Pillars of Light (23 page)

No one stepped forward. Instead, they began to drift away, until he was left alone with the child. For long minutes, he had tried to lift her over his good shoulder, but with only one working arm his efforts had been pitiable. At last a big, quiet man in a dark robe and a faded green turban had stepped forward and offered his services. He bent and scooped the child up and followed Nat without a word through the winding streets of the medina.

When this man had brought the girl in and laid her on the cushions in the shady salon, he said, “Your father eased my mother’s passing, God rest her soul. He is a good man, and I can see he has taught you well. My name is Mohammed Azri and I have a smithy near the east gate. If ever you need me or my son, Saddiq, you will find us there.
Bes’salama
.” Then he had dipped his head, touched his hand to his heart and walked back out into the dreary day.

The girl was still unconscious, though her breathing was regular. Nat laid a hand on her forehead, then on her neck, felt her heart beating steadily. He could find no obvious injury to her head or body. Perhaps the shock of what she had seen had rendered her insensible and she would come to in her own time. Poor little thing. In what sort of world did a child have to waken in a stranger’s house to the news that her mother was dead?

When Yacub came home, he knelt down and brushed the girl’s hair from her forehead, but the child just lay there, her chest rising and falling. He levered himself upright with a grunt as his knees creaked, and looked at Nathanael. “She seems to be physically unharmed. Let us hope she will wake up in her own time. You, on the
other hand …” He cocked his head. “Let me have a look at that arm.”

Nat waved him away. “It’s fine, I’ve stitched it.”

His father gave him a long, steady look. “You may be a doctor now, but you’re also my son.”

Yacub unwound the bandage carefully and regarded the arm with a blank expression. The old doctor gently touched the inflamed skin around the wound, got his son to flex the arm; he touched each finger and manipulated the shoulder joint. Then he went away and came back some minutes later with a sweet-smelling ointment, and he offered Nat a cup of something so strong it made his eyes water.

“Drink this.”

“What’s in it?”

“I’ll tell you when you’ve drunk it.”

Nat knew what that meant. He also knew his father’s uncompromising tone. Reduced to being a child again, he took his medicine without complaint and let the poppy take its effect.

The next day there was a knock at the door. Nat opened it and found Zohra Najib there, in a headscarf, reticent, with the rain pattering down around her. “I heard you’d been hurt,” she said, and then just stared at him.

“It’s nothing. Much. I’m fine, really.”

They stood apart as if a fence divided them. “Come in out of the rain,” Nathanael started, at exactly the same moment Zohra said, “Well, I must get on.”

They both fell silent until Zohra dropped her amber gaze, mumbled something about the fish market and ran away down the alley, her basket bumping on her back.

It was the first time they had been in one another’s company since that terrible day when they had found Nima Najib dead. He watched her go, and it was as if his heart were being dragged down
the street after her, drawn through the mud and bashed against the walls. Then he went back inside, walked quickly past the kitchen where his mother was crushing chickpeas and sesame seeds with oil, out into the farthest corner of the courtyard under the shelter of the vines, where no one but the bees could see him weep as he had not done since he was a child of three.

After that, he shut all his memories of Zohra away, sealed them off, just as his father had cauterized his wound.

The little girl slept on. On the sixth day, Nathanael went out into the streets to see if he could find a clue to her identity. But no matter where he asked no one knew who she was, or the name of her dead mother. No one had heard of a family seeking a lost child.

When he got home, he found the child was sitting up and that his mother was tempting her with some little pastries. He stopped in the doorway. It was like a small miracle.

Crossing the room, Nat dropped to one knee before the girl. He took one of the cakes and held it out to the child. Honey dripped languorously from it to pool on the plate below. He watched the girl watching it. She glanced up as if questioning the gift, then slid her eyes away hastily. At last she reached out and popped the sweetmeat into her mouth and chewed solemnly, her regard rapturous.

“Can you tell me your name?”

The child shook her head.

“We have to call you something. Zinab?”

Another shake of the head.

“Rachel?”

The little girl glared at him.

Nat ran through half a dozen more names, receiving blank looks or fierce head shakes and was about to give up when suddenly the child said, “Nima.”

A prickle ran down his spine. The first word the girl had uttered and it had to be the name of Zohra’s dead mother. He caught his mother’s gaze over the top of the child’s head. Sara gave him a wavery smile. He knew exactly what she was thinking, what she wanted to say.

He forced himself to a cheeriness he did not feel. “Nima? That’s your name?”

The little brows drew together. Then the child stuck her finger into the pooled honey, raised it to her mouth and sucked thoughtfully. “Nima,” she said again.

Nathanael swallowed. “Nima, can you remember your family name?”

A look of consternation.

“Your father’s name?”

Tears began to well. He knew he could not mention the dead mother, her chest all crushed and ruined.

“Nima, well that’s good, then,” Sara said brightly. “That’s a lovely name. Are you from Akka, sweet? Do you live in the city?”

Nima shook her head.

“Did you travel here by boat, on the sea?” Nat asked.

“No.” A very emphatic denial. After a pause, she added, “A donkey. It was brown.”

“Little dove, all donkeys are brown.”

“Some are grey. It had kind eyes and it did this.” She shook her head in parody of an animal beset by flies.

Nathanael laughed. “Did it do this?” Throwing his head back, he hee-hawed till both Nima and his mother were giggling uncontrollably.

So that was the key, then.

The next day Nat came back to the house with a tabby kitten—
al-tabiya
, for the markings on watered silk—and like silk its fur was cool and smooth and fragrant. Nima dubbed it Kiri. She buried
her nose in its fur, and the little animal squirmed and purred, and from then on it was love and babbling and Kiri this and Kiri that until it was hard to believe the child had ever been mute, and Nat half wished she still was.

Soon Nat was able to take up his duties again, administering medical aid to the garrison. It was hard work, and bloody, but it kept his mind away from his personal pain.

One evening, after finishing his shift, he dropped into the tea house on what had once been called Templars Way but since the retaking of the city had been renamed Martyrs Avenue. Inside, old men sat or squatted, their hands cupped around glasses of hot tea. He took his usual seat just inside the awning and leaned back against the cool wall to watch the rain patter down into the muddy puddles outside.

It was not long before he was recognized. His father was something of a local celebrity—he had brought innumerable children into the world, saved grandmothers and sons and tended to the odd infection picked up in the bordellos by the dock without a word of censure—and Nat had taken on a lot of Yacub’s work when he was not working on the wall, now that his father was so occupied at the citadel. It meant he rarely had to pay for his drinks.

Three of the men brought their cushions closer, inquired after his injured arm. Hamsa Nasri, a grocer from close to the Friday Mosque, poured him out a fresh glass of the steaming tea. “Get it down you, lad—it’ll warm you through.”

Tea was running short. Ships were reluctant to chance the double peril of the enemy fleet and bad weather. And it wasn’t just tea, either: sugar, fresh meat, fruit and vegetables were all scarce, for all the farmland beyond the walls had been enveloped and destroyed by the besieging army. Everyone’s diet was becoming monotonous.

“What’s been going on up there today, then?” Nat nodded his head vaguely in the direction of the city walls.

Younes the barber wore a patched-up version of the garrison uniform, though still with his white crocheted skullcap over his neatly cropped hair. Nat suspected he had volunteered because he liked being first with the news and was missing the gossip from his barbershop. “Nothing much. They’re having a worse time of it than us, the Franj. Their trenches are full of water and shit, the mud is knee-deep and no one can be bothered to man the ballistas.”

Driss leaned across the table. “I remember when we—”

The rest of them groaned. “No more of your old war stories, Driss!”

Driss was a veteran of the last campaign. A huge scar bisected his eyebrow and carried on, after the interruption of the orbit, down the cheek, to disappear into his grizzled beard. He shrugged. “Just giving the boy the benefit of my extensive knowledge.” He patted Nathanael on the shoulder. “You should come back with me, have a good home-cooked meal and let me tell you about Ramla. My Habiba makes a fine lentil soup. Why, you could even bring some of your meat ration, make a proper feast of it.”

That got them all talking about the rationing. “I’ve had to close my stall,” Hamsa Nasri said with a sigh. “Now that most of the stock’s been commandeered by the citadel to stop all the panic-buying and profiteering, there’s just no point staying open. It’s bad luck for those of us who were selling at a fair price.”

“Tahar the baker was grumbling away this morning,” Driss said. “The authorities have set a price on his loaves. He says it’s impossible to turn a decent profit. But I swear the loaves Habiba bought off him this morning were smaller than yesterday’s.”

“Well, that’s one way of making money,” Hamsa said sourly.

“How long can the bloody Franj keep this up?” Younes said. “Surely the sultan will chase them off before it gets much worse.”

“They were there for the taking, the Christians. You could see they were in chaos,” said Younes. “Taki ad-Din had them on the run. Salah ad-Din should have pressed on when he had the chance.”

Driss agreed. “Another day of battle and we could have driven them right into the sea.”

“I heard the sultan was ill,” said Nat. It was common knowledge that Salah ad-Din suffered maladies that would send any other man to his bed.

That quietened them. “God give him health,” Driss said fervently.

“Insh’allah.”

“
Insh’allah
. Even so, you’d have expected the war divan to act when it had the advantage.”

“That’s the trouble when your army is made up of squads from as far apart as Mauritania, Harran and south of the Tigris,” Driss said. “There are so many factions involved it’s a miracle they ever agree on anything.”

“If there’s one thing they seem to agree on, it’s not being here for the winter.” The barber laughed.

“There seem to be fewer of them every day,” Younes agreed. “The hillside encampments have been getting sparser. But the Franj army is just as diverse—and they don’t even speak the same language. At least all of our army speaks Arabic. God knows how the Christians keep order and make their different battalions work together.”

Driss laughed morosely. “It’s a lot easier when they can’t run away. Once the Franj are here they’re stuck here, aren’t they? Their homes and comforts are thousands of miles away, whereas for our lot, even if their families are far away, there’s plenty of women to be had a few days’ ride away. That’s why so many of them have gone: the sultan had no choice but to let them go, for fear they’d simply leave and never be seen again. Besides, there’s not much anyone can do out there at the moment.”

“They’re soft bastards, those Persian lords. Too used to their luxuries,” said the grocer.

“Missing their harems, you mean,” Driss said dismissively.

“And their dancing boys.” Younes smiled.

It was said that Younes himself kept a painted dancing boy down near the docks. Nat didn’t think any the less of Younes for his preference. He just found it rather odd, when the city was so full of prostitutes, to choose to keep a boy. But he supposed everyone needed someone to love. The thought of Zohra’s golden eyes made his heart squeeze. He drained the last drops of his now cold tea. It tasted as bitter as death.

Pushing himself away from the table, he stood up. “Good health, gentlemen. May God keep you.” It did not matter that their versions of God were different.

As he walked home he saw an old woman begging at the corner of the road, her outstretched hand painfully thin. He imagined Zohra reduced to such a state, and the image horrified him so much that he ran to the bakery, bought the two small loaves that were his family’s allowance and, returning, pressed them into the old woman’s arms. Then he walked quickly away before she could thank him.

The Romans used starvation as a siege tactic
, he thought, remembering Josephus’s account of the ancient siege of Jerusalem, when the inhabitants died in droves from famine, ate one another, slaughtered their children because they could not bear to see them suffer. He could not imagine that this modern Franj army would be any more merciful than the Roman besiegers.