“An unlucky line, that. Father and grandfather died young too, and short of heirs. Not like my sire, God rest his soul. I am the youngest of six sons, so the patrimony had run out by my turn. No stomach for the cloister, as my fool brother advised. Tell me, is his Bertrand as law-abiding a sheep as his father?”
Robert de Veragny relaxed and smiled as he denied knowledge of Bertrand’s enterprise or lack of it. They exchanged hoary scandal until Rodriga wearied of names unknown to her and the present ramifications of dead men’s families. Her appreciation of her wily father’s tactics increased. His outrageous humour was winning the cripple’s favour. Presently, gently led to it, he was providing names and directions of other Poitevins of Landry’s generation, whom he knew to be in Acre, and her father was solemnly expressing his sense of obligation. In that the knave was ironically sincere; he was being saved a deal of tedious searching, and disarming suspicion at the same time.
At last Landry apologised for trespassing so long upon his good nature, thanked him and began making his farewell. The cripple, forgetting his original purpose, turned to accompany him from the church. The group by the door stood aside. Three were arbalesters, crossbows on their shoulders, but the fourth was a knight, a tall, slender, languid man in a chain-link hauberk. Its hood was thrown back from a straw-fair head, and he carried one of the new flat-topped helmets under his arm. Beneath heavy eyelids remarkably blue eyes glinted at the shabby knight with faded red hair and the equally shabby girl.
Robert de Veragny presented him. “My seneschal, Lothaire de Gallenard. Sir Landry de Parolles and his daughter.”
“Met you before,” said Landry cheerfully. “Probably forgotten me; all of twenty years ago.”
“I would not be so discourteous,” he answered, in a light, musical drawl. “The occasion was a wedding, Sir Landry.”
“Odd coincidence,” Landry observed affably to the cripple. “Simon de Rionart’s wedding. Fixed for ever in my memory, that, because it was the last celebration I attended in Poitou. Never thought to meet a fellow-reveller in Acre, Sir Lothaire, and there will be few enough left above ground of those who danced with us.” He beamed at them, apparently oblivious of the slight tension showing in both faces.
“Few indeed,” agreed the tall knight. “Life in Poitou was ever precarious, and under Count Richard doubly so.”
He stood back to let his lord pass with Landry. The move brought him to Rodriga’s side, and courtesy demanded that he should escort her. Rodriga repressed her distaste, but ignored his proffered hand. “Demoiselle, may I know your name?”
“Rodriga de Parolles.”
“A charming name, demoiselle, and one that you adorn, but strange to me.”
“Spanish, Sir Lothaire.” Any charm was entirely his, and he was wasting it on her. Rodriga knew his kind; the man whose every word and look hinted at intimacy, to the discomfort of any chaste woman subjected to his company.
“Spanish, demoiselle? May I guess that your mother was of that country? You were born there?”
“Yes.”
“It is a name which speaks of hotter suns and bluer skies than ours; of bright flowers, red wine and rare fruits.”
Rodriga stifled a grin and forebore to enlighten him on the facts of her christening. “Does it, Sir Lothaire?” she asked flatly.
“I have seen the mountains that divide our lands, and wondered greatly what lay beyond them. Demoiselle Rodriga, tell me if my dreams come near reality.”
“For that you must consult my father, Sir Lothaire. We left Spain before I was four, and my memories are too scanty to be of use.” That disconcerted him, but only for a moment; he chuckled lightly and seized on her statement to turn it, with practised ease, to his purpose. “Demoiselle Rodriga, memories of your enchanted birthplace you may lack, but those of your travels must entrance a man who has grown mossy roots in one place until this Crusade tore him out!” Her brusque manner had done nothing to repulse him; this monument of self-satisfaction would of course consider it the awkwardness of a raw virgin dazzled by his courtly compliments.
“A maid’s travels are unworthy of recounting,” she answered untruthfully, and thanked the Saints when her father and his companion halted at the next corner. Lothaire de Gallenard expressed his deep pleasure at their meeting, his deeper regret at so early a parting, and his heartfelt desire to improve his friendship with so rare and fair a Spanish flower. The Spanish flower, restraining her natural urge to clout him until his teeth clacked, permitted him to kiss her hand, which he did with languid grace, and a charming smile for her maidenly stiffness which contrived to suggest that he would soften it as a fire’s heat softens a candle. Meanwhile Robert de Veragny and her father parted with expressions of mutual goodwill, and presently Landry tucked her hand firmly under his arm and limped briskly along the street.
“Stroke of luck, that,” he commented. “Mind you, I do not say whether it be good or ill-luck, but we have made a beginning.”
“Was it prudent to admit you witnessed that wedding?” she asked soberly. “Will he count you a danger to him?”
“It would have been damnably imprudent to have pretended otherwise, with that long-legged hank of tow squinting down his nose at me by the door. Saw him over Robert’s shoulder, by Saint Martin’s grace, and knew him at once. And with all modesty, brat, I am less easily forgotten than he is.”
They had reached the open space before the ditch and wall, where the common soldiers laboured like ants and a few knights gave orders. Cross-bowmen and archers, shielded by mantlets of board or wicker-work propped up within arrow-shot of the battlements, kept up a hail of arrows at the defenders. Others, stripped to the waist and shining with sweat, strained at the windlasses or hauled on the ropes of engines that hurled stones and great darts at the city, so that the irregular crash of missiles sounded above all other noises. Stone-dust and splinters spurted from the battered walls and crumbling crenellations, and sometimes a louder cheer indicated that visible casualties had been inflicted. The Accursed Tower’s indomitable mass still stood at the angle of the walls, target for the fiercest assaults. The French miners were pecking doggedly at its foundations, and fighting murderously in their noisome tunnels when Saracen counter-mines broke in upon them. The ditch, that had again and again been bridged by assaulting parties, was heaped and littered with broken rock, loose earth, and the stinking ashes of brushwood, timber and hides destroyed by Greek fire. A ragged breach in the wall near the tower had been roughly barricaded with untrimmed stone. Banners drooped in the hot air, and occasionally men moved, black against the blinding sky, behind the gap-toothed battlements.
Landry and Rodriga strolled along by the northern wall of the city, watching the progress that the besiegers had made since yesterday. They paused to watch men at work on a new siege-tower, and then hastily quitted its vicinity, screwing up their faces as a slight shift of wind carried to their nostrils the nauseous stench of green hides, rapidly putrefying under the burning sun. In a cloud of flies the blaspheming carpenters were nailing them over the timbers as a protection against Greek fire.
“Holy Saints strengthen the guts of those who must mount it, and grant them wit to go to it fasting, or they will puke so they have no heart left in them,” observed Landry pungently. “Glad I shall not be one.”
Rodriga looked keenly at him, wondering how deep a bitterness his caustic wit concealed. However cheerfully he accepted it, she knew he was deeply hurt by the knowledge of failure. No lord had use for a lame and elderly knight, landless, all but penniless, with but five half-armed scarecrows to follow him. He who had heedlessly traversed every disputed land in Europe, insubordinate, irascible, inveterately outspoken, scornful of settled service, had come at last close to Jerusalem the earth’s navel, and found himself denied a share in that greatest adventure of all. Old and done and ruined, in this savage alien land, he troubled, she knew, only for her sake, but the hurt of uselessness must gnaw at him constantly.
In the thickest o
f the turmoil a party of finely mailed knights clustered round a lurching litter borne by men-at-arms. Passing close, they glimpsed an unmistakable red head and heard a hoarse, hurried voice issuing orders. Landry’s peaked eyebrows climbed his corrugated forehead.
“May the Lord Above insert a little sense in place of the one idea our King has in his thick skull, and extend particular protection to his physicians!” he prayed fervently. “Has the fool no notion how valuable is his idiotically heroic life?”
“His presence puts vigour into the siege,” she pointed out in fairness, wondering whether his unmoderated voice were audible to the King’s company.
Landry snorted like Job’s warhorse. “You mean the single-minded hero thinks nothing can go aright unless he oversees it, and cannot abide the thought that foxy Philip might forestall him in taking the city!”
It was not really matter for marvel that no overlord had tolerated Landry’s service for longer than six months, Rodriga reflected, as her father snorted again and sourly watched the litter out of sight. His insistence on brutally exposing the motives a man would not admit even to himself was scarcely endearing to those in high places.
“The King’s duty,” he stated, for once wholly serious, “is first to recover his health. What matter whether he or Philip takes Acre? Who but Richard can lead our armies to Jerusalem? His life means more than a few days before a doomed city, or glory won by the King of France! His duty is to obey his physicians, not to endanger his life by defying them!”
“He will most likely submit to them and to his fever before the week is out,” agreed Rodriga, a little grimly. “Why must these valiant paladins be born without the least particle of common sense?”
“They would not then be paladins,” chuckled Landry, who, though a useful man of his hands, had never aspired to that perilous eminence which took so much maintaining. He ran his fingers through his hair, which stood in sore need of trimming, and looked back at the Accursed Tower. There, the legend went, had been minted thirty pieces of silver for which God’s Son had been betrayed. “Nothing can save it now, but every man here must testify that no more valiant warriors live on earth than these Infidels!”
He drew her on. A hoarse voice raised in exhortation caught their attention, and they turned aside to the “Petraria of God”, the great engine built, maintained and supplied by the contributions of passers-by. A priest preached beside it continually, appealing for alms to pay for the stones it hurled and the wages of the men who worked it. Landry signed to Rodriga, who tossed a piece of their scanty and rapidly dwindling silver to the priest. However little they had, they must further the work of God.
The priest, a gaunt man leather-brown from the sun, his over-used voice harsh and cracking, scowled into their startled faces. “Do you think to buy salvation with silver?” he demanded. “Repent, repent, put aside your fornication ! You who go forth with your harlot in the face of the people, know that her feet go down to death, her steps take hold on Hell!”
Landry grinned, and Rodriga, regrettably, giggled. The priest snarled in outrage and opened his mouth to blast them anew. “My daughter, Father,” he said hastily, and the thwarted priest diverted his eloquence to the little group of gapers who had gathered.
“O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? There is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood. Therefore shall the land mourn, and every one that dwelleth therein shall languish!” He raised stringy arms to the blinding sky, the ragged sleeves of his old habit sliding down past his elbows. A trace of spittle gathered at the corners of his vehement lips, and he glared round at the uneasy circle. The hairs prickled on the nape of Rodriga’s neck, and she crossed herself. The priest’s sunken eyes flashed to her, and his voice cracked to a whisper that seemed meant for her alone. “What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”
As Landry drew her away he began to declaim the bitterly appropriate seventy-ninth Psalm against the thudding of the petraria, the cursing and grunting of the workers, and the clamour of the crowd. She had Latin enough to follow him.
“O God, the heathen are come into Thine inheritance; Thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Jerusalem on heaps.
“The dead bodies of thy servants have they given to be meat unto the fowls of the heaven . . .”
For the first time cold doubt assailed her for the Crusade’s ultimate success. In this past generation God seemed to turn His face from their cause. Jerusalem was lost, the Kingdom broken, its empty title become a prize bickered over by a competent scoundrel and a knightly fool. She had expected glory and beauty in the land her Saviour’s holy feet had trodden, and that their invincible enthusiasm must sweep the Infidels before them in a broken rout. There was no beauty in this squalid stinking encampment where the sweepings of Christendom gambled, whored and murdered, and died ingloriously in a haze of heat, dust and flies. There was neither integrity nor unity among the jealous, wrangling leaders, shamelessly seeking selfish ends, agreeing on nothing that might increase the renown or profit of one above the rest.
Her father’s voice broke upon her piercing dismay and dragged her back to practical matters with something of a thump. “Eloquence, in faith! And a sound Poitevin accent. Might be worth our while to converse with him. Not now, with that flood of Holy Writ in full spate; he would grant us naught but a maxim from the Scriptures if we interrupted him. Humph.” He thrust his fingers through his hair, which was his habit when engrossed in thought and which was largely accountable for his resemblance to an unbarbered lion, and then made purposefully for the sergeant commanding the petraria team.
The sergeant welcomed a chance to expound the peculiar sanctity of his priest, in whom he took a proprietorial pride. He was no common priest of the camp, but a holy hermit who had withdrawn from the world to the wilderness, from which he appeared at intervals to castigate the besiegers’ sins and exhort them to repentance. And when Father Hilary came into Acre on his holy mission, the sight of its vices openly flaunted usually inspired him to preach denunciation while the light lasted.
Landry eyed the gaunt figure respectfully. He had a healthy admiration for his own eloquence, but he knew his limitations. “Until sundown, eh? Shall I stand here until I see Hell’s Mouth gaping at my feet? Come, lass. By the end of the day he will have preached his tongue to leather and be ready to give his ears a turn.”
He towed her briskly away. His lameness, reminder of a moment’s carelessness many years past, hampered him very little except after a hard day in the saddle, and though he relished walking no more than any other knight, the need to spare his only mount compelled him to keep his feet most of the day. Fodder was poor and dear, and the heat suited his sound but aging Flemish destrier very ill. Almansor was irreplaceable; a fully trained destrier was the scarcest and most precious merchandise in Acre, utterly beyond his lightening purse. The state of that purse was constantly in Rodriga’s mind these days, and the worry of how they would live when it was exhausted.
Together, as they did most things, they went through the city of tents like hounds quartering a covert, starting up middle-aged Poitevins, clerics and laymen, who all seemed to Rodiga addicted to wordy reminiscence. It was soon evident that their chief difficulty would be to pick out from the irrelevant mass what was worth further investigation. Owing to the highly unsettled state of Poitou twenty years ago, such social events as marriages, christenings and funerals had not drawn the usual company of celebrants. Occasionally mention was made of Simon de Rionart, a promising life untimely ended, but nothing to their purpose.
“These fellows all know Robert de Veragny,” Landry remarked as they turned homeward, “and his nose is already testing the wind. Enough for the day. I am weary of remembering what fools young men can be, and listening to a parcel of old knaves past sinning boas
ting of what is better forgotten.”
“Not only listening,” his undutiful daughter commented with a chuckle.
“Are you hinting that I am past sinning, disrespectful brat? Tomorrow you may find other occupation, while I am engaged with Father Augustine and his colleagues. The presence of anything female seems to afflict clerical tongues with paralysis. Now for a word with that hermit, and we shall have earned a better supper than we are likely to receive.”
Since Diego was a truly appalling cook, that was a certainty. They pushed through the throngs dispersing for the evening, and reached the petraria too late. The hermit’s post was occupied by a mild young Bavarian. An attempt at inquiry foundered through lack of a common language, and the helpful sergeant had departed likewise to his own place. Landry shrugged and made for the market to purchase bread.
The market was a fascinating place, and a supper of Diego’s contriving no allure to hasten them. They listened to the bargaining in a dozen tongues, criticised or marvelled at the wares on offer, and gazed with childlike interest at native Christians robed like Saracens, at Turcople soldiers in light mail and loose gay garments, at veiled women, at a half-naked man whose polished skin was almost as dark as charcoal and whose head was covered with tight black wool, and at men from every land in Christendom, come to free the Holy Sepulchre.
They bought odd, dark flaps of bread that they had learned were palatable, and some of the figs and raisins that were so plentiful and cheap. They shivered with mingled loathing and awe as a bony dark creature made weird music on a wooden pipe and a hooded snake swayed in a hideous dance. They passed the busy dealers in secondhand armour and clothing, grimacing at that reminder of how the sickle of death reaped a grim harvest in Acre, and admired the silks and brocades and gold-threaded cloths, the ivories and ikons and jewels and other precious things displayed by the Byzantine and Italian traders. They were laughing in the throng about a trained monkey that danced and somersaulted, when a sudden sideways pressure of the crowd thrust them away.
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