Pillars of Light (56 page)

A body crumpled, suddenly headless, followed by another and another. Screams rent the air.

Zohra gazed over Nat’s shoulder, aghast. “No! No, they can’t—”

It had clearly been designed that the slaughter should take place in full view of the Muslim camp. Swords flashed in the late-afternoon light, the sun and worse lending them a red sheen. Suddenly there were soldiers from the Muslim camp careering down the hillside. Christian soldiers rode out to confront them, easily keeping them at bay, while behind them the decapitations continued inexorably.

Zohra wailed and tried to run. “Baba!” she screamed. “Sorgan!”

Nathanael wrapped his arms around her, bore her to the ground. “There is nothing you can do. Nothing!”

Zohra fought like a wildcat, biting and scratching in her fury. “I must see, I must!” Her hair came loose from the scarf, a snaking
river of black. She flung herself this way and that, but Nat would not let her go. At last she subsided, tears and dust streaking her face. “It is the least I can do,” she croaked, wrenching herself upright. “I must watch. I must bear witness.”

Nathanael collapsed beside her, his limbs suddenly as weak as string, his wound throbbing as if it had been made anew. They knelt together in the parched dead grass, tears falling silently as one by one the bodies fell and the earth became red mud, as the soldiers surged against one another and the banners of kings flew in the scream-laden air.

I
did not have much recollection of that day for a long time. The Moor told me he feared me dead. When the killing started I apparently ran screaming down the hillside, without armour, bare-headed and weaponless. When he found me, hours later, I was covered top to toe in blood, none of it my own, and had my hands wrapped around a mace, from which I would not be parted. They say I growled like an animal, could not speak in any human tongue.

The sequence of events on that terrible day came back to me in fits and starts, in the middle of a sweat-filled nightmare, or out of the blue. We left the camp a few days later, striking out into the interior of the country, heading for Damascus. On the road we overtook many refugees previously freed from the city. They had all lost family in the massacre; their tales were hard to hear. There was a young woman who had lost her father and brother in the slaughter, and the rest of her family either prior to or during the siege. That she was still able to eat and speak, and even sometimes smile, after such a loss was to me a greater miracle than any church could boast.

She was travelling with a tall, dark-haired man and a pretty child. Occasionally, I caught the man giving me puzzled looks, which made me feel uncomfortable, scrutinized.

In the middle of the third night we travelled with them I sat bolt upright, sweating. It had come to me: I had seen the assassin stab that very man in the citadel inside Acre, had seen him on the floor of that rich chamber, surrounded by a spreading pool of blood. I had thought him dead, and felt guilty for doing nothing to help him.

Once my heart had stilled I lay there looking up at the swath of stars scattered overhead and wondered at the fact he was still alive. A great weight lifted off me that night: even though we never said anything about it, it was as if I had been handed a gift, a sort of redemption.

Nathanael was a doctor. He and the Moor fell into easy company, comparing herbal remedies, experimenting with the best tisanes to ease my troubled sleep and that of the woman he called his wife, Zohra. And whatever they did, the child, Nima—who seemed drawn by the Moor, as children often are—watched with her big, dark eyes, taking it all in.

“I’m going to be a doctor too, just like both of you,” she announced.

“Are you, little bee?” the Moor asked her.

“Yes,” she declared solemnly.

Nathanael smiled at him over Nima’s head. “You have to make a difference, that’s what my father always said. No matter how slim the chance of success may seem, it’s the only way to make things better in the end. You have to pass on your wisdom to a new generation, and each time, step by step, things improve.”

The Moor held his gaze, then nodded slowly. “That’s it exactly.”

In Damascus we shared an empty and long-neglected house rented from a distant cousin of Zohra’s. They did not seem much pleased to welcome her new husband. I felt a fool when the Moor had to explain to me why; it had not even occurred to me.

“Does it matter so much that he’s a Jew?” I asked. Before we had left the Muslim camp, Rosamund had announced to me that she was going to marry Malek. “He doesn’t know it yet,” she’d added
with a grin. “But I am.” Christian and Muslim; Jew and Muslim; and … well, I had no idea how to identify the Moor and myself.

“People go to war over such things,” he said. “But we are all just men.”

The Moor and Nathanael and I put our backs into clearing the weed-filled garden, replacing the broken tiles around the rubble-choked fountain, clearing the water-pipes, restoring it to life. But the greatest restorative was to my soul. It felt good and simple to put my efforts into manual labour. It made me feel again that despite all I had seen there was still some small chance of bringing something good into this imperfect world. We planted fruit trees. Buntings gathered at the water’s edge on the first day we turned the fountain on, until Nima came dancing out, clapping her hands with delight, and scared them away. Then she acquired a cat, a sly calico tom with mismatched eyes, and after that the birds kept their distance.

One day the Moor suggested I come to the Umayyad Mosque with him.

“But I can’t.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I’m not a Muslim. You said I was a heathen and it wasn’t allowed.”

“What are you, John?”

So much easier to say what I was not. “I don’t know.”

“Do any of us know? We may call ourselves by many names—Christian and Jew, Muslim or infidel. But how can we know our source or our destination? As soon ask stone or earth or river: we each of us have our own secret way of being a part of the mystery.” His eyes glowed as if lit from within. “Come be a part of the mystery with me. I will show you what to do.”

There was a great serenity to be found amongst the endless replication of pillars and arches of the mosque. Its quiet beauty
surprised me. I was given permission to sketch there, and I did, day after day, which soothed my spirit. To capture that immense impression of space and light would have taken a greater artist than me. Still, it woke in me a sense of greater purpose. I felt as I had in the little church in Lisbon, as if I was questing after the unseen, the elusive capture of perfection. I recalled the vision of grace I had experienced in the Acre mosque. I began to understand what drove Bishop Reginald and his dream for his cathedral, despite all the questionable methods he and his cousin had employed.

When I stumblingly tried to discuss this with the Moor, he smiled. “And now you are ready to travel with me.”

“Travel where?”

“There is still much to see, much to discover, before we go back.”

“Back where?”

“Back to England. To Wells.”

I had come to think of Damascus as home. Almost. Almost it had come to feel like home to me. “I don’t understand why you would want to go back to England after … after all that has happened.”

“All the more reason to do what I must do. There are two kinds of men in this world, John. Those who fear beauty and seek to destroy it, and those who strive to create it, against all the odds, who seek to make sense of the world, to find the truth of it. Beauty is the highest truth of all: to capture that beauty in stone, to the glory of God—whatever name we call him by—is the most perfect expression of man’s striving. After all the ugliness we have seen, how much more does the world need beauty?”

A few days later we left Damascus. And so it was that a boy bearing the name of Savage, a wild boy from the Cornish moors, entered the gates of Jerusalem the Golden.

The city still lay in Muslim hands; King Richard’s drive to regain the holy city had come to nothing. Deserted by the French King Philip Augustus, dogged by ill health and self-doubt, by
concerns about his kingdom back home, he had turned back from the decisive battle, which he might well have won, said the Moor, the Muslim army being so exhausted and reduced.

“All that death and cruelty, for nothing.”

“War never solved anything,” my friend said. “But it can destroy much. Look around you.”

We were inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the eastern part of the Holy City, having walked through the remarkable bazaar to reach it.

“When the Christians took the city at the end of the last century, they killed every Muslim who took sanctuary here. Then they turned this place into stables,” the Moor told me. “First blood, then horse shit, but even that could not break its beauty. Salah ad-Din had it washed with rosewater, scattered with rose petals when he took it back. And now look at it.”

I gazed around at the marble pillars, at the colonnades of arches. I looked at him. The previous night there had been a cloudburst: rolling thunder overhead, rain hammering down; lightning I could see even though my closed lids. Maybe it had reminded my unconscious mind of being rolled in the sea, the thundering of the breakers as they drove me in to shore.

“I saw you,” I said. “The day I was washed up on the shore south of Acre. I have remembered now, remembered it all.”

He looked at me oddly. “Go on.”

I closed my eyes, drawing it back. “The cross. I had it in my hands when I jumped off the ship. It was so heavy, dragging me down to the bottom of the sea, and I was just … letting it. I accepted everything: the past, my heart, my sins, my death. I knew it all and I let it all go. Gave myself up to my fate, or to God, or whatever you might call it. And then …” I frowned. “It became so light, the cross, and huge. Suddenly it felt … immense. And instead of dragging me down, it was taking me up, towards the light. I thought I was dying. I thought it was the end. And I just … embraced it.

“The next thing I knew, I was on the beach. I thought I was in Heaven, seeing you there beside me. And then you picked up this piece of wood—just a dull chunk of grey stuff, like driftwood. Except you turned it over and there was a bit of gold, and some jewels, still covering it, and you dug your thumbs into it and … peeled it away, just like a skin from a
naranja
, and then you sat back on your heels just looking at it, the wood, I mean. And you brushed the sand off it, and looked at it again, very close. And then you did something strange.”

“I did?”

“You did.” I creased my brow, trying to separate nightmare from memory. “You took the Nail of Treves from around my neck.”

The half-moon eyes never left my face. “I was going to leave it there,” he said. “I never wanted to see it again. But I never could leave well alone. It felt hot in my hand. Buzzing slightly, like a wounded bee.” His voice was dreamy, far away. “My wrist started to ache in that old familiar way …” He shivered. “I knocked the wood against a rock to dislodge the sand and there it was: a small dark hole. I took the nail and put it in. It fit perfectly.” His gaze, dark and lambent, burned me. “As I knew it would.”

“Who are you?” Suddenly, I was terrified of the answer.

“Just a man,” he said, smiling.

He offered me his hand, and together we walked out into the light.

1239

S
tanding in the nave of Wells Cathedral, I crane my neck back so far I almost stagger with dizziness. Is it by some act of faith between air and stone that this magnificent masonry is held in place? Why doesn’t it all come crashing down? I’ve seen the effort it takes to raise just a single piece of stone—the slings and pulleys, the teams of strong men—and yet the network of vaulted ribs that interlace the distant ceiling appear to float in shimmering weightlessness with all the grace of a spiderweb spread across a hedge at dawn.

They say this is the strongest structure ever created, that it is the greatest hymn of praise to the divine made by the hand of man. But these pillars of light joined with the arches of Islam represent a marriage forged in blood and war and suffering.