Tom Harper - Siege of Heaven

‘Bless his name,’ added his companion instinctively.

‘Curse his name! He would have ruined us — and might still, if anyone thinks to look for us. He may have convinced us he was the one foretold in scripture and the prophecy; he may even have convinced himself. But he did not convince God.’ He lifted the two sackcloth bags in his hands. ‘Thank Christ he convinced men with deeper pockets.’

He tested the weight of the bags. ‘This is fair.’

‘Then we should go. Before the others think to look for us.’

The two men embraced. ‘God go with you.’

‘And with you.’

They spoke the farewells quickly, mechanically. Then, without a second glance, they parted and left the clearing, one taking a path to the north and the other heading east. I counted towards twenty under my breath, wondering which to follow. I had only reached eighteen when I heard a sound from ahead. Dropping down on my stomach again, I saw the man in the brown tunic re-emerge from the path he had taken. He looked around cautiously, then hurried over to where the shovel still lay on the ground. As he bent down to take it I saw his face for the first time: only for a second, framed between branches, but I knew it at once. The prophet John. He had lost his camelskin robe and cut his hair much shorter than before, but the puffy face was as unpleasant as ever. It was his voice I had remembered.

He walked across to another place in the clearing, a few yards away from the first hole, and began digging. I edged around through the undergrowth so that I was behind him again, trying to time my movements to the strokes of the shovel, and waited until he had finished his hole. It did not take him long — whatever he was excavating was not buried deep. He put the shovel aside, glanced over his shoulder, then dropped to his knees and scrabbled in the earth.

I only needed four strides to cover the distance between us. Distracted by his buried treasure he barely heard me coming: the first he properly knew was when he felt my weight pinning him down, one hand on the back of his head and the other holding a knife to his throat.

‘Did you forget something?’

‘Thaddaeus?’ His voice was frightened, pathetic — not the voice of a man who had presumed to lecture princes. ‘I forgot about this bag, Thaddeus; I would have come after you to give you your share, I swear to you.’

‘I do not want your gold.’

Through his terror, he must have realised I was not his cheated companion returning for vengeance. ‘Who are you?’

I didn’t answer. ‘You were Peter Bartholomew’s selfannointed prophet.’

‘No,’ he squealed. ‘No!’

I twisted the knife so that the flat of the blade was against his throat, and pressed hard. ‘Liar. I saw you with him.’

I loosed the pressure a little so he could breathe to answer. ‘I never knew him.’

‘You stood in his tent and told me that no one came to Peter except through you.’

I doubt he remembered me from that, but it was enough to puncture his feeble resistance. All energy left him and his body sagged forward, so limp that I had to pull the knife away lest he slit his own throat.

‘Why were you stealing away so fast?’ I demanded. ‘Shouldn’t you be at your master’s side, in the hour of his greatest suffering?’

‘Peter Bartholomew is dead!’ He cried out the words like a wounded animal.

‘When I left the camp, Peter Bartholomew still lived.’

‘Yes — if you can say a man lives because his heart beats and his lungs breathe. He will cling to life as long as he can, and who can blame him? He knows what awaits him in the world to come.’

‘Angels and seraphs hymning his praise, and a seat at the right hand of the Father? Or is he bound for the dark places where false prophets and deceivers languish?’

John mumbled something I could not hear. I made him repeat it.

‘For what he has done, he will be cast in the deepest pit of hell.’

Even for one bent on apostasy, it was a terrible thing to say — and spoken with savage hurt.

‘Why? What lies did he tell you?’

John writhed and whimpered in my grasp but did not answer.

‘Was it the lance?’

He nodded eagerly. ‘Yes — the lance.’

‘What else? Did he claim he was a saint? A prophet?’

‘At first he said he was only a messenger sent to proclaim the things to come. But the more the Lord spoke to him, the greater his claims grew. First that he was a saint — then that he had been possessed by the spirit of Elijah to prepare the world for its tribulations.’

‘Did he tell this widely?’

John shook his head. ‘Only to us, his closest disciples. He said the time to reveal himself had not yet come.’

He spilled out his words, unburdening himself with the eager gratitude of the penitent. But I had heard enough confessions to know when a heart had given up all its secrets — and when it had not.

‘Elijah was not the limit of Peter Bartholomew’s ambition,’ I guessed. ‘He went further.’

I twisted John around so that he lay on his back. I wanted to look in his eyes. I took the knife from his throat and stepped back, though not so far that he could hope to escape me.

‘He told us he was the one foretold by the prophecy.’ John whispered the words, as if afraid to hear himself saying them. ‘The last and greatest of all kings, who will come at the end of days to capture Jerusalem.’

‘The son of God?’ Even I was whispering now.

John did not answer directly. ‘ When the Son of Perdition has risen, the King will ascend Golgotha. He will take his crown from his head and place it on the cross, and stretching out his hands to heaven he will hand over the kingdom of the Christians to God the Father. This will be the end and the consummation of the Roman and Christian Empires, when every power and principality shall be destroyed .’

His gaze was distant, and he recited it with the familiarity of well-worn verses of scripture. But I had spent my youth in a monastery, had heard every word of the Bible so many times it was as familiar as my own name — and I had never heard that passage.

‘What is that?’

John’s eyes refocused on me. ‘The prophecy,’ he said simply.

‘Whose prophecy? Peter Bartholomew’s? Was it another thing revealed in his dreams?’

He thought for a moment, as if he had never questioned its provenance before. ‘No. It was written down in a book — and Peter could not write.’

‘But he could read.’

John gave a sly smile. ‘He pretended he could not, but I often saw him alone in his tent poring over the book. And how else would he have known what it said?’

‘Did he show it to you?’

‘Only once.’ John shrugged. ‘It made no difference — I do not have to pretend to be illiterate. But I saw the images that illuminated it. Terrible things. Monsters with the heads of Saracens and the bodies of lions ripping women’s bellies with their claws and devouring the unborn children. Locusts with tails like scorpions; a red dragon with seven heads and ten horns. Men dressed as women lying unnaturally with each other in pools of blood, even as the carrion birds picked out their entrails.’ He trembled with the memory. ‘And at the bottom of the page, a radiant king on a white horse. He wore two crowns; his left hand wielded a lance with which he dispatched the Saracens and Ethiopians who assailed him, while his right stretched out to the cross on Golgotha.’

I knew what they illustrated. ‘The last days. And how did Peter Bartholomew come by this manuscript?’

‘He said he found it in a cave after a dream.’ Again that sly, slightly rueful smile. ‘But I also heard that he stole it from one of the princes.’