A nauseating anger boiled up in my stomach. Whatever I had come for-freedom, fortune-all that left me as if it had never been there. For the first time, I wanted not just to fight for my own gain, but to kill these curs. Pay them back!
I had to leave. I ran, past Robert and Nico, past the fires to the edge of the camp.
Why had I ever come to this place? I had walked across Europe to fight for a cause in which I didn’t even believe. The love of my life, all that I held true and good, was a million miles away. How could all those faces-all that hope-be gone?
Chapter 10
WE BURIED THE DEAD for six days straight. Then our dispirited army headed farther south.
In Caesarea, we joined forces with Count Robert of Flanders and Bohemond of Antioch, a heralded fighter. They had recently taken Nicaea. Our spirits were bolstered by the tales of Turks fleeing at full run, their towns now under Christian flags. Our once fledgling troop was now an army forty thousand strong.
Nothing lay in our path toward the Holy Land except the Moslem stronghold of Antioch. There, it was said, believers were being nailed to the city’s walls, and the most precious relics in all of Christendom, a shroud stained by the tears of Mary and the very lance that had pierced the Savior’s side on the cross, were being held for ransom.
Yet nothing so far could prepare us for the hell we were about to face.
First it was the heat, the most hostile I had ever felt in my life.
The sun became a raging, red-eyed demon that, never sheltered, we grew to hate and curse. Hardened knights, praised for valor in battle, howled in anguish, literally roasting in their armor, their skin blistered from the touch of the metal. Men simply dropped as they marched, overcome, and were left, uncared for, where they fell.