Pillars of Light (38 page)

N
athanael watched the man close the door behind him and move off down the street. Tariq walked with his shoulders hunched and his hands curled inwards, a man guarding the generous swell of his belly from jealous eyes. Even if Nat had not known who he was, he would have hated him for his self-satisfied swagger. Imagine, feeding yourself out of the citadel stores and bringing nothing out to feed your wife, her father and brother. The man was a monster on that count alone. Nathanael wished him dead.

He waited until Tariq was out of sight, checked to make sure there was no one marking his presence, then crossed the road and rapped on the door, once, twice, a pause, then once again. Footsteps on the tile floor, then the door opened and he stepped quickly inside.

“Did he see you?”

“No.”

“Good.”

Nat handed the covered basket over and Zohra took it. Inside was the very last of their store of tea, some lentils and chickpeas scraped from the cellar floor, a small packet of rice that would make
maybe two meagre meals, some raisins from last summer’s grape harvest and a handful of the final dried onions. There was hardly anything left to give. Soon they would be like the very poorest folk, forced to boil old hides and shoe leather for broth, to search for weeds among the ruins, to lie in wait for the few rats or wild birds left within the walls. Some people had made a sort of tea out of ground-up palm fronds, which proved to be poisonous. He watched Zohra move quickly towards the kitchen with her treasures.

“You must not live in fear of him,” he chided, following her into the kitchen. “He cannot forbid you to go out.”

Zohra sighed. “It’s easier to do as he demands. Don’t be angry with me, I can’t bear it.”

Ever since Aisa had drowned, something had gone out of her, some essential spark. Little sign of the lioness now, more like a feral cat that snatched at food then ran away. Tariq, noting this, had pressed his advantage, every day taking greater control of the household, and of his wife, introducing rules governing her behaviour—not to venture beyond the communal oven at the end of the road, not to walk abroad without either himself or Rachid, not to allow anyone beyond the immediate family into the house when he was not there, to go veiled at all times, never to look any man directly in the eye.

“He never said anything about other parts,” Nat had teased upon hearing this, and Zohra had promptly burst into tears. So now he tried not to add to her burdens by making remarks or jokes, though it was difficult to see Zohra so reduced. And gradually, once the storm of grief over the loss of poor Aisa had lost some degree of its force, he had tried increasingly to bring a little kindness into her life—a pot of honey, packets of herbal tea put together by Sara, some grain for the pigeons begged from a merchant in exchange for his services, a piece of turquoise silk he had found in a chest at home with which Zohra might bind her hair beneath the hood of
her djellaba. He had never seen her wear it, no doubt out of fear her husband would demand to know where it had come from. He seemed to take pleasure in denying her.

“Little bird,” he said now, “you haven’t been eating.”

Zohra shook her head. “I eat enough.”

“Enough to survive, not enough to thrive.”

“There’s not enough to go around. The men need more than I do.”

Nathanael cut off the bitter words that welled up inside him. “Sorgan gets little treats up at the garrison, and Tariq gets fed at the citadel,” he pointed out. “You must not let them take your share. What would they do without you if you were to fall sick?” He watched as Zohra took this in. He took Zohra’s hand in his own, turned it over. “See how every bone is visible? That’s too thin.” It was a thrill to touch her, even innocently. “If ever you run out of food you must come to me, there is always something I can find. You will, won’t you?”

Zohra looked down at her hands and said nothing.

How had she become so passive? To see her like this gave him a physical pain, a pang of loss.
Little wraith
, he thought,
little ghost
.

“Promise me.”

“Your first duty is to your mother and Nima,” Zohra said quietly.

Duty? The word
love
teetered on Nathanael’s tongue but he bit it back.
Each day a little more
, he vowed to himself.
I will win you back. I will save you
. He hoped his fervour didn’t show in his eyes.

“There is always honey, little bird. Always honey for you. And when that is gone, there is always me.”

Zohra looked confused. “What?”

She does not remember
, Nat thought.
She does not remember that afternoon when I offered my whole self to her, to love, to destroy, to be devoured—eaten if ever she was starving
. The remark had been made half in jest, but he meant it fully now.
Perhaps she does not remember
how we were
, he thought again.
Perhaps she doesn’t remember any of it at all
.

But Zohra remembered it all: every word, every touch. And that was what frightened her so much.

A fortnight later, Nat was sitting in the tea house, staring into the glass of liquid before him on the table. You could not have called it tea; he did not know what it had been made from.

“It’s all there was,” Hamsa Nasri said, apologetically.

Around them the usual babble of gossip and chatter dipped and rumbled. The tenor of it grew more sober by the day. There had been some excitement at the arrival of the new commander the previous week, a fierce Kurd with a huge black beard by the name of Al-Mashtub, who had given a rousing speech about pride and ancestors. But it was clear to Nat as he listened to the conversations around him that folk were losing what little optimism the Kurd’s arrival had initially provoked.

“The sultan sent him because he knew what was coming,” said Younes, who’d just come down from a shift on the wall. “He’ll have had spies out all down the coast, and when they reported back what they’d seen heading our way he knew our defences would need stiffening. He’s an old warhorse is Al-Mashtub. He’s seen it all. He’ll put some backbone into the garrison.”

Six great ships bearing the blue silk banners of the French king, Philip Augustus, had sailed blithely into view the previous week, entirely unchallenged. The Christian blockade was so tight that no Muslim ship could approach without being destroyed or turned back miles from Akka’s port. From these ships they had watched a small army of new warriors in full armour disembarking, warhorses with ribbons braided through their manes, horns blaring, troops singing in chorus. They seemed happy to be at war.

“They want to kill us,” Younes said. “They cannot wait.”

“I’ve never seen such monsters as those siege towers they brought,” said a thin young man who pulled up a stool to join their group. “I never knew trees grew so high.”

Younes leaned over and pulled him into an embrace so tender that Nat realized the young man must be his dancing boy, Iskander. He looked as frail as a cricket, as if he had not eaten in weeks. There was probably not much trade at the moment, Nat thought.

“I heard they have massive battering rams, too,” Hamsa said, at his most doomy. “Those towers will overtop our walls, and while they’ve got us pinned down they’ll send the rams in to batter down the gates.”

“I heard our supplies of
naft
are running out,” Younes said. “Even the lad from Damascus can’t magic it out of thin air.”

Nat had been up on the walls earlier in the day, in his usual capacity as a doctor to the wounded, but also—though it went against every precept of his training—as a combatant. There was hardly a man in the city now who did not put in a shift with a crossbow, if he could shoot one, or simply hefting rocks to the catapult team to lob down at the enemy. The Franj had set up a number of vast catapults, the largest of which the garrison had named The Bad Neighbour. They had set up their own mangonel, The Bad Kinsman, opposite. Daily, the two traded boulders. A large chunk of the wall near the Accursed Tower had been badly damaged. They had repaired it as best they could, beneath a hail of missiles. The enemy were mining deep inside the sturdy walls now; it was only counter-mining from within that stopped them breaking through. By night the Franj continued to fill in the moat, bringing earth and stones from their camp, building up a great rampart topped with iron breastworks, behind which shield their bowmen fired upon the garrison night and day.

“They are inexorable,” Younes said, his eyes dark with exhaustion. “They are like the sea: every day they come up closer and wash
away a little more of our defences. And they just keep coming, God damn them.” Then he told them how the man beside him on the wall had fallen to the ground as if arrow-struck. “I looked for a wound,” he said, “but there was nothing. He was quite, quite dead. Even Nat here couldn’t have brought him back.”

There was muted laughter at this old joke.

“I thought perhaps he’d fainted. I mean, no one’s getting any sleep with this bombardment. But no, he’d just died. Just like that—on the spot. From hunger, we reckoned. His body was all skin and bone.” He shook his head, and turned his attention to Iskander.

Nat watched as Younes stroked the boy’s cheek, oblivious to the gaze of others, and he saw how the lad turned his face to his lover, and for a moment he felt a twinge of jealousy. When he looked around, he saw the same looks of sympathy and tenderness on other men’s faces as they watched the pair. There was no disapproval or disgust; no one had the energy for it. They were all teetering on the edge of survival—lost and grieving, damaged and alone.

“Nathanael!”

Nat looked around. It was the veteran, Driss.

“Thank the Lord you’re here.” The old man touched his hands to his heart. “Can you come see my Habiba? She’s taken a turn for the worse.”

Nat made his farewells swiftly, swung his great leather doctor’s bag over his shoulder and followed the fierce old soldier down the street, trying not to wince at his pronounced limp, which must have been all the more painful when forced to such determined speed.

The house didn’t look like much from the outside; Muslim culture enshrined modesty at its heart. But once inside Nat looked around the salon with some surprise. As far as he knew Driss got by on a veteran’s pension, which wasn’t much. Yet shining Venetian vases sat on carved tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl; there was a good quality carpet beneath his bare soles. Driss had been most
insistent about the removal of shoes at the door, which was the case in most houses, but in times of sickness and hardship people didn’t always remember such niceties.

He attended the old woman in the cool room at the back of the house where she lay in shuttered darkness, went into the small but immaculate kitchen and made up tinctures for her from the simples he carried in his bag. It was clear, though, that she wouldn’t last out the year, and there was little he could do for her condition. Not that he said as much. There was no point in taking hope away from the devoted couple, and sometimes people rallied miraculously. But when it came to the matter of payment he refused to take anything for the visit or the medicines.

“I can’t take money from a friend,” he said. “And you’re always paying for my tea.” Which was true.

Driss was implacable. “I can afford it,” he insisted, as he always did, and Nat realized it was not just the iron pride of a soldier speaking, but simple, honest truth.

Nathanael was less shy than others when it came to matters of money—you had to be when you were a doctor, in and out of people’s houses, in and out of their lives. Indicating the lavish furnishings, he asked, “Did you come into a fortune or something?”

“Or something.” The veteran tapped the side of his nose, but his eyes glinted. Nat could sense he was dying to tell his story to someone, a story he could not tell in public.

“So …?” he encouraged. “What was the something?”

“You must tell no one. I was sworn to secrecy.”

Nat placed his hand on his heart. “I promise.”

Driss leaned in close as if the walls had ears. “I saved the sultan’s life once,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

Nat raised his eyebrows. “Did you now? And which battle was that in?” He almost dreaded asking, for the old man’s war stories were famed for being interminable.

“Not a battle. Someone tried to kill him.” He pulled aside the neck of his frayed brown robe, a garment that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on a beggar in the central square.

Nat found himself looking at a big, pale scar, a depressed and puckered circle, much more wicked in appearance than anything produced by a simple knife wound. He sucked air through his teeth. “Nasty, that. Looks as if you lost a fair bit of flesh there.”

“They had to cut it out,” Driss said matter-of-factly. “The blade was poisoned.”

“Poisoned?”

“It was the Old Man.”

“What old man?” Nat frowned.

“The Old Man of the Mountains, old Sidi ad-Din Sinan. The Lord of the
Hashshashin
.”

“He really exists?” Nathanael was skeptical. People in power often put about tales of assassination attempts to bolster the legend of their capacity for survival. Though from what people said of the sultan, he did not sound like a man much given to embellishment or lies.

“He’s tried to murder Salah ad-Din three times to my certain knowledge. The first time was in ’74 when I got in the way. Then a while later some fellow who’d managed to win his trust enough to be made a personal bodyguard attacked him. That was a close shave. Luckily the sultan is a cautious man—he was wearing a mail coif under his turban at the time and the blade grazed right off it. It’s said he wears a steel cap at all times now. And on the last occasion, when he’d gone to beard the old lion in his den at Masyuf itself, they say he woke to find an assassin’s dagger and some cakes on the pillow beside him, the cakes still warm from the oven.”

“But why would the Old Man want to kill Salah ad-Din? Surely they’re on the same side.”

Driss shook his head. “These fanatics, they have no side but their own. Can’t see beyond their own noses. The world they inhabit is a distortion, a fantasy, an abomination of all that is right and decent. There’s nothing godly about them. They’d side with the Devil himself if they thought it would bring about the domination they seek. It wouldn’t surprise me to find them in league with the bastards beyond these very gates.”