The Dagger and the Cross (25 page)

“I might not have allowed them to become quite so
boisterous,” Raymond observed, leaning on the parapet and taking a deep breath
of air scented with smoke and dung and humanity and a tang of the sea.

“It can’t harm them to run wild for one night before they
come under discipline,” said Aidan.

The Count of Tripoli cocked a brow at him. Raymond was a
rarity in a lord: an intelligent man. Unlike Humphrey of Toron, whose
intelligence made him no good in the field, Raymond was a thoroughly competent
knight and general, seasoned in a lifetime of ruling and fighting in Outremer.
He was not what Aidan would call a friend; that warmth was not in him, except
for his lady and for King Baldwin who was dead. But they understood one
another. “Your troops, no doubt,” Raymond said, “are under discipline now, and
have been since you rode up from Jerusalem.”

“No more than yours.”

Raymond smiled. “Some of us have odd views as to what
constitutes proper behavior in an army.” He rubbed an old scar along his jaw,
which he disdained to hide behind a beard. “Your brother amazes me more every
time I see him. Was he born knowing how to hoodwink kingdoms?”

“Every word he spoke was the truth.”

Raymond laughed aloud. “The truth, and nothing but the
truth. He’ll fight because he wants to fight, but the war is Guy’s. For better
or for worse. And if it goes badly, he won’t take it on himself to save it.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Aidan said. “He’ll do what he can,
but he won’t claim the crown to do it.”

“Magnanimous of him,” Raymond said dryly. “He must be the
only man in the world who doesn’t want the crown of Jerusalem; and he’s in the
best position to take it.”

“I don’t think the rest of the world would be delighted to
see the Holy Sepulcher defended by the witch-king of Rhiyana.”

“Ah, but how he would defend it! I’m rather sorry he won’t.
I’d happily relinquish my own claim in favor of his.”

“No fear of that. I’ll tell you a secret, messire. My
brother is king of Rhiyana and no other, and that he will always remain,
because that earth and that alone is his.”

“Ah, so he’s bound to it, like the pagan kings?”

“Close enough,” Aidan said. “He can leave it, obviously. But
leave it to rule any other kingdom, no. The land would never allow it.”

“Remarkable,” said Raymond. “He won’t tarry here, then,
whether we win or we lose.”

“Not past this season. When the ships go west at summer’s
end, he goes with them.”

“And you?”

It was like Raymond to ask a question so difficult, and to
expect an answer to it. Aidan wandered a little, down along the parapet, back. “I
don’t know. I’d thought I would go, before this war broke on us. When my lady
was my wife, and my affairs were settled. Now...I can only wait, and fight as I’m
called to, and see what comes.”

“It’s all any of us can do,” Raymond said. “I dare to have
hopes, myself. We have a fool for a king, but a fool who can listen to reason.
And we are as good an army as I’ve ever seen. We’ll singe the sultan’s beard
for him.”

“So we shall,” Aidan said, taking his arm to go back down
among the feasters.

o0o

Raihan was there when Elen came back, precisely as she had
commanded. He seemed to have come to a decision while she sent her maid to
scour the markets for a trinket which, if she was lucky, Gwenneth would never
find. When she shut and barred the door, he said, “I should take a proper
revenge. I should call for a
qadi
and have this registered as a
marriage.”

“Why don’t you?”

He gaped at her. Suddenly he laughed. “Do you want me to?”

“If it will content you,” she said. She was not chaffing
him. It was nothing that the Church would acknowledge, being an infidel rite,
but in her present mood she would be pleased to call herself a Muslim’s wife.
It would give Messire Amalric pause. It might even drive him off.

Raihan shook his head. “I don’t need a judge to tell me what
you are to me.”

“And what is that?”

“The world,” he said.

Elen could not move. It was not enough, this meeting of mind
and wit, but it was most of why she loved him. He faced her as an equal, and
expected her to do the same. Maybe it came of growing to manhood where Morgiana
was. Morgiana was a powerful argument for the capacities of women.

He moved in the stillness, not to touch her, not yet, but to
take off his coat. He laid it carefully on the clothes-stool, and slipped off
his boots with their silver spurs. He might have been alone, for all the
self-consciousness he showed. When he was in his drawers, he sat cross-legged
and began to unwind his turban.

Her heart was beating hard; her breath came short. He was no
surprise to her as he was, since the day Lisabet’s goat butted him into the
fishpond. In this very house, in the kitchen garden. She could not have
imagined then that he would be here, and about to be her lover.

He was as beautiful as she remembered. Not a big man, but
not a small one either, built like a rider and a swordsman. The skin that
seldom saw the sun was more olive than bronze, but still shades darker than her
own. There were scars on his shoulder and down his side: marks of tooth and
claw.

He marked her stare, read it easily. “Lion,” he said, “when
I was too young to have any sense.”

“I wonder you survived it.”

“I might not have, if it hadn’t been for my lord and his
lady. My lady killed the lion. My lord put me back together again, and between
them they beat life into me. I had to live, they told me, to get the tanning I
deserved.”

“Did you?”

He grinned at her. “Twenty strokes with the strap when all
my wounds were healed; and a wild foal to train, since it was so obvious that I
needed to be kept out of mischief.”

“It didn’t do much good, did it?”

His turban was off, a long white ribbon, twisted in his
hands. He set to work unplaiting his braids, but watching her, not quite
smiling.

“Is that what half of you is?” she asked him. “A Turk?”

“No,” he said. “I’m vain, that’s all. And stubborn. I don’t
want to shave my head like an Arab.”

And no wonder. A woman would have given her hope of salvation
to have hair like that, thick and black and curling, growing of its own accord
halfway down his back, and then obliging him by stopping. The three Turkish
braids straightened it a little, but it found its measure soon enough.

She had nothing so marvelous. It was black enough, and it
was nigh as long as she was, but it was almost straight except for the plait
she kept it in. She moved slowly, sliding out of girdle and cotte, ridding
herself of her veil and the elegant new fashion of the wimple. It was strange
to breathe unconstrained under a man’s eyes.

She almost ordered him out then. He would no doubt have
gone, and even been glad that she had come to her senses. But she had not
labored this long, to turn craven at the end. Barefoot in her shift, with her
hair loose about her, she knelt in front of him and gently, almost fearfully,
laid her hand on his cheek.

She laughed suddenly, startling him.

He had to know. “I thought you might be rabbit-chinned,” she
said.

He was offended, but he was keeping it in hand. She traced
the firm line of his chin under the surprising silkiness of his beard. “It is
an advantage,” she pointed out, “which a woman can’t share. Though it’s a
shame, too, when a man is beautiful under it.”

“That’s boy’s beauty,” he said, a little stiff still. “Or
woman’s. I am neither.”

“That is obvious,” she said. She measured the width of his
shoulders, laid her palms flat on his breast. The black curling hair was as
soft as it was thick. It grew like a tree: rising narrow out of his navel and
spreading wide over his chest. It was not time, yet, to think about its root.
His shoulders were smooth and silken-skinned, and his back.

He seemed as intrigued by her body as she was by his. He was
not a virgin, she could tell from the way he touched her: light, deft, sure of
his craft here as with his beloved horses. But as with a new mount, he was
careful how he proceeded, asking nothing that she would not willingly give. His
dark hands on her white flesh made her shiver. Not but that Riquier had burned nigh
as black in the summer, but Raihan was gloriously foreign, with the scent of
musk and rosewater that lay on him, and the lilt on his tongue when he spoke to
her, and the cast of his face beneath its beautiful beard.

Her shift was lost somewhere, but he still had his drawers.
Muslims were modest that way. Someone had told her that. Sybilla? They must be
covered always from the navel to the knee. “But how do they—?” she had asked.
Sybilla had laughed and said something silly about drawers big enough for two.

She was slender enough and he was enchantingly lean in the
flanks, but she did not think that there was room enough for them both. The
cord was just where she could reach it without alarming him. She slipped it
free. For a moment she feared that she had failed. Then he laughed and stepped
out of them.

A root, indeed. “So that is what a Muslim looks like,” she
said.

His cheeks were crimson, but he grinned at her, cocky as a
boy. “Some of us,” he said.

“What, you aren’t all lions, bulls, stallions—”

He smothered the rest with kisses, laughing round them. He
had not asked for this, except maybe in his prayers, but he did nothing by
halves, did Raihan. He carried her to the bed and laid her in it. His face was
the face of a warrior and a lover, both fierce and tender.

Her heart swelled. He was beautiful, and it was all she
could do not to weep. He was going away to war, and he might not come back; and
if he did, what place could there be in a princess’ world, for a Saracen who
had been a slave?

They had until the evening. After that, God would provide.

Tiberias had fallen.

The army of Jerusalem camped about the springs of Cresson
beside the cool and living waters, in green seared by the furnace heat of
summer; where not long ago seven thousand Saracens had paused to water their
horses, and the Grand Master of the Templars with his hundred-fifty knights,
riding to Tiberias, had given way to temptation. Now the Franks had come back
to take their revenge, thirty thousand of them, knights and fighting men, with
their horses and their baggage. It was, for that country, a rich pasture, and a
strong position from which to fight: a hill rising out of a barren and tumbled
upland, with mountains to the east of it, and beyond the mountains the Sea of
Galilee and the city of Tiberias. They were prepared to settle there, to bar
the way to their kingdom, to wear the enemy down with their motionless,
inescapable presence.

But Tiberias had fallen, and the great lords of the kingdom
gathered in the king’s tent, wrangling over the news. Scouts had brought it
before sundown; a messenger had come just now, as the darkness fell, bearing
word from the Countess Eschiva.
The citadel is ours still, my lord king, but
the city and the lands about it are overrun. I beg you, my lord, come to our
aid, or all of us are lost.

The one to whom that message was greatest grief, Count
Raymond whose wife the countess was, had said nothing at all. He left it to his
fellows to cry their outrage and to consider what they had to face.

“Saladin has divided his army,” mused Reynaud de Châtillon. “He
attacked Tiberias with a force of picked men, laughed at the garrison when it
tried to buy him off, sacked the city and camped amid the ruins. But the
greater part of his force sits idle two leagues south of the city, barring the
road and the main approaches. No doubt he thinks us nicely cut off.”

“No doubt he wants us to think so,” said Humphrey of Toron.
In this rough camp, after a month and more in the field, with every man living
in armor and with little water to spare for cleanliness, he still managed to
look as if he were about to ride in a tournament. “He’s trying to lure us out,
to fight on ground of his choosing. He’ll know what we’ve been doing: trying to
wear him down, avoiding a pitched battle, trusting to his levies and his sadly
straitened purse to lessen his army for us.”

“And where has it got us?” Gerard de Ridefort demanded. The
Master of the Templars was on his feet, as restless as Aidan could be, and much
less circumspect. “We knew that he would strike for Tiberias. Did we do
anything about it? We did not. We sat by the water, dabbling our toes and
singing to the birds.”

Raymond regarded him in sour dislike. “Singing, maybe, but
singing war-songs. Yes, he wants to lure us out. He knows that our position
here is strong enough, with water for the taking, and ample pasture for our
horses. We bar his way into the kingdom. He’ll do nothing while we hold fast
here; and
if
he does nothing, he’ll lose his army. Half-trained levies,
most of those, raiders from the desert and farmers from the fields, apt enough
for a bit of fighting, but now they’ve had it, they’ll reckon it enough.”

“You know him well,” Reynaud drawled. “But no, I’m
forgetting. You were his friend until he broke your truce for you.”

“This is more than a broken truce,” Raymond said with
careful calm. “Tiberias, after all, is my city. My wife holds it in peril of
her life. My children will be meat for Saracen dogs, if the citadel falls.”

“So, then,” Amalric said. “You counsel that we bring the
battle to it.”

“No!” Raymond’s vehemence brought them all upright.
“No,
my
lords. It is my city, yes, my wife and my children. But this is my army and my
kingdom. The plain of Sepphoris lies between us and the city. There is no water
on it before the village of Hattin; none at all, but for one small spring,
which is never enough for an army. If the enemy harries us, if he holds the
wells of Hattin, if we cannot reach Tiberias before we run dry, then we shall be
lost. We cannot fight in summer’s heat, in our armor, with our horses, without
water. That, we have here. It would be mad for us to leave it.”