Knights of the Cross (20 page)

‘Then he must be strong indeed at the moment.’

We walked on a little in silence, our hands ever on the hilts of our swords to discourage the hate-filled looks we drew. Eventually, Mushid said: ‘If a man in my village were killed, I would seek his murderer nearby, among his friends, his lovers, his servants and his master.’

‘Drogo’s friends were building the tower by the bridge, and it was his servant who brought us to the body. His lovers . . .’ I thought of the woman, Sarah, whom many had seen but none could find. ‘I do not know. As for his master, Bohemond—’

I broke off in surprise as I saw where we had arrived. Even as I spoke Bohemond’s name, we had come into open ground, in the midst of which stood his huge, crimson-striped tent. A banner emblazoned with a silver serpent hung limp in front of it.

‘I must leave you here,’ said Mushid.

‘For Bohemond?’ Though I hated the memory, I thought of Tancred’s abomination with the Turkish prisoners. ‘You do not know what Normans will do to Ishmaelites like you.’

Mushid smiled. ‘Even Normans can stem their hatred if there is gain to be had. Bohemond seeks a weapon to slice open the city. Perhaps I can supply the blade he needs. Thank you for guiding me here.’

He inclined his head, then strode confidently into the tent. Neither of the guards challenged him.

Two weeks later, at the end of May, Sigurd, Anna and I sat around our campfire, eating fish stew. Our provisions had improved immeasurably since we had moved to Raymond’s camp, for he controlled the supply road to the sea, but there was no satisfaction in it. In those days every meal seemed a last supper before the Turkish onslaught, and the bread was ash in our mouths. Nor did the coming of summer lighten our mood, for our armour weighed doubly heavy in the heat, and the flies which swarmed about the marshes near the river plagued us every hour. We no longer starved, but instead watched disease and pestilence slide their fingers ever deeper into the body of the army. And above all hung the black threat of Kerbogha, now – it was said – less than a week away.

‘To think that it has been a year since we left Constantinople,’ said Sigurd. He speared a lump of meat out of the pot and chewed it off his knife. ‘Your grandchild will have children of his own before you see him.’

‘If I live to see him, the delay will be worth it.’ If all had gone well, Helena should have given birth by now. Every night I prayed for their safety, imploring my late wife Maria to plead for them in the world beyond, but still there had been no word. It seemed there were none I loved who did not live in the shade of death.

‘I will be satisfied to live until next month,’ Anna declared. ‘If Kerbogha comes while the Franks still bicker . . .’

‘Do not say that,’ I snapped. ‘Too often, the fates hear our foolish hopes and honour them. Wish to live a month, and they may grant it too precisely.’

‘Superstition,’ scoffed Anna. ‘I am surprised . . . What is that?’

She pointed through the fire, where some movement in the night had drawn her gaze. It came nearer, at last revealing itself as a child, barely taller than my waist. His hair and clothes were ragged, his face filthy, but his eyes were bright in the firelight and his voice was as clear as water.

‘Which one is Demetrios Askiates?’

I rubbed my eyes. The surrounding smoke ringed him with a hazy nimbus, and his head seemed to burn out of the flames between us like some conjuror’s trick. Against the darkness beyond he was almost ethereally bright.

‘I am Demetrios.’ I touched my hand to a stone in the earth, its rough strength anchoring me to the world. ‘Why?’

The apparition frowned, as if trying to lift phrases from his memory. ‘You have desired to speak with my lady.’

‘Has he?’ Sigurd’s ribald tone broke the illusion, and at once there was only a shabby urchin beside our fire. ‘You did not mention this, Demetrios.’

I ignored him, and Anna’s angry glare as well. ‘Who is your lady?’

‘Her name is Sarah. She will see you alone,’ he added, as he saw Anna and Sigurd making to rise.

The child did not take me far, but led me quickly through the camp to the river. Many who followed the army had abandoned us now, and the empty intervals between fires lengthened. Sometimes the boy disappeared completely, dissolving into the night like mist, but he always emerged to lure me onwards. At the river he seemed to stop, a smudge of white in the darkness, and I hurried to keep close.

‘Demetrios Askiates. You have answered me. Or perhaps I have answered you.’

I halted. Where the boy had gone I did not know, but the shape I had thought was him now spoke with the assured, sweet cadence of a woman. My eyes strained against the veiling darkness, but apart from her white dress I could see nothing.

‘Are you Sarah?’

She laughed – or perhaps it was a ripple in the river. ‘I have many names. You know me as Sarah.’

‘How did Drogo know you?’ I stretched out my hand, hoping for some tree or boulder to lean on, but there was nothing.

‘As a teacher.’

‘What did you teach him – other than to carve scars into his back?’

‘I did not teach him that.’ Her voice was clouded with remorse, and suddenly I felt an irrational urge to hug her close to console her. ‘There will always be men whose minds distort their learning.’

‘Were Drogo and Rainauld such men?’

‘It was not their fault. Drogo’s heart had turned to thorns: whatever tried to reach him was torn to pieces. As for Rainauld, he followed Drogo, perhaps too much.’

‘And what did you teach them?’

‘Faith in Christ. A purer path.’

‘There are enough priests and bishops in this army whose duty that is.’

Again I heard her rippling laugh. ‘Priests and bishops. Their duty is to their masters, the princes of this Earth. They preach obedience, that by it they may have a share in the spoils of war. They care nothing for the souls they shepherd. Look about the camp, Demetrios – can you deny that the Lord has abandoned us?’

‘The Lord passes by, and we do not see him.’

‘If we are pure, he will restore us to happiness. For the moment, this camp is a wicked and dirty place, ruled by crows and beset by wolves. Only prayer and truth can free us. “God is with us,” the princes say, but even as they speak their doom marches on. They and their clergy, they are all corrupted. Only the righteous will escape this place. The rest will perish.’

‘To question the clergy is treason.’ The warmth of the night was suddenly gone from my bones.

‘You do not believe that. In your heart, you know that I speak the truth.’

‘I know that your adepts broke into pagan shrines and died murderously. Is that the purity you taught?’

‘No! I told you, they would not heed me. I thought Drogo sought salvation. In truth, he sought only revenge.’

Though I could not see Sarah’s face, I sensed that at last I had cracked through her serenity. It left me feeling strangely soiled, as if I had broken something precious. ‘Revenge on whom?’

‘Revenge for the loss of his brother. Revenge for the torments he suffered on the plains of Anatolia, and here before the walls of Antioch.’ The white dress fluttered like a moth in the darkness as she moved on the fringes of my sight.

‘But revenge
on
whom? His brother died on the march, killed by Turks.’

Sarah’s voice seemed to grow softer, as though she were trickling away. ‘I thought that in Drogo’s grief he might hear truth. That through his sadness the Lord might enter. But there are other powers which can enter through a broken heart, and Drogo succumbed.’

She had passed beyond seeing, and as she stopped speaking a wave of solitude enveloped me. ‘Wait,’ I pleaded, stumbling forward. ‘You visited his tent in the hour before he died. He must have told you something.’

‘I tried to reason with him, to draw him back to the light. But he had found a new teacher, and would not hear me.’

‘Who did he go to meet in that dell?’ I demanded. ‘I must know what brought him there.’

Once more Sarah laughed, though now the sound held only sadness. ‘Keep seeking, and perhaps you will find what Drogo sought and found.’

‘What was that?’

‘Truth.’

‘What truth?’

‘I cannot tell you that. Not until you tire of the self-serving lies that the priests tell. When you are willing to discard their deceptions and unveil their secrets, then I will show you truth.’

‘Tell me!’ I ran towards her voice. Whatever her secrets, I was desperate to know them.

But she was gone, moving soundlessly across the meadow, and my only answer was the gurgling of the river.

I awoke next morning with a searing headache. It was the first day of June, and already the heat seemed harsher, parching all life from the air. The shallow streams that fed the Orontes had dried to dust, and I crouched in the river to splash the sweat of a sleepless night off my face. It did nothing to soothe the pain within, nor wipe away the confusion which governed my mind.

In the middle of the morning, Count Raymond summoned Sigurd to his farmhouse and asked for a company of Varangians to relieve his garrison at the tower by the bridge. Every hour, more scouts rode in from the east bringing fresh news of Kerbogha’s advance. The breadth of his army covered the plain from mountain to mountain, they said, a hundred thousand strong. Even slowed by their numbers they would be at the Iron Bridge, where the road from the north crossed the Orontes, by the end of the week.

‘The Varangians should be standing in the vanguard against Kerbogha, not guarding this place,’ Sigurd complained. We were standing on the top of the tower, the city spread out before us little more than a bowshot away. A bowshot, a river, and walls four times the height of a man, I reminded myself, and still impregnable as ever.

‘Your battle will come, and when it does a hundred Varangians will be little more than pebbles beneath the feet of a thousand Turks.’

‘Pebbles sharp enough to make them bleed.’

‘Is that enough?’ There was more sharpness in my voice than I had intended, but I did not try to master it. ‘Will you be satisfied to die in this desolate place, far from home and family, with none but pagans and barbarians to see you fall?’

‘I have been far from home and family for thirty years. If I die here, or in Thrace, or drowned in the ocean it will be the same.’

‘You have a wife in Constantinople.’ He seldom spoke of her, but I knew she had borne him two sons and a gaggle of daughters.

‘A warrior’s wife knows that she will one day be a widow.’

Sigurd looked away, perhaps finding my argument tedious, and I leaned out on the rough-hewn wooden parapet. The tombs we had despoiled made a poor foundation, and I was forever fearful lest the entire edifice should collapse in a hail of splinters. Every time Sigurd moved, the rampart swayed, while the open shaft at the tower’s centre yawned open behind us.

With a nervous sigh, I turned my attention outwards. The sun was high, heating my armour so that it became a forge around me, and although it was not yet midday an afternoon stillness seemed to grip the landscape. I lifted a nearby bucket with both hands and tipped water into my mouth, letting some splash through my beard and down my neck. At the foot of the tower a band of Normans was nailing animal hides to a crude frame, fashioning a shield under which they could approach the walls unscathed. It seemed a forlorn hope to indulge so late; perhaps they planned to use its shelter to destroy the bridge, and so deny the Turks in the city a route to our flank.

‘Do you want an arrow in the eye? Join that seam tighter, or every Turk in Antioch will make it his target.’

There was something in that stinging voice I recognised. Craning my head out through the embrasure I looked closer at the construction. A dozen Normans were busy around the frame while a sergeant paced about, overseeing their labour. He had removed his helmet in the heat, though his hair was still lank with sweat, and he moved gracelessly, spasmodically, jabbing here and there where the work prompted his anger. From my high angle I could not see his face, but I was certain that I knew his name.

I slid down the ladder in the well of the tower and ducked out through its door. Just beyond the stockade, at the bottom of the mound, I found him.

‘Quino,’ I said to his back.

He spun around. In a second, his sword was in his hand. Though we were in open daylight, and surrounded by his allies, he was tensed like a cornered beast. ‘You would have done better to avoid me.’

‘I have nothing to hide from. Do you?’

‘Only catamite Greeks who speak poison and lies.’

‘Poison and lies?’ Perhaps it was something in his temper which prodded me to retaliate; perhaps it was the shroud of mystery and ignorance which had stifled me so long; or perhaps it was my fear of the coming Turks: whatever the reason, I abandoned all caution and advanced towards him. ‘Is it a lie that you and Drogo and the others were adepts of a mystic named Sarah, a false prophet who preaches treason and impiety to your rightful church? Is it a lie that you journeyed to a pagan temple in Daphne and slaughtered a bullock on the altar of a Persian demon? Is it a lie that two of your friends, your so-called brothers, are dead – and you live to see them silent in the grave?’