by Tom Harper
‘I would have been happy for her to abandon me for her husband completely, if only he’d kept her safe in Constantinople.’
‘You should watch Thomas. He is too eager for battle.’
‘Whereas you, of course, have harnessed your axe to an ox and made it a plough.’
Sigurd looked serious. ‘I have been in enough battles that I know what to do — and even, though you may not believe it, when to step back. If Thomas charges into his next battle thinking he can avenge his wounds with every sweep of his axe, he will make an easy kill for some Ishmaelite.’
‘He saved my life,’ I said, ducking away from Sigurd’s warning.
‘And you saved his. But it will mean precious little if you and he don’t live long enough to make the debt worthwhile.’
I made a final attempt to reinvigorate the fire, then stood and wiped the ash from my face. Down the slope, I saw Zoe returning from the river where she had been sent to fetch water.
‘Your daughter will be strong enough to join the Varangians soon,’ said Sigurd. ‘Look at the way she carries that water jar — almost as if it was empty.’
It was true: she held the jar one-handed, and it bounced freely as she ran towards us though no water spilled out. Forgetting the fire, I ran to meet her, instinctively checking for any sign of injury.
‘Are you all right?’ I called. ‘Are you in danger?’
She shook her head, her loose hair flying across her face. ‘The camp across the river — Duke Godfrey’s camp.’ She gulped a deep breath. ‘It’s gone.’
Duke Godfrey’s camp, which for the last two months had stood on the southern side of the mountain spur, was a ruin. A film of smoke hung over the ground like a dawn mist: through it I could see scraps of charred cloth hanging from the ribs of tents, beds of ash still smouldering, bare patches in the earth where tents had once stood. I rubbed my eyes.
‘Did the Saracens creep down from the city and burn the camp in the night?’ I wondered. ‘Why didn’t we see any flames?’
Sigurd gestured to the bulk of the spur behind us. ‘That would have hidden it.’
‘But we would still have heard the battle.’
‘If there was a battle.’ Sigurd stepped forward and walked a little way forward. ‘Do you see anything strange about this battlefield?’
I looked closer. Though the embers still smouldered and the ash was fresh, the carcass of the battle had already been picked impossibly clean. There were no bodies.
‘What’s that?’
I looked up. A man in a white cassock was walking towards us between the rows of ruined tents, striding the battlefield like the angel of death — though I did not think the hem of an angel’s robe would have been soiled grey by the ash he kicked up as he walked. Nor, in my image, would he have been old and balding, with a pronounced wart on his left cheek.
He reached us and made the sign of the cross. ‘Good morning, brothers.’
‘What happened here?’ I asked.
He looked around, as if seeing the wreckage for the first time. ‘Praise God, the Holy Spirit moved in the hearts of the faithful last night and roused them like a great wind. As one, they rose from their camp and set out on the road to Jerusalem.’
‘And this?’ I gestured to the ruin.
‘Whatever they could not take they burned. They will not be coming back.’
‘So Duke Godfrey has gone …’
‘And the Duke of Normandy, and the Count of Flanders, and Tancred-’
‘Tancred was in Count Raymond’s service,’ I interrupted.
‘He left it — they all left. I was the only one who stayed behind, to tell you what has happened. And now that I have done so …’ He put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. A grey horse, which had been grazing on the sweet grass by the river, trotted over. The priest lifted himself into the saddle, with surprising ease for a holyman, and took the reins. As his cassock rode up over his boots, I saw the glint of spurs on his heels.
He offered a crooked smile. ‘Tell Count Raymond this: the time for vanity and hesitation has passed. If any man from his army, knight or peasant, wishes to see Jerusalem, let him hasten after us: the other princes will welcome his service. But there will be no more delays now. They must come quickly, before the whole world falls away to ash.’
He turned his horse and kicked its flanks. Dust and cinders billowed up behind him as he left, so that the pale horse and its pale rider vanished in the cloud. By the time it had settled again he was gone, though the drum of his hoofbeats seemed to echo for a long time afterwards in the valley. Not only echo, but grow louder, swelling out until they sounded all around me.
I looked around, and saw the reason. It was not the departing priest I had heard, but Count Raymond, galloping down towards us with a score of his knights and nobles behind. They thundered over the bridge, then reined themselves in.
‘What has happened here?’ Raymond demanded. His face was white, glistening with sweat. He gestured up to the promontory behind us. ‘Have the Saracens done this?’
I told him what I had heard, though he barely seemed to listen. He paced his horse around me, this way and that, glancing distractedly at the remains of Duke Godfrey’s camp. His knights kept their distance and watched.
Only when I had finished did Raymond go still, though he would not look at me.
‘Tancred went?’ he said bleakly.
I nodded.
‘He took an oath to me!’ A terrible groan, like the cry of a wounded boar, tore the air. Raymond doubled over in his saddle, clutching his arms to his stomach, then suddenly jerked upright and threw out his hands as if grasping at the air for balance. The men around him drew back.
‘They have abandoned me,’ he whispered.
One of his knights edged tentatively forward. ‘They have only been gone a few hours. If we march quickly we could overtake them by sunset and join our armies for the final charge.’
‘And what about Arqa?’ Raymond looked up at the walled town on its promontory above us, as inviolable as ever; then at the road winding away towards the coast and Jerusalem. A solitary tear seemed to trickle from his eye — though perhaps it was just sweat, for the sun was already hot.
‘Give orders to strike the camp.’
36
We caught up with the other princes the following day. The Flemings, Normans and Lotharingians embraced the Provencals gladly, rejoicing to see the army reunited, but Count Raymond rode in the midst of his bodyguard and remained unseen. That evening the princes concluded a peace with the emir of Tripoli, and the next day we proceeded on to the coast. This was the place the Fatimid envoy had warned us against, a treacherous spot where the rampart of the mountain met the sea in a dizzying cascade of fractured cliffs and crevices. A stiff onshore wind drove waves against the rocks, filling the air with spray, while sea birds called mournful cries from above. Here the road seemed to disappear into the rock: even standing at the foot of the mountain, we could not see where it went until our guide showed us a path, which the breaking waves had carved out of the cliff. It was little more than a ledge, barely two feet above the surging sea and scarcely wide enough for two men to walk even in single file. The stronger gusts of wind whipped the waves so high that they overflowed onto the path, so that boiling white water foamed about our feet, snatching and sucking at our ankles as it tried to drag us into the sea. When a few men lost their balance and fell screaming into the water, no one dared leap in to save them; we could only watch them drown.
Yet even that was not the limit of its defences. At the very tip of the headland, where the path dwindled almost to a sword’s width, our Roman ancestors had built a gate-house to command the road. Its ancient stones were wet and black with age; one wall seemed to grow out of the cliff itself, the other plunged straight into the sea.
‘Raz-ez-Chekka,’ said our guide, pointing to it. He giggled. ‘The Face of God. Only the worthy will pass.’
Duke Godfrey crossed himself. ‘The gates is narrow
and the way is hard,’ he murmured.
I shivered, and I was not alone. In that lonely, perilous place I could almost feel the terrifying weight of God’s gaze on me, searching my soul for its infinitesimal worth. The dark gates in the tower opened before me like ravening jaws, and the small windows above watched like eyes. Water bubbled around my feet; gulls called their plaintive song and the waves roared in my ears. Dizziness broke over me, so that even as I stood still the tower seemed to rush closer. Helpless, I stared into its eyes. They were not cruel, nor angry, nor even sad: only unfathomably empty. Then — I swear — one of them winked. I gasped; the world spun away and the sea rushed up to swallow me.
A Varangian hand grabbed my shoulder, and stout arms hauled me back. I blinked, rubbing the salt from my eyes. In front of me, the tower stood where it always had, and a white gull perched on the sill of one of the windows.
‘The Egyptian was right,’ said Sigurd. ‘Six men could hold that tower until Judgement Day.’
But the tower was empty, and the rotten bar that held the gates gave easily under a few blows. Worthy or not, we passed through unhindered.
Perhaps the Franks had been right: perhaps God did will them on. Certainly it felt so during those last weeks of May: after the twenty months we had taken to crawl the hundred miles between Antioch and Arqa, we managed twice that distance in only twenty days. Every obstacle suddenly seemed to fall away from our path, so much that I began to wonder what had ever held us back. Narrow passes through the mountains, which a hundred Saracens could have held against the entire human race, stood undefended; fresh springs flowed with such abundance that the whole army could not exhaust their supply. Even the seasons seemed altered: though it was only the middle of May, the harvest had already ripened. In the orchards, boughs yielded up their fruits, while the wheat in the fields seemed to bow down before our approach, each stalk willingly offering its neck to our sickles. We hardly needed the emperor’s grain ships, whose white sails kept pace with us on the western horizon as we marched down the coast.
I do not mean to give the impression that it was easy — of course there were hardships. The same sun that fattened the wheat burned our skins and parched our throats. The bountiful land could also be treacherous. One evening we made our camp by a stony river bank: in the night, a host of fiery snakes slithered out from the stones and bit many of the army. They died horribly, bloated out so far you could hear the joints snapping inside them. At Sidon, the Saracen garrison sallied out unexpectedly and massacred a company of pilgrims as they foraged. And our holy road was no defence against the usual trials of life. Horses went lame, milk soured, men quarrelled. But against the storms that had ravaged us before, these were nothing: spring squalls forgotten almost before they had passed. They could not stem the confidence and expectation that grew in the army every day.
For, like the Israelites of old, we had come at last into the promised land, a country that had already been ancient when Romulus laid the first stone of the first Rome. Every town we passed resounded with history: Tyre, whose cedarwood Solomon used to build the temple in Jerusalem, and Byblos, whose parchment gave its name to the scripture written on it; Accaron, where the Philistines took the Ark of the Covenant, and Caesarea, city of King Herod. Phoenicians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans and Saracens — all had possessed this land, or parts of it. Their monuments remained, a palimpsest of the past, though the men themselves had long since rotted to dust.
We celebrated Pentecost and rested a few days. Then, we left the coast and headed inland, towards the spine of mountains that had loomed on our eastern flank every day for the past fortnight.
‘And somewhere in those mountains is Jerusalem,’ said Thomas. It was early June; we sat around the dying embers of our campfire and lay back, looking up at the stars. Anna’s head rested on my chest, while Helena and Thomas cradled the child — no longer a baby — between them.
‘I wonder if it will appear as it does in the Bible,’ mused Helena. ‘Jewelled walls and golden gates and. . everything else.’
‘It will probably look like any other town we’ve passed,’ I told her, trying to douse the hopes that flared in my own heart. ‘Stone walls, dusty streets, square houses.’
‘It won’t,’ Zoe protested. ‘We can’t have come so far just for that.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘If we make it to Jerusalem.’ Even there, sitting under the same sky that Christ must have seen a thousand years earlier, Sigurd’s pessimism remained unshaken. ‘Why haven’t the Fatimids attacked us yet?’
‘Only you could grumble about that,’ Anna teased him.
‘Either they have some ambush planned or they are drawing us on to Jerusalem deliberately.’
‘Or they’re too weak to oppose us.’ Thomas propped himself up on one arm, using the other to tousle his son’s hair. ‘We’ve descended too swiftly, before they can gather their forces.’
I shook my head. ‘They don’t have to gather their forces — they’re already there, behind Jerusalem’s walls. Why should they confront us in open battle? They know that we will come to them.’
‘And no doubt they’ll be ready for us.’
Later, after the others had gone to bed, Anna found me still lying by the fire. She lay down beside me and burrowed into the crook of my arm, pressing herself against me in a way she had not done in an age. Perhaps I should have shied away from such sinful touch so close to the holy city, but the warmth of her body awoke a craving I had almost forgotten how to feel. I turned her towards me and kissed her eagerly, running my hands over her dress with the awe of fresh discovery.
‘Not here,’ she whispered. She stood, took my hand and led me to a small gully. The night was hot but we did not remove our clothes, nor dare lie on the ground for fear of scorpions and adders. Anna leaned against a boulder, arching backwards as I pressed my kisses against her lips, her throat, her cheeks and her hair. She moaned when I entered her, as hungry for me as I was for her.
Lust made us impatient, and our hasty coupling was over too soon. After we had finished I held her in my arms, still joined with her, breathing in the smoky texture of her hair. Though when I pulled back to look her in the face, her cheeks were wet.
‘Are you crying?’ In the moonlight I could not tell if it was sweat or tears.
‘No,’ she said quietly. Then, after a moment, ‘Yes.’
I touched her dress, dark with sweat where I had pressed against her. ‘Did I hurt you?’
‘No.’
‘Is it guilt?’
‘No.’ She turned away and wiped her cheek with her sleeve.
I wrapped my arms closer around her and pulled her into me, cradling her head against my chest. ‘Soon,’ I promised her. ‘In four days, five at the most, we will reach Jerusalem.’ I marvelled that I could say that, and that it could be true.
‘Yes.’ She sniffed. ‘I don’t know. . perhaps that’s why I feel so tired, suddenly. It’s so close, the hope is almost too much to bear.’
‘Hope of seeing the holy city?’
‘Hope of going home.’ Fresh tears sprang from her eyes, but she ignored them, stroking a finger through my beard. ‘I’m ready.’
‘So am I.’
‘And Helena should hurry home too. Has she told you?’
I started. ‘Told me what?’
Anna pressed a hand over my groin. The smile had returned to her face, and her eyes gleamed with mischief. ‘You and I are not the only ones who have been sneaking away from the camp. Helena is expecting another child.’
I drew back in amazement. ‘When?’
‘Six months from now.’
I counted in my head. ‘How long has she known without telling me?’
‘Two months — and she did not tell me either. But I recognised the signs.’
‘I saw that she looked healthier, that she had grown again,’ I defended myself. ‘I thought it was the abundance of food.’
Anna laughed. ‘She did not tell you beca
use she was afraid it would worry you on the march.’
‘It would have.’ I had to pull away from Anna and lean against the wall of the gully, so bewildered was I by the emotions Anna’s news had unleashed in me.
‘It’s lucky we’re almost ready to go home.’
The next day we came to Aramathea, a prosperous town in the foothills of the mountain range. We approached with caution, for if the Fatimids wished to mount a defence before we reached Jerusalem this was their final opportunity. But when we reached the gates we found the town abandoned, not just by its garrison but by every single inhabitant. They had left behind a great store of grain and provisions, and full cisterns from which we gratefully filled our waterskins. We knew there would be scant water in the mountains ahead.
Of all those days marching, I remember the last one the best. The whole army was awake before dawn, like children at Easter, and before the cool morning could grow stale we were well on our way. We were now deep in the mountains, the first places God made, and the weight of ages was everywhere in the wizened landscape around us. Deep clefts furrowed the faces of barren hills, and desiccated veins of white rock were all that remained of the rivers that had once brought life to the soil. It did not seem like the promised land flowing with milk and honey, but we did not care. Our songs resounded off the crumbling valleys: pious hymns of thanksgiving; proud songs of war; and sometimes more poignant songs of the countries we had left so far behind. Happiness, wonder and laughter bubbled up from the army like fresh springs, and the faces around me seemed to glow with joy.
By midday, the still air had grown thick and heavy. On another day we might have rested through the worst of the heat, but that afternoon there was no thought of delay. I walked between my daughters, Helena on my left and Zoe on my right, glancing at Helena’s belly so often that she scolded me for my unseemly impatience.