“No, you don’t,” said Tripoli. “It’s like looking at an unburied corpse.” In some ways he was still, profoundly, a mere barbarian. “He should die and have done with it. What is it?”
A servant had come into the room, and stood bowing and waving his hands, trying to attract attention. The Sultan’s eyes sharpened. Behind him, he saw his nephew Ali, waiting in the doorway, and he said, “With your permission, my lord Count, I think this is my concern. Yes.”
Ali came in, hastily. His face was flushed. Behind him was a man with cropped red hair and a full red beard, whom the Sultan did not know, but whom Tripoli knew: the Count stood up suddenly, saying, “What are you doing here?”
Ali said, “Uncle, my lord, call your guards, you must protect yourself.”
Behind him, the redheaded man said to Tripoli, in French, “They’ve lost Rannulf.”
“Oh,” said Tripoli. His gaze flicked toward the Sultan. “Well, that’s a mistake.”
Salah ad-Din sat where he was, his hands on his knees. “Ali, what is going on?”
His nephew said, “My lord, the Templar al-Wali is missing. He could be anywhere, even inside the palace somewhere. You yourself could be in mortal danger.”
“Truly,” the Sultan said. He jerked his attention toward Tripoli, and the redheaded man, who he realized now was a Templar; why he was with Ali the Sultan put aside for later consideration. “Is he of evil intent? What sort of man did you bring into my court?”
Tripoli said, “Not one I would want roaming freely through my palace. I thought you were keeping them under control.”
The Sultan nodded to Ali. “Call my guards. I will go back to my own apartments until he is found. When he is found, bring him to me.” He stood, coming face to face with the redheaded knight. “Your comrade is foolish to attempt this. He is only assuring himself of trouble. If you tell us where he is, it will go easier with you in the end.”
“I’m sure it would,” the knight said, composed, “but I’m not telling you anything.”
“Ali, take him and chain him until his friend is found.”
Tripoli said, “These men are your guests, my lord Sultan, you may not misuse them.”
“They are misusing me,” the Sultan said, making ready to leave, and then the door opened again, and he lifted his head, and past the shoulders of the other men he looked straight into the black eyes of the Templar called Saint.
Salah ad-Din gave a violent start. Around him the room fell suddenly quiet, and the Templar walked in among them. “Looking for me?” He went through their midst to the couch and dropped down onto it, as if he were master here. He was barefoot. The djellabah he wore was already stained and filthy. His gaze was fixed on the Sultan. “I bow before the magnificence of the Sultan of Cairo and Damascus, beloved of Allah, Master of Realms and Dominions.” He did not bow.
Ali said, “Guards,” and the Sultan raised his hand to stop him.
“No. Don’t be a fool. More of a fool. You may go. My lord Count will stay, and this other knight, and—” He gestured toward the couch. “The rest of you will leave us.”
Quickly they filed out of the room. The Sultan sat down again on his chair. He could not bring himself to look at the man on the couch. “What is it, monk?”
“I want to get out of here,” the Templar said. “I did not come to the Holy Land to die of pox, and this city is rotten with it. Make this truce, now, so I can take my men and leave.”
The Sultan folded his arms together. All his grand designs were dwindling down fast to a small practicality. This damned knight was about to bring down the whole elaborate subterfuge. He said, “I have set my conditions for a truce. Match them, and it is done.”
Tripoli said, “Is there plague in the city?”
“There is sickness in every city.”
The Templar’s voice was relentless. “There was plague in your army, too, wasn’t there, at Jacob’s Ford—that was why you did not attack Jerusalem: all your men were dying of the pox. You can’t get an army together without everybody falling sick. You’re no threat to anybody, right now. Mouse, bring me something to drink.”
The redheaded knight obeyed him, crossing the room to the table where the wine ewer stood, and then moving to stand beside the couch. If he had joined Ali in an indiscretion clearly he had come out again on the same side he had gone in. The Sultan made one last attempt to master this and get what he wanted. He lifted his gaze to Tripoli. “Are you lord here, or is this clod ?”
Tripoli said, “A three-year truce, my lord. No payment, no exchanges of prisoners.” His eyes were steady; behind the fringe of his moustache his lips hardly seemed to move.
The Sultan was quiet. He still did not look at the man sprawling on the couch as if he owned this palace, as if he ruled this world. The Templar said, “If you do not give us the truce, Sultan, I will go back to Jerusalem for three hundred of my brothers, and we will come and take this city, and there is nobody here to prevent us from doing it.”
“You’re bluffing,” Salah ad-Din said, curt. Now he did turn and stare at the Templar. “I crushed your brotherhood at the Litani River. There aren’t three hundred of you left.”
The knight sneered at him. “We are dragon’s teeth, Sultan. We grow back.”
Salah ad-Din studied him a moment, the hard black eyes unblinking, the mouth in the dense beard heavy with a sensuality that should not have been so resistant to seduction. The Sultan saw little chance now of gaining anything out of this negotiation, save some necessary room to maneuver.
It would be a relief to be able to leave Damascus, to go up to the mountains for the rest of the summer’s heat, to escape from the plague. He needed the truce. He needed money but he would find it elsewhere. He wanted his nephew out of Margat but that would have to wait. He nodded to Tripoli.
“Very well, I can accept that. A truce of three years.”
“Excellent,” Tripoli said. “I’ll send for a scribe.” He glanced at the Templar. “Does that satisfy you?”
The Templar stood. He took the cup from the redheaded man, and drank it empty. “I will hold to it,” he said, and put the cup down, and walked out the door, the other knight on his heels.
Tripoli sat back in the cushions of his chair, tenting his fingers together, his eyes brimming with amusement. “You know, my lord, we have a saying, something about supping with the devil, to whom that particular Templar bears a close familial resemblance. You should have been honest with us from the beginning.” There was a little of the priest in him; he brandished a forefinger. “You see there is some danger in being too elaborate.”
“Bah,” the Sultan said. “You Franks, you’re all damned. Get some servants in here, close the windows.”
Bear moaned, his eyes bleary. “God’s blood, I’ve been poisoned.” His horse shifted sideways and he swayed in his saddle as if he were about to fall off.
Stephen gathered his reins and mounted. They had all heard about the plague in Damascus; now half the palace was gathered in this open court, making ready to escape from the diseased city. The Templars had moved off toward the wall, to get by themselves, and the palace folk were avoiding them anyway. Felx came up through the gate from the stable, leading his horse and a packhorse. Rannulf rode on his heels, with another packhorse.
Over in the middle of the courtyard horns blared. Tripoli and the Sultan were exchanging more ceremonial remarks. A pattering of applause went up. Felx slung his stirrup leather over his saddle and checked his girths.
“Truce, false,” he said. “It’s a long way to come for a few words.”
Stephen said, “Oh, I didn’t mind it.”
Ali was over there, in the crowd around the Sultan. Stephen turned his eyes away. He would be glad to be gone from here, out of the way of sin. On the other hand, he felt like a god. Rannulf mounted his horse and swung around to yell at them.
“Form up! Move, Felx, or you’ll walk back to Jerusalem.”
“I’ll walk on your black heart,”
Felx muttered.
If he heard that, Rannulf ignored it. The Norman knight trotted his horse up and down in front of the other Templars. His voice was sharp, pitched just loud enough to reach their ears. “Now, listen to me. Since you all had such a wonderful time, you must know you’re going to do penance, and here it is. I begged some corn for the horses, but I could get no food for us; we’ll be fasting all the way back to Tiberias.”
Bear hissed between his teeth. “I can’t eat anyway.” He put one hand to his forehead.
Felx said, “Do we have an escort again?”
“They’re letting us ride vanguard this time,” Rannulf said. “If there’s a Saracen who can keep pace with us, I want to see him do it.”
In the crowd around the Sultan and the Count of Tripoli, a cheer rose; the Sultan was giving Tripoli a splendid chestnut horse, dressed in gaudy cloths and harness. From the ranks of the Sultan’s guard a rider jogged across the pavement toward the Templars. Recognizing him, Stephen straightened, wondering what he should say, but it was Rannulf that Ali approached.
“Al-Wali!” His voice was harsh. “My uncle the most excellent Sultan, in the name of Allah, bids me tell you he will not offend you by offering you gifts.”
Rannulf sidestepped his horse around to face him. “The Sultan has given me fitting gifts.”
Ali’s voice rose, loud enough to reach all ears. “He would show you some honor, for the sake of his honor and that of Allah, and so he will give you, not treasure or beauty, but a promise. You have met twice now, he says. Twice now you have been the victor, but the time will come when he will put your head on a stake.” Without looking at Stephen, he wheeled his mare and loped away.
Bear said, “I’d sooner the treasure and beauty.”
Rannulf hacked out one of his unpleasant laughs. “Let’s go.”
By midday they had outdistanced the last of the Saracen escort. They climbed through the pass in the hills and spent the night on the desert west of there, eating nothing, drinking water, one man always sitting up to keep watch. Stephen woke before dawn, his belly raging with hunger, his ears full of the Matins bells. As he wakened wide, the tolling of the bell became the moan of the desert wind.
He lifted his head. The other men slept around him on the ground. Rannulf was sitting watch, cross-legged, his head bowed. Silently Stephen got up, and went off a little to relieve himself and say his prayers. Felx and Bear slept on. Stephen sat down next to Rannulf.
“I have to confess.”
“Do it,” Rannulf said.
Stephen went quickly through the formula, one hand up, fingers splayed, between his face and Rannulf’s, and got through his sins at a gallop, burying Ali among luxury and gluttony and a few other abstractions. His stomach hurt. It seemed important to have his sins removed before they reached Jerusalem. Afterward he sat staring into the darkness, struggling with the memory. Beside him Rannulf suddenly crossed himself.
“Mouse. I want you to shrive me.”
Stephen lifted his head, pulled out of his own thoughts. He had said his confession to others of the Temple but he had never heard one before; quickly he got his mind into the other half of the ritual. He said, “Tell it.”
Rannulf lifted one hand between them, his gaze aimed steadily somewhere else. Stephen looked down at the ground.
“Forgive me, Jesus, for I have sinned,” Rannulf said. He fell still for a while. Stephen waited, puzzled; Rannulf said nothing for so long a time he wondered if the other knight had fallen asleep.
Then at last Rannulf said, “There’s a woman.”
“In Damascus?” Stephen blurted, and almost looked at him.
“No. In Jerusalem. I’ve never touched her. But I want her. I dream of her. I think of her all the time.” He said, intensely, “I love her.”
Stephen watched his own hands in the dark. He said his part of the ritual. “Are you contrite?”
“No,” Rannulf said.
“Can I absolve you, then?” He remembered how Rannulf had refused to serve the Mass or receive the Sacrament, on the way here, and guessed the answer.
“No,” Rannulf said.
Stephen reached out and took hold of Rannulf’s hand. The other knight closed his fingers on him. Neither of them spoke. Stephen wondered who the woman was, and gave up at once. They sat like that until the sun rose and the other men woke up.
Chapter XX
The city of Ascalon, Sibylla thought, was like the sheep in the fable, that fattened between two packs of wolves. She laid her hand on the railing of the terrace and looked out over the city. To the west the sea ran dark and blue out as far as her sight reached, out to where the sky began; as the waves rushed on toward Ascalon, they paled, turned green as Chinese stone, and then broke into tumbling white that flooded along the beaches in a restless, ceaseless surge, gnawing and clawing at the shore like wolves.
The shore itself rose in white waves, the sand waves of the desert that prowled up out of the south with the furnace wind of Arabia. When the wind rose, its shriveling blast howled like wolves.
Between the dunes and the surf Ascalon raised its towers. For centuries the city had given way as it had to, so that to south and west her earlier boundaries were marked with broken walls, great tilted blocks of plastered stone like the upshrugging shoulders of some giant under the coastal plain, walls half-buried in drifted sand, tumbled into the sea, eroded down to their granite ribs. Yet the advance of the desert made the beaches on which the city grew, and the sea made tolerable the desert’s burning heat; and cradled in this enmity Ascalon prospered.
The city clustered around its many wells. Beneath the clattering fronds of the palm trees, in the shrill marketplaces, in the crowded streets, the people lived and worked as they had since the days of Abraham and Isaac. Their houses incorporated stone from Roman days; their great public baths displayed mosaics showing scenes of Alexander. They spoke a language that traded in foreign words as the merchants traded in foreign goods, and in the bazaar all races met: a jet-black Abyssinian dickered with a red-headed Circassian merchant, or a yellow man in a silk cap.
It was, Sibylla thought, a city that could balance on opposites, and wring profit from contention. She had always loved it best of all the cities of Outremer. Now it seemed to her a sermon on her destiny.
This day her destiny seemed ambiguous. She drew her gaze from the city and faced the man beside her on the terrace.
“What did my brother say to you?”
The Patriarch of Jerusalem was a client of her mother’s. His name was Heraclius but behind his back the court called him Montargent, because everything he did turned on money. He was flawlessly composed, clean and fragrant, his lavish vestment immaculate, his beard combed and trimmed. He always smiled. He said, “Alas, my child, the King will not allow even the mention of your name.”
She could see he enjoyed telling her that. She stared back at him, steady-eyed. “I can assume you gave the task some effort?”
“My dear, I was persistent.”
She said, “Thank you, Father.” She turned away from him, but he would not be dismissed; he pushed more bad news at her. “The King is adamant. I heard it from others there as well, how he silences anyone who dares speak for you. I fear, Princess, you have no place anymore in his favor.”
She said, “Is he well?”
“Well?” Montargent gave a laugh cracked with disbelief. “He is all but blind, and holds audience only from Prime to Tierce, before he must get back into his bed. The more wonder his ferocious spirit toward you, who might comfort him in his final days. Ah, this vale of tears.”
These words stung. The contempt in the priest’s voice hurt worse than the news he brought. She said, “He still rules. He does his will. He has made this truce. Thank you. I shall repay you.” She turned and walked off down the terrace. Behind her the patriarch strolled away in a cloud of his hangers-on.
Sibylla wrung her hands together. She missed Baudouin sorely. She had come to Ascalon soon after the q
uarrel with him. Half the court was here for the summer: her mother, and her little son, with all their household, and some of every great family in Outremer, Ibelins and Millys and Plancys and Courtenays. Every day another great reception, another feast on the beach; always the same people, different clothes, different settings. After a while she had sent a message to Jerusalem, offering to forgive him, but he had sent it back, the seal unbroken.
She had asked other people to go between them; no one could get him to listen. When the Patriarch had offered, she had been desperate enough to accept, all the while knowing the thing foredoomed. Until she bent to his will her brother would have nothing to do with her. Until she did her duty.
She knew he was sick. She was afraid he would die, that she would never see him again.
The terrace was a broad flagged skirt along three sides of the palace; a stone railing guarded the edge. Beyond the railing the land swept away in a stretch of gardens, with statues of birds and animals among the dense tended shrubbery, and cypress trees in rows. From the terrace a stone stair led down into a fountain shaped like a great stone shell, set in a little pocket of a lawn. Alys joined her, carrying some flowers out of the garden boxes around the courtyard. She gave Sibylla a quick, searching look.
“You look angry.”
“It came to nothing. And he is a wicked man, even for a priest.”
Alys said, “You should never deal with these people. He has the most awful reputation.” She held up some of the posies she had picked. “Smell this, isn’t it beautiful? We should make some perfume while we’re here.”
Sibylla buried her nose in a handful of soft pink petals. The scent cloyed in her nostrils. They went to the corner; the great many-leveled palace courtyard was covered with people, talking in little groups, their voices a general buzz, their clothes a bright mosaic against the grey marble. She stopped. Below her, on the next level, she saw Montargent, smiling, talking, and knew he would tell everybody her brother hated her.
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