Pillars of Light (54 page)

I wondered how so young and cheerful a man as Ahmad could be responsible for dealing so much death. But now, I supposed, he was working to save lives. Maybe there was some kind of invisible balance at work in the world after all.

Our work tent was set up at some distance from the rest of the army camp, partly because of the noxious fumes we were producing, and partly because of the need for secrecy. There were many times during that week that I thought our task impossible. The bubbling metal in the cauldron was a dull brown colour, bursting into bubbles of red and giving out sulphurous farts and gulps. On the first attempt it emerged almost black, and no amount of alum or scraping made much difference.

The Moor was unfazed, however. “It’s a matter of trial and error,” he’d said after consulting Ahmad and the alchemists. “Once we hit the right heat to anneal it, the impurities will emerge and can be removed. That will brighten the colour.”

I simply couldn’t imagine how the dull mixture in that cauldron could ever come to resemble the gleaming relic we’d stolen from the treasury in Acre. In the end, for fear my lack of conviction would somehow magically spoil the process further, I left them to it.

I did not see the Moor for several days, spending my time instead with Rosamund as she recuperated from her wound. Sometimes we were joined by the tall Muslim soldier, and I would watch how his dour, narrow face lit up when she smiled at him, and how her cheeks glowed as she mimed something she could not yet phrase in his language, and I wondered how such tenderness could possibly flower out of the bloody roots of this war.

Then, one day, the Moor came to find me. His robe was spotted and stained and his hands were black to the wrists, his nails as filthy as my own. I had never before seen him dirty. Even on the muddiest of our travels he had always somehow contrived to remain fastidiously clean, making soaps from riverbank plants, using sand or grit to wash with where there was no water. He smelled sharply of citrus, with a bitter, salty tinge. I wrinkled my nose.

He grinned. “We’ve had to use a cartload of lemons and another of alum, but I think we’ve done it. Come and see.”

The tent was dark after the bright light outside. It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the light, but when they did …

“That’s incredible.”

The goldsmith’s boy was beating out a thin sheet of the metal. It gleamed like buttercups. Like liquid sunshine. Like gold …

“It’ll tarnish and blacken as time goes on, so I’ve sent word to the sultan. The Christian envoys will be here in two days.”

“Two days!”

“Sayedi Soufiane here says that will be time enough to do the work, and that we can keep the oxidation at bay long enough for the metal to retain its colour.” He said something rapidly to the goldsmith in their guttural language; the old man nodded vigorously and raised his hands, as if seeking God’s aid.

And I had thought our venture at Glastonbury a chancy business …

“May I?” I gestured towards the artifact.

The goldsmith was reluctant to let me near his work of art, and I couldn’t honestly blame him, but at last he stepped aside. He had been sitting, surrounded by candles at night and with the flaps of the tent up by day, hammering and etching for days with his tiny gold-working tools. What he had achieved in that time was well-nigh miraculous: the back as well as the front of the replica cross was adorned with “jewels”—finely chiselled coloured glass and some real pearls purloined from who knew where—and busy with whorls and bosses and tiny portraits of Christian saints. Some of the latter I’d drawn from scratch: the others I’d recalled from the Lady Chapel. There had been a lot of metal to embellish: we’d had to extemporize. But who, I thought, gazing at this wondrous object, would ever suspect it had been forged by infidels? It was covered with Christian iconography devised by a wild heathen who’d lived as a beast on the moors, and replicated by a man whose religion allowed for no such representations of its sacred imagery.

I picked it up gingerly, expecting it to weigh as heavy as iron. It came away lighter than I’d expected and I almost let it slip. The goldsmith wrestled it away from me and set it back on the table. The look he gave me was not friendly.

“We had to use more wood and less metal in the end,” the Moor said, stepping out of the shadows. “Drawing the golden hue out of the copper proved to be … challenging. We were not left with enough to make all parts solid, like the original. And maybe
the wood of the relic became denser with age as it dried and contracted over the centuries. But,” he bent and swept his fingertips lightly over the intricate, glowing surface, “it looks impressive to me … pagan that I am.” He turned and grinned at me, and the gold reflected in the half-moons of his eyes.

For a moment my knees went weak. “You have worked magic,” I told him.

“Jamil.”

Malek turned with a start to find Rosamund behind him. Asfar whickered, annoyed that Malek’s careful grooming had suddenly stopped.
“Jamilla,”
he corrected. “The feminine form takes an ‘a.’ And yes, she is beautiful my horse, my Asfar.”

“Jamil,”
repeated Rosamond cheerfully. She touched Malek on the chest. “You. You look so … grand.” Not knowing the Arabic for this, she puffed her chest out and strutted until he laughed.

He took his helmet off and held it out to her. “See, it is only me, Malek, under all this,” he said in Arabic, and then, “Only a man,” he continued in English, and she almost fell down in shock.

“What? How?”

“Your friend the Moor. He teaches me your language.”

Rosamund’s grin went from ear to ear. “He is matchmaking!” She chuckled, and refused to explain the word to him. Instead, she ran her hand through the chestnut mare’s glossy mane and exclaimed when her fingers came away gleaming with fragrant oil. “She smells better than me!”

“The sultan has asked us not to shame him,” Malek tried to explain. He mimed polishing his helmet, the harness, his boots, while Rosamund made appreciative noises.

“Very handsome,” she said.
“Jamil!”
and this time he did not correct her. A faint blush coloured his cheeks.

“He cannot be seen to be lacking funds,” he went on quickly in Arabic to cover his embarrassment, “when the envoys come.” This was what Ibrahim had so perceptively remarked first thing that morning: “He will need to buy more time and to instill confidence in them. It is a dangerous and narrow path between two chasms that he has to walk.”

Malek had nodded grimly, thinking of his father and brother, his Uncle Omar and his aunts. He had felt sick then, but now, looking at Rosamund, his heart lifted. Whenever he saw her smile his heart leapt up, and whenever she was with him she smiled. The two things seemed indivisible: a marvellous, miraculous conjunction of events. There was something thrilling about this connection between them. He did not know what it was or what it meant. He did not know where it might lead or how he might be changed by it, but whenever that smile—sometimes shy, sometimes teasing—lit her face, he felt that anything in the world was possible.

I will speak to my father as soon as he is released
, he thought.
While he is still happy to be alive
. It would not be an easy conversation. A foreign woman raised by their enemies, speaking only a little Arabic, with no bridal goods and no one to speak for her and, worst of all, an infidel. For a moment his heart seized at the prospect. But the best things in life never come easy—wasn’t Baltasar himself fond of saying that?

Malek took up his position with the rest of the burning coals on either side of the meeting place. All the best carpets had been gathered from the princes of the camp and laid out over the parched soil—a gorgeous tapestry of crimson and peach and ochre and rose and blue—leading to the canopy. Beneath it the sultan sat in his plain dark-green robe and his plain white turban, under which Malek knew he wore the steel cap he had always worn since the
hashshashin
had made their last attempt on his life. The scene made a handsome sight.
Jamil
, he thought, and smiled to himself.

The envoys came riding up the Hill of Carobs with their banners flying. Malek recognized among them the blue silk of the French king and the red-and-gold of the English king, and behind them the great gold crosses on white silk of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Had the great kings themselves come? He craned his neck, intrigued. No, the man whose squire flew the English banner was not al-Inkitar, and the Frenchman also did not look like a king. The third envoy, though, he recognized, barely. Guy de Lusignan: the snake who had started this siege, the man Salah ad-Din had spared after the Battle of Hattin. The intervening four years had not been kind to him. Lank brown hair threaded with grey was bound back from his forehead by a thin golden circlet; deep-set eyes gazed hauntingly from beneath a shelf of bone. They had heard he’d lost his daughters to the plague, and his queen, too; he looked himself like a man on the brink of death.

The envoys dismounted and the sultan rose to welcome them. Refreshments were brought, greetings exchanged. Niceties over, the English envoy waved his men forward. They were burly fellows, chosen for their ability to carry heavy chests. Salah ad-Din waved the men away, as if it was rude to bring business to a head quite so soon in their meeting. Voices were raised, but not enough for Malek to hear exactly what was said. His guts clenched: it was clear that the envoys were unhappy, that their instructions had been to fetch the ransom monies and to return with them without delay. More talking, quieter now. Some prisoners were herded forward and given over to the envoys, followed by four small chests: a down payment on the full ransom.

Even this was not enough to calm tempers. The English envoy shouted again; the Frenchman joined him. Hands went to sword hilts on either side.

The sultan stood and said something to a man behind him. He gestured for the envoys to take another glass of wine. Then, at a signal, the honour guard parted to allow the passage of a tall man in a white robe. It was the Moor, and he carried before him the relic that had been captured at Hattin, the object the Franj called the True Cross.

Sunlight played over rich gold, sparked a fire in the jewels, caressed the pearls. The Moor’s sleeves fell back to show arm muscles corded with the effort of bearing the heavy cross aloft. A heady scent of roses engulfed the onlookers.

The envoys stared at the relic, Guy de Lusignan through narrowed eyes, the other two with expressions of awe bordering on terror.

Then, one by one, they fell to their knees before it and began to pray.

“H
old still, John. You’re as twitchy as a mule plagued by horseflies.”

I tried to still myself beneath his hands and allow myself to luxuriate in the sensation.

“Shaggy as a pony,” he said fondly. Clippings of my black hair floated to the ground, as coarse and curly as a dog’s.

I closed my eyes and tilted my face up to the sun till the insides of my eyelids shone as red as a
naranja
. “Tell me, were you ever in Lisbon?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

The hands stopped for a moment, then resumed their gentle plucking and measuring and cutting. “Once,” he said softly. There was a smile in his voice.

“I … I thought I saw you there.”

“I was on the road the best part of two years,” he said evasively.

“Where did you go after you left us in Rye?”

“From Paris to Cluny Abbey. I followed the pilgrim route to Compostela. After that …”—snip, snip—“a little while in Cordoba. Do you know there are eight hundred and fifty-six columns in the Great Mosque? It is a building shaped by light,” he said dreamily. “Then I travelled on in search of a special form of arch that
will enable us to build our cathedral high, make it light and airy—”

“I have seen these arches!” I could not help but shout it out. People stared, then laughed, thinking the Moor had nicked an ear. I lowered my voice. “In Acre, in the mosque. There were things there I have dreamed of all my life—towering pillars and sharp arches, and a roof all of gold—”

He stopped cutting. “You went into the Friday Mosque?”

I nodded. “While Quicksilver and I were escaping. It was … like a vision.”

The Moor clucked his tongue. “A pair of infidels in a mosque.” He started his snipping again. “I took ship from Lisbon to Amalfi and from there to Monte Cassino, where there are still Muslim masons working. From there I shipped to North Africa to see the Qubbat Barudiyan in Marrakech, and from there to the Qairouan Mosque, and at last to Cairo.”

I turned my head to look at him, and this time the shears really did nick my ear. “Ow! But how did you afford it, having left me all your money?”

“Oh, John.” He sounded amused. “Reginald sent me to visit the sacred sites where I would find these ogival arches that enable a construction so strong it will allow for the opening of great windows in the walls. I was to find masons who understand the principles required to construct his project at Wells. He gave me a good sum of money to carry out the research.”