Siege of Heaven (19 page)

‘Not enough time to reach the sea, at any rate,’ I said.

Perhaps, because I had just saved his life, Nikephoros held some of his scorn in check. If so, I did not notice. ‘Reach the sea? Even if the night hid us for ever, we would never find our way through the tangled mouths of this river. And if, by God’s grace, we did reach Tinnis, what would we find there? A chain across the harbour, and every ship hauled out of the water for winter. Did you hear what the caliph said? The seas are closed.’

Aelfric stirred. ‘What about the ship we came on?’

‘The emperor’s fleet is no use to him penned up in an enemy port. The ship’s master had orders to sail home if we had not returned when winter came.’

‘It was the caliph who turned on us,’ I said tentatively. ‘Al-Afdal was willing to bargain. If we hide until he returns he may protect us.’

Nikephoros shook his head. ‘Al-Afdal would have bargained with us, but now the caliph has declared war on us and we have killed Fatimid soldiers. He cannot protect us now.’

‘Much good his protection did us anyway,’ Aelfric muttered.

‘If al-Afdal finds us, he will have to kill us.’

A glum silence descended between us. Oars squeaked, the rowers sighed the unheard sighs of slaves, and mist drifted across our bow. The moon had set, and though I could not see the stars I guessed that morning could not be far off.

‘So what shall we do?’

Nikephoros, who had been idly stroking his fingers through the tendrils of fog, looked up. ‘We cannot go north, we cannot stay where we are, and we certainly cannot go south. West only takes us further from home. We will go east.’

‘I have heard that there is only desert to the east,’ said the Patzinak warily.

‘So there is. But it has been crossed before. And you know what lies beyond?’ Sodden, battered and doomed though he was, Nikephoros gave a wolfish grin.

‘The promised land.’

We rowed on as long as we dared, then nosed the boat into a patch of reeds at the water’s edge. Before we disembarked, I forced the point of Bilal’s knife into the lock that fastened the slaves’ chain and pried until it opened. A dozen blank-faced slaves stared up at me, apparently unable to comprehend their freedom; we almost had to haul them off their benches and drive them ashore. When the boat was emptied, Aelfric and I waded into the water, keeping a cautious watch for the crocodiles, and rocked it back and forth until we capsized it. Then, with a final heave, we pushed it out into the stream and watched it drift into the darkness.

‘If we’re lucky, they may think we were all drowned.’

‘Or eaten,’ Aelfric said.

Nikephoros snorted, gesturing to the muddy ramp we had trampled out of the river bank. ‘And will they think that this was made by cattle? We should hurry.’

We left the slaves still huddled together in their herd and struck out across the adjacent field. Dark cracks split the ground at our feet, but despite the river’s failure to flood, the earth was still damp, and we left a perfect trail of footprints moulded into the soil. It would have been easier to walk on the embanked causeway that rose to our right – but then we would have been exposed to pursuing eyes.

As we had seen by the pyramids, the fertile ground extended no further than the edge of the river valley. We scrambled up the escarpment where the fields ended, and paused. Directly opposite, on the far side of the world, the sun climbed over the rim of the earth and faced us. An amethyst sky soared above us, fragile and new, while pink and golden light flooded across the horizon.
The promised land
, Nikephoros had said, and at that moment I could believe it.

But before that was the desert. It sprawled as far as we could see, all the way to the glittering horizon, a desolate wilderness of sharp stones and dust. Soon the heat of the day would boil the dregs of moisture from it, softening the scene with a haze, but for now we could see every peak, crag and broken hillside with savage clarity. Beside me, I heard the Patzinak groan.

‘Are we going to cross that?’

‘The Israelites did,’ said Nikephoros.

‘The Israelites struck water from the rock,’ I said. ‘Will we do the same?’

‘There is no need for blasphemy.’ Nikephoros pointed to our left, to the next ridge, where the splayed legs of a wooden tripod stood silhouetted against the new horizon. ‘We can drink at the well.’

But the well was not unguarded. As we came to the top of the rise, into the glare of the rising sun, we heard a splash, and moments later saw a woman standing by the edge of the well. She was dressed entirely in black, her hair covered with a shawl, so that only a single bone-white hair escaped. She must have seen us struggling towards her long before that, but she did not flee. She waited a moment for her bucket to fill, then began hauling on the rope. The sleeves of her dress rode up her thin arms as she struggled with the weight. Without a word, Aelfric stepped forward and took the rope. The woman edged away with a reproachful look but said nothing. Now that she faced us, I could see wizened cheeks and a furrowed brow in between the black wrappings.

Aelfric hoisted the bucket onto the stone rampart. Water spilled over its edge, but he steadied it with his hand and gestured the woman to take it. With a wary glance, she tipped the contents into a clay jar by her feet. Beside it, I saw two deflated goatskins lying on the sand.

The gushing sound of pouring water stirred my thirst. I took the empty bucket, threw it down into the well and drew myself a fresh draught. In my haste, the bucket came up half full, but I hardly cared. I tipped it to my lips and
drank greedily, so fast that water splashed over my face and chin, dribbling down over my filthy tunic. I emptied it far too soon, and would have refilled it for myself had I not felt the envious eyes of my companions. Reluctantly, I let them take it in turn, while the woman crouched by her jar and watched cautiously.

I prodded one of the goatskins with my toe. ‘Will you sell us this?’

Blank eyes stared out at me from beneath her shawl. Beside me, Nikephoros shook the water from his beard and sniffed. ‘Do you think she will understand you? Why should she? What can she do against us if we take her goatskins?’

Ignoring him, I threw down one of the spears we had stripped from the caliph’s guards. She stared at it in terror, and I realised too late I had forgotten to wipe the blood from its tip. Trying to smile, I reached down for the two goatskins and pulled them towards me. I pointed to them, then to myself, then to the spear and then to the woman.

She stretched a bare foot from under her dress and pushed the spear back towards me. The goatskins she left untouched.

‘What use is a spear to her?’ Nikephoros jeered. ‘Do you think she will march to the palace and ask to join the caliph’s guard?’

‘He has some spaces in his ranks to fill after last night,’ said Jorol, the Patzinak.

‘The steel in the blade is worth something.’

‘Only trouble.’ Aelfric took the spear off the ground and earned a grateful glance from the woman. ‘If the
caliph’s guards come chasing us and find that spear in her house, what do you think they’ll do to her?’

‘No worse than they’ll do to us if we wait any longer,’ said Jorol, looking pointedly over his shoulder. Long shadows stretched out behind us, but they were shortening every minute.

With an apologetic bow to the woman, Aelfric tossed the leather bucket into the well and drew three quick measures. When the goatskins were filled, he and Jorol heaved them onto their shoulders while I gazed uncertainly at the woman.

‘What if she tells someone she saw us?’ Nikephoros’ voice was harsh.

Aelfric shrugged. ‘They’ll see us for themselves if we don’t go soon.’

Just before we left, I reached into my boot and pulled out the knife Bilal had given me, which I had retrieved from the bilge of the boat after the fight. I was loathe to part with it now: it had brought me luck in battle, and might be needed again in the desert. But the woman had given us water, and bad bargains bring bad luck. Bilal had bought the knife from a market stall, he had said, and there was nothing to mark it as ours – or his. I threw it to her; she caught it in her bony hand, examined it, then tucked it into the folds of her dress. Nikephoros stared at me with bare contempt.

‘If you have finished giving alms . . .’

We walked into the desert.

* * *

Fifteen months earlier, I had marched with the Army of God across the barren plains of Anatolia in August, when we chewed thorns for moisture and slaughtered dogs for food because the horses were already dead. Turkish cavalry had harried our column every day, ants trying to strip the army’s body one crumb of flesh at a time, and we had left a trail of corpses on the road behind us, mile after mile, because we had neither the time nor the strength to bury our dead. After surviving that, I had thought nothing could ever be so terrible again.

But that misunderstood the desert. Heat, thirst and hunger can kill a man, but it is the everlasting emptiness that flays his soul. The desert draws up life like a sponge, sucking until the heart dries up and turns inside out. Then it confronts you with the skeleton that remains. Some men find their revelation there and become prophets; some are driven mad. Most do not survive the ordeal.

How did the Army of God survive the march across Anatolia? Not through strength or courage or faith, but merely because it was too big to kill. However much we suffered individually, the sheer mass of humanity around us, in all its lumbering, screaming, stinking pain, proved we were still alive. We drove a column of life through the desert, and the desert could not overcome it. Four men, battered and hungry, with barely a day’s water between them, were a different matter. Almost immediately, the desert began to reduce us. My limbs shrivelled and burned like sticks in a fire as the sweat was wrung out of them; my tongue felt as though it was baking in my mouth. I
tore a strip from the bottom of my tunic and wound it around my head to shield the sun, though it did little good. Jorol went further still: he pulled off his tunic completely and ripped it in two, draping one half over his head and shoulders like a woman’s shawl and tying the other around his waist for modesty. It made him look blasphemously like Christ.

By midday, we could go no further. We staggered into the shade of a rock in a shallow depression and lay there, too tired to stay awake and too hot to sleep. Flies crawled out of the sand to bite us, and rivulets of sweat slithered over my skin like snakes. And always I was listening out for the drumming hooves or jangling armour that would spell the end of our mad flight.

We pretended to sleep until dusk. Then we rose, brushed the dust from our clothes, and continued on.

At first we navigated by our shadows, following where they pointed as the sun sank behind us. They became so long it seemed they must reach all the way home; then, abruptly, they vanished. Stars came out, impossibly familiar in that lonely place, and we struggled on, keeping the pole star forward and to our left as much as the fractured terrain allowed. We walked in a single column for the most part, but every so often a steep slope or high obstacle would knot us together again. At one of those places, I asked Nikephoros about our course.

‘We have to reach the coast,’ he said. None of us had spoken a word all day, and his voice cracked with exhaustion.

‘What will we find there?’

‘Water.’ He tried to smile, but his dry lips would not oblige. ‘And perhaps a boat.’

‘Then what? None of us is a sailor. Even if we were, you said the sea is closed.’

‘We can make our way up the coast. The Fatimids control it, but their ships will be in harbour.’

With good reason, I suspected. I did not ask any more questions.

The desert had been a hostile place by day; in the dark, it became a nightmare. A land that had seemed unable to nourish a single stalk of grass now brought forth a host of living beasts: strange, unseen creatures, which scuttled, squealed and grunted all around us. Soon I became convinced that if only we had had a lamp to kindle we would have seen ourselves surrounded by a writhing mass of all the carrion birds, flesh eaters, beetles, snakes and worms of Hell. As it was, we saw none of them, though once I felt my boot step on something furry, which screamed and squirmed under my foot before scurrying away. Somewhere, perhaps half a mile away, something like a wolf howled to the stars.

The air itself seemed to mock us. We had waited for dusk to avoid the heat of the day; what we had not expected was that the night could be so cold. The empty dark seemed to suck all warmth from the air, so that the clothes that had felt like plates of burning iron now seemed flimsy and inadequate. Jorol untied the torn half-tunic
from his head and draped it over his shoulders; it did not reach as far as the loincloth at his waist, and in the dark the gap between the two pieces of white cloth made it look as though his torso had been sawn in half.

We marched through the night. When the blood-red fingers of dawn began to reach over the horizon, we found another shelter and curled up for the day.

Many men enter the wilderness seeking answers. Some, I suppose, find them. For myself, I found that the emptiness of the desert left only questions. Words and images tumbled unbidden into my mind, as if every thought and memory I had ever had was being flushed through me. I saw Anna and Sigurd, sometimes alive and sometimes as ghosts; I saw my daughters, as they were and as they had been, cradled in their mother’s arms. I even saw my parents, though I thought I had forgotten what they looked like. In one memory, or dream, I had thrust my hand into a bees’ nest; I ran down the hill between spring wildflowers, crying with pain even as I licked the honey from my stinging fingers. A woman hugged me, so close that I could not see her, and I dried my tears on the folds of her skirt.