The blood… God have mercy! There was so much!

Sickened, wretched, he turned his back and fled the sight. Heedless of all else save the need to escape, he ran until he could run no longer. When at last he stopped to look around he saw that the shadows stretched long across an empty square, and the pathways were dark. Corpses strewed the paths and byways, and lay heaped on the doorsteps of the houses – whole families, slain in defence of their homes and of one another.

Pressing a hand to his side, he moved across the square, and passed a building surmounted by a six-sided star of bronze. Someone had written 'Isu Regni' in blood over the doorway. The words brought him up short. As he was standing there, he felt a feather-soft touch on his face and hair and looked up. Falling from the sky all around him, black ash, fine as snow was drifting gently into the silent streets.

Thirsty now, and sweating from his exertion, Murdo walked on. The further he walked, the thicker grew the ash. He saw grey smoke filling the street ahead, but continued on and soon came to the flaming wreckage of a huge building. The roof had fallen in and little remained of the walls; a few of the larger timbers yet burned, but mostly the flames had died to embers. The smoke was bitter, and stank of burning fat; it stung Murdo's eyes and made a putrid taste in his dry mouth.

He wondered at the reason for this, and then saw that what he had taken to be mounds of smouldering debris were in fact the charred bodies. Murdo looked with dull eyes upon the great mass of twisted, blackened husks, frozen in the rictus of death, limbs deformed by agony and fire.

The heat of their still-smouldering corpses parched Murdo's skin even as the ash from their clothes and flesh settled over him. The carcasses crackled as the fiery embers continued to devour them. The air was rank with the odour of scorched grease and burned meat; every now and then one of the corpses would burst, spilling its stewed internal organs into the embers to sizzle and stink.

When at last he turned away, his eyes were hot and his lips cracked. He walked on with aimless steps, and the sky overhead-when it could be glimpsed through the drifting tatters of smoke-took on the colours of a ruddy dusk. Murdo wondered how it was the sun yet continued on its accustomed round, moving through its course, undeflected and unchanged.

The strangeness of this occupied him until he arrived in yet another quarter. There were, he noticed without interest, domes on some of the buildings and these bore wooden crosses. By this he knew he had come to one of the Christian districts. Perhaps, he thought, this quarter had escaped the worst ravages of the fighting, and he might find water here. He licked his dry lips, and stumbled on.

After a while, he found himself in another yard-the courtyard of a grand house. Near the house stood a stone basin of the kind used to water animals; Murdo moved towards it, thinking he might get a mouthful of water there, and indeed the basin was full, but the body of a drowned child floated just below the surface. He stood and gazed at the little corpse, staring up at him through the water, its mouth rounded in a soundless word. A swirl of black hair framed the little face, and bubbles nestled beneath the tiny chin and in the corner of each wide eye.

Whether boy or girl, he could not tell, but Murdo marvelled at the calm serenity in that small face. How could it be that the child should express a peace so greatly at odds with the violence of its death? He stood long, gazing at the child, and gradually became aware of screams and coarse laughter coming from around the side of the house. Probably, the commotion had been going on for a time, but, absorbed in his unthinking contemplation of the child, he had not attended it.

He walked to the corner of the house and looked: five soldiers were standing before a wall-two held an infant between them, and two others grasped a frantic woman by the arms; the fifth soldier stood behind the woman with a sword in his hand. The woman's clothing was ripped and rent, and she was screaming for her babe, which was squalling in the soldiers' grip. A man sat with his back against the wall, head down, unmoving, the front of his robe a solid mass of blood.

The soldiers holding the baby offered the infant to its mother. They said something to her and she struggled forward, but was held fast and could not move. Again they offered the infant, and again she struggled forth, only to have the babe snatched away. This time, however, the soldiers turned and, with a mighty heave, dashed the infant head first against the wall.

The babe slid silent to the ground.

In the same instant, the two brutes holding the mother released their grip. The woman lurched forward to retrieve her child. Even as she started forth, the soldier behind her swung his sword. The blow caught her on the back of the neck. Her scream stopped abruptly as her head came away from her shoulders. She crumpled in midstep, pitching awkwardly forward, her head spinning to the ground in a crimson arc, and rolling to a stop between the legs of her dead husband.

Murdo turned and ran from the yard, the sound of the soldiers' laughter grating in his ears. When at last he stopped running, he walked. But he moved like a man in a dream, heedless of his steps, seeing all, yet attending nothing, feeling nothing, stumbling forward, falling, picking himself up and staggering on, his heart a dull aching bruise inside him.

Sick to his soul at all he had seen, he thought: This day I have walked in hell

Murdo carried the thought for a long time, listening to the words echo and reverberate inside his head. Some time later, long after nightfall, he finally reached the Jaffa Gate and made his way out of Jerusalem. As he stumbled out through the great doors, he paused to shed his borrowed mantle. He pulled the garment over his head and held it up to see the white cross glimmering in the pale, smoke-fretted moonlight.

Overcome by revulsion, he wadded the garment between his hands and hurled it away from him with all his might. He then stripped off his breecs and boots as well, and threw them away, too, before walking free from the Holy City.

He did not sleep that night, but roamed the darksome valley outside the walls, moving from camp to camp, restless in his search. However, Murdo no longer remembered why he searched, no longer knew what he hoped to find.

The fever raged for two days and nights, releasing its grip as a murky, windswept dawn seeped into the troubled eastern sky. Niamh, who had spent the last days and nights at her friend's bedside, felt the fierce heat slowly leave the hands beneath her own. She roused herself from her numb half-sleep and removed the cloth from Ragnhild's forehead, dipped it in the basin, wrung it out, and replaced it.

At the touch of the cool cloth, Ragnhild's eyelids opened. Her cracked lips parted and she made to speak.

'Wait,' said Niamh softly; she brought a bowl to the stricken woman's lips. 'Drink a little. It will help you.'

Ragnhild swallowed some of the water, and tried to speak again. 'Ragna…' she said, her voice a dry rasp deep in her throat.

'She is near. I will bring her.'

Niamh left the bed, and hurried to the room beyond, where Ragna was asleep in a chair beside the hearth. The young woman came awake at Niamh's touch. 'The fever is gone, and she is asking for you.'

Ragna struggled up from the chair, pressing her hand to the small of her back as she steadied herself on her feet. Niamh took her arm and led her to her mother's room.

'You go in,' Niamh directed. 'I will remain here if you need me.'

Ragna nodded and stepped through the doorway. The fire was low on the hearth in the corner; the room was cool, but close, the air dead. She went to the bedside and, settling her ungainly bulk on the stool, took her mother's hand in her own. 'I am here, Mother,' she said quietly.