Pillars of Light (31 page)

In the end, word of the Franj woman reached the ears of the sultan as she wandered the Muslim lines, seeking her child.

“Go fetch her to me,” he instructed Malek. “I would hear her grievance.” And so Malek went in search of the woman.

He was astonished to find her flagrantly unveiled. Seeing all that yellow hair reminded him with sudden force of the whore in Jerusalem, and so his manner with her was brusque. She was barely older than his sister, he thought as they walked back to the war tent. What was she doing here, and with a child, too? He wondered if she was married to one of the enemy soldiers—he had heard that their wives sometimes followed them on campaign. Then it occurred to him that she might be one of those who took money for the use of their bodies. The idea roused him fiercely.

Salah ad-Din, courteous as ever, rose and greeted the woman, called for cushions where she might sit, for a goblet of iced sherbet, and watched as she sipped it wonderingly. He took no umbrage at her brazen appearance, at the dirt on her face and clothes, or the scratch marks on her cheeks where she had torn at herself in her grief. Quite the opposite: he treated her as if she were Queen Sibylla herself.

Having coaxed her tale from her, by way of Imad al-Din’s halting translation, he dispatched men to search everywhere, within the camp and beyond, to look for the infant. And still the woman wept, more quietly now, gazing fearfully around the tent as if expecting these foreign men with their neat black beards, inquisitive black eyes and unnerving courtesy to transform themselves suddenly into the ravening beasts she believed them to be.

At last, one of the guards returned with a bundle in his arms. Salah ad-Din laid a hand on the infant’s head. “A war camp is no place for a child,” he admonished its mother. “It does not do for children to be exposed to such horrors at an early age, for fear they will become inured to them and think that life is cheap. The taking of a life should never be done without consideration. It is a great shame to us all that we must resort to such wars.”

Then he ordered that a guard accompany her back to the Christian lines under white flags of truce, and all the while the woman looked at him in astonishment.

Looking back, it was almost as if this act of grace was directly rewarded, Malek thought, when two days later an exhausted courier on a sweating horse rode in. The messenger gave his name as Theophilus.

“I have been sent by Isaac the King, emperor of Constantinople,” he croaked, “servant of the Messiah, crowned by the grace of God, ever glorious and victorious, the invincible conqueror, the autocrat of the Greeks, Angelos, who extends to His Excellency the Sultan of Egypt, Salah ad-Din, sincere affection and friendship—”

“Yes, yes,” cried Imad al-Din impatiently, “but now to the nub of the matter!”

“The German army crossed into Cicilia,” Theophilus continued with a frown, annoyed that the formal protocols had been curtailed. “The Holy Roman Emperor Barbarossa was pushing ahead of the main body of his troops with his scouts and a small vanguard.
They came to the River Saleph, but rather than wait for the army the emperor was impatient to continue and insisted on fording the river at once. In the deepest part of the current his horse lost its footing and threw the old man over its shoulder. It was the hottest day of the year but the water, streaming out of the mountains, was deadly cold. It may be that the emperor’s heart gave out, for he was not a young man, or that he could not swim, weighed down by his armour. Either way, all attempts to revive him failed—”

“What, the Redbeard is dead?” Salah ad-Din cried, rising from his chair. “The greatest king in Christendom?”

Theophilus inclined his head. “We had the news of his demise on the best authority, for Isaac the King, servant of the Messiah, God praise his name and ever lengthen his days, has spies embedded within Barbarossa’s army, and all this was witnessed by one of those men.”

Since this tumultuous event, he said, a confusion had fallen over the Germans, whose number had already been greatly reduced by disease and hardship. And although it was thought that they would continue south into Syria, the threat they posed was not as insurmountable as it had previously appeared.

Malek could hardly believe what he was hearing: it seemed too momentous, too fortuitous to take in. It was only when the sultan fell to his knees to give thanks to Allah, and the rest of the inner council followed suit, that it sank in. A black cloud had been lifted. He felt like shouting in exultation. But of course he knelt like the rest and touched his forehead to the ground and thanked God for his grace.

Salah ad-Din sent a pigeon to Akka, but since the Christians had taken to shooting them down whenever they could, he sent a boy to fetch “the swimmer.” Malek smiled. For once, Aisa would be able to carry good tidings home. What celebrations there would be!

Aisa, arriving some minutes later, fell to one knee before the sultan to accept the message. He already wore, wrapped tight around
his waist, the otterskin bags containing the wages to take back to the garrison. At the sight of his little brother, whose shoulders were beginning to fill out with muscle gained from these regular exertions, Malek’s heart swelled with pride.

Salah ad-Din gave him the message he had dictated to Imad al-Din and watched as Aisa tucked it carefully in with the money. “You will be hailed a hero for delivering this,” he said, with tears in his eyes.

The smile the lad returned to the sultan was rapt, and Malek found his own eyes swimming with tears.

The news of the loss of the German horde seemed to stir up a ferment in the Christian ranks, and waves of men carrying pikes and axes beat uphill against their own army. The attacks seemed random and disorganized, the provocateurs from the lower orders.

“Desperation?” Ibrahim asked Malek on the third morning of unrest, as they armed themselves on the sultan’s orders.

Malek shrugged. “Who can know the mind of the unbeliever?”

“Our lord must think there is an advantage to be gained, if he’s sending us out with Ala al-Din.” The sultan rarely risked his burning coals for no good reason.

Malek went to the farthest picket lines to saddle up Asfar. She nickered at the sight of him, and when he mounted her she danced and spun around and around. Malek looked at the range of hills to the south, sere and brown, baked by the sun, and above them a hawk making slow, graceful sky-circles, the light turning its wings to a blur of golden-red against the unbroken blue. How lovely, Malek thought, to be up there away from the stink and the noise and the flies, the excrement and sickness and death. But then the hawk folded its wings and stooped, faster than the fastest arrow. It disappeared from sight, but a sudden piercing shriek marked the death
of its prey. The sound went through Malek like a shaft of ice. Was this the day he would die? Had it long been written? Unshielded by his usual concerns about keeping the sultan safe, he rode into battle sure that something terrible was about to happen to him.

He lost track of the number of enemies he faced that day—of the nameless men who rose up before him, of the number of times his sword rose and fell, of the blows he struck, the cries of horses and men merging into one long, drawn-out death-scream that became a blur of noise in his head. His world had shrunk to this burning arena in which the sun beat down and the enemy became increasingly trapped between the walls, the ocean and the closing pincers of the Muslim troops.

The chroniclers would write of this battle that the bodies of the Franj stretched in nine lines between the sand dunes and the sea, and that in each line lay a thousand corpses. Malek knew nothing of this: all he saw was what was before him—details etched into his memory, to be replayed in jerky, formless repetitions in the dead of night or during unguarded waking moments. And the worst of the nightmares was to come in his final encounter of the day, when he was barely strong enough to wield his scimitar.

If there was anything different about his final opponent of the day, Malek did not notice it. If the figure was slighter or shorter than others he had faced, he did not register the fact. If the blow the Franj landed on his shield failed to jar his arm as he would have expected, he did not mark it, but pushed back with his shield to unsteady the soldier and swung down with his curved blade with all the strength he could muster, catching the fellow a disabling blow on the shoulder, the honed scimitar shearing down through the flimsy layers of cloth and leather, through skin and muscle and bone, where it grated and stuck, threatening to unhorse him.

The scream the man emitted was terrible. Malek yanked the scimitar up and back with all his strength till it came free and was
about to ride on when the trumpets blared out the signal to desist.

Wearily, Malek turned to scan the field, only to find none standing but Muslims and mamluks. And then he knew they had taken the day. All around, men lay corpse-still or writhing. Already, soldiers were scavenging, removing weapons and valuables from the fallen. There was booty to be found: it was a practice shared by every victorious army under the sun. Maybe it was the sight of such mutilated humanity, or superstition at being too close to death in case it rubbed off on you in some way, or the fear of dead men’s spirits hovering, or the djinns that swarmed over battlefields like crows. Or maybe he was simply weak of stomach. Whatever the reason, Malek could not bring himself to join them.

He turned Asfar to return to the camp, but a detail snatched his attention. His last opponent lay there, helmet askew, the nose-guard knocked sideways. He glimpsed the whole, naked face now—so pale, and growing paler. The fair skin of these people never failed to amaze him, like dough taken too soon from the oven. But this one had skin so pale it was almost luminous, and the exposed throat was smooth, the veins a shadowy blue.

Something was not right; it clutched at his gut, the dread he had been feeling all day long. He felt compelled to go closer. He found himself swinging down out of the saddle, drawing the mare with him as he stood over the fallen Christian soldier. He went down on one knee and pulled the helmet fully off and a mass of red-gold hair spilled out. Hot iron in his palm; cool hair slipping like silk across the back of his hand: a contradictory image he had difficulty holding in his mind, like opposing magnets. And then the fallen soldier’s eyes opened and they were blue, a violent, dark blue like the heart of a storm, yet fringed by golden lashes.

The mouth twisted and uttered a word he could not understand. And then the soldier tried to sit up, rising with immense effort onto one elbow. The ruined leather of the soldier’s jerkin—soaked in
scarlet, already drying to brown in the baking heat—fell away to reveal an impossible wound—an arm hanging by sinew and shattered bone—and a single, perfect, small white breast.

He had committed a terrible sin: he had cut down a woman.

Malek lurched backwards, appalled as the figure tried once more to rise. He watched, gripped by a sort of terror. Her eyes locked on his, and then blood gushed from her mouth and she fell back and did not move again, but lay there, her hair fanned out, just like the hair of the Jerusalem whore against the mattress on which he had taken her, her blue eyes staring sightlessly into the blue eternity above.

Malek buried his face in his hands and wept, and wept, and wept.

Z
ohra woke suddenly with her heart thundering, her robe tangled around her legs. She lay there, disoriented, sweat pooling between her breasts, trying to remember where she was and what had happened. She had been running from something—or maybe towards something—something terrible, something world-breaking. Running, but unable to move, screaming silently.

Beside her, Tariq stirred, raising his head a little off the mattress. In the darkness she stared at him, willing him not to wake, and a moment later he grunted and turned away from her, and his gentle snoring resumed. It was the only gentle thing about him. Her thighs were chafed from his attentions: he was not a thin man, or a tender husband. Sometimes she thought she would break apart under his weight. “God give me the strength to endure this marriage,” she prayed. “I am doing my best, but you are not making it easy.”

It had come as no surprise that she did not enjoy all that was required of her as a wife. She had always found it hard to accept, as others seemed to without question, that it was natural that her fate be parcelled out by men. She had at first faced the travails Tariq inflicted on her with cold disdain, but that had just made him crueller. When she tried to fight him off, he laughed and seemed to enjoy
it all the more. She had learned to give the appearance of compliance but took herself away from him, into a locked room in her head that smelled of amber and herbs, of inks and vellum.

She lay there a while longer, trying to recover the nightmare, but all that was left in her grasp were dark tatters of threat and danger. She ran through all those she loved, one by one, to reassure herself.

Her father had a summer cold and a hacking cough she did not like the sound of, but whenever she mentioned it he brushed her concerns away. “What do you expect when I spend my days knee-deep in pigeon feathers and bird shit?” Every other day he lost a pigeon, either shot down by the Christians or lost because he was reduced to sending out inexperienced birds. It made him permanently bad-tempered.