Siege of Heaven

42

Our return to Jerusalem found the army in grim spirits, which even the arrival of our cargo did little to improve. The streams of living water promised in scripture no longer flowed: the land was parched, and the few wells that lay around the city had been poisoned or stopped up by the garrison. Worse, while we had been away the Franks had intercepted messengers from the Fatimid vizier, al-Afdal. He was coming from Egypt with a great army, he said: he would be there in a month. If the garrison could only hold out until then, the Army of God would be ground into dust. The Franks gritted their teeth and swore it would make no difference: this was exactly what had happened at Antioch, they said, and they had prevailed then. By God’s grace, they would take Jerusalem and then march out to destroy al-Afdal as well. But they spoke too loudly when they said it, and the hands that clutched their crosses trembled.

All our hopes now rested on God — and on the materials we had brought from Jaffa. The masts from Saewulf’s ships were raised again, far from the sea, the cornerposts of the two vast siege engines the Franks had designed. The towers reached higher than the walls themselves, and every day they grew. The wheelwrights gave them feet; the carpenters built platforms and ladders within while the women wove wattle screens to cover them. Finally, the tanners nailed on skins of mottled hides so that fire could not burn them. It gave the machines a monstrous appearance. On each, the drawbridge at the summit gaped like an open jaw, while the arrow slits above seemed like blundering, half-blind eyes. The Franks named them Gog and Magog, the beasts who would come at the end of time to besiege Jerusalem.

A strange mood overtook the army in those last few weeks. They stood on the brink of an impossible victory, and equally on the threshold of destruction, yet to look at their faces you would not have seen much trace of either hope or fear. Even the threat of al-Afdal’s army did little to stir their passions. They had suffered the journey for too long: now that they had arrived, it meant nothing. You could see it in their eyes — the numb awareness that these should be days of passion and drama, of triumph or terror, and the quiet, reproachful despair that they felt nothing. Each day they toiled with willing, dead hands: they lay on their bellies to drink from stagnant pools where animals wallowed; they wandered carelessly within bowshot of the walls and barely murmured when the arrows struck them.

Yet life stirred among the waste and wreckage of our hopes, if you looked carefully. But it was not the fresh, clean life that drives out winter; this was the sort that crawls out of holes and feeds on rot. It did not show itself, but I became aware of it, shadows moving at the fringes of my perception. I saw it in the groups of pilgrims who huddled together, whispering; in sly glances that sidled away when I looked at them; in the mysterious slogans that appeared scrawled on boulders overnight: unsettling verses from the Revelation of Saint John speaking of tortures and trials ahead. I felt it in the brooding presence of the towers, ever-present and stark against the skyline. More insidiously, I heard it from the mouths of the priests. When they opened their Bibles, it was always to Daniel or Ezekiel. I will strew your flesh on the mountains, and fill the valleys with your carcass; I will drench the land so that your flowing blood laps the mountain tops, and drowns the streams and rivers. When they preached, they spoke of the kingdom to come with rare urgency, as if they could glimpse the holy city through a tear in the clouds. Though few of them were gifted preachers, their words seemed to touch their audiences like tongues of fire. Dull faces flared with passionate intensity; in those moments, I began to suspect that the army was not exhausted, simply nursing its meagre strength. It improved my hopes of taking the city, but it filled me with foreboding.

Unsurprisingly, in that atmosphere, men started to see visions again. Some saw winged creatures swooping down from heaven; some saw saints in shimmering raiment; some saw magical beasts — griffins, basilisks and unicorns — and no doubt others saw worse visions that afterwards they did not dare voice, but tried to forget in their hearts.

Among these visions, one came with particular authority. A Provencal pilgrim announced that he had seen Bishop Adhemar, who had ordered a penitential procession around the four walls of Jerusalem to free the army from the filth of the world. So, on a Friday afternoon in early July, we marched around the city.

Looking back, it was a miracle we were not all massacred. By Adhemar’s command, given in the vision, every man in the army had removed his boots and walked barefoot. If the Fatimids had sallied out from the city, they could have ridden through us like a field of wheat. Perhaps they could not believe our temerity and assumed it must be a trap; perhaps they simply laughed to themselves and left us to our folly, seeing it as the last throes of an army dying of thirst and madness. Perhaps they pitied us. Whatever their reasons, they stayed within the walls.

And if they thought we were mad, who could argue? We knew the risks, and still we marched blithely on. Fear of death did not deter us; instead, the army seemed to drink it in. The whole procession had the air of a macabre carnival. Seven priests walked at the front of the column with ram’s horns, blasting out a cacophony that filled the valley, from the walls to the surrounding hills. Men and women danced in rapture; they held their weapons aloft and waved them to heaven — spears and swords, but also billhooks, cudgels, even pilgrim staves. The trumpets blasted, and the pilgrims sang so hard they almost screamed. Each time we came near one of the gates the noise rose to a fevered crescendo as we waited to see if it would open for an attack; each time we passed safely, the air shivered with the sound of delight. Drunk on its own daring, the army tottered forward; they had abandoned caution, thrown off the chains of fear that had bound them so long, and every step that they did not fall only convinced them of their invincibility.

‘I once knew a herder who grazed his oxen where wild onions grew,’ said Sigurd. He had to bellow in my ear to be heard. ‘It made them swell up like melons. When they let it go. .’ He waved his hand in front of his nose. ‘It sounded like those trumpets.’

‘Perhaps they think the walls will fall down if they blow hard enough.’

‘Then there’ll be nothing to stop the Egyptians running out and slaughtering us.’

I shrugged. ‘It worked for Joshua.’

At least Joshua had been allowed to wear his boots. The ground beneath my feet might be holy, but it was merciless. The stones were so hot they raised blisters even through a thousand miles’ worth of callouses, and when once I did not look where I trod I quickly felt the pain of a stubbed toe.

I stepped out of the procession and knelt to rub my toe. The procession flowed past. Seen from below, with the blazing sun above, the pilgrims became little more than barefoot shadows, a jabbering confusion of limbs and blades that writhed like tendrils of smoke over a fire. Or perhaps they were like a thicket of walking trees, their branches rippling as if in a breeze. The spikes of their spears looked more like palm fronds, and the sunlight was so strong the metal seemed to wilt in its glare.

I blinked. Thirst and heat had not made me delusional. The men and women passing by no longer carried weapons, not even the crude tools of the peasants, but palm fronds. They were dressed in white, and they seemed to come from all the tribes of the barbarians — Normans and Provencals, Lotharingians and Flemings — but they all sang the same song.

Salvation belongs to God on His throne, and to the Lamb who is his son.

I stood up. The crowd’s momentum had carried Sigurd on well past me and for the moment I was on my own. I stepped back into the procession, feeling dark and dirty among so much white. Immediately, I found myself in the shade of a broad palm frond, which an old man held aloft with frail but unyielding arms. He turned to greet me, smiling in welcome.

I gestured around. ‘Who are all these people?’

His skin was dark and mottled with liver spots, but his teeth were as white as his robe. ‘We are those who have come out of the great ordeal. We have washed our robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’ His brown eyes stared at me.

It was the last answer I had expected. Stranger still, I found I knew the words to continue it. ‘They shall hunger and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat.’

He nodded approvingly. ‘The Lamb on His throne will be our shepherd, and He will guide us to the springs of the water of life.’

‘I’d be glad to find any spring in this foul heat.’

The pilgrim frowned. ‘The earth’s water is stagnant and stale. Soon we will all taste the sweet water of