Tom Harper - Siege of Heaven

‘Who are you?’ I retorted.

He would not say, but reached into the folds of his tunic. Sigurd tensed his arm, the oiled axe gleaming in his hand, but there was no danger. Instead, the boy pulled out a brooch and tossed it across to me. I examined it. The gold was leaden in the moonlight, but the design was clear enough. A tree wrought in enamel — reds, blues and greens — and two birds flanking it.

‘You know whose it is?’

I nodded, dumbstruck. It had been a gift from the imperial treasury to Anna, after she saved the emperor from a spear-wound.

‘Then come with me.’

I wanted to bring Sigurd, but then I would have had to take Thomas, and I did not trust him in his evil mood. So I went alone. The youth walked behind me through the camp, letting me meet the challenges and give the watchwords, then took the lead. Ten minutes brought us to the north-eastern corner of the city: we rounded it, then dropped away from the walls as the ground descended into the steep valley that divided the Mount of Olives from the city. The night deepened as we went down — I clutched the brooch so tight its pin pierced my hand, but I carried on until suddenly I saw a faint light winking in the darkness.

The light drew closer as we reached the bottom of the valley. The ground was broken here, strewn with rocks, though it was only when I stubbed my toe on one and looked down that I saw they were not boulders, but fragments of a shattered building. The remains of toppled columns, tumbledown walls and fallen arches littered the landscape like bones on a battlefield. The destruction must have happened some time ago, for grass and bushes had grown tall around the ruins. Where a solitary piece of wall still stood, a fig tree had twined itself through the empty window.

But the corpse of the building remained, buried in the ground. A flight of open stairs brought us down into an oblong pit lined with stone. Two rows of stumps marked where the columns had once stood, and though most of the ground was covered in earth, in a few places you could still make out the tiles of the mosaic floor. It must have been a church, I thought. And despite its desolation, it still seemed to be in use. At the far end, unhidden by any altar screen, two black-robed priests with long, white beards bowed before a long-vanished altar. It was their light I had seen, a lone oil-lamp resting on a fallen capital. The flame illuminated the face of a high stone mausoleum — the only structure to have survived the destruction.

‘Do you know where you are?’

I swung around. With all my attention on the ghostly scene in the sanctuary I had not noticed the man sitting on the stub of a column to my right. He stood, his cloak rustling around his legs.

‘Bilal.’ I stepped towards him, then checked myself, suddenly overtaken by confusion, fear. I opened my palm to reveal the brooch. ‘Did you send this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are they. .?’ I could not bring myself to finish the question.

He offered a tired smile. ‘They are safe.’

Relief flooded through me. So much tension had knotted itself around me that week that, in the end, it was all that had held me together. Now it washed away and I dropped to my knees. The poison bile that had filled my body rose in my throat and I let it pour out onto the onceholy ground, praying God to forgive me. In the chancel, the priests continued their low chanting.

Bilal took my arm and pulled me to my feet. I would have embraced him, almost fallen upon him with thanks, but something held me away. There was a distance in his manner that I had not seen before.

‘A squadron of our cavalry surprised a column of Frankish knights,’ he said. ‘There was a battle.’

‘I was there.’

‘But not with your wife and children. They found them with the ambassador, Nikephoros.’

There was no rebuke in his words, but I felt it anyway like a hammer. ‘They fell upon us so quickly there was nothing I could do. I was separated from them. I-’

Bilal held up his hand to still my babble. ‘God is the All-Hearing and the All-Seeing. Perhaps He did not mean you to be with them. Nikephoros fought to protect your family — bravely, they said — and died for it. If you had stood beside them, the same might have happened to you.’

I remembered Thomas’s desperate longing to charge into the battle that morning. You could not escape guilt by dying.

‘As it was, they assumed the women must be Nikephoros’ wife and daughters, and therefore worthy of ransom.’

So Nikephoros’ pride had served a purpose in the end. I remembered the golden robe he had worn that day, the jewelled lorum wrapped around his neck. Perhaps he had already imagined himself back in the perfumed halls of Constantinople, returned from his exile. And he had fought to protect my family. Suddenly, for all his deceits, I found I no longer hated him.

‘But I have no money to ransom them,’ I said, trying to comprehend all this unexpected news. ‘And the Franks will not waste their gold on Greeks.’

‘My masters would not offer them to the Franks. All Muslims may seem the same to the Franks, but we understand the differences between the Christians well enough. When the vizier needs to buy favour with your emperor, then he will offer him the women as part of some bargain.’

‘But the emperor will know they cannot belong to Nikephoros.’ Hope rose within me. ‘Can you help them escape?’

Bilal sighed, and I could see that he wished I had not asked it. ‘I cannot.’

The euphoria that had lifted me subsided. I sank down on one of the stone stubs. Bilal stayed standing, silhouetted against the priests’ lamp at the far end of the nave.

‘At least I know they’re safe,’ I said, when I could control my voice again. ‘Thank you for that.’

‘It is the least I can do. And the most. But for as long as my people control the city, no harm will come to them.’

‘A long time if our attack this morning was any omen. Did you see it?’

‘I was there.’ Bilal looked away, unwilling to talk more of it. Perhaps he was embarrassed by the wanton ease with which the Franks had given themselves up to be slaughtered.

A thought struck me. ‘The vizier must be confident of victory if he is already able to think of bargaining with the emperor.’ No answer. ‘Is the vizier here now?’

Bilal shifted uneasily.

‘Come,’ I urged him. ‘Do you think I’m trying to pry secrets out of you? I want to know, in innocence, if I will ever see my family again. Nothing else.’

‘In innocence?’ Bilal repeated the words with heavy irony. ‘Can there be such a thing? When we fought beside each other in the pyramid, when the Turkish troops tried to harm that boy, we did it because we hated evil, nothing else. When the caliph in his madness threatened to kill you, I warned you for the same reason. But we are in Jerusalem now, and the next time your army charges at those walls you will be on one side and I will be on the other. It will be a battle to the end. So how can you and I speak to each other in innocence?’

Bilal looked away, to the light in the sanctuary of the church. The two priests must know we were there, must have heard us, but they continued with their ritual as if we did not exist.

‘Do you know where you are?’ Bilal repeated the question he had asked when I first arrived. I looked around, then up. Far above us, the fires on the city walls burned bright against the sky from the great courtyard of the Temple Mount.

‘You are in Gethsemane. This was the church of Mary, the mother of Jesus and that tomb’ — he pointed to the stone mausoleum — ‘is hers.’

You could hardly breathe in this place for the weight of history. ‘But Mary was taken up to heaven. When Saint Thomas came to her tomb three days after she fell asleep, her body was gone.’