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 scentscalded 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
“E qual 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, had 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 aflapping 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
Colin F. Barnes, Darren Wearmouth