The walls were manned as fully as possible now night and day and there were always sentries at all of the gates. We dared not wait for the darkness and the chance of going over the wall with a rope—not only were there our own sentries to avoid but we both had no doubt whatever that the Franks would also be waiting for the darkness of this night to come over those same walls into Antioch. We had no plan beyond getting out of Antioch; if we were able to do that we should consider what to do next.
We headed for the Iron Gate east of the Citadel where in the winter Onopniktes entered its channel. It was by way of that cleft in the mountain that many people now went to forage and we hoped not to be noticed there. This day, however, was not like other days: on this day Firouz was at the Iron Gate with the soldiers of the guard.
Only a few moments ago I had felt as if we might be invisible but now suddenly it was as if all the crowded space around us became blank and empty and in the whole world only we were to be seen. Firouz was pacing back and forth with his turning walk. The sky had gone grey and the shadow that turned and twisted with him was dull and blurred. He had seen us approaching, and for us to turn away now would invite more trouble than to continue towards the gate.
There swept over me a wave of irritation: I was annoyed with everything and everybody, even with Sophia and my little son that they had come thus at the eleventh hour to interfere with the smooth and orderly winding-up of my affairs. My being was grating on this day as the teeth grate on a stone in the bread. In my heart and soul I knew it to be my last day; I knew that the stones of my little history and the world’s great one were fitted together so precisely by cause and held in place so firmly by effect that the feeble knifeblade of my too-late good intention could not even find a crack between them let alone pry them apart. And it was in this state of mind that I stood before Firouz on the morning of the first of Tammuz in the Christian year of 1098.
Firouz looked at us with satisfaction. ‘Where are you going?’ he said.
I wanted to say, ‘To find Sophia and my son.’ I didn’t want to have to take Firouz into account sufficiently to have to lie to him.
‘We’re going to have a look around Suwaydiyya,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘I think some of the merchants there may have provisions they’ve hidden away from the Franks.’
‘Very daring,’ said Firouz, ‘with so many Franks between here and Suwaydiyya. Very daring indeed.’ He was looking at the sword I was wearing that used to be his.
‘I know the back ways,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Firouz. He took the bag that was slung from my shoulder and looked into it. ‘You won’t starve while you’re out looking for provisions, will you,’ he said. ‘You’re got enough food here for a week. Will you be back in time to stand guard on the wall tonight?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We don’t go on until midnight.’
‘Good,’ said Firouz. ‘I think it’s probably best if I lock you up until then; that way you won’t wear yourselves out walking all those weary miles and you’ll be alert and well-rested for tonight.’
‘We haven’t done anything to be locked up for,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘Not yet,’ said Firouz. ‘But you inspire doubt and mistrust in me, and as I’m in command of this part of the wall I’m taking it on myself to keep out of trouble.’
‘No!’ I cried out. ‘You mustn’t do that!’
‘Why not?’ said Firouz.
‘Because tonight may be the night the Franks take Antioch!’ I blurted out.
Firouz jumped back as if I had thrust a viper into his face. ‘Who told you that?’ he said.
‘It came to me in a dream, a vision, a night journey,’ I said.
‘Have you told this to anyone else?’ said Firouz.
‘No,’ I said.
Firouz motioned to two of the guards. ‘Lock these two up in the tower,’ he said.
I began to laugh, I couldn’t help it.
‘What are you laughing at?’ said Firouz.
‘Life and death,’ I said. ‘It’s so hard to make a good job of either.’
Firouz began to laugh too. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Truly it doesn’t give me pleasure to lock you up, it’s just that all of us have different things to do and this is what I have to do.’
‘It doesn’t really matter,’ I said. ‘It’s only life and death.’
‘It’s strange,’ said Firouz: ‘people buy and sell, they go here and there, they make plans for this year and the next year as if there will be no end to life, as if there will always be a next day and a next year; but sometime there must come an end to the days and the years; it must be like walking into a wall where one has always found a door.’ While he said this reflectively and in a companionable manner as if we were sitting in a coffee house Bembel Rudzuk and I stood before him with a guard on either side of us. When he had completed this observation the guards took away our bows and arrows, our swords and daggers and our bags. ‘Your weapons and your other possessions will be given back to you later,’ said Firouz as the guards took us away to the tower.
Later than what? I thought. With the two guards behind us we climbed the stone stairs to that part of Firouz’s tower that rose above the wall. There we were taken up more stairs to the top of the tower and put into a little room in which there was nothing but an overwhelming stench of urine and excrement and a bucket that had not been emptied for a very long time. A little dimness was provided by a high-up window that was too small to squeeze through.
I beat on the door to ask for the bucket to be emptied. There was no response of any kind. ‘This is to be our end then,’ I said, ‘in a little dim room with a bucket of old shit.’
‘Be glad we’re in the room and not in the bucket,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
We sat on the floor and looked up and down and all around the little room. It was so dreadfully finite. There was no possibility whatever of there being any more to it than we could see.
‘What Firouz said about buying and selling, do you think he meant anything by it, do you think he wanted to be bribed?’ I said.
‘I think he’s already been bought by the Franks,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
The bucket stood there stinking in a corner in a buzzing of flies in the dimness of the little locked stone room. I thought: Is this a metaphor? Then a nearby bird said, ‘Plink, plink, plink.’ Ah! I thought, explanations are unnecessary. So I felt a little better until the naked headless tax-collector appeared, writhing with maggots as always. Never mind, I thought, this is only illusion.
From wherever the tax-collector’s voice lived came a long sigh, ‘Ahhhhhhh!’ He assumed the necessary position over the bucket and emptied his bowels with a torrent like Onopniktes, I half expected dead donkeys to come out of him turning over and over in that disgusting flood. This is metaphorical illusion, I told myself, dismiss it from your mind; have other illusions, better ones; see Sophia. But Sophia would not come, even Bodwild would not come. My young death, I thought, surely he will come, I am like a father to him, I am his father—let us at least have a proper leavetaking before he goes out into the world to seek his fortune, let there be a fond embrace, a manly clasping of hands, a tear or two would be nothing to be ashamed of. But no, he would not come. Comfortless I sat on the floor with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands.
‘Ahhhhhh!’ sighed the tax-collector again. He must have left the bucket because now he was returning to it to relieve himself once more with the same torrential rush and with a noise that was like the bursting of the Unseen into the seen, which of course in its own way it was. Surely, I thought, this is no proper epiphany; surely if God is gone I shall at least see Christ one more time, I deserve at least that much.
Pffffffttttt! went the tax-collector. The stench was no longer within the limits of what could be called a smell, it had become something in the nature of a metaphysical premise. The grotesquerie of the tax-collector’s appearing without a head while thus emptying himself of the
waste of a lifetime, perhaps of more than one lifetime! Really, I thought, how much can be expected of my forbearance, my civility? After all, if this is illusion I must have something to say about it. ‘If you’re going to keep doing that at least you must accept responsibility for it!’ I shouted. ‘At least you can show your face!’
‘What did you say?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘Say!’ I said. ‘Who can say anything with this constant noise, this unbearable stench!’
‘I don’t hear anything,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘and I haven’t been noticing the smell for a while.’
‘Everything’s all right with you then, is it?’ I said. ‘With you there’s nothing to complain of?’
‘I’ve already told you,’ he said, ‘that I’ve had a good life and I’ve had enough of it and I’m ready to go. Why should I have any complaints?’
‘This smell,’ I said, ‘this smell isn’t illusion, it’s a real stink, it’s a stench of actuality.’
‘Where I am there’s not that much of a stench,’ he said.
‘There’s no need to be insulting,’ I said.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Here we have an opportunity for preparation, we have a little quiet time in which there is nothing for us to do, nothing is required of us; it is like a silent desert in which we are not far from the track that will take us to that farthest lote-tree that is shrouded in unutterable mystery. All we need is a little patience, a little quietness of mind as we look for the track in the silent desert.’
‘You!’ I said. ‘You are attached to nothing, you care for no one.’
‘The one doesn’t necessarily follow from the other,’ he said. ‘I am attached to nothing but I care for you and I have cared for others in my time.’
‘Always you make me ashamed,’ I said.
‘Stop disquieting yourself and stop being ashamed,’ he said. ‘Use this time to find the track in the desert.’
‘Ahhhhhhhh!’ said the tax-collector returning to the bucket.
It seems now to be much later although I don’t know how much time has passed, I don’t know whether I’ve been asleep or not. The little stone room is full of darkness, but it seems to me that beyond the stench of the bucket I can smell the dawn that is coming. There enters my mind the thought that the bucket in the corner has been put there for Elijah. I don’t want Elijah to come here and relieve himself in that bucket, I want to see Elijah running ahead of Ahab’s chariot, running beautifully under a black sky in the rain and the wind, running in the thought of God to Jezreel.
Something is happening below us on the wall, there are footsteps and voices, there are armed men running, men shouting, ‘Deus le volt!’ The Franks are in Antioch and we are locked up in this little room of stone.
Bembel Rudzuk, whose silent stillness in the darkness suggests not sleep but contemplation, now says, ‘If you stand on my shoulders you can empty that bucket out of the window.’
This bucket-emptying is not a simple thing; there is no chair or table that I can use as a mounting platform, and one hand is of course required for the bucket. But Bembel Rudzuk at sixty-two is still a strong man. Facing the wall he kneels on one knee below the window. I step on to his broad shoulders and with one hand touching the wall I maintain my balance as he rises to his feet.
Bembel Rudzuk bracing himself with his hands against the wall is as steady as a rock. I am just high enough so that I can see the little crescent of the new moon of Tammuz and feel the freshness of the night on my eyes. From the sounds I hear I judge that our window overlooks the walkway on the top of the wall, and it is from this walkway that the shouts of the Franks are coming. There are cries and groans from the Turks; someone exclaims, clearly and distinctly as if required by history to bear audible witness, ‘We are betrayed!’
‘Bohemond!’ goes up the shout, ‘Bohemond! Bohemond! Bohemond!’
With my right hand under the bucket I slide it very slowly, very carefully up the wall to the window, keeping my balance with my face against the wall while I bring my left hand over to grasp the handle. There is in my mind an ardent prayer as I bring the bucket up over the window sill.
‘Deus le volt!’ I shout as I empty the bucket and hurl it after its contents. From below there comes a wild cry of rage as startling and primitive as the roar of a lion.
‘Allah The Finder,’ says Bembel Rudzuk.
At that moment the door opens and in the candlelight from a sconce on the stairs we see Firouz. He lays our bags and weapons on the floor. ‘Forgive me if you can,’ he says. In the doorway is my young death also, his face shining with love as he points to my sword that used to belong to Firouz. Bembel Rudzuk and I as one man stretch out our hands for our swords, we have no need of anything else now.
Pell-mell down the stairs we go to the walkway on the wall; there are dead Turks there, we step over them, we hurry down the next stairs to the ground.
‘Hidden Lion!’ says Bembel Rudzuk. Yes, yes, I know what is in his mind as we run. The little crescent hangs in the sky so delicate and slender, shouts and screams run through the darkness like fire through stubble; the mu’addhin will not sound the call to prayer in the new morning, there will be a great silence where there used to be the prayer of many. Stronger grows the smell of the dawn that is coming, that alchemy by which substance of darkness becomes substance of light in which are bodied forth all forms moving and still; the disquietude of the invaded houses, domes, and minarets, the continual surprise of Silpius that waits to manifest itself tawny and empurpled, unsurprised at the heaped bodies of the dead, surprised only that there should be world at all and itself in the world.
Dawn has not yet come but everything is Now and the actuality of it illuminates the night in my eyes so that I seem to see whatever is before me in the purple-blue crystalline vibrations in which I first saw the upside-down body of the tax-collector in the little wood of night.
Dim and yellow against the vibrations of the purple-blue shudders the faltering light of a lantern that stands on the tiles of Hidden Lion. And here is Questing the death-hound, here is Elijah for whom Firouz has opened the door, here is Messiah following on Elijah, here is the giant Bohemond foul and stinking with excrement that stains his scarlet cross as he stands on Hidden Lion lifting his sword vertically with both hands and plunging it down again and again like a man breaking ground for a post-hole. All around him are broken tiles and among them are heaped the gold and silver coins that were mortared into the tiles.
Now I see what I have seen before in the darkness and the brightness in my mind, I see leaping and still like a butterfly transfixed by lightning the elegance of Bembel Rudzuk as he attacks Bohemond; I see the great Frankish sword that has been going up and down like a post-hole digger suddenly leap like a live thing as Bohemond shifts his grip and now a track of brightness horizontally cleaves the darkness, cleaves the purple-blue, cleaves with its savage arc the body of Bembel Rudzuk; now in two pieces falls the body of Bembel Rudzuk to the broken tiles of Hidden Lion.
Here now before me is Bohemond. This is the great moment when I shall see the face of this man who has become my world and my Jerusalem. His fouled and stinking mail shirt glitters in the purple-blue luminosity of Now, his helmet flashes as if wreathed in lightnings; the iron nasal of his helmet makes other than human this face that I strain to see but I cannot, I shall never see it, I see instead the face of that veiled owl of my childhood.
I raise my arm, I strike with my sword, I see it shatter like shards of ice as the great sword of Bohemond makes a rainbow in the night, in the dawn that is coming. I stare into the brilliance, I see the Virgin and the Lion wheeling in the darkness, in the light. I see the sun-points dazzling on the sea, the alchemy of the triangular sail changing from the hot and dry to the cold and wet; I smell the salt breath of Bruder Pförtner.
But I cannot see Bohemond in this night and dawn of brilliance, of purple-blue luminosity. No, as the great sword makes another rainbow in the pale dawn where hangs the new
moon of Tammuz, the last thing that I see with my mortal eyes, very, very high in the sky and circling in the overlapping patterns of the Law, is that drifting meditation of storks that I have known from my childhood, each year returning in their season to their wonted place.
Quotes and References
All Old Testament quotes except those on pp. 61, 62,112 and 113 are from The Holy Scriptures, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1955. The quotes on pp. 61 and 62 are from The Jerusalem Bible, Koren Publishers, Jerusalem, 1977. The quote on pp. 112 and 113 is from The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament in Greek and English, translated by Sir Launcelot Lee Brenton, Samuel Bagster and Sons, London.
All New Testament quotes are from The Interlinear Greek-English New Testament translated by Reverend Dr Alfred Marshall, Samuel Bagster and Sons, London, 1958.
All Quran quotes are from The Holy Quran, translated and with commentary by A. Yusuf Ali, Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, Kashmiri Bazar, Lahore, Pakistan, 1977.
Page 11. Deuteronomy 6:4
12. Genesis 15:17,18
19. Deuteronomy 6:4 Mourner’s Kaddish, p. 80, The Authorised Daily Prayer Book of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth of Nations, translated by Rev. S. Singer, Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, 1962 Morning Service, ibid. p. 9.
19,20. Selichot for the First Day, pp. 18, 19, Selichot, Authorised Hebrew and English Edition for the Whole Year, translated and annotated by Rabbi Abraham Rosenfeld, The Judaica Press, New York, 1979.
22. Hebrews 12:18-21
24. Morning Service for the Ninth of Av, pp. 77, 78, Kinot, Authorised for the Ninth of Av, translated and annotated by Rabbi Abraham Rosenfeld, The Judaica Press, New York, 1979.
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