In the refectory, we have a lunch of hummus and peppers in oil, with a glass of red wine from a Trappist monastery near Latrun. Father Prosper asks me where I am staying; he says I can move to the guest rooms at the École Biblique free, as I am a legitimate researcher. I explain that I have paid for three weeks at the American Colony Hotel, and after that I will take him up gratefully on his offer. He says I may use the library to write my thesis; he will confirm this with the Prior. I don’t reveal that my project is a sinecure, possibly with undertones of unrequited Greek love.
Father Prosper tells me that my father spent five days walking all over the battlefield of Hattin, where, on 4 July 1187, Saladin was said to have captured the True Cross. My father slept on the ground at night. Perhaps he was trying to sense through mystic channels the real truth. But I am also beginning to understand that Israel is a place where every rock and wadi is invested with significance; the difficulty is that they are semaphoring different messages to different people.
Still, I can also see why my father might have camped out on the Horns of Hattin: the terrible loss of the Crusader forces at Hattin, and the capture of Jerusalem a few weeks later, were a call to arms that the red-haired, red-garbed, six-foot-five Richard the Lionheart, King of England, Duke of Normandy, Count of Poitou, the poster-boy of the belligerents, could not resist. That year he took the cross: his mind was inflamed with the dream of taking back Jerusalem from the infidel.
4
The Horns of Hattin
I have spent the night in my sleeping bag on the spot where Guy de Lusignan, the King of Jerusalem, pitched his red tent (red seems to have been fashionable among the Frankish Crusaders) up on the Horns of Hattin, overlooking the Lake of Galilee. Down below, along the water, was Saladin’s vast encampment. Like Guy – like my father – I am facing east. In our world-view, all trouble comes from the east. Down there, the lake is taking on the battered sheen of old cutlery.
It is not a profound thought, but I am aware that the lake would have looked exactly the same eight hundred years ago, and exactly the same when my father spent his three nights here. Now the surface of this biblical water is being brushed with a gleaming molten wash, applied in broad strokes. The sky above the low hills beyond the lake is touched with silver, shot with pink, but the sun proper is still some way off. These shards of colour are the heralds of what is to come. I think of the banners and flags of an approaching army. Or of a sophisticated ice cream.
King Guy’s forces had moved out to Sephoris where there was plenty of water when news came that Saladin had crossed the Jordan and was heading for Tiberias. Saladin was incensed because Reynald de Châtillon, Master of Kerak, had attacked and plundered a caravan from Mecca, despite the truce the Latin Kingdom and Saladin’s caliphate had made. Saladin wanted revenge. The Grand Master of the Temple, Gerard de Ridfort, in his ceremonial white, emblazoned with a huge red cross, tried to persuade King Guy to move towards Tiberias. One of those besieged was the wife of Count Raymond of Tripoli and she had sent a messenger asking for help. Despite this, Raymond advised against moving towards Tiberias. The besieged, he said, were in no immediate danger: Saladin was preparing a trap; the Crusader army was twenty miles away from Tiberias; it would not last long in the parched countryside. It was up to Saladin to move.
Both Grand Master Gerard and Reynald de Châtillon accused Raymond of Tripoli of being a coward or in league with Saladin. They cited chivalric duty, pointedly. For all that, Raymond’s advice was accepted by the council. But Guy, who always listened to the last opinion he was offered, changed his mind when Grand Master Gerard crept into his tent and asked, ‘Sire, are you going to trust a traitor?’ Guy decided to advance; the heralds were sent out, trumpets blaring. In appalling heat the vast army of one thousand two hundred knights and fifteen thousand infantry marched all day over the Galilean hills until the Knights Templars, the hard men, themselves said their horses could go no further without water. The well they were relying on proved to be dry and Saladin had ordered all the other wells en route poisoned; now he blocked the route to the water below.
Raymond of Tripoli said, ‘Ah, Lord God, the war is over. We are dead men. The kingdom is finished.’
The Christian army made uneasy camp on the Horns of Hattin, horribly exposed. The army was made up of large and small contingents of Genoese, Greeks, Germans, Dalmatians, Serbs, Sicilians, French, English, Pisans, Patzinaks, Poitevins, Russians, Bulgars, Langobardians, Lombardians, Provençals, Venetians, Tuscans, Bretons, Brabançons, Flemings, Gascons, Spaniards, Burgundians and Normans. Down below was an army of Egyptians, Kurds, Arabs, Turks, Armenians and Sudanese numbering thirty thousand.
All night the exhausted and dehydrated Crusaders were harassed and kept awake; before dawn they could hear the calls to prayer from below where the thirty thousand were readying themselves for battle. These were the same calls that I had heard from Room 6 in the American Colony Hotel.
As the sun suddenly stripped the darkness off the hills like used sheets, the Crusaders were offered a terrifying sight, described by Saladin’s secretary or kdtib, Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani:
A swelling ocean of whinnying chargers, swords and cuirasses, iron-tipped lances like stars, crescent swords, Yemenite blades, yellow banners, standards red as anemones and coats of mail glittering like pools, swords polished bright as streams of water, feathered bows as blue as hummingbirds, helmets gleaming above curveting chargers.
The Crusaders were in the trap.
Now the Saracens set light to the dry scrub, sending choking clouds of smoke up the hill, blinding the Christians as the Saracens took up battle stations, with Saladin at the centre, surrounded by his loyal Mamelukes. The Bishop of Acre, standing in for the Patriarch of Jerusalem, raised the True Cross. The Saracens sent wave after wave of cavalry against the Franks who repulsed them, each time more weakly. King Guy had his tent moved to the summit of the hill. He ordered Raymond of Tripoli to break through to the water: a surcoat over his armour, emblazoned with a red cross on a yellow background, Raymond mounted his horse. Balian of Ibelin, his surcoat decorated with a white cross, immediately followed. They led their knights in a charge down the hill; but Saladin ordered Taki ed-Din to open their ranks, so that Raymond and Balian galloped harmlessly and futilely through. They could not attack from behind the lines, and headed for Tripoli, so escaping the massacre that was to follow. Armenian archers sent showers of arrows – ‘clouds of locusts’ – at the Frankish army. Although tormented by thirst and aware that they were doomed, the Crusaders kept on attacking. A Muslim chronicler, Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad, wrote:
They were closely beset as in a noose, while still marching on as though being driven to a death that they could see before them, certain of their doom and destruction and knowing that the following day they would be visiting their graves.
Now I hear the armies. It is cold: I am still in my sleeping bag. I can hear a great roar, the clashing of armour, the shouts of Dieu lo vult – God wills it, and Allahu Akbar – God is great, and Caelum denique – Heaven at last rising with the Templar cry, Le Beau-séant, honouring their black over white banner. I can hear the ringing of swords, the thundering of galloping knights, the wasp-music of the arrows, the blacksmith collisions of the knights, the whinnying agony of the wounded, blameless horses, the incoherent appeals to God of the injured – all unanswered. There were said to have been rivers of blood. Did the blood really cascade down the hill, across the Roman road, which to this day follows the shoreline, and into the reedy fingers of the lake? I think it must be a figure of speech. The thin soil would certainly have sucked it up.
Thirty thousand died in a few hours. In his red tent, King Guy surrendered and was taken down the hill towards Saladin’s pavilion.
Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani, who was present, wrote:
Saladin invited the King [Guy] to sit beside him, and when Arnat [Reynald] entered in his turn, he seated him next to his king and reminded him of his misdeeds. ‘How many times have you
sworn an oath and violated it? How many times have you signed agreements you have never respected?’ Reynald answered through a translator, ‘Kings have always acted thus. I did nothing more.’ During this time King Guy was gasping with thirst, his head dangling as though drunk, his face betraying great fright. Saladin spoke reassuring words to him, had cold water brought, and offered it to him. The King drank, then handed what remained to Reynald, who slaked his thirst in turn. The Sultan then said to Guy: ‘You did not ask permission before giving him water. I am therefore not obliged to grant him mercy.’ After pronouncing these words, the Sultan smiled, mounted his horse, and rode off, leaving the captives in terror. He supervised the return of the troops, and then came back to his tent. He ordered Reynald brought there, then advanced before him, sword in hand, and struck him between the neck and the shoulder blade. When Reynald fell, he cut off his head and dragged the body by its feet to the King, who began to tremble. Seeing him thus upset, Saladin said to him in a reassuring tone, ‘This man was killed only because of his maleficence and perfidy.’
A small detail, which Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani does not include, is that the water that was to be Reynald’s last drink was cooled with snow from the summits of distant mountains.
Saladin himself cut off Reynald’s head at Hattin, I think, as a symbolic act. Decapitation has a macabre significance for the executioner. It suggests that mere killing is not the object, but that the deliberate severing of the face and the brain from the rest of the body is the most final death, sending an unmistakable message. When Anne Boleyn was beheaded by Henry VIII, I can only imagine that he intended to snuff out a life in the least equivocal way.
Now Saladin ordered the execution of all the Knights Templars apart from the Grand Master, Gerard de Ridfort.
Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani wrote:
Saladin ordered that they should be beheaded, choosing to have them dead rather than in prison. With him was a band of scholars and sufis and a certain number of devout men and ascetics; each begged to be allowed to kill one of them, and drew his sword and rolled back his sleeve. Saladin, his face joyful, was sitting on his dais; the unbelievers showed black despair.
Many Templars volunteered themselves for execution in solidarity. The bodies were left for the hyenas and jackals. Thousands of ordinary soldiers were sent as slaves to Damascus. The True Cross was attached upside down to a lance and taken with the caravan of captives. There were so many captives for sale in Damascus that their price fell to 3 dinars. One of the inhabitants is said to have bought a prisoner in exchange for a pair of sandals.
Count Raymond of Tripoli’s words – ‘The kingdom is finished’ – were prophetic. Saladin kept Guy in custody for months as an insurance policy while he destroyed as many of the Crusader castles as he could before he took Jerusalem in September and only then did he trade Guy. Guy gave his oath that he would not take up arms. He renounced the oath immediately he was free.
The Holy City was lost, the True Cross was lost. It was a catastrophe which shook the whole of the Christian world profoundly.
Richard the Lionheart took the cross in response. It is reported that when Saladin received word of his intentions, he was afraid: Malik al-Inkitar was coming.
But Richard was delayed, defending his empire in France, and resisting his brother’s ambitions. He was unable to set sail until 1190.
The sun is now striking the water itself. The lake is still, although a few trucks and taxis are passing, from this distance apparently very slowly; with the advent of the light the sound of conflict subsides. I must now accept that perhaps I was dreaming. But this place makes persistent assaults on one’s imagination so that it is difficult to separate the real and the imagined.
I pack up my things. I am stiff after a restless night. There are scorpions in these hills, and many times in the night I imagined they were sharing my sleeping bag. I have arranged to meet an Arab taxi driver down below at a stall on the old road that skirts the lake. On the way back to Jerusalem, he tells me that Mossad orchestrated a recent bombing of a bus in Tel Aviv, which I had read about in Haaretz. I feel the urge to reach across the torn seats of the Mercedes. He sees me as a deluded backpacker, lowlife. I want to tell him that right here, thirty thousand people lost their lives for just this kind of persistent ignorance.
We set off for the American Colony. I need a bath – a wallow – in Room 6, but most of all I need to go down to the bar below the hotel, not particularly to drink, but to be among those who go there to escape the tensions and intensity of Jerusalem. Many of the regulars are journalists in search of information; the bar is famous for its meetings and assignations. Down there in the Cellar Bar an ironic good humour prevails; these people are professionally acquainted with delusion. Also, I have been seeing a young woman I met there one night. Her name is Noor, a Canadian-Arab journalist. I call her, and she says she will meet me. The taxi driver turns in his seat.
‘You have sweetheart?’
His gold teeth are winking obscenity.
I don’t answer.
‘She is Jew?’
The obsession that never goes away.
5
The Levant
I have been here nearly four weeks. Already I feel that I am becoming a Levantine. This world of ambiguity and disillusion and the shadows of past glory and the whispers of endless intrigue are getting to me in ways I hadn’t expected. I have walked the Old City ceaselessly. I have, with Father Prosper’s help, gained access to the closed chapel in the depths of the Holy Sepulchre. This little chapel is said to have been built on the spot where Helena, the mother of Constantine, found the True Cross.
Levantines, I think, don’t make a clear distinction between what is true and what they would like to believe is true. As a way of seeing the world, it has its charms; certainly this crypt is ancient, but it is not clear how Helena would have found the True Cross here in ad 328. It was said that she was led here by a vision. I emailed a professor in Oxford, an expert on the Holy Sepulchre: he thought it likely that what Helena discovered was some of the scaffolding left over after the destruction of the Temple of Venus, built by Hadrian on the site of the crucifixion. She found, or was sold, the titulus, the incised inscription bearing the words: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, along with some of the beams of the cross itself and part of the crosses of the thieves crucified with Christ. The inscription was in three languages, Hebrew, Latin and Greek. It was in mirror-writing from right to left in the Hebrew fashion. Helena had it sawn in half, and took one piece to Rome. When, in the fifteenth century, this section of the titulus was discovered hidden behind plaster in Santa Croce, in Rome, which retains some of the walls of Helena’s palace, Leonardo da Vinci rushed to see it. The Oxford professor told me that he believed the crypt was built in the depths of what had once been a stone quarry, used for building purposes. I didn’t ask him what special interest Leonardo may have had, for fear he would imagine I was a mythomane.
I have grown very close to Noor. She has red hair, the deep russet colour of a gun dog’s coat, which falls around her face and onto her shoulders. Her skin is almost golden. She speaks like a Canadian. (For instance she says ‘aboot’ for ‘about’.) She has the innocence of a Canadian too, although she has seen – she is unwilling to tell me the details – some terrible things in the Middle East. She is also closely related to one of the substantial Palestinian families of Jerusalem. Her glamour makes me feel both uneasy and blessed. Although I know her body intimately now, with all its little uplands and valleys, there is a hinterland to which I am still a stranger. I couldn’t say exactly what it means, but Noor is intensely female. She belongs to an altogether different species of womanhood from Emily. Emily has the gawky vulnerability of a newborn antelope, her limbs rather loosely connected, so that there is something of the marionette in her movements. It’s endearing in its way, but also needy.
I have maxed out my credit card. It has an insubstantial look at the best of times, entry-level. It’s an old stud
ent card, never upgraded. I used the last of my credit to book an extra week at the hotel because I can more easily conduct our liaison there, particularly urgent as she is going on assignment soon.
It’s a short walk, sometimes a libidinous scamper, from the bar, our feet clacking goatishly on the slabs. (I am thinking of buying some Ottoman slippers.) She leaves early because she is living with her relatives somewhere not far away and they expect her. She is driven away in a black Mercedes. I don’t like to ask her if the car is armour-plated, but it does have a bulky look. The driver also has a bulky look, as if he is wearing a bullet-proof vest. Sometimes I stand at the front door of the hotel as she drives away. She looks intriguingly mysterious. I know nothing about her life beyond the hotel. But in bed she tells me that she loves me, which calms me.
After her adventures in Sheffield, Emily was awkward in bed and then, alarmingly quickly, she became distracted as if she was having sex with a spirit, who was standing in for me. She was expecting a healing, even spiritual, epiphany, and when it happened her body was racked fiercely and she cried, and then whimpered, her pale eyes swimming into focus, as if she was trying to remember who I was. Her painful realisation that it was not the hairy littérateur – and fraud – Edgar Gaylard, ruined our last sexual encounter. Also, I thought Emily looked increasingly like Virginia Woolf. She rearranged her hair into a bun, primly, without speaking to me. I had the impression she was trying to destroy the evidence.
Lion Heart Page 4