Pillars of Light (27 page)

I
t was fearsomely hot for so early in the year, and the news was bad. Malek was on duty inside the door of the sultan’s war tent. In there, apart from the pages and the sultan’s scribe, Imad al-Din, were two men. Once was a spy. The other was Al-Mashtub, one of Salah ad-Din’s senior generals, a warlike Kurdish chieftain who had fought alongside the sultan for much of his life.

“How many ships?” the scribe asked the spy.

There was a pause, as if the man was calculating. “Ten, maybe more.”

An uneducated man, Malek decided, unable to count beyond the fingers of his hands. They had to rely on all manner of spies nowadays, things being so disordered. The Christians had broken their supply lines, disrupted their communications. Increasingly they were reduced to passing messages via Akka’s swimmers, men who would brave the blockade of enemy ships, as well as the treacherous currents and tides on this part of the coast.

“And these huge timbers—tell me again, for it is hard to believe such trees as you have described can possibly exist.”

“I swear on my faith, sir, that they are as I said—giants among
trees, the like of which I have never seen. Not just tall but massive in girth, too.”

“Can you be more exact?” Imad al-Din’s voice was as sharp as his nose.

“Eyes deceive when fear has the beholder in his grip,” rumbled Al-Mashtub. But the man was adamant: the timbers were almost the full length of the ships that had brought them, and they were not small ships, either, but good-sized Italian merchant vessels.

Malek saw the sultan’s eyebrows shoot up. “Thank you for your news.” Almost immediately he regained his equilibrium. “Take this reward, which you will find, I trust, equal to the value of the information you have brought us.”

The man scurried past Malek, his face already bent over the open pouch, his fingers assessing the contents. A paid informant, then, motivated by profit rather than by faith. And one well able to count dinars, if not ships’ masts.

“The Franj will use those timbers to construct siege towers, towers that will top Akka’s walls,” Salah ad-Din said.

Al-Mashtub snorted. “We will burn them if they try.”

“The caliph’s
naft
has failed on that score thus far.” The caliph of Baghdad had sent a quantity of the combustible substance and five alchemists from his city to make more and oversee its use—rat-faced men with shifty eyes and a language they had developed to speak secretly amongst themselves. They were embedded in Akka, but so far the artificial fire they manufactured had not managed to do significant damage to the Christian war-engines.

“They need to make larger pots, then,” Al-Mashtub declared. “It’s obvious, is it not?”

At the door, Malek bristled: this was no way to address the Commander of the Faithful. Al-Mashtub might have been loyal and brave in battle, but he could be blunt.

“It is not the size of the vessel that counts,” the sultan said,
looking at his general pointedly, “but the contents. The
naft
doesn’t burn fiercely enough to get a hold.”

“Nonsense.” The general contradicted him with a cheerful disregard for protocol. “Make ’em bigger. It’s a matter of scale.”

“There’s not enough clay in the whole of Akka to make fire pots that large,” said Imad al-Din. “Nor mangonels with sufficient power to fire them.”

Salah ad-Din added, “Let us talk of this no longer. Friend, go take some rest. We shall look forward to your refreshed presence this evening.” It was as abrupt a dismissal as Malek had ever heard the sultan deliver.

Al-Mashtub got to his feet, made his obeisances and tramped out of the tent, his fingers tangling in his huge beard, a habit he had when discomfited.

The sultan began dictating letters. He had been sending them out regularly for the past few months across the entire caliphate. Begging letters, Malek’s father, Baltasar, would have deemed them, Malek thought. Letters to princes and emirs requesting men and money—to Harran and Mosul, Egypt and Nisbin. Receiving no useful reply, he had then sent his friend, the qadi of the army, Baha ad-Din, the only man he would entrust with the task, to whip up support in person from the princes of Mesopotamia. The qadi had not yet returned.

Reinforcements had arrived with the spring, but they were greatly outnumbered by the Christian troops that had flooded in, ship by ship, ever since the winter storms had dispersed. And that was before the arrival of the vast German army rumoured to be on its way. Malek had heard terrifying numbers mentioned: hundreds of thousands of men. He felt his fear for his family like a burning coal in his stomach.

The sultan rose now to pace the tent, still dictating. “I do not believe you have grasped the extreme gravity of the situation. I must
humbly inform you that the army that marches upon us—that is even now approaching Constantinople—is a great dark flood that will destroy everything in its path. How shaming is it that where the Franj of the West have acted in concert at the behest of the popes of Rome to take back the Holy City, our call to jihad has been all but ignored? Is it not shaming that there should be such apathy among the Faithful when there is such zeal among the Polytheists?

“The Franj army is supplied by ships more plentiful than the waves, and for every one of their soldiers who falls, a thousand spring up in his place. We are desperately short here not only of men, but of weapons, food, forage, equipment and the money with which to pay for all of these things. If we do not receive what is necessary then Akka will surely fall, and with it will go all hopes that our sacred endeavour will keep the infidel at bay and prevent the spread of their shadow over all we hold dear.”

It was only the use of the word “humbly” that gave Malek a clue as to the recipient: the missive must be to the Caliph of Baghdad. That the sultan had taken such a tone with such a man was proof indeed of his desperation.

Within weeks the siege towers of the Franj were constructed: tall enough to overtop the city walls. Great teams of men wheeled them under cover of darkness. Sheltered by the crenellations on the towers, Franj archers duelled with the garrison bowmen to deadly effect, while beneath their cover other men filled in the great ditch surrounding the city with brush and waste and rocks, and the bodies of the dead—both the Christians shot by the Muslim bowmen and the corpses of those who had fallen from the walls—and inch by inch the towers crept closer. Soon they would be close enough to drop their bridges onto the walls and the enemy would flood from them into Akka.

True to the sultan’s observation, fire pots hurled from the city made little mark on the monsters: the Franj had mantled them with
hardened leather, off which the pots bounced harmlessly. Where they did strike, all they managed was char and smoke.

Malek watched helplessly. He thought of his family and his friends and neighbours and his heart clenched. But what could he do?

“What on earth are you up to?”

Malek stood up and away from his handiwork, wiping his hands on his tunic. He turned to find himself confronted by the sultan’s younger brother, Al-Adil.

“It’s a pigeon cote,
sayedi
,” he said. “A place where the birds can roost.”

“Pigeons? Good heavens, doesn’t my brother keep you busy enough?”

Malek sighed. “It was the sultan himself who asked me to build it. For messenger pigeons.” He explained how he and his father and brother had developed a system of flying pigeons back and forth between the city and the hills beyond. “My father loves his birds. More than anything else, I sometimes think. But now with Akka cut off we can use them to keep in contact with the garrison.”

Al-Adil lifted an eyebrow. “I thought we were using divers to bring messages.”

“It’s a dangerous business,” Malek said.

The sultan’s brother tugged at his beard. “But what if the enemy shoots one of your birds down and intercepts the message?”

Malek took a roll of paper from his pouch and handed it over. The older man bent his head over it. “Ah, I see. Some sort of code?”

“My brother Sorgan and I developed it, yes.”

“So what happens—God forbid—if one of you dies?”

This was not something Malek dwelled on. It was for God to give and take life at will. “There is my younger brother as well,” he said defensively. “Young Aisa. He’s learned the code too.”

“Well, we must pray that they survive.
Insh’allah
.”

“Insh’allah.”

Towards the end of the month Malek watched the Lord of Dara arrive with troops and contingents of light cavalry, so it seemed either the missives or Baha ad-Din’s embassy had had some effect. They moved camp closer to the enemy, the better to survey their movements. Every day there were skirmishes, every day deaths and small triumphs; the hospital tents were kept busy. And still they came, the Franj, new arrivals day by day, and daily the towers moved forward.

Breaking out from time to time from Akka’s inner harbour, the Muslim fleet made sorties in an attempt to escape the Christian blockade. The vessels shot
naft
at each other, burning the decks and sails where the viscous stuff stuck, but few of these encounters were conclusive. Then one day a Muslim galley was separated from the rest of the fleet and driven up on the shore. There it was set upon by a ravening band of Franj camp-followers who were butchering pigs on the beach. These women set upon the unfortunate sailors, dragging them from the wreckage, out of the surf and up onto the rocky beach, chopping and stabbing them with the same knives they had used on the livestock. The noise of the slaughter carried as far as the Tower of Flies. From their lofty viewpoint the guards there had looked on helplessly as—out of bowshot—their colleagues were massacred by these harpies, and the surviving pigs squealed and stampeded and shat on the dead and dying. The story spread far and wide. If the women of the Franj were so ferocious, Malek thought, what were their menfolk like?

Every morning, between dawn prayer and his first stint of duty, Malek moved the grain he laid as an incentive to the pigeons a little closer to the camp. Soon they would find the wooden cote.

It was a particularly lovely morning. The sky was an unblemished blue, and a crisp onshore breeze cooled his skin and stirred Asfar’s chestnut mane. She pawed the ground, eager for exercise, and so he allowed her to canter down through the tussock grass to the margins where the dunes began. Gulls side-slipped and shrieked high above: if he closed his eyes he could imagine this to be nothing more than a pleasant morning ride and the world a peaceful, stable place in which people loved and laughed and went on with their lives without fear of violent death.

When he opened his eyes again, it was to see a figure emerging from the water, a slender silhouette against the sun-bright sea. Messengers from Akka often came in at this point, having braved the waters of the outer harbour and the open sea beyond the Tower of Flies, where the Christian vessels patrolled. But this was neither Saif nor Mahmoud, both big men with beards and long black locks. As the figure came closer, picking its way between the rocks, he realized with a start that it was his little brother Aisa, and at that moment Aisa saw him and his face broke into an enormous beaming smile.

Malek dismounted in haste and they embraced. Malek came away damp.

“I’m an official messenger now!” Aisa crowed. He thrust his chest out so that his ribs showed. “I’ve got a message to deliver to Salah ad-Din from Karakush.”

Aisa was thinner than he had been when Malek had last seen him, almost a year ago. He was taller too now, more man than boy. Something about that change in him, the time apart and all that had filled it, made his chest tighten.

“Here,” he said, throwing his cloak around his brother’s shoulders. “Let’s get you to the sultan so you can deliver your message.”
He leapt up into the saddle and swung Aisa up behind him and the lad chattered out all his news: how he had come to be a messenger; how Kamal had disappeared, no one knew where; how Sorgan and his father were managing to breed the pigeons, and he was teaching Sorgan his letters; how they kept a pair of goats in the rear courtyard, and had learned to grind flour out of date pits—really, the news was endless.

But as they rode back through the lines Aisa went quiet. The sight of all the fighting men, their tents and banners and equipment, the trenches and churned ground where there had been orchards and farms, took his words away.

At last they reached the summit of Tell Ayyadieh and the sultan’s war tent. Malek dismounted and helped Aisa down off the big chestnut mare. The boy was shaking. Cold from the sea? A reaction to the long swim? More likely it was the sight of the enemy, so very many of them. Then he wondered if it was simply nerves at the idea of speaking to the sultan.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said to Aisa. “The sultan isn’t a fearsome man, except to his enemies. Greet him humbly, and when he asks you to rise, deliver your message and look him in the eye as you do so. If he asks you your name, tell him without hesitation. And cherish the moment, for you’ll remember it the rest of your life.” Gently, he brushed a strand of hair out of Aisa’s eyes, straightened the cloak and pushed him towards the guards at the door, who checked him for weapons and then let him through.

Aisa managed to prostrate himself with a certain grace, and when the sultan bade him stand he looked the commander in the eye. Aisa delivered the message from the waterproof pouch he wore wrapped about his waist, and Salah ad-Din unrolled the furl of paper and bent his head over it. Then he rolled the message up again and placed it on the table and returned his gaze to Aisa.

“This is the first time you have come as a messenger,” Salah ad-Din observed.

Aisa nodded.

“And what is your name, lad?”

“Aisa Najib,” Aisa replied without a beat.

“Are you by chance related to Malek, my burning coal, and to Baltasar, who was injured at Ramla?”

Aisa flushed with pride and admitted as much. Malek, watching as unobtrusively as he could from the flap of the tent door, was proud of his brother, too.

The sultan smiled. “Then I am indeed well served by your family. Go now and take food and rest. Return after third prayer and I will have a message for you to take back to Karakush.” He paused. “Though it will not be one he much likes.”