Knights of the Cross

by Tom Harper

  I rolled my tongue around my mouth. ‘A little,’ I admitted.

  ‘Drink.’

  Again the wooden cup tipped against my lips, spreading the bitter liquid within me. I gulped it eagerly, then suddenly stopped my throat in panic. ‘What is this – some foul communion of your heresy?’

  ‘It is water, and a little artemisia to ease your pain. You need have no fear.’

  She paused. From somewhere on my left I heard the grate of a cup being placed on a table. I strained my ears, but there were no sounds beyond, no evidence of the congregation who had been there earlier. Were we alone?

  ‘You said I worshipped God falsely. How do you say it is right to worship Him?’

  ‘That is hidden knowledge.’

  Frustration rose within me, rolling back the pain and confusion: the childish anger at being barred from secrets. Again I tried to rise from my bed, and again the bonds restrained me. ‘Why hidden? So you can lord it over your followers, tempt them in with curiosity?’

  ‘Hidden, because it is dangerous. It is not pride or selfish delight which hides these mysteries. They are open to all, but only if those who desire to know them have a pure and seeking heart. I can tell you these things, but you must wish to know them. Not for advantage, nor malice nor greed, but from the sincere yearning for salvation.’

  ‘Who does not desire salvation?’

  ‘Many. And even of those who do, the greater part lack the pure soul and true heart to persevere. They desire truth, but from ignorance. They do not understand what they seek. When they find it, it is beyond them. Their faith suffers; sometimes it is ruined altogether. Sometimes they themselves do not survive.’

  Her words filled me with dread. A part of me – the part which had sought unpleasant truths from every pimp, thief, mercenary and noble in Constantinople – bridled at her overblown warnings. But in another, more profound part, I shivered at the awesome promise and threat entwined in her words.

  ‘The knowledge I have to give is not some scroll or book, to be filed away on a shelf once you have read it. My knowledge is the knowledge of life, of light. Once learned, it cannot be forgotten. It will consume you like a furnace, and if your soul is flawed you will be broken. It is not enough to know it – you must also believe it.’

  I raised myself on my elbows, feeling the cord press against my waist. ‘I will hear it.’

  All that followed, I heard as if in a dream. Afterwards, indeed, I wondered if I had dreamed it. Scenes and images passed through my head as she spoke – glowing angels with fiery wings, lush gardens of fruit, rearing serpents – but more as if I were walking through a church, peering at the icons each in turn. My soul seemed to swell in my head, pressing against my skull as it grappled with her story. One voice screamed that it was falsehood, a deception wrought of evil to damn all who heard it. But another voice counselled caution, testing her words and wondering in terror if they were true.

  ‘Much of what I have to tell will seem familiar. That is because the liars and demons who possess the church have twisted it, by the merest fraction, into error. The prince of darkness knows that the best lies sit closest to truth. Only when I have finished will you see how far from truth the church has turned.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I will tell you from the beginning. Many ages ago, after Satan fell from Heaven, he divided the waters of his prison firmament, and raised up earth from beneath the waters to become land. He made himself a throne, and caused his rebel angels to bring forth life: plants and trees and herbs, animals, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. But still it was not enough. He took clay from the earth and moulded man, and from that man he took more clay and made woman. Then he snared two angels from heaven and made them prisoners in the clay, so that their spirits were clothed in mortal form. In his depravity, he bade them sin, but they were pure and did not know how.

  ‘So Satan placed them in a garden. From a stream of his spittle he made a serpent; he took its form, and entered the garden. He slithered into the woman’s body and filled her with a longing for sin until her desire was like a glowing oven. He filled the man with a like desire for sin, so that both captive angels were consumed with lust. Together, they spawned the children of the Devil. The spark of the angels is divided and scattered among the people of the Earth, but it is not lost. A fragment of their being remains within us: that is why we must forswear the dark substance of this world, and seek to kindle a flame from the angelic fire within. Only thus will we free ourselves from the vessels which bind our souls, and escape this wicked Earth for the realms of light.’

  Sweat had begun to pool on my skin in the close air of the cave, but I barely noticed it. Far hotter was the fire that raged within me, scalding and blistering my soul even to think on what she had said. Her warning had been honest: her words were pure fire. Even if I disbelieved them, even if I longed to tear them from my memory, I would not forget them. They would undermine the walls of my faith with doubt, perhaps to destruction. Even repeating them might be mortal sin. And I feared there was a part of me, an insistent part, which clamoured that she might speak truth.

  ‘You have opened the first door of our mysteries, Demetrios Askiates. What do you say? Are you afraid to cross the threshold?’

  I did not have the strength to lie. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Only the proud rush in where they do not see clearly. The humble tread fearfully, but journey farther. Yet, in your soul, the truth begins to stir. Have you never felt the empty weight of your sinful clay? Has it never seemed to you that your spirit is snared in a vessel from which it cannot escape? Surely – in the clarity of grief, perhaps – you have ached to shake off the trappings of the flesh and liberate the divine spark within?’

  Caution and reason implored me to resist her, but I could not deny the simple accuracy of her words. I remembered running through the labyrinth of streets and alleys after Odard’s death, desperate to lose my guilt. I remembered lying next to Anna on the walls, our bodies touching but our souls sundered by the secret of what I had done. Was it all as Sarah said?

  Her soft voice was like balm on my thoughts. ‘You begin to see clearly, Demetrios. All your life you have lived in sin and error – now at last the light of God begins to glow in your heart. Take it. Cup it in your hands and breathe on it, so that the flame grows and the fire takes hold. For now it is the merest ember, but in time it will burn away your sin like sun on a dawn mist.’

  ‘But how—’

  She pressed a sweet finger to my lips. ‘Sleep now.’

  I did not sleep. I lay on my bed while questions and arguments roared through my head like storms in the desert. Some whipped up into towering columns of confusion; others eddied and flowed in thick clouds of chaos. At times I thought they were gone, that the grains of thought had settled, but they always returned with renewed ferocity. Pain thumped against the back of my skull and hunger cramped my stomach: my body was failing. I no longer knew if that was a curse or a blessed relief.

  Yet even as my senses collapsed, my perception of the cave improved. Light began to filter in through long cracks in the ceiling, and gradually the darkness resolved itself into a palimpsest of grey shadows. Rough-hewn walls emerged around me; dark figures moved in the recesses of the cave. My bed seemed to be in a corner, while at the far end I could make out the vertical lines of a stair or ladder rising through the ceiling. It was often in use, though even when a man came down it no additional light was admitted. How deep was this place, I wondered? Were we in a cave below a cave?

  Later, I did not know how long, Sarah returned. Her robe was like a shaft of moonlight before me, though her voice was much troubled.

  ‘Have you thought on what I told you, Demetrios?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘How does it seem to you?’

  ‘Difficult.’

  ‘Truth does not strike us all as it did the holy Saint Paul. For many, it is a long and arduous road.’

  ‘The ways of the flesh are hard t
o shake off. Is that why your followers carve themselves with crosses, to mortify their sinful bodies?’

  ‘As the cuts are made, as the sign of the Lord enters their flesh, they say they hear Satan himself screaming in fury.’

  ‘Drogo and Rainauld had heard your truth. They marked their bodies. Their faith must have been prodigious.’

  ‘Do not talk of them,’ said Sarah sharply. ‘The pure novice bows his head and fastens his eyes on his own path. If he looks at his fellow pilgrims, he distracts his thoughts from righteousness.’

  ‘Drogo and Rainauld are dead. Their companion Odard too. If that is the ultimate end of our road, then I wish to know it.’

  ‘To know where you travel is not a journey of faith. It is the way itself which matters; you will know the destination when you reach it. But if it will soothe your thoughts, I will tell you that their fate owed nothing to their faith. As I told you once before, they had abandoned my teaching. Another teacher – a false prophet – seduced them.’

  Her words cut through my tangled thoughts. ‘Who?’

  ‘It does not matter.’ Exasperation and suspicion swelled in her voice. ‘I think you do not—’

  A shout from the ladder silenced us both. Whatever door or panel covered its mouth had been thrown back, and a column of sunlight poured into the room. All around me white-robed acolytes were staring as if at an angel – and, indeed, the figure who descended the ladder might well have been a messenger of Heaven, for the light ringed him with a shining nimbus, and thick tendrils of smoke curled above him in its beam.

  As my eyes adjusted, I saw that it was not an angel of the Lord but a scrawny man with a crooked nose. Nor was there anything ethereal about the screeching panic in his voice.

  ‘The city,’ he shouted. ‘They are burning the city.’

  κ ζ

  The spell of Heaven was broken. Men and women rushed to the ladder, tearing at each other in their frenzy to get out. The messenger himself was pulled down and subsumed in the fray. Cascades of smoke rolled through the trapdoor, darkening the cave once more, while a devouring roar began to sound in the distance.

  I was forgotten, but I was not free. I strained at my bonds, but my desperate efforts only seemed to pull them tighter. I reached under the bed and felt for a knot or clasp. My hands scrabbled on the wood; a splinter pierced under my fingernail. Wrenching my arm, I found the loop of cloth that bound me and followed it along, until at last I touched a bulge. It was almost beyond my grasp, and I would never loose it where it was. I tugged on the cloth, sliding it around until the knot rested on my belly.

  I did not have the time to look about, but I sensed that I was now alone save for the swelling clouds of smoke. It crept into my eyes and mouth, rasping my throat raw and pricking tears down my cheek. If I did not escape it soon, it would choke the life out of me as surely as any noose. Yet I could not afford to pull the knot tighter in my haste to undo it.

  Near panic, I poked my fingers into the knot, prying and teasing at the twisted fabric. My brittle reserve was bent almost to destruction by the effort of keeping my panic in check, but though my mind was in uproar my hands remained calm. The light from above was completely masked by the smoke; I could not see where I worked but tried to trace the loose ends back through the whorl of the knot.

  It is only the bonds of sin which hold you, I heard the priestess say, though she had long since fled. Her voice was cool and unforgiving.

  At last my finger slid through the knot and emerged the other side. I groped for the loop of cloth beside it, tugged, and felt it slither free. The tension relaxed; with one binding released, the others began to uncoil themselves. I pulled on them again, and they came apart. Perhaps it had been a feeble bond, but it had been strong enough for a feeble prisoner.

  I swung myself off the bed and staggered forward. After two days lying supine my legs were weak and unsteady, but the joy of my freedom and the desperation of my predicament impelled me forward. I staggered through the smoke, trying not to breathe, kicking over unseen relics left by the fleeing pilgrims. My hands were on the ladder. I stepped onto the lowest rung, felt firm wood beneath my feet, and climbed. It seemed to me that the air should have been clearing as I rose, yet the clouds around me remained as thick as ever. My head came through the trapdoor opening; I was in a wooden hut or shed, and through its open door I could see daylight and a dusty courtyard. I hauled myself onto the ground, picked myself up, and ran outside. I was free.

  It was scant relief. Enough of the artemisia lingered in my veins that for a moment I wondered if I had climbed into Hell itself. The air was as stifling as it had been in the confines of the cave, and an enormous pall of smoke hung over the city as far as I could see, so that the sun’s light turned to rust and bathed us in an eerie, infernal twilight.

  A small gate led out into a street, where dark figures scurried past. I was about to make for it when a grating, rumbling noise erupted behind me. I turned. The timbers of the hut that I had come from must have been burning over me; now they gave way, and the roof crashed down into the shell of the walls. The trapdoor and the cave were buried beneath, while a plume of dust and ash rose over it.

  In the street I met a new world of confusion. Frantic pilgrims fled by in every direction, wailing prayers and screams. Many had had the clothes burned from their bodies, their skin shrivelled and blackened by the fire; others, whose legs had been crushed in falling buildings, dragged themselves through the dust by their hands. I saw one frenzied woman running past with her baby still sucking her breast, heedless of the consuming calamity.

  I looked to my right. Through the smoke I could see shreds of flame burning in the air, so high that it seemed they must have descended from the heavens. A hot wind stroked my cheek, and I felt my skin tightening as the blood seethed under it. The thunder of the fire was everywhere: the crackle of the flames, the roar of buildings tumbling over on each other, the howl of the wind gathering itself in to feed the blaze to yet greater heights. Against that the beat of hooves was nothing; I did not hear it until it was almost upon me.

  A horse charged out of the red smoke, a sword in its rider’s hand. Too late, I thought to wonder how the fire had started, whether Kerbogha was laying waste the city. I was unarmed, though in that inferno even the strongest shield would have burned free of my arm. Yet the horseman did not look Turkish: the coned helmet silhouetted against the red smoke was Norman. Was he part of a rout, the remnant of a broken army?

  Whether he did not recognise me as an ally, or whether he did not care, he had no mercy for me. He saw me standing transfixed in the road, swerved towards me and drew back his sword arm. A fresh gust of wind fanned my face as the beast rushed past, inches away; I did not even have the wit to duck. The sword swung forward and struck against my shoulders. I fell to the ground.

  Though I was almost too numb to care, I did not die. The Norman had not hit me with the edge of his blade but with the flat, using it as a cudgel or a drover’s stick. My back smarted, and there would be a livid weal rising under my tunic even now, but if that was to be the worst injury I suffered that day I would count myself blessed.

  As I rose to my feet, the knight wheeled his horse and trotted back towards me. Reflected flames danced on his helmet as though it still sat in the armourer’s furnace.

  ‘Worm! Provençal coward! How dare you cower in dark holes when the defence of the city commands every man to the walls?’

  ‘Kerbogha?’ I mumbled. ‘Has Kerbogha taken the city?’

  ‘He will if you delay. Seek out your lord, and offer yourself up to his service.’

  The Norman turned his horse away, spurred its side and galloped down the street. Through the swirling haze, I saw other fleeing pilgrims suffer the brutal touch of his sword and tongue as he passed.

  His words had only increased my confusion, but I ignored it. The fires were raging hotter and closer, and if I did not fly before them my bones would be burned to embers. I turned after the Norman, away from th
e heat, and ran.

  I knew little of Antioch, and had lost myself so many times already that I had no idea where the cave had been. I had to trust to the instincts of the crowd and follow them blindly through the smoke. I felt as though I had almost ceased to be human, but ran like a brute animal, my only instincts escape and survival. Norman knights on horse and on foot snapped at our heels and flanks, wraiths in the choking fog driving us on. I did not try to withstand them. They could have herded us towards the abyss and I would not have resisted.

  Gradually, from the corners of my eyes, I began to recognise landmarks. A tavern sign, a crooked house, an empty fountain befouled by birds – they seemed familiar. I had passed them with Little Peter on my way to the Tafur kingdom, whenever that had been. Two days ago? It did not matter. I must be in the south-eastern quarter of the city, near the palace; from there I could find my way to the walls, to Anna and Sigurd and sanctuary.

  The crowds around me were thicker now, but the air was clearer and cooler. Like a host of rats people poured from the corners and crannies which had hidden them, scurrying to safety. And suddenly, sooner than I had expected, I was out of the narrow alleys and into the wide expanse of the square by the palace. The throng was no less, for the tide of the dispossessed stretched clear across its boundaries, but for the first time in three days I knew where I was. On the edges of the square I could see knights with spears trying to push the fleeing pilgrims onwards towards the walls, while at the centre, like steadfast trees in a river in flood, two men sat on horseback, arguing. In silhouette, the knight’s helmet and the bishop’s mitre were almost identical but I could see just enough to recognise the men beneath. I pushed towards them.

  An invisible circle of deference seemed to surround the two nobles, an island of space, so that the crowds flowed around them at a respectful distance. Even in the chaos of the moment, I needed a fresh draught of courage to break through and approach.

  ‘I had no choice.’ Soot had stained Bohemond’s skin dark as a Saracen’s, but the unyielding bite of his words was as clear as ever. ‘All Kerbogha’s strength is concentrated on the citadel – our line is almost broken. We cannot suffer cowards to cringe in hiding, when every arm that can carry a spear is needed.’