MILES CHRISTI

Chapter Twenty

MILES CHRISTI

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MILES CHRISTI

Chapter Twenty

Jackals. Vultures. Crows. God’s noble creatures. Noble in their labour. In their tenacity. A dignity in what they do. Who can thwart them from their task despite its foul nature? If the foot says, “Because I am not a hand, I am not of the body . . .” But we shun them because they’re vile. Much of life is vile. The dead rot and stink and feed the worms.

And we forget them.

As we will be forgotten.

As those who will forget them who forgot us.

On and on and on till Christ comes and all will be known and remembered with vivid detail we wish not remembered. Such a reckoning. Embrace Jēsu while He loves us still. For He’ll come in fury. And our notions will collapse . . .

A growling and snarling.

Tìbald observed wild dogs tearing a Seljuk apart. ‘Observed’, mind you, not looked or watched – the pack in a ritual hierarchy, their fangs bared, their hips arched. A tug of war till sinews tore, and the man, who once was, in pieces; that same man, who’d observed a dozen battle aftermaths, now Jezebel in their jaws. What those teeth could do. They bite the soul. Tìbald knew that sting. The Nothing. Is Hell the Nothing? But Hell is flame. גֵיא־הִנֹּם‎ - Gēʾ-Hīnnōm – the garbage heap . . .

In the distance near the battleline, the digging of pits. The Christians will sleep together in the cool quiet ground and will rise the same arm in arm to sit right of the Judgment Seat. Them and the martyrs.

And the heathen?

Let them rot. Let them rot as they let the People’s Army rot. Let them be millions of bones ground into dust to fertilize Christian crops . . . But Little Peter’s ‘saints’ a butchering mob: an innocent, wonderful, faithful, butchering mob, whose remains deserved desecration. That they digest in a vulture’s gut and be shit out . . . Not that all were vicious. ‘I was fulfilling my vow. I’ve no hatred.’ ‘I killed without anger.’ ‘If you saw evil, would you not shout at it and cut it down?’ O’ the lies we tell ourselves, about ourselves, about everyone else. Lies of judgment. Lies of kindness. Grand, shape-shifting lies . . . of pity . . . and tolerance, masking intolerance, assuaging guilt to hold off the Judgment Seat. And we all have our Judgment Seat . . . No pilgrim deserves desecration . . .

And for that matter, bury the heathen warriors, valiant that they are, but not until a looting; their boots and belts have no souls; their trinkets and coins need no burial. Let them return to the earth as God had made them, naked and unadorned. Better yet, burn them – a pleasing and useful holocaust as a warning. Let their white ash fly into the air and snow on fresh tilled soil. That they enrich the land they stole . . .

Tìbald dismounted and walked the destrier. It nickered at the corpses of horses. Some still dying. Legs broken. Bodies hacked. So many. Nearly one for every man. And with Tìbald out of the saddle it whinnied. He looked back. It stared at him with big eyes. Every dead animal had lost its rider.

They walked to a pit, but no mere a pit, consecrated ground. The priests would make it so. The Christians face-up in neat rows. Yet even their bodies stripped. Tìbald searched the files and covered his nose with a cloth. The miasma.

Men. Mostly men. And boys. Hard to tell them from their faces. Some without faces, legs or arms; these were burned. But odd the detail of them now naked. The women who were there with their wide hips and stretch marks . . . Aile? Would he know her if he saw her? . . . Aile? Could his eyes accept? That he could look away making along the edge. Behind him the stench of smoke. Already they started the pyres – horses and Saracens. The brume rising in black columns. Such is battle . . . Aile? He did not see her. On to the next pit. The dead look the same. They lose their character. All men Adam. The women Eve. On the wind a snap and crackle. The bodies on the pyres burst and pop. And emerging between the smoky coils – Marin.

“Père! Père!” Tìbald shouted.

What priest did not look up?

Marin, his fists clutched tight to his belly, walked the line of bodies to Tìbald and the horse with its arrows.

“I cannot find her, Père,” Tìbald moaned, looking at the pits.

Without a word, Marin took him by the arm . . .

When Aile saw Tìbald, she slapped him then wept, her shoulder bandaged and her gambeson bloody. He took her gently and she cried into his armour, but pulled away when he stroked her back. And him wise enough not to ask . . . yet not wise enough to know how . . . She sobbed into her hands, heaving, a cry of a lifetime going on and on, and when sniffling and exhausted, raised her head. “I killed horses. I killed men.”  

You! . . . Which made your heart twinge more – horses or men? Confess! . . . ‘least to yourselves . . . if it twinged at all . . . As if it should matter . . . But you grieve for animals over your own kind? Both, you say? But Aile, poor Aile, I detract from her.   

In her mind the stabbing, the disembowelling, the beat of arrows against her shield. That was someone else. And the smell – in her nose even now. In her ears – the screams. She’d not noticed them in the fight. A freeze up her spine. She shivered without feeling. Feeling spent and gone. She shook, teeth chattering and into Tìbald’s arms again. Just hold don’t touch.

“Horses –” he said in spite of himself, “they’re the largest thing to strike. They’re always killed . . . Does that hurt?” he said of her wound.

It ached. ‘I want to go home,’ she could say, but not to him. “I sent a soul to Hell,” she said instead. “An ignorant, heathen soul.” Contrivance?

Tìbald turned his chin toward Marin.

“Indeed, she did,” the priest said.

“To kill a man is no light thing,” she said.

“It is not,” Tìbald said. “But he was not a man in that moment.”

“No, he wasn’t,” she said too quickly.

“And when dead, no man at all.”

She nodded despite herself.

“He’s nothing. You were nothing to him. His soul was bound for Hell as he thought was yours. He is meat – bones to grind, flesh to burn. The evil was in his living, now it’s gone. You feel shame?”

“No . . . different.”

“Innocence lost,” Père Marin said.

“Yes,” she said matter of fact.

“And you can’t take it back,” Marin said.

She nodded grimly, weakened.

“It’s not death but the killing. Killing makes you a different creature.

“Yes.”

“You kill,” Tìbald said in an attempt to be impassive. “Chickens, goats, and piglets – the enemy is no different. In time, you’ll be glad for it.” At that moment. But this moment is not that moment. Tìbald touched her bandaged shoulder. “And this?” he asked, controlling his alarm.

Such theatre.

“An arrow,” she said. “It broke through the mail.”

She waivered. Her brow sweaty. Fever in her cheeks. Tìbald caught her and sat her on a log. “Why are you up?” he asked rhetorically. She closed her eyes. He picked her up and carried her.

Heat from the fires came their way. All about breaching columns of black smoke and rising with them, moans of the wounded. The sun was high and hot. Clouds of flies – buzzing the scavengers, buzzing the pits – the hurt, the dead, the feeding. A landscape of suffering – the Dorylaeum battlefield.

“Esmè pulled the arrow,” Marin said as he took her into a field tent. “She is a healer. She cauterized the wound and salved it with a mixture. Fulk and I helped.”

“Fulk? . . . Where is Fulk?”

“I do not know, dómini. He vanished after the wound was dressed.”

Tìbald laid Aile upon a cot in the field tent, the last one near the open-door with a cool breeze compared to the recesses. A miserable place to get your pity, but you did – a kindness, the priests did their duty – Extreme Unction as much as bodily care. Aile slept. Tìbald, in full armour and helm, bent over, the mail clattering, and kissed her.

He walked out to tend the destrier and there, Ysobel, collapsed in Esmè’s lap at the base of a tree, her right arm gone above the elbow. He thanked Esmè with a knowing nod. She replied the same.

He led the horse to the stable flies where he could work quickly. Through all this the beast was unflappable with a steady gate. Remarkable, Tìbald thought. Heal him quickly . . . That Aile heals quickly. The army will move soon. No more enemy left between them and Antioch.

Where is Fulk?