Crusade (46 page)

As they walked barefoot toward the Haram Mosque, Zaccaria and Alessandro each bearing one of the panniers, the tension rose to a new pitch. Kaysan was the first to enter. He nodded respectfully to the guards as they passed through. Will’s heart was a fierce drumbeat. He leaned in close to Robert as they approached the gates. “This is it,” he murmured. “Are you ready?”

Robert inclined his head and they passed beneath the shadow of the gate, heads bowed. They had only taken a few steps, when there was a shout behind them. Will froze. Zaccaria and Alessandro had been stopped. One of the guards was speaking, pointing to the panniers. Quickly, Kaysan moved past Will and began answering the guard in rapid Arabic. He opened the lid of one of the baskets and pointed at the contents. After a moment, the guard waved them on with a brusque gesture and Will felt the relief in every nerve inside him.

Once through the gates, they found themselves passing through an arcade into an expansive courtyard. There were pavilions erected within it, all encircling a squat, cube-shaped building, two stories high, at the courtyard’s center: the Ka‘ba. The temple was covered, as Everard had told him it would be, with a vast black and gold brocade cloth, called the kiswa, which each year was replaced during the Hajj. The words of the Shahada were woven through it and seemed to shimmer in the light of the torches that were placed around the compound. The place was neither as dark nor as empty as Will had been hoping. Around the courtyard were little pockets of people, who had bedded down for the night under blankets. There were even a few fires, burning low. Other figures wandered through the arcade that ringed the courtyard, some of them guards, others pilgrims.

As arranged, Kaysan and the Shias moved off, melting into the shadows between the arches of the arcades, from where they would keep watch. Will and Robert took the pannier from Zaccaria. Between them, the two knights lifted it easily and headed for the Ka‘ba, the hems of their burkas trailing across the sand, whilst the Sicilians moved toward the western gate. Will and Robert advanced on the temple, moving silently past groups of sleeping pilgrims. The area around the Ka‘ba was paved with black tiles, painfully cold beneath their bare feet. As Will approached, he could see the relic.

The Black Stone was a smooth, glossy orb, encircled within a band of silver set at chest height in the wall of the temple. It had a strange sheen to it that was quite unlike anything he had ever seen before, similar to glass, but deeper and darker, with concealed depths. A shiver ran through him as he recalled Everard telling him how the Muslims believed the Stone recorded the sins of mankind, which it would repeat on Judgment Day. He almost felt it watching him, a single, silver-rimmed eye, and had to look away.

The plan was for Robert to wait with the pannier whilst Will began the circumambulation of the Ka‘ba, which was to be done seven times, each circle of the temple marked by kissing the Stone. On the last pass, he was supposed to stop before it. To any of the guards it would look like he was taking his time honoring the relic, to Zaccaria and the rest of the party, it would look like he was stealing it. When he returned to Robert, who would open the pannier for him, he would simply lean over it, pretending to put something into it, and the ruse would be complete. The rest of their party was too far away, lingering near the western gate, to see that the Stone would remain in its place as they left the compound.

About ten paces from the temple, Will and Robert set down the pannier, facing the corner where the Black Stone was embedded. Will took a step toward the Ka‘ba. At once, a barked command rent the air. All around the shrine, the sleeping pilgrims rose, the coarse blankets that covered them falling away to reveal silver chain mail and scarlet robes, with black bands on the arms. The one who had shouted the command was a powerfully built, dusky-skinned man, whose armband was embroidered with gold. As the others fanned out, he unsheathed a sword and went straight for Will.

27

The Plain of Albistan, Anatolia 15 APRIL A.D. 1277

On the towering heights of the Taurus Mountains, the winter snows remained, clinging stubbornly to jagged peaks, frozen hard in the shadowed depths of plunging ravines. In the deep blue of dawn, the icy peaks, marching east and west, were stark and infinite. Kalawun, looking out across them, felt diminished in their presence. The air was wintry and sharp, and his breath misted before him. He wrapped his cloak, lined with rabbit fur, tighter and headed through the awakening encampment.

The Mamluk Army had set up a temporary base on a plateau. Horses grazed the scrubby grass close to a large circle of tents. Between the structures, fires were points of brightness in the purple gloom. Men stirred, woken by their officers, and the hum of conversation punctuated the stillness. Kalawun nodded to the men of his regiment, who greeted him with respectful salutes. He paused, speaking briefly with some of his officers, then moved on, passing the infirmary tent. Nearby were several fresh graves. So far, they had lost twenty-eight men on this campaign, and five of those had been to the mountains.

Passing through Damascus, where they had gathered the Syrian troops under Kalawun’s command, the Mamluks had entered Aleppo. Baybars, until then resolute and assured, was subdued in the city. He visited Omar’s grave as soon as they arrived, and Kalawun later heard, from one of the amirs who had accompanied the sultan, that he had also spent some considerable time standing in silence outside a burned-out structure in the city. The amir hadn’t been able to guess the significance of it, although Kalawun knew that Baybars had spent his first year in slavery in Aleppo, and privately he wondered if the ghosts of the past had not yet been laid to rest there for the sultan. Whatever haunted him seemed to find no purchase outside the city walls, however, for when they left the following day, Baybars’s spirits had risen as dramatically as the mountains before them.

Dispatching one of his amirs with a regiment to the Euphrates frontier to prevent the Mongols from attacking his rear, Baybars had led the Mamluk cavalry north into Anatolia, leaving the infantry, heavy equipment and siege engines in Aleppo, along with Baraka, Khadir and Kalawun’s sons. Scouts had delivered reports that Abaga, the Ilkhan of Persia, having learned through his own spies of Baybars’s arrival, had amassed an impressive force. It was under the control of a formidable Mongol commander, Tatawun, and augmented by Seljuks led by their
pervaneh
. They were thought to be camped out on the Plain of Albistan, beyond the broad Jayhan River. Baybars’s plan was to take out this force, before he attempted to capture any strongholds or towns. The route he would be taking was too treacherous for anything other than mounted men, but even they were at its mercy.

The defile through the Taurus had claimed the lives of many since the First Crusaders, having sailed across the Bosphorus from Constantinople, were faced with the awesome mountain barrier that lay between them and Syria. The narrow pass stretched dizzyingly through craggy limestone peaks, in places clad with ice and dark pine forests. Now and then, the track would wind around the mountains, and chasms, thousands of feet deep, would yawn beside it. In the mist one morning, after a cramped, freezing night in the pass, one man’s horse lost its footing and plunged into one of these chasms, taking its rider and another Mamluk with it. Another three were riding close to the edge when part of the track disintegrated, hauling them screaming into the abyss. The army was still in the defile when a scout returned to tell them that a company of Mongols, two thousand strong, was waiting for them beyond the pass. Baybars sent one of his amirs ahead with a regiment bolstered by Bedouin troops to deal with them. By the time he led the rest of the army down from the heights of the Taurus, the Mongol dead were already bloated and flyblown in the field where they had been cut down.

Kalawun found Baybars standing at the edge of the encampment, looking down on the Plain of Albistan. Several Bahri were close by. “My lord? You wished to see me?”

Baybars didn’t look round. “Are the men ready?”

“The officers have begun rousing them. They will be fit to leave within the hour.”

“Good.”

Kalawun followed Baybars’s intense gaze. In the somber half-light, the land stretched away, folded and creased like crumpled cloth. A wide, pale strip flowed like a hem of silk through it. The Jayhan. Beyond the river, visible by the fires they had lit, was the Mongol camp. Kalawun made out faint movement, as riders rode between the tents, probably waking their men. He always found the mirror armies made of each other disturbing. This far, unable to see faces or hear voices, he might as well have been looking at his own soldiers. But then he made himself focus on who they were, and the impatient glint he saw in Baybars’s blue eyes became reflected in his own. For it had been Mongol swords that had cut down their families and the families of so many others during raids into the lands of the Kipchak Turks, destroying lives and condemning the survivors to slavery. It was years ago now, but the old memories were like dry wood, the merest spark setting a fire within him. The Mongols had paid the price for those attacks seventeen years ago at Ayn Jalut. Now they would pay again.

“You’ve been quiet on this campaign, Amir. What is troubling you?”

Kalawun tore his gaze from the Mongol encampment to see Baybars watching him. It was true, he had been preoccupied, but he couldn’t very well tell the sultan why. Forcing aside the troubling image of the Ka‘ba in Mecca that sprung into his mind at the question, he answered. “I am concerned for Nasir, my lord. I have been wondering when he will be returned to us. It has been months since we heard from the Assassins.”

“They would not have known we were leaving Cairo. I imagine that when we return we shall find him waiting for us there. Come, let us prepare for the battle.”

Together, Baybars and Kalawun headed across the grass to their camp, two old warriors walking in silence, the gray in their beards made silver by the advance of dawn.

MECCA, ARABIA, 15 APRIL A.D. 1277

Will, only a few yards from the Ka‘ba, barely had time to draw his falchion from beneath the burka’s folds, before the scarlet-robed man was on him. A word leapt into his mind.
Betrayed!
Then he was lashing out with his sword to deflect the blow the dusky-skinned man cast at him. Their swords met with shocking force, almost threatening to buckle the blades. Will clenched his jaw with the impact of it and heard Robert, a few paces behind him, fighting with another of the men who had risen from what had, now so obviously, been a protective circle around the temple. As he lunged at his attacker, Will glimpsed a word inscribed on the man’s armband, the gold thread picked out by the torchlight.
Amir.
The only time he had seen that title displayed in such a way was on Kalawun’s uniform. This was no ordinary guard and no mere soldier. The man he was fighting was a Mamluk commander.

Within moments, the courtyard surrounding the Ka‘ba was filled with the hollow ring of steel and shouts as the Templars and Shias raced to help Will and Robert. The Egyptians spread out to meet them, aided by the mosque’s guards. One of the Shias fell at a thrust from a Mamluk sword, and Carlo let out an anguished howl as a blade punched through his side and was ripped out again, blood spraying as he collapsed to his knees. A second thrust punctured him in the stomach, killing him. Francesco went down a few moments later, a Mamluk sword through his throat. Zaccaria had felled one soldier, but two more were circling him, and the powerful Sicilian, already wearied by the journey, was feeling the uncustomary bite of fear.

Will heard Robert cry out, and he stabbed desperately at the Mamluk amir in front of him. He wanted to yell at the man that he had no intention of stealing the Stone, but he had no words, only breaths, ragged and desperate, that were ripped from him as he fought for his life.

Suddenly, something solid connected with the back of his legs and he fell back, landing with a shout on the black tiles, his sword jolting from his hand to clatter away behind him. He had tripped over the pannier. It toppled, dislodging the tray of spices fitted inside, which fell out as the lid came away, spilling powdered nutmeg. And something else. The stone, which had been nestled at the bottom of the pannier covered in cloth, rolled out beside Will. The triumph that flared in the Mamluk commander’s eyes as he bore down on Will vanished. He faltered, staring in shock at the oval-shaped black stone, which had come free of its coverings. His gaze flicked to the true relic that was still safely embedded in the wall of the Ka‘ba. Confusion spread through his face, and the few seconds’ pause was all Will needed. Grabbing for his sword, he brought the blade round, lunging toward the Mamluk. The amir saw it coming and just managed to get his own weapon in the way, but he wasn’t quite quick enough to avoid the strike. Will’s falchion, although deflected from its trajectory toward his groin, slipped past the outside of his leg, below the point where his mail coat extended, slicing flesh. The amir cried out and stumbled, dropping to one knee. Will was up a second later. The Mamluk raised his head, seeming to brace himself. But Will didn’t strike a second time. Instead, he turned and fled.

Robert was close to the Ka‘ba, fighting vainly. There was a rip in his burka, and Will could see a nasty slash through his upper arm, a fold of skin flapping loose, blood flowing thickly. His eyes were slits of pain and he didn’t see Will racing toward him. Neither did his attacker. Will whipped his sword brutally across the back of the Mamluk’s knee, hamstringing him. As he fell with a howl, Will grabbed Robert and propelled him toward the west gate. A shout went up. Zaccaria and Alessandro were close to the gate. Four Mamluks and two guards were down, as were three of the Shias, Carlo and Francesco. Will glimpsed Kaysan fighting savagely with two soldiers, drenched in sweat, a ferocious grin twisting his face, then he and Robert were at the gate. Two guards were there, fighting with two Shias who, Will realized, were those left in charge of the camel. “Get out of here!” he shouted at Zaccaria. Pulling Robert with him, Will ducked a stray sword blow that arced in his direction and raced through the shadows of the arcade and out of the gate.