Siege of Heaven da-3

by Tom Harper

  I stared at him, not knowing whether to feel pity or scorn. Even after all his humiliations, his disastrous entanglement with Peter Bartholomew, his stubborn pursuit of the siege of Arqa, the loss of half his army, he had not learned humility. He stood on the diminished rock of his own dignity while the tide washed out, and railed at the waves for going the wrong way. It was so childish as to be ludicrous.

  Something of my astonishment must have shown on my face, and perhaps Raymond felt it himself, for he added softly: ‘I was lord of thirteen counties, and I left them all behind to pursue this vision of Christ that the Pope conjured before me. My court at Toulouse was the greatest court west of the Alps — now my court is a tent that smells of horse shit. I am a realist, Demetrios. I know I am nearer the end of my life than the beginning, and I came here knowing I would not go back. But that does not mean I should die without dignity. What are Bohemond and Godfrey? Second sons and bastard sons of worthless lines. Did you know that Godfrey only inherited his dukedom because his hunchback uncle was sterile as a mule? What did they give up to come here? What sacrifices did they ever make?’

  Even if there had been an answer, he would not have wanted to hear it — least of all from me. I shrugged, and looked at the floor.

  Raymond sat back and fiddled with his coins again, sliding them across the chequered cloth to form the shape of a cross. ‘After all I have suffered, this ordeal will not have been for nothing. You understand.’

  A silence fell between us, in which the only noise was the clink of coins as Raymond’s hands knocked them together.

  ‘I will not be fighting in your army when we attack Jerusalem.’ I rushed the words out, stumbling and mumbling. Only when I had finished the sentence did I dare to look at Raymond. He sat very still: the only thing that moved was the corner of his empty eye socket, which twitched rapidly.

  ‘Why not?’ The words rasped out like a knife being dragged across a stone. ‘Is it money?’ He scooped a big fistful of coins off the table and shook them at me. ‘I thought you of all men, Demetrios Askiates, were above mere greed.’

  You of all men. It was a clumsy attempt at intimacy, no doubt meant to shame me. Instead, it only hardened me against him. If he had known me at all, he would have known how false his flattery was, how often I had fought for money. The fact that for once I cared nothing for money, that I would have given all the gold in his treasury to not have to do this thing, only added to the insult.

  ‘I have given my allegiance to Duke Godfrey,’ I said shortly.

  With a hiss of rage, Raymond rose to his feet and hurled the coins at me. I felt them rain against my face as I threw up my hands to cover myself, as they bounced away to fall on the ground. On the soft carpet that covered the floor they hardly made a sound.

  ‘Traitor!’ screamed Raymond. ‘You have betrayed me, sold yourself like a whore to my enemies.’ He scrabbled on the table for more coins, pelting me with his pieces of silver. ‘Take them! I took you into my camp and put you under my protection, and this is how you repay me? I stood by your emperor when no one else would. I was his staunchest ally, and all the while Godfrey plotted against him in secret. Have you forgotten that when he was at Constantinople he even tried to wage war on your emperor, he hated him so much?’

  ‘My family are in Jerusalem,’ I said simply. ‘I have to reach them before they get lost in the slaughter. For that, I must follow whoever will lead me inside those walls soonest.’

  ‘And you think that I will not?’ Raymond pounded his fists on the table, so that the remaining coins leapt in the air. The scales toppled over with a crash. ‘I will prove you wrong, Greek. I will be over those walls before Godfrey, before Tancred, before all the liars and cowards who have betrayed me. I will seize its strongholds and towers and make myself lord of Jerusalem, though the devil himself come to take it from me. And you will beg me to release your family, Greekling, as I begged you to stand with me now.’

  If there had not been a table between us, I think he would have knocked me to the ground. Instead, he hissed between his teeth, ‘Go!’

  I went. The last I saw of him, he was kneeling on the floor, gathering up the coins he had hurled at me and weeping.

  That was Sunday. On Monday I spent the day trying to avoid Sigurd’s fury: he had not reacted well when he heard I had volunteered us as mules to drive Godfrey’s siege tower. On Tuesday his temper had cooled, at least to the point where it simmered rather than boiled. By Wednesday it was forgotten. Word went through the army that the final assault would begin next morning, and suddenly there was no time for anything. The hours seemed to slip by like water, and still we had blades to sharpen, armour to oil and dents to hammer out of our shields. A troop of women left the camp at dawn and did not reappear until sundown, returning with skins and buckets of water that they had filled from springs many miles away. The priests recited masses and prayers throughout the day for the endless procession of knights and pilgrims who flocked to them seeking communion, confession and blessing. I wondered how many of those gulping down the transubstantiated bread believed their next meal would be in the celestial city in the presence of Christ. Even Sigurd, who had never entirely let go the pagan gods of his ancestors, disappeared that afternoon to make his confession. Thomas went for much longer and returned with a fiery determination filling his eyes.

  That evening we gathered around our camp fire for the last time. A red sun flamed in the west; the hot urgency of the day had cooled into stillness, and now we sat and tried to replenish our strength before the onslaught. Sigurd wiped a rag over an axe that was already sharp enough to split a hair in two, while Thomas wound a fresh strip of hide around the grip of his shield. I took two twigs I had rescued from the kindling pile and methodically cut the thorns away with my knife, stripping them smooth. When that was done I laid them across each other at right angles and wound a piece of twine over the join to form a crude cross.

  ‘Have thoughts of the battle brought you back to God?’ Sigurd asked.

  I kept my eyes on my work and did not answer. The truth was that I needed a cross to wear in the battle, to mark myself as a Christian if we succeeded in getting inside the city. Once I had believed in its power to save my soul; now I only saw its power to protect me from the violence of men.

  Sigurd took my silence for assent. ‘It’s as well. We’ll need all the help He can give us tomorrow, if He doesn’t damn the Franks for being so stupid as to attack the strongest corner of the city.’

  I shrugged. The open ground that divided the armies, barely a bowshot wide, ended in a shallow ditch that then rose into the outer wall, a low barrier designed more to impede an attack than withstand it. The Egyptians would not defend that for long. They would retreat up onto the main ramparts and rain death down on us from there, fully fifty feet high, and guarded on the corner by a vast tower. The tower of Goliath, they called it, and I feared it was with good reason.

  ‘You won’t topple that with a sling and a stone,’ said Sigurd, following my gaze to the tower. ‘It’s madness to attack there.’

  It was, and the Fatimids had had almost a month to prepare for it. They had spent every day of the last four weeks repairing those walls and strengthening them, filling them with arms and men and supplies. They had not even tried to hide it. When we attacked there the next day, it would be against the strongest, best-defended corner of the city. Not for the first time, a shiver of doubt ran through me as I wondered if I had chosen the right path by abandoning Raymond.

  I looked at Thomas. Ever since he had returned from the mass he had barely spoken a word. There had always been a distance between us, ever since I first hauled him out of a fountain in Constantinople. His marrying Helena had narrowed it, for a time, but in the past month I had felt it stretch wider than ever.

  ‘Tomorrow, God willing, we’ll be standing beside the tomb where Christ himself lay.’

  ‘Or lying in our own graves,’ Sigurd added.

  Thomas laid his shield against his l
egs so that it covered them like a skirt. ‘Better to be dead in the next world than alive in this,’ he said softly.

  I stared at him across the fire. The hot haze that rose from the coals seemed to melt his features like wax, so I could barely recognise him. How deeply had the wound of Helena and Everard’s capture struck him that he could say such things? With a crush of shame I saw how little I had noticed him this past month, how superficial my care had been. With my own wounds so raw, it had been too easy.

  I crossed myself, more out of habit than belief, and saw Thomas sneer at my false piety. ‘You cannot give up on this world — not while your wife and son are held captive. There is no other.’

  ‘Lift your eyes higher, old man. Of course there is another world. And it is a better place than this.’ He tossed a leaf onto the coals and watched it curl and shrivel to ash. ‘Our world is a dying ember; that world is the sun.’

  ‘But there is no point trying to get from here to there.’

  ‘No!’ Thomas banged his fist on the rim of his shield, like a warrior before battle. ‘The point is not to get from our world to that one. The point is to bring that world here, to remake it on earth.’

  I shook my head in disgust. ‘You sound like Peter Bartholomew.’

  For a moment Thomas did not reply. In the everchanging firelight, his face seemed to churn with indecision. I could see part of him wanting to abandon the argument, but another part — a stronger part — could not let go.

  ‘Why did we come here — why did any of us come here — if not to try and make the world more perfect?’

  ‘You cannot perfect the world with bloodshed,’ I said sharply.

  ‘No? Then how do you plan to rescue your daughters?’

  I shook my head in frustration, trying to sift the sediment that clouded my thoughts. ‘Arnulf and his followers don’t want to perfect this world. They want to throw it all out and start anew, remake it entirely.’

  ‘And what is wrong with that? That is the inheritance promised in the Gospels. Why not seize it? Why struggle day by day to mend this sick and broken world, when in one glorious moment we could cure it?’

  ‘You don’t cure something by killing it.’

  ‘Perhaps the sickness has spread so far there is no alternative.’

  ‘No!’ I stamped my foot, lifting a cloud of dust. ‘And if it has, it is not for us to decide. Arnulf preaches that we should kill every man, woman and child inside that city in our impatience to bring on the kingdom of heaven. Every one — including your wife and son, my children and grandchildren. Can that be right?’

  Thomas looked uncertain. ‘Perhaps that is the price of the kingdom of heaven.’

  ‘I do not believe that. But even if it was, there is no man alive who could demand payment.’ I tried to calm myself. Speaking more surely than I felt, I said, ‘God made the kingdom of heaven as an ideal, an example for men to dream of. It is not a place that we can reach except when He calls us there. It is certainly not a place we can call into being.’

  A tear trickled down Thomas’s face, though I could not tell if it was of rage or sorrow. ‘Then why does He tempt us with it?’

  ‘Maybe to see if we resist.’

  45

  ‘Wake up.’

  I couldn’t wake — I had not been asleep. I opened my eyes to see a Frankish sergeant with a long moustache looking down on me.

  ‘Is it dawn already?’ It seemed only minutes since I had gone to bed. Around me, all was dark.

  ‘Barely midnight. Get your armour on and follow me.’

  He led us swiftly down the hill to the place where the great siege tower, Magog, stood in its pomp. It disappeared into the darkness, ready to lay siege to the stars themselves for all I could see. Or perhaps that was wrong. As my eyes balanced with the night, it seemed that the tower was shorter than I remembered it. Perhaps it was the night playing tricks on me.

  I heard the grate of wood rubbing together, a slither and a thud. And then, in a dialect I did not understand, a succession of short, hard words that sounded like curses.

  ‘I almost broke my toe,’ complained an aggrieved voice.

  ‘I’ll break your leprous arm if you’re not more careful,’ retorted the first man. Belatedly, I realised that I knew his voice — it was Saewulf’s. I found him standing at the foot of the tower, while eight Frankish men-at-arms laboured to lift a massive slab of wood.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I whispered. ‘Did this come off the tower? Have the Fatimids struck it with their stonethrowers?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Saewulf turned away to hiss instructions to another team of men, who seemed to be manhandling one of the wattle screens down from the summit of the tower.

  ‘What then? Are you dismantling it? Have we abandoned the siege?’ Every possibility was dreadful, but that was too much to contemplate.

  Saewulf grinned, his teeth white in the darkness. ‘I will tear it down, and rebuild it in three days. That’s what Christ said. But this shouldn’t take more than a night. We’re taking it apart and rebuilding it over there.’ He pointed to the east.

  I gaped. ‘In one night?’

  ‘That’s what we built it for.’ Even as he spoke, another piece of siding slid down from the tower, like a snake shedding its skin.

  ‘Is Count Raymond doing the same?’

  Saewulf shook his head. ‘The stubborn bastard built his tower where there was nowhere else to go. Now he’ll just have to push it up exactly where the Fatimids expect.’ He slapped the side of his tower affectionately, like the rump of a horse. ‘And so will we, if we don’t hurry. Take that, and follow where the others lead you.’

  It was an exhausting, eerie night. Hour after hour, we trudged back and forth over the ridge above Jerusalem, ferrying the dismembered machine to its new site. We were forbidden from carrying lights lest we betray our secret, while a choir of priests kept up a chorus of hymns and anthems to mask the clatter of our work from the watchers on the walls.

  The night seemed unending — as if day had been abolished, and all nights ran together unbroken. I prayed for it to end, and then prayed for it to last as I watched the achingly slow progress of the tower’s reassembly. My hands grew chafed and numb from manhandling the pieces of the siege tower, my legs were weary and my head ached from lack of sleep. But just as Saewulf’s carpenters were hammering the last few trenails into the uppermost storey of the tower, and the wheelwrights oiling its axles, a bloody smear of red trickled over the Mount of Olives in the east. I thought of Arnulf ’s prophecy, and wondered if this would be the last of all days — and even if it was not, whether I would see another.

  Dawn brought fresh urgency to the world. Birdsong was drowned out by the blast of horns and trumpets as the Franks summoned their armies to battle. They assembled on the spur that dropped towards the city, their banners limp above them in the still morning. On the high walls in front of them the sentries from the Fatimid garrison looked out in disbelief. To them it must have appeared as though the land itself had shifted in the night, a mountain erupted and a forest of spears grown in the arid soil.

  Once all the army had assembled, the princes rode out. Godfrey came last of all, riding the white horse I had seen in the paddock. He had braided its mane with silver ribbons so that it shone in the morning like dew. Just in front of him, on foot, Arnulf carried a golden cross with fragments of the True Cross embedded in it. I wondered if relics could hold memories, and if so if those few splinters of wood felt the stir of being so close to the place where they had lifted a man to his willing death, a thousand and more years ago.

  The princes reined in, turned to face the army and dismounted. There would be no place for horses in the coming battle. Grooms led the animals away, while Godfrey and Arnulf walked towards the hulking tower. Its back was open and undefended, so we could see them slowly climbing the ladders inside all the way to the roof of the machine, as high as the towers that guarded Jerusalem behind them. There Godfrey turned around to face the watching ar
my.

  A murmur of awe shivered through the crowd. At that height he was high enough to catch the first rays of the sun coming over the Mount of Olives, and in its pure light he dazzled like a god. His fair hair glowed like a nimbus of pale gold; he wore a white tabard sparkling with five golden crosses for the five wounds of Christ, and a white cloak hung from his shoulders. Even the mail hauberk beneath seemed to have been brushed with silver, and polished so bright it shone white in the dawn. He gazed out on the army and lifted his arms wide. The gold cross gleamed above him like a sign from heaven.

  He drew a breath, as if to make a speech, but there were only two words he needed to say that morning and he shouted them with all his voice: two words that had propelled the army all the way to the gates of Jerusalem. Deus vult. The army cheered. They hammered their sword pommels against their shields; they stamped their feet and the butts of their spears on the ground until the dust rose in clouds to their waists. Most of all, they shouted. They roared out the cry until it filled the valleys like the ocean, rolling from the Mount of Olives across Mount Moriah and Mount Zion all the way to the western ridge. They roared until the earth trembled with their noise, until it seemed they might shake down Jerusalem into dust.

  Three boulders rose into the air and hurtled towards the walls, flung by the mangonels we had brought up in the night. They struck home against the ramparts, and the rhythmic chant of Deus vult swelled into a chaotic roar of triumph. And so the battle for Jerusalem began.

  As Godfrey clambered down from the roof of the wooden tower, Arnulf removed the golden cross from its staff and fastened it to an iron spike that protruded from the top of the tower. It gleamed like a crown. Perhaps it seemed right to him that men would die under fragments of the same wood that had crucified Christ, but I did not think that the man who died on that cross had intended it to be stained with blood again. All around me, men were running about to prepare the assault, while the bombardment from the mangonels flew overhead. I had just started moving towards the tower when I heard a voice calling my name. I turned, to see a Frankish knight looking at me commandingly. His name was Grimbauld, one of Godfrey’s lieutenants. He had lost the lower part of his left arm in the battle for Antioch, but had adapted the slings on his shield so that he could bind it on to what remained. Too unbalanced to wield a sword with skill, he now carried a club-headed mace in its stead.