Beatrice nodded, blinking back her tears, and drew a deep breath, oblivious to the fact that Maria Zoë was referring to the temper tantrum her eldest son was throwing in the lists below the window. Maria Zoë had not given up hope for Joscelyn—who was, after all, only twelve. He showed an increasing interest in riding and jousting with the other boys his own age, who were all eager squires-in-waiting. Bart, on the other hand, was handicapped not only by the time lost in captivity, but also by a sullen and whiny temperament that alienated his comrades.
“I suppose it’s time we got back to work,” Maria Zoë announced to change the subject, and left the window seat to return to the pile of linens the two women had been sorting through. The linens had been discovered in some trunks under a semi-collapsed roof in one of the partially burned out-buildings. While badly mildewed on discovery, after a thorough washing they were looking quite serviceable. Given the state of their finances, Maria Zoë was determined to let nothing go to waste, and these linens could, she felt, be turned into surcoats, tunics, or, if quilted, gambesons for the squires and aketons for the men-at-arms. For now, however, she was hoping to use them on the tables for the upcoming Christmas feast. Last year they’d had only bare tables; this year she wanted the feast to be more festive. A little more pomp, she felt, would signal hope.
Wild shouting from the lists, however, again distracted her. This had a different ring to it. It wasn’t the usual shouted advice and insults, nor the cheers and boos of judgment. She rushed back to the window and stuck her head out just in time to see two men ride into the lists. Before she had fully recognized who and what they were, her husband (who was no longer blindfolded) flung himself from his horse to embrace one of the riders, who had vaulted down to meet him.
“It’s John!” Maria Zoë exclaimed in amazement. “And Aimery! They must have come for Christmas!”
She leaned as far as she could out of the window into the brisk wintry air and called as she waved, “John! Aimery! Welcome home!”
John heard her and waved back, a broad grin on his face.
Maria Zoë had learned dignity at the court in Constantinople. For the first twenty years of her life, she had been trained not to show her emotions, not to “betray” herself to those around her—who were (by definition in Constantinople) her inferiors. But over the last nineteen years she had, piece by piece, broken out of that prison. She grabbed a shawl in passing and hurried out of the solar, calling up the spiral stairs to the floor above, “Eschiva! Come quick! Your lord husband is back!”
Eschiva had been in the nursery with her daughters Burgundia (nine) and Helvis (seven) and her youngest child, four-year-old Aimery. She appeared almost at once at the top of the stairs to ask, “What did you say? Aimery is here? At Caymont?”
“Down in the lists, but he’ll be inside shortly.”
Eschiva put her hands to her hair, her gown, her face. “I’m not ready for him! I have to change! I need—”
“You have rarely looked as lovely as you do right now,” Maria Zoë told her with a smile. She was not lying. Eschiva had bloomed in the more simple rural life of Caymont. At court, in her former capacity as lady to Queen Isabella, Eschiva had been constantly exposed to the problems of the realm—from finances and disputes over land to threats and rumors—without, of course, being able to do anything about any of them. Here at Caymont, she had nothing to worry about but whether her eldest child, eleven-year-old Guy, was taking care of his pony and whether the girls were learning to stitch.
“Oh, no, I must change,” Eschiva insisted, disappearing from the top of the stairs. It was not vanity that motivated her; Eschiva had no illusions about being particularly attractive. Rather the opposite—a nagging insecurity that Aimery, who had so often cheated on her in the past, would be disappointed.
Maria Zoë let her be, and turned instead to cross the great hall and descend the stairs to the inner courtyard, reaching it just as her son and Aimery came through the archway from the road with Balian and a gaggle of young men around them. Aimery had his arm draped over the shoulders of his eldest son, Guy, while John’s younger brother Philip, who was the same age as Guy, bounded beside John like an excited puppy.
The past year had been good for Philip, Maria Zoë noted mentally. He had always stood in John’s shadow, and to escape it he had often been disobedient, foolish, or wayward. The more John strove to please his father and be ready to step into his shoes, the more Philip rebelled. Maria Zoë could hardly blame her husband for the attention he had showered on John, but she knew Philip had been jealous—until John went away with Aimery and his father turned his attention to his remaining son. Without John to compete against, Philip had become more stable and more congenial. Caught red-handed in a misdemeanor, he had always had the most outrageous excuses, but this last year he had shown he could use his glib tongue to entertain them all. His sharp wit seemed capable of finding the humor in almost any situation, and Maria Zoë could not count the times he had saved them from feeling sorry for themselves with some remark that made them laugh. She was glad to see her husband reach out to Philip and pull him into the circle of his arm as he said something to John that made Philip blush, struggle, and then punch his father—laughing all the while.
Behind the principals trailed Henri de Brie’s two sons, Anseau and Conan. They too had been left at Caymont with their mother, Heloise, while their father served Guy de Lusignan on Cyprus. They were clearly trying to attract John’s attention, while bringing up the rear was a big, furry dog. The latter was evidently confused by the large crowd and was trying frantically to push his way through them all to John. Maria Zoë laughed: John had his dog at last.
It was nearly midnight before Aimery could be alone with Eschiva. First there had been the boisterous reception by Ibelin’s men, then greetings from the household, followed by a meal in the hall with nearly a hundred people, including servants and tenants. Even after the public portion of the day was over, his family had demanded attention. They had eventually seen the younger children off to bed, which meant Aimery had to carry his already sleeping namesake up to his little pallet and tuck Helvis into the big bed she shared with Burgundia and Balian’s Meg. But Aimery’s oldest son Guy wanted his attention, too. Aimery could have said no—but this last nine months, watching his brother brooding in his loneliness, had made Aimery see his family in a new light. His brother Guy had worn a crown, but he was now nothing but a lonely, prematurely aged man. So Aimery took the time to talk at length to his brother’s namesake until the boy’s eyes were falling shut. Only after young Guy had also been sent to bed could Aimery and Eschiva retreat to their own cramped quarters under the eaves.
Closing the door to their little chamber and throwing the bolt, Aimery looked at his wife. Eschiva had always been eclipsed by the women around her: the Greek princess selected for her beauty to be bride to the King of Jerusalem, and that woman’s daughter by the notoriously good-looking King Amalric. Eschiva had also served the infamous Eleanor of Aquitaine’s daughter for a bit, when the latter accompanied her brother King Richard to the Holy Land. Yet even in the absence of more celebrated beauties, Eschiva would never turn men’s heads when she walked into a room. She was too slim, too flat, too small. Her hair was a medium brown rather than blond or dark chestnut. Yet her features were harmonious, her lips soft, and her eyes a rich, amber gold—and most of all, she was his. She had been his since she was eight years old, and he so much older that he thought of her not at all.
He would never forget that day he rode back to Ibelin after her father, the Baron of Ramla and Mirabel, was taken captive on the Litani. The Sultan’s ransom demands were so ridiculous that he’d pictured Eschiva’s entire inheritance—his future lands—mortgaged to the hilt to pay them. He’d come to Ibelin to secure those lands by consummating his marriage to Ramla’s heiress. He hadn’t much cared what she looked like, and he couldn’t remember how old she actually was. He’d been waiting impatiently in the hall for what seemed like hours, fu
ming at the entire situation, when the Dowager Queen had walked in with a lovely little dove beside her, and he’d been stunned to realize that that dove was his wife!
He had consummated their marriage, not with the cold efficiency of greed that had brought him to Ibelin that day, but rather with genuine delight and passion that had fostered a sense of protectiveness and affection. Those feelings had grown into love as time passed. Not that he hadn’t dallied with other women in the early years, but his year in Saracen captivity had cured him of his wayward eye. He had returned determined never to stray again, for the sake of his marriage and his soul.
These last nine months had reinforced those feelings. What other woman would ever love him as unquestioningly as Eschiva? Who else would look at him with admiring eyes despite his graying hair and thickening waist? Where else could he be assured of complete acceptance, regardless of what he did? Even now, after a long absence in a strange land, Eschiva did not question him or ask what he had been up to. Instead she gazed at him, watching his every move, listening to whatever he had to say, smiling whenever he looked at her. She returned even the most casual touch with hungry eagerness.
Now all he had to do was stretch out his arms, and she came into them wordlessly. He folded them around her and swiveled back and forth as if to calm a child, when in fact it was his own racing emotions that he needed to calm. There was so much to say, he could not find any words. So they made love instead, frantically like young lovers and then languidly like old ones, and then they cuddled together like children, and Aimery thanked God for his wife.
While Eschiva fell into a deep, contented sleep, breathing evenly in his arms, Aimery lay awake thinking. For nine months he had argued with his brother Guy about the latter’s counterproductive policies. He had been frustrated to the point of madness by Guy’s stubborn refusal to consider alternatives. He’d been driven to silent rage by his brother’s sullen adherence to the poisonous advice of men like Barlais, Cheneché, and Henri de Brie. He’d begged Guy to at least leave Nicosia and take a look at things for himself—all in vain. For nine months he had racked his brain for an explanation. And tonight he had discovered it.
Guy didn’t care what his policies did to Cyprus, and he didn’t care if the Cypriots hated him. Guy clung to Cyprus because he had nowhere else to go, but he did not love it or cherish it. Because he had no one to leave it to.
For as long as John could remember, his father had taken him along on rounds of his barony. As a very little boy, he had ridden in his father’s lap; later he’d ridden his own pony. His earliest memories were of his father showing him the fields, orchards, mills, and villages of Ibelin. Always, his father had been at pains to explain to him about the different crops and different peoples that made Ibelin rich. Ibelin lay on the fertile coastal plain south of Jaffa, and the sound of seagulls crying and the smell of the salt air, like the yellow dunes, had been part of the landscape.
Caymont, in contrast, lay in an inland valley along a lazy river that almost disappeared in the dry season but after the rains flowed slowly, a muddy brown. The principal crop of the manor domain of Caymont was sugar cane rather than pomegranates and citrus fruits. Irrigation was essential to the production of sugar cane, Balian explained to his son, as they rode down toward the river from the manor that stood higher up the slope of the rugged hills. Aqueducts brought the water from springs in the mountains to large, stone-lined reservoirs, and ditches funneled it to the upper edges of the fields, where gravity led it down the rows of cane. The fields were divided into plots large enough to be harvested in a single day. They cut off the water to each plot one month before it was due to be harvested, and harvested the sugar one month later. The stalks were brought to the large limestone sugar mill, located in the middle of the fields, to be crushed and processed. Only during the rainy season did the sugar production halt.
They left the manor shortly after the sun lifted itself over the mountain range to the east. Balian urged John to try one of the younger stallions at the stud, with the irresistible argument that “You’ll need a second horse once you’re knighted.” John’s spirits soared at the mere thought of knighthood, and he selected a bay stallion with a billowing mane that his father assured him was one of their best. “He’s cheeky if you don’t pay attention, but intelligent.” Philip joined them, riding his own stocky gelding and in irrepressible high spirits.
There were several hawks floating on the morning air, and twice they stopped to let shepherds herd their charges down to the river for watering along the designated paths between the fields of sugar. After crossing the river by ford, they picked up an easy canter through the cane fields on the far side until they reached the vineyards that rose up gently behind the sugar. The vines stretched parallel to the river, and Ibelin slowed to a walk so they could pick their way carefully. Many of the stalks were very tiny and barely visible above the surface of the soil, replacements for the vines trampled down by the Saracen cavalry as they swept through. Fortunately, Balian told his sons, the Sultan’s cavalry had not taken the time to systematically destroy the vineyards, and some of the vines had survived. These survivors stood upright and proudly spread their leaves along the strings stretched between the stalks. The leaves were a mustard yellow at this time of year.
Beyond the vineyards the slope became steep and was dotted with olive trees. Here at last Ibelin gave his horse his head. With his eldest son close behind and his younger son trailing, he galloped up a steep, rugged path, both exciting and exhausting the horses.
When at last they crested the hill, the horses slowed of their own free will, breathing heavily, but snorting and shaking their heads in pleasure. Ibelin drew up and, gesturing toward the next valley, remarked, “This is the border.”
“It looks like the Sultan hasn’t awarded the land to anyone yet,” John noted observantly, taking in the fact that the valley lay fallow, sprouting weeds rather than useful crops.
“That, or the recipient is too busy intriguing against al-Afdal to spend time here,” his father countered.
John looked over, unsure what this meant; Philip was less inhibited. “Why don’t we take it back?” he asked cheerfully.
“There’s a treaty—” John started to remind his brother in exasperation, but his father cut him off, explaining in a far more patient voice, “Because I swore to uphold the Treaty of Ramla, Philip, a treaty I personally negotiated.”
Philip sighed and looked duly chastised for half a second. Then he cheered up and announced, “I’ll bet there’s lots of game in those woods over there. There’s not anything in the treaty against hunting in unoccupied land, is there?” His father laughed. “No, I didn’t think about that at the time. Maybe another day.” He turned his horse around and they started to descend at a more decorous pace, letting the horses find their footing carefully among the loose stones.
“How are things, Papa?” John asked earnestly.
“Good,” his father answered. Then, recognizing that this answer was not enough for his heir, he elaborated. “We’ve been very lucky. Edwin Shoreham agreed to leave his flourishing business in Tyre to come help us rebuild.” Edwin Shoreham was the carpenter son of Ibelin’s former master sergeant. Ibelin had knighted the elder Shoreham during the defense of Jerusalem, and two of his younger sons had died there. John understood that Edwin (and his shrewd but shrewish wife) had come to Caymont to support the aging Sir Roger and comfort him in his lingering grief over his lost sons.
Balian was continuing, “The rains were good, which helped; but more important, we found good tenants for the outlying farms, the ones producing millet and barley, and—what’s more astonishing—we were able to recruit two score families willing to work in the vineyards and cane fields. They’re almost all Syrians, refugees from southern Galilee and Bethsan.”
“So they’re Orthodox Christians?” John asked, pricking up his ears.
“Yes, Jacobites,” his father confirmed.
“Do they come to church?” John as
ked next.
“What do you mean? They don’t attend our Mass. Most of them don’t speak more than a smattering of French, much less Latin. Their own priest conducts Mass in Arabic according to their rites after our Latin Mass in the chapel is finished. Of course, that’s only because they don’t have a church of their own yet. I’ve allotted them land near the sugar factory, and most of the rocks we cleared from the irrigation ditches have been piled there for reuse. They hope to start construction soon, now that the rainy season has started and we can’t cut the cane anyway.”
John nodded thoughtfully, explaining to his father, “Carlo—that’s the man who runs the khan where Lord Aimery and I live—says that King Richard promised to let the Greeks on Cyprus retain their churches and monasteries and to live under the laws that had been valid under the Emperor Manuel I. But the Templars tried to make the people follow the Latin rites, and now King Guy is trying to make the churches and monasteries pay taxes to him, although they were exempt in the time of Manuel I. Carlo says that’s the main reason the people of Cyprus are up in arms against King Guy.”
“Is this rebellion serious, then?” Ibelin asked frowning slightly.
“It’s terrible!” John exclaimed. “King Guy claims he doesn’t have any income and is afraid to leave Nicosia, while Brie, Barlais, and Cheneché spend all their time burning things down to make people pay up. The Pisans say King Guy and his men are destroying the tax base and impoverishing everyone, not to mention sowing hatred of all Latins and Franks!” John told his father hotly.
That didn’t sound good to Balian, and he shook his head. “What does Lord Aimery say?”
“That his brother’s crazy, but King Guy won’t listen to him any more than to the English knights King Richard left on the island. He doesn’t listen to anyone, really. Not even Cheneché and Brie, because they keep urging him to assign them territory and let them pacify it, each in their own way.”
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