Lion Heart by Justin Cartwright Read Free Book Online

with snow from the summits of distant mountains.
    Saladin himself cut off Reynald’s head at Hattin, I think, as a symbolic act. Decapitation has a macabre significance for the executioner. It suggests that mere killing is not the object, but that the deliberate severing of the face and the brain from the rest of the body is the most final death, sending an unmistakable message. When Anne Boleyn was beheaded by Henry VIII, I can only imagine that he intended to snuff out a life in the least equivocal way.
    Now Saladin ordered the execution of all the Knights Templars apart from the Grand Master, Gerard de Ridfort.
    Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani wrote:
     
    Saladin ordered that they should be beheaded, choosing to have them dead rather than in prison. With him was a band of scholars and sufis and a certain number of devout men and ascetics; each begged to be allowed to kill one of them, and drew his sword and rolled back his sleeve. Saladin, his face joyful, was sitting on his dais; the unbelievers showed black despair.
     
    Many Templars volunteered themselves for execution in solidarity. The bodies were left for the hyenas and jackals. Thousands of ordinary soldiers were sent as slaves to Damascus. The True Cross was attached upside down to a lance and taken with the caravan of captives. There were so many captives for sale in Damascus that their price fell to 3 dinars. One of the inhabitants is said to have bought a prisoner in exchange for a pair of sandals.
    Count Raymond of Tripoli’s words – ‘The kingdom is finished’ – were prophetic. Saladin kept Guy in custody for months as an insurance policy while he destroyed as many of the Crusader castles as he could before he took Jerusalem in September and only then did he trade Guy. Guy gave his oath that he would not take up arms. He renounced the oath immediately he was free.
    The Holy City was lost, the True Cross was lost. It was a catastrophe which shook the whole of the Christian world profoundly.
    Richard the Lionheart took the cross in response. It is reported that when Saladin received word of his intentions, he was afraid: Malik al-Inkitar was coming.
    But Richard was delayed, defending his empire in France, and resisting his brother’s ambitions. He was unable to set sail until 1190.
     
    The sun is now striking the water itself. The lake is still, although a few trucks and taxis are passing, from this distance apparently very slowly; with the advent of the light the sound of conflict subsides. I must now accept that perhaps I was dreaming. But this place makes persistent assaults on one’s imagination so that it is difficult to separate the real and the imagined.
    I pack up my things. I am stiff after a restless night. There are scorpions in these hills, and many times in the night I imagined they were sharing my sleeping bag. I have arranged to meet an Arab taxi driver down below at a stall on the old road that skirts the lake. On the way back to Jerusalem, he tells me that Mossad orchestrated a recent bombing of a bus in Tel Aviv, which I had read about in Haaretz . I feel the urge to reach across the torn seats of the Mercedes. He sees me as a deluded backpacker, lowlife. I want to tell him that right here, thirty thousand people lost their lives for just this kind of persistent ignorance.
    We set off for the American Colony. I need a bath – a wallow – in Room 6, but most of all I need to go down to the bar below the hotel, not particularly to drink, but to be among those who go there to escape the tensions and intensity of Jerusalem. Many of the regulars are journalists in search of information; the bar is famous for its meetings and assignations. Down there in the Cellar Bar an ironic good humour prevails; these people are professionally acquainted with delusion. Also, I have been seeing a young woman I met there one night. Her name is Noor, a Canadian-Arab journalist. I call her, and she says she will meet me. The taxi driver turns in his