Siege of Heaven (39 page)

I remembered Godfrey’s sudden fury when John had quoted a passage of the prophecy at him in Raymond’s council. ‘Do you know who he stole it from?’

‘No.’

‘But he came to believe that he was the king foretold.’

‘Perhaps.’ John sat up, raising his hands in ignorance. ‘By the end, I do not know what he believed. The way he walked into that fire, he might have thought he was Christ himself reborn. He fooled us all – even me, who knew better than most what he was.’

His voice faltered. It might merely have been self-pity, a lament for the power he had lost, but I thought I detected grief as well for the visionary betrayed by his own dreams. For a moment I almost felt sorry for him.
Then I remembered that this was the man who half an hour earlier had spoken of stringing up Peter like a puppet to preserve his authority. I remembered the woman caught in adultery, so bewitched and brutalised that she had plunged the hot brand into her breast; the knights from Count Raymond’s bodyguard who had broken their oaths and abandoned their lord in the fog. There had been no pity in the faith Peter Bartholomew preached.

I jerked my knife at the fallen prophet. ‘Go.’

He scrambled to his feet. One hand reached for the sack of coins he had taken, then paused as he caught my eye. He contrived a pitiable, beseeching gaze.

‘Take it.’ I would have liked to count out thirty pieces of silver for him, but at that moment I only wanted to be rid of him. He snatched up the bag, took a last look around the clearing, then crossed quickly to its edge. Just before he disappeared into the trees, he looked back.

‘The prophecy says that the king will come when we wrest Jerusalem from the forces of Babylon.’

‘So?’

His fat face twisted in an unpleasant smile. ‘Don’t you wonder? If Peter Bartholomew was not the promised king, who is?’

As Peter’s condition worsened, so too did Raymond’s spirits. He kept to his tent and let it be known he was praying for Peter Bartholomew. Up on the mountain our siege engines stood silent, while down in the valley the army held its breath and waited.

At dusk on the Thursday after Easter, Nikephoros lost patience and demanded an audience. As we walked through the camp I could not help looking up the northern hill where Peter Bartholomew still clung to life. There was nothing to see: his tent was dark, and none of the surrounding pilgrims had lit fires. It was said that even the least wisp of smoke sent Peter into paroxysmal fits, clawing at his skin and screaming like a demon.

Raymond’s tent, by contrast, was ablaze with light –
golden candlesticks inscribed with the sharp-figured script of the Arabs, looted from their churches; wrought ivory lamps that must have been gifts from the emperor Alexios; and a host of other vessels burning oil, wax, tallow and coals, banishing the shadows from every corner of the room.

He would not have admitted us; indeed, his stewards tried to turn us away three times, but Nikephoros was more than a match for Frankish functionaries and harangued them into submission. We found Raymond alone in his chamber: if he had been praying, he had not coupled it with fasting, for the furniture and carpets were strewn with plates and bowls, half-finished meals congealing within them. Red wine stained Raymond’s tunic and blushed his lips like a harlot’s.

‘Is there any news of Peter Bartholomew?’ His voice was dull and empty, his words slurred.

Nikephoros shrugged. ‘He is only delaying the inevitable. Not for much longer, I think.’ He swept a plate of gawping fish-heads from the chair where it rested and sat down opposite Raymond. I stood behind him.

‘But there is still hope?’ The desperation in Raymond’s voice was pitiful.

‘No!’ Nikephoros slammed a fist on the arm of his chair, rattling the cups on the floor beside it. ‘Forget Peter Bartholomew. If you never spoke his name or thought of him again, it would be a great blessing to you.’

Raymond staggered out of his chair. Nikephoros rose to meet him, and for a moment they stood facing each
other, one face blazing bitter fury, the other cold with contempt.

‘I am the lord of thirteen counties and captain of the Army of God.’ Raymond invoked the titles without strength, as if they had become no more than the hollow shell of a lost faith. ‘You cannot speak to me–’

‘I am speaking to you as a friend,’ Nikephoros insisted. He raised a hand, and though he did not touch the count he shrank away, dropping back into his chair. Nikephoros remained standing.

‘Peter Bartholomew betrayed you,’ he said, more softly now. ‘He tricked you, as he tricked so many others. Forget him.’

Raymond sank his face into his hands. ‘Why did he insist on that ordeal? He did not have to, and he should not have let himself be goaded into it. What of it if some of the princes were jealous of his power? The pilgrims trusted him. That was all that mattered. Who will guide them now that Peter Bartholomew has gone?’

‘Who cares? They are just peasants – a rabble.’

‘But put enough peasants together and they will become a power to be reckoned with. They have nothing to offer save their faith – but that can be a mighty weapon when you are fighting for God. Peter understood that. While he lived, the pilgrims put their faith in him, and through him in me. They paid me no tribute and added no spears to my army, but their loyalty proved my greatness to the other princes.’

‘Then send one of your priests to minister to them.
They may have abundant faith to give, but it is easily won. If you do not, someone else will.’

Raymond looked up in hope. ‘And there is still the lance. Peter carried it intact from the flames; I have it in my chapel.’

‘Forget the lance!’ Nikephoros kicked out at a cup that stood on the floor: it flew against the side of the tent and spattered a dark stain down its wall. ‘Forget Peter Bartholomew. Forget the lance. Forget Arqa. They are only distractions, poisoning the army with false hopes and lies. All that matters is Jerusalem. That is where you should be looking.’

‘But without Peter Bartholomew–’

‘Without Peter Bartholomew you are free of a treacherous ally. If he did one good thing in his life, it was to walk into that fire and rid us of his madness.’

Nikephoros looked around wildly, seeking something else to kick. Finding nothing, he strode towards the door. Just before he reached it he turned. His cheeks were flushed in the lamplight, and his breath was faster than it could ever have been in the courtyards of the imperial palace. With great effort, he tried to check his anger.

‘You are still the greatest lord in this army. You still command more men, and more honour, than any of your rivals. If you lead them to Jerusalem now, everything that has happened here will be forgotten.’

He turned to go, and almost walked straight into a servant hurrying in through the door. Nikephoros cursed the unfortunate and cuffed him aside, while Raymond fixed him with a weary glare.

‘I told you to leave me alone.’

The servant bowed, rubbing his ear where Nikephoros had hit it. ‘Mercy, Lord. There are men outside you must see.’

‘What men? If it is Godfrey or Tancred come to gloat, I will not give them that satisfaction. If they have come to pity me, I do not need it.’

‘Forgive me, Lord, but these men are not from Duke Godfrey’s camp – or Tancred’s or Duke Robert’s.’ He swallowed. ‘They say they have come from Egypt.’

The Egyptians were waiting for us outside the tent, on a makeshift parade ground illuminated by many torches. I could see at once why the servant had trembled with such wide-eyed awe: even to me, who had sailed up the Nile and walked in the shadows of the pharaohs’ glory, there was something savage and exotic in their appearance. Some were still mounted on the camels they had ridden, perhaps all the way from Egypt; others had dismounted and stood proudly in front of their animals. As for their masters, their silver armour moved like dragon scales, their swords were curved like lions’ teeth, and their solemn faces were black as the depths of Sheol. One of them carried the black banner of the Fatimids, though the fabric disappeared in the darkness so that the white writing seemed to flutter over their heads as if by witchcraft. If they had announced they came not from Egypt but from the deepest reaches of hell, and not on an embassy but to reap the earth, few would have disbelieved them.

But three men stood among them who did not look like spectres of the apocalypse. Two of them, indeed, wore thick wooden crosses over their tunics to prove their true faith. Their faces were pale, like moons against the darkness, and pitted by hardship. One in particular seemed to have suffered terribly. His left arm had been reduced to a stump, not even reaching the elbow, and his once-powerful frame was now stooped and skewed. Some tufts of his hair still grew russet-brown, but the greater part was white, like dust. Worst of all were the eyes, bulging out of his face and interrogating the world with a terrible, candid bitterness.

‘Achard?’

I spoke tentatively, hardly believing what my own eyes told me. In my mind I was suddenly transported many hundreds of miles away, to a moonless night and a river, a desperate battle and monsters from the deep feasting on the dead. Achard had called on me to save him.

I looked away, ashamed by the memory. As I did, I saw another face I knew. He had been watching me, waiting for me, and his white teeth smiled broadly in the darkness.

Two hours later I sat by my fire with Anna, Thomas, Sigurd and Bilal. Sigurd eyed him warily, and made a great display of oiling and polishing his axe-blade while we talked – though in truth, despite the extremes of their skin, the two men had much in common. Both were built like warriors, and held themselves with the easy confidence of strong men. Anna, who had always maintained that God
made all men the same beneath their skins – Christian or Ishmaelite, orthodox or heretic – covered herself modestly and watched. Only Thomas seemed troubled: he stared at the ground, fidgeted with whatever came to hand, and said almost nothing.

‘You escaped, God be praised,’ said Bilal, and I remembered that the last time he saw me I had been going to my death. ‘I knew that you never reached the other side of the river; and I heard that a detachment of the caliph’s horsemen had been massacred by
Nizariyya
bandits in the eastern desert. But there was no way of knowing . . .’ He gave a tight smile. ‘Many men get lost in the desert.’

I thought back to those terrible days: the thirst, the heat, the emptiness that flayed away the layers of my soul until the hollow core was stripped bare. In the deepest places of my heart I still bore the scars.

‘Bilal saved us,’ I told Anna. ‘I owe him my life.’

Bilal shrugged off the compliment with a graceful lift of his shoulders. ‘With the vizier away the caliph had lost his senses. Al-Afdal approved what I had done when he returned. Though not before the Franks had suffered cruelly in the caliph’s dungeon.’

I shivered as I remembered the sight of Achard’s tormented body. ‘What did the caliph want from them?’

‘Revenge for those who had escaped. To win the love of his people by persecuting Christians. To show his independence of the vizier.’ Bilal flicked his hand at the empty air. ‘Who can say?’

‘What happened to Achard?’

‘They dragged him half-dead from the river. The crocodiles had torn off one of his hands, and part of his leg as well. They healed him as best they could but the arm became infected. They had to amputate three times to cut off the poison. When that was done they sent him to the caliph’s torturers.’ Even Bilal, hardened to suffering by a lifetime on the battlefield, did not hide his pity. ‘His body may have been broken, but his will did not suffer. If anything, his ordeal only strengthened his faith. And not through any mercy of the torturers.’

Thomas picked up a stick and began scoring the earth by his feet.

‘How long was he in there?’

‘Only a week. It was long enough. Then the vizier returned and freed them. He was furious with the caliph for making enemies where we did not need them.’

‘Then perhaps he should have arranged it so that Achard never returned.’

‘He considered it,’ Bilal admitted. ‘Achard’s anger is like a tumour inside him, feeding on itself and consuming him. I have known violent men, and good men driven to anger, but never such a hate-filled man as that. The world offers him nothing but revenge. He is not a man I would want to face in battle.’

He leaned forward, locking his gaze on mine. ‘And you should fear him too, Demetrios. He has not forgotten that you escaped and he did not.’