Pillars of Light (46 page)

No one stopped us as we ran through the citadel corridors. We emerged into the darkness of the gardens and still there were no guards. “Don’t run,” I told the troupe. “Don’t draw attention to yourselves.” We drew our cloaks around us and walked with our heads down into the streets.

There was hardly anyone around. At a crossroads we came upon a child by the side of the road; as we passed he looked up, automatically put out a hand, begging. He said something in a high, reedy voice, and Red Will turned around and, digging into
his sack, pulled out a charger of pure silver and thrust it into the boy’s hands.

“What the hell are you doing?” demanded Little Ned, glaring at him as if he would like to kill him.

Quickfinger cuffed Will around the head. “You soft idiot. He weren’t beggin’ for treasure, he were beggin’ for bread.”

The child stared uncomprehendingly at the shining item, then cast the silver plate into the dust. A woman picked up the charger and shouted at us, and angry-looking people began to appear out of the shadows. A man grabbed Red Will and pulled his hood down, exposing his light eyes, and suddenly there was a crowd, pushing and shouting. Someone wrested the sack of booty from him and upended it, gold and jewels spilling across the ground. A few people dropped to their knees, even in their starvation lured by the tawdry thrill of gold, but the rest were intent upon the interloper.

I saw Hammer clutch the dagger at his waist, but then he seemed to think better of it and, without a word, turned and walked smartly away.

Red Will cried out. The crowd was pushing him from one to another now, grabbing at his clothing. There was the sound of cloth tearing and I saw his pale skin gleaming.
“Franj!”
someone shouted, and there was a scream, and Will went down in a flurry of fists and knives.

With a cry of “Enoch Pilchard!” Quickfinger launched himself into the fray. He had the crozier in one hand, a dagger in the other. Like a whirling demon he set about the attackers and the crowd parted before his fury, then closed in around him.

T
hey beat us with sticks and whatever else came to hand, then surrounded us and pushed us through the streets and up onto the ramparts, screaming at us in their guttural language. They were thin—so thin—but hatred gave them strength as they pushed people out of the way, shouting at the tops of their voices to be heard over the hellish noise. Quicksilver was in front of me, the pre-dawn light making a silver corona of his wild frizz of hair. Little Ned stumbled along beside me, swearing and lashing out. I looked behind me, and there, unconscious, carried by his hands and feet, his long, thin body making a bow, his tangled red hair trailing in the dust, was Will. A rusty stain spread across his robe; the hilt of a dagger protruded from his side.

“Will!” I cried.

Someone grabbed hold of Ned and shoved him at a team of men loading rocks into the missile-basket of a massive catapult. The officer—at least he seemed to be the man in charge—looked at us. There was no fellow-feeling in his expression, just a sort of exhausted mirth, as if he were enjoying a joke with the powers that be at our expense.

Ned fought like a demon, but they knocked him over the head and piled him unceremoniously into the sling of the trebuchet, on
top of its load of rocks. “For fook’s sake!” Quicksilver breathed. “They’re going to chuck him over t’wall.”

I had not believed they would do it. I had seen corpses and body parts of animals and men sent over their walls by our own catapult men, hurtling overhead to burst and spatter on the ochre stones of the city, spreading brains and gore and disease where they landed. But I had never seen a living being hurled to destruction. I hadn’t much liked Ned, but to die like this—streaking towards your death, terrified and powerless in the face of the inevitable, agonizing obliteration—was something I would wish on no man. And yet, when they released the mechanism and Ned’s screams trailed away into the general cacophony, I could not look away.

As Ned arced towards the Christian lines, they started hauling on the winding mechanism of the trebuchet beside it, drawing back the counterweight. I shrank reflexively. It was Red Will they handed forward. They slung him unceremoniously into the sling, and I prayed silently he would not awaken suddenly to his awful fate.

Quicksilver broke free of his captors and confronted them like a wild animal, hands like claws, curses spilling from his mouth. “You bloody bastards, leave him be!” It did no good: he was soon held back. When the sling was released for a second time, he wept and bowed his head, and started to recite the Lord’s Prayer.

I had never been able to pray without feeling myself a hypocrite, until then. I watched as Will soared gracefully, the rising sun making an angel of him, illuminating his billowing robe as if he had unfurled invisible wings. On reaching the top of its arc, Will’s body plunged towards the darkness of the Christian camp. Then I lost him in the distance and the gloom. Any last cry he might have made was swallowed by the racket of the great engine as it rocked and recoiled.

They came for me next. I bit and scratched. I used every trick I’d ever learned, but none of them had ever done me much good—in
the monastery on the Mount; beaten by the mob in London—and of course they did me no good now. Up into the catapult basket they hauled me until I was sitting astride a great boulder like some champion on his tourney horse. I stared out over the walls to the beauty before me—of the Christian army campfires punctuating the gloom, the red eye of the sun peeping over the distant hills. Was this the last sight my eyes would see?
Only if I close them now
, I told myself with gallows humour.

But what in hell was that?

At the western edge of the battlefield, something stirred in the foothills leading from the Muslim camp. I shouted out and stared, and all of a sudden everyone was doing the same, craning their necks, pushing forward for a better view. I had the best view of all.

A green cloud had materialized on the outer reaches of our lines, accompanied by a blare of trumpets, a throb of drums and great explosions of light. On it came, gaining definition until I could see a band of charging horsemen enveloped in an uncanny cloud of green smoke, hundreds of them, in green cloaks, with the crescent banners of Islam flying from their lances.

All around, I could see our soldiers falling back in fear, abandoning their positions, some even abandoning their weapons. Many fell to their knees as if in terror and awe as the spectral horsemen careered past. Many died, seeming to realize too late that this strange green cavalry was more corporeal than they had imagined.

The defenders of Acre crowded forward, their hands raised as if to bless God. They beamed at one another, hugged each other, laughed, even danced.

“
Alhemdulillah
!” cried the man who was holding Quicksilver. He fell to his knees, pressed his forehead to the ground.

All around, the other soldiers were doing the same. There were a lot of cries of “
Allahu akhbar
!” They seemed to be praying.

I gazed out at the bizarre scene beyond the walls. What was I seeing? It defied the imagination, and yet, and yet … that green vapour … I had seen coloured smoke, and incandescent lights, and heard cacophonies like this before …

Quickfinger caught my arm urgently, hauling me from out of the trebuchet. “Wake up, man! Run!”

We stumbled down the stairs up which we’d been dragged into the deserted streets below just as the first rays of the morning sun crept into the city. We had lost all our treasure. All that remained to us was the wretched lump of wood jammed hard against my ribs. How I had managed to hold on to it through all this I didn’t really know, given how cumbersome the thing was, but strangely it had felt lighter with every step we’d taken. Or maybe I’d been so distracted by our circumstances I’d paid it scant attention. I didn’t even know why I was bothering to carry it any more, for it had caused the deaths of Will and Little Ned. I thought,
If we ever get out of this godforsaken place, King Richard can take his Wood of Life, his
lignum vitae,
and stick it up his royal arse
.

Wearily, I looked around. Ochre buildings everywhere in various states of ruin, a maze of streets, and downhill, impossibly far away, a glint of liquid silver. “There!” I pointed. “The sea.”

Quickfinger shook his head. “Too far. Let’s head back for the tunnel we came in by.”

But the streets towards the north were filling with soldiery heading for the walls, no doubt to view the miraculous presence in the field beyond. At last we were forced to move downhill towards the sea after all, through ruined neighbourhoods and burned buildings, through abandoned marketplaces and open spaces gone to baked clay and dust. As we went, the cloaking darkness faded, and all of a sudden a wailing rent the air, right overhead. Shocked, I craned my neck towards the crying voice. Picked out by the first rays of dawn light was a man standing on the gallery of one of those tall spires
they called minarets. He was not looking down at us but pointing out over the walls, and I realized that his raucous cries were not the usual melodic call to prayer but a summons to witness what he was seeing, what we had just seen for ourselves—the cloud of green horsemen charging out from the Muslim lines.

Suddenly a mass of people were surging up the hill towards us.

“Fook!” Quickfinger’s eyes went wide with panic.

I grabbed him by the arm and bundled him ahead of me up some wide steps and into an open doorway, from which we watched the crowds pour past. I don’t know what made me turn to look into the building. Perhaps it was the faint scent of roses …

Inside was a marble-floored hall, and through a tall, horseshoe arch at the back I glimpsed something that made my knees tremble. Without thinking, I stepped towards it.

Hard fingers hauled me back. “Where do you think you’re going?” Quickfinger glared at me.

I found myself wordless, unable to frame even the thought to answer him. The scent of roses had become overpowering. I pulled away from him as though he were not there, my feet dragging me to the space beyond the horseshoe-shaped opening. And there it was. The vision in my head, the towering, arcaded pillars linked by a succession of beautiful pointed arches. And above them a sky of gold: a soaring, gleaming cupola, bounding an immensity of light. I staggered, and sat down, dizzied, the Moor’s sonorous voice like a deep bell in my head: “A place where earth touches heaven” … and then I blacked out.

I must have lost consciousness for only a few seconds, for I came to with Quickfinger bent over me, fumbling at my cloak as if to find a heartbeat. His eyes were wet. It touched me that he should show such emotion for me: then I realized it was not my plight that
had caused him to blink so. He had pulled aside the cloth and was gazing down in awe at the True Cross.

“Well fook me, John, I thought we’d lost the lot.” All of a sudden his dagger was in his hand, and for a dizzying moment I thought he was going to stick me with it and leave me bleeding on the marble floor in the place of my visions. But instead he dug the point into the casing and prised out a red stone, which he held up so that all the light in the mosque seemed to funnel through it. His fingers closed over it, but I could still see the light between them, as if it had eaten the sun. “My fee,” he said grimly, “for this fools’ chase.” He stashed it carefully away from prying eyes and hands, then helped me to my feet, and together we stumbled back through the marble hallway.

Outside, the streets were deserted, and I blessed the natural curiosity and superstition of people, which had always been our stock in trade, for taking them up onto the city walls and out of our path. We continued our passage towards the sea, keeping the rising sun over our left shoulders. Downhill we ran until at last we glimpsed a gleam between alleys stacked with empty crates, and there was the harbour, shining in the rosy light. There were little boats and skiffs aplenty, pulled up and overturned on the quay. We selected one, found oars and were beginning to push it down the ramp into the water when a voice behind us shouted, “Wait!”

Quickfinger spun, ready for a fight, but it was Hammer, belting towards us, his dark eyes wild with joy, the first time I had seen him smile since his twin died.

“I thought you were all dead!”

“Aye,” said Quickfinger. “Didn’t stick around to find out, I noticed.” Then his long, pale face broke into a grin and he grabbed Hammer up and spun him around, losing his turban in the process. I swear the carpenter rattled—and when he was on his feet again I saw why: under the cloak was his bag full of ransacked gold and silver plate.

“Ha!” cried Quickfinger. “That’s where me loot went, then.”

We had just got the sack stowed in the skiff when there was another shout, not such a friendly one this time. Men were running towards us waving sticks and knives overhead, shouting threats.

The boat rocked dangerously as we leapt aboard and shoved off into the harbour.

“Can you row?” I shouted.