-/
Tyre, Winter 1190
David remained secretly defiant of the baroness. In November, when Baldwin, the aged Archbishop of Canterbury, died and Conrad of Montferrat returned from the siege of Acre with a wife stolen from another noble, David took advantage of the grief and outrage in the city to absent himself for a tour of the local holy places. The baroness, busy with her own intrigues among the nobles of the city and her indoctrination of his granddaughter, did not miss him.
Saladin's army had dispersed for the winter, and the real danger in the land lay not in warfare but starvation. The ferocious battles of the last season had destroyed numerous farms and fields, and many people were reduced to slaughtering horses and mules for food. David traveled on foot to the hillside Jewish village where Rosh ha-Qahal dwelled, and he beseeched him for help in finding a husband for Rachel.
"He must be willing to flee far," David insisted, "to Egypt, where the baroness will not be able to find us."
Rosh ha-Qahal, approving that David had found the courage to defy the baroness, set about finding an appropriate husband. Within a few days, he presented to David a curly-haired young man of intense paleness with dark eyes of penetrating lucidity and a wide, guileless mouth. A carpenter, Daniel Hezekyah had learned the trade from his father and grandfather. But books, not wood, held his passion. At nights, he studied with Rabbi Meir, hoping soon to become a rabbi himself.
David returned to Tyre with Daniel and his father, so that he might show them to Rachel. They knew David's story and willingly broke with tradition, traveling to meet the prospective bride, because her virtues had been so well lauded by Rosh ha-Qahal.
They were not disappointed. Rachel met them in the synagogue, dressed in the silken finery the baroness had bestowed on her, her heart's blood in her face at the prospect of being a bride.
Daniel had to force his voice to speak to her: The avidity of love had opened in him so fully that he barely found room in his lungs for breath.
David caught the eye of Daniel's father and received his nod.
After the formalities of their introduction, Rachel and Daniel strolled by the sea, most of the congregation following at a respectful distance. He talked in long scholarly sentences about their lives as a block of wood, to be shaped with the grain, which was the dark striation of griefs she had endured, and that now necessitated their flight to Egypt. The compassionate tenderness of his voice convinced her to speak of the emptiness her sorrow had hollowed in her, and of the voices of the dead that echoed there, with their chant: Never and always.
Daniel could have known then that their love was doomed. He had faith in the restorative power of the fluid, warm strength that swelled in his chest at her nearness. When he left with his father, he promised that in the spring they would be wed and then leave at once to find their happiness in Egypt.
-/
Tyre, Spring 1191
The winter famine had worked to the baroness' advantage. While the fields around Acre had been ravaged by the war, the farm and fields she owned near Tyre enjoyed rich harvests, and she sold each sack of her cereal grains for a hundred pieces of gold, each egg for six deniers, and the sale of her small herd of cattle made her more money than she had possessed before she sailed for Rome. Even after paying the tallage she owed the marquess, she remained a rich woman.
The continual winter rains had dampened her bones and crippled her with pain. Yet, her accruing wealth and the profound usefulness of Karm Abu Selim in the training of Rachel eased her suffering. She had brought the Persian magician to her palazzo and given him his own suite and servants.
Each morning and evening, he immersed Rachel in a trance, in which she sat open-eyed, not only listening to the baroness' life story but experiencing it with all her senses. Karm Abu Selim masterfully re-created sensations with perfumes, textures, and sound effects garnered from a multitude of improvised instruments. Gradually, the whole of Ailena Valaise's remembered life lived again in Rachel's mind.
Ailena, thoroughly pleased with the girl's progress, happily put more of her attention into increasing her wealth and did not notice that, between the magical sessions, Rachel spent less time at the seashore and more time at the synagogue. The community worked out in detail secret arrangements for her wedding and the escape to Egypt. The rabbi dispatched letters to contacts in the Jewish communities of Alexandria and Cairo, and several members of the groom's family, who were disgruntled at the bride's lack of dowry and the necessity for such a distant move, had to be mollified.
By Passover, everything was in order. Daniel and Rachel had met several times, and their affection for each other had become ardent. But at the Pesach ritual, when the rabbi pulled back the Paschal lamb's head and cut its throat, Rachel fell into the emptiness of its gaping wound. The spurt of blood draining into the sacrificial cup drained her strength with the lamb's, and her senses teetered into delirium.
Karm Abu Selim had implanted in her mind the image of the Grail. Whenever she wished to intensify the memories of the baroness, she had merely to imagine the Sacred Chalice, and the memories the magician had given her leaped up in her. Now, seeing the ceremonial chalice catching blood, she witnessed again in her mind the gruesome image of her family's slashed throats: All of Ailena's memories scattered like smoke in a blast of wind.
Rachel experienced herself collapsing into a cavernous chill, a huge, icy darkness, in which the lamb's blood provided the only warmth. Her bones knocked with her shivering. An incandescent terror flared through her as she realized she was dying. Her throat had been cut. All life spilled out of her. A monstrous cold wreathed her heart, and she heard distantly, growing louder, the pulsing sound of some horrible fate approaching, inevitable, final.
Iron hands had seized her, tearing her apart—shaking her awake as sight snapped back into her gaping eyes. She met David’s worried countenance looming close and heard the gloomy, pulsing sound of her own voice shouting again and again, "Never and always!"
She had collapsed, and her grandfather crouched over her, shaking alertness back into her. Over his shoulder, she glimpsed the appalled grimaces of the congregation surrounding Daniel Hezekyah’s pallid, horror-stricken, and inconsolably grieved face.
-/
Daniel Hezekyah waited at the synagogue for Rachel to return to the seashore. He wanted to speak to her again before he left Tyre, to tell her himself that he still loved her, no matter her madness. Who would not be mad who had seen that horror? He waited three days to apologize for letting his father hold him back from where she had fallen during the Pesach ritual, afraid like the others of whatever virulent dybbuk possessed her.
Afterward, when David had swathed his granddaughter in his mantle and had huddled her back to the gentiles' palazzo, Daniel realized he loved her more than he feared any dybbuk. So, he stayed at the synagogue when his father returned to their village. He waited at the large window of the temple, watching for her to stroll down to the sea as she had been wont to do.
Daniel wanted to tell her that he loved her in body and soul, that the flaw of her soul was the flaw of all their people since the Diaspora, and that it was not wrong to be mad in a mad world. He could not marry her. The Law forbade that—for, as he knew from Deuteronomy 28:28, those who did not obey the commandments of the Lord God, the Lord would smite with madness and astonishment of heart.
What she had done wrong he could not say. Though others claimed she had been struck mad for serving the gentile, he did not believe that. Perhaps some ancestral crime required atonement. Whatever the crime, he could not break the Law and marry her, and neither could he stop loving her.
On the fourth day, Daniel went to the palazzo and asked at the gate for her. The servant claimed no such person resided in the house. Back at the synagogue, he waited another week, twice more returning to the palazzo and twice more turned away. Finally, he wandered the strand alone where they had strolled together. He wrote her name in the sand and, haunted by an incipient and tenaci
ous remorse, returned to his village.
-/
Rachel never again came to the beach or the synagogue. After her collapse and humiliation before her people, she wanted to forget herself and all the grief of her past.
Karm Abu Selim found her a more eager devotee of his magic and was able to steep her in trances so deep that even upon awakening she walked about dazed for half the morning believing she was Ailena Valaise, bewildered to find herself in a garden of vine and jujube, pistachio and apricot, the sea air tainted with desert dust.
David mortified himself before God, covering his head with ashes, and fasting until vision blurred and he could no longer stand up for his prayers.
The Persian magician fed him a pellet of opium, guiding him to the throne of God, where tongues of fire lashed him and purged him of his transgressions. When he recovered, a childlike hesitation seemed to wrap his body and unfathomable resignation shone out from under his silver hair.
From then on, he conspired no more to remove his granddaughter from the baroness' influence. When his friends at the synagogue inquired about Rachel, his unvarying reply sounded like a chant, "All that is is God's will."
-/
Acre, Summer 1191
On July 12, Richard Plantagenet, the Coeur de Lion, captured Acre, massacring twenty-five hundred of the Saracens after they had surrendered and he had assured them of no reprisal. When the baroness moved there in August to invest heavily before speculators purchased all the worthy properties, the field where the slaughter had occurred glittered with mounds of bleached human bones. The remnants of the horrid orgies of carrion birds and jackals strewed the hills.
The sight dizzied Rachel, and Karm Abu Selim tranced her with a tap to the center of her forehead. "Behold this field of lilies," he intoned and she looked upon what he evoked. "How radiantly they shine in the sun."
Ailena Valaise, despite the pains of her advanced age, knew joy in Acre. She moved into a large manor house on the Street of the Three Magi near the central blue-domed mosque that had been converted to the city's palace. There, she mingled with royalty, winning their favor with her generous gifts.
King Richard, pleased with her financial support of him in Sicily, renewed in his own hand her charter as baroness of Epynt. Ailena exulted to learn from the king that, on Easter of that year, he had been wed in Sicily by the new pope, Celestine III, born Giacinto Bobo-Orsini.
Occasional letters from the baroness' daughter Clare informed Ailena of her son's despotic rule of her domain. She was now in no hurry to exact her revenge. The anguish of her twisted bones had been held in check by the dry clime as well as by her Persian magician’s charms and medicines.
And Acre offered new opportunities to expand her wealth. She owned an oven in the city that earned her over two hundred bezants a year, and, in the countryside outside the ramparts, she purchased Kfar Hananya, a village replete with orchards and extensive fields. She also acquired two nearby gardens, where she could meet in private with Rachel, for, now that Ailena had become a local favorite among royalty and the knights, she could not be seen with the woman she had destined to take her place.
Rachel and David lived in Kfar Hananya with their own servants. David spent his time overseeing the care of the baroness' fruit trees and praying in the temple, where he told all inquirers that his granddaughter was already spoken for.
Each day, Rachel rode her horse through a stone valley of red sandstone needles and across a scrubby wasteland of rosy shale rubble, where butterflies tippled among desert flowers. No one but peasants saw her as she arrived at the small oasis garden of Quasur el Atash, the Fortress of the Thirsty. There, she met with Ailena and Karm Abu Selim and continued her trance-education.
Sometimes Rachel lingered at the oasis all day, long after the baroness had finished relating the next episode of her story in company with the magician’s magical rapport. She replayed in her memory all she had learned of that distant and cold land of Wales, imagining among the red basalt rocks the verdant cliffs and mountains where she was a baroness.
In the evening, riding back to Kfar Hananya, the hooves of her horse ringing on the shingle floor, the sky ablaze with stars, Rachel brooded on all the small details of her new life—the name of her favorite boarhound, the arrangement of rooms in her castle, and even the numerous brutalities her husband had inflicted on her. And the remembered pain and rage became a vivid part of the world she carried inside her.
-/
Jerusalem, Autumn 1192
As soon as King Richard won the right of pilgrims to enter Jerusalem, Ailena moved David and Rachel into a Jewish settlement within the Holy City's Syrian quarter. In a tiered house of stone blocks at the corner of Jehosaphat and Spanish streets, they lived simply with their servants. David remained immersed in his worshipful life, assuaging his onerous foreboding with prayers, and Rachel continued her tutelage with Ailena in a walled garden behind Saint Elye's chapel.
Now that Rachel knew the salient features of the baroness' life, she had to learn Welsh as well as Ailena’s handwriting. These disciplines proved easy compared with the training necessary to overcome her docile habits and assume the flinty, strong-willed temperament of the baroness. In her trance, she practiced the hostile mannerisms that would be necessary when she finally confronted Guy Lanfranc and the knights of the frontier.
"These men understand only one thing," Ailena whispered to the mesmerized girl. "Power. The power to assert your will is the power to restrict freedom, to inflict pain, to kill. Power is not your right or your privilege. Power belongs only to those who can command it. And the secret of command is voice and bearing—and, above all, cunning."
With the baroness and the Persian magician, Rachel went out into the desert often and worked endless hours ordering the wind and the rocks, hardening her voice to the temper of iron with her indignation at the insolence of the sun and the audacity of the clouds. She learned to stand unquailed, defiantly staring down the magician’s lion-shouts and the baroness' degrading insults.
In the evening, back in the palazzo, sipping cool, minty sharbat, Ailena instructed her in the philosophy of the wolf. "You need the pack, yet you must stand alone. You are the leader. If you show any weakness at all, you will be eaten." Ailena’s bony face quivered with remembered rage. "I swear to you. Show weakness and you will be devoured."
"Yet, the ruler and the land are one," Rachel reminded the baroness. "Who rules must serve."
The old woman's upper lip curled contemptuously. "That is a fairy tale. In the real world, the sword rules—and it serves only power. Learn these lessons well!"
Even with Karm Abu Selim's help, such difficult tasks required arduous effort. Rachel lost herself in them. She began to speak Welsh almost continually. And, to the exasperation of her grandfather, she began comporting herself with imperial arrogance.
David feared for her soul and confronted the baroness on the worn steps of Saint Elye's: "What you are doing offends God."
The Frankish soldier who escorted the baroness among her numerous properties moved to seize the impertinent Jew. Ailena stopped him and had the knight wait for her in the doorway of the chapel, out of earshot. "David," she said kindly and sat on the sun-warmed steps. "What happened to your faith that whatever is is God's will?"
"What you are doing offends God," he repeated. "My granddaughter believes she is a baroness."
Ailena's crumpled face crinkled with a satisfied smile. "She is the baroness. When I die, she will take my place."
"She is Rachel Tibbon. She has her own soul. She cannot carry yours. What you are doing to her offends God."
Ailena's smile slid from her face. "There is no God, David. Don't looked so shocked. Have you been blind the whole time you've been here? The Saracens and the Christians have been killing each other for their gods over a hundred years now. And the Jews, the Chosen People, have been crushed in between. Where is God in all of this blood-letting? Smug in His heaven, perhaps. But down here, David, down her
e in the suffering, in this boneheap of life, there is no God." She offered her hand. "Now help me up. Mass is about to begin. There are so many tiny details I must sort out, and church is the only place I can think clearly—the music is so soothing."
-/
Jerusalem, Spring 1197
Years passed. With each season Ailena shriveled smaller, and her joy at soon fulfilling her wrath on her son seemed to burn brighter as she watched Rachel grow to a tall, imperiously beautiful woman. Daily they shared the magician’s trance, seeing as one their domain in the hills of northern Wales. And when not under his spell, they spoke to each other in a melange of Welsh and langue d'oc about their feelings and perceptions, more intimate than mother and daughter.
To appease her grandfather and to earn his blessing for this endeavor which she had embraced with her soul, Rachel read the Law with him in her spare moments. She assured him that when the baroness died, they would collect the treasure she had promised them and return to Kfar Hananya to live as dutiful Jews.
However, as that day approached, and the baroness shrank even beyond the help of the magician's potions, nightmares mocked Rachel's sleep. She dreamed repeatedly of the Paschal lamb, its throat slashed, severed veins spurting blood—and always her mother's eyes looking out at her from within the beast’s startled face.
Servant of Birds Page 15