Those other horsemen, the Frankish horsemen, or whatever it is that has offered to the eye this appearance of Frankish horsemen, may they or it not be a broken cathedral, inexplicable in a distant desert, the spire no longer in unity aspiring to heaven but toppled in pieces, pointing only to the sand? Broken stones, broken stones singing broken songs, broken verses chopped abruptly off, odd words leaping suddenly into silence? From these broken stones, these hewn and carven broken stones, there puts itself together a broken stone angel of death towering over the dawn trees, bigger than the cathedral ever was, the stones of it continually toppling as it strides but bounding up again to move as arms or legs or as a head that turns this way and that, turning in its looking but unturning in its questing. Questing is the name of this death angel made of broken stones, Bohemond is the name of this Questing.
Now at last Bohemond has become altogether real to me, not to be understood — nothing can be understood, I see now — but to be seen with the same solidity and shadow-casting reality as the port that is approached by crossing the water at dawn so that it grows larger, larger in the eye, so that at last it is arrived at. So have I at last arrived at Bohemond in his aspect of the death angel named Questing, the many-horsed, many-hoofed many-faced striding of the broken stones, the broken cathedral that crosses seas and deserts and mountains, questing on the death-track of the mystery that is Christ.
14
Night passes, morning comes, surprised as always to find itself here. This morning is full of urgent motion, of horsemen trotting to and from Yaghi-Siyan’s palace, of shouted commands, of the slap and jingle of harness and the shuffling and snuffling and whinnying of horses as cavalrymen prepare for action. Action impends but does not come until the afternoon when a Turkish galloper clatters over the bridge, through the gate, and into the city with the news that the cavalry who rode out last night have ambushed the Franks returning from Suwaydiyya. The Turks have put the Franks to flight, have captured the wagons with the siege materials and are now on their way back with them.
Only a few minutes after the arrival of the Turkish galloper we on the wall see scattered horsemen coming from the direction of Suwaydiyya and making for the Frankish camp. These we guess to be Franks who have fled the ambush. Now the Frankish camp is in motion, they will be riding out to help their comrades. In Antioch the kettledrums are pounding; Yaghi-Siyan’s cavalry come pouring out through the bridge gate, thundering across the bridge to engage the Franks and keep them from reinforcing the others.
The Turks are able to hold the Franks for a time but suddenly here are Bohemond and Raymond with their forces regathered and their lances levelled. As always I see him at a distance, and I recognize Bohemond by the gathering of galloping warriors into a point; I know that only he can be that point, only he can be that ardent forwardness with his name cleaving the air before him. Surely by now his name is like the roar of the lion: it is more than a sound, it is that which makes the knees shake. The Turks cannot now move forward against the man and the name, they must wheel their horses round towards the bridge and the gate, must turn themselves in the saddle to loose their arrows at the baneful man, the baneful name that overwhelms them.
As it lives again in the eye of my mind it seems all in one moment that Yaghi-Siyan’s cavalry are galloping for their lives over the bridge while there rises stone by stone the tower of the Franks that will command the bridge and further tighten the blockade of Antioch. But before this can be done the Franks must recapture the building materials from the Turks, and for this must many Turks be killed.
On the far side of the river there is a Muslim cemetery, and this night the Turks come out of Antioch to bury their dead there. In the morning the Franks dig up the bodies, there is gold and silver to be taken from them. They use stones from the tombs in the building of their tower and this becomes a part of the picture in my mind, almost it seems to me that the tower is being built of dug-up Turkish corpses while yet the Turkish cavalry gallop for their lives across the bridge into Antioch. And in this same moment rises the other Tower, Tancred’s tower that will command the Ladhiqiyya Gate.
Still the back ways of Mount Silpius and the postern doors in the walls are there for those who want to leave Antioch and for the more determined of the foragers and profiteers but from now on there will be no more sorties from Antioch nor will there be more than a trickle of provisions coming in. In the five months of the siege the Franks have been able to do nothing much with their mangonels and other missile-throwing machines, and the river has kept them from moving siege towers up against the walls. The rumours of advanced Greek-fire techniques have proved unfounded; but now the striding stones of the broken cathedral have walled in the unbroken stones of the walls of Antioch.
Now ships from Genoa are bringing provisions to the Franks and the Suwaydiyya road is under their control; now do their fortunes improve while those of Antioch decline. Well do we know that in each of us lives a skeleton that waits for the flesh to die, there is an absence waiting for the presence to depart— but a great city! A city like Antioch! As Pilgermann the owl I fly over it now and it looks like nothing really, it has retreated from its medieval boundaries, it has shrunk and dwindled, it has huddled itself together, has drawn back from the vaunt of its greatness and the largeness of its history, it is like a swimmer who has struggled barely alive out of a raging torrent and does not enter the water again. No, I think as I look down on this place that is so small, so diminished, so unspecial, this is not Antioch: Antioch was days and nights of vivid action, Antioch was a paradigm of history in which at one time and another every kind of thinker and doer, every kind of greatness and smallness jostled together and shouldered and elbowed their way through all the lights and resonances and colours, all the smells and flavours and motion of endless variations of circumstance and event in a large and crowded arena. In a particular time people fought and lived and died for particular things; now it is small, now it is quiet. An old woman in black walks a path with a basket on her head; a man leads a donkey loaded with firewood; perhaps they say to themselves that God wills it. And of course God wills everything: the beating of hammers; the baking of bread; the rise and fall of nations; the quiet clopping of the hooves of one small donkey.
Raymond’s tower, the one commanding the bridge and the bridge gate, was built in March of 1098, and from that time Antioch moved forward faster and faster towards its fall. That tower was completed and Raymond’s banner was run up on the top of it on the Eve of Passover.
Before that, while the tower was being built, while Passover was approaching, there began to be in my mind the idea of Elijah and the anticipation of that moment in the Seder when the door is opened for him. I began to see that another idea was coming to me, it was the idea of Bohemond as Elijah, Elijah as enemy, enemy as messenger of God. Yes, the enemy as messenger of God, the enemy as teacher. Sophia was the beginning of my Holy Wisdom and Bohemond would be the end of it.