Many invoked Christ: had He not sent us His lance, they asked? Some who had fought on the western extremity of the battle swore that at its height three white riders had appeared in the hills and charged home against the Turks, and it was commonly agreed that these three had been the warrior saints: George, Mercurios, and Demetrios my namesake. Others heard reports from captured Ishmaelites that it was Kerbogha’s faithless allies, resenting his power and remembering past injuries, who had abandoned the field and left him helpless. This too was much credited to Christ’s intervention. Some suggested that the routed infantry of Kerbogha’s vanguard had panicked the ranks behind and turned them from battle, but who could tell? The truth was that none could explain it, not even Kerbogha himself.
Tancred’s horsemen pursued Kerbogha and the remnants of his army far beyond the plain of Antioch, all the way to the Euphrates. There, Kerbogha took a boat across the river and passed beyond knowledge.
Antioch was freed.
? ?
The priest at the front of the church looked up from his book, and scanned the watching faces of his congregation lest any miss the miraculous symbolism. He spoke in Latin, but I knew the story well enough: how when Saint Peter had been cast into prison and condemned to death, the chains had fallen from his wrists and an angel had brought him to safety.
I slipped out through the great doors at the back. On this, the feast of that miracle, I needed no Frankish priest to explain the analogy. Nor did I care to hear the Latin rite in a Byzantine church. Besides, I had an appointment to keep.
I stepped into the square, flinching as the sun struck my face. It was the first day of August, and the afternoon heat seemed to burn the very air itself. All was still. The stone fragments of the Ishmaelite tower lay where they had been pulled down, waiting to be broken up and to become new walls and homes and churches. In the far corner of the square I could see a group of Genoese merchants clustered in a circle, haggling over some argument or other. Like crows, they had arrived almost before the battle had finished, looking to feast on the trade which our victory had opened. Bohemond had granted them a market and houses: doubtless their caravans were already pushing out along the roads to the east. They would bring back spices, and news and gold, and Bohemond would take the choicest portions to fill the treasury of his new realm.
I looked up at the mountain looming over us. In the glare of the sun, its colour seemed to fade and every line and wrinkle of its ancient face was made plain. There must have been a breeze at the summit, for I could see the crimson banners streaming out from the citadel in proud dominion. With Kerbogha vanquished and all hope of relief gone, the garrison had surrendered it to the princes, and they in turn to Bohemond. Now the banner of Provence flew only over the bridge gate and the palace, where Count Raymond isolated himself with his jealousies and regrets.
I saw two figures walking towards me across the square and I hurried to meet them. Seeing them from a distance, Sigurd so vast and Anna so slight beside him, I was struck anew by how much a month of rest had restored us all. The lands around Antioch might still be a wilderness, but in the rest of the world summer still brought the usual crops. With the siege broken and the roads open, the markets in the city had flourished again. Our cheeks and bellies had filled, not with bloated bile but with nourishment, and strength had returned to our arms. A month, I marvelled: a month and more since we had met Kerbogha on the plain, yet it seemed a single day. At first I had kept to my bed, too exhausted to stand, while Anna nursed me; then, when I could walk, I had wandered through the city in a daze, astonished that I could pass in and out of the gates as I pleased. For nine months those walls had been our cage, first on the one side and then the other: it seemed almost impossible that I could go through them at will.
‘How are your bandages?’ Anna took my hands and twisted them round, peering at them back and front. The cloths were clean. Her salves had served their purpose, and though Mushid had cut deep the wounds were beginning to heal. She still took every opportunity to examine them – probably to be thorough, but perhaps also as a reminder, a soft rebuke for the risks I had taken.
‘They seem healthy.’
‘Good,’ said Sigurd. ‘Then we will soon be able to make the journey to Constantinople.’ Even more than I, he longed to be in the queen of cities, to be away from the Normans and out of this desert, to be back in the palace serving the Emperor.
‘Soon,’ I agreed. ‘When we are strong enough, and the summer heat abates. After so much struggle, it would be unfortunate to die of thirst on the road home.’
Sigurd scowled. ‘The weakness of the Franks has seeped through those bandages and into your blood, I think.’
Perhaps it had. None of the Franks, certainly not their princes, had showed any eagerness to continue on their road. The men who had marched across Anatolia in the height of summer would not do the same in Syria. When we arrived, Antioch had been merely a barrier on the greater path to Jerusalem; now, for many, it seemed to have become the object. What did it matter? For me, Antioch would be the limit of my journey, and that was enough.
I squeezed Anna’s arm. ‘I will come back to you in an hour,’ I promised. ‘I have been summoned up the mountain.’
I left them in the square and hurried through the city to the road which twisted up Mount Silpius. The south- eastern quarter, where once Sarah’s heretics had held me captive, had changed again: the ruins had been razed and the ashes ploughed into new fields. As I walked across them, I wondered what had become of the priestess. She had vanished in the fire, and I had heard no word of her since. Perhaps I could have asked Peter Bartholomew, but since the vindication of his vision he had become revered among the pilgrims and his lapse into heresy was doubtless washed from his memory. Would his flock care if they knew? Or would they look into their hearts, and see how sorely their own faiths had been tested during the darkness of the siege? Drogo had not been the only one whose suffering had driven him to error.
I reached the path and began climbing. The last time I had come this way, burdened by armour and the prospect of battle, it had seemed like the way of the damned. Now, with wild flowers growing at its edge and the pines rustling above, it was a bucolic idyll, perfect on a summer’s day. Only the occasional flash of bone in the grass, where the burial parties had missed the remains of a forgotten corpse, gave testament to its past. My feet crunched on the dry stones and earth; the heat held me in its stillness, and when I closed my eyes the sun was like a shining white veil before me. As I swung my legs, I could feel every sinew in my body as if it were newly born, as Lazarus must have felt when Christ awoke him.
At a bend in the road, where it turned back across the face of the mountain, I forked away onto a small path. For a few minutes I walked alone in the pine forest, my footsteps muted on the fallen needles; then I came onto the open hillside and the view spread out before me. I could see the Orontes, much diminished by the summer drought yet still gleaming as it curled to the sea. On its banks, on the plain, teams of men and oxen were cutting furrows and pruning back the trees in the orchards. It was strange to see the ground without the tents which had sat there for so many months. From that height, the fragment of land between the walls and the river seemed so thin, so tenuous. Had it really been our world for eight months?
The path ended at the gate of a low villa, built out on terraces on the southern arm of the mountain. The blue banner of the Virgin hung from a spear by the doorpost, and a pair of Provencal knights guarded it. I told them my name and they admitted me, first to a garden, then to a blue courtyard tiled to resemble the sea. Looking down was like peering into clear water: small fish and great leviathans swam side by side, while silver waves rippled through the design where an imaginary sun caught the waves.
The guard led me down a stone corridor, its alcoves populated with marble figures, and through a door to a
