by Judith Tarr
Well before the laughter began, it was evident that the enemy was undeceived. He had taken count of the faces under the helmets, and marked how many wore grey beards or none at all, nor could grow any. Acre had no defense that could match the army of Islam.
The enemy camped on the field outside the walls, conspicuously at their ease, laughing and singing. From within it sounded as if they were all drunk on wine, but Elen did not think that many of them were. Saladin was too devout, and too strong a commander. All that intoxicated them was victory won, and victory soon to be won. They had no doubt at all of it.
“The seneschal will give in,” Joanna said. The children were fed and put fretfully to bed, even Akiva, who clearly reckoned himself more than a child.
“Not until Rosh Hashonah,” his father told him, and that ended that.
The three of them sat on the roof: the two women and the Rhiyanan king’s friend. They could not see the enemy’s army even if they had been minded to; there was a church tower between. They looked seaward instead. The harbor had been emptying since word came from Hattin. Tonight there were almost no ships left in the outer harbor, and most of those in the inner readied for a swift departure in the morning. Some would go to Cyprus. Many meant to take refuge in Tyre, a short sail up the coast. The harbor there was less secure in a storm, but the city was strongly defended against attack by land; more strongly than Acre.
“The rats leave the ship,” Joanna said. It was hard in lamplight to read her face. Her voice was flat. “My lord Joscelin will surrender. What else can he do? He can’t put up anything resembling a decent fight. He’s not mad like our noble king. He’ll get what concessions he can, and hand over the city.”
“I wish I could call that cowardice.” Elen’s head ached. She leaned it against her cup, letting the coolness give what comfort it could. “I’ve never been on the losing side of a war.”
“None of us has.” Joanna was a shadow in the gloom, massive and immobile. “We don’t know how to act.”
“With dignity,” said Simeon. “That is how one acts.”
They looked at him. The lamplight caught his coat, and the raven sheen of his beard, and half of his face: flat cheek, deep eye, broad uncompromising nose. His voice was as dry as the plain of Hattin.
He met their stares calmly, with a glint that might have been irony. “One acts with dignity,” he said, “as much as one may. One compromises only as much as one must, and still remain oneself. And one keeps one’s pride, even if one must keep it in secret, where only God can see.”
“One doesn’t fight?” Elen asked.
The narrow shoulders lifted in a shrug. “What good does it do?”
“It makes one feel better.”
“And maybe one dies, and the enemy is still the victor.” Simeon sat back in his chair, stroking his beard, more at ease than she had ever seen him outside of Gwydion’s company. This, the edge of disaster, seemed to be his element. “What will you do, my ladies? Will you fight?”
Elen shook her head but did not answer. Joanna said, “I will do what I will do.” She heaved herself up. “Which is, now, to get what sleep I can.”
They watched her go. Elen was disinclined to move. She did not like the taste that was in her mouth. It was defeat; it saw no escape.
“There is a way out of this, you know,” Simeon said, as if like his son he could know what she thought.
“Death?” she asked.
Simeon’s eyes glittered. “Of course not. That is final, and God forbids it. What He will allow... Who is to say that He wouldn’t be as pleased to be addressed as Allah by a new-made Muslim?”
“Is that what you will do?”
He laughed, which both dismayed and comforted her. “I, no. I lacked the sense to turn Christian when the Anglian king’s dogs hunted me out of the isles. What makes you think I’d turn Muslim now, with the Syrian sultan’s dogs yapping at the gates?”
“Why didn’t you?” she asked. “Turn Christian, that is.”
“Why don’t you turn Muslim?”
That was answer enough, if she thought about it. “Does God even care what name we call Him by?”
“He may not. We, being human and imperfect, do. And I have generations of pride to protect. We kept our faith when the whole world turned against it. How can I forsake it now?”
“What would your son say to that?”
“My son is as stubborn as I am.” Simeon was proud of that and of him.
“It must be strange,” Elen mused, “to know that one’s child is of that blood. And he will carry it on through years out of count. Our Church is appalled. What do your people think of it?”
“My people accept what is. Maybe he is something out of the Enemy’s kingdom: golem or dybbuk, or creature of a darker persuasion. I, and such of my people as know him, prefer to think him a new face of God’s creation. He says that he is mine, and he was incontestably Rachel’s. I know that I have no such blood as your family claims; Rachel saw farther and deeper than most women do, but she was human enough for all of that. So: God gave us a gift, and let Rachel live long enough to know it for what it was. She seemed glad. I know she loved him. What could I do but love him enough for both of us, once she was gone? And now he sleeps on the edge of war.” The dark eyes closed; the face withdrew out of the light. “I would have spared him that if I could. Or,” said Simeon, “no. He has to know what the world is. It will betray him twice over, once for his faith and once for what he is, unless he knows how to live in it.”
“Then pray God the Saracen doesn’t kill him.”
“I am praying,” said Simeon. “Every moment, I pray. This country has suffered enough from rashness and folly. It’s time someone showed sense.”
o0o
Joscelin, seneschal of Acre under the captive king, seemed to have come to the same conclusion. In the cool of morning, but with the sun threatening already to scorch that little coolness out of the air, he sent his envoy to the sultan. His terms were simple. As the Muslims had done fourscore years before when the Franks took the city from them, he offered surrender. In return he asked that the sultan spare the lives and the goods of the city’s people.
Saladin had had enough of summary justice after Hattin. He accepted the terms.
But the city would not accept him. Some of the wealthier merchants and one or two young sprigs of the nobility and a remarkable number of plainer citizens saw in surrender only shame. They rose in revolt.
Joanna barricaded her family in the house and would not let any of them out. Even through the walls they could hear sounds that were more like riot than proper battle. Trumpets marked the seneschal’s response. It was swift, it was firm, and it was exactly as brutal as it needed to be. Word of it came through the barred gate from a crier who traversed the streets, relaying the seneschal’s command for citizens to keep to their houses, master their tempers, and forbear from assaults on the new masters of Acre. Merchants, the crier added, were beseeched to remain; the sultan was well disposed toward them, and would welcome their presence and their commerce.
Those merchants who still lingered responded by departing in a caravan. As hastily as they did it, they had no time to gather their stores. When toward evening the sultan rode into the city he would find the warehouses filled to bursting with the wealth of an empire: silks and satins, gold and silver and copper, jewels and weapons and a myriad lesser riches. More than one trading enterprise would founder for its owners’ cowardice.
Joanna, behind her walls, settled in to wait. Saladin was a clement conqueror: he did not set his troops free to sack and burn unless he was provoked. As here he seemed not to be, rebellion notwithstanding.
Her household could not understand what she meant by refusing to leave. Those who could think of it at all, thought that she was about to deliver herself of her baby. So she was, but she had more in mind than that. Which was why, when the hour drew near to sunset, she called for her litter.
Elen, God be thanked, did not seem to m
ark the signs; she simply insisted on being part of the deputation. So did the witch-children. What they knew, they were not telling, but they stayed closer even than they had been doing. Simeon she left to look after the house. He was not happy, but he was a practical man. He could see that one of them should stay, in case there should be looting after all. One wing of Saladin’s army had escaped his vigilance, mercifully outside the walls, and plundered the sugar mill; God knew what the sultan’s own troops might take it into their heads to do.
The city was full of them. Most quartered in merchants’ abandoned houses. Some established themselves by the harbor, though they did not try to stop ships from leaving. A goodly number took the citadel and the surrender of its defenders, and set themselves on guard.
A lady’s litter, with a second lady walking haughtily beside it and a pair of children flanking it and a pair of guards with swords carefully in sheaths, was startling enough that it passed unhindered even where the conquerors were thickest. No one offered them insult. Elen, wisely, had drawn her veil across her face. Joanna was borne in curtained propriety like a Muslim khatun.
Like a Muslim lady, she had learned the art of seeing the world from behind the veil. She saw what the infidel had made of the city: a shocked, silent place, with here and there a remnant of the rebellion. A stain of blood on a wall; a broken door. A dead man awaiting his turn for burial.
Then, as the shadows lengthened, it came: the sound that above all marked the triumph of Islam. From the summit of a tower, perhaps a church, perhaps a crumbling minaret, the muezzin’s wail called the faithful to prayer. God is great! God is great! There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God. Come to prayer, O ye Muslims, come to prayer...
Joanna shivered on the too-soft cushions, in the stifling confinement of the litter. Her throat was locked shut. She refused fiercely to burst into tears.
The wailing died away. The city’s masters bowed down in prayer. Joanna’s litter made its way through the silent, all-but-empty streets to the citadel and its turbaned guardians.
They were taken aback as their fellows had been in the city, by a Frankish lady who wished to speak with their sultan. Who expressed that wish, further, in Arabic somewhat purer than their own, with an accent that bespoke Aleppo, and noble Aleppo at that. That they were turning petitioners away, she could see for herself: a man with the look of a merchant left even as she arrived, clearly unsatisfied, and muttering what sounded like curses. What he had hoped to do, she could imagine. Make a profit from the invading army, then abscond with it. Clearly Saladin was having none of that.
She was not asking for profit, and she was anomalous enough to gain at least a promise that her message would be passed to the proper authorities. “To your sultan,” she said firmly.
The captain of guards, who had come to his underlings’ call, bowed and sent a guardsman inward. He promised nothing, she noticed, but she was prepared to wait, and if she must, to insist.
In good enough time, considering that they were kept waiting at the gate, the guard returned and spoke to his commander. His voice was too low for Joanna to catch. She was admittedly somewhat distracted. Her belly had tightened in a way she knew too well. Not painfully, not quite, not yet, but its message was plain.
She would not need after all to test her willingness to give birth on the sultan’s doorstep. Saladin would speak with her. She was to understand that propriety could hardly be observed here in what was in essence a camp of war. Would she be content with the presence of the seneschal?
She would. She would not, mercifully, be forced to walk up from the gate. As far as the litter could go, it was allowed: only into the courtyard, but even that was something. She extricated herself from it, stiffly, struggling not to double up as the first honest pain lanced through her center. The support she clung to resolved itself into Akiva. Growing like a weed, the boy was: he was as high as her shoulder already, and slender-strong as all his people were.
The sultan’s men were appalled to discover that not only was she big with child, she was perilously close to giving birth. She drew herself up under their darting, half-frightened glances, and mustered strength to walk.
It was easier once she had begun. A woman should walk when she was at her time; it made the baby come more easily. She climbed the last flight of stairs almost lightly, and entered the lamplit hall.
It was full. The seneschal clearly was an honored captive; he sat near the sultan, and his men were not far from him, though they carried no weapons. They seemed to have decided to accept what they could not alter. There was no open rebellion to be seen, and of sullenness no more than there should be.
The sultan’s men were jubilant, though they stilled for Joanna’s entrance. She must have been impressive. She was taller than most of them, and she was dressed as a Frank, scorning the veils and the modesty of Muslim women. The boy who was her prop, so evidently a Jew, and the lady and the maidchild behind her, made a most peculiar procession.
Saladin could not know Joanna’s face, but she knew his well enough. She had been in Damascus once, when Ysabel was conceived, and she had known his Turkish wife, the Lady Ismat; from the sultan’s harem, through secret lattices, she had been privileged to observe the sultan at his diwan, his time of open audience. Saladin was older, inevitably, but he had still the same fine, close-bearded, pleasing face, and the same air almost of diffidence, as if he could not believe that he of all men was the lord of both Egypt and Syria, a king of kings in Islam. His rank sat more easily on him now; he wore simple black as she remembered, but it was somewhat less threadbare than it had been, and his weapons were beautiful. The sword in its damascened sheath reminded her of Aidan, who had a blade very like it: straight, slender, with a silver hilt. There was a ruby in Aidan’s pommel. Saladin’s was plain, and lovely in its plainness.
She offered him such obeisance as her bulk and her rank would allow. He did not stare, she noticed, though the boy who sat at his right hand was all eyes and arrogance. That would be his son, no doubt. Al-Afdal, whose first battle had been Hattin.
Joanna had no time to spare for grief. She was too busy keeping the baby from coming in the middle of the hall, and keeping her audience from guessing it.
The sultan inclined his head to her. He was always a gentleman, even when he was murdering infidels. “My lady,” he said.
The shadow of a man next to him began to speak in Frankish. Joanna overrode him in Arabic. “My lord sultan. I am grateful that you would receive us.”
“It is my belief,” said Saladin, “that the measure of a man is his conduct in victory.”
“Not in defeat?”
Saladin’s eyes glinted, direct on her for once, and more amused than annoyed. “In that, too, my lady. You have an admirable command of our language.”
“No more admirable than yours, my lord. I am kin to the House of Ibrahim in Aleppo.”
“Are you indeed?” Saladin asked. “I had been given to understand that you were a baroness of Jerusalem.”
“That, too,” she said. “Your lady, Ismat al-Din Khatun: she is well, I hope?”
“Well,” said Saladin, “and prospering.” He paused, eyes opening wide in sudden surmise. “Ah. Would you be the Lady Jahana?”
“So I am known in the House of Islam.”
He smiled. His face was stern in repose, and rather grim; his smile transformed it, made it seem as lively as a boy’s. “My lady, my lady! Well met indeed. Come, sit, you should not be standing, where is my courtesy?”
She sat because she did not know if she could go on standing, but she kept her head up. Akiva stood beside her like a young guardhound, all bones and fierceness. Ysabel insinuated herself under Joanna’s arm and glared at Saladin.
Saladin smiled back. “This princess would be yours, I think, my lady? And the young warrior?”
“The son of a friend,” she said. “As this is the near kin of one whom you call friend.” She indicated Elen, who had refused to sit. “The Lady
Elen of Caer Gwent in Rhiyana.”
Saladin knew those names. He accorded their bearer deep respect. “I see your kinsmen in you,” he said. “They are well, and would send you greetings, I am certain, had they known that I would find you here.”
Elen started forward, caught herself. Joanna asked the question she would not, or dared not, ask. “They are well? And where would they be?”
“By now,” Saladin answered, “in Damascus, recovering from the ravages of their battle.”
“And awaiting ransom?”
“That has been seen to.”
Joanna forbore to press. She had other concerns, for the moment. “My lord sultan, I hardly came here for the pleasure of your company, great though that has proven to be. I know that the city has surrendered according to its own chosen terms. I know also that those terms require Frankish citizens to take themselves elsewhere. So shall I do, but not, I fear, for some days yet. Will you grant us leave to remain until my child is born?”
“Allah forbid that I should refuse you,” the sultan said. He sounded honestly shocked that she should hint at such a thing.
She inclined her head. “Will my lord also allow me the presence of my household and my kin, undiminished, and our departure unmolested when I and my child are able to travel?”
He raised a hand. “You have my word on it.”
Again she bowed her head. “The world knows that Salah al-Din Yusuf is a man of his word. Now it may know that he is also generous and compassionate, as a lord of Islam should be.”
She was not flattering him emptily, and he seemed to know it. He offered her food and drink. She did not want them, but she understood what they signified. She choked down a bit of bread sprinkled with salt, and a sip of something sweet and redolent of oranges. She made the others share both. None of them argued, for a miracle.