Siege of Heaven (27 page)

The triumph drained from Raymond’s face though the smile remained fixed there, the skeleton of emotion. His hand trembled as he leaned on the reliquary’s column for support.

‘Is there any sensible man among you?’ Desperation flecked his voice. ‘Is there anyone whom Bohemond has not poisoned with his lies and malice?’ As if to remind them of his riches, or perhaps out of nervous instinct, he dug his hand into the chest of gold again and let the coins trickle through his fingers.

‘I will take your gold.’ Tancred sauntered forward, immune to the stares of surprise and suspicion he drew. ‘I am not too proud to accept aid if it will bring me closer to Jerusalem.’

He knelt before Raymond, putting his hands in the older man’s. ‘I swear—’

For the second time that day, the council was interrupted by the sound of hooves. Tancred broke off, while men looked back in fear lest Bohemond had returned with his knights to finish his feud. But there were no Norman hosts, only a single rider on a spent horse. Reining it in, he flung himself down and pushed his way into the church.
He wore no hat or helmet: his hair was tangled and filthy, and matted with crusts of ice. He must have ridden through the night.

He dropped to his knees before Count Raymond. ‘Mercy, Lord,’ he gasped, crossing himself. ‘There is a mutiny among the pilgrims at Ma’arat. They have risen against your garrison and are tearing down the defences. They say they will not wait to proceed to Jerusalem, but must go immediately. God has willed it.’

The council ended in uproar. Count Raymond’s men rushed to their camp and began pulling it down, churning the snow to slush, while grooms saddled horses and squires stuffed their belongings into saddlebags. With nothing to pack, I stood by my horse with Nikephoros and Aelfric and watched as, one by one, the princes hurried out of the town. Whatever hopes had existed for the union of the Army of God died in the snows of Rugia. Some marched north towards Antioch, others west to the coast. A few followed Raymond south to Ma’arat.

For all our haste, it was well after noon before we set out, and the sky was already darkening. Even then, we could not travel quickly. The fresh snow cast a treacherous veil over the ruts and holes in the road, and we had not
gone far when we found it blocked completely by a fallen fir tree. I clutched my reins tighter, fearing an ambush, but it was only the weight of snow that had toppled the old tree. A company of Norman knights had already dismounted and were hacking at it with axes, while their captain walked his horse around them and shouted angry orders. He wheeled around as he heard our approach, and trotted up the road to meet us. Unruly curls stuck out from beneath his fur hat, and his dark eyes were alive with malice – which only deepened as he recognised me.

‘Can it be Demetrios Askiates?’ A soft, dangerous laugh. ‘I saw you at the council. I had heard you were dead – or perhaps that you had gone to whore yourself to Ishmaelites.’

I fought back a wave of hatred and bile. I had not forgotten the vision of Tancred toying with Pakrad as he seared out his eyes at Ravendan. Nor was that the worst atrocity I had seen him inflict on captives during this campaign. I gestured to the tree. ‘Has Count Raymond made you his forester, now that you have taken his gold and made yourself his servant?’

Tancred’s horse shivered. Behind him, his men had managed to chop the tree free of its splintered stump. With a heave, they lifted the trunk off the road and rolled it into a ditch.

‘You should be more careful when you address your betters,’ Tancred warned me. ‘Perhaps you do not know how much you have to lose.’ Again the dangerous laugh. ‘Have you had news of your family recently? They are not
as safe as you suppose. If I were you, I would hurry to Ma’arat as quickly as I could.’

He had spurred his horse and was already moving, his last words almost drowned by wind and the beat of hooves. I kicked my own mount to follow, but she was a feeble creature compared with his. Before I had gone a hundred yards, he was lost from sight.

A chill dread held me in its grip for the rest of our ride. Night fell; further down the valley the snow had fallen as rain, turning the road to a bog, but Count Raymond insisted we press on through the darkness. Long before we reached Ma’arat, a writhing skein of flames in the sky ahead served as our beacon.

By midnight we had come close enough to see the individual fires burning ahead, and to make out the shadows of torn buildings around them. Soon, half a dozen fires seemed to break away from the main blaze like sparks, but they did not fly up and fade to cinders. Instead they drew nearer, growing larger and brighter until they resolved themselves into a troop of horsemen with torches in their hands. They halted before us and saluted.

‘What has happened to my city?’ Raymond demanded. ‘Is this Bohemond’s doing?’

The knight looked surprised. ‘Bohemond has not been here. I thought he was at the council. This is Peter Bartholomew’s work.’

Raymond pounded a fist on his saddle pommel, so hard that the horse below almost unseated him in its fright.
‘Peter Bartholomew was under my patronage and my protection,’ he raged. ‘I sponsored his vanity so that he would keep the pilgrims obedient. Has he lost his command of them entirely?’

‘Not at all. He preached this.’

All the men around Raymond edged back, anticipating another eruption of fury. Instead, he sat very still.

‘It was yesterday evening, at sundown,’ the knight continued. ‘He summoned all the pilgrims and recounted a vision, how Saint Peter had appeared to him and revealed God’s anger that His people suffered and delayed because of the avarice of princes.’ The knight shot Raymond a fearful look. ‘Forgive me, my lord, but that is what he said.’

‘Go on.’

‘He preached that a house built on error cannot stand. All at once a devilish madness seized the pilgrims and they spread through the town, grabbing mattocks and axes and firebrands – anything they could find that would destroy. They ran to the walls and began tearing them down, even with their bare hands.’

‘And you did nothing to stop it?’

The knight swallowed hard. ‘We tried, my lord. But the pilgrims were devious. Wherever we went they fled, only to reappear at another corner of the walls. We hanged any that we found but . . .’ He shrugged. ‘It has been going on a day and a night now. They are too many and we are too few. And there was nobody with your authority here to command them.’

Raymond heard all this in silence. The light from the
flickering torches did not reach his empty eye-socket, which loomed like a hole bored through his face.

‘Come,’ he said at last. ‘Let us see what disaster Peter Bartholomew has worked.’

We rode on into the ruins of Ma’arat. Perhaps, before the Franks arrived, it had been a middlingly prosperous place on this lonely plateau; now it was a ruin. A ghoulish amber light filled the air like dawn, and by its glow we could see the devastation the pilgrims had wrought. At first sight, the destruction seemed wild, indiscriminate: some sections of wall were all but intact; in other places gaping holes rent the stone like cloth. Wisps of smoke rose from beneath the rubble, as though the very earth burned, and long stretches of the moat had been filled in with the debris.

Aelfric, riding beside me, gestured to the ruined defences. ‘Frenzied peasants didn’t do this.’

‘No?’ I was paying little attention, for I had other concerns. Tancred’s taunt still echoed in my mind. What if Anna was somewhere in this smouldering chaos?

‘Not unless the devil possessed them with the spirits of siege engineers. It takes more than zeal and a hammer to collapse ten-foot-thick walls, and I never heard of a wild crowd taking it into their heads to dig sapping tunnels. Look.’ Aelfric pointed ahead of us, to where a felled gate now made a makeshift bridge over the moat. The towers that had flanked it were dissolved completely, and even the rubble had been carted away or used to fill in ditches.

‘They couldn’t have done that alone. Whatever the
count’s steward protests, they had help from men who knew what they were doing.’

‘Bohemond’s agents, do you think?’

Aelfric shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’

A sense of dread began to build in me as we approached the centre of the town. The streets were eerily empty, but the sounds of ruination were all around us: long screams abruptly choked off, shouts of alarm, the crackle of fire and the crash of tumbling stone. Somewhere near by we could hear singing, a sad sound like a lament for the ruined town. We followed the noise, listening to it swell as we rode down deserted streets.
Where was Anna?
I scanned every alley, every window and every door, desperate for a glimpse of her, but the shadows were too deep.

We came around a corner into the main square of the town. Suddenly, all the life that had been hidden in the empty town was thrust before us. A host of pilgrims packed the square, singing the mournful song that now engulfed us, staring at the church on the eastern side where two bonfires burned brightly. The flames played over the stone like sunlight on water, while a tall figure dressed all in white stood on the roof and stared down at the congregation. His hands were folded into his sleeves and his head was turned to heaven, as if it were he whom the pilgrims hymned.

Not one of the pilgrims turned around as Raymond rode in, yet they parted before him like waves before a ship’s prow. Their song grew louder, almost deafening. I could not make out the words – perhaps it was a psalm, thought it might have been the tongue of angels for the
fervour with which they sang it. On the dais at the front, Peter Bartholomew stood in a white robe.

Raymond had ridden to within about twenty yards of the church when suddenly he found the crowd would yield no further. He looked back, but that path had vanished. The pilgrim ranks had closed in, and he was marooned in their midst.

The man on the church stretched out his hands. For a moment it seemed that he did not have the mastery of the congregation I had expected, for they persisted with their song, rendering it louder still until the noise was almost deafening. And then, with a discipline so abrupt it left me breathless, they stopped, and there was nothing but an overwhelming silence.

A thousand pairs of eyes turned to Count Raymond.For a moment I feared he would buckle under the weight of their stares, but he recovered himself enough to call out in a ringing voice, ‘Peter Bartholomew, what have you done?’

The man on the church stared down at him as dispassionately as an icon – though not nearly as beautiful. He had let his hair and beard grow long; his nose was misshapen where it had once or twice been broken, and the erratic firelight could not soften the hard pox marks on his face. Even so, he had climbed a long way since he crawled out of the pit at Antioch clutching the fragment of the holy lance.

‘What I have done is God’s will,’ he declared. His voice was deeper than I remembered it, echoing off the
surrounding walls. ‘
For lo, I will send a man to make straight the way of the Lord
…’

Raymond sat up straight. ‘That is blasphemy.’

A quiet sigh carried through the crowd, and they seemed to press closer around the count. He looked down uncertainly.

‘It is prophecy,’ Peter answered calmly. He seemed to be clutching something in his right hand: a tablet, or maybe a book. ‘Look around you. The Lord has sent these men out as sheep among wolves, and now their shepherd has abandoned them. You have tried to make your kingdom here, and forsaken the celestial kingdom that awaits us in Jerusalem.’

‘I have not forsaken Jerusalem,’ Raymond protested. His voice was brittle. ‘I have the unity of the Army of God to consider.’

‘Listen to your people. They are crying out to go to Jerusalem. You built your house here and they tore it down, stone from stone, because it was not built on the rock of faith. If you will not lead us to Zion then we will leave you here, abandoned and defenceless, for your enemies to pick over.’

‘The time is not right,’ Raymond murmured, almost to himself. ‘It is madness to campaign in winter. None of the other princes will support this folly.’

‘Then your glory will be all the greater.’ Peter’s voice was warm, the coaxing voice of a sympathetic friend. ‘But if you do not go, your name will be ignominy, and your reputation dust.’

His hold on the crowd was astonishing. When he spoke kindly they stood there as docile and comforting as sheep, but as soon as he uttered a threat you could almost feel the anger ignite. I began to wonder what would happen to me if Count Raymond provoked Peter Bartholomew to violence.

Raymond looked away from Peter, scanning the crowd in the desperate hope of allies. Among the peasants’ hoods and straw-brimmed hats I saw a good number of armoured helmets, but none of them showed the least impulse to help their lord.

‘You have disobeyed my laws and offended against my authority,’ he said, addressing the crowd directly. ‘But disperse now, remake what you have broken and yield up the wicked men who led you astray and I will show mercy.’

It was a brave gesture from an old warrior, but he had been lured into a battle he could not win. Peter Bartholomew did not even need to reply: the sea of impassive, upturned faces around Raymond was all the answer he needed. From somewhere near the back a voice whispered ‘Jerusalem’, and very quickly the word spread until it resounded through the host like the crash of waves.