Knights of the Cross (27 page)

I shifted on the hard stone beneath me. ‘Why are you here now?’

‘I heard that you had occupied this tower. It is prudent to know where your friends are in these times.’

‘That was not what I meant.’

Mushid lifted an eyebrow. ‘Then what? Do I carry more secrets of hidden plans? Having worked the city’s betrayal once, will I do it again? Is that what you ask?’

‘If a man sits at my fire I like to know why he is there.’

‘Then you are wise.’ He smiled. ‘I did not weep to see the Turks lose Antioch, because they were
Ahl al-Sunna
. Having helped the Franj, I will not turn away so quickly from them. And if Kerbogha takes the city, there will be more killing. You will have killed all the Muslims, he will kill all the Christians, and Antioch will become a wasteland. Nobody will win.’

‘How can you bear it?’ Anna spoke so quietly that her words seemed to entwine with the hissing fire. ‘Whichever doctrines divided you from the Antiochenes, they were your brothers. By your hand, many thousands of them now lie in an open grave. How can you sit by our fire and discuss this calamity as if it were nothing more than the forging of a sword?’

‘First, because they did not die by my hand. They died by the hands of a thousand Franj, not one more or less guilty. Do not try and blame me for what your allies have done.’

‘They are not my allies. And hateful though they are, their evil would have remained undone if you had not arranged for the gate to be open.’

It was as if hot lead had been poured into my belly. I squirmed where I sat, praying that Anna’s fixed stare did not move onto me. In my account of the battle at the walls, I had not told her the truth of my role: the fear that she would blame me for all that had happened since was unanswerable. How could it be otherwise, when I could not defend it myself?

‘Firouz the armourer opened the gate,’ said Mushid. ‘If I had not carried his messages to Bohemond, he would have found another. Even if he had not, even if I alone were responsible for unlocking the gate, I would not bear the blame for what happened afterwards. Many doors open: it is for men to choose which they enter – and what they do inside.’

I had rarely seen Anna bested in argument, but now she had no reply. None, at least, that she could voice, though her face evinced an inconsolable anger.

‘Would you rather that I had done nothing?’ Mushid continued. ‘Would you rather now be cowering in your tent before the walls, watching Demetrios pull on his armour? Would you rather see three thousand Franj, with barely a sound horse between them, marching to fight the mightiest Turkish army in a generation? Would you rather be in the camp when Kerbogha’s victorious janissaries overran it, massacring every man and boy and dragging you away by your hair to the slave-brothels of Mosul where—’

‘Enough,’ I snapped. ‘That is not necessary.’

Mushid looked at me almost curiously, then bowed his head. ‘I am sorry. I meant no insult. It is bad to offend one’s host at his own fire. All I wished to say is that there would have been a terrible killing in any event. Perhaps you do not like what I have done, but I have been on many battlefields, both as victor and vanquished. I assure you of this: it is always better to be among the living than the dead.’

I could see from the faces around the fire that his argument satisfied no one, me least of all. It did not lift one straw from the burden of guilt I bore. Yet unless the dead came to lend their voices to the debate, it was irrefutable.

I was uneasy with the turn that the conversation had taken, and with the enmity that seemed to have flared up between Anna and Mushid. Still, there were questions I wanted to ask.

‘Your friendship with Drogo – was that part of this plot?’

Mushid studied his knuckles, his face impassive. ‘No. As I told you once before, I met Drogo when I sold him a sword. It was much later that Firouz confided in me his plan, after Drogo had died. He was simply a friend, a good man to sit with by a fire. It is sad that he lived under so unfortunate a roof.’

‘Unfortunate indeed, but not uncommon.’

‘And still the misfortune continues. His servant was found dead by the river three days ago.’

‘Simon?’ A torrent of images flooded my mind: the boy shivering under Quino’s brutality, picking herbs from the river bank covered in mud, rubbing an oily cloth over Drogo’s sword. Was it possible that he had suffered the same fate as his master?

‘Simon, yes. I was in the Norman camp when they discovered him.’

‘How did it happen?’ So many men had died in the past days – and weeks and months – that it was astonishing I could feel anything from one more death. In truth, I felt nothing, for the news had a numbing effect that I could not resist. Yet somehow, if it were possible, in the recesses of my soul I felt a cold hand squeeze tighter about me, felt a more profound absence of feeling itself.

‘He was pierced with arrows. He had been hunting for herbs on the bank – a party of Turks must have seen him from the far side and chanced their aim.’

Perhaps, I thought, I had known it already. I remembered dismantling the boat bridge two days earlier, and a peasant telling me of a boy killed picking herbs. I had felt a sickening premonition, but then Bohemond had arrived and dragged me away, and all else had been forgotten. Not that remembering would have helped by then.

Mushid was still speaking. ‘It was a tragic end. Had he lived another day, he would have entered the city in safety.’

Through the welter of thought and memory that flurried about me, I found myself thinking that if this city, besieged and starving, had been Simon’s best hope of safety, how wretched must he have been? Hardly less, I supposed, than we who had survived.

Much later I lay on the stone of the rampart under the dark sky. Anna lay against me, my chest against her back and my knees crooked inside hers, like two bowls stacked together. My arms were wrapped around her chest, which swelled and sank gently under her cotton shift. We had no mattress save our cloaks, for every stick of straw in the city had gone to feed the horses. The hot night meant there was no need for blankets.

‘I don’t trust the Saracen,’ said Anna. ‘Neither should you.’

‘I don’t.’

‘He has already betrayed the city once. Who can tell what other secrets he hides? Thousands of innocents have died because of him.’

Again, the frantic memory of the gate on the mountain rasped through my mind. I could not discuss this with Anna. ‘He saved us from certain death. How can I hate him, if because of him Helena’s child has a grandfather?’

‘I do not say you should hate him. But you should not draw him near you either.’

As the night had come on, I had insisted that Mushid should stay in our tower until dawn. There were too many Franks on the streets, knights and pilgrims alike, who might recognise him as an Ishmaelite and tear him apart. He had resisted my urging but I had sensed gratitude when finally he allowed me to prevail. Now he slept with the Varangians in the guardroom along the wall.

‘As much as you do unto the least of my people, you do unto me,’ I quoted. ‘He will be gone in the morning.’

‘Good.’

Anna nestled back into me. Her long hair prickled against my nose and I shook my head to breathe freely again, unwilling to push her away even an inch. Warmth flowed between us – and with it, I fancied, some small measure of my cares.

‘What was it that struck you when you heard that the Norman’s servant had died?’ Anna asked at last. ‘I saw your eyes. You looked – guilty.’

I paused, trying to order my thoughts. ‘I saw the knight, Quino, the day before Simon died. At the tower. I accused him of worshipping a pagan idol. I suggested that it might have been he who killed Drogo.’

‘Did you think so?’

‘I don’t know. I have not considered it in many weeks; there has been too much else to distract me. But now three of Quino’s companions are dead. Even when Bohemond wanted their murderer found, Quino gave no help. And when I challenged him he threatened to kill me.’

‘The Saracen said the boy was killed by Turks.’

‘He said the boy was found on the river bank, pierced with arrows. Three nights ago the Turks were pent up in Antioch. Any raiding party on the far bank would have had to pass the watchtower by the fortified bridge, the guards by the boat bridge and the rest of our picket line. And even the Turks might struggle to hit a boy in the dark from across the river.’

‘But why would the knight . . . ?’

I remembered the snarl of Quino’s voice as we wrestled at the foot of the tower, the frenzy in his eyes. ‘It was the boy who told me that the knights had gone to Daphne, to the pagan cave. If Quino guessed that, what would he not have done to protect himself? The western princes do not bring heretics into their palaces to dispute theology with them, as the Emperor does. They burn them alive. And I – I revealed to Quino that I knew his secret. I gave him cause to suspect that the boy, Simon, had betrayed him. A day later Simon was dead.’

I rolled away, setting my back to Anna’s. Almost immediately, she turned over so that our positions were reversed, and her arms squeezed around me.

‘You must not think of it,’ she said. ‘Perhaps Quino killed the boy, perhaps he did not. There are too many other concerns, more pressing, to trouble you now.’

‘No.’ I struggled free of her embrace as the images of a thousand slaughtered Turks clamoured in my mind. Whatever Mushid said, whatever blame the Franks held, it was my hand which had opened the gates of death to them. Against their deaths, Simon’s was nothing – a tear in a torrent. But their lives were beyond salvation now, while Simon’s I might still redeem.

The few inches between me and Anna yawned like a chasm, and the silence lasted so long that I thought she must have fallen asleep. At length, though, I felt the touch of her hand on my shoulder as she pulled me back towards her. I did not resist.

‘The baby will be three months old by now,’ said Anna. ‘I hope Helena has kept him healthy.’

I simply hoped that there was a baby to be healthy. We did not speak of the other possibility.

‘If you are worried, perhaps you should go back. It would be good for Helena to have a doctor and a mother to help.’ I spoke carefully, for any implication of weakness or cowardice would enrage Anna. ‘A starving, doomed city is no place for a woman.’

To my relief, she did not pull away from me. Nor was there any anger in her voice, only weary sadness. ‘It is too late for that. It would be suicide, trying to evade Kerbogha’s army. Sigurd says that in two days we shall not even be able to leave the walls.’

‘There are still ships at Saint Simeon,’ I urged her. ‘You could take passage to Cyprus, and thence to Constantinople. With the summer seas, it would be as safe a journey as any.’

For a long time she was still. From down in the city I could hear occasional shouted challenges from the Frankish patrols, sometimes the braying of animals. Otherwise Antioch seemed asleep. I doubted whether dreams would be any relief for its inhabitants.

‘No.’

‘It would be better—’ I began.

‘No. While I am here, I worry for Thomas and Helena, for Zoe and your grandchild, and for all who are dear to me. I fear for myself, and for what will become of me when Kerbogha comes. But if I left now, I would live every minute in fear for you. And that would be worse.’

I closed my eyes. A wave of warm confusion swept through me, threatening to spill out in tears. I kissed Anna on the nape of her neck.

‘You are a fool.’ My voice was shaking. ‘You should never have come, and then you should not have stayed.’

‘Neither should you. But we are both here now.’

Mushid had gone when I woke; he had slipped away just before dawn, the guard told me. He was probably wise to have done so, for the Frankish watchmen would have been most drowsy then – and we had nothing to offer him for breakfast. I longed for activity, for distraction from the cares that ravaged me like carrion-birds: I oiled my armour, polished my sword until I could have shaved in its reflection, worked the leather of my shield and even cut a new hole in my belt to fit my shrunken waist. After that, there was nothing to do save pace the walls and watch.

During the night, more Turks had come up on the far bank of the Orontes. It seemed that the Franks had at last learned patience, for they did not ride out to attack. Nor, though, could they avoid battle, for at first light the Turks renewed their assault on the tower by the fortified bridge. I could see it from where I watched, the wooden palisade raised on its mound and the banner of the Duke of Normandy hanging limp from a spear above it. The Normans had packed it with defenders, and for now seemed able to withstand the constant Turkish siege, but still it was merely the advance parties of Kerbogha’s vanguard whom they faced.

At noon Adhemar summoned us to another council. It was a relief to know that we were not forgotten, though I feared it was only the bishop – and perhaps Count Raymond – who cared anything for us. They brought us together in the great church of Saint Peter, where the customary four benches had been set in a square under the silver dome. After so many meetings in the confines of Adhemar’s tent or Raymond’s farmhouse it was strange to be placed in so cavernous a hall, where broad spaces stretched behind us and every word rebounded from the roof. The labourers had been cleared out for the council, but their work was far from finished: half-exposed icons stared out from splintered holes in the plaster; fragments of stone and rubble lay in heaps on the floor; and all was shrouded in dust.