Knight of Jerusalem

by Helena P. Schrader

  “Try to put me there!” Henri screamed and ran for the door.

  Barry and Balian both sprang up to follow him, but Henri flung the door shut behind him, gaining precious seconds. He took the back stairs two at a time, and by the time his older brothers reached the kitchen courtyard he was already tearing out of the gate, leaving alarmed packhorses and fluttering chickens in his wake.

  “I’ll chain him in the dungeon! He won’t see the light of day for the next year! Bread and water! He’ll beg me to forgive him! He’ll grovel at my feet!” Barry blustered furiously.

  Balian said nothing and just let Barry blow himself out. Barry finally stopped threatening the brother who was no longer within hearing and glowered at the one who was. “Say something!”

  “Oultrejourdain—”

  “Sir Miles,” Barry corrected him, denying him his forfeit title.

  “Sir Miles will throw Henri out of his household in his own selfinterest, and Henri will be back, contrite and humiliated.”

  This was exactly what Henri feared as he fled across Jerusalem. It wasn’t just that Henri idolized his lord—he had vowed three years ago never to forgive Barry for cutting him out of their father’s inheritance. He could not bear the thought of being dependent on him.

  Henri, steaming inwardly, plunged into the covered market, famous for stalls selling swords, daggers, scimitars, and knives from all over the world. There were ornamental weapons with handles inlaid with ivory from Constantinople, Syrian swords with magnificently engraved silver sheaths, and the finest of German broadswords. The merchants were as diverse as their wares: Armenians, Coptic and Syrian Christians, Arabs, Turks, and Kurds.

  Henri was so angry he was all but running, despite the upward incline, which left him panting as he took the irregular steps. He dodged overeager shopkeepers who tried to block his way, and elbowed customers aside. He took several right-angled turns as he navigated the warren of vaulted tunnels that housed Jerusalem’s market, heading for Oultrejourdain’s residence near the Zion Gate. In his mind, he was preparing the impassioned speech he would make to declare his undying loyalty and beg the baron not to dismiss him. He was too focused on his own crisis to take much note of his surroundings until a man almost collided with him, running in the opposite direction. The Turk shoved Henri roughly out of his way with a curse; outraged, Henri turned to shout an insult after the man. The man was tearing his turban from his head as he ran. Why would he do that? Henri asked himself without really caring.

  The next instant, however, he was nearly trampled by three Franks shouting frantic orders: “Stop him! Stop him! Murderer!” Because they were shouting in French, most of the people in the market ducked back into their stalls, fearing trouble.

  Henri not only understood their words, however, he recognized their livery: these were some of Oultrejourdain’s men-at-arms. He spun on his heel and joined in their pursuit of the fleeing criminal.

  But the man had already disappeared.

  His pursuers stopped, panting, at the intersection of two of the covered alleys and looked around. The culprit had melted away in the welter of stands, shopkeepers, and customers. No matter which way they looked, there was the usual bustle of a busy market, but nothing more. The fugitive had submerged into the market like a stone dropped in a rushing stream.

  “What happened?” Henri asked the men in his lord’s livery.

  “An assassin!” one gasped out breathlessly, but said no more.

  They turned and made their way back through the crowded market, to emerge from the arcade just a hundred feet from the entrance to the Oultrejourdain residence. Here a large crowd had gathered around men hovering over something on the steps leading up to the residence.

  Henri recognized several of his fellow knights from Oultrejourdain’s household. “No!” he screamed and rushed forward, pushing his way through the others with the sheer intensity of his desperation.

  Oultrejourdain was stretched out on the first two steps, his face white and wet with sweat and his stomach and abdomen soaked in bright blood.

  Two days later Sir Miles de Plancy was dead. King Baldwin IV insisted that he be buried with full honors as a baron of Jerusalem, his loss of titles negated by his death. Baldwin also explicitly recognized the reversion of his lands and titles to his widow, by whose right he had held them in the first place. “We will not punish the innocent widow for the misdeeds of her husband,” King Baldwin told his Regent firmly.

  Tripoli hesitated, but then bowed to his King and agreed. “Stephanie de Milly is a courageous woman, my liege, and I agree she should not be punished for Miles de Plancy’s intransigence. But Oultrejourdain is an exposed and vulnerable barony. The widow will, my liege, need a fighting man to hold her inheritance for her.”

  “Do you have someone in mind, my lord?” Baldwin asked.

  “Not at the moment, but . . .”

  “But what, my lord?”

  “I only wanted to draw your attention to the risks we take by returning Oultrejourdain to Stephanie de Milly so long as she is unwed.”

  “What do you propose we do to reduce those risks, my lord?” Baldwin pressed his Regent, looking at him with large blue eyes that seemed to understand so much more than a thirteen-year-old should.

  “We could send royal constables to hold the castles of Kerak and Montreal for her until such time as she remarries.”

  “Yes, that sounds reasonable,” Baldwin agreed. “You will take care of that, my lord?”

  “I will,” Raymond assured his King.

  Kerak, Oultrejourdain

  Stephanie de Milly was not an attractive woman, and she had no illusions about why Miles de Plancy had sought her hand in marriage. In that he was no different than her first husband, the younger Humphrey de Toron, to whom her father had given her at a tender age. She was the heiress to a valuable barony, and her father had chosen not the man most pleasing to his immature daughter, but the man most likely to hold on to what he’d gained and held. With young Humphrey it had not been the boy himself, but rather his formidable father, Humphrey II, Baron de Toron and Constable of the Kingdom, who had pleased her father. But the young Humphrey had died in a stupid accident, leaving her a teenage widow with a infant son—who was instantly snatched away by her father-in-law, who wanted the boy (another Humphrey) raised in his own castle.

  Meanwhile her father had chosen a second husband for her, Miles de Plancy. Miles had been twenty-three years her senior when he married her, and she had been sixteen. But Miles had been a good husband to her. He had not coddled her or courted her or treated her like a fragile doll. Instead he had recognized that she was as tough as he was, and as fiercely dedicated to holding her father’s barony as he was. She had been his ally, his partner, his trusted lieutenant. . . .

  It had been a stormy marriage at times. They had fought—even thrown things at one another, when their wills clashed—but they had respected one another. Stephanie had thrived in that marriage, gratified that her word was obeyed as alacritously as her husband’s, exhilarated by being entrusted with the defense of her castles when her husband was away, and proud to be called a “she-devil” and other insulting names by their enemies. The Saracens hated a woman who could fight more than anything else on earth, she thought with pride.

  At twenty-six, Stephanie de Milly was taller and stronger than many men. She had flesh on her bones, and her detractors accused her of having hair on her chest as well, but nothing had prepared her for the news that her husband had been cut down by an assassin on the streets of Jerusalem. She flatly refused to believe the first messenger. “This is a trick!” she protested, jumping to her feet. “Tripoli thinks he can trick me into surrendering my castles!”

  The second messenger fared no better. “Get out of my sight!” she screamed at her husband’s squire, sent to fetch her to Jerusalem for her husband’s interment. “You are a traitor!”

  It was not until Sir Henri d’Ibelin showed her her husband’s wedding ring that she understo
od he was truly dead. Henri knelt before her in the solar of Montreal and simply held up the ring, tears streaming down his face.

  Most men did not wear wedding rings, but Stephanie had given Miles this ring with the crest of the Millys on it to remind him that he held Oultrejourdain through her. She’d underestimated the size of his fingers, and he had been unable to jam it over his knuckle at the wedding ceremony, but he’d pocketed it and had it enlarged shortly afterwards. From the day he put it on, he never took it off again.

  Stephanie had stared at the ring proffered by the young knight, and felt as if a violent earthquake had brought the castle walls tumbling down around her. Miles dead? “How?” she gasped out, reaching for the ring. “How?”

  “It was an assassin, madame,” Henri told her, relating how a merchant from the weapons market had stepped into Oultrejourdain’s path as he started up the steps into his townhouse, and held him back.

  “My husband would never allow that!” Stephanie de Milly protested.

  “He was annoyed and turned to hit him with his free hand. In that instant the merchant took the very knife he had been selling and stabbed him. Four times. He was a professional, madame,” Henri told the widow, who stared at him with wide eyes and open mouth. “Any of the wounds would have been fatal on their own. The assassin went for the stomach, the liver, and the kidney.”

  Oultrejourdan’s widow was clutching her husband’s ring, cutting her fingers on the rough edges where his men had cut the ring from her husband’s finger to bring it to her. She did not notice that blood was smearing the front of her dress. “Why?” she asked. “Miles had no quarrel with the Assassins. Miles has even given them safe passage on occasion. . . .”

  Henri swallowed and took a deep breath. “My lady.”

  The widow did not hear him; she was gazing, dazed, at her bloody hands and the ring in them.

  “My lady.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes blank.

  “My lady, I don’t think it was the Assassins.”

  She frowned. “What are you babbling about? You said yourself it was a professional. Who else uses such methods?”

  “Assassins usually die, madame. They sacrifice their own lives, confident that in killing—and dying—they go to paradise. But this man ran away, and—and—” The intensity with which she stared at him made Henri nervous. He had told the others, but they had not taken what he said seriously. Stephanie de Milly, however, was staring at him as if he were the Archangel Gabriel.

  “Madame, he tore off his turban as he ran. In the open street.”

  Stephanie de Milly started. She understood. “A disguise!”

  “Yes, madame! I think it was a disguise. The man was an assassin, but not an Assassin. He was a hired killer, not an adherent of Hassan. I do not think the Old Man of the Mountain sent him, madame.”

  “Who, then?” Stephanie demanded, horrified and fascinated by what Henri was saying.

  “Who had the most to gain by your husband’s death, madame?” Henri asked, and when she did not answer him, he provided the answer. “Raymond de Tripoli, madame.”

  Stephanie de Milly sprang to her feet with a stifled cry, but Henri could see that she believed him. She stood clutching her husband’s ring as she thought it all through for herself, and then she nodded and said almost inaudibly, but all the more forcefully: “Tripoli.”

  She spun away from Henri and started pacing so furiously that he began to fear he had miscalculated. Maybe she would not reward him for bringing her this message.

  Abruptly Stephanie de Milly stopped. She turned back on Henri. “I will have my revenge. Wait and see. Miles will not go unavenged.”

  Henri nodded, convinced by the sheer intensity of her voice, even if he could not imagine how a widow could take revenge on the Regent of Jerusalem.

  “Will you help me, Sir Henri?” she asked, leaning closer to him—her eyes boring into his own so sharply that he wanted to squirm as if in physical pain.

  “Yes, yes,” Henri stammered. “Of course, my lady!”

  Still the eyes bore into him, searching his heart and his soul. “Do you mean that, Sir Henri?” she asked him in a low, ominous voice.

  “Yes, my lady,” he assured her again, sweating from fear that she might not believe him.

  But she did. She straightened and drew back a little, keeping her eyes fixed on the household knight she had hardly noticed before. Then she said slowly and deliberately, “You will be my knight, then? . . . My knight?”

  “Yes, my lady; always!” Henri vowed, crossing himself, to seal his oath by calling on the Holy Trinity as his witness.

  Chapter 5

  Kingdom of Jerusalem, August 1174

  “WHY ARE YOU HERE, MADAME?” THE Mother Superior asked in a cold voice. She was not an old woman. Maria Zoë guessed her age at no more than thirty-five—although nuns usually aged well, spared as they were the cares and hardships of husbands and children. So perhaps this woman was forty. Regardless of her age, she had a lovely, regular face that was well set off by the tight-fitting white wimple of her habit. Her lips were thin, however, and her eyes dark, intelligent, and hostile.

  “I have just lost my husband, madame,” Maria Zoë returned, astonished by this reception. She had expected the Carmelite nuns at this remote, impoverished convent to welcome a prominent (and wealthy) boarder with open arms. “I wish to withdraw from the world so I may have time to grieve in private.”

  “Truly, madame?” the Mother Superior asked, with raised eyebrows that underlined her disbelief.

  “Of course that is what I wish!” Maria Zoë insisted, starting to get angry. It had been a long and unpleasant journey. Twice they had been caught in unseasonable rain showers and drenched through. With sunset, the temperatures had dropped dramatically here in the mountains. She was cold, damp, and weary, while little Isabella had a running nose and appeared to be coming down with a cold. “Do you think I would have come all this way with my poor child if I did not wish to retreat from the world?” she asked back sharply.

  “You have a very strong escort, madame,” the Mother Superior countered. “The Comte de Tripoli seems to think there are people in your stepson’s Kingdom who wish you harm—or that you are not quite so keen to come here as you claim.” Her eyes were searching Maria Zoë’s face.

  Thinking that the Mother Superior was concerned about whether she had been brought here against her will, Maria Zoë curbed her temper and explained, “The Comte de Tripoli feared that my infant daughter might be seized by men who resent being ruled by a leper—men who would raise her up as the rightful heir and use her for their own purposes.”

  The older woman nodded, but she still did not smile or offer a welcome. She simply stood and rang a bell on her desk. At once a nun appeared and bobbed her knee to the Mother Superior, her head bowed. “Sister, show the Queen and her attendant to our best guest chambers. Be sure they have sufficient firewood and water to wash with. Arrange for a light meal to be brought to them there, along with hot spiced wine. Send Sister Alys to me at once.” The nun dipped her knee again and gestured for Maria Zoë to follow her, but remained dutifully silent.

  The guest quarters were not palatial, but they were comfortable, with a large fire that, after some coaxing by the lay sisters who brought wood and coals, started to take the chill off the damp air. Isabella was soon fast asleep in the small bed the sisters brought. Rahel, meanwhile, stripped Maria Zoë’s wet clothes off her, sponged her down with the warm water provided by the nuns, and dressed her in a velvet dressing gown trimmed with wolf fur, a gift from her great-uncle. Lastly, Maria Zoë slipped her feet into sealskin slippers, and by the time the hot spiced wine arrived, she was beginning to warm up and relax. Even more than that, she began to feel safe.

  Surely no one would look for her here. The place was too obscure, too far off the beaten track, too insignificant for a queen, even a dowager queen. Tripoli is a clever man, if also a calculating and selfserving one, she thought, leaning her head
against the high back of the chair, and holding the wine goblet close to her chest so she could breathe in the spicy steam.

  It was good to get away from Jerusalem, the court, even her ladies. Her only regret was not having the opportunity to take her leave of either her stepson or Balian d’Ibelin. The thought of the latter gave her an ache in her heart. Not that he wouldn’t understand her departure. Balian was an intelligent man. He would surely grasp the advantages of taking Isabella someplace like this in secrecy. Yet the thought of not seeing him again—perhaps for years—hurt.

  For two years they had been friends. Not ordinary friends. She had not dared invite him to her apartment after that first interview. She had never spoken to him alone again. When they spoke, it was before the entire court, often with her husband on her arm. However, she had often stopped in public to ask him about Baldwin. Her concern for her stepson was widely praised, and people approved of the way she consulted with the knight who looked after him.

  Only Balian and she knew that these frequent and public conversations had had little to do with Baldwin. Her private correspondence with Baldwin had given her all the information she needed about her stepson. When she stopped to talk to Balian, she was seeking only an excuse to talk to him. Balian invariably asked if she had anything she wished him to report back to his charge, which gave her the chance to tell Sir Balian what was on her mind.

  Oh, dear God, forgive me! She closed her eyes and prayed. “All I really cared about was the expression on his face, the melodic sound of his voice, the sense of being near to him. . . .” Was that such a terrible sin?

  No. Perhaps it was not a sin at all. But sin or not, it was over.

  Maria Zoë took a sip of the wine and savored the tangy taste of the local red grapes mixed with nutmeg, cloves, and slices of orange. There was better wine in Constantinople, she thought wistfully, and when she first came to Jerusalem she had missed it. But with time she had developed a taste for this wine, which tasted of limestone and desert rather than the sweet, blooming valleys of Greece.