Tom Harper - Siege of Heaven

‘And what will we do when we enter the city?’ Sigurd asked. It was the fifth time he had asked that question, and I had no good answer. All I had were Nikephoros’ dying words — and I did not even know how accurate they might be. The Fatimids could have taken their captives to another fortress, or to a cave in the hills, or. .

I shook my head to clear it of evil thoughts. ‘We will do what we can, and trust to God for the rest.’

On my right, Thomas was staring forward with desperate intensity, his axe ready in his hands. When I touched his arm, he jerked as if I had cut it open.

‘Keep loose,’ I warned him. ‘You won’t be able to swing your axe if your arms are so tense.’

Without a word, he turned back to look at Jerusalem. Not a muscle in his face moved. All his life was in that city: his dead parents, his captive wife, his son — perhaps even his God. I hoped he would find at least some of them beyond the walls that now loomed ahead of us in the blue dawn.

Another herald galloped up the line towards us. ‘The front ranks have reached the outer walls. Prepare to advance.’

I had spent two years and a thousand miles trying to reach Jerusalem. Now, as the sun’s molten rays crept over the ridge and began to touch Mount Zion, I began to march the last few hundred yards. The faces around me were wide-eyed, like men awakening into a dream; many crossed themselves, and some wept openly. The battlehymn of the Army of God resounded in my ears like clashing cymbals.

‘God wills it!’

‘It would have been better if God had willed them to bring ladders.’

Sigurd spat on the ground. All his weapons were laid out around him, silver in the moonlight — his great battleaxe, a pair of small throwing axes, a sword and two knives. One by one he polished them with a cloth, rubbed them with oil, then wiped them clean. It was an exercise in futility: I knew for a fact that not one of those blades had touched so much as the beard of an enemy that day.

‘Perhaps our faith was not strong enough,’ said Thomas. He sat on a rock a little distance away from us, resting his chin in his hands. They were almost the first words he had spoken since we returned from the battle.

Sigurd, who had one of the throwing axes in his hand, looked as though he might willingly put it into Thomas’s skull. ‘The only thing that was too weak was the sense of those shit-cursed princes.’

For the Army of God, which had cracked open the greatest fortresses of antiquity and defied the combined hordes of the Ishmaelites, the assault on Jerusalem had been a disaster. Ten thousand men had tried to climb into the city with a single ladder between them. After some hours of fighting they had breached the low outer wall and charged through, only to pass into the dead ground between the curtain wall and the great rampart. Buttresses between the two walls hemmed in their flanks, so that the defenders could rain down missiles from three sides. When the Franks had tried to make a tortoise roof with their shields, the Egyptians had simply broken it apart with rocks and then poured arrows into the gaps. Meanwhile, thinking the city must have fallen, more men flooded through the breaches so that those in the front were crushed against the main wall or trampled underfoot. They had filled the ground between the walls like lambs in a pen, and like lambs they had been slaughtered.

Yet despite all this, they had managed to raise their ladder to the main walls. A Norman knight had started to climb it. The air around him was dark with arrows; the ladder swayed and shuddered as stones ricocheted off it. Still he climbed, somehow untouched by the cloud of missiles. The defenders brought vats of boiling water and tried to pour it over him, but in their haste they tipped it too quickly and it fell on the men at the foot of the ladder instead. No one heard their screams: the entire army was holding its breath, waiting to see if the knight could reach the top. That he had not been plucked from it already seemed nothing short of a miracle — proof, for those who sought it, that God had ordained their victory. The further he went the more they allowed themselves to hope. Weighed down by his armour, his progress was agonisingly slow; once he seemed to slip, and the whole army gasped, but he regained his footing and continued inexorably up. God is so powerful that if He desires it, we will scale the walls with a single ladder , I remembered Raymond had said. Now, before the eyes of all men, his words were becoming manifest, and the army trembled with fearful expectation.

The knight gained the final rung, reached out his arm and fastened his hand on the embrasure between the battlements. For a moment, he must have looked down to see the holy city framed in stone. A great cheer rose up from the army; more men started climbing the ladder, while the rest surged forward. The knight on the ladder glanced back down, and though I could not see his face I could imagine the triumph on it. He waved his sword to rally the army and screamed, ‘ Deus vult! ’

From the ramparts before him, a heavy sword flashed down. The knight cringed back, flailing his arm, and we saw in horror that the hand that clasped Jerusalem had been severed from his body. He flung away his sword and scrabbled for a grip, but he had no chance. An arrow pierced his side, another his shoulder; he lost his balance and crashed down onto the crowds below, spinning as he fell.

On the walls around us, the Fatimid archers resumed their bombardment. Scores of the Franks had lowered their shields to watch the ascent; now they paid for their carelessness. Mercifully I was too far back to trouble the bowmen: they did not want for targets. From up on the walls, a pair of hands reached through the embrasure and pushed away the ladder. It pivoted back, then toppled down into the fray. Within seconds it had been ground to splinters as the Franks rushed to escape.

‘The only miracle was that the Norman did not die,’ said Sigurd.

Thomas looked at him with the sure contempt of youth. ‘There were no miracles today.’ His voice was hollow, heartbroken. ‘The Norman survived because three corpses broke his fall. There were enough bodies between those walls to clog the gates of heaven.’

I said nothing. I knew some of the anguish he must feel — I felt enough of it myself. But he seemed to have taken the defeat so much to his heart that it consumed him. At the height of the battle, when the Franks were fleeing back through the breaches, he had even tried to rush forward, though it was certain death. Sigurd had held him back, almost breaking his arm to do it. I prayed it had only been the madness of war — not the weight of his sorrows becoming unbearable.

‘I’ve heard that Count Raymond will move his camp around to the south,’ said Sigurd, breaking the awkward silence.

‘I wonder how many will go with him?’

‘Twelve of us, at least.’ Sigurd gestured to the Varangians, all that remained of his company. ‘No one else will have us.’

‘We may be the only ones.’ I knew that several of Raymond’s captains had transferred their allegiance to other princes in the aftermath of the battle. ‘No wonder he wants to move his camp away from the others.’

Sigurd held up his throwing axe to the moonlight, squinting down the blade. He grunted with grudging approval — then looked up in surprise as a shadow fell over him. A youth in a yellow tunic had emerged from the darkness, blocking out the moon. His skin was smooth, his dark hair curly: he might easily have been taken for a Saracen. Perhaps that was why he wore an outsize wooden cross on a cord around his neck. It seemed to cause him some discomfort.

‘Who is Demetrios Askiates?’ he asked, in heavily accented Greek.