Pillars of Light

by Jane Johnson

Aisa turned a full circle. “Look, I’m wearing Malek’s hauberk! It’s heavy! He said I had to wear it in case the Franj fired arrows at us when we rode in, and they did! But they are hopeless shots: they missed us. Malek’s got a horse. She’s a mare, all reddy brown, and she’s called Asfar, isn’t she, Malek?”

  His brother acceded with a smile. “She’s a very fine animal. Even the sultan says so.”

  “I met the sultan!” Aisa gabbled. “He spoke to me! When I told him my name he said, ‘Are you related to Malek?’ ” He grinned at his brother. “He called you ‘my burning coal’!” And then he was off into the corridor, his footsteps slapping noisily on the stairs.

  Jamilla clasped her withered arm to her chest. “Well, my goodness, what an honour.” She gazed at Malek with all her heart in her eyes, but as soon as he looked back at her she looked away and started energetically kneading the dough again.

  Zohra crossed the kitchen to him. “Brother. It’s so good to see you at last.”

  Malek put his arms around her and held her tightly, and felt the fragility of her shoulders and ribs. Had things really been so hard in Akka?

  At last his sister stepped away. “Come along,” she said. “You should see Baba and Sorgan. Let poor Jamilla concentrate or we’ll have no bread.” And as their cousin protested, she led her brother into the dim corridor beyond.

  On their way up to the terrace, Malek put a hand on his sister’s arm. There was something he needed to say to her in private. “Aisa said something that worried me. Something about gifts of food …” He felt Zohra stiffen. “Times are hard, I know, and you must all get by as best you can when there are shortages. But I would not want to see your reputation … damaged in any way.”

  She pulled her arm away from him. “Damaged? What in hell are you saying?”

  “It’s just that such gifts could be … misconstrued. Especially from a Jewish family.”

  She drew herself up, golden eyes fiery. “What has Aisa been saying? Nothing is going on that is ‘damaging’ to my reputation. Whatever that might mean!”

  “All right, all right,” Malek said. “But there is no need to look beyond the family for anything you need. Tariq will ensure you need never go short—”

  “Tariq?” she spat the name out. “I don’t want anything to do with Tariq!”

  “He’s your betrothed.”

  “Well, no one consulted me.”

  “Why should we consult you? Our parents chose Tariq for you when you were a little girl.”

  “Tariq is a pig. And a coward!” Zohra’s face was flushed with a sudden passion Malek could not comprehend. “I will not marry him! And if I want to spend time talking with my friends, I shall!”

  “The Prophet says that when a man is alone with a woman, Satan is the third in the room with them!” Malek cried. The force of his fury took even him by surprise.

  “What did the Prophet know of a woman’s duty? Men! You are all the same.” Her hand flew to her mouth, too late to retrieve the insult.

  Malek watched his arm rise to strike her, but she did not flinch.

  Upstairs on the terrace, he could hear Sorgan and Baltasar welcoming Aisa back; it was jarring to have such happiness just a few feet above their heads. With all the restraint he could muster, Malek drew back his hand, took a deep breath, then pushed past Zohra. “I am going to see Tariq and Uncle Omar,” he declared. “Someone needs to take charge of this family.”

  Zohra busied herself about the house, her movements jerky. She was shocked to find so many little caches of piled-up dirt and dustballs. There might be a war on, but Nima Najib would never have accepted that excuse for skimping on the housework.

  She got down on her knees and scrubbed the tiled floors. For a while the work stilled her mind, but as it became ever more repetitive she found her sense of dread descending. What if Malek returned with Tariq and Rachid to drag her away to be married? Usually a wedding took months to plan—the clothes, the feasting, the guests that had to be invited from miles away, the musicians to be booked, the imam, too—but in times of war such niceties were often ignored. Only last week there had been a swiftly arranged marriage on Swallow Street. Gossip had it the girl had got pregnant—it was said in hushed whispers, a shocking allegation. People blamed the war for loosening morals. The mother of the girl was dead, her father and brothers in the garrison. It seemed she could not be trusted to guard her own honour. Zohra did not want people saying the same thing about her. She did not want anyone talking about her at all.

  She thought about running away but there was nowhere to run to: a city becomes a small place when every way out of it is blocked. She fantasized briefly about seeking sanctuary with Nathanael, but how could she after putting such a distance between them, after causing such hurt? Visiting the house had brought back too many memories, and seeing Nathanael—paler and thinner, the laughing eyes now sunken and haunted, his sensuous mouth set in a grim line—had brought her guilt flooding back. There was no going back, and some things time could not mend. In any case, she could not leave her father and Sorgan and Aisa to their own devices—they would grow filthy and starve within a month.

  Once she had finished cleaning the house, she went out into the courtyard. Where once it had been neat to the point of sterility—pots of flowers and desiccated herbs placed at precise intervals—now there was now a small riot of nature. She had started cultivating zucchini, peppers, peas, beans, aubergines, chilis, lemon trees, espaliered peach trees, grapes. There was a chicken run along the wall, and a small wooden shed for the goats. Zohra looked around in satisfaction. And then it struck her with some force that their courtyard was every day coming more to resemble the courtyard at Nathanael’s house, with its rampant herbs and tumbles of flowers. She closed her eyes and was immediately visited by a memory of Nat standing out there with his trousers rolled up and his hair wild with light, with earth on his hands and cheeks and knees and his arms full of young plants, like some sort of pagan deity.

  How long she stood there, remembering, she could not say. But when at last she opened her eyes again, her cheeks were wet with tears.

  Nathanael had just finished tending to a wounded man in the barracks when someone called out, “Look, it’s Sorgan!”

  He turned, and there was Sorgan Najib, Zohra’s big, simple brother, a head taller than the off-duty garrison soldiers who were coming up to thump him on the arm or back, full of camaraderie. Of course, he looked different from the last time Nat had seen him, hugging his knees and keening like a child as his mother lay murdered in one room, and dozens of his beloved pigeons lay torn to pieces on the roof.

  “How are the pigeons?” someone asked now. “Did the last one make it back all right?”

  “Lady? Yes, she’s fine. Tucked up in her roost, full of grain,” Sorgan replied. But even as he responded, his gaze flicked here and there, and he was frowning. “I can’t find my brother.”

  “Aisa? We saw him earlier. He came back with the column the sultan sent in this morning.”

  “Malek. It’s Malek I can’t find.”

  The soldiers looked from one to another. “When we saw him, he was on his way back to your house with Aisa,” said one of the men.

  “Aisa’s home,” Sorgan said. “But I haven’t seen Malek at all.” The corners of his lips turned down and it looked as if he might cry.

  “He’s probably gone to see the cousins before coming back to eat with you,” another suggested kindly, but Sorgan was not to be so easily placated.

  “Why doesn’t he want to see me?”

  “Course he does, you silly sod. He’s your brother, isn’t he?”

  “Kamal’s my brother too and he ran away.”

  Sorgan’s logic was unassailable.

  “And Ummi left, too …”

  His shoulders began to shake. The soldiers shifted awkwardly from foot to foot; no one wanted to see a man of Sorgan’s great size break down in tears.

  Nat got to his feet and crossed the room, his hand alre
ady digging in the pocket of his robe. “Hello, Sorgan,” he said cheerily. He offered a handful of dates and nuts to him.

  Sorgan’s frown dissolved. “I remember you!” he said joyfully, and he crammed the treats into his mouth.

  The tension in the room lessened.

  “We’re going up onto the walls to watch some lad from Damascus show those bastards from Baghdad how to use Greek fire,” a sergeant said. The caliph’s artificers had not made many friends in Akka. “Why don’t you come and watch, Sorgan?”

  Sorgan looked unsurely at Nathanael, who nodded encouragement. “Yes, why don’t you go up to the walls to watch?”

  Sorgan scowled. “Will Malek be there?”

  “I don’t know,” Nat said truthfully.

  “I miss him.” Tears were gathering again.

  “I’ll come with you,” Nathanael offered. It was about time to go up to the wall as the doctor on duty, though there was very little he could do if there was an accident with the naft, which would burn through everything it touched.

  Sorgan considered this for a long moment, then imprisoned one of Nat’s hands in his own vast fist. “All right, then, if you come with me.”

  They followed the garrison soldiers up towards the Accursed Tower, at the corner where the east wall met the north wall and was exposed on two fronts to the enemy. This was where the Franj had built their three great siege towers.

  There was already a great scrum of people up there. It was mainly other garrison soldiers who had heard about the experiment, but word had spread, and there were a lot of townspeople too, pressing through the crowd and being turned back by the increasingly harassed guards.

  “Official personnel only. Look, there’s no room. It’s dangerous for civilians here. Move a bit farther along the wall towards the harbour. If there’s anything to see you’ll be able to see it from there. Doctor Nathanael, this way—”

  “Sorgan Najib is here to help me,” he told the guard.

  The guard looked up from Nat to the man looming behind him. “Oh, it’s you, Sorgan. Come on through, we’ll find a place for you up here. Make way, you there, make way! Garrison soldiers coming through!”

  And suddenly they were up on the wide walkway behind the wall. There were a lot of people up there Nat recognized, but many more he did not. Among these, in the middle of a space into which the crowd did not intrude, was a young man near his own age, his face lit by the glow from a giant brazier. He had an odd sort of face, with eyes as wide apart as a fish’s. He was tending to a contraption suspended over a brazier.

  “It looks like a huge lamp,” Sorgan said in wonder. He turned to Nat, pointing at the long spout, from which vapour issued in a noxious cloud. “Is there a djinn in there?”

  Nat turned a calming face. “Not a djinn, no. But it could be dangerous, so let’s move away a little.”

  Nat could feel the heat coming off it in waves. In the occasional lull in the noise of the crowd, the enemy missiles striking the walls, the foreign chatter of the black-robed men with beaky faces and crows’ robes watching the fish-eyed man and his lamp, he could hear the crackling and popping inside the great brass vessel, and sometimes an ominous rumble. Two men worked a bellows and the brazier flared and spat, and then the noise in the lamp redoubled.

  Nat turned with Sorgan and tried to push his way back towards the steps, but there were more soldiers coming up and the press of bodies was almost impossible to negotiate. Eventually they were pushed up against the wall itself, and still the soldiers came, and the pressure became greater. It was hard to breathe and the air was hot. Beside him, Sorgan began to gasp, then to sob. Nat tried to placate the big man with more dates, but as soon as he got his hand out of his pocket they were dashed to the ground by the crush of the crowd and lost underfoot.

  Sorgan was staring now, over the heads of the soldiers and other onlookers, out at the Franj siege towers. There were three of them—immensely tall, creaking and grinding and … howling. “They’re full of ghosts!” Sorgan wailed.

  “No, Sorgan, they’re not ghosts.” Nat had to shout to make himself heard.

  “They have no beeeeards!”

  It was true: many of the Franj were clean-shaven, and the newcomers were paler than the men of Akka, who were the only people Sorgan had for comparison.

  “They’re enemy soldiers, Sorgan. The Christians: flesh-and-blood men, not ghosts.”

  “It’s like that story from the mosque. The tower full of voices.” Sorgan’s dark eyes were round and fearful.

  Nat frowned. Then he realized what Sorgan meant. “Oh, the Migdal Bavel.” The Tower of Babel. He tried to remember what the Muslims called the thing, failed.

  “The Burj Babil. And it’s coming right at us!” A soft wail came out of Sorgan, rising in volume to a bellow of fear. The cacophony was unbearable.

  Nat reached to put a comforting arm around the big man. “It’s all right, Sorgan, it’s all right.”

  But just as he said this the brass vessel gave a vast belch, and suddenly, at the Damascene’s command, a great bolt of fire came scorching out of its long snout. The gout of burning naft arced across the space between Akka’s city walls and the first siege tower, striking it at mid height and splattering wide. For a long moment nothing happened. Inside the tower the enemy soldiers began a ragged, taunting jeer. But then, with a ferocity none could have imagined, the entire midsection of the tower caught fire. And not just any fire: the naft burned with such an intensity that the flames seemed white at their heart, then red, then violet. Like rampant flowers they swarmed up and down the structure. The taunts became cries of terror as the blaze ate through the treated hides mantling the engine, then through the wood beneath, hungry for the men who now used their shields to ward off the ravaging fire. Soon the interior of the first tower was ablaze with a steady orange blast, as hot as the inside of a baker’s oven. Pieces of burning debris began to rain down, setting fire to the brushwood in the fosse below, and everything else with which the Franj had stuffed the ditch. A terrible acrid stench rose as corpses caught alight, burning with a curious greenish flame, as steady as candles.

  The Franj inside and out shouted in their many and various languages for the mercy of their god, but it seemed he was not listening. The top of the first tower, burned through, tilted suddenly and then tumbled backwards, trailing banners of flame, spilling dead and burning men left and right. The second tower took the brunt of the falling timbers, and soon it, too, was alight.

  All along the walls of Akka the men who had been defending the city with increasing desperation raised their voices in triumph as below them the enemy fled in terror or were roasted alive.

  “Come away,” Nathanael said to Sorgan, fearing the sight of such horrible death would upset him even more, but the simple man was gripping the wall with both hands, leaning out towards the blaze, his expression rapacious, yet rapt: with all the innocence and savagery of an avenging angel. He would not be moved.

  “See!” he said, his eyes never leaving the hellish scene. “See how the djinn is killing the giants. He is destroying them!”

  Nat could not bear to watch the staggering figures down below, their armour gone, their swords melted, their skin crisped black, their heads still afire with an uncanny violet flame, as if their departing souls had taken on visible form. The man from Damascus primed his monstrous cauldron again; the bellows-men worked it up to pressure and applied the levers, which sent more gouts of death shooting out. Behind him, the Greek fire caught the third tower, and all along the walls the cry went up: “God is great!”

  Nat saw someone catch the man at the brazier by the shoulders and whirl him around in an impromptu dance. “You have saved Akka, my boy! You’re a hero!”

  The young man’s grin was as wide as the sky. “I knew it would work.”

  The caliph’s artificers stood in a disgruntled huddle, muttering in their secret language, casting dark glances at the parvenu.

  Now the city’s archers sent down a barrage
of arrows on the unfortunate survivors. There was no return fire: the Franj, so shocked at the disaster that had befallen their towers, had even abandoned their incessant bombardment. The mangonels were being towed out of range before they, too, were engulfed. Between the arrows of the Akka bowmen and the Damascene’s Greek fire, it was a massacre. And Nat had no work of his own to tend to: there was not a single casualty to the defenders on the wall.

  Nathanael and Sorgan walked together in silence along the winding street known as Martyrs Avenue that led to his favourite tea house. From time to time the young doctor cast a glance at his companion, only to find that same expression of unholy glee on his face. Nat found it deeply unnerving.

  Inside the tea house was the usual assortment of loafers and greybeards. Word of the Greek fire had not yet spread to this usually reliable bastion of gossip. Hamsa Nasri was fetched from his house to share the celebration; he brought with him old Driss, hobbling painfully from an infected toe. When he saw Nathanael and Sorgan he grinned, the huge old scar running down his face making his expression even more alarming. “Burned the bastards, have we? That’ll teach ’em, building their infernal engines. Akka’s walls will never fall to such infidel tricks!”

  Younes the barber had lost his crocheted white skullcap. Now his bald patch was clearly on display. He looked older. “Who’s your friend?” he winked at Nat. “Given up on the girl with the lion eyes, have you?”

  Nat gave him what he hoped was a warning glare. “This is Sorgan,” he said stiffly, but Younes was not to be so easily diverted.

  “Next best thing, eh? Good size, too.” He grinned at Sorgan, and the big man, knowing no better, grinned back, spilling pastry crumbs.

  Nat got to his feet. “Come on, Sorgan,” he said.

  But Sorgan was hard to shift once he got settled, and Younes was pressing more of the little honeycakes on him. Nat remembered the stories of the dancing boy he kept.

  “Come along, Sorgan,” he said more firmly now. “We must get you home.”

  Sorgan stuffed the cakes into his mouth. His tongue laboriously gathered in the honey that had smeared his face; then he licked his fingers one by one, and then the palms of his hands. For fear he would start on the table, Nathanael hauled him upright and turned him towards the door. “I am sure your sister will be preparing your dinner, and if we don’t hurry Malek will eat your share.” That, at last, got the big man moving.