Knights of the Cross

It was no animal they roasted. It was a man. Through a prism of tears, I watched Tancred and the Norman throng revelling in the firelight as Sigurd dragged me away.

ι β

Three weeks passed after that abomination. I did nothing to delve into the deaths of Drogo and Rainauld; I avoided any errand which took me near Quino, Odard or Bohemond, and they for their part did not seek me out. They would have found scant welcome if they had, for every day the memory of the prisoners whom I had betrayed into their care visited torments upon me. Anna and Sigurd tried to plead my innocence, but I did not heed them. I was sullen, ashamed, and withdrew from their company too often. I must have been more irritable even than Tatikios, whose soul seemed daily to shrink within him at the Frankish sneers and threats he endured. Nor could any of us find solace in the affairs of the siege: the walls of Antioch remained as unyielding as the mountain behind, and its garrison safe within. Each morning we woke to the Ishmaelite chants resounding from their church towers, and each night the same sound mocked us to sleep. One day I met Mushid, the Syrian swordsmith, walking by the Orontes, and I asked him what the words said.

‘Our God, Allah, is greatest, and none other is to be praised,’ Mushid told me, translating easily into Greek. ‘It is the second pillar of our faith.’

After that the song rang more bitterly still in my ears, an inescapable, unceasing rebuke proclaiming the triumph of our enemies.

One day, a week after the feast of Easter, Tatikios summoned me to take a message to Bishop Adhemar in the Provençal camp. The past months had told terribly on him: his hair had thinned, his skin had paled, even the golden nose seemed tarnished. He no longer dared set foot outside the Byzantine encampment; indeed, he could spend days on end never leaving his tent. Once, visiting a nobleman’s house, I had seen a menagerie filled with every manner of exotic beast: it had struck me then that while many of the smaller and humbler creatures met their captivity with philosophy, those who were greatest in the wild became most wretched in the cage. Such an animal was Tatikios: without armies to command and princes to flatter, with no campaigns to direct or enemies to outmanoeuvre, the life was strangled from him.

‘Pay the bishop my respects, and ask him why eighty bushels of grain sent to me by the Emperor from Cyprus have not arrived.’ Tatikios paced before the golden saints and eagles on the wall. ‘Tell him – no, demand of him – that if he and Count Raymond abuse their command of the road from Saint Simeon, I will see to it that the Emperor’s bounty dries up.’

‘Yes, Lord.’ I bowed. The longer Tatikios spent in his tent the more punctilious he became, as if by walls of protocol alone he could protect himself. It did not seem to soothe his worries.

Although Bishop Adhemar travelled and fought as the legate of the Patriarch of Rome, he made his camp with the Provençals of Count Raymond. He was the most exalted man in the army, inasmuch as the bickering princes could acknowledge any one master, yet he did not set his tent away from the masses or take shelter in the comfort of a farmhouse. Nonetheless, there was no mistaking his tent among the muddied and frayed surrounds: the white cloth gleamed as if woven from alabaster, and the pole which held it up stood at least a head taller than the others around. Outside the door two banners proclaimed his faith: one a simple design of a blood-red cross on white cloth; the other his own standard, the Holy Virgin cradling her child. A few beggars and paupers – though who in that army was not a pauper? – knelt hopefully nearby, their bowls poised for any charity that might emerge, but otherwise there was only a single guard in a blue cloak. On hearing my errand, he was swift to let me pass.

‘Greetings, Demetrios Askiates.’ The bishop rose from behind a wooden table and lifted a hand so that the palm faced me. He pronounced a blessing, in Latin words that I did not understand, then waved me to be seated. ‘Have you come to speak of Drogo?’

Even the name of Drogo dredged up thoughts of death and anger. ‘Your Grace, I have a message from my master Tatikios.’

‘He desires to know what I have done with his grain?’ the bishop guessed. He leaned forward, watching for my reaction, and I met his gaze. Though his eyes were kindly, and warm like polished oak, there was a sharpness in them which I fancied might cut through to the soul. Despite his white cassock and crimson cap, he did not have the look of a holy man: his face was taut and cracked, like hide stretched over a shield, and his shoulders seemed more suited to bearing a sword than a staff. He must have been twenty years my senior, the years etched into him, yet there was unbending strength there which I would not want to meet in battle.

‘Tatikios desires to know why eighty bushels of the Emperor’s grain have not reached him,’ I said.

‘Then your errand is futile.’ He smiled at me. ‘If the grain had been in my hands, it would already have passed to his. I can only suppose that some of Count Raymond’s men must have misnumbered the shipment, and taken it by mistake.’

‘Their mistake means we go hungry.’ I was unwilling to accept excuses that we both knew to be false.

‘Every man in this camp goes hungry. But if Tatikios can control his appetite and forgive the injustice, I will see that the deficit is made good in the next shipment.’

I nodded. We both knew that the Franks delighted in denying the Byzantines our rations, and that we could do nothing about it save protest. When the Franks had passed through Constantinople, the Emperor had used his command of their provisions to force obedience; now the trick was revisited on us.

‘And what news of Drogo?’ the bishop asked. He spoke lightly, but did not try to mask his interest.

‘There is no news of Drogo,’ I said harshly. ‘Nor of Rainauld. Bohemond seems to have lost his interest in the question, and even if he had not, I am no longer minded to serve him.’

‘It was an evil thing that his nephew did with the prisoners. If I could have stopped him . . .’ He parted his clasped hands before him, like a man releasing a bird.

‘There seems to be much evil in this army that you cannot stop.’ The memory of Tancred swept aside all caution and respect for rank. ‘Prisoners are killed, food is stolen, and you – you who wield the authority of God Himself – claim impotence. How is it that God’s legate has so little power in the Army of God?’

Adhemar did not flinch. ‘The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. Sometimes evils, great evils, must be borne in a higher cause.’

‘The cause of letting thousands die besieging an unbreakable city?’

‘The cause of salvation – and of peace also.’ He leaned forward, his brow creased by intent or sadness. ‘Do not scoff when I say peace. For all my life – and yours also – the peace of God, to which all Christians should adhere, has been nothing more than a dream in Christendom. Norman against Greek, Frank against German, father against son and emperor against king – ambition and greed have stirred every lord against his neighbour. Dukes become kings and earls become counts, but at what profit? A lord may add another country to his estate, but it is a wasted land, its fruits and its people pillaged by war. In such circumstances, famine and pestilence and hate and despair and all other works of the Devil flourish, while faith and justice are obliterated.’ He closed his eyes in pain, and I wondered what images he saw behind them. ‘You have seen the princes, Demetrios, their pride and their jealousies. Only a single power could impose peace on them: God’s power, as vested in the Pope. All my life I have worked to advance that power. Now we are at its crisis.’

His words were heartfelt, supple and strong as steel, but all his preacher’s art could not mask the contradiction at their core. ‘You would make peace by waging war?’ I asked. ‘Truly, it is said: “I bring no peace but the sword.”’

Adhemar shook his head. ‘You do not understand our purpose. Since the time of Pope Gregory, the church has fought with words and swords to bend the princes of the Earth to its rule, so that under one authority there need be no struggle. Now, at last, my lord Pope Urban has united all the tribes of Christendom under the banner of the cross. Their feet tread the road to Jerusalem, and their souls walk the still thornier path to the peace and fellowship of Christ. For the first time in history, the lords of the Earth have willingly submitted themselves to the direction of the church.’

‘Would they have followed you without the prospect of war and plunder?’ Afterwards I might wonder that I had spoken so freely, so intemperately, to a man of Adhemar’s station, but for now his proselytising energy provoked equal response.

‘The church must work in the world God made. And human flesh is weak. But if we can keep hold of their ambitions, and govern their wills, then eventually we may guide them to a higher path. This great project is the crucible in which the power of the church, and the peace of Christendom, will be forged. Do you wonder, then, at the fires that burn us?’

‘I wonder that you claim to govern their wills, yet cannot command eighty bushels of wheat to reach my camp safely. Nor even keep Tancred from committing the foulest abomination. I see no power – only vain words.’

‘There are many powers in this world, visible and invisible,’ said Adhemar patiently. ‘When Christ came, he did not bring an army of angels to smite his enemies. His was the power to teach and to endure suffering; the power of compassion over anger. If I had ten thousand knights at my command I would be a rival to the princes, and they would sift my words through suspicion and distrust. It is only by forsaking the means to their form of power that I gain the spiritual power to engage their souls. Moral strength comes from weakness in arms – but it is a transient strength, easily spent, and thus much must be sacrificed to the greater end.’

He sat back, apparently drained by the sermon, while I at last let deference reassert itself. It seemed to me that he spoke in paradox, theological riddles to cloud his impotence, but I did not say so. Instead, his last words had spurred a new thought in me.

‘On the subject of Drogo, your Grace, there is an aspect of his death which goes beyond my understanding.’

Adhemar gestured to me to continue.

‘A month before he died, he and his companions journeyed to the valley of Daphne. I have followed their path and seen where they went. Beneath one of the ancient villas, they discovered a hidden chamber.’ As best I could remember, I described the form and the decoration of the cave. ‘It was as nothing I have ever seen.’ Nor had I discovered anything from the priests in our camp, who had shied away from any report of such pagan evil, enjoining me only to confess and forget it. ‘I wonder whether in learning to combat idolatry, you have heard of anything similar?’

Adhemar scratched his white beard, his eyes apparently fixed on some knot in the wood of the table. ‘A bull,’ he murmured, repeating what I had told him. ‘It was an animal, I believe, much worshipped by the ancients. Stephen!’

He called, and a young dark-haired priest appeared from behind the inner curtain of the tent. I felt a stab of wounded confidence that words I had spoken so intemperately to the bishop had been heard by another. The priest ignored me, however, and inclined his head to his master.

‘Fetch the writings of the fathers from my library,’ Adhemar said.

The priest disappeared and Adhemar looked back to me. ‘We shall see what ancient authorities can tell us of ancient idolatry.’

In a few minutes the priest returned, bearing two enormous volumes. They were artfully made, stitched with crimson thread and bound with stout iron locks, while the leaves within seemed tinged with a great age. Unlocking one with a key that he took from his robe, Adhemar cracked it open and turned slowly through the pages. They whispered and crackled like fire. I could not read the script but I could admire its beauty: row upon row of words in perfect alignment, broken every so often by oversized letters swirling across the page. So even was the text that it might have been hammered out from a mould, like coins in a mint.

‘His Holiness, my master, foresaw that I might need the direction of wisdom in the wilderness.’ Adhemar licked his finger and turned another page. ‘These are from his own library in Rome. Ah.’ He took a candle from the priest, who had fetched it unprompted, and held it close to the parchment. ‘Here is what Eubulus says of the ways of the pagans. “I have heard that the Persians falsely worship a hero who – they say – sacrificed the Bull of Heaven, by whose blood they believe the world and life were created. They name this hero Mithra; they celebrate his rites in secret caves, so that veiled in darkness they may shun the true and glorious light of Christ. They say—”’

He broke off, snatching the candle away so that the page fell into shadow. ‘There are some lies which a Christian should not hear repeated, lest entering by his ear the Devil poison his heart.’

Being deemed unworthy of secret knowledge was ever a spark to my temper, but I managed to restrain it. The words which the bishop had already confided were portion enough for my mind: what could Drogo and his companions have purposed in a Persian temple?

‘Of course we need not range so far from Truth,’ Adhemar said. He seemed distracted, still leafing through the book in search of something. ‘It is written that when the Israelites were at Sinai, the Lord said to Moses: “You shall slaughter a bull before the Lord; some of its blood you shall smear on the horns of the altar with your finger, and all the rest you shall pour out at the base of the altar.”’

‘It is also written: “I delight not in the blood of bulls or lambs or goats.”’

Adhemar’s face lifted swiftly from his reading and he glared at me. ‘You have no cause to remind me what is written in scripture. But among the credulous and wicked, much that is written can be twisted to the purposes of evil. As is warned of here, indeed.’ His finger came to rest on a fresh page of text. ‘From the writings of Tertullian: “The Devil, by his wiles, perverts the truth. The mystic rites of his idols vie even with the sacraments of God. He . . .”’ Adhemar’s aged brow creased as he concentrated on his text, muttering under his breath in unintelligible Latin. When he looked up, the sharp edge of his eyes seemed dulled by confusion.

‘This is remarkable,’ he said, his voice deliberately controlled.

‘What?’

‘In this same passage, Tertullian writes: “The Devil too baptises his own believers; he promises the indulgence of their sins by a rite of his own.”’ The bishop’s fists clenched white around the book, so tight that I feared he might rip the pages from it. “‘There in the kingdom of Satan, Mithra sets his mark on the foreheads of his soldiers.”’

All resentment and irritation flooded from me. ‘When we found Drogo, there was a mark on his forehead in blood. A mark in the shape of a Latin sigma.’

‘So I have heard.’ Adhemar closed the book and snapped the iron clasp shut.

‘I thought it might be the initial of his killer – or of a lover whose affections they rivalled. Could it instead stand for Satan?’

‘Do Greeks believe that the Devil writes in Latin?’ Despite his evident shock, the bishop managed a thin smile. ‘The mark may be the shape of an S, but there is another form it resembles. A form much associated with Satan and his works.’

Adhemar’s eyes searched my own. ‘Do you not see it? It is the form of a serpent.’

ι γ

That night, after supper, I left our camp and climbed a little way up the mountain, to a small hollow in the lee of the tower of Malregard. We had long since driven the Turks from these slopes, and Tancred’s cannibalism had deterred any spies, but there were still enough footpaths and posterns unguarded that I could not be easy in my mind. Yet I needed to escape the confines of the camp, the clamour of men and beasts and arms, to find an expanse in which my mind could wander. Perhaps I had chosen unwisely, for the fear of marauding Turks pressed my thoughts far harder than any distraction in the camp, but I squeezed myself in the shadow between two rocks and let curiosity gradually tease away my fears.

The questions which exercised me offered scarce comfort: it was a lonely place to contend with the ways of the Devil. Several times I tried to reason a path of thought, and each time I found my way barred by some insuperable image: the cave, the bloody mark on Drogo’s face, the flies crawling on Rainauld’s rotted corpse. Rainauld and Drogo had entered the temple of some Persian demon; Quino and Odard too. Had their deaths then been some form of divine punishment for their impiety – or the hand of the Devil reclaiming his own? Suddenly I was assailed by the vision of a diabolical claw, wreathed in smoke, scratching out its evil sign on Drogo’s body. I trembled, and fastened my hand around my silver cross. Such fancy would serve me nothing.

A noise from the slope below broke my thoughts in panic. I leaned forward, bowing my head as I tried to discern the least whisper around me, but it needed little effort. The beat of footsteps crunching into the stony soil was unmissable, coming ever closer, and I cowered back with my cloak thrown over me. ‘Deliver me from evil, Lord,’ I prayed silently, closing my eyes lest they betray me. ‘Have mercy upon me, sinner that I am.’

The footsteps halted, terrifyingly close, though there seemed to be only a single man. I had my knife with me, but stuck in the cleft I could hardly hope to spring on him in surprise. And what if he were a Frankish sentry, one of the tower guards come to relieve himself? I might easily provoke a massacre if I knifed him in the dark.

‘Are you trying to become a hermit, Demetrios, to emulate Saint Antony?’

My eyes sprang open. In the hollow before me stood Anna, her silk belt luminous under the folds of her palla. She was turned towards me, and though I could not see her face I could tell there was a smile on it. Abashed, I scrambled out.

‘You should take more care,’ I scolded her. ‘Wandering the mountain at night, you may find yourself emulating any number of saints more gruesome than Saint Antony.

‘Saint Demetrios, for example, stabbed with a pagan spear. Why have you come here?’ The levity in Anna’s voice vanished with the last question, unable to overcome her worry. For weeks now she had fretted at my ill mood, sometimes remonstrating with me, more often just watching me with concern. Far from soothing me, her anxiety only added shame to my misery.

‘I came to find the peace to think. Why have you come?’

‘I followed you. I feared you might find too much peace on this mountain in the dark.’

‘No peace at all with you about.’ I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around her to show that I meant no anger. She pressed forward, her cheek cool in the spring air, and for a moment we embraced in silence.

‘What thoughts did you come to think?’ she asked, drawing me over to a rocky shelf where we could sit in shadow.

‘Evil thoughts.’ At supper I had avoided recounting my conversation with the bishop, but now I found I could summon the words with ease. At first I spoke to the night, not meeting Anna’s gaze, but as my story continued I leaned ever closer towards her. My eyes began to sift her face from the surrounding darkness, and I slipped my hand into hers so that our fingers wove together.

‘You cannot think Satan himself killed Drogo?’ she said when I had finished.

‘No.’ It was true – I did not think so, though I could not entirely disbelieve it either.

‘Even if the murder was the Devil’s work, he need not have troubled to stir himself. There are many acolytes too ready to hear his bidding.’ Anna paused. ‘What did Bohemond say?’

‘I have not told him. I have not spoken with him since I saw the cave.’

‘He has lost his enthusiasm for finding Drogo’s killer?’

‘Yes.’ I remembered the Count of Saint-Gilles’s cynicism. ‘When it seemed a Provençal might have been the murderer, Bohemond was eager to prove the man’s guilt. Now that Rainauld is beyond suspicion, his interest wanes.’

‘It will wane still further if he discovers that his men worshipped at the shrine of a Persian demon. That will not enhance his standing in the Army of God.’

‘His standing matters nothing while the army wastes itself against this city.’ Again, my anger welled within me. ‘For what he and his nephew have done, I would happily see their heads impaled on Turkish spears. If his men have communion with the Devil, if Satan has come to claim them for his own or if God has wreaked his vengeance, so be it. I no longer care what befalls them, nor even whether Antioch falls or stands. I would like to see Jerusalem, but not in the train of this army of thieves and murderers. That is no pilgrimage.’ I lowered my voice, aware that my words might carry too far in the quiet of the night. ‘Let them all kill each other, the sooner that I can return to my family.’

My face had grown hot with anger. Then, suddenly, there were cool lips against my own, drawing the fever from me. I started, then pressed forward in haste to meet her kiss. For long moments we said nothing.

‘Whatever befalls the Normans, you won’t stop seeking Drogo and Rainauld’s killer,’ Anna said, pulling her hood back over her hair.

‘Because Bohemond has bought me?’ I challenged her.

‘Not at all.’ She set her finger against my mouth to hush me, then stroked it over my cheek and into my beard. ‘In part, because Bohemond may find the truth unwelcome. But mostly, I think, because you cannot let a mystery be until you have torn off its veil and revealed it to the world.’

Anna spoke truthfully, and I opened my arms to acknowledge it. Somewhere in the night an owl was hunting, while insects chittered and water dripped from a mossy ledge nearby. Down on the plain the Army of God would be dousing its fires and settling onto muddy straw and reeds. But up on the mountain, under a starless sky, Anna and I sinned in silence on the rocky bed we had made.

ι δ

Anna’s embrace comforted me that night, but stark guilt gnawed at me next day. The memory of the cave had weighed heavy on me for weeks: my soul could hardly bear further sins. I was in a black humour as Sigurd and I walked the road on the west bank of the Orontes, checking all who passed for hoarded food or treachery. The worst straits of our famine had abated in the month gone by, as spring had opened the mountains and the seas to the Emperor’s convoys, but a little food had proved almost worse than none. Our grain became the seed of a thousand quarrels, envy and greed flourishing on its stalk, and it took frequent patrols to keep peace in the camp.

‘We would do better,’ said Sigurd, ‘turning our efforts against the city.’

We would indeed. With sun and food, the army’s strength had begun to recover, but the spring had produced no thaw in the Turkish defences. Across the sparkling river, beyond the tents, Antioch’s long walls faced us as stoutly as ever. From the heights where we stood I could see the red-tiled roofs of the houses within, and the terraced orchards climbing up the slope behind. In the fields to the north tiny figures steered ploughs and oxen, tilling the ground for the new season’s crop. They could be confident, I feared, of still being there to reap the harvest.

‘If I were the princes, I would grow more nervous every day,’ said Sigurd. ‘Once their armies find their health, they’ll turn to greater mischief if they cannot spend their vigour in battle.’

‘There’s little danger of mischief, then.’ A stone had worked its way into my boot, and we paused while I extracted it. ‘It’s been two months since Bohemond defeated the last relief army. There are more Turks left in Asia, and the news of our siege will have travelled far. If they come again in strength, we will be hard pressed to defeat them.’

‘Then perhaps they’ll allow us to go home.’

Sigurd might joke, but we both knew the danger. Rumours of impending Turkish armies swept around the camp every day, but recently they had become more consistent, more specific. Only that morning an imperial courier had brought Tatikios a message. He would not divulge its contents, but it had left him pale. As long as we had none save the city’s defenders to oppose us, the priests could preach that time was of no import in the service of the Lord. But that delusion was folly. Sooner or later, it would be exposed on the spears of an approaching army.

‘Demetrios!’ A Varangian, his fair hair blowing out behind him, came running up the road. ‘The doctor has sent me – she says you must come. She has discovered something about the dead Norman.’

‘Drogo? What is it?’

‘She would not say.’

‘Where is she?’

‘In her tent, treating a Frankish pilgrim.’

I left Sigurd and ran back. Anna had caused her tent to be set on the southern edge of our camp, facing the open ground that separated us from the Normans. A narrow stream ran off the mountain nearby to give fresh water, and nourished a plentiful supply of reeds for the patients’ rest. As was her custom when the sun shone, Anna had rolled up the walls of her tent. Underneath the canopy were four crude beds, planks raised on stones and covered with rushes; three were empty, but a half-naked figure was lying face down on the fourth, apparently asleep. A poultice bound in cloth oozed green fluid onto his back. On a stool beside him Anna kept patient vigil, her dress covered by a much-stained apron.

‘What have you found?’ I asked, panting with the effort of running.

She looked up from her patient. ‘I wondered whether Drogo’s name would bring you.’

‘When you call, of course I come immediately.’

She wrinkled her nose in mock disbelief, then gestured back to the bed. ‘Look at this.’

As soon as I looked, I saw why Anna had summoned me. From the poultice, I guessed there must have been some cut or boil on the man’s neck, but that was not the first wound he had suffered – nor what drew my gaze. Among the warts and freckles and pimples, a long scar ran up his spine, disappearing under his dishevelled hair; another intersected it just below the shoulder. The skin was puckered tight, with none of the glossy sheen of a freshly healed cut, but the lines were straight and clear as the day they were carved, unmistakable in the cross they made.

‘I see why you thought of Drogo.’

‘He came to me to lance a boil. He was reluctant to remove his tunic, but the pain was so great that at last he surrendered.’

‘This was cut some time ago. He—’

Something of my voice must have penetrated the man’s dreams, for he shuddered, and turned his head abruptly towards us. ‘Who are you?’

‘Who are you?’

‘Peter Bartholomew.’ He winced as his movement strained the burst boil. ‘A pilgrim of the Lord.’

I could have guessed from his ragged clothes that he was no knight. Nor was there any nobility in his face: his nose was crooked, as if it had been broken in a fight, his teeth were cracked, and the skin was pocked with sores. ‘Do you follow Christ faithfully?’

‘As faithfully as I may.’

‘Really?’ Anna pointed to the base of his spine, just above the folds of his tunic. The skin around it was covered with blisters, some bubbling up, others long since burst and crusted with pus. I grimaced; I had been in the army long enough to know the symptoms of an immoral disease.

Bartholomew’s ratlike eyes blinked at us. ‘Even Job, who was perfect in the Lord’s sight, was smitten with sore boils from head to toe. I endure my trials as best I can.’

‘Doubtless the Lord will judge you as you deserve. Was it He, pilgrim, who carved His sign in your flesh?’

Bartholomew yelped and tried to leap up from the bed. The poultice tumbled from his back, spilling pulpy leaves over the soil, but I had expected his move and clamped my hand on his shoulder to hold him down. He writhed and twisted like an eel in my grip until Beric, the Varangian who had summoned me, stepped forward and pinned down his arms.

‘Who put that mark on your back?’

‘I did it, as a mark of my piety before the Lord.’

‘You did not carve it by reaching your hands over your shoulder. Who helped you?’

‘A . . . a friend.’

‘His name?’

‘He is dead now.’

‘Is he?’ Trying to ignore his stink, which was very great, I leaned close to Bartholomew’s ear. ‘You are not the only man to bear that cross, Bartholomew. I have seen it on two others, though their piety earned them no favour from the Lord. They were dead.’

‘Dead?’ Spit drooled out of the side of his mouth.

‘You have heard of Drogo of Melfi? Or Rainauld of Albigeois?’

‘I know of the knight Rainauld. He was a Provençal, as I am.’

‘Then you know what befell him, how his broken body was found ravaged in a culvert.’ I pulled out my knife and laid the flat of the blade against his neck. He shivered at the touch of the cold iron. ‘You would not wish to suffer the same fate.’

The pilgrim’s ugly face creased into sobs. ‘Have mercy,’ he wailed. ‘I came here for healing, and now I will be murdered. Have mercy on Your servant, Lord. Deliver me from my enemies, from the workers of bloody iniquity who set snares for my soul. O Lord my shield, God of mercy, You alone are my defence and my refuge, have mercy—’

‘Silence,’ I snapped. ‘Do not pretend to invoke His name, lest hearing you He visits still more afflictions upon you. Why did you have the cross carved?’

‘To show my piety.’

‘To whom?’

‘To the Lord God.’

I slapped my knife against the raw skin of the boil that Anna had lanced, and he screamed. ‘When two or three men bear exactly the same mark, I think it is more than personal piety that moves them. You were part of some secret order or brotherhood, were you not, and this was your sign?’

‘Yes,’ shrieked Bartholomew. ‘It is true – there was a brotherhood. You could not understand it for it was a fellowship of purity, of sanctity.’

‘A fellowship of purity?’ I repeated. ‘Why should that have been kept a secret?’

‘Because the Devil has many spies lurking to snatch us. Because the Army of God has become corrupted. Our leaders have forgotten Christ and are fallen prey to selfish greed; our camp festers with vice and blasphemy. Why else has God deserted us before this city? Voices cry out to them to straighten their ways, but they suppress us. That is why we meet in secret and hide the marks of our faith, lest the ravening wolves of Satan consume us.’

‘And Drogo and Rainauld were adepts of this group?’ I did not know whether to trust him, but there was a terrified force in his words that betold their truth.

‘I cannot say.’

‘You will say.’ I tapped him with my knife again, though this time on unbroken skin.

‘I cannot. We are sworn to secrecy – and even if I have betrayed that, I cannot betray my companions. I do not know their names.’

‘You must have seen some whom you recognised.’

‘My eyes were only focused on God.’ Having revealed his secret and survived, Bartholomew seemed to be finding new strength.

‘How did you discover the group, if you knew no one in it?’

‘My friend – who is dead – brought the priest to speak with me. She spoke with me for many hours, opening my eyes to truth and repentance. Afterwards—’

So confused were my thoughts that it took a full sentence for me to hear the meaning of his words. ‘She?’ I exploded, spinning him round so that he stared up at me. ‘The priest was a woman? What sort of heresy was this?’

‘No heresy but the truth of Christ. Consider the Holy Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus – she was a woman made a vessel of God’s purpose. Why not another? Sarah lived—’

‘Sarah? Her name was Sarah?’ I felt like a man flailing on the edge of a cliff, snatching at branches not knowing if they would snap or hold. ‘She was a Provençal?’

Bartholomew shook his head, plainly terrified by my frenzy. ‘She was not a Provençal. I thought she was a Greek, though she did not speak of it. Her name was Sarah.’

‘Demetrios!’

The sound of my name spun me around in redoubled confusion. Stooped under the tent flaps, a Patzinak behind him, Sigurd was watching me. His face was grim.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Tatikios has summoned us.’

‘Tatikios can wait,’ I insisted. ‘My business is urgent.’

‘You must come. He has decided to leave Antioch.’

Sigurd led me at a run to Tatikios’ tent, saying nothing. My fears redoubled when I saw a band of Norman knights gathered in front of it, but they did not hinder us. Tatikios’ guards were nowhere to be seen.

I had always thought the interior to be spacious, but it seemed crowded as we entered now. Four more Normans were standing near the door, three of them in armour and one in chains between them. They formed an immovable mass of iron, about which Tatikios’ slaves scurried in haste, bearing bundles of cloth and arms. The rich partitioning curtain had been ripped from its hangings, and the icon of the three warrior saints had vanished from its stand. In the centre, standing by his silvered chair, stood a highly agitated Tatikios.

‘Demetrios. You have come at last.’ He twisted his hands together, made as if to step forward, then slumped into the chair instead.

‘You are leaving, Lord?’ I asked in confusion.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘The better to bring this siege to a close. And for my own safety.’

‘Your safety is assured while the Varangians serve you.’ Sigurd stepped forward, his axe prominent in his hands. ‘A brutish gang of Normans will not trouble you.’

‘On the contrary.’ Tatikios’ voice had jumped high as a girl’s. ‘It is they—’

‘It is we who have saved him.’ The moment the leading Norman spoke, all attention switched to him, to the strength of command in his voice. With his head hidden under a helmet and his back to me, I had not recognised him, though size alone should have warned me. As he turned to face me, he revealed the red-and-white mottled skin, the russet beard and dark hair squeezed beneath the dome of his helmet, the eyes as pale as a winter sky.

‘I owe my life to the Lord Bohemond,’ Tatikios protested. Absent-mindedly, he scratched the side of his golden nose as if it itched.

‘How?’

‘We have discovered a plot,’ said Bohemond. ‘A base conspiracy among those who hate the Emperor.’

‘They planned to murder me,’ Tatikios squeaked. ‘Me – the Grand Primikerios, plenipotentiary of the Emperor himself. Can you conceive it?’

‘Wickedness indeed,’ said Sigurd inscrutably.

‘Why should they do that?’ I asked. ‘What would they gain?’

Bohemond turned to the man in chains behind him, secured between the two knights. ‘Well, worm? What did you hope to gain by your treachery?’

‘Mercy, Lord.’ Long hair covered the prisoner’s sagging face so I could not see him; he moaned as Bohemond aimed a kick at his knee. ‘Have mercy on me.’

‘Confess yourself.’

‘I planned to steal into the eunuch’s tent late at night and stab him in the heart. I despise the Greeks. Their presence in our army draws the Lord’s wrath. They promised to feed us, and we are hungry. They promised gold, and we are poor. They promised to fight, but they sit comfortably in their palaces. Now, at their Emperor’s command, they pay the Turks to assail us in secret, that we might be destroyed.’ His voice, which had been curiously unpassioned, now began to rise. ‘Only when their filth is driven from our camp will the Lord favour us with victory. Only—’

‘Enough.’ Bohemond slapped his hand across the man’s cheek. The prisoner subsided into silence. ‘You see, my Lord Tatikios, the ignorance of some of my followers. I crave your forgiveness, but too many in my army do not love the Greeks. Their charges are lies and slanders, but however often I deny them they are believed.’

‘How did you discover this plot?’ I asked.

Bohemond did not even look at me to answer. ‘One of his companions betrayed him.’

‘Luckily so,’ declared Tatikios fervently. ‘You, Demetrios, are charged with ensuring my safety. You are supposed to guard against rumours and betrayals. You have failed me – and it is only by the good offices of Lord Bohemond that I am saved.’

I bowed my head, and said nothing. I could guess why I might have failed.

‘But if the conspiracy has been discovered and the murderer captured, then why are you leaving?’ Sigurd broke in. ‘To abandon the siege now would be—’

Tatikios drew himself up in his chair, and fixed a haughty stare on Sigurd. ‘I do not abandon the siege, Captain. If you suggest that I do, I will have you dragged across Anatolia in chains to learn humility.’

The axe seemed to tremble in Sigurd’s hands, but he kept silent.

‘This wretch, I fear, is only one gust in a storm.’ Bohemond gestured to the prisoner. ‘There is a whirlwind brewing in my camp – and among all the Franks – and I cannot pledge to halt every evil they may concoct.’

‘If it were only my own safety, that would matter nothing,’ said Tatikios stiffly. ‘But there are other concerns, higher duties. If we are to prosecute this siege to its end, we shall need reinforcements. The Emperor is campaigning in Anatolia – I will undertake an embassy to persuade him to advance swiftly in all his power and might.’

Bohemond nodded. ‘A wise plan. Although . . .’

‘What?’

‘If you leave now, while our prospects seem bleak, there will be many in the camp who misconstrue your motives. Some will talk of fear – others, perhaps, of cowardice. And if they think the Greeks have abandoned them, they may even believe themselves released from their oath to your Emperor, free to seize whatever lands they can.’

‘They will soon find their error when the Emperor returns.’

‘It would be easier if you left some token of your trust, evidence to persuade my companions to adhere to the Emperor. If you were to confirm one of our number in possession of lands, for example, none could deny the good faith of the Greeks. It need not even be lands that you already possess,’ Bohemond added, seeing the doubt on Tatikios’ face. ‘If you assigned future conquests to our charge – under the Emperor’s authority, of course – you would prove your good will at little cost.’

Bohemond could not hide the hunger in his voice, nor in his eyes, as he stared down on the eunuch. Tatikios, to his credit, did not look away, but gazed back as impassive as if he were in the Emperor’s palace. I hoped he could see the doubt written bold across my face.

‘You speak wisely, Lord Bohemond,’ he said at last. ‘I would not desire my departure to become a pretext for any man breaking his oath. Any who did would surely be called to a reckoning before God and my Emperor. As a sign of my earnest desire for friendship and favour between our peoples, I will do as you suggest.’

I fancied that I saw Bohemond’s tongue shoot out like an adder’s, licking his lips in expectation.

‘Your nephew Tancred currently claims the lands of Mamistra, Tarsus and Adana in Cilicia. I confirm them in his possession, as vassal to the Emperor.’

A spasm passed through Bohemond’s back as if he had been struck by a lance. ‘The lands of Cilicia were taken from Armenians,’ he protested, unable to keep the wound from his voice. ‘They are not the Emperor’s to bestow.’

‘The Armenians held them from the Emperor. Now Tancred does. I will have my scribe write out the charter. And as a further pledge of my honour,’ he continued, before Bohemond could object, ‘I will leave my tent and my supplies and a company of my men here at Antioch, until I return.’

‘We will value them, Lord.’ The calm had returned to Bohemond’s voice, though the skin on his cheeks throbbed red. ‘But you cannot forget your own safety. There are many brigands and Turks between here and Philomelium, and the road is dangerous. You will need an escort.’

‘I will sail from Saint Simeon, and take the Patzinaks. Sigurd will remain here as captain, in command of the Varangians. Demetrios, you will see to the well-being of our camp followers and servants.’

‘What will become of the Norman conspirator?’ I asked.

‘He will be judged and punished according to our laws,’ said Bohemond harshly.

‘Good.’ Tatikios clapped his hands together, and rose. There seemed a confidence in his bearing that I had not seen in weeks. ‘I must make my preparations and go. My cause is urgent, and the road long.’ He looked to Bohemond. ‘I shall report to the Emperor all I have seen, and pray that he comes to rescue his noble allies.’

Bohemond bowed. ‘I shall pray that he comes in time.’

Tatikios left two hours later, a stiff figure on a grey palfrey. Two hundred Patzinaks followed on foot, their spears straight and rigid as the bars of a cage, while two dozen horses carried his baggage. We could ill afford to lose the animals, and a detachment of Varangians was sent to escort them back when the men had embarked from the harbour. With a leaden heart, I watched the column ride towards the pale sun as it dipped behind the mountains into the sea.

‘We won’t see him again,’ said Sigurd.

I laughed, though there was no joy in it. ‘Because he won’t return?’ I asked. ‘Or because we shall not be here when he does?’

A wispy feather of down, perhaps from some newly hatched bird, had drifted onto the blade of Sigurd’s axe. He brushed it away, and gave no answer.

ι ε

I had not believed a word of the plot that Bohemond claimed to have discovered, and my distrust proved well founded. I never heard of any punishment meted out to the Norman who had confessed; to the contrary, the next time I saw him, some days later, he was mounted on a fine colt and lavishly dressed. No doubt he had been well rewarded for serving Bohemond’s purpose.

Two nights after Tatikios left I saw more of Bohemond’s schemes. It was after dark, on a grim evening, when a Frankish priest called at my tent. I recognised him from my interview with Bishop Adhemar, a dark-haired man named Stephen.

‘His Grace the Bishop of Le Puy sends greetings,’ he announced to me and Sigurd. ‘The princes hold a council tonight, and you would benefit by attending.’

‘Benefit whom?’ I asked, suspicious of any Frankish invitation.

‘Come and learn.’

As captain, it was Sigurd’s place to go, but he insisted that I accompany him. ‘Someone may need to restrain my temper. And I would not trust Bohemond further than I could swing my axe.’

The council was held in Adhemar’s tent, its furniture stripped away and four benches arranged in the customary square. As ever, Count Raymond had contrived to sit facing the door, where men looked first, with the bishop at his right. On the bench to their left, resplendent in a wine-red robe with a golden belt, was Bohemond. I avoided his gaze and tried to seat myself on the end of the bench opposite Adhemar. Almost immediately there was dissent.

‘My Lords, who are these peasants who disturb our council, foreigners who creep in to spy our secrets? Call your knights, Bishop, and send them away to the dungheap they crawled from.’

It was the Duke of Normandy who spoke, his fat cheeks puffed up like a cow’s. A well-fed belly pressed against the rich silk of his tunic, and he swayed slightly as he spoke. He had distinguished himself by spending almost the entire siege far from Antioch, safe on the coast, and I wondered what it signified that he had returned now. I knew that Sigurd hated him above all Normans, for he was the son of the bastard who had conquered Sigurd’s English homeland.

‘Peace, Duke Robert,’ said Adhemar. ‘These men speak for the Emperor himself, to whom you are all sworn. It is right that they should attend our council.’

‘A dog may bark when his master is away, but you do not invite him to your table. These are not princes – they are vagabonds. They are not our equals.’

Adhemar frowned. ‘All are equal in the eyes of the Lord – while they keep His peace. Soon we shall need every sinew of our strength if we are to survive.’

The threat in his words silenced them, and they retreated glowering to their benches. Adhemar offered a prayer, then turned to Duke Godfrey.

‘The Duke of Lorraine brings news.’

‘From my brother Baldwin,’ said Godfrey. The jewelled cross he wore swung from his neck as he stood. ‘He has sent a messenger from Edessa.’

When we were halfway across Anatolia, the Duke’s landless brother Baldwin had broken away from the army and ridden east, hoping to seize Armenian lands for himself. In a progression of violence, cunning and murder, he had – according to reports – first been adopted heir of the local ruler, then bloodily deposed him, and now ruled the far-flung lands of Edessa as tyrant. Having had some dealings with Baldwin at Constantinople, I could well believe the story.

‘Baldwin sends word that, even now, Kerbogha the Terrible, Atabeg of Mosul, marches his army towards Antioch.’ A babble of panicked chatter burst across the room. ‘From every province of the Turkish empire, from Mesopotamia, Persia and distant Khorasan, he has assembled ar army to drive us from Asia. Already when Baldwin wrote they neared Edessa – within a month, or even within weeks, they will be here.’

The tumult in the room stopped as Adhemar banged his staff on the ground. In an instant the sallow-skinned Count Hugh was on his feet.

‘We must retreat immediately,’ he announced, his tongue flapping to keep pace with his terror. ‘There is no glory in a rout. We must fall back on Heraklea, or Iconium, and join with the Emperor’s forces. Remember that we are but the vanguard of Christendom, and even as we speak fresh armies of the pious are pouring out of the west to aid us. After we have reinforced ourselves, then we can battle this Turk as he deserves.’

‘Retreat?’ Raymond bored his single-eyed glare into the hapless Hugh. ‘Have you forgotten the torments that brought us here – the passes so steep that even crows could not get into them to feast on our dead, and the salt deserts where we withered? If we journey north, rocks and thorns will rip our ragged army apart long before the Turks come. Besides, Jerusalem is to the south – and I will not turn my course until I have fulfilled my vow to walk in the footsteps of Christ.’

His outburst drew approving nods and murmurs, though there was little conviction in them. I saw Adhemar whisper something in his ear, but before the bishop could speak to the council Bohemond had risen. As ever, there was something in his presence which commanded attention, and the company fell silent.

‘Count Raymond speaks the truth. We cannot go back: the road will destroy us.’

He paused, allowing others to mutter their assent. Looking at the Count of Saint-Gilles, I saw his head crooked to one side, the eye half-closed, almost as if he were falling asleep.

Bohemond hooked his thumb on his belt. ‘But the Count of Vermandois speaks the truth also. There is no glory in a rout.’

‘Then what would you have us do?’ snapped Godfrey. ‘We cannot fight; we cannot flee: shall we sit in our tents until Kerbogha burns us alive in them?’

Bohemond showed no concern. ‘The Duke of Lorraine asks what I would have us do. I will tell you. Kerbogha the Terrible rushes on us like a bull. If we fight, we are gored on one horn. If we run, we are gored on the other. If we do nothing, we are trampled under the hooves. What, then, do we do?’

‘Exactly.’

‘We strike it clean between the eyes.’ As if from the air itself, a bone-handled knife appeared in Bohemond’s hand. He rolled the hilt in his palm. ‘In the scant time remaining, we take the city and make it a bulwark to withstand everything the Turks may throw at us. For six months we have sat out here like women, hoping that the Lord would send some miracle to break open the city. Now we have His sign. If we cannot force the city, we are unworthy of our quest. When I hear that Kerbogha is coming, I am not afraid.’ His restless gaze dropped a moment on Hugh, and moved on. ‘I rejoice that now, when the fire is hottest, we may prove ourselves true before God. Every alternative is death. What does the council say?’

‘It says we meet in the peace of Christ, and all weapons are to be left outside,’ observed Adhemar mildly.

‘And I say that famine has starved Bohemond’s mind,’ said Hugh. ‘“Take the city”, he says. Shall we knock on the gates? For six months we have tried to take the city, and—’

‘No!’ Bohemond thumped a fist into his palm. ‘For six months we have tried nothing. Now that ruin is upon us we may at last begin to try. Our stratagems have failed. The Greek King has proved a false ally, and his manless minion has abandoned us in our greatest need. Only if we unleash our desperation can we hope to escape this trap. In peace we esteem humility the only grace, but in war the truest spur is glory. Let the council agree that whoever takes the city, he alone will rule it. With such a prize to be had, we will break down those gates like clay.’

‘No.’ Old though he was, Adhemar’s voice rang above the clamour that Bohemond’s words had sparked. ‘The city belongs to no man.’

‘Except the Pope?’ Robert of Normandy did not bother to stand but stabbed a fat finger at the bishop. ‘We know that Rome allows no kings but her vassals, that she would extend her domain over realms temporal as well as spiritual. Will your master not be satisfied, I wonder, until his fiefdoms stretch from Rome to Jerusalem?’

‘Have a care,’ Raymond warned. ‘Do not rekindle long-forgotten feuds.’

‘My master the Pope does not covet this city.’ Adhemar’s sharp-eyed gaze swept across the room. ‘One city alone is in his heart, and we are still far from reaching it. As for Antioch, none shall have it outright, because none shall take it outright. We fight in the name and service of the Lord: only through Him shall we find victory. We march as the Army of God, and as the Army of God we shall claim the spoils. If Kerbogha does not destroy us first.’

‘You are also bound by oath to return it to the Emperor,’ Sigurd muttered. No one seemed to hear him.

‘I disagree with Bishop Adhemar.’ Still Bohemond would not yield. ‘We fight in the name of God, and with His aid, but we fight also as Normans and Lotharingians and Frisians – even, sometimes, Provençals. I demand to know the will of the council as to whether the worthiest of these should take the city.’

Adhemar thumped his staff three times on the ground. ‘There is only one issue before the council: whether we fight or flee in the face of Kerbogha’s advance. We will know the will of the council on that alone. Who favours flight?’

There was silence. Looking around, I could see the searching expressions on many men’s faces each trying to guess his neighbour’s intent. Some arms wavered in uncertainty, but none was raised.

‘Who favours battle?’

Immediately, and in unison, Raymond and Bohemond showed their hands. With greater or lesser enthusiasm, every other man around the square followed their example.

Adhemar nodded. ‘It is decided. We will face Kerbogha here.’

‘Nothing is decided – nor will be until you acknowledge the truth. Unless one man is assured of the city, none will hazard the risks needed to take it.’ Bohemond pushed through the corner between two benches and stormed out of the tent. Several of his lieutenants followed.

‘Bohemond does not care to be frustrated,’ said a voice. I turned and saw Count Raymond at my side. ‘He has seen off your emperor’s general, but still Adhemar checks his ambitions. For how long, I wonder?’

‘For as long as the Franks stand by their oath to the Emperor, and their God.’

Raymond gave a rasping chuckle. ‘Their God will tell them that they honour Him best by preserving the lives that He has gifted them. As for their oath, who is now here to hold them to it? A company of Englishmen and a scribe? Do you feel safe, Demetrios?’

‘I put my trust in the Lord,’ I said instinctively.

‘I put my trust in stout armour and a sharp blade. You are isolated in your camp, I think – on the fringes of the siege and with none but Normans nearby. When Kerbogha comes, it will be from the north. Are you read to stand in the first line of defence?’

‘Would you rather have me flee like Tatikios?’

‘I would rather have you surrounded by the Emperor and ten thousand of his legions, but that will not happen. Thus, I offer you my protection. Move your tents within my encampment and I will assure your safety.’

‘Tatikios believed that we should not commit to any Frankish faction lest the Emperor lose the allegiance of the others.’

‘He has already lost the allegiance of the others – they merely wait for one of their number to be the first to repudiate him. As for Tatikios, this is no longer his concern.’

‘If we move now, men will see another instance of Byzantine cowardice. They will say we do it to escape the enemies approaching from the north.’

‘You would do better to fear the enemies camped to your south.’ Raymond stooped to pass through the door, and I followed him into the mild evening. ‘When the Turks come and find us trapped between the river and the city, it will not matter if you are in your camp or my camp or even Duke Godfrey’s camp.’

He looked to the north, where the sky was firming into darkness. ‘There will be no escape when Kerbogha comes.’

ι ς

We moved our camp next day, squeezing our tents into the spaces left by Provençals who had died or fled. Every day, it seemed, the weather grew warmer and the skies bluer; trees blossomed and the earth hardened, but nothing could shake off the mournful cloud building over the army like a thunderhead. At night our campfires hissed with whispered rumours of Kerbogha, and each morning fresh patches of bare earth revealed where more tents had vanished away. Yet still the princes could find no way of cracking the city – nor even seemed minded to try. They garrisoned their towers and shot arrows at defenders on the walls, but they moved not an inch closer.

One day, in the middle of May, I was sitting by the river alone, wondering how I might save Anna if Kerbogha overran our camp. Despite all my pleas she had refused to take ship to Cyprus, claiming that she would be most needed when the Turks attacked. I feared gravediggers would be more use. I buried my hand in the earth of the river bank and pulled out a fistful of pebbles, tossing them one by one into the green water. If only I could have cast my cares away so easily.

The clash of metal rang out and I stared round. A little way upstream I could see a loose knot of figures standing near the bank. They carried a rustic armoury of axes, hammers and billhooks, waving them viciously above their heads. In their midst I could see the flashing blade of a lone sword.

I scrambled to my feet and sprinted towards them. They were peasants, Franks, their ragged clothes scarce fit for rubbing down horses. By the turbaned head which bobbed between them, I guessed they had happened on a lone Turk far from his lines. They were baiting him like a dog, and if they did not disembowel him with their tools they would soon drive him into the river.

‘What are you doing?’ I shouted as I drew near.

‘An infidel spy.’ One of the Franks leaped back as the Turk’s sword swung past his chest. ‘The lord Bohemond will pay well for his corpse.’

‘Demetrios Askiates?’ With a ringing clang, the Ishmaelite parried a blow from a billhook and looked up. In shock, I saw that it was not a Turk but a Saracen, the swordsmith Mushid. ‘In the name of your God and mine, get these hounds away from me.’

‘Leave him alone.’ I drew my own sword, for in those days it never left my side, and jabbed it at the nearest Frank.

The peasant, a gaunt and hairless man, spat at my feet. ‘His life is ours. No Greek will keep us from him.’

‘And no Frankish villein shall kill a man under my protection.’ I rolled my wrists and swung the sword. The peasant had begun to raise his sickle; my blade caught on its curve and tore it from his hands. As the other Franks stared, Mushid brought the flat of his sword down on the knuckles that gripped a hammer. They sprang open and the tool dropped to the ground. Before it landed, a kick in the belly had sent another of the Franks sprawling back, while I reversed my blade and thumped the pommel into one more adversary’s face. Blood dribbled from his lip.

‘We will return here, traitor,’ the gaunt man warned me. His gaze darted to the fallen sickle, but two hovering swords warned against rashness. ‘I will come back with my brothers and I will rip out every inch of your entrails so that when I finally throw you in the river you will float all the way to Saint Simeon.’ He stumbled away, drawing his bruised companions after him.

‘You fight well, considering the poverty of your blade.’ Mushid wiped his own blade on the hem of his white woollen robe, squinted down it to check for cracks, then replaced it in its sheath. The iron barely whispered as it slid into the scabbard.

‘The Varangians have been teaching me. I fear I will have more than peasants and pruning hooks to fight before long.’

Mushid’s dark eyebrows lifted. ‘Kerbogha?’ I must have shown some surprise, for he laughed. ‘You forget, Demetrios, that I travel widely in my trade. These past weeks the talk has been of little else.’

‘Do you know where he is?’ In the back of my mind, I wondered what other rumours this smiling, itinerant craftsman might carry, and to whom he might report them.

‘At Edessa. He thought to reduce the city first, but it has proved harder than he thought. I suspect he will soon abandon it and hasten on to greater battles.’

‘And easier pickings.’

‘Come, Demetrios: your swordplay is not so bad.’ He looked at the sky. ‘But I must hurry on, for the wars of this world need swords to fight them. Will you accompany me through the camp? I do not want to dirty my blade again on peasants.’

As we walked north, through the Norman lines, a thought occurred to me. ‘You said you travel widely. Have you ever been to Persia?’

‘Often. It is said that the Sultan in Isfahan himself carries one of my blades.’

‘Tell me: on your journeys, did you ever encounter the worship of a Persian deity named Mithra?’

Mushid looked perplexed. ‘There have been no gods save Allah in Persia for four hundred years – since the Prophet, praise him, converted its peoples to truth.’

‘You have never heard of this Mithra?’

‘Never. Why?’

I hesitated. ‘You were friendly with Drogo. Did he ever speak to you of religion?’

‘A little. Our friendship was easier without it. He was very devout, I think.’ He paused, his smooth face furrowed in thought. ‘You ask about ancient gods, and then about Drogo’s faith. What are you truly asking, I wonder?’

‘I seek any thread I can grasp. Drogo’s murderer has still not been found.’

‘That is bad. The Devil draws strength when his deeds go unchecked.’

‘Then he must be strong indeed at the moment.’

We walked on a little in silence, our hands ever on the hilts of our swords to discourage the hate-filled looks we drew. Eventually, Mushid said: ‘If a man in my village were killed, I would seek his murderer nearby, among his friends, his lovers, his servants and his master.’

‘Drogo’s friends were building the tower by the bridge, and it was his servant who brought us to the body. His lovers . . .’ I thought of the woman, Sarah, whom many had seen but none could find. ‘I do not know. As for his master, Bohemond—’

I broke off in surprise as I saw where we had arrived. Even as I spoke Bohemond’s name, we had come into open ground, in the midst of which stood his huge, crimson-striped tent. A banner emblazoned with a silver serpent hung limp in front of it.

‘I must leave you here,’ said Mushid.

‘For Bohemond?’ Though I hated the memory, I thought of Tancred’s abomination with the Turkish prisoners. ‘You do not know what Normans will do to Ishmaelites like you.’

Mushid smiled. ‘Even Normans can stem their hatred if there is gain to be had. Bohemond seeks a weapon to slice open the city. Perhaps I can supply the blade he needs. Thank you for guiding me here.’

He inclined his head, then strode confidently into the tent. Neither of the guards challenged him.

Two weeks later, at the end of May, Sigurd, Anna and I sat around our campfire, eating fish stew. Our provisions had improved immeasurably since we had moved to Raymond’s camp, for he controlled the supply road to the sea, but there was no satisfaction in it. In those days every meal seemed a last supper before the Turkish onslaught, and the bread was ash in our mouths. Nor did the coming of summer lighten our mood, for our armour weighed doubly heavy in the heat, and the flies which swarmed about the marshes near the river plagued us every hour. We no longer starved, but instead watched disease and pestilence slide their fingers ever deeper into the body of the army. And above all hung the black threat of Kerbogha, now – it was said – less than a week away.

‘To think that it has been a year since we left Constantinople,’ said Sigurd. He speared a lump of meat out of the pot and chewed it off his knife. ‘Your grandchild will have children of his own before you see him.’

‘If I live to see him, the delay will be worth it.’ If all had gone well, Helena should have given birth by now. Every night I prayed for their safety, imploring my late wife Maria to plead for them in the world beyond, but still there had been no word. It seemed there were none I loved who did not live in the shade of death.

‘I will be satisfied to live until next month,’ Anna declared. ‘If Kerbogha comes while the Franks still bicker . . .’

‘Do not say that,’ I snapped. ‘Too often, the fates hear our foolish hopes and honour them. Wish to live a month, and they may grant it too precisely.’

‘Superstition,’ scoffed Anna. ‘I am surprised . . . What is that?’

She pointed through the fire, where some movement in the night had drawn her gaze. It came nearer, at last revealing itself as a child, barely taller than my waist. His hair and clothes were ragged, his face filthy, but his eyes were bright in the firelight and his voice was as clear as water.

‘Which one is Demetrios Askiates?’

I rubbed my eyes. The surrounding smoke ringed him with a hazy nimbus, and his head seemed to burn out of the flames between us like some conjuror’s trick. Against the darkness beyond he was almost ethereally bright.

‘I am Demetrios.’ I touched my hand to a stone in the earth, its rough strength anchoring me to the world. ‘Why?’

The apparition frowned, as if trying to lift phrases from his memory. ‘You have desired to speak with my lady.’

‘Has he?’ Sigurd’s ribald tone broke the illusion, and at once there was only a shabby urchin beside our fire. ‘You did not mention this, Demetrios.’

I ignored him, and Anna’s angry glare as well. ‘Who is your lady?’

‘Her name is Sarah. She will see you alone,’ he added, as he saw Anna and Sigurd making to rise.

The child did not take me far, but led me quickly through the camp to the river. Many who followed the army had abandoned us now, and the empty intervals between fires lengthened. Sometimes the boy disappeared completely, dissolving into the night like mist, but he always emerged to lure me onwards. At the river he seemed to stop, a smudge of white in the darkness, and I hurried to keep close.

‘Demetrios Askiates. You have answered me. Or perhaps I have answered you.’

I halted. Where the boy had gone I did not know, but the shape I had thought was him now spoke with the assured, sweet cadence of a woman. My eyes strained against the veiling darkness, but apart from her white dress I could see nothing.

‘Are you Sarah?’

She laughed – or perhaps it was a ripple in the river. ‘I have many names. You know me as Sarah.’

‘How did Drogo know you?’ I stretched out my hand, hoping for some tree or boulder to lean on, but there was nothing.

‘As a teacher.’

‘What did you teach him – other than to carve scars into his back?’

‘I did not teach him that.’ Her voice was clouded with remorse, and suddenly I felt an irrational urge to hug her close to console her. ‘There will always be men whose minds distort their learning.’

‘Were Drogo and Rainauld such men?’

‘It was not their fault. Drogo’s heart had turned to thorns: whatever tried to reach him was torn to pieces. As for Rainauld, he followed Drogo, perhaps too much.’

‘And what did you teach them?’

‘Faith in Christ. A purer path.’

‘There are enough priests and bishops in this army whose duty that is.’

Again I heard her rippling laugh. ‘Priests and bishops. Their duty is to their masters, the princes of this Earth. They preach obedience, that by it they may have a share in the spoils of war. They care nothing for the souls they shepherd. Look about the camp, Demetrios – can you deny that the Lord has abandoned us?’

‘The Lord passes by, and we do not see him.’

‘If we are pure, he will restore us to happiness. For the moment, this camp is a wicked and dirty place, ruled by crows and beset by wolves. Only prayer and truth can free us. “God is with us,” the princes say, but even as they speak their doom marches on. They and their clergy, they are all corrupted. Only the righteous will escape this place. The rest will perish.’

‘To question the clergy is treason.’ The warmth of the night was suddenly gone from my bones.

‘You do not believe that. In your heart, you know that I speak the truth.’

‘I know that your adepts broke into pagan shrines and died murderously. Is that the purity you taught?’

‘No! I told you, they would not heed me. I thought Drogo sought salvation. In truth, he sought only revenge.’

Though I could not see Sarah’s face, I sensed that at last I had cracked through her serenity. It left me feeling strangely soiled, as if I had broken something precious. ‘Revenge on whom?’

‘Revenge for the loss of his brother. Revenge for the torments he suffered on the plains of Anatolia, and here before the walls of Antioch.’ The white dress fluttered like a moth in the darkness as she moved on the fringes of my sight.

‘But revenge on whom? His brother died on the march, killed by Turks.’

Sarah’s voice seemed to grow softer, as though she were trickling away. ‘I thought that in Drogo’s grief he might hear truth. That through his sadness the Lord might enter. But there are other powers which can enter through a broken heart, and Drogo succumbed.’

She had passed beyond seeing, and as she stopped speaking a wave of solitude enveloped me. ‘Wait,’ I pleaded, stumbling forward. ‘You visited his tent in the hour before he died. He must have told you something.’

‘I tried to reason with him, to draw him back to the light. But he had found a new teacher, and would not hear me.’

‘Who did he go to meet in that dell?’ I demanded. ‘I must know what brought him there.’

Once more Sarah laughed, though now the sound held only sadness. ‘Keep seeking, and perhaps you will find what Drogo sought and found.’

‘What was that?’

‘Truth.’

‘What truth?’

‘I cannot tell you that. Not until you tire of the self-serving lies that the priests tell. When you are willing to discard their deceptions and unveil their secrets, then I will show you truth.’

‘Tell me!’ I ran towards her voice. Whatever her secrets, I was desperate to know them.

But she was gone, moving soundlessly across the meadow, and my only answer was the gurgling of the river.

ι ζ

I awoke next morning with a searing headache. It was the first day of June, and already the heat seemed harsher, parching all life from the air. The shallow streams that fed the Orontes had dried to dust, and I crouched in the river to splash the sweat of a sleepless night off my face. It did nothing to soothe the pain within, nor wipe away the confusion which governed my mind.

In the middle of the morning, Count Raymond summoned Sigurd to his farmhouse and asked for a company of Varangians to relieve his garrison at the tower by the bridge. Every hour, more scouts rode in from the east bringing fresh news of Kerbogha’s advance. The breadth of his army covered the plain from mountain to mountain, they said, a hundred thousand strong. Even slowed by their numbers they would be at the Iron Bridge, where the road from the north crossed the Orontes, by the end of the week.

‘The Varangians should be standing in the vanguard against Kerbogha, not guarding this place,’ Sigurd complained. We were standing on the top of the tower, the city spread out before us little more than a bowshot away. A bowshot, a river, and walls four times the height of a man, I reminded myself, and still impregnable as ever.

‘Your battle will come, and when it does a hundred Varangians will be little more than pebbles beneath the feet of a thousand Turks.’

‘Pebbles sharp enough to make them bleed.’

‘Is that enough?’ There was more sharpness in my voice than I had intended, but I did not try to master it. ‘Will you be satisfied to die in this desolate place, far from home and family, with none but pagans and barbarians to see you fall?’

‘I have been far from home and family for thirty years. If I die here, or in Thrace, or drowned in the ocean it will be the same.’

‘You have a wife in Constantinople.’ He seldom spoke of her, but I knew she had borne him two sons and a gaggle of daughters.

‘A warrior’s wife knows that she will one day be a widow.’

Sigurd looked away, perhaps finding my argument tedious, and I leaned out on the rough-hewn wooden parapet. The tombs we had despoiled made a poor foundation, and I was forever fearful lest the entire edifice should collapse in a hail of splinters. Every time Sigurd moved, the rampart swayed, while the open shaft at the tower’s centre yawned open behind us.

With a nervous sigh, I turned my attention outwards. The sun was high, heating my armour so that it became a forge around me, and although it was not yet midday an afternoon stillness seemed to grip the landscape. I lifted a nearby bucket with both hands and tipped water into my mouth, letting some splash through my beard and down my neck. At the foot of the tower a band of Normans was nailing animal hides to a crude frame, fashioning a shield under which they could approach the walls unscathed. It seemed a forlorn hope to indulge so late; perhaps they planned to use its shelter to destroy the bridge, and so deny the Turks in the city a route to our flank.

‘Do you want an arrow in the eye? Join that seam tighter, or every Turk in Antioch will make it his target.’

There was something in that stinging voice I recognised. Craning my head out through the embrasure I looked closer at the construction. A dozen Normans were busy around the frame while a sergeant paced about, overseeing their labour. He had removed his helmet in the heat, though his hair was still lank with sweat, and he moved gracelessly, spasmodically, jabbing here and there where the work prompted his anger. From my high angle I could not see his face, but I was certain that I knew his name.

I slid down the ladder in the well of the tower and ducked out through its door. Just beyond the stockade, at the bottom of the mound, I found him.

‘Quino,’ I said to his back.

He spun around. In a second, his sword was in his hand. Though we were in open daylight, and surrounded by his allies, he was tensed like a cornered beast. ‘You would have done better to avoid me.’

‘I have nothing to hide from. Do you?’

‘Only catamite Greeks who speak poison and lies.’

‘Poison and lies?’ Perhaps it was something in his temper which prodded me to retaliate; perhaps it was the shroud of mystery and ignorance which had stifled me so long; or perhaps it was my fear of the coming Turks: whatever the reason, I abandoned all caution and advanced towards him. ‘Is it a lie that you and Drogo and the others were adepts of a mystic named Sarah, a false prophet who preaches treason and impiety to your rightful church? Is it a lie that you journeyed to a pagan temple in Daphne and slaughtered a bullock on the altar of a Persian demon? Is it a lie that two of your friends, your so-called brothers, are dead – and you live to see them silent in the grave?’

Though I should have expected it, I was unprepared for his answer. He hurled himself at me like a boar, lifted me by the collar of my mail shirt and threw me down on my back. The hard earth thumped all breath from my lungs, and I lay stunned as he advanced to stand over me. His sword shook in his hand.

‘Worm! Snake! I will cut those lies from your tongue and feed them to you until you choke. Who told you those things? Who?’

‘All who saw you,’ I hissed, squirming backwards along the ground.

‘I will kill him. Kill him! And I will kill you too, Greek. You will not live for the Turks to slaughter. Your prying and your lying—’

He was standing in front of me, little more than a yard away, when without warning the ground at his feet exploded in a puff of dust and stone. He leaped back, and I pushed myself up on my elbows to see what had happened. A small axe, no larger than a hammer, lay where it had gouged a rent in the earth.

We stared up. On the rampart of the tower Sigurd’s broad shoulders squeezed out between the battlements.

‘Forgive my carelessness,’ he bellowed. ‘But be warned – my next throw may be more careless still.’

During Quino’s brief distraction I had the wit to scramble to my feet and retrieve my sword.

‘I do not know if you killed Drogo,’ I told him. ‘But I know that he died with the mark of Mithra on his forehead, and that you were in that cave with him. If we live through Kerbogha’s coming I will see that you are driven from this army as a traitor and a heretic.’

His head jerking like that of a man possessed, Quino rammed his blade back into his scabbard. ‘Then I fear nothing, for you will not survive the battle. But I will grant you this one favour: when you run away from the Turks, shrieking like a woman, the blows that kill you will still strike you on your front.’

‘As Rainauld’s did?’

‘Do not speak of what you do not know.’ He kicked a stone towards me; I watched it bounce wide. ‘For now, it will suffice me to snare the crows who feed you lies.’

Quino stormed away towards the camp, leaving me to wonder what his final threat had meant. And what evil I had stirred.

That night the princes met again in Adhemar’s tent. It was a terse affair, every face grim, and the business was brief. Too brief, perhaps, for what later came of it.

‘Kerbogha’s army will reach the Iron Bridge in two days. I have reinforced the bridge with a company from the tower, and they will defend it, but against such numbers they cannot hold it.’ Raymond’s voice was hard and grey. ‘After that, we must choose where to fight.’

‘If Kerbogha reaches the city, our quest will be over.’ Duke Godfrey tapped the brown cross sewn on his tabard, for like almost all the princes he had come in armour. ‘We shall have shamed our God and our honour as men.’

‘What numbers do we have?’ asked Adhemar. ‘Count Raymond?’

‘Six hundred and forty knights, though fewer than five hundred horses. Some three thousand men-at-arms.’

‘Duke Godfrey?’

‘Two hundred and twelve who can ride. Of the rest, no more than a thousand. Every day they are less.’

‘Lord Bohemond?’

Bohemond, who alone in the company had come unarmoured, looked up as if surprised. ‘Three hundred horse. Nine hundred who will fight beside them.’

So Adhemar went on, until every lord had declared his strength. The dark-haired priest, Stephen, had hovered silent in the background and now whispered something in the bishop’s ear.

‘A little over three thousand knights, in total, and five times their number on foot. How many does Kerbogha have?’

‘Has anyone ridden close enough to count?’ Sigurd muttered.

Raymond glared at him. ‘My marshal has seen the army. He guesses it to be three times our size. Perhaps more.’

‘Christ preserve us,’ whispered Hugh. Had his skin been any paler I might have seen the bone beneath.

‘We will commit ourselves to the Lord’s mercy.’ Adhemar looked around the square, his face severe. ‘As for where we commit ourselves to battle, I propose we tempt them over the Iron Bridge and meet them on the near bank. With the river on our left and the arm of the mountain to our right, we will keep them from using their numbers to encircle us. What do you say, Count Raymond?’

Raymond nodded. ‘It will serve. What does the lord Bohemond think?’

He looked across the tent to Bohemond, who in his silken robe seemed dressed more for a banquet than a battle. Perhaps that was why he had spoken barely a word all evening.

‘It is a wise plan. I can think of nothing to improve it.’

‘Truly?’ Raymond’s face hardened with suspicion, while every other man in the room watched Bohemond intently.

‘Truly. It is, after all, the same tactic by which I defeated the army of Aleppo.’

‘The army of Aleppo was a quarter of the size of Kerbogha’s. And you would have been crushed had I not remained at the city to guard your back. We will not be able to divide ourselves this time.’

‘Are you trying to persuade me against your own plan?’ Bohemond furrowed his brow in mock surprise.

‘I am wondering that you do not try and unpick its defects.’

‘You have just done so yourself. It is the same problem which stifles all our plans. The city.’ Bohemond stood, a strangely confident smirk on his face. ‘I look at the city and all I see is a millstone. A millstone about our necks, one that we cannot shake off. A millstone that will grind us to powder against Kerbogha’s army if we do not break it.’

‘You have said this before,’ said Raymond, his contempt evident. ‘It is not relevant.’

Bohemond laughed. ‘Not relevant? My lord Count, it is more relevant than anything that you have said this evening. To my mind, indeed, it is all that is relevant. Take the city, and every question is answered, every strategy decided.’

‘It is too late to consider such paths,’ said Adhemar. ‘In three days Kerbogha will be here.’

‘Is your faith so weak? Three days is more than enough time for a miracle. As for my tardiness, I have urged this course on the council for months. In this wilderness I have been a lone voice crying out for reason. You have denied me, and the siege has faltered. Will you deny me now, when the only alternative is defeat?’

‘What do you ask?’ Adhemar’s face made it plain that he knew.

‘I ask the council to relinquish its claim to Antioch. To grant its possession to whoever takes it first, that by the triumph of one man we may be spared the destruction of all.’

Before Adhemar could answer, Sigurd was on his feet. ‘It is not the council’s to give. You – we – are all sworn to yield it to the Emperor Alexios. No man can dispose of it save he.’

It was a true claim, and one that might once have weighed with the princes, but it was a poor moment for Sigurd to raise it. Even as he seated himself, I saw the wolfish smile spreading across Bohemond’s face.

‘If your king comes to claim it, I will be the first to kneel before him and surrender it. Until then, I say it is the one prize that may spur us to salvation before Kerbogha comes. I ask the council to give its judgement.’

He took his seat, serene amid the consternation and doubt that he had stirred. All around me I could see counts and dukes testing his words in their minds, probing his devices. All looked troubled.

‘If the city is to be surrendered to the Emperor, I will not object to one of our number holding it in stewardship for his coming,’ said Godfrey. Murmurs of approval sounded around the room. ‘And if one man distinguishes himself in its capture, he will be the rightful steward.’

‘And what if he does not surrender it when the Emperor comes?’ growled Raymond.

‘Then he will be judged a liar and a thief by the council, and punished accordingly.’ Bohemond’s voice rang with honest confidence, though I saw his fingers tapping feverishly on the bench beside him. ‘Besides, who would content himself with Antioch while the holy city itself remained to be conquered? Will the council allow this, or are we to face Kerbogha without hope of victory?’

No one spoke. At last, Adhemar tapped his staff on the floor. There was little strength in the sound. ‘What does the council say? Shall we grant Antioch to the wardship of its conqueror, until such time as the Emperor comes?’

‘I say yes,’ said the Duke of Normandy. ‘If we gain the city, it is a small price to pay.’

‘As long as it is understood that we still honour our oath to the Emperor,’ said Godfrey.

Raymond blew air between his lips, making a noise like wind. ‘I say Bohemond has wasted too much of our time on this matter. If he can conquer the city, by all means let him enjoy it for a short while. For my part, I will concentrate on defeating Kerbogha.’

Adhemar let his stare drift deliberately over the gathering. ‘Does anyone oppose this?’

None did.

‘Then it is decided.’

ι η

I struggled under a heavy burden of dreams that night. In one, I was back on the high tower of the palace in Constantinople, looking out over a blood-drenched field as flocks of eagles wheeled overhead. In another, I was in the culvert by the orchard, looking at Rainauld’s body, except that when I touched him he was not dead. He spoke to me in words that I could not afterwards remember, warning me of some tremendous evil, and when I turned away it was only to see a black bull charging towards me. It chased me through fields and hills, over streams and across rivers, and every time I looked behind me it seemed that one more stride would bring its horns goring into my back. I ran on; suddenly I saw that I had climbed to a great height, and that the ridge ahead was in fact the brink of an enormous cliff. I slowed, but immediately the thunder of hooves overwhelmed me. Helpless, I ran faster, my whole being throbbing with my heart, until with a soundless scream I hurtled over the cliff, felt my body drop away beneath me, and awoke with a cry in my tent. It was still dark, and I recoiled as I realised that there were yet more hours of the night to endure. I reached out for Anna to comfort me, but propriety had led her to her own tent and I felt only earth.

Next morning, Sigurd and our company were ordered to begin dismantling the boat bridge. It was claimed that Kerbogha might use it to attack our flank, though I guessed the princes feared equally that it might become the path of a rout if the army panicked. With the bridge removed, the east bank of the Orontes where we were camped became a closed sack, squeezed between the river and the walls. Whether that would firm our hearts or condemn us to slaughter, none could tell.

‘Do they suppose that because Varangians wield axes, we must be foresters or woodcutters?’

Sigurd, who would have frozen to death before ever using his battleaxe on firewood, swung a carpenter’s axe into a mouldering length of rope. The fibres sprang apart, unravelling where they had broken, and I gripped the side of the boat we stood in as its prow swung downstream. Its dank timber was spongy under my hand.

‘We should leave this in place,’ I grumbled, scrambling back onto the portion of the bridge which remained intact. It swayed under my weight, and from beneath the planks I heard a rumbling as the hulls shifted and knocked together. ‘It’s so rotten that Kerbogha’s army would sink through before they were halfway across.’

Sigurd swung his axe again, and the rope that had held the stern of the boat in place parted. For a moment it stayed nestled against the bridge; then the current took it, and it began to drift away towards the sea. Long strands of weed trailed behind it.

A gap-toothed peasant, one of the labourers who had been assigned to carry away the planks we tore up, wandered over. With the morning sun already heavy on our backs, he was in little hurry. ‘It will be well to break this,’ he said, his words thick with foreign sounds. ‘Already the Turks lurk on the far bank.’

‘How can they?’ I paid him little attention, for I was trying to prise up the next section of the decking. ‘All their gates are guarded by our towers. They are stopped up like wine in a bottle.’

‘They are enemies of God,’ said the peasant seriously. ‘Satan favours the Ishmaelites, and leads them on secret paths. Perhaps he sends demons to carry them over water.’

I glanced at Sigurd, but he was working loose a mooring post that we had driven into the river bed and offered no help. ‘If they have demons to carry them across the river, why bother demolishing the bridge?’

Either he did not understand me or he did not care. ‘Last night they killed a boy who went too close to the river. He was found this morning, stuck with their hateful arrows.’ A rivulet of spit oozed down to his chin as he thought of it.

‘Truly it is said, “Be watchful, for you know not at what hour they will come.”’

My bored platitudes did nothing to deter him. To my irritation, he eased himself down onto the edge of the bridge and sat there, trailing his bare feet in the green water. I wondered if I could cut loose the section that held him.

‘It was a cursed house,’ he announced with relish, cleaning a grimy fingernail on his tooth. ‘The boy, the unfortunate, had two masters and both died. Perhaps the priests speak rightly when they say, “A servant cannot serve two masters”. He was picking herbs on the river bank when the Turks, curse them, found him. They say he was found with a sprig of thyme in his hands, stained with his blood.’

Though I had set my back to the peasant, ostensibly to work loose a nail, his final words began to nag at my interest. Against my better judgement, I looked around to prompt him further. But my question was never spoken, for as I turned towards the city and the camps I saw a great column of knights proceeding from among the tents. At their head rode Bohemond, his great stature raised still higher by the white stallion that carried him. His red cloak tumbled over the animal’s flanks and his spear was held aloft so as to gleam in the sun. Behind him the crimson banner with its twisting serpent hung in the still air.

I put down my hammer as it became clear he was approaching the bridge. His steed grew large in my sight, until it was so close that it dwarfed the city and mountain behind. I had to crane my neck to look up, only to be blinded by the sun above.

‘Demetrios Askiates,’ said the shadow that shielded the sun. His voice seemed to draw the warmth from it. ‘I had hoped to find you here.’

‘The Count of Saint-Gilles ordered me to destroy the bridge, lest Kerbogha try to outflank us.’ I felt the eyes of two hundred horsemen, and the foot soldiers beyond, gazing at me, doubtless wondering why a carpenter should delay their lord.

‘Count Raymond did not know that I must cross this river one final time.’ Bohemond let his spear slide through his hand so that the butt thumped onto the wooden deck, the noise echoing off the water below. He looked at my sweat-soaked tunic. ‘Where is your armour?’

‘On the shore.’ I pointed to the near bank, where I had left my mail, sword and shield to be close in case of attack. ‘Why, Lord?’

‘You speak Greek, I presume?’

‘I am Greek.’

‘Then I have need of you. Arm yourself, and follow.’

He was not a man easily disobeyed, even by his adversaries, yet I hesitated. ‘I am charged with dismantling the bridge,’ I said again, knowing the folly of asking for explanation.

‘Then burn it into the water when I have gone and swim after me.’ The shaft of Bohemond’s spear swung like a pendulum in front of me. ‘Come.’

‘Why – to run away from Kerbogha?’ Sigurd’s arms were folded across his broad chest, and he betrayed no fear of the lord before him.

‘Is that what you would do? Flee in terror, as your fathers did before the Duke of Normandy? Suffice it for you to know that I undertake a final foraging expedition. What fruits we shall reap I cannot say, but I promise that they will be sweet. Now come with me, Demetrios, before I lose patience.’

‘And Sigurd?’

Bohemond laughed. ‘I need a man who speaks like the Greeks, not one who fights like them.’

Even without his taunts I would have been minded to refuse him, yet there was something in his manner which made men want to follow, which promised glory and adventure and fortune wherever he went. I was not immune. Nor could I forget my charge from the Emperor, to observe the barbarians and report any treachery. Only the previous night, Bohemond had won approval to hold the city if he took it: now he marched out in strength, and with a need for interpreters. If he had some secret design, it would profit me to witness it. And I was curious.

‘If I am not back before Kerbogha’s army arrives, see that Anna is protected,’ I told Sigurd.

‘They will have to break my axe in two before they harm her.’

‘You will be back before Kerbogha.’ Bohemond spurred his horse, and it began to trot forward over the remaining portion of the bridge. ‘We will march through the night, and by dawn we will have returned. Look for my standard then.’

If Bohemond intended to march through the night, he first seemed intent on marching through the day. With no mount to be wasted on me, I joined the back of his column, lonely under the hostile glares of his men-at-arms, and followed in silence. The heat of the sun and the weight of my armour made common cause against me: the thin tunic I wore beneath my mail did nothing to cushion or smooth the jabbing iron, yet it gave no respite from the heat either. When once my head slumped, I scalded my chin on the metal, for I had no tabard. The men I marched with made loud, coarse jokes about Greeks; frequently they trod on my heels, or tried to trip me with their spears. With sweat stinging my eyes and my armour chafing, I was trapped in a boiling world of misery. And still we tramped onwards, fording the river out of sight of the city and following the road into the hills towards Daphne.

I had only half believed Bohemond when he claimed that he went to forage, and my doubts were well founded: he kept us far from any village or farm, and when we did pass fields or orchards that remained unscathed he allowed us no delay to plunder them. His knights rode up and down the line, hemming us in like sheep and showing the flats of their swords to any who deviated. Mercifully, I did not see Quino.

We must have marched two hours or more, for the sun was already declining when Bohemond at last called a halt. We were in a hollow, a broad natural bowl surrounded by hills and beyond all sight of habitation. A meagre stream ran through it, feeding a marshy pool, and we scooped the brackish water into our mouths as if it were sweet milk. Insects chattered in the bushes. We pulled off our boots and stretched out on the dry grass, too tired to wonder why Bohemond had brought us there. On the rim above, I saw the silhouettes of horsemen patrolling the heights.

‘My friends.’ The words echoed around the bowl, carrying to its furthest reaches. Bohemond had dismounted and was standing on a rock a little way up the slope, looking down on us like a statue in the Augusteion.

‘You have marched hard and far today.’ An afternoon breeze tugged at the red folds of his cloak. ‘And still there are many miles to travel.’

A low, indistinct groan sounded around the hollow.

‘Yet take heart. At the end of this night, a glorious prize awaits those who dare to snatch it. For months we have suffered and waited before the cursed city, borne only on the faith that the Lord God will rescue us. Now, at our darkest hour, as Kerbogha the Terrible approaches, the Lord stretches out his hand and offers us deliverance.’

Bohemond looked at the ridge above where his knights stood sentinel, then turned back to his audience and lowered his voice. ‘Listen. From here we will travel by secret paths into the hills above Antioch. The watchman who holds one of the towers there looks kindly on our cause: I have struck a bargain with him, and he will admit us. Once inside, one party will make to secure the citadel, while another hastens to throw open the gates to our brothers on the plain.’ A jubilant grin shone from his face; for the first time I noticed that he had shaved off his beard. ‘Who is with me?’

‘What if it is a trap? It has happened before.’

It was a courageous man who questioned Bohemond, even one of his own household, but he showed no anger. ‘If it is a trap, then we will fight our way clear, or die in glory as martyrs of Christ. For my part, I have spoken with the watchman, and I trust to his promise. But if we take the walls, trap or no, I will not be dislodged unless I bring all the towers down in ruin about me.’ His gloved hand pulled out his sword and held it up by the blade, so that it appeared as a perfect cross. ‘Do you hear the rustling on the breeze? It is the sound of our grandsons’ scribes, sharpening their pens to record our deeds. Some of you may see an impregnable city, but by God’s grace I see only a new chapter of His greatness waiting to be written. Who will follow me to the walled city? Who will come with me into Antioch?’ With a quick jerk of his wrist, the sword leaped from his grip and spun in the air, planting its hilt back in his hand. ‘Through God, we will do great deeds and trample down our enemies. I ask again: who is with me?’

Many of the army had risen to their feet as he spoke, some in awe and some in doubt. Now, to a man, they brandished their arms and bellowed their war cries. Some beat their spears on the rocks, others thumped the pommels of their swords against their shields. The hollow rang with the clamour of five hundred men raised to a frenzy, resounding so loud that I feared it might dislodge the very slopes which cupped us. But above all else, over all the shouting and drumming, one phrase swelled imperious.

‘Deus vult! God wills it!’

Bohemond held his arms aloft, his face enraptured like an angel’s. ‘Enough. We should not allow the Turks to hear us, even so far away. We will crawl up on them like snakes, and strike before they have seen we are there. By dawn, I promise you, this long siege will be over.’

ι θ

Though the agonising heat had passed, our journey back through the night felt longer than the afternoon’s march. Worst was the darkness, masking our way and forcing endless knocks and collisions along the column. Frequently men fell, tripping on rocks or slipping off the steep paths we followed. Some escaped with little more than curses and bruises, while others were left to hobble after us as best they could. Spears swayed and bumped each other, rattling like bones over our heads; one swung so low that it almost stabbed through my skull when its owner stumbled ahead of me. Frogs croaked in the under-brush and bats squeaked in the trees – once I froze as I heard a bell off on my right, though I guessed it was only a goat. I touched my chest, feeling the silver cross through the layers of cloth and iron, and prayed to Christ to keep me safe through the perils ahead. And thus our jangling, clanking, toiling column wound its way over the hills.

On the crest of a ridge we paused for breath. A few half-empty water-skins were passed down the line, and I drank gratefully. At last I knew where we had come: ahead, the dark bulk of the mountain loomed black against the silver sky; down to my left, far below, I could see the scattered glow of watchfires, and the meandering course of the Orontes like white silk in the moonlight. We were on the southern shoulder of Mount Silpius, and the string of yellow lights glimmering on the next ridge must have been the high towers of Antioch.

Before that, though, a steep ravine cut through our way. There were no paths down – even goats did not venture here, it seemed – and our column fanned out into a straggling line, each seeking the safest route. The ground underfoot was loose and treacherous: many times I had to jerk my feet away from rocks which gave beneath me. Once I was too slow, and I found myself thrown onto my back and sliding down with my shield rattling after me. A cloud of dust rose, filling my nose and mouth, and when I threw out a hand to halt myself I grasped only spiky branches. All around me I could hear similar sounds of tumbling rocks and cursing men, and my heart pounded for fear that a volley of Turkish arrows might fly hissing out of the night. None came.

The stream that must have carved the gully had dried up, leaving only a rocky channel at the bottom. After a few minutes to catch our breath we were moving again, now climbing the far side of the ravine. We scrambled up the shifting scree, heedless of the pebbles cascading down behind us or the rattle of our scabbards striking the ground. Enveloped in darkness and surrounded by alien voices, I felt that I had relinquished my soul to some intangible power, driven on without will or reason. I wished Sigurd were there to calm me with his implacable strength, his unbending faith in the power of his arms, but he was far away.

At the top of the slope we stopped again. The Romans who had built the walls of Antioch had used its terrain to their full advantage, and the greater length of the southern walls rose seamlessly from the steep gully. Here, though, the wall turned away along the ridge of the mountain, and there was a short stretch of open ground in front of us. We waited, pressing ourselves into the earth just below the lip of the ravine and praying that we were beneath the gaze of the guards. Half-whispered commands passed along our line. My face was buried in the grass, and somewhere nearby I smelled the scent of wild sage.

‘Greek.’

A rough hand jostled my shoulder, and again the word was hissed in my ear. ‘Greek!’

I rolled over. A Norman whom I did not recognise was squatting beside me. ‘What?’

‘You must go to Lord Bohemond. That way.’ He pointed east along the gully.

Too dazed to question him, I lifted my shield and edged across the slope, always keeping my head low. About a hundred yards along the line, I found Bohemond crouched in a small hollow with three of his lieutenants. Even in the dark his face gleamed with purpose.

‘That is the tower.’ He pointed ahead, where a slab of grey stood out against the night. A thin bar of yellow light shone from a narrow window. ‘There should be a ladder hidden in the bushes at its base.’

I said nothing.

‘The tower is kept by a man named Firouz. He is a Turk, but he speaks your tongue. You will accompany the first party up the ladder and tell him that I have come.’

I did not ask how he knew this, or how he could be certain that we would not meet a shower of spears and arrows when we reached the wall. ‘Now?’

‘As soon as the watch has passed.’ Bohemond looked up at the sky. ‘We must be swift. Dawn is not far off.’

We waited in silence, watching the walls. As the minutes passed the stones seemed to become brighter, more distinct, and the light in the window faded. A bird began to mewl its mournful song, and was swiftly answered by another. Bohemond fidgeted, while I kept still and felt my limbs grow stiff and damp with dew.

‘There.’

I looked up. A light was advancing along the walls, dizzyingly high above us, blinking as it passed behind the teeth of the battlements. It disappeared into the tower. Bohemond’s knuckles were now white around an exposed tree root.

‘Do you have a cross?’

I fumbled about my neck and dragged my silver cross from under the mail.

‘Wear it openly. It is not yet so light that we will be obvious to each other.’

The torch emerged on the far side of the tower, so close that I could see the shadows of the men who carried it. I heard laughter: no doubt the news of Kerbogha’s approach had lifted their spirits. I prayed that it would equally have blinded them to danger.

The light reached the bend in the wall, turned, and vanished out of sight.

‘Now.’

A dozen knights rose from the shadows and ran across the open ground. With a shove against my shoulders I was sent staggering after them. My shield and armour weighed on me like rocks; every stride seemed to fall short of where I stretched it. My legs throbbed with the effort, and with my head bowed I could see neither friend nor foe. To any archer on the rampart I would be an effortless target.

I came under the walls and dropped to my knees. On my right I could hear the urgent sounds of men searching through undergrowth; then a hiss of triumph. Wood creaked as the knights gathered round the ladder and raised it above them, shuddering as it swayed through the air. It knocked against the wall, rebounded, then settled on the stone.

‘You.’

One of the knights who held the ladder beckoned me over. ‘Climb up there and explain that the Lord Bohemond has come.’

Too drained to argue, I swung myself onto the ladder and began to climb. For months I had stared at these walls, willing them to open and wondering how it would feel ever to break through them: now, as I pulled myself hand over hand toward their summit, I could think of nothing save the frailty of the ladder. It might have been left by the original Roman architects, for the timber was brittle to the touch and every rung groaned beneath my tread. Higher and higher I went, my hands shaking so hard that I almost lost my grip. If I fell, or if the ladder broke now, the impact would snap my back in two.

The ladder held. Now I could see the edge of the parapet looming above me. Three more rungs. Two. I stretched out my arms, feeling the ladder wobble with the movement, gripped the battlements and hauled myself between them. My armour rasped in the night as I slithered through the embrasure on my belly; then I was through and standing, gasping, on the top of the wall.

I was inside the city.

I had no time to think about it. A man in scaled armour and a turban was striding towards me, his dark face twisted with dread. It seemed strange that after so much danger we should arrive to find ourselves feared, but somehow his anxiety quelled my own racking terror. At his feet, I noticed, two Turks lay in pools of blood.

‘Bohemond, pou?’ he asked, waving his hands furiously. So little did I expect it from this Ishmaelite, and so thick was his accent, that he had to repeat it twice more before I understood he spoke in Greek.

‘Bohemond, etho. Bohemond is here.’

A Norman had come up behind me. ‘What does he say?’ he demanded.

‘He asks where Bohemond is.’

‘Tell him Bohemond awaits my sign that he has brought us here in good faith.’

I put this to the Turk.

‘Too few Franj, too few. If I give my tower, it must be to Bohemond only. And his army – he promised he brings his army.’

I relayed his words in the Norman dialect. While we spoke, the knights had continued to crawl over the wall, but with only a single ladder for access they were still alarmingly few. No wonder the Turk trembled to betray the city to us.

‘Mushid, he say Bohemond come with army. Where is Mushid?’

It was the last name that I had expected to hear in that place, while men lay dead at my feet and knights hurried past into the tower. Before I could question him, though, a new voice sounded from the foot of the ladder.

‘Firouz!’

The Turk thrust his head out between the battlements and stared down; I looked out beside him. At the foot of the ladder stood Bohemond, his face ashen in the early dawn.

‘What is happening up there?’ he called. ‘Is it safe?’

I lifted myself forward so that he could see me clearly. ‘It is safe. There is no trap. But the Turk is anxious – he wants you to join him as proof of your intent. He fears you have brought too few knights.’

‘Tell him I have many more men in the gully. If we had another ladder, they would be over sooner.’

I translated his words.

‘There is a gate,’ said the Turk, agitated. ‘Not big, but faster. At the bottom of the tower, down the hill.’

I was about to relay this to Bohemond, but suddenly an enormous crack tore through the air. The ladder was gone: it no longer leaned against the battlements but lay in splintered pieces on the ground. Three or four bodies were strewn among the wreckage, unmoving.

An unearthly scream of rage howled forth from Bohemond, so loud that it must have been heard in the encampment on the plain. His sword was in his hand, and for a moment I thought he might smash it on the wall in his fury. But before he could move a new sound rose from further along the rampart, shouts of anger and alarm. A clutch of fiery torches appeared from one of the distant towers, and by their light I saw spears hastening towards us.

I grabbed Firouz and spun him about. ‘Are they your men?’

He shook his head. ‘They have heard us. We are trapped. Your men are outside; they will only see us cut in pieces. We are dead.’

As if to prove his words, an arrow slammed into the battlement in front of us. I dived to the ground, pulling Firouz with me as more arrows clattered off the stones above. Some of the Normans had managed to form a line across the parapet, kneeling behind their tall shields, but we were too few. Soon, I feared, every Turk in Antioch would be upon us.

Firouz began to crawl back towards his tower, dragging himself through puddles of blood. Following, I hauled on the hem of his armour and pulled him back.

‘You spoke of a gate,’ I shouted, trying to make myself heard over the rising roar of battle. ‘There are five hundred men beyond the wall with Bohemond – if they can break in, they may yet save us.’

He stared at me witlessly. His beard and armour were smeared red with blood, and I feared for a second that an unseen missile might have struck him. Then he nodded.

‘Through the tower.’

Ducking beneath the arrows that fell around us, we scrambled on our knees into the guardroom. A dead Turk lay sprawled over a wooden stool, stabbed through the eye, while three Normans struggled to barricade the far door. In one corner an opening in the floor led onto a twisting stairwell.

I lifted my silver cross and thrust it before the Normans, just in time to stay their swords. ‘Come with me. There is a gate.’

I led the way down the curving steps, my shield held before me and my sword arm pressed uncomfortably close to the wall. No one opposed us. At the bottom another door led out onto the mountainside, inside the city. It was land we had dreamed of treading for months, yet now we did not even notice.

‘Which way?’

Firouz pointed down the hill. Not far off, about halfway between two looming towers, I saw a small gate set in the wall, scarcely as high as a man. Thick timbers barred it, but it was not defended.

‘Be swift,’ said one of the Normans grimly. ‘I hear more enemies approaching.’

We ran down to the gate. The knights circled us with their shields, while Firouz and I worked feverishly to loosen the bars which held the door. It could not have been opened in years, for the wood was thick with grime. I strained in vain to pull the bar free from its rusting brackets.

‘Make haste.’

I looked back. A company of Turks were charging up the hill, spears raised before them. More arrows started to fall, several of them thudding into the Norman shields. One even stuck in the timbers of the gate.

I knelt, mumbling prayers under my breath, and thumped the pommel of my sword up against the bar. The impact numbed my arm, but I repeated the blow again. Still it did not move. The din of battle sounded on the walls behind us and the Turks on the slope below drew ever closer.

‘There.’ The bar had moved. Another blow lifted it higher, before a third dislodged it completely. It fell forgotten to the ground. Still the gate would not open, for an iron bolt held it. I hammered frantically. Behind me one of the knights broke ranks and charged down the hill, tearing into the Turkish line like a ram. I heard the chilling ring of clashing metal, and he was swallowed beneath them.

With the ponderous grate of age, the bolt slid clear of its socket. In an instant Firouz and I had our shoulders against the door and were heaving it open. The sun was rising and grey light flooded the hillside beyond. Barely twenty yards away yawned the gully where the Normans waited.

I do not remember what I shouted, only that I had to repeat it for what seemed an eternity before the first of Bohemond’s men began sprinting across the open ground, shields held aloft against the archers on the walls. The first one came through the gate, caught an arrow in the throat and died immediately; the second threw himself to the earth, rolled aside, then leaped into a crouch with his shield before him. Together with Firouz and the other knights we formed a thin line in front of the door. Spears stabbed at us; one grazed my cheek and another glanced off my shoulder. In another minute we would be slaughtered.

But our line did not shrink; instead, at last, it began to swell. Norman spears thrust over our heads, stabbing back the Turkish attackers. Behind me I could feel a press of bodies pushing me forward, and as our line bulged out men squeezed in among us. When I slipped on the bloody ground, the Turks did not charge through the gap; instead, a Norman was instantly in my place. In seconds I was left behind, while ever more Normans ran by to join the battle. Some found the steps in the tower and gained the walls, throwing down the Turks who defended them to be hacked apart by the men below.

Bohemond strode through the gate, his red cloak like fire behind him. His bloodless sword shone pale in the dawn. ‘The city lies open before us,’ he bellowed, and every man roared approval. ‘But victory is not assured. William – bring your company with mine to the western gates, so that we may throw them open and complete the rout. Rainulf – take my standard to the highest point and plant it where all can see that the city is taken.’

In the rush that followed his words I was entirely forgotten. Most of the Normans hastened down the slope with their captain, their appetite for plunder and slaughter undimmed, though a few stayed behind to secure the towers and dispatch the Turks who survived. All ignored me. For a time I sat in silence on a mounting block, watching them, but soon the stink of blood and death overwhelmed me. I walked away, wandering dazed and alone across the scrubby mountainside. The first fingers of sunlight were reaching over the ridge above and a new day dawned over Antioch. It gave me little hope.

I reached a small promontory on the shoulder of the mountain and looked down. Thick smoke rose from the city below, and an occasional gust of wind brought the faint echoes of screams and clashing steel to my ears. I could see the great gates lying open, the hordes of tiny figures swarming through like ants come to ravish a carcass, but I had not the strength to care. I was empty, poured out like water, my heart melted like wax.

Antioch was ours.

II

Besiegers

3 June – 1 August 1098

κ

The Franks exploded into the city like a vessel of flaming oil, splashing fire and death wherever they touched. On the walls, in streets and squares, in their homes and fields, men died and women were broken. Worthless possessions were dragged from houses merely because they could be stolen, then abandoned because they were cumbersome, then set alight because they would burn. Order was hateful, confusion master. By afternoon most of the killing was done.

I had waited seven months to enter Antioch; within hours, I could not bear to stay. All morning I sat high on the mountain, alone, watching the devastation in the shade of the cliff. Sometimes my conscience whispered that I should go down, try to save the innocent, but each time I quashed the thought. It would have effected nothing save my death. I still reviled myself for my cowardice.

As the sun came around onto the face of the mountain and the cries from the city lessened, I rose to descend the crumbling slope. I dared not risk the centre of the city, where the sack had raged fiercest, but kept to the fringes and made for a small gate in the south-west, near the bridge. Even here, the ruin was complete: in half a day, the Army of God had wrought a century’s worth of destruction. Doors lay sprawled flat; charred houses yawned open to the sky; clothes and dishes and tools and carved toys were strewn about like the debris of a receded flood. Worst, though, were the bodies. Most bore hideous testament to their brutal deaths, and in places their blood had turned the dust to mud. I pulled a length of my tunic from under my mail and bunched it over my nose, using the other hand to keep my silver cross clearly visible. Gangs of Franks still roamed, seeking easy loot and violence. In one street I saw a knight wrapped in orange cloth running after a half-naked woman crawling on her knees. The fabric billowed from his shoulders like wings; he seemed so drunk on pillage that he could not move straight but weaved between the pillared arcades. I stuck out a leg and tripped him as he passed, hoping that he would be too crazed to rise. He fell among a pile of Turkish corpses and did not move. The woman he had pursued looked round. Her breasts were withered and shrunk in to her skin, her hair torn; with not a speck of gratitude, she plucked a stone from the rubble and hurled it at me. It bounced off my shield as I watched her vanish down an alley.

At last I reached the walls. The gates were pushed open and unguarded, and I passed through the shadow under the arch without incident. It was only when I had gone a few paces beyond that I thought to look back, to wonder that I had slipped so easily through the door that had defied us so long. I had not even looked to see how the walls appeared from inside. Much the same as from outside, I supposed.

Whether it was the world that had changed or me, nothing seemed as it had before that day. Without the throngs of people, the film of smoke and noise, the camp felt a different place. The patched and torn fabric of the tents was now more dismal, their yawing angles more precarious. On the hill in the distance, the tower that we had erected to guard the bridge stood abandoned. Men had died to build it, and a day earlier it had been our first defence against a sortie from the city. Now it was useless, impotent.

The camp was not completely deserted. Near the river, I found Anna with Sigurd and his company of Varangians. Crates and sacks were piled around them, while dismantled tents lay like discarded clothes on the ground. As Anna saw me she gave a little shriek and ran to embrace me. The day had left me so numbed that her arms around my waist were like hot irons, and it took an act of will to keep from thrusting her away. The evil I had witnessed and abetted defiled me. It would be many days before I could take comfort in kindness.

‘You survived,’ she said. I had rarely seen her drop her composure; now she was almost weeping.

Sigurd set down the bag he carried and gazed at me severely. ‘I told her you would come back. If there were Turkish spears and arrows flying about, I thought you’d have sense enough to let the Normans stand in front of you.’

‘I survived.’ I lifted Anna’s arm away and stepped free. ‘You did not join the battle, Sigurd?’

‘There’s rarely honour to be won when the Franks take the field. And after the siege, little plunder either, I think. Besides, Count Raymond did not invite us.’

‘Did he expect it?’

Sigurd nodded. ‘The Provençals were roused not long before dawn. When the gates opened, they were ready. Was it Bohemond?’

‘He found a traitor who kept one of the towers on the mountain.’ Briefly, I described the night’s business.

‘And how is the city now?’

‘A charnel house. It was well you did not go in.’

‘Soon we shall have to.’ Sigurd pointed to the north. ‘Have you forgotten that Kerbogha and his army are only two days’ march from here? Just because you have been busy, it does not signify that he has not. When he hears that the city has fallen he will redouble his speed.’

In the momentous confusion of the past day, Kerbogha had vanished from my mind entirely: his name now was a hammer on my thoughts. I craved rest, weeks of solitude to mend the fractures in my soul. Instead, it seemed, I had days – or hours – before the next onslaught. I was not sure that I could bear it.

‘We cannot go into the city,’ I said. ‘The Franks are maddened, frenzied. If we go in, they will kill us.’ Nor, I might have added, did I want the taint of their barbarity on me any more. ‘I have suffered long enough on this quest. We will go back to Constantinople.’ Perhaps there I could make myself clean again.

Sigurd looked at me cautiously, perhaps weighing my fragile state. When he spoke it was with unusual calm. ‘We cannot go back to Constantinople, not now. You know that.’

I rounded on him. ‘Why? Because it will be cowardice? Because your honour as a warrior does not allow it?’

‘Because Kerbogha’s army would catch us and kill us – or worse. Do you want Anna enslaved in an Emir’s brothel?’

I wanted to hit him but did not have the strength. ‘Do not test our friendship by playing on my fears for Anna. I can see the risks of our journey, but Antioch will be no safer. Kerbogha will come and besiege it, and all within will be trapped like sheep in a pen, to be slaughtered at his pleasure. If we travel by night, and with nothing more than we need, we can slip past his army unheeded.’

‘And after his army? Mountains so steep that even goats cannot walk their paths, and then the desert. A wasteland without food or water, whose only inhabitants are Turks and brigands. Look at us – how far would we get?’

‘We could take ship from Saint Simeon.’

‘If the Franks who control the harbour allowed it. How likely do you think that is, when half the army is trying to flee? And even if they took you and Anna they would not take a hundred of my men.’

The conclusion was unspoken but inevitable. He would not leave his Varangians to face battle without him.

‘Kerbogha may reach his fist around the city,’ Sigurd continued, ‘but he will find it harder than you think to squeeze it shut. We have spent seven months trying without avail – why should it be quicker for him? The walls still stand unbroken. We are outnumbered but I doubt that we are fewer than the Turks who defied us so long. And if the Emperor is in Anatolia, as Tatikios said, then he may arrive to relieve us within weeks.’

‘No.’ It was a sound argument, but I could not accept it. Others had devised the schemes and fought the battles by which we had taken the city, but it had been my hand that drew the bolt which unlocked the gate. To see the devastation inside again, even for a minute, would be unbearable.

In deference to my frailty, Sigurd had restrained his temper; now he loosed it. ‘Very well. You, Demetrios, can beg the Franks for a ship that they will not give you, or make yourself a target for Kerbogha’s archers, or throw yourself off a cliff in the mountains; I will not lead my company into certain death. To be trapped in the city may be a grim fate, but I would rather face a grim fate behind stout walls than outside them.’ He turned to Anna. ‘What do you say?’

She frowned, her fingers twisting in her belt. Her gaze would not meet mine. ‘I am not a soldier. I think . . . I think Demetrios is right to fear that we shall not survive a siege.’

‘Then you will come with me?’ I said.

‘But I also think that his thoughts are agitated. They do not run clear. You are not a soldier either, Demetrios. Perhaps at this moment you would rather walk free and die than face the awful confines of Antioch. But we must stay alive, or try to. What was it you said two days ago? Even if you had become a great-grandfather before you saw your family again, the delay would be worth it.’

I shook my head, tears stinging my eyes, and turned away from them. A thousand thoughts warred in my mind, but they did not matter.

‘We will stay in Antioch.’

We set our camp on the western ramparts, near the Duke’s Gate. A few of the Frankish captains had roused themselves from debauch and placed sentinels near the gates, but we found a stretch of wall between two towers that none had claimed. It was not a place where I would have chosen to be, guarding the line between two armies, but it kept us from having to venture any further into the city. And whoever attacked, from whichever side, they would pay dearly to prise us out.

As quickly as possible, we set about strengthening our position. Each tower had one door opening onto the adjoining walls and one at its foot leading into the city. Using timbers and rubble, we filled in the lower portions of the stairwell in one of the towers so that it became impassable. In the guardroom above, we stacked broken beams with which we could bar the upper door if necessary. It was hot, weary work, but I did not resent it. The simple monotony of the task lifted heavier burdens from my mind; there was something pure in the effort which I snatched at. For the first time in what seemed an age I peeled off my armour and moved freely, rolling my tunic down to my waist. It was alarming to see how gaunt I had become.

‘We had best forage what food we can.’ I leaned against the stone wall of the guardroom, enjoying the feel of its coolness on my skin. ‘When Kerbogha comes, the supply routes will be cut.’

‘Agreed.’ Sigurd stepped out into the sunlight on the wall. ‘Beric, Sweyn. Take a dozen men and see what provisions you can find in the city. Sheep or goats would be good. And fodder for the horses.’ He paused; through the arch of the doorway I could see him looking up at the top of the tower. ‘We should mount our standard, let the Franks know we hold these walls.’

‘They might take it amiss.’ I followed him onto the broad walkway which joined our towers. Looking back across the city, I could see the three peaks of Mount Silpius looming over us. On the highest, in the centre, it was just possible to make out a red flag strung between a pair of pollarded pines. ‘I do not think Bohemond will suffer any other banner to fly over Antioch.’

‘Shit on Bohemond. When the Emperor Alexios comes it will be the eagle of Byzantium, not the Norman snake, which holds sway.’

‘He will not thank you for reminding him.’

‘Then I will teach him manners with the blade of my axe.’

‘I would like to see it. But to flaunt our standard now would be foolhardy. We are already hated by the Franks; it would be better to keep from offering them a clear target.’

‘Why not raise the banner of the cross?’

I turned, and saw Anna walking out of the tower. She had been arranging her medicines in the guardroom: her sleeves were rolled up and her uncovered hair was tied back with a ribbon. I hoped that none of the Franks caught sight of her.

‘No.’ I shuddered. If I was honest, the pillaging of Antioch had been little worse than the violence that any victorious army would inflict – Frankish, Turkish, Saracen or even Byzantine. When the Emperor whose honour I now served had seized Constantinople, I had spent three days guarding my home and family from the depredations of his army. But the Franks fought not for a king or a lord but in the name of God. It should be different, I told myself.

‘Why not? It is the symbol of Christ – not of any army. Will you forswear Him because of what the Franks have done by it?’ She pointed to my own cross, which hung on its chain against my chest. ‘Will you rip that away and melt it down?’

I did not answer.

‘God will judge the Franks for what they have done in His name. It is not for you to judge Him.’

‘It’s still a betrayal to hide our own banner,’ Sigurd objected.

I opened my arms in surrender to Anna. ‘We will raise the banner of the cross.’

‘We don’t have one,’ said Sigurd.

‘Anna can make it.’

Anna glared at me. ‘I sew wounds, Demetrios, not clothes or flags.’

‘If Sigurd sews it, it will look more like a spider than a cross.’

The strain of the moment passed, though the ache of unease lingered between us. It was unnerving how easily we could come to quarrel. Anna at last consented to make the banner and withdrew to find cloth, while Sigurd turned his attention to our defences again. The city’s houses were built close against the walls, with only a narrow alley between us and them. Immediately adjacent, we looked down on the red-tiled roofs of houses set in a square around a courtyard. A shady plane tree grew in its centre, masking the wreckage that the looters had left scattered about beneath.

‘If enemies reached that roof, they could lay a ladder across the alley and attack us on the wall,’ Sigurd said.

‘If enemies get so far that they are on the roof, we shall probably be doomed anyway.’ I tried to make it a joke, but neither of us smiled. ‘The courtyard will pass as a stable for the horses, though.’

‘Too well.’ Disease and battle had reduced our mounts to a mere thirteen – and if that was an unlucky number I feared it would soon be unluckier still.

‘Let us hope Beric and Sweyn find fodder. And food for the riders as well.’

The light was softening as the sun slid away, gilding us with a burnished light. Perhaps I should have read it as a sign of the Lord’s benevolence, the glow of the victory he had bestowed, but I did not. The very presence of beauty on such a day of torments seemed itself blasphemous: I could not bask in the radiance but willed the sun ever lower, hoping that night would hasten on.

We had broken one siege; now there was another to endure. Did the golden sun presage triumph, I wondered, or would it prove the last glimmer before we fell into darkness?

κ α

The Varangians returned late, empty-handed and bruised. The siege which had seemed so fruitless from outside the gates had bitten harder than we thought: the city was almost starved. What little food they discovered had been furiously contested, Beric reported, in running skirmishes with the Franks which lasted into the night. It was not an auspicious beginning.

If we were to be trapped together in Antioch, there would have to be an understanding. Next morning, Sigurd and I left the walls to seek out the princes, to learn what arrangement would be made for our common defence and welfare. I had not seen any of the leaders since Bohemond had entered the city, and though I shuddered to meet with the architects of this devastation again we could not ignore each other. Like slaves in a galley, we were chained together by fortune, and one could not founder but the others would follow.

Nonetheless, I would avoid Bohemond if I could. Instead, I sought Adhemar.

I had feared to walk in Antioch again, but the new day brought new life to the city. The world had turned, and if the marks of the sack were still scorched into every street and building there was still a sense that peace and order had begun to settle again. The sun had gone down on the rage of the Franks; when it dawned, they were restored to obedience. Armed knights guarded every corner, while pilgrims and peasants hauled the dead from the roadsides and loaded them onto handcarts. There would be much digging in the fields that day if the corpses were not to fester around us. The frenzy of destruction had passed, the outpouring of seven months of frustration: now the Frankish faces were solemn, some almost stricken, as if they themselves could hardly believe the fury that had owned them. A contrite stillness clasped the city, and few gazes were raised to meet ours.

Brief questions and Adhemar’s name brought us at last to the cathedral, the great church of the apostle Peter, who had been Bishop of Antioch before journeying to Rome. It was a worthy monument, with mighty pillars outside and a great silver dome rising over the centre. The Turks, in their impiety, had desecrated it: next door they had erected a minaret, and within they had defaced all Christian ornament to make it acceptable to their own god of ascetism. Already masons and labourers were busy inside trying to unwork the sacrilege.

I left Sigurd in the square and stepped through the bronze doors, crossing myself as I passed the threshold. In silence, I offered a prayer to Saint Peter, though I doubt he could have heard it over the cacophony of hammers and chisels that rang around the hall. Dust clouded the air, muting my tread and swirling in the columns of sunlight that came through the windows. The Turks had certainly erased every trace of Christ – the icons had been removed, the statues plastered over, and the walls repainted with the twisted, bewitching designs the Ishmaelites favoured. The iconostasis had been torn down and I could see clear to the back of the church, where workmen on ladders prised away the mortar that encased the original carvings in the sanctuary. Keeping a wary eye lest some piece of masonry fall from the roof, I picked my way through the rubble towards them.

‘Is Bishop Adhemar here?’ I shouted up. A mouthful of dust parched my tongue.

‘He left, not long ago.’ The man on the ladder did not look down but continued to pick at the mortar with his chisel. Beneath his blows a solemn face was emerging from the masonry blanket that had buried it.

‘Where did the Bishop go?’

Fragments of plaster trickled down the wall. A cheek had appeared. ‘I did not hear.’

I turned away. Behind me, another labourer was carrying a pile of planks in his arms towards the middle of the hall, perhaps to build a scaffold. As he dropped them under the dome, I accosted him.

‘Do you know where Bishop Adhemar has gone?’

The man looked up. His clothes were ragged, and he stooped even without his burden. Some unkind blow seemed to have broken his nose, though the sores and pimples which pocked his face were the worse disfigurement.

‘He has gone to the palace. He said—’ He broke off, staring at me. ‘You! The Greek.’

I had recognised him a moment sooner and mastered my surprise. ‘Peter Bartholomew. Do you still have that cross carved on your shoulders? Or has it vanished under the pox sores?’

‘You should not speak of such things in a church,’ he hissed. His jaw trembled.

‘This will not be a church again until the bishop consecrates it. When he does, I think it will be you who should fear to enter it. Have you seen the priestess Sarah recently?’

‘I do not know what you speak of.’ With a great heave of his shoulders, Peter Bartholomew set his back to me and hurried out through a side door. For a large man, I thought, he scuttled very much like a beetle.

I did not follow him. It was only four nights since I had talked with the ethereal priestess on the banks of the Orontes, but already she was almost forgotten. Drogo, Quino, the temple at Daphne and the sect they had worshipped – all were like relics of a different lifetime. I would never know how or why Drogo had died, but if I escaped Antioch alive I would not care.

I remembered my confrontation with Quino the day before the assault, at the tower by the bridge. You will not live for the Turks to slaughter, he had promised. Where in the city was he now, I wondered? And what had become of his companion, Odard?

I rejoined Sigurd outside, and we walked down the road between the cathedral and the palace, a great thoroughfare built straight as a spear through the city. Once, when Antioch was at its mightiest, the colonnades must have run its entire length unbroken; now they only remained in places. Even there, grime and cracks now veined the marble, and several times the path was blocked where the lintels had collapsed under a heap of shattered tiles. For long stretches the ancient design had vanished completely, usurped by squat brick buildings whose wooden balconies pushed out over the street. Lattice screens covered their windows, but I sensed movements within where furtive eyes looked down on us unseen. It would be a long time, I feared, before those who had survived the horrors of the day before would trust us.

At the southern end of the city, where a second road branched away towards the fortified bridge, we found the palace. It barely deserved the name, being little more than a large villa whose grounds had been overlaid with outbuildings and courtyards, but that had not saved it from the looters. The train of its sack ran far down the street: shattered pottery, torn fabrics, broken artefacts and trinkets. There was even a lion’s head carved from stone, which some ambitious thief had dragged almost a hundred yards before abandoning.

‘I wonder what happened to the Turk who owned that?’ Sigurd muttered.

I shook my head. There were things in the debris which looked sickeningly like severed limbs, ignored or forgotten by the burial crews. There might be peace in the city, but it bore little scrutiny.

We came to the palace. Horses stood tethered to the iron rings in its walls, while men-at-arms milled about in the dusty square. From the west, men and mules brought baggage in from the camp that they had dismantled; from the eastern slopes of the mountain there limped a steady flow of battered knights. Clearly not all the Turks had yet been driven from the city.

Unchallenged and unnoticed, we passed through a long, broad courtyard, under an arch and into a second courtyard. A cloister ran around its edges; in its centre a dry fountain stood flanked by cherry trees. There was no fruit on them. In the shade of their branches a handful of Franks stood or sat and argued. As we approached, a knight in the cloister saw us and ran to intercept us, but the bishop, standing by the fountain, had already noticed us. He lifted his hand, half in greeting, half to still the guard, and walked to meet us. His white beard spilled over a full coat of mail, girded with a thick sword belt, but instead of a helmet he wore a crimson skullcap. Despite the burning sun, his face seemed drained of colour and strength.

‘I wondered what had become of you,’ he greeted us. ‘I heard that you accompanied Bohemond when he forced the walls.’

‘I was there,’ I agreed. ‘Since when I have worked to establish a stronghold on the walls, lest the Turks come upon us. What have you done?’

There were many meanings to my question, and I saw in the bishop’s eyes that he heard all of them. His answer was more simple. ‘There is much to do before Kerbogha comes. You missed the fighting in the city, but they did not surrender it easily. The army is drained, and they will find little here to succour them in the short time given us.’

‘Enough time, surely,’ I said. ‘If we have learned one thing in the past seven months, it is that the walls of Antioch are not quickly breached. They will shield us until the Emperor comes.’

Adhemar grimaced. ‘If only that were so. We can shut the door to the city, but without the lock it will not hold long.’

‘What?’

He pointed over my shoulder, up to the furthest of the mountain’s three summits. It thrust out over Antioch like a buttress, and atop it I could see the imposing outlines of walls and turrets. It was the ancient citadel, built high above the city to command its protection.

‘When Bohemond’s men reached the citadel they found it barred against them. It is impregnable: a single road runs up from the city to meet it and on all sides the mountain drops sheer away. While the Turks hold it, there is a gaping hole at the heart of our defence. When Kerbogha comes, he will climb into the valley behind the mountain, reinforce the citadel through its outer gate, then pour men down into Antioch.’

‘But its strength is also its weakness.’ Sigurd spoke for the first time. ‘If a single narrow path over steep cliffs is the only way up from the city, it is also the only way down. We can block that path and stop them up in the castle, isolate them.’

‘Perhaps.’ There was a hopelessness in Adhemar’s voice. ‘But Kerbogha’s army is beyond numbering. He will throw in ever more men until our bulwark cannot contain them and we are swept down the mountain in a torrent.’

‘Where is Bohemond now?’ I asked.

‘Besieging the citadel. He hopes to force it before Kerbogha comes.’

The beat of hooves interrupted us. Ducking to clear the arch, a horseman cantered into the courtyard. Four knights rode behind him, bearing spears; streaming behind one I saw the bear banner of Tancred. The leader, Tancred himself, reined his horse to a halt and swung himself from the saddle, throwing the reins and his helmet to the guard who came running. Like Bohemond, he had shaved off his beard, stripping years and authority from his face so that he seemed little more than a child. A petulant child, I thought.

He strode towards us, one fist clenched tight. As he reached the paving around the fountain he opened it and hurled its content down. A hundred tiny black pellets bounced and scattered over the stones.

‘Peppercorns!’ he shouted. He stamped his boot, and I heard several splintering to powder beneath it. ‘I have searched every house and granary in this cursed city, and all I find are cloves and peppercorns. We cannot live on this.’ He spat into the fountain.

Adhemar frowned. ‘There must—’

For the second time, a new arrival interrupted him. Another knight, too humble to merit a horse, came running through the gate towards us. His scarlet face streamed with sweat and he collapsed onto his knees by the fountain, groaning as he saw that it would give nothing to quench his thirst.

Other men had hurried out from the cloister around the courtyard, among them Count Raymond and Duke Godfrey. They clustered around the messenger, drowning him in shade, though for the moment he seemed too drained to speak. At last he managed to gasp out a few short words.

‘At the bridge. Kerbogha.’

Despite the midday sun, we ran all the way to the bridge. The walls by the gate were already crowded with Franks who had come to see the new threat, but Sigurd managed to drive a path up the stairs and forward to the rampart. It was like being in the hippodrome when the Emperor gave out bread or meat: those who had views through the embrasures defied all demands to surrender their places, while those who could not see jostled and shoved to dislodge their neighbours. It was a miracle that no one toppled off.

A head taller than most of the crowd, Sigurd saw an opening and prised his way in, angling his broad shoulders so that I could join him. One man trod on my foot, another thumped me in the spine, but I fended off their assault and leaned through the opening. If doom was upon us, I wanted to see it.

Such is the perversity of the soul that the actual sight merely kindled disappointment. I had expected a hundred thousand Turks in burnished armour, their spears like wheat and their host innumerable, with Kerbogha himself a giant in their midst, flanked by the banners of fourteen emirs. Instead, there seemed only to be about thirty horsemen, cantering along the river bank and loosing occasional arrows at us. I knew from futile experience that few of the missiles would reach the walls. From the top of the watchtower beyond the bridge our garrison shot back in desultory fashion.

‘Kerbogha,’ snorted Sigurd. ‘This is not Kerbogha. These are the scouts of the outriders of his vanguard. If thirty of them can scare the Franks, they will run all the way to Nicaea when they see his full force.’

I agreed, and was about to abandon my tenuous vantage. But it seemed that not all the Franks dismissed the Turks so readily, for as I began to move I heard a great commotion by the gate below. There were shouts, the ring of armour and the pulse of hooves. Hemmed in by the crowd around me I could see nothing, but in an instant a column of Frankish riders burst into view through the battlements. At their head, on a white stallion, I saw a knight with red feathers in his helm.

‘Roger Barneville,’ said Sigurd. I knew him too, a Norman captain from Duke Robert’s army. Though he was not as mighty as the princes, he had joined their councils on occasion to offer advice. He was renowned as a skilful soldier and a formidable warrior.

‘What is he doing?’

Fifteen knights had followed him out through the open gates and formed a line driving towards the Turks. To the cheers of the garrison they swept past the tower and charged up the slope, following the Alexandretta road away from the river. Though the Turks had twice their numbers, and bows to fire against the Frankish spears, they offered not the least resistance. They turned their horses and galloped away, dust billowing behind them.

‘Does Roger think they will tell Kerbogha to retreat to Khorassan because fifteen knights dared to oppose them?’ Sigurd asked.

I made no reply. The dust still whirled where the Turks had vanished, but instead of dying away with their passing it seemed to build, creeping ever wider along the ridge. It was too far off for me to see clearly, yet I thought I glimpsed dark shadows moving under the eddying cloud. Still it grew, as though a storm wind whipped it to new heights.

‘What . . . ?’

The swirling shadows resolved themselves as a line of Turkish horsemen emerged from the dust. They crested the ridge and charged down the slope; a second later, I heard the thunder of their hooves rolling across the river. The Normans saw them and in an instant swerved their horses back towards the city. But they had been drawn perilously far away. There was no thought of battle, for the Turks were ten times their number and had fresh horses under them. Even as I watched, they began to outflank the Normans, driving them away from the refuge of the bridge and forcing them towards the river.

A shout rose from the gate below. ‘Where are the reinforcements? Will we allow the Turks to chase us from before our own city?’ It was Count Raymond’s voice, honed to a cutting edge by a lifetime on the battlefield, but though I heard much clamour and jangling no one rode out to help.

Now the Normans had reached the river. The summer drought had shrunk it into a thin channel between cracked mudflats; even in its centre, rocks protruded from the water. The first of the Normans slid his horse down the embankment where animals came to drink and splashed across. Others followed, picking their way over the uneven course while the water foamed white with falling arrows. I counted fourteen men on the near bank now: only one remained on the far side, the red feathers still sticking defiantly from his helmet. It was Roger Barneville, who having led the charge up the ridge now found himself in the rear of the retreat. The Turks were close behind him, their arrows whipping past, but if he could ford the river he would quickly come under the protection of the walls.

His horse cantered down the muddy embankment and onto the naked river bed. The treacherous ground slowed his pace; the pursuing Turks drew nearer, but still he managed to duck their arrows.

Barneville was almost at the water’s edge when suddenly his horse stopped short. The jarring halt threw him forward but he managed to keep in the saddle; when he tried to spur the horse again, though, it would not move. Had an arrow struck it? I could not see any wound. The horse seemed to be straining forward, struggling to lift its hooves, yet rooted to the ground.

Roger glanced over his shoulder. The leading Turks were on the river bank, looking down on him. Panicking, he tried to kick free of his stirrups, but it was too late. An arrow buried itself in his back and he jerked up like a puppet. At such close range it would have driven clean through the armour.

The shouting around me died away to nothing. Every man looked on in horror.

‘Who will help him?’ bellowed Count Raymond, now up on the walls.

No one answered.

Roger Barneville was alive – I could see him still fumbling with his bridle, trying to dismount – but the Turks had not finished. One of them galloped forward, spear in hand, and as he came up to Barneville he drove it through him like a spit. I saw the point gleaming in the sun as it emerged from his chest. He must have cried out, but he was too weak to be heard: we could only watch as he toppled slowly from his saddle into the river. A second Turk rode past; his sword flashed, and blood welled into the water. As he wiped his blade, another horseman stabbed his spear into the river like a fisherman seeking octopus. When he lifted it out, a misshapen bulge was fixed to its tip. A red feather hung limp beneath it.

It took much to outrage the Franks, but they were silent with shock and shame now. I heard one voice mumbling that they had too few horses, another that there was little they could have done in any event, but none raised their voices to agree. The Turks crossed the river and rode impudently along the base of the walls, waving their bloody trophy at us. Few arrows flew to punish them. In the distance, Roger’s horse tipped back its neck and screamed, mourning its master or bewailing its captivity, while the Turk who had struck the final blow drew up his own mount near the bridge and shouted violence at us. His words were alien, but the meaning was unmissable.

The crowd on the walls was ebbing away. Sigurd and I followed.

‘Fool,’ he hissed when we were out of hearing. ‘Senseless, worthless, idiot fool. How many times have we seen ten Turks lure us to battle, only to become a hundred? Why do the Franks refuse to learn the ways of their enemy?’

I had no answer.

‘Today we saw thirty become three hundred. What will we do tomorrow, when the three hundred become three thousand, then thirty thousand? Will we ride out to be slaughtered every time Kerbogha sends a company of scouts to goad us?’

I looked up at the mountain. Smoke was rising from the furthest peak, above the citadel, but I did not see Bohemond’s banner flying there.

‘It is a bad beginning.’

κ β

That evening we made a fire on top of the tower that we had occupied. Beric the Varangian had ridden to Saint Simeon that day and had fetched back fish and grain at exorbitant cost. I did not think that that path would be open to us much longer. As long as we held the tower by the bridge we could defend the road, but all afternoon the Turkish vanguard had harried the defences with fire and arrows. The Franks had withstood them, but they would not hold out for long when Kerbogha came in his full might.

‘We would not be able to go to Saint Simeon often in any case,’ Beric said. He pulled the pan from the fire and scraped charred fish into our bowls. ‘I almost killed my horse getting back here before dark.’

‘That will be tomorrow’s supper, then,’ said Sigurd.

‘And what shall we do the day after?’ I pulled apart the sticky flesh in my fingers, wincing at the heat. ‘It took us four months to close off the city; I doubt Kerbogha will be so slow.’

Sigurd scowled as he tasted the bitter fish. ‘If I am alive the day after tomorrow, then I will consider what to eat.’

‘Do not say that.’ It was a warm night, and the fire made it warmer still, but Anna pulled her shawl closer about her. ‘We must survive. There is no gain in thinking of the alternative.’

I reached out an arm to comfort her, but she shrugged free of it. I wrapped my arms around my knees and stared intently at the flames.

‘I wonder how Bohemond finds the city that he schemed so hard to win,’ Sigurd mused. ‘It is not the best beginning for his new empire.’

‘A curse on him and his empire,’ I said. ‘I would like to see them both thrown down in ruin and picked over by crows, if I did not fear that we would fall beside him.’

Sigurd belched. ‘He may be our brightest hope.’

‘Then our plight is truly dire.’

‘Bohemond is a snake, Demetrios, like all Normans. When the bastard William landed in England, his army was too small, his supplies too few, and winter fast approaching. Within a month he was master of the kingdom. Bohemond is hatched from the same egg. He is a snake in a corner, and therefore most dangerous. The Turks will need a long spear to force him out.’

‘Or a single well-aimed arrow. How have we come to rely on allies like these?’

‘When the Emperor comes, we will not have to.’ Sigurd licked the last juice off the fish’s skeleton and cast it into the fire.

‘If we are still here when he comes.’

‘Halt!’

The challenge from the foot of the tower echoed up to us. I jumped to my feet and leaned out through the embrasure. In the orb of a burning torch below, I could see a tall man in a long white robe standing at the door. A Varangian faced him, axe in hand.

‘Who is it?’ I called down.

The visitor tipped back his head. The torchlight flickered on a dark face fringed by a black beard. ‘Demetrios? It is Mushid. The swordsmith.’

I relaxed my grip on the battlements. ‘Come up.’

We shuffled closer in our circle and made an opening for Mushid. As he seated himself by the parapet, I heard a muffled thud from under his robe. He would be wise to keep his wares close at hand in the city, I thought, though foolish to venture here at all. At least he had taken some precaution – I saw now why I had not recognised him immediately.

‘You’ve removed your turban.’

He nodded. ‘I do not want my head raised on a Franj’s spear.’

‘If you are so cautious for your neck, why enter Antioch?’ asked Sigurd. He had not met Mushid before, and watched him across the fire with narrow eyes.

‘For many reasons. I came to see if it was true, the rumour of the ruin which the Franj had worked.’

‘It is.’

‘So I saw. All through the city I have seen not one Turk today, save those being thrown into pits to be buried.’

‘The Franks boast that not a single Turk survived the sack. I am sorry.’

‘It was not your fault.’

It was, though. Again I remembered hammering back the bolt, the shouting of the Normans and the clatter of arrows about me. I remembered climbing that frail ladder, mounting the walls that had defied me for so long and being too terrified to care. I remembered—

‘Mushid.’

‘Yes?’

‘Two nights ago I was with Bohemond’s men on the walls, translating for the Turk who betrayed the city. He was agitated – he thought we had too few men and that Bohemond had not come. He said . . .’ I commanded my mind back. ‘He said Mushid promised that Bohemond would come.’

Mushid folded his hands together and stared into the fire. It hissed and crackled; the reflected flames danced on the battlements around us. No one spoke.

‘There are many men called Mushid in my country, as there are many called Demetrios in yours.’

‘There are not many who visited Bohemond alone in his tent three weeks ago.’

Again there was a long pause. At last: ‘It was my name you heard.’

‘You plotted with Bohemond to let him seize the city?’

‘I brought messages to him. Firouz, the captain on the tower, he is an armourer. I am a swordsmith. We have friends through the guilds. I travel freely wherever men need arms. Sometimes I carry more than swords.’

‘But why?’ demanded Anna. ‘Why betray the city – and your own people? Did you revel in the destruction you saw today?’

Mushid shrugged. ‘They are not my people. They are Turks; I am an Arab, a Saracen.’

‘But you worship the same god—’

‘We all say we worship the same god – Jews, Franj, Byzantines, Turks and Arabs. But we do not agree how He is to be worshipped. Why do you think you have endured so long in such hostile country? Because of the power of your arms? You survive because every lord from Cairo to Constantinople wishes to make you his tool. The Byzantines and Fatimids seek to destroy the Turks; the Armenians would become their own masters; the emirs of Damascus and Aleppo and Antioch each hope you will destroy their rivals. You have marched into an ancient game played out in the dust of Asia. You see in straight lines, but all about you others move obliquely. That is why you live now: because each of your enemies hates his neighbour more.’

He fell silent, and leaned back against the wall. The empty spaces between the battlements were like black teeth above him.

‘If that is so, then whom do you serve?’ Sigurd asked.

‘I am a swordsmith. I serve myself, and those who buy my blades. Others make schemes; I carry their messages.’

I shifted on the hard stone beneath me. ‘Why are you here now?’

‘I heard that you had occupied this tower. It is prudent to know where your friends are in these times.’

‘That was not what I meant.’

Mushid lifted an eyebrow. ‘Then what? Do I carry more secrets of hidden plans? Having worked the city’s betrayal once, will I do it again? Is that what you ask?’

‘If a man sits at my fire I like to know why he is there.’

‘Then you are wise.’ He smiled. ‘I did not weep to see the Turks lose Antioch, because they were Ahl al-Sunna. Having helped the Franj, I will not turn away so quickly from them. And if Kerbogha takes the city, there will be more killing. You will have killed all the Muslims, he will kill all the Christians, and Antioch will become a wasteland. Nobody will win.’

‘How can you bear it?’ Anna spoke so quietly that her words seemed to entwine with the hissing fire. ‘Whichever doctrines divided you from the Antiochenes, they were your brothers. By your hand, many thousands of them now lie in an open grave. How can you sit by our fire and discuss this calamity as if it were nothing more than the forging of a sword?’

‘First, because they did not die by my hand. They died by the hands of a thousand Franj, not one more or less guilty. Do not try and blame me for what your allies have done.’

‘They are not my allies. And hateful though they are, their evil would have remained undone if you had not arranged for the gate to be open.’

It was as if hot lead had been poured into my belly. I squirmed where I sat, praying that Anna’s fixed stare did not move onto me. In my account of the battle at the walls, I had not told her the truth of my role: the fear that she would blame me for all that had happened since was unanswerable. How could it be otherwise, when I could not defend it myself?

‘Firouz the armourer opened the gate,’ said Mushid. ‘If I had not carried his messages to Bohemond, he would have found another. Even if he had not, even if I alone were responsible for unlocking the gate, I would not bear the blame for what happened afterwards. Many doors open: it is for men to choose which they enter – and what they do inside.’

I had rarely seen Anna bested in argument, but now she had no reply. None, at least, that she could voice, though her face evinced an inconsolable anger.

‘Would you rather that I had done nothing?’ Mushid continued. ‘Would you rather now be cowering in your tent before the walls, watching Demetrios pull on his armour? Would you rather see three thousand Franj, with barely a sound horse between them, marching to fight the mightiest Turkish army in a generation? Would you rather be in the camp when Kerbogha’s victorious janissaries overran it, massacring every man and boy and dragging you away by your hair to the slave-brothels of Mosul where—’

‘Enough,’ I snapped. ‘That is not necessary.’

Mushid looked at me almost curiously, then bowed his head. ‘I am sorry. I meant no insult. It is bad to offend one’s host at his own fire. All I wished to say is that there would have been a terrible killing in any event. Perhaps you do not like what I have done, but I have been on many battlefields, both as victor and vanquished. I assure you of this: it is always better to be among the living than the dead.’

I could see from the faces around the fire that his argument satisfied no one, me least of all. It did not lift one straw from the burden of guilt I bore. Yet unless the dead came to lend their voices to the debate, it was irrefutable.

I was uneasy with the turn that the conversation had taken, and with the enmity that seemed to have flared up between Anna and Mushid. Still, there were questions I wanted to ask.

‘Your friendship with Drogo – was that part of this plot?’

Mushid studied his knuckles, his face impassive. ‘No. As I told you once before, I met Drogo when I sold him a sword. It was much later that Firouz confided in me his plan, after Drogo had died. He was simply a friend, a good man to sit with by a fire. It is sad that he lived under so unfortunate a roof.’

‘Unfortunate indeed, but not uncommon.’

‘And still the misfortune continues. His servant was found dead by the river three days ago.’

‘Simon?’ A torrent of images flooded my mind: the boy shivering under Quino’s brutality, picking herbs from the river bank covered in mud, rubbing an oily cloth over Drogo’s sword. Was it possible that he had suffered the same fate as his master?

‘Simon, yes. I was in the Norman camp when they discovered him.’

‘How did it happen?’ So many men had died in the past days – and weeks and months – that it was astonishing I could feel anything from one more death. In truth, I felt nothing, for the news had a numbing effect that I could not resist. Yet somehow, if it were possible, in the recesses of my soul I felt a cold hand squeeze tighter about me, felt a more profound absence of feeling itself.

‘He was pierced with arrows. He had been hunting for herbs on the bank – a party of Turks must have seen him from the far side and chanced their aim.’

Perhaps, I thought, I had known it already. I remembered dismantling the boat bridge two days earlier, and a peasant telling me of a boy killed picking herbs. I had felt a sickening premonition, but then Bohemond had arrived and dragged me away, and all else had been forgotten. Not that remembering would have helped by then.

Mushid was still speaking. ‘It was a tragic end. Had he lived another day, he would have entered the city in safety.’

Through the welter of thought and memory that flurried about me, I found myself thinking that if this city, besieged and starving, had been Simon’s best hope of safety, how wretched must he have been? Hardly less, I supposed, than we who had survived.

Much later I lay on the stone of the rampart under the dark sky. Anna lay against me, my chest against her back and my knees crooked inside hers, like two bowls stacked together. My arms were wrapped around her chest, which swelled and sank gently under her cotton shift. We had no mattress save our cloaks, for every stick of straw in the city had gone to feed the horses. The hot night meant there was no need for blankets.

‘I don’t trust the Saracen,’ said Anna. ‘Neither should you.’

‘I don’t.’

‘He has already betrayed the city once. Who can tell what other secrets he hides? Thousands of innocents have died because of him.’

Again, the frantic memory of the gate on the mountain rasped through my mind. I could not discuss this with Anna. ‘He saved us from certain death. How can I hate him, if because of him Helena’s child has a grandfather?’

‘I do not say you should hate him. But you should not draw him near you either.’

As the night had come on, I had insisted that Mushid should stay in our tower until dawn. There were too many Franks on the streets, knights and pilgrims alike, who might recognise him as an Ishmaelite and tear him apart. He had resisted my urging but I had sensed gratitude when finally he allowed me to prevail. Now he slept with the Varangians in the guardroom along the wall.

‘As much as you do unto the least of my people, you do unto me,’ I quoted. ‘He will be gone in the morning.’

‘Good.’

Anna nestled back into me. Her long hair prickled against my nose and I shook my head to breathe freely again, unwilling to push her away even an inch. Warmth flowed between us – and with it, I fancied, some small measure of my cares.

‘What was it that struck you when you heard that the Norman’s servant had died?’ Anna asked at last. ‘I saw your eyes. You looked – guilty.’

I paused, trying to order my thoughts. ‘I saw the knight, Quino, the day before Simon died. At the tower. I accused him of worshipping a pagan idol. I suggested that it might have been he who killed Drogo.’

‘Did you think so?’

‘I don’t know. I have not considered it in many weeks; there has been too much else to distract me. But now three of Quino’s companions are dead. Even when Bohemond wanted their murderer found, Quino gave no help. And when I challenged him he threatened to kill me.’

‘The Saracen said the boy was killed by Turks.’

‘He said the boy was found on the river bank, pierced with arrows. Three nights ago the Turks were pent up in Antioch. Any raiding party on the far bank would have had to pass the watchtower by the fortified bridge, the guards by the boat bridge and the rest of our picket line. And even the Turks might struggle to hit a boy in the dark from across the river.’

‘But why would the knight . . . ?’

I remembered the snarl of Quino’s voice as we wrestled at the foot of the tower, the frenzy in his eyes. ‘It was the boy who told me that the knights had gone to Daphne, to the pagan cave. If Quino guessed that, what would he not have done to protect himself? The western princes do not bring heretics into their palaces to dispute theology with them, as the Emperor does. They burn them alive. And I – I revealed to Quino that I knew his secret. I gave him cause to suspect that the boy, Simon, had betrayed him. A day later Simon was dead.’

I rolled away, setting my back to Anna’s. Almost immediately, she turned over so that our positions were reversed, and her arms squeezed around me.

‘You must not think of it,’ she said. ‘Perhaps Quino killed the boy, perhaps he did not. There are too many other concerns, more pressing, to trouble you now.’

‘No.’ I struggled free of her embrace as the images of a thousand slaughtered Turks clamoured in my mind. Whatever Mushid said, whatever blame the Franks held, it was my hand which had opened the gates of death to them. Against their deaths, Simon’s was nothing – a tear in a torrent. But their lives were beyond salvation now, while Simon’s I might still redeem.

The few inches between me and Anna yawned like a chasm, and the silence lasted so long that I thought she must have fallen asleep. At length, though, I felt the touch of her hand on my shoulder as she pulled me back towards her. I did not resist.

‘The baby will be three months old by now,’ said Anna. ‘I hope Helena has kept him healthy.’

I simply hoped that there was a baby to be healthy. We did not speak of the other possibility.

‘If you are worried, perhaps you should go back. It would be good for Helena to have a doctor and a mother to help.’ I spoke carefully, for any implication of weakness or cowardice would enrage Anna. ‘A starving, doomed city is no place for a woman.’

To my relief, she did not pull away from me. Nor was there any anger in her voice, only weary sadness. ‘It is too late for that. It would be suicide, trying to evade Kerbogha’s army. Sigurd says that in two days we shall not even be able to leave the walls.’

‘There are still ships at Saint Simeon,’ I urged her. ‘You could take passage to Cyprus, and thence to Constantinople. With the summer seas, it would be as safe a journey as any.’

For a long time she was still. From down in the city I could hear occasional shouted challenges from the Frankish patrols, sometimes the braying of animals. Otherwise Antioch seemed asleep. I doubted whether dreams would be any relief for its inhabitants.

‘No.’

‘It would be better—’ I began.

‘No. While I am here, I worry for Thomas and Helena, for Zoe and your grandchild, and for all who are dear to me. I fear for myself, and for what will become of me when Kerbogha comes. But if I left now, I would live every minute in fear for you. And that would be worse.’

I closed my eyes. A wave of warm confusion swept through me, threatening to spill out in tears. I kissed Anna on the nape of her neck.

‘You are a fool.’ My voice was shaking. ‘You should never have come, and then you should not have stayed.’

‘Neither should you. But we are both here now.’

κ γ

Mushid had gone when I woke; he had slipped away just before dawn, the guard told me. He was probably wise to have done so, for the Frankish watchmen would have been most drowsy then – and we had nothing to offer him for breakfast. I longed for activity, for distraction from the cares that ravaged me like carrion-birds: I oiled my armour, polished my sword until I could have shaved in its reflection, worked the leather of my shield and even cut a new hole in my belt to fit my shrunken waist. After that, there was nothing to do save pace the walls and watch.

During the night, more Turks had come up on the far bank of the Orontes. It seemed that the Franks had at last learned patience, for they did not ride out to attack. Nor, though, could they avoid battle, for at first light the Turks renewed their assault on the tower by the fortified bridge. I could see it from where I watched, the wooden palisade raised on its mound and the banner of the Duke of Normandy hanging limp from a spear above it. The Normans had packed it with defenders, and for now seemed able to withstand the constant Turkish siege, but still it was merely the advance parties of Kerbogha’s vanguard whom they faced.

At noon Adhemar summoned us to another council. It was a relief to know that we were not forgotten, though I feared it was only the bishop – and perhaps Count Raymond – who cared anything for us. They brought us together in the great church of Saint Peter, where the customary four benches had been set in a square under the silver dome. After so many meetings in the confines of Adhemar’s tent or Raymond’s farmhouse it was strange to be placed in so cavernous a hall, where broad spaces stretched behind us and every word rebounded from the roof. The labourers had been cleared out for the council, but their work was far from finished: half-exposed icons stared out from splintered holes in the plaster; fragments of stone and rubble lay in heaps on the floor; and all was shrouded in dust.

Adhemar began by invoking the Lord. ‘The city is ours, praise God. By His right hand, and to His glory, we have conquered.’

All save the citadel, I thought grimly.

‘By His grace, may we still hold its walls in a month,’ Bohemond added. He sat beside Adhemar, with the east end of the church and the high altar at his back. Count Raymond, whose place it was by custom, had been pushed further down the bench almost into the corner.

‘We have earned a mighty victory, for which we must be duly grateful. But it will be for nothing if we do not now hold Antioch against the new threat which rushes to overthrow us. We are the army of light, but a storm rages, and a single breath may extinguish us for ever. Only the hands of the Lord will cup us in safety,’ said Adhemar.

‘And sharp swords, and swift arrows.’ I had not seen Bohemond since the assault on the walls, but he did not seem to have enjoyed the fruits of his conquest in the intervening days. His dark hair was matted with dirt and sweat; the beard he had so carefully shaved before the battle was already sprouting back, unchecked; his eyes were sunk deep in dark pits. I guessed he had not slept since entering the city. The tunic he wore under his armour was stained yellow, while a grimy bandage bound his right forearm.

‘Already, my lords, you have seen Kerbogha’s vanguard attacking the outer forts. Now he looks to bring the greater part of his army to bear on us. A rider came this morning from the Iron Bridge, to say that the garrison there is under heavy siege. Even with all Christ’s favour, they will not stand more than a day. That is all the time we have to organise our defences.’

Count Raymond lifted his head. ‘The time you have to organise your defences, you mean. Antioch is your city, until the Emperor comes. Or had you forgotten it?’

‘Do you think that when Kerbogha comes he will confine his war to the Normans?’

Adhemar thumped his staff on the stone floor, lifting a cloud of dust. ‘Enough! We will fight as the Army of God – as one people. There will be no Normans or Provençals on the walls to face Kerbogha – only Christians.’

‘If we fight as the Army of God, then under what title does Bohemond hold the city?’

‘Under the title of survival,’ said Bohemond angrily. ‘If not for me, we would all have met the same fate as Roger Barneville, hacked apart under the walls. Would you prefer that, Count Raymond?’

‘You would have allowed it, if we had not yielded to your ambition.’

‘The ambition of men is all that will aid us now.’

‘No!’ Adhemar lifted himself on his staff and stared first at Bohemond, then at Raymond. Looking at him, I saw with shock how the recent days had emptied him. His skin was pale, and shiny like a potter’s glaze; there was no longer any humour in his face. His hand trembled as he gripped the staff, and he seemed suddenly twenty years older.

‘The grace of God is all that will aid us now, and He is only ever served in unity. Put aside your quarrels. Every division between us opens the door to Satan’s works.’

He sagged back onto his seat. The effort those few words had taken was plain. For a few moments there was silence.

‘We must divide the keeping of the walls among ourselves,’ said Bohemond at last. ‘Duke Godfrey will watch the northern flank, by the gate of Saint Paul. Count Hugh will take the north-western portion, Count Raymond the length south of the Duke Gate, and the Count of Flanders the area by the fortified bridge. I will fight on the mountain, for Kerbogha is sure to attack first at the citadel. The Duke of Normandy will aid me there.’

‘That is strange.’ All eyes turned to Count Raymond, though he himself seemed to be staring at a statue of Saint Justin half-excavated from an alcove. ‘I have just heard the lord Bohemond ordering the dispositions of the army, yet I believed we were the Army of God. Is the disinherited whelp of a Norman pirate not content with the throne of Antioch? Does he now presume to raise himself to the throne of Heaven? Because if he does, he may find he has very far to fall.’

In an instant, Bohemond was on his feet. ‘If the Count of Saint-Gilles accuses me of blasphemy, I will answer his lie. He may be lord of thirteen counties, but in single combat I will strip him of them one by one.’

Adhemar made to interrupt, but Raymond’s voice was stronger. ‘You will not do that – unless you would defend this city with none but a few hundred horseless Normans.’ He turned to the rest of the council. ‘For months, the lord Bohemond has begged us to make him warden of Antioch. At times, his grovelling has been almost an embarrassment. And now that he has had it for three days, he makes himself overlord of us all; he tells us where to place our armies, and how to fight.’

‘Enough. Will you still bicker here when the Lord comes in glory and judgement?’

All turned to see Little Peter, the stunted, mulish man who rose from the bench to my left. He had the strange capacity to shrink from notice if he chose, but when he spoke it was as if his every word was life itself. He hobbled into the centre of the square, dragging his bare feet through the dust, and stared around. The short hermit’s cape twitched from his shoulders.

‘Why do the nations rage, and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the Earth take counsel together, they conspire against the Lord’s anointed. But He who sits in Heaven laughs; He scorns them. He will break them with a rod of iron, and dash them into pieces like clay. Be wise, O kings, be warned. Serve the Lord with fear; tremble even as you kiss His feet, or He will be angry – and you will perish.’

His words were like ice on the princes, freezing their tempers and chilling their thoughts. Several, I saw, made the sign of the cross. Even Adhemar looked discomfited.

‘You do well to rebuke us, Little Peter,’ the bishop said. ‘No man’s pride should blind him to the Lord’s will.’

‘Turn your eyes to the heavens – but turn them also to the ground on which you walk, lest among the grass you stir a serpent. When beasts contend among themselves, their shadows block the light from the humble creatures below, and their hooves trample them. But the pure are not deceived: they look up, and they see through you like water. We are small, meagre creatures, far beneath your power and might. But a thousand ants, if stirred to war, may strip a horse of all its flesh. With no thought but for your own desire, you have led your people into calamity, into torment, into death. How long will they suffer you to command them to ruin?’

Bohemond rose in anger. ‘Who are these worms you speak of? For the past two days, it has been my knights who have defended the walls and besieged the citadel, while your pilgrims burrow themselves deep into the city. When they are brave enough to cease from cowering in their holes, and come out to fight, then perhaps I will hear their complaint.’

For long moments the hermit’s jittering frame stopped moving. His head swivelled up, and his cold-eyed stare fixed on Bohemond’s. ‘Be warned, Norman. You sit on your pyre and speak words of fire: your doom will come. The Lord pulls down the mighty and shatters the proud, but He shall exalt the meek and raise the humble to His throne. The fires approach, and only the truest alloy will survive their purifying flames. For the rest, you will burn away to ash.’

κ δ

The watchtower by the fortified bridge fell the following day. The Turks had brought up siege engines, and at first light they began a bombardment of fire and stone that the dry timbers could not withstand. Even then, the Franks defended it to the last. From my vantage point on the walls, I saw a thin knot of them straggling down the slope, shields locked together as the tower burned behind them. They were a tiny number against the thousands of Turks who assailed them – though still not the tenth part of Kerbogha’s army. A few Franks managed to reach the safety of the city; many more did not. The Turks hacked their corpses apart and mounted their heads on a line of wooden palings before the gate. Of the tower, nothing survived: I watched as the beams reeled on their foundations, then crashed down in flames. Many of our men were crushed beneath it. A cloud of burning splinters rose in the air above, and smoke from the embers poured over the south-west quarter of the city, souring the light of the sun.

The same day, a band of Provençals came from the north. The Iron Bridge, our last redoubt on the Orontes, had fallen to Kerbogha; the garrison was dead, captive or routed. There were others fleeing after them, they said: a sally by Duke Godfrey’s cavalry might yet bring them home before Kerbogha overtook them. The plea was refused, for we had no horses to spare. After that, no more Franks returned from the bridge.

It was an unnatural time. Every waking minute we were assailed by the sounds and sights of war, reminders of our desperate plight, yet long hours passed sitting on the walls until our limbs grew stiff from disuse. I could see Turks flooding the plain before Antioch, planting their tents and standards in the fields that we had so recently occupied, but we did not fire so much as a single arrow towards them. We could not fight; we could not flee; we could not even forage, for there was not a crumb to be found in the city. We diced without stakes, lest jealousies fester, and told stories we all knew by heart. Every sword and axe was honed fine as a feather, but so long as the Turks kept us hemmed within our ramparts our weapons were mere ornaments. And still the tide of our enemies flowed in.

On the Monday, the fifth day since we had taken the city, I resolved to seek out Odard. I needed some distraction to drive away the guilt which besieged me in the empty hours, and finding him would serve as well as anything. That much, at least, I owed to Simon. Whether or not he cared, in whichever corner of the afterlife he haunted, was of little importance.

I began my search by seeking out a Norman gergeant. It was harder than I had expected, for most of Bohemond’s army was camped up on the mountain besieging the citadel, but at length I found a wounded knight standing guard by one of the western gates. He watched me with suspicion and though he seemed to recognise Odard’s name it provoked only a mocking leer.

‘Odard is no longer in our company,’ he told me. Perhaps he hoped the news would distress me. ‘He lost his horse, his sword, his armour, and finally his wits.’

‘And his life? Did he lose that too?’

‘Why should I care if he had? He was no use to our army.’

‘Where can I find him?’ I pressed.

The Norman shrugged. ‘Perhaps among the peasants and pilgrims. Try the hermit, Little Peter: the lunatic and the feeble are his congregation.’

I did not like to have dealings with the mule-faced mystic who had orphaned Thomas, but my desire to speak with Odard was stronger. I found Little Peter at the cathedral, standing on the steps with a great crowd of Franks in front of him. They looked to be pilgrims rather than knights, though the lines between the two were dissolving: their clothes were torn and their bodies gaunt, and in their hands they carried a brutish armoury of slings and farm tools. Their faces were little friendlier. One of their number, a tall man with a cloth tied over his head to ward off the sun, seemed to be shouting at the hermit.

‘If Christ is with us, why do we cower in this city? Is it the princes? If they are too timid, if their greed blinds them to their duty, then let them surrender their power to the faithful, the humble beloved of God. Our place is on the road to Jerusalem, not in this place of the heathen.’

Little Peter clambered onto the base of a column, raising himself above the throng, and looked down. His voice was shrill and anxious, far removed from the mystic certainty with which he had chided the princes.

‘You are ignorant,’ he snapped. ‘Or blind. Have you not seen the ten thousand Turks who bar the way to Jerusalem?’

‘Has the devil stolen your balls, Little Peter? Is that why you have grown no taller?’ Cruel laughter rang in the square. ‘When I first heard you preach, you promised we would be borne to the Holy Land on the wings of angels.’

‘I told you that the path of the pilgrim is a thorny road that only the pure may tread.’

‘Then why do we not tread it? Why does God curse and afflict us? Why do the Turks starve us and smite us?’

‘I will tell you.’ Another voice spoke up, that of a woman I could not see. ‘Because our leaders are corrupted by sin – by pride and greed. Their sin draws down God’s wrath from the heavens.’

‘I have told them this,’ said Peter. His feet were slipping from the pedestal, and he had to fling his short arms around the pillar to stay upright. ‘I prophesy, but they do not hear.’

‘There is only one true king, and the princes of the Earth are nothing before Him. Prophesy them that.’

‘It is better to die a martyr than a slave,’ someone else shouted. ‘If the princes are too fearful to trust in the hand of God, let them open the gates and we will be His army.’

‘No!’

Surprise murmured through the crowd as the stooped figure of the bishop appeared at the top of the steps. With the great door behind him he seemed little taller than Peter, and his crimson robes were pale in the glare. Only his staff kept him upright.

‘A martyr’s death is a gift of God, not to be snatched cravenly from Him. The true Christian does not fear death, but nor does he embrace it.’

‘Do you say we should not trust in Christ?’ one of the pilgrims challenged him.

‘I say you should trust in Him to work His purpose. You should not presume to anticipate that purpose. You could fling open the gates of Antioch and rush out, so that the Orontes flowed red with your blood, but then you would die as suicides, not martyrs or Christians. Look at yourselves. Each one of you wears the cross. You have undertaken this journey, at great cost and peril, for the salvation of your souls. But the path of the cross, the road to Calvary, is neither short nor easy.’

A fit of coughing convulsed him, and he broke off. His words were faint, barely audible even halfway across the square, but no one took advantage of his silence. ‘The greatness of our object does not lift stones from our path. It is the torments in our way that make the object great. All the terrors that assail us, all the sufferings we endure – it is these things you will think on when you reach Jerusalem and bend your knee at the holiest shrine, these things that will sanctify your journey. Do not think that by seeking certain death in battle you will cheat suffering, or win the martyr’s crown. The way of oblivion is the way of the Devil. The way of Christ is patience, humility, and obedience. Now go.’

With these final words, he lifted his staff as if to part the sea of faces before him. But he was too weak: before he had raised it a foot in the air his strength was gone, and he let it swing back onto the ground. The crowd muttered, but none approached. Instead, in twos and threes, they began to drift away.

I pushed against them, hastening to the bishop. By the time I reached him, one of his priests had taken his arm and guided him to a stone bench. Sweat beaded his forehead below the rim of his mitre, and his hands trembled.

‘You are losing control of your pilgrims, Little Peter.’ Close to, his voice still bore some of its former strength.

The hermit had clambered down from the plinth, and now stood bolt upright in front of the pillar. ‘What can a shepherd do when his flock deserts him, even in the midst of ravening wolves?’

‘Get a dog,’ I suggested.

Adhemar smiled, his dry lips cracking with the effort. ‘Ever a practical answer, Demetrios Askiates.’

‘It seemed to me that your sheep were a greater threat than the wolves just now,’ I said to the hermit.

‘And rightly so. When they are led into disaster by the lords of folly, when the precepts of the Lord are everywhere forgotten, it is right and lawful that they should rebel against wickedness.’ He stabbed a filthy finger towards Adhemar. ‘Be warned, Bishop: you and your princes cannot afford to neglect the care of those who follow you.’

‘Be warned yourself!’ Adhemar still had the power to summon anger when it was needed. His staff inclined towards Little Peter so that the silver tip hung over him, and his face was black with fury. ‘Why do you think that you, a peasant, are invited to our councils? You come because you command the allegiance of the pilgrims, the poor and the weak who follow this army. If you cannot keep them obedient, your power is broken. The good shepherd does not abandon his flock, but when his flock abandon him he is no longer a shepherd.’

‘I am commissioned by God for this task,’ the hermit squealed.

‘I am ordained by the church. I do not threaten you: I speak plainly. Outside these walls are countless hosts of Turks. We are beset by enemies, and the only path of salvation is unity. If you cannot deliver it, I will find others who can.’

He rose, pain creasing his body. The priest who had lingered nearby ran to aid him, but the bishop shrugged off his hand and hobbled away. He disappeared into the church.

‘The Lord sends plagues on those who displease Him,’ said Little Peter to the air. He turned to go.

‘Little Peter,’ I said. ‘A question.’

‘What?’ His round blue eyes, at once clear and utterly fathomless, peered into mine. Involuntarily, I felt myself edging back.

‘There is a knight named Odard. Odard of Bari. He served Bohemond, but now he has left that army. He lost his horse and his arms; he must have joined the ranks of the pilgrims. Do you know him?’

Little Peter’s long nose twitched. ‘There are many pilgrims. Though each may love me as a father, I cannot know them all as sons. His name was Odo?’

‘Odard.’

‘He lost everything?’

‘I believe so.’

‘And he was a Norman?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then perhaps he has joined the Tafurs.’ Little Peter gave a leering smile as he saw the horror spreading across my face. ‘You have heard of them?’

‘Who has not?’

‘Few dare venture into the realm of the Tafur king. Fewer, perhaps, emerge. Who can tell? But I tread there. Christ is with me, and I fear no evil.’

‘Will you take me?’

The hermit cackled. Spit ran down his chin, but he affected not to notice it. ‘I will take you there, Greek. Whether they let you leave – that is in God’s hands.’

κ ε

Accompanying Little Peter was an uncomfortable experience. We met near the palace, and within minutes we had plunged away from the main roads into a labyrinth of alleys and passages below the slopes of Mount Silpius. Wooden balconies hung crooked from the mud-brick walls; rubble and filth littered our path. Not so long ago it must have been a Turkish quarter; now their only relic was their absence. Their homes and streets had been filled with Franks, in such poverty as I had never seen even in the worst slums of Constantinople. Children ran naked around us, throwing mud and excrement at each other, while their mothers sat with breasts shamelessly bared in the doorways. I blushed, my eyes seeking in vain for a safe refuge, but Little Peter seemed immune to sinful thoughts and moved serenely on with his lolling, limping gait. We struggled to make progress. The alleys were barely wide enough for a dray cart, and wherever Peter went the Franks clustered so close that the narrow paths became impassable. Some were satisfied to feel the hem of his short cloak, but others fell on their knees before him and implored favours or benediction. With eyes shut and palms outstretched, his face turned in bliss towards the sun, he touched their wounds and murmured comforting words. He was like some shrunken, shrivelled effigy of the Christ, and his congregation of the desperate seemed to adore him for it. No wonder so many had followed him so far – and at such cost.

At a pinched crossroads, deep in shadow, we found a sign. It hung from the web of criss-crossed ropes that stretched overhead: a splintered plank daubed with the words Regnum Tafurorum. Two long shields bearing white crosses hung at either side of it, while on a nail above the plank was mounted a grinning skull.