Tom Harper - Siege of Heaven

I reached the crumbling window ledge and crouched under its arch. Behind me, high tongues of flame licked into the night — ahead was only darkness.

‘Go on!’ shouted Aelfric’s voice below. ‘Out of the way.’

I jumped. It was the leap of a madman: from a high window, on a cliffbound mountain top, into darkness. If I had fallen a thousand feet and impaled myself on jagged rocks, it would have been no more than I deserved. But God was with me that night. The ground was hard, but not far. I struck it with a yelp of pain, jarring my knees, feeling my ankle turn beneath me, and rolled away in a cascade of dust and pebbles until a thorn tree brought me to a stop. After the inferno in the monastery, the night seemed cool and quiet. The smell of sagegrass filled my senses.

‘Demetrios!’ A voice from above was calling my name. ‘Is it safe?’

I do not know what I answered — I was almost past thinking. I lay there, while one by one the Varangians crawled out through the window and dropped to the ground. Somehow they managed to manhandle Sigurd’s naked body onto the ledge, and then lower it down. By that time, I had recovered enough that I could stand and hobble over to look at him. His face was deathly pale, scratched and bruised from being squeezed through the window.

‘Sigurd?’

Whether he understood, or whether it was just reflex, his eyes flicked open. They looked vague and distant, but after a moment they seemed to focus on me.

‘Demetrios,’ he said, and I felt a thrill of hope. ‘You shit.’

We had escaped — but not far. In the darkness, our heads still reeling from the smoke we had breathed, we did not dare try to find our way down. Even if there had been a path, we could never have managed to carry Sigurd. We found a small ledge in the mountainside, almost hidden by the gorse bushes that fringed it, and settled down to wait.

The monastery burned on, lighting up the western sky with its glow and filling the night with the crashing sounds of ruination. The noise wrought havoc on my nerves as I sat hunched on my rock: with each falling beam or collapsing wall, I was convinced I heard the footsteps of an unseen enemy about to discover us.

Eventually, when the fresh light in the east matched the sullen glow in the west, I left our hiding place and crawled back up the slope. I could see the high wall of the monastery church and the window we had escaped through towering above me. I skirted around it to the north, then crept up to a hollow just below the summit where a tree-stump offered some cover. Even that was not entirely safe, for a spent arrow, a relic of the battle, lay planted in the earth by my feet. I pulled it out, snapped off the shaft and gripped the arrowhead like a dagger. Then I peered over the rotting tree-stump.

I had come around to the front of the monastery. As we had guessed, the steep path that Pakrad had brought us by was not the main entrance. Here, the mountain sloped away more gradually towards a high valley. A road ran up to a broad gate in the monastery wall; the gates had been thrown down, and through the arch I could see the ruins of the monastery still billowing smoke. Yet for all the desolation, it was not abandoned. Some fifty Frankish knights were arrayed in a wide cordon on the open ground before the gates, some mounted, others on foot; some watching outwards and some facing the centre of their circle, where a knot of men was gathered beside a smouldering heap of coals. Duke Godfrey stood among them. He had removed his helmet, so that his tousled hair blew freely in the morning breeze, and his face was streaked black where he had tried, unsuccessfully, to wipe away the soot stains. I thought of the ring he had taken from me, and wondered where it was now.

In front of Godfrey stood the defeated men from Pakrad’s garrison. A dozen Frankish spear-points held them back, though there was little defiance now in their wretched faces. Many were wounded: one had lost an entire arm, so that his captors could not shackle him but had been forced to tie him to the man next to him.

Two knights dragged one of the prisoners forward and flung him onto his knees in front of Godfrey. It was Pakrad, I realised, though he was hardly recognisable from the cocksure bandit who had betrayed us. He had lost his armour and his tunic, leaving only a dirty cloth around his hips to cover him. Terrible burns covered his naked chest and arms, and flaps of charred skin hung from his body like feathers. He was weeping.

‘Did you think you could cheat our bargain?’

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.