Oultrejourdain paused to see the reactions of the men around him. Most were nodding agreement, although Maria Zoë thought her new son-in-law Humphrey looked decidedly nervous.
“Our duty,” Oultrejourdain continued matter-of-factly, “is to be ready to sortie the moment the royal army launches its attack. If it has deployed to the south, as I hope, we will be able to sortie out of the southern postern, and it may be possible to cut right through the enemy to join up. If we can do that, we should be able to feed enough infantry out of the postern to provide protection for our cavalry to regroup and launch a second attack.”
Maria Zoë was impressed despite herself. She hated this man with all her heart, but he clearly understood war.
“If, however, the Constable deploys to the west or east, we’ll have a much harder time joining up with him, and should therefore concentrate instead on a diversion.”
“What about the northern postern?” Henri d’Ibelin asked. He was leaning against one of the pillars that supported the vaulting of the roof, his arms crossed over his chest. The fact that he had managed to escape the invested castle, reach Jerusalem, and return through the enemy lines had greatly increased his stature, and indeed his allure. Maria Zoë had noted many of the ladies cooped up here taking an inordinate interest in him—all except his wife, that was.
“Ah, Sir Henri!” Oultrejourdain was clearly pleased with his protégé. “I expected that question from you. The northern postern is far too steep for horses, but we could send men-at-arms down that slope, ready to break out and cause havoc at an appropriate moment. Don’t you think?”
Sir Henri nodded. “I’ll select a hundred men and take them down tonight under cover of darkness. We can wait in the base of the fosse until you give us a signal.”
“Excellent. We can discuss the details in private,” Oultrejourdain responded, and Maria Zoë suspected she did not want to know those details.
“Does anyone else have any questions?” Oultrejourdain scanned the room, his eyes coming to rest on Maria Zoë with a smirk. “Madame d’Ibelin, perhaps?” He meant to mock her.
“To ensure you have the maximum number of men ready for the sortie, why don’t you assign some of us to lookout duty?” Maria Zoë suggested spontaneously. “We may not be able to fight, but our eyes are as sharp as yours, my lord.”
There was a surprised reaction among the knights—some grumbling, some casting amused or deprecating smiles at the ladies, others shrugging and saying, “Why not?”
Stephanie de Milly silenced them all. “I’ll take charge of that. We women will post the lookouts starting immediately, so the men can get a good night’s rest.”
Oultrejourdain shrugged in answer to indicate he did not object, and that was the end of it. War could make strange bedfellows, Maria Zoë concluded, as she and her bitterest enemy, Stephanie de Milly, went together to make a roster and assign volunteers.
Sentries had been a part of Marie Zoë’s life as long as she could remember—well, at least since she’d come to the vulnerable and threatened Kingdom of Jerusalem—but she had never actually stood watch before. She was surprised to discover how hard it was to stay alert, particularly after her feet became too tired to pace. Yet it was impossible to sleep, either, knowing that battle was likely to be joined on the next day.
It was bad enough knowing that a battle was imminent when Balian took their troops to join a muster far away. But at least before, she had had her duties and her children to distract her thoughts. The thought of looking down from these very walls and watching the ebb and flow of battle, watching men hack each other to pieces, watching horses wild with pain and terror, did not appeal to her. Part of her wanted to hide under the covers of her bed with a pillow over her ears until it was all over. But she wouldn’t be able to stand that, either, she concluded with a deep sigh.
As the night passed, the campfires on the valley floor gradually died out. Because Maria Zoë had not been on watch before, she did not realize this was unusual and therefore significant. She did not report it.
Instead, she wrapped her cloak more firmly around her shoulders and forced herself to pace some more, while her mind insisted on thinking through scenarios. The worst one was that the Christian army would attack but be beaten back with heavy casualties. They would then have no choice but surrender, and would all face Saracen imprisonment with only a distant prospect of ransom. Maria Zoë did not fear personal abuse—she was of too high rank—but she feared for Beth and Rahel. And of course, in such a scenario there was no certainty that Balian would not be among the killed, wounded, or captured.
Another possibility was that the Christian army would succeed in driving off their besiegers, but that Balian might still be among the dead or dying. He had the best armor money could buy and he had a remarkable stallion, but no man was invincible. The thigh wound he’d taken at Le Forbelet was testimony to his vulnerability.
Maria Zoë knew she would survive Balian’s death. She had five children who still depended on her protection and care because, married or not, Isabella was still her little girl, and what she had seen of Humphrey had not impressed her. Not that he didn’t have his good qualities. He seemed genuinely fond of Isabella. He was certainly gentle with her, and he was very well mannered and well educated, too. Certainly Isabella would be better off at Toron with Humphrey than here in Kerak under the control of Oultrejourdain. Nevertheless, Humphrey did not strike her as the kind of man who would stand up to the likes of Agnes de Courtenay or Guy de Lusignan when it came to Isabella’s rights. He was still young of course, at fifteen, and he might well grow into a more forceful man, but meanwhile she remained Isabella’s strongest advocate.
So for the sake of Isabella and Balian’s children, she would not break down or withdraw from the world if she lost him. But what a bleak and desolate place this world would be without him!
Was the horizon becoming lighter? Surely the contours of the land were becoming more distinct? Maria Zoë strained her eyes in the murky light, frowning as she looked for the familiar outlines of tents. She couldn’t seem to make them out, although looking in the other direction, back toward the castle, she could clearly see various features of the now all-too-familiar stone structure: towers, stairs, arches. She looked again toward the desert, first with a sense of irritation because the patterns of light and dark that had marked the besieging army weren’t visible.
And then her sleep-starved brain began to understand: Salah ad-Din’s army wasn’t there! It had melted away in the night!
They opened the gates and flung down an improvised bridge made of beams lashed together with ropes and cross boards nailed down on top. Maria Zoë didn’t like the look of it and did not relish the thought of crossing on it—a sentiment the horses of their rescuers shared. Neither Antioch nor Tripoli could persuade their horses to cross the fosse on such a precarious contraption, and so the Prince and Count were forced to dismount. While they were doing that, however, people surged out of the castle to swarm around them in jubilation.
It was the commoners who fled first, their confinement having been so much more unpleasant. Besides, they had been housed down in the lower ward anyway, near the gate that opened on the improvised bridge. They swarmed past the vanguard of the relieving army and into the town they had been forced to abandon in haste six weeks earlier.
It was thus the common people, not the knights and nobles that followed them, who first found the King of Jerusalem. When they realized that the King himself, carried on a litter, had come to the relief of Kerak, the people of the town started cheering so wildly that in the castle it sounded as if there’d been some kind of ambush.
Then those like Maria Zoë, watching from the northern wall walk, saw a horde of people surge back toward the castle—and in their midst, carried upon what seemed like a hundred shoulders, was a litter. It was covered by a white canopy with the gold crosses of Jerusalem glittering in the morning sun. And upon that litter sat a small man, likewise dressed in white-an
d-gold robes, white gloves, and a silver mask.
“Jerusalem!” they shouted in a frenzy of joy as they carried him into the castle in triumph. “Jerusalem!”
The great Sultan Salah ad-Din had fled at the mere approach of the Leper King.
Chapter 11
Jerusalem, April 1184
“THERE HAS TO BE SOME GROUNDS for annulling the marriage!” the King of Jerusalem protested to the collected princes of the Church. The learned bishops had been arguing in Latin over Church law for hours, and King Baldwin had had enough. He had rarely felt so helpless, and all his frustration with his illness, his paralysis, and his approaching death was echoed in his voice as it rang out, loud if distorted, from his silver mask. “My sister’s marriage to Guy de Lusignan threatens the very existence of this Kingdom! The marriage must be dissolved!”
“Marriage vows are sacred, your grace!” the Patriarch Heraclius retorted primly, harvesting laughter from his fellow prelates and a muttered “So are a priest’s vows of chastity” from the Archbishop of Tyre.
Baldwin looked with affection (lost behind the mask) at his old tutor. The Archbishop was too principled and prickly to forgive Baldwin the insults he had suffered, and Baldwin accepted that, but Baldwin was glad to have his voice of reason in the council again. He was further warmed to have him so uncompromisingly behind his efforts to dissolve Sibylla’s marriage.
Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Caesarea deflected discussion away from Heraclius’ scandalous lifestyle with a warning frown at his fellow archbishop as he insisted, “That is a topic for a different day.” Gregory of Caesarea personally shared William of Tyre’s outrage over Heraclius’ flaunting of his mistress, but he felt equally strongly that the Patriarch’s morals should not be discussed before the secular authorities.
“Indeed, but the sacredness of vows is something we must not lose track of here, my lords. Intensely as I sympathize with your grace’s desire to be rid of Lusignan,” the Bishop of Acre addressed himself to his King, “marriages cannot be dissolved at whim.” The pomposity of the young bishop harvested rolling eyes from some of his more worldly colleagues, but vigorous support from the Patriarch, who added, “We are not godless Mussulmen who can simply say ‘I divorce thee’ four times to be rid of a wife.”
“Guy de Lusignan is the last man who wants to be rid of his wife,” Tyre retorted sharply.
“Unfortunately Sibylla does not want to be rid of her husband, either,” the Archbishop of Nazareth pointed out with a weary sigh.
“This isn’t about what Sibylla or Guy wants!” the King reminded them in an angry outburst. “It’s about the Kingdom of Jerusalem! We are endangered as we have never been before since the very founding of the Kingdom. We are surrounded by a united Islamic state under a competent and charismatic leader. We must stand united behind a leader capable of leading the defense. That man is not Guy de Lusignan!”
His words were greeted by silence until the practical Bishop of Bethlehem tried to explain. “The problem, your grace, is that the usual grounds for dissolving unwanted royal marriages—consanguinity—just don’t apply here. Lusignan is not related to any royal house, much less your own.”
“What about bigamy?” the Bishop of Lydda suggested hopefully. “Surely Guy de Lusignan was married or betrothed to someone in France before he came out here? Most crusaders are.”
“I’ve looked into that,” the Bishop of Hebron reported with a deep sigh. “Unfortunately, as a fourth son, he was too poor to marry—which did not stop him from fornicating and committing adultery, of course. Nevertheless, no father was prepared to give his daughter in marriage to Guy unless Hugh de Lusignan, Guy’s oldest brother and Lord of Lusignan, settled land on him. The elder Lusignan, however, does not appear to have had much affection for his youngest brother, and is on record saying he’d rather give land to the devil.”
“Wait,” Tyre sat up straighter. “Guy may not have been married before, but Sibylla was!”
“William de Montferrat was dead long before Guy even set foot on our shores.”
“But the Baron de Ramla was not,” Tyre pointed out, harvesting astonished looks from his colleagues.
“You can’t dredge up that old story!” Heraclius protested shrilly, and everyone in the room stared at him.
“Everyone knows that Princess Sibylla had promised herself to the Baron of Ramla,” Tyre pressed his case in a reasonable tone. “Why, even Salah ad-Din and the Emperor of the Eastern Empire had heard of it—otherwise they would not have set, much less paid, a ransom of one hundred fifty thousand bezants.”
“It doesn’t matter what she said to him,” Heraclius insisted in obvious agitation; “their agreement was never blessed by the Church. They did not exchange vows!”
“How do you know that?” Bethlehem wanted to know.
“Her mother told me—”
“In bed, no doubt!” Tyre mocked, harvesting laughs from some of his colleagues and admonishments from others.
“Does it matter where she told me?” Heraclius flung back. “What’s important is only the truth, and who knows better than the girl’s mother—”
“I’d say the man she gave the vows to. No woman tells her mother everything.”
“Careful, William. Ramla has remarried. If he exchanged vows with Sibylla, he too is a bigamist, and that would make his son Godfrey illegitimate. He may not like that notion,” the Bishop of Lydda warned.
“Yes,” the Archbishop of Caesarea pressed Tyre earnestly, “think carefully. Do you know for certain that Sibylla and Ramla exchanged vows?”
“No, but I’m saying we need to investigate.”
“This is ridiculous!” Heraclius protested, his very defensiveness underlining how serious the charge was. “If they’d exchanged vows, Ramla would have protested before Sibylla’s marriage to Guy. He would have stopped it!”
“How could he? He was in Constantinople at the time,” Tyre pointed out smugly. “He returned to find the marriage celebrated and consummated—which undoubtedly curbed his appetite for his faithless bride.”
“He still could have protested—”
“He did,” the King reminded them, his whole body vibrating with newfound hope. “He did!”
“We can’t take Ramla’s word for this,” Heraclius protested vehemently. “He will say they were betrothed just to get his hands on the Crown. His word is worthless.”
“You exceed yourself, my lord,” the King rebuked the Patriarch. “You have no right to call a baron of Jerusalem a liar.”
“But if Sibylla denies it,” Caesarea asked reasonably, “what then?”
“It will prove nothing, as the Lady of Jaffa appears singularly attached to Monsieur de Lusignan,” Tyre answered dismissively.
“She is besotted with him!” Lydda agreed, shaking his head in disgust.
“So we can assume she will deny having exchanged vows with Ramla, even if she did, just as she evidently forgot all her promises to Ramla as soon as she’d become enflamed with passion for Lusignan,” Caesarea concluded his argument. “That means it will be his word against hers, with both having strong motivation to lie.”
“If they exchanged vows before a priest, then it should be possible to find the priest who officiated—or a written agreement,” Lydda suggested cautiously.
“There were no such vows!” Heraclius insisted stubbornly.
“There’s no harm in asking Ramla—and if he says he exchanged vows with Sibylla, then we can ask him to produce the priest who officiated,” Tyre returned with a smug smile; he knew no one could oppose such a reasonable proposal. Around him his fellow bishops gave their vigorous assent, leaving the despised Patriarch stewing in his own anger.
The Baron of Ramla stood on the ramparts of David’s Gate and looked eastward into the city of Jerusalem. From here he could see all the major landmarks, from the Tower of David on his right to the Patriarch’s palace on his left. Behind the Patriarch’s palace rose the dome of the Holy Sepulcher, almost dwarfed by the
massive Hospitaller complex beside it. Farther away, the even larger dome of the Temple of God reared up against the luminous sky of dusk, while the Templar headquarters, housed in what had been the Al-Aqsa mosque, crouched to its right. Jerusalem.
On these streets, on the paving stones leading from the gate below him past the Hospitaller quarters to the old Jewish Temple, Christ had walked. Now tens of thousands of pilgrims followed in his footsteps. The Baron of Ramla watched as a slow-moving procession of pilgrims shuffled forward, singing a hymn and carrying candles. A couple with a crippled boy between them were making their way along the cobbles on their knees in evident hope of a miracle. A lone knight followed behind them, leading his horse in a clear gesture of penitence; his cloak, with a cross sewn on the shoulder, was ragged and filthy from the journey, and he seemed grayed and bent from the weight of his sins.
They came from the four corners of the earth, speaking many tongues and wearing everything from ermine to rags. They came at great expense through great danger, braving the uncertainties of sea travel or walking across two continents to reach this city. They had mortgaged or sold all they owned at home and had faced the threat of pirates, cutthroats, thieves, and slavers. They had endured thirst, hunger, exhaustion, and disease. They came for the redemption of their sins, in search of Divine forgiveness. They came to prove their love of Christ and earn their entry into heaven. They were drawn here by the sole desire to pray at the place where Christ had shed his blood for them—and risen from the grave again with the promise of everlasting life for those who followed him.
And it was all at risk.
Lifting his gaze slightly, Ramla’s eyes traced the perimeter walls. White and tall, they enclosed the vibrant city like a mother’s arms her child. The clean lines were punctuated by square towers and projecting gates, all topped with battlements and proudly flying the white-and-gold banners of the Kingdom. But Ramla was a military man, and proud as the walls appeared, Ramla could see their vulnerability. They might keep out the rabble at night, but they were not built to withstand a modern siege with the kind of engines Salah ad-Din could bring to bear against them, or the sappers he would send to undermine them.
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