David urged Rachel not to go on deck. The captain arranged to have food and water brought to their cabin, and David, groaning with nausea, enjoyed her comfortings. When he slipped into deep slumber, she sat in the gallery at the rear of the cabin and opened the windows.
Rachel loved the sea. The crisp wind with its briny redolence filled all the chambers of her lungs with brightness and charged her limbs with vivid strength. Under her fingers, driven into the oak of the sill, sea minerals glinted with the same rainbow hues she saw in the spindrift lashing off the waves.
Best of all, she loved the embracing sensation of the ship's flight as the prow crashed into the swells and the sea picked up the stern so high she felt as if she were flying. Then the bow wave poured outboard with a rushing roar, and the ship reeled down into the sea's trough.
This was the only ship she had known, and she had learned all she could about it on the docks at Arles before they sailed. Called an usciere, it was among the largest transports in the world, thirty full strides long, eight wide, with two masts and two complete decks. On both sides of her bow, large eyes had been crudely painted, and on her flat stern a horse's head.
In harbor, Rachel had seen the giant stern ramps lowered and horses marched into the hold. Often during the journey, she heard them neighing, as unhappy as her grandfather with their flight over the sea.
The noises of the journey spellbound Rachel. The cricketing of the timbers, rigging snapping and whistling, the cough of the waves all spoke to her of mystery, of everything that could not be known but could be spoken of in the near-speech of the sea and the wind.
Only when the pilgrims began to sing and their dolorous hymns rose and fell among the sparking flints of the ocean breeze did the hollow roar of the crashing bow sound sinister. Death trumpets bleated in the broken swells. Whatever happiness could dwell on earth fled into the blue silence, and all the layerings of sound, full of ghostly speech, chilled, went cold inside her head. And she was again in dark tunnels of oak woods, numb under frost-fiery rays of snow shooting through branches. Her stomach hurt and her eyes ached with tears locked inside her by the gruesome sight of her dead family.
Rachel closed the windows on the pilgrims' praise of their god of love. Hands over her ears, she crept to her berth, managed one difficult sob, and lay there listening to horses crying within the silence of her blood.
-/
Rome, Autumn 1189
Ailena sat still in her crux of pain. Every move sparked tiny searing fires in her bones. To minimize the painful jostling of her body during her travels, she had bound her joints with tight bandages, which obliged her to sit rigidly erect, legs and arms stiff. Now her nose itched, and scratching it would cost her a moment's century of pain. To distract herself from the itch, she put her mind on the city outside the window and dwelled on all that it signified.
The baroness sat in a small fort in the Torre delle Milizie close to Trajan's market. Fortresses toothed the skyline, overshadowing ancient buildings, which long ago had outlived their usefulness. Rival gangs from those fortresses roamed the winding alleys and lanes of the tense, shadow-strewn city and clashed in the markets and piazzas.
The Curia, representing the political power of the pope, fought for dominance with the Republic, Rome's aristocrats. And the commune, a powerful coalition of guildsmen and leasehold farmers, defied both the pope and the nobles. Almost daily, riots erupted on the hilly avenues, and partisans of all groups garroted, or stabbed, or hanged rivals from the skinny trees that sprouted on most street corners.
Ailena had come to this tortured city to fulfill a small but important facet of her strategy. If she survived the journey to Tyre, if she lived long enough to train Rachel to be Ailena Valaise, to know all that she knew, and even if she could successfully arrange an appropriate miracle to explain the restoration of her youth, still she would require the validation of a higher authority. So, she had come to Rome to buy the pope's blessing.
That the Holy Father's blessing could be won with wealth Ailena had learned early from her father, whose family had gained title and land by supporting the house of Frangipani against the Pierleoni in their rivalry for the papacy. Alas, the current Vicar of Christ belonged to the rival family, so Ailena had arranged to meet with a powerful cardinal who had influence with the pope.
Giacinto Bobo-Orsini in his eighty-third year appeared a tiny, languid frog with bulbous eyes and knobby fingers. He entered the room briskly, scarlet robes flurrying. Behind followed his secretary, a young, blond priest scrupulously dressed in white surplice and black robes.
The baroness grinned like a painted mask, eating pain as she forced herself to kneel before the diminutive cardinal and kiss his ring. Her servitors helped her back into her chair and wiped the pale sweat from her creased brow and tremulous lips.
Bobo-Orsini sat in a grand chair, his secretary close at his side, translating the baroness' langue d'oc into Latin.
"Your Grace, I am bound for the Holy Land, where, at my advanced age, I will almost certainly commit my immortal soul to God. Thus, having little further need of my worldly possessions, I am surrendering my wealth to those of this world who can best use them." Ailena took a pearl-crusted jewel box from one of her servitors and opened it, displaying an oblong emerald and three rubies large as hazelnuts. She had spent half her fortune on these jewels, determined to make an impression in the Curia that would persist until she needed their help. "I know that your Grace is much beloved of our Holy Father. I know that you strive daily against the secular powers of the world to assure that our Holy Father’s influence is not diminished in this world. I wish to offer you these few insignificant baubles that I possess, to further your efforts on behalf of our Holy Father—and to remember me should I need your counsel during what little time is left me in this world."
Bobo-Orsini accepted the pearl-studded box with a lugubrious smile and, not even glancing at the gems, passed the gift to his secretary.
"Surely, your pilgrimage will win favor in the eyes of God," the secretary translated, and the Prince of the Church rose and briskly exited from the room.
Alone with her servitors, Ailena felt her disappointment wince, a bubble in her heart. The cardinal, older than she, would probably depart this life before she reached Tyre, no matter his influence. Had her wrath deluded her? Was her unholy pilgrimage God's final mockery of her life?
She signed for her bearers to remove her from this fort. She would not spend another day in Rome, this city of defeat, its corpse fought over by jackals for the last thousand years. She would leave at once for the Holy Land, where victory had once been won over death—and where she would win that victory again.
-/
Tyre, Autumn 1189
The city extended like a hand spread upon the sea, attached to the mainland at the wrist. Approached by so narrow a spit, the city stood well-defended by the arbalesters on the Christian barges.
The deep moats and sturdy ramparts gladdened David, for the long sea journey had left him weak, and he wanted to rest untroubled by fear. With the baroness' letters in hand, they arrived at the fortress of the town's commander, Conrad, the Marquess of Montferrat, who immediately received them.
Well pleased by the baroness' promise of gold coin and a tallage on the lands she proposed to purchase and farm in the area, he installed the Tibbons in a spacious palazzo on a palm-crested terrace overlooking the green sea.
David sought out the city's synagogue and found a small, blackstone building wedged between the sea wall and the monolithic rocks buttressing the terrace slopes. The narrow building had been tucked so far out of the way no road led to it. Accessible only by boat or by a precarious footpath on the sea wall, David and Rachel braved the footpath. He kissed the threshold of the temple in gratitude for his safe delivery, praising God for sparing him and his granddaughter from the slaughtering Crusader mobs.
Rachel listened to his prayer of thanksgiving in silence, until she could stand it no more. "What of you
r children and grandchildren, my parents and brothers and sisters?" Rachel challenged hysterically when he invited her over the threshold. "God let them die. Uncle Joshua and his sons, too. They died horrible deaths, and God did not save them. How can you thank God?"
The worshipers in the temple covered their faces and turned away. "God creates calamity as well as blessings," David said to her quietly. "Isaiah says so: ‘I make peace and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.'"
"I will not thank such a god." Rachel turned away, gazed out over the emerald water shading to hard blue under high morning cumulus.
David waved aside the rabbi, who had emerged frowning at the disturbance, and stepped behind his granddaughter. "Look at the land." He gestured at the saffron hills of the coastline splotched with virid hues. "This is the land that God has given our people. He has blessed us by returning us here."
Rachel passed her grandfather a dark, sidelong stare, then pointed at the lofty tower of Gibeleth that rose from the sea haze above an unseen fortress far to the south. "This land is not ours. It belongs to the Saracens and the Christians. If this is our land, why do the unfaithful possess it? Why did God let the faithless kill my family?"
"Why? Why?" David shook his head. "Shall the clay question Him that fashions it?"
Rachel said nothing. Her words had opened a jagged darkness inside her. Is this God's wrath? The rustling busyness of fronds on the terrace above her filled with half-heard voices— the sibilant laughter of her sisters. No! She would not listen to the dead again. With forced animal clarity, she looked down at the white juts of ocean limestone where the sea sloshed and black crabs scuttered.
David pulled at his shorn temple locks and turned away. God alone could retrieve her from where she had gone. He returned to the synagogue and joined his people in praising the Creator. Afterward, when he had told them his story, they advised him to leave Tyre before the baroness arrived. They told him of the numerous Jewish settlements throughout the Promised Land and urged him to flee there with his granddaughter before the gentile found them again and bent them to her will.
But David had given his word. The baroness had retrieved them out of abject poverty and had promised that their servitude would not be menial, and that Rachel would not be molested. The thought of violating his word felt terribly wrong.
Later, on the way back along the footpath atop the sea wall, David twisted his ankle and very nearly plummeted into the tropic tide. He limped a short way to a sand bank littered with coral skeletons and old conchs, while Rachel searched about for a crutch.
She came back with a smooth staff of driftwood and helped him to his feet. When their eyes met, he countered the mocking flatness of her stare with a shrug. "Sometimes God hides—and then we fall over Him." He sighed. "And often break our necks. We must trust God knows what He is doing."
-/
Tyre, Winter 1189
Each night, Rachel woke when the ocean clouds crashed into the mountains and rain drummed on the tile roof and rattled the fronds of the palms. She would lie there breathing the coolness of washed air as it streamed through the lotus-shaped windows of the palazzo and billowed the diaphanous curtains.
In the sounds of the rain dripping off the roof and rushing down the gutters of the street, voices whispered in Hebrew. The dead swarmed through the mauve lambency of night and circled her as she floated under the damascened bedspread, her folded over her chest as though she were one of them.
When she tried to understand them, everything began to deepen again. The harder she listened, the more she forgot where she was. What were they saying?
Never and always.
Each night, she became convinced they were praying for a place and time to be heard, and she listened hard for their voices in the coughing rain.
Never and always.
And then the rain passed, the thunderish atmosphere chilled, and through the windows she beheld wisps of the storm floating among bright, crepitant stars. The voices departed. Watching the wheel of stars revolve in the dark tempestuous night, she drifted back to sleep.
The bells of the churches spoke at dawn. Rachel woke to aromatic fumes from the sailors' taverns along the seafront below the terrace of the palazzo. Spicy wafts of cuttlefish, blistering entrails, and braised pigeon and squid lofted into her bedroom with first light and the shouts of fishermen gathering their nets.
In the garden, David was already awake, hands open before him, praying to the Creator as He wove a new day. The servants, too, moved about, brewing fragrant teas, mashing sesame seeds to strew in the fig paste served each morning with dates and winter plums.
The baroness would not arrive until the spring. No large transports could cross the sea until then, and she had chosen to winter in Sicily. Several small skiffs had dared the crossing and delivered letters from her. They arrived each time by the same courier, a tall, bald man in a burgundy caftan. With the alert hairy face of a monkey, he called out from the iron gate in Arabic, and the servants came scurrying from wherever they worked in the palazzo.
The letters bore the signet impress of the baroness and the wax seal of the marquess, who had received them, accompanied always by a pouch of bezants, the thin gold coins distributed to the servants as payment.
The letters carried assurances to the marquess of the baroness' intentions to reimburse him, and they also contained accounts of the political developments on Sicily. There, Tancred, a petty despot, fancied himself a king, and the baroness was using her monies to prepare for his overthrow by the new English monarch, Richard Coeur de Lion. The letters provided no instruction to the Tibbons other than to await her arrival in the spring.
David’s imagination had exhausted itself trying to surmise what the baroness wanted of them. After the morning meal, he went each day to the synagogue, by boat and not the precarious footpath, to pray and confer with the leaders of the Jewish community.
The oriental Jews, headed by Rabbi Ephraim, whom everyone called the Egyptian and who could not fathom what a Norman baroness would want of the Jews, eventually convinced David to seek counsel from the European Jewish community who had established settlements outside the fortress city of Tyre.
During the winter months the Saracens disbanded, returning to their wives and children in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and roaming the countryside posed little danger. The Tibbons rode out of the city astride donkeys among a group of pilgrims on a tour of the local holy sites.
They passed through rustling fields of sugar cane and black fields dusted green with the early buds of winter barley. Gulls wheeled overhead until the land became stony and the road a rivulet of dust among the citron rocks.
Here and there, scraggly carob trees crowned low hills and a stone house glowed limewash-white in the brash Levant sunlight. Beside wooden scaffolds for drawing water from deep wells, drowsy palms and the green slither of gourd vines sprouted, a crooked field fluttered verdantly, oxen lumbered, a black-faced farmer stared at the pilgrims from under the hood of his white robe and smiled, showing blue gums, amused by their dusty progress. Then, the terrain turned to rock and sand again and shone like tin.
In a village of cluttered square houses on a hillside of lion dust and pearl-shadowed shards, the Tibbons found the community of European Jews recommended by Ephraim the Egyptian. The villagers warmly welcomed them.
Rosh ha-Qahal—"Head of the Community"— Rabbi Hiyyah, a fleecy-haired old man, introduced them to a robust, bronze-fleshed farmer, Benjamin of Tudela, and to a waxen little weaver, Rabbi Meir of Carcassonne. Their wives and daughters embraced Rachel and sat her and her grandfather on a reed mat under a sprawling fig tree. There, they served their guests flat bread, olives, and small red oranges.
After hearing their story, Rosh ha-Qahal nodded sagely. "You will buy your freedom," he decided. "You will pay to the Norman baroness the full cost of the clothing she has given you, the transport on the usciere, the food, the shelter during your time at the palazzo, the use of her servants, and a genero
us amercement for breaking your pledge. Then you will be free, and you will both come and live here among us." He looked to the large, bronzed farmer. "How much should that be, Benjamin?"
Benjamin scratched figures in the ocher dust with his finger, said, "A hundred and twenty bezants for cost, half that for an extravagant amercement—a hundred and eighty bezants."
"Good," Rosh ha-Qahal nodded. "You will pay the baroness two hundred bezants and be free of her."
"Two hundred bezants," David despaired. "I haven't even one."
Rosh ha-Qahal dismissed his concern with a backhanded wave. "That is only gold. We will lend it to you."
Rabbi Meir slapped his waxen hands together. "It is done. I will collect the sum from the community after the winter harvest. You will have it in hand well before the baroness returns."
"But how will I repay you? I am an old man."
"Your experience will repay us," Rosh ha-Qahal replied. "Your knowledge of vineyards and orchards will enrich the community many times over what we are lending you. Think no more about it. Let us eat. And afterward we will sing and there will be dancing."
Throughout the remainder of the day, one family after another hosted the Tibbons, each hearing their story anew and telling its own while the others took their places in the buff fields and in the hillside orchards of smoke-silvered olive trees. David glowed with joy, and Rachel hung between desire and dread, wanting the affection the families laved over them and yet fearing the emptiness these people widened in her. The young women so reminded her of her sisters, the boys of her brothers—laughter and happiness came only so far in her, then brinked on this black chasm of memory.
The community sensed the young woman's reserve and queried her grandfather. "She is grieved, because she saw the martyrs," he explained. "I think she sees them still."
At sunset, Rachel went alone into an open field to find the expanse that complemented the emptiness that had been opened in her. Titanic octaves of violet and indigo vaulted the sky. Starscapes burned magnificently over the dark sand faults and ancient hills.
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