by Mike Ashley
I nodded, baking, sweat dripping from the joints of my armour. I’d have to be very stupid to be as stupid as I looked.
Three palm trees this time. I dismounted at sunset, exhausted. “You stink,” Leyla said. “Swim.”
“A knight bathes only for Easter.”
Without warning she tugged my tabard. I recoiled, hand on sword, but her look was of wonder. “Is it true?” She nodded at the Cross of sang réal. “Is that truly the blood of your Jesus?”
I pulled off my tabard and hung it reverently from an olive bough.
“Is it true the founders of your Order found the sepulchre of Jesus beneath Jerusalem, and you wear your saviour’s undying blood?” She knew I would not reply. Suddenly she said, “Perhaps there are wonders enough for all to be found in Jerusalem.”
I knelt, bathing my face in the pond between the trees. “I shan’t look,” she called behind me. “See, I’m going to my prayers.” Her voice became distant. I looked round and saw only the hills.
The cool waters invited me. I lay my sword close to the water’s edge. As I discarded my armour and chain-mail a feeling of freedom made me laugh suddenly. My leathers and linen shift took only a moment, then I ripped the hair-shirt from my sticky flesh. My under-garb was rotted by the heat and sweat of the past six months; I peeled the soggy mess from my legs and felt evening air caress me. Sand gave way under my feet as I launched myself forward into the delicious cool waters, floundering to the middle.
But the oasis was deeper than it looked, and I cannot swim. I was sinking.
She called from the shore, “Perhaps you are the devil, Sir Roger.”
I blew water from my nose and mouth, splashing. At last I felt the blessed sand catch my toes. “Turn away!”
She laughed silently. Even as she turned her back, her shaking shoulders mocked me. I crawled ashore and sat with my back to her, pulling on my clothes. “Stop,” she called wonderingly. Had she looked, and seen the marks of the whip? But no, she marvelled only at my shirt. “What, woven of hair? It must feel unbearable.”
“Not compared to your company.”
“What can possibly justify such self-inflicted suffering?”
“Every day of my life, it reminds me that I am a fallen creature, miserable servant of the one true God.”
I turned, dressed. Leyla was staring at me, her wide-open eyes dark in the dusk, gold-flecked. I had the strange impression that her veil had been off her face and she’d replaced it the moment I turned.
“No, sir knight,” she said. “I do not believe you are fallen.”
At the hour of Lauds I rose and prayed in the dark. Soon the hour for Prime would come, and daylight. I prayed again and heard Leyla at her prayers. Such different gods; how strange the prayers should sound the same. We rode without words, both knowing that our journey to Jerusalem was not ending but just beginning.
As we topped the rise the sun lifted over the shining domes, minarets, shield-walls and battlements of the City of God, divine oasis in the desert. Tears sprang to my eyes.
“Al-Quds is beautiful,” she agreed.
The faithful were called to prayer by horns in one quarter, tolling bells in another, and everywhere chanting muezzins in their tall towers set the rooftops echoing. I rode through the great gate in the company of the woman, straight-backed, in my shining armour and white cloak and Cross of Jesus’s blood, who was crucified here.
Jewish, Christian, Muslim beggars, wearing every imaginable mutilation, fell back crying and wailing as we rode up the steep rutted street. By the market we turned right, clattering up steps and along alleyways. I averted my gaze; the immense Temple built by our Order over Solomon’s temple was broken down for stone, its mighty colonnades melting back into the city.
Belmondo’s white house lay on a busy square, cleverly adjoining Jews on one side and Christians on another, with the new fine houses of Muslim merchants on the third side. The house was as I remembered, a cunning mixture of all three styles. Chained pails of leftover food, now empty, remained outside for the poor. The gate swung and we rode into a deep courtyard enclosed by the house on three sides. The fourth side was a high wall, topped with spikes, pierced only by the gate. Our horses drank from the fountain.
“A room is prepared,” Leyla said. “My father commands that this house is yours.”
I’d no time for rest. “I need your father’s permission to visit Belmondo.”
“He knows you are here.” Someone laid out tables of sweetmeats, sherbet, turmeric eggs, water jugs, wine jugs. Leyla tossed me a sweet confection then saw my face, took it back, ate half, giggled, and did not die. It was not poisoned. She offered me the other half, but rather than risk the feminine contamination of her hand I chose another.
“I’ll see the room where Haran was murdered.”
She summoned a cringing servant or caretaker, the same who’d brought the sweetmeats I think, to be my guide. I stared around me, amazed: the house was a wreck inside, the tile floors broken into the soil beneath, plaster torn from the walls. I followed my guide around rubble and smashed furniture. Saladin’s men had ripped the place apart.
Leyla spoke behind my shoulder. “What room was this?” I turned on her, startled, but she gave her sideways shrug. “I may not leave your side.”
“Shouldn’t you be reporting to your father my habits, strengths, weaknesses?”
She sounded amused. “You did not see, at the city gate, one of the beggars slip a tight-rolled paper from my sleeve?”
I hadn’t. I tried to ignore her, but her light footsteps always followed me. “You!” I called to our guide. He turned, bowing, almost too old for sense. I spoke loudly to make him understand. “This was Belmondo’s dining hall, I remember?”
He spoke gibberish, white beard flapping. Leyla translated. “Many people, much food. Music, dancing girls, boys.” She rattled off a few questions then nodded at the old fool’s replies. “He’s no one, an unprofitable servant because he’s lived so long. No one noticed him. He hid in the corridor listening to the music.”
“Belmondo and Haran sat together at the top table?” In response the old man nodded eagerly, pointing at now-overturned tables, couches with the stuffing pulled out, broken platters. I raised my voice. “Belmondo and Haran, friends?”
“For many seasons,” Leyla translated. “Good business. Much trust. You do not have to shout.”
I asked quietly, “Did they drink wine together?”
Leyla said at once: “Alcohol does not pass our lips.”
But the old man spoke. She hesitated. “When the other guests had gone, Belmondo and Haran stayed up drinking wine.”
“Still friends?”
“Laughing, happy,” she translated. The old man grinned through stained teeth, nodding. “Haran carried something on a chain around his neck. He showed it to Belmondo.”
“A rose-coloured jewel?”
“It flashed.”
I said, “Obviously no one has questioned this man before. Why not?”
“He’s a fool,” she said impatiently, getting angry. “Who wants to hear gossip that Haran of blessed memory drank wine on the night he died, and in his cups showed off something he shouldn’t?”
“I.”
“You’re a Christian. No vice is too low for you. Your religion is cannibalism, you change wine into blood, bread into flesh –”
“Your father asked my help.”
She shut her eyes, then opened them. “Of course.” She listened calmly to the old servant. “He heard they parted and went upstairs, Belmondo to his bedroom on the left side of the house, Haran on the right.”
The stairs were broad, leading to an equally broad and airy three-sided balcony overlooking us. “But after bed-time,” I mused, “Belmondo left his wife’s side, padded around that balcony in his nightshirt in plain view of anyone here below, murdered Haran and returned clutching the jewel?”
“Obviously that’s what happened.”
“The priceless jewel Har
an looked after but didn’t own. Did it belong to your father?”
Again she hesitated. “Perhaps.”
“Why the strange arrangement?”
“Because.” She shook her head. “I cannot answer. The matter is too sensitive.”
I went upstairs, looking around the balcony, then called over the rail, “How was Haran killed? Strangled? Stabbed?”
“Belmondo stabbed him repeatedly around the heart. The knife has not been found.”
I beckoned the old man. “Haran’s room, you show.” While he climbed the stairs one gasping step at a time I strode to the left, opening doors off the balcony. One upstairs room, grander than the rest, had been torn apart, the bed ripped by the searchers, tapestries slashed, feathers spilt from the bolsters. Belmondo’s room.
I followed the old man around to the balcony’s third side, to Haran’s room. Here the broken couches were spattered with blood, blood on the rugs and wardrobes, blood down the walls, even the inside of the door. The attack had been frenzied, yet woke no one. Then I noticed how heavy and well-fitting the door was. The murderer had thoughtfully closed it before the deed. I slid the inside bolt closed, then opened it again to show the clean tip.
“The murderer was covered in blood.”
“Do you see my father’s wisdom now, Christian? Belmondo’s whole family aided him in the crime, disposed of his bloodstained clothes, washed him. One, probably Reuben-William, ran out with the jewel and hid it. It could be anywhere in Jerusalem. The whole family are guilty.”
I examined the wardrobes, then moved to the end wall. A door led to a small bare corridor, a gutted straw mattress. Haran’s personal body-servant must have slept here, inexplicably unwoken, while his master struggled and died. A doorway opened on the room of commode. I held my nose; zealous searchers had smashed the seat and scattered the foul contents. Stepping back I noticed a second door inset discreetly in the corridor wall, used, I supposed, by household servants. I followed steep steps down to a short hall, one door to the kitchens, another to the street. I returned shaking my head.
The old man muttered a few words, grinning slyly.
“Sometimes a guest would wish to entertain a visitor . . . privately.” Leyla would not meet my eyes.
“A woman?” I crossed myself.
“At least one,” she said.
The old man grunted. Leyla stared firmly at the wall. “In Haran’s case . . . Haran preferred . . . young men.”
“The exact word?”
“A boy. Boys!” she burst out. “Sodomy! I know this is difficult for you, Christian, but it is not uncommon.”
I gazed around the destroyed room. “If Haran had a boy or boys in here that night, we’ll never know. He would have sent his body-servant away – intimate moments, the one time a man’s apart from his servant. The servant had probably procured them from the street and knew to make himself scarce until his master had finished his pleasure.”
Leyla swallowed. “That’s exactly what happened. The servant swore it.”
“You’re sure he didn’t lie?”
“A man dying a ghastly death does not lie.”
“He’s dead?”
“Of course. That’s how we know he told the truth.”
I leant on the wall. Anyone could have come upstairs from the street, anyone sneaked through the kitchens.
“The whole of Jerusalem could have killed Haran,” I said. “What hour did Belmondo retire?”
The old man held up five fingers. The fifth hour of the night. Haran had been killed in the early hours, some time between the boys’ departure and the body-servant’s return; probably the body-servant had been taking street-pleasures of his own and the murderer, waiting his opportunity here, had struck.
“I suppose there’s no hope of finding them?”
“Ah, so many boys,” the old man said in English. “All will invent any story for gold, or under torture.”
“I need to ask your father –” I told Leyla, and stopped, realising.
The old man chuckled. Servants scuttled around him, pulling away his matted beard and grimy turban, replacing them with clean headgear and shining gowns. The filth was washed from his face. Someone else cleaned the stains from his teeth, then the servants withdrew leaving only bodyguards. A new man stood unbowed before us, about fifty years of age, of Kurdish expression, with sunstruck eyes and pockmarked face. Stood like a king.
Leyla knelt. “Father.”
I looked Satan – Saladin – in the eye, and was filled with awe, horror and wonder.
Leyla kissed his hand.
“Daughter.” He spoke softly, raising her to her feet. “You have done well.”
“Our Christian’s dangerous,” she said. “Cleverer than he looks. And he learns quickly.”
“Yet he remains incorruptible?” I had the terrible, destroying insight that I was not supposed to have come through the desert undefiled by Leyla. I was to have become Satan’s creature, eliciting Belmondo’s confession and the hiding-place of the jewel. The Devil indeed, to treat his own daughter so; he disgusted me.
She smiled behind her veil; I knew her so well. “He’s incorruptible, Father, a pure man, a snow-white knight.”
She made my heart grieve. Still I stared Satan in the eye, my hand on my sword-hilt, yet I could not move. I could not strike him down.
“Then Sir Roger is the very man I hoped for,” he said simply.
What should I believe? He lifted my fingers from the cold steel, taking my hand between his own hands, warm. “Forgive my small deception, Sir Roger. I am indeed Salah, called Saladin in your tongue. I attended the, ah, questioning and know well what happened that night. Are you satisfied now of Belmondo’s guilt?”
“I am satisfied Belmondo did not do it.”
Salah made a small but ferocious gesture. “There is no other alternative.”
“Let me see him.”
“Belmondo!” I called in greeting, but the bed-ridden figure was not the proud Belmondo I remembered, sleek, fat with cunning, brimming with gold-given confidence. This shadow was a broken man, but even so Belmondo would not return my greeting lying down. “Ruth,” he called his wife, but she was not strong enough in her thinned state to lift him. Their son Reuben-William, standing by the arrow-slit twisting beads in his hands, did not seem to realise her plight. Finally she dragged at a bellrope, crying out, “Peter!” and the steward came from a doorway somewhere in the quiet unobtrusive way of such people, helping her lift Belmondo into a wooden chair. When I looked round he was gone, but the boy flinched as though he saw him still.
“Sir Roger, I remember you,” Belmondo quavered. “Pray for me.” He lifted the blanket from his legs. They were parboiled to the knee. The scalded, shiny flesh stuck to my fingertip. No doubt he had received other, more discreet, persuasions as well.
“After such torment,” I marvelled, “you still claim you are innocent?”
“I am innocent!” he cried.
“Then your son must be guilty,” Salah said contemptuously. “Shall we put the boy to the test now? Leyla, call them.”
But instead of calling the torturers she looked to me. I shook my head.
“I know what happened that night,” I said. “The father was not there. The son, too, is innocent of this crime.”
There was a moment of silence while they digested my words: if I was right, that left only the women. Salah rounded on Belmondo’s wife, who cowered into the corner with her two daughters, all three of them screaming and whimpering now. “Women?” he muttered, “but they’re just women. They do nothing without command. Who could command them but Belmondo? He’s still guilty.”
“Let me question them with words, Salah, not terror.” It caught at my heart to beg mercy from Satan. “God will show us the truth. I will give you the murderer and the innocent need not die.”
“I require only a guilty verdict from you,” Salah said, “not divine intervention.” But to my great relief he drew his cloak around him and sat in a
corner-chair, resting his chin thoughtfully in his hand. Leyla remained by the women, watching me with large eyes.
“Is this the only room?” I asked loudly.
Belmondo nodded.
“It’s a prison not a house,” Salah called irritably.
I strode at the boy Reuben-William, who flinched from me. A handsome lad. His mother and sisters screamed at me, begging me to leave him alone.
“A single room,” I agreed, “but with doors nobody notices.” I opened the door the steward had used. Belmondo looked blank for a moment then said, “Oh, but that’s Peter’s room.”
“Peter?”
Belmondo shrugged. “Only my steward.” I gazed at him steadily. “I don’t know, he’s been around the last fifteen, twenty years?”
“More,” his wife said. “An ordinary servant before that.”
“Is Peter a good servant?”
“I suppose so.”
“That’s all?”
“What more is there?” Belmondo sounded baffled. “A household falls apart without a good steward. I’ve never had to reprimand him. He’s the perfect servant, I suppose, if there is such a thing. What’s this to do with –”
I ducked past the door and closed it behind me. I leant back against the thick planks, holding it shut, for there was no bolt, and asked of the shadows: “Would you let your master die for you?”
Peter’s hair was grey but he was not an old man, still strong. The room was narrow and dark, a crowded nest filled by the family’s possessions stacked or fallen down, bags, clothes, shoes, all clean, a few flagons of wine, a bench for him to prepare food, a part-jointed chicken and the knife beside the carcass. Peter looked from me to the knife. The knife that had killed Haran. The knife that so obviously had an innocent purpose that it had never been noticed, just as Peter was never noticed.
His fists unclenched, then he breathed out. “My master . . .” He began again. “My master is an ignorant stupid fool.”
“Rich enough to fill whole churches with silver and gold,” I murmured. “That raises him very close to God.”
Peter’s eyes gleamed silver in the shadows. “He never saw anything important.” He was close to tears. “My master supped with rulers and imams and knights and chevaliers and all the richest and most noble, and never saw what was going on in his own home, under his own nose.”