Pillars of Light

by Jane Johnson

He might well have asked. We were marching through a wasteland: acres of turned earth, pitted and burned and stinking. Was this what we were fighting over, this ruined ground? Everywhere there were rags and shards and rubbish mashed into the earth. Looking closer, I saw scattered bones and nameless pieces of rotting flesh where bodies had been rooted up by some rummaging creature.

  And the stench—my God, the stench. It hurt the nose.

  “What is this hell?” asked Little Ned.

  “Who are these people?” asked Ezra.

  These people regarded us dourly as we passed, faces weathered to the colour of old wood, more like the infidel we were there to fight than the flower of Christendom we thought to join. They were gaunt and sullen-eyed; their filthy clothes hung on them like rags on scarecrow-sticks. We had thought to have cheers and welcome, but all we heard were catcalls and insults. They laughed at us, sneering at our bright banners and our clean surcoats, at the knights sweating in their armour in the hot sun, at the pennanted lances and our well-ordered marching. But there were other expressions, too, even less pleasant. Avid eyes followed the passage of the warhorses and the ox carts piled with provisions.

  As far as the eye could see this wasteland stretched, studded with ragged tents and makeshift lean-tos, striped with earthworks and barricades, spiked palisades, tatty enclosures. Men sat listlessly on the bare ground playing dice and knucklebones. And there were women here too, though it took more than one glance to ascertain their sex, for they were as scrawny and ill-kempt as the men, even those with their dugs out on show. Though our lads had been relishing the chance of a visit to the brothels of Tyre and, due to our swift departure, had never fulfilled their wish, none of them made a lustful comment, but instead looked away in horror. “Women, Jesus,” Hammer breathed. He made some odd folk-gesture to ward off evil.

  They gave us the filthiest quarter in which to pitch our tents. Savaric protested, and was derided by the lords who presided over the camp. He muttered, “Just wait until King Richard arrives,” as if the king were some living saint who could command miracles at will. Well, perhaps he could. For the time being, we pitched our tents where we were told, and set guards on the animals and the provision wagons.

  Within days, of course, one of the horses went missing—the mount of a French noble from Aquitaine—along with the lad whose job it was to guard it. The man was almost in tears, for without his horse, what was a knight? As Hammer put it, “Just a fool rattling around in a tankard.”

  Questioning of the lords in charge of the camp did not go well. The Bishop of Auxerre preached a furious sermon on the subject of theft, exhorting the horse-thieves to confess. Since it had just been announced that any man caught whoring, drinking or thieving would be hanged, unsurprisingly no one stepped forward.

  A few hours later and there was still no sign of horse or boy. Savaric sent for me. With him was a man I had not met before, tall, gaunt, with dirty yellow hair and beard, and equipped with more weapons than I’d ever seen on one man. Savaric said he was one of the “raptores,” which did not fill me with confidence, for in Latin that meant “plunderers.” The man—Florian—told me he preferred the French term “routier,” man of the road.

  “A sell-sword?” I asked.

  “We don’t use that word. Or mercenary, either.”

  Ordered to make a search, we trudged along in silence for a while after that, looking over the few horses left in the camp, but there was no sign of a dappled grey with feathered fetlocks and a plaited mane.

  The routier snorted. “We should inspect the roasting spits, and not just for the horse.”

  I stared at him, and he gave me his quick, feral grin, part of his face static where a sword had at some time bisected his left cheek.

  “Is it really so bad here that men have to eat horses?”

  Florian turned to me. “What, you never ate horsemeat?”

  My expression answered him.

  “My God, you people have no idea. There are men here who haven’t had a proper meal in weeks. They’ve been eating frogs, seagulls, rats, anything they can lay hands on. Oh, the nobles do all right, but they don’t give a damn about their own people. And the merchants are making a killing. A bushel of wheat for thirty, even forty gold bezants. And with a horse’s intestines selling on the black market for eight soldi, can you imagine how much an entire horse is fetching?”

  That gave me pause.

  “Why do you think I’m working for your lord now?”

  I didn’t try to answer his question; he was going to tell me anyway.

  “Paying me twice as much, and he’s brought fresh supplies.” He smacked his lips. “Mutton, God’s bollocks, I’ve missed the taste of mutton.”

  We passed a particularly grim camp and Florian’s nose twitched. He pulled me away. “Flux,” he said. “If the air begins to smell sweet to you just keep walking. Ain’t no horse in the world worth catching the bloody flux for. It’s a killer. Twelve thousand Danes and Frisians came out here a year ago.” He turned to me. “You know how many are left now?”

  I shook my head.

  “Maybe two hundred. The flux is doing Saladin’s job for him. All he has to do is sit up there in those hills and wait till it kills us all.” He nodded towards the horizon, a ragged, tawny line punctuated by far-off banners and the pointed tops of tents. He strode on, pointing out the landmarks of our own camp: a banner here, a banner there.

  My eyes wandered to the hills. It was hard to imagine your enemy when they were so far out of sight. The garrison soldiers who manned the walls of the city, we saw them every day, they held no terror for us. But an invisible foe was a different matter.

  We passed a heavily guarded enclosure with a fine tent in the middle of it flying a flag with five gold crosses—one large, surrounded by four small—on a white background. Florian nodded towards it.

  “The King and Queen of Jerusalem,” he said. “Guy de Lusignan and Sibylla, the sister of the Leper King. Once we take Acre they’ll make it the seat of their kingdom. Your lot are supporting them.”

  “My lot?”

  “The English, the Angevins.”

  “Who are they supporting them against?”

  He laughed. “You don’t know much, do you? Conrad of Montferrat, of course, from the Piedmont—he’s claiming the Jerusalem crown. He’s the very devil, is Conrad. A cunning man, brave, too. He held Tyre against the Arabs, against Saladin himself—and that’s some feat, for the sultan is another wily man. He took Conrad’s father, old Marquis William, and called to Conrad that he’d have the old man killed if he didn’t give up the city. But Conrad, he took up his crossbow and pointed it at his father and cried back, ‘Stand aside, I’ll kill him myself and save you the trouble!’ Conrad’s a bastard. Well, they both are, but Conrad’s a hard bastard and Guy’s a weak one. He’s only king through his wife, but he’s one of your King Richard’s vassals and some sort of cousin, so your lot are bound to support his claim. The French and the Germans, they’re behind Conrad.”

  I’d seen a fight already between some German soldiers and some men I recognized off one of the ships that had sailed with us, but I had put it down to traded insults. Now I wondered if this was the cause.

  “I thought we were here to win Jerusalem back for Christendom,” I said. “Not to get involved in some fight between rival kings.”

  Florian shook his head wearily, as if he had been saddled with a halfwit child. A sword for hire had to be alert to all manner of allegiances and manoeuvrings, I supposed. He had to be well enough informed to choose the noble most likely to survive and prosper in order to pay the best wages. But I had little hand in my own destiny, and so I let my mind wander, my eyes upon the grand tent with its gold-and-white banners set amid the same mud and shit as the tents of the commonest soldier. Imagine being the King of Jerusalem, reduced to this. It seemed to me that if God existed he had surely abandoned these people.

  I said as much around our campfire that night, and Florian said, “You aren
’t wrong. What with the flux and the weather and empty bellies and the sheer bloody pointlessness of the whole endeavour, me and the boys would have cleared off long ago if it weren’t for the booty.”

  “Booty?” Quickfinger stopped poking the fire with a bone and his eyes fixed on the routier’s scarred face. “What booty?” This was what the troupe had come for, what they had been promised.

  “All sorts, if you’re up for it.” Florian pulled the neck of his tunic aside to reveal three gold chains, each bearing a chunky crucifix.

  Ezra pursed her lips; Hammer and Saw exchanged a glance. Ned sucked his teeth thoughtfully. But Will—ever the innocent—could not stop his mouth. “You mean you rob our own dead?” His outrage was almost comical, but no one laughed.

  “Until we break these putain walls down and get at the treasure inside we’re here for nothing. Of course we rob the fools who are stupid enough to go out and fight the enemy.”

  “But you’re paid to fight them too,” Will persisted. “And they’re infidels. We’re morally bound to fight them.”

  “Oh shut up, Will,” Quickfinger growled. “This treasure, tell me more.”

  “There’s a hoard of gold behind the walls of the city, all the gold that came out of Jerusalem. Why else do you think we’ve spent a year besieging the wretched place? Saladin’s got his armoury in there. Why keep it there unless you’re defending something valuable?”

  “It might just be relics,” I suggested smoothly, though my heart had begun to skip. “They’re a holy lot, these Muslims, or so I hear.”

  “Relics!” The routier snorted. “Who wants a load of bones et merde? No, it’s gold they’ve got. Gold and gems, pearls and rubies—all the riches they robbed out of Jerusalem. Why’d you think King Guy attacked Acre in the first place? It’s the contents of his treasury Saladin’s stashed in there, looted from the coffers of the Holy City.”

  “I thought the sultan’s palace was in Damascus,” Hammer said suddenly, surprising us all.

  Damascus? The name rang a bell. I remembered the Moor and Bishop Reginald talking their endless talk of church architecture, the Moor declaring, his eyes burning with passion, that he dreamed of visiting the great mosque in that city. I was so sure I had spied him that day in Lisbon: was he on his way to Damascus, pursuing his dream, even now? A thrill ran through me. I turned a bland face to the mercenary.

  “Perhaps Saladin robbed so much treasure from Jerusalem that he decided to spread it around. Better to have two sheepfolds if the wolf’s on the prowl.”

  “Exactly. There’s something in that city worth saving, and it ain’t the poxy inhabitants.”

  I went to relay the nub of this conversation to Savaric. Despite the filth of its surroundings, his tent was a handsome one, patterned inside and out in different colours. He called it a pavilion. Baldwin of Canterbury had come past while we were putting it up and Savaric had had the misfortune to emerge while the archbishop was still there and caught the brunt of the old man’s contempt.

  “What does a man of God have to do with such ostentation? Oh, vanity, vanity, thy name is Savaric Fitzgoldwin!”

  Savaric’s chest had swelled as if he might explode. He watched the archbishop go, a sour look on his face. “Sanctimonious old bastard. I bet his pavilion’s twice the size of my poor dwelling.”

  But it wasn’t. We passed it later that day: plain canvas, marked out from the common soldiers’ tents only by the bright standard of Saint Thomas pitched outside. Savaric skulked past it like a beaten dog.

  Being Savaric, he soon recovered. I found him that evening lounging in his great wooden chair, his feet propped on a stool, a brazier warming his soles. Beside him was a small, round wooden table in the local style, bought in the market at Tyre, all pretty wooden patterns and shell inlays. On it sat a flask of wine. He waved me to sit down, and with a grunt moved his feet from the stool. He saw me eyeing the wine but did not offer me any.

  Thus it starts, I thought. As soon as there are shortages, it’s the poor who go without.

  I told him what the routier had said and watched as he took it in. His thoughts were obviously the same as mine, for he nodded and sat up straighter, suddenly alert. “Makes sense. Why else tie your army up here for more than a year?” His black eyes gleamed. “Remember what the Lady Eleanor told Richard in London: ‘Recapture the True Cross, my son, and the whole Christian world will open to you as easily as a whore spreads her legs.’ Imagine the king’s gratitude to the man who saved the True Cross from the Saracens and put it in his hands. Imagine the debt that king would owe, the rewards he would give to such a man—or men. Enough to make them rich beyond dream! Enough for Reggie to build his cathedral—and surely there would be no better church in which to house the world’s greatest relic? Just think of the queues of pilgrims who would come to venerate it—”

  “Enough!” I cried. “We don’t even know it’s in there.”

  He wagged a finger at me. “Spies. That’s what we need, from inside the city, who know their way around.”

  I laughed, largely out of relief. “But no one goes in or out. That’s the whole point of a siege, as you explained it to me.”

  The look he gave me was similar to the one the routier had given me earlier: an incredulous adult to a naive child. “Believe me, John, there are those who pass between the camps.” I had no idea what he meant by this. But as long as it didn’t mean me, I didn’t care.

  The weather worsened, and even our own food supplies began to run short. A combination of gluttony, poor husbandry, pilfering and rot had done for us. The mud had deepened and the flux had us by the throat; every day there were more deaths. Every day, raiders from the army on the hill harried our lines, forcing watchfulness and rebuttal, but I had yet to draw my weapon in anger. Life was dull and grim, but at least it was life.

  More troops poured in, but there was still no sign of Richard. We began to wonder if he would ever arrive. There were calls for reinforcements to the front lines to hold off the Saracens, but Savaric kept us back: we were there to guard his person and enable him to impress the new king with his valour and resourcefulness. What was the point of heroism if Richard was not there to witness it?

  The longer we spent in the besieging camp the clearer it became that it was no unified army of God but a fractured and bitter collection of rival lords who would rather be at each other’s throats than unite against the common enemy. The Germans hated the English; the French hated the Anglo-French; the Pisans and Genoese hated each other so much that they had to be kept at opposite sides of the encampment. The French and the Germans had allied with Conrad of Montferrat, but we were supporting Guy, the ousted King of Jerusalem. Until recently, Conrad’s supporters had greatly outnumbered Guy’s, but English ships were blowing in day by day. And so was the rain.

  One morning, Ezra and I were sitting outside the billet trying to get a brew going over a recalcitrant fire. The little fuel we had was soaked through; it smoked but refused to burst into flame. Eventually I leapt to my feet in frustration, with the intent of booting the pot up into the sky. A pair of men on big horses came lumbering into view—one in the bright white surcoat of the Templars, the other older, slab-faced …

  “Shit! Turn your head, Ezra!”

  “What?”

  “It’s Geoffrey de Glanvill!” I moved so that I was shielding her. “Put your helm on.”

  She jammed the iron cap on her head; the noseguard made for anonymity. Their gaze swept over us: just common soldiers, beneath their regard. Then Savaric’s voice boomed out a greeting to us.

  “Christ’s teeth!” I swore at him. “Look, it’s de Glanvill.”

  “Oh … merde.”

  Over his shoulder I saw the Templar stare hard, turn and say something to his companion. And then suddenly I recognized the first chevalier as Ranulf de Glanvill, Geoffrey’s brother, once the King’s Eye.

  “Go away, Ezra,” I whispered. “Just get up and walk away. Fast as you can. Find Florian, make sure he k
eeps you out of sight.”

  Ranulf de Glanvill turned his horse’s head in our direction. Savaric, black eyes hooded, turned to meet them.

  “Good day, Ranulf. A pleasure to see you join our siege. Sorry about your … troubles with the king.”

  Enthroned upon his impressive warhorse, the slab-faced man drew himself up. “The king and I have reconciled our differences. All is very well between us now.”

  “Though I hear your coffers are somewhat lighter,” Savaric said, and I am sure I was not the only one who caught his gloating tone.

  “Who was that man with you?” Geoffrey demanded, squinting at the retreating back of Ezra.

  “One of my sergeants,” Savaric replied, as if he were a man of great substance. “Recently taken on.”

  “He was not with you in Lisbon?”

  “No,” Savaric returned smoothly. “I acquired him here. Part of a dead lord’s retinue. The nobility are falling like flies in this place, it’s a most unhealthy environment. Best take care of yourselves. And your mounts—there’s plenty here have a taste for horseflesh: good men starving while others ride.”

  The air was charged with violence. The black eyes gave us a hard look. Then Ranulf barked some dismissive response and they moved off, their horses picking their way between the pits and ruts.

  Savaric looked drained. He sat down beside me where Ezra was sitting before, as if his legs had given out.

  “Why must you taunt them?” I asked.

  He gave a small, mirthless laugh. “They’re bullies, the pair of them. If you let men like that bully you they will destroy you.”

  “It’s not me I’m worried about,” I said. “It’s Ezra.”

  There was soon more to worry about than the de Glanvills. The Archbishop of Besancon had constructed at great personal expense a huge battering ram. Acre was not his objective, but it stood between him and the Holy City. Not a subtle man, he had decided to take matters into his own hands and batter down the doors to the besieged port so that he could get on with the business of winning his place in Heaven.