Just before we left, I reached into my boot and pulled out the knife Bilal had given me, which I had retrieved from the bilge of the boat after the fight. I was loathe to part with it now: it had brought me luck in battle, and might be needed again in the desert. But the woman had given us water, and bad bargains bring bad luck. Bilal had bought the knife from a market stall, he had said, and there was nothing to mark it as ours — or his. I threw it to her; she caught it in her bony hand, examined it, then tucked it into the folds of her dress. Nikephoros stared at me with bare contempt.
‘If you have finished giving alms. .’
We walked into the desert.
Fifteen months earlier, I had marched with the Army of God across the barren plains of Anatolia in August, when we chewed thorns for moisture and slaughtered dogs for food because the horses were already dead. Turkish cavalry had harried our column every day, ants trying to strip the army’s body one crumb of flesh at a time, and we had left a trail of corpses on the road behind us, mile after mile, because we had neither the time nor the strength to bury our dead. After surviving that, I had thought nothing could ever be so terrible again.
But that misunderstood the desert. Heat, thirst and hunger can kill a man, but it is the everlasting emptiness that flays his soul. The desert draws up life like a sponge, sucking until the heart dries up and turns inside out. Then it confronts you with the skeleton that remains. Some men find their revelation there and become prophets; some are driven mad. Most do not survive the ordeal.
How did the Army of God survive the march across Anatolia? Not through strength or courage or faith, but merely because it was too big to kill. However much we suffered individually, the sheer mass of humanity around us, in all its lumbering, screaming, stinking pain, proved we were still alive. We drove a column of life through the desert, and the desert could not overcome it. Four men, battered and hungry, with barely a day’s water between them, were a different matter. Almost immediately, the desert began to reduce us. My limbs shrivelled and burned like sticks in a fire as the sweat was wrung out of them; my tongue felt as though it was baking in my mouth. I tore a strip from the bottom of my tunic and wound it around my head to shield the sun, though it did little good. Jorol went further still: he pulled off his tunic completely and ripped it in two, draping one half over his head and shoulders like a woman’s shawl and tying the other around his waist for modesty. It made him look blasphemously like Christ.
By midday, we could go no further. We staggered into the shade of a rock in a shallow depression and lay there, too tired to stay awake and too hot to sleep. Flies crawled out of the sand to bite us, and rivulets of sweat slithered over my skin like snakes. And always I was listening out for the drumming hooves or jangling armour that would spell the end of our mad flight.
We pretended to sleep until dusk. Then we rose, brushed the dust from our clothes, and continued on.
At first we navigated by our shadows, following where they pointed as the sun sank behind us. They became so long it seemed they must reach all the way home; then, abruptly, they vanished. Stars came out, impossibly familiar in that lonely place, and we struggled on, keeping the pole star forward and to our left as much as the fractured terrain allowed. We walked in a single column for the most part, but every so often a steep slope or high obstacle would knot us together again. At one of those places, I asked Nikephoros about our course.
‘We have to reach the coast,’ he said. None of us had spoken a word all day, and his voice cracked with exhaustion.
‘What will we find there?’
‘Water.’ He tried to smile, but his dry lips would not oblige. ‘And perhaps a boat.’
‘Then what? None of us is a sailor. Even if we were, you said the sea is closed.’
‘We can make our way up the coast. The Fatimids control it, but their ships will be in harbour.’
With good reason, I suspected. I did not ask any more questions.
The desert had been a hostile place by day; in the dark, it became a nightmare. A land that had seemed unable to nourish a single stalk of grass now brought forth a host of living beasts: strange, unseen creatures, which scuttled, squealed and grunted all around us. Soon I became convinced that if only we had had a lamp to kindle we would have seen ourselves surrounded by a writhing mass of all the carrion birds, flesh eaters, beetles, snakes and worms of Hell. As it was, we saw none of them, though once I felt my boot step on something furry, which screamed and squirmed under my foot before scurrying away. Somewhere, perhaps half a mile away, something like a wolf howled to the stars.
The air itself seemed to mock us. We had waited for dusk to avoid the heat of the day; what we had not expected was that the night could be so cold. The empty dark seemed to suck all warmth from the air, so that the clothes that had felt like plates of burning iron now seemed flimsy and inadequate. Jorol untied the torn half-tunic from his head and draped it over his shoulders; it did not reach as far as the loincloth at his waist, and in the dark the gap between the two pieces of white cloth made it look as though his torso had been sawn in half.
We marched through the night. When the blood-red fingers of dawn began to reach over the horizon, we found another shelter and curled up for the day.
Many men enter the wilderness seeking answers. Some, I suppose, find them. For myself, I found that the emptiness of the desert left only questions. Words and images tumbled unbidden into my mind, as if every thought and memory I had ever had was being flushed through me. I saw Anna and Sigurd, sometimes alive and sometimes as ghosts; I saw my daughters, as they were and as they had been, cradled in their mother’s arms. I even saw my parents, though I thought I had forgotten what they looked like. In one memory, or dream, I had thrust my hand into a bees’ nest; I ran down the hill between spring wildflowers, crying with pain even as I licked the honey from my stinging fingers. A woman hugged me, so close that I could not see her, and I dried my tears on the folds of her skirt.
I opened my eyes and was back in the desert.
The second night’s march was worse than the first. A chasm of hunger had been opening inside me since the previous morning; now it engulfed me. Cramps of pain shot through my stomach and I was forced to bend almost double, leaning on my spear for support like an old man. Halfway through the night we ran out of water. We had hoarded it as long as we could, taking sips so small they barely wet our lips, but even so we could not eke it out for ever. Unfortunately for Aelfric, he was holding the goatskin when it happened — and he did not help matters by upending the empty sack and shaking the last few drops out into his mouth. Jorol stared at him with covetous anger.
‘Who said you should have more than your share?’
Aelfric met his stare with haggard eyes, but did not answer. That in itself was a goad to Jorol. The Patzinak stepped towards Aelfric, snatched the empty skin from his hands and dashed it to the ground.
‘What will we drink now? Dust?’
‘You can drink my piss if you like.’
Even through the haze of despair and exhaustion, Aelfric must have known what he said; indeed, his fists were already rising as he spoke. But Jorol was too demented by thirst to be satisfied with that. He swung his spear around and lunged towards Aelfric.
The sneer died on Aelfric’s face and he flung himself away. He tripped on a stone, lost his balance and sprawled backwards. Jorol sprang after him, and the wild look on his face left no doubt what he intended.
A heavy staff swept through the moonlight, humming with its speed. It struck Jorol in mid-air, square on the chest, and he dropped like a bird felled by a sling. As he bent over in pain, Nikephoros slapped the spear-haft across his shoulder blades; then he turned to Aelfric, still lying on the ground, and kicked him hard in the ribs.
‘If you lose your discipline again, it will be the sharp end of this spear you feel. Get up.’
The two men staggered to their feet, breathing hard. For a moment, I feared they might both attack Nikephoros, but the desert had not yet stripped all habits of obedience from them.
‘If we quarrel among ourselves, we will never escape this desert,’ said Nikephoros.
‘We will never escape anyway. Not without water to drink.’ Beneath the despair, I sensed a sly mischief in Jorol’s words, like a child who cannot help provoking his father to beat him.
Nikephoros’ shoulders stiffened, and the spear twitched in his hand.
‘Say that again, and I will see your body rot in the desert.’ Before Jorol could decide whether to test the threat, Nikephoros spun around to face me. ‘We will take the waterskins with us in case we find another well. You will carry them.’
I started. ‘Why me?’
