“Send Hortense after them.” I squawked about like a chicken. “No doubt they are cousins of your goose.”

Civetot seemed deserted, an enclave of stone dwellings on the edge of a dense wood. No one wanted to delay in our rush to catch up with the army of Peter, but we needed water badly, so we decided to enter the town.

On the outskirts, a grim odor pressed at my nostrils. Nicodemus glanced at me. “You smell it, don’t you, Hugh?”

I nodded. I knew the stench, from burying the dead. But this was magnified a thousand times. At first I thought it was just [31] slaughtered livestock, or offal, but as we got closer, I saw that Civetot was smoking like burning cinders.

As we entered the town there were corpses everywhere. A sea of body parts. Heads severed and gawking, limbs cut off and piled like wood, blood drenching the parched earth. It was a slaughter. Men and women hacked up like diseased stock, torsos naked and disemboweled, heads charred and roasted, hung up on spears. Red crosses smeared all over the walls-in blood.

“What has happened here?” a soldier muttered. Some puked and turned away. My stomach felt as empty as a bottomless pit.

From out of the trees, a few stragglers appeared. Their clothing was charred and tattered, their skin dark with blood and filth. They all bore the wide-eyed, hollow look of men who have seen the worst atrocities and somehow lived. It was impossible to tell if they were Christian or Turk.

“Peter’s army has crushed the infidels,” Robert called out. “They’ve gone ahead to Antioch.”

But not a man among us cheered.

“This is Peter’s army,” Nicodemus said grimly. “What remains of it.”

Chapter 9

THE FEW SURVIVORS HUDDLED AROUND fires that night, sucking in precious food, and told of the fate of Peter the Hermit’s army.

There were some early successes, they recounted. “The Turks fled like rabbits,” an old knight said. “They left us their towns. Their temples. ‘We’ll be in Jerusalem by summer,’ everyone cheered. We split up our forces. A detachment, six thousand strong, pushed east to seize the Turkish fortress at Xerigordon. Rumor had it some holy relics were held ransom there. The balance of us stayed behind.