Pillars of Light Read online

  Behind them, with a head of grey woolly hair, like a sheep in purple robes, was the Bishop of Bath, Reginald de Bohun. We had already met; he looked at us, then quickly—too quickly—looked away.

  The lesser gentry were in overly bright clothing, flaunting their fortune and lack of taste. Wealthy merchants’ wives displayed their flashiest jewels to advertise their husbands’ success. I thought: Ned and Quickfinger will have their eye on those.

  Quickfinger we’d found in Launceston. I’d watched him disappear under a trestle table where people were busy eating a harvest feast. When they rose to go they found they were all wearing mismatched shoes. While I was laughing, I saw how Quickfinger moved among them, quietly robbing a purse here and there. I nudged the Moor. He grinned and nodded, having seen it all for himself, and shortly after that, Quickfinger became the first member of our troupe. He was from the north.

  “York?” I remember asking him.

  “Farthern tha’.” Quickfinger had pointed up into the air as if to suggest he fell from Heaven.

  His accent was so impenetrable that I couldn’t always understand him, and he’d claim the same of me, mocking my West Country vowels with such a mangling imitation that I’d want to knock him down. Twice we’d nearly come to blows, but he was as fast on his feet as he was with his hands. Then he’d grin and grin as if touched in the head. It was an act he’d developed to distract people. You don’t tend to make a lot of eye contact with someone who grins in such a lunatic way. And that was when he’d rob you, take your purse or your belt-knife or whatever else he could lay hands on. Life was a huge joke to Quickfinger. It made him likeable and dislikeable in equal parts.

  Ned was small and dark and rat-like enough to pass for the cripple he pretended to be. He’d fastened himself on to the growing troupe as we passed through Tavistock. I did not much want his company, for he had a sly, weaselly look, but he showed us tricks that were breathtaking: producing gold from the Moor’s ear, and fitting himself into a tiny hole in a tree you’d think not even a cat could squeeze into before disappearing altogether and reappearing on a branch above our heads.

  Tricksters and thieves—impossible to trust at the best of times. I felt my skin prickle.

  On the outskirts of the congregation, the servants, smiths and rustics, penitents and cripples gathered, looking overawed. Kept at a safe distance by the constables, their hideous faces hidden by hoods, clutching their clappers and bells, were the lepers from St. Mary Magdalene’s, poor souls suffering Purgatory on Earth, let out of the lazar house to seek the only known cure for their affliction: a miracle.

  The procession reappeared, led by a monk carrying a great jewelled cross worth a king’s ransom. Then came the prior bearing the Corpus Christi, and a line of canons cradling the relics that had survived the fire. After this came the big oak-and-silver box containing “Arthur’s” arm and sword. The doors to the chapel were thrown open and in they went, commemorating Christ’s triumphant entrance into the Holy City of Jerusalem, and the sacristan waved us to follow.

  Inside, the Lady Chapel was pitch-black, the thick darkness and animal smell oppressive. There began at once a cacophony of unearthly howls, the clanging of metal. The Glastonbury monks banged and stamped and screeched, playing their parts as Hell’s minions. It was the one time in the year when the disciplined quiet of the Benedictine life could be set aside and they could behave as badly as they liked, reminding the congregation of the demonic punishments that awaited their sorry, sinning souls in the afterlife if they didn’t do what they were told and give Mother Church all their money. Those who’d never before experienced the Ceremony of Light shouted in terror.

  I turned and saw the Moor grinning in the darkness, revelling in being a Saracen, a heretic, an intruder among the enemy, a wolf in the sheepfold. His grin did not fill me with confidence. If all this went wrong, we’d never get as far as being hanged, I thought. They’d rip us apart. I added my own voice to the demonic choir: it was a relief to howl out my terrors.

  At last the windows were unshrouded, candles lit. The Lady Chapel was flooded with light. Hell was banished for another year. In its place, pillars bursting with carved foliage, arcades decorated with crimson, gold and blue. The sun and moon together, defying the natural order, hovered above the head of a smiling Virgin Mary, the Christ child cradled in her arms. Bright friezes of saints, martyrs and apostles gazed down. I felt their eyes on me.

  I looked out over the congregation. Somewhere amongst the merchants was the rest of our troupe: Red Will; Hammer and Saw; and Plaguey Mary, farther back among the peasants.

  Hammer and Saw were twins, small and dark and wiry. They spoke a shared language when in their cups that none of the rest of us could understand. We’d seen them in a village on the edge of Dartmoor, juggling. We later discovered they were out-of-work carpenters, clever with their hands. Quickfinger soon taught them to pick pockets.

  Red Will and Plaguey Mary we’d found on the outskirts of Exeter. Will was playing a flute, badly, and Mary was laughing at his lack of skill. She gave us an assessing look. We soon disabused her of the idea we might be customers. Despite the name she went by, Mary was a hale and healthy whore, one possessed of a robust sense of humour and a ready laugh. We passed them by, but Mary came after us, sensing a better opportunity than her usual trade, and Will followed.

  Travelling players, a terrible minstrel, jugglers, out-of-work carpenters, pickpockets, a whore—how I enjoyed their company after the mealy-mouthed monks and the mean novices and their snide violence. We laughed and shared stories, and soon I felt for the first time as if I was part of a family, and not the runt of the litter, and that by our ruses and clever tricks I was taking some sort of revenge on Mother Church for all I had suffered at her hands.

  From the edge of Dartmoor to the Somerset Levels, our ragtag band had gone from church to chapel, priory to abbey to marketplace, faking a cure here, a resurrection there, gaining renown and money along the way. People were so willing to believe. They wanted miracles to exist. And the clergy we approached were all too happy to play along. Miracles brought money in, in the form of offerings, but Canterbury had been piling up its gold in the thirteen years since Thomas à Becket’s canonization, leaching away funds from all the other saints. We were rarely turned away when offering our authentications and testaments. This grand fraud here in Glastonbury was to be our swan song, after which we would disband and go our separate ways, once the abbey’s bursar had divided up the spoils with us.

  At least, that was the plan …

  During the sermons, one of the fettered mad folk started to cry out like a squallyass and had to be removed next door, into the patched-up ruins of the nave. The prior, sensing he was losing his audience, declared: “Miraculum magna videbis!” “Now miracles will be seen!”

  The relics were announced: from Saint Aidan and the Lindisfarne saints, Saint Indracht and Saint Beonna, Saint Patrick of Ireland … the list went on and on. We’d been told at dinner the previous night that before the canonization of Thomas à Becket, Glastonbury was the richest in relics, with twenty-two entire saints (well, almost entire—a half of Saint Aidan was claimed by the monks of Iona, and another bit was in Durham, but almost half of such a powerful saint was better than a whole minor martyr), and so its coffers used to overflow. But following the rise of the cult of Saint Thomas, and the great fire, Glastonbury’s fortunes had been on the wane. And you could see how the congregation hung back, dissatisfied with the array of worn-down saints, waiting as the reliquaries were disposed about the chapel under the watchful eye of the warden. Pilgrims had been known to try to steal a souvenir here and there; one man got caught with a mouthful of Saint Beonna after bending to kiss the bones.

  Finally, out came the ornamented box that our clever carpenters, Hammer and Saw, had made. Amazing that tin, shined up right, could look so much like silver.

  The canons opened the reliquary so that the pilgrims could view the bones of Arthur’s strong right arm
. All round the Lady Chapel there was a great intake of breath. Rumours of the cures the hero-king had brought about, all the way from Cornwall to the Somerset moors, had been reaching them for weeks. At Newton St. Cyres a dead boy who had fallen down a well was restored to life. In Ottery St. Mary a pox-struck woman was instantly cured. In Chard a deaf man was suddenly granted the gift of angel-song. In Charlton Mackrell all manner of ailments had been cured by the drinking of water that was run over the bones. Agues and poxes, quinsy and falling sickness: all banished by the king’s sword-arm.

  And so here they were, the hopeless and helpless: those for whom doctors had achieved nothing but a miraculous lightening of the wallet; those who had tried remedies, from boiled snails to dog spit and everything in between; who’d been bled and leeched and covered in foul-smelling poultices; who’d prayed to all the saints for babies, for straight limbs, a stiff prick or a cure for baldness, all to no avail. Now it was down to King Arthur.

  The pilgrims poured forward. Squabbles broke out. The Moor made a signal, and a twisted little man who had been pushing himself around on a wheeled trestle with hands shod in wooden pattens suddenly untwisted his distorted limbs, got up from his handcart on legs that now appeared sound and walked into the crowd. People touched him for luck, the next best thing to the holy bones being someone in whom the mana ran strong.

  A man blind from birth, as he had sworn in the catalogue of penitents, stared about with an idiotic grin. “Ah, the colours! The colours hurt my eyes! Praise the Lord! Crimson and gold, azure and green. Are those trees that grow out of the pillars, or have the stones come to life before my new eyes?”

  Don’t overegg the pudding, Will, I thought.

  A possessed man came to his senses and started to sing the Te Deum.

  A leper peeled foul sores from his arm, revealing unmarked skin beneath.

  All was going beautifully, the merchants and nobles pressing ever greater oblations upon the overwhelmed church officers. The money was pouring in. A commotion behind me caused me to turn, to find another erstwhile blind man crying out ecstatically, “I can see! I can see!” Then he ran into a pillar and fell down as if struck by a knacker’s mallet.

  The Moor caught Plaguey Mary by the arm. “He isn’t one of ours, is he?”

  She shook her head. “Some fool who’s got carried away by it all.”

  The man was beginning to writhe, blood pouring from his split skull.

  “For God’s sake, create a distraction.”

  Wailing as if possessed, Mary whirled away, unlacing her bodice. “Save me, King Arthur! There is a demon inside me, curled up between my teats. Do you see him? Oh, he is black as night and wicked as Satan. Cast him out, I beg of you!”

  Husbands stared as her opulent breasts sprang free; wives cuffed their husbands. No one paid any attention to the blind man, now groaning and clutching his head at the foot of the pillar.

  Into the midst of this chaos, a man came running through the doors and shouted something. The Moor whispered urgently in my ear. I watched the red robes flicker like a Pentecostal flame and then he was gone. I tried to follow, but the press of folk was suddenly so tight around me that I couldn’t move.

  The justiciar’s brother caught the messenger by the elbow and made him repeat his news. His great, red, slab-like face turned ashen. The messenger took a big breath, then cried out, “By God’s grace and on the orders of Henry, Rex Angliae, Dux Normaniae et Aquitainiae et Comes Andigaviae, bear witness to my words. Jerusalem has fallen!”

  I went cold all over. Good Christ, what timing.

  The messenger strained to make himself heard. “Jerusalem the Golden, the City of Solomon, the Navel of the World, has fallen into the hands of the great devil Saladin and his pagan horde! Its people are slaughtered or scattered to the four winds. The Sanctuary is defiled and the True Cross has been captured by the Saracens. The flower of Christianity has been destroyed. All is lost!”

  Around the Lady Chapel, faces became still. Mouths hung open, dark caves of despair. Some people crossed themselves and prayed. Then one woman wailed, “Jerusalem the Golden! Jerusalem the Golden!” as if she had lost a child. And that broke the spell.

  The heart of Christendom had ceased to beat; it was at this very moment being desecrated by the heathen. And here were these Christians, helpless and continents away.

  In such a world, who could believe in miracles?

  The golden glow of hope was lost. What had seemed illuminated and transformed by the glory of the saints now showed itself a shoddy illusion. As if a veil had been dropped from her eyes, a woman stared at the leper—a small, dark man we knew as Saw, a twin to Hammer—and frowned. I knew the hideous sign of leprosy to be no more than a paste of coloured flour and water, dried to a repulsive crust. The woman leant in and with sudden boldness peeled the sore off his face, revealing a cheek that had never been afflicted with anything worse than pimples.

  At the same time, someone else discovered the true blind man, blood running in runnels down his face; another rounded on Red Will and accused him of never having been blind at all—whoever heard of a man blind from birth knowing the difference between colours and the names of each one?

  In rising panic, I tried to blend into the background, just one appalled monk among the rest. Little Ned’s trolley was found to have a hidden compartment for his not-so-shrivelled legs, and inside it, a string of pearls he had slipped off some fat neck. One of the merchants’ wives began to scream, “My jewels, my jewels!” and suddenly Jerusalem the Golden was forgotten as people patted their necks and their belt-pouches and realized they lacked much of what they’d come in with—not pains and ills, or even sins, but purses, rings and necklaces …

  Shit. Now our heads are in the noose.

  “Run!” I screamed at Quickfinger and Hammer, and they made a dash for the door. I swam through the crowd after them, shoving people out of my path. Angry churchgoers pursued the members of the troupe. Quickfinger went sprawling, bringing Hammer crashing down on top of him, spilling booty. Ranulf de Glanvill shouted, “Close the doors!” Just before I could reach them, the great wooden doors banged shut, and suddenly the justiciar’s brother was standing in my way. I cannoned into him. It was like running into a wall.

  “Running a ring of thieves, are you?” He grasped the collar of my robe and hauled me upright. “Who the hell are you?”

  Who was I? Just a wild boy, a savage, dressed up as a monk. My silence was construed as defiance. De Glanvill hit me, the great ring on his finger mashing my nose. I felt something in it burst; blood cascaded down the front of my white robe.

  “What’s your name, you bastard?” he repeated, shaking me as if I were a rat.

  I started to laugh, out of terror. “I—I, ah …”

  A muscle twitched in my cheek. The scent of roses bloomed in my head. Powerful and pungent and hot as summer, the scent scalded my nose. My knees gave way, leaving me hanging from his fist, my legs beginning to jig. I saw the look of disgust on his face, and then the gates in my head opened into a sky of gold, revealing pillars and arches that soared higher by far than those in the Lady Chapel, and I was lost.

  3

  City of Akka

  AUTUMN 1187

  “Equal sizes, Zohra!” Nima Najib peered over her daughter’s shoulder as she failed yet again to make the ma’amul—a delicate pastry filled with a mixture of chopped dates, pistachios and walnuts, orange blossom water and spices—to her exacting standards. “Look, this one’s twice the size of the others. Don’t be so slapdash!”

  Zohra’s cousins loved tasks like this—precise, repetitive—but she lacked patience. “I’m trying, Ummi, I really am.” What did it matter if the pastries weren’t all alike? They tasted the same in the end.

  They had been preparing food all morning to celebrate the reuniting of the Najib family. The occupation was over; Akka was liberated, and Jerusalem recaptured from the infidel. It was the first family gathering in long years. Zohra’s father, Baltasar, h
ad been down to the livestock market on his way back from the mosque and bought a fine black ram and three chickens. Indulgent towards his simple eldest son, Baltasar had allowed Sorgan to lead the ram while he and the twins—Aisa and Kamal—had each carried a flapping chicken. When they returned, Sorgan had been sent to feed the pigeons on the roof terrace to keep him occupied while the butchery was carried out in the courtyard. Sorgan had a soft heart, and no one wanted to explain to him the connection between the blood on the tiles, the missing animals and the meat on his plate.

  While Sorgan stroked the soft feathers on his favourite birds, Baltasar had shown the twins how to cut the ram’s meat from the bone. They were twelve years old—five years younger than Zohra. Kamal, who had a tendency to act like a small child, got smacked for running around with the horns on his head and getting blood all over his clean tunic; and then Aisa tried to stop Kamal from retaliating and caught a blow in the face, which resulted in more blood and washing.

  As the only girl, it had fallen to Zohra to get her brothers into clean clothes, a task she undertook with gritted teeth and the necessary degree of no-nonsense brutality. Then she had returned to help her mother in the kitchen. They had been working for five solid hours now: washing the mutton, rubbing it with freshly ground cardamom and cinnamon, loading it into the biggest pan and setting it to poach over the fire. They had sliced a dozen onions, plucked and jointed the three chickens, rubbed saffron into the meat and set it aside to marinate in lemon juice and garlic while getting the rest of the feast underway. While Nima griddled aubergines until their skins burned and filled the kitchen with smoke, Zohra had made the bread dough and left it to prove, then gathered armfuls of herbs from the courtyard garden. They’d mashed the aubergine flesh with garlic and lemon juice and sesame paste and chopped the herbs and cucumbers and radishes for the salad. Only then had they turned their attentions to the fiddly, infuriating pastries.