The Iron Lance (26 page)

The journey resumed, and so too the search for King Magnus' ships. Murdo was certain that any day they would find the king's fleet—only the pilgrimage would be over and the ships would be sailing home. Nevertheless, as they slowly worked their way along the coast, pushing ever east and south, they began hearing news of the crusaders' progress. The Genoese, whose ships supplied the armies, brought back stories, and these were passed on in the ports where they stopped for water and supplies.

Although they always asked if anyone had seen the Norse fleet, the answer was always negative: no one had seen or heard of King Magnus or his ships. One scrap of information did prove useful, however. They learned from the harbor master in Trapani that the crusaders were not in Jerusalem at all, but on their way to Antioch, an inland city some distance to the north of the Holy Land. What is more, this report, he said, was very recent: not more than eight or ten weeks old.

“Antioch!” Murdo exclaimed when he found out. He had heard the name once or twice before and, though he had no idea where it might be, it sounded like a needless delay to him. “Why would they go there? It must be a mistake.”

“Not at all,” Ronan corrected gently. “Antioch is a great city, with formidable defences. Any war host moving overland would have to pass Antioch in order to reach Jerusalem. Indeed, the merchants have been supplying grain and wine to the camps, and they are saying the crusader armies are encamped before the walls of Antioch even now.”

“Antioch is closer than Jerusalem,” Fionn said. “No doubt we will find King Magnus there.”

They sailed on, and the days grew longer. The sea, deep blue and alive with porpoises and small fish that skittered over the waves, grew warmer, and the islands smaller and more numerous. To Murdo, who was used to the low, smooth, green humps of the Dark Islands, the isles of the Middle Sea seemed to be mostly sharp escarpments of bare rock with tufts of gray-green thorny brush clinging precariously to life. Consequently, the arid islands, with their glistening white towns glimpsed among the blue coves and vine-covered clefts of valleys, held little appeal for him; he thought them impossibly dry, dust-filled, and sleepy, and could not imagine anything of interest ever happening. Unlike the monks, who enjoyed wandering around the tiny, fly-blown settlements, talking Greek to the inhabitants, Murdo considered every moment spent ashore a moment wasted. He could not wait to get to Antioch to find his father.

Some weeks later, they heard from a fisherman in Paphos on the island of Creta, who had heard from another fisherman, who had heard from an olive oil merchant who conducted trade between several of the many islands, that some Norse ships had indeed been seen in southern waters. Although he could not be certain, it was thought the fleet of ships was making for Cyprus.

They heard no more about this until reaching Kyrenia on the island of Cyprus, when this story was confirmed. “They say the
longships passed by here two or three weeks ago,” Ronan explained. “One of the traders said he heard a fleet of Norse ships put in for water and supplies a few leagues up the coast on the mainland—at a place called Korykos.”

Jon Wing nodded. “Three weeks ago,” he mused, looking at the cloudless sky and stroking his beard thoughtfully. “They will have joined the siege, I think.”

“Indeed,” the elder cleric agreed, “the merchant said it is but two or three days from here—four at most, if the wind is contrary.”

Murdo heard this and his heart beat faster. He could be with his father in two or three days!

Having come so far, to be this close—it was all he could do to contain himself while Jon Wing and Ronan walked down the quayside to consult the master of one of the trading vessels about the best way to reach Antioch. They returned after a lengthy conversation, and Jon began shouting orders to the crew sitting and lying on the wharf. In an effort to speed their departure, Murdo dashed everywhere at once, helping with the ropes, readying the sails, unbinding the oars. Ronan, meanwhile, retraced his steps into the town to summon his brother priests, who were lingering in the marketplace.

Soon
Skidbladnir
was ready to push away from the wharf, and Murdo had just volunteered to go in search of the monks, when they appeared, hastening for the ship as fast as their burdens of wine, goat's cheese, and olives allowed. They handed their bundles down, and dropped into the boat. Taking up an oar, Murdo helped push away from the wharf, and then settled himself on a rowing bench and rowed as if he would single-handedly propel the ship from the harbor. As soon as they were clear of the other craft, Jon called “up sails,” and Murdo was there to lend a hand with that, too.

It took a while for the wind to find them, but as they came out of the windshadow of the headland to the west, the sails rippled and filled, and the dragonhead prow began to slice blue water once again. They shipped their oars and bound them once more, and Murdo found himself at the rail searching the horizon with an air of expectation he had not felt in many, many days. Emlyn, moving back to the tented platform behind the mast, passed by him; in his exuberance, Murdo remarked aloud, “In three days we will be in Antioch, and I will find my father.”

“So I have heard,” Emlyn replied; he stopped and leaned against the rail. “I am glad for you. It has been a very long trip—a good one, but very long.” He paused, regarding Murdo amiably. “Have you thought about how you will go about finding your father and brothers?”

“That will not be difficult,” Murdo answered confidently. “They are with the Duke of Normandy. As the city is under siege, I have only to look for the duke's camp and that is where they will be.”

The hills rising from the sea, misty purple in the dawnlight, showed no sign of either port or harbor—less yet a city besieged by a hundred thousand warrior pilgrims. Although Murdo had been told that Antioch lay a few leagues inland, he still hoped he might catch a glimpse of it from the sea. Instead, the empty, rock-filled coast stretched out to either side—no towns, no settlements, no holdings of any kind, much less anything resembling the great and ancient city of Antioch. Neither did he see the port of Saint Symeon, which Ronan had said they would find upon reaching the mainland coast.

He folded his arms across his chest and stared out upon the all but featureless coastline. Somewhere on the barren stretch of pale gray rock and dust-colored brush ahead, King Magnus had put ashore. The best harborage, they had been told, was to be found at the port town of Saint Symeon. But, save for a single tiny fishing village now glinting small and white in the early morning sun, there was no other human habitation anywhere.

Stepping over the sleeping bodies of his shipmates, Murdo made his way back to the tiller to speak to Sturli, who had taken the last watch on the helm. “We must have strayed in the night,” Murdo observed sourly. “There is no port here.”

“Hey-hey,” agreed Sturli. “But I do not think we drifted off course.”

“We should be able to see the harbor by now,” Murdo told
him. He shoved a hand towards the empty hills, now pink in the rising sun. “Do you see a city anywhere?”

“Nay,” said Sturli, unperturbed by the apparent mistake. “But I do not think we drifted off course.”

“We must have!” Murdo insisted.

“I do not think so,” Sturli replied, shaking his head. “We had a clear night and good stars. I know how to steer a ship. Maybe it is
you
that is mistaken, hey?”

Murdo—angry now, as well as disappointed—stomped away and slumped onto his bench once more. He hung over the rail and watched the dull hillscape draw slowly closer, and his mind began to wander; he thought about the journey. It had, as Emlyn said, been a good voyage, all in all. Still, the wheel of the year had turned round once already, and there was still no sight of Jerusalem! It would be another year
at least
before he would see Ragna again.

The thought proved so discouraging, he pushed it firmly from him, and turned instead to thinking about the triumphant day when he and Lord Ranulf would stride boldly into the bishop's lair, and obtain the return of their lands. He imagined the larcenous old cleric down on his knees, weeping his repentance and pleading for his life. He could feel the swordblade in his hand as the point pressed into the thieving bishop's fat throat.

This vision consoled him for a long time as the ship turned and began making its way slowly along the coast. A little while later, they passed a jutting promontory, whereupon Sturli shouted from the tiller, “The king's ships!”

Murdo was on his feet in an instant, straining for a glimpse of King Magnus' fleet. He scanned the shoreline to the right and left, but saw nothing. “Where?” he demanded of Hallvard, the sailor beside him on the rail.

“There! The king's ships! I see them!” cried Nial, his arm around the throat of the dragon. He stood on the rail, stabbing a finger at a small cluster of gleaming white buildings clinging to the hillside above a small, rock-sided bay. Murdo squinted his eyes and saw what appeared to be a dark mass on the shining water of the little bay below the town. Rising from this dark mass, like so many headless spears, were the masts of the longships. At long last, they had caught the ever-elusive fleet. Where there were longships, Norsemen could not be far away.

By the time
Skidbladnir
slid into the cove, Murdo was more than ready to face the entire Saracen warhost all by himself. He did not wait for the keel to bump the small stone quay at the end of the village, but jumped into the shallow water and waded to shore.

“There is no one here,” he called to the others splashing up onto the strand behind him. Jon Wing and the three monks came ashore at the quay, and Murdo ran to where they stood. “The place is deserted.”

The seaman scanned the quiet village's empty footpaths and by-ways and replied, “We shall see.”

Proceeding on, they paused at the place where the town's single street met the harbor path. Putting two fingers into his mouth, Jon gave a long, shrill whistle. He whistled twice more, and on the third, a door opened at one of the nearby houses and a tall, fair-haired Norseman staggered out. He took one look at the newcomers and shouted something over his shoulder to someone inside the house, then came running down to the shore to meet them.

“Olvar Three-Toes!” shouted Jon Wing. “We find you at last.”

“Hey-hey,” replied the Norseman, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “You have found us, Jon Wing. What has taken you so long?”

“We can only sail as fast as the wind allows,” replied Jon.

“No doubt you have stopped for plunder in every town you passed,” replied the sailor named Olvar with a smile. “This is what has taken you so long, I think.”

“Nay,” answered Jon Wing happily. “We have these monks with us,” he indicated Ronan, Fionn, and Emlyn coming up behind him, “so we could not plunder a single town.”

Three more Norsemen emerged from the house and made their way down to the shore, calling noisy greetings to the crewmen they knew. “Is it just the four of you, then?” asked Jon.

“Hey-hey,” replied Olvar. “Us four, and six others. We drew lots, and the losers had to stay behind to guard the ships. All the rest have gone to join the siege.”

“Is the city far?” asked Ronan.

“Three leagues—maybe a little more.” Olvar shrugged. “That is what I heard.”

“What of the villagers here?” asked Emlyn. “Are they friendly?”

“I think so. Most of them have gone to tend the fields up in the hills. Only a few old ones are left behind, and they keep to themselves mostly, but they give us eggs and cheese.”

“Have you seen any Saracens?” wondered Fionn, staring at the dry, brush-covered hills rising behind the village.

“Nay,” replied Olvar. “They have all run to the mountains to hide. They are Greeks here anyway.” Turning back to Jon, he said, “Did you bring any öl? They have only wine in this place, and we are thirsty.”

Jon expressed his regrets, and said that he did not have any ale, either. He then called to some of his crewmen to bring the arms and armor ashore, secure the boat, and prepare to set off.

“You are not staying?” Olvar said, disappointment darkening his sunny features.

“We must hurry to Antioch before the city is taken,” replied Jon, “otherwise we will get no plunder. Also, the king is waiting for his counselors.”

As the weapons were unloaded and carried ashore, the six other guardsmen emerged from another house and came to greet their comrades. Weapons were then distributed among the men. Unaccustomed to carrying a heavy shield, Murdo took only a spear for himself; the blade was somewhat rusty from the voyage, but the edge and point were sharp still, and the ash-wood shaft was sound. When they were ready, the Norsemen walked with them past the fields beyond the village and showed them which road to follow. Jon and his seafarers, now transformed into a warrior band, bade their comrades farewell, promising to send them ale from Antioch as soon as the city fell.

Murdo, eager to be reunited with his father and brothers, took his place just behind Jon and Ronan, leading the party, and settled into his stride. After so many months at sea, the solid ground felt strange under his feet; he kept expecting the earth to arch and plunge, and continually braced himself for the swell that never came. As they climbed the first low hills beyond the village, he began to notice the smell of the air—heavy and dense as the earth itself, and filled with a hundred heady scents of sunbaked rock and clay and brush and summer flowers.

The morning, already warm, grew steadily warmer the further into the hills they travelled, and Murdo, regretting the times he had complained of the cramped space on deck, began to long for the cooling sea breeze always present aboard the ship. Upon reaching the crest of the highest hill, he turned to look back briefly at the sea glittering flat and calm, and the tiny bay and village already disappearing behind them. Then, shouldering his spear, Murdo turned his face towards the east, and did not look back again.

The sun was directly overhead when they reached the hills above the river plain. Murdo, eyes downcast and squinting against the white-hot light, could feel the skin on the back of his brown neck beginning to sizzle; where the sun struck the top of his head, it felt as if his hair was on fire; the soles of his feet were burning through his leather boots; his heavy siarc, wet through with sweat, stuck to his skin and chafed as he trudged along. Even the monks, who ordinarily made no concession to the weather, gathered up their long robes and tucked the hems into their belts.

The long walk had been hot and tiring, but wholly uneventful. The fierce Syrian sun was beginning its long slow slide into the west when the forerunners sang out that their destination had been sighted. Along with the rest of the war band, Murdo picked up his feet and hastened the last few paces up the long slope to the top of the hill, and the city came into view, rising before them across the Orontes valley like the immense cloud-bank of a storm looming on the horizon.

The sight halted the company in their tracks.

The monks had said it was a large city, an important city, a great city—but nothing they said had prepared any of them for the towering magnitude of the place: walls eighty feet high and two leagues long were guarded by three hundred towers, some of which protected the citadel occupying the highest promontory on the eastern wall. The walls on the lower section rose sheer from the slow-flowing river, while those of the upper section were carved out of the mountain itself, allowing the high citadel a commanding view of the valley all the way to the sea on one hand, and the Tarsus mountains on the other.

Murdo gaped in awe. Not only was Antioch the largest, most strongly fortified city he had ever seen, it was also the most beautiful. Looking at it rising across the valley, the straight high
walls and towers adazzle in the blinding light, it seemed less a city than an enormous jewel: a monstrous ornament carved of whitest ivory and nestled against the black surrounding mountains, or a colossal milk-colored moonstone set upon the dusty green of the valley to shimmer gently in the heat haze of a blistering summer day.

Crops and grazing land spread in irregular blotches over the river plain; here and there, Murdo could see men working with teams of oxen. Two roads, passing either way along the river, met at a bridge below the main gate, and there were a few people straggling on the roads, some with ox-carts bearing goods into the city. White birds soared in the air over the fields and above the towering walls.

An air of peaceful, if not oppressive, tranquillity pervaded the valley, and even as Murdo marveled at the impressive city, his heart fell. He looked left and right along the walls and plains, scanning the hills and fields and river below—if only to confirm what he already knew: there were no tents, no horse pickets, no besieging armies, no defiant banners streaming from the wall-tops and tower battlements. The crusaders were gone.

He stood and gazed into the placid, empty valley, and felt the frustration uncoiling within him. The pilgrims had not come to Antioch after all; or, if they had, they were not there now. Either way, the search would have to continue. Even as bitter disappointment crushed him down, however, Brother Ronan said, “The siege is ended. They have taken the city.”

Of course
, thought Murdo,
they have taken the city! They are all inside the conquered walls
.

Suddenly, he could not wait to be there, too. Within three heartbeats, Murdo, and all the rest of the Norsemen, were flying down the hill towards the plain. It was not long before their steps became more cautious, however. “See here!” shouted
Fafnir, a little way ahead of the group. Murdo saw him stoop and bring up a broken sword from the long, dry grass. Almost at once, Vestein, no more than a dozen paces away, produced half of a shield and the broken haft of a spear. “There was a battle here, I think,” said Fafnir.

They proceeded on, but more slowly, and the further they went, the more they found: battered war helms of a strange, pointed kind; lightweight oval shields made of boiled leather; arrows by the score, most of them broken. And scattered in amongst the remnants of battle, they found the remains of the warriors. Murdo bent down to retrieve a finely curved piece of a bow, and discovered the weapon was still attached to the hand that had last employed it. Both hand and arm came away as Murdo lifted it. There arose a fearsome, stinging stench, and he caught a glimpse of white maggots wriggling from a brown mass by his feet as he dropped the bow and jumped back with a shout.

The corpse was so far decomposed that it no longer looked human; Murdo had simply not seen it when he bent down. He saw it now for what it was and, realizing what lay before him, he began to see others as well. They had come to the part of the battleground where the fighting had been the fiercest, and the dead were lying where they had fallen.

Once fine clothes and cloaks were filthy, rotting rags; flesh and muscle were blasted black by the sun, and withered hard like old leather. Many of the bodies had been attacked by birds and beasts, and, more and more, Murdo caught the glint of smooth white bone gleaming dully from the long grass round about. Once, he stepped over what appeared to be the lower torso of a man and his foot struck what he thought was a stone. The stone rolled, however, and Murdo found himself staring down into a withered brown, worm-ravaged face, whose empty
eye sockets gazed darkly up past him and into the sun-bright heavens above.

Murdo clamped a hand over his nose and mouth, and moved on, no longer looking either right or left. It occurred to him as he trudged along that he saw no carcasses of horses, and he wondered about this. Unless the battle had been fought entirely on foot, which he very much doubted, there must certainly have been some horses killed, too. What could have happened to them?