by Tom Harper
‘God’s promise is plain. If we stay, if we hide behind these walls of despair until famine takes us, we shall die the deaths of sinners. But if we take up our crosses, if we march onto the plain and fight, then whether we live or die the victory shall be ours. We cannot rest but we will lose. We cannot fight but we will win.’
Like a storm gathering its winds, Adhemar’s voice had risen to a thunderous roar far beyond the frailty of his body. Now, suddenly, his strength departed and he slumped forward on his staff. A chaplain rushed to his side and took his arm, trying to steer him back into the shelter of the church. But the bishop had not finished.
‘We are the Army of God, and the people of God. We have journeyed together, we have suffered together, and if God wills it so we shall die together. No prince or bishop will force you into this battle: we must decide together. What do you say?’
For long moments, an utter silence gripped the square. Then, starting from the back and sweeping forward, like a squall over water, a single phrase. Deus vult. God wills it. The shout rose; men who a moment earlier had barely had the strength to breathe now bellowed it forth. God wills it. God wills it. The princes on the portico took up the cry, the priests prayed it like a hymn, until even Adhemar’s lips moved to its simple rhythm. God wills it.
I did not like their chant: as far as I could see, nothing had come of it save ambition and murder. I turned to leave. I did not think that there was any part for me in the coming battle.
A hand touched my elbow and I looked back. A priest, a short man with a balding head and a harelip, was staring at me. He seemed familiar – one of Adhemar’s chaplains, perhaps.
‘Demetrios Askiates?’ The name was unfamiliar to him, and his cracked voice struggled to pronounce its foreign sounds.
‘Yes.’
‘My lord the bishop Adhemar asks that you join him tomorrow. The fighting will be fierce, and your company of axemen will be much sought after.’
‘Tell him . . .’ I paused, not knowing what to say. To the depths of my soul, I had seen enough of slaughter and the Franks’ battles. Whatever Adhemar might say, I was not of their race, and I would not choose to share their fate. But nor could I deny the simple truth of his proposition: if we did not fight, we would die in the city.
‘I know what Sigurd would choose,’ I muttered, to the confusion of the priest.
‘Shall I tell him that you will come?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’ His deformed lip stretched into a mulish smile. ‘God wills it so.’
‘We will find out tomorrow.’
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We mustered at first light, a wraithlike army gliding through the grey streets of Antioch to the appointed places. Count Hugh, who had surprised all by volunteering to lead the vanguard, assembled his troops at the bridge gate; Duke Godfrey, with the greater force, came behind him, while Adhemar waited in the square by the palace. He must have been awake for hours, perhaps all night, but he gave no sign of it. Mounted on his white charger, he rode along the ranks, reassuring the waverers and blessing the penitent; he received messengers from the other princes and answered them; he conferred with his knights and agreed their strategies. I remembered the last surge of Quino’s strength before he died, and wondered if it was the same spark of a fading light that now animated Adhemar.
‘To think this rabble once threatened an empire.’ Sigurd rubbed his axe for the dozenth time that morning, and stared unhappily at the men around us. ‘Now half a legion of Patzinaks could sweep them away in an hour.’
‘Let us hope that sixty thousand Turks cannot.’ It was hard to deny Sigurd’s judgement. Among the hundreds gathered in the square, there could not have been two who bore the same arms. More than half wore Turkish armour, or carried the round Turkish shields that we had captured with the city. Some – the unhorsed knights – had swords, and many carried spears, but there were still too many more with nothing but billhooks and sickles. They might have been going to harvest rather than a battle.
Almost alone in this multitude, the Varangians kept their discipline and their pride. We had spent the night hammering dents out of our helmets, repainting the golden eagle of Byzantium on our shields, and polishing every speck of rust from our armour. When the trumpets summoned us, we had marched down in a double column, thirty of us, with a measured tread which would not have sounded amiss in the halls of the Emperor’s palace. I had walked beside Sigurd at the head of the column, though I did not deserve the place. Above us we carried not the standard of the cross but that of the eagle. Sigurd had insisted on it.
‘The body of Christ.’
I looked down. Priests were moving along the line, offering us consecrated bread from small silver caskets. I had taken it in my mouth and swallowed it before I even realised it was unleavened, after the Latin usage. At that moment it did not matter. I wondered where they had found the grain to bake it.
‘Brothers in Christ.’ Adhemar reined in his horse in front of us and looked out over the ranks. A helmet had replaced his mitre, though he still wore his cope over his armour. Beside him, also mounted, the harelipped priest carried the holy lance in its reliquary.
Adhemar opened a book. ‘Remember the words of the angel to the meek, and do not be afraid. We do not struggle against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the powers and dominions of darkness in this world. If you would stand fast against them, take up the armour of God: gird on the belt of truth and the mail of righteousness. Lift the shield of faith, which quenches every burning arrow that Satan may throw at you. Put on the helmet of salvation and draw the sword of the spirit, for that is the word of God.’
From the road behind him, towards the gate, the sound of a great shout and a blast of trumpets echoed back to us. Murmurs of apprehension ran through the crowd, but Adhemar lifted a hand to stay them.
‘The gates have been opened, and the battle is nigh. Hold fast to all that is true, look to your swords, and by God’s grace, by God’s will, we will prevail. Every death that we die echoes into Heaven, the perfect sacrifice of the martyrs. Every drop of Turkish blood we spill makes atonement for our sins. For long months we have been chained in hunger, suffering and siege. Today we break free.’
An uneven cheer rose from the army, but it soon faded away. The most they could expect from the day was a swift death; words merited little now.
Sigurd pointed to the mountain behind us. ‘I hope Bohemond did not depend on surprise.’
Stretched out between two spears, a black banner had been mounted on the citadel. The garrison must have looked down on our preparations with all-seeing eyes, missing nothing; doubtless the flag now signalled our advance to Kerbogha in his camp on the plain.
As I remembered from my years in the legions, the longest minutes in any war are those before battle. I said so to Sigurd.
He answered curtly. ‘The longest minutes are those when you count the dead.’
After that, I did not speak. The few men who were mounted patted their horses and whispered in their ears; some of the rest sang psalms or prayers, but most stood in silence and waited, listening for the call.
A messenger came running back from the gate. ‘Count Hugh has driven back the Turkish bowmen, and Duke Godfrey is on the plain. It is time.’
Without prompting, the herald who rode beside Adhemar put his trumpet to his lips, then waved the blue banner of the Virgin forward. Line by line, rank by rank, we filed out of the square and down the road to the bridge. Women lined the route, and some threw olive branches or garlands at our feet. But there were no leaves on the boughs, and the garlands were only thistles and weeds. There were no cheers or singing.
We came to the gate. The great doors stood open, mighty columns of oak flanking our path, while on the ramparts above and to the side stood a line of priests, crucifixes held aloft. With their arms outstretched, silhouetted against the sky, they took on the form of crosses themselves, or scarecrows. I heard them casting prayers and blessings down on us as we pas
sed, but I was not comforted. And then we were under the arch, past the threshold, and on the white stones of the fortified bridge. Locked in my phalanx and between the high balustrades, I could not see the river; even the sound of its flow was drowned out under the tramp of our boots.
We came between the two turrets that guarded the far bank, and for the first time in almost a month I trod the earth outside the city. I could not savour it, for now we were on the killing ground. The men who had gone before us had met the Turks here: the human evidence was all around our feet. Most seemed to be Franks.
‘Fan out, make the line.’
The deceits of a battlefield are infinite, and seldom kind. As our column began to unfold, the ranks of men ahead of me evaporated: suddenly I was no longer safe in their midst but thrust to the forefront of our advancing line. The landscape opened in front of me: now I could see the plain rising up from the river, the forking road to Saint Simeon, the charred mound where I had quarried gravestones for a watchtower all those months ago. Hard on my right, the battle had already been joined. Duke Godfrey’s men were locked in combat with a company of Turks barely a hundred paces away, shielding our advance.
‘Forward,’ came Adhemar’s order.
Though it was an early hour, I realised that my face was soaked with sweat. Was I so terrified? No – it was not sweat which glistened on my cheek but a fine mist falling from the grey sky. I had barely noticed it in my concentration.
Sigurd wiped the dew from the nose of his helmet. ‘Someone in the heavens watches over us. The Turkish arrows will not fly so far from wet bowstrings.’
‘Nor will swords and axes be so easy to hold.’
‘Look to your right!’
Our line shuddered as every man in it craned his head about. Adhemar had led us beyond Duke Godfrey’s company, hoping to cross the plain and position us on the flank. But our enemies had advanced too quickly, and now our own flank was exposed to the reinforcements who had splashed across the river from their siege encampments.
‘Wheel right, wheel right!’
Adhemar’s aides were galloping their mounts furiously along the line, repeating the order, though there was little need. Barbarians the Franks might be, but they had campaigned for a year in hostile lands, and those who survived had learned a discipline which the ancient Praetorians themselves would have envied. The men on the right, nearest the Turks, halted immediately and turned to face their foes, while those at the far end ran in a wide arc to re-form the line against the enemy. As I turned, I felt the clench of fear in my stomach, the terror that I would move and the man beside me would not, that I would be left exposed. Certainly it was a desperate effort to re-order ourselves so quickly, and I could still hear the thud of shields locking together as the first wave broke over us.
I looked ahead to the line of Turks who rushed towards us. For a moment I saw them clearly: the swords rising and falling like reaping hooks as they ran; the red skirts swirling around their legs; the dirt that their boots kicked up. Then the battle closed in around me, drawing me into its fold, and I knew nothing of its course save what happened in the few square feet in front of me. My sword was my light, and beyond its radius was only a throbbing, heaving darkness. Shields clashed; swords and spears stabbed between the openings, and men fell. Sigurd’s axe swung with a keen joy: I saw men reel away with their helmets split open, or their arms severed from their shoulders. Sometimes it seemed we moved forward, and sometimes back, the sinews of our army tugging and flexing. We never broke.
At length – no one measured the minutes and hours of battle – the space ahead of us widened. The Turks were falling back. I heard horses cantering behind me, and their riders shouting at us to hold fast. At our feet the ground was stained red, a ragged line painted across the earth.
‘Are they defeated?’ I asked, dazed.
Sigurd poked a toe out from beneath his shield, and kicked at one of the bodies lying in front of him. ‘This one is. For the rest, this was simply their vanguard.’
Even as he spoke, the truth of his words was made evident as a new host of spears appeared, marching towards us. Against every expectation, I was struck by how few they seemed. Why was an army of tens of thousands attacking us in hundreds? Where were their horsemen against our ragged infantry?
The distance between us closed, and thought gave way to instinct. I fought.
For a time, the fine rain kept the dust matted to the ground, so that the battle retained a strange, savage clarity such as I had not known before. Then shrouds of smoke began to billow across from behind us. Glancing back for the briefest second, I saw a line of Normans with their backs to us, hacking and lunging at a curtain of fire. The Turks who had besieged the southern gate must have come around to attack our rear. Naphtha throwers were in their ranks, and their fiery missiles kindled flames in the tangled grass and thorns that the feeble rain could not quench. The Army of God now held only a narrow finger of ground reaching out from the bridge, with enemies on both sides. I could not see to count our men, but surely the greater part of our force must have been committed. If Kerbogha launched his cavalry at us now, we would be swept away.
Yet still the Turkish horsemen did not come. The battle raged as fiercely as ever – and hot, too, with the fires behind. Now it really was sweat which coursed down my face, and the air was rank with smoke and boiling steam. The press of bodies and armies against each other was unrelenting, unyielding. Lift the shield to parry a sword thrust; bring it down on a spear striking low. Stab where the enemy laid himself open; retreat before his counter-blow could shiver your steel. The souls of the living departed, and we became mere creatures of war.
If we had wavered, if we had ever taken more than a single step back, then I believe we would have broken and been slaughtered. But we did not. Desperation, hunger, faith – whatever drove us, it set foundations of stone under our feet and kept a lethal wall of iron and steel before us. And all the while a distant part of my being insisted that despite our efforts, despite the fact that I could barely duck my head behind my shield any longer, let alone lift it, this was not the true test. I have been in battles which hung on a knife-edge and were lost, and in those which were won, but in each there came moments of panic where it seemed all order was shattered, when we truly believed ourselves beaten. In the battle of Antioch, that moment never came. The men who stood beside me never faltered, and the killing blow was not struck.
And then the face of the battle began to change. There were fewer enemies ahead of us, and more allies behind. They surged on and we were driven forward, yet every pace we advanced seemed to place our enemies further away, not closer. The line that had held like rock now cracked; gaps appeared, but no one called for them to be closed. And still we drove on.
‘What is this?’ I shouted in Sigurd’s ear. ‘Kerbogha’s cavalry will cut us down like wheat.’
He shook his head. Soon he began to outstrip me, and though at first I tried to keep pace, after a few strides I could see that I would not catch him. I slowed; then, hardly thinking, I stopped dead. The hordes of our army, the Normans who had sallied forth to reinforce us, swept around me, and I was little more than a twig in their stream. They charged past and vanished into the haze, and I was left alone.
Was this a victory? It did not feel like one – but nor did it seem like a defeat. The smoke was all around me, blocking out the sun; Kerbogha himself could have ridden by with all his train and I would not have seen him. I stumbled around the abandoned field, trying to find a path back towards the city, and let the number of the fallen be my guide. At the high-water mark, where our line had stood, they were almost like a carpet on the earth. Just beyond, I found the Emperor’s banner, the golden eagle, still in the ground where Sigurd had planted it. I leaned on its staff, exhausted, and rubbed the tears from my stinging eyes.
Though the army had moved on, dim figures still moved through the fog – the wounded, the compassionate, the corpse-robbers – so I did not see his approach until
he was almost upon me. The snap of an arrow-shaft underfoot lifted my head, and something familiar in his gait held my gaze just long enough to take in his smooth face, his close-trimmed beard, and his black eyes. I could not guess what part he had played in the battle, for he carried a round shield and a straight sword. With no turban wound around his helmet, he could have passed for any Frank who had looted his arms from the dead. Only his armour looked foreign: flat, serpentine scales sewn over each other, rattling and shaking as he moved. I did not suppose it was a coincidence that he had found me there.
‘What do you want?’ There was no hiding the desolate weariness in my voice. The very thought of fighting now turned my limbs to lead. ‘The battle is over. You have lost.’
Even among so much death, Mushid could laugh. ‘I have lost nothing. And you, Demetrios, you will not touch the victory.’
I stepped away from the standard and lifted my sword. Even that took all the remnant of my strength. Mushid was fresh, and a more practised swordsman than any I knew. It would be a short fight.
‘Killing me will not bury your secret. Others know it.’
He pulled off his helmet and threw it aside. ‘Who? Your barbarian giant? Your physician whore? I will find them in time. Then I will find other Franj to aid me. Now that they hold Antioch, it is more important than before that I have eyes among them.’
‘You could have saved yourself much effort if you had not killed Drogo.’ I could not parry his sword; my only thought was to engage him with words, and hope that Sigurd might return.
Irritation flashed in the eyes beneath his tousled hair. ‘I told you: I did not kill Drogo. He was an obedient adept.’
I stepped back two paces, circling to my left. The killing blood was in Mushid’s veins, and words would not deter him long. ‘Adept at what? The mysteries of some forgotten pagan? Sacrificing bulls in lost caves?’
