Tom Harper - Siege of Heaven

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.’

News of the Fatimids’ arrival spread quickly through the camp — and even beyond. At first light next morning, the garrison of Arqa — which had not troubled us for almost a fortnight while we broke off the siege work to celebrate Easter — began a furious bombardment of rocks and arrows.

‘They are afraid we have come to make an alliance with you to steal their lands, Christians and Fatimids against the Arabs,’ said Bilal.

‘Have you?’

‘Wait and see.’

Count Raymond had his men erect a new tent to receive the ambassadors, on the northern ridge well beyond the main camp. He claimed it was sited to be safe from attack, though I suspected he was more worried about what the pilgrims would think if they saw their leaders sitting down with Ishmaelites.

Though it was hardly a private affair. Jealousy and distrust had fractured the army: no man was willing to come alone, or to appear with the smallest retinue. The princes brought their guards, their secretaries, their bishops, priests and chaplains, their knights and standardbearers. It did not help the atmosphere in the room: by the time we had climbed the slope, and then crowded ourselves into the confines of the tent, the air was sweltering and ill-tempered. What must the Fatimid ambassador have thought of us? I wondered. He sat on a cushion near the door, a round-faced man with a soft beard and hard eyes.

‘In the name of the one God, the almighty and merciful, greetings,’ he said. An aide relayed his words in translation. ‘And greetings from my master, the caliph al-Mustali, and his faithful servant the vizier al-Afdal.’

Each of the princes introduced himself in turn. Even that took almost half an hour, for none was inclined to brevity. Expressions of welcome quickly meandered into self-aggrandising bravado, mixed with clumsy innuendo at the backward errors of the Muslims. The Fatimid ambassador listened more courteously than they deserved, giving the appearance of attending every word, though it seemed from his eyes that he already knew exactly who they all were.

‘My master has followed your progress with interest,’ he said, when at last it was his turn to speak again. He did not say that his master had been amazed at how faltering and shambolic that progress had been, though he somehow managed to insinuate it in his face. ‘From here, you are only forty miles from his border.’

‘All we desire is to reach Jerusalem.’

The ambassador nodded. ‘And Jerusalem is in my master’s possession.’

‘For the moment.’

There was an awkward pause.

‘There does not need to be a war between us,’ the ambassador tried again. ‘We have many enemies in common. Far better to destroy them than each other.’

‘If the caliph hands over Jerusalem, we will gladly make an alliance and fight beside him,’ Godfrey offered.

The ambassador replied with a smile of totally insincere regret. ‘The caliph cannot do that. Jerusalem is one of the holiest cities of Islam. The heir of the prophet, peace be upon him, would dishonour both Allah and his people if he surrendered it. Even to worthy men like you.’

‘He will be dishonoured a great deal more when we cast him out of it in ruin,’ Tancred warned.

‘We pray that will not be necessary,’ Raymond added quickly. ‘But if the caliph has followed our progress, he knows how far we have come and what trials we have suffered. We did not come for riches or glory or conquest.’ He tapped the white cross sewn onto his robe. ‘We came for this: for the love of Christ, and the humble desire to worship where he died. We cannot turn away now, so close to our goal.’