through towering above me. I skirted around it to the north, then crept up to a hollow just below the summit where a tree-stump offered some cover. Even that was not entirely safe, for a spent arrow, a relic of the battle, lay planted in the earth by my feet. I pulled it out, snapped off the shaft and gripped the arrowhead like a dagger. Then I peered over the rotting tree-stump.
I had come around to the front of the monastery. As we had guessed, the steep path that Pakrad had brought us by was not the main entrance. Here, the mountain sloped away more gradually towards a high valley. A road ran up to a broad gate in the monastery wall; the gates had been thrown down, and through the arch I could see the ruins of the monastery still billowing smoke. Yet for all the desolation, it was not abandoned. Some fifty Frankish knights were arrayed in a wide cordon on the open ground before the gates, some mounted, others on foot; some watching outwards and some facing the centre of their circle, where a knot of men was gathered beside a smouldering heap of coals. Duke Godfrey stood among them. He had removed his helmet, so that his tousled hair blew freely in the morning breeze, and his face was streaked black where he had tried, unsuccessfully, to wipe away the soot stains. I thought of the ring he had taken from me, and wondered where it was now.
In front of Godfrey stood the defeated men from Pakrad’s garrison. A dozen Frankish spear-points held them back, though there was little defiance now in their wretched faces. Many were wounded: one had lost an entire arm, so that his captors could not shackle him but had been forced to tie him to the man next to him.
Two knights dragged one of the prisoners forward and flung him onto his knees in front of Godfrey. It was Pakrad, I realised, though he was hardly recognisable from the cocksure bandit who had betrayed us. He had lost his armour and his tunic, leaving only a dirty cloth around his hips to cover him. Terrible burns covered his naked chest and arms, and flaps of charred skin hung from his body like feathers. He was weeping.
‘Did you think you could cheat our bargain?’
The breeze blew Godfrey’s words over to my hiding place. Beside him, a man with his back to me stirred the coals with his sword. A flurry of sparks flew up, and the air shimmered above it. Pakrad trembled.
‘Please, Lord,’ he pleaded. ‘I did everything you asked. I brought you the ring. I killed the Greeks. I-’
‘You told me you sold the Greeks for slaves.’
‘It is the same thing.’ Pakrad glanced back over his shoulder at the ruin of his fortress; I wondered if Duke Godfrey had noticed. ‘They are surely dead now.’ He lifted his bound hands and pawed at the hem of Godfrey’s tunic, but Godfrey stepped back with a snort of disgust and Pakrad almost fell on his face.
‘You are a worm,’ Godfrey told him. ‘A robber and a villain. This monastery that you made your lair — how many monks did you murder to take it?’ He walked around behind his captive and seized hold of a lock of his hair, jerking his head back. He rapped his knuckles on the bare skin where the tonsure had been, and Pakrad screamed.
‘Does it hurt?’ Godfrey enquired. ‘It should. It is the mark of God on a wicked sinner. You profaned the holy soil of the monastery with your crimes, and you mocked God Himself by putting on the habit of His servants to work evil.’
‘On your orders, Lord,’ Pakrad protested. Godfrey ignored him.
‘Do you know what the crime of Satan was?’ Pakrad shook his head in terror. ‘He knew he could not surpass God, so he sought to overthrow Heaven itself and make himself lord over its ruin. He tried to mimic God, as a chained ape mimics a man. And do you know what befell him?’
Pakrad, his head still pulled back by Godfrey’s grip, made an unintelligible cry.
‘He was cast into eternal darkness.’
Godfrey released Pakrad and turned his back. The bandit’s head slumped, but in an instant one of the knights had sprung forward and clamped it between his gauntleted hands, twisting it up towards the sky. The man by the fire turned towards Pakrad, showing his face to me at last, and I gasped. It was Tancred, the half-Saracen nephew of Bohemond. He pulled the sword from the coals and advanced a few paces towards Pakrad. The tip of the sword glowed a dull red — which bloomed to a burning orange as Tancred held it up to his lips and blew on it. Pakrad started to squeal; his body jerked and writhed, but the iron-clad hands that gripped his skull held it helpless.
Tancred drew back the sword. The red tip hovered in front of Pakrad’s eyes for a moment, darting this way and that. Twice Tancred flicked it forward but checked the blow, laughing to hear Pakrad’s desperate screams. Then he lunged.
My own eyes clenched shut involuntarily a split second before the blow, but I heard the hiss of the iron as it cut through the eyeball, and the shattering cries from Pakrad’s wounded body, which doubled in their agony as Tancred stabbed his sword into the second eye.
‘Take him away,’ said Godfrey. As I opened my eyes I saw that he still stood a little distance from Tancred, his back turned on the torture. Pakrad was being dragged back into the circle of prisoners. He was trying to press his hands to his face, but with the ropes that bound them he could not reach.
I had seen enough: I crawled away, back down the slope to the hidden ledge where the Varangians waited. Even there, the screams from the mountaintop echoed down to us for hours afterwards — and still seemed to linger in the air long after we heard Godfrey’s men ride away. Only near sunset, when we were certain they had gone, did we rise from our hiding place and set out for Antioch.
7
A wall of death surrounded Antioch, far stronger than any ramparts of earth or stone, and a foul film hung above the city where the smoke of countless pyres stained the air. We marched along the river bank, barely an arrowshot from the walls, and saw no one. Only the dead were in evidence. The soft earth of the meadow outside the walls had been carved into innumerable graves, some marked with stones but most of them anonymous. One by one, each of the Varangians crossed himself, and then made a surreptitious sign against the evil eye for good measure. I laid a thin cloth over Sigurd’s face so he would not breathe the malignant air. We had carried him back from the monastery on a litter, and though he had gained some consciousness and could occasionally speak a few words, he was still achingly weak. Sweat glistened on his face where the fever boiled it out of him. It was shocking to see him diminished like this — like seeing an ancient oak tree felled for firewood. In the wandering course of my life I had not had to suffer the decline and death of my parents, for I had left them far behind in Illyria and never returned, but I imagined this was how a son must feel to see his father on his sick-bed: an indomitable constant brought down. It was strange, for he and I were the same age.
A few miles west of Antioch, in the hills between the plain and the coast, we found the hilltop where the remaining Varangians — and Anna — had moved their camp from the plague-ridden city. We climbed eagerly, our burdens suddenly much lightened. At the bottom of the valley, far below, I could see the sinuous course of the Orontes hastening towards the coast and the ship that would take me home. The setting sun turned the river gold, while an eagle wheeled silently in the sky above.
We came around a bend in the path and I knew at once something had changed. The guard who blocked our way was not a Varangian — indeed, he probably came from the opposite corner of the earth. His dark face was too wide and too short, like a reflection in a polished shield, with narrow eyes and a broad mouth that almost vanished under the mane of his beard. His helmet tapered to a sharp point like an onion, with a chain hood hanging down behind his neck, while the square plates of his scale armour rasped and chattered as they moved against each other. The long spear in his hands was angled across our path, though it was the horn-ended bow slung across his shoulder that was the real danger. He was a Patzinak, another of the emperor’s far-flung mercenary legions.
‘Who are you?’ he challenged us in guttural Greek.
‘Demetrios Askiates, with Sigurd Ragnarson and what remain of his men.’
The Patzinak nodded, without curiosity. ‘Come through. Nikephoros is impatient to meet you.’
Our fortunes had changed in the ten days we had been away. We had left the company with little more than the blankets they slept on; now, two enormous pavilions with gold-fringed awnings and crimson walls stood surrounded by neat rows of simpler tents. Guards, more Patzinaks, stood at every corner. Judging by the size of the encampment there must have been at least two hundred of them. An old orchard had become an enclosure for a dozen horses, all fine beasts branded with the mark of the imperial stables, while through an open door I saw a store tent piled high with casks of wine and sacks of grain. I had not seen anything so organised in months.
Among the throng of stocky, dark-skinned Patzinaks, I found one of the Varangians we had left to guard the
