Siege of Heaven

‘Demetrios!’

From the far side of the roof, Sigurd called me. I stumbled over to him, tripping and kicking my way through the crowd, too impatient to wait for them to move. Agonising hope burned in my heart, but I saw quickly that there was no one with him. Instead, he was staring down into the courtyard.

‘We don’t have much longer.’

Looking down, I could see a crowd of Norman knights beginning to gather at the base of the temple, pointing and laughing. Behind them others were bringing up more ladders. Many had their swords out; others carried slings and bows.

The crowd on the roof had seen them too. One of their number, a statuesque woman with a baby still suckling at her breast, stood and began to remonstrate with them. No one could understand what she said, but the passion in her voice was such that at last two of the knights did run back towards the Temple of the Lord. I saw them accost Tancred in the middle of the courtyard; I did not hear what they said, but I saw him shrug and open his arms wide in abdication.

The woman with the child continued her pleading. She got down on her knees and shook her hands imploringly at the men below; she pulled a gold coin from her dress and threw it down, begging them to save her. The knights rushed forward to where the coin had fallen and scuffled for it like dogs. Others shouted back at the woman, beckoning to her, calling that if she only leaped down they would catch her in their arms. ‘Save yourself,’ they urged her, but she would not go. They grew angry; they said that she must jump to see if her god would save her, and if He did not then she was a heretic and would be put to death. Of course she did not understand a word, but she could see the cruelty building around her. Her pleas grew more frantic. She pulled down her dress and offered her naked body to them, any degradation simply to live. That only drove the Franks to new heights of mockery. They whistled and demanded to see more, shouting obscene suggestions.

At length, one of them must have tired of the sport. I did not hear the bow loose, but I saw the arrow strike. It pierced straight through the child at her breast and pinned it to her heart. With a slow scream, she toppled forward and plunged to the ground.

Her death unleashed the frenzy that had been simmering among the Franks. Those who had bows shot them high in the air so that the arrows would rain down from above, while the men with ladders rushed to lay them against the temple. Some of the men on the roof tried to push them back but the Franks were too strong. They swarmed up the ladders and began the killing, stabbing and hacking or simply pulling their enemies off the roof to break on the stones. Such was the thirst for slaughter that some died in the hail of stones and arrows that their companions still launched from the courtyard below.

For one more moment, I searched the crowd for my daughters, praying that if I had to die I might at least die with my family. Then something hard struck me on the side of my head, and I sank into oblivion.

49

Perhaps the world did end. How else to explain the place where I woke? If it was not hell, then there are worse places of which even the Bible does not speak. A dull light filled the air, and carrion birds wheeled overhead. The dead were all around me. Heaps of broken bodies, broken limbs, broken faces. Their eyes stared at me in unceasing reproach but thankfully they did not speak.

‘Anna.’ I pushed myself to my feet and staggered to the nearest corpses, rummaging through them like a pile of old clothes. ‘Helena. Zoe.’ The bodies were stiff; their blood had flowed together and hardened into a bond that seemed impossible to pull apart. Their faces stared up at me, frozen into the moment of their death: in anger, in despair, even in hope — pleading with me, even now, to rescue them.

‘They’re not here.’

I heard the voice but I ignored it, still clawing frantically through the dead, until a gentle hand on my shoulder pulled me away. Sigurd stood over me, a dark silhouette against the amber sky.

‘They’re not here,’ he said again. He had removed his helmet so that his copper hair hung loose over his shoulders. Blood streaked his face and beard, and stained his arms all the way to the elbows.

‘Helena, Zoe, Anna, Everard — they’re not here.’

A great wave of emptiness broke over me and I slumped back. I did not feel empty, for I could not feel. I did not understand it, for I was past understanding. Instead, as some men know pain and others know God, I knew — nothing. Sigurd crouched beside me and put his arm around me.

‘They weren’t on the roof?’ Twisting around, I could see the squat bulk of the Temple of Solomon across the courtyard. The ladders still leaned against it, while workers on the roof rolled down the bodies of the slain. Memories of that last battle suddenly flashed in my mind. ‘How did we escape?’

Sigurd did not answer, but pointed to my chest. The crude wooden cross I had carved beside the campfire on the eve of the assault still hung there, two small twigs bound together with twine. The mere sight of it filled me with revulsion; I snatched at it, ready to tear it off. But the habits of a lifetime are hard to dislodge, and a prick of faith stayed my hand. It had saved me, after all, even if the men it saved me from wore the same emblem. I left it, for now.

‘What about Aelfric?’

Sigurd shook his head. ‘You and I were the only ones.’

I brushed my hand against the cross and whispered a prayer for Aelfric. Even in the midst of so much death I felt his loss.

‘But the girls, Anna — they weren’t up there?’

‘Not that I saw.’ He jerked his head, as if trying to dislodge something from his thoughts. ‘It was hard. . to tell.’

We sat there in silence for a moment, two living souls dwarfed by the death around us.

‘What do we do now?’

Sigurd stood. ‘We should find Thomas. At least we know where he is. He wanted so much to see Jerusalem — the least we can do is bury him here properly.’

It did not take long to find our way to the street where Thomas had died. We left the great enclosure of the Temple Mount and walked across the valley on the high bridge, staring down into the city. The slaughter had finished. The Franks had done everything in their power to bring paradise to Jerusalem and they had failed. They had washed the city in the blood of its people, but that had not cleansed it. It stank. Now they were faced with the wreckage and ruination of their efforts. I could see small groups of them below slowly beginning the wretched business of clearing the city.

‘What time is it?’ I asked. The bronze light made it feel like dusk, or perhaps dawn, but I could not see any sign of the sun. It was the smoke in the air, I realised, clouding the sky so that only dark light bled through.

‘Saturday morning. You were unconscious all night.’

I rubbed my temple, flinching to feel the bruise where the stone had struck. ‘Did it hit me that hard?’

Sigurd shrugged. ‘There are some times when it’s better to be asleep.’

Just for a moment, I glimpsed the torments Sigurd must have suffered during that lonely night, the horrors he must have witnessed as he stood watch over me. I did not ask; I did not have the strength for pity.

We crossed the bridge and walked west, to the crossroads where the two tamarisk trees grew. The flies were thick on the ground, rising up in clouds as we passed. The heat and the stench were almost too much to bear. At the crossroads, I shed my armour and my quilted coat and abandoned them in the street, keeping only the thin linen tunic I had worn underneath, and the dagger tucked in my boot. It was a relief to be free of the burden. My whole body felt lighter, freer; I moved so easily I thought I might float away into the hazy sky.

I turned right, ran up the street and stopped. There was the house with its shaded balcony, its splintered doorframe and the door lying flat on the ground. There was the helmet Thomas had torn off in his fury, a round dent showing where he had hurled it against the wall. There were the two dark stains in the dusty road where Thomas and Bilal had died, with a third a little further off where Thomas’s killer had met his end. But the bodies were gone.