Silk and Song

by Dana Stabenow

  “Thank you, Brother Donizo.”

  The monk took courteous leave of Félicien, and moved to Alaric. He reached up a hand and they clasped arms for a long moment. “I hope to see you again in this life, Alaric.”

  “As God wills.” Alaric smiled. “Brother Donizo.”

  A league or so onwards Jaufre motioned to Félicien to drop a little way behind and said to Alaric, “You’ve never struck me as one who hankered after riches, Alaric. Why seek out Gilbert and the treasure now?”

  They rode in silence for a few moments. “Because,” Alaric said. He swallowed and turned to look Jaufre full in the face. He looked miserable, and ashamed. “Because it was all I could do to provide for Robert’s son.” He faced forward again. “And it turned out I couldn’t even do that much.”

  He kicked his mount into a canter and moved ahead, leaving Jaufre staring after him, mouth open.

  They traveled as quickly back as they had come, wringing the last ray of sunlight out of the day before stopping for the night. The closer they came to Milano, the more Jaufre became preoccupied with thoughts of Johanna, and of all the wonderful things they would do together, some of them even with their clothes on. For the first time he wondered where they would settle, where a home that would suit them both could be found, and then all he could think about was the house they would live in, and the room that would be theirs, and the bed in that room. Would they marry? In what faith? Children. Shasha would stay with them, and Shasha staying meant Firas would stay, too. Firas was a fine man, a good fighter, loyal, intelligent, able. He could wish for no better brother-in-law.

  The others? He didn’t know. After the revelations of Sant’ Alberto, he couldn’t predict what Alaric would do. Tiphaine was with them for the duration, that was certain. He grinned to himself. She might even be their first child.

  They stopped to water their mounts at the ford of a small stream. Jaufre was just pulling at the reins of his horse to keep him from drinking too much when movement caught the corner of his eye. He looked up and they were surrounded at spear’s point by a company of ten men, mounted. He reached for his father’s sword and found his hand knocked away, replaced by the point of a sharp point pressing into his neck. He went very still, his empty hands raising in surrender. He heard an oath and a thud and turned his head to see Alaric on the ground, glaring up at his attacker.

  “Yes, yes,” said his attacker, very brisk, “suffice it to say we are outlaws and villains, but we have no interest in you and will take none if you give us what we want without resistance, after which we will be on our way and you on yours.”

  Alaric used his horse’s stirrup to pull himself to his feet, his face red with rage. “You would leave us disarmed, on foot, on a road where—”

  “We don’t want your weapons or your horses, good sir,” said the knight, as the circlet around his helm indicated he must be. He raised his head and smiled at Félicien.

  Something in the quality of the goliard’s silence made both Jaufre and Alaric turn to look at him. He was still astride his horse, sitting very still, his face whiter than Jaufre had ever seen it. “Don’t harm them, my lord,” he said. “Please.”

  “That, my dear Félicienne, is entirely up to you.”

  Félicienne? There was something odd in the pronunciation of the goliard’s name. Jaufre looked at Alaric and saw dawning revelation, succeeded by furious anger. “Félicienne! Félicienne?”

  Their attacker was politely incredulous. “You didn’t know?” He looked from Alaric to Jaufre and back again. “Truly? You didn’t know?” He threw back his head and laughed so hard he seemed in danger of loosing his seat. “Oh my dear Félicienne! You have fallen in with fools!”

  The goliard waited for the knight to stop laughing, and met his eyes with a calm that seemed to Jaufre to be very hard won. “How did you find me?” he said again.

  “Oh, my very dear.” The knight laughed again. “If you will persist in singing where people can hear you, eventually someone will recognize the dulcet tones of l’Alouette du Sud, famed all over Provins for her voice, and her poetry.” He looked over his shoulder. “And sooner or later, that someone will remember the very generous gifts waiting for anyone who could lead me to her.”

  Jaufre saw Alaric follow his gaze, and did the same. An older man dressed in bright new clothes lurked behind the spearmen. “Jean de Valmy!” Alaric spat out the name.

  Not since l’Alouette du Sud have I heard such a voice. Later followed on closer and Jaufre was certain deliberate acquaintance by the oh so casual comment, The young man, the goliard who sings. He had no very certain idea of what was happening here, but he knew one thing. “You treacherous, sarding whoreson,” he said.

  The older man reddened and looked away.

  “I hope your new hose are easier on your boiled ass than your old ones were,” Alaric said. “Betrayal must pay well.”

  The knight kicked his horse until it was alongside Félicien’s rented nag. “That is a very unworthy mount for you, my lady wife. Allow me.” He stretched out an arm.

  Wife?

  Félicienne didn’t move. “If you don’t harm them, I will submit to you, willingly.”

  “By God, you will. I seem to remember missing out on my wedding night.” This last was said with an odd twist, and Jaufre saw a flicker of revulsion cross Félicien’s face.

  “I give you my word, here and now, witnessed by your men, that I will not run away again, that I will share your bed, that I will bear your children without complaint.” Jaufre, watching her, thought she might be sick over her saddle there and then, but she was not, and continued to speak in a strong, steady voice. “I will do all these things. But you must let them live.”

  The knight laughed. “Do you imagine you have a choice?”

  Something like pride flickered in Félicien’s dark eyes. “I escaped from you once before, if you remember, my lord.”

  “I do remember,” the lord said silkily. “I don’t make the same mistake twice, be sure, lady wife.”

  Félicienne raised her chin, but Jaufre could see her hands trembling on her reins. “You have to sleep sometime, my lord.”

  The lord stared at her for a long moment, and then burst out laughing again. A merry gentleman, indeed. “Florian!” he said, still laughing. “Call off the dogs and go on ahead. I will follow.”

  “My lord—”

  “God’s balls! Do you think I can’t manage a green boy who can’t even get his sword out of its sheath in time to use it and an old man long past his prime who should be dreaming by his fire? I, Ambroise de L’Arête?”

  “No, my lord.”

  “Very well, then. Get you gone.”

  The point pressing against Jaufre’s neck disappeared. Something warm trickled into his collar. There was some signal unseen by Jaufre, and the troop wheeled its mounts as one and moved down the road at an orderly trot, with L’Arête’s lieutenant leading and Jean de Valmy falling in behind, head sunk beneath his shoulders. Jaufre only wanted the opportunity to strike it off.

  “Well, my dear?”

  Her eyes sought Jaufre’s. “Tell Johanna and Shasha and Hari—tell all of them goodbye for me.”

  “It’s true then?” he said, disbelieving. “You’re a woman? And this man’s wife?”

  A tremulous smile. “And my thanks to them, from the bottom of my heart. And to you, Jaufre.”

  She grasped the knight’s arm and was hoisted behind him. With the loose end of his reins he lashed at the two loose horses and sent them crashing through the undergrowth in different directions. Jaufre’s mount neighed and sidled and made an abortive attempt at rearing.

  “My lord—”

  “My very dear lady, they are fortunate I don’t kill them both for having traveled in your company unchaperoned.” The knight nodded in their direction. “Gentles. We should not meet again.” His smile was thin, and there was a wealth of meaning in the way he sheathed his sword. “Really. We should not.”

  He kick
ed his destrier into a trot and then into a canter, and Jaufre and Alaric watched as they disappeared in the wake of the troop of spearmen.

  9

  Milano, Fall, 1324

  “Félicien is a girl?” Tiphaine said.

  “Not just a girl, a married woman,” Alaric said, who appeared not just surprised but outraged at the revelation.

  “No beard,” Jaufre said. He’d been thinking about it all the way to Milano. “I kept thinking he was just too young to shave.”

  “I never saw him shit,” Alaric said, toasting the room with his wine and drinking deep. “Should have known right then. Unnatural, a man never shits.”

  “He never removed that awful robe,” Alma said, her nose wrinkling. “I offered once to wash it for him and he thanked me but said he preferred to wash his own garments.”

  “Dirt can be a useful disguise,” Hari said. “People do not care to look too closely at the unwashed.”

  “He never said much, either,” Alaric said. “Except when he was singing.”

  “Didn’t want to draw attention,” Hayat said. She looked at Alma. They knew what that was like.

  “He looked so young,” Jaufre said again. “I kept thinking he must have left home at ten.”

  “Félicien’s a girl?” Tiphaine said.

  “I don’t understand how we didn’t know this,” Johanna said. “He—she was with us for almost two years. How could we not know this?”

  “Well,” Shasha said, and exchanged a meaningful look with Firas, and Hari cleared his throat and refolded a section of his orange robe into an elaborate pleat.

  Johanna stared at the three of them. “You knew? The three of you knew and you said nothing?”

  “It was her business,” Shasha said.

  “It was our business, too,” Jaufre said with, “especially when she’s got some crazed lord for a husband chasing after her. He could have killed us both.” And would have, if she hadn’t traded herself for them. The memory seared him like a burning brand.

  “Why did she run from him, would be more to the point,” Shasha said. “He was so young. She. She was so young. She couldn’t have been more than a child when she was married to him. Obviously she disliked her situation enough to run as far and as long from it as she did.” She looked around the room. “And what are we going to do about it?”

  Alaric choked over his wine. “Do? Do? He’s—she’s his wife! You don’t interfere between a man and his wife!”

  “He was with us almost since we left Cambaluc,” Shasha said, eyes on Johanna.

  “She lied to us!” Alaric said. “We owe her nothing!”

  “Alaric!” Jaufre’s voice cracked like a whip. “She bargained herself for us, traded herself for our freedom. There was nothing to stop him from killing us and burying us there. No one would ever have known.”

  Alaric’s gaze dropped and a tinge of color might have crept up the back of his neck. Still, he said, “We don’t even know where he took her.”

  “We have a name,” Jaufre said. “Ambroise de L’Arête.”

  Alaric fired up again. “And they’re nobility! You saw the circlet he wore on his helmet!”

  Shasha, startled, said, “Is this true?”

  “And they were my lord and my ladying it all over the place,” Alaric said, triumphant.

  Jaufre’s face was hard. “It doesn’t matter. She sacrificed her freedom for our own. She didn’t want to go with him, Alaric. Surely you saw that for yourself.”

  “She’s his wife,” Alaric said. “She has no choice in the matter.”

  Johanna took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We have other obligations.”

  Jaufre whirled around. “By all the Mongol gods! That we do, and first among them is—”

  “First among them, Jaufre, is our obligation as merchant traders to carry the goods in our care to the trade fairs in Lyon, as we contracted with Ser Gradenigo to do.”

  He stopped short, breathing hard.

  “Further,” she said, as calmly as she was able, “Lyon is the crossroads for commerce in this part of the world. Everyone who buys and sells goes through Lyon, which means—”

  “—news of everyone,” Shasha said, jumping in because Johanna was right and she didn’t want her to have to take all of Jaufre’s fire when he realized it. “Our best hope for finding news of Félicien is to go to the place where the most news circulates.”

  Jaufre’s breathing, loud in that silent room, began to slow down.

  Firas stepped in. “Do we stick to our planned route?”

  “I think so, yes,” Shasha said. “Perhaps we move more quickly now.” She looked around. “Does anyone have any other comments or observations?”

  Alma exchanged glances with Hayat, and said, “We’ll revisit this discussion in Lyon, yes?”

  Alaric snorted.

  “Of course,” Shasha said before Jaufre could say something that this time would alienate everyone in the room instead of only five or six of them.

  “North Wind had his last appointment in the duke’s stables this morning,” Johanna said. “I have accepted no more offers.”

  This time Jaufre snorted, and followed that by leaving the room. The door did not quite slam behind him.

  “Wait,” Shasha said, when Johanna would have gone after him. “Give him time to cool down.”

  “I didn’t know he cared so much for Félicien,” Johanna said.

  “I don’t know that he did, or does, young miss,” Hari said. “What I believe he objects to most is the way she left us.” He gave a faint smile. “Suppose it had been you? Or Shasha?”

  “Or even yourself,” Firas said.

  “Or even my unworthy self,” Hari said, unperturbed by the mocking note in the assassin’s voice. “It would be unwise to be too quick to judge. Like so many travelers before her—” his eye excluded no one in the room “—the young woman evidently had reasons to be far from her native land.”

  There was a brief, freighted silence.

  “Then why did she return here with us? She must have known the risk.” Johanna paused. “Alaric? What was it you said that man—her husband called her? The Songbird of the South?”

  “The Lark of the South,” Alaric said, his voice soft now. He repeated it in French. “L’alouette du Sud.”

  “You come from the south,” Jaufre said. “Are you familiar with this name?”

  Alaric drank drained his mug and refilled it from the pitcher on the table. “I’ve been in the East for so long, home might as well be a foreign country to me. I have heard all the same news that you have heard of my homeland, and in none of it was there mention of this—lark.” He drank and gave the hearth a malevolent stare. “Old man sitting beside a fire,” he muttered. “Who’s past his prime?”

  “Félicien’s a girl?” Tiphaine said.

  Johanna paused outside the room Jaufre shared with Hari and Alaric. The room they had shared with Félicien. She raised a hand as if to knock, and let it fall again.

  She slept alone that night in the room she had acquired for the two of them. The next morning she found him in the stable yard, where he already had their pack animals assembled. He was evidently prepared to drive all of them single-handedly to the warehouse where their goods were stored and load each of them himself. “Jaufre.”

  He spared her a glance. “What?”

  “We should probably lay in a few supplies for the trip,” she said, trying to keep her voice reasonable. “There are very few towns of any size between here and Lyon and we still have to get over the Alps.”

  “I sent Shasha out at daybreak. She knows what we need.”

  “Jaufre.” She caught his arm as he finished tacking up one donkey, only to have him pull free and move on to the next. “Jaufre, we’ll never be able to leave today.”

  He yanked hard on a cinch, and the donkey gave a bray of protest. “We are leaving today.”

  “Jaufre—”

  He rounded on her so ferociously she actually backed u
p a step. “We will leave today, Johanna. Or I will, alone.”

  He wasn’t interested in comfort, only action. She waited until he’d turned back to the donkey, and then stepped forward to begin tacking up the next one.

  By noon Shasha was back, trailed by a dozen street urchins Tiphaine had each bribed into carrying back a mountain of supplies. Everyone helped, even Alaric. They were loaded by sext and an hour later they were on the road west.

  Jaufre set the pace and the plain of Lombardy seemed to roll away beneath them of its own volition. They found campsites near water sources, living as much as possible off their own supplies, showing arms and attitude when they thought a display of force advisable. “I don’t want any trouble,” Jaufre said, “but by Mohammed’s hairy ass I want to look like we could cause a lot of it if needs be.”

  Alaric’s eye brightened at the prospect, but they were for the most part left to themselves. They saw more pilgrims than any other kind of traveler, gray-robed and en route for Venice and Jerusalem. Dame Joan was still vivid in their memories and they all expressed their silent gratitude to whomever might be listening that these pilgrims were going in the opposite direction.

  Les Alpes rose steadily before them, tall and sharp-edged and snow-capped. The pass through them was called Moncensio in Lombardy and as they would discover, Mont Cenis on the other side. The trail switchbacked suicidally up from the plains but when they achieved the pass Johanna said to Shasha, “Not quite Terak, is it?”

  Jaufre heard her. “Let’s just hope there are no surprises waiting for us on the other side.”

  “Always with the cheerful prospect in view,” Firas said, but he said it for Shasha’s ears alone.

  The pass was quite beautiful, ringed with white peaks and blue lakes. Going down, the trail felt less likely to fling them from the side of the mountain into the ravine beneath. It was August by then, with the bright, pitiless sun leeching the blue from the sky. The temperature rose as the elevation fell and made everyone snappish. Firas, scouting ahead, found a campsite near a trickle of water barely large enough to suit their needs. They picketed the livestock, and Johanna led North Wind downstream and let the cool water trickle over his hooves. He nudged her, and she produced a bit of apple. He munched contentedly.