the river to splash the sweat of a sleepless night off my face. It did nothing to soothe the pain within, nor wipe away the confusion which governed my mind.
In the middle of the morning, Count Raymond summoned Sigurd to his farmhouse and asked for a company of Varangians to relieve his garrison at the tower by the bridge. Every hour, more scouts rode in from the east bringing fresh news of Kerbogha’s advance. The breadth of his army covered the plain from mountain to mountain, they said, a hundred thousand strong. Even slowed by their numbers they would be at the Iron Bridge, where the road from the north crossed the Orontes, by the end of the week.
‘The Varangians should be standing in the vanguard against Kerbogha, not guarding this place,’ Sigurd complained. We were standing on the top of the tower, the city spread out before us little more than a bowshot away. A bowshot, a river, and walls four times the height of a man, I reminded myself, and still impregnable as ever.
‘Your battle will come, and when it does a hundred Varangians will be little more than pebbles beneath the feet of a thousand Turks.’
‘Pebbles sharp enough to make them bleed.’
‘Is that enough?’ There was more sharpness in my voice than I had intended, but I did not try to master it. ‘Will you be satisfied to die in this desolate place, far from home and family, with none but pagans and barbarians to see you fall?’
‘I have been far from home and family for thirty years. If I die here, or in Thrace, or drowned in the ocean it will be the same.’
‘You have a wife in Constantinople.’ He seldom spoke of her, but I knew she had borne him two sons and a gaggle of daughters.
‘A warrior’s wife knows that she will one day be a widow.’
Sigurd looked away, perhaps finding my argument tedious, and I leaned out on the rough-hewn wooden parapet. The tombs we had despoiled made a poor foundation, and I was forever fearful lest the entire edifice should collapse in a hail of splinters. Every time Sigurd moved, the rampart swayed, while the open shaft at the tower’s centre yawned open behind us.
With a nervous sigh, I turned my attention outwards. The sun was high, heating my armour so that it became a forge around me, and although it was not yet midday an afternoon stillness seemed to grip the landscape. I lifted a nearby bucket with both hands and tipped water into my mouth, letting some splash through my beard and down my neck. At the foot of the tower a band of Normans was nailing animal hides to a crude frame, fashioning a shield under which they could approach the walls unscathed. It seemed a forlorn hope to indulge so late; perhaps they planned to use its shelter to destroy the bridge, and so deny the Turks in the city a route to our flank.
‘Do you want an arrow in the eye? Join that seam tighter, or every Turk in Antioch will make it his target.’
There was something in that stinging voice I recognised. Craning my head out through the embrasure I looked closer at the construction. A dozen Normans were busy around the frame while a sergeant paced about, overseeing their labour. He had removed his helmet in the heat, though his hair was still lank with sweat, and he moved gracelessly, spasmodically, jabbing here and there where the work prompted his anger. From my high angle I could not see his face, but I was certain that I knew his name.
I slid down the ladder in the well of the tower and ducked out through its door. Just beyond the stockade, at the bottom of the mound, I found him.
‘Quino,’ I said to his back.
He spun around. In a second, his sword was in his hand. Though we were in open daylight, and surrounded by his allies, he was tensed like a cornered beast. ‘You would have done better to avoid me.’
‘I have nothing to hide from. Do you?’
‘Only catamite Greeks who speak poison and lies.’
‘Poison and lies?’ Perhaps it was something in his temper which prodded me to retaliate; perhaps it was the shroud of mystery and ignorance which had stifled me so long; or perhaps it was my fear of the coming Turks: whatever the reason, I abandoned all caution and advanced towards him. ‘Is it a lie that you and Drogo and the others were adepts of a mystic named Sarah, a false prophet who preaches treason and impiety to your rightful church? Is it a lie that you journeyed to a pagan temple in Daphne and slaughtered a bullock on the altar of a Persian demon? Is it a lie that two of your friends, your so-called brothers, are dead – and you live to see them silent in the grave?’
Though I should have expected it, I was unprepared for his answer. He hurled himself at me like a boar, lifted me by the collar of my mail shirt and threw me down on my back. The hard earth thumped all breath from my lungs, and I lay stunned as he advanced to stand over me. His sword shook in his hand.
‘Worm! Snake! I will cut those lies from your tongue and feed them to you until you choke. Who told you those things? Who?’
‘All who saw you,’ I hissed, squirming backwards along the ground.
‘I will kill him. Kill him! And I will kill you too, Greek. You will not live for the Turks to slaughter. Your prying and your lying—’
He was standing in front of me, little more than a yard away, when without warning the ground at his feet exploded in a puff of dust and stone. He leaped back, and I pushed myself up on my elbows to see what had happened. A small axe, no larger than a hammer, lay where it had gouged a rent in the earth.
We stared up. On the rampart of the tower Sigurd’s broad shoulders squeezed out between the battlements.
‘Forgive my carelessness,’ he bellowed. ‘But be warned – my next throw may be more careless still.’
During Quino’s brief distraction I had the wit to scramble to my feet and retrieve my sword.
‘I do not know if you killed Drogo,’ I told him. ‘But I know that he died with the mark of Mithra on his forehead, and that you were in that cave with him. If we live through Kerbogha’s coming I will see that you are driven from this army as a traitor and a heretic.’
His head jerking like that of a man possessed, Quino rammed his blade back into his scabbard. ‘Then I fear nothing, for you will not survive the battle. But I will grant you this one favour: when you run away from the Turks, shrieking like a woman, the blows that kill you will still strike you on your front.’
‘As Rainauld’s did?’
‘Do not speak of what you do not know.’ He kicked a stone towards me; I watched it bounce wide. ‘For now, it will suffice me to snare the crows who feed you lies.’
Quino stormed away towards the camp, leaving me to wonder what his final threat had meant. And what evil I had stirred.
That night the princes met again in Adhemar’s tent. It was a terse affair, every face grim, and the business was brief. Too brief, perhaps, for what later came of it.
‘Kerbogha’s army will reach the Iron Bridge in two days. I have reinforced the bridge with a company from the tower, and they will defend it, but against such numbers they cannot hold it.’ Raymond’s voice was hard and grey. ‘After that, we must choose where to fight.’
‘If Kerbogha reaches the city, our quest will be over.’ Duke Godfrey tapped the brown cross sewn on his tabard, for like almost all the princes he had come in armour. ‘We shall have shamed our God and our honour as men.’
‘What numbers do we have?’ asked Adhemar. ‘Count Raymond?’
‘Six hundred and forty knights, though fewer than five hundred horses. Some three thousand men-at- arms.’
‘Duke Godfrey?’
‘Two hundred and twelve who can ride. Of the rest, no more than a thousand. Every day they are less.’
‘Lord Bohemond?’
Bohemond, who alone in the company had come unarmoured, looked up as if surprised. ‘Three hundred horse. Nine hundred who will fight beside them.’
So Adhemar went on, until every lord had declared his strength. The dark-haired priest, Stephen, had hovered silent in the background and now whispered something in the bishop’s ear.
‘A little over three thousand knights, in total, and five times their number on foot. How many does Kerbogha have?’
