Faithful Dead

8

‘Your grandson?’

‘Yes. He is a courageous boy, like his father, but sometimes strong-headed. Yes? Is that the word?’

‘Headstrong.’

‘Ah, thank you. Headstrong.’ Mehmed repeated the word a couple of times under his breath, as if committing it to memory.

Geoffroi said carefully — it seemed neither polite nor diplomatic to infer criticism — ‘I was surprised to see a child in the field of battle.’

Mehmed sighed. ‘Ah, sir knight, you ask yourself what sort of a people can we be, what sort of a man am I, to permit a little boy to do a grown man’s job. Yes?’

‘I — well, yes,’ Geoffroi admitted.

‘It was not done with my permission,’ Mehmed said, in a tone of voice that allowed no argument. ‘The child — his name is Azamar, incidentally — the child is disobedient.’ The fat face crinkled into an indulgent smile. ‘But then what spirited child of six is not? Azamar was confined with his mother in the innermost fastness of my house, told — ordered — to keep well away from any openings through which a Christian arrow or assault weapon might find him. Yet, so strong was his wish to fight the treacherous Franks, whom we had believed to be our friends, that he slipped away from the vigilance of his mother and her ladies, made his sly way past my servants and my guard, found himself a horse that was far too big for him and rode out to do battle.’

Geoffroi said admiringly, ‘He sounds quite a lad.’

Mehmed nodded. ‘Quite a lad, yes. You must understand his great desire for our family to be seen to have at least one man on the field and I, alas, as you see. .’ He made a rueful face, extending a hand to indicate his large, unwieldy frame.

‘You said he stole a horse,’ Geoffroi began.

‘He did not steal,’ Mehmed rebuked him. ‘The horses in my stable are ever at his disposal.’

Geoffroi was, he realised, going to have to be more careful how he phrased things; this grandfather, clearly, was so besotted with his grandson that, in his eyes, the child could do no wrong. Well, hardly any.

‘He had no horse when I came across him,’ Geoffroi said. ‘He was on the ground.’

‘On the ground.’ Mehmed’s face reflected his pain. ‘Yes, so I have been told. On the ground, a six-year-old child, wounded, concussed, helpless. And a great Frankish knight about to — about to-’ Unable to put such a horror into words, he closed his eyes and waved a fat hand, as if to push away the very thought.

Geoffroi, who could think of nothing to say, kept quiet.

After a while, Mehmed opened his eyes again and fixed them on Geoffroi. ‘You saved him,’ he said, his voice soft. ‘You risked your own life to pick him up out of the path of that fury with the broadsword, and you rode off with him until you found a quiet place where you could treat his wound. Then you rode back with him and left him in the safest place you could think of, right outside the gates of his own city of Damascus.’

‘It wasn’t right outside,’ Geoffroi muttered.

‘Ah, honest as well!’ Mehmed exclaimed. He waved a hand around at the assembled servants, who all echoed, ‘Ah!’ sounding, Geoffroi thought, like the wind in the poplars. ‘But near enough, sir knight, for little Azamar to trot up to the city walls and swiftly be brought inside to safety.’

‘Is he all right?’ Geoffroi asked. ‘That head wound was bleeding profusely.’

‘He is all right, yes. His mother and her nursing woman have tended him, bathed him, fed him, cuddled and coddled him, and now he sleeps.’

‘I am glad of it,’ Geoffroi muttered.

‘You are glad?’ Old and fat he might be, but Mehmed had sharp ears. ‘Think, then, how glad I must be, for Azamar is the son of my only son, my jewel, who died when the child was two years old.’ Shadows of a great grief crossed the round face and, for a moment, Mehmed put up a hand to shield himself from Geoffroi’s intent stare. Then, recovering, he said quietly, ‘Azamar is all that I have. He would be precious in any event. Under the particular circumstances that apply to my family, he is doubly, trebly, four times precious.’ A soft smile crossed his face. ‘Four times precious,’ he repeated. ‘Yes. I like that.’

There was a short pause. Then, as if remembering his manners, suddenly Mehmed clapped his hands and shouted out a barrage of words in a language quite strange to Geoffroi. At once, three of the servants leapt into action, swiftly rushing to Geoffroi’s side and proffering trays of food, drink and something that looked like cloth, steaming gently and smelling delicious.

At a loss, Geoffroi went to take one of the tiny cups. But the servant, with extreme delicacy, withdrew his tray a fraction, allowing the servant bearing the hot cloths to advance instead. Geoffroi nodded his thanks and took one of the cloths.

But what was he to do with it?

The servant — how subtly attentive they were! — immediately put down his tray, unfolded the tightly-rolled cloth and, holding it out, mimed a quick, neat wiping of face and hands. Understanding at last, Geoffroi took it from him and gave his hands, face and neck a very thorough wash.

There were soft titters from behind him. Mehmed, crushing them with a steely look, said something in his own language. Then, as Geoffroi handed the now filthy cloth back to the servant — he was ashamed of the black dirt; he couldn’t think when he had last bathed — Mehmed said kindly, ‘We are pleased that we may offer you this small service.’ Then he clapped his hands once more, and the food and drink trays were offered again.

Geoffroi only ate a tiny amount — the delicacy was extremely sweet, and in fact made him feel rather sick — but he accepted two cups of the hot, spicy drink. Then, when he had nodded his thanks, the servants withdrew.

He wondered what would happen next.

He wanted, more than anything, to be safely back in his camp. Could he ask to be taken? Or would that break some rigid rule of Turkish hospitality?

Mehmed had clapped his hands again. This time, a servant from the shadowy far side of the hall advanced, bowing low before his master and holding out to him some object, wrapped in soft leather, laid on a velvet cushion.

Geoffroi, embarrassed, hoped very much that it was not going to be some unlikely, unsuitable gift; more of that tooth-rotting sweetmeat, perhaps?

Mehmed beckoned him forwards. He moved to the foot of the marble steps. Mehmed beckoned again; ‘Come closer! I cannot reach you down there!’

Geoffroi did as he was bid.

He watched as the fat fingers unfolded the leather. Whatever was inside was not sweetmeats, that was clear, because, as it caught the light, rays shone out of it like bright stars in the night sky.

Mehmed was holding up a gold chain, from which hung a large, dark-blue stone. Round in shape, and about the size of Mehmed’s thumbnail, it was set in a thick gold coin, the centre of which appeared to have been softened and hollowed out slightly, so as to hold the stone firmly. There was lettering of some sort around the edge of the coin, although Geoffroi could not read it.

Mehmed swung the stone on its chain gently, to and fro, to and fro. Then, in a hypnotic voice, he intoned, ‘Behold the stone that men call the Eye of Jerusalem. Its mystical origins are lost in the past, and it came to my family when we were young and the tally of our days was yet brief.’ He gave the deep blue stone a loving, almost yearning look. ‘It is protector and friend to its rightful owner, keeping him safe from enemies both known and unknown,’ he went on. ‘Dipped in water, it will make a febrifuge that also has the power to stem bleeding. Dipped into a drink proffered by a stranger, it will detect the presence of poison.’

There was a long pause while Mehmed continued to swing the stone and everyone else watched it. Then he said, ‘It was ever told, and the tale passed down from father to son, that the day would come when the Eye of Jerusalem, great treasure of the Mehmeds, would be given in exchange for something that we valued yet more highly. Until this day, we could not imagine what event this tale foretold.’ He sighed again. Then, abruptly shooting out his arm and holding the stone out to Geoffroi, he said, ‘Now we wonder no more. This day you saved my grandson, last male child of my line, and returned him safe to me. He is more valuable than all the sapphires and gold in the world and, in exchange for his life, I must do as long tradition orders me and give to you, sir knight, this precious jewel.’

Very slowly and cautiously, Geoffroi reached out and took the chain from Mehmed’s fingers. The stone hung heavily; he could hardly bear to look at it.

‘Take it,’ Mehmed said, ‘you are its rightful owner, and, from this day forward, it will acknowledge you as its master and protect only you.’

‘But-’

‘There is no but,’ Mehmed said gently. ‘Even if I had the courage and the foolhardiness to countermand a thousand-year-old tradition and hang on to what is now yours, it would advance me nothing, for the Eye knows a new master now and would do me nothing but harm.’ His small, dark eyes went back to the great jewel as if it drew them. Then, breaking his gaze away with an obvious effort, he picked up the leather wrapping still lying on the cushion, held it out to Geoffroi and said, ‘Put it away, sir knight. Wrap it up and hide it well.’

With one last look at the stone, Geoffroi folded it up inside the soft leather and pushed it deep inside his clothing. He could feel it, hard against his chest.

Mehmed, who seemed to be overcome, said from behind the hand he was pressing to his face, ‘That is all, sir knight. My men will take you back to your camp although, I am sorry to say, once more they must cover your head. I regret the mode of your transportation to my home and from it, but I would not have my dwelling known to the Franks.’

‘I understand.’

Before Geoffroi was quite ready — he would have liked a long last look around the extraordinary hall and its rich fabrics and furnishings — the hood was once more pulled down over his head. This time his wrists were bound in front of him, which was easier.

But, just as the two horsemen began to lead him away, Geoffroi broke free of them. Turning to where he thought Mehmed sat on his divan, he said, ‘Sir, I had no thought of reward when I went to the aid of your grandson, and I would have asked for none. He was a child, and we — I do not kill children.’ He paused, trying to think of an appropriate form of words, then said, ‘I wish you a long and happy life and, for Azamar your grandson, I wish the same, with the hope that he weds a fair wife and begets a quiver-full of sons.’ Then he made a very deep bow and finished, ‘Mehmed of Damascus, I thank you.’

From in front of him and slightly to the right came Mehmed’s voice. He said, ‘I thank you for your wishes and I extend the same sentiments also to you. It is for me to thank you, which I do with a full heart. Farewell, Geoffroi of Acquin. May Allah turn a kind face upon you.’

Then the two horsemen took Geoffroi’s arms and marched him out of the hall and back along the maze of passages to the stables.

It was only as they were cantering away through the silence of the dark night that he realised.

Mehmed’s spy network must have infiltrated right to the heart of the Frankish camp. Because he had known Geoffroi’s name all along.

With the humiliating failure of the siege of Damascus, the crusaders had, in Muslim eyes, turned themselves into incompetent, hapless fools.

With no clear purpose in Outremer, the continued presence there of what remained of King Louis’s great army seemed pointless. As the August days passed and the year proceeded into September, then October, the King acceded to pressure from his men — many of whom had already deserted — and issued orders that those who were still there should be provided with funds and allowed to return home.

King Louis himself, it was rumoured, was to remain in Jerusalem, and Queen Eleanor would stay at his side. Nobody quite knew why; Geoffroi, for one, could not bring himself to care very much.

The army was moved up to the coast, at Acre. Preparing to depart — the ship that would take him at least part of the way home, as far as Constantinople, was due to sail in the morning — Geoffroi thought back over the sixteen months that he had been away. He still wore his crusader’s cross; had he fulfilled his vow? He had seen the Holy City, Jerusalem, yes. But could he put his hand on his heart and say that he had fought for God’s cause, and thereby gained the longed-for remission of his sins?

He was not sure.

He tried to ask some of his fellow knights and, when they shrugged and said, of course! what else? he asked a priest. But the priest, also due to sail for Constantinople in the morning, clearly had other things on his mind and paid Geoffroi even less heed that the knights had done.

In the morning, sailing away from Acre in the pale dawn light, Geoffroi stood at the ship’s rail and stared at the dry, dusty land until it was nothing more than a faint smudge on the eastern horizon. Then, with a sigh, he turned his back on Outremer and began to think of home.

On the long march overland from Constantinople, Geoffroi met up with the dark-haired knight from Lombardy, who had come seeking him out. Both were affected by the pleasure of seeing a familiar face in a friendless place, and they fell into the habit of riding together. In the perils of that endless journey, it was an advantage to have a companion; conditions on the northward march were very different from how they had been when the great Christian army had ridden south. Then, they had been a vast force, unassailable, invulnerable, taking what they wanted, unmindful of the feeble protests of the weak and the unarmed.

Now, riding in small bands, it was they who were vulnerable.

Afterwards, Geoffroi could not help but wonder whether the Eye of Jerusalem had played any part in his survival. Certainly, the fact that he finally reached home largely unhurt and reasonably healthy was something of a miracle. Marking the daily tally of misfortunes — horses gone lame, falling sick, having to be slaughtered for meat; men using up their last particle of energy and collapsing by the roadside; fevers, sickness and injuries; theft, assault and even murder among the men as their supplies and their hope ran out — Geoffroi began to believe that his survival must have something supernatural about it.

He first put the Eye to the test when, in a small village on some desolate Bulgar plain, he and three of his companions were approached by a pair of ragged, foul-smelling herdsmen and offered some sort of fermented, milky drink in exchange for coin. One of the knights eagerly reached into his pouch to take out a coin, and was on the point of putting the cracked wooden cup to his lips when Geoffroi murmured, ‘Wait. Let us retreat a few paces first.’

Angrily the knight — a tall, rangy Burgundian — cried, ‘Wait? What for?’

But Geoffroi did not answer, instead walking away from the herdsmen and moving a little apart. The Burgundian followed him.

‘Give me the cup,’ Geoffroi said quietly.

‘No! It’s mine, I just bought it!’

‘Let me test it,’ Geoffroi insisted. ‘It may-’

The Burgundian paled. ‘You think they try to poison us? The bastards, wait till I-’

Geoffroi grabbed at him. ‘Wait,’ he repeated.

Then, turning away from his comrades, he took the Eye from the secret place under his shirt where he kept it safe, unfolded the leather cover and held the jewel over the wooden cup.

Nothing happened.

Then he gently lowered the sapphire in its gold coin into the milk.

And, after an instant, there came a sort of fizzing sound. A wisp of yellowish smoke floated up from the surface of the liquid. Hastily Geoffroi withdrew the Eye.

Turning back to the Burgundian, he said, ‘It’s poison. Don’t touch it.’

The Burgundian glared at him. ‘You are sure?’

‘I am.’

The Burgundian took back the cup, dashed it and its contents to the ground, then drew his sword and, in the blink of an eye, one after the other cut off the heads of the two herdsmen.

Geoffroi, horrified, stared at the headless bodies, their blood at first fountaining and then seeping into the dusty ground. Looking up, he met the Burgundian’s eyes.

He was wiping his sword prior to returning it to its sheath. With a faint lift of his shoulders, he said, ‘It was them or us. Would you have me leave them alive to poison more poor, thirsty knights?’

Geoffroi made no reply.

He tested one of the Eye’s other claimed virtues a month later when the Lombardy knight went down with a fever. Hardly crediting what he did — his friend was raving, sweating profusely and thrashing about in his makeshift, insubstantial bed — Geoffroi heated some water, cooled it and then, again ensuring that he was unobserved, lowered the Eye into it and stirred it a few times around in the cup. Then, supporting the Lombard’s head, he trickled a few drops on the cracked lips. The Lombard ran his tongue over his mouth, taking in the liquid. Geoffroi repeated the exercise, then again. On the fourth attempt, the Lombard sucked up and swallowed two decent mouthfuls.

His fever broke that night.

In the morning, he was weak but fully conscious. Two days later, they were able to resume their journey.

It was the water itself that restored him, Geoffroi told himself. Everyone knew that fevers dried a man out, and that water was the way to make him better again. So, the Lombard had drunk, and he had recovered.

That had to be the way of it.

The alternative — that Geoffroi truly did have in his possession a miracle-working jewel — was almost too awesome to contemplate.

Protective jewel or not, Geoffroi’s luck appeared to desert him in the spring of the following year. Their progress over the winter months had been very slow; some days, the weather had been so foul that it had seemed the safer option to remain in whatever meagre shelter they had found for the night.

With their food supplies all but non-existent and their funds running dangerously low, the four knights — Geoffroi, the Lombard, the Burgundian and the latter’s kinsman — were ambushed in a mountain pass. The Burgundian was killed outright by a rock dislodged from the mountainside as the assailants charged down from the heights. The remaining three knights, penned into a narrow file whose width made the use of a broadsword difficult, if not impossible, were swiftly overcome.

There were enough men in the band of assailants for some to pin down the knights while others went through their garments and their belongings. Geoffroi, fully believing his end had come, silently mourned his home and his kinfolk, neither of which he would ever see again.

The band of thieves attended to the Lombard and the Burgundian first. Then, just as they leapt up and prepared to approach Geoffroi, there was a shout from somewhere up above and a horn was blown three times in quick succession. To a man, the marauders stood up, jumped nimbly over the knights and ran off, scrambling back up the steep side of the gorge as if it were a flight of steps.

Geoffroi’s initial huge relief quickly evaporated. He had retained his weapons, his small parcel of food and what little money he had left, yes. But, unless he now abandoned his companions and went on alone — which was unwise as well as ungallant — he faced the prospect of supporting the three of them on his own rapidly-dwindling supplies.

It was hopeless.

They ran out of food two days later. Starving, seriously dehydrated, ragged and filthy, they presented themselves at a reasonably prosperous-looking farm and threw themselves on the farmer’s mercy. When their crusader’s crosses failed to impress, they offered their labour. Finally, when a promise had been extracted from them to work until the harvest was gathered in exchange for food and water, they were given a meal. Not much of a meal, but it was the best food Geoffroi had ever tasted.

They set out on the last leg of the long road home in the late autumn of 1149. Again, misfortune struck; they were at the foot of an Alpine pass when a life-threatening snowfall occurred. They had food enough now, and there was nothing for it but to descend down the pass, find shelter and camp until the weather relented.

They finally came down on the northern side of the mountains at the beginning of March. They had been snowbound, they had got lost, and the Burgundian’s kinsman had taken a bad fall. But they were alive.

As they rode on, Geoffroi constantly expected that the Lombard would announce he was leaving them; his home must now lie to the west, and the direction in which the trio was travelling was north-west. But the Lombard said nothing.

Finally, Geoffroi asked him.

With a rueful glance at him, the Lombard said, ‘My friend, I would, if I may, travel on with you.’

Amazed, Geoffroi said, ‘Haven’t you had enough of travelling? As God is my witness, I have!’

The Lombard smiled. ‘Ah, Geoffroi, but you probably do not have a young woman waiting for you at home, whose formidable mother will insist becomes my wife the moment I have got my boots off.’

‘You are promised in marriage?’

‘Yes. Oh, she is fair, and I dare say will make me a splendid wife. But not just yet. I wish to spend a little more time free and single before I am forced to settle down and chained to the house for ever more. I would dearly love to travel the road home with you, if you will have me.’

Moved by his friend’s honesty, and flattered by the fact that he obviously enjoyed Geoffroi’s company sufficiently to desire some more of it, Geoffroi agreed.

They bid farewell to the Burgundian’s kinsman on the road from Beaune to Veezelay. Then, hearts high and singing as they went, they marched on north and, in the fine spring weather of 1150, they came at last to Acquin.