Jerusalem

by Cecelia Holland

  Rannulf said, “I beg your pardon, my lord Marshall.”

  De Ridford said, “Your aim is faulty. Give that work to someone better at it; I am going to see the King, and I want you to accompany me.”

  “Mouse,” Rannulf said. He took the bolt out of the crossbow and got down from the stool. “Shoot the rats.” He went across the room to take his jerkin and followed de Ridford out of the room.

  De Ridford said, in a tone of mild injury, “Here I thought we were brothers.”

  “I missed, didn’t I?” Rannulf said.

  The Marshall laughed. “You know, sometimes I think you have more wit than I first supposed.” They went down to the stables, under the corner of the great haram pavement, and rode out across Jerusalem to the citadel.

  In the street, on the way, de Ridford started in again. “Did you enjoy yourself, in Damascus? I saw how you smiled, when le Mesne denied it.”

  “Everybody to his own vices,” Rannulf said.

  “But yours are more peculiar than other men’s. Le Mesne, and van Janke, I understand. Even de l’Aigle makes sense to me.” They had come to the citadel, and de Ridford went first through the gate. A train of camels crowded the yard between the two towers; the porters were unloading them of sacks and baskets, goods for the King’s kitchens. De Ridford went into the tower and led the way up the stairs, past the rows of people at their endless waiting. The chamberlain announced them at once.

  The King sat crumpled up among the cushions and bolsters of his throne. His eyes were glassy. The swollen, discolored skin of his face looked half-cooked. The two Templars went up before him and bowed.

  De Ridford said, “God keep you, Sire. I am at your service, and Rannulf Fitzwilliam here, with me.”

  “Yes, thank you for answering me.” The King hitched himself a little higher in the cushioned throne. His head seemed too heavy for him. His eyes stared at nothing. He was blind, Rannulf realized; he had been half-blind, when Rannulf last saw him, but now he saw nothing at all. His lips were split and bleeding and his voice wheezed up like something squeezed out of him. “Have you tested this truce, my lord Marshall?”

  “I have investigated it, Sire, and know it to be fairly struck.”

  “Good. Then I have you with me. I am summoning the whole council of the Kingdom here for Christmas, and then we shall send out the call for the Crusade.” The King swung his head to one side, turning away. “God cannot mean the fate of Jerusalem to turn on a woman’s virtue.”

  Rannulf looked at him; he had heard that the Princess Sibylla still defied him, refused to marry to serve his policy, lived openly with some unknown knight. The King held one hand out, and a page came from behind the throne and put a cup of wine into his grasp, and closed his fingers around it.

  The King said, “Rannulf. Tell me of the Sultan.”

  Rannulf said, “When we got there, Damascus was full of plague, and half-deserted. But he wanted us to think that it throve, and so he put on a show of a thriving city, with such crowds, and such shops and goods, I believed it, until I learned otherwise. That was what most impressed me, that he could do such a thing.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “Somewhat. That was double-tongued, too.”

  De Ridford laughed. The King drank of the wine, spilling some of it on his chin; the page came back, and took the cup, and gave him a napkin, and the King swabbed at his face with it. He said, “What did you think of him?”

  “That he has more of everything than we do. More people, more money, more land. More power.”

  “He does not have the one true and living God,” said de Ridford. “Which is all that matters.”

  The King said, “And the plague has him stopped now.”

  “For now,” Rannulf said. “There’s something going on in the east, too, some rebellion. The plague is bad there, too, between the rivers. He needs the truce, and he certainly cannot fight.”

  “God save us from this pox,” the King said.

  Rannulf said, quietly, “God save us from this Sultan.”

  “Amen,” de Ridford said.

  “God may,” the King said. “I will send for a new Crusade. My lord Marshall, have you considered the other thing I asked you?”

  “I have, Sire,” de Ridford said, smoothly. He nodded to Rannulf. “The King has asked me to provide him with a guard of our brethren, to stand watch over him day and night. I think you best suited for this duty.”

  Rannulf started. He said, “I have no wish to leave the Temple.”

  The King said, “I promise you, it will be only for a little while.”

  De Ridford said, “You are ordered to this duty, which you will take up.”‘

  “Take it,” the King said. “I have no strength to argue with you.”

  “I will serve you, Sire,” Rannulf said.

  “Good,” the King said. “Make arrangements. You have my leave.”

  The Templars went out again; in the street, de Ridford turned, and said, “I have just made you virtually King of Jerusalem, and you are too stupid to see the advantage in it. Which of course makes you perfect for my purposes. Keep him safe, and out of reach, is all I ask. I have already sown his mind with Tripoli’s evils; can his foolish sister but bridle her headlong spirit, all shall be as I will it.”

  Rannulf said, “I will do this to serve the King, and not you. I will not be your spy.”

  “No, no. But I will know everyone who sees him, or tries to, and you will tell me especially should Tripoli seek the King’s ear, in anything. And you will do this for the sake of the Order, hmm?”

  Rannulf had already told him he would not; he saw no use in repeating it. He said, “I need men. I cannot do it alone.”

  “Take those you trust. I know already who they are; you will arrive at it eventually.” De Ridford smiled at him. “I ask nothing of you beyond your ability. You should thank me for seeing to your advancement.”

  “Thank you,” Rannulf said.

  The Temple held an election for Master, and elected Arnold da Toroga, a Spanish knight. At Christmastide the King sent out the call for a new Crusade, and his sister Sibylla married Guy de Lusignan, a Poitevin knight nobody had ever heard of, who had been in the Holy Land only a few months.

  CHAPTER XXII

  The King gave his sister’s new husband the cities of Jaffa and Ascalon, and the title of Count of Jaffa, so that she would not be married to a landless man. But Baudouin would not receive the new-married pair; although he longed for his sister’s company again, his pride controlled him.

  Then the war came back.

  Kerak had always disdained the truce, and he did not wait for the Crusade. In the year after Tripoli’s return from Damascus, the Wolf built boats in his castle of Montreal and carried them on camels across the southern desert to Aqaba, and launched them on the Sea of Egypt. Packed with the Bedouin who supported him, this fleet raided all along the Arabian coast, threatening even Mecca. Kerak went back to the Ultrajordain, his pirates were all caught and hanged, and Saladin called his army out of the Syrian desert and led them on Jerusalem again.

  The King was too sick to ride, too blind to see faces. He summoned all the knights in Outremer, and at the head of this army, borne in a litter, he went out to fight Saladin. They met on the Plain of Esdraelon, in the north of the kingdom.

  The King had the Templars with him, to see for him, and carry his orders around, and make sure that he was obeyed. He arranged his army on the western edge of the swampy plain, where to attack him Saladin would have to cross the marshes and then expose himself on all sides to the charges of the knights. Saladin remained on the eastern edge of the plain. The King’s scouts and spies reported that his great army was rapidly eating up the surrounding country.

  The King sent to the knights of his army that they should parade and cavort in front of the Saracens, and draw them out to fight. So every day between the two armies there were single combats and flashy little melees. But Saladin would not launch a mass attack; Baud
ouin grew tired of waiting.

  His sister’s husband joined the army, leading some twenty men and a hundred footsoldiers. The King lay on his cot and heard the news of this, how the Count of Jaffa rode through the camp to the blowing of brass horns, a dozen banners flying, with a crowd of servants and a string of pack animals, and set up a little court of his own in the middle of Baudouin’s army.

  “Everything so new you can still smell the dyestuffs,” Mouse told him. “Even their horseshoes shine.”

  The King laughed, but his heart ached. He missed his sister. He thought he saw a way back to her. He said, “Summon him to the council tonight, we shall look him over from close up.”

  But when the council met that night, in the King’s tent, Jaffa had not come. Instead he sent a message, that he had joined the army to fight for the Cross, but that he would not greet King Baudouin as a brother until the King apologize for mistreating Guy’s wife.

  The King heard this and stiffened; the words jangled in his ears. For a moment he thought of dismissing Guy from the army and sending the Templars to do the job. His anger disoriented him. The noises of the other men shuffling into the tent blurred into a general roar, and he had to work to remember what was actually around him. For a moment his mind was blank; the black void engulfed him.

  He fought down a surge of terror. He knew he sat in the back of the tent, with the Templars standing on either side of him, and beginning with them, he forced himself to remember, to rebuild it all in his mind; the arch of the silk above his head and the space around him, full of people; he made himself give the people faces, and then came to realize that Jaffa’s messenger still stood in front of him, waiting for an answer.

  He said, “Hell freezes, first. Tell your master that. Go.”

  From the inchoate darkness before him came a murmur of leave-taking. He put his hand out, and someone—one of the Templars—put a cup into it. He drank deep.

  “Come up around me,” he said, in a loud voice, to the darkness. “I shall hear your counsel.”

  They gathered around him; they talked over the stand-off, and how to lure Saladin into the trap set for him. Tripoli and de Ridford got into an argument, and the King, in a rage, shouted them to silence. With so little life left to him it infuriated him that they would waste his time on their stupid quarrel. The hot bolt of his anger sustained him; he called forth each man in his turn, got from him what he knew, and gave him orders, and when he was done, sent them all away and then sank down, exhausted.

  The black nothing surrounded him. There was silence.

  He said, “Who is there ?”

  “Mouse,” said the knight, beside him. “And Felx. Do you wish anything, Sire?”

  “I’m tired,” the King said and put his hand out, and they lifted him. Then he heard Tripoli’s voice, somewhere at a distance.

  “No. He must hear us. Let me by!”

  “Hold,” the King said. “Sit me down again.” Lifting his voice, he called, “My lord of Tripoli, come here.”

  They set him down on the chair again. His mouth was dry; he put out his hand, and they gave him wine to drink. His weary mind struggled to remember what Tripoli looked like, a face that he had known since babyhood. The voice helped.

  “Sire, we have come to speak to you as your loyal men, and as the barons of this kingdom.”

  He grunted. He could see already that this was going somewhere unpleasant. “Which loyal men are these ?”

  “Sire, I am here, and Balian d’Ibelin, Reginald of Sidon, a few other men.”

  The King’s temper simmered again, that uplifting fire. He said, “I see. Speak, then.”

  His voice warned them. Tripoli said nothing; the others coughed and cleared their throats. At last Balian said, “Sire, for the sake of the kingdom, you ought to yield the throne.”

  “Really,” the King said. His rage felt like an iron man inside his skin. “To whom ?”

  Tripoli said, “Sire, you have served beyond all our hopes—”

  “And will serve yet,” the King said. “God gave me this task, to defend Jerusalem, and this body to do it with, and I will go on doing it until God himself removes me. Now, leave me.”

  Tripoli said, “Sire, you must—”

  “Leave me,” the King said, his throat raw, his brain beating in his skull, “leave me before I have them throw you out.” He raised his hand, and in a rush the men before him were moving. He felt the Templars brush by him on either side, and heard them all hurrying noisily away, toward the front of the tent. He sank down in the chair.

  He said, aloud, “I should, he is right, I should let him be King.”

  “No,” Rannulf said, beside him. “You are the King, you should have seen them quake when you railed at them.”

  His voice startled Baudouin, who had not known he was there. He put his arms out, and the Templar lifted him. One of the others came and helped him bear the King away to his cot, and take off his crown and his robe and shoes, and lay him down. Dust and ashes, he thought. Ashes and dust. What was it he clung to with such a fervor? He could feel nothing, see nothing; his ears were full of sounds, but most of them were illusions. Yet through this ran some edge of understanding, a little ripple of a connection with the world. If he lost that seam he would disappear. The world would disappear. His mind reeled.

  He said, “Rannulf, why does the Sultan not attack ?”

  The knight said, “He’s gotten too clever. He sees the trap. But he’ll have to move soon, he’s running out of forage.”

  “When the battle starts—” The King swallowed. A longing rose in him so strong and sweet it made him groan. “I want to lead the first charge. Swear this to me, that you will obey me in this. If you have to tie me to the horse. If Saladin but gives me the opening, I will die like a man.”

  “Sire,” Mouse said.

  “Swear it,” the King said.

  “We swear,” they all said, together.

  He laid his head down on the pillow. He was exhausted but if he let go, if he gave up to the darkness, how would he ever find his way back again? So needing to sleep he battled against it, until at last sleep crushed him like a cross.

  In the end Saladin backed off. With his whole huge army he faded away into the desert. The Franks took King Baudouin back to Jerusalem. He was dying, and all knew it. The summer heat oppressed him, and he sent to his sister’s husband, Guy, Count of Jaffa, and asked him to give him Jaffa in trade for Jerusalem, because he longed for the cool and the sweet air of the seacoast. And he wanted also to see his sister again, to reconcile himself with her.

  But Sibylla was in childbed. Her husband the Count took no counsel with her, only sent immediately back to the King that for the sake of pride and honor, and the mortal insult that Baudouin had dealt him and his wife, Jaffa would give him nothing.

  Then the King called up all the great men of the Kingdom, the patriarch and the Masters of the Hospitallers and the Templars, and the Count of Tripoli who was in the city by chance, Philip de Milly and Balian d’Ibelin and young Humphrey de Toron, the King’s uncle Joscelin de Courtenay, and even the lord of Kerak. Before this council he disinherited his sister and her husband, and he changed the succession from her to her son by her first marriage, who was six years old. If the child died before he was of major age, then Tripoli was to get the crown. If he died older, but without issue, the Pope and the Emperor should name the new King.

  De Ridford argued against it, as much as he dared, but the King would hear no persuasions.

  He set up a council of all the barons to rule as Regent. He excluded Sibylla and her husband from any part in the governance of the Kingdom. He wanted to name Tripoli as the guardian of the child King, but the Count refused, saying if the boy died, he would surely be accused of murdering him. So Joscelin de Courtenay was his great-nephew’s guardian. As the child’s bodyguard King Baudouin chose Rannulf Fitzwilliam.

  Baudouin was so weak now he could not lift his head by himself, but to the last he was the lord of
Jerusalem, and the greatest men of his kingdom submitted to his will. They swore to his testament in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, each man with his hand on the empty marble box that was the emblem of their faith, the proof that death could not hold them. But death was waiting there among them as they signed and sealed the charter.

  The King went into his citadel and lay down in his bed. His mother came down from Nablus, and he said good-by to her, and sent her away. He took the viaticum, and called the Templars around him.

  “My life is over; I know I shall not get up again. I am not afraid of dying. In all my life I regret only one thing, which is that I lost my sister, through my own fault, commanding her to do what I should not even have asked of her. For the rest, I am content. God gave me charge of Jerusalem, and I have kept faith with that. As for my dying I shall do that away from the eyes of the crowd, and without a constant looking in to see if I am gone yet. Send everybody else away. Henceforth, only you four shall be around me, and tend to me. And tell no one how I fare, no one, until I am dead. And then I don’t care whom you tell.”

  But the King did not die at once. Ordinary things went on. He lay in his bed and listened to the four men around him. Among themselves they spoke a crossbreed of Latin and French, with odd bits of Arabic mixed in. Rannulf bullied them all like an older brother.

  “Getting enough to eat?” ,

  “He left his whole meal, all that food would go to waste.”

  “Well, I can see you aren’t going to let that happen.”

  The King said, “Let him eat it. What are you, a bishop? Let me tell you, Saint, I have little patience with all this holy deprivation. I have never touched a woman, my beard stopped growing long ago, I have no pleasures left; everything you do for God’s sake, God makes me do, and I know it is worthless. In me, sickness, in you, vanity. So let him eat.”

  “You’re dying,” Rannulf told him, close by. “You’re safe from sin. He wallows in it.” Hands tugged and pulled at Baudouin’s covers, rough, as if Rannulf knew that through the numbness of his flesh Baudouin could feel only roughness, pulling, and tugs. His vision was a field of sparkles and blobs of light; his ears popped and crackled so that sometimes he could hardly hear anything else.