Later that day they brought home from the Hospital the convalescent Juan, for which the hard-pressed knights gave thanks. Just before sunset Marco departed on his twice-postponed ride to Tyre, and Rodriga was a little dismayed to find how much she missed him. Even during the course of a pleasant evening with Piers, playing chess under her father’s benign eye and critical tongue, she found herself thinking that Marco made other men’s company colourless as an English fog. Thinking of him riding alone in danger of stray Saracens cost her the game, which did her no disservice in Piers’s sight but caused her father to watch her narrowly. When the two men fell to discussing the search that must be renewed as soon as Landry’s health permitted, it required a shameful effort to hold her mind to the talk when she was wondering how soon to expect Marco. Tyre was thirty miles away along the coast, and she knew nothing of the track or of a camel’s pace.
He did not return the next day, and the succeeding one had less than an hour to run when a kind of bubbling howl in the courtyard brought Rodriga out to the stair-head. Marco’s camel knelt by the pool, its ugly head on the snake-like neck sneering at the respectful Catalans. Marco, grey with dust, a corded leather bundle under his arm, was exchanging a few words with Ramiro, but as he saw her running down the stairs, her face alight with relief, he came straight to meet her.
“Oh, Marco, we began to fear you had come to harm!”
“You must not trouble for me, my lady. I had business to transact in Tyre that took longer than I had thought.”
The bleak expression in his eyes touched her sympathy. “Not a pleasant transaction?” she asked gently. “I am sorry, Marco.”
He halted with one foot on the lowest step and looked at her, his brows lifting in surprise at the first concern anyone had ever shown for his affairs. “I had arranged to sell a parcel of incense to a Byzantine trader,” he explained. “My mother got to know of it—”
“Your mother?” she exclaimed, taken aback. “But I concluded— I imagined she was dead!”
“Regrettably alive, my lady. She owns the finest pleasure-house in Tyre,” he told her grimly. “She persuaded the Greek that I was a thief and a cheat, and he broke the agreement.”
Rodriga was appalled. “Then she still—” she began, and could have bitten out her tongue for shame at her unruly curiosity.
“Once I cheated her of my price, my lady. She will nurse that grudge for ever.”
“Marco, what was the outcome?”
“I outfaced her and held him to his bargain.”
“Oh, but I am glad!” She looked shrewdly at him, and suddenly grinned. “How did you accomplish it? With your knife to his paunch?”
He grinned back. “Nothing so crude, my lady. Shall we say, with my hand on its haft?” He shrugged. “No matter; it is done with.” Done with or not, it left a sour taste in her mouth. She started up the stair, and then glanced back at Marco. He, whom she had never known to miss the slightest movement, continued to gaze past her, locked fast in thought, a little frown between his level black brows. It was so unlike him to betray trouble in his imperturbable face that she was startled, and then inspected him more closely. At every step he shed sandy dust from every fold of his clothing, and she suddenly chilled. A broad stiff splotch of reddish-brown was emerging from under it, near the hem of his tunic. He moved too easily for it to be his own blood, and she caught her breath back.
“Marco! That blood—what—whom did you have to fight?”
“No one, my lady.” He smiled at her a little abstractedly. “A party of pilgrims had been set on by Saracens, about a league north. You know the Templars and Hospitallers have been patrolling the roads of late? Sir Jehan de Jornec was there with his men; they had driven off the enemy when I came on them, and were tending the wounded. I carried a man to the Hospital for him.”
She was astonished and then overjoyed. “Oh, but that was well done, Marco! To help in such need!”
“Sir Jehan gave me small choice,” he told her with his wry smile. “He said, ‘Well met, Marco; take this weighty ox up on your camel, if the brute will permit, and we will make shift to get the others in on the horses.’ So I did.”
“It was Christian kindness, and God will reward you for it!”
He shook his head, the same curious abstraction in his face. “No. It is its own reward. I never knew. Not until I lifted him up, and he thanked me. You know, my lady. I never guessed. To save a man— it is to feel like God.”
For a moment she was shocked by what seemed blasphemy; then she understood, and even ceased to marvel at Marco’s bemused state. “Truly it is of God,” she agreed gravely, and continued up the stair considering it. At its head he roused to beat the dust from his clothes. She looked again at the blood, and her earlier fear and relief returned to her. “I was so afraid you had encountered the cripple’s men and had to kill one!” she confessed.
“After this, how can I kill again?” he asked absently.
She stood staring, dumb from astonishment mingled with consternation. Then Piers’s voice sounded in the courtyard below, and the moment for comment was lost. No one in possession of his faculties could have missed Marco’s camel in the courtyard, and he came up the stair demanding explanations. Landry enlightened him, and he expressed sourly insincere hope that he would not have reason to regret his generosity. The number of resultant ills he found to prophesy seemed unending, but distraction was provided before Landry was driven to violence by an uproar in the courtyard.
Rodriga ran to investigate. Wulfric had mislaid his bride, and was noisily proclaiming that she was nowhere in the building, while the disturbed camel supplemented his shouts with gurgles and grunts and bellows. But by the time Rodriga reached the stair-foot Helga came smiling from the further end of the dark courtyard, explaining that she had been enjoying a closer inspection of the hideous brute. Her husband scolded her fondly and warned her that camels should not be inspected within range of their teeth, the men teased him for his uxorious anxiety, and Rodriga called them to make haste with supper. Half-way up the stair the smile was wiped from her face. A camel should be no novelty to anyone who had passed the best part of a year in the Holy Land, and it was too dark for a closer look at one to be particularly rewarding.
Piers left immediately after supper, explaining that his master had given him leave only for a couple of hours. He had developed the comforting theory that since his identity had been discovered by the enemy there was no need to forgo his visits. To Rodriga it seemed to be based on fallacy, but there was no restraining him. She went down to the door with him. Marco was preparing to lead forth his camel, with which he would not afflict the household’s senses. The beast padded to the stable gate. Piers drew Rodriga into the passage, where the little lamp had not been lighted yet, and seized her hand and squeezed it. Wulfric lifted the bar, and he put his arm round her waist and pulled her close, dropping a swift kiss on her mouth while the Englishman’s back was turned. She submitted without any particular excitement, twisting free as soon as his grip slackened, mentally noting that the lamp must be lighted promptly in future; Piers was not the man to miss his grip on the skirts of opportunity.
He stepped out into the dark street just as Marco emerged from the alley, the camel’s long neck thrusting before it as though it did not belong to the grotesque body following. A loud bubbling complaint made Rodriga start and then grin, and halted Piers in the black doorway. Then the dense shadow at the foot of the opposite wall broke outwards into half a dozen leaping figures. Spearheads glimmered faintly in the dark, driving at the rider on his high perch. Men were all about the camel’s long legs, scrambling behind it to cut Marco off from the shelter of the alley. Rodriga started forward, but Piers caught her back into the doorway and held her.
The lurkers were accustomed only to tackling horsemen, not to thrusting high overhead at a mark lurching to a camel’s peculiar gait; probably that was Marco’s salvation in the first onslaught. He caught the foremost spear by the shaft as it lunged
at him and drove it furiously downward, breaking its wielder’s grip and sending him stumbling to his knees. The camel, with a terrifying bellow that filled the street, darted out its long neck like a striking snake and seized another spearman by his shoulder, swung him screaming from his feet and hurled him aside against the wall. Marco urged it forward unhesitatingly, disconcerting the men holding the alley at his back, and brought the spear round butt-foremost like an eight-foot mace. A spear clattered. Another body went rolling. The camel’s neck swerved round viciously and huge teeth snapped with sickening force on an upflung arm. Marco whacked backwards at a helmet and met it with an anvil-clang of metal; then he used the momentum of the return swing in an underarm blow that threw another man sideways with his hands to his face. Then he was away, the beast’s great feet padding noiselessly in an awkward trot. The last man lifted his spear for a clumsy cast, but he was round the projecting corner of Robert de Veragny’s house and out of sight. No one offered to pursue him.
Piers was shaking with throttled laughter as the ambushers began to pick up themselves and their comrades, and the darkness filled with groans and curses. “Holy Saints, but that was worth seeing! Devil fry me if I ever properly appreciated a camel before!” he whispered, squeezed Rodriga’s hand and fled in the other direction, unnoticed by men who had ample preoccupation with their own sorrows.
Doors were opening all along the street, voices calling questions, guards being mustered, neighbours gathering to investigate the extraordinary disturbance. The man who had been bitten in the shoulder was writhing and wailing on the ground, another was clutching his mauled arm with his other hand, a third sitting against the wall with his head in his hands spitting blood and teeth. Rodriga hardened her heart to their distress, slipped back and gently pushed shut the heavy door. Wulfric, grinning all across his broad face, lowered the bar quietly into its sockets. He struck flint and steel, lighted the little lamp in its niche, trimmed the wick, and then observed with deep satisfaction, “Went hunting for a jackal and cornered a leopard, they did. Two on ’em ’ll be lucky if they has a spear-arm this side o’ Saint Bartholomew, my lady, and I hopes one was that tallow-dip they calls seneschal.”
“They were all underlings, I am sorry to say. But why that one in particular?”
“Winks at my Helga in the street, he does. Winks and greets her, like as if she was still in that house of Hell.” He paused, frowning, to gather his thoughts for utterance; speech did not come glibly to him. His honest face puckered with distress. “You knows, my lady, I ha’ no blame for what they done together in th’ past, afore I seen her. No fault o’ Helga’s she was forced to it. But now she is an honest wife he should keep his eyes and tongue off of her.”
“He has neither grace nor decency to keep them from any woman, maid or wife, and she needs sharp steel to keep his hands clear!” Rodriga declared savagely, and went straightway to tell her father.
“Wondered if that din were Satan come to fetch his own in person,” he commented, cocking his ears to the faint cries still sounding from the street. “And I was right; they think it safe to kill Marco, and the cripple is determined on it. Pitch him into the harbour with a hole in his belly, and no one would even trouble to deprive the crabs of their dinner, let alone suspect that miracle of virtue.”
“Do you think they will lie in wait for him to return?” asked Rodriga in sudden alarm.
“They have had a bellyful of Marco and his camel, too. And only Piers outside this household knows that he is of it now, so why should they expect him to return? But look from the roof if you wish.”
She laughed a little sheepishly, but ran up the stair and peered cautiously over the parapet. Torches were flaring in the street, and many voices joining in a babble of questions and exclamations. Two men-at-arms were supporting a third round the projecting corner. A voice was saying over and over, “A camel. Yes, bitten by an angry camel. Badly bitten—”
Presently the curious crowds, offered no more entertaining explanation of the appalling uproar that had gathered them together, began to disperse. Doors slammed up and down the street, and the voices faded away. Soon none remained but a little knot of three men with a torch at the entrance to the alley, conversing in voices too low for Rodriga to distinguish the words. They were directly below her, dwindled to helmets and mailed shoulders in the spluttering glare of the torch that dazzled her eyes; had she dropped anything it must have fallen upon their heads. Then one man uttered a disgusted oath and all three tramped away round the corner. A last door thudded shut, and the street was still.
Rodriga drew a long breath of relief and thankfulness. She sat on the edge of the parapet because her knees were suddenly trembling, and wiped the tears from her eyes with her sleeve, a little surprised by the intensity of her own feelings. It was a little while before she felt ready to meet her father’s keen eyes, and she had just risen to go down when a faint clink of mail and a rustle of movement below made her heart jolt. She craned her neck, and discerned at the alley’s mouth three dark figures, likely enough the same three, but without a torch to light them. One padded along the alley and back, and then they flattened themselves against the walls, two below her and one opposite. Faint light reflected from the high window of Landry’s room, and its dim gleam on their helmets betrayed them to her alerted eyes, but a man turning in from the street would not glimpse them until it was too late. Her skin chilled. The alley had but one entrance; the other end was the high blank wall of a courtyard abutting on theirs from the next street. Whether Marco came to the stable gate or the house door they would be on him before he knew it.
Rodriga crept away on tiptoe, scarcely daring to breathe until she had gained the stair, and then sped to her father. Landry ran his hands through his hair and expressed his fervent desire that the ten plagues of Egypt might speedily blast these persistent seekers after blood. “No, our lads may not immediately fall upon them from behind. Unprovoked attack, and that crippled scorpion has King Richard’s ear. Discredit us for ever. They must show steel first.”
“I can warn Marco from the roof as he comes into sight.”
“Yes. Wait, I have it! Post Ramiro and the lads at the stable gate, ready to sally out at the first sound of steel, and if I know them and Marco the hounds will be sorry they ever tried this!”
Inspiration visited Rodriga, prompted by the memory of heads immediately beneath her in the alley. She chuckled. “Better still, I will take a pitcher of water to the roof and pour it over them!”
“No, drop pitcher and all on their heads, lass, and no half-measures!”
Rodriga lugged the biggest pitcher in the house up the stairs and padded noiselessly to the parapet. The three men were waiting below as she had left them. Careful to make no scrape or jar, she set the pitcher on the parapet above the nearer heads, so that a slight push would send it hurtling down upon them. Then she sat herself upon the corner coping and tried to watch both ends of the short stretch of street that was visible at once.
Time crawled. The stars marched across the sky, swinging in great arcs about the Pole Star steadfast in the north. Lights in the harbour tried to tempt her eye, swaying to the waves. A man rolled up from the waterfront whistling discordantly, and passed somewhat erratically within a yard of the ambush and never observed it. None of the waiting men stirred. They wanted one man, who would not announce himself.
A shadow became substance at Rodriga’s side, and she started like a hare. Marco grinned at her in the starlight and touched a finger to his lips. Half-incredulous, she gaped at him, wondering how under Heaven he had reached the roof without magic art to carry him on wings. He leaned to look into the alley, drew back, pointed to the pitcher and made an interrogative movement of his head. She nodded vigorously. Still grinning, he set his hand against its bulging side.
“Were you seeking me, jackals of the night?” he asked, and pushed.
It tipped as it fell, discharging a great gush of water across the alley, and fell between two gaping fa
ces to shatter with an appalling crash. Startled yelps were followed by a mingling of three-fold oaths. The stable gate flew open, and Ramiro and his sons come whooping along the alley. The three recognised failure when it was thrust upon them and departed incontinently. The Catalans chased them to their own door and came laughing back. The gate slammed and their voices retreated to the house. A voice from the opposite roof made peevish protest against the noise, but few in Acre had any tenderness for their neighbours’ hearing and his protest was a mere formality. He was immediately mollified by Rodriga’s shouted apology and wished her a cheerful good-night.
Marco, leaning against the parapet, was laughing delightedly as Rodriga had never heard him laugh before. She chuckled herself, and then caught him by the arm and shook him slightly.
“You are not hurt? How did you get back?”
“Over the walls from the next street.”
“Over the walls?” she repeated sharply, for the merchants who had owned the houses in this quarter had built their walls with the protection of valuable property in mind.
“A sailor, like a monkey, can climb most obstacles, my lady.”
“Did you guess that they would be waiting for you?”
“Not until I saw your men at the gate, my lady. It was a chance I preferred not to take, but an unlikely one. How were they to know I would return?”
“A chance they took?”
“Perhaps.” He chuckled again. “So you waited with the pitcher. An inspiration, my lady.” The simple jest seemed to give him keener delight than it merited.
“My father’s. We thought you would have been able to do the rest.”
“It would have been difficult without killing. The pitcher was so much more entertaining.”
She gasped as though the pitcher had been emptied over her own head. “You cannot! Oh, Marco, you cannot mean that!”
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