Tom Harper - Siege of Heaven

The grunting stopped. I looked to the canvas flap, expectant and dreading, but there was no sign of anyone emerging. And then, suddenly, a voice from the tent door behind us.

‘What do you want?’

Thomas and I spun around. He had arrived with startling silence, but he did not look like a quiet man. His pockmarked face was bloated and heavy, his belly likewise, though the rest of him was meagre enough. His eyes were too small for his face and his mouth too large. Something sticky seemed to be smeared on his chin. He wore a long camelskin robe tied with a leather belt: he hooked his thumbs in it, and puffed out his chest.

‘I have a message for Peter Bartholomew,’ I said. ‘It will help the army reach Jerusalem.’

The man’s eyes fixed on me. ‘Peter Bartholomew, bless his holy name’ — he tapped a perfunctory sign of the cross across his chest — ‘is at prayer. He will not be disturbed.’

‘He will want to hear my message.’

‘Then you can tell it to me.’ His voice was coarse, even by the standards of the Provencals. There was no poise in his manner, only blunt strength.

‘It is for Peter Bartholomew alone,’ I insisted.

‘No one comes to Peter Bartholomew, bless his name, except through me.’ He gave an ugly smile. ‘I am his steward and his prophet.’

‘I have seen him many times.’ I spoke mildly. Despite his obvious dissolution, there was a menace in the man’s face I did not want to provoke.

‘That was in the past. Now that the time of trial is coming, he must gather his strength and devote himself to God. If he saw every disciple who sought his blessing he would never sleep.’

‘I am not his disciple.’

The steward gave what was meant to be an indulgent look; it emerged more like a leer. ‘We are all his disciples — though some do not know it yet.’

‘Then will you tell him Demetrios Askiates has brought a message for him.’

He shook his fat head. ‘Tell it to me.’

‘It is for him only.’

My obstinacy was beginning to irritate this selfproclaimed prophet: his small eyes narrowed, his hands began to ball into fists by his side. Thomas saw it too and edged closer, but I flicked my head to keep him back.

‘Raymond cannot advance to Jerusalem unless Bohemond and Godfrey come to reinforce him. But they will not come until Raymond asks — and his pride will not bend to that.’

The prophet folded his arms across his chest. ‘So?’

‘Peter Bartholomew-’

‘Bless his name.’

‘. . has influence Raymond cannot ignore. If he commands Raymond to send for Bohemond and Godfrey, to ask for their help, Raymond will do it.’

The prophet stared at me. ‘Is that all?’

‘It is enough.’ I hoped that was true. I had little faith that the fat prophet would relay what I had said, and less still that Peter Bartholomew would act on it.

But the next day, Aelfric reported he had seen a knight leave Count Raymond’s camp and ride north to Antioch.

The boy stood between his mother’s bare legs, his arms wrapped around them. His young face was screwed into a mask of concentration as he surveyed the ground in front of him. Worry furrowed his face like an old man’s — though these furrows were plump and fertile, ripe for planting, not the arid, barren lines of age. With a hiccup of resolve, he suddenly unlatched himself from his mother and lurched forward, flailing his limbs like a newborn foal. One step, two, three — and the beginnings of a fourth before the momentum undid him. He sprawled face-first into the carpet of pine-needles, a plaintive bawl lamenting his failure. Helena ran forward and picked him up, dusting the pine needles off his blue tunic.

‘Soon he’ll walk better than his grandfather,’ said Sigurd.

I picked up a pinecone and threw it at him, but he swatted it away with the palm of his hand. The boy — my grandson — stopped wailing as he watched it fly into a patch of tall grass.

‘With an arm like that, you should be throwing rocks at Arqa,’ Sigurd teased me. ‘You’d do no worse than the catapaults.’

I waved the insult away. We were sitting in a glade in the forest that covered the lower slopes of the mountain — Thomas and Helena with the baby Everard; Zoe, picking the scales off pinecones to get at the nuts within; Sigurd, and Anna sitting on a fallen log beside me. We had brought baskets of bread and fruit, for it was a rare escape from the grim confines of the camp.

‘There was a full moon two nights ago,’ said Sigurd. ‘A whole month we’ve been here now.’ He pointed to Everard, who had balanced himself against his mother and was teetering forward, summoning courage for his next advance. The anticipation and delight in his young face seemed to have forgotten all memory of ever having fallen, though his knees were black with earth.

‘If that boy set out for Jerusalem now, he’d still be there before this army.’

Everard obliged Sigurd’s pessimism by choosing that moment to launch himself into another doomed run. This time he only managed two steps before the inevitable collapse. Helena stepped forward and wrapped him in her skirt, hushing the cries.

I smiled, trying not to let Sigurd’s pessimism sour the mood in the glade. What he said was true enough. In the nine weeks since we had set out from Ma’arat we had come, by Sigurd’s reckoning, less than a hundred miles. In the past month we had not moved at all. The Army of God’s resolve, once a keen and indomitable blade, had been bent so far that it had snapped. It could not be remade, not with the same strength, and the men who had swung and slashed their way across Asia Minor now prodded forward like blind men. The first incarnation had been terrible, terrifying to witness. This agonising decrepitude was simply a slow, aimless death.

Everard was ready to try again. He pushed off from Helena and ran forward, flapping his arms like an injured bird. Four steps, five, and then — just as it seemed he could defy his limitations no longer, he reached the sanctuary of my knee. He clung on desperately, and I had to prise his little hands away to hoist him up on my lap. I ruffled his hair — fair like Thomas’s, though already growing steadily darker — and pointed through a gap in the trees where the slope fell away to the plain, and the coast beyond.

‘That is where you need to go,’ I told him. ‘To Jerusalem.’

He snatched hold of my outstretched finger and began pulling on it. Anna reached over and tickled his chin, while Helena seated herself on the ground, leaning against the fallen log and chewing on a crust of bread. She looked well, I thought. Her face, sallow during the winter, had begun to brown again in the spring sun, and there was new vigour in her arms when she picked up her son. Anna had told me that Helena had struggled for a long time with feeding the baby, unable to nourish his body without enfeebling her own. It had been worst during the lean weeks at Ma’arat, and our subsequent travels had allowed little chance for recovery.

‘What’s that?’

I craned forward so that I could see what Sigurd had seen from his vantage on the opposite side of the clearing. A disgruntled fist tugged on my finger, trying to recapture my attention, but I ignored it. Thomas was on his feet beside Sigurd and staring over the tops of the pine trees to the west.

‘An army.’

I passed the baby onto Anna’s knee and ran over. My eyes were not as sharp as Thomas’s, but even so I could see the procession winding stiffly out of the valley and down towards our camp. Sunlight gleamed on their weapons like the scales of a snake, with two white banners like fangs at their head.

‘Can you see the device?’ I asked. In the camp below, men were running out of their tents and staring, but I could not tell if they were preparing for battle.