Bladesong

by Jean Gill

  Table of Contents

  Bladesong (The Troubadours Quartet, #2)

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  About the Author

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  Other books by Jean Gill

  Bladesong

  Jean Gill

  © Jean Gill 2013

  Ebook edition

  The 13th Sign

  This book is available in print at most online retailers.

  First published in 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form without prior permission from the publisher

  Cover design - Jessica Bell.

  Cover images © LadyMary, MihailDechev, Jean Gill

  For Heather

  in hopes we’ll make Haye together again

  Historical Note

  Dragonetz and Estela are fictional characters living in real 12th century events. Whenever actual historical figures appear in the story (see list at the back of the book), I have kept within historical evidence and only imagined events and details that could indeed have happened. If I’ve made mistakes in the research, then I plead ‘novelist’.

  Within the story, I have used my research and answered some of the questions posed by historians. Everyone agrees that the Second Crusade was a failure from the Crusaders’ viewpoint but what caused the military disasters at Mount Cadmus and in the siege of Damascus? Who had Alphonse Jourdain murdered and why? Dragonetz’ adventures include my answers to these questions.

  The real historical characters include an amazing woman; Mélisende, the Queen of Jerusalem, queen in her own right and ruler of all the Crusader States. Geoffroi de Rançon really was the Commander of Aliénor’s Guard at Mount Cadmus and he was indeed dismissed in disgrace afterwards. He did have a son, although dates are a little contradictory so I have suited my story with regard to Geoffroi Junior.

  The rare Torah of the story is the book known today as the Aleppo Codex, and it is perfectly possible that an adventurous spirit took it from the Jewish community in Provence to Maimonides in Egypt.

  Much debate has taken place about the Hashashins, who gave rise to the term ‘assassins’. Some say their alleged use of hash arises from a linguistic misunderstanding; others cite oral tradition as suggesting otherwise. This is a romantic novel so you can guess which version suited me best.

  Working in four languages is confusing enough, let alone adding the random choices of medieval spellings. I’ve tried to give the flavour of the different languages by my choices so, for instance, I’ve used the Occitan spellings of French place-names such as Lyon (Lion) and Marseille (Marselha). The name Txamusca should be pronounced ‘Sh-a-moose-ka’ but you can say it how you like! Welcome to my version of the 12th century...

  The Crusader Lands after the Second Crusade

  Chapter 1

  His world was a small white chamber, dazzling him with light after days in the darkness of a blindfold. Large cushions of rich, silk brocade offered ruby-and-ochre relief from the whiteness, and rest for his body. An empty pail for his needs in one corner, clean rose-scented water and a towel in another, were the only other furnishings.

  Stripes of sun and shade slanted through the arched window, filtered by the vertical iron bars rooted in the stone sill. The room was well protected from invaders. Wrought in the iron were flourishes of spear and ball but the man was in no mood to appreciate the exquisite craftsmanship of his prisonand cared not whether someone could attack him from outside.

  His enemies would come through the door, not through the window. Wearing black robes and swathes of black around their heads and faces, speaking soft Arabic, they would bring some kind of spicy pottage. They would untie his hands so that he could use them to stuff the mash into his mouth and they would give him a cup of water. He’d be allowed to wash his hands and face. Then they would bind him again and bow before taking leave of their ‘honoured guest’. Strange hospitality.

  Escape attempts had failed so far, although it was a compliment to his perseverance and ingenuity that three anonymous attendants always stood outside the door with their curved swords. Rubbing bonds against the rough wall merely fretted his skin to bleeding, as did the shattered fragments of his water-cup after he’d kicked it against the wall. After that, they’d not left the cup with him.

  Biting into the cushions and scattering their contents - feathers - advanced him no further than when he’d kicked over his chamber pot. Unless disgust in his jailers’ eyes counted as an advance. Fasting for a day while they were absent and lower mortals cleaned his mess, struck him as no advance at all but he added their obsession with cleanliness to his observations on the fine scimitar blades. The filigree patterns on the steel were no ordinary pattern welding and they teased his memory. Who knew what would be useful, or when.

  His hands were tied and his balance was badly affected, but he was starting to adjust. Lying on his back and repeatedly scoring the wall under the window-sill with a big toe, he could mark the passing of nights, a dirty smudge for each, without it being noticed by the guards. The toe-marks tallied twelve already but he couldn’t guess at time lost before he started counting. Time when he also lost his clothes, his precious horse and the book entrusted to him by a wise Jew; the book he was supposed to g
uard with his life and deliver to Abdon Yerushalmi in the dye-works in Jerusalem; the book on which his own future depended. His ideas about that future were changing rapidly in the white chamber but it was still possible he might have one. If they meant to kill him, they would have done so. Wouldn’t they?

  He crouched and straightened, exercising his calves and thighs, rotating his ankles, strengthening his riding muscles. His hands bound behind his back, he could do little for his arms but stretch them sideways or lie prone and arch hands towards feet but whatever use he could make of a cushion and a wall in keeping active, so he did.

  For his restless mind, his usual release was unhampered and he shut his eyes, breathed deeply and sang. He roved through springtime and kisses, goat-girls and fatal sword-thrusts. When memory threw him lines last sung as a duet with the sweetest partner he’d ever known, he accepted the pain and let it flow into the song of morning-after, the aubade and a lovers’ farewell. Discipline for the heart as well as the mind.

  Another lyric, not his own, floated into his mind; a song born in Occitania and carried into the crusade by its maker.

  Lanqand li jorn son lonc en may,

  M’es bels douz chans d’auzelhs de lonh,

  E qand me sui partitz de lay

  Remembra.m d’un amor de lonh

  ‘When days are long in May

  I hear

  the sweet-tongued birds so far away

  And near

  Things leave me dreaming

  Only of my love so far away’

  The far-away lady-love of the poet, Rudel, had been here, in the Holy Land, although he had never seen her. His fancy had been fuelled by stories of a matchless beauty, the Comtesse de Tripoli. The captive knight mouthed the plaintive Occitan.

  Iratz e gauzens me.n partray

  S’ieu ja la vey l’amor de lonh,

  ‘I would leave in joy but also pain

  Should I but see my love so far away

  Just once, again,’

  He deliberately altered the words, thinking of his own Estela, no unseen, unknown lady.

  ‘I know not how nor when,

  The lands between so far away,

  The roads uncertain to her door -

  No more!

  I cannot speak! Insha’Allah!’

  He sang the Arabic, ironically, instead of ‘Diau platz.’ It seemed to him that the God of the Muslims held more power over him at this moment than the God of the Christians.

  He let the sounds of the street below accompany his first attempts at shaping a new lyric, clashing tin pans for a tambour and a muezzin’s call instead of the plaintive flute, to the rhythm of a rolling cart. Everything was a song if you knew how to listen.

  Whatever the anonymous guards thought of such music, nothing showed in their demeanor as they entered the room, seemingly in the appointed way, at the appointed time. When they’d taken off blindfold and gag, after a head-splitting journey, the first thing he said was, ‘If you harm my horse, may God, Allah and Yahweh spit on your children’s future, and on their children’s future, to the thousandth generation.’

  ‘He is fed, water and stabled, honoured guest,’ was the reply, with a bow.

  Then the knight tried questions. ‘Where am I?’ he asked them in Arabic, accented with Occitan. Like most Franks of his standing, he could read the language and speak it fluently, along with his Occitan mother tongue and Latin.

  ‘In the care of Allah,’ was the response, ‘may His Name be praised.’ The Guards’ own Arabic was odd, the words difficult to understand but the overall meaning was clear enough. Always accompanied by a deferential bow and no expression in eyes that dipped quickly to avoid his, and were all he could see in the swathes of black.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked them.

  ‘The servants of Allah, may His will be done.’

  All his questions were answered in this way, politely, a fog of nothings from which he tried to give shape to his enemy. For he was surely in the hands of the enemy, however soft-voiced. Three years had passed since the humiliating end to the second crusade and nothing was more easily explained than Moors capturing and holding a Christian knight foolish enough to venture alone across their territory. It would certainly explain the respect with which he was treated and which usually preceded lengthy negotiations over a suitable ransom, after which he would be free to continue on his way. As heir to extensive lands in Aquitaine, and until recently Commander of the Guard and troubadour to Aquitaine’s infamous Duchesse Aliénor, Lord Dragonetz los Pros was worth several coffers to those who could afford to pay. Such a sum might even attract someone rich enough to replace the chewed and tattered cushion immediately with another, larger, and even more sumptuously woven.

  However, Dragonetz had not been on Moorish territory. Three days after disembarking in St Jean d’Acre, he’d been ambushed in an alleyway and knocked unconscious, and now here he was, wearing a striped linen robe instead of his armour. Perhaps he should have been more vigilant but, in a city swarming with Templars and Hospitalers, his main concern after a month at sea was to avoid questions and to stock up for the journey to Jerusalem. There was no reason to fear Moorish attack in the heart of Oltra mar Christendom and although bad blood remained from the second crusade, the war had ended two years ago. As a defeated veteran, Dragonetz was an unlikely military target for such a premeditated attack, however profitable he might be as an opportunist catch on the road.

  He had to face the possibility that someone not only knew who he was but what he carried with him. From the moment when he accepted the book from the Jew in Narbonne, he also accepted the danger that came with carrying such a priceless treasure Oltra mar, overseas, to the Holy City itself. Jerusalem was under Christian rule but across disputed lands, and the journey there was perilous.

  On the long sea voyage, he had time to wonder why the book was so important, to unwrap the oilskin and study the parchment pages, which were covered in the even script of the Hebraic letters. Accustomed to reading Arabic, with its curves and loops, Dragonetz could make nothing of this square alphabet, words hanging like washing from a line running across the column. Between the three columns were squiggles, obviously the annotations that Raavad told him were the most precious feature of the Codex. What else had Raavad told him?

  At the time, Dragonetz had been too shocked by the death of Arnaut, his aide and friend, and the fire that ended his paper mill, to take in all he was told by the leader of Narbonne’s Jewish community. Dragonetz owed money he could not repay and was bound against his will to this strange mission of the book, bound to put thousands of miles between himself and the woman he loved, as well as between himself and his enemies. Or so he’d thought. Maybe the book had brought him new enemies, or maybe old ones were harder to shake off than he’d expected.

  The book was a Jewish bible, two hundred years old and precious in itself but the annotations made it a sacred and irreplaceable treasure. Raavad called it the Keter Aram Sola, perhaps the oldest Torah in existence.

  ‘These,’ he’d pointed with reverence to the squiggles in the margins, ‘are the work of Aaron Ben Asher and they represent years of work and study by a brilliant mind. They tell us not only how to read the Torah but how to sing it. This Codex is the sacred guide to the Torah and must be preserved. It has been stolen, ransomed and given into my care. It has fed the learning of my people in Provence and I have great hope that something special has been born here, thanks to this book. But it is no longer safe in Narbonne, or even in Occitania. It is perhaps the only copy after the desecrations of the last decade in the Holy Land and it must go back there, all four hundred and ninety-one pages still in one piece, to somewhere that is safe. ‘Blessed be he who preserves it and cursed be he who steals it, and cursed be he who sells it, and cursed be he who pawns it. It may not be sold and it may not be defiled.’

  Then Raavad had given the book and the mission to Dragonetz, along with the name of Abdon Yerushalmi and a way to contact him in Jerusalem. From t
he moment the book was out of his hands, and in Abdon Yerushalmi’s, Dragonetz would be free. His debt of honour paid, he could go home to Estela and to - what? His dreams of making paper were in ashes and the Church would never allow him to start again.

  If not in making paper, then in what lay his destiny? He could reclaim Estela from her position in Dia with the Comtessa, and return to his father’s lands, where he would await his inheritance and play at estate management. His face screwed up wryly. He could reclaim Estela and they would tour Occitania, singing and jongling at the great courts, Aurenja, Barcelona, or head north to Champagne and its strange whining language. They could even cross the seas to learn the songs of the barbarians living in the Pais de Gallas. He sighed. If only such a future were possible! But a warrior of his experience could not lay down his sword and stay in the world. He would be challenged wherever he went and if he declared no allegiance, blood would spill to make him choose sides.

  He could reclaim Estela and take her to war with him, while he fought once again for Aquitaine and Christianity, fighting with his kind against the Moors and the Jews, fighting against the very civilisation that supported his dream, fighting against all knowledge, against science, mathematics, medicine, astronomy. If another crusade erupted, he might be forced to do just that, but there must be a better choice for him. For when he was free.

  Free! He laughed aloud. He couldn’t even move his hands! He just hoped that a few of the book’s curses would land surely and quickly on whoever was holding him. As he tallied another mark under the window-ledge, he tried not to think of knights held to ransom for years, their beards grown to their knees. At least he would remain beardless if he continued to accept the efficient ministrations of his guards, whose only turn of the knife against him had been to smooth his cheeks and chin, without so much as a nick. If ever he lost hope, he only had to jerk his head violently enough and a Moorish blade would end all. A blade patterned with silver swirls that ran impossibly deep into the metal.

  Swirling steel and stiffened silk, he mused. And then it came to him, the one word to describe both silk and steel - damascene - and suddenly he knew where he was. When the door opened, his guess was confirmed. Accompanied by the usual guards was someone he recognised and had hoped never to see again. He was in the oldest city in the world, Damascus, a city Dragonetz had last seen from outside the walls, where he led besieging Crusader troops.