Pillars of Light (42 page)

Some people were sympathetic, and one or two even gave the little girl a piece of food—bread made with ground date pits, a piece
of dried fish—that they could barely afford to part with. But most were short with them, and a couple were openly derisive and angry. “A cat? If that’s the most you’ve lost you’re very lucky.” One man even said, “I tell you,
habibi
, if we’d seen a cat, there’d have been kebabs that night!” After that house visit, Nima was very quiet.

Nathanael no longer walked near the central plaza, where the bazaar had once spilled into the square. The sight of the abandoned stalls, the empty crates and canvas covers, the shattered boulders, cratered ground and gaping reed roof over the
qissaria
, and the dust over everything simply depressed him too much. The little Henna Souq, where he had first encountered Zohra Najib, was all closed up: no one cared much about how they looked or how they smelled when they did not know where their next meal was coming from.

He was luckier than most: Rana and her father looked after Nima when he was working, in exchange for his treatment of Rana’s little brother, who suffered from intermittent shivering fevers. These Nathanael could never quite eradicate, but he could at least relieve them with warming possets and tisanes. Rana’s family also gave him small fish and crabs from time to time. They had also, till last week, provided Nima with fish heads and tails with which to feed Kiri.

Nathanael sighed. If it had not been for the crabbers and the fishermen at the quay, they would all have starved to death long ago, though even the little harbour was not safe from the Franj missiles. Only last week a boat had taken a direct hit and gone to the bottom, and any vessel attempting to slip out into the open sea was immediately set upon by the ships in the enemy blockade

Rana and her father lived in a row of little mud-brick houses close to the docks. It had been a poor area at the best of times, and now it was little more than a slum. He reached the crabbers’ door and knocked. Sad to see doors shut, he thought: in times of peace folk were so much more trusting, in and out of each other’s houses,
sharing food and gossip, borrowing pots and ingredients, doors left wide open. Now it seemed people trusted their neighbours even less than their common enemy, the Franj.

“Hello! It’s me, Nathanael!” he called, and Rana opened the door and ushered him inside.

“Look, Nat, look!” Nima held something out—an earthenware pot full of water. Nathanael took it from her and raised it to his lips.

“No, silly!” The child giggled so much she almost choked. “It’s not for drinking, look, look!” Inside the pot there was a small, multicoloured fish swimming around in a dull, endless quest for the non-existent exit from its earthenware prison. “Rana says you can’t eat this sort, so I’m going to keep it. But if Kiri comes home we’ll have to hide it away or she’ll eat it and get sick.”

How long before she would forget the cat, Nat wondered, then felt ashamed of himself. Nima’s adoration of the tabby was as ardent as his for Zohra: as a child, you didn’t make the distinction between differing values of objects of desire.

He treated the boy, examining his tongue and his eyes, but found little sign of recovery. If he was honest, he did not think the lad would survive the summer, war or no war. But you couldn’t take people’s hope away from them, and so when Rana’s father asked he said he was no better but no worse, which was the truth.

“Perhaps they’re right to surrender,” the crabber said, shocking him.

“What?”

The man shrugged. “A swimmer left for Salah ad-Din’s camp this morning with another message from the commanders asking that they be allowed to call a truce and discuss terms.”

“Another?”

“That’s at least the second message. He sent back a flat no last time, and I don’t suppose it’ll be any different this time, more’s the
pity.” The crabber paused. “I just hope the lad makes it, he looked so tired and thin—” Too late he stopped, and his daughter’s face was closed and still.

To hear of the commanders of the city discussing the possibility of surrender filled Nathanael with a righteous fury: they had no right to decide the fate of the inhabitants of a city in which neither had lived for any time, to which they had no emotional ties. But to hear the crabber welcoming the idea sobered him. Perhaps, he thought—a rare admission—he was wrong.

On the way back to the Street of Tailors, he barely paid attention to Nima’s chatter, and so wrapped up in his thoughts was he that he did not respond at first when his name was called. It was Nima who cried out, “It’s Zohra, look, it’s Zohra!”

Zohra Najib had obviously left the house in a hurry, for she came bare-headed, her black hair snaking like the Medusa’s. She clutched Nathanael’s arm. “You have to come, quickly. You have to help me, Nat. There’s no one else I can ask.”

It was immediately clear that there was no doctor on earth who could do anything for Tariq. He lay in a heap at the foot of the stairs on the first landing, his neck at such an angle that it was obvious it had been broken. Sorgan sat at the top of the stairs like a statue.

“We have to get him out of here, hide him,” Zohra said.

“I killed him,” Sorgan added, with what seemed to Nathanael to be gloating satisfaction. “He hurt the pigeons. He hurt Zohra, too.”

Nat felt the old fury fire through him. Damn the man: he wished he’d killed him himself.

“Hush!” Zohra implored her brother. “You can’t say that! What have I told you?” She gazed helplessly at Nathanael. “They’ll take him away, put him in gaol, maybe even hang him. After Mother and Aisa, and Kamal …” The amber eyes welled with tears. “People
go missing all the time,” Zohra said. “They slip out over the walls, giving themselves up as prisoners to the enemy, or trying to make it to Salah ad-Din’s camp. And Tariq was never known as any sort of hero.”

“They’re going to ask questions anyway, my love.”

“Yes, but without a body …”

Nat rubbed a hand over his face and sighed. “Let me see what I can do.”

The area of the city near the east gate was worse than anywhere he had yet been. The houses were cratered, burned-out ruins, and in the midst of them a pair of huge mangonels had been set up, broken masonry from the houses used as ammunition to fire at the enemy over the walls. The sound of the enemy bombardment was loud here, and sometimes he could see clouds of mortar-dust blooming above the walls as their missiles struck.

“I’m looking for the smith, Mohammed Azri,” he shouted to one of the soldiers on duty, but the man shook his head, and so did the next dozen people he asked.

But farther down the road he found the ruins of a forge and a young man salvaging bits of pig iron.

“I’m looking for Mohammed Azri,” Nat said.

The man straightened up, extended a hand. “I am his son, Saddiq. We’ve moved the smithy to a safer place.” He was young and tall, gaunt in the face. The way his robe hung on him suggested he had been well-muscled before the famine took hold.

He led Nat through alleys towards the centre of the city, to a street that led onto the bazaar. Of old, it had been a tranquil area, occupied by bookbinders and perfume-sellers. The minaret of the Friday Mosque rose up behind it. Now, there was the usual array of boarded-up doors and stalls and a strong smell of burning. They
made their way through a throng of folk and workers ferrying barrows of wood and charcoal.

In the space occupied by the new smithy, soot-covered boys fed the fires and wielded the bellows while a group of men heated metal and hammered it out. A pile of household pots, horseshoes and braziers were being fed into the fires to emerge as arrowheads, swords and spearheads, which were, as they cooled, gathered eagerly by waiting soldiers and garrison volunteers. They did not look like people ready to give up the fight, Nathanael thought; they looked impatient and determined. He recognized the tallest of the hammering men as the one who had carried an unconscious Nima back to their home after the missile strike had killed her mother at the baker’s.

Nat hung back, waiting for a chance to speak with the smith, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of the hammers, the searing brightness of the fanned flames. But after a while one of the men missed his blow and stood swaying; then he went down like a felled ox. Others dragged him away from the heat of the furnace and the hammering recommenced.

Nathanael gathered himself. “I’m a doctor, let me through.”

The man was not unconscious, but he was groggy. “Have you eaten anything?” he asked him at last, and the fallen man cocked an eye and croaked out, “Have you?”

There was not much humour to be had in the midst of the siege, but that provoked some laughter. Someone brought the man a piece of flatbread and some lentil paste, another gave him water, and soon he was back on his feet again.

Mohammed Azri came to Nat’s side. “I recognize you,” he said. “You’re the doctor’s son.”

“I’m the doctor now.”

“Have you come to claim the favour I owe you?”

He admitted as much. “You may not want to do it when I tell you what it is.”

Mohammed Azri led him away to the back of the smithy where a small brazier bore a steaming samovar, and he poured out a bowl of some pale brown liquid. It did not taste like any tea Nat had ever drunk, but he sipped it gratefully. He kept his explanation to a minimum and the smith asked few questions.

“I will do this thing because it is you who asks,” he said at last. “I will meet you by the Little Mosque in the small hours.”

Nathanael had straightened Tariq’s limbs before they stiffened, but even so it took all five of them to move the body, they were all so weak and the corpse so heavy.

“He has not stinted himself during this siege.” Saddiq grimaced.

Zohra gave a bitter laugh. “No. Tariq did not believe in stinting himself.”

Baltasar, wakened by noises that echoed off the tiled walls, cried out from his bed, and Zohra ran to give him more of the valerian Nathanael had brought to quieten him. After that he slept till past first prayer, by which time the shrouded corpse of Tariq Assad was in its final resting place, the open grave near the east wall where all the poor dead were being interred. Nat stared into the mass grave, then around at the desolation, feeling a long-denied anger. This was his city, his home. These were good people, decent people, who had not sought conflict but were simply caught in the middle of two warring forces.

As they came away, the smith bowed his head and intoned, “O Allah! Grant this man protection and have mercy on him, and pardon him, and wash him with water and snow and hail and cleanse him of faults as a white cloth is cleansed of dirt.”

Nathanael gazed at Zohra, who held his glance for one piercing moment, then looked down at the shrouded body. “I am a widow,” she whispered. She started to tremble.

Then Sorgan’s stomach grumbled loudly. Saddiq clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s the trouble with being a giant,” he said. “It sounds so much emptier than anyone else’s stomach.”

“It is emptier,” Sorgan complained.

Mohammed Azri turned to Zohra. “I will bid you farewell, lady.”

She clasped his hand. “I do not know how to thank you.”

He looked at her hulking brother, then back to her upturned face. “I do. We are in desperate need of help at the forge. Could he help us sometimes?”

“You should ask him.”

The smith smiled at Sorgan. “Tell me, young man, do you like fire?”

Sorgan’s eyes lit up. “I love fire.”

T
hey had been telling me about Hell all my life. From those first weeks when I entered the Priory of St. Michael on the Mount as a wild boy, they’d set about beating it into me. In the book of Saint Matthew, Hell is described as a place where both soul and body could be destroyed. Acre defined the idea of Hell for me now.

Outside the walls there was a constant background noise of souls in agony, always an unquenchable fire was burning, and at night a storm of darkness. What it was like inside, God alone knew. We had been battering at the walls by night and day, hurling Greek fire over the battlements. If it went on much longer soon there would be nothing left of Acre but a burned-out shell. And maybe that was what they wanted, those kings we fought for: for, like angels armed with savage weapons, they were merciless in their destruction.

King Richard was so determined to take the city before the French king, Philip, that he was defying even the illness that ravaged him and had risen from the bed to which he had been banished by his doctors. He’d had a kind of hurdle-shed constructed for himself, and from there—too weak to stand upright—he would lie on his back to fire his mighty crossbow, and thus claim the glory.
Meanwhile, King Philip’s diggers had burrowed almost through the thickness of the wall beside the Accursed Tower, and, having set fires below the tower, they had weakened the structure. But still it had not fallen, and still the defenders held firm. And so the bombardment went on.

Our king declared that he would personally pay a week’s wages to any man who brought back a stone from the wall with his own hands. Four gold bezants! The heralds who brought the decree were almost trampled in the rush that ensued. Of the troupe, only Quickfinger succeeded in the task—by stealing a stone from a man who was having trouble dragging his boulder out of the trench with him, and running back through the smoke to claim his reward. Ezra was stationed with the other bowmen, and so I had seen little of her these past weeks; Little Ned spat at the idea of putting himself in harm’s way—“You can’t spend your wages in Hell, can you?”; and Hammer had stared at the herald as if he wanted to kill him.