by Judith Tarr
Aidan smiled behind his cup. He was quite willing and able to be part of King Guy’s councils, and it was an old game to let people think that his brother was the lesser of the two. Quiet, diffident Gwydion, who could happily have been a monk, if God had not willed that he be a king. In this place, under this king, it was more than a game; it was pure prudence. Guy had decided, all by himself, that Gwydion was harmless. He would not listen to the few who preached distrust. No king lived so long, in such evident tranquility, without there being more to him than he was letting strangers see.
Guy was happy to let that be all there was. It reassured him that he was a good king himself. Was he not good to look at? Did he not listen well to everyone’s advice? Why then, there was the Elvenking with his fair young face, as secure on his throne as any king alive, and scarcely a word to say for himself.
There had, of course, to be an open affirmation of Gwydion’s place in the army. Two kings in an army, however circumspect one of them might be, needed more than a casual word to mark their amity.
It was almost time. The subtlety, the great pièce de résistance of the feast, which had begun as an image in spun sugar and marzipan of Jerusalem upon her hills, lay in ruins. The wine was going round; heads would be spinning soon, and then would be too late for matters of state.
Aidan’s eye caught his brother’s. Gwydion nodded very slightly. He leaned toward Queen Sybilla, who sat on his left, and murmured in her ear. She smiled brilliantly. She thought him a poor shadow of his brother, but he was too beautiful to despise; and she was always at her best with beautiful men. She turned to her husband and whispered a word or two. He blinked, paused, nodded. It took him a moment to gather his wits and stand, while the steward struck a bell and the hall went quiet.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “we ride to war against the Saracen.”
He waited out the roar that went up, the clanging of knife-hilts on goblets, the thudding of fists on tables and feet on floor.
When it was quiet enough for him to be heard, he went on. “We ride to war, all of us, the flower of the kingdom and its strongest defense against the enemy. There is no finer army in the world.”
Again they whooped and cheered. Some bellowed their own war-cries, or the war-cries of Outremer: “Deus lo volt! Holy Sepulcher!”
Guy smiled, fidgeting with his dagger-hilt. “Yes,” he said. “We’ll fight like champions, every one of us, in the Lord Jesus’ name. But before we go, there’s something that needs to be done. You know my royal brother of Rhiyana.”
They did indeed, loudly. There was more in it than simple exuberance. Aidan was surprised to hear how much more there was. The knights, unlike the council, knew what they had in Gwydion, and were glad of it.
“My royal brother,” Guy said, frowning as it sank in on him what the uproar meant, “has given us the gift of his person and his people, as many as there are here over the sea. He is also determined that both should be entirely at our disposal. He will not be swearing fealty to me—that would hardly be proper—but he will accede to my authority in all that pertains to the ruling of my kingdom and its army.”
“That is,” said Gwydion, rising, sliding smoothly into the pause, “in all that pertains to the war against the Saracen.”
Guy nodded, still frowning. “Yes, precisely.”
“I am a guest and a pilgrim,” Gwydion said, “and a royal ally. The war is yours, my brother of Jerusalem. I shall aid you in all that I may.”
Guy’s frown faded. He liked the sound of that. So did almost everyone else.
Some, however, had heard what was behind it. Amalric’s brows were knit. Lord Humphrey hid a smile behind his hand. Count Raymond seemed amused.
o0o
“As tidy a slither as I’ve ever had the pleasure to observe,” the count said to Aidan when they could have a word together. Aidan had honestly needed the garderobe; Raymond, it was apparent, had followed him in order to speak with him.
Aidan flattened against the wall to let a burly knight go by. He cocked his head toward the stair. Raymond nodded, bowed, gestured him ahead.
The palace roof, like nearly every other in this country, was a garden and, in the summer, a sleeping place. There was no one there now. Aidan made his way to the side of it that looked on the harbor: dim now in the dusk, lit here and there by a flicker of torches. The sound of hammering and of drunken voices came up from the city. There was still a little to do among the smiths and the armorers. The rest of the army celebrated its last night before the march.
“I might not have allowed them to become quite so boisterous,” Raymond observed, leaning on the parapet and taking a deep breath of air scented with smoke and dung and humanity and a tang of the sea.
“It can’t harm them to run wild for one night before they come under discipline,” said Aidan.
The Count of Tripoli cocked a brow at him. Raymond was a rarity in a lord: an intelligent man. Unlike Humphrey of Toron, whose intelligence made him no good in the field, Raymond was a thoroughly competent knight and general, seasoned in a lifetime of ruling and fighting in Outremer. He was not what Aidan would call a friend; that warmth was not in him, except for his lady and for King Baldwin who was dead. But they understood one another. “Your troops, no doubt,” Raymond said, “are under discipline now, and have been since you rode up from Jerusalem.”
“No more than yours.”
Raymond smiled. “Some of us have odd views as to what constitutes proper behavior in an army.” He rubbed an old scar along his jaw, which he disdained to hide behind a beard. “Your brother amazes me more every time I see him. Was he born knowing how to hoodwink kingdoms?”
“Every word he spoke was the truth.”
Raymond laughed aloud. “The truth, and nothing but the truth. He’ll fight because he wants to fight, but the war is Guy’s. For better or for worse. And if it goes badly, he won’t take it on himself to save it.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Aidan said. “He’ll do what he can, but he won’t claim the crown to do it.”
“Magnanimous of him,” Raymond said dryly. “He must be the only man in the world who doesn’t want the crown of Jerusalem; and he’s in the best position to take it.”
“I don’t think the rest of the world would be delighted to see the Holy Sepulcher defended by the witch-king of Rhiyana.”
“Ah, but how he would defend it! I’m rather sorry he won’t. I’d happily relinquish my own claim in favor of his.”
“No fear of that. I’ll tell you a secret, messire. My brother is king of Rhiyana and no other, and that he will always remain, because that earth and that alone is his.”
“Ah, so he’s bound to it, like the pagan kings?”
“Close enough,” Aidan said. “He can leave it, obviously. But leave it to rule any other kingdom, no. The land would never allow it.”
“Remarkable,” said Raymond. “He won’t tarry here, then, whether we win or we lose.”
“Not past this season. When the ships go west at summer’s end, he goes with them.”
“And you?”
It was like Raymond to ask a question so difficult, and to expect an answer to it. Aidan wandered a little, down along the parapet, back. “I don’t know. I’d thought I would go, before this war broke on us. When my lady was my wife, and my affairs were settled. Now...I can only wait, and fight as I’m called to, and see what comes.”
“It’s all any of us can do,” Raymond said. “I dare to have hopes, myself. We have a fool for a king, but a fool who can listen to reason. And we are as good an army as I’ve ever seen. We’ll singe the sultan’s beard for him.”
“So we shall,” Aidan said, taking his arm to go back down among the feasters.
o0o
Raihan was there when Elen came back, precisely as she had commanded. He seemed to have come to a decision while she sent her maid to scour the markets for a trinket which, if she was lucky, Gwenneth would never find. When she shut and barred the door, he said, “I sh
ould take a proper revenge. I should call for a qadi and have this registered as a marriage.”
“Why don’t you?”
He gaped at her. Suddenly he laughed. “Do you want me to?”
“If it will content you,” she said. She was not chaffing him. It was nothing that the Church would acknowledge, being an infidel rite, but in her present mood she would be pleased to call herself a Muslim’s wife. It would give Messire Amalric pause. It might even drive him off.
Raihan shook his head. “I don’t need a judge to tell me what you are to me.”
“And what is that?”
“The world,” he said.
Elen could not move. It was not enough, this meeting of mind and wit, but it was most of why she loved him. He faced her as an equal, and expected her to do the same. Maybe it came of growing to manhood where Morgiana was. Morgiana was a powerful argument for the capacities of women.
He moved in the stillness, not to touch her, not yet, but to take off his coat. He laid it carefully on the clothes-stool, and slipped off his boots with their silver spurs. He might have been alone, for all the self-consciousness he showed. When he was in his drawers, he sat cross-legged and began to unwind his turban.
Her heart was beating hard; her breath came short. He was no surprise to her as he was, since the day Lisabet’s goat butted him into the fishpond. In this very house, in the kitchen garden. She could not have imagined then that he would be here, and about to be her lover.
He was as beautiful as she remembered. Not a big man, but not a small one either, built like a rider and a swordsman. The skin that seldom saw the sun was more olive than bronze, but still shades darker than her own. There were scars on his shoulder and down his side: marks of tooth and claw.
He marked her stare, read it easily. “Lion,” he said, “when I was too young to have any sense.”
“I wonder you survived it.”
“I might not have, if it hadn’t been for my lord and his lady. My lady killed the lion. My lord put me back together again, and between them they beat life into me. I had to live, they told me, to get the tanning I deserved.”
“Did you?”
He grinned at her. “Twenty strokes with the strap when all my wounds were healed; and a wild foal to train, since it was so obvious that I needed to be kept out of mischief.”
“It didn’t do much good, did it?”
His turban was off, a long white ribbon, twisted in his hands. He set to work unplaiting his braids, but watching her, not quite smiling.
“Is that what half of you is?” she asked him. “A Turk?”
“No,” he said. “I’m vain, that’s all. And stubborn. I don’t want to shave my head like an Arab.”
And no wonder. A woman would have given her hope of salvation to have hair like that, thick and black and curling, growing of its own accord halfway down his back, and then obliging him by stopping. The three Turkish braids straightened it a little, but it found its measure soon enough.
She had nothing so marvelous. It was black enough, and it was nigh as long as she was, but it was almost straight except for the plait she kept it in. She moved slowly, sliding out of girdle and cotte, ridding herself of her veil and the elegant new fashion of the wimple. It was strange to breathe unconstrained under a man’s eyes.
She almost ordered him out then. He would no doubt have gone, and even been glad that she had come to her senses. But she had not labored this long, to turn craven at the end. Barefoot in her shift, with her hair loose about her, she knelt in front of him and gently, almost fearfully, laid her hand on his cheek.
She laughed suddenly, startling him.
He had to know. “I thought you might be rabbit-chinned,” she said.
He was offended, but he was keeping it in hand. She traced the firm line of his chin under the surprising silkiness of his beard. “It is an advantage,” she pointed out, “which a woman can’t share. Though it’s a shame, too, when a man is beautiful under it.”
“That’s boy’s beauty,” he said, a little stiff still. “Or woman’s. I am neither.”
“That is obvious,” she said. She measured the width of his shoulders, laid her palms flat on his breast. The black curling hair was as soft as it was thick. It grew like a tree: rising narrow out of his navel and spreading wide over his chest. It was not time, yet, to think about its root. His shoulders were smooth and silken-skinned, and his back.
He seemed as intrigued by her body as she was by his. He was not a virgin, she could tell from the way he touched her: light, deft, sure of his craft here as with his beloved horses. But as with a new mount, he was careful how he proceeded, asking nothing that she would not willingly give. His dark hands on her white flesh made her shiver. Not but that Riquier had burned nigh as black in the summer, but Raihan was gloriously foreign, with the scent of musk and rosewater that lay on him, and the lilt on his tongue when he spoke to her, and the cast of his face beneath its beautiful beard.
Her shift was lost somewhere, but he still had his drawers. Muslims were modest that way. Someone had told her that. Sybilla? They must be covered always from the navel to the knee. “But how do they—?” she had asked. Sybilla had laughed and said something silly about drawers big enough for two.
She was slender enough and he was enchantingly lean in the flanks, but she did not think that there was room enough for them both. The cord was just where she could reach it without alarming him. She slipped it free. For a moment she feared that she had failed. Then he laughed and stepped out of them.
A root, indeed. “So that is what a Muslim looks like,” she said.
His cheeks were crimson, but he grinned at her, cocky as a boy. “Some of us,” he said.
“What, you aren’t all lions, bulls, stallions—”
He smothered the rest with kisses, laughing round them. He had not asked for this, except maybe in his prayers, but he did nothing by halves, did Raihan. He carried her to the bed and laid her in it. His face was the face of a warrior and a lover, both fierce and tender.
Her heart swelled. He was beautiful, and it was all she could do not to weep. He was going away to war, and he might not come back; and if he did, what place could there be in a princess’ world, for a Saracen who had been a slave?
They had until the evening. After that, God would provide.
PART THREE
THE HORNS OF HATTIN
2-6 July 1187
18.
Tiberias had fallen.
The army of Jerusalem camped about the springs of Cresson beside the cool and living waters, in green seared by the furnace heat of summer; where not long ago seven thousand Saracens had paused to water their horses, and the Grand Master of the Templars with his hundred-fifty knights, riding to Tiberias, had given way to temptation. Now the Franks had come back to take their revenge, thirty thousand of them, knights and fighting men, with their horses and their baggage. It was, for that country, a rich pasture, and a strong position from which to fight: a hill rising out of a barren and tumbled upland, with mountains to the east of it, and beyond the mountains the Sea of Galilee and the city of Tiberias. They were prepared to settle there, to bar the way to their kingdom, to wear the enemy down with their motionless, inescapable presence.
But Tiberias had fallen, and the great lords of the kingdom gathered in the king’s tent, wrangling over the news. Scouts had brought it before sundown; a messenger had come just now, as the darkness fell, bearing word from the Countess Eschiva. The citadel is ours still, my lord king, but the city and the lands about it are overrun. I beg you, my lord, come to our aid, or all of us are lost.
The one to whom that message was greatest grief, Count Raymond whose wife the countess was, had said nothing at all. He left it to his fellows to cry their outrage and to consider what they had to face.
“Saladin has divided his army,” mused Reynaud de Châtillon. “He attacked Tiberias with a force of picked men, laughed at the garrison when it tried to buy him off, sacked the city
and camped amid the ruins. But the greater part of his force sits idle two leagues south of the city, barring the road and the main approaches. No doubt he thinks us nicely cut off.”
“No doubt he wants us to think so,” said Humphrey of Toron. In this rough camp, after a month and more in the field, with every man living in armor and with little water to spare for cleanliness, he still managed to look as if he were about to ride in a tournament. “He’s trying to lure us out, to fight on ground of his choosing. He’ll know what we’ve been doing: trying to wear him down, avoiding a pitched battle, trusting to his levies and his sadly straitened purse to lessen his army for us.”
“And where has it got us?” Gerard de Ridefort demanded. The Master of the Templars was on his feet, as restless as Aidan could be, and much less circumspect. “We knew that he would strike for Tiberias. Did we do anything about it? We did not. We sat by the water, dabbling our toes and singing to the birds.”
Raymond regarded him in sour dislike. “Singing, maybe, but singing war-songs. Yes, he wants to lure us out. He knows that our position here is strong enough, with water for the taking, and ample pasture for our horses. We bar his way into the kingdom. He’ll do nothing while we hold fast here; and if he does nothing, he’ll lose his army. Half-trained levies, most of those, raiders from the desert and farmers from the fields, apt enough for a bit of fighting, but now they’ve had it, they’ll reckon it enough.”
“You know him well,” Reynaud drawled. “But no, I’m forgetting. You were his friend until he broke your truce for you.”
“This is more than a broken truce,” Raymond said with careful calm. “Tiberias, after all, is my city. My wife holds it in peril of her life. My children will be meat for Saracen dogs, if the citadel falls.”
“So, then,” Amalric said. “You counsel that we bring the battle to it.”