Siege of Heaven (8 page)

The breeze blew Godfrey’s words over to my hiding place. Beside him, a man with his back to me stirred the coals with his sword. A flurry of sparks flew up, and the air shimmered above it. Pakrad trembled.

‘Please, Lord,’ he pleaded. ‘I did everything you asked. I brought you the ring. I killed the Greeks. I—’

‘You told me you sold the Greeks for slaves.’

‘It is the same thing.’ Pakrad glanced back over his shoulder at the ruin of his fortress; I wondered if Duke Godfrey had noticed. ‘They are surely dead now.’ He lifted his bound hands and pawed at the hem of Godfrey’s tunic, but Godfrey stepped back with a snort of disgust and Pakrad almost fell on his face.

‘You are a worm,’ Godfrey told him. ‘A robber and a villain. This monastery that you made your lair – how
many monks did you murder to take it?’ He walked around behind his captive and seized hold of a lock of his hair, jerking his head back. He rapped his knuckles on the bare skin where the tonsure had been, and Pakrad screamed.

‘Does it hurt?’ Godfrey enquired. ‘It should. It is the mark of God on a wicked sinner. You profaned the holy soil of the monastery with your crimes, and you mocked God Himself by putting on the habit of His servants to work evil.’

‘On your orders, Lord,’ Pakrad protested. Godfrey ignored him.

‘Do you know what the crime of Satan was?’ Pakrad shook his head in terror. ‘He knew he could not surpass God, so he sought to overthrow Heaven itself and make himself lord over its ruin. He tried to mimic God, as a chained ape mimics a man. And do you know what befell him?’

Pakrad, his head still pulled back by Godfrey’s grip, made an unintelligible cry.

‘He was cast into eternal darkness.’

Godfrey released Pakrad and turned his back. The bandit’s head slumped, but in an instant one of the knights had sprung forward and clamped it between his gauntleted hands, twisting it up towards the sky. The man by the fire turned towards Pakrad, showing his face to me at last, and I gasped. It was Tancred, the half-Saracen nephew of Bohemond. He pulled the sword from the coals and advanced a few paces towards Pakrad. The tip of the sword glowed a dull red – which bloomed to a burning orange
as Tancred held it up to his lips and blew on it. Pakrad started to squeal; his body jerked and writhed, but the iron-clad hands that gripped his skull held it helpless.

Tancred drew back the sword. The red tip hovered in front of Pakrad’s eyes for a moment, darting this way and that. Twice Tancred flicked it forward but checked the blow, laughing to hear Pakrad’s desperate screams. Then he lunged.

My own eyes clenched shut involuntarily a split second before the blow, but I heard the hiss of the iron as it cut through the eyeball, and the shattering cries from Pakrad’s wounded body, which doubled in their agony as Tancred stabbed his sword into the second eye.

‘Take him away,’ said Godfrey. As I opened my eyes I saw that he still stood a little distance from Tancred, his back turned on the torture. Pakrad was being dragged back into the circle of prisoners. He was trying to press his hands to his face, but with the ropes that bound them he could not reach.

I had seen enough: I crawled away, back down the slope to the hidden ledge where the Varangians waited. Even there, the screams from the mountaintop echoed down to us for hours afterwards – and still seemed to linger in the air long after we heard Godfrey’s men ride away. Only near sunset, when we were certain they had gone, did we rise from our hiding place and set out for Antioch.

A wall of death surrounded Antioch, far stronger than any ramparts of earth or stone, and a foul film hung above the city where the smoke of countless pyres stained the air. We marched along the river bank, barely an arrowshot from the walls, and saw no one. Only the dead were in evidence. The soft earth of the meadow outside the walls had been carved into innumerable graves, some marked with stones but most of them anonymous. One by one, each of the Varangians crossed himself, and then made a surreptitious sign against the evil eye for good measure. I laid a thin cloth over Sigurd’s face so he would not breathe the malignant air. We had carried him back from the monastery on a litter, and though he had gained some consciousness and could occasionally speak a few
words, he was still achingly weak. Sweat glistened on his face where the fever boiled it out of him. It was shocking to see him diminished like this – like seeing an ancient oak tree felled for firewood. In the wandering course of my life I had not had to suffer the decline and death of my parents, for I had left them far behind in Illyria and never returned, but I imagined this was how a son must feel to see his father on his sick-bed: an indomitable constant brought down. It was strange, for he and I were the same age.

A few miles west of Antioch, in the hills between the plain and the coast, we found the hilltop where the remaining Varangians – and Anna – had moved their camp from the plague-ridden city. We climbed eagerly, our burdens suddenly much lightened. At the bottom of the valley, far below, I could see the sinuous course of the Orontes hastening towards the coast and the ship that would take me home. The setting sun turned the river gold, while an eagle wheeled silently in the sky above.

We came around a bend in the path and I knew at once something had changed. The guard who blocked our way was not a Varangian – indeed, he probably came from the opposite corner of the earth. His dark face was too wide and too short, like a reflection in a polished shield, with narrow eyes and a broad mouth that almost vanished under the mane of his beard. His helmet tapered to a sharp point like an onion, with a chain hood hanging down behind his neck, while the square plates of his scale armour rasped and chattered as they moved against each other.
The long spear in his hands was angled across our path, though it was the horn-ended bow slung across his shoulder that was the real danger. He was a Patzinak, another of the emperor’s far-flung mercenary legions.

‘Who are you?’ he challenged us in guttural Greek.

‘Demetrios Askiates, with Sigurd Ragnarson and what remain of his men.’

The Patzinak nodded, without curiosity. ‘Come through. Nikephoros is impatient to meet you.’

Our fortunes had changed in the ten days we had been away. We had left the company with little more than the blankets they slept on; now, two enormous pavilions with gold-fringed awnings and crimson walls stood surrounded by neat rows of simpler tents. Guards, more Patzinaks, stood at every corner. Judging by the size of the encampment there must have been at least two hundred of them. An old orchard had become an enclosure for a dozen horses, all fine beasts branded with the mark of the imperial stables, while through an open door I saw a store tent piled high with casks of wine and sacks of grain. I had not seen anything so organised in months.

Among the throng of stocky, dark-skinned Patzinaks, I found one of the Varangians we had left to guard the camp.

‘What has happened here?’

The Varangian glanced anxiously at Sigurd’s litter. ‘The new ambassador came a week ago. What happened to you? Where are the others?’

‘The monk betrayed us. The others did not survive it – and Sigurd may yet follow. Where’s Anna?’

The Varangian’s mouth dropped open, as if the sun had fallen out of the sky. ‘Sigurd? Sigurd cannot die.’

‘I hope not. But where is Anna?’

‘Anna?’ Uncharacteristically, the Varangian seemed to be searching for delicate words. ‘She—’

A sharp voice behind me interrupted us. ‘Are you Demetrios Askiates?’

I turned. Another Patzinak, this one with a loaf-shaped cap and gilt edging on the plates of his armour, was watching me.

‘Nikephoros wants you.’

‘Find Anna and get Sigurd into her care,’ I told the Varangian. ‘Tell her I’ll find them afterwards.’

The confines of a former life seemed to rise up and envelop me as I stepped into the gilded pavilion. Ever since my superior, the general Tatikios, had departed Antioch in May, I had lived beyond the reach of the empire – a desperate, untamed life where we had slept rough, killed easily, and obeyed nothing but the dictates of survival and our duty to each other. Now the whole edifice of Byzantine civilisation, vast as the pillars of Ayia Sophia, seemed to have descended on the hilltop. Rich carpets traced designs of lions and eagles on the floor, echoing the mosaics of the great palace, while the silk walls of the tent glowed red, as if we stood inside the orb of a setting sun. Gossamer-thin curtains partitioned the different rooms, so that the slaves and clerks who scurried behind them became pale spectres of themselves. Mahogany trees held
golden lamps in their branches, and icons of the saints looked out from their gilded windows. Rich incense filled the air. And, in the centre of the room, two men sat on carved chairs, their feet elevated on cushions, watching me carefully.

I had not changed my tunic or trimmed my beard in almost a fortnight of marching and fighting in the August sun. I had not washed, nor mended the tears and burns our ordeals had left in my clothing. In any company I would have felt filthy and disgusting: here, I felt like a dung-beetle rolling its ball on a banquet table. Too late, I remembered I should probably have bowed, though my back and my pride were both too stiff to allow it.

‘If you have been the emperor’s only representative these last four months, it is no wonder our situation is so desperate.’

The words were spoken with immaculate condescension, but their effect was like a kick in the groin. Fortunately, I was too weary to retaliate in anger. Instead, I looked blankly at the man who had addressed me. Both he and his companion were dressed in long white robes, trimmed with heavy embroidery and studded with coloured stones. There the similarity ended: the man on the left, who had spoken, was tall and strongly built; he kept his hair in studied disorder, and his face would have been handsome but for its arrogance. Only his beard seemed out of place, recently grown and not yet thickened to its fullness, like an adolescent who has not yet summoned the courage to shave, or a guilty man trying
to hide his appearance. His companion, by contrast, was slight and clean-shaven, with thinning hair and a permanently worried expression tightening his soft features. I guessed he must be a eunuch. In their company you could believe that the courtyards and fountains of the palace were just beyond the door, not a thousand miles away across mountains and desert.

‘Has the emperor sent you?’ I asked.

The larger man drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. ‘I am Nikephoros.’ He nodded to the eunuch beside him. ‘This is Phokas. We arrived from Constantinople a week ago. Where have you been?’

Evidently I did not merit pleasantries. ‘At the monastery of Ravendan, in the mountains north of here.’

Someone must surely have told him as much already, but he affected indignant surprise. ‘What folly took you there?’

‘A terrible folly.’ I guessed he did not want to hear the whole ordeal, that its filthy details would bore his refined sensibilities. I told him anyway.

‘It was a trap,’ I concluded. ‘Set by Duke Godfrey in concert with the Armenian brigands. Tancred was there too.’

My voice died away. The two envoys stared at me, their faces as flat and all-powerful as the saints in the icons around them.

‘You are sure it was Duke Godfrey?’ the eunuch, Phokas, asked at last. His voice was high, though not shrill, pitched in that indeterminate range between a man’s and a woman’s.

‘I stood as far from him as I am from you now.’

That did not impress Nikephoros. ‘It was a fool’s errand anyway. What did you mean by going to Ravendan?’

‘I was trying to defend the church’s interests – and the emperor’s. I did not know that his so-called allies would use the opportunity to try and kill us.’

‘It hardly matters.’ Acid disdain etched his voice. ‘Though it is a pity you lost the emperor’s seal that was entrusted to you. He will not be pleased.’

Had I been half my age, I would have broken his nose for his snide dismissal of our sacrifices. As it was, the cowardice of wisdom stilled my hand – but I could not keep all the heat from my voice. ‘Six days ago I watched Duke Godfrey and Tancred mutilate the survivors of the battle and leave them to die on a mountaintop. They would have done worse to us, if Pakrad’s greed had not spoiled their plan.’

‘Perhaps you have spent too long with the barbarians – what else did you expect from them? This does not change anything.’

‘Four of the emperor’s men are dead. Does that change nothing?’

‘You cannot cleanse your mistakes by washing them in your friends’ blood,’ Nikephoros retorted coolly. ‘Do you really think the empire’s interests have changed because – you say – a Frankish lord took against you? The emperor does not put down his hunting dogs just because they snap at his slaves.’

An agonising rage gripped me. I clenched my fists and
dug my long nails into the palms of my hands trying to force a pain excruciating enough to match the pain in my heart. But the harder I pressed, the less I felt.

The eunuch must have seen my anguish. ‘Do not blame yourself too much. You were swimming in seas too strong for you. You did not have the wit to see what should be done.’