Knights of the Cross

‘The realm of the Tafurs.’ Even Little Peter seemed cowed by the name as he spoke it.

‘Is there really such a man as the Tafur King?’

Peter shrugged his misshapen shoulders. ‘His name is often spoken.’

That much I knew. Early in the siege, around December, rumours had sprung up of a new leader among the poor, an impoverished knight who had made himself master of the dispossessed. It was said that their desperation knew no restraint: that they sliced open the bellies of corpses in search of swallowed gold, and pulled the dead from their graves to eat in times of famine. That they existed was beyond doubt: I had seen them, barefooted and shirtless, labouring on the siege works and fighting in battle, where their reputation for savagery was well earned. Most had vowed silence and would not talk to outsiders, but still the whispered stories of their king seeped through the army, and at night every howl and scream was believed to rise from their camp.

‘Have you seen him, this king?’ I asked. It was said that Little Peter was the only man allowed to pass their borders.

‘He sits on a throne of bones as high as a man and wears a crown forged from spears. He drinks from a cup made from the head of a Turk, and his tent is sewn from their skins.’ Peter’s voice wavered between horror and awe, and his eyes were wide.

I felt a kick of disbelief. ‘Surely those stories cannot be true?’

He frowned. ‘Why not?’

‘You have seen it?’

‘Perhaps. If I had, I would be sworn to secrecy. No one tells the Tafur king’s secrets.’

Unwilling to be questioned further – or perhaps reluctant to incur the Tafur king’s revenge – Peter hurried on. I kept close, for I did not want to be lost in that place.

I do not know how long we walked in the heat and the stink. Sometimes Tafurs passed us, staring at me with hostile eyes as they answered Peter’s brief questions. All were dressed alike in white loincloths and wooden crosses, which they hung around their necks on thick ropes like yokes. At last, after many turns, Peter stopped at a door. Waving me to be still, he rapped on the carved panel. It cracked open and I heard a short challenge, which Peter answered in the Provençal tongue. The door swung in and led us through a short passage into a central courtyard.

For all the tales of skeletal thrones and human cups, the reality of the Tafurs was at once far more ordinary and yet more terrible than I had imagined. The square was strewn with wood and stone where the surrounding windows had been hammered out, and half a dozen Tafurs, barely clothed, lounged on the rubble. One was sucking on a bone that might have been a cow’s. All were watching another of their number, who knelt in the centre of the yard, and the woman on all fours in front of him. The only sound was the regular slap of his cross as it swung against his chest: the man showed no more emotion than if he had been digging a patch of weeds, while the woman stared ahead, unblinking. From the blood crusted on the inside of her thighs and the bruises on her ribs and breasts, I guessed that every trace of feeling had long since been raped out of her.

I cannot say exactly what happened next. A hundred fractured pictures exploded in my skull: my wife Maria lying on her bed, her skirts soaked red; my baby daughter cradled in my arms as victorious legionaries sacked Constantinople; the silver cross that hung around my own neck, a symbol which had comforted me so often. Unthinkingly, I reached for the knife at my belt. All the Tafurs were watching me, and even before the blade was out of its sheath one had risen and thrown himself towards me. A fist swung at my face, struck my chin and knocked me on my back. As I lifted myself on my elbows, I tasted blood on my lip.

‘Demetrios!’ Little Peter whimpered with terror, darting about like a wasp. ‘Has the Devil possessed you?’

‘Perhaps he was jealous,’ said a voice above me. Would you like to take your turn with the Turkish bitch, Greek? Or is it only boys that rouse you?’ A bare foot planted itself in my groin and squeezed down; I tried not to moan. ‘Are you a eunuch? If not, I have a knife. I could make you so.’

‘Let him be,’ squeaked Little Peter. I had not expected him to have the courage to speak out. ‘He is a friend of the bishop, and I have sworn him my peace.’

‘But I have not – and I am no friend of the bishop.’ With a last, agonishing jab of his foot, the man stepped away. My eyes were clenched shut with pain, but above me I heard the voice asking Little Peter: ‘Why have you come?’

‘We . . . He seeks a man named Odard, a Norman. I have heard he joined your band.’

‘He did – though much use he has been. His senses have been torn away, and he jabbers nothing but riddles and nonsense. What does the Greek want with him?’

I opened my eyes. The man who had struck me now stood over me, watching with malicious interest. Behind him the Turkish woman had crawled into a corner and now lay curled up like a corpse while her assailant wiped himself with a cloth.

‘Two of Odard’s companions were murdered,’ I said, speaking slowly as the blood slid over my tongue. ‘I seek to know who killed them.’

‘Who?’

‘Drogo of Melfi, and Rainauld of Albigeois.’

The Frank disappeared through a broken door into the house. I staggered to my feet and seated myself on a lump of stone, clutching my groin where it still ached. A dozen dull eyes watched me. The hermit perched in the corner and made himself still, fixing his gaze on heaven and muttering unintelligible incantations. I hoped that he was praying for me.

The Frank emerged back into the courtyard. Behind him, shuffling reluctantly, came Odard. He too was naked to the waist, and though he could not have eaten any better than I had in the past months he seemed larger than I remembered. Perhaps it was merely that I had shrunk more. He still looked like a walking skeleton, his skin barely binding the bones within: I could have counted each one of his ribs, while his fingers had become talons.

‘What will you ask him?’ said the Tafur.

‘Why the boy who served him, Simon, died by the river six days ago.’

‘And why should I let you, Greek?’

I stared hard at the crude cross around the Tafur’s neck. ‘Because Odard has committed deeds that are abominations in the sight of God. He has worshipped on pagan altars and sacrificed to ancient idols. If we are abandoned now by Christ, it is because of Odard’s evil.’

Odard, who had hovered in the Tafur’s shadow, now darted forward. ‘Lies! Lies!’ he shrieked. ‘You are the crow, Greek, trilling lies and death. Curse you! Curse you!’

‘You did not go down to that temple to eat, did you? You prostrated yourself before the Antichrist, and gave yourself into his power.’

Behind Odard the Tafur band had begun to rise. Suddenly their leader stepped forward and hooked his arm around Odard’s neck. It seemed so thin, and the grip so firm, that I thought it might snap off his shoulders.

‘Truly?’ hissed the Tafur in his ear. ‘Has the Devil broken your mind and brought curses upon us?’ He turned to me. ‘Or is it you who speaks for the prince of lies and darkness?’

All my attention was on Odard; I did not notice the Tafurs sidling up to me until it was too late. I jerked back with a cry as one of them stepped behind me and locked my head in the same vicelike grip as held Odard. A second man pinned my arms at my sides. Little Peter had vanished.

‘I speak the truth.’ My throat burned, and the arms clamped around my stomach made me want to retch, but it was nothing against the fear of what I would suffer if they disbelieved me. I directed my words to Odard again. ‘Was it Quino? Did Quino come to you, tell you I guessed your secret? Did you fear that Simon had betrayed you – that his testimony would see you burned on a pyre? Was it you who drew the bowstring while the boy picked herbs on the river bank? Tell me. Confess it, and win mercy.’

The hand on my neck choked short my words, so that I feared Odard had not even heard them. Certainly he did not heed me: without regard for his safety he twisted and fought against the Tafur’s grip. It availed him nothing.

‘Those are solemn charges,’ said the Tafur. A callous smile belied his concern. ‘You swear its truth; he denies it. Who can decide?’

‘It would be easier to judge if he answered me.’

Odard stamped his foot on the Tafur’s, and was rewarded with a blow to his belly. His head jerked about like a puppet’s.

‘He will not answer you. His wits are broken.’

‘Then let me take him away, to see what I may coax from him.’

The Tafur shook his head, chuckling. ‘No. You say he has profaned his holy faith. If he has not, then you yourself are an enemy of Christ. The Lord is just in all His works – He will decide.’

Fear began to warm my veins. ‘How?’

‘You will suffer the ordeal of combat. God’s favour will decide it.’

Before I could argue, the hands that held me dropped away. My knife, which lay on the ground where it had been struck, was picked up and placed in my fist. The Tafur pulled a similar knife from his own belt and passed it to Odard, keeping his arm gripped tight so that he did not turn the blade on his captor.

The rest of the Tafurs stepped away and leaned against the walls, watching with undisguised anticipation. Two of them blocked the gate by which I had entered, while another barred the inner door. Even the brutalised Turkish woman had sat up, staring at us through a curtain of torn hair.

‘This is not justice.’ The words seemed to fall from my mouth unnaturally fast now the pressure on my throat had been released. ‘This is sport.’

‘It is the will of God,’ said the Tafur solemnly. ‘Only the man who doubts His cause fears Him.’

I set my hands by my side. ‘I will not fight.’

‘Then pray that God defends you.’

The Tafur let Odard go and stepped back. Even before I could lift an arm to defend myself Odard had flown forward, his knife poised to rip me open. I ducked, spinning away from his flailing blade, and as he stumbled past me I kicked out at his knee. He fell with a howl onto a pile of rubble.

I glanced at the Tafur. ‘Is it enough?’

He did not need to answer. The tension coiled into Odard’s frame made him quick as a whip: he leaped to his feet and moved towards me again, more carefully this time. Grime and blood were smeared on his face where he had fallen.

‘I have no quarrel with you,’ I said loudly. ‘Tell me the truth of Simon’s death, why he died, and we will set our blades aside.’

Odard screamed something indistinct and charged. He feinted to his right, then swung left, but I had read it in his eyes and avoided him.

‘Fight honestly,’ called one of the watching Tafurs. ‘Fight to kill.’

‘Whom did you worship in the cave?’ I persisted. ‘Was it Mithra?’

Odard lifted his drooping face and fixed his stare on mine. ‘What was he to you?’

He ran at me, moving right again, and this time it was no feint. His blade sliced across my arm, but I did not feel the welling blood. His momentum had brought him crashing into me and we both collapsed to the ground. Sharp stones bit into my back. I tried to roll him over, tried to escape his pressing weight – who would have thought so scrawny a man could be so heavy? His right hand, his sword hand, was trapped under my shoulder, and as it wriggled free I saw that his fist was empty. That was brief respite. Fingers and nails scratched my wrist as he sought to prise away my own knife.

Odard’s bare torso pressed close against my face. The smell of his sweat and of my own blood mingled in the air about me as my right hand jerked against the attack. If he seized my knife now I would die.

‘Drogo. It is time to finish this, Drogo.’ His black eyes seemed to spin in their sockets. ‘You led me into the path of sin, the way of death. Now it is yours.’

He swooped down, leaning across me and sinking his teeth into my arm. I cried out, and before I could master the pain my fingers sprang open. The knife dropped from my grasp and in an instant Odard snatched it away.

‘What have you done to me?’ he whispered. Strange contortions wracked his face, as if a demon struggled to escape, but now his eyes were still. I wondered if it was me he saw, or Drogo or Quino or none of us. ‘What have you done?’

‘Nothing. Odard, I have done nothing to you, I swear it.’

‘He is innocent, Quino. What has he done to us?’

‘Nothing.’

I saw Odard’s gaze sidle over to his right, to the hand which held my knife. Surprise creased his brow.

‘This is not mine.’

His thoughts were shattered, so much so that I could not guess whether he would throw the knife away or plunge it into my heart. I doubt whether he knew himself. I would not wait to discover it. Drawing on his distraction, on the fact that he had released my arm, I drove a fist into his jaw. As he reeled backwards I pushed myself off the ground, trying to shake him off me. I unbalanced him, but did not dislodge him: instead we rolled over and over, locked together in each other’s arms like lovers. Dust rose around us and filled my eyes; splinters dug into me, while Odard’s hands snatched at my tunic. The knife seemed to be lost.

And suddenly there was no more struggle. I had come to rest on top of him, and my first thought was that my arm had bled more than I realised, for the sweat ran red on his chest. Then panic struck me, as I saw the blood spreading between us. That did not come from my arm: had I been stabbed without knowing?

At last I saw the truth: the knife was buried to the hilt in Odard’s chest. Whether it had been my hand or his that had guided the weapon I would never know, but somewhere in our frenzied grappling it had pierced his heart. He was still breathing, just, but his head was still and his eyes were closed. His left arm flapped limply, like a broken wing.

I bent my mouth close to his ear. ‘Why did Simon die?’

Odard did not answer. He had joined Drogo, Rainauld, Simon and the other denizens of that cursed tent. I wondered what he would say to them in the world beyond.

I hauled myself to my feet and glanced around.

The Tafur leader watched me, smirking. ‘The Lord has spoken. Truly, this man was a heretic. Now, Greek, you may ask your questions.’

His ringing laughter chased me from the courtyard. None of the Tafurs tried to stop me.

My arm still bled a little, but there were deeper cuts to my soul which I could not bind. Nonetheless, I tried. As if my pain was not a part of me, as if I could escape my very self, I ran. Through Antioch’s alleys and passageways, past houses, mansions, churches and empty markets, I ran until my lungs faltered and my legs burned. Even then I could not free myself from my torment, though at least the ache in my body dulled it.

I might have run for miles, or merely in circles; at last I stopped to see where I had gone. I was on the eastern outskirts of the city, against the foot of the mountain. At the end of the road I could see orchards and olive groves rising in stepped terraces over the lower slopes, the sheer cliffs looming above them. A golden light washed over the landscape and the air was still, yet the beauty only sharpened my feeling of desolation. I had killed men before, of course – for war, for money, for pride and for hate – but never had I slain a witless innocent in such vicious entertainment.

I could not dwell on it now. I was far from our camp on the walls, and soon the light would dissolve into shadow. I did not know whether I had left the realm of the Tafurs or not, but it had been terrible enough in daylight. By night, it must have been beyond imagining. I would go back to Anna, though I dared not think what I would say.

It should have been an easy journey, for the sinking sun pointed straight to the walls, but in the maze of streets I soon lost sight of it. I tried to remember the bearing and tread a straight path, but that was impossible: this quarter of the city was so tangled that I could barely walk fifty paces before I was spun around a corner, or found the road blocked. Within ten minutes my sense of direction was uncertain; after twenty, I had lost it completely. The hazy shadows deepened, the houses melted together, and my pace grew ever more hesitant. A rising panic drove the guilt and pain from my heart, which now beat only with the urgency of escape. Though I had seen no Tafurs, I feared there might be other Franks keen to take advantage of a solitary Greek.

At a crossroads I found a man squatting by a wall. He was wrapped in rags; his teeth were gone and the skin on his bare head was mottled purple with disease. Had it been any darker, I might have thought him a pile of discarded refuse.

‘Which way to the church of Saint Peter?’ I asked.

He said nothing, but after a few moments a single arm extended to his right.

‘Thank you.’

I hurried on the way he had indicated. Either I was more badly lost than I had feared or this was a little-travelled short cut, for the way quickly narrowed until barely two men could have walked abreast. High walls towered on either side, unbroken by windows or doors, and though I could see a ribbon of blue sky stretched above none of its light reached into those depths.

The road ended abruptly in a brick wall. I cursed. I had been played false by the derelict at the crossroads, and doubtless he would think it a fine joke when I returned. I turned to go back.

Two men were standing in my path, pressed shoulder to shoulder against the confining walls, their faces hidden in the gloom. I had not heard them arrive.

I opened my palms to show that I was harmless. Perhaps that was a mistake.

‘It’s a dead end,’ I said. ‘I have come the wrong way.’

They did not answer. The man on the right stepped forward, cocked his head, and drove a fist into my stomach. As I doubled over, I sensed his companion moving closer.

A hard blow struck me on the back of my skull, and I fell into darkness.

κ ς

‘Drink.’

I had slept without dreams. When the voice came, I did not know if I heard it or imagined it. I could not even tell if I had opened my eyes, for whatever I did the darkness remained complete.

‘Drink.’

The rough grain of a carved cup pressed against my lip. An unseen force tipped back my head, and I felt cool water pouring in. My mouth was dry as stone, and I held the water on my tongue to let it seep into the flesh.

‘Where am I?’

‘Alive.’

The voice was soft, feminine. Was it Anna’s? I leaned forward, knocking my teeth on the cup, but still the night rebuffed me.

‘Who are you?’

The cup eased away without answer.

When I next awoke, it was to the feel of fresh air on my cheek. I was sitting beside a lake surrounded by high mountains, grey and blue in the distance. Low clouds scudded over the peaks, and birdsong blew in on the breeze that furrowed the water. I could smell charred smoke, as if a candle had recently been extinguished nearby.

A woman in a white shift walked towards me along the shore. A hood covered her hair, and her face was strangely indistinct. Even when she drew near it seemed as though I looked at her through smeared glass, though I could see nothing between us.

‘Where am I?’

‘You are lost in the wilderness. You must find the path that will take you away, to Jerusalem.’

I looked around. There was no break in the mountains. ‘I see nowhere to go.’

She laughed – a soft, half-mocking laugh whose meaning I could not fathom. ‘You do not see because you walk in darkness. You must kindle a flame, a light to see by.’

‘How?’

She did not answer; instead, she vanished, and in her place I saw Rainauld and Odard standing a little way off. Their heads lifted in recognition and they began to approach. Panic flared down my spine; I began running across the shingle beach, my feet sliding and jarring on the rounded stones. Behind, I could hear them striding effortlessly after me.

I was dreaming.

I opened my eyes, and was back in darkness.

The cup was at my lips again, but this time when I drank the water was bitter. I spat it out, but immediately a soft hand was pressing against my forehead, tipping it back so that my mouth hung open. The liquid splashed down my throat, and I held my breath so that I would not taste it.

‘You must drink this. It will release you from your pain.’

‘I have no pain.’

‘Then it is working.’

I was laid out on a bed or a table, I realised. I could feel hard boards under my back, softened a little by a thin cloth. I tried to lift myself, but my arms were powerless.

‘Let me go.’

‘You are free to go, if you wish. It is only the bonds of sin which hold you.’

Something in the darkness rippled like woven silk, though it might have been my mind imagining it. My thoughts seemed to be ebbing away from me, and when I tried to grasp them they merely flowed through my hands like water.

Three candles had been lit in an alcove at the far end of a low room. They cast a feeble light, but after the hours of darkness I had endured they were bright as the sun to my aching eyes. Their orange glow shone on coarse walls, humped and gouged where chisels had carved the stone, and on ranks of bowed heads facing away from me, row upon row stretching back into the shadows. Before them, her face towards me, stood a woman in a white woollen robe. Her eyes were closed, her head tipped back in a rapture that was at once sublime and wholly sensual. She was chanting something, a liturgy perhaps, though it was in no language that I could comprehend.

Two men came forward from the congregation and knelt. One was older, and looked to be some sort of acolyte, for he wore the same kind of white robe as the priestess. The other was a youth, dressed as a peasant. I could see his shoulders trembling beneath his tunic. The woman took a jug and poured water over his hands, then over the acolyte’s, and then her own. The acolyte knelt and rose three times in front of her. Turning aside, he repeated the obeisance at a stone altar covered in a white cloth. There was a book sitting on the altar; the man lifted it, and with more bows passed it to the woman. She raised it above her, then held it flat over the youth’s head, declaiming her strange rite. The words were still foreign to me, but as I listened more closely patterns of repetition began to emerge. Despite the unknown sounds, there was something familiar in the voice as well. It sounded like the woman in my dreams – and somewhere else. I could not think where.

She passed the book back to the man, and laid her hands on the youth’s forehead. More phrases were repeated. Then she took him by the arm and lifted him to his feet, turning him to face her congregation.

‘Resolve in your heart that you will keep this holy baptism throughout your life, according to the usage of the Church of Purity, in chastity, in truth, and in all other virtues which the Lord ordains.’

I sank back on my harsh bed. For a few moments, my thoughts had run almost clear: now they were agitated beyond reason. A baptism? How could it be a baptism? There had been no chrism – nor any priest that I had seen. And the language had been neither Greek nor Latin, for I had heard the latter tongue often enough in the past months to know its sound.

Whatever unnatural service it had been, it was now finished. The worshippers who had knelt on the floor rose. The woman stepped away from the candles and steered the youth, the initiate, into the midst of the congregation. The older man who had assisted her turned to follow, and as he did so the candlelight illuminated his face. It was hard to see through the throng and by the unsteady light, but I had seen him recently enough, and the crooked nose and blistered face were quite distinctive. It was Peter Bartholomew.

I surrendered to confusion and lay back.

Later, after the cave had emptied, I heard the voice from my dream again. This time I was not at the lake in the mountains; I was in darkness. It had the same earthy smell as the cave, and I wondered if for once I was not asleep. There was little way of knowing.

‘How is your pain, Demetrios?’

‘Endurable.’ The ache at the back of my head was the least of my discomforts. For the rest of me, my arm throbbed where it had been cut by Odard’s knife and my back was stiff from lying still so long, but I could survive that. My stomach, I noticed, was pulled tight as a drumhead. How long had it been since I ate?

‘How long have I been here?’

‘A night and a day.’

No wonder I felt hungry. ‘Where am I?’

‘In the church of the pure.’

‘In Antioch?’

She hesitated. ‘Beneath it.’

‘How did I come here?’

‘We found you at the roadside. You had been robbed and beaten and left for dead. We saved you.’

‘Thank you.’

I thought back to the two men looming over me in the alley, and flinched.

‘I must go,’ I said. ‘My companions will fear for my life, if I have not returned in almost two days.’

Warm breath played over my cheek – she must have been mere inches away.

‘You have witnessed our service, Demetrios. You have seen our secrets. We cannot release you now to betray us.’

I jerked up, ignoring the agony racking my skull. I tried to leap off the bed, but though my arms and legs were free there was some cord around my waist binding me down. I fumbled at it, but I felt no knot, and in the darkness I could see nothing.

‘Do not struggle. You will suffer no harm here. In truth, you are probably safer. Kerbogha arrived yesterday. His army is on the mountain, trying to force the walls. They say the fighting is very terrible.’

‘All the more reason that I must find my companions.’ If Anna were left defenceless when the Turks broke in . . . ‘Let me go.’

‘It is for your own good. Once, you asked me to help you. I told you then that I could do nothing until you were willing to discard the deceptions worked on you by the priests. I can help you now, but again, only if you will receive it.’

At last I knew the voice. Sarah, the priestess who had ministered to Drogo and his friends. Had they been baptised in the same rite that I had just seen?

‘What deceptions? I am a Christian.’

She laughed. ‘Have you ever spoken of God to an Ishmaelite? They say that we worship the same god, but that they alone know the true way to venerate Him.’

I slumped back. ‘Are you an Ishmaelite?’ How could she be, when her followers carved their backs with crosses?

‘No.’ Her voice was sharp, insulted. ‘But they are right that one may name God truthfully and worship him in error. That is what you have done.’

‘How?’

‘Are you thirsty?’

I rolled my tongue around my mouth. ‘A little,’ I admitted.

‘Drink.’

Again the wooden cup tipped against my lips, spreading the bitter liquid within me. I gulped it eagerly, then suddenly stopped my throat in panic. ‘What is this – some foul communion of your heresy?’

‘It is water, and a little artemisia to ease your pain. You need have no fear.’

She paused. From somewhere on my left I heard the grate of a cup being placed on a table. I strained my ears, but there were no sounds beyond, no evidence of the congregation who had been there earlier. Were we alone?

‘You said I worshipped God falsely. How do you say it is right to worship Him?’

‘That is hidden knowledge.’

Frustration rose within me, rolling back the pain and confusion: the childish anger at being barred from secrets. Again I tried to rise from my bed, and again the bonds restrained me. ‘Why hidden? So you can lord it over your followers, tempt them in with curiosity?’

‘Hidden, because it is dangerous. It is not pride or selfish delight which hides these mysteries. They are open to all, but only if those who desire to know them have a pure and seeking heart. I can tell you these things, but you must wish to know them. Not for advantage, nor malice nor greed, but from the sincere yearning for salvation.’

‘Who does not desire salvation?’

‘Many. And even of those who do, the greater part lack the pure soul and true heart to persevere. They desire truth, but from ignorance. They do not understand what they seek. When they find it, it is beyond them. Their faith suffers; sometimes it is ruined altogether. Sometimes they themselves do not survive.’

Her words filled me with dread. A part of me – the part which had sought unpleasant truths from every pimp, thief, mercenary and noble in Constantinople – bridled at her overblown warnings. But in another, more profound part, I shivered at the awesome promise and threat entwined in her words.

‘The knowledge I have to give is not some scroll or book, to be filed away on a shelf once you have read it. My knowledge is the knowledge of life, of light. Once learned, it cannot be forgotten. It will consume you like a furnace, and if your soul is flawed you will be broken. It is not enough to know it – you must also believe it.’

I raised myself on my elbows, feeling the cord press against my waist. ‘I will hear it.’

All that followed, I heard as if in a dream. Afterwards, indeed, I wondered if I had dreamed it. Scenes and images passed through my head as she spoke – glowing angels with fiery wings, lush gardens of fruit, rearing serpents – but more as if I were walking through a church, peering at the icons each in turn. My soul seemed to swell in my head, pressing against my skull as it grappled with her story. One voice screamed that it was falsehood, a deception wrought of evil to damn all who heard it. But another voice counselled caution, testing her words and wondering in terror if they were true.

‘Much of what I have to tell will seem familiar. That is because the liars and demons who possess the church have twisted it, by the merest fraction, into error. The prince of darkness knows that the best lies sit closest to truth. Only when I have finished will you see how far from truth the church has turned.’

I nodded.

‘I will tell you from the beginning. Many ages ago, after Satan fell from Heaven, he divided the waters of his prison firmament, and raised up earth from beneath the waters to become land. He made himself a throne, and caused his rebel angels to bring forth life: plants and trees and herbs, animals, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. But still it was not enough. He took clay from the earth and moulded man, and from that man he took more clay and made woman. Then he snared two angels from heaven and made them prisoners in the clay, so that their spirits were clothed in mortal form. In his depravity, he bade them sin, but they were pure and did not know how.

‘So Satan placed them in a garden. From a stream of his spittle he made a serpent; he took its form, and entered the garden. He slithered into the woman’s body and filled her with a longing for sin until her desire was like a glowing oven. He filled the man with a like desire for sin, so that both captive angels were consumed with lust. Together, they spawned the children of the Devil. The spark of the angels is divided and scattered among the people of the Earth, but it is not lost. A fragment of their being remains within us: that is why we must forswear the dark substance of this world, and seek to kindle a flame from the angelic fire within. Only thus will we free ourselves from the vessels which bind our souls, and escape this wicked Earth for the realms of light.’

Sweat had begun to pool on my skin in the close air of the cave, but I barely noticed it. Far hotter was the fire that raged within me, scalding and blistering my soul even to think on what she had said. Her warning had been honest: her words were pure fire. Even if I disbelieved them, even if I longed to tear them from my memory, I would not forget them. They would undermine the walls of my faith with doubt, perhaps to destruction. Even repeating them might be mortal sin. And I feared there was a part of me, an insistent part, which clamoured that she might speak truth.

‘You have opened the first door of our mysteries, Demetrios Askiates. What do you say? Are you afraid to cross the threshold?’

I did not have the strength to lie. ‘Yes.’

‘Good. Only the proud rush in where they do not see clearly. The humble tread fearfully, but journey farther. Yet, in your soul, the truth begins to stir. Have you never felt the empty weight of your sinful clay? Has it never seemed to you that your spirit is snared in a vessel from which it cannot escape? Surely – in the clarity of grief, perhaps – you have ached to shake off the trappings of the flesh and liberate the divine spark within?’

Caution and reason implored me to resist her, but I could not deny the simple accuracy of her words. I remembered running through the labyrinth of streets and alleys after Odard’s death, desperate to lose my guilt. I remembered lying next to Anna on the walls, our bodies touching but our souls sundered by the secret of what I had done. Was it all as Sarah said?

Her soft voice was like balm on my thoughts. ‘You begin to see clearly, Demetrios. All your life you have lived in sin and error – now at last the light of God begins to glow in your heart. Take it. Cup it in your hands and breathe on it, so that the flame grows and the fire takes hold. For now it is the merest ember, but in time it will burn away your sin like sun on a dawn mist.’

‘But how—’

She pressed a sweet finger to my lips. ‘Sleep now.’

I did not sleep. I lay on my bed while questions and arguments roared through my head like storms in the desert. Some whipped up into towering columns of confusion; others eddied and flowed in thick clouds of chaos. At times I thought they were gone, that the grains of thought had settled, but they always returned with renewed ferocity. Pain thumped against the back of my skull and hunger cramped my stomach: my body was failing. I no longer knew if that was a curse or a blessed relief.

Yet even as my senses collapsed, my perception of the cave improved. Light began to filter in through long cracks in the ceiling, and gradually the darkness resolved itself into a palimpsest of grey shadows. Rough-hewn walls emerged around me; dark figures moved in the recesses of the cave. My bed seemed to be in a corner, while at the far end I could make out the vertical lines of a stair or ladder rising through the ceiling. It was often in use, though even when a man came down it no additional light was admitted. How deep was this place, I wondered? Were we in a cave below a cave?

Later, I did not know how long, Sarah returned. Her robe was like a shaft of moonlight before me, though her voice was much troubled.

‘Have you thought on what I told you, Demetrios?’

‘I have.’

‘How does it seem to you?’

‘Difficult.’

‘Truth does not strike us all as it did the holy Saint Paul. For many, it is a long and arduous road.’

‘The ways of the flesh are hard to shake off. Is that why your followers carve themselves with crosses, to mortify their sinful bodies?’

‘As the cuts are made, as the sign of the Lord enters their flesh, they say they hear Satan himself screaming in fury.’

‘Drogo and Rainauld had heard your truth. They marked their bodies. Their faith must have been prodigious.’

‘Do not talk of them,’ said Sarah sharply. ‘The pure novice bows his head and fastens his eyes on his own path. If he looks at his fellow pilgrims, he distracts his thoughts from righteousness.’

‘Drogo and Rainauld are dead. Their companion Odard too. If that is the ultimate end of our road, then I wish to know it.’

‘To know where you travel is not a journey of faith. It is the way itself which matters; you will know the destination when you reach it. But if it will soothe your thoughts, I will tell you that their fate owed nothing to their faith. As I told you once before, they had abandoned my teaching. Another teacher – a false prophet – seduced them.’

Her words cut through my tangled thoughts. ‘Who?’

‘It does not matter.’ Exasperation and suspicion swelled in her voice. ‘I think you do not—’

A shout from the ladder silenced us both. Whatever door or panel covered its mouth had been thrown back, and a column of sunlight poured into the room. All around me white-robed acolytes were staring as if at an angel – and, indeed, the figure who descended the ladder might well have been a messenger of Heaven, for the light ringed him with a shining nimbus, and thick tendrils of smoke curled above him in its beam.

As my eyes adjusted, I saw that it was not an angel of the Lord but a scrawny man with a crooked nose. Nor was there anything ethereal about the screeching panic in his voice.

‘The city,’ he shouted. ‘They are burning the city.’

κ ζ

The spell of Heaven was broken. Men and women rushed to the ladder, tearing at each other in their frenzy to get out. The messenger himself was pulled down and subsumed in the fray. Cascades of smoke rolled through the trapdoor, darkening the cave once more, while a devouring roar began to sound in the distance.

I was forgotten, but I was not free. I strained at my bonds, but my desperate efforts only seemed to pull them tighter. I reached under the bed and felt for a knot or clasp. My hands scrabbled on the wood; a splinter pierced under my fingernail. Wrenching my arm, I found the loop of cloth that bound me and followed it along, until at last I touched a bulge. It was almost beyond my grasp, and I would never loose it where it was. I tugged on the cloth, sliding it around until the knot rested on my belly.

I did not have the time to look about, but I sensed that I was now alone save for the swelling clouds of smoke. It crept into my eyes and mouth, rasping my throat raw and pricking tears down my cheek. If I did not escape it soon, it would choke the life out of me as surely as any noose. Yet I could not afford to pull the knot tighter in my haste to undo it.

Near panic, I poked my fingers into the knot, prying and teasing at the twisted fabric. My brittle reserve was bent almost to destruction by the effort of keeping my panic in check, but though my mind was in uproar my hands remained calm. The light from above was completely masked by the smoke; I could not see where I worked but tried to trace the loose ends back through the whorl of the knot.

It is only the bonds of sin which hold you, I heard the priestess say, though she had long since fled. Her voice was cool and unforgiving.

At last my finger slid through the knot and emerged the other side. I groped for the loop of cloth beside it, tugged, and felt it slither free. The tension relaxed; with one binding released, the others began to uncoil themselves. I pulled on them again, and they came apart. Perhaps it had been a feeble bond, but it had been strong enough for a feeble prisoner.

I swung myself off the bed and staggered forward. After two days lying supine my legs were weak and unsteady, but the joy of my freedom and the desperation of my predicament impelled me forward. I staggered through the smoke, trying not to breathe, kicking over unseen relics left by the fleeing pilgrims. My hands were on the ladder. I stepped onto the lowest rung, felt firm wood beneath my feet, and climbed. It seemed to me that the air should have been clearing as I rose, yet the clouds around me remained as thick as ever. My head came through the trapdoor opening; I was in a wooden hut or shed, and through its open door I could see daylight and a dusty courtyard. I hauled myself onto the ground, picked myself up, and ran outside. I was free.

It was scant relief. Enough of the artemisia lingered in my veins that for a moment I wondered if I had climbed into Hell itself. The air was as stifling as it had been in the confines of the cave, and an enormous pall of smoke hung over the city as far as I could see, so that the sun’s light turned to rust and bathed us in an eerie, infernal twilight.

A small gate led out into a street, where dark figures scurried past. I was about to make for it when a grating, rumbling noise erupted behind me. I turned. The timbers of the hut that I had come from must have been burning over me; now they gave way, and the roof crashed down into the shell of the walls. The trapdoor and the cave were buried beneath, while a plume of dust and ash rose over it.

In the street I met a new world of confusion. Frantic pilgrims fled by in every direction, wailing prayers and screams. Many had had the clothes burned from their bodies, their skin shrivelled and blackened by the fire; others, whose legs had been crushed in falling buildings, dragged themselves through the dust by their hands. I saw one frenzied woman running past with her baby still sucking her breast, heedless of the consuming calamity.

I looked to my right. Through the smoke I could see shreds of flame burning in the air, so high that it seemed they must have descended from the heavens. A hot wind stroked my cheek, and I felt my skin tightening as the blood seethed under it. The thunder of the fire was everywhere: the crackle of the flames, the roar of buildings tumbling over on each other, the howl of the wind gathering itself in to feed the blaze to yet greater heights. Against that the beat of hooves was nothing; I did not hear it until it was almost upon me.

A horse charged out of the red smoke, a sword in its rider’s hand. Too late, I thought to wonder how the fire had started, whether Kerbogha was laying waste the city. I was unarmed, though in that inferno even the strongest shield would have burned free of my arm. Yet the horseman did not look Turkish: the coned helmet silhouetted against the red smoke was Norman. Was he part of a rout, the remnant of a broken army?

Whether he did not recognise me as an ally, or whether he did not care, he had no mercy for me. He saw me standing transfixed in the road, swerved towards me and drew back his sword arm. A fresh gust of wind fanned my face as the beast rushed past, inches away; I did not even have the wit to duck. The sword swung forward and struck against my shoulders. I fell to the ground.

Though I was almost too numb to care, I did not die. The Norman had not hit me with the edge of his blade but with the flat, using it as a cudgel or a drover’s stick. My back smarted, and there would be a livid weal rising under my tunic even now, but if that was to be the worst injury I suffered that day I would count myself blessed.

As I rose to my feet, the knight wheeled his horse and trotted back towards me. Reflected flames danced on his helmet as though it still sat in the armourer’s furnace.

‘Worm! Provençal coward! How dare you cower in dark holes when the defence of the city commands every man to the walls?’

‘Kerbogha?’ I mumbled. ‘Has Kerbogha taken the city?’

‘He will if you delay. Seek out your lord, and offer yourself up to his service.’

The Norman turned his horse away, spurred its side and galloped down the street. Through the swirling haze, I saw other fleeing pilgrims suffer the brutal touch of his sword and tongue as he passed.

His words had only increased my confusion, but I ignored it. The fires were raging hotter and closer, and if I did not fly before them my bones would be burned to embers. I turned after the Norman, away from the heat, and ran.

I knew little of Antioch, and had lost myself so many times already that I had no idea where the cave had been. I had to trust to the instincts of the crowd and follow them blindly through the smoke. I felt as though I had almost ceased to be human, but ran like a brute animal, my only instincts escape and survival. Norman knights on horse and on foot snapped at our heels and flanks, wraiths in the choking fog driving us on. I did not try to withstand them. They could have herded us towards the abyss and I would not have resisted.

Gradually, from the corners of my eyes, I began to recognise landmarks. A tavern sign, a crooked house, an empty fountain befouled by birds – they seemed familiar. I had passed them with Little Peter on my way to the Tafur kingdom, whenever that had been. Two days ago? It did not matter. I must be in the south-eastern quarter of the city, near the palace; from there I could find my way to the walls, to Anna and Sigurd and sanctuary.

The crowds around me were thicker now, but the air was clearer and cooler. Like a host of rats people poured from the corners and crannies which had hidden them, scurrying to safety. And suddenly, sooner than I had expected, I was out of the narrow alleys and into the wide expanse of the square by the palace. The throng was no less, for the tide of the dispossessed stretched clear across its boundaries, but for the first time in three days I knew where I was. On the edges of the square I could see knights with spears trying to push the fleeing pilgrims onwards towards the walls, while at the centre, like steadfast trees in a river in flood, two men sat on horseback, arguing. In silhouette, the knight’s helmet and the bishop’s mitre were almost identical but I could see just enough to recognise the men beneath. I pushed towards them.

An invisible circle of deference seemed to surround the two nobles, an island of space, so that the crowds flowed around them at a respectful distance. Even in the chaos of the moment, I needed a fresh draught of courage to break through and approach.

‘I had no choice.’ Soot had stained Bohemond’s skin dark as a Saracen’s, but the unyielding bite of his words was as clear as ever. ‘All Kerbogha’s strength is concentrated on the citadel – our line is almost broken. We cannot suffer cowards to cringe in hiding, when every arm that can carry a spear is needed.’

Opposite him, Adhemar’s horse moved nervously from side to side. ‘Burning down the city to keep Kerbogha from taking it is no answer.’

‘The vermin had to be smoked from their holes. I am not to blame if the wind fanned the flames too high.’

‘You are to blame for everything – you have brought ruin upon us.’ I had never seen the bishop so wild. Streams of sweat and tears flowed down his grimy face; he hunched over in his saddle, and abused Bohemond like a prophet of old.

‘Do not provoke me, priest. I am the only man who may yet save us.’

‘Look around you!’ Adhemar stretched out his hands, waving them at the fleeing hordes. ‘Look in their faces. They are broken, defeated; they are fleeing the city. Stone walls and locked gates will not hold them. Our army will be routed, and you will be to blame.’

‘For three days I have contended with Kerbogha. I have not slept, I have not eaten, I have not even got down from my horse to piss. These worms are your flock, Adhemar: if you and your dwarf hermit cannot rouse them to battle, I will. If you cannot deliver them, let them flee or burn. I need men – not noble men or skilled men or even strong men, but men with the spirit to fight, to battle against our destruction. If you cannot summon these men, then come to my mountain yourself and put your spear in Kerbogha’s path. If you dare.’

He kicked his horse, and rode into the mêlée. From the edge of the circle, I saw another knight spur after him.

Adhemar looked down. ‘Demetrios.’

‘Your Grace . . .’ After so long in the cave, and now caught up in the consuming panic, even familiar faces looked strange to me. ‘Has . . . has Bohemond done this?’

Adhemar gave a grim nod. ‘He believed that too many pilgrims were hiding themselves from battle. He set the fire to smoke them out, but I fear he has merely opened the city to Kerbogha.’

‘Has Kerbogha broken through?’

‘I do not know. The last I heard was that we still withstood him.’

Amid all the turmoil I did not hear the sound of feet approaching. Suddenly a dark figure had thrown himself between me and the bishop, was clutching the horse’s bridle and staring imploringly at Adhemar. He swayed from side to side, his free arm swinging wildly, and as his face turned towards the firelight I saw its features clearly. A crooked nose, and a host of pox scars. Peter Bartholomew.

‘Your Grace,’ he shrieked. ‘What has this liar told you?’

Without wasting a word, Adhemar swivelled his sword and slapped the blade hard against the wretch’s shoulders. Bartholomew screamed and fell back, but did not let go his grasp of the bridle.

‘Blessed are you when men persecute and revile you,’ he gasped. ‘Your Grace, the Lord has granted me a vision. You must hear it – by Christ you must hear it, before this Greek poisons you against me.’

The earth shuddered under our feet as a colonnade on the far side of the square crashed down on itself. Thick pillars toppled over and shattered on the ground; a cloud of ash and sparks erupted. Through it, set in an alcove on the rear wall, I saw the scorched face of an ancient statue staring down impassively on the destruction. A few men whose courage and order remained ran towards the blaze, carrying buckets and hurling water on the flames. The statue vanished in a steaming mist.

I looked back at the bishop. Peter Bartholomew was still at his side, still clinging to the bridle and ranting. Perhaps he feared that I was about to betray his heresy and wanted to denounce me first, but my only concern was to find my friends in all the fire and riot. I did not say farewell to Adhemar, did not even look at him, but threw myself back into the crowd and plunged on. There was little merit in trying to strike my own path, for no man could have imposed himself on the mob’s surging course. Instead, like a drowned man, I let it draw me effortlessly along, away from the mountain, down towards the walls and the river.

It did not take long to reach the walls: the road was wide, and the crowd inexorable. At the bridge a troop of Norman knights stood with brandished spears, stabbing back any who approached the barred gates, but they were little use. Peasants and knights swarmed up the steps to the walls above. Where the crowds were too thick, makeshift ladders had been leaned against the rampart, sagging under the weight pressed onto them. I remembered the scaling ladder that had snapped on the night we took the city, and chose the stairs. Looking up at the hordes clustered on the walls, it seemed impossible that there could be room for any others, yet still we pressed on up the steps. The city dropped away beneath me; when I turned my head at a bend in the stairwell I could see the roofs and domes stretching back to the mountain. Even in my shattered state I trembled, for here the full appetite of the fire was evident. It seemed that half of Antioch must be ablaze. Fat gouts of smoke rose over the flames, lifting the cries of men and beasts to the heavens. If this continued, Kerbogha could watch our destruction from the citadel on the summit, then ride down to pick over the ashes of our army in triumph.

Half-blinded by the flames and deafened by the noise, I reached the rampart. It was broad enough that in normal times four men could easily have marched abreast, yet now the space between the towers was choked with humanity. Still they surged forward, pushing into the teeth of the battlements where ropes dropped into the darkness on the far side of the wall. Some were the stout hawsers that we used for the siege engines; others were more rudimentary, bridles and tunics and cloth torn from tents hurriedly knotted together. The pilgrims clambered over each other, vying to snatch the hastily devised ropes and slide down out of the city. Such was the unrelenting pressure of crowding bodies that many were tipped from their perches before they had a hold.

I turned away. That was not the path for me. Along the walls to my right the crowds thinned, and though at first I had to batter my way across their flow my route gradually eased as I moved further from the gate. A few hundred yards away, indeed, the rampart was almost deserted: I passed through deserted watchtowers and met not a single challenge. So it was that when I did hear voices, from beyond a door ahead of me, I was well warned.

I no longer believed that I had any ally in that city save the Varangians, and I was half a mile or more from their camp. I slowed my pace and edged my way towards the guardroom door.

‘You must sail as soon as you reach the harbour,’ I heard from the other side. ‘Allow no delay. It will not be long before Kerbogha strikes at Saint Simeon to bar us from the sea, and you must be away before that.’

A second man mumbled a reply, but I did not heed it. From the moment I had heard the first voice, an icy fear had frozen me still. I knew it, its commanding tones and brusque arrogance. He had set the city alight to roust out the feeble and fearful because he had no men; now it seemed that he was sending his followers away. What was Bohemond doing?

‘Order the vessel’s master to make for Tarsus – you have enough gold to persuade him?’ I heard the chink of coin. ‘Good. Cross through the Cilician Gates, and seek out the Greek king Alexios in Anatolia. My last report was that he was campaigning at the lakes, near Philomelium, though he may have moved since. He should not be hard to find.’

‘They will call me a coward.’ I realised that the second voice was also familiar to me, though I could not name its owner.

‘You will say that you had no choice. You will tell the king that you left Antioch only so that the Lord might preserve your sword arm to kill the Ishmaelites. That Kerbogha stood in the gates when you left, and that you heard the doom of our army as you fled. Make sure that the Greek understands there is no merit in coming to our aid – that the only course open to him is to retreat to his palaces.’

‘I will tell him,’ said the second man doubtfully. ‘It will be all too easy to persuade him, for our doom is nearer than you admit. The city burns, the army flees – and you would have me delay the only man who could rescue us? I will do as you ask, but it is madness.’

‘A man may risk all on the throw of a single die. If he loses, they call it madness. But if he wins, William, suddenly it is greatness. When my father challenged the decadent might of the Greeks, when he landed his army on the shores of Illyria, he burned his baggage and scuttled his fleet so that not one man could succumb to cowardice. It is the same now. I will win this city myself, or not at all. Twice I have been denied the kingdoms which were mine by right – it will not happen a third time.’

There was a pause; perhaps they whispered, or embraced, or stood in silence. At length Bohemond said: ‘God go with you, William.’

‘Better He stays here. You have more need of Him.’

I heard the clinking of armour and the scrape of boots on stone, followed by the creak of a rope stretching taut. Then nothing. And then, quite suddenly, the sharp rap of footsteps approaching the door. It swung in so quickly that the hinges did not even squeak, and I barely had time to leap back into the shadow behind it. I crouched low, hoping that Bohemond had not heard me.

I need not have worried. He stepped straight past my hiding place, and a few of his long strides carried him away. He disappeared into the next tower and was gone.

I waited a few minutes for him to be well away, listening for any other companions he might have left behind. But there were none. I eased out onto the rampart, into the blue twilight. A thick rope was secured onto the battlements, dropping down to the dry meadow in front of the walls, but I did not examine it. I had eavesdropped enough to know who had descended it: William of Grantmesnil, Bohemond’s piggish brother-in-law. Doubtless others would discover it soon. I could scarcely comprehend the treacherous ambition of Bohemond’s plot, but this was not the time to wonder at it. I hurried away.

I knew that I had reached the right tower when I found the door barred. I hammered on it with my fist, though there was little enough strength left in that, and shouted in Greek for them to let me in.

They must have been on their guard, for they challenged me almost immediately. ‘Who are you?’

‘Demetrios.’

I heard the heavy clatter of beams being thrown aside. The door swung open, though its frame was filled almost immediately by the huge bulk of the man standing within. Behind him I could see a cluster of Varangians staring in amazement, the turbaned head of Mushid the swordsmith, and Anna, her arms crossed and her eyes crimson.

‘Fool,’ said Sigurd. ‘We thought you had died thrice over.’

I stumbled forward and slumped against his chest, oblivious to the rough touch of the iron mail. His bear arms closed around me, swaddling me in darkness.

κ η

They let me sleep for an hour – they could not have stopped me, for the moment Sigurd let me go I sprawled exhausted onto the stone floor. Then they roused me to demand answers. We made a fire on the top of the tower, for after so long in dark caves I craved light and air, and Sigurd roasted a small cube of meat on the end of a spear.

‘Horseflesh,’ he explained. ‘I found a Norman who had slaughtered his mount and was selling it, a bezant a portion.’

‘He will regret that when Kerbogha comes.’

‘He has probably already fled – or died. Have you seen what Bohemond did to the city?’

Sigurd waved an arm to the south-east. From our height, the devastation of that quarter of Antioch was easily visible. The blaze no longer raged, for the wind had turned the flames back towards the mountain where they had already devoured all there was to consume. Yet its embers still glowed red, winking in the night like a carpet of light, as though a bucket of live coals had been tipped out across the city.

‘I have seen what Bohemond did,’ I said wearily. ‘I was there.’

‘So was I.’

‘Why?’

‘I was looking for you.’ Sigurd pulled the spear from the fire and held it towards me. I scorched my fingers as I slid off the dripping meat, and shook it in the air to cool a little.

‘Sigurd has spent two days searching the city for you,’ Anna explained. She was sitting against the parapet at a little distance, unwilling to come too close to me.

‘I gave up when I saw the madness Bohemond had unleashed. I would not have found my own brother in that rout. And now, perhaps, you can tell me where you have been.’

The meat had cooled in my hand; I popped it in my mouth, desperate to savour it after my long, unwanted fast. Too quickly, it was gone – and though I knew what it had cost Sigurd, and loved him for it, it only sparked a more ravenous hunger.

‘I went in search of Odard. I wanted to know . . .’ I paused. What had I wanted to know? ‘I wanted to know if he had killed the boy – Simon, his servant.’

‘Had he?’

‘I don’t know. I think so.’ I could barely remember. ‘His wits had deserted him – he gibbered without meaning. I – I killed him.’

Anna leaned forward sharply. ‘What?’

Without meeting her gaze I told how the Tafurs had made me fight Odard, how the dagger had plunged itself into his heart, how I had run until I could run no further, then been struck down by the robbers. ‘When I awoke, I was in a cave. I did not know it at first, but it was a lair of heretics.’

‘What heretics?’ Sigurd asked.

‘The heretics who carve their backs with crosses. Sarah, the woman who visited Drogo in his tent, she is their priestess.’ I shuddered, remembering the dark hours in their cave. ‘I saw their rituals; I heard their secrets – terrible lies which should not be repeated. They fed me artemisia to ease my pain, and bound me.’

‘Artemisia would have numbed your senses as much as your pain.’ The physician in Anna was quick to speak. ‘Doubtless they hoped to stupefy you.’

Perhaps they had. Even to think on what Sarah had told me was like touching a scar. Was it the pain of error, though, or the stabbing fear of truth?

‘When the fires started they fled their cave. I escaped, found my way to the walls and came here.’

There was silence.

‘What will you do about the heretics?’ Sigurd asked.

‘What can I do? I did not see their faces, save one. If I report them to the Frankish priests they will be burned alive.’

‘If you do not, their impiety may infest the whole army. God may abandon us.’ Sigurd had a soldier’s fear of affronting the deities, and an exhaustive knowledge of the ways in which they might take offence.

Anna had less care for divine sensibilities. ‘God may abandon us?’ she echoed. ‘Look around you. He has abandoned us. The city burns, the army flees, and Kerbogha is at hand to deliver the killing blow. What does it matter if a rabble of Franks want to dispute the nature of the substance of the Trinity?’

‘This was not that sort of heresy,’ I said. ‘It was deeper. Darker.’

Anna banged her fist on the stone beside her. ‘It does not matter, Demetrios! The ship founders, and all you care about is the set of the sail.’

‘If we are bound to die, it is important to die piously,’ I insisted.

‘Are we bound to die?’

I looked out across the ravaged city again. It was not a quiet night: screaming and crashing and shouting still resounded in the darkness, punctuated by the occasional clash of steel. Who could guess the calamities they signalled, the battles raging unseen around the fragment of wall we sat on? For all I knew, we could be the last Christians left in the city.

‘I do not know if we are doomed. All we can do is stay here as long as our defences stand, and see who comes to find us.’

‘Nonsense,’ Sigurd growled. ‘Feeble nonsense. If we are to die, we should die like men, taking our fight to the enemy. When I come to see my ancestors, I will not have them scorn me as a coward.’

‘And what will you do if they condemn you for rushing too fast to meet them?’ Anna demanded. ‘You will not be able to come back.’

‘You fear to die too soon. I only fear to die badly.’

‘Enough!’ I lifted my hand to still them, and in the pause I heard shouts from below. I scrambled to my feet and looked down through one of the embrasures. Two horses stood patiently in front of the tower door; I could not identify their riders, for both wore cloaks even though the night was hot. One leaned forward to speak with our guard, and whatever he said must have satisfied the Varangian for he took the horses’ bridles and tethered them to a ring in the wall, then ushered the men into the tower. The slap of footsteps rose from the stairwell behind me, sounding ever louder, until a cowled head popped up through the opening. It looked around, blinking in the firelight, then fixed on me.

‘Demetrios. I hoped to find you here.’

The man’s hands came up and pulled the hood back from his face. He wore neither hat nor helmet beneath it: his grey hair was matted and tousled. At his neck, behind the beard, I saw the gleam of mail. Clearly he had not changed his clothing since we had met by the palace.

‘Are there not more important matters in Antioch to attend, your Grace?’

Adhemar climbed out of the stairwell and, glancing at me for permission, seated himself against the wall between me and Sigurd. His companion sat beside him. He did not pull back his hood, and Adhemar did not name him.

‘What news of the city?’ Anna’s impatience swept her manners aside. ‘Has it fallen?’

Adhemar shook his head slowly. The flames reflected on his face dug out every crevice and wrinkle, the deep pits around his eyes: he seemed immeasurably old.

‘We hold it, praise God. We have tried Him sorely.’

‘Bohemond tries God like none save the Devil,’ added Adhemar’s companion, with a rasping anger that I recognised immediately as Count Raymond’s. ‘And for now it earns him the Devil’s luck.’

‘How many men were lost tonight?’ I asked.

‘Who knows? Those who burned to death in the flames will never be found; those who escaped will never be numbered, unless Kerbogha finds them and sends trophies of their bodies. But I fear that Bohemond has lost more through the fire than he has gained.’

‘And those who do remain have lost what hope they had,’ said Raymond savagely. His hood had slipped back a little, and I could see the glint of his single eye staring at me. ‘They had little enough before; now there is nothing. In a rout, men become like cattle and even the bravest falters. If their miseries are inflicted by their own captain, what confidence can they have?’

‘Bishop Adhemar, Count Raymond – you have not come here, so late on this night of fire and death, to seek commiseration in our shared peril. Why have you come?’

My blunt speaking silenced them for a moment. Raymond hunched his legs to his chest and fiddled with the straps of his boots, while Adhemar stroked a finger over his cheek and stared at the fire. At length, speaking carefully, he said, ‘It concerns a pilgrim, a Provençal named Peter Bartholomew.’

There was a speculative note in his voice which implied that we had entered a negotiation, that he sought to barter for information. I tried to hide my surprise. Bartholomew had turned up so often: in the cathedral, in the heretics’ cave, in the tumult by the palace – why not also in the Bishop’s cares?

‘I know Peter Bartholomew. He came to Anna for relief from a boil. I saw him again as I left you in the square by the palace this evening.’

‘Is that all you know?’

‘Should I know more?’

Adhemar sighed. ‘As you saw, he threw himself at me in the square by the palace. He was greatly agitated. Much of it seemed to come from you, from a fear of what you might have told me.’

‘I told you nothing,’ I said evenly.

‘I know that – but he did not. And I wonder how much it affected the fabulous story he insisted that I hear.’

‘What story was that?’

I was giving Adhemar no help, but there was nothing he could do. Reluctantly, he unclasped his cloak – it must have been stifling in the June heat, even at night – and began.

‘He told me he had seen a vision. More accurately, he told me that the Lord had sent him a vision. Now, many men see visions, the poor and simple more than most. Certainly, some are divinely inspired, others the product of credulous enthusiasm or wishful thinking. And sometimes, I fear, of calculated interest.’ He spoke these last words with special emphasis. ‘As a bishop, a shepherd of souls, my duty is to establish the truth of such visions.’

‘Christ manifests himself in many ways,’ I said solemnly. Count Raymond scowled at me.

‘I need not trouble you with the details of his vision,’ Adhemar continued. ‘Enough to say that Saint Andrew had visited him in a dream and had spoken of a holy relic, a glorious artefact of our Saviour’s life. The saint told him this thing was concealed within Antioch itself, and gave Peter instructions on how it might be found. No fewer than four times, apparently.’

‘He is nothing if not persistent,’ muttered Raymond.

‘So?’ I asked. ‘Follow the saint’s commandments. You will know soon enough if the vision came from Christ.’

Adhemar pressed his fingers together. ‘It is not so easy. If we seek it in secrecy, and only reveal it when it is found, who will believe that it is the relic we claim? If we seek it openly, and do not find it, we shall be scorned and reviled. You have seen the sentiment of the army, Demetrios. The panic is calmed, but their courage balances on a single straw. If they lose faith in their leaders, or believe that God has deserted them, the straw will break and we shall be plunged into a pit from which we will not rise. That is why I must know what I can of Peter’s motives.’

He fixed his gaze on me, demanding an answer. Still I prevaricated.

‘This relic might be valuable.’

‘Invaluable,’ said Adhemar. ‘As a sign of God’s continuing favour, a symbol that He is with us still, it would be beyond measure. It would lift the hearts of the army, restore their trust. And as a standard in battle it would surely bring us victory.’

‘And great honour to the men who found it,’ I observed. ‘A Provençal pilgrim’s vision, received by a Provençal count and his bishop. The men who say that Bohemond should lead would be silenced; Count Raymond’s prestige would be unchallenged.’

‘If you say we do this only for gain, you are a fool, spat Raymond.

‘If you say you have no thought for gain, you take me for a fool.’

‘No,’ said Adhemar. ‘Of course we will gain. But that is not our motive. What benefits us benefits the army.’

‘Now you sound like Bohemond,’ Sigurd said.

Raymond rose in anger. ‘Perhaps we do. Who better than a mercenary to understand his wiles? But we are not so alike as you think. What serves Bohemond well serves your Emperor ill. What serves us serves Alexios better.’

I thought of Bohemond’s instructions to his brother-in-law on the wall, the treacherous gamble he had devised. Bohemond’s star would only rise at the Emperor’s expense. And if his fixation was such that he would cut himself off from all hope of relief, he would not hesitate to be rid of the only Byzantines remaining with his army.

Yet still I waited. Peter Bartholomew was no friend of mine: he was a heretic, and he had conspired with heretics to keep me captive. But could I condemn him to be burned alive for that? I had been the instrument of so much death already.

I looked up. In the surrounding silence, all gazes had come to rest on me: Sigurd’s, Anna’s, Raymond’s and Adhemar’s. All I desired was to be free, to be away from Antioch and safe with my family. It seemed that even so simple a prayer could not be answered without more killing.

‘Only God can judge the truth of Peter Bartholomew’s vision.’ I saw Count Raymond about to speak again, thinking that I spoke platitudes to delay him, and hurried on. ‘But as to why he might fear me, I will tell you this. It will not please you to hear it. Heresy has infested your flock. For two days the heretics held me in a cave under the city. I saw their rites, and heard their lies.’

Adhemar had gone very still and his skin was pale as the moon. ‘What manner of lies?’

‘That the world was made not by God but by the Devil. That every fleshly thing is evil. That we are children of Satan.’ I struggled against my revulsion to remember more, but every word of it was like chewing mud. It was enough.

‘That is a wicked heresy indeed,’ whispered Adhemar. ‘How could the Army of God . . . ?’

Under his hood, Count Raymond’s reaction was better hidden. ‘That is bad. But what does it have to do with Peter Bartholomew’s tale?’

Through his horror, Adhemar had guessed. ‘He was one of the heretics. He saw you talking to me and feared that you had betrayed his secret. He invented the vision to impress me with his piety, to stall his punishment. Well? Was it so?’

His question hung unanswered. Sigurd lifted the spear he had used to roast my meat and thrust it into the flames like a blacksmith, stoking the embers. They chattered and crackled, spitting sparks into the air above. I shivered.

‘If I tell you that he was a heretic, you will burn him alive.’

‘If he believes what you say he believes and has taught its corruption to others, he deserves it,’ said Raymond.

‘What can I do?’ Adhemar spoke as much to himself as to any of us. ‘If I try him for his crimes, if I roust out this nest of heretics, there will be more hatred and more killing among us when unity is our greatest need. If enough schismatics adhere to their foul church, there might even be war between us. We would gift Antioch to Kerbogha.’

Anna looked at him without pity. ‘Enough Christians have died in flames already. If Peter Bartholomew reports this vision, perhaps it is a sign of his repentance.’

‘Or of his fear of execution,’ said Sigurd.

Adhemar stood. ‘I will think on what you have told me and make my decision in the morning.’ He looked up at the sky, though a pall of smoke still hid the stars. ‘I fear it is already not far off.’

‘I have told you nothing,’ I warned him. ‘I have not accused Peter Bartholomew of anything.’

‘I know. Be assured I will not treat him as if you had. Not yet.’

The bishop began to make his way down the stairs. He stooped terribly, I noticed, as if under an enormous burden.

‘A dishonest man may still be granted a true vision,’ I called, on impulse.

Adhemar did not answer.

‘I thought you were dead.’

It was too hot to sleep. Anna and I lay naked on the tower, alone. We did not touch, but faced each other resting on our sides. The gully of air between us seemed charged with heat, and my chest ran with sweat.

‘Perhaps I should have died.’ So many others had, by my hand or my acts.

Before I could move, Anna had lifted her arm and slapped me hard on my cheek. ‘Never say that. Never.’ Her voice trembled. ‘It is awful enough being in this cursed city. Without you . . .’

‘You do not know what I have done.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘I have killed men, and I have let them die. I have consorted with heretics. I have heard things—’

Anna raised her hand again, and I did not try to avoid the blow. ‘Be quiet. If you must give in to despair, do not try and draw me into it.’ She rolled over, setting her back to me. Now there was only silence between us.

A yearning to confess my part in the downfall of the city, a guilt such as I had not felt since I was a boy, overwhelmed me. In my mind, I formed the words a hundred times over; sometimes I opened my mouth to speak them, but each time fear choked them back. Even as she loved me – because she loved me – Anna hated me for the pain that my absence had inflicted on her. It would be many days, I feared, before she could forgive me, and the vice of Antioch was not a place for loosing emotions.

‘What shall we do?’

‘Await our fate. Face it when it comes. I have overheard Bohemond conspiring with his brother-in-law. He will go to the Emperor, and he will announce that we are slaughtered. The Emperor will not come.’

Anna turned back to me. ‘How can he do that? We are already drowning – must he pile on more stones to speed us down?’

‘He would rather die than give up Antioch.’ I remembered the promise that he had made to the princes. ‘If the Emperor comes, Bohemond’s title will be snatched away.’

I sensed Anna shivering in the darkness – was it fear or rage? At last, in a faint voice, she asked again: ‘What shall we do? How can we await our fate if there is no hope?’

‘How can we do otherwise?’

‘You sound like Sigurd – obsessed with dying.’

‘It is hard not to think of it.’

‘Think of life – think of your children, your new grandchild. Surely you cling to the hope of seeing them again?’

‘No.’ I shook my head, though she could not see it. ‘That would make it unbearable.’

‘For me, it is all that I can bear.’

κ θ

Dawn came quickly. In the south-east, smoke still rose from the ashes of the city, and the morning air was bitter. Soon it would boil, for midsummer was ten days hence, and there was no canopy of cloud that day to shield us. It was not a happy thought as I pulled on my heavy quilted tunic, and my chain mail over it. I soaked a rag in water and tied it around my neck so that I would not burn my skin on the iron. I tied my helmet by its chin-strap onto my belt. Whatever enemies the day might bring, I would be ready for them.

I did not have to wait long. As I stepped out of the tower, I saw a Norman standing facing Sigurd in the street below the wall. They seemed to be arguing furiously, but by the time I had descended from the rampart the knight was gone.

‘Who was that?’

Sigurd spat on the ground. ‘One of Bohemond’s lieutenants.’

‘What did he want?’

‘He wanted nothing. He demanded that my company go to reinforce the Normans on the mountain and help them defend the city against the Turks in the citadel.’

My pulse quickened. ‘You can’t go.’

‘So I told him. But you know that the Normans are not easily denied. He swore that if we did not come Bohemond would burn us out of our towers and slaughter us for cowards.’

‘Either way we die.’ I felt sick. Bohemond had sent his brother-in-law to cut us loose from the Emperor’s aid; now he would rid himself of the last Byzantine checks on his ambition. Either he would murder us as deserters, or put us in the forefront of the battle, like David with Uriah, and let the Turks achieve his purpose.

Nor could I doubt that Bohemond would make good his threat if we did not go. He had burned down half the city, Franks and his own kinsmen alike, to bolster his army; he would happily add a handful of Varangians to the pyre.

‘At least on the mountain we can die well.’ Sigurd folded his arms. His shield and axe leaned against the wall behind him, and he had a pair of small throwing axes tucked in his belt. ‘I will take a dozen men and do as Bohemond demands. The rest will stay here and defend our camp, and you and Anna.’

‘Not me.’ My stomach churned as I spoke, but I hurried on. ‘I will come with you.’

Sigurd snorted. ‘How long since you left the legions, Demetrios Askiates?’

‘Nineteen years.’

‘And you will march up that mountain, to a battle you have no part in, because a bastard Norman orders it? You will be dead in the first minute.’

‘I will go,’ I insisted.

‘This is my calling, not yours. What would Anna think of you for doing this?’

I scowled. ‘If Anna asked you not to go, would you obey?’

‘This is different.’ A troubled look passed over Sigurd’s face. Both of us, I think, felt things we wished to say but could not.

He kicked his foot in the dust, and turned to pick up his axe. ‘We should go, before Bohemond murders us from impatience. If you want to march into death, that is your concern.’

It made no difference. Wherever we went in the city, we walked in death, and if it came I felt a strange certainty that Sigurd would guide me to it bravely. Anna would have condemned such a thought, but to me it was reassuring.

The path up the mountain began in the south-eastern quarter. The main avenue, with its long colonnades and broad paving, had served as a noose on the fire: when we crossed it, we stepped into a burnt realm of ash and charcoal. Twisted buildings hung bent and shrivelled like balled-up paper, and smoke belched up as from naphtha pits.

‘This is the kingdom that Bohemond makes for himself,’ Sigurd muttered, awestruck. ‘The cost of his ambition.’

How much else would be felled by his pride, I wondered? I did not speak it aloud, for I had not mentioned Bohemond’s latest treachery to Sigurd. There seemed scant purpose in destroying the last vestiges of his hope. Instead, I grunted my agreement and tried not to breathe the morbid fumes.

It took little time to cross the city. The labyrinth of alleys, which two days earlier had snared me in its endless tangle, had been razed to the ground. As long as we took care to avoid the places where embers burned, or where pieces of iron still nursed the fire’s heat, we could walk the roads we chose.

Too quickly, we arrived at the foot of the path, where the gentle rise of the river valley met the steep slope of Mount Silpius. At first the way was easy, a broad scar rising across the face of the mountain past terraced olive groves and high villas perched on the rock. The pine trees which crowded between them still shaded us from the climbing sun, and it was as well they did, for my armour weighed on me terribly and the shield on my back constantly tugged me backwards. Sigurd had been right: nineteen years out of the legions was too long.

Even at that hour we were not the only ones climbing the road. Ahead of us I could see cohorts of knights marching in loose order, shouting and laughing, perhaps to disguise their fear. I had expected to see them, and was content to keep a safe distance lest they chose to whet their scorn on us. What I had not expected were the women: scores of them, from barefoot girls in torn smocks to wizened grandmothers wrapped in black shawls. Every one of them carried a vessel filled with water – buckets, jars, urns, barrels. The smallest children carried cups, holding them out in rapt concentration like chalices, while some of the stronger adult women had casks yoked over their shoulders in pairs. They stretched as far ahead as I could see, and as far back, a river flowing miraculously up the mountain.

Sigurd pointed to the summit, his arm raised almost vertical. ‘A bad place for hot work.’

‘No easier for Kerbogha, at least.’

Whether it was the rising heat of the day, or the sight of so much water around me, I was suddenly consumed by thirst. A scrawny girl, no more than seven or eight years old, was passing; I knelt, stretched out cupped hands, and as clearly as I could said: ‘Water?’

She did not stop.

‘Water,’ I repeated. ‘Please.’

She shook her head. It was stained black with soot, everywhere save on her forehead, where a finger had marked a crude cross in the grime.

‘For the fighters,’ she said, staring at her cup. ‘Not Greeks.’

After that, the way only seemed hotter. After a time, the path switched back sharply, and took us south-east, straight into the sun. My armour began to burn where it rubbed against me, and whether I screwed my eyes shut or kept them open I was blinded. The path narrowed; it was too high for villas here, and too steep for trees. Our pace slowed as our fellow travellers were squeezed closer together onto the constricted road. It reminded me of crossing the Black Mountains into the plain of Antioch, when treacherous paths through steep gorges had proved almost impassable. Men had pulled off their armour and flung it into the ravines; they had sold their horses rather than have the effort of leading them. Even the sure-footed could not hold the path: whole trains of mules had been lost over the precipices. A hard journey and a sweet arrival, we had consoled ourselves at the time.

Now the corpses began to appear. Casualties of the fighting on the mountain, men had tried to return to the succour of the city and had failed. At first scattered, then ever more numerous, they lay sprawled where they had fallen. Some bore few wounds, so peaceful-looking that you might have thought they were merely dozing to break the long climb. Others were so badly injured that it seemed a miracle they had managed to stagger so far to die. All were naked, stripped bare by looting and now become the habitation of flies.

‘Are you sure you want to go on?’ asked Sigurd.

I could not speak, for searing nausea had joined the thirst in my throat. All I could manage was a limp wave forward.

At the next corner the road began to level. It was little consolation, for by now we were high up, only slightly below the height of the middle summit. The sounds of the armies drifted down to us – though not, as yet, the sounds of war. At the roadside two stakes had been driven into the ground like gateposts. One had a crossbar nailed to it, so that it took the form of a crucifix; the other tapered to a spike on which a Turk’s head was impaled. I shivered as we passed them.

Ahead of us, the path continued across the neck of the mountain into a small dip between the middle and northern summits. Atop the latter, on a high rocky promontory thrusting out to the west, I could see the unbroken walls of the citadel. The purple banner of Kerbogha hung from its tower.

‘This is as far as we go on this road.’ Sigurd pointed to our right, over the hump of the middle summit. ‘Bohemond’s camp is over there.’

We picked our way up the hill, through the outlying positions of the Frankish army. It was like no battlefield I had ever seen – a victory, a rout, a battle and a siege all heaped over each other. Groups of men squatted in the scrub, sharpening blades and saying nothing. Archers crouched behind boulders and watched for a Turkish sortie. There were no cavalry. Scattered among the living lay the dead, dozens of them – though nothing compared with the number in the killing ground of the valley between the two summits. Within bowshot of both camps, those corpses could not safely be retrieved by either side, and so they rotted. The stink was merciless. Only the crows moved with impunity, for none could waste the arrows to fell them.

‘Some of them have been there for a week,’ said Sigurd.

I stared at him, amazed, as I counted back on my fingers. A week and a day – that was all the time we had been in the city. As many days as we had spent months outside the walls, yet it felt a hundred years longer.

And on every one of those days Bohemond had fought to win the one fragment of the city that he did not hold, while the Turks sought to overthrow him. I could see why neither had prevailed, for it was obvious even to me that this battlefield was no place for tactics or ingenuity. It was a shallow valley between the two opposing summits, bounded on one side by the wall along the ridge, and on the other by a cliff edge. Between those limits, all the armies could do was push against each other, face to face in an endless trial of strength. It was almost as if the Lord had made it to this purpose, for the bare earth was red as blood and the broken rocks as sharp as spears. At the very centre, in the belly of the valley, a jagged hole yawned open like the gates of Hell. All was black within.

‘The cistern,’ said Sigurd. ‘Bohemond smashed it open to parch the garrison in the citadel. Now it is fouled with the bodies of the fallen.’

We carried on up the hill. The high battlements of a square tower rose in front of us, and as we crested the summit we could see the full expanse of the walls spreading out from it. The main force of Bohemond’s army was concentrated here, and I saw immediately why he had risked firing the city in his hunt for more men. They were in a perilous condition. They sat on the ground in the noon heat, swatting flies and praying, waiting for the next onslaught. Few were not wounded.

I looked to the foot of the tower. Clearly, we were not the only men to have climbed the mountain that morning. Gathered in a circle, apparently heedless of the dying army about them, the princes held council. I could recognise Adhemar’s domed cap, Count Raymond’s stiff bearing, the various figures of Count Hugh, Duke Robert and Tancred. Of the first rank, only Duke Godfrey was missing. Towering over them all, his chin raised in pride or defiance, was Bohemond. We made towards them. I longed to confront Bohemond in front of the others, to make them know that he had cut us off from all hope of rescue, but I did not dare. He would deny it outright – the word of a prince against the word of a Greek spy – and afterwards he would ensure that I never spoke again.

Before we even reached the princes, one of the Norman captains stepped into our path. I did not recognise him, though with a week’s blood and dust and beard on his face he might have been my own brother and I would not have known it. He looked at us and at the file of Varangians behind us.

‘Are these all your men?’

‘All that can fight for you,’ said Sigurd. ‘Where shall we go?’

The Norman pointed down the slope, along the wall which stretched like a ribbon to the citadel. ‘The last tower.’ He drew his sword and swung it through the air to loosen his arm. From the far side of the wall, and within the citadel, I could hear the battle-cry rising. ‘You must hold it – and attack the Turks from their flank when they come.’

I looked to the nearest stairs, thinking that we would approach the tower along the top of the wall. But the Norman shook his head.

‘The tower doors are barricaded, so that the Turks cannot advance along the walls. The tower is cut off.’

‘How . . . ?’

‘There is a ladder. Go to the foot of the tower and call up to them. Tell Quino that I have sent you.’

The thought of the coming battle had already begun to numb me, but the name he spoke cut through all my defences. ‘Quino?’

‘Quino of Melfi. He commands the tower.’ The Norman must have seen the turmoil on my face. ‘Why? Do you know him?’

λ

Perhaps the ancients were right, and we mortals are merely playthings of a capricious fate. Certainly the gods of old would have laughed at this latest turn, that Sigurd and I should be thrown together with our enemy to fight for our lives. Even I had to acknowledge the grim irony of it. And, after a flash of confusion, I accepted it. This was destiny; I could not fight it.

I looked along the wall. Our tower must have been about a hundred and fifty paces away, close enough to be within bowshot of the citadel.

‘Pray the Turks don’t choose this moment for their attack,’ said Sigurd.

With our backs to the wall, our shields on our right arms, we edged down the slope. Sigurd led the way. Even pressed against the stones there was no shade, no shadow, for the sun was at its zenith and spared nothing. Sweat poured down my face, so much of it that I thought my armour might rust from my body. A sudden terror assailed me: that I would tug my sword from its sheath and find my palm too slippery to grasp it. I wiped my hand on the hem of my tunic, then touched it to where the silver cross hung under my armour.

Stepping sideways like crabs, crouching beneath the rims of our shields, our progress was faltering. On these heights the wall was the only path, and the broken ground reached right to its foot. Spiked plants scratched welts of blood across my bare hands, and several times I was tipped back against the wall when the ground at my feet gave way. I gripped my shield tighter and tried to ignore the thoughts of Quino that raged in my head.

We skirted the first tower and continued down. Here the wall followed the line of the ridge exactly, so that the slope fell away steeply beside us. At the bottom, the black mouth of the broken cistern yawned open, ready to swallow us if we lost our footing.

Sigurd pointed to the line in the valley where the corpses began. We were now almost level with it.

‘From here, the Turks can kill us with their arrows. Be careful.’

But the Turks – assuming that they were watching us from the round towers of the citadel – chose not to spend arrows on a forlorn column skirting the fringe of the wasteland. Perhaps we were not worth the effort. Perhaps they reasoned that we were bent on our own doom, approaching it with every step, and needed no dispatch.

The last twenty paces were the hardest, in full view of two armies and the heavens, too far from one and too near the others. The cloying smell of the yellow flowers on the hillside swam in my senses; now the bushes that brushed me seemed like soft grass. If I lifted my gaze to the mountains far across the Orontes I could almost imagine I was back at the monastery of my youth in Isauria, seeking beeswax and honeycomb with the other novices on a June day.

The rap on my helmet was so unexpected that I almost fell down the slope in fright. Had the Turks chanced a shot while I dreamed? Ahead of me Sigurd was crouched behind his shield and staring angrily back.

‘Keep down,’ he hissed. ‘I know that you could not kill so much as a beetle with your sword; they do not.’

Chastened, I squatted low, and though my thighs begged me to relent I managed to keep my eye below the rim of my shield until we had crossed the last stretch and had come to the foot of the tower. The shade was as elusive as ever, but at least in the corner where the tower met the wall we were hidden from the Turks. I rested my shield gratefully on the ground, straightened, and looked up.

Quino’s men must have watched us coming, doubtless wondering whether our few men were all the relief they would get. A mailed head peered over the edge of the wall, so low that he must have lain on his belly, and stared down. Against the searing sky, I could not make out his features.

‘We were promised more,’ he complained. ‘Are there others?’

‘Only us.’

A rope ladder, crudely made, rattled down the wall. Slinging my shield over my back, I held the ladder taut for Sigurd, then climbed after him. It swayed under me, and with so much weight to carry I had to be dragged over the lip of the rampart onto the broad walkway at the top. The rest of the Varangians were coming up behind me. On a sign from the guard, I lay flat behind the parapet. I had forgotten that Kerbogha’s army waited on the far side.

‘How do we get inside?’ I asked, looking at the barred door.

As if in answer, I heard a clattering from above and saw another ladder dropping down from a window in the tower. The window must have been several yards higher up the wall, far above the protection of the battlements. I wondered how I could reach it without becoming a target for the archers beyond.

‘Climb swiftly,’ the Norman said, tugging on the ladder to make sure that it was fast.

I moved my shield back to my right arm. It would make for a harder climb, but at least it would be some protection against arrows in my side. Though what hid me from the Turks equally hid them from me: I had made a corner for myself, and had to mount the twisting ladder blind to everything beyond the walls. There might have been a company of archers nocking their arrows, or a ballista being pulled taut, or a spear-thrower, and I would know nothing until the missile slammed into my shield.

Nothing was fired, and nothing struck me. I could see the windowsill approaching, a black arch in the stone. Then I was level with it, struggling to keep hold of the ladder while I slipped my shield from my arm and pushed it through ahead of me. A new horizon opened in the corner of my vision, a dappled landscape of green and brown, but I did not examine it. I reached through the window. There were no hands to help me, but I fastened my fingers onto the ledge and heaved. Then, with a clatter of weapons and armour and stone, I was inside.

Brushing dust from my face, I moved clear of the window. Outside, I could hear Sigurd starting to climb the ladder; inside, nothing moved. There was another arched window facing the one I had entered by, boarded over with planks, and rows of narrow slits along the other walls. Somehow they did not seem to admit as much light as they should have.

‘Who are you?’ asked a voice from the gloom.

I stepped back, surprised. As my gaze took in the darkness, I saw where the voice had come from. A pale face, its owner squatting below the line of the windows. There were others beside him, I saw – half a dozen or more, all hunched over, forlorn and abandoned.

‘I have come for Quino. Quino of Melfi.’ Doom surrounded us, and the deaths of Drogo and Rainauld, even Simon, were drops in the ocean of blood which had been spilled. But if God had ordered it that Quino and I should be thrown together at the last, perhaps it was to a purpose.

‘Quino keeps the watch upstairs.’

‘Then he will know that I have come.’

I doubted he would welcome me; indeed, I half expected a shower of stones tipped down as I climbed the final ladder. This one was solid at least, though withered and aged so that the knots bulged out like bones. Above me a square of light showed the way. I could feel its warmth on my face, a single beam plucking me out in the darkness.

Then I had emerged into the open air, and was face to face with Quino.

It took a moment to see Quino clearly as my sight struggled with the renewed brightness. Even then, it was hard to lock my gaze on him, for there was so little to see. He had always been wiry; now he was emaciated. I could see where the hunger had devoured him, eating out his cheeks and pulling away his hair until he looked to be nothing more than a skeleton in armour, like a relic of some long-forgotten battle found in the desert. He sat alone against the battlements, his sword propped between his legs, and stared with blank eyes. All around him were scattered the tools of archery: bows and bowstrings, arrows in quivers and in criss-crossed heaps, as if a storm had swept through a bowyer’s workshop. There were even a few of the barbarian tzangras, crossbows that could fire short bolts clear through steel. I had witnessed their effects in Constantinople. I picked one up, remembering an afternoon once spent learning its ways, and heaved on it until the bowstring was latched into its hook. The bone arms which sprouted from the stock tensed into a perfect arc. Rummaging through the arrows on the floor, I at last found one of the right length, and slotted it into the wooden groove. When it was done, I pointed the bow at Quino, who had watched me all the while, neither speaking nor moving.

‘Have you come to kill me, Greek?’ What strength remained in him must have retreated inwards, for his voice still held its familiar bite.

‘The Turks will do that soon enough.’ To my left, Sigurd hauled himself through the hole and sat against the wall. Below, I could hear the Varangians investigating the tower’s defences. ‘I have come to hear your confession.’

Quino scowled, though it seemed a great effort for him. ‘You are no priest. You are not even a true Christian.’

‘Truer than you.’

Quino suddenly seemed to forget our conversation. He twisted around and stared through the embrasure. ‘They are massing again. Soon, when the day is hottest, they will come. We will not withstand them here.’

‘All the better, then, to ease your soul. Before you go to join Drogo and Rainauld – and Odard.’

His eyes flickered up. ‘Odard? Odard is dead?’

‘Three days ago. He died fighting.’

‘Then I am the last to live. It will not be long. Soon the curse we drew down on ourselves will run its course. And you, Greek, the scorpion who comes to prick my conscience, you will be ruined with us.’

‘The curse you drew down?’ I repeated. ‘The curse you drew down when you allied yourselves with a sect of heretics?’

Quino coughed – or perhaps he laughed, a dry sound, as though the skin had been stripped from his throat and only the bones rattled. ‘You have been busy. Are the Pure Ones dead also? I saw a column of smoke rising from the city yesterday.’

‘Some of them have died. But enough live to betray you.’

Again that terrible laugh. ‘And what of it? Will the bishop come here, scuttling along that wall to put me on my pyre? He will have to hurry.’ A bent arm clawed at me to come nearer. ‘Come. Come and see.’

All this while, Sigurd had sat in silence, ordering the scattered arrows into piles by the embrasures. Reluctantly, I passed him the crossbow and crawled across the floor to the far wall.

‘Look out there.’

Keeping an arm’s distance from Quino, I lifted my head to the battlements and looked out. The tower faced east, away from Antioch and into the mountains behind. A high, broad valley stretched out before us, a cradle between Mount Silpius and the peaks beyond. I had seen it before, on a foraging expedition the previous autumn, when small fields still sprouted the stalks of the harvest and the land was green. The farms, the fields, the crops and the trees were long gone, wasted by the siege: now, in their place, an army had grown. They spread out over the rolling plateau in their thousands, some in makeshift camps, others marching in columns of ominous purpose.

‘You see the pavilion with the purple banner? That is Kerbogha.’

I looked where Quino pointed, filled with a thrilling dread to see our terrible enemy, but amid so many men and arms I could not make out the tent.

Despite that, it seemed clear that the army was moving, that its shimmering legions were swarming towards the citadel. I turned back to Quino with new urgency.

‘Did you kill Simon?’

‘Ask him yourself. You will see him soon enough.’

‘And you will not, if you take your sins to the grave.’

Quino bared his teeth. Possibly it was a smile. ‘We have been living in the tomb for months – I do not fear death. And I have followed enough gods in this life that surely one will take pity on me in the next.’

‘I can see movement in the citadel,’ Sigurd interrupted. ‘There are banners waving behind the walls.’

‘I was at Amalfi with Bohemond when the news came.’ From the distance in his voice, I thought Quino might be there in Amalfi again, though I did not know where it was. ‘The city was in rebellion, and we besieged it. High summer. A Frankish army passed nearby – bound for Jerusalem, they said. They sent envoys to us, proclaiming their pilgrimage. That very afternoon Bohemond declared he would follow them. He unclasped his cloak and tore it into pieces; the women sewed them into crosses. Red, like his banner. He gave them to his captains and swore that all who followed him to the Holy Land would win honour, riches, blessings. Had there been a ship in the harbour, I think we would have sailed it to Tyre that very day. Imagine it, Greek. The promise of salvation, of casting off our sins and starting anew on holy ground. A second baptism.’ He broke off, choking as if his lungs were seized with dust. ‘It has not happened as I thought.’

There was a long pause. Sigurd was peering out at the citadel, looking anxious, and I felt the weight of every passing second.

‘Did you kill Simon?’

‘Yes.’

His voice was so hoarse that I thought for a moment it was merely his armour scraping over the stone.

‘Because you thought he had betrayed your heresy to me?’

‘Yes.’ If this was a confession, there was no taint of remorse in it.

‘You followed the priestess Sarah in her false religion. You received her baptism and knew their mysteries.’

‘Yes.’

There was a ritual in his answers like the rhythm of a prayer. I looked to see if he even heard my questions but his eyes were shut, his head bowed.

‘The gates are opening,’ Sigurd warned.

‘Did you kill Drogo and Rainauld as well? Because they threatened to confess? What was the mark you put on Drogo’s forehead?’

‘No.’ His voice had been ground down to a whisper.

‘Was Drogo unwilling to follow you in your blasphemy?’

‘Hah.’ Quino looked up, a terrible smirk contorting his skull. ‘In pursuit of secret truths, Drogo followed none save the priest. It was Drogo whom Sarah first converted, and Drogo who tired of her religion soonest.’ He grimaced. ‘After we had scarred ourselves with their cross.’

‘And afterwards you turned to the pagan gods – at the cave in Daphne?’

Quino nodded, like a condemned man offering his neck to the executioner.

‘You did not take the bullock to eat. You sacrificed him to Mithra, according to some ancient evil rite.’

‘Mithra?’ Quino’s voice was parched of all emotion, yet he seemed confused. ‘He said we sacrificed to Ahriman.’

‘Who said this? Drogo?’

‘The priest. The priest who led us there.’

A strange reticence, almost like fear, seemed to have come over Quino. My whole mind was stretched taut, screaming to hear who this priest had been, but a sharp crack from the far side of the tower broke my train of thought. Sigurd was crouching by the battlements, struggling to reload the crossbow.

‘They’re coming.’

I took another bow from the floor and braced my feet against its horns, then tugged back like a rower on the galleys. The string snapped into its lock, and I slipped the bolt into the groove. From within the tower, I could hear feet hurrying up the ladder.

‘Look to the east,’ croaked Quino. He still sat slumped against the walls; I doubted there was enough strength in his arms even to nock an arrow. ‘They will try and gain the walls.’

I glanced down. As he had said, there were companies of Turks running towards us in loose order, ladders held between them. Archers followed behind them, loosing arrows into the sky to keep us pinned down. One arced into the nest of the turret, though it struck no one.

‘More over here,’ shouted Sigurd. I crawled across to join him. Inside the walls, in the valley between the summits, Turks were pouring out of the citadel. There seemed no end to them: they covered the land in a wave of steel and iron. There was no tactic or strategy, for the ground did not allow it – they simply surged forward, borne on their own momentum.

Yet even within a wave there are eddies and currents. The cistern in the middle of the valley which Bohemond had smashed open served as a breakwater, and the Turkish advance slowed as they split around it, squeezed against the walls on one side and the precipice on the other. Many were caught at the foot of our tower.

‘Fire,’ I shouted, though I doubt whether anyone heeded me. We were no longer Byzantines and Normans, merely desperate men trapped in an ocean of our enemies. What the Emperor’s diplomacy and Adhemar’s prayers had failed to achieve, battle now wrought. Quino had called me a scorpion, and a scorpion I had become, trapped in a corner and stabbing my sting at all who approached. I had never been an archer, but the crossbow is an easy weapon with which to kill. Stretch, lock, load; kneel by the battlements, thrust the bow between them, and fire. Aim a little above the target, to correct for the angle of flight – though with so many Turks bunched below our walls, a blind man could hardly have missed. That was my rhythm, my whole life reduced to half a dozen movements in endless repetition, and the single remnant of my humanity was the terror I felt each time I revealed myself at the embrasures, that an enemy arrow might fly through and strike me down. It was not an idle fear: the Norman garrison and Sigurd’s Varangians were all around me now, firing with whichever bows and crossbows came to hand, and already two were sprawled out dead or injured.

Afterwards, I realised how tangential we must have seemed to the generals watching from their hilltops: Bohemond to the south, and Kerbogha in the citadel to the north. The real battle was down in the valley, though I saw it only in brief flashes framed by the battlements, and then only as a background to the men I aimed for. First the Turks were pressed back behind the cistern, struggling to squeeze their numbers past it; then, when I next looked, they were far beyond, charging up the opposite slope against the Norman defences. Such was the power of their charge that I almost expected to see them cresting the mountain on my next glance. But instead they seemed to have faltered. Their front rank was in ragged disarray, and eroding ever further as the Norman archers above poured arrows into them. Bohemond must have built a wall or a barricade, I realised, hidden among the low scrub just high enough to hold the attackers beyond the Norman line.

I had watched too long. In battle, the only spectators are the dead. I ducked back, pressing myself against the wall, and felt a breeze stroke my cheek as a Turkish arrow whistled through the battlements beside me. It flew across the tower and struck deep into the back of one of the Normans. He slumped over the parapet.

There was no time for relief or guilt. I was already bent forward trying to stretch the bowstring back. Load. Kneel. Now the Turks had passed Bohemond’s obstacle, and were face to face with the Normans. I could not even see where the armies joined: they were a seamless expanse of shields, helmets, flashing blades and death, while the white serpent writhed on its crimson banner above.

‘Look to the walls!’

On my right, a wide-eyed Norman with a patchwork tabard was pointing down to the wall which led to the citadel. I crawled over and looked out. A company of Turks was running along the rampart, a ladder carried between them. I snatched up my bow and fired at them, but against moving targets my aim was poor.

The rest of our men crowded against the wall and loosed their arrows down on the Turks, desperate to escape this new threat. Some of the attackers fell, dark shadows on the pale stone of the rampart, but most did not. Now they were at the door where the tower met the wall, and they could lift their shields over their heads to ward off our stream of arrows. In vain we tried to dislodge them by casting down rocks which had been gathered onto the turret. With one we unbalanced a Turk’s shield, opening his defence to the fatal arrow that followed, but otherwise they clung on. I could hear them battering on the wooden door, though it was barricaded with stone and would not yield.

‘Ladder coming up,’ shouted one of the Normans.

There were no more rocks to throw, and the Turks were so close to the tower that we could not fire down on them. I looked around. Quino was on his feet, sword in hand, his bones animated by new life.

‘You, you, you.’ He pointed at three of the Normans. ‘Come down to the next level. They will try and climb in through the window. You—’ His claw-arm swept over the rest of us. ‘Keep their reinforcements at bay.’

‘I will go with him,’ said Sigurd. He was beside me, though I had not noticed him there.

‘Make sure you come back.’ I felt a stab of self-pity at losing him, as if my shield had been cut away, but I did not try to stop him. As a soldier, Sigurd valued archery as a tool of victory. As a warrior, he despised it for a coward’s trick.

The five men disappeared into the gloom below, and for a moment afterwards there was peace in the tower. Four men lay where they had been struck by Turkish arrows, two dead and two dying. I would have given them water, but there was none to give; I tore strips of cloth from the dead men’s tunics and tied them about the wounds of the living to staunch the flow of blood. Then I peered out the other side of the tower. The battle still raged on the slopes of Bohemond’s mountain, though its clamour seemed curiously remote. The Turks were still checked; perhaps they had been pushed back a little, though it was hard to tell. But more companies were issuing forth from the citadel to join them, while Bohemond had no reserves.

There was a crash from below, and I glanced down through the opening in the floor. The planks over the window had been splintered away, and a shaft of light poured into the guardroom. By it, I could see a dead Turk hanging over the sill. Sigurd stood with his back to the wall and his axe raised, ready to strike down any who came through the window. Opposite, a Norman waited in the shadows with a loaded crossbow. Our besiegers would need more than a high window and a ladder to take this tower from us, few though we were.

I looked again to the rampart between us and the citadel. There were no more Turks coming to our corner of the battlefield. Kerbogha was concentrating all his might on Bohemond’s standard. I stared at the fortress, the round buttresses rising out of the rock of the mountain and the square towers above. Tatikios once told me that it had been built by the great Justinian five centuries earlier: it seemed strange that a Turkish warlord and his Frankish enemies should now contest it.

There was another commotion in the guardroom. I heard the crack of a crossbow, and then a scream as an arrow struck flesh. The Norman opposite the window had been pitched forward onto his knees, and had his hands pressed to some wound I could not see. The dead Turk on the windowsill had been pulled away, clearing the opening, and as I looked at it a volley of arrows – four or five at least – swept through. I heard them clatter against the walls. A Turk hurled himself in after them; Sigurd’s blade swept down and he was dead. But there must have been another Turk crouched on the ladder behind, for before Sigurd could pull his axe free the man had vaulted into the room. For a second there was no one to oppose him, and it was all the time he needed to bring his sword up. Sigurd’s axe was loose again; he lunged at the Turk, but he had hurried his blow and it was easily dodged.

Another Turk was at the window. They had their bridgehead, and they would not lightly let it go. I tried to fire my crossbow, but Sigurd was too close and my aim not so true. Then the Turk had leaped down into the fray, and was lost in the confusion of clashing swords and shouts.

‘Up the ladder!’ Above all the noise, Sigurd’s voice rang out. If he called the retreat, their situation must be grave. I saw a Varangian mount the ladder, with others climbing after him. I knelt by the opening, crossbow in hand, and tried to make out my enemies. Almost all our men had gained the top of the tower now: below, there was a hand on the ladder, but I could not see the arm, let alone the face. It climbed two rungs, paused, and was dragged down again. Then it reappeared, and this time it came high enough that I could see tufts of an orange beard under the helmet. Still someone tried to pull him back. With a blow that might have cracked the ladder in two, he stamped down and was free. He flew up the ladder one-handed and bounded onto the turret top.

‘Close up that hole,’ he shouted.

I looked around the tower, which was strewn with spent arrows and bodies. Several shields, too cumbersome for the archers, lay abandoned amid the debris. I hauled them across the floor. Sigurd was crouched by the ladder, axe in hand, and as a Turkish head appeared he brought the weapon down so hard that it cleaved both helmet and skull in two. The man fell back into the hole.

‘Quick.’

Sigurd and I dragged the shields into place over the opening. Almost immediately, one was thrust aside by the next attacker on the ladder. Without thinking, I picked up my crossbow and fired it into his chest. The effect of the bolt at close range was terrible: it drove through the scales of his armour and exploded into his flesh with a spray of blood. The last I saw was an anguished face falling away.

‘More weight.’ Quite callously, Sigurd had lifted one of the corpses by its feet and was pulling it over the shields. Numbed, I did likewise, and was startled when the body let out a scream of pain. I had forgotten that some still lived.

‘How many crossbows?’ Sigurd asked. It was a needless question, for he could see as well as I that there were three, in addition to the one I held. He threw one towards the Varangians who had taken up longbows by the parapet, where they could still fire on Kerbogha’s army below.

‘Load that.’

‘What will we do?’ I asked. The fighting in the guardroom must have been terrible, for of the dozen Varangians we had brought only five still stood, together with two Normans. I could already hear the thud of a spear or axe hammering on the shield barricade, and most of our arrows were spent.

‘We fill this tower with their dead.’ Sigurd wiped his axe clean on the skirt of his tunic. The battle-craze that possessed him was beginning to relax its hold, but only a little. ‘We kill them until we have made a stair of their corpses, or until they set the whole tower alight as our pyre.’

There was a blast of trumpets. A great shout interrupted Sigurd’s doom-saying. I looked out over the parapet to the south, and my heart almost died with hope. Battles, like fires, must move to endure; they abhor stasis. It had been clear that the Turks and Normans could not remain locked in combat, that eventually one or other must force themselves forward. I had expected it to be Bohemond’s forces who broke first, but instead they seemed to have prevailed. The Turks were streaming back to the citadel in disarray, their courage gone, while exultant Normans chased close on their heels.

‘Bohemond is making a mistake,’ said Sigurd, resigned. ‘It is a feint. The Turks will draw his men from their positions, then turn and slaughter them.’

But for once his gloom was misplaced – or Bohemond’s luck too strong. The Turkish army was routed; I could see them vying with each other to press through the citadel’s gate to safety.

‘Listen.’

The pounding on our makeshift barrier had stopped. I crossed to the northern battlements and saw Turks running back along the wall. When none followed, Sigurd and I pulled the bodies and the shields aside, while the Varangians kept crossbows ready against any enemies who remained.

The room below was empty, at least of the living.

‘We had better be swift,’ I said. My voice rang hollow in my ears, as if my soul were watching my body from a great distance. I remembered what the priestess had said of the angelic spark captive within our clay, and shook my head. This was not the time for such thoughts.

As gently as we could, though not nearly so gently as to stop them weeping with pain, we manhandled the wounded down the ladder, then repositioned it against the outer window. Those who were not hurt lowered the injured onto the walls, while Sigurd and I examined the fallen in the guardroom, seeking the living.

There was only one: Quino. We found him slumped in a corner, his tabard soaked in blood where a Turkish sword had pierced his belly. At first I thought he was dead, but some movement of my shadow must have stirred his senses for I heard a gurgling moan. It seemed incredible that there had been anything in him to bleed, so skeletal had he appeared at the top of the tower. Then, he had looked almost eager for death, yet now that it had come for him some stubborn remnant of his soul clung to life. We bound his wound with the clothes of the dead, passed him down through the window, and began our long trudge back across the valley.

λ α

Sigurd carried Quino in his arms – he was so frail that he could have weighed little more than a child – while the rest of us bore the other wounded between us. It was a hard journey over the broken landscape, and we jolted them terribly as we picked our way over hummocks of the dead. Once a Varangian’s bandage caught on a briar and was torn from his side, spilling yet more blood into the red earth. Mercifully, no one attacked us. Only scavengers and devourers of carrion shared the field with us: crows and flies and lean-faced women stripping the fallen of their possessions.

Even the Norman lines were deserted. With Kerbogha’s army forced back into its citadel, the Normans had retreated onto the mountain top. We passed in silence through their defences, makeshift barricades of heaped stone and masonry. They would not have served to pen a flock of sheep, but they had been enough to break the Turks, whose corpses in some places were piled higher than the walls themselves.

Pausing for a moment, I looked ahead. The Normans seemed to have gathered in a great crowd on the crest of the mountain, hundreds of them ranged in a circle around a figure I could not see. Were they celebrating the victory? They were remarkably muted – almost solemn.

We laid the wounded in the shade of a boulder, where the women could bring water, and hurried up the slope. The crowd was thick; the blood and sweat that stained their armour almost steamed off them in the heat. Nonetheless, Sigurd and I managed to push through until we found a small rise from where we could see the centre of the circle.

All the princes I had seen earlier were there: Raymond and Bohemond, Hugh, Robert and Tancred – and Adhemar, seated on a rock between them. Beside him stood a priest in white robes, a slight man with a mop of dark hair. Like all of us in those days, his cheeks were sunken and his eyes dull, but there was a twitch in his shoulders that bespoke nervousness, the anticipation of some spectacle to perform. I knew him: he was the priest Stephen, one of Adhemar’s chaplains. I had seen him often in the bishop’s tent.

Adhemar was speaking. ‘Christ has granted you this victory. But like all the works of man, it will soon become dust. Kerbogha’s forces are so legion that he may fling them at us as often as he likes, heedless of loss. We cannot match him man for man. For the eternal victory, we must implore God’s aid.’

A fit of coughing overwhelmed the bishop. At his side, I could see Bohemond with an ill-tempered scowl on his face, despite the battle he had won. Raymond, by contrast, wore a strange smirk.

‘Truly, we have tried God’s indulgence. Some have hidden themselves away, deserting the just battle from craven fear. They tremble to become martyrs to Christ. Some – many – have worked evil pleasures with the pagan women of Antioch, and the stink of it has reached even into Heaven. A few have forsaken God in their hearts. He has made our camp a barren wilderness; He has filled it with scorpions and serpents, and left us to be preyed on by wolves.’

Some of the men around me looked sullen – they could not have expected such a harangue in victory – but many more seemed abashed and afraid. Doubt had fallen over them, and there was a desperation in their gaze which hungered for solace.

‘Yet do not fear.’ Adhemar’s voice rose, carried on a new strength. ‘Our Lord is a merciful god, and He listens to the saints who intercede for us. He has sent a token that He keeps faith with His pilgrims.’

A murmur of wonder rippled through the crowd, and they pressed in closer.

‘Last night, this priest was granted a vision.’

The priest, Stephen, stepped forward. His arms were rigid by his sides, though his left hand flapped involuntarily against his thigh; he looked like a mouse before a flock of hawks. He looked at the ground, and spoke so softly that Adhemar had to urge him several times to raise his voice.

‘It came to me last night. In the fire and the panic, I took refuge in the church of Saint Mary. Many terrors assailed me and I prayed to Christ, imploring His mercy. When I raised my eyes, three figures were before me.’

‘Describe them,’ Adhemar ordered.

‘Two men and a woman.’

‘Did you know them?’

‘Your Grace, I did. But they were not of this Earth.’ He hesitated, as though even he faltered before the wonder of his vision. ‘They were wreathed in a cloud of gold, which shimmered behind them so that they stood out from the darkness. They had the form of humans – but no substance. To the right stood a man, very old. His beard was white. In one hand he carried a staff mounted with a cross, while in the other he bore a ring of keys that jangled as he moved. He was Saint Peter, the prince of the apostles and guardian of Antioch.’

At a little distance from the priest, Bohemond stood fidgeting with the hem of his tunic. One of his red eyebrows seemed inclined upwards.

‘To the left was a woman. Her robe was blue, trimmed with gold, and her face looked as serene as the stars. In her arm she cradled a child, whose countenance radiated the light of heaven—’

‘The mother of God,’ Adhemar interrupted. ‘And the third?’

‘He stood in front of his companions and his face was solemn, though beautiful beyond all men. He clutched a Bible to his heart, and when he spoke it was with the sound of many waters. He asked if I knew him, and I answered no, for I feared to lift my thoughts to such presumption. But even as I denied it, a radiant cross appeared above his head. Again he asked if I knew him.’

There was something pedestrian, almost rote in the way Stephen recited the words, but his speech had drawn in every man among the Normans. They were held rapt by his performance; Count Raymond, standing before us, looked as though he himself could see the vision at that very moment.

‘I replied: “I do not know you, but I see a cross like our Saviour’s.”

‘“I am He,” He answered.

‘My Lords, I fell at His feet and beseeched His mercy, and the loving Virgin and the blessed Peter fell at His feet also, praying Him to aid us in our distress.’

‘What did He say?’

The memory of the miracle, or the attention of the crowd, had filled the priest with confidence. He crossed himself, turned his face to the heavens and closed his eyes.

‘He said, “All along the length of your journey, through every toil and peril, I have walked beside you. I broke open the walls of Nicaea, and I held your lance at Dorylaeum. When you suffered torments before Antioch I grieved, and when you strayed like lost sheep I lamented your wickedness. It was I who brought you safe into Antioch, rejoicing as you drove the pagan host from my house. At that hour, the angels sang in Heaven, and my holy father was well pleased.”

‘Then he opened his book, and it seemed it was written in letters of fire so that I could not read its words. “Tell my people,” He said, “that if they are with me, I am with them. They will fast, and offer penance, and in five days I will grant a miracle that all will see. I am with you, and none in Earth or Heaven shall stand before me.”’

Stephen’s head slumped forward. ‘He closed his book, yet the light did not dim. Indeed, it grew brighter, and brighter still. I lowered my eyes; I closed them, and covered them with my hands, but still I could not shut out His divine light. When I looked again, He was gone, and I was alone in the church.’

The priest stepped away, shrinking back into himself, and the spirit which had animated him departed. It was as if the sun had retreated behind a cloud, though the sky was immaculately clear. A wondrous silence gripped the mountain top.

Adhemar sat still on his rock, his back straight and his hands folded together. ‘Amen.’

His word was like a pebble cast into the middle of a pond, rippling out through the crowd. Amen. Amen. Amen.

‘And you will swear that all you have said is true?’ Adhemar asked the priest.

‘Before God and all His saints.’

Adhemar waved his hand, and two more priests emerged into the centre of the circle. One held a book bound with silver; the other an ornately jewelled golden crucifix. Adhemar stood, took them, and passed them to Stephen. His hands, I noticed, were shaking again.

Stephen lifted the book.

‘This is the gospel of Christ,’ said Adhemar. ‘Do you swear by its truth the truth of your vision?’

‘I swear it.’

‘This is the cross of Christ. Do you swear on the pain of our Saviour the truth of your vision?’

‘I swear it.’

Adhemar turned to take back his holy artefacts. But the priest was not yet finished.

‘I will swear by whatever oath will satisfy you. If there is any man here who doubts me, I will climb to the top of that tower’ – he pointed to the tower in the wall, where Bohemond’s banner flew – ‘and throw myself down. If I speak truly, surely I will be borne up on the hands of angels, so that not one toe touches the ground. Or, if you prefer, I will suffer the ordeal of fire. The truth of God’s righteousness will guard me from the flames. Does any man ask it?’

He spoke with fervour, though there was a nervous reticence in his eyes which was at odds with his words. I saw Bohemond open his mouth as if to speak, but he closed it again as Adhemar calmly answered: ‘You have sworn on the gospels. That is enough.’

A murmur of assent rumbled through the crowd.

‘We will—’

Adhemar was silenced as a man broke free of the crowd and ran towards him. He fell to his knees at the bishop’s feet and – in a braying voice which Kerbogha himself must have heard in the citadel – declared: ‘Mercy, your Grace: I too have received a vision of the Lord.’

Confusion and consternation erupted from the massed Franks, but if Adhemar felt any surprise he mastered it quickly. He stooped down and raised the man to his feet, then turned him to face the crowd.

I had thought that I recognised the voice, the self-righteousness and wheedling. The face I certainly knew. His hair had been combed since the night before, and a new tunic put on him, but the crooked nose and sneering lip were the same. Truly, it seemed there was nowhere that Peter Bartholomew might not appear.

‘I have beheld His glory too.’ He thrust out his chest like a cockerel readying its crow. ‘In dreams and in visions, Saint Andrew the apostle has visited me.’

I sensed a certain hostility among the throng. Perhaps they did not like Bartholomew’s sudden arrival, or were unimpressed by the lesser saint he had seen. Perhaps they knew him as I did.

Adhemar, though, was indulgent. ‘How often?’

‘Four times.’

The crowd stirred. This was better.

‘Did he speak to you?’

Peter nodded greedily, then remembered his humility and bowed his head. ‘He did. With words so wondrous that I scarcely dared believe them.’

‘What did he say?’ called a soldier from the crowd.

‘He said: “Know my words and obey them. When you have entered Antioch, go to the cathedral of Saint Peter. There, hidden, you will find the spear of the centurion Longinus, the holy lance which pierced the side of our Saviour as he hung on the cross at Calvary.’

I felt warm breath against my ear as Sigurd leaned close. ‘I have seen the lance of Longinus. It is in Constantinople, in the Chapel of the Virgin at the palace.’

‘I know.’

Peter Bartholomew did not think so. ‘Suddenly, it seemed that the saint led me through the city and into the church of the apostle Peter. He reached his hand into the ground – stone and earth were like water to him – and drew forth the lance and gave it into my hands.’

Reliving his vision, Peter had stabbed a fist down and then raised it above his head, brandishing his invisible relic to the crowd. All stares were fixed on it.

‘The saint told me: “Behold the lance which opened Christ’s side, whence has come the whole world’s salvation.”

‘I held it in my hands and wept. I asked to take it to the Count of Saint-Gilles, for at this time we were still hard pressed outside the city walls, but the saint said, “Wait until the city is taken, for then your need will be greatest. At the hour I appoint, bring twelve men to this place and find it where I have hidden it.”

‘He plunged his hand back into the ground, before the steps which lead to the altar, and the lance was gone.’

I looked around. Whatever his failings, Peter Bartholomew was a convincing preacher. His vision seemed to have surpassed even the priest’s in the crowd’s estimation.

‘You said this happened while we were still camped before the walls,’ Adhemar probed.

Peter tilted his head defiantly. ‘It did.’

‘Why, then, do you only tell us now?’

‘Because I was afraid. Because I was poor and you were mighty. “Counts and bishops will not listen to a humble pilgrim,” I told myself. “They will think I tell lies to win favour, or food.” But the saint persisted. Twice more he visited me, commanding me to reveal this miracle, and each time, after he had gone, fear restrained me. Then, yesterday, he appeared again. His eyes flashed, and his red hair burned like fire. “Why do you contemn the Lord your God?” he demanded. “Why, when Christians suffer, do you hold back the words of salvation?”’

Peter’s head was bowed in shame, his hands clasped penitentially before him. ‘As soon as I could, I came to you, my lords, and confessed all. And I will swear it,’ he added, ‘by any holy relic or ordeal you demand.’

If Adhemar was tempted to demand such proof, he did not show it. ‘It is not necessary,’ he declared. ‘Yesterday, in the depths of our distress, as the city burned’ – he glanced significantly at Bohemond – ‘and the Turks assailed us, our Lord granted two visions to the faithful. Hearing them together, we cannot doubt His divine purpose. To this pilgrim He promised the great gift of the holy lance, and to Stephen relief four days hence. This is how it will come to pass. We will wait three days in fasting and prayer. On the fourth day, in accordance with Peter’s vision, we will take twelve men to the cathedral and open the ground where the saint prophesied. There, if we are true, the Lord will fulfil His promise and grant us His miracle.’

‘What if they find nothing but earth and stone?’ Sigurd whispered in my ear.

‘But first,’ Adhemar continued, ‘this holy revelation should rekindle the flame of God’s purpose in our hearts. Who can doubt that the Lord is with us? Though we are bloody and embattled, besieged by enemies and beset by suffering, He shares our torments and sustains us. We are His people, the sheep of His pasture, and He does not forget us. Therefore let every prince and noble, and every knight, pilgrim and servant, reconsecrate himself to our holy cause. Swear by the sacrament of Christ that you will not leave Antioch until we all leave Antioch together, in triumph or defeat as Christ wills it.’

Bohemond stepped forward, drew his sword, and held it before him with the hilt upright like a cross. ‘I swear by the cross, by the sacraments and by the saints, that I will remain in Antioch until death takes me or victory is assured.’

Count Raymond, eager to match this piety, knelt behind his own sword. ‘We are the fellowship of Christ. By one bread and one blood, we are made one with Him. I will not forsake Him.’ He rose and put his arm around Peter Bartholomew’s misshapen shoulders. ‘As for the herald of the Lord, I will take him into my camp and honour him.’

One by one, the other princes sank to their knees and made similar vows. Then Adhemar turned to the massed army and had them do likewise.

‘Our three days of fasting and penance have begun,’ he said. In the middle of the kneeling hordes, he alone remained standing. ‘Confess your sins, make clean your hearts, and prepare your souls for the eternal victory.’

A chant rose from one of the priests behind him. ‘Tradiderunt me in manus impiorum, et inter iniquos proiecerunt me . . .’

‘Congregati sunt adversum me fortes et sicut gigantes steterunt contra me . . .’ the army answered.

Sigurd and I slipped away, back down the mountain.

λ β

For three days we suffered fasting and penance as Adhemar had ordered. It needed little effort, for there was not a crumb of food to be had in Antioch. And although it was a time of prayer there was no respite from fighting. Each day Kerbogha attacked the Frankish defences, and each day Bohemond repelled him. At night I could see the watchfires burning on the mountain, and during the day the plumes of smoke where they cremated the dead. I did not return to the battle but spent my days pacing my short stretch of wall, looking out over the plain and the river, though I knew that no help would come.

On the third night Sigurd and I sat with Mushid on the top of our tower. The swordsmith was a curious presence who came and went to his own inscrutable schedule, but he had become a frequent guest during our time in the city. It was one of the few places where he could be safe, and I enjoyed his company. Though Anna thought him unsettling, I found that his talk diverted me from the evils which surrounded us. And I valued the morsels of information his travels occasionally unearthed.

‘All is not well with Kerbogha’s army,’ he was saying. ‘For almost a week, he has poured out his troops against Bohemond. Many Normans have died, but even more Turks have perished and the city has not been taken.’

‘It can only be a matter of days.’ Sigurd was in a foul humour, as he had been since we had returned from the mountain. ‘Our army is besieged by Turks on one side, and famine on the other. They cannot fight two enemies for long.’

Mushid nodded. ‘But Kerbogha has his enemies too. Thirst, for one. He has ten thousand men camped on that mountain, where there are no springs or streams to feed them. It is a week until midsummer, and every day they fight another battle. Each day they lose diminishes their strength.’

‘Each day we win diminishes ours.’

‘But Kerbogha’s army is a fragile creation. The Emir of Aleppo will not fight with the Emir of Damascus, because they have had their own war too recently. The Emir of Damascus looks over his shoulder, because in the south his lands are under attack from the Fatimids of Egypt. The Emir of Homs and the Emir of Menbij have a blood-feud, so they do not speak. The Saracens despise the Turks: they ask why they should fight so far from home when it is the Turks who will claim the spoils. And Kerbogha, whose rank is not so great as his reputation, must yoke these unruly beasts together to pull his chariot. If they continue to bite each other and pull apart, soon the axle will snap and the charioteer will be left helpless.’

‘That is not the Ishmaelites you have described,’ I said. ‘It is the Franks. Bickering princes jealous of each other’s glory; different races divided against themselves. If Kerbogha’s army thirsts, it can retreat to the Orontes to drink. In our hunger, we can do nothing but starve.’

‘And why does an Ishmaelite care so little for the fate of his brethren?’ Sigurd asked. He did not dislike Mushid, but he did not trust him. He preferred the lines of battle to be clearly drawn; the presence of an Ishmaelite who was not an enemy unsettled him. ‘Whose side do you take?’

‘The side of war.’ Anna had climbed the stair below and emerged onto the tower, her pale dress stained with blood. ‘As long as nobody wins, his swords will keep gobbling up lives.’

‘How is the patient?’ I tried to deflect the conversation from the awkward direction she had sent it. ‘Has Quino spoken yet?’

Anna sat beside me. ‘Nothing has passed his lips save air – and little enough of that. He is dying quickly.’

‘He would be dead already if you didn’t waste your time on him,’ Sigurd complained. ‘Why should a murderer and a heretic live when worthier men die?’

Anna did not answer but looked at me for justification.

‘Because every life is precious to God.’ I glared at the others, trying to mask my discomfort. The truth, as they perhaps suspected, was that everything which mattered was beyond my grasp. My life was balanced on a sword-edge, whose hilt was in the hands of Franks who cared nothing for me. I would survive or fall as an unthought consequence of their destiny. Only in pursuing the truth of Drogo’s death did I have any mastery of my fate. Or perhaps I deceived myself.

‘Look there.’ Mushid had leaped to his feet and was pointing at the stars like some magus of old. ‘There – in the north.’

I stood. For a moment I saw nothing but the constellations, as fixed and immutable as ever; then, following Mushid’s outstretched arm, I saw a new star imposed on the heavens. In brightness it dimmed all the others, and its light seemed to grow broader and brighter as I watched.

‘It’s falling over Kerbogha’s camp,’ said Sigurd.

It fell from the sky, passing across the canvas of stars behind and growing ever larger in our sight. Falling from heaven like Lucifer, I thought.

‘Look.’

Through some divine magic, the star was no longer whole. It had split into three, branching out like the prongs of a trident as it plummeted to the ground. Each fragment still glowed with the residue of its starlight and behind them I saw little tails, like cloaks billowing in the wind.

‘The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch,’ murmured Anna.

‘The Triune God descends on Kerbogha’s camp,’ said Mushid. ‘There is hope for you yet, it seems.’

‘Or else the star of Bohemond falls from its firmament,’ Sigurd countered. ‘Its ruin comes from the north.’

Mushid smiled. ‘What was it that the angel said at the birth of the prophet Jesus? “Be of good cheer.” Your god has spoken to your peasants, to your priests, and now He gives a sign to every man in this city that He is with you. The time of dreams and miracles is upon you.’

I stared at him. In those last words his mild voice had strengthened, deepened, as if resonating to some deeper truth. He sounded almost like a prophet, or an oracle.

‘Little less than a miracle will save us,’ said Sigurd.

Anna looked at him, her gaze impenetrable. ‘You had better pray, then, that God does not disappoint when they excavate the church tomorrow.’

Later, while the others slept, I descended the tower and crossed the road behind the wall. We had commandeered one of the houses here: a low, square building set around a courtyard. Under the Varangians’ hammers, the doorway had been enlarged to admit a horse and the courtyard turned into a makeshift stable. Only three of the animals survived, gaunt and weak, but their warm scent on the night air comforted me. As I passed, I heard one of them huffing in his byre.

Beyond the horses, in a long room whose furniture had long since become firewood, Anna had set up her infirmary. I spoke a few quiet words with the Varangian who guarded it and let myself in through the open door. I walked hesitantly, afraid lest I should step on the wounded who lay on the floor, but my eyes were well used to the dark and I disturbed no one.

At the far end, a little removed from the others, I found Quino. He lay wrapped in a white blanket, an indistinct bundle like a butterfly in its cocoon. His head was raised on a balled-up tunic, and he breathed in short, ragged bursts. I feared that Anna was right, that it would not be long before even that was too much effort.

‘What do you know?’ I asked softly. ‘Who led you into your impiety? Was it Drogo?’

Quino did not answer, and without another miracle I feared he might never speak again. Anna had said he had a fever; the bandages around his belly were soaked with the blood and bile which oozed from his wound, and there was no food to feed his strength.

The guard had come over, and joined me looking down on Quino.

‘Has he said anything?’ I asked. ‘In his dreams, perhaps?’

‘No.’ The guard poked Quino with the toe of his boot. ‘Nor will he. He’ll die tomorrow, I think.’

I remembered Mushid’s words. The time of dreams and miracles is upon you.

‘Perhaps his life will return.’

But even in the realm of miracles that had only happened once.

λ γ

Certainly no miracles happened overnight. Next morning Quino was still in the grip of his wound, silent as ever. After a few minutes watching him I left Anna and her patients and made my way towards the church of Saint Peter.

Long before I reached the church, I felt the change that had come over Antioch. A day earlier, it had been a city choked in the last throes of a siege, squeezed in Kerbogha’s fist. The strain had told on every face – human, animal – even the walls had seemed about to crumble to powder. Now it had the air of a holiday. Men walked with a surer purpose, neither crawling in despair nor running in terror. Women braided bright cloths into their hair – all the flowers had long since been eaten – and did not pull their children back when they tousled in the street. The sun, which yesterday had scorched us with unyielding fire, now seemed to bless us with its warmth, and the blue sky offered unblemished promise.

At the main avenue, between the colonnades, I found crowds gathered in anticipation. They lined the road as if for a saint’s day, and for a moment I was transported to the Mesi in Constantinople, waiting for the Emperor and five hundred burnished Varangians to parade by. It was strange to think that my road to Antioch had begun with just such a procession.

We did not have long to wait. After about quarter of an hour I heard trumpets sound near the palace, and shouts rise down the road to my right. They rippled nearer like gusts of wind, though no breeze disturbed the heat of the morning, and burst out all around as the column came into view.

Four Provençal knights came first, pushing back the crowds to clear a way. They wore clean white tabards emblazoned with crosses, though when the cloth billowed out I saw dried blood on the armour beneath. Next came Bishop Adhemar on a white horse. Doubtless he intended it to be a magnificent steed, its coat as bright and soft as wool, but in truth it was a mangy beast, half-lame. In those days, any horse that walked was miraculous enough. Adhemar sat erect in the saddle, though he grimaced with the effort; he seemed weighed down by the enormous cope, stitched in gold with images of the saints and prophets and the resurrection, that he wore. There was a sword at his side and a cross in his hand, and a horn bow slung from his shoulder.

Behind him, on a pair of emaciated mules, were the blessed visionaries, Stephen the priest and Peter Bartholomew. Each bore an icon of the apostle who had blessed him: Saint Peter and Saint Andrew. Stephen did not look to be enjoying the attention of the crowds: his head was hunched down into his cassock, and his lips seemed to move with the words of some silent prayer. Peter Bartholomew had no such humility. His chin was as high as Stephen’s was low; he faced the sun and mirrored its beam onto the surrounding pilgrims, serene in its countenance. In emulation of his namesake, Little Peter, he had even put on a hermit’s short cloak over his tunic.

In two lines, the dozen men who were to dig the hole came next. They were humbly dressed, though in an artful, deliberate way different to the mass of pilgrims around them. Certainly there was nothing lowly in their station. Count Raymond himself led the near column, and a bishop the other; priests and knights filed behind them. After them came more priests, seven of them, chanting the liturgy with their eyes closed. Lord hear my prayer, and let my cry come unto thee. It had resounded through the city so often in the past three days that I had learned the unfamiliar Latin.

The crowd surged after the priests, flowing in the wake of the procession as it marched on to the church. I stepped out from the shadow of the colonnade to join them, and was carried along the road in a tumult of hymns and prayers. From deep within their parched bodies the pilgrims discovered new wells of strength to which they gave voice with an almost desperate frenzy. They had found hope, and the agony of its frailty only made them sing harder.

With every yard we travelled, the pace of the procession slowed, and by the time we reached the square in front of the church it was barely moving. There was no hope of entering the sanctuary itself, for those who had gone before were crammed between its pillars and spilling out down the steps, but that did not deter the crowd. They stood in vigil, waiting for the miracle. When Adhemar began to pray at the altar all fell silent, though none could hear him.

The prayer finished. Somewhere, far beyond my sight, Count Raymond lifted his pick to break open the foundation of the church. At that moment, I doubt there was a single soul in Antioch who did not believe the lance was there, where he struck. There was little alternative.

The blow rang out, faint and feeble at that distance. A pause, and then another. Then others joined in, hammering at the stone. The noise was curiously muted, like a child banging a pot with a spoon, but it held us absolutely in its thrall.

A whisper came back through the crowd. ‘They have cracked open the paving.’

I sighed. Even with twelve men digging, I feared it would be a long wait.

The sun climbed higher. The shadows slipped away, and with them, little by little, the expectant audience. Hope waned in the faces around me; prayers turned to gossip, and then to a despairing silence. The chime of hammers and picks gave way to the muffled sliding of spades in earth. The heat in the square was savage, unbearable, and even in the church it must have sapped the will of the diggers. I wondered if Count Raymond and his priests were regretting their great show of piety.

I lingered for an hour, stifling my rising doubts with protestations of faith. Then I succumbed and returned to the house by the tower. Anna was there, wiping Quino’s forehead with a damp cloth. There seemed little else she could do: his bandages had been changed recently, but already blood had fouled them again.

‘Has he spoken?’ How many times had I asked that in the last three days?

‘He can barely open his mouth to drink. Have they found the lance?’

‘No. It seems that Saint Andrew did not specify how deep it might be buried.’

I paused, interrupted by a fit of choking by my feet. Quino’s hand shot out from his side and scrabbled on the floor; his eyes opened, and he seemed to be staring on me with horror. I bent low and inclined my ear, but there were no words, only the hiss and gurgle of air. His eyes closed, and he lapsed back into whatever dreams possessed him.

Afternoon came, and with it a stillness that settled over the city like dust. The festive atmosphere of the morning had gone; when I drifted back to the church of Saint Peter, there were no crowds to keep me from its door. A cluster of watchful pilgrims stood in a circle before the altar, but it took little effort to push through them and look down into the pit which the diggers had excavated for themselves. A rampart of earth and broken stones surrounded the hole, and I thought I could see a stump of bone among the rubble. Had they disturbed the grave of some early saint or martyr? It would be an unfortunate beginning.

On the opposite side of the hole, I saw Count Raymond stand back from his labour and mop his face. The cloth must have been stained with the red soil they had excavated, for it left a weal of earth across his grizzled cheek. His tunic was likewise smeared with sweat and mud. He pushed out his chest and tipped back his head, and I could see the weariness in his aged limbs. It was in his face, though, that he seemed oldest.

‘I must go,’ he said.

‘My lord!’ said Peter Bartholomew indignantly. ‘We do Christ’s work here, as commanded by His most holy saints. You cannot leave it unfinished.’

Tired and worn he might have been, but there was strength enough in Raymond’s eye that even a man as shameless as Peter stepped back under its glare. ‘I am called to defend this city – and you – from the Turks. That too is Christ’s work.’

‘It is right to do so.’ Adhemar sat in front of the altar on his episcopal chair, staring down on the diggers like a stone saint. ‘Count Raymond should relieve Bohemond’s watch on the citadel.’

‘But in my dream the saint commanded twelve men to accompany me.’

There was a spade in Raymond’s hands and for the briefest instant I thought he might swing it, mace-like, into Peter’s self-righteous face. Or perhaps that was my hope.

The count pulled himself out of the pit and wiped the earth from his hands. He pushed through the onlookers, followed by a gaggle of his knights and attendants. As he passed me I saw bitterness in his features, disappointment that he had sought but had not found.

Another knight was found to take Count Raymond’s place and the digging went on. The heat under the silver dome grew and the watching crowd thinned. From out in the city, I heard the terrible squeals of a mule or donkey being slaughtered, and wondered if it was the one that Peter Bartholomew had ridden that morning. It would have been no use for war, and there now seemed little hope that we would need a baggage train again.

The hole deepened. The men who dug were in it up to their waists now, and still they turned up nothing but potsherds and gravel. They stabbed at the earth; had they actually found the lance, they would probably have struck sparks from it. Anger and defeat and misery filled the pit, and spilled out to infect the few pilgrims who remained to watch.

I left, and for an hour I wandered without purpose through the streets. I walked in the shadow of the walls, hearing snatches of conversation from the guards above. I found a small church tucked behind an abandoned bakery and entered its stifling gloom to offer a few private prayers. After a time, I found myself near the quarter which Bohemond had burned down two days earlier, and I marvelled that already shoots of life were growing back from the ashes. Tents had been pitched on clear ground, and awnings stretched from the walls and timbers which still stood. Mothers sat on scorched rocks feeding their babies, and children black as Nubians chased each other through the ruins. Their shouts seemed uncommonly loud in the open, silent space.

As the shadows began to creep back over the city, I retraced my aimless steps to the church of Saint Peter. A single glance confirmed that no miracle had occurred in my absence. The knot of watchers around the hole was thinner than before, and even from the door I could see Adhemar’s impassive figure beyond them. He and Raymond had gambled on a charlatan, and their last effort to thwart Bohemond and the Turks had failed. No wonder the bishop seemed so forlorn, alone on his chair above the low business of digging.

I walked back to the house by the walls, feeling the copper gaze of the setting sun on my face. I did not need Sigurd’s knowledge of portents to ascribe it a meaning.

As soon as I came within sight of the door, the guard hailed me. ‘Demetrios. Anna has been seeking you. The Norman has woken.’

In an instant, the lethargy of a hot afternoon was washed from my mind. ‘How long since?’

The Varangian shrugged. ‘Not long. But it will not last long, either. She said it was the last coil of his strength unravelling.’

I ran through the gate and across the courtyard, under the plane tree into the infirmary. In my haste, I may have kicked against some of the other patients on the floor, but I was heedless of their cries. I came to the end of the room, where Quino lay, and knelt beside him. His black eyes were open and the dullness that had glazed them was wiped away. He tried to raise himself on his elbow as he saw me, but the effort was too much.

‘Quino.’ I spoke gently, as to a child, though desperation consumed me.

‘I am dying.’

‘Yes.’ Sometimes it is a mercy to deceive the dying, but I sensed that Quino craved only honesty.

‘You are the scorpion, Greek. Now you have stung me to my grave.’

I did not argue. ‘Will you give me your confession?’

A gurgling, choking sound rose from Quino’s throat, and he screwed up his face in agony. Wishing Anna were there, I put my arm about his shoulders and lifted him upright. The coughing subsided.

‘I do not think . . . I do not think God will grant me life enough to confess my sins.’

‘Then tell me what you can. Tell me who killed Drogo.’

Quino’s eyes rolled back in his skull, and I tightened my grip on him. Every fibre of my being implored Christ to save him long enough to answer me.

‘Who killed Drogo?’

Though I had him cradled in my arm, the strength to keep upright was still beyond Quino. As tenderly as I could, I laid him back on the ground.

‘Do you repent it? Your heresy?’ I remembered him on the tower, even before the Turkish arrow had pierced him. A man broken by his conscience.

‘I am beyond . . . repentance.’ His life was measured in words now, each one bringing him nearer death. ‘Soon . . . I will know.’

‘Who killed Drogo?’

‘He took us to the cave. In the valley. He knew the ancient magic. The old gods.’

‘Who? Drogo?’

‘He offered truth.’ Impossible though it seemed, I thought I saw a smile touch Quino’s fractured lips. ‘But I will find it first.’

‘Who offered truth? Did he kill Rainauld also?’

‘He killed the bull. He took us to the cave. He—’

Another spasm racked him. I looked around, hoping desperately that Anna would return to minister to him, but there was no sight of her. There was only the guard, standing by the door and watching uncomprehendingly.

But the coughing seemed to have dislodged some canker on Quino’s soul, for when he spoke again it was with a firmer voice. ‘He knew our sins. He swore that if we betrayed him we would burn in flames. But already I am falling into the fire. His hold is broken.’ Again, the ghostly smile. ‘It is funny, is it not, Greek? I came so many miles, through desert and starvation and war, to follow the cross. And here, in this godless waste, I lost my soul to an Ishmaelite.’

‘An Ishmaelite?’

‘The swordsmith.’

Afterwards, I despised myself for leaving a broken man to die alone. At the time, I had no other thought. Without even pausing to tell the bewildered Varangian what had happened, I ran out of the building and up the stairs to the walls. An absent guard had left a spear leaning against the battlements, and I had the presence of mind to seize it before I stepped through the door.

After so many months of searching and ignorance, I found my quarry with disarming ease. Mushid was sitting on a stool in the guardroom, his face fixed in concentration as he rasped a whetstone along the edge of his swordblade. He looked up in surprise as I burst in.

‘What is it? Has Kerbogha entered the city?’ He saw the spear in my hand. ‘Is this the holy lance which pierced the side of the prophet Jesus? Have you stolen it?’

I levelled the spear at him. ‘Put down your sword.’

His smooth features creased with concern. ‘What has come over you, Demetrios? Are you unwell?’

I jabbed the spearhead at his belly, and he jumped back in alarm. Fixing his stare on mine, he laid the sword on the ground with great deliberation. As he straightened, his face was clear and guileless as the sky.

‘Have you joined the Franks in their hatred of my race and my faith? Will you kill me in the name of your god?’

‘If I kill you, it will be your own doing.’

He held out his arms, like a priest administering a blessing. ‘I will not provoke you.’

‘You killed Drogo.’ The spear twitched in my hand as I said it.

‘I was Drogo’s friend.’

‘Then you betrayed his friendship.’

Mushid shook his head in slow sadness. ‘I honoured it to the end. I grieved for his death. Why do you accuse me, Demetrios?’

‘Quino. He has few breaths left in him, but there were enough for him to name you as the one who led them into sin and idolatry.’

Everything in the room seemed suddenly very still: Mushid, my spear, the light which pierced the slit window. When the swordsmith spoke again, his words were sharp and finely crafted. ‘You believe the single, dying word of a heretic Norman? A man from a race so full of hate for my own? The thought of an Ishmaelite left alive in Antioch must have tormented his soul, and so he has sent you, his willing accomplice, to finish the murder his countrymen have committed. Nor can I answer his charge, for doubtless if we go down he will be dead.’

‘He has not seen you, Mushid. He did not know you were here, or even alive. What would it profit him to name you?’

‘He knew I was Drogo’s friend. He hated me as an infidel. I am easy to blame – especially if he wished to hide his own guilt.’

‘He was about to die. There was no gain in deception.’

Mushid allowed a smile to break the tense set of his face. ‘There is much difference between dying and death.’

‘Not for Quino. You may say what you will, but you will not keep me from believing him. You befriended Drogo when his soul was troubled, and you offered him secret knowledge of ancient evils. You led him to the cave at Daphne, and you introduced him to the rites of Mithra.’

‘Mithra?’ Impatience began to rise in Mushid’s voice. ‘I have never heard of this Mithra.’

I remembered Quino’s words on the mountain. ‘You named him Ahriman.’

‘Ahriman, Mithra – I am a Muslim. It is forbidden to worship any god but Allah.’

‘As you yourself once told me, your faith permits things in war which are not otherwise allowed. Passing as a Christian among your enemies, for example.’

‘Only to a purpose. How would I gain if I introduced Drogo and Quino and their companions to the worship of false gods?’

Mushid was mocking me – I could hear it in his voice, see it in his sneering eyes.

‘How would you gain?’ I wondered. ‘You found them wandering in the wilds of heresy and doubt. Their friends and brothers had died; disease and famine ravaged their camp. The army faltered before Antioch, and so – it seemed – did their God. You came among them as a wolf among sheep; you preyed on their thirst for salvation. They were lost, and you promised them a way home. Instead, you took them over the precipice, into the abyss of apostasy whence they could not return. Once they had bowed down before Mithra, or Ahriman or whatever evil name you worshipped him by, they were beyond all hope of redemption. They were chained into sin, and you held the key.’

The sneer was gone from Mushid’s face. His gaze flickered past me, as if looking at something over my shoulder, but I did not turn to follow it. The door was shut behind me and I had not heard it open: there was no one there. Nor did I doubt that Mushid, the maker and wielder of swords, would be past my guard in an instant if I ever relaxed it.

‘Why did I do that?’ he asked. It was not a taunt this time. Perhaps he was curious to hear his deeds recounted to him, or to test my skill at guessing.

‘I do not know. I do not know who you serve. You are an Ishmaelite, yet you worked to betray the Ishmaelites who held Antioch, to their ruin. You are a Saracen, yet you mingle freely with Franks and Romans. Whose side do you take, Mushid?’

He laughed softly. ‘You see much, Demetrios – but only with the eyes of the Rum. When you look west, you see Franks and Normans, Provençals, Lotharingians, Bulgarians, Serbians and English. A man drops one word from your creed, or bakes his bread differently, and he is of a different church. Not one detail is missed. But when you look east, you and all your people, you see only dark faces and turbans. Turks, Arabs, Egyptians, Persians, Berbers – you do not care which we are when we cross your path. You do not care whether we are of the Ahl al-Sunna or the Shi’at ’Ali, whether we obey the Caliph in Baghdad or in Al-Qahira, because you do not understand why it should matter.’

‘What is your faith?’ I asked.

‘It does not matter. I am of the minority – indeed, even in the minority I am of the minority. We are the few in the midst of the many. We walk in shadows and meet in secret and whisper in men’s ears. Yet our faith is pure.’

‘You oppose the Christians?’

Mushid rolled his eyes. ‘I am like you: I oppose whoever does not believe. I told you once that when you came into Asia Minor you blundered into an ancient game. Did it not occur to you that I too was part of that game?’

‘And Drogo and his companions? Were they part of it too?’ There was so much that I did not know, so many tangled questions, but at last my mind began to cleave a path through them. ‘Did you hope that by leading them into this unspeakable sin you would gain a hold by which you could govern them? That they would be your spies and agents in the Christian army? Did you kill Drogo and Rainauld when they refused you?’

‘Drogo was a willing adept. He refused me nothing.’

We were skirting the truth, I was sure of it. Mushid’s words had the manner of practised evasions, careful twists of fact, riddles. Even now, confronted with his deceit at the point of my spear, he played with me.

‘If Drogo did not refuse you—’

How to tell what happened next? From the wall behind me, I heard running footsteps approach. Before I could think, the door was flung open and Anna’s voice was shouting at me that Quino was dead. But I could not listen, for the arc of the opening door had caught the butt of my spear and wrenched it away, throwing me off balance. It was all the opportunity that Mushid needed. His blade was in his hand and he was past the tip of my spear, lithe as a tiger beneath his white robe. A stinging pain exploded in my head as the fist which grasped his sword thumped into my face, and as I reeled backwards I saw the blade driving for Anna. I was powerless to prevent it; she fell beneath his charge and did not move.

I scrambled to my feet and ran to the doorway. Mushid had not paused to savour his victory, had not even looked back on his handiwork: already he was in the far tower and descending the stairwell. There was a Varangian at its foot; I shouted to him to stop the Saracen, but even as he looked up to see who hailed him Mushid pushed past and sprinted into the alley beyond.

Fearful of what I might see, of finding something from which there would be no release, I lowered my gaze to where Anna lay at my feet. She was on her back, eyes closed; I could not see any blood, but I knew that meant little.

Her eyes blinked open.

‘Are you hurt?’ I could hardly bear to ask it, for fear of the answer.

‘His blade passed by me. Why—’

I left her question unanswered. As much as I knew, I could explain later. For now, a single purpose drove me, hopeless though it was. Mushid had already vanished into the alley when I reached the door; by the time I was at the foot of the wall, he would have had enough time to be halfway up the mountain. Nonetheless, I chased him. With every pounding stride I offered prayers to God: that I would find Mushid, that I would avenge the evils he had worked, that I would strike him down for assaulting Anna. After a time I began to see the futility of my headlong search; my malnourished legs began to falter, my lungs to ache. I remembered the grace which had spared Anna from harm, and offered belated thanks for that, but still I stumbled on.

I came into the square in front of the cathedral and halted – not from pain or reason, but because a sudden crowd blocked my path. The great throng of the morning had returned, and though the light was fading, all stared at the figure standing on the steps before the portico. The cone of his bishop’s mitre was silhouetted against the light of the candles which his acolytes held behind him and his hand was raised aloft, clasping a bundle of purple cloth. It was barely larger than the fist which held it: if it was the spear, it was no great portion of it.

The crowd fell silent as Adhemar spoke.

‘The lance is found.’

All around me, men and women fell to their knees in wonder. Some beat their brows on the ground; others lifted their arms to Heaven and sang hymns of praise and thanksgiving. Even in the twilight, every face radiated exultant joy. Sounds of ecstasy and weeping filled the air.

‘Salvation has come.’

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And God came down, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the evangelist says. I wonder. Was it so simple? If I had lived a thousand years earlier, would I have known Christ as the Messiah, or would I have joined the crowds who jeered him on the cross for an impostor and a fraud? Until Antioch, I imagined myself with the apostles; now, I am not so sure. Did I witness a miracle? From what I have been taught of the ways of God, there is no question: a poor man, despised by his people but beloved of Christ, dreamed a vision; the saint’s message was obeyed, and the promised relic was found in the appointed place. What could be more obvious?

Yet knowing the ways of man, doubts remain. A heretic had this dream months earlier, he said, yet he did not reveal it until his crimes were known and his punishment was at hand. It saved him from death in flames. Those princes in the army most likely to benefit seized on his prophecy, and presided over its fulfilment. And when even they had lost hope – I later heard – when the diggers cast down their picks and spades in despair, it was Peter Bartholomew who leaped into the pit and scrabbled on his knees until he unearthed the precious fragment. Some said that it looked more like a roofer’s nail than the tip of a lance; others swore that they had seen the sacred blood still crusted on its point. It seems to me now that they believed, and then saw as they believed. For my part, I did not know what to believe.

One day during the fortnight after the discovery of the lance, I put my thoughts to Adhemar. I doubt that I was the first to ask him, for his answer was practised.

‘Saint Augustine writes that there is only one miracle, the miracle of miracles, the creation of this world. All that is in this world proceeds from that, and is thereby miraculous. The signs and portents that we ascribe to God’s wondrous acts do not occur contrary to nature, but by it. If it seems to us that the Lord has gone against the natural order of things, it is merely our understanding of the natural order which is imperfect.’

It did not seem to me that he had answered my question, but I dared not challenge him further. Too many of my doubts about the miracle’s provenance attached to his role in it.

Curiously, it was Anna who defended Adhemar best. I had expected that she, so sceptical of mystics and soothsayers, would dismiss the lance as a ruse and a sham. Instead, she seemed happy to accept it.

‘Of course it is ambiguous,’ she said. ‘Of course it is open to every suspicion and doubt. How else could the Lord test our faith?’

‘The conjurors in the market seek my faith. I do not oblige them simply because they ask.’

‘Because your reason tells you that they are bent on fraud. But how would you have answered if a humble carpenter had proclaimed himself the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, and called you to cast off all possessions and follow him?’

‘That was different. He performed miracles by which he might be known.’

Anna folded her arms. ‘Exactly.’

And though I prayed every night, imploring Christ to strengthen my faith beyond the weakness of doubt, the truth remained veiled.

Certainly, for those who did believe, the miraculous beneficence of the lance was plain. On the very day when it was found, Kerbogha’s army came down off the mountain, leaving only a passive garrison to guard the citadel. Some said it was because they were exhausted, parched of water and broken by too many days of defeat. But Bohemond himself declared that a single further assault would have shattered his ranks, and so this respite was ascribed to the lance. Indeed, its power seemed to have robbed Kerbogha of all stomach for battle: not only did he withdraw from the mountain, but he did not seek to break down our defences elsewhere either. He disposed his army around Antioch’s walls, besieging the gates and bridges, and waited for us to starve.

And there, even the most fervent advocates of the lance began to lose faith. Kerbogha’s new strategy saved us from the press of battle, but nothing could cure the misery of our condition. Famine consumed us. Each day it seemed there was nothing to eat, yet each day after there was less. Limbs shrank into themselves until skin and bone fused together, while bellies – by some cruel junction of humours – swelled as if we had gorged ourselves. Men pulled apart dung with their bare hands, seeking even a single grain which might remain undigested. We stripped the trees of their leaves and ate those, boiling them into green soups to stretch them further. Afterwards it looked as though winter had come to the orchards. The few who still had horses cut open the beasts’ veins, draining their blood into cups and drinking it. One day I saw a Lotharingian knight lead his horse through the streets, shouting that for a bezant any man could buy the cup of salvation. Later, I saw a mob chase him away, hurling abuse and stones and beating on his heels with sticks. I could not tell if it was the greed or the blasphemy which had offended them.

Such was our hunger that time itself seemed to contract. Counting now, it seems impossible that a mere twelve days passed from taking the city to finding the lance but that we endured a full two weeks of starvation afterwards. With no battles, and no strength, the period passed like a dream. My sight grew hazy, as if I was fading from the world, and my mouth was filled with a sweetness like ripe fruit, though I had eaten none in months. Every day I sat on my tower, half-asleep, staring out on the vastness of Kerbogha’s camp, the opulence of his tents and the brilliance of the horsemen who rode between them. At night, I lay half-awake on my stony bed, listening to the bleating of the herds that Kerbogha’s army had brought to feed themselves. I remembered the pagan legend of King Tantalus, neck-high in water but ravaged by an unquenchable thirst, and wondered if the lance had brought us not to Heaven but to Hell.

One evening, while Anna and I lay sleepless in the tower, I confessed the secret of my part in the city’s downfall, my guilt for the slaughter that followed. It had weighed so heavy on my soul that I feared it might be too enormous to reveal, but now I did not have the strength to withhold it. It poured out, almost unbidden, and Anna listened in silence. When I was done, I could hardly bear to hear her response.

Again she surprised me. Her words were neither harsh nor angry, but gentle. ‘It was not your doing. If we had not come into the city, Kerbogha would have crushed us in our camp. What happened afterwards, the slaughter of the Ishmaelites – that is for the Normans to repent, if God will forgive them. You cannot take the burden of their sins upon yourself. There was only ever one man who did that, and he died a thousand years ago.’

Reason told me that she spoke truly, but reason alone could not wash my conscience clean. Yet her words proved to be a balm: at first they made little difference, but over time, working their way into the wound, they began to knit together the lacerations in my soul, to heal me. Even so, the scar would remain.

The Army of God was dying. Day by day, life by life, we withered on the famished vine of Antioch. If the miracle had come, it had not been enough. So, thirteen days after the finding of the lance, two days before the high feast of Saints Peter and Paul, Adhemar summoned every man in the army to the square in front of the church. The casket which held the holy relic of the lance was placed on a table before him, open to view. The princes, Bohemond and Tancred, Hugh, Godfrey, and the two Roberts lined up behind him. Only Raymond was absent. Whatever miraculous powers the lance held, they had not helped him. Nor, if he had hoped to use it to prick Bohemond’s swelling ambition, had it served his purpose. All his might and riches could not ward off the wasting disease that ravaged the hungry in their weakness. He had kept to his bed for a week, and there had been no others with the power or the inclination to check Bohemond. He was undisputed master of the army; Raymond, it was rumoured, was close to death.

Adhemar fared little better. His health had been failing for months, and though he could still walk and ride, the pain of the effort was clear each time I saw him. Only the need to keep his flock together, the knowledge that his presence alone could unite the princes and reassure the pilgrims, gave him strength to continue. Looking up at him now, I could see little remnant of the kindness and patience which had once animated him. He had given his soul to nourish the army, and there was nothing left of him.

‘Brothers in Christ,’ he began. ‘Pilgrims on the holy road to Jerusalem. Truly it is written, “The Lord scourges with whips every child whom he loves.”’

A thousand skeletal faces stared lifelessly back at him.

‘But it is also written, “There is a time for peace, and a time for war.” Look around you. If the time for war is not now, it will never be. Our strength fades, our hopes die. In another month, Kerbogha will march into Antioch and find only the dust of our bones. Have we come so far, for that? Has the Lord brought us into this wilderness to kill us with hunger?’

Adhemar lifted his gaze above the crowd, stretched out his staff and spoke to the heavens. ‘Lord, why should your wrath burn so hot against your chosen people? By your mighty hand were we led from the lands of our birth: will Kerbogha the Terrible now boast that you brought us here only to kill us in the shadow of the mountain, to tear us from the face of the Earth? Avert your wrath. Do not wreak disaster on us in the sight of our enemies.’

A strange energy seemed to course through Adhemar; his whole body shook with reverence. He turned his gaze back to the masses in front of him. ‘What fools are we who question God’s divine purpose? How far beyond our mortal sight are His plans? If He has brought us here to die, then it is to die in His name, to His glory, the beautiful deaths of the martyrs. How can we fear so holy and wondrous a fate? If we strike forth from this city, this holy city where the saints Peter and Paul first preached the true gospel, and die in battle, how great will be our reward in Heaven? Merely to think on it would make one long for death. Fight the Turks in the name of Christ, and however the battle falls, our sins will be washed clean in blood.’

He dropped his voice. ‘But if we win – if we drive Kerbogha from the field and trample the ruins of his godless army under our feet – our glory will echo down the ages with the greatest heroes of old. Think of it. The Lord has blessed us with this holy relic, the very lance with which Christ’s blood was shed. If we turn it against our enemies, feeble and hungry though we are, how will they stand against it?

‘God’s promise is plain. If we stay, if we hide behind these walls of despair until famine takes us, we shall die the deaths of sinners. But if we take up our crosses, if we march onto the plain and fight, then whether we live or die the victory shall be ours. We cannot rest but we will lose. We cannot fight but we will win.’

Like a storm gathering its winds, Adhemar’s voice had risen to a thunderous roar far beyond the frailty of his body. Now, suddenly, his strength departed and he slumped forward on his staff. A chaplain rushed to his side and took his arm, trying to steer him back into the shelter of the church. But the bishop had not finished.

‘We are the Army of God, and the people of God. We have journeyed together, we have suffered together, and if God wills it so we shall die together. No prince or bishop will force you into this battle: we must decide together. What do you say?’

For long moments, an utter silence gripped the square. Then, starting from the back and sweeping forward, like a squall over water, a single phrase. Deus vult. God wills it. The shout rose; men who a moment earlier had barely had the strength to breathe now bellowed it forth. God wills it. God wills it. The princes on the portico took up the cry, the priests prayed it like a hymn, until even Adhemar’s lips moved to its simple rhythm. God wills it.

I did not like their chant: as far as I could see, nothing had come of it save ambition and murder. I turned to leave. I did not think that there was any part for me in the coming battle.

A hand touched my elbow and I looked back. A priest, a short man with a balding head and a harelip, was staring at me. He seemed familiar – one of Adhemar’s chaplains, perhaps.

‘Demetrios Askiates?’ The name was unfamiliar to him, and his cracked voice struggled to pronounce its foreign sounds.

‘Yes.’

‘My lord the bishop Adhemar asks that you join him tomorrow. The fighting will be fierce, and your company of axemen will be much sought after.’

‘Tell him . . .’ I paused, not knowing what to say. To the depths of my soul, I had seen enough of slaughter and the Franks’ battles. Whatever Adhemar might say, I was not of their race, and I would not choose to share their fate. But nor could I deny the simple truth of his proposition: if we did not fight, we would die in the city.

‘I know what Sigurd would choose,’ I muttered, to the confusion of the priest.

‘Shall I tell him that you will come?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ His deformed lip stretched into a mulish smile. ‘God wills it so.’

‘We will find out tomorrow.’

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We mustered at first light, a wraithlike army gliding through the grey streets of Antioch to the appointed places. Count Hugh, who had surprised all by volunteering to lead the vanguard, assembled his troops at the bridge gate; Duke Godfrey, with the greater force, came behind him, while Adhemar waited in the square by the palace. He must have been awake for hours, perhaps all night, but he gave no sign of it. Mounted on his white charger, he rode along the ranks, reassuring the waverers and blessing the penitent; he received messengers from the other princes and answered them; he conferred with his knights and agreed their strategies. I remembered the last surge of Quino’s strength before he died, and wondered if it was the same spark of a fading light that now animated Adhemar.

‘To think this rabble once threatened an empire.’ Sigurd rubbed his axe for the dozenth time that morning, and stared unhappily at the men around us. ‘Now half a legion of Patzinaks could sweep them away in an hour.’

‘Let us hope that sixty thousand Turks cannot.’ It was hard to deny Sigurd’s judgement. Among the hundreds gathered in the square, there could not have been two who bore the same arms. More than half wore Turkish armour, or carried the round Turkish shields that we had captured with the city. Some – the unhorsed knights – had swords, and many carried spears, but there were still too many more with nothing but billhooks and sickles. They might have been going to harvest rather than a battle.

Almost alone in this multitude, the Varangians kept their discipline and their pride. We had spent the night hammering dents out of our helmets, repainting the golden eagle of Byzantium on our shields, and polishing every speck of rust from our armour. When the trumpets summoned us, we had marched down in a double column, thirty of us, with a measured tread which would not have sounded amiss in the halls of the Emperor’s palace. I had walked beside Sigurd at the head of the column, though I did not deserve the place. Above us we carried not the standard of the cross but that of the eagle. Sigurd had insisted on it.

‘The body of Christ.’

I looked down. Priests were moving along the line, offering us consecrated bread from small silver caskets. I had taken it in my mouth and swallowed it before I even realised it was unleavened, after the Latin usage. At that moment it did not matter. I wondered where they had found the grain to bake it.

‘Brothers in Christ.’ Adhemar reined in his horse in front of us and looked out over the ranks. A helmet had replaced his mitre, though he still wore his cope over his armour. Beside him, also mounted, the harelipped priest carried the holy lance in its reliquary.

Adhemar opened a book. ‘Remember the words of the angel to the meek, and do not be afraid. We do not struggle against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the powers and dominions of darkness in this world. If you would stand fast against them, take up the armour of God: gird on the belt of truth and the mail of righteousness. Lift the shield of faith, which quenches every burning arrow that Satan may throw at you. Put on the helmet of salvation and draw the sword of the spirit, for that is the word of God.’

From the road behind him, towards the gate, the sound of a great shout and a blast of trumpets echoed back to us. Murmurs of apprehension ran through the crowd, but Adhemar lifted a hand to stay them.

‘The gates have been opened, and the battle is nigh. Hold fast to all that is true, look to your swords, and by God’s grace, by God’s will, we will prevail. Every death that we die echoes into Heaven, the perfect sacrifice of the martyrs. Every drop of Turkish blood we spill makes atonement for our sins. For long months we have been chained in hunger, suffering and siege. Today we break free.’

An uneven cheer rose from the army, but it soon faded away. The most they could expect from the day was a swift death; words merited little now.

Sigurd pointed to the mountain behind us. ‘I hope Bohemond did not depend on surprise.’

Stretched out between two spears, a black banner had been mounted on the citadel. The garrison must have looked down on our preparations with all-seeing eyes, missing nothing; doubtless the flag now signalled our advance to Kerbogha in his camp on the plain.

As I remembered from my years in the legions, the longest minutes in any war are those before battle. I said so to Sigurd.

He answered curtly. ‘The longest minutes are those when you count the dead.’

After that, I did not speak. The few men who were mounted patted their horses and whispered in their ears; some of the rest sang psalms or prayers, but most stood in silence and waited, listening for the call.

A messenger came running back from the gate. ‘Count Hugh has driven back the Turkish bowmen, and Duke Godfrey is on the plain. It is time.’

Without prompting, the herald who rode beside Adhemar put his trumpet to his lips, then waved the blue banner of the Virgin forward. Line by line, rank by rank, we filed out of the square and down the road to the bridge. Women lined the route, and some threw olive branches or garlands at our feet. But there were no leaves on the boughs, and the garlands were only thistles and weeds. There were no cheers or singing.

We came to the gate. The great doors stood open, mighty columns of oak flanking our path, while on the ramparts above and to the side stood a line of priests, crucifixes held aloft. With their arms outstretched, silhouetted against the sky, they took on the form of crosses themselves, or scarecrows. I heard them casting prayers and blessings down on us as we passed, but I was not comforted. And then we were under the arch, past the threshold, and on the white stones of the fortified bridge. Locked in my phalanx and between the high balustrades, I could not see the river; even the sound of its flow was drowned out under the tramp of our boots.

We came between the two turrets that guarded the far bank, and for the first time in almost a month I trod the earth outside the city. I could not savour it, for now we were on the killing ground. The men who had gone before us had met the Turks here: the human evidence was all around our feet. Most seemed to be Franks.

‘Fan out, make the line.’

The deceits of a battlefield are infinite, and seldom kind. As our column began to unfold, the ranks of men ahead of me evaporated: suddenly I was no longer safe in their midst but thrust to the forefront of our advancing line. The landscape opened in front of me: now I could see the plain rising up from the river, the forking road to Saint Simeon, the charred mound where I had quarried gravestones for a watchtower all those months ago. Hard on my right, the battle had already been joined. Duke Godfrey’s men were locked in combat with a company of Turks barely a hundred paces away, shielding our advance.

‘Forward,’ came Adhemar’s order.

Though it was an early hour, I realised that my face was soaked with sweat. Was I so terrified? No – it was not sweat which glistened on my cheek but a fine mist falling from the grey sky. I had barely noticed it in my concentration.

Sigurd wiped the dew from the nose of his helmet. ‘Someone in the heavens watches over us. The Turkish arrows will not fly so far from wet bowstrings.’

‘Nor will swords and axes be so easy to hold.’

‘Look to your right!’

Our line shuddered as every man in it craned his head about. Adhemar had led us beyond Duke Godfrey’s company, hoping to cross the plain and position us on the flank. But our enemies had advanced too quickly, and now our own flank was exposed to the reinforcements who had splashed across the river from their siege encampments.

‘Wheel right, wheel right!’

Adhemar’s aides were galloping their mounts furiously along the line, repeating the order, though there was little need. Barbarians the Franks might be, but they had campaigned for a year in hostile lands, and those who survived had learned a discipline which the ancient Praetorians themselves would have envied. The men on the right, nearest the Turks, halted immediately and turned to face their foes, while those at the far end ran in a wide arc to re-form the line against the enemy. As I turned, I felt the clench of fear in my stomach, the terror that I would move and the man beside me would not, that I would be left exposed. Certainly it was a desperate effort to re-order ourselves so quickly, and I could still hear the thud of shields locking together as the first wave broke over us.

I looked ahead to the line of Turks who rushed towards us. For a moment I saw them clearly: the swords rising and falling like reaping hooks as they ran; the red skirts swirling around their legs; the dirt that their boots kicked up. Then the battle closed in around me, drawing me into its fold, and I knew nothing of its course save what happened in the few square feet in front of me. My sword was my light, and beyond its radius was only a throbbing, heaving darkness. Shields clashed; swords and spears stabbed between the openings, and men fell. Sigurd’s axe swung with a keen joy: I saw men reel away with their helmets split open, or their arms severed from their shoulders. Sometimes it seemed we moved forward, and sometimes back, the sinews of our army tugging and flexing. We never broke.