Siege of Heaven

by Tom Harper

  His guards stiffened as I approached, and moved to bar my way, but Godfrey murmured that I should pass. I walked the few paces across the dusty ground and stood beside him at the fence.

  ‘I did not send Achard to kill you.’ He did not look at me, but kept his gaze fixed on the stallion in the paddock. ‘He went of his own will, because he hated you for what you did to him in Egypt.’

  ‘It can be hard to forgive the men who betray you,’ I said coldly.

  ‘But if you cannot do that, you end up as Achard did: destroyed.’ Godfrey flicked his head. ‘I told you once before that you should leave behind those things that do not concern you.’

  ‘You told me to go home to my family. And now I cannot, because they are in that city.’ I gestured to the walls a few hundred yards distant. ‘Because of what Achard did.’

  At last Godfrey turned to me. ‘Did you come here to hurl your bitterness at me, Demetrios Askiates? What do you want?’

  I swallowed, trying to calm myself. ‘I want to be the first man in the city.’

  ‘Many men want that honour,’ he rebuked me. ‘Many men have begged me for it. But it is not my gift to give. Only God can decide it – if He means us to capture the city at all.’

  I nodded, and crossed myself. One thing about Godfrey had not changed: his pedantic piety.

  ‘Many men have lost their families – I cannot give you my army for that.’

  ‘I don’t want your army.’ I tried desperately to fight back my temper. ‘I want to join it.’ I had raised my voice, and the guards had noticed. They began to close on me, but Godfrey raised his head a fraction to nod them back.

  ‘I will submit my men to your authority. Varangian guards, from the emperor’s palace at Constantinople. There is not a king in Christendom who would not want them in his army.’

  ‘Except perhaps the Norman king of England,’ said Godfrey drily.

  ‘They will fight to the death for you.’

  Godfrey stared out at the paddock. The white stallion had been calmed, and was now allowing the groom to lead him around the ring.

  ‘Will you be riding him in the assault?’ I asked.

  Godfrey laughed dismissively. ‘I would not risk him. He is too good to be felled by an Egyptian arrow.’

  ‘Then risk me,’ I pleaded. ‘Put me in the vanguard of the battle. When they hurl rocks and arrows and fire at us, put me on the top of your tower.’

  ‘I think you have spent too long with your Englishmen. I have heard they fight every battle as if they want to die in it.’ He laughed again, the same short laugh as when I had asked about the horse. ‘Perhaps that is a good thing.’

  I waited. Godfrey drummed his fingers on the wattle fence. His horse was skittish, tossing its mane and kicking out its hooves as if the meagre business of walking around a ring demeaned it.

  At last, without looking at me, Godfrey said, ‘You can go with the tower, if that is your wish. But first you must submit to me and swear your allegiance.’

  I dropped to my knees in front of Godfrey and repeated the few words he told me, forgetting them almost as I spoke them. When I had finished, he held out his hand like a bishop so I could kiss his ring. Loathing myself, I pressed my lips to the cracked, black stone that bulged from the worn gold. His ancestors’ ring, I remembered: I had seen it before, in his tent before the council at Rugia. I wondered what had happened to the other ring, the gold seal that had been taken from me at Ravendan. He had wanted me dead, then; now, I feared I would grant him his wish. Fate is inescapable.

  I got up, brushing the dust from my knees.

  ‘All those who will be with me at the top of the tower are already chosen,’ he announced. ‘So are those who will be on the second level, ready to charge over the drawbridge when we lower it.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘You and your men will go at the bottom of the tower. We will need strong arms to push it.’

  There was nothing I could say. Godfrey knew it.

  ‘You may go. I suppose you will have to tell Count Raymond how you have changed your loyalties.’ Again that tight smile. ‘No doubt he is used to hearing it by now.’

  ***

  I found Raymond in his tent, alone, as he often was in those days. He must have just finished paying his knights and labourers their wages: a broad table laid with a chequered cloth had been set in the middle of the room, piled with small stacks of coins, and a pair of scales sat at rest in its centre. I remembered the scales the third horseman had carried in the ceremony the night before, and shuddered.

  ‘What do you want?’ He sounded impossibly tired, an old man whose life had become a dispiriting ordeal. Barely looking at me, he dropped a succession of coins into one of the pans of the scale until it sank into balance.

  The July sun had turned the tent into an oven. The cloth walls seemed to throb with the light outside and stifle the air, but that was not why I felt ill.

  ‘It is about the assault . . .’

  Raymond swept the coins into his palm and arranged them on one of the cloth squares. ‘The towers are almost ready. The English captain says we should be able to launch our attack on Wednesday, Thursday at the latest, if the priests agree.’ Absent-mindedly, he began arranging the coins in a pattern like a flower. ‘I am glad that you came. I wanted to talk to you.’

  The sickness in my stomach seemed to grow. I tried to speak to pre-empt whatever he would say, but my mouth was suddenly too dry.

  ‘The princes have already begun to discuss who will rule Jerusalem when we conquer it. The kingship of Jerusalem should only be given to the mightiest and worthiest of princes, and I wanted your assurance that the emperor has not wavered from his commitment to me. That when the victory is won and the city liberated, I will have his support for my claim.’

  I stared at him, not knowing whether to feel pity or scorn. Even after all his humiliations, his disastrous entanglement with Peter Bartholomew, his stubborn pursuit of the siege of Arqa, the loss of half his army, he had not learned humility. He stood on the diminished rock of his own dignity while the tide washed out, and railed at the waves for going the wrong way. It was so childish as to be ludicrous.

  Something of my astonishment must have shown on my face, and perhaps Raymond felt it himself, for he added softly: ‘I was lord of thirteen counties, and I left them all behind to pursue this vision of Christ that the Pope conjured before me. My court at Toulouse was the greatest court west of the Alps – now my court is a tent that smells of horse shit. I am a realist, Demetrios. I know I am nearer the end of my life than the beginning, and I came here knowing I would not go back. But that does not mean I should die without dignity. What are Bohemond and Godfrey? Second sons and bastard sons of worthless lines. Did you know that Godfrey only inherited his dukedom because his hunchback uncle was sterile as a mule? What did they give up to come here? What sacrifices did they ever make?’

  Even if there had been an answer, he would not have wanted to hear it – least of all from me. I shrugged, and looked at the floor.

  Raymond sat back and fiddled with his coins again, sliding them across the chequered cloth to form the shape of a cross. ‘After all I have suffered, this ordeal will not have been for nothing. You understand.’

  A silence fell between us, in which the only noise was the clink of coins as Raymond’s hands knocked them together.

  ‘I will not be fighting in your army when we attack Jerusalem.’ I rushed the words out, stumbling and mumbling. Only when I had finished the sentence did I dare to look at Raymond. He sat very still: the only thing that moved was the corner of his empty eye socket, which twitched rapidly.

  ‘Why not?’ The words rasped out like a knife being dragged across a stone. ‘Is it money?’ He scooped a big fistful of coins off the table and shook them at me. ‘I thought you of all men, Demetrios Askiates, were above mere greed.’

  You of all men. It was a clumsy attempt at intimacy, no doubt meant to shame me. Instead, it only hardened me against hi
m. If he had known me at all, he would have known how false his flattery was, how often I had fought for money. The fact that for once I cared nothing for money, that I would have given all the gold in his treasury to not have to do this thing, only added to the insult.

  ‘I have given my allegiance to Duke Godfrey,’ I said shortly.

  With a hiss of rage, Raymond rose to his feet and hurled the coins at me. I felt them rain against my face as I threw up my hands to cover myself, as they bounced away to fall on the ground. On the soft carpet that covered the floor they hardly made a sound.

  ‘Traitor!’ screamed Raymond. ‘You have betrayed me, sold yourself like a whore to my enemies.’ He scrabbled on the table for more coins, pelting me with his pieces of silver. ‘Take them! I took you into my camp and put you under my protection, and this is how you repay me? I stood by your emperor when no one else would. I was his staunchest ally, and all the while Godfrey plotted against him in secret. Have you forgotten that when he was at Constantinople he even tried to wage war on your emperor, he hated him so much?’

  ‘My family are in Jerusalem,’ I said simply. ‘I have to reach them before they get lost in the slaughter. For that, I must follow whoever will lead me inside those walls soonest.’

  ‘And you think that I will not?’ Raymond pounded his fists on the table, so that the remaining coins leapt in the air. The scales toppled over with a crash. ‘I will prove you wrong, Greek. I will be over those walls before Godfrey, before Tancred, before all the liars and cowards who have betrayed me. I will seize its strongholds and towers and make myself lord of Jerusalem, though the devil himself come to take it from me. And you will beg me to release your family, Greekling, as I begged you to stand with me now.’

  If there had not been a table between us, I think he would have knocked me to the ground. Instead, he hissed between his teeth, ‘Go!’

  I went. The last I saw of him, he was kneeling on the floor, gathering up the coins he had hurled at me and weeping.

  That was Sunday. On Monday I spent the day trying to avoid Sigurd’s fury: he had not reacted well when he heard I had volunteered us as mules to drive Godfrey’s siege tower. On Tuesday his temper had cooled, at least to the point where it simmered rather than boiled. By Wednesday it was forgotten. Word went through the army that the final assault would begin next morning, and suddenly there was no time for anything. The hours seemed to slip by like water, and still we had blades to sharpen, armour to oil and dents to hammer out of our shields. A troop of women left the camp at dawn and did not reappear until sundown, returning with skins and buckets of water that they had filled from springs many miles away. The priests recited masses and prayers throughout the day for the endless procession of knights and pilgrims who flocked to them seeking communion, confession and blessing. I wondered how many of those gulping down the transubstantiated bread believed their next meal would be in the celestial city in the presence of Christ. Even Sigurd, who had never entirely let go the pagan gods of his ancestors, disappeared that afternoon to make his confession. Thomas went for much longer and returned with a fiery determination filling his eyes.

  That evening we gathered around our camp fire for the last time. A red sun flamed in the west; the hot urgency of the day had cooled into stillness, and now we sat and tried to replenish our strength before the onslaught. Sigurd wiped a rag over an axe that was already sharp enough to split a hair in two, while Thomas wound a fresh strip of hide around the grip of his shield. I took two twigs I had rescued from the kindling pile and methodically cut the thorns away with my knife, stripping them smooth. When that was done I laid them across each other at right angles and wound a piece of twine over the join to form a crude cross.

  ‘Have thoughts of the battle brought you back to God?’ Sigurd asked.

  I kept my eyes on my work and did not answer. The truth was that I needed a cross to wear in the battle, to mark myself as a Christian if we succeeded in getting inside the city. Once I had believed in its power to save my soul; now I only saw its power to protect me from the violence of men.

  Sigurd took my silence for assent. ‘It’s as well. We’ll need all the help He can give us tomorrow, if He doesn’t damn the Franks for being so stupid as to attack the strongest corner of the city.’

  I shrugged. The open ground that divided the armies, barely a bowshot wide, ended in a shallow ditch that then rose into the outer wall, a low barrier designed more to impede an attack than withstand it. The Egyptians would not defend that for long. They would retreat up onto the main ramparts and rain death down on us from there, fully fifty feet high, and guarded on the corner by a vast tower. The tower of Goliath, they called it, and I feared it was with good reason.

  ‘You won’t topple that with a sling and a stone,’ said Sigurd, following my gaze to the tower. ‘It’s madness to attack there.’

  It was, and the Fatimids had had almost a month to prepare for it. They had spent every day of the last four weeks repairing those walls and strengthening them, filling them with arms and men and supplies. They had not even tried to hide it. When we attacked there the next day, it would be against the strongest, best-defended corner of the city. Not for the first time, a shiver of doubt ran through me as I wondered if I had chosen the right path by abandoning Raymond.

  I looked at Thomas. Ever since he had returned from the mass he had barely spoken a word. There had always been a distance between us, ever since I first hauled him out of a fountain in Constantinople. His marrying Helena had narrowed it, for a time, but in the past month I had felt it stretch wider than ever.

  ‘Tomorrow, God willing, we’ll be standing beside the tomb where Christ himself lay.’

  ‘Or lying in our own graves,’ Sigurd added.

  Thomas laid his shield against his legs so that it covered them like a skirt. ‘Better to be dead in the next world than alive in this,’ he said softly.

  I stared at him across the fire. The hot haze that rose from the coals seemed to melt his features like wax, so I could barely recognise him. How deeply had the wound of Helena and Everard’s capture struck him that he could say such things? With a crush of shame I saw how little I had noticed him this past month, how superficial my care had been. With my own wounds so raw, it had been too easy.

  I crossed myself, more out of habit than belief, and saw Thomas sneer at my false piety. ‘You cannot give up on this world – not while your wife and son are held captive. There is no other.’

  ‘Lift your eyes higher, old man. Of course there is another world. And it is a better place than this.’ He tossed a leaf onto the coals and watched it curl and shrivel to ash. ‘Our world is a dying ember; that world is the sun.’

  ‘But there is no point trying to get from here to there.’

  ‘No!’ Thomas banged his fist on the rim of his shield, like a warrior before battle. ‘The point is not to get from our world to that one. The point is to bring that world here, to remake it on earth.’

  I shook my head in disgust. ‘You sound like Peter Bartholomew.’

  For a moment Thomas did not reply. In the everchanging firelight, his face seemed to churn with indecision. I could see part of him wanting to abandon the argument, but another part – a stronger part – could not let go.

  ‘Why did we come here – why did any of us come here – if not to try and make the world more perfect?’

  ‘You cannot perfect the world with bloodshed,’ I said sharply.

  ‘No? Then how do you plan to rescue your daughters?’

  I shook my head in frustration, trying to sift the sediment that clouded my thoughts. ‘Arnulf and his followers don’t want to perfect this world. They want to throw it all out and start anew, remake it entirely.’

  ‘And what is wrong with that? That is the inheritance promised in the Gospels. Why not seize it? Why struggle day by day to mend this sick and broken world, when in one glorious moment we could cure it?’

  ‘You don’t cure something by killing it.’

&
nbsp; ‘Perhaps the sickness has spread so far there is no alternative.’

  ‘No!’ I stamped my foot, lifting a cloud of dust. ‘And if it has, it is not for us to decide. Arnulf preaches that we should kill every man, woman and child inside that city in our impatience to bring on the kingdom of heaven. Every one – including your wife and son, my children and grandchildren. Can that be right?’

  Thomas looked uncertain. ‘Perhaps that is the price of the kingdom of heaven.’

  ‘I do not believe that. But even if it was, there is no man alive who could demand payment.’ I tried to calm myself. Speaking more surely than I felt, I said, ‘God made the kingdom of heaven as an ideal, an example for men to dream of. It is not a place that we can reach except when He calls us there. It is certainly not a place we can call into being.’

  A tear trickled down Thomas’s face, though I could not tell if it was of rage or sorrow. ‘Then why does He tempt us with it?’

  ‘Maybe to see if we resist.’

  με

  ‘Wake up.’

  I couldn’t wake – I had not been asleep. I opened my eyes to see a Frankish sergeant with a long moustache looking down on me.

  ‘Is it dawn already?’ It seemed only minutes since I had gone to bed. Around me, all was dark.

  ‘Barely midnight. Get your armour on and follow me.’

  He led us swiftly down the hill to the place where the great siege tower, Magog, stood in its pomp. It disappeared into the darkness, ready to lay siege to the stars themselves for all I could see. Or perhaps that was wrong. As my eyes balanced with the night, it seemed that the tower was shorter than I remembered it. Perhaps it was the night playing tricks on me.

  I heard the grate of wood rubbing together, a slither and a thud. And then, in a dialect I did not understand, a succession of short, hard words that sounded like curses.