The Calatrava had lost seventeen men. Eighty-seven knights were left in our entourage. We stumbled on the stone steps leading to an open plaza, where the constable and other notables of the city greeted the commanders. Representatives of the three major orders—Templars, Teutonic Knights, Hospitallers—were present to welcome their brethren and escort them to their quarters.
News spread quickly amongst our ranks that several thousand infidel soldiers surrounded the walls of the city. One knight whispered to his brothers, who passed on the news until we all knew. We had arrived in a city under siege. The fears engendered by this information dissipated, though, as I perused the strangeness of our surroundings, its secrets, which distracted and seduced my attentions.
Alongside the Knights of the Cross stood the city’s natives, dressed in wondrous garb—white turbans, twisting headdress, purple shoes with upturned points, golden armbands shaped like demonic serpents. Curious onlookers gazed at us as if we were refugees who worshiped at some primeval altar. Young boys, half naked, were hawking coarse bread and perfumed potions that left a foreboding aftertaste. Bejeweled prostitutes poised in the shadows like a somnolent, dreaded promise.
Burning incense created a haze that permeated the narrow streets. The red stone, pockmarked, salty, rose in gilded churches. Soaring towers brooded over a doomed city. The raw wind we drank—swallowed it like desert wanderers, covetous after months of breathing the fetid air of the ship’s quarters. A briny balm pervaded the city—the scent of my brother’s deliverance and my freedom.
The Calatrava had no representatives in Acre. We were orphans, but fortunate to be affiliated with the Hospitallers through the blood of Uncle Ramón, the fourth cousin of Baron Gustav Bernières of Rouen. Baron Bernières was the Deputy Grand Master of the Hospital of Saint John, the most powerful military Order in the Levant.
The Baron was surrounded by an entourage of knights, battle-weary soldiers in full armor, eyes distant and preoccupied, white Crosses sewn on their black tunics. I felt like a boy amongst men who had experienced the trials of combat and had seen up close the face of death, whereas I had only viewed it from a ship, a safe harbor. They treated us courteously, but there was about them an intimation of disdain, or perhaps bitterness for the uninitiated, as if they begrudged our innocence.
The Baron arranged for our knights to be quartered at the Hospitaller Ward. Their Order had suffered heavy losses in the recent offenses by Baibars, and they were pleased to adopt the new arrivals. Moreover, of the three hundred or so Hospitallers that remained in the Holy Land, the majority were guarding the castle fortress in the north, the Krak des Chevaliers.
Toward the center of the city, the Hospitallers occupied a massive compound surrounding a pillared courtyard, palm trees sprouting from a floor overlaid with Arab mosaic—peacocked birds, green and yellow patterns on white tile. The Calatrava were housed on the second floor in the eastern wing of the quarter. We slept ten to a room, on straw mattresses, the ocean breeze whispering to us in our dreams of glass castles reaching to the heavens; fair women with copper hair and glazed skin; invisible foes, gargantuan, invulnerable.
The Hospitaller knights, mostly French and German, slept in the western wing, their foot soldiers in the stables sharing the straw mattresses with the horses. The Hospitaller foot soldiers were peasants from all the Christian countries of Europe. Some were native to the Levant. Most did not possess a horse and had little armor—perhaps a shield—maybe a helmet stolen off the head of a dead enemy. But many would fight with a bravery unsurpassed by their noble brethren.
Don Fernando Sánchez, the bastard son of King Jaime, to honor his father’s word, provided the Calatrava with squires from his own force. They transported our armor to the Hospitaller compound. The Hospitallers gave us horses from their own stables.
Meals for the knights were served in the refectory. We ate in pairs, each person assigned the task of monitoring the diet of his partner—to verify that he ate enough to regain the strength for battle, although this mandate was superfluous for the Knights of Calatrava. For the few weeks we remained in Acre, we ate voraciously, rapturously, even when full, to stifle illusive pangs of hunger, the ghosts from our last weeks at sea. Together, the knights from both Orders could fill the long cedar tables in the Great Hall only by half—the echo from grace reminding our fellow knights of their missing and dead brethren. We ate two meals a day. Sesame bread with olive oil, mashed chickpeas, and melon in the morning. For dinner, rice, honeyed bread, and every other day skewered lamb. The wine flowed plentifully during both meals.
There was a hospice across the courtyard from the refectory. True to their original mission in Jerusalem before Saladin reconquered the city from the crusaders, the Order of the Hospital maintained a ward in the western wing of the compound to administer to the sick and provide shelter for pilgrims to the Holy City. In truth, most of the ward’s occupants were native Christians displaced by Baibars’ recent advances. There was a separate wing on the third story for knights who had suffered grave wounds in battle. One of the Hospitallers told us that the incurables were taken to die there. Exploring this sector one morning, Andrés and I walked by the gates, peering into the darkness behind the iron bars, hearing moans, intimate, breathing the rancid stench of rotting flesh.
We took turns manning the gates and towers of the city. Each Order had responsibility for a different section. Baibars had surrounded the fortress city, but he had made no move to breach its defenses. In the night, we could see the bonfires of the infidels, like a thousand fireflies beating against the city gates. We could hear the sound of their laughter, smell the pungent spices of their roasts. When we looked up, it was to a star-filled sky full of premonitions.
Three and a half months after our arrival, we woke to find that the infidels had disappeared, packed their tents and marched off, a pilgrimed caravan into the night. Baron Bernières said that Baibars’ decision to withdraw derived from his intelligence concerning the arrival of a large force in the city. But Uncle Ramón, in private, surmised that the infidel generals had merely turned their attention north and would return.
With the siege ended, the gates of the city opened. Moribund streets sprang to life with a parade of merchants, their wares in tow. We could hear the procession from our windows in the Hospitaller compound—traders making their way to the market.
Our commanders relaxed the vigilance of our regimen. Baron Bernières and Uncle Ramón gave one day of leave to their knights to explore the city. Andrés and I departed the compound after breakfast. Initially, we tried to avoid the crowds, ambling through side streets, disoriented in the maze of alleyways. Winding streets became so narrow I had to move sideways, hugging the wall. Buildings leaned one toward the other, each one planted in the other’s light. The sun disappeared as if we had passed a door into night.
We ducked under an archway into a dark tunnel. I glided my fingers over the cold stone. A stream of water ran over my boots. A man was begging silently, his palm thrust forward. I stepped over him. The street opened. The sun returned.
Black robes hung from a line above the street, dripping water and soap onto the cobblestone. The smell of lye stung my eyes.
An old man, shirtless, stood in a window, a thin patch of white hairs on his chest. He stared down at Andrés and me. I saluted him playfully. His face remained unchanging, impassive.
We could hear the sounds of the market—shouts, grunts, laughter. A foreign strand of music weaved gentle amidst the tumult, teasing us forward.
Walking around a bend, we found ourselves in the middle of a fantastic carnival. All colors of men—white, black, brown, olive, yellow, red. Smiling welcome, they waved us toward them and their stalls, as if we were old friends. Each one was speaking a different tongue, some harsh, others soothing, like a Tower of Babel. They wore costumes from every land. A man in flowing white robes and the Arab kaffiyeh wrapped around his head was talking with a Frenchman, fitted in the tights and blouse fashionable in Europ
ean courts.
Amongst these different men, the haggling proceeded, solemn and thoughtful, as if they were philosophizing. The negotiations turned fierce, then tender, and back again.
Shops were selling all manner of merchandise—panther skins from India, crimson silks from Mosul, paper from Samarkand, the parchment thick and creamy. Other stalls displayed spices and other delicacies—open sacks of cinnamon, saffron, rhubarb, anise, capers, cloves, dates, pistachios. Pungent aromas penetrated beneath the skin so that even the hairs on my arms stood straight. A red so red I could swear I had never seen that color.
We entered a plaza. Two giraffes from Yemen milled about languid, as if they had passed most of their days in just such a place. Children squealed. They reached up, proffering bread to the animals. The noble beasts did not bother to look down at the clamor beneath them.
With the promise of cold water mixed with fresh lemons, an old man selling pieces of the True Cross managed to lure Andrés and me into his shop. The cold, tart flavor pressed against the back of my throat, bitter tears momentarily blurring the scene of this sacred sale. When we had drained our cups, we turned our attention to the bloodstained pieces of timber. They resembled wood chips recently axed, the bandaged finger of the man’s mute assistant suggesting the origin of the dried blood. Andrés and I, callow, clothed in the robes of a strange order, must have seemed easy targets. I suppose the fact that we picked up the chips—just to view up close the ridiculousness of the scheme—sparked the old man’s hopes.
“For true believers such as yourselves,” he said, “I will give two pieces away—one gold dinar each.”
We left soon thereafter, but the old man, having invested fresh lemons already, followed us through the stalls, maintaining a one-sided dialogue in which he kept lowering his price—he reached three wood chips “soaked in His blood” for half a copper—until we finally dashed off to lose him, hiding around a corner in the busy market, panting, laughing.
After a few blocks, we found ourselves before a shop selling articles from different warriors who had traversed this remote land, their weapons strewn across the walls in homage to their lonely sacrifice in deserts long forgotten. There were feathered arrows that must have been over one hundred years old; a round, studded shield that bore the scars of many sword blows; a broken lance, the point dulled from its service to the Lord. I unsheathed a hooked Muslim dagger that the owner claimed was from the Abbasid’s royal guard in Baghdad. Andrés tried on the round helmet of a Mongol warrior. He looked like Genghis Khan come to Acre.
The shopkeeper wanted five silver dirhams for the Mongol relic. Andrés offered three. In the end, he bought the helmet for four. Four silvers for the memory of this warrior, a brave man or coward we knew not, nor on what field of battle he drew his last breaths. Perhaps, I thought, my own helmet, rusted and bloody, would one day hang on the same wall.
Three stalls down the same Mongol helmet was selling for two silvers. We went back to the original shop, where the man pretended not to remember us. We were engaged in a heated argument with him, demanding the return of two silvers, when a commotion broke out in the Venetian quarter. Reluctantly, we abandoned our efforts and went to see the source of excitement.
It was the advent of a new batch of slaves. The arrivals were chained together, walking from the pier toward a semicircular stone stage on the very edge of the market, wooden benches aligned before it. It was a doleful procession, a lurid circus—white-haired pagan girls from Georgia; voluptuous women from the harems of Arabia; tall, unbroken ebony men from deep Africa; sinewy Orientals, captured by the Muslims east of Persia.
The chief slave master was a Venetian of about forty years, a straggled beard like a patch of weeds covering his several chins. His brown eyes darted around the stage viewing his potential patrons. A gold medallion that bore the emblem of the Roman Pope hung from a thick chain and danced on his belly. Several rubied rings, gold and silver, seemed to be strangling his fat fingers. He was assisted by six of his countrymen—sailors all, faces leathered by the wind.
When the Venetians had herded their captives onto the stage, they unlocked the chains to allow for more thorough examination by prospective buyers, who climbed on the scaffold to inspect the stock. There were locals, and others in Arab kaffiyehs who had traveled many miles. A group of Templars were examining one of the Arabian women. They held her hair up to the sunlight, studying the raven strands. An Arab merchant was using a string to take the measurements of one of the Africans—the shoulders, the width of his chest, his biceps.
Don Fernando was viewing the Georgian girls. The bastard son of King Jaime was a man of thirty-four years, with dark hair, close-cropped, with a pointed beard and a goatee. He was medium height, well built. He could be recognized from a distance by the purple cape he always wore. His close-set eyes, coal black, carried a perpetual look of worry, as if he were making critical internal calculations. Perhaps he was thinking of whom he would have to kill to succeed to the throne, or simply to remain alive.
When Uncle Ramón had introduced Andrés and me on board early in our journey, Don Fernando recognized my name. He ignored Andrés.
“This is young Montcada, then,” he said, scrutinizing my face. “I have heard of your brother’s untimely demise. So you have become the heir to the Montcada estate. The last becomes the first. The words of Our Savior.”
At the slave market, Don Fernando’s look of worry was replaced by a pensive, earnest expression. He was examining the group of Georgian girls, looking at their teeth, their eyes, their posture. He focused his attentions on one in particular, a slender creature, maybe thirteen years old, maybe less. Don Fernando placed his hand gently on her cheek, and glanced at her, a paternal smile. Then he turned to one of the Venetian assistants and asked that he pull down the girl’s smock. It was brought down to her waist, the silken down from her femininity just visible. The man behind her motioned to Don Fernando, asking whether he wanted the smock removed altogether. Don Fernando, musing, shook his head, then cupped her left breast and squeezed it, as if he were measuring the freshness of an orange in the markets of Barcelona; the girl impassive, perfectly still, like the stone statue of the Virgin in the Correas’ garden. Don Fernando brushed his trimmed beard with one hand, nodded thoughtfully, then retreated to take his seat in the gallery, surrounded by his eight lieutenants and four courtesans.
The bidding began when one of the African men was brought to the front of the stage. A Genoan merchant, well dressed, with hose, red jacket, and skirting, made the first offer. He raised his hand, three fingers spread, and said, “Oro”—three gold pieces. With the opening bid, a slew of cries, raised hands, cryptic, alien words, erupted from the crowd. The slave master, sitting in a solid wood chair at the side of the stage like a bishop on his throne, followed the progression of prices dispassionately, judiciously, pointing to the current highest bidder with raised fingers as if he were blessing one of his subjects. Several Arabs in the gallery jostled one another. The bidding reached a high pitch. I placed my hands over my ears to shut out the frenzied shouts. Then it was over. Sold. To the first bidder, the fashionable Genoan, for nine dinars. The chains were again placed on the African, and he was led off the stage to his new master.
One of the Georgian girls was next—the selfsame whom Don Fernando had examined so closely. She was brought to the front of the stage, her smock once again lowered to her waist and then pulled back up. The girl stood transfixed—looking toward the sea, as if she might capture a glimpse of her father, mother, or some other refuge. An enchanted gaze that engendered a wistful quiet amongst the gallery, a silent prayer to this pale madonna and our own homelands, real and imagined. I turned my thoughts to Isabel and clutched inside my robe the cloth that held her tears against my skin.
It was a rapt spell, but it was interrupted, exiled by the onslaught of savage cries from the gallery. The price for the girl rose quickly, the stares from the bidders primitive, hungry, untamed. Don Fernando seemed obliv
ious to the prospective transaction, twirling his purple cape, laughing with his lieutenants. The sale was about to close at seventeen gold coins when Don Fernando finally turned his attention to the stage and put forth his proposal. He said that he would trade two of his courtesans—“straight from the royal court of Barcelona”—for the five Georgian girls.
“I give you my word,” Don Fernando said, “the two girls are virgins. The Crown of Aragón be my witness.”
The slave master thought that he had misunderstood and had his assistant translate Fernando’s offer. When he had heard again the proposal in his native tongue, he looked perplexed, and questioned Don Fernando: “But these women that you offer, they are of the Christian faith, signore, no?”
Don Fernando responded forthwith, “As was Mary Magdalene.”
The slave master raised himself from his chair, pacing the stage, squinting, scratching his head, like King Solomon deciding the fate of the newborn claimed by two women. He rubbed his hands together, called over one of his colleagues, consulted in agitated whispers. Then he descended from the stage to observe more closely the two proffered women, who were laughing amongst their company and seemed willfully oblivious to the proposed transaction.
“Sí.” One word from the slave master, a nod from Don Fernando, and the deal was done. The Venetian shouted to his assistants, and the group of Georgian girls were chained and led down to Don Fernando’s party.
The two courtesans made no movement from the royal contingent. Three of the Venetian sailors came down from the stage and stood tentatively outside the circle of Don Fernando’s retinue, waiting for his signal. Andrés and I, drawn by a wrenching curiosity, squeezed our way through the throng of people to the margins of the royal party.
Don Fernando spoke to the two women: “My elegant nymphs, I have some unfortunate news. You are now the property of Venice.”
He looked away from them, spoke with one of his lieutenants, then looked back, as if he expected the two women to have withdrawn already.
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