Pillars of Light

by Jane Johnson

  “The sultan has spoken,” the Moor said softly. “There is nothing more I can do.”

  “At least let me see the True Cross,” Savaric begged. “For myself.”

  The Moor relayed this, and a curious expression crossed the sultan’s face. He turned and spoke to a man behind him who walked quickly from the tent.

  There followed several minutes of tense silence during which sugared pastries were offered and refused. Then the man returned, and behind him Ahmad al-Rammah and one of the alchemists bearing a heavy object smothered in silk. They came to a halt between the door and Savaric so that much of the natural light was blotted out. Then they uncovered their burden.

  Savaric’s dark eyes welled; tears spilled. His mouth gaped open. He got unsteadily to his feet and staggered a pace towards the cross. Alarmed, Ahmad took a pace back. “It’s all right,” the Moor said. “Messhi moushki. Let him approach.”

  The tears were streaming so fast down Savaric’s face now that I doubted he could see anything clearly. From where I crouched I could see that the back of the relic had darkened already in the day since it was last polished with lemon and alum salt. But judging by the citrus smell that permeated the air, maybe Ahmad had swiftly removed the patina from the front of the artifact.

  Savaric reached a trembling hand to the relic, touched it briefly and closed his eyes, his lips moving in silent prayer. He turned back to the Moor. “Let me take it,” he begged again. “If I go back with nothing … He has a terrible temper, this king. He is a man obsessed with getting his own way. There is no flexibility in him. I fear for the hostages. There is not enough food for all as it is, and there are so many of them …” His voice trailed off.

  The chill ran down my back and legs. This was a king whose subjects had massacred Jews in his own city and who had done nothing to stop them. “You have no idea what he is capable of,” Savaric had said. But I did.

  I stood up from my hiding place.

  “King Richard has neither patience nor honour,” I said. “Savaric, you must do whatever you can to save these people. Tell him he must wait for his payment.”

  Savaric stared at me as if he were seeing a ghost. The Moor said something quickly to the sultan, who again shook his head and replied quietly.

  Meanwhile, my erstwhile master looked me up and down. “John, have you turned coat?”

  “I never had a coat to turn,” I said bitterly.

  The Moor interrupted us. “Remind your king that princes must honour their words,” he translated. “The sultan will hold the cross as surety against the welfare of our people.”

  At a motion from the sultan, the men hooded the relic again and carried it away. Light flooded into the tent in their wake.

  Savaric watched them go, shaking his head sadly. “I have no influence, none at all. I am just a messenger.” He bowed to the sultan and walked away. When he came to me, he extended his hand. “Good luck, John.”

  “And to you.”

  “I fear I will need it more than you.”

  Some days later, Zohra and Nathanael walked away from the camp, to a pretty spot on the hills above the road to Nazareth, having left Nima in the care of Cousin Jamilla. They took with them dates and water, and a loaf that was still warm from the oven. It was the first time they had been out of the eyes of others for a long while, for the men’s and women’s areas were on opposite sides of the encampment: even husbands and wives slept separate from one another. To be alone together was like a huge weight being lifted.

  It was afternoon before the conversation turned to the future: they had both been sidestepping the subject.

  “Where will we go, beloved?”

  Zohra turned her head and smiled up at Nathanael, the blue sky reflecting in her wide eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t care, as long as it’s with you.”

  A stray curl of hair had slipped from her confining headscarf. Nat pulled at it playfully, winding it around and around his finger till it came free. “Damascus is where you have family,” he started.

  Zohra rolled up onto her elbows. “You are my family now. You and little Nima. We shall just wait for Baba and Sorgan and your mother to be released and get them to the cousins in Damascus, and then we can go wherever you want.”

  “Wherever?”

  “Wherever.”

  Nat grinned up at her. “The moon?”

  “I will come to the moon with you,” said Zohra, deadly serious.

  He tugged on the strand of hair to bring her closer. Zohra resisted playfully, then leaned in for a long, final kiss. Then she sat up and dusted the bits of earth and dried grass from her skirts. “We’d better be getting back to camp …”

  The sun was westering now, casting a brazen light across the sea.

  “There are people coming out of the city,” Nathanael said suddenly.

  Zohra shaded her eyes. “A lot of people.” She turned to her lover, suddenly glowing with hope. “You don’t think … the ransom has been paid, do you?”

  Nat said nothing, but a vertical line formed between his brows.

  More and yet more figures emerged from the city gates, tiny as ants at that distance.

  “Let’s go back down to the camp,” Zohra said excitedly. “We can see better from there.”

  Nat put a hand on her arm. “I think we should stay where we are. There will be a lot of fuss and bother around the camp if the hostages have been released.”

  “But they will need our help—”

  “I don’t think the pair of us will make a whit of difference,” he said grimly. “Let us wait and see what’s going on before we move.” His voice held a note of foreboding that made Zohra turn to him questioningly. Nathanael shook his head. “All will soon be clear,” he said, trying to sound reassuring.

  A column of soldiers and a great crowd of people on foot came out and began to move slowly uphill. “I don’t know what’s going on,” Nat admitted after a while. “It does look as if they are bringing all the hostages out.”

  They sat in silence as the procession filed through the Christian camp and continued to toil up towards the Tell Ayyadieh and the Muslim camp. “It looks as if they’re delivering them to the sultan,” Zohra said happily. “I do hope so. I’ve been so worried about Baba. I know he says he’s too old to leave Akka and start anew, but he has family in Damascus.”

  Still they came on, and soon they could see that the prisoners were roped together, their hands bound with thick cords, men and women, even children.

  “You’d think they’d allow them a bit more dignity,” Zohra said bitterly. “It’s not as if they’re going to run if they’re being freed, is it?”

  She started down the hillside towards them. Biting off a curse, Nat went after her fast, grabbed her by the arms and spun her around, but Zohra tore herself free and continued at a run. “Look, look! I can see Aunt Asha in her best red robe, and look, there’s Mohammed Azri and Sorgan!”

  The sight of people she knew stopped her in her tracks. Nathanael stared at the swarm of hostages in anguish, making out, almost against his will, a face here and there, searching for his mother, Sara. Instead he saw one of the women who had been in the baker’s queue on the day Nima’s mother had been killed, and Sayedi Efraim, the old herb-seller, supporting as best he could the weight of an elderly, grey-haired woman, who must surely have been his wife. Saïd, the doctor from the hospital; the crabber, and his daughter, Rana …

  Then he saw the men behind them draw their swords.

  “Come with me, my lioness,” he said, bundling Zohra backwards. “This is not a sight for those amber eyes.”

  Zohra fought him. “What are you doing? I’m sure if we look hard enough we’ll be able to see Sara and my father, too. Oh—”

  A body crumpled, suddenly headless, followed by another and another. Screams rent the air.

  Zohra gazed over Nat’s shoulder, aghast. “No! No, they can’t—”

  It had clearly been designed that the slaughter should take place in full view of
the Muslim camp. Swords flashed in the late-afternoon light, the sun and worse lending them a red sheen. Suddenly there were soldiers from the Muslim camp careering down the hillside. Christian soldiers rode out to confront them, easily keeping them at bay, while behind them the decapitations continued inexorably.

  Zohra wailed and tried to run. “Baba!” she screamed. “Sorgan!”

  Nathanael wrapped his arms around her, bore her to the ground. “There is nothing you can do. Nothing!”

  Zohra fought like a wildcat, biting and scratching in her fury. “I must see, I must!” Her hair came loose from the scarf, a snaking river of black. She flung herself this way and that, but Nat would not let her go. At last she subsided, tears and dust streaking her face. “It is the least I can do,” she croaked, wrenching herself upright. “I must watch. I must bear witness.”

  Nathanael collapsed beside her, his limbs suddenly as weak as string, his wound throbbing as if it had been made anew. They knelt together in the parched dead grass, tears falling silently as one by one the bodies fell and the earth became red mud, as the soldiers surged against one another and the banners of kings flew in the scream-laden air.

  35

  I did not have much recollection of that day for a long time. The Moor told me he feared me dead. When the killing started I apparently ran screaming down the hillside, without armour, bare-headed and weaponless. When he found me, hours later, I was covered top to toe in blood, none of it my own, and had my hands wrapped around a mace, from which I would not be parted. They say I growled like an animal, could not speak in any human tongue.

  The sequence of events on that terrible day came back to me in fits and starts, in the middle of a sweat-filled nightmare, or out of the blue. We left the camp a few days later, striking out into the interior of the country, heading for Damascus. On the road we overtook many refugees previously freed from the city. They had all lost family in the massacre; their tales were hard to hear. There was a young woman who had lost her father and brother in the slaughter, and the rest of her family either prior to or during the siege. That she was still able to eat and speak, and even sometimes smile, after such a loss was to me a greater miracle than any church could boast.

  She was travelling with a tall, dark-haired man and a pretty child. Occasionally, I caught the man giving me puzzled looks, which made me feel uncomfortable, scrutinized.

  In the middle of the third night we travelled with them I sat bolt upright, sweating. It had come to me: I had seen the assassin stab that very man in the citadel inside Acre, had seen him on the floor of that rich chamber, surrounded by a spreading pool of blood. I had thought him dead, and felt guilty for doing nothing to help him.

  Once my heart had stilled I lay there looking up at the swath of stars scattered overhead and wondered at the fact he was still alive. A great weight lifted off me that night: even though we never said anything about it, it was as if I had been handed a gift, a sort of redemption.

  Nathanael was a doctor. He and the Moor fell into easy company, comparing herbal remedies, experimenting with the best tisanes to ease my troubled sleep and that of the woman he called his wife, Zohra. And whatever they did, the child, Nima—who seemed drawn by the Moor, as children often are—watched with her big, dark eyes, taking it all in.

  “I’m going to be a doctor too, just like both of you,” she announced.

  “Are you, little bee?” the Moor asked her.

  “Yes,” she declared solemnly.

  Nathanael smiled at him over Nima’s head. “You have to make a difference, that’s what my father always said. No matter how slim the chance of success may seem, it’s the only way to make things better in the end. You have to pass on your wisdom to a new generation, and each time, step by step, things improve.”

  The Moor held his gaze, then nodded slowly. “That’s it exactly.”

  In Damascus we shared an empty and long-neglected house rented from a distant cousin of Zohra’s. They did not seem much pleased to welcome her new husband. I felt a fool when the Moor had to explain to me why; it had not even occurred to me.

  “Does it matter so much that he’s a Jew?” I asked. Before we had left the Muslim camp, Rosamund had announced to me that she was going to marry Malek. “He doesn’t know it yet,” she’d added with a grin. “But I am.” Christian and Muslim; Jew and Muslim; and … well, I had no idea how to identify the Moor and myself.

  “People go to war over such things,” he said. “But we are all just men.”

  The Moor and Nathanael and I put our backs into clearing the weed-filled garden, replacing the broken tiles around the rubble-choked fountain, clearing the water-pipes, restoring it to life. But the greatest restorative was to my soul. It felt good and simple to put my efforts into manual labour. It made me feel again that despite all I had seen there was still some small chance of bringing something good into this imperfect world. We planted fruit trees. Buntings gathered at the water’s edge on the first day we turned the fountain on, until Nima came dancing out, clapping her hands with delight, and scared them away. Then she acquired a cat, a sly calico tom with mismatched eyes, and after that the birds kept their distance.

  One day the Moor suggested I come to the Umayyad Mosque with him.

  “But I can’t.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m not a Muslim. You said I was a heathen and it wasn’t allowed.”

  “What are you, John?”

  So much easier to say what I was not. “I don’t know.”

  “Do any of us know? We may call ourselves by many names—Christian and Jew, Muslim or infidel. But how can we know our source or our destination? As soon ask stone or earth or river: we each of us have our own secret way of being a part of the mystery.” His eyes glowed as if lit from within. “Come be a part of the mystery with me. I will show you what to do.”

  There was a great serenity to be found amongst the endless replication of pillars and arches of the mosque. Its quiet beauty surprised me. I was given permission to sketch there, and I did, day after day, which soothed my spirit. To capture that immense impression of space and light would have taken a greater artist than me. Still, it woke in me a sense of greater purpose. I felt as I had in the little church in Lisbon, as if I was questing after the unseen, the elusive capture of perfection. I recalled the vision of grace I had experienced in the Acre mosque. I began to understand what drove Bishop Reginald and his dream for his cathedral, despite all the questionable methods he and his cousin had employed.

  When I stumblingly tried to discuss this with the Moor, he smiled. “And now you are ready to travel with me.”

  “Travel where?”

  “There is still much to see, much to discover, before we go back.”

  “Back where?”

  “Back to England. To Wells.”

  I had come to think of Damascus as home. Almost. Almost it had come to feel like home to me. “I don’t understand why you would want to go back to England after … after all that has happened.”

  “All the more reason to do what I must do. There are two kinds of men in this world, John. Those who fear beauty and seek to destroy it, and those who strive to create it, against all the odds, who seek to make sense of the world, to find the truth of it. Beauty is the highest truth of all: to capture that beauty in stone, to the glory of God—whatever name we call him by—is the most perfect expression of man’s striving. After all the ugliness we have seen, how much more does the world need beauty?”

  A few days later we left Damascus. And so it was that a boy bearing the name of Savage, a wild boy from the Cornish moors, entered the gates of Jerusalem the Golden.

  The city still lay in Muslim hands; King Richard’s drive to regain the holy city had come to nothing. Deserted by the French King Philip Augustus, dogged by ill health and self-doubt, by concerns about his kingdom back home, he had turned back from the decisive battle, which he might well have won, said the Moor, the Muslim army being so exhausted and reduced.<
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  “All that death and cruelty, for nothing.”

  “War never solved anything,” my friend said. “But it can destroy much. Look around you.”

  We were inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the eastern part of the Holy City, having walked through the remarkable bazaar to reach it.

  “When the Christians took the city at the end of the last century, they killed every Muslim who took sanctuary here. Then they turned this place into stables,” the Moor told me. “First blood, then horse shit, but even that could not break its beauty. Salah ad-Din had it washed with rosewater, scattered with rose petals when he took it back. And now look at it.”

  I gazed around at the marble pillars, at the colonnades of arches. I looked at him. The previous night there had been a cloudburst: rolling thunder overhead, rain hammering down; lightning I could see even though my closed lids. Maybe it had reminded my unconscious mind of being rolled in the sea, the thundering of the breakers as they drove me in to shore.

  “I saw you,” I said. “The day I was washed up on the shore south of Acre. I have remembered now, remembered it all.”

  He looked at me oddly. “Go on.”

  I closed my eyes, drawing it back. “The cross. I had it in my hands when I jumped off the ship. It was so heavy, dragging me down to the bottom of the sea, and I was just … letting it. I accepted everything: the past, my heart, my sins, my death. I knew it all and I let it all go. Gave myself up to my fate, or to God, or whatever you might call it. And then …” I frowned. “It became so light, the cross, and huge. Suddenly it felt … immense. And instead of dragging me down, it was taking me up, towards the light. I thought I was dying. I thought it was the end. And I just … embraced it.

  “The next thing I knew, I was on the beach. I thought I was in Heaven, seeing you there beside me. And then you picked up this piece of wood—just a dull chunk of grey stuff, like driftwood. Except you turned it over and there was a bit of gold, and some jewels, still covering it, and you dug your thumbs into it and … peeled it away, just like a skin from a naranja, and then you sat back on your heels just looking at it, the wood, I mean. And you brushed the sand off it, and looked at it again, very close. And then you did something strange.”