Siege of Heaven da-3

by Tom Harper

  Nikephoros glanced at me and nodded. I licked my lips, then shouted: ‘Ambassadors from the emperor Alexios.’

  With a crack and a hiss, something ripped through the air and buried itself in the mud. My horse reared up; I flung my arms around its neck and hugged it tight, clenching my knees against its flanks. Beside me, I saw a small feathered arrow sticking up from the ground.

  ‘Antioch is closed to you,’ said the disembodied voice.

  Nikephoros circled his horse back a little, trying to see between the battlements. ‘Antioch belongs to the emperor. Who has closed it?’

  There was no answer except the ominous creak of a bowstring being drawn back and snapped into position. A chill gust of wind blew over us, and the serpent banner flapped against the stone as the breeze lifted it.

  None of us spoke as we rode south. It took all my concentration simply to stay in my saddle: my soul was trembling like a broken sword, while my body shivered in the deepening cold. I could barely keep hold of the reins. We forded the Orontes and rejoined the main road from Antioch, now rising towards the mountains. The rain had eased, but a thick, freezing fog replaced it as we climbed higher, and we had no warning of the men ahead until we saw dark shapes staggering through the fog.

  It could so easily have been an ambush, and we would have been powerless to stop it. On the miry road and with flagging mounts, we could not even have run. But there was something shambolic and frantic in the shadows before us that did not speak of menace. We spurred our horses forward, and a dozen men turned in the mist to look at us.

  They were not brigands. Nor were they Turks. All were dressed in mail hauberks, and most carried weapons, but they posed little danger. Dirty cloths and bandages hung off their bodies like flags; one man’s head was bandaged thick as a turban where he had apparently lost an eye. Their faces were wretched: had they not been armed, you would have taken them for a slave coffle. Only the ragged crosses sewn on their sleeves told their true allegiance.

  I gestured to their wounds. ‘Where have you come from? Was there a battle?’

  The foremost of the Franks leaned heavily on his spear, burying it in the mud. ‘They attacked two nights ago. There was nothing we could do.’

  ‘Where?’ Had the Army of God been routed? Was this its last remnant, a handful of survivors spared to tell of its terrible fate?

  ‘Antioch,’ he mumbled. ‘They have taken Antioch from us.’

  ‘Who?’ I could guess the answer, but I asked it anyway.

  ‘The Norman traitor. Bohemond.’

  Nikephoros twitched his reins. ‘What did he say?’

  I ignored him. ‘And the Greeks in Antioch — what happened to them? What did Bohemond do to them? What — ’ I broke off as I heard my voice become shrill with panic. It did no good; the soldier dismissed my question with a careless shrug that was worse than any answer.

  ‘And you — you are Provencals? Count Raymond’s men?’

  He nodded. Behind him, I could see his men shivering, and trying to keep their sodden bandages in place. There had never been any love between the Normans and Provencals, least of all between their leaders, but could Bohemond really have launched a war on his fellow Christians?

  ‘Where is Count Raymond? Was he at Antioch?’

  The Provencal shook his head. ‘The count is at Ma’arat.’

  ‘Where is that?’

  ‘Further along this road.’ Even in his despair, he seemed surprised that I had not heard of it. ‘Two days’ march from here.’

  A cold gust of wind blew rain in my eyes, and my mount pawed at the ground in her eagerness to be moving again. Two days’ march, I thought, listening to my own words as I translated for Nikephoros. We had been away more than four months, seen palaces, kings and wonders; crossed deserts and seas just to return. While in all that time, the invincible Army of God had moved just two days forward.

  Snow fell in the mountains that night. Next morning, a brittle crust covered the ground, and our horses picked their way anxiously over the frozen ruts in the road. The skies above were grey, unyielding, but the air was clear. When we came to an outcrop on the mountain road, we could see a high plateau opening out below us. The whole earth sparkled white, made new by the snow.

  ‘What’s that?’

  While I had been staring into the distance, Aelfric’s practical gaze had been examining the road ahead. Immediately before us it plunged into a pine forest, but it emerged again below, heading south-east across the plain. At the bottom of the slope a river flowed around the mountains’ feet, and where river and road met there stood a small town.

  ‘Do you see there?’ Aelfric was pointing to the meadows just beyond the town. I looked, but saw nothing. Squinting against the sullen winter light, I stared closer until suddenly, like a ship emerging from fog, foreground and background split apart and I saw what Aelfric meant. Tents — scores of them, white as the snow. Deceived by the distance, I had taken them for the furrows of some farmer’s field, and the specks moving among them to be crows. In fact, they were not nearly so far off.

  We had found the Army of God.

  Whatever ordeals we had endured in the past months, the Franks must have suffered worse. As we rode through their camp towards the town we were surrounded by haggard faces and ragged bodies. Even in the midwinter cold, many did not have enough clothes to cover themselves: ribs like curved fingers pressed out against skin, while the bellies of the worst-affected swelled up in cruel mockery of satiety. Black toes and fingers poked from dirty bandages that had long since become useless, while twice I saw bodies so still they must have been corpses, lying unheeded and unburied in the mud.

  Aelfric stared at the miserable faces, which turned towards us as we passed. ‘Has nothing changed?’

  I knew what he meant. There was a horrible familiarity in these scenes: we had suffered exactly the same way a year ago outside Antioch. It seemed almost inconceivable that for all the victories we had won in that time, the miracles that had sustained us, the Army of God now found itself suffering the same torments only a few dozen miles distant. Nothing had changed — except that there were many fewer tents now than there had been a year ago. The river of humanity, which had forced its way across deserts, broken down the walls of Antioch and swept away all opposition, had flowed into the earth. A few lingering pools were all that remained — and soon they, too, would drain away.

  I glanced at Nikephoros, wondering how his life in the immaculate confines of the palace would have prepared him for this. He held his head rigid, his eyes fixed ahead, but it was not shock or compassion that his mask was worn to hide. The corner of his lip twitched, and his pitiless eyes stared on the wretches around us with something like disgust. And, I could have sworn, satisfaction.

  Beyond the camp, at the entrance to the town proper, a guard challenged us. With relief, I saw he was a Provencal, one of Count Raymond’s men.

  ‘Is this Ma’arat?’ I asked eagerly.

  He looked puzzled. ‘Ma’arat? Ma’arat is another day’s march from here. This town is called Rugia.’

  Two days’ progress in four months, and now they had lost one of them. ‘Has there been a battle? A defeat? Why has the army retreated here?’

  The guard laughed at my panic. ‘We have not retreated. The bulk of the army is still camped at Ma’arat.’ He gestured at the rows of tents in front of him. ‘Did you think this was all that survived of the Army of God? These are just the princes’ bodyguards.’

  ‘The princes?’ My hopes rose. ‘Is Count Raymond here?’

  ‘They all are.’ He gave me a crooked look, taking in our travel-stained clothes and weary faces. ‘They’ve come here for a council — though to call it a parley would be nearer the mark. All of them: Count Raymond, the Count of Flanders, the Duke of Normandy, Tancred, Bohemond. .’ He paused, counting them off on his fingers. ‘And Duke Godfrey.’

  19

  A Provencal knight led us to a high-walled villa in the centre of the town, where the
blue banner of Provence and the white standard of the Army of God hung by the gate. Aelfric waited outside, while a small priest with a harelip brought us through many guarded doors to a wide chamber deep in the house. Rich carpets laid three or four deep covered the floor and lined the walls, steaming slightly where the lamps had been placed too close to them. A smouldering brazier filled the room with hot smoke; at the back, on a table of its own amid a constellation of candles, sat the golden reliquary with the fragment of the holy lance.

  The harelipped priest motioned us to stay by the door and advanced to the middle of the room, where a slumped figure sat in a chair beside the brazier. A thick blanket was drawn over him, though he still seemed to shiver underneath it. The priest whispered in his ear, then beckoned us closer.

  Whatever had happened in the months we had been away, it had not been kind to Count Raymond. He had always been the oldest of the princes — twice my age, I thought — but now the years showed. There was little trace of the vigour that had held together his army outside Antioch, and no authority in his bearing. His iron-grey hair had turned white, and his single eye was kept half closed.

  ‘You have returned from Egypt,’ he mumbled. ‘I thought you had died there.’

  Nikephoros did not even bother to bow. ‘We nearly did. What has happened in our absence?’

  ‘Bohemond has taken Antioch.’ The cry rose from within him as if dragged out by torturers’ hooks. Nikephoros remained impassive.

  ‘I know. We were there two days ago.’

  The count leaned forward, spilling the blanket off his chest. ‘Then you know what must be done. In Constantinople, I bowed to the emperor as my liege-lord and offered him homage. Now is the time for him to honour his obligation and come to my aid.’

  ‘The emperor knows you are his closest ally and most faithful servant.’ Nikephoros contrived to look suitably sympathetic. ‘But you forget, my lord count, that we have just returned from four months’ absence. There are too many things we do not understand. Why you and Bohemond and all the Army of God are not at the gates of Jerusalem, for example.’

  Count Raymond stiffened, but ordered his servants to bring us seats and hot wine. Nikephoros took only the merest sip.

  ‘It is all Bohemond’s doing,’ Raymond began. ‘Everything — or rather nothing — that we have accomplished since summer is his fault. It was madness to trust him — a man who came without an acre of land to his name; a man his own father disinherited. He never meant to go to Jerusalem. He has used us to sustain his ambition, and now that he has his prize he has turned on us.’ Raymond gestured to the gilded casket behind him. ‘He has even questioned the authenticity of the relic of the holy lance.’

  Nikephoros drummed two fingers against his cup. ‘This is not news. Bohemond had more than half of Antioch before we had even left. You were supposed to draw him out by leading the army on to Jerusalem.’

  ‘That is what Bohemond wants!’ Raymond thumped a fist on the wooden arm of his chair. ‘Nothing would satisfy him more than if I set out for Jerusalem now. You have seen the state of my army here — and the rest, at Ma’arat, are no better. The Saracens would massacre them before we even reached the coast. Bohemond would sit safe in Antioch, unchallenged, and your emperor would have lost his last ally.’

  Nikephoros pursed his lips. ‘What happened to Phokas? My colleague, the eunuch? He was supposed to stay here and advise you.’

  ‘Much use he was. He should have advised himself to stay away. The plague took him almost before you’d left for Egypt.’

  And what of Anna and Sigurd? I ached to know. But Nikephoros had already continued. ‘And Duke Godfrey? The other princes? Where do they stand?’

  ‘Hah! Without Bishop Adhemar, each looks to his own interests. Every day they come out and announce they want nothing more than to reach Jerusalem. Then they retire to their tents to sniff their own farts, trying to divine if it will be Bohemond or me they should support. I am sixty-six years old, and I am the only man with the balls to withstand him. Until the emperor comes.’

  ‘No.’ Nikephoros rose. ‘Even if I could get word to the emperor straight away, he would not be able to come until the summer. You cannot afford to wait that long. You are locked in this struggle with Bohemond, but his feet are planted on the rock of Antioch and yours are in the mire of Ma’arat. You will not win this test of strength.’

  ‘What would you have me do then?’ Raymond’s defiance was gone, and I heard only an old man’s despair.

  ‘If someone is pushing against you with all his might, it is easier to unbalance him by stepping backwards than forwards.’

  ‘Not when you’re standing on the edge of a cliff.’ His words choked off in a fit of haggard coughing. He wiped his mouth on his blanket and continued. ‘There are many voices that say the same as you. The soldiers offered to acclaim me as leader of the whole army if I would lead them to Jerusalem. Did you know that?’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I accepted, of course. I will lead the Army of God to Jerusalem, and if God wills it we will take it for Christ. As soon as Bohemond surrenders Antioch.’

  ‘You do not need Antioch,’ Nikephoros persisted. ‘It is a distraction.’

  ‘Of course I do not need Antioch,’ Raymond hissed. ‘But that is not a reason why Bohemond should have it either.’

  A thought struck me. ‘What do the pilgrims say?’

  The great swarm of peasants who followed the army like flies had never been happy with delay: rightly, for they only ever suffered or starved by it. At Antioch their frustrations had led many to question the authority of the princes — and some to ask still more dangerous questions.

  ‘The pilgrims can afford a simpler view of affairs,’ said Raymond shortly. ‘They hunger for Jerusalem, but my priests trim their appetites with a diet of humility and obedience. And Peter Bartholomew holds great sway over their thoughts.’

  ‘The visionary? The same Peter Bartholomew who found the holy lance?’ I glanced at the reliquary again in its shining forest of candles.

  Raymond’s single eye swivelled towards me with suspicion. We both knew that Peter Bartholomew’s journey to sanctity had been a circuitous one. ‘The same.’

  ‘Do you trust him to keep the pilgrims quiet?’

  ‘I hold the lance: he is bound to me. Besides, what do peasants know? They are unhappy, of course; they always are. They say we should have taken Jerusalem months ago, and that all our quarrels are just the vanity. But these are the same simpletons who believed that God would give them an invulnerable shield against Turkish arrows. When I see spears and arrows bouncing off them like rocks, then I will let them dictate my strategy.’

  ‘And if they do not let you wait that long?’

  Nikephoros was giving me a strange look, irritated by my interruption but intrigued by my purpose. I kept my eyes on Raymond, who had half-risen from his chair in anger.

  ‘I will wait as long as I choose, until the last peasant has rotted into the mud if necessary. I am the lord of thirteen counties, honoured by popes and the rightful captain of the Army of God. When Bohemond takes down his banners from Antioch and surrenders the keys to the citadel, and marches out his army, then we will join him on the road to Jerusalem. Until then, I will stay here and throttle him.’

  ‘His fixation with Bohemond will be his ruin,’ said Nikephoros darkly as we walked away. In a side-street, two women were fighting over what looked like a dog’s leg. One held the paw while the other pulled on the haunch, their thin faces scarlet with the effort. The woman with the paw let go and her adversary tumbled back into the mud, screeching with triumph that turned to anguish as the first woman stepped over her and stole the trophy away.

  ‘Does that matter?’ All I cared about now was finding Anna and Sigurd — and then going home. Other men could quarrel over Jerusalem if they chose — though I doubted they would ever see it.

  Nikephoros stopped in the road and turned to look at me. ‘Of course it matters. Noth
ing has changed, except that we must try even harder to work Bohemond out of Antioch. And Count Raymond, Christ help us, is our last hope for doing that.’

  I let my eyes sweep across the street, to the woman still lying in the mud lamenting her lost meal, and a ramshackle troop of Provencal soldiers picking their way up the slope. One had no boots and two others had no weapons. I gestured to them.

  ‘Do you think we will take Antioch with those?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Nikephoros turned away impatiently and continued on. ‘Did you listen to what I told the count? We must draw Bohemond out of Antioch.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By going to Jerusalem.’

  I ran after Nikephoros and stepped in front of him, blocking his path. ‘Jerusalem is a myth, a lie concocted by priests and sold to peasants.’ I realised that I was shouting, that passers-by were looking with crooked eyes at the mad Greek raving in a foreign tongue. I did not care. ‘This army will die here. Not one man will ever see Jerusalem and even if they do, it will not solve one single thing.’

  Nikephoros’ cold eyes looked down on mine; clouds of air formed and dispersed between us as he breathed out.

  ‘The man who conquers Jerusalem will be a legend through the ages — a hero to rank with Caesar and Alexander. His power and authority will be boundless.’

  ‘Powerful enough to take on Bohemond?’

  Nikephoros gave the cruel laugh I had heard so often. ‘Powerful enough that Bohemond will not allow it to be anyone but himself. If he sees Raymond is about to conquer Jerusalem, he will flay his horse alive to be there first.’

  ‘But if Bohemond takes Jerusalem it will be his power that is magnified.’

  Nikephoros shrugged. ‘What does it matter? He will be out of Antioch. That is all the emperor cares for.’ He leaned closer, almost whispering in my ear. ‘Yes, Jerusalem is a myth for peasants. But it is also a myth peddled to kings and princes, a myth that inspires men to greatness and folly. This army will reach Jerusalem. You and I will see that it does — even if we have to carry Count Raymond every mile ourselves.’