Siege of Heaven

by Tom Harper

  ‘Back!’ Aelfric stood shoulder to shoulder with Raymond, swinging his axe as more attackers poured in. He wielded it awkwardly, not with the usual scything cuts but with short, spasmodic darts. In our desperate defence he could not commit himself, for a single mistimed stroke would leave him mortally vulnerable. I prayed it was a lesson Thomas had learned, but I had no time to look, for I was under desperate siege myself. Two Saracens charged towards me along the stream bank; I punched one in the face with my shield and watched him skid on the slippery ground, exposing his neck to the kiss of Aelfric’s axe. His companion paused, his sword hovering between us; I pounced on his indecision, swinging out my shield to check his sword while stabbing forward with my own. But he was too fast: he twisted away from the attack, at the same time grabbing on to my shield and tugging. I lost my footing on the slimy stream bed and was hurled onto my knees. Cold water rushed into my open mouth, choking off the scream; I tried to push myself up, but the water seemed to suck me down. In a second I would be dead.

  Something splashed into the stream beside me, and a salt tang tainted the fresh water. For a moment I let it fill my mouth; then, realising what it was, I gagged in horror. The convulsion jerked my head up, out of the stream, and I looked around as the bloody water cascaded off my head. Thomas was standing over me, a bloodied axe in his hands. Just upstream from me, the Saracen lay unmoving. A great gash, from his collarbone to his navel, cleaved him almost in two.

  ‘Come on,’ said Thomas. Blood streaked his armour and his face was wild. In that instant, I barely recognised him. Half a dozen Saracens lay dead about his feet, though he could not have killed them all. They clogged the stream and added their blood to the reservoir filling up behind them. No more came to share their fate.

  ‘Thank you.’ My lungs burned from the water I had swallowed, and the words came out awkwardly.

  Thomas scowled. ‘You should be more careful next time.’

  We clambered out of the stream and edged our way down the muddy bank. My feet were sodden and numb; I felt like some bedraggled animal as I hauled myself over rocks and around roots. The taste of blood and water fouled my mouth; I tried to spit it out but still it remained. Several times my weary legs gave way and my lumpen fingers could not seize a handhold: then I would slide or tumble a little way down the slope, smearing myself in mud, until at last a stone or hummock stopped me. Each time, getting up proved harder and harder, until at last I slithered my way into a small hollow where Aelfric and Raymond were waiting.

  ‘Have we escaped them?’

  As if in answer, Aelfric dropped to one knee, dragging Raymond down with him, and threw his shield over them. I thought he was joking; then, as I looked up, my heart almost died. The mist was thinning, and on the ridge above I could see a line of men, a company of dark shadows looking down on us.

  I pulled my shield over me like a blanket, too weary to do more. A voice rang out from above, calling a challenge in some barbarous tongue.

  Aelfric laughed, put down his shield and shouted back an answer. I waited to see what would come of it.

  The voice from above sounded again, this time in Greek. It was accented, but wholly familiar.

  ‘Let’s get out of this bastard fog.’

  κς

  Wounded and humbled, the Provençal army drifted back to the main column. By noon the sun had burned away the ceiling of fog, so that all could see the hillside strewn with bodies, and the proud castle triumphant on its promontory. Anna and Zoe ran to greet me as we returned, while Helena embraced Thomas without thought for the blood that stained her dress.

  As soon as he had removed his armour, Raymond summoned his shamefaced army. Standing on a boulder, his arms spread apart in anger, he looked like nothing so much as Christ on Golgotha.

  ‘I thought I had seen every piece of cowardice and treachery that men could devise.’ He held his voice calm, but there was a throbbing tremor in the words which threatened to shake it apart. ‘I thought there was nothing shameful on the battlefield that I had not seen. But today . . .’ His shoulders slumped; his head dropped, before rising slowly to fix its hate-filled gaze on the watching army. ‘Is this how the Army of God fights? If you were not creatures of lust we would be feasting in that castle this very moment, and I would be drinking to your valour. Now, we have nothing to feast on but our wounds.’

  He paused and surveyed his host, daring them to disagree. No one spoke.

  ‘Where are my bodyguard?’

  Half a dozen men shuffled forward from the ranks. They had removed their armour and quilted jerkins, and wore only woollen tunics with crosses sewn on the sleeves.

  ‘Two hours ago I was lying up there with a Saracen’s sword at my throat. All alone.’ The last two words resonated deep with anger, as if he had had to wrench them from his soul. ‘If not for the grace of God, I would be one more corpse on the hillside.’ He pointed up behind him, where flocks of crows wheeled above the ridge, then looked back at the six men standing before him. ‘Where were you then?’

  One of them, a stocky man with a ruddy face, looked up. ‘We lost you in the fog and could not find you.’

  ‘Really?’ With a coiled energy far beneath his years, Raymond leaped down from his boulder and advanced towards the man. ‘All six of you?’

  Six faces stared back at him. Several flushed with something like embarrassment, but none showed shame or begged forgiveness.

  ‘Have you forgotten your oaths to me?’ Raymond’s voice was sharp as ice. ‘I chose every one of you, to sleep by my bed, eat at my table and fight at my side. You—’ He turned to one of them. ‘Your father served me every day of his life; he fought beside me in seventeen battles, and when the eighteenth claimed him I was beside him. And now, in my greatest danger, you leave me blundering among my enemies like a blind man.’

  The ruddy-faced man edged forward a little. ‘My lord, we—’

  ‘Your lord? Who is your lord? A knight who abandons his lord is no knight at all.’ Without warning that he even considered it, he punched the man square in the face. Age may have lined his skin and stooped his back, but it had not corroded the strength in his arm. The knight stumbled backwards, blood trickling from his nose.

  ‘Stand up,’ Raymond ordered. ‘Stand fast, if you have not forgotten how.’

  The knight shook his head to clear it, licking away the blood that stained his lip. Swaying slightly, he stepped forward again and snapped his feet together.

  ‘Where was your courage on the mountain?’ Raymond jeered. ‘Did you forget it?’ He swung his fist straight into the knight’s chin. His head spun away with a sickening crack, but still he stayed standing.

  ‘Do you remember the oath you took to me? To fight as my sword and serve as my shield? To suffer my wounds?’ Raymond clasped his hands on either side of the knight’s bloodied face and held it inches from his own. ‘Why did you betray me?’

  The knight looked as if he wanted to clear the blood from his mouth, but Raymond held him so close and tight he could not have done so without spitting in his master’s face. He swallowed, and mumbled, ‘We did not mean to lose you.’

  Raymond loosed his grip, running his hand over the knight’s cheek almost lovingly. ‘You did not lose me in the fog – you abandoned me. Admit it.’

  The knight whispered something I could not hear. Raymond shook his head, cupped one hand around the back of the knight’s head and smacked him hard with the other.

  ‘Liar,’ he shouted. Beneath the grey stubble his cheeks had flushed crimson. ‘Who told you to betray me?’ He let go the knight and wheeled round. ‘Was it him? An upstart peasant who thinks himself touched by God? Raymond stepped back, but only to give himself more room to drive his next blow into the knight’s stomach. The man gagged and stumbled forward; Raymond could have caught him, but instead stood aside so that the knight fell at his feet.

  ‘Was he trying to warn me?’ He lashed out with his boot, kicking the knight in the face. A gasp rose from the watching army
, but no one moved. The other five guards stood in a row and stared straight ahead, stiff as corpses. ‘Crawl back to him, worm, and tell him I have heard his message.’ Another kick. ‘Does he think he will usurp my power?’ Another kick, this time so hard that it rolled the knight over with its force. ‘Does he think he will steal my army from me, even my own household?’ A kick. ‘My handpicked knights.’ Kick. ‘My dearest friends.’

  He drew back his leg as if to kick the man in two, then instead pivoted away to face the army. No one moved to help the knight, who lay broken and whimpering in a pool of blood and mud.

  ‘Is there anyone else who questions my authority?’ Raymond demanded. He was breathing hard, spent with his violence. ‘If so, let him see that I am in command here. I am in control.’

  He paused, then repeated it more quietly, almost like a prayer.

  ‘I am in control.’

  Raymond’s fury at the men who had deserted him was not matched by gratitude to those who had saved him. He said nothing to me, and I received precious little thanks from Nikephoros when I found him. ‘You were supposed to stop the count ever going up that hill,’ was all he said after I had told him the story. ‘Now he will not leave here until that castle falls, even if he has to spend half his army taking it.’

  Thankfully, it did not come to that. Late that night we crept up the hillside once again, clambering between the bodies of the fallen, and as the first smudge of light began to crease the horizon we climbed onto the ridge. Two companies ran forward, carrying their scaling ladders under a roof of shields against the expected onslaught, but it never came. No defenders rose from behind the battlements, and no arrows rained down on the tiled shields.

  ‘Perhaps they’re still asleep,’ Aelfric suggested.

  The assault parties planted the ladders in the ground and raised them to the ramparts. At a sign from Count Raymond, another company of knights ran to the rubble ramp that led to the breach they had attacked the day before. Behind them, our archers waited with arrows nocked and strings tensed. Their arms strained with the effort – too much for one, who lost his grip and sent his arrow aimlessly towards the castle. It clattered into the walls and provoked a furious rebuke from Raymond – but no answer from within.

  The first knights climbed tentatively to the tops of their ladders, paused for a moment, then vaulted through the embrasures. More followed on their heels; others ran up the incline and burst through the breach. Still we heard no shouts, no challenge or sound of battle.

  ‘Is it a trap?’ I wondered aloud.

  Raymond waved more companies forward. Their feet fell softly on the dewy ground, and they held their weapons carefully so as not to make a sound. Birds had begun to sing in the grass; a swallow flew up from a tower and wheeled above it, but otherwise the dawn stillness still gripped the hilltop, and men moved as if in a dream.

  A rumble from the gatehouse dispelled that. The gates began to move and a ghostly, disjointed clangour rippled through our army. ‘Here it comes,’ men warned each other. A crack of light opened between the gates, widening as they swung out. Every man among us strained forward to see what would emerge.

  A single figure in Provençal armour stood framed in the gateway, silhouetted against the grey morning light. Behind him, I could see that the courtyard was empty, save for a single sheep tethered to a stake in the ground, grazing on the weeds that grew between the cobbles.

  The knight pulled off his helmet. ‘It’s empty. There’s nothing there but ghosts and the spoils of war.’

  Sigurd spat on the ground, then deliberately began wrapping the deerskin cover over his axe head.

  ‘Let’s hope Jerusalem is as easy.’

  It was a strange outcome – to have lost a battle we should have won, and won a battle we did not fight. Every man in the army, from Count Raymond to the humblest groom, seemed disoriented and frustrated. We had prepared ourselves for a great assault, our passions raised high with expectation; without a battle, the passions remained unspent, and curdled in our hearts. Many quarrels broke out that week, even among the Varangians, and a sullen disappointment clung to the army as we plundered the fertile valley for food.

  Two slow weeks after the battle we came out between the arms of the mountains and looked down on the coastal plain. From early in the morning I could see the blueglazed expanse of the sea ahead, with a river running eagerly to meet it, while to our left a walled town stood precariously on a narrow spur protruding from the mountain.

  ‘Arqa,’ said Nikephoros, riding beside me. ‘From here, we can be at Tripoli by nightfall, and then only ten days’ march to Jerusalem.’

  A heaviness seemed to lift from my heart. Though it was only the middle of February, I thought I could feel spring welling up in the roots of the leafless trees and vines around me. The sea sparkled in the distance, offering its promise of infinite journeys, and the sun seemed warm on my face.

  But we did not reach Tripoli that night. Instead, we made our camp below Arqa, the fortified town on the mountain. And there, Count Raymond decided, we would go no further.

  Another siege. Sometimes I thought there must only be one wall in all the world, spiralling around itself like a snake, and that however often we broke through, we would only advance to confront it again. I stood on a ridge in the shadow of the mountain and felt the warm February sun on my cheek. To my left, the foot of the mountain swept out to form the natural buttress on whose formidable heights the town was built. The only approach was by a thin neck of land little wider than a bridge, carved away by the fast river that flowed along its base. The Provençals had tried to force their assault across the promontory and failed, losing many men. Now, two weeks later, they had resigned themselves to the familiar toil of siege work.

  A heavy crack sounded behind me, like rock breaking off the mountain. I did not bother to look. I heard the familiar whiplash of coiled rope unspooling, the whoosh of the sling and the creak of timbers. A flock of starlings squawked their protest, though even they must have grown used to it. A heavy stone flew close over my head and sailed over the deep ravine that divided us from the town, spinning and tumbling in the air.

  It struck Arqa’s wall with a thump and an eruption of dust. A few dislodged bricks fell into the bushes at the base; otherwise, there was no discernible effect. Behind me, I heard the Provençal engineers begin the laborious effort of winding back the catapult.

  ‘Even if you make the breach, you’ll never get your men up that slope.’ Tancred sat on a black gelding and surveyed the town across the ravine. Beside him, Raymond and Nikephoros tried to calm their own steeds after the noise of the catapult. I stood attentively by Nikephoros’ stirrup, more an ornament than an aide, and absent-mindedly stroked the horse’s flank.

  ‘We’ll wear it down,’ said Raymond shortly.

  Tancred rolled his eyes. ‘Not if we wear ourselves down first. What does Peter Bartholomew say to this delay?’

  He pulled on his reins, turning his horse to face north. Beneath the heights of Arqa the road wound along the plain, lined with the tents and baggage of the Provençal army. Beyond, a little apart, more tents and makeshift shelters covered a rounded hill, enclosed by a low wall of wood, wattle and rubble. In its centre, on the crown of the hill, a large cross stood empty to the sky, almost as if waiting for something.

  ‘Well?’ pressed Tancred. ‘What does the peasant messiah say?’

  ‘Do not call him that,’ Raymond snapped. ‘And what he thinks does not matter.’

  ‘Even when what he says is true?’ Tancred looked to the south, where an ancient bridge carried the road towards the coast and Jerusalem. ‘We should have kept moving.’

  Nikephoros, who had learned to prefer silence during Tancred and Raymond’s arguments, stirred. ‘Not with this army. You would be walking into the lion’s mouth. Better to wait until you are large enough that his jaws cannot devour you.’

  Raymond slapped the pommel of his saddle impatiently. These were not new debates. ‘Listen t
o what the Greek says. Your youth makes you impatient.’

  ‘My poverty makes me impatient. I entered your service because you promised conquest and plunder – not to sit at the foot of a fortress of no consequence and throw stones at it.’

  Another whip-crack from behind launched another boulder into the air. This one actually bounced off the wall, landing on the slope below and tumbling slowly down among the gorse and sagebrush until it came to rest at the foot of the spur. A cloud of dust rolled down the hillside after it. Above my head, I heard Nikephoros mutter something about Sisyphus.

  ‘You entered my service because I paid you five thousand sous,’ said Raymond to Tancred. ‘What happened to those?’

  ‘I spent them on my army. A good lord is bountiful to his vassals.’

  The slight was not lost on Raymond. ‘And so I will be. Arqa belongs to the emir of Tripoli. When we have made an example of it, he will see our might and offer a rich ransom to be spared.’

  ‘I heard he had already offered gold to let us pass.’

  ‘When we have taken Arqa, he will offer more.’

  ‘And how much will he offer if we do not take it?’

  A bang echoed across the ravine, and a white projectile flew up from within the town. At first it appeared to rise straight into the air; then, gathering pace, its trajectory became clear. It seemed to move much faster from the receiving end, I noticed: there was no thought of trying to avoid it. The three lords on horseback stood still as stone, trapped at the mercy of an unswerving destiny.

  The rock rushed over our heads and struck the cliff behind us. The earth shivered under our feet; I heard a crack as the rock split in pieces, and a rain of stone fell to the ground. A surprised cry rang out among the clatter, then choked off suddenly. Looking back, I saw a knight lying on the ground amid the fallen rubble. A dent in his helmet was the only damage I could see, but he did not move. Others ran over to help him, though their efforts did not last long.