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Zusatztext "Forget everything you think you know about the Crusades. In this gorgeously wrought tale, Kamran Pasha depicts the other side of the legendary struggle with startling modern relevance. His unexpected vision of charismatic Saladin, tortured Richard the Lionheart, and the proud woman who comes between them is passionate, gilded with detail, and steeped in the blood and thunder of two antagonistic faiths, vying for possession of a beleaguered land. A triumph from start to finish!" —C.W. Gortner, author of The Last Queen and The Confessions of Catherine de Medici Informationen zum Autor Kamran Pasha is a business school graduate, former reporter, litigator, web entrepreneur, and television writer. He moved to the U.S. when she was three but has remained involved with the Middle East throughout his life. Klappentext Includes WSP readers club guide and a conversation with Kamran Pasha. Leseprobe 1 The Horns of Hattin—AD 1187 It is said that God favors irony. Perhaps that is why His city, named for peace, has known only war and death.” The rabbi’s father had said that to him once, when he was a restless youth and a virgin. He had changed much in the untold years that had passed since then. His desire for adventure had been supplanted by a desperate longing for serenity. His wedding night was a distant but still tender memory. The old man had learned that much of what he had believed in the morning of his life was incomplete at best. False, at worst. Yet these words had proven true, time and again. The God of irony was an accurate description of the ineffable, unpredictable Being from whom the cosmos derived its essence. Perhaps it was not fair to call God an outright trickster, but He undoubtedly had a sense of humor. Like his people, the old man was a wanderer. He had sought the Divine Countenance in the shadowed gardens of Cordova. His weary feet had traced the Queen of Sheba’s paths through the African desert. His gray eyes had filled with tears before the Pyramids, which were ancient even when Moses played in their shadow. Yet he knew from his journeys that all paths returned here, to the navel of the world. To the Holy Land. To Jerusalem. Jerusalem had been the prize of many conquerors, few who had been friends to the Jews. His people were banished and scattered to the winds, yet they never forgot the city of David. It beckoned them in their souls, their dreams. Then the sons of Ishmael arose from the desert to claim their share in the legacy of Abraham. And, for a time, there was peace and the sons of Isaac began to return home. So it was, until the Franks arrived on the horizon. Poor, illiterate, filled with hate. They sought to regain Jerusalem in the name of their Christ. The rabbi had read the sayings of this Jesus of Nazareth and had not found in them anything to explain the horror of what they did. The Franks slaughtered the old and the weak. The women. The little ones. They killed the Muslims as infidels, and then they killed the other Christians as heretics. They gathered all the Jews who remained and locked them in the main synagogue. Then they set it on fire. In the end, the lamentations ceased, for there were none left to lament. Frankish historians would later boast that blood ran down the streets of Jerusalem up to the ankles of their armored soldiers. But the slaughter of tens of thousands in the Holy City was the least of their crimes. In the once pristine town of Ma’arra, emerald with vineyards and fields and olives, an evil beyond evil rose from the very bowels of Hell. The rabbi had vomited after he read the full account of Albert of Aix, the Frankish chronicler who witnessed and glorified the greatest victory of Satan over the hearts of men. For in Ma’arra, the Crusaders not only massacred the population. They cannibalized their victims. Men and women ...
