Valentine

by Heather Grothaus

  “It is,” Adrian insisted. “He is one of Baldwin’s generals, redheaded, and—”

  “Yes, yes,” the soldier interrupted agreeably. “A red haired general, his nose, long and pointy, yes?”

  “Yes,” Adrian said. “Glayer Felsteppe is his name.”

  “You are confused.” The Saracen shook his head as if disappointed for Adrian. “Our mutual friend clearly stated his name was General Constantine Gerard.”

  “General Gerard just passed us,” Adrian rasped, his muddled brain fighting to make sense of what the soldier was saying. “He is on this very road, just ahead of us.”

  “Is that so?” The Saracen tossed the circlet of rope. It landed expertly around Adrian’s body, catching on the ties that held his arms behind him. With a sudden flick, the rope tightened, causing Adrian to realize he hadn’t lost all feeling after all. He cried out in agony.

  “How convenient for Baldwin that we have his traitor in our captivity. I am certain there shall be a large ransom for him.”

  “Constantine did not betray Chastellet,” Adrian whispered, his eyes squeezed shut. He could not fathom how his arms were still attached to his torso. If he’d had any moisture left in his body, his face would have been washed with tears.

  The Saracen leaned slightly toward him in the saddle, as if eager to impart a great secret. “This I, alone, know. Which is why he will not live long enough to be bought.” The man regained his regal posture. “Come now, soldier—if you only ask it of Allah, he will give you the strength of ten men. You can walk into Damascus with your dignity and recover in some comfort until you are ransomed.”

  Adrian didn’t know what the Saracen’s plans for him were, but from his treatment thus far, he was very sure they would involve massive pain and torture. And Constantine was going to die. What would it matter if Adrian indulged the dark man’s religious delusions with a self-preserving lie? If he played along, perhaps there would be a chance to warn Constantine. A chance to plead their cases to the triumphant Saladin. The ruler was rumored to be reasonable and fair with his prisoners.

  The ones who lived, any matter.

  But then Adrian’s mind was filled with a memory of his father, portly, graying, his beard tugged down into a point where he worried at it with his fist. Adrian knew he bore much of the responsibility for the beard’s pointedness. Rather than live a life of relative ease or take the cloth as was expected of him, Herne Hailsworth’s younger son had boldly decided to leave his noble home to pursue an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Everyone had thought him a fool—his father’s peers, even his own brother. Quiet, odd Adrian, with his books and his stones and his measure sticks. Adrian remembered vividly the day he’d left, when his father had taken him aside.

  Always be who you are, Adrian. Dare not belittle your assets in hopes of avoiding scrutiny, for it is only in bearing his own full weight that a man grows stronger.

  Adrian raised his face to look squarely at the Saracen. “I am not a soldier. I am a scholar. A philosopher. And if any god existed to stand before me in this moment, after all he has allowed to happen in his house, I would spit in his bloody face.”

  It was then that Adrian received the blow to his skull that he had been expecting. The hot, brown world of the Damascus Road went silent and black in an instant.

  The god who did not exist was merciful in allowing unconsciousness to cling to Adrian as the Saracen soldier kept his word and used the power of his own horse to drag Adrian’s limp and battered body the remainder of the way to Damascus.

  The sound of ragged sobs stirred Adrian from the depths, and as he came aware of the cold stone beneath his cheek, he realized he was the source of those sobs.

  His voice, cawing and raw, echoed as he writhed on the stone floor. Every inch of skin, every muscle, screamed as if they had been painstakingly scored with glowing iron. He tried to tilt his head back as he cried out again, to relieve the drawing torture on the back of his neck and spine, but he felt a wide cuff of iron dig into the base of his skull. His cry intensified.

  “Adrian,” a muffled voice called. “Adrian, stop. You must get hold of yourself.”

  Adrian thought it was perhaps Constantine who spoke, and so he tried mightily to quiet, to still, so that he could locate his friend. His cries retreated back into his throat, but he could not help the whimpers that escaped him, like dogs straining at their leads. His whole body trembled with such pain that he could not understand how he still lived.

  “That’s it,” the voice said again, perhaps somewhere behind him. Adrian’s ear canals seemed to be swollen together, muting the sounds around him but amplifying the sluggish rush of blood in his skull. “Move beyond it. Can you open your eyes? Come outside yourself.”

  Adrian tried to raise his eyelids, but they felt melted shut. Increasing the effort brought another round of jagged sobs, but he was rewarded with a sliver of light that made him cry out again in earnest. He felt thick wetness running down his forehead, his cheeks. He didn’t know if it was blood or sweat, although he doubted the latter, as he felt as though he was in the midst of a blizzard.

  Constantine? Adrian tried to say his friend’s name, but all that came out was a moan of which the effort and sound pained him so that he began to weep again.

  “Get hold of yourself, Adrian!” Constantine demanded, using every nuance of his military tone. “You must not surrender to it. You must fight! If you don’t, you shall die.”

  It was his friend’s last statement that brought Adrian some measure of stillness. He could not see the extent of his injuries, and he knew in some part of his fevered mind that he was only feeling a fraction of the damage that his body was suffering, but he realized that he was only hanging on to life by a fingertip. He could quiet, and then just let the pain slip away. His heart would stop beating, his pupils would contract a final time, and then Adrian Hailsworth, master architect, would simply cease to exist.

  He would never again see his brother, or his father. He would never again stride through the green grass of Hereford on his visits home from his travels. He would never see the completion of the great bridge in London, the plans of which he himself had helped conceive before accepting the ill-fated charge of the great fortress Chastellet. It was to have been his final project before taking the position in Oxford, teaching generations of fresh young minds the truth about the world around them, and shining light into the darkness of superstition and myth that gripped the populous of his country.

  Now that bright dream, along with his weak physical body, was flickering.

  “That’s right,” Constantine’s voice broke into his dimming thoughts once more. “Be still. Conserve your strength. You are gravely injured, it is true, but now Saladin will preserve us until we can be ransomed or traded. Kind Baldwin will not forsake us. We must have faith, Adrian.”

  While Constantine launched into a murmuring plea to an imaginary creator, Adrian let his friend’s hopeful words reach his muddled consciousness. Ransom? Why did that sound false to his ears?

  How convenient for Baldwin that we have his traitor in our captivity. He will not live long enough to be bought.

  The King would be told that Constantine was the traitor of Chastellet. Perhaps the news had already spread. There would be no ransom.

  But Constantine would never know that if Adrian let himself die.

  Adrian tuned his ears to the sounds around him again, hearing Constantine’s murmuring prayer for Adrian’s failing body, for the preservation of Constantine’s son and wife, awaiting what was to have been their father and husband’s imminent return to England. He fought to crack open his eyes once more.

  At first Adrian thought it was his damaged eyesight that made his surroundings so dim. But after a moment, he realized that it was the cell itself that was dark—blurry brown sandstone walls which appeared sueded with the orange and yellow torchlight washing over them. Perhaps it was night, but Adrian guessed that he and Constantine had been interred in some underground prison
—the smooth, domed ceiling seemed to mimic Constantine’s bowed form.

  Adrian saw the thick metal collar around his friend’s neck, and he realized then the source of the choking and pulling sensation around his own throat. But whereas Constantine was tethered to the wall behind him, preventing him from kneeling or sitting, Adrian surmised his own bond terminated on the floor nearby. He could not move anything beyond his eyeballs at the moment to test his range. Constantine’s hands were free, however, and he utilized them to cross himself as he now finished his sonnet to the Great Pretend.

  Adrian almost reconsidered then. What good would it do Constantine to know with certainty that he was going to die? Was it not kinder to let him believe, this last bit of time he had left, that he might be saved? That good would somehow triumph and right would win the day and he would see his little boy again? Why not let him continue in his delusion if it should bring him comfort, rather than have him die knowing that his name would be forever remembered as a traitor and a murderer?

  Because it is a lie, Adrian told himself. Because he deserves the truth. If ever an opportunity arose for Constantine to save himself before he was executed, he must be aware of the truth, else he might just wait patiently for his rescue unto the very moment of his death.

  Constantine saw then that Adrian’s eyes were opened. “Adrian?” he asked hesitantly, and Adrian realized that he must look as if he had already expired.

  He gave a great effort and blinked.

  Constantine Gerard’s broad shoulders slumped momentarily, and Adrian thought perhaps it was with relief. “We will survive this,” Constantine said firmly, his posture straightening as much as his tether would allow. Even the metal restraints weren’t enough to rob the commander of the Templars from his duty to lead. “God has spared us thus far—beyond the hundreds that were killed—for a purpose. And God will see us delivered.”

  Adrian could only stare at his friend, leashed to the prison wall. For a moment, he wanted to believe, if only to delude himself against the inevitability of the fate that awaited them both. Adrian told himself it was the pathetic condition of his physical body that caused the wetness to leak from his eyes. Or perhaps the unspeakable pity he held for the capable and honorable Constantine. But he wept quietly all the same.

  The sound of footfalls shuffled dully in the space behind Adrian’s head, and then the creaking of some gate being opened. Shadows interrupted the torchlight, causing Adrian to wince. A moment later, the wicked face of the Saracen general leaned into Adrian’s line of vision. His smile was bright.

  “You are not dead,” he said with something akin to delight. “I am impressed, infidel. I have great plans for your conversion, indeed.” Then the face was gone, and a pair of metal dishes were dropped inches before his face, murky water and chunks of runny, unidentifiable stuff sloshing onto the stone and splattering Adrian’s cheek.

  Adrian could not register any smells from the offering through his clogged nostrils, but he saw a speck of white morsel moving, wiggling within the mottled mass of gray.

  Maggots.

  He focused his eyes instead upon the soft-looking leather boots of the accompanying soldiers that crossed the floor beneath voluminous robes.

  “Stay where you are, infidel,” the general called out to Constantine from where he still stood near Adrian’s form. The soldiers quickly deposited similar metal vessels on the floor at what looked to be the very limits of Constantine’s restraints. But Adrian could see a wide piece of the unleavened bread popular in this part of the world, and what was perhaps a leg of meat.

  When the soldiers retreated, Constantine stepped toward the food, only barely able to drag it into his reach with the toe of one boot. The dish of water trembled wildly in his hands as he picked it up and brought it to his mouth.

  The Saracen’s evil countenance came into Adrian’s view again, and he used one hand to push the low-rimmed bowl of rotting matter closer to Adrian’s face. “Here is your meal, infidel. Go on—eat it.”

  Adrian closed his eyes against the sight of the wriggling mass.

  “You must have nourishment,” the voice in the darkness cajoled. “To build your strength.”

  “Don’t eat it, Adrian,” Constantine called out, his anger clear in his deep voice. “Why do you give an injured man rotting foodstuffs? Have you not done enough to him that you still seek to poison him?”

  “Go on,” the Saracen encouraged from beyond Adrian’s eyelids. “If you do not eat, I will take away your friend’s food, as well.”

  Adrian continued to lie very still while Constantine engaged the soldier. “Take it then, for I will not eat good food while my friend is offered that which swine would refuse.”

  Adrian felt a painful rush of air over his skin and the Saracen’s voice was directed toward the back of the cell. “Is that so? How honorable of you. Thank you for illuminating my mistake, however, this business does not concern you. It is between myself and your friend, who killed my son.”

  Adrian’s eyes opened then, and he saw brown hands snatch the dish of water from Constantine’s hands while another set whisked away the bowl of untouched food from the cell floor. His vision moved jerkily upward to see the Saracen general removing the short, beaded whip from his belt.

  The man Adrian had slain at Chastellet had been the general’s son?

  “Will you eat, infidel?” he asked pleasantly, but now Adrian recognized the hatred burning in the man’s dark eyes.

  Constantine commanded, “No, Adrian. Don’t.”

  Adrian stared at the whip, remembering its cutting song.

  “Very well,” the Saracen said lightly. “You leave me no choice.”

  In the next moment, a whistle of air preceded a clicking slap, and Adrian heard Constantine’s cry escaping through clenched teeth even as he tried to contain it.

  Adrian closed his eyes. Perhaps if they thought him unconscious again . . .

  But only a beat of time passed before the whip’s whistle and slap sounded again in the close air of the cell. Then again. And now Constantine could not withhold his shouts.

  Adrian remembered the bite of the beads as they sank beneath his skin, the ripping as they retreated.

  Again the whip sounded, and again Constantine screamed.

  Adrian opened his eyes and saw Chastellet’s general crouched against the rear wall of the cell, his forearms raised to protect his face. Adrian tried to call out for the Saracen to stop as he raised his arm again, but his throat would not work. The whip fell with a gasp, and Constantine’s scream pierced Adrian’s ears.

  Drawing strength from an unknown source, Adrian inched his face toward the congealing mass spilled over the side of the dish before him. The scrape of the metal bowl on the sandstone floor sounded like the sharpening of a blade. He peeled his lips apart, feeling the sting of the skin as it was pulled away. For a moment he wondered that he hadn’t already bitten off his tongue, for he felt nothing emerge when he willed himself to sample the rotten offering before him. But then he tasted its sour perfume, felt the liveness of the mass in his mouth, around his lips.

  “Adrian, no,” Constantine pleaded in a breaking voice. “It will be as poison!”

  But the whip fell no more, and the Saracen’s boots came into close relief as the man moved over Adrian once again and crouched down.

  “Again, you surprise me, infidel,” the man said, obviously pleased as he watched Adrian struggle to swallow.

  Adrian gagged as the mush pushed against the sides of his throat. He fought against the urge to vomit while he held the Saracen’s gaze.

  “Sorry,” he slurred, his voice emerging thick and garbled, unable to open his jaws wide enough to form the words properly. “Your . . . son.”

  The dark man blinked and his brow creased as he seemed to consider what Adrian had said. Then his eyes narrowed and he leaned forward on his haunches and spat in Adrian’s face.

  “Eat it,” he commanded in his own raspy whisper and then shoved the dish tow
ard Adrian’s face again so that the rim bounced off of his nose and upper lip. “All of it. I want to watch you.”

  Adrian was thankful the Saracen was between him and Constantine so that his friend was not forced to watch the grisly meal. He hoped the dark man’s chuckling laughter was loud enough to mask the retching noises coming from Adrian’s body.

  By the time the dish was empty, Adrian knew his mind had been broken, for he was praying for a dark angel to deliver him from the hell he had finally accepted was very real indeed.

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  LYRICAL PRESS BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2015 by Heather Grothaus

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Lyrical and the L logo are trademarks of Kensington Publishing Corp.

  First Electronic Edition: June 2015

  eISBN-13: 978-1-60183-396-9

  eISBN-10: 1-60183-396-2

  First Print Edition: June 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-6018-3396-9