Knights of the Cross (24 page)

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 Provençals 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.’

‘If the Franks who control the harbour allowed it. How likely do you think that is, when half the army is trying to flee? And even if they took you and Anna they would not take a hundred of my men.’

The conclusion was unspoken but inevitable. He would not leave his Varangians to face battle without him.

‘Kerbogha may reach his fist around the city,’ Sigurd continued, ‘but he will find it harder than you think to squeeze it shut. We have spent seven months trying without avail – why should it be quicker for him? The walls still stand unbroken. We are outnumbered but I doubt that we are fewer than the Turks who defied us so long. And if the Emperor is in Anatolia, as Tatikios said, then he may arrive to relieve us within weeks.’

‘No.’ It was a sound argument, but I could not accept it. Others had devised the schemes and fought the battles by which we had taken the city, but it had been my hand that drew the bolt which unlocked the gate. To see the devastation inside again, even for a minute, would be unbearable.

In deference to my frailty, Sigurd had restrained his temper; now he loosed it. ‘Very well. You, Demetrios, can beg the Franks for a ship that they will not give you, or make yourself a target for Kerbogha’s archers, or throw yourself off a cliff in the mountains; I will not lead my company into certain death. To be trapped in the city may be a grim fate, but I would rather face a grim fate behind stout walls than outside them.’ He turned to Anna. ‘What do you say?’

She frowned, her fingers twisting in her belt. Her gaze would not meet mine. ‘I am not a soldier. I think . . . I think Demetrios is right to fear that we shall not survive a siege.’

‘Then you will come with me?’ I said.

‘But I also think that his thoughts are agitated. They do not run clear. You are not a soldier either, Demetrios. Perhaps at this moment you would rather walk free and die than face the awful confines of Antioch. But we must stay alive, or try to. What was it you said two days ago? Even if you had become a great-grandfather before you saw your family again, the delay would be worth it.’

I shook my head, tears stinging my eyes, and turned away from them. A thousand thoughts warred in my mind, but they did not matter.

‘We will stay in Antioch.’

We set our camp on the western ramparts, near the Duke’s Gate. A few of the Frankish captains had roused themselves from debauch and placed sentinels near the gates, but we found a stretch of wall between two towers that none had claimed. It was not a place where I would have chosen to be, guarding the line between two armies, but it kept us from having to venture any further into the city. And whoever attacked, from whichever side, they would pay dearly to prise us out.

As quickly as possible, we set about strengthening our position. Each tower had one door opening onto the adjoining walls and one at its foot leading into the city. Using timbers and rubble, we filled in the lower portions of the stairwell in one of the towers so that it became impassable. In the guardroom above, we stacked broken beams with which we could bar the upper door if necessary. It was hot, weary work, but I did not resent it. The simple monotony of the task lifted heavier burdens from my mind; there was something pure in the effort which I snatched at. For the first time in what seemed an age I peeled off my armour and moved freely, rolling my tunic down to my waist. It was alarming to see how gaunt I had become.

‘We had best forage what food we can.’ I leaned against the stone wall of the guardroom, enjoying the feel of its coolness on my skin. ‘When Kerbogha comes, the supply routes will be cut.’

‘Agreed.’ Sigurd stepped out into the sunlight on the wall. ‘Beric, Sweyn. Take a dozen men and see what provisions you can find in the city. Sheep or goats would be good. And fodder for the horses.’ He paused; through the arch of the doorway I could see him looking up at the top of the tower. ‘We should mount our standard, let the Franks know we hold these walls.’

‘They might take it amiss.’ I followed him onto the broad walkway which joined our towers. Looking back across the city, I could see the three peaks of Mount Silpius looming over us. On the highest, in the centre, it was just possible to make out a red flag strung between a pair of pollarded pines. ‘I do not think Bohemond will suffer any other banner to fly over Antioch.’

‘Shit on Bohemond. When the Emperor Alexios comes it will be the eagle of Byzantium, not the Norman snake, which holds sway.’

‘He will not thank you for reminding him.’

‘Then I will teach him manners with the blade of my axe.’

‘I would like to see it. But to flaunt our standard now would be foolhardy. We are already hated by the Franks; it would be better to keep from offering them a clear target.’

‘Why not raise the banner of the cross?’

I turned, and saw Anna walking out of the tower. She had been arranging her medicines in the guardroom: her sleeves were rolled up and her uncovered hair was tied back with a ribbon. I hoped that none of the Franks caught sight of her.

‘No.’ I shuddered. If I was honest, the pillaging of Antioch had been little worse than the violence that any victorious army would inflict – Frankish, Turkish, Saracen or even Byzantine. When the Emperor whose honour I now served had seized Constantinople, I had spent three days guarding my home and family from the depredations of his army. But the Franks fought not for a king or a lord but in the name of God. It should be different, I told myself.

‘Why not? It is the symbol of Christ – not of any army. Will you forswear Him because of what the Franks have done by it?’ She pointed to my own cross, which hung on its chain against my chest. ‘Will you rip that away and melt it down?’

I did not answer.

‘God will judge the Franks for what they have done in His name. It is not for you to judge Him.’

‘It’s still a betrayal to hide our own banner,’ Sigurd objected.

I opened my arms in surrender to Anna. ‘We will raise the banner of the cross.’

‘We don’t have one,’ said Sigurd.

‘Anna can make it.’

Anna glared at me. ‘I sew wounds, Demetrios, not clothes or flags.’

‘If Sigurd sews it, it will look more like a spider than a cross.’

The strain of the moment passed, though the ache of unease lingered between us. It was unnerving how easily we could come to quarrel. Anna at last consented to make the banner and withdrew to find cloth, while Sigurd turned his attention to our defences again. The city’s houses were built close against the walls, with only a narrow alley between us and them. Immediately adjacent, we looked down on the red-tiled roofs of houses set in a square around a courtyard. A shady plane tree grew in its centre, masking the wreckage that the looters had left scattered about beneath.

‘If enemies reached that roof, they could lay a ladder across the alley and attack us on the wall,’ Sigurd said.

‘If enemies get so far that they are on the roof, we shall probably be doomed anyway.’ I tried to make it a joke, but neither of us smiled. ‘The courtyard will pass as a stable for the horses, though.’

‘Too well.’ Disease and battle had reduced our mounts to a mere thirteen – and if that was an unlucky number I feared it would soon be unluckier still.

‘Let us hope Beric and Sweyn find fodder. And food for the riders as well.’

The light was softening as the sun slid away, gilding us with a burnished light. Perhaps I should have read it as a sign of the Lord’s benevolence, the glow of the victory he had bestowed, but I did not. The very presence of beauty on such a day of torments seemed itself blasphemous: I could not bask in the radiance but willed the sun ever lower, hoping that night would hasten on.

We had broken one siege; now there was another to endure. Did the golden sun presage triumph, I wondered, or would it prove the last glimmer before we fell into darkness?