Stateless (52 page)

Nimrod's voice caused Simeon to turn.

‘Perhaps what your army feels is simple exhaustion after such a long journey, or perhaps there is something more.'

‘Never just one answer with you Jews, is there?' said the duke, his tone dry as the air around them, but Nimrod ignored the jibe.

‘For two thousand years, people have lived and died in that city
for the love of their God, be he Yahweh, Jehovah or Allah. These three great creeds are centred on this very place. It is the home of the Jews, the Muslims and the Christians. It is, my lord, the centre of the world.'

Duke Henri sniffed and looked up at the city. ‘It is a city occupied by a godless infidel called a Mohammedan who performs his heathen ceremonies here, where only Christians should be allowed to worship,' he said firmly. ‘The Mohammedan and the Jew defile the place!'

Standing there, facing the holy city, Nimrod found a courage that he rarely had, enabling him to speak plainly. ‘Jesus was a Jew, my lord. And to the Mohammedan, Jesus is revered as a great prophet. The centre of the world is perhaps not so simple as you may think.'

Duke Henri scoffed. ‘You can keep your religions and your faiths and your sanctity and your goodness. It's the gold I want, and not the gold of eternity – the gold of now!'

And Henri wheeled his horse around and rode away, leaving Nimrod and Simeon alone with the view of Jerusalem's massive stone walls.

‘It is now a siege. And with walls such as those, it will be sickness, disease and starvation that take the men long before the sword and the arrow.' Nimrod shook his head and turned to follow his lord.

‘Idiots! Crook-pants! Dankish pottle-deep puttocks!' The duke roared so naturally that it seemed his normal manner of speech, and neither Nimrod nor Simeon were much affected by it anymore.

The duke continued to rant. ‘Not one stone, not a single pebble, has been taken down from those walls in the two months since we arrived and laid siege! Twelve thousand Crusaders, lancers, ballisters, archers and catapulteers and still the walls stand! And now a gaggle of addle-brained malcontents say that they've seen a vision of Bishop Adhemar and want me to blow a trumpet to bring down the walls like those of Jericho!'

The stalemate of the siege had stirred a cauldron of rumours, inflamed by the fervent and deluded. The vision of Bishop Adhemar was just the latest.

The duke's voice dropped to a cold rasp and he extended a finger at Simeon. ‘You said that there was great treasure waiting for us in Constantinople, and in Antioch. And what did I get? Nothing. Trinkets.'

This was not the first time that the duke had mistaken Simeon for old Jacob who had died long before arriving at Jerusalem. Duke Henri even often referred to Simeon as Jacob. Simeon, for his part, had learned not to correct his master and, like Nimrod, was all too aware of the illness that was slowly eating the duke's mind.

‘The other dukes and nobles looted the mosques and were weighed down by fabulous riches; I followed your advice and took the synagogues and the houses of the Jews, and came away with little. How do I know that Jerusalem will be different?'

‘My lord, in Constantinople, and in Antioch, you took a vast fortune. By our estimate, it accounts for the equivalent of two years of income from your lands,' insisted Simeon.

‘Two years! I could have been shafting whores in France for the next two years and still earned as much. Yet I've ridden halfway around the folly-fallen world, been laid low with pox that you cannot cure . . .' The finger of blame shifted from Simeon to Nimrod, ‘ . . . and spent a fortune feeding and arming the laziest and most cowardly army any duke has ever
sent into battle! And my saddlebags remain empty. Where is all the money and jewellery of the Jews that should now be mine?'

‘Jerusalem will be different, my lord,' said Simeon, trying to calm the duke down.

‘How so, Jew?'

‘Because in Constantinople and in Antioch, the Jews were in a degraded condition. They were a poor community, made poor by the Muslim's taxes and by the hatred of the Christians towards them. In Muslim lands, my lord, Jews are considered
Dhimmi
, or non-Muslim residents, and subject to a special tax called
jizya
, which has been a great impost and has damaged their chances to attain wealth. But in Jerusalem, the Fatamid dynasty has ruled this land for nearly a century and a half and they are, for the most part, benign rulers. Jews, Christians and Muslims are free to follow their own faiths, without interference. So the reports that reach me, my lord, say that the Jews of Jerusalem are indeed wealthy.'

The truth was that Simeon had no way of knowing if what he said was true; it was conjecture at best. Yet the frailty of the duke's mind, the growing discontentment in the army, the long stalemate of the siege, all prevailed upon him to lie. The simmering hatred of the Christian invaders towards any ‘non-believers' was palpable. The duke protected his Jewish advisers for now, but should something happen to the duke – either physically or financially – the fate of Simeon, as well as that of Nimrod to whom the treasurer owed his life, might be sealed. The hopeful lie Simeon told the duke was a ploy to keep the man focused and to keep up the morale of his army.

Duke Henri pondered the words of his treasurer. ‘You had better be right or else make your peace with your God!' He flung open the tent flap and looked out towards the city walls. ‘But I'll not fall to foolishness of trumpets and visions. I will
find a way to breach those walls.' Then the duke raised his voice once more to summon his captain. ‘Roux!'

The duke needn't have yelled as the gaunt red-headed man was never far away and he quickly appeared in the portal of the tent.

‘I want you to gather ten of your best men. No horses. We go on foot.'

Roux looked strangely puzzled by the order and twisted his eyes to glower for a brief moment at the two Jews behind the duke.

‘Where are we going, my lord?'

‘There is a way. There must be a way inside. And we go tonight to find it.'

‘My lord, the Genoese siege engines will not arrive until tomorrow. Proper siege engines made of the finest wood and tempered iron. Surely we must wait?'

‘No. No. No. We will go now! Ten of the best and we will find another way. If we wait, we will lose. They . . .' The duke cast his arm wide to take in the tents of the other lords, his rivals, encamped nearby. ‘They will take what is mine and what the Jews have told me awaits inside those walls.'

These words brought the twisted glare of Roux back to Simeon and Nimrod.

‘We will reconnoitre the perimeter of the city under darkness and we shall find the weakness of these walls.'

Roux knew there was no arguing and, moreover, he saw the misguided order as an indicator of the duke's failing faculties. At first it had only been Nimrod who had seen the duke's syphilis spread from his loins to his mind. But the paranoia and hallucinations had become harder to hide and Roux now saw opportunity in his lord's demise.

‘Go. See to the men,' ordered the duke, and Roux left quickly.

The duke turned back to Nimrod and Simeon. ‘Yes. I shall find a way. I shall find a hole in the wall.'

‘But my lord –' protested Nimrod.

‘I shall find a way, and you, my good doctor, will come with me. I want a doctor and a Jew by my side when I find a portal into the city . . .'

There had been no arguing with the duke, but Nimrod and Simeon had argued between themselves. Simeon insisted on coming with him to scout the walls but Nimrod refused outright. The debt that Simeon felt he owed the older man, who had spared his life at the hands of Michel Roux, was too large for him to remain behind. The danger in what the duke had proposed was obvious and yet Simeon could not in good conscience let his friend go without him.

But, as was often the case with Nimrod, argument became philosophical examination; only this time his voice was filled with a strange sadness.

‘These may well be our last days, Simeon. And I have spent them as I have spent my life: in books seeking knowledge and wisdom. I have been reading the philosophies of the Gaonim, the wise Jews of ancient Babylon. They lived, like we do, under the rule of others. We under Christians and they under the Abbasid, followers of Mohammed. Perhaps it is that otherness that creates wisdom. Their work brings me much consolation. These Gaonim were the great minds of our people and they changed the way we think. Unlike the Christians, they didn't encase their faith in a golden casket making it immutable. Instead they looked at how it might adapt and change and be
renewed with thinking, as thinking itself changes. But these Christians who are our earthly lords, they're unwilling – no, incapable – of changing. They even find thinking difficult.'

‘Is this what we've come to then?' asked Simeon. ‘Is this now our lot? To die with thousands of others in the madness that will be the end of this city as its walls are breached by the siege engines?'

‘We can't stop them. An entire city can't stop them. This has always been the end of our road. I foresee great slaughter in the coming days and I am prepared to die rather than carry back to France the awful truth of tens of thousands of Jews and Muslims slaughtered by these Crusaders. I would . . . I will . . . rather die.'

But Simeon was not so resigned and so as Duke Henri, Michel Roux, the ten chosen soldiers and Nimrod slipped out of the camp under cover of darkness, Simeon, son of Abel, followed them.

The small group of Christian soldiers, and one slow-moving Jewish doctor, circumnavigated the outer walls of the holy city of Jerusalem. The soldiers carried only swords, leaving shields and spears behind to keep their movement light and swift. Yet they were aware of their vulnerability to the guards who walked the ramparts above, and as a result moved nervously along the path led by Duke Henri.

The darkness of both the night sky and the perpetual shadows of the city's massive walls gave them some comfort; the lights of the torches burning atop the walls cast no illumination this far below. For hours they had been searching, not knowing what they were supposed to be searching for. The duke simply kept repeating, ‘There must be a hole in the wall.'

Michel Roux's narrow eyes darted like a wolf's as he followed the duke but he also kept peering back at Nimrod shuffling along behind as if he was stalking prey. When the party rested, Nimrod heard murmurs of scorn among the soldiers that a ‘Christ-killer' was among them and that they were dismayed that their lord seemed to maintain such faith in Jews who, like the Muslims, corrupted the holy city. Such words could not hurt Nimrod, but the implications of what darker actions they may breed quickened his heart.

The journey around the walls seemed to drag on endlessly into the night. The men were silent save for the creak of their amour and weaponry. But Nimrod could hear the duke muttering to himself and he feared the demons of his lord's addled mind now had free rein.

‘The bones will lead us . . . we should follow the bones . . .' mumbled the duke and urged the troop, with exaggerated hand movements, to follow him down a small hillock. Then, with little warning, the duke let out a scream, guttural and incoherent, and broke into a run. The men were bewildered that such a mission of stealth should see their leader make such a racket of madness.