Soon must I tell of the fall of Antioch but not yet. Mortal life is a difficult proposition because hardly anything can be experienced as what it actually is; everything is time-distorted. In childhood we wait for things that seem too long in coming, we wait for treats, for presents, for festivals and holidays, we wait for growing up. There is so much waiting that suddenly childhood itself is gone with all that was being waited for. As grown-ups we find ourselves pitched headlong down a steep and slippery slide with everything hurtling towards us at great speed; some things smash us full in the face, others streak past half-glimpsed or unseen; everything has happened before we were ready for it. Only after the hurly-burly of mortal life is over can one have a really good look at what has happened; unburdened by choice and unthreatened by consequences one is able to sort through the half-glimpses of a lifetime and find perhaps one or two workable fragments of recognition.
So it is that only now in this little space of centuries since my death have I been able not so much to understand anything as simply to look carefully at everything to see if this fragment and that fragment which do not fit together may yet both belong to a shape which might be recognizable if seen entire.
I have in mind the deeds of the Franks and the Turks, such as I was able to see or hear about; I have in mind how men would sometimes rush forward, sometimes back, some on horseback, some on foot. I have in mind one particular night of the winter rains of 1097, it was soon after Christmas. At that time I was often on the walls of Antioch in the small hours of the night; I was in a state in which I could feel the passage of time as if I were an hourglass through which the sand was running more and more swiftly. It was well towards morning on this night that I am speaking of; it had been raining steadily but the rain had stopped, and now in the dim cloudlight I saw what seemed to be thousands of Frankish horsemen moving out of their encampment and heading up the valley of the Orontes.
Bembel Rudzuk came and stood with me. We were on that part of the wall by the Aleppo Gate that overlooked the sector of Bohemond of Taranto. On the hill behind his encampment the Franks had built a tower that we called Evil Eye; now we saw lanterns moving on the top of it while between us and it the dark horsemen slowly rode away into the fading darkness. Stubbornly stood the sodden and threadbare tents they left behind; in some of them glimmered the dim light of candles. We had no idea how many had gone but from other watchers we heard that more than half of the Franks remained to keep the siege. Many of them were starving and by now were regularly drinking the blood of their horses; we guessed that this moving-out of the thousands was a foraging expedition and the size of it indicated to us that they intended to move deep into hostile territory.
The next night there was again no rain nor was there a moon; the darkness of the sky was opaque. ‘This night will bring out Yaghi-Siyan,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. We went up on to the wall over the bridge gate and waited there for hours, equally expecting Turks to go out or Franks to come in. Even from what little we knew of the Franks there was nothing that they could have done that would have surprised us; starving as they were and faced with impregnable walls they might yet at any moment storm those walls. In moments of quiet like this it seemed to us that any sortie by the Turks could well provoke a counterattack that would bring the Franks raging into the city.
Bembel Rudzuk and I had no doubt whatever that a night would come when the Franks, whatever the odds against them, would take Antioch; it seemed to us that it was simply in the nature of things. And of course when that night came it would bring certain death to the Muslims and the Jews of Antioch.
It would have been easy enough to leave the city — Mount Silpius, as I have said, kept a back door open — so that we might live yet awhile and do our dying elsewhere but neither of us wanted to. It was in Antioch that a readiness to die had come upon us and now we felt committed to that place; to take our dying elsewhere would have seemed frivolous and disloyal. Both of us admitted to a certain vanity about dying: we preferred to do it as handsomely as possible; but we agreed to be guided by the circumstances and not, when the proper moment came, to refuse a lesser death in the hope of winning a greater one some other time.
My original idea of attaining Jerusalem before it was too late, before Jesus withdrew from any further possibility of manifestation and the world was left with the bleakness of what he had called ‘the straight action and no more dressing up’ now seemed like those fond hopes of childhood that even a child recognizes as being made of that kind of mental sugar-candy that melts in the hard sunlight of reality.
The siege as the months passed had developed, as does everything, its own particular rhythm and mode of being. When the Franks had first appeared outside the walls of Antioch Yaghi-Siyan had at every moment expected a major assault. He quadrupled the watch on the walls; he kept the citadel on constant alert; and he mobilized every male young and old who was capable of lifting so much as a stick or a stone against the enemy. All civilians were organized into a militia who in the event of an attack would respond to a trumpet call and would be under the command of an officer of the garrison. The months had passed; the attack had not come. This condition of no-attack became more and more a condition of no-attack, like a very thin-shelled egg that grew bigger and bigger, older and older until, enormous and rotten, it now hung suspended above us.
This night that I am speaking of, this winter night without rain and without a moon — I have called its darkness opaque but I was not being accurate: there was some light in the sky, it was not utterly black. It was a night of obscurity, yes, obscurity is the word I want; it is this that makes that night such a paradigm of the rushing forward, the rushing back, that so much of history is made of.
In this obscurity we stood and into it we looked across the river towards the encampment of the Franks. Some of the tents with candles burning in them were like dim and feeble lanterns. Between those few dim lanterns and us ran with a strong rushing, with a heavy running, the river heavy with the rains, darkly rushing, gurgling, like a giant animal that drinks blood. Mingling with the rush of the river was the subterranean echoing rumbling grinding rolling roar of Onopniktes. These strong rushing-water sounds made the dim and feeble lantern-tents seem even dimmer and feebler and farther away. In the quietness of the Frankish camp a man began to sing. His voice rose and fell sadly, there was no word that I could understand except the oft-repeated name of Jesus, Jesu. There was no accompanying instrument but the manner of the song was suggestive of a lute. After a time someone shouted, the singing stopped, there was only the running of the river, the roar of Onopniktes.
We could hear then behind us, on the road between Yaghi-Siyan’s palace and the bridge, a trotting of horsemen coming and going and we could hear many shouts, now here, now there, of the sort that are heard when cavalrymen gird themselves for something of importance. The shouts, the clopping of hooves increased, horses whinnied, there was much shuffling, snuffling, snorting, stamping, jingling, clinking, slapping, and grunting as all of the sounds formed themselves into a concerted picture of dark colours, dark gleamings, dark horsemen girding.
The sound-picture gathered itself into a forward movement, came towards us, passed beneath us, appeared in front of us on the bridge in the dark images of itself, the dark gleamings of iron and leather, the forested lances nodding, the shaking of reins and bridles as the horses tossed their heads. The clop of hooves, the clinking and the jingling passed into the darkness across the river, quickened unseen to a trot, a canter; for the first time then the kettledrums were heard, they pounded out the headlong gallop of the charge as voices whooped in war cries, voices called on Allah. There came then Frankish cries to Jesus, cries to God, cries of ‘Saint-Gilles!’
Suddenly the clamour of the drums is heard again — a different beat, the choppy rhythm of unluck and about-turn. Here now the Turks are coming back in thunderous flight across the bridge. ‘To the gate!’ they cry. ‘Back to the gate!’ cries Yaghi-Siyan at the head of the rout. ‘Deus le volt!’ cry the Franks, ‘Saint-Gilles!’ ‘The gate!’ cry the Turks. With these shouts we hear the clash of weapons, the screams of the wounded and the dying, the screams of horses and of men, the groans and curses, the grunts and trampling and scuffling of men fighting for their lives, and the splashing of men and horses into the river. ‘Saint-Gilles!’ goes up the shout, it seems very close, almost beneath us. ‘Jesu!’
Back across the bridge ebb the voices of the Franks. ‘There is no god but God!’ shouts Yaghi-Siyan, and once more the Turks gallop across the bridge and into the darkness beyond it. Now from across the river we hear again, but indistinctly and mingled with the running of the river and the subterranean roar of Onopniktes, the clash of weapons, the shouts and cries, the screams of horses and of men. Below us on the bridge the dead in their obscurity lie still, the wounded and the dying writhe and groan, both men and horses; the horses lift their long necks, their noble heads, and fall back; they can no longer gallop to the battle or away from it.
Now with others Bembel Rudzuk and I go down to the bridge to bring in the wounded and the dead. The crippled horses are killed with a sword stroke to the neck, the blood spurts out on to the stones of the bridge. I think of how this blood would be better than wine to the starving Franks. The horses that can walk are brought back inside the walls with the wounded men. With their eyes the horses acknowledge that they are slaves; if they were owned by scholars they might have led quiet lives but as they are ridden by fighting men they must suffer these wounds, they can expect nothing else. In the fluttering light of torches the wounded men look at me with eyes like the eyes of ikons or statues or like the eyes made of white and black tesserae in mosaics. The heads from which the eyes look out have been vertical only a little while ago; now they are horizontal, and these men, like the horses, acknowledge with their eyes that they are the slaves of that in them which has used them up in this rushing forward and back in the darkness; having used them up it will find others for its purpose.
These bodies that I try to repair, already have they been violated once by cold iron; now again I violate them, I intrude upon their privacy to stuff entrails back into the places where they belong, to sew up flesh that has been violently parted. How startling are the secret colours that in time of peace are hidden beneath the skin. We slaughter sheep and cattle and chickens as a matter of course; we are the vertical ones with the knives so we assume this as a right: we slit the throat, the heart pumps out its last bursts of blood into a basin, we open up their bodies and lay hands upon their varicoloured mysteries of red and purple, blue and yellow inner parts. But in time of war each man is a cattle to his enemy and they struggle to see which one will be the slaughterer. The stranger, the unknown to whom one must always offer hospitality, that sacred stranger has now become a murderer whom we must murder first. How strange that this is not strange.
Certainly we are the slaves of that which looks out through our eyes, and it is nothing simple, that outlooker; does it want to live, does it want to die? As with my arms red up to the elbows I sew up the wounded I crave to be where the shouting is, the cries and groans, the clash of weapons. I am afraid to be there but what looks out through my eyes wants to put me there, it doesn’t want to be left out of anything, it wants to be everywhere at once, it wants to be included in all matters of life and death, wants to be at the same time here in the shuddering light of the torches and there across the river in the obscurity of battle and the night.
From the wounded we hear something of the fighting: when the Turks had first attacked the Frankish camp one of the Frankish leaders, Raymond Saint-Gilles, had immediately got together some of his knights and led a charge into the dark. Those Franks! You could wake them up out of a sound sleep in the middle of the night and they would open their eyes fighting. It was Raymond’s charge that had driven Yaghi-Siyan back across the bridge and had very nearly carried the Franks through the bridge gate and into Antioch. But when they were more than halfway across the bridge there had come galloping wildly back towards them in the darkness a riderless horse and the Franks faltered and fled, pursued by the newly confident Turks.
The Franks put to rout by a riderless horse! Surely here is a sign for those who know how to read it! Surely here is an action parable! Now Yaghi-Siyan and his cavalrymen, blood-spattered riders on blood-spattered horses, return. They are many fewer than they were when they rode into the obscurity on the other side of the bridge. They are tired but their eyes are bright; for the moment they are the slaughterers and not the cattle. The green-and-gold banner droops proudly on its staff like a male member that has done a good night’s work.
The morning comes again, every time is like a first time, every time the morning happens it seems surprised at its actuality but it offers no opinions, it only reckons up what has happened in the night. ‘Here there are so many dead horses, so many dead men,’ says the morning. ‘See how they are dead. These men will not do anything more. They have no more to say. The horses will not walk, trot, canter, gallop. They will do nothing. Here there is only so much dead meat.’
Now in the first light of this grey and impassive morning this dead meat becomes newly active and inspires new activity in both the Franks and the Turks. While the Frankish bowmen shoot up at us and we on the walls shoot down at them, some of the Franks, protecting themselves as well as they can with their shields, gather up their dead from the river bank and the bridge. Some of the dead they sling over their backs to be newly killed by our arrows, some they drag away, some they carry off on litters. The arrows glance off their helmets, stick in their shields, stick in the rings of their mail shirts; at this close range some of the arrows pierce the mail and some find a naked throat. One of the Franks falls and lies shuddering with an arrow in his back, then is still, requiring now the labour of his comrades. There are some dead horses beyond the far end of the bridge; all the closer ones were dragged (by teams of horses that shied and danced sidewise and showed the whites of their eyes) into Antioch last night. These dead horses on the other side of the river, each of them may well have carried a man to his death last night; now each will give life to many men for several days. The shocking thought arises: how much better off everybody would be if the Franks would go away somewhere and butcher their horses and live quietly on the meat.
There are dead Turks beyond the far end of the bridge, and there are now seen among them other Franks who are not like the Franks that I have just been speaking of. These men move with perhaps something of a birdlike hop in their walk; one can imagine that a moment ago they have flapped down from the grey sky on black wings and turned into men. Some of the dead Turks they drag away by their legs, others they tie by their arms and legs to poles to be carried off by two men. The air is blackened with our arrows but at that distance they are only like bee-stings. Later we smell the smoke of the cooking-fires of these Franks.
Seeing all this in this grey dawn that is surprised to be here but is not surprised at anything else I have in my eyes what I see but I have also that riderless horse that I did not see, it is an image of green fire in the obscurity of last night that is still in my eyes.
There is in the light of this grey morning something that moves with a sickening motion behind the curtain of grey light. It is not like the riderless horse that galloped across the bridge, it is like those horses of last night that lifted up their heads and fell back again, lifted and fell back. This morning is seen as if in a flawed mirror. The curtain of air shakes and sways, one feels drunk, the ground beneath one’s feet will not maintain its proper plane, its proper steady stillness. The earth seems to be retching, shuddering.
Bembel Rudzuk and I fling ourselves to the ground, others do the same. Perhaps the earth itself is a riderless horse, showing the whites of its eyes and galloping to its death. Lying prone on the top of the wall I feel the stones beneath me shift, I see cracks where there were none before. Hidden Lion cannot be seen from where we are but with the eye of the mind I see the tower on David’s Wheel tottering, shaking, bricks are jumping off it; I see the tiles of Hidden Lion lifting, moving, leaping out of the pattern, breaking, crumbling. The thought comes to me that the earth is sick of humankind, it is trying to vomit itself up to be rid of us.
The curtain of grey light is still shaking, the world still looks out at us from a flawed mirror. Several horses have broken loose and are galloping through the streets as if in a dream; from the Frankish camp we hear singing and praying; in its caverns underneath the city Onopniktes shouts in the darkness, ecstatic like a prophet as stones topple from the four hundred towers, from Justinian’s wall, from the bridge across the Orontes. I see in my mind the river, roiled and muddy, strangely heaving, shuddering as it runs with its surface pocked and dimpled by the trembling beneath the river bed. There is a gabble of voices all around us and a continual sobbing and praying. With my cheek against the stones and my vision at an unaccustomed angle I see the spire of the minaret of the central mosque slowly sway and fall.
In the gabble of voices on the wall and rising from the streets below we hear in Turkish, in Syriac, in Arabic, and in Greek the words ‘punishment’ and ‘judgment’. Some think the punishment is for one thing, some think it is for another; the Christians beheaded on Hidden Lion are spoken of by many. There is also some lamentation for the destruction of a shrine of Nemesis and the pulling down of a statue of Tyche, the Goddess of Fortune. (‘All that happened centuries ago,’ says Bembel Rudzuk, ‘but still they talk about it when the earth shakes, all these good Muslims lamenting the departed goddesses of Rome.’) Many think that the Christian Patriarch John, who is in prison, ought to be freed. It is thought by some that if he is freed he will pray for the safety of Antioch; others think that he is more likely to pray if he is kept in prison. All this time there is a wild neighing of unseen horses. Soon a wagon rattles past, it is pulled by men, the horses are too unmanageable to be put in harness. In the wagon is an iron cage and in the cage, desperately clinging to the bars, his face white, his beard flying, is the Patriarch. Later we hear that the cage has been hung by chains from the wall and that he has prayed constantly for God’s mercy.
The shaking of the earth stops, the grey light of the day is once more steady. There are cracks in the walls, cracks in streets and houses, fallen bricks and stones here and there but no serious damage and no one killed as far as we know. Bembel Rudzuk and I go to Hidden Lion. The tower stands intact and unmarred and the pattern has suffered no damage whatever although there are cracks in the streets all around and in the nearby shops and houses. ‘Its time is not yet come,’ says Bembel Rudzuk.
When we look at Hidden Lion now it is difficult to recall the feelings we had when the pattern was first assembled. Now Bembel Rudzuk’s idea of observing ‘that point at which stillness becomes motion’ and that other point ‘at which pattern becomes consciousness’ seems altogether ill-conceived and the words with which he described his intention make me shudder. When I call to mind those early days of Hidden Lion when the tiles were arriving from Tower Gate’s brickyard and his foreman and workmen were with their swift and dancing movements putting the pattern together, when I remember how we walked about and viewed the expansion of those tawny and red and black triangles with a commanding eye as if we were in charge of the thing, I cannot help making a face of embarrassment.
As we stand there looking at Hidden Lion I find myself shaking my head; I no longer know how to approach this place in my mind, I no longer know what to think of it. Up until the time when the Syrian and Armenian Christians were beheaded it was everybody’s good-luck place; afterwards I expected it to become a bad-luck place but I was wrong. Until the next rain the bloodstains remained to mark the tiles, and to those tiles during those few days came many people who stood and looked at them and pointed them out to other people who then stood and looked at them. All of these people who came and looked were Muslims. One day I saw a man squat and rub his hand over one of the tawny bloodstained tiles, then he put his hand inside his robe and rubbed his chest. After that many others did the same, and children began to walk in special ways on those tiles and to dance on them.
The tiles being glazed, the blood had not permeated the clay; when the rain came it washed them clean. The tiles that had been stained with blood did not, however, become unknown: by some general understanding amongst themselves those who took an interest in the tiles had noted their positions relative to the tower, and by counting carefully they found their way to them again. This was a source of great amusement to the headless and maggoty tax-collector, who now appointed himself a guide and would stand where the blood had been, stamping his foot and pointing with his finger to the tiles. I could of course not see his smile but I could hear his laughter and there was no mistaking the mockery in the way he stamped his foot and pointed with his finger.
One day a boy of eight or nine came and prostrated himself on some of the tiles that had been stained with blood. He was dressed the same as any other child, he was not wearing a blue turban. I recognized him as the same boy who had come to the paved square and drawn on the stone the morning after I made my first chalk drawing for Hidden Lion. After a few moments he stood up and looked all around at everyone, then walked away. The next day there appeared on those tiles an earthenware pot which filled up with money. The butcher volunteered to divide it among Christian orphans. This was done, and each day after that the pot was filled up and emptied in the same manner.
Now on this day of the shaking of the earth the shaking has stopped and people are returning to their ordinary activities; the stallholders are again at their places on Hidden Lion. Trade here has of course diminished with the progress of the siege; the caravans have left off coming to Antioch, the road from Suwaydiyya is dangerous, and goods are scarce. Vendors, having little to sell, have lately been reduced to trading among themselves; their collective scanty stock distributes itself anew every day: the copper pot with the hole in it that used to be at the stall of A makes its appearance at the stall of B, while the haftless dagger that was a veteran non-seller with B now tries its luck with A. Eventually, perhaps with P or Q, the pot and the dagger assume with the new venue a new aspect that gets them sold, proving yet again to those who knew it already that action creates action.
Today, however, the merchants sit or stand listlessly by their wares as if all buying and selling are gone out of the world. Most of them pack up and go home early. The man at the coffee stand by the tower puts his coffee pot and his little brass cups into their wooden box, picks up the box by its leather strap, slings it from his shoulder, takes his brazier, says, This place is finished’, and turns to go.
‘Why is it finished?’ I ask him.
‘Look,’ he says, pointing to the pattern with his foot, ‘there’s not so much as a single tile cracked, it isn’t natural.’
‘What do you think it means?’ I say.
‘It means that this place is being saved for something worse,’ he says, ‘and I don’t want any part of it.’ He recedes into the distance, never looking back.
The butcher comes, takes the pot of money for the Christian orphans, spits on the tiles, and walks away.
‘Wait,’ I say to him. ‘Why did you spit on the tiles, why do you look that way?’
Without saying a word the butcher makes with his index and little finger the sign against the evil eye and off he goes.
This day that has begun with the shaking of the earth moves on and there are more wonders to be seen: the dreadful grey curtain of the day becomes the darker curtain of night and there are seen moving behind it strange red lights in the sky that shift and slide from one shape to another. More praying and singing from the Franks and many voices lifted to God on our side of the walls as well. The Patriarch, who was taken out of his hanging cage and put back in prison when the earth stopped shaking, is brought out again to offer an opinion on the strange lights. He sees very plainly in the sky the sign of the Cross and is put back in prison. Bembel Rudzuk and I look up at the sky but we say nothing to each other of what we see — there is perhaps too much motion becoming stillness, too much consciousness becoming pattern for us to respond with anything but silence.
The sky stays grey the next day and rain comes pelting down like hopelessness turned into water; the earth becomes a soggy boggy mire; the river swallows up its banks, it is no longer to be trifled with, soon it must run over the bridge instead of under it, soon it must lose patience with this city, must rush it brick by brick and stone by stone away into the sea that drowns Muslims, Christians, and Jews impartially and says nothing about God, nothing about justice or mercy. Dismally falls the rain on Silpius, and slides of mud and stones go down the mountainside to join the ponderous rolling rush of Onopniktes that bellows and echoes under Antioch as if fulfilling a prophecy, as if it has been foretold centuries ago that when the mountain will have passed under the city a monstrous thing will happen, perhaps the end of all things will come; or worse, some great beast taller than the mountain will appear and say at the same time and with one voice in all the languages of humankind that there will be no end to anything, that everything will go on and on for ever.
Those thousands of Franks who rode off in the night come squelching back now under the grey sky and the rain. These thousands, we hear, have been led by Bohemond of Taranto and Robert of Flanders. Moving up the Orontes valley they have run into the armies of Duqaq, Tughtagin, and Janah al-Dawla coming from Damascus to relieve Antioch. We are told that Bohemond has learned how to fight Turks now, that he kept his cavalry in the rear to prevent the encirclement of Robert’s men and then charged in at the right moment. So they have driven back the Turks, Bohemond and Robert and their thousands; they have won a battle but they have lost men, they have worn themselves out, and they have come back empty-handed to their rotting and sodden tents in the mud and such treats as horses’ heads without the tongues for three solidi and goats’ intestines for five.
Here they are then, the conquerors of Antioch held back from the conquering of it; it is like holding back the bull from the cow: he paws the earth, he rolls his eyes, his breath steams on the air. All that makes him a bull is hot and ready. But the cow is a cow of stone.
What is the nature of things? The nature of things is that what can happen will happen, often it has already happened before it is recognized. The walls of Antioch were built during the reign of Justinian, a time of strong stonemasonry; those walls are not be knocked down or undermined, and any attacker who scales them will only find himself on a short stretch of rampart between the massive towers with a bitter rain of arrows hissing down and the strong doors of the towers barred against him. How then can the Franks breach the unbreachable, pass the impassable? How can Antioch be taken? It can be taken if someone on the wall will turn away from his duty, it can be taken if someone will open the strong tower doors and let the soldiers of Christ in quietly. And will someone be found to do this? What a question! Such a question can only be asked by an atheist; anyone who recognizes the existence of God (whether as He or as It) and the intersections of virtuality and actuality is well aware of how easily such crossings on the plane of possibility can be sucked up into a point of happening. After the event one looks at all the many lines converging on the point and marvels because it seems that people were born, nations assembled, geography organized, roads laid out and bridges built expressly so that this event could happen. So rise now to a point of happening the turningness of Firouz and the unturningness of Bohemond, the one on what is called the inside and the other on what is called the outside of the walls of the four hundred towers, those stones that have no enemy.
At this time that I am telling of I have so far seen Bohemond only at a considerable distance. There is of course no mistaking him, he is so astonishingly tall, taller than most men by half an arm’s length. When I see Bohemond, when I think of Bohemond, I know that I am seeing and thinking of more than Bohemond: as the arrow streaks to its target the point of the arrow is driven by the shaft behind it, the feathers that make the shaft fly true, and the bow that has loosed the energy of its bending into the flight of the arrow; so comes Bohemond from the loins of his father Robert Guiscard and the womb of his mother Alberada of Buonalbergo. But Bohemond’s lineage is more than human, it includes generations of horses; the line of Bohemond goes back to Eohippus, the dawn horse, the very beginning of all chivalry. And yet the most prepotent of Bohemond’s ancestors was neither a human nor an animal but an artifact: Bohemond is descended mainly from the stirrup. Bohemond is grown out of an aristocracy of warriors on horseback rising from the cavalry of Charles Martel; this aristocracy comes to the point of the present in the armoured man on the heavy horse with his feet firm in the stirrups that give power to the drive of his lance, the swing of his sword; the armoured man strong in the saddle, bred to fight and trained from boyhood to be unturning in attack; the armoured man superior in wealth, in breeding, in physique and in confidence to the man on foot.
Bohemond’s ancestors of the fifth century who fought under Chlodovech, they fought without armour and on foot, they hurled axes and barbed javelins, God knows what stocks and stones they offered to. What did they know of Jerusalem? How in the world has Bohemond come to be a soldier of Christ? How has Bohemond become the Bohemond who cut up his scarlet cloak into crosses? This is not to be known by me, I shall die without knowing it.
Bohemond is always in my mind but I have no chance of understanding him. When he was first pointed out to me I was high up on the wall looking down at his distant figure but in my thoughts he at once took his place high up as if striding on ramparts built for him alone. He is everything that I am not, this quintessential warrior prince. I am told that he can, fully armed, leap from the ground to his horse’s back; that no other man can wield with two hands the sword he wields with one; that he requires three women nightly to keep him tranquil; that he is a serpent in cunning, a thunderbolt in attack, he is simply not to be withstood. Red-haired and blue-eyed, he does what he wants and he gets what he wants. How should I not be obsessed with Bohemond? But his thoughts are beyond my imagination. In my drift through this space called time I have reported two dreams of Pope Urban II and I know that, whether virtually or actually, they are true. They are there, I have experienced them. But of Bohemond I can offer nothing sure, only intimations, only things half-sensed, half guessed-at. As the animals of the forest scent the questing hound I scent him, questing through the death of Christ and God’s departure, questing on the track of gold and fame and power, questing for the tangible, the visible, questing for that which cannot be mistaken, that which can be held in the strong hand, that which can be gripped between strong thighs as a horse is gripped.
So. Bohemond is encamped before the walls of Antioch and now we are in the year 1098. Bohemond, greedy and lusting for the seen, cannot yet have what he craves; that time is not yet come. As I say this there comes into my mind an image of Bohemond opposed by Bembel Rudzuk; it is a night image, the background of it is darkness; against the darkness the two figures are luminous, they leap out of the dark, stopped in mid-motion as if by lightning — Bohemond with the gleam of his helmet, the glitter of his mail, the flash of his great sword, the scarlet cross on his surcoat, the iron nasal and the straight brow-line of his helmet simplifying his face, the face of the death-angel haloed by the rainbow arc of the great sword. Bohemond the death-angel, Bohemond the questing death-hound circling in the night beyond the circle of Christ’s little wander-fire. Bohemond the tall, lit by the lightning as he leaps with his death-bringing, with his blood-drinking sword. And leaping at him with a flash of the gold brocade on his elegant scarlet jacket, with his Turkish sword heroic against the death-hound, with his moustaches heroic, Bembel Rudzuk the dauntless, Bembel Rudzuk who is at the same time like a lion of innocence, like an angel of folly, like a butterfly transfixed by the pin of actuality, Bembel Rudzuk the friend true unto death.
That is the image, held motionless against the dark as if by lightning, that comes into my mind as I think of the never-to-be-known, never-to-be-understood Bohemond. Simple greed, simple ambition, simple unlimited courage do not suffice to explain this man. Nothing I have so far said explains Bohemond. As one who is not a mathematical genius cannot understand one who is, so I cannot understand this genius of maleness and action; even simply counting up his attributes and his actions one arrives at something that cannot be accounted for: the total of the seen becomes the unseen, becomes a mystery. Bohemond has in the mystery of him such force as to make him a kind of un-Christ; in the greatness of his courage and his greed he looms gigantic; almost Death stands aside at the sound of his name and his great bones stand up shouting. His tomb in Apulia is domed, it has Romanesque arches, it has bronze doors. Sometimes as Pilgermann the owl I sit on the dome of Bohemond’s tomb in the twilight when it is still warm from the last sun of the day.
But it is the year 1098 that I tell of now; the bones of Bohemond are still in active partnership with his flesh and I have not yet achieved owlhood. It is February, a Turkish army is again on its way to the relief of Antioch, and this time Rudwan of Aleppo is with them. The Frankish cavalry is much diminished now; they must have less than a thousand horses fit for war. I cannot help thinking of those battles in the Holy Scriptures in which God would diminish the armies of the children of Israel the better to show his power; I have come to believe that God, having departed, now wills that nothing should stand between the Franks and Jerusalem.
Bohemond does not wait for the Turks to come to Antioch; he leaves the foot-soldiers and the horseless cavalry to defend the camp against further sorties and with that cavalry numberless in arrogance but many times outnumbered by the enemy he moves out to take up a position between the Orontes and the Lake of Antioch where he cannot be encircled. Needs must when the devil drives, and he has learned by now that the harrying, stinging, in-and-out, encircling tactics of the Turks must be met with equal cunning if he is to beat them. And of course he does. On first sight of the Turks the Franks charge before the Turkish archers can be effectively disposed, then they withdraw, luring the Turks into that space between the lake and the river, that space chosen for the battle. Here the Frankish cavalry do again what they do better than anyone else, the straight charge with lance in rest. So again the relieving army is put to flight by Bohemond, by that unturning battle-greed of his. So ardent is he in his pursuit of the enemy that the points of his crimson banner, we hear, fly over the heads of the rearmost Turks.
Here at Antioch the absence of Bohemond reliably brings Yaghi-Siyan out through the bridge gate for yet another sortie on the Frankish encampment where there are only men on foot to oppose him. Things are going badly for the horseless Franks, the time must seem long to them until Bohemond returns in the afternoon like the sun and Yaghi-Siyan, like a wooden foul-weather figure, goes back inside. The soldiers of Christ put Turkish heads on poles outside their camp to stare with dead eyes at the walls of Antioch until the flesh rots away and they are no longer heads but skulls.
The Franks have so far held off two attempts to relieve the city but they have not yet been able to close it off completely from the world. The Suwaydiyya road, though no longer travelled by caravans, is still used by enterprising traders at unlikely hours and for high profits. Supplies are also moving through the Ladhiquiyya Gate at carefully chosen times.
At the beginning of March we hear of ships at Suwaydiyya and we hear that they bring to the Franks fighting men and horses, siege technicians from Constantinople, timber and every kind of tackle for the building of siege towers and giant war machines, also apparatus capable of shooting Greek fire from the far side of the Orontes into the centre of Antioch. There is little doubt that Antioch will soon be in Frankish hands unless the siege materials are intercepted.
It is Bohemond and Raymond who one night lead their men to Suwaydiyya to bring in the materials and the reinforcements. About an hour after their departure we hear the horsemen trotting to and from Yaghi-Siyan’s palace, hear the shouting of commands, the slap and jingle, the shuffling and snuffling and whinnying as cavalrymen ready their horses and themselves. They ride out on the Suwaydiyya road and we of the civilian militia together with soldiers of the garrison man the walls to watch the Frankish camp and wait.
It is while I stand on this wall built by a Roman emperor and keep watch on the Franks with a Turkish bow in my hand that I find myself reflecting on where I am and what I am doing. It isn’t that I haven’t taken notice of the separate parts of it but somehow I haven’t taken notice of how the parts look when they’re all put together. I am carrying weapons that I was taught to use by a Muslim (we non-Muslims of the militia are now permitted to go armed) and I am keeping watch on the walls of this city that is being held by Muslims against Christians who call themselves soldiers of Christ. Bohemond himself may at any time come climbing over this wall with his sword that only he can wield with one hand, Bohemond the battle-greedy, the death-hound.
To this has my late-night walking in the Keinjudenstrasse brought me. And yet each step of the way had nothing surprising in it. There was the garden, there was the ladder; up I climbed to that naked and incomparable Sophia and here I am.
This castration that I have suffered, has it a use, has it a value? What was I before I was castrated? I was already castrated, was I not, by mortality? All of us are castrated by mortality, we are unmanned, unwomanned, we are made nothing because all we have is this so little space of time with a blackness before and after it (that I speak out of this blackness as Pilgermann is only a borrowing; it is to unself and the namelessness of potential being that I must return when I have said what I have to say). How to live then in this little space in which we have a self and a name, this little space in which we are allowed to accumulate our tiny history of tiny days, this moment that is at once the first moment and the last moment, this moment that contains our universe and such space/time as is unwound in the working of it?
We don’t want to know about our mortal castration. We throw ourselves into the work of each day, the beating of hammers, the baking of bread; we find ourselves a spouse, we gather children around us to keep out the dark, we keep the Sabbath, pray to God, hope that all will be well. Ah, but there is more! Not for this alone was there smoke and fire and a quaking on the mountain while the voice of the horn sounded louder and louder. No, there is a mystery that even God cannot fathom, nor can he give the law of it on two stone tablets. He cannot speak what there are no words for; he needs divers to dive into it, he needs wrestlers to wrestle with it, singers to sing it, lovers to love it. He cannot deal with it alone, he must find helpers, and for this does he blind some and maim others. ‘Look,’ God has said to me, ‘what must I do to make you play the man? I have already castrated you with mortality but you pay no attention to it. So now let it be done with a knife, then let’s see what happens. Let’s see if you’ll grow yourself some new balls and jump into the mystery with me.’
‘But what’s it all about?’ I cry.
‘If I could tell you that it wouldn’t be a mystery,’ says God. ‘Let it be enough that I ask for your help.’ (God has of course not actually been speaking here because he is no longer manifesting himself as He; but God as It has put these words into my mind.)
This is then the value and the use of my castration; with this must I be content. If even God in his omniscience doesn’t know the answer then each of us must help however possible. And think how it would be if God could give the answer, if God could say, ‘All right, here it is: the answer is this and this and this and this; now you know the answer.’ Who would then have any respect for God, who would even have any interest in Him? ‘What!’ we should say, ‘Is this the best you can do? Is there to be no mystery then? Feh!’
‘I know what you mean,’ says the man in front of me in Turkish with an Italian accent. While thinking the thoughts that I have just been telling of I have been pacing my stretch of wall and I have come face to face with this remarkable Mordechai Salzedo of whom I have spoken once before: it was he who cited from Genesis the words, ‘Where he is’ when we met in the street by the synagogue before Rosh Hashanah.
This Salzedo has come to Antioch by a route even less direct than mine. He was born in Barbastro in Spain and as a child of seven he escaped from the town when it was sacked by the French in 1064. Those Christian armies dealt with the Muslims and Jews of Barbastro in the traditional way, and when his mother lay dead with her skirt over her head and his father with his guts wound round a post young Salzedo crept away quietly to try his luck elsewhere. He fell in with a company of wine merchants, Italian Jews who were on their way to Barcelona, went with them when they sailed back to La Spezia, was taken into the family of one of the partners, grew up to marry one of the daughters, became a partner in the house, lost his wife when their ship bound from Cagliari in Sardinia to Bizerta in Tunisia sank in a storm, clung to a wineskin and drifted for three days, was picked up by a Neapolitan business associate, decided to go into textiles, came to Antioch to sell wine and buy silks and cottons, fell into conversation with Bembel Rudzuk, was unable to disengage himself, and so set up in business and settled here.
‘What do you mean, you know what I mean?’ I say.
‘I noticed how you were shaking your head,’ he says, ‘and I said to myself: this man has in his mind the same thought that I have in mine.’
‘And what is that thought?’ I say.
‘That to be a Jew is to find yourself doing all kinds of things in all kinds of places,’ he says. ‘Here we are keeping watch against the Franks on a wall built by a Roman emperor around a city now held by Turks.’
‘If I’d kept watch from the wall of my town I might still have a pimmel,’ I say. It comes to me that if I hold my mind right a tremendous thought will illuminate it. This thought is a real treasure too. It is so cunningly and commodiously formed that it contains all other thoughts in a beautiful instantaneous order of total comprehension. I am trying so hard to hold my mind right that I get a crick in my neck. Come, wonderful thought, come! The ladder was presented, yes … Sophia was given, yes … my pimmel and my balls were taken away, yes … Bohemond is given … What? How? Ah! it’s gone, the wonderful thought is gone.
‘What’s going to happen?’ says Salzedo. He has maintained a respectful silence for what seems a very long time while I have been trying to hold my mind right.
‘The Franks will take Antioch,’ I say.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It’s the kind of thing that happens. Everyone says that Karbuqa of Mosul will be here soon to relieve us but I doubt that he’ll get here soon enough.’
‘You can still leave Antioch,’ I say. ‘They haven’t got everything completely closed off yet.’
‘I don’t think I’ll bother,’ says Salzedo. ‘I’ve already had quite a bit of extra time, and if God needs dead Jews as badly as he seems to I’m ready to go. And you?’
I think of the tax-collector, I think of my young death whom I have seen in the dawning on the roof of Bembel Rudzuk’s house. I think also of Bruder Pförtner and the others whom I’ve not yet seen here in Antioch. I think suddenly of Sophia (she is always in my mind like a continuo above which rise each day’s new thoughts of her) and for the first time there comes to me the question: is she alive or dead? Why should she be dead? She is not a Jewess, no one will rape her and kill her on the cobblestones of our town; she is safe there. But is she there? Until now I have never thought of her as being anywhere else, she has been in my mind a world that continues inviolate while I disappear into chaos; in my mind she has been as static as that other Sophia in Constantinople. Now the curtain of my sight sways before me, the earth seems to move sickeningly beneath me, and in a suddenly clear sky the stars wheel as if the world is spinning like a top. I look up and see, perhaps in the sky, perhaps in my mind, those three stars between the Virgin and the Lion, that Jewish gesture of the upflung hand: What, will you block the road for ever? The whole world is moving, it is walking, it is riding on horses, it is sailing in ships to Jerusalem. Why should she be still, be safe?
‘And you?’ Salzedo is saying.
‘I was going to Jerusalem,’ I say.
‘And will you still go to Jerusalem?’ he says.
‘Jerusalem will be wherever I am when the end comes,’ I say.
‘That could be soon,’ he says. ‘It could happen by Passover; Shavuoth at the latest. Yes, Shavuoth is probably when it’ll be, it’s a better time because Shavuoth celebrates the giving of the Torah to Israel at Sinai, the giving of the Law; yes, that’s why it’ll be Shavuoth: from Passover to Shavuoth is a development, it’s the coming to maturity of the children of Israel. At Passover they left their bondage in Egypt, they began their wandering; when they came to the mountain of God they were given the Law. Also Shavuoth is a harvest holiday, and this that is coming is certainly some kind of harvest.’
‘Of whose sowing?’ I say.
‘It doesn’t matter who does the sowing,’ he says. ‘Life is sown and Death comes to reap the harvest; when has it been otherwise? Have you ever seen this mountain where the children of Israel were given the Law?’
‘No,’ I say.
‘It isn’t the biggest mountain in the world,’ he says, ‘but you know it when you see it: it looks only like itself, like a lion of stone, this mountain whose name is Horeb; the Arabs call it Djebel Musa, the mountain of Moses. It is called Sinai because of the thornbush, seneh. This thornbush from which God first spoke to Moses was on that same mountain whereon God later gave Moses the tablets of the Law. Perhaps you already knew this?’
‘I didn’t remember that about the thornbush,’ I say.
‘Not everyone does,’ he says. ‘But it’s a good thing to keep in mind because God is such a thorny business and we shouldn’t expect him to be otherwise. But I’ll tell you one good thing about being a Jew — whenever your time comes you don’t have to worry that the day will be unmarked and forgotten because you can be sure that some really famous Jew has died on the same day, maybe even thousands of them. Akiba died around this time of year, it was sometime during the seven weeks of the Counting of the Omer. The Romans flayed him.’
‘His last words,’ I say, ‘were: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”’
Salzedo is content to let Akiba have the last word, and we resume our separate pacing. There comes to me then something that is both image and not-image. It has to do with a striking, a vast and not to be held in the mind striking of side-posts and a lintel beyond imagination, the striking of them with the hyssop that is the tree of the world, spattering the blood of all the world on the side-posts, on the lintel of the universe. And there must none of us go out of the house until morning, but will morning ever come? At such times as the not-image phases into image I see the right arm and shoulder and back of this striking. The spattering drops of blood fan slowly, slowly out, out, out, the drops of blood become the stars. Far and frozen the luminous drops of burning blood, far and frozen, drifting ever wider, wider, wider.
And there must none of us, none of us pass under the lintel, pass between the side-posts until morning comes, none of us beneath the spattered blood of the lamb without blemish, the word of blood to be read by the LORD in His aspect of Justice, the LORD in His aspect of Mercy passing in the night, passing with the destroyer.
I have described this that is both image and not-image as it comes to me and as it compels me to describe it. I describe what I do not understand because I am lived by it. Yes, that’s what it is, why I have no choice, why I am compelled. This that I have described is not an idea that I have had or a vision or a dream, it is not a means of expression for me as poetry might be. No, I am a means of expression for it, God as He or God as It knows why. That is why I have not the privilege and the pleasure of telling stories, of showing brightly coloured pictures of Samson and the lion. Not only is storytelling denied me but history also — I may well be reporting nothing more than spiritual mirages and metaphysical illusions. I can only tell what, as far as I know, happened or seemed to happen to what I recognize as myself with such recognition as has been borrowed from the darkness.
Very well then, I return to the walls of Antioch. I am there now and I smell these old strong stones that have no enemy. I smell their tawniness, their sweat of years, I smell the slow clinging of the lichens and the mosses on them. I smell the blood as well, the blood that has been and the blood that is coming. I smell the hotness and the dryness baked into the stones by centuries of summer sun, I smell the coldness and the wetness of the winter rains; the stones forget nothing.
I feel in this wall of stone something else that is happening; the idea of sorting comes into my mind. Walls by their nature do sort: by defining an inside and an outside they sort the insiders from the outsiders, they sort what is happening inside from what is happening outside. More than that: on this wall that girdles Antioch in the year 1098 I pick up a bit of broken stone and as I hold it in my hand I feel the sorting that goes on continually inside it: this way, that way, this way, that way, Christ in every stone with arms outspread, not raging as he judges between the elect on his right hand and the damned on his left; he has put himself into a state of perfect balance, he does not weigh with a scale, measure with a rule: he himself, abandoning all self, is the rule and the scale, the pointer that wavers on the beam. He is entranced, he makes no judgments although he is the judge: he is a necessary, an essential instrument in the sorting process and it is the process that has brought the instrument into being. I have seen this necessary instrument, this Christ-as-balance, carved in stone in the century after mine by Gislebertus on the tympanum of Autun Cathedral in Burgundy, that same Burgundy from where came some of those soldiers who sacked Barbastro and orphaned Salzedo in 1064. The sorting being necessary, the instrument appears.
I have understood so little in my lifetime! Now in the centuries of my deathtime I am just beginning to understand a little more but my consciousness is not continuous, I am only a mode of perception irregularly used by strangers. Perhaps there will never be the possibility for me to understand what Christ is. I understand that he was born from the idea of him — that he told me himself: ‘From me came the seed that gave me life.’ That he is essentially a sorter I also understand; the sorting of course follows on that disparity without which the universe could not maintain spin; I think that I knew that even before I read Plato’s Timaeus in which he says: ‘Motion never exists in what is uniform. For to conceive that anything can be moved without a mover is hard or indeed impossible, and equally impossible to conceive that there can be a mover unless there is something which can be moved — motion cannot exist where either of these is wanting, and for these to be uniform is impossible; wherefore we must assign rest to uniformity and motion to the want of uniformity.’
That good and evil should be sorted along with right and left, up and down, light and darkness and all other complementarities is clearly in the nature of things, and that Christ should be a medium of this sorting is also clearly in the nature of things; but the rest of what he is continually moves on ahead of my comprehension like a great whale cleaving cosmic seas; I try to grasp the essence of him but I grasp only the fading wake of his passage.
Where was I? The walls of Antioch, and we are waiting for news of the Turkish cavalry who took the Suwaydiyya road after the Franks. The question arises whether apparent consistency of manifestation is to be accepted as reality. May it not simply be the persistence of image in the eye of the mind? This Turkish cavalry, for example, this whole numerous appearance of horses, men, and weapons — does it in actuality remain the same from one moment to the next? May it not suddenly and without any noticeable change be a black dog, not numerous at all, just one single black dog trotting inseparable from its little black noon shadow, even in the twilight trotting with that same little noon shadow which is also the shadow of a small stone both moving and still? Or trees, not many, just a clump of trees in the stillness of the dawn. The roundness and solidity of the shadowed trunks like circling dancers under the tented leaves. Wine of shadows, shadow music fading, fading to the shout of day.
Those other horsemen, the Frankish horsemen, or whatever it is that has offered to the eye this appearance of Frankish horsemen, may they or it not be a broken cathedral, inexplicable in a distant desert, the spire no longer in unity aspiring to heaven but toppled in pieces, pointing only to the sand? Broken stones, broken stones singing broken songs, broken verses chopped abruptly off, odd words leaping suddenly into silence? From these broken stones, these hewn and carven broken stones, there puts itself together a broken stone angel of death towering over the dawn trees, bigger than the cathedral ever was, the stones of it continually toppling as it strides but bounding up again to move as arms or legs or as a head that turns this way and that, turning in its looking but unturning in its questing. Questing is the name of this death angel made of broken stones, Bohemond is the name of this Questing.
Now at last Bohemond has become altogether real to me, not to be understood — nothing can be understood, I see now — but to be seen with the same solidity and shadow-casting reality as the port that is approached by crossing the water at dawn so that it grows larger, larger in the eye, so that at last it is arrived at. So have I at last arrived at Bohemond in his aspect of the death angel named Questing, the many-horsed, many-hoofed many-faced striding of the broken stones, the broken cathedral that crosses seas and deserts and mountains, questing on the death-track of the mystery that is Christ.