Over the city circle the vultures while crows, bolder and more nimble, hop and flutter with red beaks and feet, picking and choosing. Dogs go cringing with their ears laid back, they seem stricken with guilt and terror at seeing so many masters slain at once; some are in an ecstasy of blood-frenzy, they snarl and growl and tear at the dead flesh, the corpses flop and jerk as they are pulled this way and that.
Here are the Western Wall and the Temple mound with the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque. I have never seen these places before but I know them from maps and pictures, from dreams and from the phantom Jerusalem I have seen on Hidden Lion. Blood runs down the stones of the Western Wall and in the heat of the day the air quivers and sways above the dead who are heaped between the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque. These are mostly Muslims; I can see no Jews here but I can smell their death in the smoke that rises from the synagogue to which they fled and in which they have been burnt alive. I am not walking, I am moving on the air in this waking sleep-travel, this night journey to a day that is coming; if I had to walk I should find little space on the red and slippery stones, I should have to walk on corpses.
Now I see among the blood-soaked bodies one that is like a naked ivory goddess in this butchery-place of the soldiers of Christ. The back of her head is crushed; her flawless limbs are sprawled in dishonour — but I am wrong to say that: her beauty of self and person cannot be dishonoured; she has been violated and murdered but such as she cannot be dishonoured; those who have done this have dishonoured only themselves. Here she lies, my dead and naked pilgrim, her Arab gown torn from her; flinging it over her head was not enough, they had to see all of her. I cannot cover her nor can I more modestly dispose her limbs, I have no corporeal existence in this place to which I have spun with burning hands and feet.
Here is a strange thing: in Sophia’s left hand is a little shoe, a little scarlet slipper worked with gold. A child’s shoe. Now do I seek and search, powerless to move so much as a dead finger of the numberless dead who lie here bearing witness.
I seek, I search; crows flap their black wings and cry their carrion-lust, dogs growl at my strange presence as I look everywhere to see if there will be a live two-year-old child with one foot bare. Have I been brought here to see the end of Sophia and that alone?
The sun goes down; the crows depart; the dogs are bolder now, the smacking and slavering and crunching of their feasting is loud in the twilight. There! Something moves! Fouled with the blood of the corpses he has sheltered under, there crawls out of this midden-heap of history a boy of perhaps two years and a few months. On his left foot is the mate of the slipper in Sophia’s left hand. A fine boy, big for his age and strong-looking, with a face like Sophia’s. It is growing dark, there is no moon to be seen. The little boy is not crying, his eyes are open wide and all his senses are alert as he walks slowly and quietly among the silent dead and the snarling dogs.
I cannot follow. My burning hands and feet, my north and south, east and west are spinning me up into the night and away from Jerusalem. ‘My son!’ I cry, ‘My little son!’ Never shall I know his name. His face was not only like Sophia’s, there was something of me in it as well, also in the way he held his head.
I am in my bed. The last of the darkness is paling towards the dawn. My hands and feet still burn. I am naked. I look away from my mutilation and cover myself. At the foot of my bed stands my young death, naked but complete. For the first time his face is not obscure, and I see that it is like Sophia’s face and yet it is my face too, the face of my child’s soul grown into a better man than I ever was. Still I can’t be such a bad fellow to have a death like this. He points to my hands and feet and I see there, written on the palms of my hands and on the soles of my naked feet, the four characters of the unutterable name of God.
He has done this for me, my young death: by writing on my hands and feet the sacred name he has sent me through the space called time to the taking of Jerusalem and the death of Sophia to show me our son walking alive out of the slaughter. Perhaps he will live only one day more, perhaps only one hour more, but he will begin his journey and will have in his eyes for however little time the same world that burned in the vision of his mother and his father. My son! Never to know his name! As I look at my hands and feet the letters fade with the paling of the sky. My night journey is done.
Now the cool dim tones of light that every morning build afresh the world are building it again this morning; the houses and the domes and minarets, Justinian’s walls and towers all stand up in readiness for their dayward passage. Now appear before me, consubstantial with the light, the dead fellow-travellers of my pilgrimage in the order of their deaths: the tax-collector, headless and naked and writhing with maggots; Udo the relic-gatherer whom I killed in the little wood; the bear shot full of arrows by the man who called him God; Bodwild the sow and Konrad her master; the pilgrim children raped by Bruder Pförtner and his fellows — they must have perished at sea, they are bloated and eyeless, their hair is matted and tangled. My young death, respectful and attentive, stands a little to one side. His lips are moving, they shape the word, ‘Tonight’.
I nod. ‘Tonight!’ I say. I am ready, even eager. As comradely as I am with Bembel Rudzuk, as close as our friendship is, yet am I closer to these dead. As a pilgrim acquires merit by making the journey to Jerusalem, so have these acquired not only merit but magical power by completing the journey to the end of themselves, to the fullness of their action. In death they are intensified, they are more than themselves, they are more than philosophies; they are geographies, histories, they are sciences and guides for a soul sore troubled and perplexed. Where they are, where Sophia is, there would I be.
But Sophia is not standing before me with the other dead. Suddenly I recall that she is not dead. Jerusalem has not yet fallen to the Franks, this is not yet the year 1099, it is still 1098. Sophia is alive! Our little son is not alone among dogs and corpses. There is the delicate crescent of the new moon of Tammuz still in the morning sky. The evil decree is not yet upon us.
Tonight’ is the word shaped by the lips of my young death. This is the last day of my life! Only a moment ago I was eager to join the dead but now everything is different, I am not a dry tree, I have a son, I am needed by my child and the mother of my child, I must find them. Life is calling me now, not death.
I look at my young death, I shake my head and with my mouth I shape the words, ‘Not yet.’
‘Tonight!’ Again the word appears on his lips. I look away, I don’t want to see him now. The tax-collector and the others have gone, I am alone with my young death.
I am on my feet, I pick up my curved Turkish sword, Firouz’s sword that Yaghi-Siyan has given me. My young death looks at me sadly; in his face I see the face of my little son alone among the dogs, among the dead. I raise the sword to strike but it is as if an iron bar has dropped across my arm. This has happened to me once before when I tried to save the life of the bear, and now as then it is the bony arm of Bruder Pförtner that has stopped me.
‘You don’t mean to do that,’ he says, breathing upon me with his breath that is like the fresh salt wind by the sea. ‘It simply isn’t done.’
‘You don’t understand,’ I say. ‘For myself I don’t care, I’m quite ready to die. It’s my son, you see — he’s only a very little fellow and he needs me badly, and his mother, if I can find her perhaps she needn’t die in Jerusalem.’
‘Yes,’ says Bruder Pförtner, ‘I do understand, you’ve no idea how often I hear this sort of thing. So many people are urgently needed elsewhere when the time comes. And what about me, eh? Have you perhaps a little thought for me? I am like a diligent housewife who cleans the house and cooks the meal and lays the table, all is in readiness but the expected guest suddenly can’t be bothered to come. Only in this case I’ve cleaned the house and cooked the meal and laid the table of history, and one can’t take liberties with history; it isn’t possible, the complexity of the energy exchanges is absolutely staggering.’