Tom Harper - Siege of Heaven

His guards stiffened as I approached, and moved to bar my way, but Godfrey murmured that I should pass. I walked the few paces across the dusty ground and stood beside him at the fence.

‘I did not send Achard to kill you.’ He did not look at me, but kept his gaze fixed on the stallion in the paddock. ‘He went of his own will, because he hated you for what you did to him in Egypt.’

‘It can be hard to forgive the men who betray you,’ I said coldly.

‘But if you cannot do that, you end up as Achard did: destroyed.’ Godfrey flicked his head. ‘I told you once before that you should leave behind those things that do not concern you.’

‘You told me to go home to my family. And now I cannot, because they are in that city.’ I gestured to the walls a few hundred yards distant. ‘Because of what Achard did.’

At last Godfrey turned to me. ‘Did you come here to hurl your bitterness at me, Demetrios Askiates? What do you want?’

I swallowed, trying to calm myself. ‘I want to be the first man in the city.’

‘Many men want that honour,’ he rebuked me. ‘Many men have begged me for it. But it is not my gift to give. Only God can decide it — if He means us to capture the city at all.’

I nodded, and crossed myself. One thing about Godfrey had not changed: his pedantic piety.

‘Many men have lost their families — I cannot give you my army for that.’

‘I don’t want your army.’ I tried desperately to fight back my temper. ‘I want to join it.’ I had raised my voice, and the guards had noticed. They began to close on me, but Godfrey raised his head a fraction to nod them back.

‘I will submit my men to your authority. Varangian guards, from the emperor’s palace at Constantinople. There is not a king in Christendom who would not want them in his army.’

‘Except perhaps the Norman king of England,’ said Godfrey drily.

‘They will fight to the death for you.’

Godfrey stared out at the paddock. The white stallion had been calmed, and was now allowing the groom to lead him around the ring.

‘Will you be riding him in the assault?’ I asked.

Godfrey laughed dismissively. ‘I would not risk him. He is too good to be felled by an Egyptian arrow.’

‘Then risk me,’ I pleaded. ‘Put me in the vanguard of the battle. When they hurl rocks and arrows and fire at us, put me on the top of your tower.’

‘I think you have spent too long with your Englishmen. I have heard they fight every battle as if they want to die in it.’ He laughed again, the same short laugh as when I had asked about the horse. ‘Perhaps that is a good thing.’

I waited. Godfrey drummed his fingers on the wattle fence. His horse was skittish, tossing its mane and kicking out its hooves as if the meagre business of walking around a ring demeaned it.

At last, without looking at me, Godfrey said, ‘You can go with the tower, if that is your wish. But first you must submit to me and swear your allegiance.’

I dropped to my knees in front of Godfrey and repeated the few words he told me, forgetting them almost as I spoke them. When I had finished, he held out his hand like a bishop so I could kiss his ring. Loathing myself, I pressed my lips to the cracked, black stone that bulged from the worn gold. His ancestors’ ring, I remembered: I had seen it before, in his tent before the council at Rugia. I wondered what had happened to the other ring, the gold seal that had been taken from me at Ravendan. He had wanted me dead, then; now, I feared I would grant him his wish. Fate is inescapable.

I got up, brushing the dust from my knees.

‘All those who will be with me at the top of the tower are already chosen,’ he announced. ‘So are those who will be on the second level, ready to charge over the drawbridge when we lower it.’

‘But-’

‘You and your men will go at the bottom of the tower. We will need strong arms to push it.’

There was nothing I could say. Godfrey knew it.

‘You may go. I suppose you will have to tell Count Raymond how you have changed your loyalties.’ Again that tight smile. ‘No doubt he is used to hearing it by now.’

I found Raymond in his tent, alone, as he often was in those days. He must have just finished paying his knights and labourers their wages: a broad table laid with a chequered cloth had been set in the middle of the room, piled with small stacks of coins, and a pair of scales sat at rest in its centre. I remembered the scales the third horseman had carried in the ceremony the night before, and shuddered.

‘What do you want?’ He sounded impossibly tired, an old man whose life had become a dispiriting ordeal. Barely looking at me, he dropped a succession of coins into one of the pans of the scale until it sank into balance.

The July sun had turned the tent into an oven. The cloth walls seemed to throb with the light outside and stifle the air, but that was not why I felt ill.

‘It is about the assault. .’

Raymond swept the coins into his palm and arranged them on one of the cloth squares. ‘The towers are almost ready. The English captain says we should be able to launch our attack on Wednesday, Thursday at the latest, if the priests agree.’ Absent-mindedly, he began arranging the coins in a pattern like a flower. ‘I am glad that you came. I wanted to talk to you.’

The sickness in my stomach seemed to grow. I tried to speak to pre-empt whatever he would say, but my mouth was suddenly too dry.

‘The princes have already begun to discuss who will rule Jerusalem when we conquer it. The kingship of Jerusalem should only be given to the mightiest and worthiest of princes, and I wanted your assurance that the emperor has not wavered from his commitment to me. That when the victory is won and the city liberated, I will have his support for my claim.’

I stared at him, not knowing whether to feel pity or scorn. Even after all his humiliations, his disastrous entanglement with Peter Bartholomew, his stubborn pursuit of the siege of Arqa, the loss of half his army, he had not learned humility. He stood on the diminished rock of his own dignity while the tide washed out, and railed at the waves for going the wrong way. It was so childish as to be ludicrous.

Something of my astonishment must have shown on my face, and perhaps Raymond felt it himself, for he added softly: ‘I was lord of thirteen counties, and I left them all behind to pursue this vision of Christ that the Pope conjured before me. My court at Toulouse was the greatest court west of the Alps — now my court is a tent that smells of horse shit. I am a realist, Demetrios. I know I am nearer the end of my life than the beginning, and I came here knowing I would not go back. But that does not mean I should die without dignity. What are Bohemond and Godfrey? Second sons and bastard sons of worthless lines. Did you know that Godfrey only inherited his dukedom because his hunchback uncle was sterile as a mule? What did they give up to come here? What sacrifices did they ever make?’

Even if there had been an answer, he would not have wanted to hear it — least of all from me. I shrugged, and looked at the floor.

Raymond sat back and fiddled with his coins again, sliding them across the chequered cloth to form the shape of a cross. ‘After all I have suffered, this ordeal will not have been for nothing. You understand.’

A silence fell between us, in which the only noise was the clink of coins as Raymond’s hands knocked them together.

‘I will not be fighting in your army when we attack Jerusalem.’ I rushed the words out, stumbling and mumbling. Only when I had finished the sentence did I dare to look at Raymond. He sat very still: the only thing that moved was the corner of his empty eye socket, which twitched rapidly.