Siege of Heaven da-3

by Tom Harper

  ‘He stripped me of my rank, my armour, my servants. He says that when we return to Provence he will take away my lands as well.’ He cracked a ghastly smile. More than half his teeth were missing, and blood still oozed from his gums. ‘But that will not happen. Not once we reach Jerusalem.’

  ‘If we reach Jerusalem.’

  He leaned forward on his spear. ‘We will reach Jerusalem. It has been prophesied.’

  I stared him in the eyes — one swollen and half-shut, the other wide open. Perhaps Raymond had kicked out more than his teeth, for I saw no craft or machination behind them, just innocent faith. I leaned closer.

  ‘If you want to reach Jerusalem, you will let me speak to Peter Bartholomew.’

  He shook his head, though this time with some semblance of regret. ‘I cannot. He will not be disturbed.’

  ‘I will not disturb him,’ I lied. ‘But you can see that our path is faltering again.’ I pointed up behind me, where the watch-fires of Arqa burned high on the mountain spur. ‘Count Raymond will not give that up lightly. What I have to tell Peter Bartholomew could change his mind.’

  The guard hesitated, but I could see the doubt I had sowed. He glanced at me and Thomas, then back to the encampment, then to us again.

  ‘Peter Bartholomew will not see you,’ he reiterated. ‘But I will take you to him.’

  He called another guard to take his place, and led us up the hill into the heart of the camp. Raymond’s beating had broken more than his face: he walked with a heavy limp, dragging his foot and learning on his spear like an old man’s staff.

  ‘I have a friend who would make sure that mended properly,’ I told him. But he only muttered something about the healing of Christ, and shuffled on through the camp. Though it must have been a camp of thousands, sprawled all down the slope, there was neither sound nor light save the flap of our footsteps, and a golden glow from the very top of the hill.

  ‘Are all the pilgrims in their beds?’ I wondered.

  The guard touched a finger to his cracked lips. ‘Peter Bartholomew has ordered it.’

  The camp thinned as we neared the top of the hill. By some twist of the landscape the summit was hidden until we were almost upon it: then, suddenly, I could see three solitary tents set to form an open-sided square, with the vast cross I had seen from the mountain at its centre. The tents on either side flickered dimly with the light of lamps within, but the third shone like a beacon. A regal light burned through its delicately spun walls so that it appeared as a pyramid of light, celestial in its radiance. I could hear a soft song rising within, like a psalm or a lullaby — many overlapping voices, though no shadows darkened the golden walls save for the black silhouette of the cross.

  ‘Is that Peter Bartholomew’s tent?’ Thomas’s voice rang with suspicion and wonder.

  The guard did not answer, but took me by the arm and pulled me towards the dim tent on the left. Even he seemed awestruck to be there: his grip was slack, and the light beamed on his shattered face to make it seem almost whole again. He lifted the flap of the tent, called something inside, then beckoned us in.

  After the still beauty outside, the tent we entered was a mean and shabby place. Its lamps hissed and spat, filling the space with an oily smoke; the cloths that divided the apartments were stained yellow, and hung crooked from the ceiling. Tangled heaps of carpets and furs lay discarded on the floor, and at least half the furniture seemed to have been knocked over as if in a brawl. An unpleasant odour hung in the air, despite the oversweet perfumes that tried to mask it.

  ‘Wait here,’ said the guard. His ease had vanished, and he scuttled out of the tent before we could answer. Through the cloth partition I could hear rustles and a low grunting, like a pig rooting in the ground — and occasionally a high-pitched whimper. I did not dare look at Thomas.

  The grunting stopped. I looked to the canvas flap, expectant and dreading, but there was no sign of anyone emerging. And then, suddenly, a voice from the tent door behind us.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Thomas and I spun around. He had arrived with startling silence, but he did not look like a quiet man. His pockmarked face was bloated and heavy, his belly likewise, though the rest of him was meagre enough. His eyes were too small for his face and his mouth too large. Something sticky seemed to be smeared on his chin. He wore a long camelskin robe tied with a leather belt: he hooked his thumbs in it, and puffed out his chest.

  ‘I have a message for Peter Bartholomew,’ I said. ‘It will help the army reach Jerusalem.’

  The man’s eyes fixed on me. ‘Peter Bartholomew, bless his holy name’ — he tapped a perfunctory sign of the cross across his chest — ‘is at prayer. He will not be disturbed.’

  ‘He will want to hear my message.’

  ‘Then you can tell it to me.’ His voice was coarse, even by the standards of the Provencals. There was no poise in his manner, only blunt strength.

  ‘It is for Peter Bartholomew alone,’ I insisted.

  ‘No one comes to Peter Bartholomew, bless his name, except through me.’ He gave an ugly smile. ‘I am his steward and his prophet.’

  ‘I have seen him many times.’ I spoke mildly. Despite his obvious dissolution, there was a menace in the man’s face I did not want to provoke.

  ‘That was in the past. Now that the time of trial is coming, he must gather his strength and devote himself to God. If he saw every disciple who sought his blessing he would never sleep.’

  ‘I am not his disciple.’

  The steward gave what was meant to be an indulgent look; it emerged more like a leer. ‘We are all his disciples — though some do not know it yet.’

  ‘Then will you tell him Demetrios Askiates has brought a message for him.’

  He shook his fat head. ‘Tell it to me.’

  ‘It is for him only.’

  My obstinacy was beginning to irritate this selfproclaimed prophet: his small eyes narrowed, his hands began to ball into fists by his side. Thomas saw it too and edged closer, but I flicked my head to keep him back.

  ‘Raymond cannot advance to Jerusalem unless Bohemond and Godfrey come to reinforce him. But they will not come until Raymond asks — and his pride will not bend to that.’

  The prophet folded his arms across his chest. ‘So?’

  ‘Peter Bartholomew-’

  ‘Bless his name.’

  ‘. . has influence Raymond cannot ignore. If he commands Raymond to send for Bohemond and Godfrey, to ask for their help, Raymond will do it.’

  The prophet stared at me. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘It is enough.’ I hoped that was true. I had little faith that the fat prophet would relay what I had said, and less still that Peter Bartholomew would act on it.

  But the next day, Aelfric reported he had seen a knight leave Count Raymond’s camp and ride north to Antioch.

  28

  The boy stood between his mother’s bare legs, his arms wrapped around them. His young face was screwed into a mask of concentration as he surveyed the ground in front of him. Worry furrowed his face like an old man’s — though these furrows were plump and fertile, ripe for planting, not the arid, barren lines of age. With a hiccup of resolve, he suddenly unlatched himself from his mother and lurched forward, flailing his limbs like a newborn foal. One step, two, three — and the beginnings of a fourth before the momentum undid him. He sprawled face-first into the carpet of pine-needles, a plaintive bawl lamenting his failure. Helena ran forward and picked him up, dusting the pine needles off his blue tunic.

  ‘Soon he’ll walk better than his grandfather,’ said Sigurd.

  I picked up a pinecone and threw it at him, but he swatted it away with the palm of his hand. The boy — my grandson — stopped wailing as he watched it fly into a patch of tall grass.

  ‘With an arm like that, you should be throwing rocks at Arqa,’ Sigurd teased me. ‘You’d do no worse than the catapaults.’

  I waved the insult away. We were sitting in a glade in the fores
t that covered the lower slopes of the mountain — Thomas and Helena with the baby Everard; Zoe, picking the scales off pinecones to get at the nuts within; Sigurd, and Anna sitting on a fallen log beside me. We had brought baskets of bread and fruit, for it was a rare escape from the grim confines of the camp.

  ‘There was a full moon two nights ago,’ said Sigurd. ‘A whole month we’ve been here now.’ He pointed to Everard, who had balanced himself against his mother and was teetering forward, summoning courage for his next advance. The anticipation and delight in his young face seemed to have forgotten all memory of ever having fallen, though his knees were black with earth.

  ‘If that boy set out for Jerusalem now, he’d still be there before this army.’

  Everard obliged Sigurd’s pessimism by choosing that moment to launch himself into another doomed run. This time he only managed two steps before the inevitable collapse. Helena stepped forward and wrapped him in her skirt, hushing the cries.

  I smiled, trying not to let Sigurd’s pessimism sour the mood in the glade. What he said was true enough. In the nine weeks since we had set out from Ma’arat we had come, by Sigurd’s reckoning, less than a hundred miles. In the past month we had not moved at all. The Army of God’s resolve, once a keen and indomitable blade, had been bent so far that it had snapped. It could not be remade, not with the same strength, and the men who had swung and slashed their way across Asia Minor now prodded forward like blind men. The first incarnation had been terrible, terrifying to witness. This agonising decrepitude was simply a slow, aimless death.

  Everard was ready to try again. He pushed off from Helena and ran forward, flapping his arms like an injured bird. Four steps, five, and then — just as it seemed he could defy his limitations no longer, he reached the sanctuary of my knee. He clung on desperately, and I had to prise his little hands away to hoist him up on my lap. I ruffled his hair — fair like Thomas’s, though already growing steadily darker — and pointed through a gap in the trees where the slope fell away to the plain, and the coast beyond.

  ‘That is where you need to go,’ I told him. ‘To Jerusalem.’

  He snatched hold of my outstretched finger and began pulling on it. Anna reached over and tickled his chin, while Helena seated herself on the ground, leaning against the fallen log and chewing on a crust of bread. She looked well, I thought. Her face, sallow during the winter, had begun to brown again in the spring sun, and there was new vigour in her arms when she picked up her son. Anna had told me that Helena had struggled for a long time with feeding the baby, unable to nourish his body without enfeebling her own. It had been worst during the lean weeks at Ma’arat, and our subsequent travels had allowed little chance for recovery.

  ‘What’s that?’

  I craned forward so that I could see what Sigurd had seen from his vantage on the opposite side of the clearing. A disgruntled fist tugged on my finger, trying to recapture my attention, but I ignored it. Thomas was on his feet beside Sigurd and staring over the tops of the pine trees to the west.

  ‘An army.’

  I passed the baby onto Anna’s knee and ran over. My eyes were not as sharp as Thomas’s, but even so I could see the procession winding stiffly out of the valley and down towards our camp. Sunlight gleamed on their weapons like the scales of a snake, with two white banners like fangs at their head.

  ‘Can you see the device?’ I asked. In the camp below, men were running out of their tents and staring, but I could not tell if they were preparing for battle.

  ‘The cross of the Army of God,’ said Thomas. ‘And beside that, the banner of the five wounds.’

  Godfrey’s standard. I looked at my family in the glade, trembling that he should have come so near them. ‘And the Norman serpent banner? Is that there too?’

  Thomas shrugged. ‘Not that I can see.’

  I pulled on my boots. ‘I had better go. Nikephoros will want me.’

  Anna hoisted Everard down from her lap and set him on the ground. He swayed, then dashed resolutely forward towards his mother — as if he had never fallen before, would never fall again. But of course he did.

  I was summoned almost immediately. Duke Godfrey’s arrival occasioned a council of the princes, and Nikephoros required me to be his mouth and ears. They met in Count Raymond’s tent — not his great pavilion, with its silk curtains and rich furnishings, but a small, square tent erected in a field a little distance from the camp. The princes watched each other warily.

  ‘But where is Bohemond?’ asked Raymond. He said it lightly, as if referring to a well-renowned horse he had been curious to see. No one was deceived.

  Godfrey looked up. Where the trials of the past two months had slowly twisted the roots of Raymond’s soul, so that his whole body appeared crooked and misshapen, Godfrey seemed to have benefited from the interlude. His bearing was firm, his face bright, his blond hair thick as a lion’s mane and his blue eyes unyielding with purpose.

  ‘Bohemond set out with us from Antioch two weeks ago. Three days later, he turned back.’

  Raymond breathed a slow sigh, like a warm summer wind. His hunched shoulders relaxed and his bearing straightened, so that he seemed taller, more noble again.

  ‘He will not come,’ he declared softly, almost to himself. ‘He has shown himself at last.’

  ‘He swore he would honour his oath to worship at the tomb of Christ,’ said Godfrey.

  ‘When better men have captured it.’ Raymond laughed in savage triumph. ‘Bohemond’s part in this enterprise is over. Our names will ring in history as the conquerors of the holy city; Bohemond’s will be forgotten, or remembered only in the annals of traitors and cowards. As soon as Arqa is taken we will fall on Jerusalem like wolves.’

  ‘As soon as Arqa is taken? I did not bring my army here at a forced march to defend you against a few Saracen villagers marooned on a hilltop. We should go now.’

  Several of the other princes nodded their agreement. Raymond stiffened, bending forward like a bow drawn tight.

  ‘I have besieged this town for a month; I will not see all that effort wasted now.’

  ‘Better than seeing it wasted two months from now,’ said Tancred.

  Raymond looked as if he might strike Tancred — and Tancred, equally, as if he would relish fighting the old man. Fortunately, at that moment the council was interrupted by a commotion among the guards. A small knot of men were trying to push through, their voices raised in indignant protest. The guards waved their spears and shouted them back; for a moment I feared this might be the moment that the entire army broke apart in open battle. But Raymond must have recognised one of them, for he angrily called the guards to let the newcomer in.

  A short, pot-bellied man shrugged his way between them and marched across to the tent. The camelskin tunic flapped around his knees, bulging out over the leather belt that tied it, and his small eyes surveyed us from the illtempered face. He seemed different in daylight, smaller in every part except his belly, but I recognised him at once as the man I had seen in the pilgrim camp — Peter Bartholomew’s self-styled prophet.

  He did not have the air of a peasant approaching the great princes of the earth. He held his head high and sure, his fat lips pouting as if he had already detected some slight against his dignity. All the princes stayed seated, save Raymond who was already standing.

  ‘What is happening here?’ he demanded. He turned on Count Raymond. ‘Why have you summoned secret councils without my lord Peter Bartholomew’s presence, bless his name?’

  In any other place, to speak as he did to a man of Raymond’s station would have been death. Instead, Raymond choked back his obvious anger and said simply, ‘This does not concern Peter Bartholomew.’

  ‘That is for him to judge.’ The prophet’s eyes swept around the gathering, defying them to argue.

  Godfrey ignored him. ‘Who is he?’ he asked Raymond. His face was a mask of distaste.

  ‘I am John, disciple and prophet of Peter Bartholomew, bless his name.’ He r
ounded on Godfrey, who somehow contrived to evade the accusing stare and fix his gaze just over the man’s shoulder.

  Godfrey stood. ‘I thought this was to be a council for princes — not paupers and rabble.’

  ‘Wait,’ Raymond pleaded. ‘At our councils at Antioch, we always had leaders from the pilgrim host present.’

  ‘If Peter Bartholomew is their leader, why is he not here himself?’

  Raymond was about to offer an excuse, but the prophet John spoke more quickly. ‘The time is not yet ready for Peter Bartholomew to reveal himself. He is preparing for the time to come — the time foretold by the prophecy. The time when the last shall be first and the first last.’ He spun around, fixing his small eyes on the princes. ‘You know what is coming. The King will ascend Golgotha. He will take his crown from his head and place it on the cross, and stretching out his hands to heaven he will hand over the kingdom of the Christians to God the Father.’

  Godfrey moved so quickly I did not see what he did. One moment the peasant was standing, the next he was writhing on the ground, squealing in outraged agony until Godfrey’s boot on his throat choked off the sound.

  ‘Who told you that?’ he demanded. ‘Where did you hear it?’

  He half lifted his foot from John’s neck so that the wretch could speak. ‘Mercy,’ he spluttered. ‘It is what Peter Bartholomew preaches. It is written in his book.’

  ‘What book?’

  ‘The book of prophecy,’ squealed John.

  ‘Liar!’ Godfrey’s cheeks were flushed; I had never seen him lose his temper like this, not even on the mountaintop at Ravendan. ‘That is not his book.’ He took his boot off John’s throat and delivered a sharp kick to his ribs. ‘You should keep your dogs better trained,’ he hissed at Count Raymond, ‘or they will pull you down and devour you. Bring Peter Bartholomew to me.’

  Raymond squirmed. ‘I cannot-’

  ‘He will not come.’ John had struggled to his feet. ‘Not until the appointed hour.’ He circled around like a cornered dog, keeping his eyes fixed on Godfrey. ‘And then, Duke Godfrey, beware, for his revenge will be terrible. The good wheat he will gather into his granary, but the chaff’ — he almost spat out the word — ‘he will burn with unquenchable fire.’