Eager to partake of this feast, the godless things that swim in dark and unseen places … Childeric AD 1099 Jerusalem, the navel of the world, the sacred city of Christians, Jews and Moslems alike, might have been worth the wearying journey to reach it had its alleys not swarmed with flies, its squares and courts not lain under a vast litter of the hacked, mutilated and dead. In any normal time, the sight of the sun – a ball of orange flame high on the rugged flanks of Mount Zion, or shimmering through the green canopies of lemon and fig trees in the lush gardens of Gethsemane – might stop the surliest man in his tracks and make him draw breath. But now that sun was lost in a haze of acrid smoke, and the sky, the little of it visible, fluttering with ravens. “They said the Church of the Sepulchre was once destroyed,” the boy muttered. “By the mad Caliph Al-Hakim. But that it was raised to glory again by a Viking … Harald Hardraada, in the pay of Byzantium. I thought it would be an astounding place to visit.”
