The iron lance

TWENTY-FIVE

The hills rising from the sea, misty purple in the dawnlight, showed no sign of either port or harbour-less yet a city besieged by a hundred thousand warrior pilgrims. Although Murdo had been told that Antioch lay a few leagues inland, he still hoped he might catch a glimpse of it from the sea. Instead, the empty, rock-filled coast stretched out to either side-no towns, no settlements, no holdings of any kind, much less anything resembling the great and ancient city of Antioch. Neither did he see the port of Saint Symeon, which Ronan had said they would find upon reaching the mainland coast.

He folded his arms across his chest and stared out upon the all but featureless coastline. Somewhere on the barren stretch of pale grey rock and dust-coloured brush ahead, King Magnus had put ashore. The best harbourage, they had been told, was to be found at the port town of Saint Symeon. But, save for a single tiny fishing village now glinting small and white in the early morning sun, there was no other human habitation anywhere.

Stepping over the sleeping bodies of his shipmates, Murdo made his way back to the tiller to speak to Sturli, who had taken the last watch on the helm. 'We must have strayed in the night,' Murdo observed sourly. 'There is no port here.'

'Hey-hey,' agreed Sturli. 'But I do not think we drifted off course.'

'We should be able to see the harbour by now,' Murdo told him. He shoved a hand towards the empty hills, now pink in the rising sun. 'Do you see a city anywhere?'

'Nay,' said Sturli, unperturbed by the apparent mistake. 'But I do not think we drifted off course.'

'We must have!' Murdo insisted.

'I do not think so,' Sturli replied, shaking his head. 'We had a clear night and good stars. I know how to steer a ship. Maybe it is you that is mistaken, hey?'

Murdo – angry now, as well as disappointed-stomped away and slumped onto his bench once more. He hung over the rail and watched the dull hillscape draw slowly closer, and his mind began to wander; he thought about the journey. It had, as Emlyn said, been a good voyage, all in all. Still, the wheel of the year had turned round once already, and there was still no sight of Jerusalem! It would be another year at least before he would see Ragna again.

The thought proved so discouraging, he pushed it firmly from him, and turned instead to thinking about the triumphant day when he and Lord Ranulf would stride boldly into the bishop's lair, and obtain the return of their lands. He imagined the larcenous old cleric down on his knees, weeping his repentance and pleading for his life. He could feel the swordblade in his hand as the point pressed into the thieving bishop's fat throat.

This vision consoled him for a long time as the ship turned and began making its way slowly along the coast. A little while later, they passed a jutting promontory, whereupon Sturli shouted from the tiller, 'The king's ships!'

Murdo was on his feet in an instant, straining for a glimpse of King Magnus' fleet. He scanned the shoreline to the right and left, but saw nothing. 'Where?' he demanded of Hallvard, the sailor beside him on the rail.

'There! The king's ships! I see them!' cried Nial, his arm around the throat of the dragon. He stood on the rail, stabbing a finger at a small cluster of gleaming white buildings clinging to the hillside above a small, rock-sided bay. Murdo squinted his eyes and saw what appeared to be a dark mass on the shining water of the little bay below the town. Rising from this dark mass, like so many headless spears, were the masts of the longships. At long last, they had caught the ever-elusive fleet. Where there were longships, Norsemen could not be far away.

By the time Skidbladnir slid into the cove, Murdo was more than ready to face the entire Saracen warhost all by himself. He did not wait for the keel to bump the small stone quay at the end of the village, but jumped into the shallow water and waded to shore.

'There is no one here,' he called to the others splashing up onto the strand behind him. Jon Wing and the three monks came ashore at the quay, and Murdo ran to where they stood. 'The place is deserted.'

The seaman scanned the quiet village's empty footpaths and byways and replied, 'We shall see.'

Proceeding on, they paused at the place where the town's single street met the harbour path. Putting two fingers into his mouth, Jon gave a long, shrill whistle. He whistled twice more, and on the third, a door opened at one of the nearby houses and a tall, fair-haired Norseman staggered out. He took one look at the newcomers and shouted something over his shoulder to someone inside the house, then came running down to the shore to meet them.

'Olvar Three-Toes!' shouted Jon Wing. 'We find you at last.'

'Hey-hey,' replied the Norseman, rubbing sleep from his eyes. 'You have found us, Jon Wing. What has taken you so long?'

'We can only sail as fast as the wind allows,' replied Jon.

'No doubt you have stopped for plunder in every town you passed,' replied the sailor named Olvar with a smile. 'This is what has taken you so long, I think.'

'Nay,' answered Jon Wing happily. 'We have these monks with us,' he. indicated Ronan, Fionn, and Emlyn coming up behind him, 'so we could not plunder a single town.'

Three more Norsemen emerged from the house and made their way down to the shore, calling noisy greetings to the crewmen they knew. 'Is it just the four of you, then?' asked Jon.

'Hey-hey,' replied Olvar. 'Us four, and six others. We drew lots, and the losers had to stay behind to guard the ships. All the rest have gone to join the siege.'

'Is the city far?' asked Ronan.

'Three leagues-maybe a little more.' Olvar shrugged. 'That is what I heard.'

'What of the villagers here?' asked Emlyn. 'Are they friendly?'

'I think so. Most of them have gone to tend the fields up in the hills. Only a few old ones are left behind, and they keep to themselves mostly, but they give us eggs and cheese.'

'Have you seen any Saracens?' wondered Fionn, staring at the dry, brush-covered hills rising behind the village.

'Nay,' replied Olvar. 'They have all run to the mountains to hide. They are Greeks here anyway.' Turning back to Jon, he said, 'Did you bring any ol? They have only wine in this place, and we are thirsty.'

Jon expressed his regrets, and said that he did not have any ale, either. He then called to some of his crewmen to bring the arms and armour ashore, secure the boat, and prepare to set off.

'You are not staying?' Olvar said, disappointment darkening his sunny features.

'We must hurry to Antioch before the city is taken,' replied Jon, 'otherwise we will get no plunder. Also, the king is waiting for his counsellors.'

As the weapons were unloaded and carried ashore, the six other guardsmen emerged from another house and came to greet their comrades. Weapons were then distributed among the men. Unaccustomed to carrying a heavy shield, Murdo took only a spear for himself; the blade was somewhat rusty from the voyage, but the edge and point were sharp still, and the ashwood shaft was sound. When they were ready, the Norsemen walked with them past the fields beyond the village and showed them which road to follow. Jon and his seafarers, now transformed into a warrior band, bade their comrades farewell, promising to send them ale from Antioch as soon as the city fell.

Murdo, eager to be reunited with his father and brothers, took his place just behind Jon and Ronan, leading the party, and settled into his stride. After so many months at sea, the solid ground felt strange under his feet; he kept expecting the earth to arch and plunge, and continually braced himself for the swell that never came. As they climbed the first low hills beyond the village, he began to notice the smell of the air-heavy and dense as the earth itself, and filled with a hundred heady scents of sun-baked rock and clay and brush and summer flowers.

The morning, already warm, grew steadily warmer the further into the hills they travelled, and Murdo, regretting the times he had complained of the cramped space on deck, began to long for the cooling sea breeze always present aboard the ship. Upon reaching the crest of the highest hill, he turned to look back briefly at the sea glittering flat and calm, and the tiny bay and village already disappearing behind them. Then, shouldering his spear, Murdo turned his face towards the east, and did not look back again.

The sun was directly overhead when they reached the hills above the river plain. Murdo, eyes downcast and squinting against the white-hot light, could feel the skin on the back of his brown neck beginning to sizzle; where the sun struck the top of his head, it felt as if his hair was on fire; the soles of his feet were burning through -his leather boots; his heavy siarc, wet through with sweat, stuck to his skin and chafed as he trudged along. Even the monks, who ordinarily made no concession to the weather, gathered up their long robes and tucked the hems into their belts.

The long walk had been hot and tiring, but wholly uneventful. The fierce Syrian sun was beginning its long slow slide into the west when the forerunners sang out that their destination had been sighted. Along with the rest of the war band, Murdo picked up his feet and hastened the last few paces up the long slope to the top of the hill, and the city came into view, rising before them across the Orontes valley like the immense cloudbank of a storm looming on the horizon.

The sight halted the company in their tracks.

The monks had said it was a large city, an important city, a great city-but nothing they said had prepared any of them for the towering magnitude of the place: walls eighty feet high and two leagues long were guarded by three hundred towers, some of which protected the citadel occupying the highest promontory on the eastern wall. The walls on the lower section rose sheer from the slow-flowing river, while those of the upper section were carved out of the mountain itself, allowing the high citadel a commanding view of the valley all the way to the sea on one hand, and the Tarsus mountains on the other.

Murdo gaped in awe. Not only was Antioch the largest, most strongly fortified city he had ever seen, it was also the most beautiful. Looking at it rising across the valley, the straight high walls and towers adazzle in the blinding light, it seemed less a city than an enormous jewel: a monstrous ornament carved of whitest ivory and nestled against the black surrounding mountains, or a colossal milk-coloured moonstone set upon the dusty green of the valley to shimmer gently in the heat haze of a blistering summer day.

Crops and grazing land spread in irregular blotches over the river plain; here and there, Murdo could see men working with teams of oxen. Two roads, passing either way along the river, met at a bridge below the main gate, and there were a few people straggling on the roads, some with ox-carts bearing goods into the city. White birds soared in the air over the fields and above the towering walls.

An air of peaceful, if not oppressive, tranquillity pervaded the valley, and even as Murdo marvelled at the impressive city, his heart fell. He looked left and right along the walls and plains, scanning the hills and fields and river below-if only to confirm what he already knew: there were no tents, no horse pickets, no besieging armies, no defiant banners streaming from the walltops and tower battlements. The crusaders were gone.

He stood and gazed into the placid, empty valley, and felt the frustration uncoiling within him. The pilgrims had not come to Antioch after all; or, if they had, they were not there now. Either way, the search would have to continue. Even as bitter disappointment crushed him down, however, Brother Ronan said, 'The siege is ended. They have taken the city.'

Of course, thought Murdo, they have taken the city! They are all inside the conquered walls.

Suddenly, he could not wait to be there, too. Within three heartbeats, Murdo, and all the rest of the Norsemen, were flying down the hill towards the plain. It was not long before their steps became more cautious, however. 'See here!' shouted Fafnir, a little way ahead of the group. Murdo saw him stoop and bring up a broken sword from the long, dry grass. Almost at once, Vestein, no more than a dozen paces away, produced half of a shield and the broken haft of a spear. 'There was a battle here, I think,' said Fafnir.

They proceeded on, but more slowly, and the further they went, the more they found: battered war helms of a strange, pointed kind; lightweight oval shields made of boiled leather; arrows by the score, most of them broken. And scattered in amongst the remnants of battle, they found the remains of the warriors. Murdo bent down to retrieve a finely curved piece of a bow, and discovered the weapon was still attached to the hand that had last employed it. Both hand and arm came away as Murdo lifted it. There arose a fearsome, stinging stench, and he caught a glimpse of white maggots wriggling from a brown mass by his feet as he dropped the bow and jumped back with a shout.

The corpse was so far decomposed that it no longer looked human; Murdo had simply not seen it when he bent down. He saw it now for what it was and, realizing what lay before him, he began to see others as well. They had come to the part of the battleground where the fighting had been the fiercest, and the dead were lying where they had fallen.

Once fine clothes and cloaks were filthy, rotting rags; flesh and muscle were blasted black by the sun, and withered hard like old leather. Many of the bodies had been attacked by birds and beasts, and, more and more, Murdo caught the glint of smooth white bone gleaming dully from the long grass round about. Once, he stepped over what appeared to be the lower torso of a man and his foot struck what he thought was a stone. The stone rolled, however, and Murdo found himself staring down into a withered brown, worm-ravaged face, whose empty eye sockets gazed darkly up past him and into the sun-bright heavens above.

Murdo clamped a hand over his nose and mouth, and moved on, no longer looking either right or left. It occurred to him as he trudged along that he saw no carcasses of horses, and he wondered about this. Unless the battle had been fought entirely on foot, which he very much doubted, there must certainly have been some horses killed, too. What could have happened to them?

Upon reaching the plain, they passed through several grain fields and proceeded towards the entrance to the city, meeting no challenge until, upon crossing the bridge, they came to the huge, open gate. Six guards in loose, light-coloured mantles-three at either of the enormous doors-noticed their weapons and stopped them. 'You there! Halt!'

Murdo was surprised to hear these dark-skinned men speaking Latin. 'What is your business here?' demanded the foremost guard; he held a long, flat-bladed lance, and carried a short sword in his belt. A large man, he nevertheless looked ill-fed and haggard; those with him appeared even less robust. Murdo decided they looked like men dragged from their sickbeds and forced to stand guard.

Ronan answered. 'Pax Vobiscum!' he declared benevolently, raising his hands in priestly blessing. 'Greetings in the name of Our Lord Christ. My friend, we are pilgrims on our way to Jerusalem. We were told that this city was yet under siege, but it appears we were ill-informed.'

'The siege is over long since,' replied the soldier, eyeing them with tired suspicion. 'The armies have moved on.'

'Ah, yes,' answered Ronan, nodding sympathetically. 'As it happens, my brothers and I are priests, as you can see, and we travel in the company of vassals belonging to Magnus, King of Norway, whom we were hoping to meet here. We were told he has come to Antioch, I hope we are not mistaken.'

'Oh, him,' said the soldier, relaxing at last. 'He is here. You may enter.' He motioned them through with the head of his spear.

'You know him! Good. Could you tell us where we might find the king?' asked Ronan hopefully.

'All the lords are received at the citadel,' the guardsman said. 'That is all I know.'

The elder priest thanked the man for his help, gave him a blessing, and they continued on their way, passing between the great, iron-bound timber doors, and into the cool, shadowed darkness of the gate-tower. The respite was all too brief, however; a moment later, they were stepping once more into the harsh sunlight striking off the stone pavements all around. Momentarily blinded, Murdo put up his hand to shade his eyes; when he looked again, he found he was standing in the middle of a street, the like of which he had never encountered.

Stretching as far as the eye could see was a wide, stone-paved avenue lined with tall, graceful columns either side; moreover, these columns supported a second row of columns bearing a vine-covered roof to shelter the walkway below. The civility of this feature amazed Murdo when he realized that the people of the city were not forced to walk in the street with the carts and animals, but beneath a leaf-shaded arbour which kept the hot sun off their heads.

Rising from the broad, flat river bluff on which the city was founded, this remarkable double colonnade swept gracefully towards the heights of the cliffs and mountains, whose peaks could be seen soaring above the rooftops and domes just beyond the city to the south. Straight as a rod along its entire length, the broad street passed the ruin of an old Roman amphitheatre, an enormous basilica, and an elegant palace faced with glowing yellow marble. There were so many churches that Murdo soon lost count and interest, delighting himself instead with the profusion of palm trees, and brightly-coloured flowers growing in massive earthenware tubs everywhere.

Up the street they went, passing along the stately row of columns, past gleaming white houses with pierced-screen windows and bronze-figured doors. In niches high up in the walls of some of the more elaborate houses, statues looked gravely down upon the passing troop. Perhaps due to the heat of the day, the newcomers had the street and shaded walkway mostly to themselves. Apart from a few ragged water vendors pushing carts laden with clay jars there were few citizens about. They passed likewise empty sidestreets, and a vacant marketplace sweltering in the sun.

Over all the city, a quiet lethargy hung like a pall draped upon a gilded tomb. Murdo had imagined that a city of such size and grandeur must be thronging with people day and night, and the scarcity of citizens surprised him so that he began to wonder at it. Where was everyone? And where were the crusaders? Even if the whole population had been driven off, there should have been pilgrims aplenty to crowd the streets and marketplaces.

But, save for the occasional creak of a wagon wheel, or the rushing flap of pigeon wings as they passed another empty square, the city was quiet. The Norsemen noticed this, too, and their jovial exuberance grew more and more muted and subdued the further up the street they walked, until no one spoke at all, and they passed by the dark and silent houses in a bristling hush.

The wide central street ended at the citadel in the upper part of the city; the final climb to the fortress was the steepest part of the walk, and it left the seafaring warriors winded by the time they reached the square fronting the stronghold. On the left-hand side of the square, beneath the stronghold, four pairs of low, wide doors marked out the stables. The foremost pair of doors gaped open, and from stone troughs on either side, twin vines grew and spread to form a bower before the entrance where five or six men sat lolling in the drowsy shade.

At the approach of the newcomers, one of the men stood and came forward a few steps. He turned and called behind him to someone inside, then came on to meet them. He raised his hand to halt them as five or six more men tumbled out of the stable doorway behind him. The company stopped uncertainly, and waited.

The man spoke to them in a tongue which none of them could understand. When he received no reply, he spoke again, in Latin this time. 'What is your purpose here?' he demanded, hand on the knife in his belt.

'We have come to join Magnus, King of the Norsemen,' replied Brother Ronan crisply. 'Is the king to be found here?'

Before the guard could answer, one of the men behind him pushed forward suddenly. 'Jon Wing!' cried the man in loud Norsespeak. 'So! You come dragging in at last.'

'Hey-hey!' replied Jon happily. 'Here we are. And who is the first person we should meet?' Turning to the others just behind him, Jon called, 'See here! If they are letting a skull-breaker like Hakon Fork-Beard prowl the streets in broad daylight, I know we have come to the right place.'

The two men clapped one another on the back and embraced like kinsmen. They began talking loudly together. More men were staggering out of the stables to join them; the priests, and some of the other crewmen gathered around, happily exchanging greetings with the others like long-lost kinsmen. Murdo stood looking on, suddenly very aware that the moment he had long awaited was upon him, and that his carefully nurtured resolve was swiftly deserting him.

'Come, wayward Sea Wolves!' said the man, his voice booming in the quiet square. 'The king will be glad to know his priests and pirates have arrived. Follow me!'

He led them to the door of the stables where he was met on the threshold by another Norseman-taller, younger, and dressed in breecs of brown leather, and a fine new linen siarc. His hair was long and fair, his braid thick. The two exchanged a word, and the one called Hakon motioned them inside, while the stranger stepped aside to greet the newcomers as they passed.

Murdo took his place behind Oski and Ymir at the end of the line. He hung his head and tried to creep by, hoping he would not be noticed. This hope died in vain, for as he came to the doorway, the fair-haired Norseman saw him, and put a hand to his chest and stopped him. 'Here now!' he said. 'Who is this with his bold glance?' He moved the hand to Murdo's chin and raised his face. 'Where did these Sea Wolves get you, boy?'

Since he had no other choice, Murdo squared his shoulders, raised his head, and looked the man straight in the eye. 'My name is Murdo Ranulfson,’ he answered forthrightly. 'I came aboard with the priests at Inbhir Ness.'

'Did you now!' The man eyed him up and down. 'Why would you do that?'

Brother Ronan appeared at the Norseman's shoulder. 'Murdo here has taken the cross and has come to join his father and brothers who are also on pilgrimage to the Holy Land.'

The fair-haired man accepted this with a nod. 'Where is your home, boy?'

'Orkneyjar, my lord,' Murdo answered, and inwardly cringed. Why had he said that?

'Orkneyjar!' repeated the man, much impressed. 'I have lands in the Dark Isles, too. It seems we are fellow countrymen, you and I. Greetings and welcome, Murdo Bold-Eye.' He offered his hand in friendship.

Murdo grasped the offered hand, and grinned at his new name: Murdo Bold-Eye. He liked that very much.

'We Orkneyingar should watch out for one another, hey?'

'Just so,' agreed Murdo readily, forgetting his wariness.

'If you find yourself in trouble, just sing out for Orin Broad-Foot, and you will have a stout sword at your side before you can turn around.' The lord slapped him on the back, and bade him enter and partake of the welcome cup.

Murdo stumbled forward into the cool darkness of the room, feeling lost and confused. He had just accepted the friendship and protection of his avowed and hated enemy.