Pillars of Light

by Jane Johnson

  But Zohra remembered it all: every word, every touch. And that was what frightened her so much.

  A fortnight later, Nat was sitting in the tea house, staring into the glass of liquid before him on the table. You could not have called it tea; he did not know what it had been made from.

  “It’s all there was,” Hamsa Nasri said, apologetically.

  Around them the usual babble of gossip and chatter dipped and rumbled. The tenor of it grew more sober by the day. There had been some excitement at the arrival of the new commander the previous week, a fierce Kurd with a huge black beard by the name of Al-Mashtub, who had given a rousing speech about pride and ancestors. But it was clear to Nat as he listened to the conversations around him that folk were losing what little optimism the Kurd’s arrival had initially provoked.

  “The sultan sent him because he knew what was coming,” said Younes, who’d just come down from a shift on the wall. “He’ll have had spies out all down the coast, and when they reported back what they’d seen heading our way he knew our defences would need stiffening. He’s an old warhorse is Al-Mashtub. He’s seen it all. He’ll put some backbone into the garrison.”

  Six great ships bearing the blue silk banners of the French king, Philip Augustus, had sailed blithely into view the previous week, entirely unchallenged. The Christian blockade was so tight that no Muslim ship could approach without being destroyed or turned back miles from Akka’s port. From these ships they had watched a small army of new warriors in full armour disembarking, warhorses with ribbons braided through their manes, horns blaring, troops singing in chorus. They seemed happy to be at war.

  “They want to kill us,” Younes said. “They cannot wait.”

  “I’ve never seen such monsters as those siege towers they brought,” said a thin young man who pulled up a stool to join their group. “I never knew trees grew so high.”

  Younes leaned over and pulled him into an embrace so tender that Nat realized the young man must be his dancing boy, Iskander. He looked as frail as a cricket, as if he had not eaten in weeks. There was probably not much trade at the moment, Nat thought.

  “I heard they have massive battering rams, too,” Hamsa said, at his most doomy. “Those towers will overtop our walls, and while they’ve got us pinned down they’ll send the rams in to batter down the gates.”

  “I heard our supplies of naft are running out,” Younes said. “Even the lad from Damascus can’t magic it out of thin air.”

  Nat had been up on the walls earlier in the day, in his usual capacity as a doctor to the wounded, but also—though it went against every precept of his training—as a combatant. There was hardly a man in the city now who did not put in a shift with a crossbow, if he could shoot one, or simply hefting rocks to the catapult team to lob down at the enemy. The Franj had set up a number of vast catapults, the largest of which the garrison had named The Bad Neighbour. They had set up their own mangonel, The Bad Kinsman, opposite. Daily, the two traded boulders. A large chunk of the wall near the Accursed Tower had been badly damaged. They had repaired it as best they could, beneath a hail of missiles. The enemy were mining deep inside the sturdy walls now; it was only counter-mining from within that stopped them breaking through. By night the Franj continued to fill in the moat, bringing earth and stones from their camp, building up a great rampart topped with iron breastworks, behind which shield their bowmen fired upon the garrison night and day.

  “They are inexorable,” Younes said, his eyes dark with exhaustion. “They are like the sea: every day they come up closer and wash away a little more of our defences. And they just keep coming, God damn them.” Then he told them how the man beside him on the wall had fallen to the ground as if arrow-struck. “I looked for a wound,” he said, “but there was nothing. He was quite, quite dead. Even Nat here couldn’t have brought him back.”

  There was muted laughter at this old joke.

  “I thought perhaps he’d fainted. I mean, no one’s getting any sleep with this bombardment. But no, he’d just died. Just like that—on the spot. From hunger, we reckoned. His body was all skin and bone.” He shook his head, and turned his attention to Iskander.

  Nat watched as Younes stroked the boy’s cheek, oblivious to the gaze of others, and he saw how the lad turned his face to his lover, and for a moment he felt a twinge of jealousy. When he looked around, he saw the same looks of sympathy and tenderness on other men’s faces as they watched the pair. There was no disapproval or disgust; no one had the energy for it. They were all teetering on the edge of survival—lost and grieving, damaged and alone.

  “Nathanael!”

  Nat looked around. It was the veteran, Driss.

  “Thank the Lord you’re here.” The old man touched his hands to his heart. “Can you come see my Habiba? She’s taken a turn for the worse.”

  Nat made his farewells swiftly, swung his great leather doctor’s bag over his shoulder and followed the fierce old soldier down the street, trying not to wince at his pronounced limp, which must have been all the more painful when forced to such determined speed.

  The house didn’t look like much from the outside; Muslim culture enshrined modesty at its heart. But once inside Nat looked around the salon with some surprise. As far as he knew Driss got by on a veteran’s pension, which wasn’t much. Yet shining Venetian vases sat on carved tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl; there was a good quality carpet beneath his bare soles. Driss had been most insistent about the removal of shoes at the door, which was the case in most houses, but in times of sickness and hardship people didn’t always remember such niceties.

  He attended the old woman in the cool room at the back of the house where she lay in shuttered darkness, went into the small but immaculate kitchen and made up tinctures for her from the simples he carried in his bag. It was clear, though, that she wouldn’t last out the year, and there was little he could do for her condition. Not that he said as much. There was no point in taking hope away from the devoted couple, and sometimes people rallied miraculously. But when it came to the matter of payment he refused to take anything for the visit or the medicines.

  “I can’t take money from a friend,” he said. “And you’re always paying for my tea.” Which was true.

  Driss was implacable. “I can afford it,” he insisted, as he always did, and Nat realized it was not just the iron pride of a soldier speaking, but simple, honest truth.

  Nathanael was less shy than others when it came to matters of money—you had to be when you were a doctor, in and out of people’s houses, in and out of their lives. Indicating the lavish furnishings, he asked, “Did you come into a fortune or something?”

  “Or something.” The veteran tapped the side of his nose, but his eyes glinted. Nat could sense he was dying to tell his story to someone, a story he could not tell in public.

  “So …?” he encouraged. “What was the something?”

  “You must tell no one. I was sworn to secrecy.”

  Nat placed his hand on his heart. “I promise.”

  Driss leaned in close as if the walls had ears. “I saved the sultan’s life once,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

  Nat raised his eyebrows. “Did you now? And which battle was that in?” He almost dreaded asking, for the old man’s war stories were famed for being interminable.

  “Not a battle. Someone tried to kill him.” He pulled aside the neck of his frayed brown robe, a garment that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on a beggar in the central square.

  Nat found himself looking at a big, pale scar, a depressed and puckered circle, much more wicked in appearance than anything produced by a simple knife wound. He sucked air through his teeth. “Nasty, that. Looks as if you lost a fair bit of flesh there.”

  “They had to cut it out,” Driss said matter-of-factly. “The blade was poisoned.”

  “Poisoned?”

  “It was the Old Man.”

  “What old man?” Nat frowned.

  “The Old Man of the Mountain
s, old Sidi ad-Din Sinan. The Lord of the Hashshashin.”

  “He really exists?” Nathanael was skeptical. People in power often put about tales of assassination attempts to bolster the legend of their capacity for survival. Though from what people said of the sultan, he did not sound like a man much given to embellishment or lies.

  “He’s tried to murder Salah ad-Din three times to my certain knowledge. The first time was in ’74 when I got in the way. Then a while later some fellow who’d managed to win his trust enough to be made a personal bodyguard attacked him. That was a close shave. Luckily the sultan is a cautious man—he was wearing a mail coif under his turban at the time and the blade grazed right off it. It’s said he wears a steel cap at all times now. And on the last occasion, when he’d gone to beard the old lion in his den at Masyuf itself, they say he woke to find an assassin’s dagger and some cakes on the pillow beside him, the cakes still warm from the oven.”

  “But why would the Old Man want to kill Salah ad-Din? Surely they’re on the same side.”

  Driss shook his head. “These fanatics, they have no side but their own. Can’t see beyond their own noses. The world they inhabit is a distortion, a fantasy, an abomination of all that is right and decent. There’s nothing godly about them. They’d side with the Devil himself if they thought it would bring about the domination they seek. It wouldn’t surprise me to find them in league with the bastards beyond these very gates.”

  The pig had almost touched him! With a thrill of disgust, Kamal Najib pressed himself back against the side of the ship until the hard wooden rail bit into his spine. He watched the unclean creature skittering crazily down the deck to join the other half dozen that had also been let loose from the crate, and felt nothing but contempt for a captain who had thought such a facile stratagem could deceive the might and intellect of the infidel.

  Everyone had shaved their beards off just before they set sail from Beirut on the Crescent Moon (and the name of the ship had been painted out): if challenged they would claim they were Christian sailors come to relieve the hardships of the besieging army. He had barely even started growing his own chin-hair, but even so the cool sea breeze on his naked skin felt strange, adding to his general sense of discomfort. He hated being on board a ship, hated the idea of the heaving sea beneath the hull. He had never learned to swim. When Zohra and Aisa had been competing with one another as to who could dive deepest and swim fastest, Kamal had always stayed on the beach, crying with fear at the thought of someone pushing him in. He had learned ways to control fear during his training in the mountains, but beneath the Grand Headmaster’s chants he could still sense the cold profundity of his dread.

  For months now he had been plagued with nightmares of drowning from which he woke gasping in terror. It seemed cruel of Fate to decree that he should be sent on this particular mission. Or maybe—and this seemed even more likely—the Grand Headmaster knew his greatest fear and was determined he should face it head on.

  To get out of the way of the revolting hogs, he climbed the steps up to the high forecastle. The Grand Headmaster had drummed into all of them how the sultan was no true Muslim, that he was a man bent on power for his own pleasure and ambition. After all, he was not a true Arab but one of those troublesome Kurds, barely more than savages. That Salah ad-Din had come to prominence in such a far-flung region of the Ummah, the cradle of debauchery and corruption that was Egypt, whence came that abomination the eunuch Karakush, further emphasized the wrongness of the situation. Twice, the Order had attempted to assassinate Salah ad-Din; twice, he had eluded them.

  But this had not stopped the sultan from sequestering the goods of the Nizari sect. And so the Old Man had declared him their enemy. To the naive it might seem illogical to support the efforts of the infidel against a man leading the troops of the Ummah, he’d said, but the ways of Allah were mysterious, far beyond the comprehension of ordinary men. He—Sidi Rachid ad-Din Sinan—was one of the few to whom such understanding was vouchsafed. One day his disciples would take pride in having played their small part in the great scheme.

  It had not been hard to persuade Kamal of the sultan’s iniquity; after all, he had heard his father deriding the man often enough. Bashar, though, had owned up to private doubts in the beginning of their training. He had left Akka to emulate his dead elder brother, who had died in the service of the hashshashin, and who had always said Salah ad-Din was as close to a saint as any man he had ever met. But the Grand Headmaster was a highly persuasive man, able to quote the Holy Book at will to back up his every utterance, and in the end Bashar had forgotten everything he had ever believed in his former life. Where his mission had taken his erstwhile friend now, Kamal did not know. What he did know was that when he had completed this, his own first mission, he would be a fully fledged hashshashin, beloved of the Order.

  From the top deck of the Crescent Moon’s forecastle, Kamal could see the foreign ships bearing down behind them—one handsome galley and three smaller craft. But even the big galley was tiny compared to the Crescent Moon, which carried six hundred and fifty fighting men, a hundred camel-loads of weapons and ammunition, thousands of bottles of Greek fire, and large ampullae filled with poisonous snakes to be hurled from the walls of Akka. The hold was stuffed with provisions for the starving inhabitants of the city—distantly visible as a line of pale ochre beyond the Christian naval blockade. The warriors on board would bolster the beleaguered garrison; the supplies would feed the city for many months, long enough, it was hoped, for troops to muster from across the caliphate to answer Sultan Salah ad-Din’s call to arms.

  If they could run the blockade and force their way into Akka, it would surely be the downfall of the Franj. The siege would fail and the sultan would once more be victorious, confirmed in his power and potency.

  But that was the last thing the Old Man of the Mountains wished for. As soon as the Grand Headmaster had heard from his spies about the great ship being provisioned at Beirut, he had sent Kamal to infiltrate the crew and thwart the attempt. Kamal hoped he could complete this part of his mission successfully. His stomach contracted, he thought he might throw up, but once more his training came into play and he forced himself to calmness.

  A smaller craft was approaching them. When it came within hailing distance of the Crescent Moon’s mighty prow, a man stood up and challenged them, inquiring as to their identity and the port they had set sail from. The captain was ready for this—but so was Kamal, well schooled in the various tongues of the Franj. The Beiruti captain spoke, and Kamal translated his words for the captain of the foreign ship.

  “My captain says we have come from Genoa and are bound for Tyre with supplies for the Christian army! But you may tell your master this is not the full truth.” He knew he could not mention the word Beirut—even the dull-witted captain would be suspicious if he heard the name of his home port mentioned.

  Kamal watched the foreigner’s smooth face take in this information. “You fly no Christian flag,” the man called back.

  He translated this for the captain, who cursed. “Tell them we left port in a great hurry, knowing the army’s need for provisions.”

  It was a feeble response, and Kamal duly relayed it, grinning his contempt. “If you take me back with you,” he told the officer in the skiff, “I can tell your master a great deal more. Demand me as a hostage. You will not regret it.”

  And so it was that he climbed nimbly down the rope into the enemy skiff and was rowed swiftly away, his eyes firmly shut against the proximity of the terrible sea.

  Once safely on board the foreign ship, he relaxed a little and looked around. The crew seemed very organized, very workmanlike. They went about their tasks quickly and with discipline. Sidi ad-Din Sinan would have approved. Kamal relayed all his information to the captain of the vessel in the presence of a tall, red-haired man, relating how they had come from Beirut on the sultan’s command, listing the goods contained in the hold, the numbers of men stowed below.

  Perh
aps they would not believe him. He must make them believe him, for this was only the first part of the plan. Whatever danger he put himself in did not matter. All that mattered was the Way and the Grand Headmaster’s will.

  Kamal watched the Crescent Moon plough on towards Akka, heading for the blockade of Christian vessels lined up across the entrance to the harbour. Not too fast, but with purpose, as they had been proceeding before the challenge had come from the other vessels. He knew they would use the oars to power the ship through the blockade once they approached the city, but that they would reserve the rowers’ strength for that final push.

  Beyond the Crescent Moon, Kamal could clearly make out the Tower of Flies rising like a spear past the breakwater of the inner harbour, and the pale-gold walls that bounded the seaward face of the city. He had never before seen his home from the sea. It looked beautiful, serene. The minarets of the mosques extended gracefully towards the sky. If you ignored the Christian ships and the swaths of enemy forces stretching for miles outside the walls, it looked untouched by war. For a moment he experienced a pang of nostalgia for his lost life; then he tamped it down ferociously.

  Suddenly there was a cry. “Get after them! Stop them reaching the blockade!”

  And now it was a race. The galley he was on was big, but it was nowhere near as powerful as the Crescent Moon. At top speed that ship might well bully its way through the blockade and into Akka’s harbour, but the pursuing vessels were faster and more nimble. They sailed alongside in no time, and their crews rained missiles on the Arab vessel. The crew of the Arab vessel—ordinary sailors, untrained for war—took cover, but the game was up now.

  Kamal watched from a safe place behind a bulwark as the Muslim troops swarmed up onto the deck and returned fire. But now, as if to confirm once more the Order’s righteous plan, the wind suddenly dropped, threatening to becalm the Crescent Moon if the rowers did not prevail against the tide. Down on the rowing decks the overseers would be lashing the oarsmen for all they were worth, but now the foreign galley he was in came around in the Crescent Moon’s path. He watched as some of the Franj threw themselves into the sea, ropes slung across their backs. They are better men than me, he found himself thinking. Even if the Grand Headmaster himself ordered me to leap into the sea, I could not do it.