by like water, and still we had blades to sharpen, armour to oil and dents to hammer out of our shields. A troop of women left the camp at dawn and did not reappear until sundown, returning with skins and buckets of water that they had filled from springs many miles away. The priests recited masses and prayers throughout the day for the endless procession of knights and pilgrims who flocked to them seeking communion, confession and blessing. I wondered how many of those gulping down the transubstantiated bread believed their next meal would be in the celestial city in the presence of Christ. Even Sigurd, who had never entirely let go the pagan gods of his ancestors, disappeared that afternoon to make his confession. Thomas went for much longer and returned with a fiery determination filling his eyes.
That evening we gathered around our camp fire for the last time. A red sun flamed in the west; the hot urgency of the day had cooled into stillness, and now we sat and tried to replenish our strength before the onslaught. Sigurd wiped a rag over an axe that was already sharp enough to split a hair in two, while Thomas wound a fresh strip of hide around the grip of his shield. I took two twigs I had rescued from the kindling pile and methodically cut the thorns away with my knife, stripping them smooth. When that was done I laid them across each other at right angles and wound a piece of twine over the join to form a crude cross.
‘Have thoughts of the battle brought you back to God?’ Sigurd asked.
I kept my eyes on my work and did not answer. The truth was that I needed a cross to wear in the battle, to mark myself as a Christian if we succeeded in getting inside the city. Once I had believed in its power to save my soul; now I only saw its power to protect me from the violence of men.
Sigurd took my silence for assent. ‘It’s as well. We’ll need all the help He can give us tomorrow, if He doesn’t damn the Franks for being so stupid as to attack the strongest corner of the city.’
I shrugged. The open ground that divided the armies, barely a bowshot wide, ended in a shallow ditch that then rose into the outer wall, a low barrier designed more to impede an attack than withstand it. The Egyptians would not defend that for long. They would retreat up onto the main ramparts and rain death down on us from there, fully fifty feet high, and guarded on the corner by a vast tower. The tower of Goliath, they called it, and I feared it was with good reason.
‘You won’t topple that with a sling and a stone,’ said Sigurd, following my gaze to the tower. ‘It’s madness to attack there.’
It was, and the Fatimids had had almost a month to prepare for it. They had spent every day of the last four weeks repairing those walls and strengthening them, filling them with arms and men and supplies. They had not even tried to hide it. When we attacked there the next day, it would be against the strongest, best-defended corner of the city. Not for the first time, a shiver of doubt ran through me as I wondered if I had chosen the right path by abandoning Raymond.
I looked at Thomas. Ever since he had returned from the mass he had barely spoken a word. There had always been a distance between us, ever since I first hauled him out of a fountain in Constantinople. His marrying Helena had narrowed it, for a time, but in the past month I had felt it stretch wider than ever.
‘Tomorrow, God willing, we’ll be standing beside the tomb where Christ himself lay.’
‘Or lying in our own graves,’ Sigurd added.
Thomas laid his shield against his legs so that it covered them like a skirt. ‘Better to be dead in the next world than alive in this,’ he said softly.
I stared at him across the fire. The hot haze that rose from the coals seemed to melt his features like wax, so I could barely recognise him. How deeply had the wound of Helena and Everard’s capture struck him that he could say such things? With a crush of shame I saw how little I had noticed him this past month, how superficial my care had been. With my own wounds so raw, it had been too easy.
I crossed myself, more out of habit than belief, and saw Thomas sneer at my false piety. ‘You cannot give up on this world — not while your wife and son are held captive. There is no other.’
‘Lift your eyes higher, old man. Of course there is another world. And it is a better place than this.’ He tossed a leaf onto the coals and watched it curl and shrivel to ash. ‘Our world is a dying ember; that world is the sun.’
‘But there is no point trying to get from here to there.’
‘No!’ Thomas banged his fist on the rim of his shield, like a warrior before battle. ‘The point is not to get from our world to that one. The point is to bring that world here, to remake it on earth.’
I shook my head in disgust. ‘You sound like Peter Bartholomew.’
For a moment Thomas did not reply. In the everchanging firelight, his face seemed to churn with indecision. I could see part of him wanting to abandon the argument, but another part — a stronger part — could not let go.
‘Why did we come here — why did any of us come here — if not to try and make the world more perfect?’
‘You cannot perfect the world with bloodshed,’ I said sharply.
‘No? Then how do you plan to rescue your daughters?’
I shook my head in frustration, trying to sift the sediment that clouded my thoughts. ‘Arnulf and his followers don’t want to perfect this world. They want to throw it all out and start anew, remake it entirely.’
‘And what is wrong with that? That is the inheritance promised in the Gospels. Why not seize it? Why struggle day by day to mend this sick and broken world, when in one glorious moment we could cure it?’
‘You don’t cure something by killing it.’
‘Perhaps the sickness has spread so far there is no alternative.’
‘No!’ I stamped my foot, lifting a cloud of dust. ‘And if it has, it is not for us to decide. Arnulf preaches that we should kill every man, woman and child inside that city in our impatience to bring on the kingdom of heaven.
Thomas looked uncertain. ‘Perhaps that is the price of the kingdom of heaven.’
‘I do not believe that. But even if it was, there is no man alive who could demand payment.’ I tried to calm myself. Speaking more surely than I felt, I said, ‘God made the kingdom of heaven as an ideal, an example for men to dream of. It is not a place that we can reach except when He calls us there. It is certainly not a place we can call into being.’
A tear trickled down Thomas’s face, though I could not tell if it was of rage or sorrow. ‘Then why does He tempt us with it?’
‘Maybe to see if we resist.’
45
‘Wake up.’
I couldn’t wake — I had not been asleep. I opened my eyes to see a Frankish sergeant with a long moustache looking down on me.
‘Is it dawn already?’ It seemed only minutes since I had gone to bed. Around me, all was dark.
‘Barely midnight. Get your armour on and follow me.’
He led us swiftly down the hill to the place where the great siege tower, Magog, stood in its pomp. It disappeared into the darkness, ready to lay siege to the stars themselves for all I could see. Or perhaps that was wrong. As my eyes balanced with the night, it seemed that the tower was shorter than I remembered it. Perhaps it was the night playing tricks on me.
I heard the grate of wood rubbing together, a slither and a thud. And then, in a dialect I did not understand, a succession of short, hard words that sounded like curses.
‘I almost broke my toe,’ complained an aggrieved voice.
‘I’ll break your leprous arm if you’re not more careful,’ retorted the first man. Belatedly, I realised that I knew his voice — it was Saewulf’s. I found him standing at the foot of the tower, while eight Frankish men-at-arms laboured to lift a massive slab of wood.
‘What are you doing?’ I whispered. ‘Did this come off the tower? Have the Fatimids struck it with their stonethrowers?’
‘Not yet.’ Saewulf turned away to hiss instructions to another team of men, who seemed to be manhandling
