Knights of the Cross (9 page)

I looked to Adhemar, but his head was bowed in prayer.

Tatikios was in a peevish humour that evening, and spent an hour dictating another petition for relief to the Emperor. Christ help us, I thought, if the Franks ever saw the correspondence. It was well after dark before I was able to return to my tent, damp and famished, to see what humble supper awaited me. Anna and Sigurd were there, with a few Varangians clustered around a single candle. The shadows were deep in the canopy above.

‘Welcome to my mead hall,’ said Sigurd mirthlessly. ‘Have you found out who killed the Norman?’

I lowered myself onto the ground and took the wooden bowl that Anna passed to me. The broth in it was long cold, and the only trace of meat seemed to be the scum of fat on its surface.

‘One of the companions who shared his tent has been missing for two days. Even you, Sigurd, might guess something was suspicious from that.’

Sigurd waved his crooked knife at me, but before he could retort Anna was speaking.

‘If one Norman killed another then there is hardly reason for you to involve yourself. Bohemond must be satisfied – has he paid you?’

After my conversation with Count Raymond, I was no longer so certain what would satisfy Bohemond. ‘The man was not a Norman – he was a Provençal who had taken service with Bohemond.’

‘Hah.’ Sigurd’s knife flashed in the candlelight as he held it up and licked the crumbs off it. I looked for the bread it had cut, but in vain. ‘Bohemond did not hire you to prove that his Normans were ill-disciplined barbarians intent on murdering each other. That we knew. There is an answer he wants you to find, Demetrios, and my guess is that he already knows it far better than you.’

‘And what of it?’ Anna interrupted. Though there were men present, she had unwrapped the
palla
from her head so that her black hair hung loose behind her neck. It shimmered in the candlelight, but her face was firm with anger. ‘What does it matter if it was a Norman or a Provençal or a Turk or even a Nubian who killed that man? Bohemond and Raymond and the other princes have killed far more men by their impatience and ambition.’

‘This is a war, and men die in it,’ said Sigurd.

‘Of course men die in war. But it should not be because we gorged ourselves when there was plenty, and now suffer famine. Where were the princes five months ago, when our gravest danger was gluttony? Before the orchards were reduced to firewood?’

She looked around, challenging us to argue, but there were none in that group who would defend the Franks. Besides, it was the truth. When we had arrived at Antioch, the land had been fat with fruit: trees bowed with apples and pears, vines dripping grapes, pits and granaries bursting with the newly gathered harvest in every village. Within two months, the fertile plain had become a wasteland. No animals grazed the fields or sat in their barns for they had all been slaughtered, and our horses had devoured the winter hay. The granaries had been ransacked until not one seed remained, and the withered vines had been gathered and burned. We had plagued the land without thought for the future, and the greasy soup now in my hands was our reward.

‘It was not even that their strategy was frustrated,’ Anna continued. ‘There was no plan then for getting into Antioch, any more than there is now.’

‘Enough.’ I raised my arms in barely exaggerated horror. ‘I have just spent an hour hearing Tatikios make the same complaints.’

‘Perhaps they expected God to deliver them,’ Sigurd suggested. ‘They seem to know His mind uncommonly well.’

I thought of Drogo’s naked body in the cave, the long cross scarred into his back. I thought of all the others whom I had seen make similar professions on their bodies, knights and pilgrims alike. ‘You cannot deny their piety.’

Sparks spat into the gloom as Sigurd rasped his knife against a stone. ‘When the Norman bastard came to conquer England he carried a banner of the cross – a personal gift from the Pope in Rome – and the relics of two saints. If you had seen what the Normans did to my country in the name of their church, you would not acclaim their piety.’

‘And the most pious of them all is that dwarfish hermit,’ Anna added. ‘The man who led ten thousand pilgrims to their death, all the while promising them they were invulnerable. That is the sort of piety they practise. They forget that reason and will are divine gifts no less than faith.’

There were times when I thought that Anna had spent so long peering at the blood and flesh of men that she neglected the spiritual realms, yet I never came away the winner when I challenged her.

Sigurd must have seen the darkness that crossed my face. ‘Better not to mention the dwarf priest who orphaned Thomas.’

It was a kind thought, though too late. Thomas was my son-in-law, a Frankish boy whose parents had followed Little Peter to their doom in his expedition against the Turks. After the massacre, a series of misadventures had at last led Thomas to my house. Gratitude for my hospitality – not least for my daughter, though I had not known it then – had driven him to betray his countrymen in the Frankish army, after which I could deny him neither my daughter nor a place in the Varangian guards. He had married Helena three days before I crossed into Asia, at a small church in the city. I had ached to give her up, even to a man who had saved my life, and ached doubly to leave them so soon afterwards. But Thomas was safest where the Franks were furthest away and by staying he had at least saved himself the horrors of march and siege. The Army of God had left too many young widows already: I did not need Helena added to their number.

Sigurd was watching me. ‘Has Thomas sent word recently? Have you become a grandfather yet?’

I shrugged, though the question weighed keenly on me. ‘There has been nothing from Constantinople in weeks. Winter has closed the passes, and who knows what storms have wracked the coasts?’

A frown of concern was on Anna’s face. ‘The child will come any day now. I should be there.’

‘Helena will be perfectly safe.’ Though Sigurd’s voice never lacked force, this time I thought he seemed a little too insistent. ‘You will worry Demetrios needlessly if you think otherwise. Helena will have her sister present, and her aunt, and probably a legion of other women to assist the birthing.’

Anna nodded, though to my mind it was without conviction. I knew she fretted about my daughter’s child, so much so that she could not hide it from me. It did nothing to soothe the tension every man feels when faced with the mysteries of birth. Nor could I forget the sight of Maria, my late wife, lying white in a lake of her own blood as she tried to bear me a third child. She was often in my dreams now.

Anna stroked my cheek, her expression now recomposed. ‘Helena will be well protected,’ she said. ‘Thomas will see to it.’

‘If he hasn’t beheaded himself trying to wield his axe,’ said Sigurd, trying – in his own fashion – to lighten the mood.

With a glance at how low the candle had burned, Anna rose. ‘I should return to my tent. No doubt the sick and the hungry will be there before dawn, seeking succour.’

A glance passed between us: mine half pleading, hers half regret. Perhaps in a different year we would have been married by now, but I had not wanted to diminish Helena’s wedding with another ceremony so soon afterwards. Then we had left for war, where marriage seemed inappropriate, and so we lived more like brother and sister than husband and wife. Though not entirely without error.

‘I will see you tomorrow.’

The next day I went again to look for the missing Rainauld, and the following day as well, but each time there was nothing. On the third day I did discover something of him, though not from his friends. Instead, I found an Ishmaelite waiting at his tent. I saw him from some distance as I approached, and was instantly confused, for he neither skulked like a spy nor guarded himself like a merchant. He stood alone outside Drogo’s tent, his turbaned head proclaiming his faith to all yet apparently careless of his safety.

‘Demetrios Askiates?’ he asked as I drew near. It took me a moment to realise that he had spoken in Greek.

‘Who are you?’

‘I am Mushid, the swordsmith.’

‘A Turk?’

‘An Arab.’ In addition to the white turban knotted over his head, he was dressed humbly in a brown robe with a red belt. His dark-skinned face was unlined by age and framed by a beard whose hair was black as tar. It was a little longer than mine, and split in the middle where it had grown unevenly, but otherwise he might have passed for a Greek. His brown eyes were clear and round, with neither malice nor fear disfiguring them.

‘You’re brave. Not many Saracens would walk unarmed into this camp.’

He smiled, his teeth very white. ‘A swordsmith is never unarmed.’ He tapped his hip, and I heard the rap of something solid under the robe. ‘I do not provoke battle, but I defend myself if it comes.’

His voice was light, and his smile constant, yet something in his words made me wonder how much more steel was hidden under the plain cloth. ‘How did you know my name?’

‘They say you come here every day. They say you are looking for the man who killed Drogo of Melfi.’

He did not explain who ‘they’ might be, and I did not ask. There was no shortage of ‘them’ in the camp. ‘What do you know of Drogo?’

‘When he was penniless, he sold his sword to eat. Then, when his fortunes improved, he needed another blade. I made it for him. Later we became friends. He had lost a brother – and mine too died last year. When they told me he was dead, I . . .’ For the first time, he seemed to hesitate over his words. ‘I was sad.’

‘When did you see him last?’

‘A week ago. On the day he died, I think.’

‘Where? What time?’ Suddenly I was alive with hope. Bohemond had promised to ask through his army whether anyone had seen Drogo in the hours before he died, but thus far none had admitted it. Doubtless they feared blame. If this swordsmith had met him, he must have been among the last to see him living.

‘On the road, at about the ninth hour – three hours past noon. He was happy with me; his new sword had slain three Turks in the battle the previous day.’

‘Did he say where he was going? Whom he purposed to meet?’

‘He had been at the mosque, building your tower. He felt guilty that you had desecrated the dead.’ The swordsmith fixed me with an earnest stare. ‘Even in war, the dead should be honoured.’

‘He did not say where he was going?’

‘I did not ask. I thought he went back to the camp – where else?’

‘Indeed.’ I paused, feeling certain that I should put more questions to this Saracen who had fallen across my path, who might remember something significant of that afternoon. To fill the silence, I asked: ‘What do your fellow Ishmaelites think of you, that you sell the blades by which they die?’

The swordsmith shrugged. ‘What they say in their thoughts, they keep there. What they speak with their tongues is that trade affords no enemies. Many, after all, supply the food which sustains you, the horses you ride to battle. Why not your weapons?’ He laughed. ‘Besides, we are not all as one in Islam because we all wear turbans and beards.’ He jerked his head towards the triple peak of Mount Silpius, and the walls that ringed it. ‘The Turks in the city, they are
Ahl al-Sunna
. I am of the
Shi’at ’Ali
, like the Fatimids of Egypt. We believe differently – as
Rum
and
Franj
do.’

‘The Byzantines and Franks are united in Christ,’ I protested, though I knew it to be scarcely true.

Mushid frowned. ‘But you believe it is ordained to eat leavened bread, not unleavened. And that your priests should marry. And that . . .’

I held up my hand. ‘Enough. I am neither monk nor theologian. Indeed, I wonder if you know more of my religion than I do.’

‘Only two kinds of the Nazarenes pass through my country: merchants and pilgrims. I speak with both, and learn their ways.’

‘And you are of a different faith to the Turks? A different party of Ishmaelites?’ I could not quite comprehend how I had come to debate religion with a Saracen swordsmith outside Drogo’s tent, but I remembered the Emperor’s exhortation to learn their divisions.

‘Our differences would seem as obscure to you as yours do to me. Yet they can bring us to war against each other. The Fatimids of Egypt have fought the Turks for decades.’

‘And you are one of them?’

‘No. I—’

He broke off as a figure in mail came striding up between the rows of tents. With a coif about his neck and a helmet on his head, he was almost unrecognisable, but there was something familiar in the sharp, snapping movement of his limbs. Behind him, I could see the boy Simon leading a grey palfrey.

‘You,’ he barked, raising a gloved fist. The voice was Quino’s. ‘I ordered you never to come here again.’

For a moment both Mushid and I hesitated, neither sure whom he addressed. As he drew too near to ignore I said at last, ‘I was seeking Rainauld.’