At the foot of the stairs he stopped and looked around bewildered for a moment, until he finally spotted his younger brother Daniel curled up in the far corner on a pile of hides. He looked like he was asleep and Michael approached cautiously, unsure about disturbing him. The streaks of blood on his brother’s back, however, made him gasp. He went down on his heels, setting the tankards on the floor, and reached to shake his brother’s shoulder.
Daniel woke with a start, reared up as if frightened, and then recognized his brother. “What are you doing here?” he demanded sullenly, from a face misshapen with an ugly bruise that had discolored his entire left cheek and all but closed his left eye.
“I brought you some ale,” Michael answered, gesturing toward the tankards, “but first tell me what happened to your face.”
“What do you think? Dad hit me!” Daniel spat at him.
Michael raised his eyebrows. He had never known his father’s fists. Roger was not a brutal man, certainly not with his children, and Michael had been a good boy.
“You don’t have to say it!” Daniel retorted, deflecting the expected criticism. “I deserved it! I’m a worthless piece of shit! A disgrace to the family! A—”
“God loves you, Daniel, and so does our father,” Michael replied, cutting off his brother’s tirade of self-loathing. “Now let me look at your back.”
Daniel didn’t seem to know how to react. His jaw was set as defiantly as his aching teeth would allow, but something stung his eyes. He hadn’t expected any sympathy, not even from Michael.
Taking advantage of his confusion, Michael took hold of Daniel’s shirttails and shoved the cloth upwards. Although he tried to be careful, the cotton of the shirt stuck in the coagulated blood, and Daniel cried out in pain. The bleeding started afresh in several places, and Michael drew in his breath. “Did Dad do this, too?” he asked, unable to believe it.
“Of course not. That was Fulk. For being thirteen minutes late!” Daniel’s resentment started to swell up again. “Thirteen goddamned minutes!” He cursed to provoke his clerical brother, but Michael was too wise to take the bait, so Daniel had no choice but to continue raging. “Thirteen goddamned minutes on one day of three hundred sixty-five, and do you know what time it was? Four o’clock in the morning—or four-thirteen. For a whole year I’d been there on time, and just once I’m late! And it wasn’t even my fault, but no one bothered to ask why I was late. No, just beat the shit out of him! Kick him around until I just had to run away! I had to! Do you know what? Fulk wanted to humiliate me from the day I started, because he’s always resented that Dad got promoted over him when they were taking part in the siege. All that blood on my back was meant to be Dad’s!”
Michael had only been half listening to his brother, thinking it best to let Daniel get the rage out of his system, but this remark made him lift his head and look more sharply at him.
“Dad’s so naive!” Daniel continued. “He thinks everyone who fought with him a quarter-century ago is his friend. Well, they’re not.”
“But most of them are,” Michael insisted, thinking it was time to counter his brother’s bitterness.
“How do you know?” Daniel challenged him.
Michael didn’t bother answering; he just settled down on the floor and handed Daniel one of the tankards, taking the other for himself. “We need to get that back cleaned up before it starts to fester.” He paused and then admitted, “Mom wants to send you to a monastery—preferably one of the ones in Sinai.”
Daniel gaped in horror. “They wouldn’t—Surely, Dad—Michael! I’d go mad! I’d end up killing someone—myself, if no one else! You’ve got to stop them from sending me there! I’ll run away!”
“Relax. Dad knows it’s not right for you—”
“Sure!” Daniel scoffed. “Like he knew I wasn’t cut out to be a baker, either! But he can’t stand up to Mom when she gets something in her head.”
“That isn’t what I was going to say. It’s just . . .”
“What?” Daniel demanded, through a mustache of ale foam.
“It’s that he doesn’t know what else to do with you. It won’t be easy to find a master willing to take on an apprentice with your reputation.”
“Tell me something I don’t know!” Daniel snapped back, and tried to chug down the ale all at once. Instead, he only succeeded in getting some of it down his windpipe. He doubled up, coughing, and when Michael automatically clapped him on his back, Daniel howled in outraged pain.
“Sorry!” Michael pleaded, wincing at his own thoughtlessness. Then as Daniel’s coughing subsided and he laid his head on his knees in despair, Michael laid a hand gently on his shoulder and promised, “I’m going to fetch you some of the food now, and later I’ll talk to Mom. I’ll convince her you don’t belong in the Church. She’ll accept it from me as she won’t from you or Dad.”
Daniel nodded without lifting his head. He kept his face buried in his knees—because he wanted to cry and was fighting it with all his strength.
Michael took the empty tankards in one hand, hitched up his cassock in the other, and started back up the stairs, kicking the door open at the top. He thought about leaving the door unbolted but changed his mind, for fear one of the servants fetching something for the wedding feast might notice and raise the alarm. He returned the way he’d come, left the empty tankards on a sideboard where servants collected them for rinsing and reuse, and then pushed his way through the crowd into the forge itself, where two sheep were slowly roasting over the fire. He waited his turn in line for a plate piled high with slices of fatty lamb, and then started back down the alley.
The next instant he collided with his youngest brother Gabriel so hard he was almost knocked over. The plate tipped up and the lamb fell into the mud of the alley. “What’s got into you?” Michael demanded angrily, furious about the wasted meat and a little afraid of being caught feeding Daniel, who was supposed to be on bread and water in punishment.
“Dad! We’ve got to get Dad!” Gabriel answered breathlessly. Gabriel was too young to like dancing, flirting, or even drinking, and he had wandered off from the wedding feast hours ago.
“Why? He’s enjoying the day off—”
“But it’s Jerusalem!”
“What do you mean, ‘It’s Jerusalem’?” Michael asked back, scowling.
“The party of riders coming towards us! They’re flying the banners of Jerusalem! It must be the King!” Gabriel could hardly breathe from excitement.
Michael was torn between disbelief and the realization that if his brother were right, his father indeed needed to be warned. He glanced in the direction from which his brother had come, hoping to see a more reliable messenger. There was none, he decided. “Take this empty plate back and go tell Dad. Tell him I’ve gone ahead to the Jerusalem Gate.” Not watching to see his orders carried out, Michael grabbed a liberal fistful of cassock and held it up so he could run.
By the time he reached the barbican, he had to pause to catch his breath more than once on the stairs up. At the top, however, he was rewarded by the sight of the guards clustered on the ramparts, gesturing and talking excitedly. Michael did not interrupt them. He just went to the edge and followed their outstretched fingers. The forerider, carrying an upright lance with the banner of Jerusalem fluttering from it, was now only four or five hundred yards from the gate. It was easy to see he was a young man wearing a tunic with the arms of Jerusalem over a chain-mail hauberk. He rode a chestnut stallion with a white blaze and four white socks.
The main party, however, was still some distance behind. Michael thought it looked too small to be the entourage of a king. He counted only eight horses, and the two lead horses appeared to be ridden by women. Women in Outremer rode astride. The terrain was too difficult and the risk of ambush too great to give women the luxury of riding sidesaddle like the Greeks, but it was still obvious that the two leading riders had long skirts and veils that blew out behind them. Would the women of the King’s household ride in
front of him? Michael asked himself, and heard his answer on the lips of the soldiers. “Take word to Lord Balian that the Queen of Jerusalem is approaching the city,” one soldier ordered, and at once one of the men clattered down the spiral stairs.
Satisfied that this justified interrupting his father’s day off, but relieved it wasn’t the burden of a full royal visit, Michael slipped back down the stairs. The Queen was unlikely to want an inspection of the garrison, he reasoned; she was more likely just stopping here on her way somewhere else. Her arrival would distract his father for a while, however, and Michael decided it was a good opportunity to take care of his brother’s lacerated back.
No sooner was Michael gone than Roger Shoreham came pounding up the stairs. He strode to the cluster of men still looking out over the ramparts. “What’s this about the King?” he demanded, and they answered in a chorus: “The Queen, not the King!”
“What the devil . . .” Roger asked as he gazed out at the unmistakable sight of a woman, wearing a neat silver circle over her fluttering white veils, cantering on a sweating but far from tired black mare toward the gates. The gates were already open to admit her, and the Queen swept in under him, still at a fast canter.
The news reached Balian when he returned from the lists, where he had been tilting with the quintain because he had no better partner. He was drenched in sweat and the dust of the tiltyard clung to him. He stank of horse and leather, and his hair stood stiff with salt from sweating hard in his helmet.
“Which Queen of Jerusalem?” he demanded of the messenger.
“Are there two?” the guard answered, astonished.
“Yes, fool! Agnes de Courtney and Maria Zoë Comnena.” But even as he spoke he knew that Agnes de Courtney might have moved into the Queen’s apartments and might sit beside her son, but she was not entitled to carry the arms of Jerusalem. It had to be Queen Maria Zoë. “God’s nails!” Balian cursed, then asked, “Where’s Father Laurence? Where’s Sir Walter? Tell them to receive the Queen, and make up chambers for her and the rest of her party. They need to warn Demetrius, too. He must prepare a feast. Have them tell the Queen I will receive her as soon as I return.”
“But you’re here!” the guard protested.
“No, I’m not. I’m at the baths.”
Balian had already decided it would be much faster to get himself cleaned up at one of the public baths than to have the servants draw and heat water for his private bath. So he turned Gladiator over to the waiting Dawit and exited by the back.
To save time, Balian did not head for the large and luxurious baths, dating back to the Romans, that he usually used, but instead ducked into the small Turkish bath just around the corner from the palace. It was not just smaller and darker—it catered to a less exalted clientele than the Roman baths. The arrival of the Constable without his squire caused an immediate commotion.
“Just get me cleaned up!” Balian insisted to the flustered attendants.
At last a dark, mustachioed man of indecipherable origins started giving orders and shooing other customers away, while no less than three boys were ordered to help Balian out of his clothes.
Balian tossed his surcoat on the nearest bench, then unlaced the leather ties at the throat of his hauberk and bent over to let gravity help him out of the heavy chain mail as he crossed his arms behind his back and pulled from the shoulders. The hauberk fell to the tiled floor with a rush and a loud metallic hissing. Balian kicked it to one side. “Go to the palace for clean things!” Balian ordered one of the bath boys as he stripped out of his sweat-soaked gambeson, peeling it and his shirt off his body together. His braies were equally sweatsoaked, and he undid the cord to let them drop to his feet, stepping out of them and then tossing them to the boy, who had already picked up his shirt and gambeson. “Get a clean surcoat as well!” he instructed, pointing to the one he’d tossed over a bench.
The boy grabbed it, then looked at him wide-eyed over the disorderly heap of clothes. “But who will give me your clean things?”
“Ask in the stables for Dawit,” Balian instructed him, and the boy departed.
Naked, Balian turned to enter the steam baths and was startled to find one of his household clerks, the second son of Roger Shoreham, coming toward him with an unfamiliar youth. Michael caught his breath and drew back as if caught in the act of something shameful—which made Balian look more closely at the youth, rumors of clerical sodomy shooting through his mind.
“This is my brother Daniel,” Michael explained before Balian’s suspicions could take hold. “I brought him here to clean him up.”
Balian noted the boy’s bloated, discolored face and drew the right conclusion. “You’re the one who just got thrown out of his apprenticeship by his master, aren’t you?” Balian answered, showing he knew more about his staff than Michael expected. Before Michael or Daniel could answer, Balian grabbed Daniel and ordered, “Come with me and make yourself useful. I’m in a hurry.”
Maria Zoë was not expecting an elaborate reception. Her decision to come to Ascalon had been made in private, and not even her escort had been told her destination until they were on the road. She had forbidden them to send a harbinger as well. “We are not so large a party that we will inconvenience the Constable,” she told her escort commander.
“Ascalon is an outpost, my lady,” he had countered. “There is no royal palace there and no suitable accommodation for you.”
“I lived with the Carmelite nuns quite contentedly for years. I’m sure the Constable of Ascalon will be able to find something at least as comfortable as a Carmelite convent.” Her tone of voice brooked no further contradiction, and the commander had not pressed the point.
Now, as they rode through the city of Ascalon, Maria Zoë felt justified in her assessment. It was a pleasant city with many trees and fountains—clearly remnants of its Greek heritage, she concluded. Furthermore, the bishop’s palace looked like it could offer more than comfortable accommodation—but, of course, that was not where she wanted to stay. . . .
Her guide stopped before the entrance to a sandstone caravansary with batteries of windows on two stories and canvas shades suggesting a rooftop terrace as well. The lower-story windows were grated and glazed with small, dark roundels of glass set in stone, but the upper-story windows were gracious and open. The gate creaked open to admit the Queen’s party, and Maria Zoë found herself in a pleasant courtyard with a two-story arcade enclosing it. The fountain gurgled and glittered in the sunlight, and large palm plants stood in massive pots at each of the four corners. She lifted her eyes toward the second story, half hoping to see Balian lean over the railing to greet her, but there was no sign of him.
The next moment a priest emerged out of the shadows of the arcade with his robes fluttering about him. “I’ll see to her grace,” he called out in an irritated tone to a groom approaching from the other direction, and offered Maria Zoë a hand dismounting.
Maria Zoë jumped down lightly and stood to face the priest, who was stammering: “Your grace, we were not warned of your impending visit. It will take us some time to prepare suitable accommodation. My Lord Constable is absent, but I will take you up to his private apartments while we see to fixing up some of the empty rooms. Refreshments will be brought to you there. Will you be staying with us long?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Maria Zoë answered vaguely, and bit her tongue to stop from asking where her host was. It had not occurred to her that Balian might be absent. How foolish not to check first—but then people would have known why she was here. She retained her façade of dignity and indifference as she followed Father Laurence up to the second story with Rahel in her wake.
She was led to a spacious room with a marble floor and tiled walls. It had three arches open to a terrace spilling bright sunshine in, and it was modestly furnished with two tall carved cabinets, several carved chests, and two chairs beside a small round table in the space between two of the windows. It was a pleasant room—and utterly devoid of perso
nality. It could have been anyone’s room. Not one thing hinted at the identity of the Constable, not even a hanging with his coat of arms.
Disappointed, Maria Zoë went to one of the chairs between the arches and slowly sank down onto it. From habit she folded her hands in her lap, and the image she presented to the outside world was one of a patient queen, awaiting the refreshments promised. Behind that façade, however, her emotions were teetering on the brink of panic. She had ridden all this way, mystifying those around her, for a confrontation with what? A ghost from her past? A figment of her imagination?
Just who was Balian d’Ibelin?
In this functional room, shorn of all her dreams and wishful thinking, she realized that she did not know him at all. He had never said one word about himself—about his feelings, his plans, his dreams. He had always spoken of Baldwin. Baldwin had been their shared interest. Nothing more.
There was a knock on the door and she caught her breath, turning toward it expectantly. But the young knight who entered was not Balian. He looked vaguely familiar, but Maria Zoë could not place him. He came toward her, smiling, and bowed deeply from two feet away before announcing, “My lord was out in the lists, but he will return shortly. Meanwhile, is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable, your grace? Sherbet is being prepared even as we speak, but perhaps you would like something more substantial?”
“At the moment, no, aside from learning your name, sir.”
“Oh, I’m Sir Walter. You’ll remember me as Sir Balian’s squire.”
Knight of Jerusalem Page 18