Siege of Heaven da-3

by Tom Harper

  ‘Blow the trumpet in Zion, and sound the alarm on the holy mountain! Let its inhabitants tremble, for the day of the Lord is near. A great and powerful army has come: their like has never been seen before, nor will be again in the ages to come.’ He looked around, taking in all the assembled warriors. ‘From the head of His army the Lord shouts out His battle-cry — how vast is His host. Truly, the day of the Lord will be great — and terrible.’

  With a heavy slam, Arnulf let the book fall shut. The acolyte scurried away, and Raymond stepped forward. His cheeks were flushed, and an ungainly smile played over his face, as if he wanted to show humility but did not have the patience for it.

  ‘Three years ago we left our homes, our fields and our families to seek Jerusalem. Here we are. Tomorrow, praise God, it will be ours.’

  The congregation cheered and stamped their feet on the ground. A low cloud of dust rose up around their knees.

  ‘We will attack at dawn. By noon, the city will have fallen.’

  Chain mail shifted and clanged as ten thousand armoured heads rose from prayer. In the grim light before sunrise I could make out little more than the coned helmets and spear-shafts that rose around me like a forest — though in the east, a dark shadow was slowly resolving itself into the silhouette of a mountain as the dawn spread behind its peak. Horses galloped up and down our lines, their stirrups jangling as their riders barked the orders they brought. For the third time that morning I checked that my shield was buckled tight, then half-drew my sword and touched my thumb against its edge. I had promised myself that if — when — I ever rescued my family, I would throw it away, or give it to a smith to hammer into impotence.

  One of the heralds cantered up to us. ‘Be ready. The front ranks have begun the assault. God wills it.’

  ‘God wills it,’ the knight who commanded our line replied. After the losses the Varangians had suffered in the orchard, there were no longer enough of us to make our own company: we had had to submit ourselves to a Frankish command. It had almost destroyed Sigurd’s pride — and worse was to follow when we discovered that none of the leading knights would accept our service. The glory to be won by being first into Jerusalem was not a prize they would share lightly, least of all with our tattered band. At last we found a knight from Flanders who had lost half his company in the siege of Ma’arat and did not have the wealth to attract others: he took us happily enough. But he was old, and most of his knights were men he had fought with since boyhood. He was happy enough to bide his time near the back of the army.

  ‘The vanguard will have marched clear through Jerusalem and on into Egypt by the time we reach the walls,’ I fretted. I could only hope that reverence for the holy city would keep the Franks from the sort of pillage they had inflicted on Antioch. The thought of my daughters and Anna escaping the Ishmaelites only to be slaughtered — or worse — by Franks was like a noose around my heart.

  ‘And what will we do when we enter the city?’ Sigurd asked. It was the fifth time he had asked that question, and I had no good answer. All I had were Nikephoros’ dying words — and I did not even know how accurate they might be. The Fatimids could have taken their captives to another fortress, or to a cave in the hills, or. .

  I shook my head to clear it of evil thoughts. ‘We will do what we can, and trust to God for the rest.’

  On my right, Thomas was staring forward with desperate intensity, his axe ready in his hands. When I touched his arm, he jerked as if I had cut it open.

  ‘Keep loose,’ I warned him. ‘You won’t be able to swing your axe if your arms are so tense.’

  Without a word, he turned back to look at Jerusalem. Not a muscle in his face moved. All his life was in that city: his dead parents, his captive wife, his son — perhaps even his God. I hoped he would find at least some of them beyond the walls that now loomed ahead of us in the blue dawn.

  Another herald galloped up the line towards us. ‘The front ranks have reached the outer walls. Prepare to advance.’

  I had spent two years and a thousand miles trying to reach Jerusalem. Now, as the sun’s molten rays crept over the ridge and began to touch Mount Zion, I began to march the last few hundred yards. The faces around me were wide-eyed, like men awakening into a dream; many crossed themselves, and some wept openly. The battlehymn of the Army of God resounded in my ears like clashing cymbals.

  ‘God wills it!’

  39

  ‘It would have been better if God had willed them to bring ladders.’

  Sigurd spat on the ground. All his weapons were laid out around him, silver in the moonlight — his great battleaxe, a pair of small throwing axes, a sword and two knives. One by one he polished them with a cloth, rubbed them with oil, then wiped them clean. It was an exercise in futility: I knew for a fact that not one of those blades had touched so much as the beard of an enemy that day.

  ‘Perhaps our faith was not strong enough,’ said Thomas. He sat on a rock a little distance away from us, resting his chin in his hands. They were almost the first words he had spoken since we returned from the battle.

  Sigurd, who had one of the throwing axes in his hand, looked as though he might willingly put it into Thomas’s skull. ‘The only thing that was too weak was the sense of those shit-cursed princes.’

  For the Army of God, which had cracked open the greatest fortresses of antiquity and defied the combined hordes of the Ishmaelites, the assault on Jerusalem had been a disaster. Ten thousand men had tried to climb into the city with a single ladder between them. After some hours of fighting they had breached the low outer wall and charged through, only to pass into the dead ground between the curtain wall and the great rampart. Buttresses between the two walls hemmed in their flanks, so that the defenders could rain down missiles from three sides. When the Franks had tried to make a tortoise roof with their shields, the Egyptians had simply broken it apart with rocks and then poured arrows into the gaps. Meanwhile, thinking the city must have fallen, more men flooded through the breaches so that those in the front were crushed against the main wall or trampled underfoot. They had filled the ground between the walls like lambs in a pen, and like lambs they had been slaughtered.

  Yet despite all this, they had managed to raise their ladder to the main walls. A Norman knight had started to climb it. The air around him was dark with arrows; the ladder swayed and shuddered as stones ricocheted off it. Still he climbed, somehow untouched by the cloud of missiles. The defenders brought vats of boiling water and tried to pour it over him, but in their haste they tipped it too quickly and it fell on the men at the foot of the ladder instead. No one heard their screams: the entire army was holding its breath, waiting to see if the knight could reach the top. That he had not been plucked from it already seemed nothing short of a miracle — proof, for those who sought it, that God had ordained their victory. The further he went the more they allowed themselves to hope. Weighed down by his armour, his progress was agonisingly slow; once he seemed to slip, and the whole army gasped, but he regained his footing and continued inexorably up. God is so powerful that if He desires it, we will scale the walls with a single ladder, I remembered Raymond had said. Now, before the eyes of all men, his words were becoming manifest, and the army trembled with fearful expectation.

  The knight gained the final rung, reached out his arm and fastened his hand on the embrasure between the battlements. For a moment, he must have looked down to see the holy city framed in stone. A great cheer rose up from the army; more men started climbing the ladder, while the rest surged forward. The knight on the ladder glanced back down, and though I could not see his face I could imagine the triumph on it. He waved his sword to rally the army and screamed, ‘Deus vult!’

  From the ramparts before him, a heavy sword flashed down. The knight cringed back, flailing his arm, and we saw in horror that the hand that clasped Jerusalem had been severed from his body. He flung away his sword and scrabbled for a grip, but he had no chance. An arrow pierced his side, another his shoulder
; he lost his balance and crashed down onto the crowds below, spinning as he fell.

  On the walls around us, the Fatimid archers resumed their bombardment. Scores of the Franks had lowered their shields to watch the ascent; now they paid for their carelessness. Mercifully I was too far back to trouble the bowmen: they did not want for targets. From up on the walls, a pair of hands reached through the embrasure and pushed away the ladder. It pivoted back, then toppled down into the fray. Within seconds it had been ground to splinters as the Franks rushed to escape.

  ‘The only miracle was that the Norman did not die,’ said Sigurd.

  Thomas looked at him with the sure contempt of youth. ‘There were no miracles today.’ His voice was hollow, heartbroken. ‘The Norman survived because three corpses broke his fall. There were enough bodies between those walls to clog the gates of heaven.’

  I said nothing. I knew some of the anguish he must feel — I felt enough of it myself. But he seemed to have taken the defeat so much to his heart that it consumed him. At the height of the battle, when the Franks were fleeing back through the breaches, he had even tried to rush forward, though it was certain death. Sigurd had held him back, almost breaking his arm to do it. I prayed it had only been the madness of war — not the weight of his sorrows becoming unbearable.

  ‘I’ve heard that Count Raymond will move his camp around to the south,’ said Sigurd, breaking the awkward silence.

  ‘I wonder how many will go with him?’

  ‘Twelve of us, at least.’ Sigurd gestured to the Varangians, all that remained of his company. ‘No one else will have us.’

  ‘We may be the only ones.’ I knew that several of Raymond’s captains had transferred their allegiance to other princes in the aftermath of the battle. ‘No wonder he wants to move his camp away from the others.’

  Sigurd held up his throwing axe to the moonlight, squinting down the blade. He grunted with grudging approval — then looked up in surprise as a shadow fell over him. A youth in a yellow tunic had emerged from the darkness, blocking out the moon. His skin was smooth, his dark hair curly: he might easily have been taken for a Saracen. Perhaps that was why he wore an outsize wooden cross on a cord around his neck. It seemed to cause him some discomfort.

  ‘Who is Demetrios Askiates?’ he asked, in heavily accented Greek.

  ‘Who are you?’ I retorted.

  He would not say, but reached into the folds of his tunic. Sigurd tensed his arm, the oiled axe gleaming in his hand, but there was no danger. Instead, the boy pulled out a brooch and tossed it across to me. I examined it. The gold was leaden in the moonlight, but the design was clear enough. A tree wrought in enamel — reds, blues and greens — and two birds flanking it.

  ‘You know whose it is?’

  I nodded, dumbstruck. It had been a gift from the imperial treasury to Anna, after she saved the emperor from a spear-wound.

  ‘Then come with me.’

  I wanted to bring Sigurd, but then I would have had to take Thomas, and I did not trust him in his evil mood. So I went alone. The youth walked behind me through the camp, letting me meet the challenges and give the watchwords, then took the lead. Ten minutes brought us to the north-eastern corner of the city: we rounded it, then dropped away from the walls as the ground descended into the steep valley that divided the Mount of Olives from the city. The night deepened as we went down — I clutched the brooch so tight its pin pierced my hand, but I carried on until suddenly I saw a faint light winking in the darkness.

  The light drew closer as we reached the bottom of the valley. The ground was broken here, strewn with rocks, though it was only when I stubbed my toe on one and looked down that I saw they were not boulders, but fragments of a shattered building. The remains of toppled columns, tumbledown walls and fallen arches littered the landscape like bones on a battlefield. The destruction must have happened some time ago, for grass and bushes had grown tall around the ruins. Where a solitary piece of wall still stood, a fig tree had twined itself through the empty window.

  But the corpse of the building remained, buried in the ground. A flight of open stairs brought us down into an oblong pit lined with stone. Two rows of stumps marked where the columns had once stood, and though most of the ground was covered in earth, in a few places you could still make out the tiles of the mosaic floor. It must have been a church, I thought. And despite its desolation, it still seemed to be in use. At the far end, unhidden by any altar screen, two black-robed priests with long, white beards bowed before a long-vanished altar. It was their light I had seen, a lone oil-lamp resting on a fallen capital. The flame illuminated the face of a high stone mausoleum — the only structure to have survived the destruction.

  ‘Do you know where you are?’

  I swung around. With all my attention on the ghostly scene in the sanctuary I had not noticed the man sitting on the stub of a column to my right. He stood, his cloak rustling around his legs.

  ‘Bilal.’ I stepped towards him, then checked myself, suddenly overtaken by confusion, fear. I opened my palm to reveal the brooch. ‘Did you send this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are they. .?’ I could not bring myself to finish the question.

  He offered a tired smile. ‘They are safe.’

  Relief flooded through me. So much tension had knotted itself around me that week that, in the end, it was all that had held me together. Now it washed away and I dropped to my knees. The poison bile that had filled my body rose in my throat and I let it pour out onto the onceholy ground, praying God to forgive me. In the chancel, the priests continued their low chanting.

  Bilal took my arm and pulled me to my feet. I would have embraced him, almost fallen upon him with thanks, but something held me away. There was a distance in his manner that I had not seen before.

  ‘A squadron of our cavalry surprised a column of Frankish knights,’ he said. ‘There was a battle.’

  ‘I was there.’

  ‘But not with your wife and children. They found them with the ambassador, Nikephoros.’

  There was no rebuke in his words, but I felt it anyway like a hammer. ‘They fell upon us so quickly there was nothing I could do. I was separated from them. I-’

  Bilal held up his hand to still my babble. ‘God is the All-Hearing and the All-Seeing. Perhaps He did not mean you to be with them. Nikephoros fought to protect your family — bravely, they said — and died for it. If you had stood beside them, the same might have happened to you.’

  I remembered Thomas’s desperate longing to charge into the battle that morning. You could not escape guilt by dying.

  ‘As it was, they assumed the women must be Nikephoros’ wife and daughters, and therefore worthy of ransom.’

  So Nikephoros’ pride had served a purpose in the end. I remembered the golden robe he had worn that day, the jewelled lorum wrapped around his neck. Perhaps he had already imagined himself back in the perfumed halls of Constantinople, returned from his exile. And he had fought to protect my family. Suddenly, for all his deceits, I found I no longer hated him.

  ‘But I have no money to ransom them,’ I said, trying to comprehend all this unexpected news. ‘And the Franks will not waste their gold on Greeks.’

  ‘My masters would not offer them to the Franks. All Muslims may seem the same to the Franks, but we understand the differences between the Christians well enough. When the vizier needs to buy favour with your emperor, then he will offer him the women as part of some bargain.’

  ‘But the emperor will know they cannot belong to Nikephoros.’ Hope rose within me. ‘Can you help them escape?’

  Bilal sighed, and I could see that he wished I had not asked it. ‘I cannot.’

  The euphoria that had lifted me subsided. I sank down on one of the stone stubs. Bilal stayed standing, silhouetted against the priests’ lamp at the far end of the nave.

  ‘At least I know they’re safe,’ I said, when I could control my voice again. ‘Thank you for that.’

  ‘It
is the least I can do. And the most. But for as long as my people control the city, no harm will come to them.’

  ‘A long time if our attack this morning was any omen. Did you see it?’

  ‘I was there.’ Bilal looked away, unwilling to talk more of it. Perhaps he was embarrassed by the wanton ease with which the Franks had given themselves up to be slaughtered.

  A thought struck me. ‘The vizier must be confident of victory if he is already able to think of bargaining with the emperor.’ No answer. ‘Is the vizier here now?’

  Bilal shifted uneasily.

  ‘Come,’ I urged him. ‘Do you think I’m trying to pry secrets out of you? I want to know, in innocence, if I will ever see my family again. Nothing else.’

  ‘In innocence?’ Bilal repeated the words with heavy irony. ‘Can there be such a thing? When we fought beside each other in the pyramid, when the Turkish troops tried to harm that boy, we did it because we hated evil, nothing else. When the caliph in his madness threatened to kill you, I warned you for the same reason. But we are in Jerusalem now, and the next time your army charges at those walls you will be on one side and I will be on the other. It will be a battle to the end. So how can you and I speak to each other in innocence?’

  Bilal looked away, to the light in the sanctuary of the church. The two priests must know we were there, must have heard us, but they continued with their ritual as if we did not exist.

  ‘Do you know where you are?’ Bilal repeated the question he had asked when I first arrived. I looked around, then up. Far above us, the fires on the city walls burned bright against the sky from the great courtyard of the Temple Mount.

  ‘You are in Gethsemane. This was the church of Mary, the mother of Jesus and that tomb’ — he pointed to the stone mausoleum — ‘is hers.’

  You could hardly breathe in this place for the weight of history. ‘But Mary was taken up to heaven. When Saint Thomas came to her tomb three days after she fell asleep, her body was gone.’