by Tom Harper
Seven arches loomed before me as I reached the Temple of Solomon at last. Compared with the intricacies and beauty of the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of Solomon was a squat and solid building, with nothing but a single dome at the far end to ornament it. I barely noticed it. A ladder at the side led up to the roof, from where a host of terrified faces peered down. Three Norman knights guarded the ladder, but they did not hinder us when they saw we wanted to go up. They waved us on with mock bows and false smiles. ‘You can go up if you like,’ they told us. ‘It’s the coming down that’s hard.’
‘That’s what Jesus said,’ said one of them, and his companions laughed wickedly.
We climbed the ladder, and came out at last on the roof of the temple. It felt like standing on the roof of the world. We were above the enclosure now, so I could see the entire city below rising to the western summit of Mount Zion. Screams filled the air, and the thick smoke from a thousand fires rose overhead so that — though it was only afternoon — darkness seemed to cover the earth. I wondered that there should be any light at all, but there was: a red, sickly glow that could only come from a withered sun. A warm breeze blew smoke and ash in my eyes, and I wept.
I turned away from the scene and looked behind me. Hundreds of cowering faces stared back. What must they expect from us? I began pushing through them, frantically calling for Anna, for Helena and Zoe, for Everard. To my right and left, I heard Sigurd and Aelfric calling the same. No one hindered us, but no one answered. Though they packed that rooftop so tight that many were piled on top of each other, they still contrived to part before me like lilies in water. All I saw was a sea of unknown faces, the last citizens of a dying world awaiting their judgement.
‘Demetrios!’
From the far side of the roof, Sigurd called me. I stumbled over to him, tripping and kicking my way through the crowd, too impatient to wait for them to move. Agonising hope burned in my heart, but I saw quickly that there was no one with him. Instead, he was staring down into the courtyard.
‘We don’t have much longer.’
Looking down, I could see a crowd of Norman knights beginning to gather at the base of the temple, pointing and laughing. Behind them others were bringing up more ladders. Many had their swords out; others carried slings and bows.
The crowd on the roof had seen them too. One of their number, a statuesque woman with a baby still suckling at her breast, stood and began to remonstrate with them. No one could understand what she said, but the passion in her voice was such that at last two of the knights did run back towards the Temple of the Lord. I saw them accost Tancred in the middle of the courtyard; I did not hear what they said, but I saw him shrug and open his arms wide in abdication.
The woman with the child continued her pleading. She got down on her knees and shook her hands imploringly at the men below; she pulled a gold coin from her dress and threw it down, begging them to save her. The knights rushed forward to where the coin had fallen and scuffled for it like dogs. Others shouted back at the woman, beckoning to her, calling that if she only leaped down they would catch her in their arms. ‘Save yourself,’ they urged her, but she would not go. They grew angry; they said that she must jump to see if her god would save her, and if He did not then she was a heretic and would be put to death. Of course she did not understand a word, but she could see the cruelty building around her. Her pleas grew more frantic. She pulled down her dress and offered her naked body to them, any degradation simply to live. That only drove the Franks to new heights of mockery. They whistled and demanded to see more, shouting obscene suggestions.
At length, one of them must have tired of the sport. I did not hear the bow loose, but I saw the arrow strike. It pierced straight through the child at her breast and pinned it to her heart. With a slow scream, she toppled forward and plunged to the ground.
Her death unleashed the frenzy that had been simmering among the Franks. Those who had bows shot them high in the air so that the arrows would rain down from above, while the men with ladders rushed to lay them against the temple. Some of the men on the roof tried to push them back but the Franks were too strong. They swarmed up the ladders and began the killing, stabbing and hacking or simply pulling their enemies off the roof to break on the stones. Such was the thirst for slaughter that some died in the hail of stones and arrows that their companions still launched from the courtyard below.
For one more moment, I searched the crowd for my daughters, praying that if I had to die I might at least die with my family. Then something hard struck me on the side of my head, and I sank into oblivion.
49
Perhaps the world did end. How else to explain the place where I woke? If it was not hell, then there are worse places of which even the Bible does not speak. A dull light filled the air, and carrion birds wheeled overhead. The dead were all around me. Heaps of broken bodies, broken limbs, broken faces. Their eyes stared at me in unceasing reproach but thankfully they did not speak.
‘Anna.’ I pushed myself to my feet and staggered to the nearest corpses, rummaging through them like a pile of old clothes. ‘Helena. Zoe.’ The bodies were stiff; their blood had flowed together and hardened into a bond that seemed impossible to pull apart. Their faces stared up at me, frozen into the moment of their death: in anger, in despair, even in hope — pleading with me, even now, to rescue them.
‘They’re not here.’
I heard the voice but I ignored it, still clawing frantically through the dead, until a gentle hand on my shoulder pulled me away. Sigurd stood over me, a dark silhouette against the amber sky.
‘They’re not here,’ he said again. He had removed his helmet so that his copper hair hung loose over his shoulders. Blood streaked his face and beard, and stained his arms all the way to the elbows.
‘Helena, Zoe, Anna, Everard — they’re not here.’
A great wave of emptiness broke over me and I slumped back. I did not feel empty, for I could not feel. I did not understand it, for I was past understanding. Instead, as some men know pain and others know God, I knew — nothing. Sigurd crouched beside me and put his arm around me.
‘They weren’t on the roof?’ Twisting around, I could see the squat bulk of the Temple of Solomon across the courtyard. The ladders still leaned against it, while workers on the roof rolled down the bodies of the slain. Memories of that last battle suddenly flashed in my mind. ‘How did we escape?’
Sigurd did not answer, but pointed to my chest. The crude wooden cross I had carved beside the campfire on the eve of the assault still hung there, two small twigs bound together with twine. The mere sight of it filled me with revulsion; I snatched at it, ready to tear it off. But the habits of a lifetime are hard to dislodge, and a prick of faith stayed my hand. It had saved me, after all, even if the men it saved me from wore the same emblem. I left it, for now.
‘What about Aelfric?’
Sigurd shook his head. ‘You and I were the only ones.’
I brushed my hand against the cross and whispered a prayer for Aelfric. Even in the midst of so much death I felt his loss.
‘But the girls, Anna — they weren’t up there?’
‘Not that I saw.’ He jerked his head, as if trying to dislodge something from his thoughts. ‘It was hard. . to tell.’
We sat there in silence for a moment, two living souls dwarfed by the death around us.
‘What do we do now?’
Sigurd stood. ‘We should find Thomas. At least we know where he is. He wanted so much to see Jerusalem — the least we can do is bury him here properly.’
It did not take long to find our way to the street where Thomas had died. We left the great enclosure of the Temple Mount and walked across the valley on the high bridge, staring down into the city. The slaughter had finished. The Franks had done everything in their power to bring paradise to Jerusalem and they had failed. They had washed the city in the blood of its people, but that had not cleansed it. It stank. Now they were faced with the wreckage and ruin
ation of their efforts. I could see small groups of them below slowly beginning the wretched business of clearing the city.
‘What time is it?’ I asked. The bronze light made it feel like dusk, or perhaps dawn, but I could not see any sign of the sun. It was the smoke in the air, I realised, clouding the sky so that only dark light bled through.
‘Saturday morning. You were unconscious all night.’
I rubbed my temple, flinching to feel the bruise where the stone had struck. ‘Did it hit me that hard?’
Sigurd shrugged. ‘There are some times when it’s better to be asleep.’
Just for a moment, I glimpsed the torments Sigurd must have suffered during that lonely night, the horrors he must have witnessed as he stood watch over me. I did not ask; I did not have the strength for pity.
We crossed the bridge and walked west, to the crossroads where the two tamarisk trees grew. The flies were thick on the ground, rising up in clouds as we passed. The heat and the stench were almost too much to bear. At the crossroads, I shed my armour and my quilted coat and abandoned them in the street, keeping only the thin linen tunic I had worn underneath, and the dagger tucked in my boot. It was a relief to be free of the burden. My whole body felt lighter, freer; I moved so easily I thought I might float away into the hazy sky.
I turned right, ran up the street and stopped. There was the house with its shaded balcony, its splintered doorframe and the door lying flat on the ground. There was the helmet Thomas had torn off in his fury, a round dent showing where he had hurled it against the wall. There were the two dark stains in the dusty road where Thomas and Bilal had died, with a third a little further off where Thomas’s killer had met his end. But the bodies were gone.
At another time, in another world, I should have dropped to my knees and wept that of all my family, not one could be found even to bury. On that day, overwhelmed by death, I just stood and stared.
‘He’s not here,’ I mumbled to myself. Then, to Sigurd, ‘Could he have lived?’
‘No.’ Sigurd spoke brusquely, refusing any compromise with hope. ‘I saw him as well as you. He was dead.’
My chin sank against my chest in despair. Looking down, I saw the wooden cross still hanging there, jerking like a marionette as I moved. Its impossible promise of the miraculous dangled before me, taunting me. I hated it.
I heard a sound from the road and looked up. Two Frankish knights had come around the corner, wheeling a creaking barrow between them. A tangle of arms and legs dangled over its sides, the corpses piled so high they threatened to topple out. I stared at them, sucking back the bile in my throat, but I could not see Thomas’s body among them.
The barrow stopped in front of us and one of the knights stepped out from behind it. His face was scarlet with sunburn, his moustache shaved short for battle. He was sweating.
‘What are you doing?’ he shouted at us. ‘Who told you to linger around with so much work to be done?’
I stared at him vacantly. ‘We. . We were looking for a body.’
‘And you couldn’t find one in this shambles?’ The knight turned to the barrow and tugged on a loosehanging arm. Two bodies tumbled off and fell on the ground with a flat thud. A man and a woman, both Ishmaelites, both horribly ravaged by the wounds that had killed them. They fell one on top of the other, a casual piece of innuendo that seemed almost more horrible than the wounds themselves.
‘There you go,’ said the soldier. ‘There’s bodies for you. Take them away.’ Still I stared at him. ‘Left at the end of the road. Follow the others.’
Without another word, he and his companion lifted up the cart handles and pushed it on down the street. Sigurd and I stared at each other, each as confused as the other. Then, because there was nothing else to do, we picked up the two corpses and dragged them in the direction the knight had ordered.
We were not alone. At the top of the road we found many others — Provencals, Normans, Lotharingians and Flemings, as well as Ishmaelite prisoners, even Jews — working to dispossess the city of its dead. Carnage and devastation were everywhere; to look on it was to taint your soul for ever. We followed the procession across Mount Zion to the western gate, where the high citadel rose above the ramparts. No sign of siege or sack marked its massive walls, but it had fallen nonetheless: I could see the blue banner of Provence fluttering from the topmost tower, and Provencal archers patrolling its walls. Jerusalem was taken, but Count Raymond’s jealous eyes still saw enemies everywhere.
We passed through the gate onto the bare mountain beyond. The ground fell away steeply into the valley, with a great crowd of knights and pilgrims milling about at its rim. A soldier shouted at us to bring our burdens there and, numbly, we obeyed. We hauled them to the edge and stared down.
For a moment I thought I truly had witnessed the resurrection. Looking into that ravine was like looking into the bowels of the earth, as if the jaws of hell had opened to disgorge the legions of the dead. The hillside was thick with bodies, their stiff arms outstretched as if trying to haul themselves out. At the bottom, still more corpses were piled up in vast mounds, like fallen leaves ready for the burning. There must have been thousands of them, ten thousands. Small groups of Franks clambered over them, piling cords of wood and dousing them in oil. I could not believe we had killed so many.
A group of pilgrims hauled a cart to the edge and upended it. More corpses tipped out like rubbish, tumbling and sliding down the rocky slope. I stared at them, trying to make out anything that could be Thomas, but it was no use.
‘Come on!’ shouted a soldier impatiently. ‘Plenty more to come.’
We lifted the bodies we had brought and hurled them into the pit. When they had gone I said a brief prayer for Thomas, trying to imagine him lying lost among the naked, unnumbered dead. Then I went to find what we had come for.
After all our struggles, all that time, it was not hard to find. We followed the pilgrims who streamed back into Jerusalem from that open grave — down a sloping street, through the wreckage of what had once been a market or a bazaar, and then along a narrow, twisting alley.
‘Are you sure this is the right way?’ Sigurd asked doubtfully.
I was not sure, but I carried on. Around a corner, through a narrow door in a wall — and suddenly we were there. A shady, colonnaded courtyard, with lofty porticoes to our right and our left opening into dim chambers beyond. The waiting crowds within almost overflowed it, and the red-tiled roofs around the courtyard sagged under the weight of the pilgrims who had climbed up on them. It seemed to take an age to worm our way through the throng; several times our rough manners would have provoked violence if there had only been room to swing a fist. I drew the knife I had kept in my boot and balled my tunic around it. The closer we came the more slowly we progressed until suddenly, at last, there was nothing in front of us except the sweet smell of incense wafting out of the chamber within. We peered over the threshold, into the shrine of the Holy Sepulchre.
It had been an image in my mind so long, but — like so many things — it was not as I had expected it. From my childhood, I had always imagined the sepulchre as a great stone cave, rugged and primal, yawning open in the middle of the church. Perhaps it had been, once, but that had long since been hidden by the artifice of men. It stood in the middle of a broad, semicircular hall, under a lofty rotunda whose centre had been cut out to allow a pillar of light to plunge through. The shrine stood at its foot, so that you could not tell if the tomb was the object or the source of the brilliance. Tendrils of smoke writhed in the bloodred light like souls in torment.
Of the tomb itself I could see very little. The bricks that made its walls were scarred and pocked with holes, while the lead cupola on top was badly scratched and dented. It looked more like a roadside chapel than the tomb of God. But even that I could hardly see, for the inside of the church was as crowded as the courtyard beyond. A phalanx of priests in golden robes circled the tomb, singing a psalm of thanksgiving. In their centre, raised above all of t
hem at the door of the tomb, stood Arnulf. A radiant triumph smirked on his face as he sang:
The Lord rejoices in his people,
and adorns the humble with victory.
Let the faithful exult in their glory;
Let the high praises of God be in their throats,
And sharp swords in their hands.
An acolyte held the golden cross beside him, the fragments of the true cross erected once again on the hill of Calvary. The princes stood in front of him, facing the sepulchre, and their knights packed the chamber around them. Some had their heads bowed, but others stared around in wide-eyed astonishment, unable to believe where they stood. They seemed to have come straight from the battle: many still wore their armour, their tabards soaked with blood like butchers’ aprons. Some were bloodied up to their elbows; others bore open wounds, which wept and bled as they sang the psalm.
Let the faithful wreak vengeance on the nations
And punishment on their peoples;
Let them bind the kings of the earth with chains
And their princes with iron shackles,
To execute on them the judgement of God —
This is the glory of the faithful.
‘Praise the Lord!’ shouted the crowd. The priests had stopped singing but the crowd carried on, repeating the antiphon again and again with such noise and fervour that I feared the dome might crack apart and collapse on them in the moment of their triumph. ‘Praise the Lord.’ It was an awesome sound. Its monolithic unison seemed to ring with everything that was most mighty and terrible in the Army of God. The more often they repeated it, the louder they sang. Confidence became stridence, unison began to shake with disharmony. Looking at the fervent faces that thronged the sanctuary, breathless mouths straining to build the sound ever louder, it suddenly seemed to me that they were not gripped by glory or love of God, but by desperation. The moment of victory had passed and they knew it. They had come to find heaven, to capture God, but the tomb was empty. Soon they would have to leave that sanctuary and venture into the world they had made, a dark and terrible place, but for a little while yet they could delay it. So they sang on, not in joy but in dread of what was to come.
