Free Knights of the Cross by Tom Harper Page A

for relief to the Emperor. Christ help us, I thought, if the Franks ever saw the correspondence. It was well after dark before I was able to return to my tent, damp and famished, to see what humble supper awaited me. Anna and Sigurd were there, with a few Varangians clustered around a single candle. The shadows were deep in the canopy above.
    ‘Welcome to my mead hall,’ said Sigurd mirthlessly. ‘Have you found out who killed the Norman?’
    I lowered myself onto the ground and took the wooden bowl that Anna passed to me. The broth in it was long cold, and the only trace of meat seemed to be the scum of fat on its surface.
    ‘One of the companions who shared his tent has been missing for two days. Even you, Sigurd, might guess something was suspicious from that.’
    Sigurd waved his crooked knife at me, but before he could retort Anna was speaking.
    ‘If one Norman killed another then there is hardly reason for you to involve yourself. Bohemond must be satisfied – has he paid you?’
    After my conversation with Count Raymond, I was no longer so certain what would satisfy Bohemond. ‘The man was not a Norman – he was a Provençal who had taken service with Bohemond.’
    ‘Hah.’ Sigurd’s knife flashed in the candlelight as he held it up and licked the crumbs off it. I looked for the bread it had cut, but in vain. ‘Bohemond did not hire you to prove that his Normans were ill-disciplined barbarians intent on murdering each other. That we knew. There is an answer he wants you to find, Demetrios, and my guess is that he already knows it far better than you.’
    ‘And what of it?’ Anna interrupted. Though there were men present, she had unwrapped the palla from her head so that her black hair hung loose behind her neck. It shimmered in the candlelight, but her face was firm with anger. ‘What does it matter if it was a Norman or a Provençal or a Turk or even a Nubian who killed that man? Bohemond and Raymond and the other princes have killed far more men by their impatience and ambition.’
    ‘This is a war, and men die in it,’ said Sigurd.
    ‘Of course men die in war. But it should not be because we gorged ourselves when there was plenty, and now suffer famine. Where were the princes five months ago, when our gravest danger was gluttony? Before the orchards were reduced to firewood?’
    She looked around, challenging us to argue, but there were none in that group who would defend the Franks. Besides, it was the truth. When we had arrived at Antioch, the land had been fat with fruit: trees bowed with apples and pears, vines dripping grapes, pits and granaries bursting with the newly gathered harvest in every village. Within two months, the fertile plain had become a wasteland. No animals grazed the fields or sat in their barns for they had all been slaughtered, and our horses had devoured the winter hay. The granaries had been ransacked until not one seed remained, and the withered vines had been gathered and burned. We had plagued the land without thought for the future, and the greasy soup now in my hands was our reward.
    ‘It was not even that their strategy was frustrated,’ Anna continued. ‘There was no plan then for getting into Antioch, any more than there is now.’
    ‘Enough.’ I raised my arms in barely exaggerated horror. ‘I have just spent an hour hearing Tatikios make the same complaints.’
    ‘Perhaps they expected God to deliver them,’ Sigurd suggested. ‘They seem to know His mind uncommonly well.’
    I thought of Drogo’s naked body in the cave, the long cross scarred into his back. I thought of all the others whom I had seen make similar professions on their bodies, knights and pilgrims alike. ‘You cannot deny their piety.’
    Sparks spat into the gloom as Sigurd rasped his knife against a stone. ‘When the Norman bastard came to conquer England he carried a banner of the cross – a personal gift from the Pope in Rome – and the relics of two saints. If you had seen what