Knights of the Cross

Mushid shrugged. ‘They are not my people. They are Turks; I am an Arab, a Saracen.’

‘But you worship the same god—’

‘We all say we worship the same god – Jews, Franj, Byzantines, Turks and Arabs. But we do not agree how He is to be worshipped. Why do you think you have endured so long in such hostile country? Because of the power of your arms? You survive because every lord from Cairo to Constantinople wishes to make you his tool. The Byzantines and Fatimids seek to destroy the Turks; the Armenians would become their own masters; the emirs of Damascus and Aleppo and Antioch each hope you will destroy their rivals. You have marched into an ancient game played out in the dust of Asia. You see in straight lines, but all about you others move obliquely. That is why you live now: because each of your enemies hates his neighbour more.’

He fell silent, and leaned back against the wall. The empty spaces between the battlements were like black teeth above him.

‘If that is so, then whom do you serve?’ Sigurd asked.

‘I am a swordsmith. I serve myself, and those who buy my blades. Others make schemes; I carry their messages.’

I shifted on the hard stone beneath me. ‘Why are you here now?’

‘I heard that you had occupied this tower. It is prudent to know where your friends are in these times.’

‘That was not what I meant.’

Mushid lifted an eyebrow. ‘Then what? Do I carry more secrets of hidden plans? Having worked the city’s betrayal once, will I do it again? Is that what you ask?’

‘If a man sits at my fire I like to know why he is there.’

‘Then you are wise.’ He smiled. ‘I did not weep to see the Turks lose Antioch, because they were Ahl al-Sunna. Having helped the Franj, I will not turn away so quickly from them. And if Kerbogha takes the city, there will be more killing. You will have killed all the Muslims, he will kill all the Christians, and Antioch will become a wasteland. Nobody will win.’

‘How can you bear it?’ Anna spoke so quietly that her words seemed to entwine with the hissing fire. ‘Whichever doctrines divided you from the Antiochenes, they were your brothers. By your hand, many thousands of them now lie in an open grave. How can you sit by our fire and discuss this calamity as if it were nothing more than the forging of a sword?’

‘First, because they did not die by my hand. They died by the hands of a thousand Franj, not one more or less guilty. Do not try and blame me for what your allies have done.’

‘They are not my allies. And hateful though they are, their evil would have remained undone if you had not arranged for the gate to be open.’

It was as if hot lead had been poured into my belly. I squirmed where I sat, praying that Anna’s fixed stare did not move onto me. In my account of the battle at the walls, I had not told her the truth of my role: the fear that she would blame me for all that had happened since was unanswerable. How could it be otherwise, when I could not defend it myself?

‘Firouz the armourer opened the gate,’ said Mushid. ‘If I had not carried his messages to Bohemond, he would have found another. Even if he had not, even if I alone were responsible for unlocking the gate, I would not bear the blame for what happened afterwards. Many doors open: it is for men to choose which they enter – and what they do inside.’

I had rarely seen Anna bested in argument, but now she had no reply. None, at least, that she could voice, though her face evinced an inconsolable anger.

‘Would you rather that I had done nothing?’ Mushid continued. ‘Would you rather now be cowering in your tent before the walls, watching Demetrios pull on his armour? Would you rather see three thousand Franj, with barely a sound horse between them, marching to fight the mightiest Turkish army in a generation? Would you rather be in the camp when Kerbogha’s victorious janissaries overran it, massacring every man and boy and dragging you away by your hair to the slave-brothels of Mosul where—’

‘Enough,’ I snapped. ‘That is not necessary.’

Mushid looked at me almost curiously, then bowed his head. ‘I am sorry. I meant no insult. It is bad to offend one’s host at his own fire. All I wished to say is that there would have been a terrible killing in any event. Perhaps you do not like what I have done, but I have been on many battlefields, both as victor and vanquished. I assure you of this: it is always better to be among the living than the dead.’

I could see from the faces around the fire that his argument satisfied no one, me least of all. It did not lift one straw from the burden of guilt I bore. Yet unless the dead came to lend their voices to the debate, it was irrefutable.

I was uneasy with the turn that the conversation had taken, and with the enmity that seemed to have flared up between Anna and Mushid. Still, there were questions I wanted to ask.

‘Your friendship with Drogo – was that part of this plot?’

Mushid studied his knuckles, his face impassive. ‘No. As I told you once before, I met Drogo when I sold him a sword. It was much later that Firouz confided in me his plan, after Drogo had died. He was simply a friend, a good man to sit with by a fire. It is sad that he lived under so unfortunate a roof.’

‘Unfortunate indeed, but not uncommon.’

‘And still the misfortune continues. His servant was found dead by the river three days ago.’

‘Simon?’ A torrent of images flooded my mind: the boy shivering under Quino’s brutality, picking herbs from the river bank covered in mud, rubbing an oily cloth over Drogo’s sword. Was it possible that he had suffered the same fate as his master?

‘Simon, yes. I was in the Norman camp when they discovered him.’

‘How did it happen?’ So many men had died in the past days – and weeks and months – that it was astonishing I could feel anything from one more death. In truth, I felt nothing, for the news had a numbing effect that I could not resist. Yet somehow, if it were possible, in the recesses of my soul I felt a cold hand squeeze tighter about me, felt a more profound absence of feeling itself.

‘He was pierced with arrows. He had been hunting for herbs on the bank – a party of Turks must have seen him from the far side and chanced their aim.’

Perhaps, I thought, I had known it already. I remembered dismantling the boat bridge two days earlier, and a peasant telling me of a boy killed picking herbs. I had felt a sickening premonition, but then Bohemond had arrived and dragged me away, and all else had been forgotten. Not that remembering would have helped by then.

Mushid was still speaking. ‘It was a tragic end. Had he lived another day, he would have entered the city in safety.’

Through the welter of thought and memory that flurried about me, I found myself thinking that if this city, besieged and starving, had been Simon’s best hope of safety, how wretched must he have been? Hardly less, I supposed, than we who had survived.

Much later I lay on the stone of the rampart under the dark sky. Anna lay against me, my chest against her back and my knees crooked inside hers, like two bowls stacked together. My arms were wrapped around her chest, which swelled and sank gently under her cotton shift. We had no mattress save our cloaks, for every stick of straw in the city had gone to feed the horses. The hot night meant there was no need for blankets.

‘I don’t trust the Saracen,’ said Anna. ‘Neither should you.’

‘I don’t.’

‘He has already betrayed the city once. Who can tell what other secrets he hides? Thousands of innocents have died because of him.’

Again, the frantic memory of the gate on the mountain rasped through my mind. I could not discuss this with Anna. ‘He saved us from certain death. How can I hate him, if because of him Helena’s child has a grandfather?’

‘I do not say you should hate him. But you should not draw him near you either.’

As the night had come on, I had insisted that Mushid should stay in our tower until dawn. There were too many Franks on the streets, knights and pilgrims alike, who might recognise him as an Ishmaelite and tear him apart. He had resisted my urging but I had sensed gratitude when finally he allowed me to prevail. Now he slept with the Varangians in the guardroom along the wall.

‘As much as you do unto the least of my people, you do unto me,’ I quoted. ‘He will be gone in the morning.’