Knights of the Cross (28 page)

Adhemar began by invoking the Lord. ‘The city is ours, praise God. By His right hand, and to His glory, we have conquered.’

All save the citadel
, I thought grimly.

‘By His grace, may we still hold its walls in a month,’ Bohemond added. He sat beside Adhemar, with the east end of the church and the high altar at his back. Count Raymond, whose place it was by custom, had been pushed further down the bench almost into the corner.

‘We have earned a mighty victory, for which we must be duly grateful. But it will be for nothing if we do not now hold Antioch against the new threat which rushes to overthrow us. We are the army of light, but a storm rages, and a single breath may extinguish us for ever. Only the hands of the Lord will cup us in safety,’ said Adhemar.

‘And sharp swords, and swift arrows.’ I had not seen Bohemond since the assault on the walls, but he did not seem to have enjoyed the fruits of his conquest in the intervening days. His dark hair was matted with dirt and sweat; the beard he had so carefully shaved before the battle was already sprouting back, unchecked; his eyes were sunk deep in dark pits. I guessed he had not slept since entering the city. The tunic he wore under his armour was stained yellow, while a grimy bandage bound his right forearm.

‘Already, my lords, you have seen Kerbogha’s vanguard attacking the outer forts. Now he looks to bring the greater part of his army to bear on us. A rider came this morning from the Iron Bridge, to say that the garrison there is under heavy siege. Even with all Christ’s favour, they will not stand more than a day. That is all the time we have to organise our defences.’

Count Raymond lifted his head. ‘The time
you
have to organise
your
defences, you mean. Antioch is your city, until the Emperor comes. Or had you forgotten it?’

‘Do you think that when Kerbogha comes he will confine his war to the Normans?’

Adhemar thumped his staff on the stone floor, lifting a cloud of dust. ‘Enough! We will fight as the Army of God – as one people. There will be no Normans or Provençals on the walls to face Kerbogha – only Christians.’

‘If we fight as the Army of God, then under what title does Bohemond hold the city?’

‘Under the title of survival,’ said Bohemond angrily. ‘If not for me, we would all have met the same fate as Roger Barneville, hacked apart under the walls. Would you prefer that, Count Raymond?’

‘You would have allowed it, if we had not yielded to your ambition.’

‘The ambition of men is all that will aid us now.’

‘No!’ Adhemar lifted himself on his staff and stared first at Bohemond, then at Raymond. Looking at him, I saw with shock how the recent days had emptied him. His skin was pale, and shiny like a potter’s glaze; there was no longer any humour in his face. His hand trembled as he gripped the staff, and he seemed suddenly twenty years older.

‘The grace of God is all that will aid us now, and He is only ever served in unity. Put aside your quarrels. Every division between us opens the door to Satan’s works.’

He sagged back onto his seat. The effort those few words had taken was plain. For a few moments there was silence.

‘We must divide the keeping of the walls among ourselves,’ said Bohemond at last. ‘Duke Godfrey will watch the northern flank, by the gate of Saint Paul. Count Hugh will take the north-western portion, Count Raymond the length south of the Duke Gate, and the Count of Flanders the area by the fortified bridge. I will fight on the mountain, for Kerbogha is sure to attack first at the citadel. The Duke of Normandy will aid me there.’

‘That is strange.’ All eyes turned to Count Raymond, though he himself seemed to be staring at a statue of Saint Justin half-excavated from an alcove. ‘I have just heard the lord Bohemond ordering the dispositions of the army, yet I believed we were the Army of God. Is the disinherited whelp of a Norman pirate not content with the throne of Antioch? Does he now presume to raise himself to the throne of Heaven? Because if he does, he may find he has very far to fall.’

In an instant, Bohemond was on his feet. ‘If the Count of Saint-Gilles accuses me of blasphemy, I will answer his lie. He may be lord of thirteen counties, but in single combat I will strip him of them one by one.’

Adhemar made to interrupt, but Raymond’s voice was stronger. ‘You will not do that – unless you would defend this city with none but a few hundred horseless Normans.’ He turned to the rest of the council. ‘For months, the lord Bohemond has begged us to make him warden of Antioch. At times, his grovelling has been almost an embarrassment. And now that he has had it for three days, he makes himself overlord of us all; he tells us where to place our armies, and how to fight.’

‘Enough. Will you still bicker here when the Lord comes in glory and judgement?’

All turned to see Little Peter, the stunted, mulish man who rose from the bench to my left. He had the strange capacity to shrink from notice if he chose, but when he spoke it was as if his every word was life itself. He hobbled into the centre of the square, dragging his bare feet through the dust, and stared around. The short hermit’s cape twitched from his shoulders.

‘Why do the nations rage, and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the Earth take counsel together, they conspire against the Lord’s anointed. But He who sits in Heaven laughs; He scorns them. He will break them with a rod of iron, and dash them into pieces like clay. Be wise, O kings, be warned. Serve the Lord with fear; tremble even as you kiss His feet, or He will be angry – and you will perish.’

His words were like ice on the princes, freezing their tempers and chilling their thoughts. Several, I saw, made the sign of the cross. Even Adhemar looked discomfited.

‘You do well to rebuke us, Little Peter,’ the bishop said. ‘No man’s pride should blind him to the Lord’s will.’

‘Turn your eyes to the heavens – but turn them also to the ground on which you walk, lest among the grass you stir a serpent. When beasts contend among themselves, their shadows block the light from the humble creatures below, and their hooves trample them. But the pure are not deceived: they look up, and they see through you like water. We are small, meagre creatures, far beneath your power and might. But a thousand ants, if stirred to war, may strip a horse of all its flesh. With no thought but for your own desire, you have led your people into calamity, into torment, into death. How long will they suffer you to command them to ruin?’

Bohemond rose in anger. ‘Who are these worms you speak of? For the past two days, it has been my knights who have defended the walls and besieged the citadel, while your pilgrims burrow themselves deep into the city. When they are brave enough to cease from cowering in their holes, and come out to fight, then perhaps I will hear their complaint.’

For long moments the hermit’s jittering frame stopped moving. His head swivelled up, and his cold-eyed stare fixed on Bohemond’s. ‘Be warned, Norman. You sit on your pyre and speak words of fire: your doom will come. The Lord pulls down the mighty and shatters the proud, but He shall exalt the meek and raise the humble to His throne. The fires approach, and only the truest alloy will survive their purifying flames. For the rest, you will burn away to ash.’

The watchtower by the fortified bridge fell the following day. The Turks had brought up siege engines, and at first light they began a bombardment of fire and stone that the dry timbers could not withstand. Even then, the Franks defended it to the last. From my vantage point on the walls, I saw a thin knot of them straggling down the slope, shields locked together as the tower burned behind them. They were a tiny number against the thousands of Turks who assailed them – though still not the tenth part of Kerbogha’s army. A few Franks managed to reach the safety of the city; many more did not. The Turks hacked their corpses apart and mounted their heads on a line of wooden palings before the gate. Of the tower, nothing survived: I watched as the beams reeled on their foundations, then crashed down in flames. Many of our men were crushed beneath it. A cloud of burning splinters rose in the air above, and smoke from the embers poured over the south-west quarter of the city, souring the light of the sun.

The same day, a band of Provençals came from the north. The Iron Bridge, our last redoubt on the Orontes, had fallen to Kerbogha; the garrison was dead, captive or routed. There were others fleeing after them, they said: a sally by Duke Godfrey’s cavalry might yet bring them home before Kerbogha overtook them. The plea was refused, for we had no horses to spare. After that, no more Franks returned from the bridge.

It was an unnatural time. Every waking minute we were assailed by the sounds and sights of war, reminders of our desperate plight, yet long hours passed sitting on the walls until our limbs grew stiff from disuse. I could see Turks flooding the plain before Antioch, planting their tents and standards in the fields that we had so recently occupied, but we did not fire so much as a single arrow towards them. We could not fight; we could not flee; we could not even forage, for there was not a crumb to be found in the city. We diced without stakes, lest jealousies fester, and told stories we all knew by heart. Every sword and axe was honed fine as a feather, but so long as the Turks kept us hemmed within our ramparts our weapons were mere ornaments. And still the tide of our enemies flowed in.

On the Monday, the fifth day since we had taken the city, I resolved to seek out Odard. I needed some distraction to drive away the guilt which besieged me in the empty hours, and finding him would serve as well as anything. That much, at least, I owed to Simon. Whether or not he cared, in whichever corner of the afterlife he haunted, was of little importance.

I began my search by seeking out a Norman gergeant. It was harder than I had expected, for most of Bohemond’s army was camped up on the mountain besieging the citadel, but at length I found a wounded knight standing guard by one of the western gates. He watched me with suspicion and though he seemed to recognise Odard’s name it provoked only a mocking leer.

‘Odard is no longer in our company,’ he told me. Perhaps he hoped the news would distress me. ‘He lost his horse, his sword, his armour, and finally his wits.’

‘And his life? Did he lose that too?’

‘Why should I care if he had? He was no use to our army.’

‘Where can I find him?’ I pressed.

The Norman shrugged. ‘Perhaps among the peasants and pilgrims. Try the hermit, Little Peter: the lunatic and the feeble are his congregation.’

I did not like to have dealings with the mule-faced mystic who had orphaned Thomas, but my desire to speak with Odard was stronger. I found Little Peter at the cathedral, standing on the steps with a great crowd of Franks in front of him. They looked to be pilgrims rather than knights, though the lines between the two were dissolving: their clothes were torn and their bodies gaunt, and in their hands they carried a brutish armoury of slings and farm tools. Their faces were little friendlier. One of their number, a tall man with a cloth tied over his head to ward off the sun, seemed to be shouting at the hermit.

‘If Christ is with us, why do we cower in this city? Is it the princes? If they are too timid, if their greed blinds them to their duty, then let them surrender their power to the faithful, the humble beloved of God. Our place is on the road to Jerusalem, not in this place of the heathen.’

Little Peter clambered onto the base of a column, raising himself above the throng, and looked down. His voice was shrill and anxious, far removed from the mystic certainty with which he had chided the princes.

‘You are ignorant,’ he snapped. ‘Or blind. Have you not seen the ten thousand Turks who bar the way to Jerusalem?’

‘Has the devil stolen your balls, Little Peter? Is that why you have grown no taller?’ Cruel laughter rang in the square. ‘When I first heard you preach, you promised we would be borne to the Holy Land on the wings of angels.’

‘I told you that the path of the pilgrim is a thorny road that only the pure may tread.’

‘Then why do
we
not tread it? Why does God curse and afflict us? Why do the Turks starve us and smite us?’

‘I will tell you.’ Another voice spoke up, that of a woman I could not see. ‘Because our leaders are corrupted by sin – by pride and greed. Their sin draws down God’s wrath from the heavens.’

‘I have told them this,’ said Peter. His feet were slipping from the pedestal, and he had to fling his short arms around the pillar to stay upright. ‘I prophesy, but they do not hear.’

‘There is only one true king, and the princes of the Earth are nothing before Him. Prophesy them that.’

‘It is better to die a martyr than a slave,’ someone else shouted. ‘If the princes are too fearful to trust in the hand of God, let them open the gates and we will be His army.’

‘No!’

Surprise murmured through the crowd as the stooped figure of the bishop appeared at the top of the steps. With the great door behind him he seemed little taller than Peter, and his crimson robes were pale in the glare. Only his staff kept him upright.