“I am the third son of the first Baron d’Ibelin, the younger brother of Barisan de Ramla—”
The Archdeacon cut him off with a shake of his head. “I know who you were born, Sir Balian. I am not interested in your bloodlines and estate, but rather in your character. I would like to know why you accepted this position—since evidently you consider it a death sentence.”
Balian looked down, embarrassed.
“Would you feel more comfortable in a chapel?” the Archdeacon asked, leaning past Balian to open the doors to a room immediately off the gallery. It was hardly more than an oratory, really, with room for no more than two or three people to kneel before the altar. But Christ was here, the Eucharist candle hanging by silver chains above the altar. The Archdeacon closed the door behind them, and Balian was cornered. This was a confession, only facing the priest.
“There is nothing wrong with admitting you took this position for the rewards the King offered, for I’m sure he offered you something valuable,” the Archdeacon told Balian with a smile, as if trying to make this easier for him.
“No, I didn’t take it for rewards, since I question whether I will live long enough to collect,” Balian answered honestly.
“Then why did you take this position?”
Balian fixed his eyes on the Eucharist rather than the churchman. “Because I thought that if God had seen fit to make the Prince of Jerusalem a leper, then who was I to think I was too good to serve him?”
This answer took even the Archdeacon by surprise. In a spontaneous gesture that was very rare for the learned cleric, he embraced Balian and murmured, “My son!” Then, as if embarrassed by his own gesture, he stepped back and held Balian at arm’s length, looking him in the eye. “Do you know what the Byzantines call leprosy? They call it “the holy disease.” Lepers are not punished for the blackness of their souls! You will understand that better when you meet Baldwin. Rather, leprosy is a sign of His grace. Lepers have been singled out to suffer as He did—and to give other Christian men an opportunity to demonstrate their faith through service to these poor souls. I see that you understand that, and I am certain the Lord has blessed you, young man. But remember, he who is blessed by the Lord is not guaranteed health or prosperity in this life, but surely in the next. He will be with you always!”
“May I do nothing to offend Him, my lord.”
“Amen!”
The Archdeacon opened the door to the chapel and let them out again. They continued down the gallery until they stood before the guards at the entrance to the Jaffa Tower. The Archdeacon announced to the guards that Balian was assigned to the Prince’s household and should be granted access whenever he wished. Then they passed into the first-floor chamber of the tower that served as classroom and dayroom of the Prince’s apartment.
Unlike the Tower of David, which—as the name implied—dated back to Biblical times, the Jaffa Tower had been built by Fulk d’Anjou only a quarter-century ago. It had fine double-light windows on three walls, and sunlight poured through the western pair onto floors paved with beautiful, brightly glazed mosaics. The furnishings were of Byzantine origin, with elaborate carvings inlaid with mother-of-pearl or ivory.
The Prince, who had been reading in the far window niche, turned and then got respectfully to his feet at the sight of the Archdeacon. Balian had his first shock. Baldwin was a beautiful boy. He had fair hair and a well-formed face. Even his skin was flawless, albeit pale as a result of living confined to these rooms. Balian was completely baffled.
“Did you expect a boy covered with ulcers and lacking limbs?” the Archdeacon remarked with an amused glance at Balian. “As I told you, the symptoms have not yet become unequivocal. Baldwin suffers from a lack of feeling in his right hand and lower arm. That is all for now. The time may come when Baldwin is as unsightly as the beggars in our streets, but that time is not yet.” As he spoke he smiled at Baldwin, adding, “Baldwin, this is Sir Balian d’Ibelin; he has agreed to teach you how to ride.”
Balian was looking at the boy when the Archdeacon spoke. He saw Baldwin’s look of excitement, saw the light ignite—and then extinguish—in his wide blue eyes. He saw the boy’s face and shoulders fall as he admitted manfully, “I—I don’t have any feeling in my right hand. How can I ride if I can’t control my right hand?”
Balian had expected Baldwin to be more than ulcerous and crippled; he had expected him to be embittered and sullen. The boy’s unexpected politeness and calm captured Balian’s heart. Balian went down on one knee before the Prince and smiled at him. “You can, my lord. It will be more difficult, of course, but it is possible. It is possible to ride a horse completely without the use of your hands, if you will let me show you.”
The light was back in Baldwin’s eyes. “I love horses!” he exclaimed eagerly. “There is nothing I loved doing so much before as riding. I told my father that just the other day—” He cut himself off and looked sharply at his tutor. “That is why he has sent Sir Balian, isn’t it?”
The Archdeacon nodded, and Balian revised his opinion of the King, impressed that the King had been moved by his son’s longing.
Baldwin was looking at Balian again with wide, serious eyes. “And you aren’t afraid of catching my illness?” he asked bluntly.
“I am afraid, my lord, but the good Archdeacon says we can take precautions to prevent it. Have any of your servants taken ill?”
“Not yet,” Baldwin admitted, but he still looked skeptical. Turning to the Archdeacon, he asked, “If it is not so dangerous, why don’t my stepmother and sister visit me anymore?”
“That is the wish of your father the King,” his tutor told him sternly. “He cannot take even a small chance with the future of the Kingdom. Now, it seems to me you should stop complaining about what you don’t have and rejoice in Sir Balian’s presence instead.”
Baldwin looked duly chastened, biting down on his lip as he looked at his feet for a moment, and then he turned to Balian. “I’m sorry, sir. I did not mean to be discourteous. Tell me more. I have never seen men ride without using their hands.”
“Perhaps not, but you know as well as anyone that the Turks have mounted archers, and they use their bows while charging. They guide their horses with their knees, calves, and the weight of their bodies, to ensure they go exactly where they want them; otherwise it would be impossible for them to take aim.”
“That’s true!” Baldwin exclaimed, his eyes lighting up again as he started to believe what Balian said. “And you can do that?” he asked eagerly.
“Yes—although not as well as the Turks.”
“When can we start?” Baldwin asked, turning instinctively to the Archdeacon.
Balian laughed at his enthusiasm, and then tried to curb it. “My lord, this is going to take a very long time, and the first step is finding a suitable mount. Not all horses are sensitive or intelligent or devoted enough. We must find you a mount that has the potential to understand you, and then one that wants to do so. Do you understand me?”
Baldwin looked earnestly at Balian. “Yes,” he decided. “And please get up off your knees and come sit with me here in the window seat.” He returned to the southern window seat and patted the place beside him. Balian had to overcome a surge of panic at the prospect of such close proximity. Yet he couldn’t rebuff the Prince, either. His gesture was innocent and meant only as a courtesy.
Balian joined Baldwin in the window seat, but tried to keep his distance while explaining the plan. “We need to find a horse that accepts you as his master and wants to please you so completely that he seems to read your mind.”
The Archdeacon raised his eyebrows skeptically, but Baldwin asked eagerly, “How do we do that?”
“Well, your father says we may use any horse in his stables. I propose that I first select horses that are intelligent enough for what we intend—and then tomorrow, very early, we go together to the stables and you see if one of these horses pleases you particularly. If so, we will start your lessons on that ho
rse, but if the lessons don’t go well, we will find another horse. Does that sound reasonable?”
“Oh, yes! Do we have to wait until tomorrow morning?”
“Yes,” Balian replied firmly. “You do not want to be observed by idle knights and men-at-arms, do you? Besides, the morning is a good time to get the measure of a horse.”
Baldwin seemed to accept this explanation, nodding his head, but then he looked up at Balian again and asked candidly, “You will be my friend, won’t you, sir? I’m so very lonely here with just the Archdeacon for company. Even if you can’t teach me to ride, you’ll still be my friend, won’t you?”
Balian was so moved that he put his arm around Baldwin’s shoulders and drew him close in a spontaneous gesture of comfort and confirmation. “Yes, Baldwin,” he assured the boy, “I’ll be your friend no matter what kind of progress we make with the riding.”
Baldwin was so overwhelmed by the sudden gesture—by the warmth he had felt from no one in over a year—that tears welled into his eyes. Not even William had ever held him like this, and he found himself looking at the churchman almost reproachfully.
“Now,” Balian declared without taking his arm away. “You must get back to your lessons, and I will go down to the stables to select the most suitable mounts for you to choose from tomorrow. But tomorrow morning before the crack of dawn I will be back, so be ready for me.” He smiled at the leper Prince.
Baldwin found he couldn’t speak, so he just nodded solemnly. He wanted very much to throw his arms around this knight who did not shun him and rest his head on his chest, but he already liked him too much to put him in greater danger, feeling guilty as well as grateful for the arm over his shoulders. “I will be ready,” he promised, adding ruefully with a timid smile, “In fact, I doubt I’ll sleep at all in anticipation. But that doesn’t matter.”
Balian gently withdrew his arm and got to his feet. He smiled down at the little boy. “Until tomorrow, then.”
“Until tomorrow!” Baldwin answered, smiling back brightly.
Chapter 3
Jerusalem, July 1172
THE ACTUAL BIRTH HAD NOT BEEN particularly difficult, the midwife claimed, but a fever came afterwards. It raged so violently that the Queen’s sheets became drenched, and by the third day the priests were hovering over her, offering her the last rites.
Maria Zoë was only sporadically conscious. She knew she had given birth to a girl—disappointing her husband, her great-uncle, and the entire Kingdom. She knew that Amalric had not once come to her chamber, although she could not know if the women kept him away or if he simply had no interest in seeing her like this: filthy, stinking, and undignified. A woman suffering from milk fever was not a pretty sight.
She could sometimes hear the wagging tongues of her ladies, unsure whether they thought her senseless or if they thought she would die anyway and have no means to punish them. She heard the way they dismissed her for being so cold and arrogant and vain. “Yet for all her fine airs,” they concluded, “she could not produce a male heir!”
“Beauty isn’t everything!”
“Much less her fancy learning! Reading Greek philosophers! What nonsense!”
“Do you think the King will remarry?”
“He has to—and he can’t wait two years for the Byzantine Emperor to send him a new child bride. Not with Prince Baldwin dying limb by limb. He’ll look for someone closer to home.”
“And someone mature—ready and able to bear an heir within a nine-month. Maybe even a widow who’s proven she can produce sons. . . .” The voices of her ladies faded, and in their place was the soft pleading of the Egyptian woman, Rahel.
“Don’t fret, madame. They are just jealous of you. The Good Lord knows what is in your heart.” Rahel was sitting on the floor beside her bed, holding and stroking her hand. She spoke in Greek, which no one else in the room understood.
Rahel had not been with Maria Zoë very long. Rahel had been traveling on pilgrimage to Jerusalem from Alexandria with her brother’s family when they had been seized by Bedouins crossing Sinai. Sold in the slave market of Damascus, she had the good fortune to be recognized as a fellow Christian by an Armenian trader from the Principality of Antioch, who bought her as a gift for King Amalric, from whom he hoped for trading concessions. Rahel was a striking woman in her tall, dark, dignified way, and the merchant apparently thought the King would want the Egyptian woman as an exotic bedmate.
The Latin Church, however, did not recognize the right of Christians to hold other Christians as slaves. Amalric accepted the gift, but freed Rahel. He told her there was a Coptic community in Jerusalem and offered to have his servants take her there—but because she spoke Greek and was a widow who had borne four children, he offered her the alternative of serving in his wife’s household. Rahel had accepted the position, on the condition that she first be allowed to pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Amalric had readily granted her wish.
The fact that she spoke Greek, as none of the Queen’s other ladies did, had given Rahel an instant advantage in the Queen’s household—an advantage that the other women resented. But that was not the only reason Maria Zoë favored Rahel. From the start, Rahel had simply accepted Maria Zoë for what she was: a pregnant teenager facing her first childbirth. She had reassured her that all would go well, speaking matter-of-factly of her own four pregnancies. She had lost all her children, she admitted, before her husband, a merchant, was lost at sea. She was grateful her brother had taken her into his family, and was overjoyed when he allowed her to accompany him on pilgrimage. She had wanted nothing more than to come to Jerusalem, she told Maria Zoë. Now, after many misadventures, she was here, and she had prayed in the very place where Christ was crucified and where He had risen from the grave. She did not speak about her capture, her separation from her brother’s family, or the indignity of slavery. That was in the past; it was God’s will.
Rahel spoke Greek with an accent, but she soothed Maria Zoë as no one else could. “Christ is very near,” she assured Maria Zoë, as if He would cure all ills. Rationally Maria Zoë knew how many people suffered and died in Jerusalem every day, but Rahel made her believe that she would be saved.
The day the fever broke, no one was with Maria Zoë except Rahel. The others had already abandoned her. Rahel single-handedly prepared a bath for her and washed out her tangled hair, massaging her head and her neck with strong, wiry fingers. “When you are strong enough,” Rahel promised, “we will go to the Holy Grave to thank Him for your recovery.”
“What has happened to my child?” Maria Zoë asked anxiously. “Is she still alive?”
“Yes, she is with a wet nurse. She is healthy and strong and will grow up pretty like you, but with lighter hair. She has been christened Isabella.”
“And my husband? Has he forgiven me for giving him a daughter rather than the son he needs?”
Rahel shook her head sadly. “Who can understand the minds of men, madame? Do they think we decide the sex of our children? God makes children, madame, and God makes both men and women. You are not to blame, madame,” Rahel assured her, making it very clear that her husband took a different stand.
When the King still had not come to her more than a fortnight after her recovery, Maria Zoë took things into her own hands. She knew that Amalric, a conscientious monarch, met with his Privy Council every day at noon in the Tower of David. She ordered her ladies to dress her in her wedding gown with its extravagance of jewels, and she set the crown of Jerusalem upon sheer silk veils that shimmered gold and white over her dark hair. Then she sent for the herald. “Announce me to the King,” she ordered the astonished herald.
“But, your grace—” He broke off as she rose to her feet and met him in the eye.
“I am going to the Tower of David to see my husband. Go and announce me.”
The herald backed out of her chamber, bowing, and then Maria Zoë could hear his boots as he ran along the gallery leading from the modern palace back to the ancien
t citadel. Maria Zoë moved slowly to give the herald time to warn her husband, but not so slowly that Amalric could escape her altogether. By the time she reached the exterior stairs leading up to the great audience chamber in the ancient tower, the Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Constable, Humphrey de Toron, were exiting the grand chamber in apparent haste. Both men bowed their heads to their Queen, and Maria Zoë could feel their eyes boring into her back.
As she entered the grand chamber with the throne and a table for the council, two clerks were falling over themselves in their haste to put away their quills and inkpots and clear out. They, too, bowed deeply to Maria Zoë and beat a hasty retreat.
Amalric awaited her seated, his face impassive, his eyes following her alertly. Maria Zoë approached the throne and went down in a formal curtsy. “My lord,” she murmured as she righted herself. “Since you have avoided my presence these last two weeks, I thought it was time I sought you out.”
“Hmm,” Amalric remarked. “You are recovered, then?”
“I am recovered. And you, my lord, you are well?”
“As well as a man can be—after being presented with a second daughter at a time when the Kingdom desperately needs a male heir. People may not say it out loud, but Baldwin has leprosy. Very likely it disqualifies him from the throne altogether. A nobleman with leprosy must enter the Order of St. Lazarus. Can the law exempt a prince?”
“My lord, I am as disappointed as you are that my child is a girl,” Maria Zoë answered steadily. “But I cannot decide the sex of my child.”
“No, so I’m told,” Amalric admitted grudgingly.
“The only solution is for us to try again.” Maria Zoë had practiced this line in her head a hundred times and she tried to sound bold, but her voice quavered a little nevertheless.
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