Knights of the Cross da-2

by Tom Harper

  ‘You have a keen mind, Demetrios, but you should listen more. My god is Allah, the one true deity. The matter in the cave, it was . . . a device. One step on the journey.’ Pride entered his voice. ‘What do I know of the worship of pagan idols? I invented the ritual, to feed those hungry for belief. There are many stairs on the path to knowledge, and sometimes it is necessary to come through error into truth. In the cave, Drogo and his friends abandoned the false god of the Christians. They crossed a chasm which could not be bridged, dividing them from their past. This was the first step.’

  His words had bewitched me, as he knew they would, and I had allowed him too close. His sword hissed through the air, so sharp that it glided through my skin unchecked. A gash opened on my right forearm, and more blood spilled onto the ground.

  Mushid was moving faster now, almost like a dancer. The tip of his sword darted like a dragonfly, probing my guard, though it was more an exercise than a necessity. ‘On the second rung, it is annihilation. The soul must be wiped clean, ignorant even of its ignorance. All error and false belief must be purged. And so this is what I told Drogo: that there is no God.’

  The blade flashed. I stumbled to avoid its arc and as I flung out an arm for balance I felt a hot iron bite the palm of my hand. Mushid was not trying to kill me, or not yet – rather, he seemed to be working to the rules of some cruel, self-imposed game.

  Hardly less agonising were the words he had spoken. I ached to answer them, to rebut the terrible lie he had told, but all I could manage through my pain was a mangled cry. ‘Lies. Lies.’

  ‘Of course.’ Mushid stepped carefully over a body and continued circling me. ‘But again, a necessary lie. Drogo needed to renounce all gods before he could acclaim the true God. How could he accept truth, if he had not known falsehood? And he believed me. He proved it.’

  This time I had learned to shut my ears to his words. When the blow came, I just managed to lift my sword to meet it. The toll of clashing steel rang between us.

  ‘Do you know how he proved it, Demetrios the unveiler of mysteries? How in one act he obliterated the power of God and cast himself free of his people? He summoned Rainauld to a lonely dell, and he plunged a dagger into his friend’s heart. For if there is no God, as he believed, if no one will punish evil, who can do wrong?’

  I was so dazed that I barely knew myself any longer. A part of me tried to wield my sword against my enemy, a part dismissed his tale as a feint, and a part wept that the answers I had sought so long were now becoming manifest, but too late. As for which part mastered the others, I had not the strength to decide.

  ‘But it was a lie,’ I whispered. ‘Drogo’s evil was punished.’

  Mushid scowled. ‘I took Rainauld’s body and hid it in the culvert. When I returned to the dell, Drogo was dead.’ He raised his sword over his shoulder, hefting it for the killing blow. ‘A waste. He would have been a true disciple. Through him I could have reached deep within your army and guided it to my purpose, to destroy the godless Sunni who blaspheme the name of the prophet, and make my own faith master.’

  He swung his sword like an axe at my neck; I parried with an upright blade and felt the impact shiver through my wounded arm. My sword dropped from my hand and I fell back. Mushid stood over me, wreathed in smoke.

  ‘Farewell, Demetrios. You will—’

  Lying on my back, I felt the ground beneath me shudder. Was it an earthquake? They had happened here before, dreadful portents from the depths of the Earth. But this did not feel like a tremor to shake down houses and trees. There was a rhythm in it, a pounding like a drum, yet faster than any man’s hands could beat.

  A line of horsemen thundered out of the smoke, lances couched beneath their arms. Their shields were painted with the red bear, and I saw Tancred’s stallion galloping at their head. I doubt whether they knew Mushid, whether they even knew his race. They were in battle, and he was in front of them. He did not have time to move, or even to face his doom. The spear tore apart the plates of his armour, plunged through his chest, and emerged on the other side. For the merest second, I saw his eyes widen and his face begin to contort into a scream. Then he was gone, lifted off the ground and swept on by the relentless drive of the knights. He must have been dragged fifty yards before the Norman pulled free his lance.

  I sank back. Blood had turned the earth to a crimson mud; I was mired in it, and did not have the strength to escape. I leaned my head on the corpse behind me, and shut my eyes.

  Afterwards, many men tried to explain how our feeble, tiny army had defeated a force ten times its strength. Many invoked Christ: had He not sent us His lance, they asked? Some who had fought on the western extremity of the battle swore that at its height three white riders had appeared in the hills and charged home against the Turks, and it was commonly agreed that these three had been the warrior saints: George, Mercurios, and Demetrios my namesake. Others heard reports from captured Ishmaelites that it was Kerbogha’s faithless allies, resenting his power and remembering past injuries, who had abandoned the field and left him helpless. This too was much credited to Christ’s intervention. Some suggested that the routed infantry of Kerbogha’s vanguard had panicked the ranks behind and turned them from battle, but who could tell? The truth was that none could explain it, not even Kerbogha himself.

  Tancred’s horsemen pursued Kerbogha and the remnants of his army far beyond the plain of Antioch, all the way to the Euphrates. There, Kerbogha took a boat across the river and passed beyond knowledge.

  Antioch was freed.

  λ ς

  After Peter and the angel had passed unnoticed among the guards, they came before the iron gate which led out of the city. Unseen hands opened it for them. They walked outside, and along a lane, when suddenly the angel departed. Then Peter said: ‘Now I know that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from the hands of Herod, and from death.’

  The priest at the front of the church looked up from his book, and scanned the watching faces of his congregation lest any miss the miraculous symbolism. He spoke in Latin, but I knew the story well enough: how when Saint Peter had been cast into prison and condemned to death, the chains had fallen from his wrists and an angel had brought him to safety.

  I slipped out through the great doors at the back. On this, the feast of that miracle, I needed no Frankish priest to explain the analogy. Nor did I care to hear the Latin rite in a Byzantine church. Besides, I had an appointment to keep.

  I stepped into the square, flinching as the sun struck my face. It was the first day of August, and the afternoon heat seemed to burn the very air itself. All was still. The stone fragments of the Ishmaelite tower lay where they had been pulled down, waiting to be broken up and to become new walls and homes and churches. In the far corner of the square I could see a group of Genoese merchants clustered in a circle, haggling over some argument or other. Like crows, they had arrived almost before the battle had finished, looking to feast on the trade which our victory had opened. Bohemond had granted them a market and houses: doubtless their caravans were already pushing out along the roads to the east. They would bring back spices, and news and gold, and Bohemond would take the choicest portions to fill the treasury of his new realm.

  I looked up at the mountain looming over us. In the glare of the sun, its colour seemed to fade and every line and wrinkle of its ancient face was made plain. There must have been a breeze at the summit, for I could see the crimson banners streaming out from the citadel in proud dominion. With Kerbogha vanquished and all hope of relief gone, the garrison had surrendered it to the princes, and they in turn to Bohemond. Now the banner of Provence flew only over the bridge gate and the palace, where Count Raymond isolated himself with his jealousies and regrets.

  I saw two figures walking towards me across the square and I hurried to meet them. Seeing them from a distance, Sigurd so vast and Anna so slight beside him, I was struck anew by how much a month of rest had restored us all. The lands around Antioch might still be a wildern
ess, but in the rest of the world summer still brought the usual crops. With the siege broken and the roads open, the markets in the city had flourished again. Our cheeks and bellies had filled, not with bloated bile but with nourishment, and strength had returned to our arms. A month, I marvelled: a month and more since we had met Kerbogha on the plain, yet it seemed a single day. At first I had kept to my bed, too exhausted to stand, while Anna nursed me; then, when I could walk, I had wandered through the city in a daze, astonished that I could pass in and out of the gates as I pleased. For nine months those walls had been our cage, first on the one side and then the other: it seemed almost impossible that I could go through them at will.

  ‘How are your bandages?’ Anna took my hands and twisted them round, peering at them back and front. The cloths were clean. Her salves had served their purpose, and though Mushid had cut deep the wounds were beginning to heal. She still took every opportunity to examine them – probably to be thorough, but perhaps also as a reminder, a soft rebuke for the risks I had taken.

  ‘They seem healthy.’

  ‘Good,’ said Sigurd. ‘Then we will soon be able to make the journey to Constantinople.’ Even more than I, he longed to be in the queen of cities, to be away from the Normans and out of this desert, to be back in the palace serving the Emperor.

  ‘Soon,’ I agreed. ‘When we are strong enough, and the summer heat abates. After so much struggle, it would be unfortunate to die of thirst on the road home.’

  Sigurd scowled. ‘The weakness of the Franks has seeped through those bandages and into your blood, I think.’

  Perhaps it had. None of the Franks, certainly not their princes, had showed any eagerness to continue on their road. The men who had marched across Anatolia in the height of summer would not do the same in Syria. When we arrived, Antioch had been merely a barrier on the greater path to Jerusalem; now, for many, it seemed to have become the object. What did it matter? For me, Antioch would be the limit of my journey, and that was enough.

  I squeezed Anna’s arm. ‘I will come back to you in an hour,’ I promised. ‘I have been summoned up the mountain.’

  I left them in the square and hurried through the city to the road which twisted up Mount Silpius. The south-eastern quarter, where once Sarah’s heretics had held me captive, had changed again: the ruins had been razed and the ashes ploughed into new fields. As I walked across them, I wondered what had become of the priestess. She had vanished in the fire, and I had heard no word of her since. Perhaps I could have asked Peter Bartholomew, but since the vindication of his vision he had become revered among the pilgrims and his lapse into heresy was doubtless washed from his memory. Would his flock care if they knew? Or would they look into their hearts, and see how sorely their own faiths had been tested during the darkness of the siege? Drogo had not been the only one whose suffering had driven him to error.

  I reached the path and began climbing. The last time I had come this way, burdened by armour and the prospect of battle, it had seemed like the way of the damned. Now, with wild flowers growing at its edge and the pines rustling above, it was a bucolic idyll, perfect on a summer’s day. Only the occasional flash of bone in the grass, where the burial parties had missed the remains of a forgotten corpse, gave testament to its past. My feet crunched on the dry stones and earth; the heat held me in its stillness, and when I closed my eyes the sun was like a shining white veil before me. As I swung my legs, I could feel every sinew in my body as if it were newly born, as Lazarus must have felt when Christ awoke him.

  At a bend in the road, where it turned back across the face of the mountain, I forked away onto a small path. For a few minutes I walked alone in the pine forest, my footsteps muted on the fallen needles; then I came onto the open hillside and the view spread out before me. I could see the Orontes, much diminished by the summer drought yet still gleaming as it curled to the sea. On its banks, on the plain, teams of men and oxen were cutting furrows and pruning back the trees in the orchards. It was strange to see the ground without the tents which had sat there for so many months. From that height, the fragment of land between the walls and the river seemed so thin, so tenuous. Had it really been our world for eight months?

  The path ended at the gate of a low villa, built out on terraces on the southern arm of the mountain. The blue banner of the Virgin hung from a spear by the doorpost, and a pair of Provençal knights guarded it. I told them my name and they admitted me, first to a garden, then to a blue courtyard tiled to resemble the sea. Looking down was like peering into clear water: small fish and great leviathans swam side by side, while silver waves rippled through the design where an imaginary sun caught the waves.

  The guard led me down a stone corridor, its alcoves populated with marble figures, and through a door to a chamber at the end. It must have been built on the very edge of the terracing, for the arched windows gazed out on a precipitous drop, with the mountainside below and the southern hills beyond. Sunlight slanted through the openings and picked out the sweet threads of incense that hung in the air. Below the windows stood a bed, pushed into the corner and covered with thick blankets despite the heat. Its occupant was propped up on cushions, his eyes closed to the sun, and in the gilded light the lines and harrows of his face were cleansed away. A priest knelt beside him, whispering prayers.

  I bowed awkwardly. ‘Your Grace?’

  The hooded eyes eased open, wincing at the light. ‘Demetrios?’

  ‘I am here.’

  A hand lifted from among the blankets and waved the priest away. ‘Leave us.’

  The priest frowned to have his supplications interrupted, but made no complaint. He backed away, bowed, and left the room.

  ‘Is the door closed?’ Adhemar asked.

  I looked. Whether from curiosity or carelessness, the priest had left it slightly ajar. I fastened it shut, then took a stool from the corner and set it beside Adhemar’s bed. There was a smell about him that no amount of incense and unguents could quench, the dank smell of a room long unopened. I had found it before among the old and the sick, though seldom for long.

  ‘Come closer, Demetrios.’

  I leaned nearer.

  ‘The day is beautiful?’

  ‘Hot, my Lord.’

  ‘Better the heat of the sun than winter’s frozen grip. It is good that I have lived to see Antioch in this light.’

  ‘It is your prize. Your victory. You have brought us through the siege.’

  ‘Christ has brought us through the siege,’ he reproved me. The stern set of his face relaxed; he chuckled, though it swiftly became a rattling cough. ‘Christ, and Bohemond’s ambition.’

  ‘His ambition would have sundered the army apart if you had not tempered it.’

  ‘But it was not enough. I was not enough.’ Adhemar clutched my arm. ‘This was to be a new path, a new way. A great enterprise to bind all Christians together, not under the princes of the Earth but under the guidance of Heaven. We built this road, Pope Urban and I – we preached its foundations and we set a great multitude upon it, in the hope that it would bear us to the peace of Jerusalem. Instead, it has led us into the wilderness of sin. Though I think now that even if it had brought us to the gates of Heaven itself, still Bohemond and his rivals would have quarrelled over the division.’

  The effort of his speech had been great; he sank back in his cushions and closed his eyes again.

  ‘When we set out, Pope Urban told me that faith was a bloom which flowered in the desert. It is not. Hate and doubt are all that flourish here. What we tried to uproot we have instead only nourished and watered. The princes will kill. They will kill and plunder as they did before, only now they will do it in the name of Christ. They will kill in His name, because I have preached it, and He will weep in Heaven.’

  ‘You did what was necessary,’ I said, remembering Anna’s words. ‘You cannot blame yourself for what became of it.’

  ‘No!’ There was rare strength in Adhemar’s voice. He fumbled within his nightshirt
and pulled forth a jewelled cross. ‘This was once the symbol of passion, of humility, of mercy.’ He twisted it on its chain so that he held it upside down. ‘I have made it a sword.’

  I did not speak. There were no words of comfort that I could say. I looked down on Adhemar, at the muscles twitching in his face where life and death vied for mastery. The breath seemed to be faltering in his throat; his heart was faint.

  The struggle in his body eased, and for a moment I thought that life had left him. Then, in a dull voice as if speaking through a veil, he whispered, ‘Did you ever discover the killer of Drogo?’

  It was the last question I had expected of him. Perhaps it was the cords of his mind unwinding which had recalled that distant memory.

  ‘There was a Saracen. For a time, Drogo had lapsed into heresy. This Ishmaelite preyed on Drogo’s doubts and seduced him into worse error. First idolatry, then apostasy. He wished to make Drogo his creature, his spy. He had Drogo lure Rainauld to the dell and kill him, to test his loyalty.’ It was a bitter truth that the man I had sought to avenge had himself been a murderer.

  Deep in his pillows, Adhemar nodded. He shuffled deeper under his blankets, turning this way and that in search of comfort. Even when he lay still he looked in pain, though it would not be for long. The breaths that hissed through his dry lips grew ever more faint.

  ‘I was walking in the fields,’ he whispered. His thoughts were dissolving; I could not tell if it was a month earlier or a lifetime he remembered. ‘Walking, and praying. I found them in the dell, alone.’

  Seated low on my stool, I stiffened. What memory was this?

  ‘They embraced as brothers. As he stepped away, he kissed Rainauld on the cheek. Then he stabbed the knife in his heart. He fell without a word.’

  Now there was no sound in the room. Even the murmur of the guards outside had ceased, though they could not have heard Adhemar’s frail words. The sound barely reached my own ears.