by Judith Tarr
“I was young,” she said, “and I hurt, and everything that I was and felt and did seemed too ugly to bear. And in the midst of it I found something beautiful.”
He could not understand. He was too young, and he was a boy. “You were weak.”
“I was weak,” she said. “People are. Why else is there rape after battles?”
Aimery went bright scarlet. “That’s different. Men are different.”
“Yes,” Aidan said. “Men aren’t taught to rein themselves in.” He met Aimery’s furious stare with one almost as fierce, if nowhere near as angry. “Don’t judge what you have no right to judge.”
“I have every right!” Aimery cried. “She is my mother!”
“She sinned against your father once. Your father sinned against her a dozen times a year.”
It was not Aimery who flew in his face, who struck him with such force that he swayed. He stared at Joanna, too shocked to be angry. “You will not,” Joanna said, shaping every word with trembling care, “speak so of my husband. What he did was never more than the body’s need. What I did was mortal sin. I betrayed my vows to him, in spirit as in flesh. And I never repented it.”
“Not even now?”
“Now,” she said, “I want you to understand. You have vows of your own. I will not give up my land and my country and my life because you want to keep me near you, though you can never let yourself touch me. That wanting is pure selfishness. It wrongs you, it wrongs me, it wrongs your lady. And it wrongs the child you begot.”
The worst of it, the very worst, was that she was loving him through all of this. Wanting him so badly that it was an ache in Ysabel’s own body, and resisting him so fiercely that it shook her within and without.
“You may take her,” Joanna said. “She is yours. I cannot raise her as she should be raised; I cannot rule her as she should, and must, be ruled. But I will not go with you. This is my country. My children were born to it. I will die in it.”
He shook, standing there, in the face of her mortality, Humans died. Love could not hold them; grief could not save them.
Her face softened as she looked at him. “My lord, we knew that it could never be more than a few moments’ pleasure, even when we did it. What came of it...that, too, was only mine for a while.”
“I am not a thing,” Ysabel said angrily. “You can’t throw me back and forth like a clipped penny.”
They both turned to her. Their eyes were frightening. She tried to meet them steadily. “I may be an accident, but I’m still me. I won’t be given away.”
“What will you do?” her mother asked. “I have to stay here. He has to go away. One of us has to look after you.”
I can look after myself, Ysabel started to say, but she stopped. It was not quite true. She was too young yet. She needed training and teaching.
She could not get it as her brothers and sisters did, from lords and ladies who owed her mother favors, or who wanted an alliance with her father. She was not like the rest of them. Humans could not understand her, or even stand her, often.
It was not a choice that she stood in front of. Of course her father would take her. He was the only one who could. It was what would happen once he took her. “I’ll never see you again,” she said to her mother. Not whining too badly. She was proud of that.
Joanna tried to be light, to make her feel better. “The world is not as wide as that. And children grow. You might be like Morgiana. Then I’ll see more of you than I ever want to see.”
Ysabel shook her head till her braids whipped her face, making the tears spring. “I’ll grow and I’ll learn and I’ll forget how long time is, and when I come back it will be too late, and you’ll be gone.”
“Your father won’t let that happen,” Joanna said. She never cried when other people would lie down and howl. She went quieter instead, and stronger. “I’m sending you the way I sent Aimery to Count Raymond, to be Prince Aidan’s fosterling and Lady Elen’s maid, and maybe when you’re older you will be a maid-in-waiting to the queen. Someday you’ll come back to Outremer and we’ll see one another again, as gentlefolk do.”
Oh, she was strong, to talk like that, who had always hated passionately to let anyone touch a child of hers, even a nurse or a servant. Ysabel would never have that kind of strength, rock-solid and rock-hard and more than a little merciless. It looked at Ysabel and saw what was best for her, and decided without wavering. It looked at Aimery and braced itself for a long hard war.
Men were not reasonable about women’s sins. It was even worse when the sinner was a man’s mother, whom he loved quite beyond measure and understood not at all. Aimery did not even hear what Ysabel said, no more than she heard it herself, something about having to do as she was told, and coming back the moment she was able. She meant it, but half her mind had turned to her brother, seeing danger there and not knowing what to do about it.
He did not say much. Only, “That’s brave of you, Mother. To hand her over to the one who sired her, and forget that she was ever born.”
There was a sneer on his face. He wanted to strike and hurt, the way Joanna had hurt him.
“I will never forget,” said Joanna, who was stronger than he was, though he lacked the wits to see it. “Nor will I beg anyone’s pardon, short of God Himself.”
“Not even the man you cuckolded?”
“That’s an ill word for your father,” she said.
“You gave it to him.”
“He never knew it, nor did any other man. Will you be the one to do it, Aimery? Will you brand your father a cuckold and your mother a whore? Will that make you feel one whit better than you feel now?”
Aimery’s eyes were the exact color of hers; the exact, thunderous blue, now almost black with pain. “I hate you,” he said.
“Of course you do,” she said. “Sometimes I hate myself. I can do two things about it. I can let it eat me alive, or I can go on past it.”
He stared at her. His mouth worked. He started to say something, let it die unsaid.
“I am not asking for your forgiveness,” she said. “All I ask is that you think, and that you try to understand. This war is going to need us both. If we cannot be friends, at least we should be allies.”
“You could go,” he said. “Turn infidel. Live in the House of Ibrahim and be safe from all the fighting.”
“I thought of it,” she said, “long and hard. I may still send the younger girls to Aleppo, where they will be safe and well looked after, and taught all that they need to know. But you and I, Aimery, we belong to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. We stand or fall with it. We can turn our private quarrel to a feud that divides half the kingdom. Or we can master it and swear a truce, and fight our war together.”
He stood stiff. He was not ready to be that sensible. He wanted to scream at her and call her ugly names, and hear her scream back, and make her cry. He wanted to throw all his anger on her, and all his grief and loss and plain dull disappointment. His mother was human and mortal, and could make mistakes, and some of them were monstrous. She was not the shining saint that he had thought her.
Aidan spoke behind them. “Before you make your choice, Aimery, consider what you have to choose. The lands that you hold by right are lost until you can win them back, although you hardly lack for means, with your share in the House of Ibrahim. I had in mind to offer you more. I had my fief of Millefleurs from King Baldwin. I never submitted to King Guy, nor called him my liege lord; my fief is still my own though I abandon it for my own country. Will you hold it for me?”
“Is that a bribe to keep me quiet?”
Aidan did not lose his temper, though Ysabel would hardly have blamed him if he had. “You wrong us both in that, messire. That I would buy silence; that you could be bought. I have lands and a castle which have become very dear to me; my oath and my honor compel me to forsake them. Should I be faulted for finding them a master who can look after them and cherish them and hold them as they should be held?”
Aimery c
ould not speak. It was too much for him all at once: all that they were asking him to understand.
“If you do accept the charge,” Aidan said, “you can’t do it alone. You’ll need your mother. To be lady and chatelaine until you have a wife to do it for you; to be regent until you grow into a man. And she needs you, messire. You are her firstborn, the one she fought the hardest for. She loves you.”
“Yes,” said Aimery bitterly. “She loves me so much that she threw me away and got herself Ysabel to take my place.”
“I see that you are her son,” Aidan said, cool, almost cold. “She never forgot a slight in her life, either. Or forgave it. If you cannot practice Christian charity, will you consider Christian politics? You need her, messire. You need what she knows of trade and of the House of Ibrahim; of court and kingdom and the games of kings. You need a teacher. You will never have one better than she.”
“You,” said Aimery. “You say that. You are the one who seduced her!”
There, thought Ysabel. He had got to that. Blaming the one he had, for hero-worship, been refusing to blame. It had taken him long enough.
It was his mother who said, “He seduced me. I seduced him. What has that to do with whether you and I can hold Millefleurs?”
“Everything!” Aimery cried.
“Only if you let it,” she said.
“Go,” Aidan said, so gently that they all stared. “Think on it. Before I go, tell me what you choose.”
“What will you do if I say no?”
Aidan raised a brow. “Will that be any affair of yours?”
“But,” said Aimery. “If I don’t take Millefleurs, or Mother doesn’t, the enemy will get it. Or someone else, maybe worse. What if they don’t know about the way the spring goes dry in August, but there’s another and smaller one in the hill, that carries the castle through till the rains come? What if they knock holes in the door with the flowers carved on it, or tear up the mosaics in the chapel? What if they don’t know how to be good to the people in the village?”
“Do you care?”
“Yes, I care!” Aimery stopped, breathing hard. “You’re working on me. The way you do in councils.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“Yes,” said Aimery angrily. “Yes, I’11 take what you offer. I’m honored. I’m grateful.”
“You’ll swear a truce with your mother?”
That stopped him. He shot a glance at his mother. She stood still. She would not help him, one way or the other. She looked the way she always looked. He tried to see her as a whore the way he had seen them in the cities or hanging about the army: raddled, painted, with her hair done up in elaborate curls. He shied from seeing her in a dress so tight it strained at the seams, with her breasts bursting out of it and her ankles showing, and no modesty in her at all.
He could not do it. He could not forgive her, either. That would take more time by far than anyone was giving him.
“I’ll swear a truce,” he said. “I won’t promise any more than that.”
“It is enough,” said Aidan. “For a beginning.”
40.
Beginnings.
That was what Joanna thought of, perversely, standing on the quay, watching the five blue-sailed ships as they took on their passengers and cargo. She did not want to think of endings. Of what was going away; of who would never come back.
Never, while she was alive to see him. She did not pretend to prescience. She simply knew.
It was all very orderly, as such things went. Inevitably the desperate or the frightened pressed forward now that it was too late, and tried to beg or borrow or steal a place on one of the ships. There would have been a fight, or more than one, but for the brothers, king and prince. It was unmistakable which was which, the one in royal blue, the other in Saracen black, but when they were so minded they had exactly the same voice. Soft, clear, and very firm. The contentious were encouraged to take their leave. The fearful were reminded, with apologies, that a ship could only hold so many.
Those who had won passage were remarkably quiet. The pilgrims huddled together and prayed. Some of the women wept. The children stared big-eyed from behind skirts or from enveloping arms.
The pope’s legate came without fanfare and boarded under cover of Archbishop William’s arrival. His entourage was somewhat less than it had been when he came. One had remained behind to do penance for a certain great sin. That one had a new novice to attend him, Joanna had heard: the merchant’s son from Genoa. The merchant himself sailed on the smallest of the ships, as far from the king and his brother as the fleet would allow. Guillermo Seco was somewhat of a broken man since he gambled on Aidan’s enmity and lost his son.
Abbot Leo looked as if he could not decide whether to be happy or sad: happy to be sailing home; sad to leave the Holy Land in such straits. The archbishop knew much less ambivalence. He was going to preach the Crusade. He spoke a few fiery words from the rail, promises of a return with the whole of Christendom at his back. A cheer went up even from those who had failed to win passage.
“That one will do well,” Aidan said.
He was standing beside her. She could have sworn that he was over by the last of the ships, seeing to the loading of the horses. No one near her seemed to see him, except Dura, who lowered her eyes and backed away. Dura had great respect for the afarit, but she did not traffic with them unless she must.
Joanna could not breathe very well. They had all said their farewells in the caravanserai before they came out into the public eye. Aidan had offered her nothing but what he offered the others. Less in truth than he gave Aimery, or Lady Margaret. Joanna had been reckoning him wise, and trying not to hate him for it. Best to part so, watching him embrace each and every one of the others, engrossing herself in struggling not to cry and spoil her daughter’s new cotte. People would not have thought it odd that he offered her no more than a formal word, with Ysabel clinging to her and the baby crying and, suddenly, too many goodbyes to say, too little time to say them.
He stood beside her now, not looking at her. The last of the horses, Raihan’s best-beloved mare, was giving trouble. A slight figure slipped out of the press and caught her bridle. She calmed with uncanny swiftness.
Joanna caught herself smiling. “Rather an unlikely horsetamer, that one,” she said.
Aidan answered smile with smile. “It does go oddly with his Torah and his Talmud.” A finger of wind waxed playful, tangling in his hair. Joanna’s fists ached with clenching. He tossed his hair out of his face and slanted a glance at her. “When Ysabel is grown, she will come back. I promise you that. I won’t let her forget you.”
“Maybe you should.”
“When did I ever succumb to plain good sense?”
“I won’t be faithful to your memory,” she said. “I’ll do what I must for Aimery and the rest of my children. If I have to marry again, then I shall do so. If I am minded to take a lover, than I shall do that. You are not the beginning and the ending of my delight in this world.”
“I never wished to be,” he said.
He did not say what he could have said. That it was not his memory to which she should be faithful. Ranulf was another part of her, another wound that would, God willing, teach itself to heal.
“I have remarkably little guilt,” she said, “when it comes down to it. Will I burn in hell, do you think?”
“I’m hardly an authority,” he said. Light, almost. Accepting it.
She turned and looked at him. Looked, only, for a long while. Committing every line of him to memory. His eyes, unveiled, were hard to meet. She met them at last, to remember. Grey steel, grey stone. Grief, yes, and the bitterness of parting, but beneath them, deep and singing gladness. This had never been his country, well though he prospered in it. No more had he been her possession. “What we had,” she said. “What, for a little while, we shared...I’ll remember. Be good to our daughter, my lord.”
“Yes,” he said, answering both parts of it. For an instant s
he thought that he would touch her. Perhaps he meant to. But he did not. He bowed low and low, as to a queen. “Prosper you well, my lady. May God keep you.”
He was gone. A shadow and a light; then, all at once, solidity, running lightly up the gangway. Morgiana was waiting for him. Ysabel was close by her, silent for once and subdued, attending Lady Elen. As Joanna watched, Aidan came up beside his daughter. Her hand slid into his; she leaned against him, seeking comfort. Morgiana set her hand on the child’s shoulder. They looked well, standing so. They belonged together.
Joanna held her head high and thought of beginnings. There went the first cry of the Crusade, on the flagship with the seabird on its sail. Here remained the war, and a new demesne for herself and her eldest son, and perhaps, with time, more than an armed truce between them.
Someone touched her. She started slightly. Where Aidan had been stood her mother, offering a rare gift: an arm about her waist, a warm human presence. Margaret said nothing, did nothing but teach Joanna how to be strong. Joanna let her own arm come to rest about the plump shoulders, and stood with her, watching the fleet.
The gate of the horses’ hold boomed shut. Gangways slid rattling over rails. Sails ran up. Captains bellowed orders in Rhiyanan, odd mingling of harshness and music, like the sea on their own cold stones. The ships slid one by one out into the harbor, coming about in a stately dance, making for the needle’s eye that was the sea-gate of Tyre.
Joanna’s sight blurred. The ships, the men on them, dimmed to shadows. But on the flagship as it pulled ahead of the others, a great light went up. The sun on Gwydion’s crown, she told herself, though it blazed fivefold. Blue fire and green, and two that were smaller, silver and ruddy gold; and a splendid, leaping flame, the color of a ruby’s heart. There was a vision in it. Lions on a field of lilies, and an eagle soaring over them, and in the sky above them a blood-red cross.
Anglia, Francia, the Emperor of the Romans. Christendom would come and take vengeance for Hattin. Whether that vengeance would be complete...