Pillars of Light (19 page)

“In Cornwall we know it as Excalibur,” I blurted.

The Lionheart raised his eyebrows. I didn’t know who was more surprised that I should have the gall to enter the discussion—the
king or me—but he let it pass. “Excalibur,” he said quietly. He brushed his hand along the ancient blade, caressed the pitted hilt with its decorated quillons. Then he wrapped it back in its cloth and handed it to a servant. “Tell the armourer to make a good copy of this sword. Not a perfect copy, but of a length better suited to my reach. He’ll know what is needed.” He puffed his chest out, threw back his mane. “I shall carry it into battle against the heathen horde, just as Arthur did. We shall forge a new legend.” He looked to his mother for approval, but she just glimmered at him.

“I have another riddle for you: when is a piece of wood not just a piece of wood?”

Richard folded his arms and waited.

“When it is the wood on which our lord Jesus Christ was crucified, that the blessed Helena excavated out of Jerusalem, where now stands the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, shamefully fallen into the hands of the infidel.”

Richard laughed. “The True Cross! Wrapped in gold and studded with gems!”

“It is not the rich casing that makes it valuable,” Baldwin said sharply. “It is Christ’s Rood, the Wood of Life—the
Lignum Vitae
!”

“Quite so,” agreed Eleanor. She turned a shoulder, shutting the annoying archbishop out of their conversation. “It may just be a piece of old wood, but it is not the gold that encases it nor the jewels that encrust it that make it valuable. It is the symbolic value it bears—”

Archbishop Baldwin could not help interrupting. “It is the cross on which Christ suffered his passion, on which he was crucified to save our souls—”

“Its symbolic value is what matters,” Eleanor went on severely. “The appearance of things is important. I look at you, my son, and I see a handsome, well-made man. But a man, just a man. Put a crown on that head and you have a king. Put that sword in that
hand and you have a hero.” And now her eyes narrowed and her sharp chin jutted so that she looked the witch many had named her. “Let him ride into battle against the Saracen horde and take back from them the one True Cross, the holiest relic in Christendom … let him take that in his hands and you have not just a king, not just a hero,” and here she dropped her voice almost to a whisper, “but an emperor, maybe even the Holy Roman Emperor …”

“Mother!”

She spread her hands, sat back. “I jest. Well, a little. But my point remains. Recapture the True Cross, my son, and the whole Christian world will open to you as easily as a whore spreads her legs.”

I gazed around to see if anyone else had heard this extraordinary exchange, but everyone was talking and drinking. Even the archbishop had a large goblet in his claw-like hand. Reginald was looking at the ground in a thoughtful manner. I caught Savaric’s eye. Out of sight of the rest, he gave me a lupine grin, well pleased with reception of the sword.

The feasting and gift-giving continued. Much wine was drunk and the noise in the hall became ever more oppressive. When a delegation of Jews brought their gifts through the crowd, insults broke out, followed by pushes and shoves and laughter.

“Go away, you dogs!” one lord cried.

The Jews filed in in their dark robes, dignified and quiet. They had brought sumptuous offerings—golden candlesticks and chains of office, caskets of jewels and crystal goblets. The king wanted the gold and ordered the guards to let them through. The nobles, full of drink and bile, catcalled and jeered, and as soon as the Jews had presented their offerings they were shoved rudely out of the great hall.

“I’ll see you back at the abbey,” I told Savaric, meaning Bermondsey Abbey where we were staying, east down the river on the other side of London’s bridge.

A large crowd had gathered outside in the hope of catching sight of the king. Clearly, they’d been waiting for hours; the mood was ugly. Seeing the Jews expelled by the guards they took it as a sign of the new sovereign’s shared loathing, for a knot of the black-garbed men was surrounded by a baying mob.

“Filthy moneylenders!”

“Christ-killers!”

It was beginning to sound like All Hallows—demons’ voices raised in chorus. And then, without warning, insults turned to blows. Fists and clubs rained down on men who had come only to honour the Lionheart.

“Get out of our country!” others howled. “Bloody foreigners! Thieving devils!”

I remembered the Moor telling me how one man makes of another a stranger in order to render him an enemy he can kill without conscience. How, before he encouraged me to think for myself, I was so ready to believe that Saracens ate babies …

I couldn’t just walk past. A young man in a black robe was bent double in front of me. I pushed away a brawny fellow with a stick. “Gerr’an! Leave him alone!” I cried.

The bully glared at me. Then his lip curled. “Another fucking Jew!” he sneered, and too late I realized my error. I’d fallen into my native Cornish tongue.

“I’m no Jew!” I cried, though something in me felt wrong to say it.

It didn’t do me any good: they beat the two of us indiscriminately, till I could no longer fight but lay on the ground amid the filth, curled up to protect my vitals, while the man down beside me stopped even grunting in pain.

Had Savaric not come out of the hall at that very moment and roared with his patrician voice for the guards to intervene I’d surely not have survived. Many didn’t, that evil night.

The violence spread, they told me after, from Westminster into Old Jewry, that collection of streets to the west of the White Tower where the Jews live and where they bury their dead, and there were many dead that day. Those who survived retreated into their houses, but the mob set fire to the ghetto, and when the inhabitants ran out into the streets with their clothes aflame, they were set upon by a baying crowd and torn apart—men, women and children, it made no difference.

They say that night the sky was lit as with an orange fire, as if Heaven witnessed the burning and held a mirror to it for shame.

Z
ohra was coming from saying prayers at her mother’s grave when the baker from the corner came running past the cemetery. “The Franj are coming!” he cried, great floury patches on his cheeks where he had clutched his face in horror.

“Not now,” she said, aghast, but he had already run on to spread the panic. She subsided onto a patch of weeds beside the cemetery wall. How could life be any worse than these past few days had been? She had not slept, so tormented was she by flashbacks. The yellow cushion bearing the imprint of Nima’s mouth. The single bloody handprint on the frame of the terrace door. Her father covered in blood, his eyes like dark holes in a mask of gore. The prized black dewlap lying dead in his hands. The smashed and overturned cages, the drifts of feathers and spattered blood. Kamal, pale and bloodstained, running away …

Her little brother had not come home. A neighbour reported that Kamal’s friend, Bashar Muallem, had disappeared as well. “And good riddance,” the man had added darkly.

The atmosphere in the house was unbearable. Baltasar could not look at Aisa without oozing tears; as a result, poor Aisa crept
about the house as if he wished he could vanish like his twin. And Zohra blamed herself for everything. If she had been at home, where she should have been, looking after Ummi, her mother would still be alive, and so would Baba’s pigeons, and Kamal’s unstable, dangerous nature would be something still to be guessed at, and they would still be a family and not this ragged bundle of hurt bound together by guilt and need. It was God’s punishment on her.

And now the Franj had come. She hoped Malek had made it back to camp safely. To lose him as well … she shook her head.

A shadow fell across her and she looked up and caught her breath. Then Aisa moved so that the sun hit his face. Like hers, it was gaunt with sorrow. “Come to the wall with me,” he said.

She stared at him. “Why?”

Aisa held a hand out to her and she took it and hauled herself upright.

“It’s our story,” he said. He sounded odd, older. “History’s being made here, just as it was at Hattin. In years to come, we will be the ones to tell the story of Akka and say we were there. We must bear witness.”

And so she let Aisa pull her through streets and alleyways towards the northern ramparts. They ran past the ward where the Templar knights once had their headquarters, past the citadel walls, past the foot of the looming fortress known as the Accursed Tower, the place where had been minted, it was said, the silver coins Judas Iscariot was paid to betray the prophet Isa Christ to the Romans.

“This way!” Aisa climbed without fear up a broken part of the wall to the north of the keep as only a fourteen-year-old boy could do, and Zohra followed stiffly, testing every hold, the sun hot on her back, her heart pounding. At the top Aisa pulled her over onto the ramparts, where quite a crowd had gathered, craning their necks all along the battlements.

The Christian horde was masked by dust clouds and heat haze.
Then coloured banners and mounted knights came into view, the horses’ hooves a rumbling thunder on the sun-baked ground. Infantry and archers, then hundreds of wagons, and finally massive timbers pulled on carts that could surely only be the makings of siege engines.

“See the blue banners bearing the great gold cross? Those are the banners of the King of Jerusalem!” someone cried, only to be shouted down by others: “There is no King of Jerusalem. He’s just some jumped-up poulain bastard!”

Others swore they picked out Conrad of Montferrat and the Master of the Temple, Gerard de Ridefort, but in truth it was impossible to pick out any individual. Aisa wormed his way between two burly men and shouted back to Zohra, “Their horses are wearing armour too! I didn’t know horses wore armour. They are huge!”

Zohra, suddenly feeling weak, sank down to the hot stone. She did not know why she had allowed herself to be led here at all. To see the Franj was to put a face to the foe, to make real what until now had been only rumour. Her chest felt tight with dread. All she wanted was to run to the house on the Street of Tailors, to crawl beneath the covers on Nathanael’s divan and burrow her head against his hot skin and pretend that time had stopped. But she knew there was no going back to the little paradise they had made between them, the heat and the honey, the sweat and groans and kisses. She had to make amends for her sins of the flesh; she had to keep what was left of her family together. It was the biggest sacrifice, the greatest submission she could make, to Allah.

But she realized with a force that shocked her that the vast army moving to encircle the city, the disappearance of Kamal, the death of her mother and all the chaos and horror that was about to ensue was as nothing in the face of the loss of Nathanael.

On the Street of Tailors, Nathanael greeted the news of the siege with a sort of mental shrug. What difference did it make if he could not leave the city? He felt more trapped inside his own skin than by Akka’s walls. After her mother’s death, Zohra would not open the door to him, would not read the messages he scrawled and left for her beneath the pot of basil outside the door. She had once walked past him where he waited for her at the end of the street, with her veil up and her head down, not even glancing at him, as if he did not exist. He felt his world had ended, but all around him everyone went about their business as usual. He did not care whether he lived or died, and people in Akka seemed determined to ignore the siege, as if by doing so they could make it go away. “All is written,” they said. “Allah will protect us.” He wished he could believe in a benign fate. But he was beginning to feel that his love for Zohra was cursed.

The next day he was called upon to tend to a defender who had taken a stray arrow in the shoulder. The distant strains of a Latin hymn drifted up over the walls, and he remembered quite sharply passing the Church of St. Anthony one summer morning four or five years before Salah ad-Din had retaken the city and hearing the same song sung by the congregation inside. He wondered how many of those the sultan had allowed to walk free were outside the walls with the enemy army. There was such a thing as too much mercy, he thought bitterly.