“I reckon it would be folly to discredit your cause by taking so notorious a renegade as myself into your household.” His voice was still harshly level, but his continued pallor and desperate stare betrayed him.
“And call an end to that damned slander! You are no renegade! Lord Above, I lived six years in Spain, and know a Muslim when I meet one! You are none, and never have been!”
“It is true I have never denied my baptism,” he agreed, with a faint flicker of humour, “but my practice of Christian faith has been lacking.”
“I would rate you a truer Christian than that grovelling hypocrite of Veragny!” Landry snorted. “And if that perverted pride of yours would ever let you deny an accusation, your name might not stink as it does in Christian nostrils!”
“What would denial avail?” Marco shrugged. “And as for faith, what does it do but breed warfare?”
A curious shock assailed Rodriga as the emotionless voice denied all that Christendom existed by, as if a giant hand squeezed her entrails. Yet Landry heard the blasphemy in perfect calm, without even a frown. There was even a smile on his lips as he surveyed the tense defiant figure.
“I pray that some day God will grant you knowledge,” he said. “But we stray. All other considerations apart, your life is valuable to us, and the benefit mutual. Will you accept, stiff-neck?”
He drew a deep, unsteady breath, and suddenly turned to Rodriga. “My lady, are you of one mind with your father?”
“Yes,” she said quietly, and wondered if her sudden excitement were obvious to the two men. He was going to accept, and she rejoiced at it.
“Then I accept, and thank you. And I know now that there are Christians in Acre.” The controlled steadiness had gone from his voice; it was grave and oddly uncertain. Landry extended a huge freckled paw to seal the bargain, engulfing the lean hand that came half-reluctantly into his. Probably it was the first time in his life that Marco had grasped another man’s hand in friendship.
“Come and go as you please, only give me the right to defend you. Fetch your horse and gear. Take the next room as your own,” Landry directed. “Do you ride to Tyre tonight?”
“Too late to pass the gate. Tomorrow night will serve.” He turned abruptly and went out.
Landry watched him go and then thumped at his cushions, swearing softly and viciously. Rodriga looked up in surprise, and saw the black anger in his normally good-humoured face. He caught her startled glance, and uttered a savage grunt. “God’s Life, lass, what shameful waste! That could have been a fine man, and pious Christian folk have made of him an outcast killer!”
“Waste indeed,” she agreed sombrely.
“God alone knows who sired him, but no thieving rat of a ribald got that out of a common whore! Courage and brains and pride enough to drag himself unaided out of the gutter, so he must be damned for it! Christian charity—how much has ever been shown him? Lord Above, do you wonder at his blasphemy?” He smote again at the unoffending cushion. “It may be too late, but we owe him more than we can ever repay, so unless he is beyond saving he shall have this chance, and the Devil grill the gossiping tongues of Christian Acre and feed them to their busy hypocrites of owners!”
“We owe it to him,” she agreed soberly, and banished her misgivings about Piers and Robert de Veragny and his seneschal. “I think he has never known a friend.”
“Fighting his way out of the kennel, trusting neither man nor woman, with that pride and that tongue? Of course not! Noticed how he lets no one touch him, keeps beyond arm’s reach?”
“He is scarred by many beatings,” she told him, and was silent, not wishing to pursue that thought further. He nodded without surprise.
“Send Ramiro to me, then. Tell the lads, and warn them that he is my guest. As I see it, this is our Christian duty.”
Once Landry had decided on his Christian duty he was not to be turned aside by argument, threat or bribe. The matter was settled. Rodriga did as she was bidden, silenced Urraca’s outrage, made the night rounds, and looked in again upon her parent. He was asleep, but she felt very much awake. She went up to the roof, open to the warm night wind which at least swept away most of the pestilential mosquitoes, where she might watch the ships’ lights swaying over the roofs, and the brilliant stars of the Holy Land that she had never yet seen obscured by cloud.
Marco was there, sitting on the low parapet, his profile dark against the sky. Her indrawn breath of surprise brought him to his feet, and he moved to go, murmuring an apology. She checked him with a gesture. “No need to go,” she said, and perched herself on the parapet a few feet away.
“In this land the roofs are the women’s domain, my lady. I am trespassing.”
“You have my leave,” she said, smiling in the dark, and he sat down again. For a little while they stayed in unconstrained silence, looking out over the darkened streets whose noises came wild and raucous from the wineshops and pleasure-houses, insulting the lovely night. Beyond them the ships’ lanterns cast swinging reflections on the dark sea, the Tower of Flies that defended the end of the mole thrust its dark crown amongst them, and the sands of the wide bay glimmered palely beyond, curving round to the black rampart of Mount Carmel that blocked the southern horizon, and the distant lights of Cayphas at its foot. Up there Elijah the Prophet, in the ages before Jesus came to redeem mankind, had challenged the false priests of Baal and called on God to justify him, and God had answered with fire from Heaven. Below, on the banks of the little River Kishon, those priests of Baal had been miserably slaughtered. This was an old land, harsh and fierce and merciless, whose soil had drunk men’s blood since time out of mind and ever thirsted for more.
“My lady,” said the deep quiet voice beside her at last, “neither you nor your father shall regret this if it rests with me.”
“We are sure of that.”
“But it will rouse vast indignation through your host, and my fame will tarnish yours. A killer, spy, renegade, Saracen’s spawn—”
“You are not a renegade, and your father was not a Saracen!”
“It is highly unlikely,” he qualified her denial, with the bitter humour she had heard in his voice before when he alluded to his antecedents, “but who is to say which guess is the right one? It made a pretty story.”
“A pretty story?”
“All the wenches had one—ravishment, betrayal, starvation. Some may even have been true, but most—who can make a pretty story of folly and laziness and greed? If the truth be told, she came of an honest trading family in Ascalon, and played the whore there until her kindred found she was with child and could not name the father. They cast her out, and she took ship to Tyre, devising her affecting but implausible story of the ravishing Saracen by the way.”
“But how did you—” she checked, conscience-stricken.
“Learn otherwise? The worst of devising a pretty story, my lady, is that sooner or later someone appears who knows the ugly truth.”
“And tells it.”
“Exactly. Though she held to the mythical Saracen as a convenient scapegoat for my existence.”
“Marco, you are yourself, whoever sired you! Saracen or Christian, it is no blame to you! And my mother was a Moor.”
An astounded silence fell upon the rooftop. Marco, who knew so much of her, had not known that. Then he struck his hand lightly on the parapet, and said softly, “Your father knows a Muslim when he meets one!”
“He married one. Oh, she was baptised afterwards. A slave-girl, a captive taken in war, and when he saw her he loved and bought her.”
“If she was like you, what else could he do?”
For a moment she was rendered speechless; Marco did not deal in idle compliments. Then she hurried on without probing into his meaning, offering gift for gift, her truth for his. “I do not remember her, but my father says not. She was beautiful and fierce and reckless. She died when I was a baby. A chance arrow in a siege.”
“Was that so ill a fate, my lady, to die young and beautiful and beloved?
For her, not for those left to bear grief? Is her name yours?”
“No. I should have been born a boy, and named for the greatest hero of Spain, Rodrigo, El Cid Campeador. I was not a boy, but still they named me for him.”
They sat on, at ease in each other’s company. Neither was of talkative habit, and the bridge between them needed no words to mortar it. It was pleasant here in the open, outside the bedroom stifling with heat and humming with mosquitoes bred in the marshes beyond the city. Rodriga watched the harbour, the lights swinging with the waves, the black outlines of spars and furled sails against the dancing reflections. The buildings between her and the sea blocked her view of the nearer ships, but the massed fleets were along the mole and the harbour and anchored out in the bay. A light crawled across the water, a ship’s boat returning from the shore. The town was noisy with the uproar of drunken men reeling back from tavern and brothel, singing and shouting and quarrelling. It was better to watch the ships. She watched while Acre quieted around her, and consciousness of the hour’s lateness came and brought her reluctantly to her feet. The man followed like her shadow, and in her heart she was not only glad for her father’s impulse but convinced of its rightness. Only God knew what the outcome would be, but in this house Marco was no outcast.
1
The Papal Ordinance making yearly confession and Communion at Easter obligatory on penalty of excommunication was promulgated in 1215, probably with such notorious offenders in high places as King John in mind.
CHAPTER XV
It would have been prudent to refrain from parading their new bonds with Marco before a censorious city, but neither Landry nor Rodriga reckoned that kind of prudence high among the virtues. Moreover, the size of their household forbade it. If the lads took out the horses for exercise, while Wulfric and Diego cleaned the stables, only Ramiro and Marco were available for other service. It was Marco whom Landry called on to escort Rodriga when she went marketing with Helga, a choice with which Ramiro was bound to agree.
Acre in the comparative freshness of dawn, while the overnight revellers were recuperating from their pleasures, was peaceful enough. They went first to the shore beyond the harbour, where the local fishing-boats were beached. The night’s catches glittered in the baskets, the nets dried on poles, and the fishermen chaffered with those who came to buy, purveyors with troops of serving-men from the royal establishments or women thriftily haggling over a single mullet. Marco left the bargaining to Rodriga, whose rightful charge it was, but the lively lad who served her took one look at his impassive face and reduced his price to reasonable bounds with unusual haste and meekness.
Because Helga was with them, straining her ears for their conversation, they spoke seldom and on impersonal topics. Rodriga, who loved ships, had to linger by the harbour to admire the Genoese and Pisan craft, to watch the sailors at work in the rigging, and to ask Marco questions about local conditions. Was it true that in winter the westerly winds, to which the anchorage was exposed, blew so fiercely that for weeks on end Acre was inaccessible by sea? True enough, he assured her; it had been largely responsible for last winter’s famine. They talked of the Italian cities’ trade in the old days before Hattin. She had expected Marco to be knowledgeable about the landward aspect of the Eastern trade, but he was as well informed about the seaborne traffic, the stowage, handling and carriage of exotic luxuries to the merchant cities of Italy. An odd suspicion began to grow in her, but while Helga was with them she would not voice it.
Her wandering life had made Rodriga familiar with the small sturdy vessels of the North and with the steep seas and savage winds of the Atlantic coasts. A casual comment on the lack of tides in these Mediterranean waters drew first an interested question from Marco and then an incredulous curiosity, and he was still asking questions when they came back to the house and dismissed Helga to deal with the fish while Rodriga attended Mass. She challenged Marco as soon as they were clear of the house.
“You have been a sailor, Marco.”
“No, I never ranked as high as that, my lady. Ship’s boy,” he said wryly.
A ship’s boy was the lowliest of all created beings afloat, but something in his voice linked itself with an earlier statement, and she asked, “Was that the service you called a mistake?”
“It was.”
“What was wrong, Marco?”
He grimaced slightly. “The captain was a drunken brute with a grievance against Saracens.” He added grimly, “He was also the first man I killed, my lady.”
“What happened?” she asked in a low voice.
He looked past her along the almost-deserted street. “He had the habit of celebrating a landfall with a skin of wine. And his mistake was to forget that even a ship’s boy at last grows desperate enough to strike first. I stabbed him in the belly with a cook’s knife and jumped overboard. I was surprised it was so easy.”
She looked up at his bleak face, and would not ask him to recall any more of memories that haunted his sleep with nightmares of terror. Her over-vivid imagination could supply details more than enough; a drunken monster lurching after his accustomed victim; a cornered boy, frantic with fear and brutal usage, snatching up the nearest weapon as a hand clutched him and striking madly, to learn in astonishment that enemies are mortal. And from the day when he had crawled ashore scarred for life by a buckled belt, he had permitted no man within arm’s length of him, nor taken service that would put him in another’s power.
Insight quickened by sympathy made clear to her then what effect that first disastrous attempt to escape, by honest service at sea, from the gutter that bred him, had had on Marco’s life. A masterless man was more than suspect; that very fact branded him as a criminal. Holding savagely to his independence, pursued always by that false tale of Saracen paternity, he had won some sort of position in the trade with the Turks in the old tolerant days before the Kingdom of Jerusalem was destroyed in the smoke and slaughter of Hattin. Any intercourse with the Saracens was damning in the fanatic eyes of the fresh Crusaders swarming Outremer; it would have needed only a hint of apostasy on the lips of an enemy, and he was Marco the renegade, outcast and condemned.
She was hotly, unreservedly his partisan from this moment. True, he had continued to trade with the Saracens; true, he had killed for hire. What was to be expected of one to whom all men were enemies, who had fought for sheer survival since childhood, who had never known Christian teaching or treatment? He had never stabbed from behind, nor concealed his crimes. He did not whine or lie, and the first kindness of a lifetime won from him a fierce gratitude that made ten-fold requitement.
“Is this your church, my lady?” he asked suddenly, as she would have walked past the arched stone doorway. She pulled herself back to her senses.
“Will you come in with me?” she asked, reluctant to leave him exposed to the hard looks and insults of pious Acre about its devotions.
“To be ordered forth again? No, my lady.”
“That has happened?” At his nod she bit her lip and hurried into the dim, incense-clouded nave, a prey to undevout indignation.
There were few folk at the Mass, and the Celebrant was a stranger, but Father Augustine was present, and when the worshippers were straggling out he made his way over to her and inquired after Landry’s improvement with real warmth. Rodriga had grown fond of the mild and gentle priest who had been kind during her father’s illness, and who had shown much concern for her own plight when it had seemed that he must die. She would have liked to unburden herself about Marco, but dreaded that he would condemn him out of hand and forbid her to imperil her immortal soul by association with a renegade. Perhaps her sympathy had made her over-anxious, but she feared that one of the departing worshippers might object to his presence outside the very door of the church and decide to cleanse it of him, so she answered hastily and moved to the door. He accompanied her, an expression of faint surprise on his round face until he glimpsed the dark figure awaiting her. He spoke in quiet reproof.
“My son, you would do better to enter than stand outside.” Marco stiffened, and his head went back. “If you knew me you would not say so!”
The priest had grey eyes, calm and alert together. “I do know you. Your name is Marco.”
The bright black eyes challenged him. “Then should you not spurn me from the door as a renegade sinner?” he demanded insolently.
“I serve One Who came to save sinners, and died that all men might live,” answered the priest quietly. “Enter at your will and need, my son. You are welcome.”
“You are a Christian priest, and say so?” His voice had the harsh steadiness that indicated strong feeling, and Rodriga held her breath.
“Are you Christian?” Father Augustine asked, as casually as he might have asked his name.
Marco looked down from his greater height, a slight bewilderment breaking through his impassive mask. “I was baptised, I suppose. No more.”
“You do not follow Mahound?”
“No.”
“Then why should you not enter? And indeed I think your need is great.”
“But—”
“ ‘Joy shall be in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance,’ ” he quoted, and put out his hand.
Marco stepped back beyond reach. “You go too fast! What talk is this of repentance?”
The priest smiled. “You are near to it, though you do not know it. Go your way, stubborn one. When you need me you will come. God’s blessing upon you!” He lifted his hand in benediction and was gone.
Marco leaned against the doorway and passed his hand across his eyes. “He blessed me!” he muttered unbelievingly. “A Christian priest! Did he mean it, my lady? Is that Christian faith?”
“Yes,” Rodriga declared firmly.
Passers-by stared curiously at them as they stood in the sunshine, oblivious of any but each other. “I never guessed,” he said under his breath, and then pushed erect and mastered himself. Without another word they returned to the house, and Rodriga prayed all the way that Father Augustine had sowed seed that would grow and bear fruit.
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