by Judith Tarr
An art which Aidan would do well to learn. He paused, weighing pain and purpose and considering what would be sacrilege for a blade of Farouk’s forging. Quickly then, with his silver-hafted dagger, he cut a rose the color of wine.
o0o
Morgiana accepted the gift as she always did: with no attempt at artifice. She frowned at it as he set it in her hand, and then at him as he bowed extravagantly. “What is this for?”
“For you,” he said. “Because you madden me, and yet I love you. Don’t you like it? It’s the exact shade of your hair.”
Her frown deepened to a scowl. “My hair is preposterous.”
“It’s beautiful.” He kissed it where it parted smoothly to ripple down shoulders and back and haunches. “You are the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“Is all this in aid of something?” she asked. “Are you trying to bribe me, by any chance?”
He refused to lose his temper. “For once,” he said, “no. I’ve made some choices. When you see fit to let me go, I shall go, and not stop until I come to Rhiyana.”
“What, not at all?”
“Not for anything.”
“Not for war? Not,” she said, “for me?”
“For war,” he said, “no. For you...” He looked down at her. She seemed like a child, looking up, with her great eyes and her pointed chin. “For you, I’ll stop in Rome, and browbeat the lord pope himself into making us honest sinners.”
“You don’t need to do that,” she said.
He stilled. “So. You’ll stay in Islam. Will you miss me a little when I’m gone?”
She struck him, not hard, but hard enough to sting. “Were you born a fool, or was it the humans who made you one? What makes you think I’d leave you again?”
“But—” he said.
“I left you once,” she said, “because I let my temper get the better of me, and because you so obviously needed the lesson. Now that you’ve learned as much from it as you ever can—”
“If I’m so contemptible,” he said bitterly, “why do you waste yourself on me?”
“You are not—”
“Listen to yourself. Child, you think me. Fool. Vaunting boy. Always in some degree of disgrace. Never capable of more than the most rudimentary good sense.”
“Aren’t you all of that? Aren’t I?” She raised her hand, the one that did not hold the rose, and stroked his cheek. He stiffened against her. “My dear love, I never know how to talk to you. I say too much or I say too little, and what I say is never what I meant to say. How it is that you can love me in spite of it—surely Allah has a hand in it.”
“God,” he said.
“Allah.” She frowned, but she wiped the frown away. “My lord, you are all that I am, and much that I could wish to be.”
“Male?”
“Allah, no.” She tugged lightly at his beard. “Can you imagine what I would look like?”
“Like Bahrain the eunuch who serves Saladin.”
“Served,” she said. “I am my own woman again.”
“And not mine?”
“Can’t I be both?”
His head tossed. It had stopped aching shortly after Amalric left the sultan’s garden; there was no pain in it now, but he was dizzy enough that it hardly mattered. She did that to him. Dangled him, spun him, befuddled him. He never knew what she would say or do. “A woman is not,” he said, “her own possession. She has to belong to a man.”
“Why?”
“Who will look after her? Who will protect her? Who will defend her honor?”
“I like to imagine,” she said, “that I have some small facility in those arts.”
He shut his mouth.
“You can look after me,” she said, “and I can look after you. That’s what being wedded is. Isn’t it?”
“Then you won’t be your own woman any longer. You’ll be mine.”
“And you will belong to me. And we will both remain ourselves. I won’t be your shadow, any more than I’ll ask you to be mine.”
That was well, he thought, as anger gave way to wry amusement. He had never been able to teach her a woman’s proper place. Even when she professed to have learned, she only played at it. In a day or a month she wearied of it, and became herself again.
And why should he bemoan his failure, when the whole doctrine of Islam could not compel her?
“You don’t need to stop in Rome,” she said with her infallible memory for the meat of any discussion. “We can find the pope’s letter here, and the one who forged it, and the ones who abetted him. Then we’ll have revenge as well as one another.”
“Revenge isn’t Christian.”
“No more am I.” She curved her arm about his neck. “I’m going to trust you. I’m going to let you go.”
At first he barely understood her. Go? Trust? “What in God’s name—”
“You’re free. You can go. If you will promise to hunt with me, and not with the armies of Outremer.”
“I can’t hunt with what pitiful little is left of the army. I’m sworn.”
“So. You’re free to hunt with me.”
He stood still with her arm about his neck and her hand cradling the rose between them, and her self all open to him. It was not given as his due. It was given because she chose; because she loved him.
Strange, that air of equality. Heady. More than a little alarming. It was heretical on both sides of this war.
“You’re mad, I think,” he said. She regarded him unblinking. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I’ll hunt with you.”
29.
It was strange, Elen thought. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was overrun; the Saracens harried it in every hill and valley, every fold and inlet in the coast; the flower of its chivalry was dead or taken and its king was held in captivity. Yet Tyre kept its pride. Here the knights and barons came who had not fallen or been taken at Hattin; here the merchants of Acre gathered, cheek by jowl with the traders of Tyre; here was strength of purpose, embodied in the one who had taken over the city’s defenses and held them against Saladin. Marquis Conrad would not allow the word defeat to be spoken in his presence. “We have suffered a reversal,” he said where any could hear. “And not a slight one, either. But we can regain what we have lost. All Europe will rise and come to our aid. Only wait, and hold, and see.”
The city waited, and held, and saw: that Saladin was not inclined to besiege it once he saw how strongly it was held. He departed in search of softer prey; the city held a festival. At the height of it they made a mummery, a mockery of the infidel who saw bright steel and strong walls, and fled with his tail between his legs.
Elen had expected at best to endure this last desperate refuge before she fled westward. She was startled to fall in love with the city. As old as Nineveh, they said, as old as Tyre. It was in Scripture; it was in the books which she had read, her Latin and her bit of Greek, and even the old, sweet, lying Latin story of Apollonius prince of Tyre. Its reality was this rock upon the sea, with its walls rising sheer out of the water and its great twin-towered harbor warded by a chain and its single gate upon the land. That was Alexander’s genius and his madness, that causeway built by men’s hands and mortared with their blood, to make an isthmus of the island because it would not yield to his kingship. The Roman road stretched die-straight down it, from the frown of wall and gate to the sun-scorched green of the fields and villages, and along it ran the lofty arches of the Romans’ aqueduct, carrying water from the springs that never failed.
It was beautiful, was Tyre. It was full of fountains. There were memories of Rome in its houses, a fluted column or a jeweled pavement; more than a memory of Byzantium in the street of the glassmakers, under the crumbling portico with its sea-veined marble, as they plied their delicate trade. And in the sea, if the wind was calm and one’s eyes were keen, one could see the sunken city, the Tyre that was as old as Nineveh: castles and markets, streets and palaces, drowned like Ys or Lyonesse, but older far, and beautiful, with its citizenry of fi
shes.
Tyre was as old as time, but there was no weariness in it. Its every house and hovel was full to bursting. Its churches rang with the voices of the faithful. Its markets thrummed with commerce; its harbor sheltered a fleet which would, its lord hoped, secure the sea for the Franks.
When the Mortmains and their guests entered the city, Elen at first feared that there would be no place for them; or that, at best, they would be sundered, quartered among strangers. But she had reckoned without Joanna. The House of Ibrahim was a kingdom of trade. Elen had been told as much without ceasing, but she had never quite understood it. Now she began to see. For a daughter of that great merchant House, there was indeed lodging to be had: a veritable palace, a caravanserai of a full five stories overlooking the harbor, with gardens and fountains and its own gate on the quay. It was not theirs alone, it could not be, but they had the better part of a wing to themselves, and the merchants who shared it were profoundly respectful of the lady and her following.
“It would be so wherever I went,” Joanna said. “Wherever traders are, our House is known. We have a house in Rhiyana, surely you know it.”
Elen did, vaguely.
Joanna laughed at her. “My lord prince is just like you. He admits, after long persuasion, that without us the world would be a far poorer place—and he a far, far poorer man. But still, to associate himself with trade...it goes against everything he was bred for.”
“He is a prince,” said Elen, “after all.”
“That’s what his mamluks say. Do you know how they kept the regent of Aleppo from executing him as a spy, when he was there as my guardsman? They reminded the regent that my lord Aidan is a Frank and a prince; could he possibly be so sensible as to take anyone’s pay, let alone for spying on his enemies?”
“They played him for a fool?” Elen was indignant.
“They saved his life,” Joanna said. “And it was true enough. Can you imagine him doing anything because he was paid to?”
“No,” said Elen, after a pause. “But still, to mock him for being honorable—”
“He mocks them for being a race of merchants. Fair is fair.”
Elen decided not to be angry. Her uncle hardly needed her to defend him; he was quite enough in himself. She turned her bit of handwork in her fingers. No pretty trifles, here; all the women had ample to do keeping the tribe of children in clothes. She was piecing together a chemise for one of the girls, out of an outworn one of Joanna’s.
Joanna nursed the youngest of her daughters with every appearance of content. She was almost a stranger without the weight of pregnancy to bear her down: a big woman, yes, broad-hipped and deep-breasted, but light on her feet, and rather more handsome than she gave herself credit for. Black became her vilely, and she would not wear it until she must, when she had proof that her husband was dead; the deep blue of her gown was somber enough, and it looked well on her.
The third of their company sat in peaceful silence, stitching a cotte for William. Lady Margaret had ridden into Tyre a handful of days ago with an escort well worthy of her: not simply her maid and a handful of grizzled men-at-arms but the pope’s legate himself with all his entourage. In the face of her daughter’s blank amazement she had said, “Father abbot’s servants wish him to be where the strongest defenses are. I wish to see my grandchild.”
“But,” Joanna said. “All that way. With armies between. And you hate to ride.”
“For my kin I can endure a hardship or two,” said Margaret. “The armies were no danger. A wing of the sultan’s cavalry kept us company from Nablus to Toron; they were most respectful. One of them was a cousin to our cousin Rashida, who married a man in Baalbek.”
Joanna accepted that with fair equanimity, once she was past the shock of having her mother there. Elen, after months in Outremer, even after Raihan, still could not comprehend how a woman could live so easily on both sides of the wall. It was only Margaret, she was certain. The other little dark women she had seen were pullani, mocked and despised, their children scorned as mongrels. And those were not even Muslims; they were Armenians or Greeks, or Syrian Christians. Margaret’s mother had been a true infidel, a Muslim from Aleppo, wedded to a Frank for the profit of the House. The Frank had been an oddity himself, a cloistered monk turned Crusading knight; what he did to earn a daughter of the House of Ibrahim, Elen had never quite understood.
The silence tempted her. She yielded; she asked.
“He was noble born, my father,” Margaret answered her, “but there were sea reivers in his blood, and trader-pirates out of the Northland, and maybe a drop or two of blood from further back, all the way to Tyre itself. He was given to the cloister as a child, to pray for his father’s soul, and for a long while it seemed that he was content. But his blood was strong, and in the end it ruled him. His abbot brought him to Rome for an audience with the lord pope; when the abbot left, my father stayed, and put off his habit, and took the cross. He came to Outremer with little but the clothes on his back, but soon his greatest gift revealed itself. He could fight well enough though he came to it so late, and he earned himself a knighthood by it, but more wonderful was what he did with the first booty he took in a battle. He sold it piece by piece; with what he earned thereby, he bought a share in a caravan which another knight had come by in a wager. The caravan was one of the House of Ibrahim. It came in soon after the battle, and he found himself a wealthy man. His gift being what it was, he did not rest content with that, or even with the castle which he won in another of the wars. He became an honored client of the House. He was a guest there more than once; he spoke with the then-mistress, and like took well to like.
“One of the daughters of the House was an adventurous soul, firm in her faith but not implacable in it. She had been married, but her husband died in a storm in the desert; the lone son of the union was old enough to depart from among the women. She had been offered another husband, and given to choose from among a number of men, but none came close to taking her fancy. The Frank, however, intrigued her. She bethought herself that the House might profit well from a kin-bond to the High Court of Jerusalem. The old coast roads, which the Franks closed at whim to the caravans of Islam or held open at the cost of ruinous tolls, were open without hindrance to the caravans of Christendom. If the House of Ibrahim shared kin with the house of a Frank, would it not be the stronger thereby?
“It was a firm choice, once she had made it, but it was never easy for her. She accepted her husband’s faith, inasmuch as she could. Her kin were and are good Muslims, but they were merchants first. They understood how she could do as she did, and why. They would not, for that, accept her again into her family’s house, although her husband was as welcome as before, and I who was born and christened a Frank had much of my fostering in Aleppo.”
“She gave up her family to make it stronger,” Elen said. “How brave she must have been!”
“She was brave,” said Margaret, “and canny, and only occasionally bitter. I will not say that she loved her husband, but they esteemed one another highly. They died within a year of one another, he of a wound gone bad, she, I think, of seeing no further use in living. I was grown and married, with a daughter and a newborn son; my husband was dead in the same battle which felled my father, and he had heirs by another, older union, leaving my son free to inherit my father’s lands. She judged me fit to take her place in the demesne and in the House.”
“Did she die a Christian?” Elen asked. “Or did she return to her old faith?”
Margaret smiled very faintly. “No one knows but God and she. She was shriven, rightly enough, and prepared for the dark road in proper Christian wise, but who is to say that, at the utmost, she did not say the words of the Prophet’s faith?”
“I wish I could have known her,” Elen said.
“She was a terrible old woman,” said Joanna. “No one ever mocked her for what she was, to her face or otherwise. When she went to court, even the king gave her respect. ‘Start at the top,’ she used
to say, ‘and all the rest will follow. ’”
“And so it does,” said Margaret peaceably, biting off a thread. “Joanna, have you any more of this green?”
Joanna’s hands were full of her baby, but Elen found what Margaret was looking for. The talk thereafter circled lazily round women’s things, small and quiet and comfortably dull.
o0o
Ysabel liked Tyre even better than Elen did. It was heaven for children, if they could slip away from overburdened Nurse, or if Mother was too caught up in the new baby to notice that some of her brood were missing. The house alone was good for hours of exploring. They were forbidden the parts where people lived, unless they were invited. But there was much more to the caravanserai than warrens of rooms full of merchants and knights and knights’ women and children. Its lower level was a vast cavern full of treasure, and under that were catacombs that went deeper even than the master of the house might know of, down into an older earth. There were pillars there, holding up the vaults of the roof, and floors that seemed made of jewels, and passages that ran away into the dark.
William and the girlchildren were cowards. They did not want to go down into the damp and the dimness, even with a lamp appropriated from the caverns above. Ysabel tried to be charitable. They were human, after all. They were blind outside of bright daylight.
But Akiva did not want to do it, either. He had been very ill after Salima was born, from stretching his power too far, too soon, with no one older or stronger to tell him when to stop. He was better now, but he was still weak; he spent most of his days reading, or simply sitting in the garden with the sun on his hollowed face. Ysabel knew—knew—that there were things one could do to help him. She could almost put her hands on some of them. But she was too young. Her gifts were only seeds, or straggly saplings with green fruit on them.