Demetrios Askiates 2 - Knights of the Cross by Tom Harper

Author:Tom Harper
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2006-09-15T10:39:06+00:00

II

Besiegers

3 June – 1 August 1098

κ

The Franks exploded into the city like a vessel of flaming oil, splashing fire and death wherever they touched. On the walls, in streets and squares, in their homes and fields, men died and women were broken. Worthless possessions were dragged from houses merely because they could be stolen, then abandoned because they were cumbersome, then set alight because they would burn. Order was hateful, confusion master. By afternoon most of the killing was done.

I had waited seven months to enter Antioch; within hours, I could not bear to stay. All morning I sat high on the mountain, alone, watching the devastation in the shade of the cliff. Sometimes my conscience whispered that I should go down, try to save the innocent, but each time I quashed the thought. It would have effected nothing save my death. I still reviled myself for my cowardice.

As the sun came around onto the face of the mountain and the cries from the city lessened, I rose to descend the crumbling slope. I dared not risk the centre of the city, where the sack had raged fiercest, but kept to the fringes and made for a small gate in the south-west, near the bridge. Even here, the ruin was complete: in half a day, the Army of God had wrought a century’s worth of destruction. Doors lay sprawled flat; charred houses yawned open to the sky; clothes and dishes and tools and carved toys were strewn about like the debris of a receded flood. Worst, though, were the bodies. Most bore hideous testament to their brutal deaths, and in places their blood had turned the dust to mud. I pulled a length of my tunic from under my mail and bunched it over my nose, using the other hand to keep my silver cross clearly visible. Gangs of Franks still roamed, seeking easy loot and violence. In one street I saw a knight wrapped in orange cloth running after a half-naked woman crawling on her knees. The fabric billowed from his shoulders like wings; he seemed so drunk on pillage that he could not move straight but weaved between the pillared arcades. I stuck out a leg and tripped him as he passed, hoping that he would be too crazed to rise. He fell among a pile of Turkish corpses and did not move. The woman he had pursued looked round. Her breasts were withered and shrunk in to her skin, her hair torn; with not a speck of gratitude, she plucked a stone from the rubble and hurled it at me. It bounced off my shield as I watched her vanish down an alley.

At last I reached the walls. The gates were pushed open and unguarded, and I passed through the shadow under the arch without incident. It was only when I had gone a few paces beyond that I thought to look back, to wonder that I had slipped so easily through the door that had defied us so long.

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