King's Man (13 page)

'Was I also mistaken in thinking that there's a marble panel in the Basilike which shows the Norns?' 'Never heard of them. Who are they?'

'The women who decide our destiny when we are born,' I said. 'They know the past, present and future, and they weave the pattern of our lives.'

'I can't remember seeing that panel, but you must be talking about the three Fates,' Trdat answered after a moment's thought. 'One spins the thread of a man's life, another measures it and the third cuts it. Norns or Fates, the message is the same.'

We reached our destination, the port of Joppa on the coast of Palestine, to find that the local governor knew nothing about our mission. For three days we sweltered in the summer heat, confined aboard the dromon while the governor checked with his superiors in the capital at Ramla if we could be allowed to land.

Finally Harald, rather than the easy-going Trdat, took command of the situation. He stormed ashore and I went with him to the governor's residence, where the anger of the towering northerner with his long moustaches and strange lopsided eyebrows cowed the governor into agreeing that a small advance party could go ahead to inspect the Anastasis while the majority of Trdat's technicians and workmen stayed behind. As we left the governor's office, we were surrounded by a clamouring crowd of elderly men, each offering to act as our guide. For years they had made their living by taking devout Christians up to see their holy places, but the prohibitions of Murad the Mad had destroyed their trade. Now they offered to hire us carts, tents, donkeys, and all at a special price. Brusquely Harald told me to inform them that he did not ride on carts and certainly not donkeys. The first person to come to the dockside with two dozen horses would be employed.

The horses that were brought were so small and scrawny that I thought for a moment Harald would take it as an insult. But their owner, as lean and malnourished-looking as his animals, assured me that the creatures were adequate to the task, and it was only two days' easy ride to our destination. Yet when Harald got into the saddle, his feet almost touched the ground on either side, and the other Varangians looked equally out of proportion to their mounts. So it was an undignified cavalcade that rode out of the town, crossed a narrow, waterless, coastal plain, and began to climb into the rocky hills of what our guide enthusiastically called the Promised Land.

I have to admit that I had expected something better. The landscape was bleached and bare with an occasional small field scratched out of the hillside. The few settlements were meagre clusters of small, square, mud-walled houses, and the inn where we stayed that night was crumbling and badly run-down. It offered only a dirty courtyard where we could stable the horses, a dreary meal of pea soup and flat bread, and flea-infested bed mats. Yet if we were to believe our guide, who was very garrulous and spoke Latin and Greek with equal ease, the sere brown land we were crossing was fortunate beyond all others. He reeled off lists of the holy men or miraculous events associated with each spot we passed, beginning with Joppa, on whose beach, he claimed, a great fish had vomited up a prophet.

When I translated this yarn to Harald and the Varangians they looked utterly incredulous.

'And the Christians revile us for believing that the Midgard serpent lies at the bottom of the World Ocean,' was Halldor's comment. 'Thorgils, don't waste your breath translating that old fool's prattle unless he says something believable.'

In mid-afternoon on the second day we rode across a ridge and there, spreading up the slope of the next hill, was our goal: the holy city of the Christians, known to them as Jerusalem. No larger than a single suburb of Constantinople, the place was totally enclosed within a high city wall studded with at least a dozen watchtowers. What caught our attention was a huge dome. It dominated the skyline of the city. Built on rising ground, it dwarfed the buildings all around it. Most astonishing of all, it appeared to be of solid gold.

'Is that the Anastasis, the place where the White Christ was buried?' I asked our guide.

He was taken aback at my ignorance. 'No,' he said. 'It is the Holy of Holies, sacred to the followers of Muhammad and those of the Jewish faith. The Anastasis is over there,' and he pointed to the right. I looked in that direction, but saw nothing except a nondescript jumble of roofs.

We rode through the city gate, crossed a large open forum with a tall column in its centre and proceeded along a colonnaded avenue which led to the area the guide had indicated. Our exotic appearance drew curious and sometimes hostile glances from the crowds. They were an amazing mix — Saracen officials in loose white gowns and turbans, merchants dressed in black cloaks and brick-coloured sandals, veiled women, half-naked urchins.

Midway along the avenue we came to a great gap in the line of buildings, and the guide announced, 'Here is the place.'

Trdat looked aghast. The space ahead of us was a scene of utter devastation. Massive building blocks, broken and dislodged, marked the lines of former walls. Heaps of smashed tiles were all that remained of roofs. Charred beams showed where the destruction had been hastened by fire. Everywhere was rubble and filth. Without a word, Trdat leaned down and picked up a small stone from among the weeds that were growing over the rubbish. Sadly he turned it over in his fingers. It was a single tessera, dark blue. It must once have graced a mosaic in the basilica that had sheltered worshippers who came to this spot. Of the church itself, nothing remained.

Our guide hitched up his loose gown and scrambled over the heaps of rubbish, beckoning us to follow. Harald and the others stayed behind. Even the hardened Norsemen were silenced by the sight of so much destruction.

I joined Trdat and the guide, just as the latter was saying, 'It was here,' as he pointed downward towards marks on the bare rock. To me it looked like the ragged scars left on Prokonnesos when the marbleworkers had prised away what they needed, only the marks of the chisels and pickaxes were random, and the spoil — the stone they had broken — was tossed to one side in a haphazard pile.

"What was here?' asked Trdat in a hushed voice.

'The tomb, the sepulchre itself. Murad's people hacked it to pieces.'

Trdat seemed numb with shock as the guide led us back through the lanes to find an inn where we could stay. The protomaistor said nothing for several hours, except to ask me to send word back to Joppa that the craftsmen waiting on the dromon should stay where they were. There was no point in them coming inland. The splendid buildings which had once stood around the Anastasis were utterly beyond repair.

'Thorgils, I never thought that I would face a challenge like this,' the architect confessed to me. 'The task is even more daunting than when my grandfather had to repair the Church of Holy Wisdom after the earthquake. At least he had something to work with. Here I have to start from scratch. I'm going to need your help.'

So it was that I, Thorgils, the devotee of Odinn, came to assist in the recreation of what our guide called the Holy Sepulchre. Partly my work was practical: I held the end of the tape as Trdat took the measurements of the area he had to work in, and I took down notes of the angles he measured. I helped him uncover the lines of the damaged walls, so that he could trace the ground plan of the earlier buildings and compare them with the architectural plans he had brought from the archives in Constantinople. I also made lists of the materials on site that might be reused — the surviving sections of columns, the larger building stones and so forth. But by far my most important contribution was assisting him in interviewing all those who had known the holy place before it was razed on the orders of Murad the Mad.

Our talkative guide was our primary source, but rumours of our enquiries spread throughout the city, and furtive figures appeared, followers of the White Christ, who were able to tell us what the shrine had looked like before its demolition. In the light of what those Christians told us, we cleared away some of the rubble and chalked out on the ground the dimensions of the tomb as they indicated. It had been a small, free-standing building, chiselled from the living rock, sheathed in marble and surmounted by a golden cross. The cave inside had been large enough for nine men to stand inside as they prayed, and at the back was the shelf on which the White Christ's body had been laid.

Trdat wanted measurements and practical details. He was told that the cave had been high enough for there to be a space of one and a half feet between the top of a man's head and the roof; the shelf was seven feet long; the entrance to the cave had faced east according to some, south according to others. Our informants told us that it had taken seven men to move the large rock rolled in front of the cave at the time of the Christ's burial, but that it had broken in half. Its two parts had been squared off and turned into altars, which had been set up within the great circular church that once covered the entire site. The man who told us that particular detail took us on a search through the rubble to see if we could find either altar, but without success.

Trdat was unperturbed. He drew a quick sketch of a squared-off stone, and showed it to the Christian. 'Is that how it looked?' he asked.

The man looked at the drawing. 'Yes, just like that,' he agreed readily.

Trdat gave me a quizzical glance and drew another altar stone, a slightly different shape this time. 'And the other one. Was it like this?'

'Oh yes, you have it perfectly,' his informant replied, so eager to please that he barely glanced at the drawing.

In our inn later that evening I asked Trdat if he really believed our informants.

He shrugged. 'It's not important if I do. People will believe what they want to. Of course I will do my best and try to reproduce the original details when I do the designs for a restoration. But as the years pass, I'm sure that those who are devout will come to believe that what they are seeing is the original, not my copy.'

All this time Harald and the other Varangians had been remarkably patient. They spent most of their hours in the inn, playing at dice, or they came to where Trdat and I were at work. The presence of these bearded warriors was useful as it kept onlookers at bay and discouraged those Saracens who shouted curses at us or threw stones. In the evenings Trdat sat at a table, ceaselessly drawing his plans or scratching out diagrams and calculations. Occasionally a Varangian might saunter over and peer over his shoulder at the work, then return to his place. But I was aware that their patience would not last for ever. I felt that without some sort of distraction, Harald and his men would want to leave.

It was our guide who proposed an excursion. He offered to show us the Christian sights in and around the city, then take us on a short trip to the nearby river, where, he said, the White Christ had undergone a ceremony of immersion. Trdat was at the stage when he was working on perspective drawings and wanted to be left alone in the inn in peace and quiet, so he readily agreed that Harald, Halldor and the others should take up the guide's suggestion, and that I should go as their interpreter.

To me that tour of the Holy Places was astonishing. There was hardly an item, a building or street corner that was not in some way associated with the White Christ or his followers. Here was Golgotha, where the White Christ was crucified, and our guide pointed to a bloodstain on the rock, which, if you were to believe him, had never been washed away. Nearby was a crack in the stone, and he assured us that if anyone put his ear to it he

would hear running water, and that if an apple was dropped into the crack it would reappear in a pool outside the city wall a mile away. Eighty paces in that direction, so he claimed, was the very centre of the world. At that point rose four great underground rivers.

Next, with many backward glances to see that we were not being followed, he took us to a storeroom where he showed us a cup that the White Christ had blessed at his final meal, as well as a reed that apparently had been used to offer up a sponge of water to the Christ as he hung on the Cross, and the sponge itself, all withered and dry. The item of most interest to me was a rusty spear propped in a corner. According to our guide, it was the very lance that had been used to stab the Christ in the side as he hung on the Cross, and had been rescued from the Anastasis before Murad's men smashed up the place. I handled the spear — it seemed very well preserved to be so ancient - and I thought it strange that the followers of the White Christ would claim to find such relics, while we, the followers of the Elder Faith, never imagined we could possess the spear which pierced Odinn as he hung upon the tree of knowledge. For us, what belonged to the Gods was their own.

The catalogue of marvels outside the city walls was just as wide ranging. Here were the marks of the White Christ's knees as he knelt to pray, the stone receiving the impression as if it had been molten wax. There was the same fig tree from which a traitor by the name of Judas had hanged himself; earlier the guide had showed us the iron chain he had used for the suicide. On the Mount of Olives were more marks in the rock. This time they were footprints left behind when the White Christ was taken up to the place which was the equivalent of Valholl for his followers. Remembering my conversation with Pelagia back in Constantinople, I asked if I could see the cave where her namesake had lived, disguised as a eunuch. Without hesitation I was led to a small, dank grotto on the side of the mountain. I peered inside, but not for long. Someone had been using it as an animal pen. It smelled of goat.

The more I saw, the more baffled I became that the faith of the White Christ was so successful. Everything associated with it seemed so ordinary. I asked myself how people could believe in such obvious fictions as the suicide's fig tree, and I put the question to Harald, picking a moment when he seemed to be in good humour, because I wanted to know if he was susceptible to the White Christ's teaching.