William – bring your company with mine to the western gates, so that we may throw them open and complete the rout. Rainulf – take my standard to the highest point and plant it where all can see that the city is taken.’
In the rush that followed his words I was entirely forgotten. Most of the Normans hastened down the slope with their captain, their appetite for plunder and slaughter undimmed, though a few stayed behind to secure the towers and dispatch the Turks who survived. All ignored me. For a time I sat in silence on a mounting block, watching them, but soon the stink of blood and death overwhelmed me. I walked away, wandering dazed and alone across the scrubby mountainside. The first fingers of sunlight were reaching over the ridge above and a new day dawned over Antioch. It gave me little hope.
I reached a small promontory on the shoulder of the mountain and looked down. Thick smoke rose from the city below, and an occasional gust of wind brought the faint echoes of screams and clashing steel to my ears. I could see the great gates lying open, the hordes of tiny figures swarming through like ants come to ravish a carcass, but I had not the strength to care. I was empty, poured out like water, my heart melted like wax.
Antioch was ours.
II
Besiegers
3 June – 1 August 1098
?
The Franks exploded into the city like a vessel of flaming oil, splashing fire and death wherever they touched. On the walls, in streets and squares, in their homes and fields, men died and women were broken. Worthless possessions were dragged from houses merely because they could be stolen, then abandoned because they were cumbersome, then set alight because they would burn. Order was hateful, confusion master. By afternoon most of the killing was done.
I had waited seven months to enter Antioch; within hours, I could not bear to stay. All morning I sat high on the mountain, alone, watching the devastation in the shade of the cliff. Sometimes my conscience whispered that I should go down, try to save the innocent, but each time I quashed the thought. It would have effected nothing save my death. I still reviled myself for my cowardice.
As the sun came around onto the face of the mountain and the cries from the city lessened, I rose to descend the crumbling slope. I dared not risk the centre of the city, where the sack had raged fiercest, but kept to the fringes and made for a small gate in the south-west, near the bridge. Even here, the ruin was complete: in half a day, the Army of God had wrought a century’s worth of destruction. Doors lay sprawled flat; charred houses yawned open to the sky; clothes and dishes and tools and carved toys were strewn about like the debris of a receded flood. Worst, though, were the bodies. Most bore hideous testament to their brutal deaths, and in places their blood had turned the dust to mud. I pulled a length of my tunic from under my mail and bunched it over my nose, using the other hand to keep my silver cross clearly visible. Gangs of Franks still roamed, seeking easy loot and violence. In one street I saw a knight wrapped in orange cloth running after a half-naked woman crawling on her knees. The fabric billowed from his shoulders like wings; he seemed so drunk on pillage that he could not move straight but weaved between the pillared arcades. I stuck out a leg and tripped him as he passed, hoping that he would be too crazed to rise. He fell among a pile of Turkish corpses and did not move. The woman he had pursued looked round. Her breasts were withered and shrunk in to her skin, her hair torn; with not a speck of gratitude, she plucked a stone from the rubble and hurled it at me. It bounced off my shield as I watched her vanish down an alley.
At last I reached the walls. The gates were pushed open and unguarded, and I passed through the shadow under the arch without incident. It was only when I had gone a few paces beyond that I thought to look back, to wonder that I had slipped so easily through the door that had defied us so long. I had not even looked to see how the walls appeared from inside. Much the same as from outside, I supposed.
Whether it was the world that had changed or me, nothing seemed as it had before that day. Without the throngs of people, the film of smoke and noise, the camp felt a different place. The patched and torn fabric of the tents was now more dismal, their yawing angles more precarious. On the hill in the distance, the tower that we had erected to guard the bridge stood abandoned. Men had died to build it, and a day earlier it had been our first defence against a sortie from the city. Now it was useless, impotent.
The camp was not completely deserted. Near the river, I found Anna with Sigurd and his company of Varangians. Crates and sacks were piled around them, while dismantled tents lay like discarded clothes on the ground. As Anna saw me she gave a little shriek and ran to embrace me. The day had left me so numbed that her arms around my waist were like hot irons, and it took an act of will to keep from thrusting her away. The evil I had witnessed and abetted defiled me. It would be many days before I could take comfort in kindness.
‘You survived,’ she said. I had rarely seen her drop her composure; now she was almost weeping.
Sigurd set down the bag he carried and gazed at me severely. ‘I told her you would come back. If there were Turkish spears and arrows flying about, I thought you’d have sense enough to let the Normans stand in front of you.’
‘I survived.’ I lifted Anna’s arm away and stepped free. ‘You did not join the battle, Sigurd?’
‘There’s rarely honour to be won when the Franks take the field. And after the siege, little plunder either, I think. Besides, Count Raymond did not invite us.’
‘Did he expect it?’
Sigurd nodded. ‘The Provencals were roused not long before dawn. When the gates opened, they were ready. Was it Bohemond?’
‘He found a traitor who kept one of the towers on the mountain.’ Briefly, I described the night’s business.
‘And how is the city now?’
‘A charnel house. It was well you did not go in.’
‘Soon we shall have to.’ Sigurd pointed to the north. ‘Have you forgotten that Kerbogha and his army are only two days’ march from here? Just because you have been busy, it does not signify that he has not. When he hears that the city has fallen he will redouble his speed.’
In the momentous confusion of the past day, Kerbogha had vanished from my mind entirely: his name now was a hammer on my thoughts. I craved rest, weeks of solitude to mend the fractures in my soul. Instead, it seemed, I had days – or hours – before the next onslaught. I was not sure that I could bear it.
‘We cannot go into the city,’ I said. ‘The Franks are maddened, frenzied. If we go in, they will kill us.’ Nor, I might have added, did I want the taint of their barbarity on me any more. ‘I have suffered long enough on this quest. We will go back to Constantinople.’ Perhaps there I could make myself clean again.
Sigurd looked at me cautiously, perhaps weighing my fragile state. When he spoke it was with unusual calm. ‘We cannot go back to Constantinople, not now. You know that.’
I rounded on him. ‘Why? Because it will be cowardice? Because your honour as a warrior does not allow it?’
‘Because Kerbogha’s army would catch us and kill us – or worse. Do you want Anna enslaved in an Emir’s brothel?’
I wanted to hit him but did not have the strength. ‘Do not test our friendship by playing on my fears for Anna. I can see the risks of our journey, but Antioch will be no safer. Kerbogha will come and besiege it, and all within will be trapped like sheep in a pen, to be slaughtered at his pleasure. If we travel by night, and with nothing more than we need, we can slip past his army unheeded.’
‘And after his army? Mountains so steep that even goats cannot walk their paths, and then the desert. A wasteland without food or water, whose only inhabitants are Turks and brigands. Look at us – how far would we get?’
‘We could take ship from Saint Simeon.’
