Pillars of Light

by Jane Johnson

  Since then, they’d spent some time together almost every day. They had even kissed once, not in the passionate, languorous way he had seen the Jewish doctor’s son kiss his sister on that fateful day, but even so, it had filled his thoughts ever since. Rana, he thought. Rana, Rana, Rana with the laughing eyes. He hadn’t spoken formally with her father yet, but he ought to soon, he thought. I’ll greet him politely, but not too humbly. I’ll say, “I’m Salah ad-Din’s messenger. I’ve brought you some eggplants, and I want to marry your daughter.”

  It sounded so ridiculous that he almost laughed, and ended up snorting water. Sharp and salty, it made his nose and throat sting.

  Nathanael ran, his arms full of bandages. There was blood on the tiles; he almost slipped as he came around the corner into the hospital. As he put the bundle down, his father glanced up from the man he was working on, and he was struck by how ill the old man looked, his face pale and sweaty.

  “You’re not well, Abi,” he said, for the third time that day.

  “How I feel is of little consequence.” Yacub applied force to the wound he was treating. “Pass me a needle, quickly.” Beside him on a plate was an array of bone needles threaded with fine gut. Nat had threaded them all first thing that morning, with little Nima watching on in fascination. He’d prepared dozens of them; now there were just four or five, and it was not yet midday. With the coming of the new reinforcements the onslaught on the city had redoubled, and they did not have enough doctors to treat the wounded. The hospital was full, and no one was sleeping, and there was another wave of sweating sickness.

  “Here, let me. Things you sew fall apart in the street.”

  Yacub raised a tired smile. For a moment it looked as if he would demur, but after that they worked swiftly together, patching up one man after another, doing their best with crush injuries and arrow wounds. The burns from mishaps with the Greek fire were the worst to deal with: the substance was merciless in its hunger to eat all in its path—skin, muscle, tendon and bone. Sometimes the victims were brought in still smouldering and you had to be careful handling them.

  In the late afternoon, Yacub collapsed. One moment he was saying something to Nat about their beehives, the next he was on the floor, unconscious.

  Nathanael cried out in horror, then wondered, Why am I just standing here? I’m a doctor! But it was his father lying there, not some unknown soldier. His shout brought other doctors running. They had blood on their hands, and then there was blood on Yacub too. He stood there stupefied as the men prodded at his father, rubbing his chest, fishing in his mouth.

  “He’s swallowed his tongue!”

  “He’s stopped breathing!”

  And all the while Nat felt strangely, shamefully detached. Time slowed, stilled, then raced. And then suddenly he was back in the moment and someone was clutching his arm and saying, “He’s gone, Nat, I’m so sorry,” and the other two doctors were standing and wiping their hands on their tunics.

  He dropped to his knees, mindless of the blood, placed his hands on his father’s face, his throat, his chest. “Abi! Abi!” Marigolds. They had picked marigolds out of the garden together this morning—he could still smell the pungent scent of them, bitter and sun-warmed. How could he be dead? Furious at the old man’s inertia, he pummelled his ribs.

  Yacub’s eyelids fluttered and a great wheezing breath came out of him. One of the doctors yelped; the other stood there with his hands over his mouth. Saïd had been a portly man only a year ago. Nathanael remembered him coming to the house to take tea with Yacub and steadily eating his way through every delicacy Sara had served. “Zinab never cooks like this. I think your wife must be a sorceress. She doesn’t just mix the ingredients, she charms them!” Now his flesh hung on him like old clothes and he was muttering. Nat thought he recognized the words: a protection against witchcraft.

  Back from the dead, Yacub of Nablus looked around like a man momentarily lost and tried to sit up.

  “Don’t.” Nathanael pushed him back down. He turned. “I need to get him home.”

  Saïd looked away. It was the other two doctors, whom he barely knew, who ran out and commandeered a pair of off-duty soldiers to carry the old man back to the Street of Tailors, with Nat running along in front of them, his medicine bag banging his hip, all the way back home turning at every other step to make sure his father was still alive.

  Had he been dead, or were the other doctors mistaken? Nat had thought often about death, about the theory and the reality of it, even before these grim days, when he encountered so much of it. The forbidden had always fascinated him. Things that other people would not talk about—like what a soul was, where it abided in the body, if it had a shape or weight, had ever been seen or drawn, where it went when you died. He’d once questioned the rabbi on the subject. The rabbi had placed a hand benevolently on Nat’s head, this precocious, unpredictable boy of barely eight, and after many vain attempts to change the subject told him a soul was nishmat, the breath of God, inseparably connected with the lifeblood, and that when you died it returned to Yahweh, to await the resurrection.

  This had not satisfied him. “Yes, but in the Book of Job it says, ‘So man lies down and does not rise. Till the heavens are no more, they will not awake or be roused from their sleep.’ But people breathe when they sleep, don’t they?”

  The rabbi had inclined his head, rather wishing he’d not entered the debate.

  “But if God has taken your breath, then you can’t breathe, or sleep,” Nat had insisted. At which point the rabbi had got up and thanked Yacub (now grinning broadly) and left.

  But Nat had followed him outside, still chattering. “And Maimonides says there is no resurrection, not really, not a physical resurrection, just an immanence of the soul which perfects itself through the knowledge of God, and I don’t understand that, because in Ecclesiastes it says ‘a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they will die; but the dead know nothing.’ ”

  The rabbi had put his head down and walked faster, and after that he’d taken Yacub to task for encouraging his boy to question the holy books, and for letting him read such heretical works as those by Maimonides. He later recounted the conversation to Nat, laughing. “Nathanael reads anything he finds,” Yacub had told him, “and besides, Rabbi Mosheh ben Maimon was under our roof, and the child has the ears of a gossip and the memory of a grocer.”

  That night, watching over his father as he lay quiet, Nat asked, “What did you see?”

  Was that a smile that lifted the corner of his mouth, or a quirk of the muscles, brought on by his ordeal?

  “Did I see angels with trumpets and choirs singing hosannas? Or the banquet hall of the World to Come, tables heaving with manna? Or the darkness of the pit?” The smile, if that was what it was, was gone. “None of that. Just a sense of crushing pain and a lifetime of regret for my many failures.”

  “Never a failure, Abi. Never.”

  “The boy who tore out the hollow reed I placed in his throat?”

  “He died, yes, I know. But the next one lived! And what have you always taught me? That it’s only from making mistakes that we learn to do better.”

  “And sometime we don’t.” Yacub’s voice was barely more than a rasp. “Sometimes I think we can’t. Or there would be no more wars. And yet there are always more wars. Men are greedy, aggressive and ungovernable, and perhaps that will never change.”

  Such despair. “You’re tired, Abi. You should sleep.” Nat stroked his hand; the old fingers closed over his.

  “Listen to me, Nathanael. You have to try to make a difference, no matter how slender the chance of success may seem. It’s the only way we can change the outcome, even if by the tiniest of increments. And pass on your knowledge, your wisdom, to a new generation so that they may make a bigger step, and their children a larger step still.”

  Children. Nat gave a mirthless smile. Little chance of that now. He’d not been able to look at another woman since Zohra had crushed
his heart. In comparison to her, they all seemed like little clay dolls.

  “Promise me, Nathanael.”

  “Sleep now, Abi.

  “Promise.” The old man’s grip was suddenly fierce.

  “I promise.”

  As the summer passed on, Yacub dwindled, despite all Sara’s and Nathanael’s care and herb tisanes, despite all the books bought from the bookseller in the market (no one wanted books any more—you couldn’t eat a book, could you?) and all the remedies Nat sought within their pages, despite all Nima’s tears because her “grandfather” wouldn’t get up and play with her.

  On a stifling day in late August, he did not wake from his afternoon nap.

  Sara, who had seen her husband’s hold on life slackening with every passing day, bore his passing with the sort of dignified acceptance that Nat could only admire, and fail to achieve. He found himself full of seething anger, but he could not disturb Nima with his primal fury, so he took to wandering down to the port, to the serene, impassive wash of the sea, where the boats bobbed quietly at anchor in the little harbour and the seabirds roosted, and there he beat his hands on the stones of the harbour wall and growled like a wild animal.

  Even when the storm of his grief had passed he continued to go there. It became his place to sit and think in those rare moments he had between tending to the sick and wounded, looking after Nima and working in the gardens. And it was there that Rana, the crabber’s daughter, found him late one night.

  “You’re the doctor, aren’t you?”

  Startled, Nathanael turned. “I am.” He had taken his father’s place at the hospital, had even tended the governor, Karakush the eunuch, up at the citadel. He recognized the girl from his many visits to the port, where she was often to be found, working with her father on the nets and pots. He had marvelled at her dexterity, had once even jested with Rana that she’d make a good doctor if she could handle a smaller needle than the one she used to pass cord back and forth through the netting. She was a sunny creature, always smiling. But she wasn’t smiling now.

  “Please …” Rana couldn’t get the words out. She just took a desperate grip on Nathanael’s arm and pulled him along at a run.

  At the end of the inner harbour a small crowd had gathered. Rana screamed at them to step aside. As they parted, Nat saw a young man lying on the stones, his skin gleaming like pearls in the moonlight. Seaweed was tangled in his hair. A thickly wadded belt was tied around his waist.

  “We were going to get married,” Rana sobbed.

  “Were you now?” A burly man with a great black beard stepped forward.

  Rana shot him a look, half guilty, half defiant. “We are. He asked me weeks ago, but I only said yes two days ago, before … before …”

  Nat knelt beside the swimmer, remembering with a suddenly tight heart a sultry day last summer, a figure stepping out of the shadows as he had pulled Zohra back and kissed her forcefully in the doorway. Aisa Najib.

  “When did you find him?” he asked of no one in particular.

  “Just now—he washed in with the tide, got caught up with the mooring ropes. I don’t think he’s breathing,” said a man in the grimy, salt-stained tunic of a fisherman. “Rana went straight to get you. She said you bring people back from the dead. That’s what she said.”

  Nathanael ran a hand down Aisa’s face, feeling the stiffness setting in. His throat swelled; his eyes pricked. He blinked several times before turning to meet the girl’s beseeching gaze.

  “There is nothing I can do.”

  “No! No, you must—you must bring him back. You must!”

  The crabber pulled his daughter close. “He’s gone, pet.”

  “The lad’s a hero,” someone declared. “That’s a martyr’s death he’s died, in the name of Allah, the Prophet and our lord Salah ad-Din.”

  “Aye,” another man agreed. “It’ll be the first time a dead man’s brought the garrison wages in. You can’t ask more than that.”

  “He was only sixteen,” Nathanael said, removing the seaweed from around his neck.

  “He … he … told me he was eighteen,” sobbed Rana.

  “Someone needs to let the family know,” a woman said uncertainly.

  It would have been so easy to keep his mouth shut and let someone else do it. But he could not.

  “I know his family,” Nathanael said at last. “I will go.”

  24

  John Savage, Holy Land

  1190

  It was October before we reached the Holy Land. Half a year to cross what felt like half the world—it seemed about right. Putting into the port of Tyre, everyone was keen to get ashore. You could feel the heat coming off the land, as if it had been stored up all summer and was now warding off the coming winter. There was spice in the air and the aroma of fried fish—our noses twitched like dogs’.

  Ezra tugged at my sleeve. She was at my side all the time now. “What’s that bird there, John?”

  It looked to me much the same as any bird back home—brown feathers, beady eyes. “I’ve no idea.” The Moor would know, I thought for the hundredth time.

  “And that one?”

  “Seagull, Ezra.”

  “I knew that.” She grinned. Freckles peppered her nose. She looked like the cheeky boy she purported to be. Ashore, she wolfed as much food as any man, and drank as much ale.

  But in Tyre, except for wine, there was no alcohol to be found, much to Quickfinger’s dismay. “What, no ale? What sort of shithole is this?”

  The twins, Hammer and Saw, chattered away like jackdaws, sometimes in their own language that none of the rest of us could understand, staring around at all the dark-skinned and dark-eyed robed and turbaned men.

  “Damn me,” Ned said, charged more than he liked for food so spicy it burned his mouth. “I thought we’d come to fight these buggers, not get fleeced by them.”

  Quickfinger kept his hand on the hilt of the fine sword he’d won at dice in Marseille, where we’d missed King Richard by some weeks. He’d cheated to win it, of course, and the next time he tried the same trick got into a fight and nearly ended up in gaol again. He’d given me his old weapon for saving his skin, but it was not much recompense—a clumsy old falchion, all the weight near the tip for hacking, like a butcher’s blade. No finesse there, nor in me as a swordsman: the combination was not pretty.

  Besides, I had no zeal to fight the Saracen. The idea of killing another man was not something I’d given much mind to, and I intended to put it off as long as possible. But they had us out of Tyre faster than you could say God’s teeth. A fleet full of men who’d been at sea for long weeks—who’d want us in their town for longer than was necessary? I’d barely shaken my sea-legs before they had us marching out again. In my foolishness I was thinking we’d be marching straight for Jerusalem, but instead we found ourselves heading for a town called Acre—or Akka, in the local tongue—a march of a day or so south down the coast. It was a port like Tyre, but held by the Muslims, despite a siege by Christian forces that had—according to Will, who hung on the knights’ every word—already lasted a year and more. A siege. I remembered Robert de Sable speaking of such at Lisbon. “The will,” he had said. It was all about the will.

  “How have they held out for so long,” I asked Savaric, “against the flower of Christendom?”

  He waved his hand dismissively. “We have God on our side, and King Richard coming any day. We shall prevail in no time. And then it will be on to Jerusalem, where we shall sweep all before us, and the pickings will be rich.”

  We set out just after dawn, and our company made for a brave sight with the knights astride their big horses, the beasts all caparisoned in bright colours, the men in shining plate and mail, banners flying above. Robert de Sable rode with the Archbishop of Auxerre and the Bishop of Bayonne, talking in French too fast to follow. Ahead of them rode Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Hubert, Bishop of Salisbury, the one bearing the sigil of Saint Thomas à Becket, the other a great jewelled cr
oss.

  “Bet that’s worth summat,” Quickfinger said quietly, eyeing the cross.

  “Wouldn’t like to see you trying to prise that out of the bishop’s grasp.” I grinned. Hubert Walter looked more like a soldier than a man of the cloth. “He’d pick you up and snap you in two.”

  “Aye, and eat me for breakfast when we run out of that lot.” Quickfinger hiked a thumb back over his shoulder to where a mile of ox carts trundled, piled high with tents and equipment, supplies to feed thousands: cheeses and hams, flour and salted beef, ale and wine, beans and barley and an entire flock of sheep bought in Tyre’s huge market.

  We sang as we marched:

  Lignum crucis, signum ducis,

  Sequitur exercitus, quod non cessit,

  Sed praecessit, in vi sancti spiritus.

  Behind the wood of the Cross, the banner of the chieftain,

  Follows the army which has never given way,

  But marches in the strength of the Holy Spirit.

  Even we foot soldiers had polished our helms and honed our weapons, said our prayers and washed our faces. We looked like God’s army, clean in body and spirit, even though the wood of the Cross lay in the hands of the heathen.

  But our first sight of the siege city the next day was not auspicious. Black birds were circling: crows? I knew what attracted carrion-eaters. And it was telling that Ezra didn’t ask me what birds these were; indeed, within minutes, as we approached closer to the tawny-walled city, all our words had ebbed away.

  “What is this place?” Red Will turned a horrified face to me, as if I should know. He had caught the sun in just a few hours’ march and his face was already beginning to peel.