Stateless (54 page)

As Nimrod struggled to draw in air and find his way to his feet, his hands grabbed at his side and grew wet with blood. The Arab blade had somehow pierced him during the tackle. But there was no time to contemplate the wound as the Mohammedan was already standing and drew a curved dagger from a sash at his waist. The man leapt towards Nimrod, who screamed and tried to roll away, but the Mohammedan was too
quick and suddenly his knees pinioned Nimrod's arms to the ground. Nimrod saw the dagger draw back, ready to be swept across his throat, and tried to remember the Jewish prayer for those in mortal danger, but it had left his mind.

He closed his eyes and waited for the death blow. But it never came.

Instead there was a sickening wet thud and Nimrod's eyes blinked open to see the Arab man's body on the ground beside him, his face a mess of blood and fragments of broken skull. The body of the warrior shuddered and twitched beside the prostrate Nimrod.

It was only then that Nimrod saw the face of his saviour who wielded the stone that had killed the Arab. Over him, the light of the moon and stars gave just enough illumination to show the face of Simeon looking down at him.

‘You should be glad I never obey doctors' orders.'

But Nimrod's mind raced to the fate of the duke and he scrambled over to the body of his master lying flat on the ground, his nearly severed limb still pumping blood.

The duke's eyes focused on the faces of Nimrod and Simeon as they knelt over him. Blood poured from the open slice where his arm lay at an obscene angle. As a doctor, Nimrod knew that the end would come as soon as the duke's life force drained away into the earth of Jerusalem. There was nothing he could do as a physician. The wound was of an enormity that defied any medicine or surgery.

Neither Simeon nor Nimrod knew what to say. The duke gazed at them both for what seemed like a long stretch of silence, then slowly his eyes focused not on their faces but something behind them. The two Jews turned to see what it was that their lord was staring at.

They saw nothing at first, but soon saw what the duke was focusing on. High on the hill, the city of Jerusalem was
beginning to glow golden as the very first rays of dawn lit the minarets and crucifixes and the tops of the white walls.

‘I see the bones . . .'

The words of the duke, whispered as his last before too much of his blood had coursed from his body, made Simeon and Nimrod turn away from the splendour of the city.

‘I see the bones. All of them. All around me . . .'

Nimrod placed a hand on the duke's chest but could find no words.

‘I see the bones of all who have died. All who have fought and died.'

The duke's eyes found Nimrod clearly for the last time and held him fast.

‘I'm sorry . . . Tell the bones I'm sorry . . .'

And the duke died, in the shadow of the walls of the city he'd come to relieve.

Nimrod felt a great desire to stay, to sit with the lord he'd known so well and for so long. To simply sit and wait for the sun to warm the dead man's face, so that his journey into eternity was lit. But a voice calling out dragged the two men from the moment.

The voice was that of Michel Roux, unmistakable and distinct. Simeon grabbed at Nimrod's clothes and hauled him to his feet.

‘Come on, we have to go,' Simeon said in a harsh whisper.

But Nimrod resisted. ‘Where? Where shall we go? We have nowhere to go and no one to trust!'

In that moment Simeon found a sense of faith that had long been absent in him.

‘I'd rather die inside the walls of the holy city with my people than out here with these dogs of Crusaders. For surely we will both be dead by morning, either at the hands of Roux, or by a sword from those within the walls. Come with me, doctor,'
said Simeon, pulling Nimrod up, and then forcing him to follow. ‘We have to get to the tunnel!'

They scurried towards the walls, Nimrod wondering what tunnel the man was talking about. They ran into the early morning gloom, with the voice of Michel Roux behind them, baying for their blood.

Nimrod followed, too exhausted to ask Simeon to explain, the wound delivered by the Saracen beginning to hurt viciously. He pressed his hand to his side, holding in the blood that was leaking from the wound, but he could feel his head growing light. He leant on Simeon's arm as they scrambled around the edge of the white stone walls and through the low tangled bushes and stunted trees that grew in the shadow of the city.

Was Simeon seeking something from memory or instinct? Nimrod could not tell. But the wiry man moved with purpose and focus, eyes darting back and forth, searching for signs that Nimrod could not see. Finally Simeon stopped when they were well clear of the evil Roux. ‘There has long been rumour in my family of a tunnel into the city, an ancient watercourse,' he said breathlessly. ‘This ancient tunnel was supposed to be used by the inhabitants. Some say my family had a hand in it, but who knows? Yet our connection has come down through generations of my family. They spoke of a watercourse built long ago. In the time of King Solomon. Few know of it, other than us Jews, and perhaps the Muslims.'

Nimrod's hand immediately reached into his tunic to touch the medallion around his neck. Simeon saw the hesitation and
then his gaze moved down to Nimrod's other hand grasping at his side, saw the blood seeping between his fingers. He wanted to say that such a story had also been told from father to son in his own family, for generation upon generation, but he was weak from the wound and found talking difficult.

Simeon continued. ‘They say of this tunnel that it runs beneath the walls of the city, carrying water to the pools below. If we climb upwards from the pools of Siloam, pray God Almighty that what is told in my family is correct, we will come into the heart of the city.'

Was Simeon saying this to keep up his spirits as he died? Or did the wiry merchant truly know how to find the ancient tunnel? As Nimrod held the metal seal at his neck, he remembered the words written in ancient Hebrew. He knew by heart the name Matanyahu and the story handed down in his family of a builder who worked in the time of King Solomon. And Nimrod remembered the words inscribed on the seal.

‘I, Matanyahu, son of Naboth, son of Gamaliel, have built this tunnel for the glory of my King, Solomon the Wise, in the Twenty Second year of his reign.'

When the siege engines made by the Genoese sailors in Joppa arrived and began assaulting the walls, new life was breathed into the Crusader campaign. The cheers of the soldiers could be heard throughout the valleys and over the hills as the siege weapons hurled massive rocks over the towers as well as the bodies of the recently killed Saracens back into the city, causing hysteria and mayhem among the residents. Not only did these dead bodies flying over the ramparts cause horror and panic,
but they were a marvellous weapon for spreading disease and destroying morale.

But the noise of the melee above was lost on Nimrod and Simeon as they made their way, slowly and painfully, up the ancient tunnel. They had found the entrance to the watercourse covered by a thousand years of rock slides, dirt, fallen debris and dead vegetation, but Simeon had been right. From the pools of Siloam the watercourse became clear when they pulled away the vegetation from where the ground was wet. They slowly, painfully, climbed the black and slippery tunnel upwards towards the centre of the city.

Like Nimrod's ancestor Abram a thousand years before, a youth completely unknown to him, he and Simeon were repeating precisely what the young Israelite had done in the time of the Romans when he returned the seal made by Matanyahu, along with the woman who would become his wife, Ruth, daughter of Eli and Naomi of the Tribe of Judah.

With a millennium separating their ascent into the tunnel, the ancestor and the descendant slipped on the same ground covered in black moss and squeezed through gaps in the rock that were little wider than their bodies.

As they eventually ascended to a larger and more open space, they felt like they'd climbed from the bottom to the top of a mountain, but in reality they had no idea how far up the city of Jerusalem they had ascended. Nimrod was growing weaker by the hour, and the blood loss, though largely staunched, had caused him to feel faint almost every step of the way.

Though a millennium separated them, Nimrod and Simeon, like Abram and Ruth, eventually rounded what appeared to be a bend in the tunnel and, out of the deadened silence, punctuated only by their footfalls and their breathing, they heard a noise.

But unlike the noise of the pagan conquerors walking the streets of Aelia Capitolina when Rome commanded the city, the
noise that Nimrod and Simeon heard was the wailing of Jews, Christians and Mohammedans. With the arrival of the siege engines, the inhabitants of Jerusalem understood that these were their last days, and were praying together, in concert, to their one God. Even the Christians believed, despite the flags with the Cross of Jesus clearly displayed, that these were the end times, and chanted a prayer to save them from the onslaught.

It was only when Nimrod and Simeon, dirty, wet, cold and aching from the climb came to the underside of the pavement on which thousands of feet scurried above that they realised their way was barred.

The ancient water causeway had been blocked four hundred years earlier by the Caliph Abd al-Malik when he'd ordered the construction of the Dome of the Rock Mosque. He'd made access to the water into a well, and the sides were so narrow, steep and slippery that they were impossible for Nimrod and Simeon to climb.

And so, as the tens of thousands of citizens of Jerusalem were wailing in fear of the assault and the destruction of their city, just the thickness of a pavement and a depth of rock in which the well had been built separated the two men from their besieged brethren. Nimrod and Simeon sat in the dark.

‘We should return to the valley floor,' said Simeon, already turning his body to negotiate the way down. But Nimrod's strength had left him. His hand was still pressed to his side but the blood, once crimson between his fingers, was now black and dry and spent. His limbs were numb and thoughts drifted towards sleep. He could go no further.

‘No,' he said in little more than a whisper.

‘You can. We can make it back. Once the Crusaders have taken the city we will be outside the walls and can make our escape. They won't notice us when they're slaughtering the inhabitants.'

But Simeon's words were futile.

Nimrod shook his head. ‘I die here, my friend.'

The siege assault took five days to drain the city of its strength. Flaming arrows set fire to rooftops and stables, dead bodies hurled through the air crashed through ceilings. Rocks exploded with the pounding of battering rams. Women and children sheltered from the nightmare as men died in the midst of it. Then, with a final breach of the outer wall, the Crusaders streamed into the city.

The Crusaders screamed ‘Hep, hep, hep hoorah' as they cleaved every limb from every body that happened in their path. The words meant
Hierisolyma est perdita
, ‘Jerusalem is lost', an insult to all the inhabitants. The Christian men of God had ordered the Crusaders to shout it out as they entered the city. And the charge and chant was led by Michel Roux, a man never driven by faith but by power and an unquenchable desire for riches. Roux led the charge with a fervour to rival any cleric, and his bloodlust fell like rain on his victims.