"Is any favor simple?" Richard demanded.
"They're all simple: I profit you, you profit me. I give you the city you prayed to win. You give me a simple thing: freedom. Take all of this country that pleases you, except those territories and castles that are mine. Leave me free to do my duty to Allah and my Faith."
"And if that duty is to destroy everything I build?"
The Old Man shrugged, a fluid roll of the shoulders. For an instant Richard saw not a feeble old man but a veteran warrior, all cunning and whipcord strength. "I can give you what you want most. Whether I later take it away… that is in the hands of God, and your own conduct toward me and mine. It's a gamble. But what in this life is not?"
"You bargain like the Devil," Richard said, but he laughed. "And this is a devil's bargain-but I'll take it. For Jerusalem I'll take it."
"So be it," said the Old Man of the Mountain. "Wait as you planned, march as you planned. When you come to the city, dispose your troops as you intended, but wait for a signal."
"And what will that signal be?" asked Richard.
"It will be unmistakable," the Old Man said. "Go with God, king of Franks. And may God give you all you pray for."
Richard could swear that he only blinked; that no one moved. But one moment the Old Man and his interpreter were there, and the next they had vanished into the heatstruck air.
Richard's army came to Jerusalem by starlight. They had met only one troop of defenders on the way, a party of Turkish archers who must have been late in receiving word of the sultan's death. Richard loosed the Templars on them; the warrior monks cut them apart with holy glee.
He had told no one of the bargain he had made. That there was treachery in the city, yes; but not whose doing it was. None of them would understand. None of them was a king.
Philip of France, that supple snake-he would have understood. But he had called this Crusade a fool's errand and taken himself back to France. Barbarossa of the Germans was dead. There was no clearly acknowledged King of Jerusalem, now that the Assassins had taken Conrad. There was only Richard here, on this march, disposing his troops along the barren hills and through valleys so holy that they could barely support the weight of living green.
He rode last, leading the rearguard, as if to thrust himself to the front would turn all this to mist and dream: he would wake and find himself prostrate with another fever, and Saladin still alive, and no honest hope of winning the prize he had dreamed of for so long. But even as slowly as he rode, in the end he topped the stony summit of the hill and looked on the Holy City.
It was a darkness on darkness, shot with streaks of fire. When he looked down, he found his army more by feel than sight. There was no moon; the stars were hazed with dust and heat. His skin prickled with it under the weight of padding and mail.
His horse snorted softly, pawing with impatience. Its steel-shod hoof sent up a shower of sparks.
In almost the same moment, a comet of fire arched up over Jerusalem. Then at last he saw the outline of walls and towers, and the golden flame of the Dome. And more to the point, he saw David's Gate open below the loom of the tower. There were no lights visible in the tower, no sign of guards on the wall or in the gate. Torchlight gleamed within, casting a golden glow across the meeting of roads that led up to the gate.
It could be a trap. Richard was ready for that. He had focused his attack on the gate, though the rams would not be needed after all; in their place he sent a company of crossbowmen. They took their positions out of ordinary bowshot, and sent a barrage of bolts into the open gate.
Nothing moved inside it. No hidden troops fell screaming from the towers. The gate was empty, open and inviting.
Richard gambled as he had with the Old Man: he ordered the first wave into the city. With a cry of trumpets and a thunder of drums, they swarmed out of the hills and fell upon Jerusalem.
Richard had intended to go in with the rearguard, but as the vanguard swarmed toward the gate, he could not bear it. He clapped spurs to his destrier's sides. He barely cared if anyone went with him; all his heart and soul were fixed on that flicker of torchlight.
He was not the first to pass beneath that echoing gate, but he was far from the last. Although he had never been in the city, he knew its ways as if he had been born to them. He had committed them to heart against just such a day, praying every night and every morning that it would come to pass.
This was David's Gate, the gate of the north and west, guarded by the Tower of David in which the kings of Jerusalem had lived and ruled and fought. The Tower seemed deserted, empty of troops and even of noncombatants. The street of David that ran inward from it, nearly straight through the middle of the city till it reached the Beautiful Gate of the Temple on the other side, was as empty as the Tower, but for crumpled shapes that proved to be bits of abandoned baggage: an empty sack, a heap of broken pots, a chest with its lid wrenched off and nothing within but a scent of sandalwood.
He was deeply, almost painfully aware of the holiness of this place, the sanctity of every stone. But in this hour he was a fighting man, and there was a fight ahead-that, he was sure of. But where? Not, he hoped, in every street and alley of this ancient and convoluted place.
The Old Man had woven this web and, Richard had no doubt, cleared this sector of the city for the invasion. Both he and Moustafa had spoken more than once of the Dome of the Rock. That was the Muslims' great holy place, the rock from which their Prophet had been taken up to heaven. Like the Holy Sepulcher for the Christians, it was the heart and soul of their faith.
It was also a great fortress and storehouse, built as a mosque and then transformed into the stronghold of the Knights Templar: the Templum Domini, the Temple of the Lord. Saladin had died under its splendid dome. It would be like the Old Man's humor to drive Saphadin's troops there and pen them like sheep for Richard to slaughter. Saphadin might even hope to withstand a siege, until hordes of reinforcements could come from his kinsmen in Damascus.
Richard gathered his vanguard and the second wave of forces behind it, ordered the lanterns lit to guide them, and led them into the city. The third rank would go in after a pause, and sweep the city behind them, taking it street by street if need be.
Beyond the gate, at last, they met opposition: a barricade across the broad street, and turbaned Saracens manning it. The Norman destriers ran right over them. It cost a horse, gut-slit by an infidel who died under the hooves of the beast he slew, but none of Richard's men fell, even when the archers began to shoot from the rooftops. They were ready for that: shields up, interlocked as they pressed forward.
There were two more barricades between David's Tower and the Latin Exchange, where half a dozen skeins of streets met and mingled. One barricade they broke as they had the first, but at higher cost: there were more men here, and more archers. They lost a man-at-arms there, arrow-shot in the eye. The other barricade was broken when they came to it, all its defenders dead-Assassins' work, quite likely. Past that, as they marched warily round the looming bulk of the Khan al-Sultan, they found the way clear, and only dead men to bar it. Walls on either side rose high and blank, windows shuttered, gates shut and barred.
Richard was preternaturally aware of the force he led, as if it had been a part of his own body. He felt as much as heard the troop of Germans who ventured to creep off and begin the sack before the city was won. An English voice called a halt to them, and English troops barred their way. They snarled like a pack of dogs, but they were quelled, for the moment.