Siege of Heaven

by Tom Harper

  ‘Did we win?’ I wondered aloud.

  No one answered. Sigurd, still in the grip of battle, stood on the harbour’s edge and shouted abuse after the fleeing Egyptians. When that did nothing, he picked up a smouldering piece of wood from the dock beside him and hurled it towards the ship. It fell well short, though it did provoke one of the archers on the ship’s stern to retaliate with an arrow. That flew wide, but it was enough to drain the battle lust from Sigurd. He fell silent and stepped into the shelter of the wall, while the Fatimid ship disappeared out of the harbour.

  The trumpet I had heard during our charge sounded again. At the time I had thought it must be my imagination, or perhaps a flight of angels come to take me to heaven, but this was different – too clear to be my imagination, too strident for the hosts of heaven. I turned around.

  We were not the only men on the docks. At the far end of the harbour, where three of Saewulf’s ships still lay moored, a troop of horsemen had ridden out onto the quay and dismounted. More men were spilling down from the town after them. All were armed and mailed, though even from that distance I could see many were limping or leaning on their comrades for support, as if they too had been in a battle. Their banners were frayed and stained, but there was no mistaking the design on them: a blood-red cross.

  ‘Thank God.’

  The leader of the new arrivals handed his bridle to a companion and came towards us, striding between the host of small fires that still burned around him. The Varangians and sailors around me turned to face him, arms crossed, watching impassively.

  He halted in front of Saewulf and removed his helmet, shaking free a mane of tawny hair. I recognised him: he was Geldemar Carpinel, one of the lesser captains in Duke Godfrey’s army.

  ‘If you came for the battle, you’re too late.’ Saewulf gestured to the debris all about, as if the Frank might not have noticed it. ‘We won.’

  Geldemar stiffened. ‘We fought our own battle. Four hundred Arab troops and two hundred Turks. We found them on the plain near Aramathea – coming this way.’

  ‘I hope you saw them off.’ Geldemar gave a smug nod. ‘You don’t want to run into them again when you leave.’

  ‘Leave?’ Geldemar sounded peeved. ‘We’ve only just come here.’

  As if by way of answer, another naphtha canister sailed over the wall and exploded against the watchtower in a cloud of fire. A fig tree that had grown out of a crack in the wall burst into flame.

  ‘I thought you said you won your battle,’ said Geldemar suspiciously.

  ‘There are always more enemies. Unless you want to meet them, we had best get on. Have you brought pack animals?’

  ***

  They had, though it was the devil’s own job to load them while the Egyptian ships beyond the harbour bombarded us with fire. We scavenged what we could from the cargo on the dock, while Saewulf’s men methodically dismantled the ships that survived. When they had broken them down to the waterline, they towed them to the harbour mouth and scuttled them. Soon all that remained were bundles of planks and timbers tied to the mules.

  By the time we had loaded up the last of the animals, the harbour swirled and glowed with the reflected flames. The wind had carried the fire into the town on the hillside, and that too had begun to burn. In the places where the sea-fire had spread over it, even the water burned.

  In my determination to see that we saved every scrap that might help make our siege engines, I was one of the last to leave. Sigurd and I hoisted the last batch of planks onto the mule’s back and tied it tight, then turned to go. I cast a last look at the harbour. Ash and oily scum covered its surface, but the water still drew my drawn and bleary eyes. Soot and dust had mingled with sweat and blood to coat my skin, my hair, my clothes: I could almost feel it cracking when I moved. I longed to be clean – but there was no time for that.

  Saewulf slapped the laden mule on the rump, and it trotted obediently away towards the gate. Now there were only three of us left on the dock.

  ‘There goes your last ship,’ I said to Saewulf. ‘What will you do now?’

  He shrugged. ‘A captain should stay with his ship – even if it’s in pieces. Besides, you’ll need someone who knows how to use those tools, if you ever want to build your siege engines.’

  μβ

  Our return to Jerusalem found the army in grim spirits, which even the arrival of our cargo did little to improve. The streams of living water promised in scripture no longer flowed: the land was parched, and the few wells that lay around the city had been poisoned or stopped up by the garrison. Worse, while we had been away the Franks had intercepted messengers from the Fatimid vizier, al-Afdal. He was coming from Egypt with a great army, he said: he would be there in a month. If the garrison could only hold out until then, the Army of God would be ground into dust. The Franks gritted their teeth and swore it would make no difference: this was exactly what had happened at Antioch, they said, and they had prevailed then. By God’s grace, they would take Jerusalem and then march out to destroy al-Afdal as well. But they spoke too loudly when they said it, and the hands that clutched their crosses trembled.

  All our hopes now rested on God – and on the materials we had brought from Jaffa. The masts from Saewulf’s ships were raised again, far from the sea, the cornerposts of the two vast siege engines the Franks had designed. The towers reached higher than the walls themselves, and every day they grew. The wheelwrights gave them feet; the carpenters built platforms and ladders within while the women wove wattle screens to cover them. Finally, the tanners nailed on skins of mottled hides so that fire could not burn them. It gave the machines a monstrous appearance. On each, the drawbridge at the summit gaped like an open jaw, while the arrow slits above seemed like blundering, half-blind eyes. The Franks named them Gog and Magog, the beasts who would come at the end of time to besiege Jerusalem.

  A strange mood overtook the army in those last few weeks. They stood on the brink of an impossible victory, and equally on the threshold of destruction, yet to look at their faces you would not have seen much trace of either hope or fear. Even the threat of al-Afdal’s army did little to stir their passions. They had suffered the journey for too long: now that they had arrived, it meant nothing. You could see it in their eyes – the numb awareness that these should be days of passion and drama, of triumph or terror, and the quiet, reproachful despair that they felt nothing. Each day they toiled with willing, dead hands: they lay on their bellies to drink from stagnant pools where animals wallowed; they wandered carelessly within bowshot of the walls and barely murmured when the arrows struck them.

  Yet life stirred among the waste and wreckage of our hopes, if you looked carefully. But it was not the fresh, clean life that drives out winter; this was the sort that crawls out of holes and feeds on rot. It did not show itself, but I became aware of it, shadows moving at the fringes of my perception. I saw it in the groups of pilgrims who huddled together, whispering; in sly glances that sidled away when I looked at them; in the mysterious slogans that appeared scrawled on boulders overnight: unsettling verses from the Revelation of Saint John speaking of tortures and trials ahead. I felt it in the brooding presence of the towers, ever-present and stark against the skyline. More insidiously, I heard it from the mouths of the priests. When they opened their Bibles, it was always to Daniel or Ezekiel. I will strew your flesh on the mountains, and fill the valleys with your carcass; I will drench the land so that your flowing blood laps the mountain tops, and drowns the streams and rivers. When they preached, they spoke of the kingdom to come with rare urgency, as if they could glimpse the holy city through a tear in the clouds. Though few of them were gifted preachers, their words seemed to touch their audiences like tongues of fire. Dull faces flared with passionate intensity; in those moments, I began to suspect that the army was not exhausted, simply nursing its meagre strength. It improved my hopes of taking the city, but it filled me with foreboding.

  Unsurprisingly, in that atmosphere, men started to see
visions again. Some saw winged creatures swooping down from heaven; some saw saints in shimmering raiment; some saw magical beasts – griffins, basilisks and unicorns – and no doubt others saw worse visions that afterwards they did not dare voice, but tried to forget in their hearts.

  Among these visions, one came with particular authority. A Provençal pilgrim announced that he had seen Bishop Adhemar, who had ordered a penitential procession around the four walls of Jerusalem to free the army from the filth of the world. So, on a Friday afternoon in early July, we marched around the city.

  Looking back, it was a miracle we were not all massacred. By Adhemar’s command, given in the vision, every man in the army had removed his boots and walked barefoot. If the Fatimids had sallied out from the city, they could have ridden through us like a field of wheat. Perhaps they could not believe our temerity and assumed it must be a trap; perhaps they simply laughed to themselves and left us to our folly, seeing it as the last throes of an army dying of thirst and madness. Perhaps they pitied us. Whatever their reasons, they stayed within the walls.

  And if they thought we were mad, who could argue? We knew the risks, and still we marched blithely on. Fear of death did not deter us; instead, the army seemed to drink it in. The whole procession had the air of a macabre carnival. Seven priests walked at the front of the column with ram’s horns, blasting out a cacophony that filled the valley, from the walls to the surrounding hills. Men and women danced in rapture; they held their weapons aloft and waved them to heaven – spears and swords, but also billhooks, cudgels, even pilgrim staves. The trumpets blasted, and the pilgrims sang so hard they almost screamed. Each time we came near one of the gates the noise rose to a fevered crescendo as we waited to see if it would open for an attack; each time we passed safely, the air shivered with the sound of delight. Drunk on its own daring, the army tottered forward; they had abandoned caution, thrown off the chains of fear that had bound them so long, and every step that they did not fall only convinced them of their invincibility.

  ‘I once knew a herder who grazed his oxen where wild onions grew,’ said Sigurd. He had to bellow in my ear to be heard. ‘It made them swell up like melons. When they let it go . . .’ He waved his hand in front of his nose. ‘It sounded like those trumpets.’

  ‘Perhaps they think the walls will fall down if they blow hard enough.’

  ‘Then there’ll be nothing to stop the Egyptians running out and slaughtering us.’

  I shrugged. ‘It worked for Joshua.’

  At least Joshua had been allowed to wear his boots. The ground beneath my feet might be holy, but it was merciless. The stones were so hot they raised blisters even through a thousand miles’ worth of callouses, and when once I did not look where I trod I quickly felt the pain of a stubbed toe.

  I stepped out of the procession and knelt to rub my toe. The procession flowed past. Seen from below, with the blazing sun above, the pilgrims became little more than barefoot shadows, a jabbering confusion of limbs and blades that writhed like tendrils of smoke over a fire. Or perhaps they were like a thicket of walking trees, their branches rippling as if in a breeze. The spikes of their spears looked more like palm fronds, and the sunlight was so strong the metal seemed to wilt in its glare.

  I blinked. Thirst and heat had not made me delusional. The men and women passing by no longer carried weapons, not even the crude tools of the peasants, but palm fronds. They were dressed in white, and they seemed to come from all the tribes of the barbarians – Normans and Provençals, Lotharingians and Flemings – but they all sang the same song.

  Salvation belongs to God on His throne, and to the Lamb who is his son.

  I stood up. The crowd’s momentum had carried Sigurd on well past me and for the moment I was on my own. I stepped back into the procession, feeling dark and dirty among so much white. Immediately, I found myself in the shade of a broad palm frond, which an old man held aloft with frail but unyielding arms. He turned to greet me, smiling in welcome.

  I gestured around. ‘Who are all these people?’

  His skin was dark and mottled with liver spots, but his teeth were as white as his robe. ‘We are those who have come out of the great ordeal. We have washed our robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’ His brown eyes stared at me.

  It was the last answer I had expected. Stranger still, I found I knew the words to continue it. ‘They shall hunger and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat.’

  He nodded approvingly. ‘The Lamb on His throne will be our shepherd, and He will guide us to the springs of the water of life.’

  ‘I’d be glad to find any spring in this foul heat.’

  The pilgrim frowned. ‘The earth’s water is stagnant and stale. Soon we will all taste the sweet water of life.’

  Dazed by sweltering heat and sound, stifled by the dust our army kicked up, I almost let myself ignore him. But there was a firmness in the way he spoke that was almost like a promise. Soon we will all taste the sweet water of life. I had heard such sentiments before, but hearing them now, with the walls of Jerusalem looming over me, I could feel their power anew.

  The pilgrim looked at me cautiously, as if noticing for the first time the shabby colour of my tunic among the sea of white. ‘Things that were prophesied are now stirring to life. Have you heard?’

  My mouth was dry, but once again I found I knew the words he wanted. I loosened a brick in the wall of my memories and reached into the dark crevice within – to a clearing in the woods, and the fat, frightened peasant who had styled himself a prophet.

  ‘When the Son of Perdition has risen, the king will ascend Golgotha.’

  I could not remember any more, but it was enough. The pilgrim recited the rest. ‘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.’

  ‘But the man who brought that prophecy died a terrible death, forsaken by God. I thought his prophecy died with him.’

  ‘It was not Peter Bartholomew’s prophecy,’ said the pilgrim. His eyes were hidden in the dappled shade of the palm frond, but his face was angry. ‘In his pride, he confused the prophet and that which was prophesied. He thought he was the promised king.’

  ‘The last and greatest of all kings, who will come at the end of days to capture Jerusalem.’

  ‘As if that grasping peasant could have been a king. The first time Christ came, He came in humility. When He comes again, it will be with all the majesty He can command.’

  My scepticism must have showed. ‘Do you doubt it?’ the pilgrim challenged me.

  ‘Of the hour of Christ’s coming, no man knows,’ I quoted him.

  ‘Until He does come.’ He grabbed me by my sleeve and spun me around, staring hard into my eyes. ‘The consummation of the world has already begun. The last and greatest king is here. I have seen him.’

  I stared at him. There was no hint of a lie on his aged face. ‘You have seen the risen Christ?’

  ‘As clearly as you see me now.’

  ‘But . . .’ I struggled to think, let alone to speak. ‘But . . . why hasn’t the world ended?’

  ‘Even after He returns, the day of judgement does not come straight away. There is to be an interlude of forty days, so that sinners may repent. But there is not much time. He appeared to us the night we reached Jerusalem, and that was thirty-three days ago.’

  This was impossible. Of course I believed that Christ would come again in glory, as the creed proclaimed, to judge the living and the dead – but I had never thought it could come in my lifetime. It was an idea, an abstraction out of time, as far in the future as the creation of the world lay in the past. It was not something I was born to experience.

  ‘You should not be surprised when God’s promises are honoured,’ the pilgrim reproved me. ‘It has all been written in the prophecy.’

  The prophecy. I had only heard it in snatches but I could feel its d
anger, a dark serpent coiled in the heart of the army. It had poisoned Peter Bartholomew when he touched it, thinking it was meant for him. Who else would it claim? Worse, what if it were true?

  ‘There is still time to prepare yourself – God is merciful. Meet me an hour after dusk at the church of Saint Abraham, near Saint Stephen’s gate, tomorrow night.’

  ‘Will the redeemer be revealed there?’

  He put a finger to his lips. ‘Be patient. You will meet him soon enough.’

  μγ

  Did we have seven days to live? It was hard to believe. The following day, Saturday, was almost stifling in its predictability. I rose at dawn and spent the morning carrying wood as we continued the slow business of preparing the siege engine. The sun climbed over us, then began to sink back. The sounds of war echoed off the ancient hills – blacksmiths beating out blades on their anvils, farriers exercising horses, the clatter of rocks as labourers gathered stones for the catapaults – but I barely heard them. Even the noise of my own hammer was dull to my ears, a metronomic beat tapping out the hours in the still air.

  When dusk began to chase the sun from the sky, I put down my tools and made my way to the church of Saint Abraham: a small church with a cracked dome, barely a stone’s throw from the city walls. I did not tell Sigurd or Thomas I was going. I half expected – and half hoped – that the pilgrim would have forgotten me, or thought better of his offer, but as I approached the church he stepped out of the shadow of the doorway and beckoned me to follow.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘Not far.’ He looked at my tunic, then threw me a white blanket. ‘Wrap this around you.’

  The blanket was grubby and smelled of straw, but I did as he told me and followed him. My misgivings grew the further we moved away from the camp, up towards the brow of the ridge that dominated Jerusalem to the north. We were not the only ones on this road: pale figures flitted through the night all around, though I could not make them out. When I looked back, I could see the city laid out beneath me, a chain of watch-fires surrounding the lamplit streets and churches. To my left, on the eastern side, a smaller cordon of light marked out the dimensions of the Temple Mount. From there, I traced the line of the stone bridge, which spanned the valley to the western city. On the far side of the bridge the street runs west, to a corner where two tamarisk trees grow. If you go right, there is a house with an iron amulet in the shape of a hand nailed to its door. I stared at the flickering lights. Did one of those lamps burn in the window of the room that held my family? Was Anna looking out of it even now, staring up at the night and thinking of me? My heart beat faster, and I felt the familiar pain tighten in my chest.