MILES CHRISTI

Chapter Twenty-Five

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Chapter Twenty-Five

It changes, conviction. So too the heart, forever moving. Faith, not belief – an act of will. A raging, caging act of will, looking neither right nor left and chocked with expectation. It can be no less, demanding the grand view. But spiritual journeys have their dry season, following neither arc nor plan, and though finite, seem unending. A crucible. We break on that crucible.

Six months of fruitless siege. Ambiguity. What can alter in six months? Everything. And change and change and change back again. ‘Who am I and what am I doing?’ In the beginning it was clear . . . Who besieges who? Antioch’s walls untouched and now the ‘cruellest’ month.

But Antioch, glorious Antioch, favoured by the Caesars, a second Rome, the Cradle of Christianity. Where Sainte Matthew wrote his gospel, the gospel the Church so praised. Where the term ‘Christian’ was coined. They all knew it. Where Sainte Paul confronted Sainte Peter on the issue of Gentile circumcision; and since then, Antioch more and more a Christian city, most Christian of cities, or it had been until today . . .

Didn’t it want rescue?

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The armies of Kerbogha still yet to come.

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Night and the city glowed. Torches from within and bonfires from without its walls. The townfolk watched as pilgrims moved among Saracen tombs. Warriors in the moonlight. Themselves cadaverous. Skin atop their bones, iron atop their skin, their jerkins rancid, darted from grave to grave near the mosque across from the bridge outside the city gate.

They broke into crypts and seized its tenants. Dragged them out. Stabbed them again and again – a butchery without rhyme or reason. Robbing the dead – twelve emirs and three hundred Agulani (Turkish seigneurs) fallen from the fearsome battle two days hence and buried in their lavish armour along with gold and gems. The princes ordered it. Gold, whatever the reek, always clean. No hint of a previous owner. Gold did not attach itself to things. It cared not who held it, living or dead. Good or bad. It is the worker of magic.

Was this night magic?

The pilgrims lit great pyres, their silhouettes rushing this way and that with the rifled corpora. They tossed them on like logs. Let the pagans see – their Agulani dragged through the mud to be roasted like hogs. Fire sucked the wind whirling the flames into columns. The dead moaned as they burned. They’ll not be whole in Barzakh. The Angel of Death will not recognize them.

Aile in moonlight.

Dark did not frighten her, nor chill, nor rot, neither prospect of ghoul nor jinn trudging beside her. She the monster; the dead feared her, their maker only the day before. She and a hundred others, as the Agulani had struggled up the riverbank after falling from the bridge (the Battle of the Lake against a relief force from Aleppo). As Bohemond’s troops drove them back, she thrusted down from the levee on her knees as they crawled up the muddy shingle, a repetitive motion till her shoulder ached, their blood hot and sour. Thrust – where neck and shoulders met. A punch with her sword hilt then a cut into their collar. They gasped. She killed them like vermin; they moved, she hacked. She saw herself. Aile, the Norman, killer of men. Do it. Blood jetted like their final spit. She could not see their eyes though she looked into them, the young and old in military finery, wounded and crawling up from the river so not to drown. Animals. Not humans but animals. A pack of dogs – she a dog too . . .

 She pulled a body from a tomb, heavy like a sack. O’ the limbs that they might animate to assist her but were contorted. Yet, something easy about the dead – they didn’t bleed. She ignored the split face. He had no name (dead pagan). She cut the wrappings, and probed the chest as if she might truss him. She felt a pouch and took her knife and cut through its belly. Kill it again and pulled the pouch away. A jingle of coins. That’s life. She hid it in her cloak, her fellow pilgrims the greater danger. Avoid the Burgundians. They would strip her too. Pedes mostly. Pedes always a danger.

She left the body. Let someone else pick it up and burn it. Her purse heavy with rings and gold. She jangled as did others. They all sounded moving between the pyres. No secret in what they do. They danced, the treasure marking their rhythms, sounding against the walls. But no voice. No song. Only jangling plunder like chimes and bells. They danced without dancing and danced all the same. Shadows leaped across the white walls in complementary motion. Here, your madness. Did they think themselves mad?

A head of Aile, a cord of bodies stacked for the flames. Near the top, she noticed a muscular hip lacking the purpling she found in others. She took her knife and cut out a round like a piece of beef, large enough to spit and placed in her shoulder sack. Salt. She must use salt. Did she think herself mad?  

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Sunup, as if the morning innocent of last night’s evils, and Mount Silpius afire as the sun crawled up its back to peek over its head. Same every morning as shadows fall away. The night watch changed. The pyres burned down, their repugnance dissipated; the graverobbers scrubbed themselves. Indeed, all the army washed. Forever washing. They patched and repaired. And attended Mass. It is as it was before. The dead no less dead. The hungry staring at each other.

Hanging over the outside wall, an iron cage. It wobbled and its chain moaned. The captive within, an old man with a thick, gray beard, sat up, pulling his knees to his chest as he looked out over the pilgrim army. He threw back his head to smack the bars and sighed, then crossed himself as a Greek would do.

“Good morning, lord Patriarch,” said a Turkish guard in Greek, leaning over the wall. “You slept well?”

John of Oxite gave no reply.

“Your Frankish kinsmen sit waiting for the end. The lord Kerbogha is coming to swallow them whole. Look at them, father, and curse us not. It is they who cause you this hardship. Did we not live in peace until their arrival. Speak to them, father. Tell them to go back to Alexius before they’re slain. Tell them, father. You are a holy man to them.”

The Norman pickets peeked out from their protective screens.

“Good morning Frankish dogs,” the Turk called. “You look hungry. Have you had anything to eat?” All were hungry though the Turks better actors. “Food: do you want some food? We’ve plenty – something to go with your infant’s feet.”

They tied a basket to a rope and lowered it down. It tipped as it touched the ground to tumble out stale bread. The pickets leered.

“The Prophet Muhammad, blessings and peace be upon him, begs us to me merciful. Take it. We’ll not harm you. Allah, the one true God, bids us be kind to our foes.”

Three pickets formed a testudo. Arrows prickled the uneven ground salted with blood. They moved over a gully towards the very wall itself, above them the Patriarch in his cage and towers on all sides of them. They came like rabbits – cautiously, tentatively – that they not end here, but they could . . . Penance, a hard thing – they came for penance. Do they lay down for bread? . . . That is not penance.  

“Take it!” the Turk shouted. “We need not harm you. You’re dead already. Kerbogha, the Terrible, is coming with an army as vast as the stars. Eat. Tell your brothers that we are well fed despite your towers and will be picking through your bones for the treasure you’ve stolen.”

Interject – Aile hung the round after rubbing it in salt. Will it taste like domestic meat? That taste should matter. What we justify in the solace of our tents supposedly in secret (did pilgrims do such things?)

In the open air, the pickets risk for stale bread, one grabbing a loaf to stuff under his mail shirt. The Turks laughed when a bolt split the air and impaled one in the shoulder. Another ricocheted off his helmet. He dropped in a sitting motion.

“No!” the pickets cried. What fool did that? Did he know? . . .  

The Turks drew on them. The picket retreated, arrows from every direction stinging through the rings of their hauberks, striking hands and necks. They squealed. And beneath the one picket’s iron shirt, a stale boule he might call it, and an arrow behind the back of his ear with rivulets in his eyes and mouth. This is not penance as he collapsed. Is he in heaven looking down? His countrymen watched, in him their sum, their invention. That could be me, they thought, just as desperate. Give us this day our daily bread in never-ending waiting. Like waiting for Jēsu to come. He will come. He will come. No proof. No sign. He will come . . .

Avenge our brothers. A spark – the pilgrims rushed to the front with their war cries, a thousand archers, flight upon flight at the palisade. Turks to the wall in quick action. The motion oncoming without thought or plan. A riot . . . God uses riots.

“The gate!” someone cried. “Storm the gate!”

Princes dashed to the line, Raymond among them glory upon glory (from pickets to Raymond). “We’ll force the gate! God will deliver them into our hands!”

An enfilade, the Turks shot back, their arrows thick and biting. More biting. A clicking when the shafts struck each other – a shaking of seeds in a thousand gourds, the tumble of a thousand clacking bones. Click-click-click-click. A rush of lifeless noise. The human cry silent. Due to bread. The snap and crumb of bread.

Pilgrim archers fell.

“The gates!” Raymond cried.

God desires it. His martyrs on the ground. These three a part of His plan?

His holy riot. It is so, the Count of Toulouse certain unaware of circumstances – Raymond a apart of His plan. Antioch falls – God whispers to him.

Last night, they robbed the dead.

“No, Count Raymond!” countered Stephen de Blois watching his lines disseminated. “We must act as a whole . . . with Bohemond.”

Duke Robert and the Count of Flanders agreed.

But God whispers to Raymond. How can they resist? It turns. They ignore. Those in power ignore. Their prerogative. My ways are not your ways. This is not penance. That you should not survive and rest go on, Raymond. Is your legacy God’s will? Pilgrim lives broken on your wheel. An old man manipulating. Better to do so than younger men.

The whirlwind flagged. The pickets dead. Archers crumped in rows. Did they think this their day?

But God had whispered to Raymond. Had he failed?

“Call them off.” Who does Raymond order? Is he Agamemnon?

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Little Peter ran away again. Tancred brought him back hogtied, the prophet weeping.

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Siege engines at last, brought by the English fleet and sent by Alexius. It spurred the pilgrims on. So much for impulse – they completed the two opposing stone towers. Yaghi-Siyan could no longer launch raids. And now Shia ambassadors in the pilgrims’ camp – emirs – the enemy of my enemy is my friend and the Sunni Turks gave no allegiance to Cairo. On this the Calipha and the Basileus agreed, both suffered from Seljuk invasions. The Egyptians shall have Jerusalem, the Basileus – the cities to the north. Jerusalem – an open city to all faiths and nations . . .

Kerbogha finally marching – Turks, Arabs, Persians of such might.

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“You must go to the Basileus and report what you have seen,” Bohemond to Taticius in private. “We cannot proceed until he comes. Tell him we are keeping faith and are his obedient servants. You must go in secret so the princes will not detain you. You know they will for you are the emperor’s voice.”

Agreed.

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“The coward has left us,” Bohemond reported to the princes. “He has run back to the Basileus for whom he acts and obeys. So it is with all Greeks. We alone are God’s true men. We must act immediately.” What is this? What is this? “Let the city go to any of us who can devise a plan to capture it. Let it be given to him and anyone else who aids him.”

“The city shall go to no one,” Raymond protested. “It will be held equally. You pledged to return the cities to Alexius.”

 “Is Alexius here? I do not see him. His representative has fled.”

 “If Bohemond can acquire the city bloodlessly, let him have it,” said Stephen de Blois, heartsick for family and home. “But on the condition if the Basileus comes as he swore, we will return Antioch to him. If not, it belongs to Bohemond. We must do something. Kerbogha will soon be upon us.”

Did it happen this way, cloudy twists and turns – Bohemond in secret contact with members of Yaghi-Siyan’s court. And half-blind Raymond – in sight, mind, and heart. Half fool. Old men cannot believe their ears. They remember too well or think they do . . . Such confusion when we sit too long and forget. Young men forget. Their vows then worthless. How easy to justify and cheat. Childish souls in bodies writ big. A world of childish souls in bodies writ big plundering . . .

O’ - we are stuck. Ramble. Ramble. Ramble.