by Tom Harper
‘We had best forage what food we can.’ I leaned against the stone wall of the guardroom, enjoying the feel of its coolness on my skin. ‘When Kerbogha comes, the supply routes will be cut.’
‘Agreed.’ Sigurd stepped out into the sunlight on the wall. ‘Beric, Sweyn. Take a dozen men and see what provisions you can find in the city. Sheep or goats would be good. And fodder for the horses.’ He paused; through the arch of the doorway I could see him looking up at the top of the tower. ‘We should mount our standard, let the Franks know we hold these walls.’
‘They might take it amiss.’ I followed him onto the broad walkway which joined our towers. Looking back across the city, I could see the three peaks of Mount Silpius looming over us. On the highest, in the centre, it was just possible to make out a red flag strung between a pair of pollarded pines. ‘I do not think Bohemond will suffer any other banner to fly over Antioch.’
‘Shit on Bohemond. When the Emperor Alexios comes it will be the eagle of Byzantium, not the Norman snake, which holds sway.’
‘He will not thank you for reminding him.’
‘Then I will teach him manners with the blade of my axe.’
‘I would like to see it. But to flaunt our standard now would be foolhardy. We are already hated by the Franks; it would be better to keep from offering them a clear target.’
‘Why not raise the banner of the cross?’
I turned, and saw Anna walking out of the tower. She had been arranging her medicines in the guardroom: her sleeves were rolled up and her uncovered hair was tied back with a ribbon. I hoped that none of the Franks caught sight of her.
‘No.’ I shuddered. If I was honest, the pillaging of Antioch had been little worse than the violence that any victorious army would inflict – Frankish, Turkish, Saracen or even Byzantine. When the Emperor whose honour I now served had seized Constantinople, I had spent three days guarding my home and family from the depredations of his army. But the Franks fought not for a king or a lord but in the name of God. It should be different, I told myself.
‘Why not? It is the symbol of Christ – not of any army. Will you forswear Him because of what the Franks have done by it?’ She pointed to my own cross, which hung on its chain against my chest. ‘Will you rip that away and melt it down?’
I did not answer.
‘God will judge the Franks for what they have done in His name. It is not for you to judge Him.’
‘It’s still a betrayal to hide our own banner,’ Sigurd objected.
I opened my arms in surrender to Anna. ‘We will raise the banner of the cross.’
‘We don’t have one,’ said Sigurd.
‘Anna can make it.’
Anna glared at me. ‘I sew wounds, Demetrios, not clothes or flags.’
‘If Sigurd sews it, it will look more like a spider than a cross.’
The strain of the moment passed, though the ache of unease lingered between us. It was unnerving how easily we could come to quarrel. Anna at last consented to make the banner and withdrew to find cloth, while Sigurd turned his attention to our defences again. The city’s houses were built close against the walls, with only a narrow alley between us and them. Immediately adjacent, we looked down on the red-tiled roofs of houses set in a square around a courtyard. A shady plane tree grew in its centre, masking the wreckage that the looters had left scattered about beneath.
‘If enemies reached that roof, they could lay a ladder across the alley and attack us on the wall,’ Sigurd said.
‘If enemies get so far that they are on the roof, we shall probably be doomed anyway.’ I tried to make it a joke, but neither of us smiled. ‘The courtyard will pass as a stable for the horses, though.’
‘Too well.’ Disease and battle had reduced our mounts to a mere thirteen – and if that was an unlucky number I feared it would soon be unluckier still.
‘Let us hope Beric and Sweyn find fodder. And food for the riders as well.’
The light was softening as the sun slid away, gilding us with a burnished light. Perhaps I should have read it as a sign of the Lord’s benevolence, the glow of the victory he had bestowed, but I did not. The very presence of beauty on such a day of torments seemed itself blasphemous: I could not bask in the radiance but willed the sun ever lower, hoping that night would hasten on.
We had broken one siege; now there was another to endure. Did the golden sun presage triumph, I wondered, or would it prove the last glimmer before we fell into darkness?
κ α
The Varangians returned late, empty-handed and bruised. The siege which had seemed so fruitless from outside the gates had bitten harder than we thought: the city was almost starved. What little food they discovered had been furiously contested, Beric reported, in running skirmishes with the Franks which lasted into the night. It was not an auspicious beginning.
If we were to be trapped together in Antioch, there would have to be an understanding. Next morning, Sigurd and I left the walls to seek out the princes, to learn what arrangement would be made for our common defence and welfare. I had not seen any of the leaders since Bohemond had entered the city, and though I shuddered to meet with the architects of this devastation again we could not ignore each other. Like slaves in a galley, we were chained together by fortune, and one could not founder but the others would follow.
Nonetheless, I would avoid Bohemond if I could. Instead, I sought Adhemar.
I had feared to walk in Antioch again, but the new day brought new life to the city. The world had turned, and if the marks of the sack were still scorched into every street and building there was still a sense that peace and order had begun to settle again. The sun had gone down on the rage of the Franks; when it dawned, they were restored to obedience. Armed knights guarded every corner, while pilgrims and peasants hauled the dead from the roadsides and loaded them onto handcarts. There would be much digging in the fields that day if the corpses were not to fester around us. The frenzy of destruction had passed, the outpouring of seven months of frustration: now the Frankish faces were solemn, some almost stricken, as if they themselves could hardly believe the fury that had owned them. A contrite stillness clasped the city, and few gazes were raised to meet ours.
Brief questions and Adhemar’s name brought us at last to the cathedral, the great church of the apostle Peter, who had been Bishop of Antioch before journeying to Rome. It was a worthy monument, with mighty pillars outside and a great silver dome rising over the centre. The Turks, in their impiety, had desecrated it: next door they had erected a minaret, and within they had defaced all Christian ornament to make it acceptable to their own god of ascetism. Already masons and labourers were busy inside trying to unwork the sacrilege.
I left Sigurd in the square and stepped through the bronze doors, crossing myself as I passed the threshold. In silence, I offered a prayer to Saint Peter, though I doubt he could have heard it over the cacophony of hammers and chisels that rang around the hall. Dust clouded the air, muting my tread and swirling in the columns of sunlight that came through the windows. The Turks had certainly erased every trace of Christ – the icons had been removed, the statues plastered over, and the walls repainted with the twisted, bewitching designs the Ishmaelites favoured. The iconostasis had been torn down and I could see clear to the back of the church, where workmen on ladders prised away the mortar that encased the original carvings in the sanctuary. Keeping a wary eye lest some piece of masonry fall from the roof, I picked my way through the rubble towards them.
‘Is Bishop Adhemar here?’ I shouted up. A mouthful of dust parched my tongue.
‘He left, not long ago.’ The man on the ladder did not look down but continued to pick at the mortar with his chisel. Beneath his blows a solemn face was emerging from the masonry blanket that had buried it.
‘Where did the Bishop go?’
Fragments of plaster trickled down the wall. A cheek had appeared. ‘I did not hear.’
I turned away. Behind me, another labourer was ca
rrying a pile of planks in his arms towards the middle of the hall, perhaps to build a scaffold. As he dropped them under the dome, I accosted him.
‘Do you know where Bishop Adhemar has gone?’
The man looked up. His clothes were ragged, and he stooped even without his burden. Some unkind blow seemed to have broken his nose, though the sores and pimples which pocked his face were the worse disfigurement.
‘He has gone to the palace. He said—’ He broke off, staring at me. ‘You! The Greek.’
I had recognised him a moment sooner and mastered my surprise. ‘Peter Bartholomew. Do you still have that cross carved on your shoulders? Or has it vanished under the pox sores?’
‘You should not speak of such things in a church,’ he hissed. His jaw trembled.
‘This will not be a church again until the bishop consecrates it. When he does, I think it will be you who should fear to enter it. Have you seen the priestess Sarah recently?’
‘I do not know what you speak of.’ With a great heave of his shoulders, Peter Bartholomew set his back to me and hurried out through a side door. For a large man, I thought, he scuttled very much like a beetle.
I did not follow him. It was only four nights since I had talked with the ethereal priestess on the banks of the Orontes, but already she was almost forgotten. Drogo, Quino, the temple at Daphne and the sect they had worshipped – all were like relics of a different lifetime. I would never know how or why Drogo had died, but if I escaped Antioch alive I would not care.
I remembered my confrontation with Quino the day before the assault, at the tower by the bridge. You will not live for the Turks to slaughter, he had promised. Where in the city was he now, I wondered? And what had become of his companion, Odard?
I rejoined Sigurd outside, and we walked down the road between the cathedral and the palace, a great thoroughfare built straight as a spear through the city. Once, when Antioch was at its mightiest, the colonnades must have run its entire length unbroken; now they only remained in places. Even there, grime and cracks now veined the marble, and several times the path was blocked where the lintels had collapsed under a heap of shattered tiles. For long stretches the ancient design had vanished completely, usurped by squat brick buildings whose wooden balconies pushed out over the street. Lattice screens covered their windows, but I sensed movements within where furtive eyes looked down on us unseen. It would be a long time, I feared, before those who had survived the horrors of the day before would trust us.
At the southern end of the city, where a second road branched away towards the fortified bridge, we found the palace. It barely deserved the name, being little more than a large villa whose grounds had been overlaid with outbuildings and courtyards, but that had not saved it from the looters. The train of its sack ran far down the street: shattered pottery, torn fabrics, broken artefacts and trinkets. There was even a lion’s head carved from stone, which some ambitious thief had dragged almost a hundred yards before abandoning.
‘I wonder what happened to the Turk who owned that?’ Sigurd muttered.
I shook my head. There were things in the debris which looked sickeningly like severed limbs, ignored or forgotten by the burial crews. There might be peace in the city, but it bore little scrutiny.
We came to the palace. Horses stood tethered to the iron rings in its walls, while men-at-arms milled about in the dusty square. From the west, men and mules brought baggage in from the camp that they had dismantled; from the eastern slopes of the mountain there limped a steady flow of battered knights. Clearly not all the Turks had yet been driven from the city.
Unchallenged and unnoticed, we passed through a long, broad courtyard, under an arch and into a second courtyard. A cloister ran around its edges; in its centre a dry fountain stood flanked by cherry trees. There was no fruit on them. In the shade of their branches a handful of Franks stood or sat and argued. As we approached, a knight in the cloister saw us and ran to intercept us, but the bishop, standing by the fountain, had already noticed us. He lifted his hand, half in greeting, half to still the guard, and walked to meet us. His white beard spilled over a full coat of mail, girded with a thick sword belt, but instead of a helmet he wore a crimson skullcap. Despite the burning sun, his face seemed drained of colour and strength.
‘I wondered what had become of you,’ he greeted us. ‘I heard that you accompanied Bohemond when he forced the walls.’
‘I was there,’ I agreed. ‘Since when I have worked to establish a stronghold on the walls, lest the Turks come upon us. What have you done?’
There were many meanings to my question, and I saw in the bishop’s eyes that he heard all of them. His answer was more simple. ‘There is much to do before Kerbogha comes. You missed the fighting in the city, but they did not surrender it easily. The army is drained, and they will find little here to succour them in the short time given us.’
‘Enough time, surely,’ I said. ‘If we have learned one thing in the past seven months, it is that the walls of Antioch are not quickly breached. They will shield us until the Emperor comes.’
Adhemar grimaced. ‘If only that were so. We can shut the door to the city, but without the lock it will not hold long.’
‘What?’
He pointed over my shoulder, up to the furthest of the mountain’s three summits. It thrust out over Antioch like a buttress, and atop it I could see the imposing outlines of walls and turrets. It was the ancient citadel, built high above the city to command its protection.
‘When Bohemond’s men reached the citadel they found it barred against them. It is impregnable: a single road runs up from the city to meet it and on all sides the mountain drops sheer away. While the Turks hold it, there is a gaping hole at the heart of our defence. When Kerbogha comes, he will climb into the valley behind the mountain, reinforce the citadel through its outer gate, then pour men down into Antioch.’
‘But its strength is also its weakness.’ Sigurd spoke for the first time. ‘If a single narrow path over steep cliffs is the only way up from the city, it is also the only way down. We can block that path and stop them up in the castle, isolate them.’
‘Perhaps.’ There was a hopelessness in Adhemar’s voice. ‘But Kerbogha’s army is beyond numbering. He will throw in ever more men until our bulwark cannot contain them and we are swept down the mountain in a torrent.’
‘Where is Bohemond now?’ I asked.
‘Besieging the citadel. He hopes to force it before Kerbogha comes.’
The beat of hooves interrupted us. Ducking to clear the arch, a horseman cantered into the courtyard. Four knights rode behind him, bearing spears; streaming behind one I saw the bear banner of Tancred. The leader, Tancred himself, reined his horse to a halt and swung himself from the saddle, throwing the reins and his helmet to the guard who came running. Like Bohemond, he had shaved off his beard, stripping years and authority from his face so that he seemed little more than a child. A petulant child, I thought.
He strode towards us, one fist clenched tight. As he reached the paving around the fountain he opened it and hurled its content down. A hundred tiny black pellets bounced and scattered over the stones.
‘Peppercorns!’ he shouted. He stamped his boot, and I heard several splintering to powder beneath it. ‘I have searched every house and granary in this cursed city, and all I find are cloves and peppercorns. We cannot live on this.’ He spat into the fountain.
Adhemar frowned. ‘There must—’
For the second time, a new arrival interrupted him. Another knight, too humble to merit a horse, came running through the gate towards us. His scarlet face streamed with sweat and he collapsed onto his knees by the fountain, groaning as he saw that it would give nothing to quench his thirst.
Other men had hurried out from the cloister around the courtyard, among them Count Raymond and Duke Godfrey. They clustered around the messenger, drowning him in shade, though for the moment he seemed too drained to speak. At last he managed to gasp out a few short wo
rds.
‘At the bridge. Kerbogha.’
Despite the midday sun, we ran all the way to the bridge. The walls by the gate were already crowded with Franks who had come to see the new threat, but Sigurd managed to drive a path up the stairs and forward to the rampart. It was like being in the hippodrome when the Emperor gave out bread or meat: those who had views through the embrasures defied all demands to surrender their places, while those who could not see jostled and shoved to dislodge their neighbours. It was a miracle that no one toppled off.
A head taller than most of the crowd, Sigurd saw an opening and prised his way in, angling his broad shoulders so that I could join him. One man trod on my foot, another thumped me in the spine, but I fended off their assault and leaned through the opening. If doom was upon us, I wanted to see it.
Such is the perversity of the soul that the actual sight merely kindled disappointment. I had expected a hundred thousand Turks in burnished armour, their spears like wheat and their host innumerable, with Kerbogha himself a giant in their midst, flanked by the banners of fourteen emirs. Instead, there seemed only to be about thirty horsemen, cantering along the river bank and loosing occasional arrows at us. I knew from futile experience that few of the missiles would reach the walls. From the top of the watchtower beyond the bridge our garrison shot back in desultory fashion.
‘Kerbogha,’ snorted Sigurd. ‘This is not Kerbogha. These are the scouts of the outriders of his vanguard. If thirty of them can scare the Franks, they will run all the way to Nicaea when they see his full force.’
I agreed, and was about to abandon my tenuous vantage. But it seemed that not all the Franks dismissed the Turks so readily, for as I began to move I heard a great commotion by the gate below. There were shouts, the ring of armour and the pulse of hooves. Hemmed in by the crowd around me I could see nothing, but in an instant a column of Frankish riders burst into view through the battlements. At their head, on a white stallion, I saw a knight with red feathers in his helm.