Siege of Heaven da-3

by Tom Harper

  Perhaps he was no more than a pilgrim looking to relieve himself in private; perhaps he wanted to pick herbs too. But there was something surreptitious about him, something deliberately evasive that I had seen before in men who had had good reason to avoid discovery — the same reason, most often, as I had had for finding them. And so, more from habit than anything else, I followed him into the forest.

  It was not difficult. The trees were thick enough that he could not see me, and my footsteps were silent on the thick carpet of pine needles. Thin columns of sunlight filtered through the foliage; if I had not been so intent on my pursuit, I might have paused to marvel at the simple beauty of a spring morning. But I pressed on, pausing twice when the fluttering of birds in the branches above temporarily frightened me — and a third time when I came to a bend in the path and heard voices ahead.

  ‘He hasn’t recovered?’ As the voice spoke, I heard the abrupt bite of a shovel breaking earth, and then the rasp of iron on loose stone.

  ‘There’ll be no resurrection for him.’ The shovel dug into the stony ground again, harder this time. ‘If I could have tied a rope on him and dangled him in front of the crowds like a puppet, I would have. That would have been enough. But he won’t get up from that bed again, except to fall into his grave.’

  The second voice sounded familiar, though I could not place it. I crouched low and moved off the path into the undergrowth, trying to find a place to see. Every branch I touched or leaf I brushed caused a stab of fear, but the sounds of digging drowned out any noise I made. I came closer, and eventually found a place where if I lay on my belly I could just see through the gap beneath a squat bush. I had brought a knife with me to cut the herbs; I pulled it from my belt, and watched.

  Two men stood in the clearing with their backs to me, one in a brown tunic and the other in blue. They had already dug out a sizeable pile of earth. As I watched, one of them knelt and reached into the hole with both hands, pulling out a bulging sackcloth bag. Its contents shifted and clinked as he set it on the ground and brushed the dirt from it.

  ‘Where will you go?’ asked the man in the blue. He drew a knife and sliced through the cords that tied the neck of the bag.

  ‘North to Tortosa. I can find a boat there to take me home. I’ve had enough of this adventure.’

  The man in the brown tunic pulled out an empty sack he had kept looped over his belt. He held it open while the other shared out the contents of the buried bag. I heard the trickle of a stream of a coins.

  The man wrapped a rope around the neck of the bag and tied it fast. ‘It may not be eternal life, but at least we have some inheritance from Peter Bartholomew.’

  ‘Bless his name,’ added his companion instinctively.

  ‘Curse his name! He would have ruined us — and might still, if anyone thinks to look for us. He may have convinced us he was the one foretold in scripture and the prophecy; he may even have convinced himself. But he did not convince God.’ He lifted the two sackcloth bags in his hands. ‘Thank Christ he convinced men with deeper pockets.’

  He tested the weight of the bags. ‘This is fair.’

  ‘Then we should go. Before the others think to look for us.’

  The two men embraced. ‘God go with you.’

  ‘And with you.’

  They spoke the farewells quickly, mechanically. Then, without a second glance, they parted and left the clearing, one taking a path to the north and the other heading east. I counted towards twenty under my breath, wondering which to follow. I had only reached eighteen when I heard a sound from ahead. Dropping down on my stomach again, I saw the man in the brown tunic re-emerge from the path he had taken. He looked around cautiously, then hurried over to where the shovel still lay on the ground. As he bent down to take it I saw his face for the first time: only for a second, framed between branches, but I knew it at once. The prophet John. He had lost his camelskin robe and cut his hair much shorter than before, but the puffy face was as unpleasant as ever. It was his voice I had remembered.

  He walked across to another place in the clearing, a few yards away from the first hole, and began digging. I edged around through the undergrowth so that I was behind him again, trying to time my movements to the strokes of the shovel, and waited until he had finished his hole. It did not take him long — whatever he was excavating was not buried deep. He put the shovel aside, glanced over his shoulder, then dropped to his knees and scrabbled in the earth.

  I only needed four strides to cover the distance between us. Distracted by his buried treasure he barely heard me coming: the first he properly knew was when he felt my weight pinning him down, one hand on the back of his head and the other holding a knife to his throat.

  ‘Did you forget something?’

  ‘Thaddaeus?’ His voice was frightened, pathetic — not the voice of a man who had presumed to lecture princes. ‘I forgot about this bag, Thaddeus; I would have come after you to give you your share, I swear to you.’

  ‘I do not want your gold.’

  Through his terror, he must have realised I was not his cheated companion returning for vengeance. ‘Who are you?’

  I didn’t answer. ‘You were Peter Bartholomew’s selfannointed prophet.’

  ‘No,’ he squealed. ‘No!’

  I twisted the knife so that the flat of the blade was against his throat, and pressed hard. ‘Liar. I saw you with him.’

  I loosed the pressure a little so he could breathe to answer. ‘I never knew him.’

  ‘You stood in his tent and told me that no one came to Peter except through you.’

  I doubt he remembered me from that, but it was enough to puncture his feeble resistance. All energy left him and his body sagged forward, so limp that I had to pull the knife away lest he slit his own throat.

  ‘Why were you stealing away so fast?’ I demanded. ‘Shouldn’t you be at your master’s side, in the hour of his greatest suffering?’

  ‘Peter Bartholomew is dead!’ He cried out the words like a wounded animal.

  ‘When I left the camp, Peter Bartholomew still lived.’

  ‘Yes — if you can say a man lives because his heart beats and his lungs breathe. He will cling to life as long as he can, and who can blame him? He knows what awaits him in the world to come.’

  ‘Angels and seraphs hymning his praise, and a seat at the right hand of the Father? Or is he bound for the dark places where false prophets and deceivers languish?’

  John mumbled something I could not hear. I made him repeat it.

  ‘For what he has done, he will be cast in the deepest pit of hell.’

  Even for one bent on apostasy, it was a terrible thing to say — and spoken with savage hurt.

  ‘Why? What lies did he tell you?’

  John writhed and whimpered in my grasp but did not answer.

  ‘Was it the lance?’

  He nodded eagerly. ‘Yes — the lance.’

  ‘What else? Did he claim he was a saint? A prophet?’

  ‘At first he said he was only a messenger sent to proclaim the things to come. But the more the Lord spoke to him, the greater his claims grew. First that he was a saint — then that he had been possessed by the spirit of Elijah to prepare the world for its tribulations.’

  ‘Did he tell this widely?’

  John shook his head. ‘Only to us, his closest disciples. He said the time to reveal himself had not yet come.’

  He spilled out his words, unburdening himself with the eager gratitude of the penitent. But I had heard enough confessions to know when a heart had given up all its secrets — and when it had not.

  ‘Elijah was not the limit of Peter Bartholomew’s ambition,’ I guessed. ‘He went further.’

  I twisted John around so that he lay on his back. I wanted to look in his eyes. I took the knife from his throat and stepped back, though not so far that he could hope to escape me.

  ‘He told us he was the one foretold by the prophecy.’ John whispered the words, as if afraid to hear
himself saying them. ‘The last and greatest of all kings, who will come at the end of days to capture Jerusalem.’

  ‘The son of God?’ Even I was whispering now.

  John did not answer directly. ‘When the Son of Perdition has risen, 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. This will be the end and the consummation of the Roman and Christian Empires, when every power and principality shall be destroyed.’

  His gaze was distant, and he recited it with the familiarity of well-worn verses of scripture. But I had spent my youth in a monastery, had heard every word of the Bible so many times it was as familiar as my own name — and I had never heard that passage.

  ‘What is that?’

  John’s eyes refocused on me. ‘The prophecy,’ he said simply.

  ‘Whose prophecy? Peter Bartholomew’s? Was it another thing revealed in his dreams?’

  He thought for a moment, as if he had never questioned its provenance before. ‘No. It was written down in a book — and Peter could not write.’

  ‘But he could read.’

  John gave a sly smile. ‘He pretended he could not, but I often saw him alone in his tent poring over the book. And how else would he have known what it said?’

  ‘Did he show it to you?’

  ‘Only once.’ John shrugged. ‘It made no difference — I do not have to pretend to be illiterate. But I saw the images that illuminated it. Terrible things. Monsters with the heads of Saracens and the bodies of lions ripping women’s bellies with their claws and devouring the unborn children. Locusts with tails like scorpions; a red dragon with seven heads and ten horns. Men dressed as women lying unnaturally with each other in pools of blood, even as the carrion birds picked out their entrails.’ He trembled with the memory. ‘And at the bottom of the page, a radiant king on a white horse. He wore two crowns; his left hand wielded a lance with which he dispatched the Saracens and Ethiopians who assailed him, while his right stretched out to the cross on Golgotha.’

  I knew what they illustrated. ‘The last days. And how did Peter Bartholomew come by this manuscript?’

  ‘He said he found it in a cave after a dream.’ Again that sly, slightly rueful smile. ‘But I also heard that he stole it from one of the princes.’

  I remembered Godfrey’s sudden fury when John had quoted a passage of the prophecy at him in Raymond’s council. ‘Do you know who he stole it from?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But he came to believe that he was the king foretold.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ John sat up, raising his hands in ignorance. ‘By the end, I do not know what he believed. The way he walked into that fire, he might have thought he was Christ himself reborn. He fooled us all — even me, who knew better than most what he was.’

  His voice faltered. It might merely have been self-pity, a lament for the power he had lost, but I thought I detected grief as well for the visionary betrayed by his own dreams. For a moment I almost felt sorry for him. Then I remembered that this was the man who half an hour earlier had spoken of stringing up Peter like a puppet to preserve his authority. I remembered the woman caught in adultery, so bewitched and brutalised that she had plunged the hot brand into her breast; the knights from Count Raymond’s bodyguard who had broken their oaths and abandoned their lord in the fog. There had been no pity in the faith Peter Bartholomew preached.

  I jerked my knife at the fallen prophet. ‘Go.’

  He scrambled to his feet. One hand reached for the sack of coins he had taken, then paused as he caught my eye. He contrived a pitiable, beseeching gaze.

  ‘Take it.’ I would have liked to count out thirty pieces of silver for him, but at that moment I only wanted to be rid of him. He snatched up the bag, took a last look around the clearing, then crossed quickly to its edge. Just before he disappeared into the trees, he looked back.

  ‘The prophecy says that the king will come when we wrest Jerusalem from the forces of Babylon.’

  ‘So?’

  His fat face twisted in an unpleasant smile. ‘Don’t you wonder? If Peter Bartholomew was not the promised king, who is?’

  32

  As Peter’s condition worsened, so too did Raymond’s spirits. He kept to his tent and let it be known he was praying for Peter Bartholomew. Up on the mountain our siege engines stood silent, while down in the valley the army held its breath and waited.

  At dusk on the Thursday after Easter, Nikephoros lost patience and demanded an audience. As we walked through the camp I could not help looking up the northern hill where Peter Bartholomew still clung to life. There was nothing to see: his tent was dark, and none of the surrounding pilgrims had lit fires. It was said that even the least wisp of smoke sent Peter into paroxysmal fits, clawing at his skin and screaming like a demon.

  Raymond’s tent, by contrast, was ablaze with light — golden candlesticks inscribed with the sharp-figured script of the Arabs, looted from their churches; wrought ivory lamps that must have been gifts from the emperor Alexios; and a host of other vessels burning oil, wax, tallow and coals, banishing the shadows from every corner of the room.

  He would not have admitted us; indeed, his stewards tried to turn us away three times, but Nikephoros was more than a match for Frankish functionaries and harangued them into submission. We found Raymond alone in his chamber: if he had been praying, he had not coupled it with fasting, for the furniture and carpets were strewn with plates and bowls, half-finished meals congealing within them. Red wine stained Raymond’s tunic and blushed his lips like a harlot’s.

  ‘Is there any news of Peter Bartholomew?’ His voice was dull and empty, his words slurred.

  Nikephoros shrugged. ‘He is only delaying the inevitable. Not for much longer, I think.’ He swept a plate of gawping fish-heads from the chair where it rested and sat down opposite Raymond. I stood behind him.

  ‘But there is still hope?’ The desperation in Raymond’s voice was pitiful.

  ‘No!’ Nikephoros slammed a fist on the arm of his chair, rattling the cups on the floor beside it. ‘Forget Peter Bartholomew. If you never spoke his name or thought of him again, it would be a great blessing to you.’

  Raymond staggered out of his chair. Nikephoros rose to meet him, and for a moment they stood facing each other, one face blazing bitter fury, the other cold with contempt.

  ‘I am the lord of thirteen counties and captain of the Army of God.’ Raymond invoked the titles without strength, as if they had become no more than the hollow shell of a lost faith. ‘You cannot speak to me-’

  ‘I am speaking to you as a friend,’ Nikephoros insisted. He raised a hand, and though he did not touch the count he shrank away, dropping back into his chair. Nikephoros remained standing.

  ‘Peter Bartholomew betrayed you,’ he said, more softly now. ‘He tricked you, as he tricked so many others. Forget him.’

  Raymond sank his face into his hands. ‘Why did he insist on that ordeal? He did not have to, and he should not have let himself be goaded into it. What of it if some of the princes were jealous of his power? The pilgrims trusted him. That was all that mattered. Who will guide them now that Peter Bartholomew has gone?’

  ‘Who cares? They are just peasants — a rabble.’

  ‘But put enough peasants together and they will become a power to be reckoned with. They have nothing to offer save their faith — but that can be a mighty weapon when you are fighting for God. Peter understood that. While he lived, the pilgrims put their faith in him, and through him in me. They paid me no tribute and added no spears to my army, but their loyalty proved my greatness to the other princes.’

  ‘Then send one of your priests to minister to them. They may have abundant faith to give, but it is easily won. If you do not, someone else will.’

  Raymond looked up in hope. ‘And there is still the lance. Peter carried it intact from the flames; I have it in my chapel.’


  ‘Forget the lance!’ Nikephoros kicked out at a cup that stood on the floor: it flew against the side of the tent and spattered a dark stain down its wall. ‘Forget Peter Bartholomew. Forget the lance. Forget Arqa. They are only distractions, poisoning the army with false hopes and lies. All that matters is Jerusalem. That is where you should be looking.’

  ‘But without Peter Bartholomew-’

  ‘Without Peter Bartholomew you are free of a treacherous ally. If he did one good thing in his life, it was to walk into that fire and rid us of his madness.’

  Nikephoros looked around wildly, seeking something else to kick. Finding nothing, he strode towards the door. Just before he reached it he turned. His cheeks were flushed in the lamplight, and his breath was faster than it could ever have been in the courtyards of the imperial palace. With great effort, he tried to check his anger.

  ‘You are still the greatest lord in this army. You still command more men, and more honour, than any of your rivals. If you lead them to Jerusalem now, everything that has happened here will be forgotten.’

  He turned to go, and almost walked straight into a servant hurrying in through the door. Nikephoros cursed the unfortunate and cuffed him aside, while Raymond fixed him with a weary glare.

  ‘I told you to leave me alone.’

  The servant bowed, rubbing his ear where Nikephoros had hit it. ‘Mercy, Lord. There are men outside you must see.’

  ‘What men? If it is Godfrey or Tancred come to gloat, I will not give them that satisfaction. If they have come to pity me, I do not need it.’

  ‘Forgive me, Lord, but these men are not from Duke Godfrey’s camp — or Tancred’s or Duke Robert’s.’ He swallowed. ‘They say they have come from Egypt.’

  The Egyptians were waiting for us outside the tent, on a makeshift parade ground illuminated by many torches. I could see at once why the servant had trembled with such wide-eyed awe: even to me, who had sailed up the Nile and walked in the shadows of the pharaohs’ glory, there was something savage and exotic in their appearance. Some were still mounted on the camels they had ridden, perhaps all the way from Egypt; others had dismounted and stood proudly in front of their animals. As for their masters, their silver armour moved like dragon scales, their swords were curved like lions’ teeth, and their solemn faces were black as the depths of Sheol. One of them carried the black banner of the Fatimids, though the fabric disappeared in the darkness so that the white writing seemed to flutter over their heads as if by witchcraft. If they had announced they came not from Egypt but from the deepest reaches of hell, and not on an embassy but to reap the earth, few would have disbelieved them.