden tables while the troupe groaned and sighed and made themselves impossible promises. In the end, once they’d exhausted their fantasies, it was Quickfinger who asked the only sensible question.
“How do we get out? Getting in, easy enough. But getting out, laden wi’ treasure?” He waggled his eyebrows meaningfully.
“There’s a boat,” I said, and couldn’t blame them for being dubious. I certainly had been when Savaric explained it to me.
“All you have to do is to get out past the Tower of Flies, the tower that guards the city’s harbour,” he’d said. “Get past the harbour chain and one of our ships will pick you up from there. I’ve already paid the captain a retainer.”
“You make it sound so simple,” I’d said to Savaric.
He’d nodded earnestly. “But it is, my boy, it is! That’s the beauty of it.”