Knights of the Cross

by Tom Harper

  ‘Next time it will be your neck that tastes this sword,’ the knight hissed. He was breathing hard.

  ‘Next time, I will break your blade in two and force it down your throat.’

  I pulled at Sigurd’s arm. Behind us, I could see the boy hunched over with terror on the bed. It tore at my conscience to leave him with the knight, but I feared worse would befall all of us if we stayed.

  ‘We should leave.’

  Outside the tent the air was hard, and I narrowed my eyes against the sudden light. I had no wish to linger any longer in the Norman camp, for the knight’s anger at us was no more than most of his countrymen felt, but the sight of an old man sitting cross-legged in the doorway of the tent opposite spurred me to one last effort. Sigurd and I crossed to greet him, and I pulled a bloodied bundle wrapped in cloth from the pouch at my belt. I had intended it to encourage the boy, but perhaps I could make it tell elsewhere.

  ‘The knight who just entered that tent, who was he?’ I let the bundle dangle from my hand.

  The man leaned closer and sniffed at the package. ‘Quino.’

  I remembered the name, for the boy had spoken it. ‘He was a companion of Drogo?’

  ‘Alas, yes.’

  ‘As was . . .’ I searched for the foreign name. ‘Odard?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And there was another, also?’

  ‘Rainauld. A Provençal.’ The old man did not hide his scorn of the foreigner, nor his hunger for what I held.

  I did not ask why a Provençal had lived in the Norman camp. Poverty and death had severed many bonds of allegiance, as those who survived flocked to whichever banner offered most hope of reward.

  ‘Were there other servants, besides the boy Simon?’

  ‘None who outlived the winter.’

  I unknotted the bundle and showed its contents. It was the liver from a hare which one of Sigurd’s men had snared in the night, its fresh blood soaking through the wrapping. Though it was no larger than a nut, the man gazed on it as if it were a full roasted boar.

  ‘What else can you tell me of Drogo? What company did he keep?’

  ‘Little.’ The man shuffled back a little as though the smell of the meat was too great a temptation. ‘He was always with one or other of the men from his tent – and rarely with any others. Sometimes one of the captains would visit; sometimes Drogo bought goods from the Ishmaelite traders. Few others.’

  ‘Did he have any enemies?’

  ‘Neither friends nor enemies.’

  ‘And women?’

  The man sucked in his cheeks and swallowed, as if there were too much spit in his mouth. ‘One woman, yes. A Provençal. I did not know her. She dressed always in white – a white robe and a white shawl about her head. Her name was Sarah.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because she announced herself at his tent. I heard her. Though whatever business she had inside, she kept quiet about that,’ he added, wiggling the end of his tongue between his lips.

  ‘When did you see her last?’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon.’

  The answer stopped me short. Long years of habit had already trained my thoughts in certain directions, and the possibility of a woman’s involvement was prominent among them. That one should have called at Drogo’s tent scant hours before he died . . .

  I let the liver drop into the old man’s hand. ‘Did they leave together?’

  ‘No.’ All his attention was clearly fixed on the meat in his palm, his eyes moonlike in wonder, but the answer was confident enough. As he noticed me staring at him, he added: ‘I saw her go before him, perhaps half an hour.’

  ‘And when he left, was he armed?’

  ‘No. No armour at all. Nor his sword.’

  I remembered the blade that the bov Simon had been polishing, and wondered whether it had been his dead master’s. ‘Were his companions in the tent when he went?’

  The man shrugged. ‘I do not think so. I saw Quino and Odard return later, near dusk. I heard they had been working near the bridge. The Provençal, Rainauld, I have not seen.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘If you remember any other facts which seem important, any other men or women who visited Drogo, you may find me in the Byzantine camp.’

  The old man did not respond to my words – I guessed he would sooner seek me at the Caliph’s palace in Baghdad than in a camp full of Greeks. Instead, he gazed at the cloth I held in my hand, still stained with the rabbit’s blood. ‘Will you keep that?’

  I looked at it in surprise. ‘If you want it . . .’

  Before I could finish my sentence, his clawing fingers had snatched it from my hand. With a glance of gratitude, he pressed it into his mouth and began sucking the blood from the fabric. We left him to his feast.

  I did not want to delay any longer in the Norman camp; we hurried away, back towards our own lines. I still had Drogo’s body in my possession, and I suspected it might benefit me to examine it in daylight before his companions buried it. We walked quickly, ignoring the angry glares that followed us.

  ‘You think the woman has something to do with this,’ said Sigurd.

  ‘I think the woman may have something to do with this.’ I tried to sound less certain than I felt, lest my confidence rebound on me later. ‘The knight left his tent without even his sword: it follows he must have planned to meet someone he knew and trusted.’

  ‘Someone with whom armour might have got in the way,’ Sigurd suggested.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘I guarantee you it was no woman who swung the stroke that killed him. His neck was almost cut clean through. Even a man the size of Bohemond would need a sound arm to manage it.’

  ‘A man aroused by passion might find the strength,’ I said.

  Sigurd tipped back his head and laughed, prompting yet deeper scowls on the faces that we passed. Doubtless they thought we mocked them. ‘I see. Demetrios Askiates, the famed unveiler of mysteries, needs only an hour speaking with two men and a boy to discover all. Drogo and the woman were lovers; she came to his tent and arranged to meet him in that dell; he went there unarmed, but was ambushed by a rival, perhaps with the woman’s connivance. Find the woman, find the rival, and Normans and Provençals and Greeks will all be friends again. Is that your answer?’

  ‘It seems as plausible as any,’ I said testily. ‘I would have thought you of all men might favour a simple solution.’

  ‘Indeed I do. And I do not think you need invent a jealous lover to explain why an unarmed man was killed in a place surrounded by thousands who are impoverished, starving, and desperate. Would you ever walk out of the camp alone and unprotected?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘He would not be the first from this army to be murdered for whatever gold he carried – he would probably not even be the hundredth. Franks or Turks, Christians or Ishmaelites: there is not one of them within fifty miles who would not kill for food.’

  I sighed. ‘Nonetheless, for the good of the army, Bohemond demands that the murderer be found.’

  Which in Sigurd’s eyes, I thought, was probably an overwhelming reason not to find him.

  We crossed through our camp, to the lower slopes of the mountain which reached into the plain of Antioch. To my left, I could see the vast expanse of farmland stretching flat as marble to the horizon; on my right, on an outcrop above, the tower they called Malregard looked down on the St Paul gate. The Normans had built it soon after we arrived, and though it had been stout enough then, the winter storms had beaten it until its stones were black and skewed. It leaned off the mountain like a falcon on its perch, poised for the hunt, and even four months on I shivered every time I passed under it.

  A little way north-east of the tower, beside the stump of a myrtle bush long since turned to firewood, we reached the cave. We had discovered it by chance when a troop of Turks had used it to ambush us; after we had defeated them, Sigurd had put it to use as our armoury. It had only been intended as a temporary expedi
ent, to keep off the rain until the city fell, but as the months passed it had gained lamps, benches, and even a ramshackle wooden door hinged into the cliff. As we approached I saw a Varangian in armour sitting on a boulder before it, spinning his knife in the dirt.

  ‘Sweyn! Has anyone tried to disturb our Norman?’

  The Varangian jumped to his feet at the sound of his captain’s voice. ‘Only one. She said you sent her.’ His words faded as he saw Sigurd’s withering stare. ‘She’s inside.’

  Sigurd pulled his helmet from his head, but he still needed to crouch low to pass through the opening of the cave. Even I had to stoop a little. I followed him past the blushing guard, into the damp, stony air within. It was more a tunnel than a cave, extending some thirty feet back into the mountain, and I stepped carefully to avoid tumbling on the shields and quivers of arrows stacked across the floor.

  The passage darkened near the middle, where the daylight receded, but it was quickly illuminated again by the lamp which had been lit at the far end. By its light, I could see the body of the Norman still laid out on the bench where we had left him, though the blanket which had covered him now lay in a heap on the floor. Before him, a slender figure with bare arms dabbed at his neck with a cloth.

  She turned as we approached. ‘Demetrios. I feared it might be the Normans come to bury him.’

  She spoke lightly, despite the debased corpse on the bench – but then, she was a physician, and must have seen equal horror many times in her calling. She was dressed simply, as ever, in a honey-yellow dress tied about her waist with a silk belt, and an ochre palla which had slipped to her shoulder to reveal her long black hair. Like all of us, her face had tightened in the past months, yet to me it did nothing to diminish her robust beauty. Though even after a year of intimacy, I still found her brisk manner disconcerting.

  ‘Doubtless the Normans will come soon, once they discover where we have hidden him,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here, Anna?’

  ‘Seeing what the dead may tell us. Look.’

  I stepped forward, pinching my nose against the odour of the decay which had already started despite the chill surroundings. I had not expected to find the man thus. Anna had stripped him of all his clothes, leaving only a round leather pouch on a string around his neck: the rest of him lay naked, entirely exposed in death. It would have been hard enough to stomach on my own, but to see it with a woman, and with Anna of all women, seemed deep sacrilege. Clearly the fire which had warmed his soul was long extinguished, so that his skin turned blue with cold – could the dead feel cold? – while the drying-out of his flesh had curled his limbs back like the edges of paper before a flame. I could hardly bear to look at the shrivelled, yellow-stained organs of his loins, nor at the blood-crusted rent in his neck, nor yet at the twisted pull of his face. I stared at his feet, and leaned on the cave wall for strength.

  ‘And what do the dead tell you?’ Sigurd at least could find a voice, though it was far distant from his usual thunder.

  ‘That he was killed by a mighty blow to the neck.’ Neither of us had the humour to mock the evidence of that statement. ‘What do you think, Sigurd? Was it an axe or a sword which struck that blow?’

  Sigurd shrugged, reluctant to look too closely. ‘It seems too clean for an axe wound,’ he said eventually. ‘More like the slice of a sword. It was not a Varangian, though,’ he added more confidently. ‘We would have cut the head clean through.’

  ‘Only a knight would carry a sword,’ I said.

  ‘Or someone who had stolen one.’

  ‘Then there is the purse.’ Anna lifted the leather pouch over the corpse’s mutilated neck and pulled the string open, tipping a handful of silver Frankish denarii into her palm. The broad outstretched wings of angels were stamped on the coins’ faces.

  I turned to Sigurd. ‘So much for your thief.’

  ‘He might have been interrupted by the boy.’

  ‘The man who inflicted this death on a knight would not have been troubled by a servant.’

  ‘More curious still are the marks,’ Anna interrupted. ‘Look at his brow.’

  I held my hand before me to block the sight of the man’s eyes, which still stared upward at the rocky ceiling, and peered at his forehead. Anna had pulled the hair back, splaying it out on the bench like a radiate crown, and the curve of the brow was plain to see. In its centre, a swirl of dried blood in the form of a writhin eel meandered from the parted hair to the bridge of his nose. At first glance it seemed as though the two halves of his skull had been forced apart, but in truth the skin was unbroken under the mark.

  ‘What of it?’ I asked. ‘With the force of the blow, some blood splashed onto his face and dribbled down. It left that stain.’

  Anna looked at me in scorn. ‘You think that while the man lay on the ground, a single drop of blood curled itself prettily into that shape? Look how broad and smooth the line is.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘And look here.’ She pointed to a spot high on the man’s left cheek, just behind his eye. ‘What is that?’

  I cracked open my fingers and gazed between them. ‘It looks like – the imprint of a finger. In blood.’

  ‘Exactly. The same finger, I suspect, as marked his forehead.’

  Now Sigurd sounded incredulous. ‘You think it was drawn as he lay dying?’

  ‘Or after he died.’ Anna was unperturbed by our doubt. ‘Either by him or by his killer. The latter, I would guess. A man choking out his life might not manage so neat a design upon himself.’

  ‘But why would anyone mark him so?’ I wondered. ‘Was it some secret sign?’

  ‘Hah!’

  Anna and I stared at Sigurd. ‘It’s not a secret sign. It’s a sigma. In Greek, you’d write it thus’ – he swiped his finger through the air in the form of a Σ – ‘but in the Latin alphabet we write it so.’ He pointed victoriously at the mark on the dead Norman’s forehead.

  ‘Why—’ Anna began, but my thoughts were faster.

  ‘S for Sarah.’ Now it was I who sounded triumphant. ‘Drogo’s mistress was called Sarah. If a rival killed him, he might have marked him with the initial of the woman they quarrelled over.’

  ‘Or S for Simon,’ Sigurd countered. ‘It would not be the first time a servant killed his master. Maybe the boy marked him in boast.’

  ‘And then ran to tell us of it?’

  ‘There is more.’ Anna had kept silent while we argued our theories, but now she gestured back to the corpse. ‘Help me turn him over.’

  Our joy at the discovery drained away as Sigurd and I rolled the body onto its stomach. This time we needed no guidance from Anna, for the mark was plain to see, and familiar as our own faces. It had been carved, not painted, and though there must once have been blood it was now long gone, leaving only glossy pink scars. Two cuts had been made, lines of awful precision, one from the nape of his neck to the small of his back, the other straight across his shoulder blades: a giant cross of flesh.

  ‘That would have hurt,’ said Sigurd quietly. ‘I hope his God appreciates it now.’

  I breathed deeply, and wished I had not. I had occasionally seen pilgrims cut such marks into their cheeks or shoulders, once even into an Abbot’s forehead, but never so large, nor so deep.

  ‘He was lucky the wound did not fester,’ Anna said. ‘More than one man has died from similar pieties.’

  Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by an onslaught of sensations: the stench, the blueing skin, the grim signs on the corpse that seemed to proclaim horrible warnings. Anna had said that the dead would speak to us, but never had I expected so many confused, clamouring voices. I choked for air and staggered towards the light at the end of the cave, but the edge of a shield caught my leg and brought me to the floor. There was shouting behind me, and ahead of me also, but it took several moments before I could open my eyes to see who spoke.

  A face lined with hatred stared down at me, scrawny hair hanging lank about it. He still stank of his horse, sti
ll wore his pointed spurs, and still spoke with contempt.

  ‘Does your Greek stomach fail at the sight of death?’

  ‘Why are you here?’ Sigurd asked above me.

  ‘To bury our brother in the name of Christ, not leave him rotting in a Greek hole.’

  Behind him I could see another Norman, indistinct in the gloom, and a small company of men bearing a litter beyond. I stumbled to my feet.

  ‘Take him, if you want.’

  The knight, Quino, reached down and pulled an arrow from one of the quivers by the wall. He snapped it in his fists, and threw the pieces at me. ‘I will leave you to your toys, Greek. You will need them when I come to claim my vengeance.’ He looked past me, to where Anna stood beside Sigurd, and laughed. ‘On you, and on your whore.’

  They took the body and left, their taunts and jibes echoing back to us from down the path. If this was the company that Drogo had kept, I for one would find it hard to lament his death.

  ε

  It seemed that I would never escape the Normans that day: in the evening Tatikios summoned me to attend him at a council of the princes. They were never comfortable occasions, for most of the Frankish leaders distrusted the Byzantines, and none of them approved of having scribes present. But Tatikios insisted on it, believing men would measure more carefully words which they knew were recorded. As a tactic, it was never particularly successful.

  We met in the house of the Provençal leader Raymond, the Count of Saint-Gilles. His camp was some distance from ours, and by the time we arrived all the other princes had taken seats on the square of benches in the centre of the room. Tatikios had to perch on one end, in a corner, his left leg trembling as he tried to balance himself.

  There must have been a score of men in that square, and twice as many watching with me from the surrounding shadows, but only a handful who signified. All save one were unshaven, as was the fashion of necessity, and all wore mail hauberks in protestation of their prowess. Some I had encountered elsewhere – the wan-faced Hugh the Great, whose beard never grew thicker than goosedown; the ruddy-cheeked Duke Godfrey with his eternal expression of disapproval; and of course Bohemond – others I had seen only in council. Chief among them, at least in his own mind, was Count Raymond. By his age, his rank, his wealth and his vast army he ought perhaps to have been general of all the Franks, but none of the other captains would admit to his authority. He sat in the centre of his bench, his grey hair framing the sour, one-eyed face, and if there was no single seat of honour in the equal-sided square then the broad candelabra placed discreetly behind him certainly drew men’s attention first.