“Do you want to wear it?” her mother asked, feeling the silk between her fingers. It was of inferior quality to the silk she had brought—almost raw—and it had faded and frayed along the folds from nearly twenty years lying folded in a chest. In was as if Stephanie de Milly wanted Isabella to look shabby at her own wedding!
“Not particularly. I don’t like the color,” Isabella admitted.
“It’s a fine gown,” Eloise de Amman objected. She had invested so many hours getting the gown adjusted that she felt personally insulted by Isabella’s rejection.
Maria Zoë turned to look at this sister-in-law she had not met before. Eloise’s face was overly long, with a much too prominent nose and close-set eyes. But all those disadvantages could have been overcome by a sunny temperament or a ready wit. Eloise had neither. She seemed both dull and morose.
“When is your child due?” Maria Zoë asked gently, nodding toward her sister-in-law’s swelling belly.
“In January, the end of January.”
“You’re welcome to come to Nablus for the lying-in, or Ibelin. Whichever you prefer. You’ll find either castle more comfortable than here.” Maria Zoë looked pointedly around the barren tower room to which Isabella had proudly led her. She had thought Ibelin was an inhospitable fortress the first time she saw it, but Ibelin was a pleasure garden compared to this. From the tower chambers of Ibelin one was only sixty feet above the ground, and looked out across the surrounding orchards or past the palms and the dunes to the brilliant blue of the Mediterranean. The view from here, in contrast, was a dizzying drop to the desert floor hundreds of feet below, and then a cracked and barren landscape of rocky hills and dry gullies across which only scrub brush grew.
“Thank you, madame,” Eloise replied stiffly. “I will lie in wherever my lord husband orders.”
Maria Zoë looked at her with a slight frown, but Eloise wouldn’t meet her gaze.
“I’ll talk to Henri,” Maria Zoë decided, and then turned to pull out of her traveling bag a gown of shiny copper-colored silk with a golden sheen on the back side. “I thought you might like to wear this,” she announced, as she shook out the worst wrinkles and spread the gown on the bed to gasps of delight from Isabella, Beth, and Eschiva all together.
“It’s beautiful!” Isabella exclaimed as she held it up to herself, stroking the long sleeves lined with gold-colored silk.
“Oh, but I’ve made it too short!” Maria Zoë exclaimed in distress. “You’ve grown so much!”
“Surely we can fix that,” Eschiva declared practically, leaning forward to check how large the hem was.
“What was that?” Elizabeth, sitting in the window seat overlooking the courtyard, asked in alarm.
“What?”
“There’s something going on out in the ward.” She leaned and unlatched the shutter to peer out.
“Probably just more guests arriving,” Eloise surmised.
“Maybe my brother the King is coming to my wedding,” Isabella suggested, revealing a hope she had harbored silently for weeks.
But with the shutter open the noise from outside was more distinct, and it was clear the shouting was angry or alarmed. Then a horn started blowing. “What does that mean?” Elizabeth asked. Trumpet signals were standardized throughout the Kingdom to ensure there was no confusion in time of war.
Maria Zoë answered soberly, “That’s the signal calling the garrison to arms.”
Elizabeth looked at Maria Zoë in shock and then hastily got out of her way, as Maria Zoë stepped into the window niche and bent forward to look out of the window. Torches were being lit and handed out as men poured through the barbican and spread out to the various tower stairs. Before long they heard men’s feet pounding up the spiral stairs of the tower. There must have been a half-dozen men on the stairs, and their breathing was heavy and rasping as they hurried past.
Maria Zoë crossed briskly to the other side of the chamber and flung open the shutters of the window that looked out across the desert. The sight before her made her catch her breath and hold it. The desert was not empty, as it should have been. It was crawling with men and horses and fluttering banners lit up by torches.
“What is it?” Elizabeth demanded, fear making her voice unnaturally sharp.
“Yes, tell us what’s going on.” Eloise echoed in a frightened whine.
Maria Zoë looked over her shoulder at her daughter, and then back out at the host gathering in the darkness, as fear crawled its way up her spine. In her mind she was trying to calculate just how many men they had gathered here. Oultrejourdain, at least, had all his knights, and she had brought sixty fighting men from Nablus. Edessa would not have come with his sister and the Countess of Jaffa without a substantial force. Maybe three hundred men?
In a castle like this, that ought to be enough to fight off an assault—but in a siege the large number of wedding guests, with their escorts and servants, would devour stores at an alarming rate, maybe ten times faster than the garrison alone. Even more dangerous, the cisterns of a desert castle might be overtaxed by the number of people gathered here. Maria Zoë fought back from her consciousness the tales told of besieged garrisons reduced to eating rats and drinking dirty water until they died of disease like flies. She tried to focus on what she could see outside, trying now to estimate the size and character of the force besieging them. In the darkness it wasn’t really possible, so she drew the shutters closed and turned to face the others.
She opened her mouth to speak, but something clattered on the wall just beside the window. The sound was so close and loud that Beth screamed in terror and Eschiva pulled her into her arms, as much to comfort herself as her maid. There was loud shouting from overhead as the noise repeated itself. A pair of feet tore down the stairs. A fist pounded furiously at the door and a man shouted, “Keep the shutters closed, for Christ’s sake! They’re shooting flaming arrows at us!”
“Who is shooting at us?” Elizabeth wanted to know.
“Salah ad-Din—with his entire host.”
Tower of David, Jerusalem, late October 1183
Baldwin sat upon the throne with the baldachin of Jerusalem over his head, the crown on his brow, and his face concealed behind his silver mask. He could not move his limbs, and Sir Daniel stood behind the throne ready to respond to his slightest request. Despite the rain drenching the walls and gurgling in the gutters, the Tower of David was hot, and Baldwin was sweating under the bandages and layers of clothes designed to disguise his claw-like hands and toeless feet.
The recriminations against the Regent came fast and furiously, and Jaffa was decidedly at a disadvantage in the absence of the Count of Edessa and the Lord of Oultrejourdain, who usually took his side. The King, watching from his vantage of distanced neutrality on the throne, noticed that not only were the Count of Tripoli and the Lord of Ramla hammering away at an apparently helpless Guy de Lusignan, but the Constable of the Kingdom was eloquently silent. Aimery did not take part in the attacks upon his brother, but he made no move to defend him, either. That said everything.
The King knew that Ramla and Tripoli hated the younger Lusignan for their own reasons, but Aimery de Lusignan had backed his brother up to now—at least in public. Baldwin sighed, remembering how Oultrejourdain had once suggested Aimery would make a better husband for Sibylla than his younger brother. How very true! Aimery was a brave man—but more important, he was capable of thinking through the consequences of any action, and he knew how to make friends. Aimery was no less an outsider than Guy, but when he had been captured by the Saracens shortly after his arrival, King Amalric himself had paid his ransom. He had won the respect of the barons of Outremer by showing them respect first. Even as Constable, he listened to their counsel, took their sensibilities into account, and never acted as if he thought himself superior to them.
Even Ramla, Baldwin reflected, as he watched Balian’s older brother gesture grandly and then point an accusing finger at the ineffectual Guy, would have made a better kin
g. If nothing else, Ramla had the bearing of a king—he was tall and muscular, with a strong face. He was proud but not haughty, and more important, he was vigorous and decisive, unafraid of making mistakes.
Baldwin asked himself how he could have made such a fatal error as giving his sister to Guy de Lusignan. With both his mother and sister absent, it was as if the very air had cleared and he could see better. He could certainly see that Guy de Lusignan was not fit to wear the crown of Jerusalem, and that Tripoli, despite being slight of stature, pedantic, and cautious by nature, was no traitor. How could he have let that evil seed, planted by his mother, grow? Yes, he had resented being under Tripoli’s tutelage as a youth; Tripoli had made it all too plain that he didn’t expect Baldwin to live for long. But that was a far cry from being power-hungry and disloyal!
“Water,” Baldwin whispered, turning his head to Sir Daniel.
Sir Daniel at once stepped back to the window niche behind the throne to pour from the waiting pitcher into a goblet. The niche looked out over the gate of the citadel, and Daniel’s attention was distracted by a commotion near the gate. He frowned and knelt on the window seat to get a better look out of the narrow loop window. It looked for all the world as if a Bedouin had forced his way into the ward and was fighting off the men who tried to stop him. An assassin? Sir Daniel thought with alarm, but calmed himself. There were plenty of guards out there.
He drew back out of the window niche and brought the water to the King. He leaned across the arm of the throne, shielding the King from view, as he lifted the mask and held the goblet to Baldwin’s lips.
The shouting from the ward was becoming audible in the audience chamber, and several of the men nearer the door turned to look over their shoulders. A moment later the door crashed open and a Bedouin burst in on the High Court of Jerusalem, his white robes drenched with rain and mud staining the skirts all the way to the knees. With a furious gesture, the man reached up and tore off his headdress, exposing the familiar but heavily bearded face of Henri d’Ibelin. Chatter erupted around the room while Sir Henri strode towards the throne and went down on one knee before the King.
“Your grace! Kerak is under siege. Salah ad-Din has brought his army from Damascus, completely investing it. He took the town in the first assault, and—”
The room exploded with curses and exclamations that drowned out Sir Henri. Some men demanded more information, while others insisted it could not be, and still others shouted that it was what Reynald de Châtillon deserved.
“Silence!” roared the Constable. “Hear Sir Henri out!”
“We barely managed to take in most of the townspeople, but we had to destroy the bridge across the fosse under the very feet of the men holding it against the enemy. We lost a dozen brave men.” Henri’s report elicited a grim response from his audience. All the men gathered in this room knew that the castle of Kerak was perched on the tip of a mountain ridge, protected on three sides by steep cliffs that fell hundreds of feet to the valley floor. They also knew that the town of Kerak sat on the same ridge to the north of the castle, and that an assault on the castle would invariably come from the north through the town. To prevent this, a man-made fosse roughly thirty feet wide and four hundred feet deep separated the castle from the town; the fosse could only be crossed by a wooden drawbridge. The men in the Tower of David understood that if the bridge was not raised in time, it would be necessary to destroy it, but they also sympathized with and admired the men who had died to hold it long enough for it to be hacked out from under them.
Henri d’Ibelin continued, “Salah ad-Din has deployed four siege engines in the town that keep the castle under continuous bombardment.”
“What about the wedding?” someone thought to ask. Balian was too stunned to ask himself. He was torn between hope that the siege had started before Maria Zoë arrived and horror at the thought that Isabella was undoubtedly trapped inside.
“The marriage took place under enemy fire. Madame d’Oultrejourdain sent out part of the wedding feast to Salah ad-Din by lowering it down in a basket from one of the eastern towers. In return, the Sultan sent word he would not bombard the tower where the nuptials were taking place, if she would identify it for him with a white flag. It was during this exchange that I was able to slip out of the postern, disguised as you see me now. I made my way across the desert in the dark. With wedding guests and townsfolk crammed in the castle, I doubt food and water will last more than a month.”
Other men were asking about their wives, while Barry clasped Balian on the shoulder and muttered, “Thank God Elizabeth left Godfrey behind.”
“Is your son all you care about? Eschiva and Elizabeth are both trapped there, along with Maria Zoë and Isabella.”
Barry answered irritably, “Of course I care about Eschiva and Elizabeth, but I’m still glad that at least Godfrey isn’t there.”
Balian had no chance to answer, because Guy de Lusignan was dramatically calling for the collected barons to take horse and rush to the relief of Kerak. His demand was as melodramatic as it was selfserving. He was clearly most interested in distracting attention from his miserable performance in the past campaign. Guy had, as usual, misjudged the temper of the men around him. His call to arms was met with deafening silence—broken only by a cool question from the Count of Tripoli: “Under your command, Jaffa? Never.”
“What are you saying?” Guy asked back, incredulous. “I am Regent. A critical castle is under siege! Not just that, but half the fair ladies of the realm, including both of the royal princesses, are trapped inside. We cannot let Kerak, the princesses, the Dowager Queen,” Guy made one of his elaborate French bows to Balian, “the Queen Mother,” he now bowed to the King, “and all the other fair ladies fall into Saracen hands! Why, they’d be turned into harem slaves!”
His last dramatic claim earned only a contemptuous snort from Tripoli. Into Jaffa’s baffled face the Count of Tripoli remarked, “Salah ad-Din is much too civilized—and self-interested—to enslave noblewomen. He’d hold them for ransom, nothing more.”
“You can’t honestly mean you’re just going to sit here and let Kerak—with all the highest ladies of the land—fall into the hands of the Saracens!” Guy de Lusignan could not fathom what was happening.
“Of course not,” Tripoli replied, and the silence of the others underlined the degree to which he had tacitly been accepted as their spokesman. “We will relieve Kerak—as soon as the King appoints a different Regent.” As he finished he turned pointedly to King Baldwin, leaving the younger Lusignan gasping like a fish out of water, while his brother Aimery raised his eyebrows in evident amusement.
Baldwin sat up straighter in his throne and lifted his head to meet Tripoli’s gaze. Things were taking an interesting turn.
Guy was blustering, “Regents can’t just be appointed and dismissed! I was—”
“—not legally appointed,” Tripoli interrupted him. “You never had the approval of the High Court.”
Shouts of “Hear! Hear!” and “True!” erupted from across the room as other members of the Court voiced their support for Tripoli’s audacious move.
“Silence.” Baldwin tried to draw attention to himself, but he could not make himself heard above the acrimonious accusations that were passing furiously between Jaffa and Tripoli and the general uproar among the other members of the High Court. Sir Daniel, however, had heard him, and he bellowed into the room: “Silence!”
Startled, the members of the High Court looked at the throne and gradually fell expectantly silent.
“My lord of Tripoli, do I understand you to mean that, in your opinion, I had no right to appoint a Regent without the consent of the High Court?”
“Your grace, not even a king can be crowned in Jerusalem without the approval of the High Court,” Tripoli countered firmly. Tripoli was not as imposing a man as Ramla; he was much smaller and slighter, with a somewhat hawkish nose. However, he was arguably more intelligent than Ramla, and certainly more intelligent tha
n Jaffa. In the name of the merciful Christ, Baldwin asked himself, why had he named Jaffa Regent rather than Tripoli? Just to please his self-centered sister? Or because he had felt slighted and disdained during his minority? He had not liked—and still did not like—Tripoli, but what did that have to do with appointing a Regent? Good kings appointed men to positions of power for their capabilities and virtues not their congeniality.
“My lords.” The King lifted his gaze from Tripoli to the entire room. “If it is your opinion that no Regent could be appointed without the approval of the High Court, then we have no Regent.” Baldwin’s eyes watched the reactions closely, and there was widespread agreement with his statement. Notably, the bishops were nodding and the Templar and Hospitaller Masters were in rare agreement, while Aimery de Lusignan just shrugged, as if washing his hands of the whole business.
When the occupants of the room had settled down and turned again expectantly to the King, he announced: “In that case, Constable, light a fire on the roof of this tower to hearten the defenders of Kerak, and summon the army to Jerusalem that we may go to the relief of Kerak.”
To his disappointment, his words were not met with a thunderous cheer of approval. Instead Baldwin, too, was met by stunned silence. It was Aimery de Lusignan who put the question on everyone’s mind into words. “Do—ah—do you want me to command the army, your grace?”
“No, I will command it myself,” Baldwin answered.
Now everyone started speaking at once. Jaffa’s voice, of course, was loudest in protesting that this idea was preposterous—but Tripoli, too, seemed far from pleased by the idea, and there could be little doubt that Aimery de Lusignan was disappointed. These were the three men who thought they should command the army, and so their voices and arguments moved Baldwin not at all, but he was distressed to realize that the Grand Masters of the Temple and Hospital and the Bishop of Bethlehem were also shaking their heads. They certainly did not expect command, so what was their objection? Baldwin was hurt and confused by this rejection of his command when he had, after all, never led the army of Jerusalem to defeat in all the years he had commanded in person.
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