None of these issues could be addressed until Johanna arrived, and not just in rumor but in flesh and blood reality. In the meantime, they had found lodgings in Gaza and settled down to wait with greater or lesser degrees of patience. Shasha disappeared into the bazaars for three days, and reappeared briefly to inform them that she had found an apothecary willing to mentor her into the mysteries of Middle Sea herbal lore. Félicien found a job entertaining at the largest local taverns.
After two weeks of this, Jaufre, edgy and snappish, and Alaric, thoroughly bored, greeted the arrival of two galleons from Venice full up to the gunnels with seasick pilgrims with positive relief. One of the galleons was captained by a cheerful rogue named Giovanni Gradenigo who wore a golden hoop in one ear and a black velvet jacket lavishly embroidered with gold thread. They met him by chance on the pier as he was overseeing the unloading and the housing and feeding of his miserable human cargo. He accepted their invitation for a drink and a meal at the quayside tavern and the three of them settled in around a corner table for the evening.
“I tell you, my new-found friends, for twenty years have I sailed the vast reaches of the Middle Sea, and yet never until now have I experienced a storm the force and fury of this one,” he said, draining his tankard and refilling it immediately. “I thought we would break apart on the seas, which I swear by the Blessed Virgin’s intact hymen were higher than the campanile of St. Mark’s. My passengers…well. They are no sailors. Not,” he added acidly, “that they took any comfort from my idiot crew, who behaved throughout as though we were headed straight for the bottom of the Middle Sea. Then a barrel of drinking water broke loose and rolled over the cook, who was trying to kill us anyway with the moldy biscuit he tried to pass off as ship’s bread. I know he got a bribe from the vendor and I intend to prove it the minute we return. By the blood of Christ, this was a voyage bitched before it ever left the wharf in Venice.” He drank more ale.
A plate of bread and cheese arrived, along with bowls of lamb stew. Conversation was temporarily in abeyance. Plate and bowls cleaned and tankards renewed, Gradenigo, much cheered—his was not a nature to brood for long—continued with his tale of woe. “We were meant to dock at Jaffa, but the weather proved as intransigent there as it had been in transit, so I brought us here. And now,” he said, the omnipresent twinkle in his eye dying briefly, “here I sit in Gaza, a dozen leagues from my mules and my camels and my guards and my supplies. Which supplies I am sure the aforesaid guards began pillaging the day after I was due in port.” He sighed, and cocked a weather eye at a passing barmaid with a pleasing waistline. He watched her out of sight and returned his attention to them, which included an appraising look at their weaponry. “But enough about me, my new friends. Yourselves, are you soldiers?”
Jaufre shook his head, but Alaric said, “Once, yes, but not now. We have been most recently employed as caravan guards.”
“Say you so?” said Giovanni Gradenigo, sitting upright, and the rest was a foregone conclusion. Shasha, when they unearthed her at the apothecary’s workshop, shrouded in a canvas apron with a large hole burned into the front of it, said only, “How long will you be gone?” He wasn’t entirely sure she registered his answer.
Félicien made a spirited bid to accompany them, and won over the captain with an off-color version of his clerk’s song. Hari gathered up his saffron robe in an authoritative manner and said he would accompany them as far as Jerusalem. Gradenigo threw up his hands and hired five other men in case the guards who were supposed to be waiting in Jaffa had wandered off, two of whom Jaufre vaguely recognized from their caravan. Alaric greeted one by name. “Hussein! I thought that was you. You left Raj’s caravan, too? You’re as mad as I am, to leave such a good billet. No one from here to Kabul feeds you so well on the Road.”
Félicien’s presence turnout to be a blessing, as his lute and his voice became the only things that made the entire trip endurable. The Gaza muleteers were surly and uncooperative and Muslim to a man, which meant they were hostile to the entire enterprise of Christian pilgrimage from the beginning. They only deigned to sign on by a doubling of the going rate, which came directly out of Gradenigo’s pocket. He did not suffer in silence. By contract, he was obliged to get the pilgrims to Jerusalem and back again to Venice or suffer the loss of his pilgrim transport license. Long experience of overseeing the said trade had led those authorities to provide for every eventuality, as well as inspectors stationed in Palestine—“Spies,” Giovanni Gradenigo said, as if the word tasted of excrement—to ensure and enforce the safe, secure and successful passage of all who had paid a fee for such passage before embarking from Venice. Punishment for abrogating any one of the clauses in his contracts lay in the hands of the Venetian authorities, whose city derived much in the way of revenues from the pilgrim trade. Their judgment was sure and fell, and to be avoided by whatever means necessary.
The captain might make a good living but he had to work for it, Jaufre thought now, especially when—after taking in the sights of Jerusalem under the stern aegis of its Saracen authorities—the captain’s group of pilgrims had decided on a side trip to visit Bethlehem, the River Jordan, which had required a tortuous descent down the face of a canyon on a narrow trail twelve leagues long, and the caves of Quarantana, where they were now.
The woman’s screams continued unabated. She convulsed again and fell to the ground, her limbs jerking and twitching, where she rolled temptingly close to the edge of the cliff that fell to the rocks a thousand rods below. Since Jaufre had been given to understand that every Christian pilgrim who completed the Jerusalem Journey was at death guaranteed a translation straight to their heaven, he didn’t know but what he might be doing Mistress Joan Burgh a great favor if he helped her over the edge with the toe of his boot.
She was a woman in her fifties and not physically fit, and she wasn’t supposed to be there at all, but when her companions had refused outright to help her climb that nearly vertical rock face, she had bribed a Saracen to carry her up. Upon achieving the top, she had been so overcome with ecstasy that she had fallen straightaway into the fit they were witnessing now.
Her companions, fellow pilgrims who had suffered Joan’s presence all the way from England to this very spot, had explained at length to Jaufre and Alaric and anyone who would listen that they had been looking forward to visiting the caves without an accompanying one-woman chorus of screams, shouts, cries and exhortations. Jaufre, who had only had to endure Mistress Burgh since Jerusalem, felt a good deal of sympathy for them.
He met their guide’s stern eyes, one Baldred, a Franciscan friar of middle age and miraculously even temperament, and went forward to pull Mistress Joan back from the edge. He took very little care for her comfort as he did so.
She rewarded him by grasping at his sleeve and shrieking, “I tell you the Blessed Virgin has baked bread for me in her own kitchen with her own hands!”
“Is there any left over?” he said. “I haven’t had anything to eat since breakfast.”
There were a few snickers and one outright guffaw.
“Sinner! You must repent, repent, before Jesus Christ our Lord!” Joan Burgh’s eyes rolled back in her head and her body stiffened into a bow and she shrieked again. Jaufre dropped her unceremoniously to the rock floor of the cave and retired to the crumbling trail head in hopes that putting some distance between them would muffle the subsequent din. It didn’t.
After that, Mistress Burgh was left to her visions and exhortations while her companions spent the afternoon exploring the caves where the saints had lived, seeing the remnants of a bed in a deteriorating piece of wood, a bookshelf in a niche carved into the rock wall above it. There was a faint painting here and there, only one or two with enough left to them to indicate some sense of the original whole. Some pilgrims surreptitiously chipped a shard from the altar of the chapel, others carved their names into the walls or wrote on them with chalk. Some got drunk on wine they had brought with them from Jerusalem. Some dickere
d with the few merchants who were hawking piles of dubious-looking relics they had hauled up the cliff on their backs in hopes of making a few coins from the pilgrims. “The little finger of the Blessed Virgin herself, I assure you, sir!”
Since the Blessed Virgin was alleged to have died thirteen hundred years before, Jaufre somehow doubted it. Besides, in the leagues from Jerusalem, if he had seen the bone from the little finger of the Blessed Virgin, he had seen a hundred.
A few of the pilgrims, the intelligent ones, he thought, had found an out of the way corner in which to curl up in their gray cloaks, although it was hard to see how they could sleep, given the amount and volume of sound. Between Joan Burgh’s continuous shrieking and sobbing, the drunken laughter, the surreptitious chink of blade on stone, the ever louder prayers, and the steady increase in volume of conversation as the aura of holiness wore off the longer they stayed, there was no peace to be found on this barren hilltop. The Franciscan, Baldred, was holding a hurried Mass at the altar for those so inclined, and the rest of them lit tapers (available for sale) and tried not to stumble over scattered rocks and their own feet as they staggered around seeking out everything in the caves that looked even remotely as if it were once the site of someone doing something holy.
He became aware of Alaric’s presence next to him, and looked around to see a disdainful expression on the Frank’s face. “Peasants,” Alaric said.
Jaufre didn’t know what irritated him more, the emotional excesses of pilgrims like Joan Burgh or the supercilious superiority of the upper classes, with whom Alaric clearly associated himself. “Has this place no hold on your faith, then?” he said.
“I’ve been here before,” Alaric said with the kind of weariness Jaufre could only describe as professional. “Many times. And I’d have had visions of the Devil, too, if I hadn’t had anything to eat for forty days.”
“Blasphemy!” shrieked Mistress Burgh. “Sinner! Repent, now, sirrah, before your soul is lost forever to perdition!”
“My good woman,” Alaric said, looking down his nose, “look after your own soul, which will be in mortal peril if you continue to assault our Lord’s ears in this cacophonous and most annoying fashion.” His sword clanked as he stalked over to the altar, and bent his head in ostentatious obedience before Baldred’s Mass.
From the cleft below Jaufre heard a feral roar, and he looked over the edge to see the distant undergrowth rustle. They had seen three lions in the leagues between here and the city, and a dozen wild boars who were the cause of their presence. He was hoping to descend in time to hunt for dinner, as the days in the blazing sun had spoiled all their food and all that remained to eat in his saddlebags was a boiled egg and a very worn pear, both of which were probably going rapidly bad. His mouth watered at the thought of some juicy roast pig, although he wasn’t sure he would be allowed to eat one even if he caught one, since the Saracens were so set against the practice.
From the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem to the River Jordan, every second rock and tree was the site of an event in the history of the Christian faith. Here Jesus was arrested. There he wavered in his faith. That place was where he was crucified (whereupon much bewailing and cursing of the Jews, although after he learned the full story Jaufre thought the Romans didn’t come in for near enough of their share of obloquy), and in there was where he rose from the dead. Here his mother lived with her sister Martha, both of whom lived not far from another Mary, this one a prostitute whose home had been replaced by a chapel, which in turn was now a goat byre. Next to this riverbank in those waters was Jesus baptized by John. This saint scourged himself here, another saint’s eyes were pierced by arrows there, and that one was thrown to the wolves, professing his faith until his tongue was torn out.
It all sounded overwrought and highly exaggerated to Jaufre, who wished the heir to one of those wolves would appear now and make for Joan Burgh. “Your faith is very violent,” he said to Félicien.
“I warned you,” Félicien said. He looked glum, but then the pilgrims had forbidden him from playing his lute during the entire journey. It was sacrilegious, they told him, disrespectful of our Lord’s suffering and resurrection.
A particularly loud and sustained screech made them both jump.
By now the pilgrims were exhausted from days of tramping through the dusty desert, weakened by a subsistence diet of eggs and fruit, when the hostile Saracen villagers would sell anything to them. There was little enough water to drink and none at all with which to wash and they could be smelled long before they were seen. When the last one of them had finally managed to scramble down the cliff—Mistress Joan employing the same Saracen farmer to carry her back down—they were all relieved to hear that the group would rest for the night next to a small spring nearby. Most of them were too tired to eat, which relieved Gradenigo, who said frankly that they would be lucky to find enough fodder for the animals to get them back to Jerusalem, never mind enough food for the pilgrims. Normally this would provoke outraged mutters and threats of retribution involving authorities in Venice, but tonight the pilgrims were too tired to bother.
Back to Jerusalem they went the next morning, clattering through Jericho on their way. They remained only one night in Jerusalem, long enough to collect Hari, who had spent the intervening two weeks there in the collection of unknown faiths. A representative of each appeared the following morning to see him off. Jaufre had never seen such a collection of old and wizened men.
They departed for Jaffa, where Gradenigo hoped the weather would by now have allowed his two galleons to meet them there. Alas, Jaffa was bare of ships, and with much cursing Gradenigo booted his increasingly sulky and recalcitrant charges back down the coast road to Gaza. They were all relieved, captain, guards and pilgrims alike, when they came over a rise to see the buildings of the bustling port outlined against the deep blue waters of the Middle Sea, and the small forest of masts bobbing there. The pilgrims, hungry, filthy, sunburned, exhausted, their gray robes in tatters and their sandals in need of resoling, altogether a sight fit to make their mothers weep, straightened up in a body and hustled down the road as if Gaza was their home village and there was a hot meal and a loving welcome waiting for every one of them. Which there wasn’t.
Mistress Joan Burgh of course shrieked at the sight of the port town and their ships and nearly fell from her donkey in ecstasy. No one moved to catch her, since Father Baldred had been left behind in Jerusalem and could no longer shame them into it. Regrettably, she recovered her balance, resettled herself in her saddle, and moved back into the line of trotting beasts. “The blessed Lord Jesus is guiding me home! O, such riches he has in store for me! Surely to God I am anointed for sainthood in this world and destined for the Kingdom of Heaven in the next!”
“We’ll all be sainted for having survived travel with you, mistress,” someone said, and there was laughter, although it was much better humored now than the malicious laughter directed at her had been at the Cave of Quarantana.
Jaufre found himself kicking his horse into a faster gait, leaning forward in the saddle. Félicien and Alaric began to fall behind.
His eyes squinted against the brilliant sun, Jaufre tried to make out the figures gathering at the northern gate of the city. Word of their coming had gone before them, and Shasha met them inside. She met Jaufre’s eyes and shook her head.
He scowled.
Alaric sidled up and said in a low voice, “Jaufre, for the sake of us all, will you please find yourself a woman and have done with this unseemly pining?”
Jaufre turned his back on the Templar and went to help shepherd their flock into an inn while Gradenigo rode ahead to the quay to check on his galleons. Mistress Joan slid from the back of her mule and dropped to her knees and raised her arms to the sky, eyes closed, singing a hymn which would have sounded better if she’d been able to carry a recognizable tune. The other pilgrims, long inured to this behavior, gathered their belongings and stepped around her to stream into the inn, where in a triumph o
f hope over experience they looked forward to hot water for washing, a hearty meal, and a vermin-free bed.
Mistress Joan continued as she was, where she was, and Jaufre, alas, lost his temper. “Will you, mistress, for the blood of this sweet Christ you adore so much, be STILL!”
There was a momentary, and somewhat respectful, silence from everyone but Mistress Joan.
An hour later, Gradenigo reappeared, full of wrath at the dismasting of one of his galleons by an early fall storm that had swooped in with great gusto on the very night they had left. His crew had botched the replacement so badly it would have to be done over again from the beginning. “By Christ’s bones, gentlemen,” he said indignantly, “I have to do everything myself!”
Jaufre, brooding over his ale, made no reply.
Alaric cleared his throat and said, “How long will your departure be delayed, captain?”
“A week at least,” the captain said.
Alaric nudged Jaufre and said in a low voice, “Didn’t you say you wanted passage to Venice? Perhaps by the time the captain is ready to sail, your Johanna will have arrived.”
Félicien paused in the act of raising his tankard. “Or perhaps she will never arrive.”
Jaufre glared at him. “You don’t have to sound so pleased at the thought, sir.”
Félicien was unabashed. “We haven’t seen her for a year, Jaufre,” he said. “Who knows who this woman is now?”
Hari had said much the same, he remembered. A year was a long time. They had not spent more than a day apart since they had met as children, outside Kashgar, seven years before.
It was a legitimate, if unwelcome, question. Clearly he was not the same man she had left behind on the trail down from Terak Pass. Who would Johanna be?
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