Pillars of Light by Jane Johnson

Author:Jane Johnson [Johnson, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-68263-3
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2016-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

The news of the loss of the German horde seemed to stir up a ferment in the Christian ranks, and waves of men carrying pikes and axes beat uphill against their own army. The attacks seemed random and disorganized, the provocateurs from the lower orders.

“Desperation?” Ibrahim asked Malek on the third morning of unrest, as they armed themselves on the sultan’s orders.

Malek shrugged. “Who can know the mind of the unbeliever?”

“Our lord must think there is an advantage to be gained, if he’s sending us out with Ala al-Din.” The sultan rarely risked his burning coals for no good reason.

Malek went to the farthest picket lines to saddle up Asfar. She nickered at the sight of him, and when he mounted her she danced and spun around and around. Malek looked at the range of hills to the south, sere and brown, baked by the sun, and above them a hawk making slow, graceful sky-circles, the light turning its wings to a blur of golden-red against the unbroken blue. How lovely, Malek thought, to be up there away from the stink and the noise and the flies, the excrement and sickness and death. But then the hawk folded its wings and stooped, faster than the fastest arrow. It disappeared from sight, but a sudden piercing shriek marked the death of its prey. The sound went through Malek like a shaft of ice. Was this the day he would die? Had it long been written? Unshielded by his usual concerns about keeping the sultan safe, he rode into battle sure that something terrible was about to happen to him.

He lost track of the number of enemies he faced that day—of the nameless men who rose up before him, of the number of times his sword rose and fell, of the blows he struck, the cries of horses and men merging into one long, drawn-out death-scream that became a blur of noise in his head. His world had shrunk to this burning arena in which the sun beat down and the enemy became increasingly trapped between the walls, the ocean and the closing pincers of the Muslim troops.

The chroniclers would write of this battle that the bodies of the Franj stretched in nine lines between the sand dunes and the sea, and that in each line lay a thousand corpses. Malek knew nothing of this: all he saw was what was before him—details etched into his memory, to be replayed in jerky, formless repetitions in the dead of night or during unguarded waking moments. And the worst of the nightmares was to come in his final encounter of the day, when he was barely strong enough to wield his scimitar.

If there was anything different about his final opponent of the day, Malek did not notice it. If the figure was slighter or shorter than others he had faced, he did not register the fact. If the blow the Franj landed on his shield failed to jar his arm as he would have

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