Siege of Heaven (47 page)

The knight gained the final rung, reached out his arm and fastened his hand on the embrasure between the battlements. For a moment, he must have looked down to see the holy city framed in stone. A great cheer rose up from the army; more men started climbing the ladder, while the rest surged forward. The knight on the ladder glanced back down, and though I could not see his face I could imagine the triumph on it. He waved his sword to rally the army and screamed, ‘
Deus vult!
’

From the ramparts before him, a heavy sword flashed down. The knight cringed back, flailing his arm, and we saw in horror that the hand that clasped Jerusalem had been severed from his body. He flung away his sword and scrabbled for a grip, but he had no chance. An arrow pierced his side, another his shoulder; he lost his balance
and crashed down onto the crowds below, spinning as he fell.

On the walls around us, the Fatimid archers resumed their bombardment. Scores of the Franks had lowered their shields to watch the ascent; now they paid for their carelessness. Mercifully I was too far back to trouble the bowmen: they did not want for targets. From up on the walls, a pair of hands reached through the embrasure and pushed away the ladder. It pivoted back, then toppled down into the fray. Within seconds it had been ground to splinters as the Franks rushed to escape.

‘The only miracle was that the Norman did not die,’ said Sigurd.

Thomas looked at him with the sure contempt of youth. ‘There were no miracles today.’ His voice was hollow, heartbroken. ‘The Norman survived because three corpses broke his fall. There were enough bodies between those walls to clog the gates of heaven.’

I said nothing. I knew some of the anguish he must feel – I felt enough of it myself. But he seemed to have taken the defeat so much to his heart that it consumed him. At the height of the battle, when the Franks were fleeing back through the breaches, he had even tried to rush forward, though it was certain death. Sigurd had held him back, almost breaking his arm to do it. I prayed it had only been the madness of war – not the weight of his sorrows becoming unbearable.

‘I’ve heard that Count Raymond will move his camp
around to the south,’ said Sigurd, breaking the awkward silence.

‘I wonder how many will go with him?’

‘Twelve of us, at least.’ Sigurd gestured to the Varangians, all that remained of his company. ‘No one else will have us.’

‘We may be the only ones.’ I knew that several of Raymond’s captains had transferred their allegiance to other princes in the aftermath of the battle. ‘No wonder he wants to move his camp away from the others.’

Sigurd held up his throwing axe to the moonlight, squinting down the blade. He grunted with grudging approval – then looked up in surprise as a shadow fell over him. A youth in a yellow tunic had emerged from the darkness, blocking out the moon. His skin was smooth, his dark hair curly: he might easily have been taken for a Saracen. Perhaps that was why he wore an outsize wooden cross on a cord around his neck. It seemed to cause him some discomfort.

‘Who is Demetrios Askiates?’ he asked, in heavily accented Greek.

‘Who are you?’ I retorted.

He would not say, but reached into the folds of his tunic. Sigurd tensed his arm, the oiled axe gleaming in his hand, but there was no danger. Instead, the boy pulled out a brooch and tossed it across to me. I examined it. The gold was leaden in the moonlight, but the design was clear enough. A tree wrought in enamel – reds, blues and greens – and two birds flanking it.

‘You know whose it is?’

I nodded, dumbstruck. It had been a gift from the imperial treasury to Anna, after she saved the emperor from a spear-wound.

‘Then come with me.’

I wanted to bring Sigurd, but then I would have had to take Thomas, and I did not trust him in his evil mood. So I went alone. The youth walked behind me through the camp, letting me meet the challenges and give the watchwords, then took the lead. Ten minutes brought us to the north-eastern corner of the city: we rounded it, then dropped away from the walls as the ground descended into the steep valley that divided the Mount of Olives from the city. The night deepened as we went down – I clutched the brooch so tight its pin pierced my hand, but I carried on until suddenly I saw a faint light winking in the darkness.

The light drew closer as we reached the bottom of the valley. The ground was broken here, strewn with rocks, though it was only when I stubbed my toe on one and looked down that I saw they were not boulders, but fragments of a shattered building. The remains of toppled columns, tumbledown walls and fallen arches littered the landscape like bones on a battlefield. The destruction must have happened some time ago, for grass and bushes had grown tall around the ruins. Where a solitary piece of wall still stood, a fig tree had twined itself through the empty window.

But the corpse of the building remained, buried in the ground. A flight of open stairs brought us down into an oblong pit lined with stone. Two rows of stumps marked where the columns had once stood, and though most of the ground was covered in earth, in a few places you could still make out the tiles of the mosaic floor. It must have been a church, I thought. And despite its desolation, it still seemed to be in use. At the far end, unhidden by any altar screen, two black-robed priests with long, white beards bowed before a long-vanished altar. It was their light I had seen, a lone oil-lamp resting on a fallen capital. The flame illuminated the face of a high stone mausoleum – the only structure to have survived the destruction.

‘Do you know where you are?’

I swung around. With all my attention on the ghostly scene in the sanctuary I had not noticed the man sitting on the stub of a column to my right. He stood, his cloak rustling around his legs.

‘Bilal.’ I stepped towards him, then checked myself, suddenly overtaken by confusion, fear. I opened my palm to reveal the brooch. ‘Did you send this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are they . . . ?’ I could not bring myself to finish the question.

He offered a tired smile. ‘They are safe.’

Relief flooded through me. So much tension had knotted itself around me that week that, in the end, it was all that had held me together. Now it washed away and I dropped to my knees. The poison bile that had filled my
body rose in my throat and I let it pour out onto the onceholy ground, praying God to forgive me. In the chancel, the priests continued their low chanting.

Bilal took my arm and pulled me to my feet. I would have embraced him, almost fallen upon him with thanks, but something held me away. There was a distance in his manner that I had not seen before.

‘A squadron of our cavalry surprised a column of Frankish knights,’ he said. ‘There was a battle.’

‘I was there.’

‘But not with your wife and children. They found them with the ambassador, Nikephoros.’

There was no rebuke in his words, but I felt it anyway like a hammer. ‘They fell upon us so quickly there was nothing I could do. I was separated from them. I–’

Bilal held up his hand to still my babble. ‘God is the All-Hearing and the All-Seeing. Perhaps He did not mean you to be with them. Nikephoros fought to protect your family – bravely, they said – and died for it. If you had stood beside them, the same might have happened to you.’

I remembered Thomas’s desperate longing to charge into the battle that morning. You could not escape guilt by dying.

‘As it was, they assumed the women must be Nikephoros’ wife and daughters, and therefore worthy of ransom.’

So Nikephoros’ pride had served a purpose in the end. I remembered the golden robe he had worn that day, the jewelled
lorum
wrapped around his neck. Perhaps he had
already imagined himself back in the perfumed halls of Constantinople, returned from his exile. And he had fought to protect my family. Suddenly, for all his deceits, I found I no longer hated him.

‘But I have no money to ransom them,’ I said, trying to comprehend all this unexpected news. ‘And the Franks will not waste their gold on Greeks.’

‘My masters would not offer them to the Franks. All Muslims may seem the same to the Franks, but we understand the differences between the Christians well enough. When the vizier needs to buy favour with your emperor, then he will offer him the women as part of some bargain.’

‘But the emperor will know they cannot belong to Nikephoros.’ Hope rose within me. ‘Can you help them escape?’

Bilal sighed, and I could see that he wished I had not asked it. ‘I cannot.’

The euphoria that had lifted me subsided. I sank down on one of the stone stubs. Bilal stayed standing, silhouetted against the priests’ lamp at the far end of the nave.

‘At least I know they’re safe,’ I said, when I could control my voice again. ‘Thank you for that.’

‘It is the least I can do. And the most. But for as long as my people control the city, no harm will come to them.’

‘A long time if our attack this morning was any omen. Did you see it?’

‘I was there.’ Bilal looked away, unwilling to talk more of it. Perhaps he was embarrassed by the wanton ease with which the Franks had given themselves up to be slaughtered.

A thought struck me. ‘The vizier must be confident of victory if he is already able to think of bargaining with the emperor.’ No answer. ‘Is the vizier here now?’

Bilal shifted uneasily.

‘Come,’ I urged him. ‘Do you think I’m trying to pry secrets out of you? I want to know, in innocence, if I will ever see my family again. Nothing else.’

‘In innocence?’ Bilal repeated the words with heavy irony. ‘Can there be such a thing? When we fought beside each other in the pyramid, when the Turkish troops tried to harm that boy, we did it because we hated evil, nothing else. When the caliph in his madness threatened to kill you, I warned you for the same reason. But we are in Jerusalem now, and the next time your army charges at those walls you will be on one side and I will be on the other. It will be a battle to the end. So how can you and I speak to each other in innocence?’

Bilal looked away, to the light in the sanctuary of the church. The two priests must know we were there, must have heard us, but they continued with their ritual as if we did not exist.

‘Do you know where you are?’ Bilal repeated the question he had asked when I first arrived. I looked around, then up. Far above us, the fires on the city walls burned bright against the sky from the great courtyard of the Temple Mount.

‘You are in Gethsemane. This was the church of Mary, the mother of Jesus and that tomb’ – he pointed to the stone mausoleum – ‘is hers.’

You could hardly breathe in this place for the weight of history. ‘But Mary was taken up to heaven. When Saint Thomas came to her tomb three days after she fell asleep, her body was gone.’

‘Then the tomb must be empty. But your priests still offer their prayers here.’

I looked up at the walls again, thinking of the other, greater sepulchre within. If we ever reached it, we would find that lying empty too. A desolation swept over me, a feeling of terrible absence. I suddenly knew in my heart that God had departed this place, that these half-buried tombs were nothing more than fossils, footprints left in the clay where He had once walked. ‘So many deserted tombs.’

‘Even the dead cannot bear to stay here,’ said Bilal. I could not tell if he was joking.

‘If your cavalry had not kidnapped my family, I would never have come.’ It was an unfair thing to say, perhaps, but it seemed to pierce the curtain that had descended between us again. Bilal thought for a moment.

‘We cannot speak to each other in innocence, but I will tell you this. If you ever have cause to use it, I will be in God’s hands. You have seen the Noble Sanctuary on the mountain top?’

‘The great courtyard with the octagonal church?’

‘It is a shrine, not a church,’ said Bilal irritably. ‘It was built by the caliph to mark the place where the Prophet, peace be upon him, ascended to heaven.’

‘It is a church, built by Byzantines to mark the place
where Solomon’s temple stood and where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac,’ I retorted, repeating what I had heard from pilgrims. ‘It is called the Temple of the Lord.’

‘For the moment it is called the Dome of the Rock. God willing, it will be for ever. But if the day comes when it is not, then your family will be in as much danger as me. So listen. Beyond the Noble Sanctuary lies a valley that divides the two hills, Mount Moriah and Mount Zion. A stone bridge crosses over it. On the far side of the bridge the street runs west, to a corner where two tamarisk trees grow. If you go right, there is a house with an iron amulet in the shape of a hand nailed to its door.’ He held up his own hand, palm out. ‘That is where you will find your family – if you take the city.’

‘Do you really think it so unlikely?’

Bilal shook his head – though whether to answer my question or to deny it I could not tell.

‘
I will send for the king of Babylon
,’ Bilal murmured. ‘
I will bring him against this land and its people and I will destroy them utterly. The whole land shall become a ruin, a waste, and its people will be his slaves.
’

‘Where did you hear that?’

‘I heard Achard say it, when we came here on our way north from Egypt. He said it was an ancient prophecy.’

‘It comes from the prophet Jeremiah.’

‘Then perhaps it is true.’ Bilal turned away. ‘I must go – I have already been away too long. Malchus will take you back to your camp.’ He whistled, and the youth emerged from the darkness where he had waited.

‘Goodbye, Demetrios. I would say I hope we meet again, but I fear it will be a terrible day if ever we do.’ He considered this for a moment, then shrugged. ‘
Allahu a’alam
. God knows all things best.’

He climbed the cracked steps out of the sunken church and vanished into the night. There were no Franks watching this part of the city – the ground was too steep, their numbers too few – and I supposed he would slip in through one of the gates easily enough. Even so, I delayed a few minutes lest anybody see us together. While I waited, I lowered myself to my knees and offered a few, heartfelt prayers – thanks that my family were safe, and intercessions for those who had died that day. Above all, I prayed that all those I loved would escape that place where God had gathered them. Those were the prayers that tested my faith the hardest.