Pillars of Light (5 page)

A man blind from birth, as he had sworn in the catalogue of penitents, stared about with an idiotic grin. “Ah, the colours! The colours hurt my eyes! Praise the Lord! Crimson and gold, azure
and green. Are those trees that grow out of the pillars, or have the stones come to life before my new eyes?”

Don’t overegg the pudding, Will
, I thought.

A possessed man came to his senses and started to sing the
Te Deum
.

A leper peeled foul sores from his arm, revealing unmarked skin beneath.

All was going beautifully, the merchants and nobles pressing ever greater oblations upon the overwhelmed church officers. The money was pouring in. A commotion behind me caused me to turn, to find another erstwhile blind man crying out ecstatically, “I can see! I can see!” Then he ran into a pillar and fell down as if struck by a knacker’s mallet.

The Moor caught Plaguey Mary by the arm. “He isn’t one of ours, is he?”

She shook her head. “Some fool who’s got carried away by it all.”

The man was beginning to writhe, blood pouring from his split skull.

“For God’s sake, create a distraction.”

Wailing as if possessed, Mary whirled away, unlacing her bodice. “Save me, King Arthur! There is a demon inside me, curled up between my teats. Do you see him? Oh, he is black as night and wicked as Satan. Cast him out, I beg of you!”

Husbands stared as her opulent breasts sprang free; wives cuffed their husbands. No one paid any attention to the blind man, now groaning and clutching his head at the foot of the pillar.

Into the midst of this chaos, a man came running through the doors and shouted something. The Moor whispered urgently in my ear. I watched the red robes flicker like a Pentecostal flame and then he was gone. I tried to follow, but the press of folk was suddenly so tight around me that I couldn’t move.

The justiciar’s brother caught the messenger by the elbow and made him repeat his news. His great, red, slab-like face turned ashen. The messenger took a big breath, then cried out, “By God’s grace and on the orders of Henry,
Rex Angliae, Dux Normaniae et Aquitainiae et Comes Andigaviae
, bear witness to my words. Jerusalem has fallen!”

I went cold all over. Good Christ, what timing.

The messenger strained to make himself heard. “Jerusalem the Golden, the City of Solomon, the Navel of the World, has fallen into the hands of the great devil Saladin and his pagan horde! Its people are slaughtered or scattered to the four winds. The Sanctuary is defiled and the True Cross has been captured by the Saracens. The flower of Christianity has been destroyed. All is lost!”

Around the Lady Chapel, faces became still. Mouths hung open, dark caves of despair. Some people crossed themselves and prayed. Then one woman wailed, “Jerusalem the Golden! Jerusalem the Golden!” as if she had lost a child. And that broke the spell.

The heart of Christendom had ceased to beat; it was at this very moment being desecrated by the heathen. And here were these Christians, helpless and continents away.

In such a world, who could believe in miracles?

The golden glow of hope was lost. What had seemed illuminated and transformed by the glory of the saints now showed itself a shoddy illusion. As if a veil had been dropped from her eyes, a woman stared at the leper—a small, dark man we knew as Saw, a twin to Hammer—and frowned. I knew the hideous sign of leprosy to be no more than a paste of coloured flour and water, dried to a repulsive crust. The woman leant in and with sudden boldness peeled the sore off his face, revealing a cheek that had never been afflicted with anything worse than pimples.

At the same time, someone else discovered the true blind man, blood running in runnels down his face; another rounded on Red
Will and accused him of never having been blind at all—whoever heard of a man blind from birth knowing the difference between colours and the names of each one?

In rising panic, I tried to blend into the background, just one appalled monk among the rest. Little Ned’s trolley was found to have a hidden compartment for his not-so-shrivelled legs, and inside it, a string of pearls he had slipped off some fat neck. One of the merchants’ wives began to scream, “My jewels, my jewels!” and suddenly Jerusalem the Golden was forgotten as people patted their necks and their belt-pouches and realized they lacked much of what they’d come in with—not pains and ills, or even sins, but purses, rings and necklaces …

Shit. Now our heads are in the noose
.

“Run!” I screamed at Quickfinger and Hammer, and they made a dash for the door. I swam through the crowd after them, shoving people out of my path. Angry churchgoers pursued the members of the troupe. Quickfinger went sprawling, bringing Hammer crashing down on top of him, spilling booty. Ranulf de Glanvill shouted, “Close the doors!” Just before I could reach them, the great wooden doors banged shut, and suddenly the justiciar’s brother was standing in my way. I cannoned into him. It was like running into a wall.

“Running a ring of thieves, are you?” He grasped the collar of my robe and hauled me upright. “Who the hell are you?”

Who was I? Just a wild boy, a savage, dressed up as a monk. My silence was construed as defiance. De Glanvill hit me, the great ring on his finger mashing my nose. I felt something in it burst; blood cascaded down the front of my white robe.

“What’s your name, you bastard?” he repeated, shaking me as if I were a rat.

I started to laugh, out of terror. “I—I, ah …”

A muscle twitched in my cheek. The scent of roses bloomed in my head. Powerful and pungent and hot as summer, the scent
scalded my nose. My knees gave way, leaving me hanging from his fist, my legs beginning to jig. I saw the look of disgust on his face, and then the gates in my head opened into a sky of gold, revealing pillars and arches that soared higher by far than those in the Lady Chapel, and I was lost.

AUTUMN 1187

“E
qual sizes, Zohra!” Nima Najib peered over her daughter’s shoulder as she failed yet again to make the
ma’amul
—a delicate pastry filled with a mixture of chopped dates, pistachios and walnuts, orange blossom water and spices—to her exacting standards. “Look, this one’s twice the size of the others. Don’t be so slapdash!”

Zohra’s cousins loved tasks like this—precise, repetitive—but she lacked patience. “I’m trying, Ummi, I really am.” What did it matter if the pastries weren’t all alike? They tasted the same in the end.

They had been preparing food all morning to celebrate the reuniting of the Najib family. The occupation was over; Akka was liberated, and Jerusalem recaptured from the infidel. It was the first family gathering in long years. Zohra’s father, Baltasar, had been down to the livestock market on his way back from the mosque and bought a fine black ram and three chickens. Indulgent towards his simple eldest son, Baltasar had allowed Sorgan to lead the ram while he and the twins—Aisa and Kamal—had each carried a
flapping chicken. When they returned, Sorgan had been sent to feed the pigeons on the roof terrace to keep him occupied while the butchery was carried out in the courtyard. Sorgan had a soft heart, and no one wanted to explain to him the connection between the blood on the tiles, the missing animals and the meat on his plate.

While Sorgan stroked the soft feathers on his favourite birds, Baltasar had shown the twins how to cut the ram’s meat from the bone. They were twelve years old—five years younger than Zohra. Kamal, who had a tendency to act like a small child, got smacked for running around with the horns on his head and getting blood all over his clean tunic; and then Aisa tried to stop Kamal from retaliating and caught a blow in the face, which resulted in more blood and washing.

As the only girl, it had fallen to Zohra to get her brothers into clean clothes, a task she undertook with gritted teeth and the necessary degree of no-nonsense brutality. Then she had returned to help her mother in the kitchen. They had been working for five solid hours now: washing the mutton, rubbing it with freshly ground cardamom and cinnamon, loading it into the biggest pan and setting it to poach over the fire. They had sliced a dozen onions, plucked and jointed the three chickens, rubbed saffron into the meat and set it aside to marinate in lemon juice and garlic while getting the rest of the feast underway. While Nima griddled aubergines until their skins burned and filled the kitchen with smoke, Zohra had made the bread dough and left it to prove, then gathered armfuls of herbs from the courtyard garden. They’d mashed the aubergine flesh with garlic and lemon juice and sesame paste and chopped the herbs and cucumbers and radishes for the salad. Only then had they turned their attentions to the fiddly, infuriating pastries.

“Oh my,” Nima said suddenly. Her cheeks were flushed; sweat beaded on her forehead. She ran a hand through her hair.
Were those
grey streaks there yesterday?
Zohra wondered.
Well, of course they were. No one goes grey overnight
.

“Take a rest, Ummi. Go, sit in the shade in the courtyard, out of all this heat.”

“No time for that. We must finish these and then get the
qidreh
on.” Nima wiped her forehead, then carried on cutting and filling and crimping like a woman possessed.

Zohra felt powerless. There had been nothing she could do to dissuade her mother from hosting the feast. Nima had been insistent, partly because she wanted to impress her sisters-by-law. Their husbands were well-to-do importers, whereas Zohra’s father was an invalided veteran, and they had to scrape by on whatever Malek sent home from his wages as a soldier in Salah ad-Din’s army. But really, who cared what the aunts and cousins thought of them? Zohra didn’t.

She found her thoughts drifting to the man she’d met at the perfume stall. Nathanael, the doctor’s son. What a strange-looking creature he was. All that curly black hair and that bold, bold look in his eyes. And the way he had laid a kiss on her palm! No one had ever touched her like that. A Muslim girl was sacrosanct: to be touched by any man was
haram
, forbidden. And yet the doctor’s son had behaved as if it were entirely normal, and no shame at all. He was a mystery, a fascinating, disturbing mystery …

“Zohra, wake up! It’s as if you’ve been in a dream all morning. And, oh! Look at the mess you’ve made of those. Well, it can’t be helped now. Quickly, take them down to the oven, and don’t forget the dough.”

Zohra loaded up a tray, made their symbol in the dough and, with it held precariously on her head, ran to the communal oven down the road to leave the
ma’amul
and flatbreads to bake, only to find that the oven was full: everyone was celebrating. The next oven had a queue that stretched around the corner, and so she ran
down the hill to a third bakery she located only by the spiral of woodsmoke that rose from its fire.

“Leave those with me,” an old woman said, taking hold of the tray. Zohra recognized her with despair as the Widow Eptisam, an incorrigible gossip. She had an eager, rabbity face with protruding teeth, and eyes that constantly darted from one thing to another. “I’ll put them in as soon as my own come out, it would be my pleasure,
binti
.”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll wait.” Zohra didn’t want to be beholden to her. But the widow had a firm hold on the tray, so in the end, rather than have to stay there and be talked at for half an hour, she left the pastries and dough with the old woman and turned for home.

As she passed a junction of alleys an idea nagged at her: if she followed one of them down the hill she would come to the Street of Tailors, where the doctor’s son, Nathanael, lived. The idea of his proximity made Zohra flush.

All this time—the best part of three months since she had encountered him in the bazaar—she had toyed daily with the possibility of following his impudent instruction to come to his house, and daily, she had retreated from imagining what might happen if she did.

Zohra had been brought up to believe that a good angel sat on one of her shoulders and a bad angel on the other, and that every decision involved a struggle between the two. So far her good angel had prevailed—during daylight hours, at least—but she could feel the pull of the bad angel now. Or perhaps it was the djinns with which Nathanael had threatened her.

When Salah ad-Din’s army had reclaimed Akka there had been chaos for a while, and she had barely dared to set foot outside. But it had not stopped her thinking about Nathanael bin Yacub before she went to sleep each night, and in her dreams. Wicked thoughts, wanton thoughts. Thoughts that shamed her in the light
of morning. She prayed for the strength to stop thinking about him, but it seemed that Allah had his mind on more important matters than one girl’s perverse infatuation.

She gazed in the direction of the Street of Tailors. You couldn’t see the top of the street from where she stood, just a confluence of roads where half the houses lay empty, while others were in the process of being rehabilitated. Salah ad-Din, generous to a fault, had offered safe passage to any Christians who wished to leave Akka and make a life elsewhere—and not just safe passage, but also a purse of gold so they might re-establish themselves outside the caliphate. There had been rich ransoms acquired when Jerusalem fell, many gold treasures appropriated and melted down for coinage. Still, it was hard to imagine any other conqueror being so magnanimous in victory. And so, many Franj had taken up the offer and abandoned their homes, leaving whole neighbourhoods half-empty. Merchants and traders, or functionaries like her cousins Rachid and Tariq, had swooped on the vacated houses like locusts on a cornfield and were now all puffed up with self-importance, as if grabbing what they could made them better than those who stayed where they were. It was one of the reasons Zohra was not looking forward to the family gathering: the women would spend all their time discussing the bargains they had made in the market over this carpet or that set of copperware for their new quarters. They were so boring, Zohra could happily have seen them all carried off, kicking and screaming, in the back of the Franj carts.