Pillars of Light

by Jane Johnson

  Behind the stall, other Amazigh were gathering, drawn by the rumpus. They looked militant, angry, like men who’d been subjected to this sort of harassment one time too many and were determined to make a stand. When the naranja-seller did not immediately do as the Templars asked, they tipped his stall over, sending bright fruit tumbling. Then they casually stabbed the trader in the gut and kicked him as he writhed.

  “No!” I couldn’t help myself. I should have remembered the beating I took in London, but in the heat of it I grabbed the first Templar by the arm, and when he turned I punched him in the face once, twice—short, hard punches that did the most damage. He went down groaning, clutching his broken nose. The second came at me, sword in hand. I was trying to draw my blade but the midnight-blue cloak—so unnecessary in the heat—got in the way, tangling around my blade.

  All at once Ezra was in front of me, darting at the knight, dagger in hand. She stuck the blade into his forearm and twisted. There was a sound like wood splintering, then a shriek. He dropped the weapon with a clang and clutched his ruined arm.

  All hell broke loose. Infidels were pouring into the street with meat cleavers and other makeshift weapons, to be met by a stream of Christian fighters, some of whom I recognized as shipmates, and before long we were in the middle of a pitched battle and blood flowed among the cobbles.

  I caught hold of Ezra but she gave me a mad look and tried to tear herself free. I very much feared that if I let go of her she would lay into the Templar knight again.

  “No, leave him, come on!”

  Savaric was running off down the street, never one for a fight. Ezra struggled but I managed to drag her away, and together we merged into the tide of men converging on the little market.

  “Geoffrey de Glanvill!” I said it like a curse.

  Ezra gazed at me, said nothing.

  “That man,” I went on, “the one whose arm you just skewered, he was one of the men who … ah … in Winchelsea—”

  “You don’t forget the man who raped you,” she said calmly. “I wish I’d severed more than his arm, and if I see him again, I bloody well will.”

  We found Savaric back at the house looking pale and sheepish. He spread his hands apologetically. “I’d have just been in your way.”

  What had started with the murder of the naranja-seller escalated to a riot as the sailors and soldiers bound for the Holy Land on a sacred task put their Christian zeal into practice and started slaughtering the remaining Saracens and Jews of Lisbon. For days the rampage continued. Whole quarters of the city were burned, shops and homes looted. The skies were thick with smoke, the streets sticky with blood.

  Memories of London on that terrible coronation day returned, leaving me sweating and trembling like a sick child. I found it hard to sleep. I was seized by nightmares. Every day members of the troupe returned with fresh tales of horror. A group of knights had been set upon and decapitated by Muslims in the alleys; by way of retribution the Templars had set fire to their mosque, their place of worship, at first prayer and slaughtered dozens as they came running out. Muslim women were hauled out into the streets and raped in the name of Christ. No one could keep order—certainly not the local authorities, who were unprepared for such an eruption of violence, or even the commanders of the fleet, whose charges had been cooped up for far too long aboard ship to show any restraint or discipline. In the end, battalions of soldiers were brought in by the Portuguese king to restore order. Many hundreds of our army were thrown into prison to sober up and repent of their wrongdoings, amongst them Quicksilver—taken in a drunken brawl—and Red Will.

  “You were supposed to keep an eye on him,” I reminded the twins.

  “He got away from us,” Hammer lied.

  In the end we found they’d been thrown into the same cell with a load of Frenchmen. Savaric reported that when he came upon them they were sitting together playing knucklebones on the floor of the gaol, laughing like brothers. “Best place for them,” he said on his return. Which meant that not only would they be kept out of further trouble, but also that while they were in custody he wouldn’t have to pay their upkeep.

  The mayhem continued, despite reinforcements to the Lisbon garrison. There was an uneasy atmosphere wherever you went. Before we came there had been a working truce among the different elements of the populace, the different cultures rubbing along without much friction, but ancient animosities had been rekindled, dormant grudges acted upon.

  Savaric told us to keep our heads down and to stay out of trouble, which coincided neatly with our own inclination. For a long while we remained confined to the area immediately adjacent to the merchant’s house, our only exercise being to accompany our master between there and the church, with the occasional visit to the ship to help board supplies. At least this meant no repeat visit to the bordello.

  I’d started taking my drawing things with me, as much to ward off boredom as to practise my sole skill. Down at the quays I drew an old man gutting fish. He came to see what I was doing and stared blankly at the sketch, unable to make any sense of the flat image. I drew children throwing a wooden ball under their mothers’ watchful care, and a woman weaving at a loom set up in a sunny courtyard. A group of black-clad women came past, chattering like jackdaws. When they saw what I was at they made the sign of the evil eye, as if they thought there was some sort of dangerous magic in my sketches. After more instances of this, I decided to stick to drawing buildings, which were unlikely to have an opinion of me or my work.

  Towards the end of the third week in July, after attending the morning mass, I told Savaric I’d like to remain behind. I waved my leather draftsman’s satchel by way of explanation.

  He nodded. “I am sure Reginald would like to see your impression of this church, since he cannot be here in person.”

  The canon, with whom I had managed to exchange a few words, told me that the little church had once been a mosque. He said it quite matter-of-factly, without any shame or awkwardness, and added, “We all worship the same God,” which took me greatly aback. Until then I had been under the impression that Muslims revered some other deity, and this confused me mightily. Why were we crossing seas and continents to fight people who believed much the same as we did? I decided the old priest had meant something different, or that I had misunderstood.

  I wandered about the church, drawing a detail here and there, taking in the elegant pointed arches, the striped pillars, the friezes of carved lettering. Some of the latter had been recently painted over, since they were Islamic writings, but what caught my eye was a small portrait of a holy figure on the eastern wall. Dark-skinned, dark-eyed, hollow-cheeked, with a golden halo that radiated out towards the top corners of the icon. Something within me flipped over at the sight of it, a strange yet familiar flutter. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t reproduce on paper the arresting face on the wall. The rest of the church receded as I tried to capture this one image, but failed again and again: the nose too long, the eyes too close together, the jaw too broad … One last try, from memory this time.

  And then, quite suddenly, there it was. The expression in the eyes, endlessly patient and wise, maybe a little sorrowful, maybe—in another light—a little wry.

  My breath caught, my vision hazing at the edges. “I told you we would meet again, John,” I heard.

  In the shadows was the Moor. I jumped to my feet. Quills, ink, paper flew, and I cried out in despair. The little pot of ink shattered on the floor, spreading in a ruinous black pool across the drawing and the mosaic tiles beneath my feet, like spilled blood.

  When I looked up again, the Moor had vanished.

  20

  It was fearsomely hot for so early in the year, and the news was bad. Malek was on duty inside the door of the sultan’s war tent. In there, apart from the pages and the sultan’s scribe, Imad al-Din, were two men. Once was a spy. The other was Al-Mashtub, one of Salah ad-Din’s senior generals, a warlike Kurdish chieftain who had fought alongside the sultan for much o
f his life.

  “How many ships?” the scribe asked the spy.

  There was a pause, as if the man was calculating. “Ten, maybe more.”

  An uneducated man, Malek decided, unable to count beyond the fingers of his hands. They had to rely on all manner of spies nowadays, things being so disordered. The Christians had broken their supply lines, disrupted their communications. Increasingly they were reduced to passing messages via Akka’s swimmers, men who would brave the blockade of enemy ships, as well as the treacherous currents and tides on this part of the coast.

  “And these huge timbers—tell me again, for it is hard to believe such trees as you have described can possibly exist.”

  “I swear on my faith, sir, that they are as I said—giants among trees, the like of which I have never seen. Not just tall but massive in girth, too.”

  “Can you be more exact?” Imad al-Din’s voice was as sharp as his nose.

  “Eyes deceive when fear has the beholder in his grip,” rumbled Al-Mashtub. But the man was adamant: the timbers were almost the full length of the ships that had brought them, and they were not small ships, either, but good-sized Italian merchant vessels.

  Malek saw the sultan’s eyebrows shoot up. “Thank you for your news.” Almost immediately he regained his equilibrium. “Take this reward, which you will find, I trust, equal to the value of the information you have brought us.”

  The man scurried past Malek, his face already bent over the open pouch, his fingers assessing the contents. A paid informant, then, motivated by profit rather than by faith. And one well able to count dinars, if not ships’ masts.

  “The Franj will use those timbers to construct siege towers, towers that will top Akka’s walls,” Salah ad-Din said.

  Al-Mashtub snorted. “We will burn them if they try.”

  “The caliph’s naft has failed on that score thus far.” The caliph of Baghdad had sent a quantity of the combustible substance and five alchemists from his city to make more and oversee its use—rat-faced men with shifty eyes and a language they had developed to speak secretly amongst themselves. They were embedded in Akka, but so far the artificial fire they manufactured had not managed to do significant damage to the Christian war-engines.

  “They need to make larger pots, then,” Al-Mashtub declared. “It’s obvious, is it not?”

  At the door, Malek bristled: this was no way to address the Commander of the Faithful. Al-Mashtub might have been loyal and brave in battle, but he could be blunt.

  “It is not the size of the vessel that counts,” the sultan said, looking at his general pointedly, “but the contents. The naft doesn’t burn fiercely enough to get a hold.”

  “Nonsense.” The general contradicted him with a cheerful disregard for protocol. “Make ’em bigger. It’s a matter of scale.”

  “There’s not enough clay in the whole of Akka to make fire pots that large,” said Imad al-Din. “Nor mangonels with sufficient power to fire them.”

  Salah ad-Din added, “Let us talk of this no longer. Friend, go take some rest. We shall look forward to your refreshed presence this evening.” It was as abrupt a dismissal as Malek had ever heard the sultan deliver.

  Al-Mashtub got to his feet, made his obeisances and tramped out of the tent, his fingers tangling in his huge beard, a habit he had when discomfited.

  The sultan began dictating letters. He had been sending them out regularly for the past few months across the entire caliphate. Begging letters, Malek’s father, Baltasar, would have deemed them, Malek thought. Letters to princes and emirs requesting men and money—to Harran and Mosul, Egypt and Nisbin. Receiving no useful reply, he had then sent his friend, the qadi of the army, Baha ad-Din, the only man he would entrust with the task, to whip up support in person from the princes of Mesopotamia. The qadi had not yet returned.

  Reinforcements had arrived with the spring, but they were greatly outnumbered by the Christian troops that had flooded in, ship by ship, ever since the winter storms had dispersed. And that was before the arrival of the vast German army rumoured to be on its way. Malek had heard terrifying numbers mentioned: hundreds of thousands of men. He felt his fear for his family like a burning coal in his stomach.

  The sultan rose now to pace the tent, still dictating. “I do not believe you have grasped the extreme gravity of the situation. I must humbly inform you that the army that marches upon us—that is even now approaching Constantinople—is a great dark flood that will destroy everything in its path. How shaming is it that where the Franj of the West have acted in concert at the behest of the popes of Rome to take back the Holy City, our call to jihad has been all but ignored? Is it not shaming that there should be such apathy among the Faithful when there is such zeal among the Polytheists?

  “The Franj army is supplied by ships more plentiful than the waves, and for every one of their soldiers who falls, a thousand spring up in his place. We are desperately short here not only of men, but of weapons, food, forage, equipment and the money with which to pay for all of these things. If we do not receive what is necessary then Akka will surely fall, and with it will go all hopes that our sacred endeavour will keep the infidel at bay and prevent the spread of their shadow over all we hold dear.”

  It was only the use of the word “humbly” that gave Malek a clue as to the recipient: the missive must be to the Caliph of Baghdad. That the sultan had taken such a tone with such a man was proof indeed of his desperation.

  Within weeks the siege towers of the Franj were constructed: tall enough to overtop the city walls. Great teams of men wheeled them under cover of darkness. Sheltered by the crenellations on the towers, Franj archers duelled with the garrison bowmen to deadly effect, while beneath their cover other men filled in the great ditch surrounding the city with brush and waste and rocks, and the bodies of the dead—both the Christians shot by the Muslim bowmen and the corpses of those who had fallen from the walls—and inch by inch the towers crept closer. Soon they would be close enough to drop their bridges onto the walls and the enemy would flood from them into Akka.

  True to the sultan’s observation, fire pots hurled from the city made little mark on the monsters: the Franj had mantled them with hardened leather, off which the pots bounced harmlessly. Where they did strike, all they managed was char and smoke.

  Malek watched helplessly. He thought of his family and his friends and neighbours and his heart clenched. But what could he do?

  “What on earth are you up to?”

  Malek stood up and away from his handiwork, wiping his hands on his tunic. He turned to find himself confronted by the sultan’s younger brother, Al-Adil.

  “It’s a pigeon cote, sayedi,” he said. “A place where the birds can roost.”

  “Pigeons? Good heavens, doesn’t my brother keep you busy enough?”

  Malek sighed. “It was the sultan himself who asked me to build it. For messenger pigeons.” He explained how he and his father and brother had developed a system of flying pigeons back and forth between the city and the hills beyond. “My father loves his birds. More than anything else, I sometimes think. But now with Akka cut off we can use them to keep in contact with the garrison.”

  Al-Adil lifted an eyebrow. “I thought we were using divers to bring messages.”

  “It’s a dangerous business,” Malek said.

  The sultan’s brother tugged at his beard. “But what if the enemy shoots one of your birds down and intercepts the message?”

  Malek took a roll of paper from his pouch and handed it over. The older man bent his head over it. “Ah, I see. Some sort of code?”

  “My brother Sorgan and I developed it, yes.”

  “So what happens—God forbid—if one of you dies?”

  This was not something Malek dwelled on. It was for God to give and take life at will. “There is my younger brother as well,” he said defensively. “Young Aisa. He’s learned the code too.”

  “Well, we must pray that they survive. Insh’allah.”

&nbs
p; “Insh’allah.”

  Towards the end of the month Malek watched the Lord of Dara arrive with troops and contingents of light cavalry, so it seemed either the missives or Baha ad-Din’s embassy had had some effect. They moved camp closer to the enemy, the better to survey their movements. Every day there were skirmishes, every day deaths and small triumphs; the hospital tents were kept busy. And still they came, the Franj, new arrivals day by day, and daily the towers moved forward.

  Breaking out from time to time from Akka’s inner harbour, the Muslim fleet made sorties in an attempt to escape the Christian blockade. The vessels shot naft at each other, burning the decks and sails where the viscous stuff stuck, but few of these encounters were conclusive. Then one day a Muslim galley was separated from the rest of the fleet and driven up on the shore. There it was set upon by a ravening band of Franj camp-followers who were butchering pigs on the beach. These women set upon the unfortunate sailors, dragging them from the wreckage, out of the surf and up onto the rocky beach, chopping and stabbing them with the same knives they had used on the livestock. The noise of the slaughter carried as far as the Tower of Flies. From their lofty viewpoint the guards there had looked on helplessly as—out of bowshot—their colleagues were massacred by these harpies, and the surviving pigs squealed and stampeded and shat on the dead and dying. The story spread far and wide. If the women of the Franj were so ferocious, Malek thought, what were their menfolk like?

  Every morning, between dawn prayer and his first stint of duty, Malek moved the grain he laid as an incentive to the pigeons a little closer to the camp. Soon they would find the wooden cote.

  It was a particularly lovely morning. The sky was an unblemished blue, and a crisp onshore breeze cooled his skin and stirred Asfar’s chestnut mane. She pawed the ground, eager for exercise, and so he allowed her to canter down through the tussock grass to the margins where the dunes began. Gulls side-slipped and shrieked high above: if he closed his eyes he could imagine this to be nothing more than a pleasant morning ride and the world a peaceful, stable place in which people loved and laughed and went on with their lives without fear of violent death.