Knights of the Black and White (41 page)

to face and stall to stall, missing nothing except the face of the young woman who was now leaning forward eagerly, peering at him through a gap between two of Suleiman’s hanging rugs. Suleiman watched her snap her fingers imperiously, then send her servant running to accost the giant and bring him to her. The tall Frank frowned, then grasped the scabbard of the long sword that hung from his shoulder and followed his summoner, clearly unaware of whom he was going to meet. When he straightened up from stooping to enter Suleiman’s premises and saw the princess waiting for him, however, his surprise and confusion was comical to behold, and Suleiman, who had been on the point of stepping down from his platform, stayed where he was, watching and listening instead.

“Brother Stephen,” the princess greeted him, unveiling her face and smiling at him. “This is a pleasant and welcome surprise. You are the last person I would expect to find wandering through the market. I would have said, had anyone asked me, that you would be out in the desert with your fellow knights, patrolling the roads and terrifying bandits.”

The big man was plainly flustered, red faced and ill at ease, and the rug merchant moved marginally closer, straining to hear what he might say.

“My lady Princess,” the fellow muttered, close to stammering with nervousness, “forgive me, I did not …

I had no idea …”

“Of what, that I was here?” The princess laughed.

“How could you? I did not know myself, until an hour The Temptress

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ago, that I would come this way. This is what is known as an accident … a meeting brought about through sheer good fortune.” She hesitated. “I was just about to have some cake and sherbet. Will you share it with me? It would give me great pleasure.”

With an imperious clap of her hands she summoned her servant again and ordered refreshments to be brought for them, then evidently remembered where she was and looked about her for Suleiman, who presented himself immediately, bowing low and smiling in welcome at the giant Frank. When the princess began to ask his permission to eat on his premises, he waved her question away before she could complete it, offering refreshments of his own. Alice would hear none of that, however. Suffice, she said, that he would permit her this privilege; she had brought food and drink with her, intending to eat outdoors later. She was most grateful. Suleiman bowed again and left her with her “unexpected” guest.

For the short time between Suleiman’s departure and the return of Alice’s servants bearing refreshments, St.

Clair stood awkwardly, looking at the carpets that lay piled all around him and hung from suspended poles to give the illusion of walls. His eyes shifted everywhere and anywhere, looking at anything except Alice.

“The rugs are beautiful, are they not?” she asked.

He frowned, almost as though he did not know how to respond, and it took Alice some time to realize that, in truth, he did not know how to respond.

“Can it be—? Have you never seen rugs before, Brother Stephen?”

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He shook his head, a deep crease between his brows.

“No, Lady. I have never seen the like of these before. But they are beautiful. What are they? What is their purpose?”

“Purpose?” She laughed, delighted by his apparent lack of sophistication. “They have no purpose, Brother Stephen, they simply
are
. They are floor coverings, to be walked upon. Surely you have rugs in Christendom?

Everyone
has rugs.”

He swung suddenly to face her, and spoke through clenched teeth, his taut jaw muscles making him look angry, although she knew he was not. “Where I came from, our floors are dirt, Lady, and we spread dried rushes over them to soak up spillage and mud. It rains in England, Princess, and the days are cold and damp and miserable most of the time. Little summer and less sunshine. Items such as these”—he waved a hand at the rugs surrounding them—“if we had anything resembling them, we would hang on walls, to keep out drafts. We do it with tapestries, but our tapestries are stiff and loveless things. We have nothing as rich and beautiful as these, with all these colors and soft, rich textures. It would be sinful to throw such beauty on a packed dirt floor, to be trodden into mud by mailed feet and be shit upon by dogs.”

He paused, then cleared his throat before continuing.

“Of course, I have seen that such things are very different in this country. Everything is warmer. Cleaner. Spacious and airy. That’s the heat. When it’s not wet and cold all the time, you can do things differently. But in our quarters, in the stables, our floors are stone and we still have rushes on them, although we call it straw—” He The Temptress

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broke off, aware that he was looking directly at her and she was returning his gaze with a wide smile on her lips.

She waited, and then, when she saw he would say no more, she laughed aloud.

“You can speak! That is the most I have heard you say since I first met you, Brother Stephen. Were you aware of that?”

He looked troubled. “I am now. And I
am
Brother Stephen. I should not be here.”

“Oh, please, please stay and share some food with me.

See, here it comes now.”

The young knight stood uncertainly, but in response to Alice’s waving hand, he finally sank slowly into one of the three chairs Suleiman provided for his clients, and thereafter, for the space of almost an hour, the princess applied herself conscientiously to putting him at his ease and undermining his defenses against her femininity. She fed him honey cakes that her servants had brought especially for her, made with crushed almonds and heavily impregnated with the opiate known as hashish, of which she had an ample and regular supply, delivered by sources about which her father would have been gravely concerned had he known of them.

What Alice had no way of knowing about that day, however, was the extreme fragility of St. Clair’s self-confidence, brought about by the simple fact that he had become obsessed with everything about her and knew very well that his attraction to her was unconscionable.

He had always been shy and awkward around her, hesitant and tongue-tied and unsure of himself since their 392

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first meeting, and Alice had quickly come to accept that as normal in him, adding to his charm—the bashful boy in the giant body of a hero. But because she had never seen any other aspect of his character, she was unable to imagine how he might behave when she was not there to influence him and his conduct, and she was, of course, incapable of seeing beyond the exterior he presented to her. There was nothing in his demeanor to indicate to her that he spent much of his life nowadays dreaming of her, awake and asleep, and there was even less evidence that he was racked by guilt because of that, and so Alice moved ahead confidently, unaware of how close her prey was to despair. In her efforts to put him at his ease, she deliberately avoided any attempts to be seductive or alluring, opting instead to treat him as she believed a sister might, and trying to be completely natural in all she did around him. It was a difficult thing for her to do, verging in fact on the impossible.

St. Clair, looking at her as she moved with such apparent lack of artifice, saw far more than she was showing him: in his imagination he saw the way her clothing clung to her beneath the heavy fabric of her shapeless outer garment, shaping the hills and hollows of her form; he saw the way she subsided into her chair, lounging back into it, and in his mind her breasts were thrust into prominence and her rounded thighs, so clearly parted beneath the flimsy stuff of her clothing, became the most all-consuming sight in the universe, and he writhed mentally, believing that his lust for her was an abomination and a crime against a spotless, innocent young woman.

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Had Alice even suspected any of what was in his mind, she would have been exultant, and would have shown her feelings far more aggressively, but instead she continued as she had begun, behaving as though there was no such thing as sexuality in her nature, avoiding any of the overtly seductive gestures and smiles that were so much a part of her normal behavior. Believing herself modestly shielded by the weight and thickness of her brocade robe, she fed the fires of the young knight’s overheated imagination with a series of uninhibited body movements, of which she was genuinely unaware, that aroused him beyond his power to prevent a sudden crisis. He leapt to his feet, his face pale as death, and fled her presence.

Afterwards, when she had time to think about it calmly, Alice had still been unable to understand what had triggered his astonishing behavior. Her fury had scarcely abated in the time that had since passed. No man, no one, had ever insulted her so grievously, and Alice was determined to have vengeance.

That he was a monk and bound by a vow of chastity meant nothing to her, because she had had many lovers with the same commitment, all of them more highly placed than he, and their vows had never kept them from her bed. Alice believed herself too desirable to be resisted over anything as insubstantial as a simple vow.

And thus she went searching for other, more pragmatic reasons for the monk’s behavior, beginning with the as-sumption that he already had a lover who must, by definition, be highly placed and well known, since there were so few Christian women in Jerusalem. Not even Alice would 394

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have believed that a devout Christian monk, and most particularly a rigidly humorless one, would have a sexual relationship with a Muslim woman. She had had him spied on and followed before, keeping track of his movements between patrols, but that had been only during daylight hours, since at that time she had had no suspicions that he might be conducting an amatory liaison with anyone. Now she set her spies to watching him night and day.

A full month later, having received the third of the regular ten-day reports of her chief spy in this matter, she was forced to accept, with great reluctance, that Brother Stephen was not involved with any woman, Christian or Muslim. Her people had made sure that he went nowhere without their being in close attendance. They had noted every person he spoke to and every purchase that he made in the markets. Two of them had even followed him into the desert when he went out on patrol, and they had seen nothing that aroused their suspicions in any way.

That acknowledgment left Alice then with the notion that he might be homosexual; it might have been sexual revulsion that drove him to run away from her. She had trouble visualizing that, let alone understanding it, but the possibility at least soothed her bruised sensibilities.

Once again, however, after a month of watching and listening, her spies could provide her with nothing to substantiate her suspicions. His brother monks were St.

Clair’s only close companions, and he was by far the youngest of them all. They all disappeared inside the sta-

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bles every night, to sleep, and they were up and about, praying at the oddest hours of the day and night, their entire routine dictated by the Rule of Saint Benedict that they followed. But there was nothing anyone could see, even with the best will in the world, that suggested that any of the monks indulged in sexual activities of any kind.

Alice remained angry and unforgiving, even after two clear months, but she was still infuriatingly incapable of putting the young knight monk out of her mind or her lustful fantasies, imagining on several occasions, when entertaining an ineffectual or unsatisfying lover, that it was Stephen St. Clair straining above her, ravishing her brutally.

FOUR

“C ome!” Bishop Odo de Fontainebleau, for -

merly the Bishop of Edessa and now Secretary Amanuensis to Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem, did not even look up in response to the knocking on his door, but he recognized the footsteps that entered the room following his summons and sat back in his chair, setting aside his quill pen and rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands, then yawning hugely and clasping his hands behind his head. In front of him stood a slight, nondescript little man with too-small eyes and a long, pointed nose, one hand clutching the strap of a leather bag that hung from his shoulder. The fellow’s face was expressionless, his manner unassuming, and his dress drab to the point of being unworthy of notice. Had there been one other person in the room to compete 396

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with him for attention, the little man would have faded into quasi invisibility.

Odo eyed the fellow for long moments before dropping his hands from behind his head and crossing his arms over his chest. “Speak to me, then. What have you discovered?”

The responding headshake was barely noticeable. “Of what you sent me for, nothing. There’s nothing there to find. The princess’s spies are everywhere, never less than six of them at any time, and they change over every four hours, but they’re all wasting their time and probably being well paid to do it. You set me to watching them, to discover what they were finding out. The answer, my lord Bishop, is that they are finding nothing, but far more astonishing than even that, although it is unsurprising, if you take my meaning, they have no idea what they are looking for. They are set to watch the knight monk—the young one, the fighter—and so they do that, but they don’t know why. I spoke with six of them in three days. They all said the same thing: they had seen nothing, found nothing.”

“So this has all been a waste of my time and money, in addition to Alice’s losses? Is that what you are telling me?”

“No, not at all, my lord. I said I found nothing of what you sent me to find.”

“You found something else instead.”

“Perhaps. I think I did, but you might disagree. Anyway, I discovered something interesting.”

“Something interesting, but not what you were sent to discover. I see. And am I going to have to pay you extra to tell me about it? Spit it out, man.”

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His visitor was not at all put out by the bishop’s nastiness. He reached into his bag and produced a grubby-looking kerchief, which he used to wipe his nose, and then he replaced it carefully in the bag, sniffing daintily.