The Dagger and the Cross (42 page)

“Not for war? Not,” she said, “for me?”

“For war,” he said, “no. For you...” He looked down at her.
She seemed like a child, looking up, with her great eyes and her pointed chin. “For
you, I’ll stop in Rome, and browbeat the lord pope himself into making us
honest sinners.”

“You don’t need to do that,” she said.

He stilled. “So. You’ll stay in Islam. Will you miss me a
little when I’m gone?”

She struck him, not hard, but hard enough to sting. “Were
you born a fool, or was it the humans who made you one? What makes you think I’d
leave you again?”

“But—” he said.

“I left you once,” she said, “because I let my temper get
the better of me, and because you so obviously needed the lesson. Now that you’ve
learned as much from it as you ever can—”

“If I’m so contemptible,” he said bitterly, “why do you
waste yourself on me?”

“You are not—”

“Listen to yourself. Child, you think me. Fool. Vaunting
boy. Always in some degree of disgrace. Never capable of more than the most
rudimentary good sense.”

“Aren’t you all of that? Aren’t I?” She raised her hand, the
one that did not hold the rose, and stroked his cheek. He stiffened against
her. “My dear love, I never know how to talk to you. I say too much or I say
too little, and what I say is never what I meant to say. How it is that you can
love me in spite of it—surely Allah has a hand in it.”

“God,” he said.

“Allah.” She frowned, but she wiped the frown away. “My
lord, you are all that I am, and much that I could wish to be.”

“Male?”

“Allah, no.” She tugged lightly at his beard. “Can you
imagine what I would look like?”

“Like Bahrain the eunuch who serves Saladin.”

“Served,” she said. “I am my own woman again.”

“And not mine?”

“Can’t I be both?”

His head tossed. It had stopped aching shortly after Amalric
left the sultan’s garden; there was no pain in it now, but he was dizzy enough
that it hardly mattered. She did that to him. Dangled him, spun him, befuddled
him. He never knew what she would say or do. “A woman is not,” he said, “her
own possession. She has to belong to a man.”

“Why?”

“Who will look after her? Who will protect her? Who will
defend her honor?”

“I like to imagine,” she said, “that I have some small
facility in those arts.”

He shut his mouth.

“You can look after me,” she said, “and I can look after
you. That’s what being wedded is. Isn’t it?”

“Then you won’t be your own woman any longer. You’ll be
mine.”

“And you will belong to me. And we will both remain
ourselves. I won’t be your shadow, any more than I’ll ask you to be mine.”

That was well, he thought, as anger gave way to wry
amusement. He had never been able to teach her a woman’s proper place. Even
when she professed to have learned, she only played at it. In a day or a month
she wearied of it, and became herself again.

And why should he bemoan his failure, when the whole
doctrine of Islam could not compel her?

“You don’t need to stop in Rome,” she said with her
infallible memory for the meat of any discussion. “We can find the pope’s
letter here, and the one who forged it, and the ones who abetted him. Then we’ll
have revenge as well as one another.”

“Revenge isn’t Christian.”

“No more am I.” She curved her arm about his neck. “I’m
going to trust you. I’m going to let you go.”

At first he barely understood her. Go? Trust? “What in God’s
name—”

“You’re free. You can go. If you will promise to hunt with
me, and not with the armies of Outremer.”

“I can’t hunt with what pitiful little is left of the army.
I’m sworn.”

“So. You’re free to hunt with me.”

He stood still with her arm about his neck and her hand
cradling the rose between them, and her self all open to him. It was not given
as his due. It was given because she chose; because she loved him.

Strange, that air of equality. Heady. More than a little
alarming. It was heretical on both sides of this war.

“You’re mad, I think,” he said. She regarded him unblinking.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I’ll hunt with you.”

It was strange, Elen thought. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was
overrun; the Saracens harried it in every hill and valley, every fold and inlet
in the coast; the flower of its chivalry was dead or taken and its king was
held in captivity. Yet Tyre kept its pride. Here the knights and barons came
who had not fallen or been taken at Hattin; here the merchants of Acre
gathered, cheek by jowl with the traders of Tyre; here was strength of purpose,
embodied in the one who had taken over the city’s defenses and held them
against Saladin. Marquis Conrad would not allow the word
defeat
to be
spoken in his presence. “We have suffered a reversal,” he said where any could
hear. “And not a slight one, either. But we can regain what we have lost. All
Europe will rise and come to our aid. Only wait, and hold, and see.”

The city waited, and held, and saw: that Saladin was not
inclined to besiege it once he saw how strongly it was held. He departed in
search of softer prey; the city held a festival. At the height of it they made
a mummery, a mockery of the infidel who saw bright steel and strong walls, and
fled with his tail between his legs.

Elen had expected at best to endure this last desperate
refuge before she fled westward. She was startled to fall in love with the
city. As old as Nineveh, they said, as old as Tyre. It was in Scripture; it was
in the books which she had read, her Latin and her bit of Greek, and even the
old, sweet, lying Latin story of Apollonius prince of Tyre. Its reality was
this rock upon the sea, with its walls rising sheer out of the water and its
great twin-towered harbor warded by a chain and its single gate upon the land.
That was Alexander’s genius and his madness, that causeway built by men’s hands
and mortared with their blood, to make an isthmus of the island because it
would not yield to his kingship. The Roman road stretched die-straight down it,
from the frown of wall and gate to the sun-scorched green of the fields and
villages, and along it ran the lofty arches of the Romans’ aqueduct, carrying
water from the springs that never failed.

It was beautiful, was Tyre. It was full of fountains. There
were memories of Rome in its houses, a fluted column or a jeweled pavement;
more than a memory of Byzantium in the street of the glassmakers, under the
crumbling portico with its sea-veined marble, as they plied their delicate trade.
And in the sea, if the wind was calm and one’s eyes were keen, one could see
the sunken city, the Tyre that was as old as Nineveh: castles and markets,
streets and palaces, drowned like Ys or Lyonesse, but older far, and beautiful,
with its citizenry of fishes.

Tyre was as old as time, but there was no weariness in it.
Its every house and hovel was full to bursting. Its churches rang with the
voices of the faithful. Its markets thrummed with commerce; its harbor
sheltered a fleet which would, its lord hoped, secure the sea for the Franks.

When the Mortmains and their guests entered the city, Elen
at first feared that there would be no place for them; or that, at best, they
would be sundered, quartered among strangers. But she had reckoned without
Joanna. The House of Ibrahim was a kingdom of trade. Elen had been told as much
without ceasing, but she had never quite understood it. Now she began to see.
For a daughter of that great merchant House, there was indeed lodging to be
had: a veritable palace, a caravanserai of a full five stories overlooking the
harbor, with gardens and fountains and its own gate on the quay. It was not
theirs alone, it could not be, but they had the better part of a wing to
themselves, and the merchants who shared it were profoundly respectful of the
lady and her following.

“It would be so wherever I went,” Joanna said. “Wherever
traders are, our House is known. We have a house in Rhiyana, surely you know
it.”

Elen did, vaguely.

Joanna laughed at her. “My lord prince is just like you. He
admits, after long persuasion, that without us the world would be a far poorer
place—and he a far, far poorer man. But still, to associate himself with trade...it
goes against everything he was bred for.”

“He is a prince,” said Elen, “after all.”

“That’s what his mamluks say. Do you know how they kept the
regent of Aleppo from executing him as a spy, when he was there as my
guardsman? They reminded the regent that my lord Aidan is a Frank and a prince;
could he possibly be so sensible as to take anyone’s pay, let alone for spying
on his enemies?”

“They played him for a fool?” Elen was indignant.

“They saved his life,” Joanna said. “And it was true enough.
Can you imagine him doing anything because he was paid to?”

“No,” said Elen, after a pause. “But still, to mock him for
being honorable—”

“He mocks them for being a race of merchants. Fair is fair.”

Elen decided not to be angry. Her uncle hardly needed her to
defend him; he was quite enough in himself. She turned her bit of handwork in
her fingers. No pretty trifles, here; all the women had ample to do keeping the
tribe of children in clothes. She was piecing together a chemise for one of the
girls, out of an outworn one of Joanna’s.

Joanna nursed the youngest of her daughters with every
appearance of content. She was almost a stranger without the weight of
pregnancy to bear her down: a big woman, yes, broad-hipped and deep-breasted,
but light on her feet, and rather more handsome than she gave herself credit
for. Black became her vilely, and she would not wear it until she must, when
she had proof that her husband was dead; the deep blue of her gown was somber
enough, and it looked well on her.

The third of their company sat in peaceful silence,
stitching a cotte for William. Lady Margaret had ridden into Tyre a handful of
days ago with an escort well worthy of her: not simply her maid and a handful
of grizzled men-at-arms but the pope’s legate himself with all his entourage.
In the face of her daughter’s blank amazement she had said, “Father abbot’s servants
wish him to be where the strongest defenses are. I wish to see my grandchild.”

“But,” Joanna said. “All that way. With armies between. And
you hate to ride.”

“For my kin I can endure a hardship or two,” said Margaret. “The
armies were no danger. A wing of the sultan’s cavalry kept us company from
Nablus to Toron; they were most respectful. One of them was a cousin to our
cousin Rashida, who married a man in Baalbek.”

Joanna accepted that with fair equanimity, once she was past
the shock of having her mother there. Elen, after months in Outremer, even
after Raihan, still could not comprehend how a woman could live so easily on
both sides of the wall. It was only Margaret, she was certain. The other little
dark women she had seen were
pullani,
mocked and despised, their
children scorned as mongrels. And those were not even Muslims; they were
Armenians or Greeks, or Syrian Christians. Margaret’s mother had been a true
infidel, a Muslim from Aleppo, wedded to a Frank for the profit of the House.
The Frank had been an oddity himself, a cloistered monk turned Crusading
knight; what he did to earn a daughter of the House of Ibrahim, Elen had never
quite understood.

The silence tempted her. She yielded; she asked.

“He was noble born, my father,” Margaret answered her, “but
there were sea reivers in his blood, and trader-pirates out of the Northland,
and maybe a drop or two of blood from further back, all the way to Tyre itself.
He was given to the cloister as a child, to pray for his father’s soul, and for
a long while it seemed that he was content. But his blood was strong, and in
the end it ruled him. His abbot brought him to Rome for an audience with the
lord pope; when the abbot left, my father stayed, and put off his habit, and
took the cross. He came to Outremer with little but the clothes on his back,
but soon his greatest gift revealed itself. He could fight well enough though
he came to it so late, and he earned himself a knighthood by it, but more
wonderful was what he did with the first booty he took in a battle. He sold it
piece by piece; with what he earned thereby, he bought a share in a caravan
which another knight had come by in a wager. The caravan was one of the House
of Ibrahim. It came in soon after the battle, and he found himself a wealthy man.
His gift being what it was, he did not rest content with that, or even with the
castle which he won in another of the wars. He became an honored client of the
House. He was a guest there more than once; he spoke with the then-mistress,
and like took well to like.

“One of the daughters of the House was an adventurous soul,
firm in her faith but not implacable in it. She had been married, but her
husband died in a storm in the desert; the lone son of the union was old enough
to depart from among the women. She had been offered another husband, and given
to choose from among a number of men, but none came close to taking her fancy.
The Frank, however, intrigued her. She bethought herself that the House might
profit well from a kin-bond to the High Court of Jerusalem. The old coast
roads, which the Franks closed at whim to the caravans of Islam or held open at
the cost of ruinous tolls, were open without hindrance to the caravans of
Christendom. If the House of Ibrahim shared kin with the house of a Frank, would
it not be the stronger thereby?

“It was a firm choice, once she had made it, but it was
never easy for her. She accepted her husband’s faith, inasmuch as she could.
Her kin were and are good Muslims, but they were merchants first. They
understood how she could do as she did, and why. They would not, for that,
accept her again into her family’s house, although her husband was as welcome
as before, and I who was born and christened a Frank had much of my fostering
in Aleppo.”