Pilgermann (26 page)

The shaking of the earth stops, the grey light of the day is once more steady. There are cracks in the walls, cracks in streets and houses, fallen bricks and stones here and there but no serious damage and no one killed as far as we know. Bembel Rudzuk and I go to Hidden Lion. The tower stands intact and unmarred and the pattern has suffered no damage whatever although there are cracks in the streets all around and in the nearby shops and houses. ‘Its time is not yet come,’ says Bembel Rudzuk.

When we look at Hidden Lion now it is difficult to recall the
feelings we had when the pattern was first assembled. Now Bembel Rudzuk’s idea of observing ‘that point at which stillness becomes motion’ and that other point ‘at which pattern becomes consciousness’ seems altogether ill-conceived and the words with which he described his intention make me shudder. When I call to mind those early days of Hidden Lion when the tiles were arriving from Tower Gate’s brickyard and his foreman and workmen were with their swift and dancing movements putting the pattern together, when I remember how we walked about and viewed the expansion of those tawny and red and black triangles with a commanding eye as if we were in charge of the thing, I cannot help making a face of embarrassment.

As we stand there looking at Hidden Lion I find myself shaking my head; I no longer know how to approach this place in my mind, I no longer know what to think of it. Up until the time when the Syrian and Armenian Christians were beheaded it was everybody’s good-luck place; afterwards I expected it to become a bad-luck place but I was wrong. Until the next rain the bloodstains remained to mark the tiles, and to those tiles during those few days came many people who stood and looked at them and pointed them out to other people who then stood and looked at them. All of these people who came and looked were Muslims. One day I saw a man squat and rub his hand over one of the tawny bloodstained tiles, then he put his hand inside his robe and rubbed his chest. After that many others did the same, and children began to walk in special ways on those tiles and to dance on them.

The tiles being glazed, the blood had not permeated the clay; when the rain came it washed them clean. The tiles that had been stained with blood did not, however, become unknown: by some general understanding amongst themselves those who took an interest in the tiles had noted their positions relative to the tower, and by counting carefully they found their way to them again. This was a source of great amusement to the headless and maggoty tax-collector, who now appointed himself a guide and would stand where the blood had been, stamping his foot and pointing with his finger to the tiles. I could of course not see his smile but I could hear his laughter
and there was no mistaking the mockery in the way he stamped his foot and pointed with his finger.

One day a boy of eight or nine came and prostrated himself on some of the tiles that had been stained with blood. He was dressed the same as any other child, he was not wearing a blue turban. I recognized him as the same boy who had come to the paved square and drawn on the stone the morning after I made my first chalk drawing for Hidden Lion. After a few moments he stood up and looked all around at everyone, then walked away. The next day there appeared on those tiles an earthenware pot which filled up with money. The butcher volunteered to divide it among Christian orphans. This was done, and each day after that the pot was filled up and emptied in the same manner.

Now on this day of the shaking of the earth the shaking has stopped and people are returning to their ordinary activities; the stallholders are again at their places on Hidden Lion. Trade here has of course diminished with the progress of the siege; the caravans have left off coming to Antioch, the road from Suwaydiyya is dangerous, and goods are scarce. Vendors, having little to sell, have lately been reduced to trading among themselves; their collective scanty stock distributes itself anew every day: the copper pot with the hole in it that used to be at the stall of A makes its appearance at the stall of B, while the haftless dagger that was a veteran non-seller with B now tries its luck with A. Eventually, perhaps with P or Q, the pot and the dagger assume with the new venue a new aspect that gets them sold, proving yet again to those who knew it already that action creates action.

Today, however, the merchants sit or stand listlessly by their wares as if all buying and selling are gone out of the world. Most of them pack up and go home early. The man at the coffee stand by the tower puts his coffee pot and his little brass cups into their wooden box, picks up the box by its leather strap, slings it from his shoulder, takes his brazier, says, This place is finished’, and turns to go.

‘Why is it finished?’ I ask him.

‘Look,’ he says, pointing to the pattern with his foot, ‘there’s not so much as a single tile cracked, it isn’t natural.’

‘What do you think it means?’ I say.

‘It means that this place is being saved for something worse,’ he says, ‘and I don’t want any part of it.’ He recedes into the distance, never looking back.

The butcher comes, takes the pot of money for the Christian orphans, spits on the tiles, and walks away.

‘Wait,’ I say to him. ‘Why did you spit on the tiles, why do you look that way?’

Without saying a word the butcher makes with his index and little finger the sign against the evil eye and off he goes.

This day that has begun with the shaking of the earth moves on and there are more wonders to be seen: the dreadful grey curtain of the day becomes the darker curtain of night and there are seen moving behind it strange red lights in the sky that shift and slide from one shape to another. More praying and singing from the Franks and many voices lifted to God on our side of the walls as well. The Patriarch, who was taken out of his hanging cage and put back in prison when the earth stopped shaking, is brought out again to offer an opinion on the strange lights. He sees very plainly in the sky the sign of the Cross and is put back in prison. Bembel Rudzuk and I look up at the sky but we say nothing to each other of what we see—there is perhaps too much motion becoming stillness, too much consciousness becoming pattern for us to respond with anything but silence.

The sky stays grey the next day and rain comes pelting down like hopelessness turned into water; the earth becomes a soggy boggy mire; the river swallows up its banks, it is no longer to be trifled with, soon it must run over the bridge instead of under it, soon it must lose patience with this city, must rush it brick by brick and stone by stone away into the sea that drowns Muslims, Christians, and Jews impartially and says nothing about God, nothing about justice or mercy. Dismally falls the rain on Silpius, and slides of mud and stones go down the mountainside to join the ponderous rolling rush of Onopniktes that bellows and echoes under Antioch as if fulfilling a prophecy, as if it has been foretold centuries ago that when the mountain will have passed under the city a monstrous thing will happen, perhaps the end of all things will come; or worse, some great beast taller than the mountain will appear and say at the
same time and with one voice in all the languages of humankind that there will be no end to anything, that everything will go on and on for ever.

Those thousands of Franks who rode off in the night come squelching back now under the grey sky and the rain. These thousands, we hear, have been led by Bohemond of Taranto and Robert of Flanders. Moving up the Orontes valley they have run into the armies of Duqaq, Tughtagin, and Janah al-Dawla coming from Damascus to relieve Antioch. We are told that Bohemond has learned how to fight Turks now, that he kept his cavalry in the rear to prevent the encirclement of Robert’s men and then charged in at the right moment. So they have driven back the Turks, Bohemond and Robert and their thousands; they have won a battle but they have lost men, they have worn themselves out, and they have come back empty-handed to their rotting and sodden tents in the mud and such treats as horses’ heads without the tongues for three solidi and goats’ intestines for five.

Here they are then, the conquerors of Antioch held back from the conquering of it; it is like holding back the bull from the cow: he paws the earth, he rolls his eyes, his breath steams on the air. All that makes him a bull is hot and ready. But the cow is a cow of stone.

What is the nature of things? The nature of things is that what can happen will happen, often it has already happened before it is recognized. The walls of Antioch were built during the reign of Justinian, a time of strong stonemasonry; those walls are not be knocked down or undermined, and any attacker who scales them will only find himself on a short stretch of rampart between the massive towers with a bitter rain of arrows hissing down and the strong doors of the towers barred against him. How then can the Franks breach the unbreachable, pass the impassable? How can Antioch be taken? It can be taken if someone on the wall will turn away from his duty, it can be taken if someone will open the strong tower doors and let the soldiers of Christ in quietly. And will someone be found to do this? What a question! Such a question can only be asked by an atheist; anyone who recognizes the existence of God (whether as He or as It) and the intersections of virtuality
and actuality is well aware of how easily such crossings on the plane of possibility can be sucked up into a point of happening. After the event one looks at all the many lines converging on the point and marvels because it seems that people were born, nations assembled, geography organized, roads laid out and bridges built expressly so that this event could happen. So rise now to a point of happening the turningness of Firouz and the unturningness of Bohemond, the one on what is called the inside and the other on what is called the outside of the walls of the four hundred towers, those stones that have no enemy.

At this time that I am telling of I have so far seen Bohemond only at a considerable distance. There is of course no mistaking him, he is so astonishingly tall, taller than most men by half an arm’s length. When I see Bohemond, when I think of Bohemond, I know that I am seeing and thinking of more than Bohemond: as the arrow streaks to its target the point of the arrow is driven by the shaft behind it, the feathers that make the shaft fly true, and the bow that has loosed the energy of its bending into the flight of the arrow; so comes Bohemond from the loins of his father Robert Guiscard and the womb of his mother Alberada of Buonalbergo. But Bohemond’s lineage is more than human, it includes generations of horses; the line of Bohemond goes back to
Eohippus,
the dawn horse, the very beginning of all chivalry. And yet the most prepotent of Bohemond’s ancestors was neither a human nor an animal but an artifact: Bohemond is descended mainly from the stirrup. Bohemond is grown out of an aristocracy of warriors on horseback rising from the cavalry of Charles Martel; this aristocracy comes to the point of the present in the armoured man on the heavy horse with his feet firm in the stirrups that give power to the drive of his lance, the swing of his sword; the armoured man strong in the saddle, bred to fight and trained from boyhood to be unturning in attack; the armoured man superior in wealth, in breeding, in physique and in confidence to the man on foot.

Bohemond’s ancestors of the fifth century who fought under Chlodovech, they fought without armour and on foot, they hurled axes and barbed javelins, God knows what stocks and stones they offered to. What did they know of Jerusalem? How
in the world has Bohemond come to be a soldier of Christ? How has Bohemond become the Bohemond who cut up his scarlet cloak into crosses? This is not to be known by me, I shall die without knowing it.

Bohemond is always in my mind but I have no chance of understanding him. When he was first pointed out to me I was high up on the wall looking down at his distant figure but in my thoughts he at once took his place high up as if striding on ramparts built for him alone. He is everything that I am not, this quintessential warrior prince. I am told that he can, fully armed, leap from the ground to his horse’s back; that no other man can wield with two hands the sword he wields with one; that he requires three women nightly to keep him tranquil; that he is a serpent in cunning, a thunderbolt in attack, he is simply not to be withstood. Red-haired and blue-eyed, he does what he wants and he gets what he wants. How should I not be obsessed with Bohemond? But his thoughts are beyond my imagination. In my drift through this space called time I have reported two dreams of Pope Urban II and I know that, whether virtually or actually, they are true. They are there, I have experienced them. But of Bohemond I can offer nothing sure, only intimations, only things half-sensed, half guessed-at. As the animals of the forest scent the questing hound I scent him, questing through the death of Christ and God’s departure, questing on the track of gold and fame and power, questing for the tangible, the visible, questing for that which cannot be mistaken, that which can be held in the strong hand, that which can be gripped between strong thighs as a horse is gripped.

So. Bohemond is encamped before the walls of Antioch and now we are in the year 1098. Bohemond, greedy and lusting for the seen, cannot yet have what he craves; that time is not yet come. As I say this there comes into my mind an image of Bohemond opposed by Bembel Rudzuk; it is a night image, the background of it is darkness; against the darkness the two figures are luminous, they leap out of the dark, stopped in mid-motion as if by lightning—Bohemond with the gleam of his helmet, the glitter of his mail, the flash of his great sword, the scarlet cross on his surcoat, the iron nasal and the straight brow-line of his helmet simplifying his face, the face of the
death-angel haloed by the rainbow arc of the great sword. Bohemond the death-angel, Bohemond the questing death-hound circling in the night beyond the circle of Christ’s little wander-fire. Bohemond the tall, lit by the lightning as he leaps with his death-bringing, with his blood-drinking sword. And leaping at him with a flash of the gold brocade on his elegant scarlet jacket, with his Turkish sword heroic against the death-hound, with his moustaches heroic, Bembel Rudzuk the dauntless, Bembel Rudzuk who is at the same time like a lion of innocence, like an angel of folly, like a butterfly transfixed by the pin of actuality, Bembel Rudzuk the friend true unto death.