‘And thieves,’ said his guest drily. Pakrad ignored him.
‘Those prisoners will fetch a high price in Damascus or Baghdad. Death would be a waste.’
The guest still had his sword in his hand. Though he held it still, the reflected firelight made the blade look as though it danced and writhed in the air. For a moment, I thought he might cut down Pakrad where he stood. Then, to my surprise, he shrugged.
‘Do as you want. They are not my concern.’
‘I promise you they will never be heard of again,’ Pakrad assured him.
The visitor looked around. ‘Are they here?’
It was a casual question, but whether by chance or some devilish intuition, his gaze came to rest right on the stretch of wall that housed my peephole, so that he seemed to be staring straight down the stone tunnel into my eyes. Terror seized me; I almost jerked away, but then he would have seen the movement. I forced myself to stay still and prayed he had not noticed me.
Oblivious to my terror, Pakrad was answering the question. ‘The prisoners have gone. I sold them this morning to an Arab.’ The lie came fluently; I wondered what he would have said if he had known how close his guest was to seeing the truth.
‘Very well.’ The guest nodded at the gold. ‘I will not forget your service.’
‘And you will see that the Franks do not come here looking for the Greeks?’
The visitor laughed softly. He had started to move to the door, was already almost beyond the confines of my view, but he turned back to answer Pakrad. The glowing fire threw up a monstrous shadow on the walls behind him.
‘Nobody will come to look for the Greeks.’
I barely heard the words. The firelight that cast shadows behind him also banished the shadows that hooded his face, so for the first time I could see it clearly. Of course I knew his voice — the only reason I had not recognised it sooner was that I had not heard it speaking Greek before. Nor had I ever expected to hear it speaking the treachery I had just witnessed.
It was Duke Godfrey.
5
It was hard to fall asleep that night. I squatted by the wall, my arms bound before me, trembling as my mind burned with thoughts of the treachery I had witnessed — the treachery that had snared me. Again and again I saw Duke Godfrey framed in the stone barrel of my peephole, his pale skin and golden beard turned orange by the firelight. Why had he done this? I knew he did not love the Greeks: at Constantinople, his army had even come to blows with the imperial forces. But that quarrel was long settled, and since then Godfrey had seemed a model of restraint, free of the tempestuous ambitions that shook the other princes. Why had he done this to me?
But of course, he had not done it to me — or not for my sake. I was merely a casualty, an inconvenience to be removed. He wanted the ring. For the rest of us, he did not even care enough to have us murdered. The thought only made me angrier: I raged against Godfrey, against Pakrad, against Tatikios who had abandoned me at Antioch and the emperor who had sent me there. But the heat of anger could not burn through my bonds or the walls that trapped me, nor lift the crushing weight of my insignificance. Few things make a man feel more alive than death, but now Duke Godfrey had robbed even that of meaning.
Eventually, fingers of sleep began to creep over me. The boundaries of the world dissolved: the things I saw and the things I dreamed and the things I feared mingled freely together in the dark room. Anna was there, though she would not talk to me, and Zoe and Helena my daughters. Helena held her newborn son and pointed to me, the grandfather he would never meet. Sigurd moaned, while Godfrey bent over him and laid gold coins on his eyes. I could see Antioch in the distance, and a terrible battle being waged before its gates. In an instant, I seemed to be in the midst of the battle, throwing up my shield while my enemies battered it with their blows.
I opened my eyes. Someone was jabbing me in the ribs, though without malice. Aelfric. With his hands bound in front of him, he could not reach me with his arms, but had swivelled himself around to poke me with his foot. Otherwise, everything in the room seemed normal: nine of us tied fast to the walls, moonlight filtering through the thatch, and the door still bolted shut.
‘What is it?’
‘Listen.’
Almost at once, I heard it. Shouts, the pound of running feet, and beyond it the drum of horses’ hooves. A group of men — three or four by the sound of them — ran past our door. I could hear their spear-hafts dragging on the floor behind them.
‘Is it a rescue?’
But even as I said it, I remembered the truth of Duke Godfrey’s words.
Whatever was happening, there was nothing we could do. We were like slaves in a galley, locked in place and powerless against the forces raging around us. We sat in the darkness, pale faces straining to understand the mysterious sounds that drifted down to us, and waited.
Outside, the uproar was rapidly building into the tumult of a full-blown battle. Bows cracked; arrows rattled against stone like leaves before a gale. The pitch of the shouts rose. Then men started screaming, and I knew the battle had been joined.
I wriggled around to see if I could see anything through my spyhole. The church was empty. The sack of gold was gone from the table, and the fire had all but burned out — though not long ago, for even through the dank stone wall I could smell the lingering tinge of smoke.
Another kick in the ribs from Aelfric drew me back to our room. His face was ashen in the moonlight.
‘Do you smell that?’
After a day and a half being confined in that hot room, unable to move more than a few inches, the stench was terrible. But beyond the rank smells of men, there was something new in the air. Smoke — not drifting through my spyhole, but pouring in through the holes in the thatch and seeping through the cracks in the eaves.
In an instant, the sullen resignation in the room turned to panic. The monumental stones of the monastery’s foundations might be immune to fire, but the ramshackle wooden superstructures that Pakrad had built on it would burn like kindling. The Varangians turned to the walls and heaved with all their might on the ringbolts; they flexed their wrists and tried to pull the ropes apart with brute strength. Nothing would give. The smoke thickened; through the hole in the ceiling I could see sparks and embers dancing on air in the night sky. If a single one fell on the dry- baked straw roof. .
‘At least we won’t be tied up much longer,’ muttered Aelfric. He had lifted his hands to his mouth and was trying to gnaw through the bonds like a rat. He spat out a wad of fibres. ‘If the roof drops on us, it’ll burn these ropes clean through.’
‘And us with them.’ I had found a corner of stone that protruded from the wall and was rubbing my wrists against it, trying to saw through the rope. It did not even dent it.
With a squeak and a bang, the door flew open. A murky, light filled the corridor beyond like dawn, though we were still hours from sunrise: one of Pakrad’s men stood silhouetted in its glow. His hair was dishevelled, his eyes wild with surprise; he had not even had time to put on armour or helmet, but the long, curved knife in his hand was steady enough. He took two steps into the room, towards the nearest prisoner — but whether he came to execute or to free us we never learned. Shouts from the corridor stopped him mid-stride. He turned back to the doorway, but his way was blocked, and this time the man who stood there had not forgotten his armour. He wore the coned helmet of the Franks, though with sackcloth hanging from its rim so that only his eyes were visible, and a loaded crossbow was wedged to his shoulder.
I did not know who fought this battle but it hardly mattered: we were merely spectators. The guard sprang towards the door, then seemed to halt, caught like a spark on a breeze. The crack of the bow still echoed around the chamber as he staggered back, clutching his breast where the bolt had struck, and collapsed. The knife dropped from his hand and skidded across the smooth-worn floor.
The Frank stared into the room. Eight pairs of captive eyes stared back in silence. Behind the sackcloth veil, I
