Envoy of Jerusalem

by Helena P. Schrader

  Ibelin was still thinking and speaking of the wider tragedy. “I’m going to meet with the Sultan again in the hope we can renegotiate the ransom for the poor,” he told his friend. “I have no other choice,” he explained in a voice both tortured and furious, “because nothing I can say or do has convinced that bastard Heraclius to part with even a portion of his treasure for the sake of the poor! The Patriarch of Jerusalem”—Ibelin’s voice was laden with contempt, disgust, and outright disbelief—“prefers to retain his gold and silver plate to buying the freedom of Christians!”

  The muezzin’s voice was fading out and the Sultan sat back on his heels, then pushed himself up off his prayer rug. He gestured to a slave boy to roll it up and put it back in its place. He reseated himself on thick cushions behind the ivory-inlaid table that he used as his writing desk, and again took up the translation of the letter from the Dowager Queen of Jerusalem.

  Behind him he heard someone enter and glanced over his shoulder. His brother had entered, asking, “Am I interrupting?”

  Salah ad-Din shook his head and indicated that his brother should join him, asking, “You have seen this letter?”

  “I skimmed over the translation,” al-Adil admitted. “What are you going to answer?”

  “I will tell her the truth,” the Sultan answered simply.

  “Which is?” al-Adil pressed him, his eyes intent on his brother’s face.

  “That her husband will go free at the end of the forty days.”

  “You aren’t going to accept his offer to stand surety for those who cannot pay?” al-Adil asked back, sounding both surprised and displeased. Ibelin had made this offer this afternoon: that if he could not find an additional thirty thousand dinars in Jerusalem, he would surrender his own person to the Sultan as a hostage until the sum could be raised in the West.

  “No,” Salah ad-Din answered firmly. “It is worthless. He cannot possibly raise another thirty thousand dinars. All that talk about the Pope in Rome paying is nonsense,” he scoffed. “The Pope is no more likely to pay for the paupers in Jerusalem than the Caliph in Baghdad is!” “Furthermore,” he continued, “the troops are already grumbling about being denied plunder and slaves. I am counting on some twenty thousand Christians being unable to pay so we can divide them among the troops. Since most of the Christians in the city are women, this will do much to appease their displeasure. One woman for every two men should be enough to restore their good humor for a few weeks.”

  Al-Adil shrugged agreement, but insisted, “Ibn Barzan is a dangerous opponent. Surely it is better to keep him in our hands than to let him go free, regardless of what happens to the Christian whores. If you let him go, he will certainly fight us again at the next opportunity.”

  Salah ad-Din raised his eyebrows and eyed his brother. “You sound like you are afraid of him.”

  “Hardly,” al-Adil snapped back, annoyed at his brother’s aspersion on his courage. “But why let him go free? At the very least we could insist that his wealthy wife pay a high price for him.”

  “She is not so wealthy anymore, now that we control all the lands her late husband Malik Amalric settled upon her.”

  “Her father’s family is wealthy,” al-Adil insisted.

  Salah ad-Din admitted, “True enough—but while I did not want to risk the Greek Emperor’s wrath by laying hands on his kinswoman, I’m not sure his sense of family loyalty would extend so far as to pay a large ransom for her Frankish husband. It is more likely we would simply end up with yet another high-ranking—but not particularly valuable—prisoner on our hands. Besides, I gave him my word.”

  Al-Adil pressed his lips together. His brother was quite capable of breaking his word when he thought it was expedient, but he also knew that his brother liked to think of himself as a man of honor. If he was going to get on his high horse and stress his sense of honor, then it would not be productive to argue with him. Al-Adil could not resist adding, however: “You will live to regret this, Yusuf. I warn you Ibn Barzan will do all he can to regain his lost lands. He will never accept our control of these places holy to his foolish faith. He will go all the way to the kingdom of the Norsemen to get help, if he has to.”

  Salah ad-Din shrugged. “Then he will die an unhappy man in a cold and distant place. We have won. Allah in his infinite generosity has heard our prayers and has granted us this great triumph. In less than four weeks, we will tear down the cross and raise the half-moon of Islam over the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque. We will drive out the polytheists, and I will establish madrassas in their churches. This is no time to be petty or vindictive. I let my emotions run away with me when I allowed the Sufis to execute the Hospitaller and Templar prisoners after Hattin. Yes, they were fanatics who would never make good slaves, and, yes, it was better to kill them—but we should have done it quickly and cleanly, as I killed Arnat al-Karak. Now that I hold the entire Kingdom, my blood has cooled, and I can afford to be generous.”

  “Tyre still holds out,” al-Adil reminded him stubbornly.

  Salah ad-Din made a gesture as if he were shooing away a fly. “It is only a matter of time until Tyre falls, and the more mouths they have to feed inside the walls, the faster they will submit. I will let Ibn Barzan escort a third of the refugees from Jerusalem to Tyre. That should fill the city to overflowing, foster sickness and shortages, and so soften the city for ready surrender. We’ll follow on the heels of the Christians expelled from Jerusalem, and be ready to lay siege to Tyre as soon as the refugees are all inside. It will fall before the winter solstice,” he predicted confidently.

  “If that is so, you will have Ibn Barzan in your hands again.”

  “Yes, and his wife and sons,” the Sultan agreed, reaching out to pick up the letter from Maria Zoë Comnena again. “I am quite curious about this woman.”

  Al-Afdal raised his eyebrows. His brother had four wives and countless concubines. He could not imagine what interest his brother had in a Greek woman, who he guessed was over thirty years old. He admitted, “it is said she was remarkably beautiful when she came to Jerusalem as a young bride, but that was twenty years ago. She is probably fat and sagging now.”

  Salah ad-Din shrugged. “Pretty flesh is plentiful and readily accessible. I am sure to find something to my taste among the women and girls who cannot pay their ransom, but this woman,” he tapped his forefinger on the letter, “is intelligent, and that is a great rarity among her sex.”

  “What makes you think she possesses intellect?” al-Adil asked, surprised.

  “The letter,” his brother answered with a smile as he tapped it again. “She constructed it very cleverly: never sounding arrogant, yet never sliding into piteous pleading. When she wrote it, she did not know if her husband was alive or dead. She appealed to my sense of honor—duly citing the Koran—in requesting the return of his remains should he be dead, and she mustered her arguments for clemency, should he be alive, as masterfully as you muster my army.” He flashed his brother a smile.

  “Surely that was the work of a clever clerk, not a brainless woman,” al-Adil countered, annoyed by his brother’s credulity.

  Salah ad-Din shook his head. “Our good Benjamin told me the letter was composed in the Greek of the imperial class but without the usual embellishments of a scribe. Furthermore, he swears, it was written by a woman’s hand.” The secretary Benjamin was a master at analyzing calligraphy, which was one reason he enjoyed favor despite being a Jew. “Benjamin believes she wrote it herself, rather than risking it to dictation. He claims that all the imperial women of Constantinople are very well educated.”

  “How can you educate a woman?” Al-Adil scoffed in exasperation. “They do not have the brains for it, so all teaching is wasted on them. The only thing a woman needs to know is how to please her master and how to honor Allah and his messenger, may Allah’s blessings be upon him.”

  “Possibly, yet this woman at least appears to have absorbed a great deal of learning since she speaks three languages, I
am told, and writes so eloquently. It makes me wonder if Allah in his infinite wisdom did not give some women a little bit of manliness. . . .”

  Al-Adil was not convinced, but he cared too little about an old woman married to a Frank to bother arguing with his brother about her. He confined himself to remarking caustically, “If she has a brain in her head at all, she must be very different from her successor on the throne of Jerusalem!”

  Salah ad-Din burst out laughing. “Indeed, they must be as different as day and night! Allah be praised that it is Sibylla who is now the faranj Queen, for Sibylla is without doubt the stupidest woman I have ever encountered in my entire life!”

  Aleppo, October 1187

  Sibylla, Queen of Jerusalem, snuggled closer to the naked body of her husband. She lay on her side under his shoulder, her knee across his hips and her face against his rib cage. With her right hand she played absently with the bronze-colored hairs on his chest. Guy was a wonderfully handsome and virile man, she thought to herself contentedly, still warm and languid from their lovemaking. She did not understand why other people refused to see his virtues. Some were just jealous, of course, like Barry, who had been furious because Guy replaced him in her bed. Others were bigots, like Tripoli and Sidon, who thought only men from Outremer could rule the Kingdom. And her poor brother Baldwin had hated Guy simply because he was all that Baldwin wasn’t: strong, handsome, and vigorous.

  But it made no sense the way the survivors of Hattin blamed Guy for their defeat. Could Guy help it that the Saracens outnumbered them, or that they poisoned the wells? Could Guy stop the wind from fanning the fires? Guy had fought bravely to the very end. He hadn’t run away like Tripoli and Ibelin. He was no more to blame for the catastrophe than anyone else.

  Guy’s breathing was becoming deeper as he drifted off to sleep, and Sibylla squirmed to wake him up again. “Guy, I have something to tell you.”

  “Hmm?” he grunted, reluctant to return to consciousness and with it, awareness of his imprisonment and helplessness.

  “You’re such a good lover, Guy,” Sibylla opened, knowing it would please him, “and we’ve been making love so often” (what else was there to do in captivity?) “that you have filled my womb with life.”

  “What?” His eyes flew open and his whole body tensed. “What did you say?”

  “That I’m carrying your child again—at last.” Despite Guy’s unquestionable virility, Sibylla had not conceived until they had been married three years. She had then given birth to a daughter who had died before her second birthday.

  “Are you sure?” Guy demanded, slipping out of Sibylla’s embrace to look down at her from a sitting position. His expression was not exactly overjoyed.

  “Of course I’m sure,” Sibylla answered, annoyed by his lack of delight. She looked up at him with a frown hovering on her brow. Sibylla was big-breasted, round-bellied, and an eager and creative bedmate, but her face had never been her best feature, and it was turning round and flabby. “I had my last flux three weeks before I came to join you. I was worried that it would come right after we were reunited and you would be angry, but it never came. Now we’ve been together ten weeks and still it hasn’t come. There are other signs, too,” she added, thinking he might have noticed her swelling breasts on his own. “Aren’t you pleased?”

  “Pleased? How can I be pleased?” Guy demanded, unable to fathom her stupidity. “What if you’re carrying a son at last?”

  “But that’s what I want and pray for,” Sibylla told him blankly. “I thought you wanted a son, too.”

  “Of course I want a son!” Guy retorted furiously, flinging back the covers and swinging his feet over the edge of the bed to stand up, his back to her.

  “I don’t understand!” Sibylla wailed. “I’m with child and it may well be the son we’ve hoped and prayed for. Why are you angry with me?” She was near to tears.

  “You stupid goose!” Guy snapped, reaching for his braies and stepping into them in obvious haste. As he drew the drawstring tight he reminded her, “Have you forgotten we’re prisoners? What do you think Salah ad-Din will do when he learns you are with child?”

  Sibylla gazed up at Guy with an open mouth that expressed her utter lack of imagination. “But what should he do?”

  “Seize the child, for a start, and then either kill him or—more probably—raise him with his own sons, make him a Muslim, and then send him back to us and say: ‘Behold your king!’ Jesus God, woman! It’s bad enough that you insisted on putting yourself in his hands, but now—” He threw up his own hands in helpless frustration and reached for his shirt.

  Sibylla pointed out petulantly, “It takes two to make a child. If you didn’t want me to become pregnant here in Aleppo, then you shouldn’t have been trying so hard.”

  “I didn’t think—never mind!” Guy pulled a shirt over his head and shouted in the direction of the door to the adjacent chamber, “Henri! Henri! Come help me dress!”

  Sibylla rolled herself into the sheets to cover her nakedness and lay with her back to her husband, swallowing down tears of self-pity. She loved Guy more than anything in the world. All she wanted to do was please him. She’d abandoned Jerusalem to be with him in captivity, and what thanks did she get? Her subjects had hissed and jeered at her as she left Jerusalem, and her barons had received her here with stony hostility. Guy had been the only one to welcome her. That had been enough at the time, but now he was snarling, too. She just didn’t understand.

  When Guy was fully dressed, he crossed to the anteroom shared by Sir Henri, who was serving him as a squire since he had none, and Sibylla’s maid, and passed through it to pound on the door that led out into the corridor. “I want to visit my brother!” he told the guards posted on the other side of the locked door. “I need to speak urgently with my brother!”

  Although he was sure the guards spoke enough French to understand him, they pretended not to and answered in Arabic or Turkish or one of their other ugly-sounding tongues. “Tell them what I want!” Guy ordered Sir Henri.

  Sir Henri smirked with an inward sense of superiority. He had been born in Ibelin, the youngest of the first Baron’s four sons, and like most of the Latin settlers he had learned rudimentary Arabic as a child in order to speak to the native population. Although he had never mastered it as fully as his older brother Balian, he had over the years acquired a serviceable vocabulary, and had more than once passed himself off as a Bedouin—a ruse that did not require extensive or intellectual conversations. He viewed Lusignan’s complete ignorance of the language as intellectual laziness and misplaced arrogance, but it also increased his own utility to the captive king, and so he welcomed it, too.

  Guy de Lusignan was a man without friends at the moment. Never popular and widely viewed as a usurper even before the disaster at Hattin, he was now despised for leading the Christian army to an unnecessary defeat and losing the entire Kingdom as a result. Henri shared his peers’ contempt for Guy’s leadership, but he saw in their open rejection of Guy an opportunity as well. Henri was under no illusion about being in a position to pay his ransom; not only was his estate at Amman lost, but the baronies of his once wealthy and powerful older brothers—Nablus, Ramla, Mirabel, and Ibelin—were likewise all in Saracen hands. Thus he had little prospect of release and might spend the rest of his days in the darkness of the dungeon—unless he could find someone else to pay his ransom.

  Guy de Lusignan, to be sure, had lost his kingdom and so his income, but he was an anointed king. Henri figured that there were rich and powerful kings in the West who would not want a fellow Christian monarch to remain in Saracen hands. By toadying up to Lusignan, Henri had already gained the privilege of sharing the King’s comparatively comfortable suite of rooms, and he hoped that when the time came he would also gain release from captivity altogether—through Guy’s good offices.

  For now, Henri informed the guards that his lord wanted to visit the other prisoners, and received the answer that they would inquire if it wa
s allowed.

  “Damn them!” Guy raged, furious with his stupid wife. It was all her fault that they were now in this ridiculous predicament. “Damn them!”

  While the King and Queen of Jerusalem were housed in a two-room suite on the upper floor of one of the many towers, the other prisoners were not so lucky. When guards eventually came to escort Guy to the other prisoners, he was led on shallow, sloping stairs to the very bowels of the great fortress. The passages were wide and tall but poorly lit, and the air was stale and foul long before they reached the large, cavernous cellar in which the other “prisoners of rank” were held.

  The arrival of King Guy with an escort caused a minor sensation—or at least a distraction. Several men roused themselves from their straw pallets, not out of respect but from curiosity.

  “Come to join us?” Haifa asked sarcastically, looking up but not rising from his chess game with Caesarea.

  The white-haired Marquis de Montferrat, father of the man who, unbeknownst to him, was now defending Tyre, hushed Haifa with a wave of his hand. He was no more enamored of Guy de Lusignan than the rest of them, but he did not think Christian lords should present a spectacle of internal bickering to their jailers.

  “Where’s my brother?” Guy asked in answer, looking around the seemingly vast underground hall, which was composed of a series of vaulted chambers supported by massive stone pillars.

  “Down that way,” Caesarea gestured vaguely, and Guy had no option but to continue deeper into the darkness. With each step he distanced himself more from the hanging lanterns, and the air seemed both colder and stiller. Suddenly something moved on his right and he shied to the left, instinctively feeling for his hilt. But he had no sword. None of them did.

  His brother Aimery loomed up out of the darkness. “Come to see how the rest of us live?” he mocked.

  “It’s not my fault you aren’t housed as well as I,” Guy answered defensively.