The Lode Stone

by Jane Ann McLachlan

  The rest of his curse was drowned in screams as the doors burst wide and a dozen soldiers on horseback thundered into the synagogue. Isaac stared in horror as the huge war horses charged toward him, trampling people in their path, their eyes wide and nostrils flared. The crusaders on their backs leaned down, cleaving bodies apart with their swords, filling the holy place with the smells of animals and blood. Isaac came to himself and made a final lunge for the Torah, wrenching it from the elder’s grasp as he gawked at the approaching crusaders.

  “Get to the round church!" Isaac cried one last time, but his voice was drowned in the screams and shouts around him. He ducked into the crowd of desperate fugitives, hugging the sacred book tightly under his arm, cursing himself for not securing the menorah as well. And the golden jug of anointing oil which would soon be defiled by the hands of the murdering soldiers. He dodged through the seething mass of people calling to them to follow him toward the back of the synagogue where there was a small door the Rabbi used. A child sat crying in his path and he swept her up in the arm that should have secured the menorah. Not a sacred article of faith, no, only a small girl child, but that and the Torah was all he could save. He ducked through the door, leaving it open in case any others had the presence of mind to follow him.

  ***

  Three Knights Templar were guarding the doors to the Round Temple when Isaac arrived. They waved him inside where he found a dozen other refugees: a Jewess with two boys, two young girls, and seven men including a rabbi. Rabbi David was not among them.

  Isaac handed the little girl to the woman and approached the rabbi. “Rabbi Samuel ben Azariah,” he said, bending his head respectfully.

  “Where is Rabbi David?” Rabbi Samuel frowned accusingly. His glare slid to the left of Isaac’s face, avoiding the puckered scar that stretched across Isaac’s right cheek from his eye to his ear, slurring his speech and making his features appear slightly lop-sided.

  “He ordered me ahead of him to rescue this.” Isaac held out the Torah wrapped in Reb David’s tallit.

  Rabbi Samuel took it, still frowning. “You should have stayed with him. You are his disciple, the least you could do is help him escape. Or die with him.” The last sentence he mumbled into his beard, but not so low it would not be heard. Rabbi Samuel had protested when Reb David accepted Isaac as his disciple. He unwrapped the prayer shawl and gasped when he saw the Torah from the synagogue. Recovering quickly, he asked, “You did not think to bring the menorah also?”

  “I tried, Rabbi, but there were elders there who mistook my intentions.”

  Rabbi Samuel leaned toward him eagerly. “And where are they now?”

  “I regret to tell you they are most assuredly dead. The crusaders broke into the synagogue soon after I got there. I tried to tell them to come here...” Isaac looked away, ashamed. Why had he not tried harder to convince them? But there had been so little time.

  Rabbi Samuel slumped at his news. He looked around at the few Jewish survivors. As he did so, the door opened and five more refugees entered, three men with two young woman, escorted by four Knights Templar. Isaac recognized two of the men as having been near him in the synagogue.

  “We were too late for the others,” one of the Templars said.

  A look of rage crossed Rabbi Samuel’s face. Holding the precious Torah against his chest he threw the tallit at Isaac. “Go and search for your master. Come back with him or do not come back at all, for you will not be welcome among us without Rabbi David ben Avraham.”

  “He cannot go out there,” protested one of the young men who had followed Isaac from the tabernacle. “It would be suicide!”

  “Look at him, his fair skin, his light eyes. He has not even covered his head,” Reb Samuel sneered. “His safety is assured; no one will take him for one of us.”

  “There was no time...” The protest died on Isaac’s lips. No other refugee had arrived bare-headed—the men all wore their turbans, however hastily tied, and the women their head scarves, even though a lock of hair might show here and there.

  “I will find him,” he said grimly. He would have gone out anyway after delivering the Torah to safety, and was annoyed that now it sounded as though he were being ordered to do a duty he would have done regardless. He bundled Reb David’s prayer shawl and tucked it under his kaftan, and left without another word.

  Chapter Fourteen: At Sea

  Pain! More intense than anything he had ever felt. He could not move, not even to open his eyes. Even the act of breathing exacerbated it. He would have held his breath, but that required effort and any effort was unbearable. He was frozen in the country of pain, a statue caught in an endless instant of agony. With great effort he yearned toward consciousness. The pain intensified, making him dizzy, unsure of himself. The ground swayed beneath him...

  Isaac’s eyes opened. The rocking motion continued but the pain was gone, although the sense of it remained, making him cautious. Always the same dream of his own wounding several years ago now, when Reb David had taken him in and tended him till he recovered. A dream that mocked him for his lack of wounds this time, as though he must punish himself for escaping unscathed when so many others perished.

  He had found Reb David dead on the street, lying atop a young boy. His last act had been to shield the child who, though wounded, had lived. Isaac had stayed long enough to help bury the friend and mentor who had died as he lived, in the service of others, and to recite the hazkarat neshamot for the few friends he had there.

  He looked around. He was tied into a hammock in a dark room filled with other similar cots, most of them containing sleeping men, all of them swaying gently as the room moved. The sound of water slapping against wood came to him. The room smelled of sweat and too many bodies close together and urine buckets that needed emptying, with a hint underneath of the fresh scent of salt water. The sea. He was on a boat. He felt around for the pack that lay on the hammock beside him. Under the softness of spare clothes and Reb David’s prayer shawl, which he kept hidden, he felt the hard shapes of his cup and knife, its long, sharp blade wrapped in a length of leather.

  He untied the bindings meant to keep him from falling out of his hammock if the waves got rough, and sat up gingerly. The hammock swayed. He clung to the side until it settled, then reached for his wooden leg, which he had bound beside him into the hammock. He fitted it to the calloused stump where his left leg ended below the knee and tied the leather straps around his upper leg. He had plenty of wounds, if none received in the attack on the Jews in Acre. More than enough to satisfy his guilt for escaping the death of his people and to remind him of his grief. Gingerly he let himself slide off the hammock to the rough wooden floor and made his way to the ladder.

  He was no sailor, not even an ‘able-bodied man’. He had only secured passage from Acre to Messina in return for working the ship because so many men had died there. If they knew he came from the Jewish community in Acre, if they ever heard the name he called himself instead of the one he gave them, he would go overboard no matter how desperately they needed men to work the ship. Jean he told himself firmly, the name he had chosen to go by. A common name no one would question or remember. He had cut his hair to shoulder length the way the Christians wore it and trimmed his beard, unable to bring himself to shave it off completely. He forced his thoughts into French. It was an effort to ignore the Hebrew words that came to his mind and search for French ones instead, but he owed his life to the fact that he could speak French. That and his straight brown hair and Norman features. He did not like to think where they had come from. He had been reborn when he came to live in the Jewish community inside Acre; everything before that was gone. And now, that was gone, too.

  He repeated the name of a town along the southern coast of France, and pictured a face, a laughing boy a few years younger than him, whom he had called brother. Their parents were gone, but he felt no grief attached to this boy, so he chose to believe he still lived. It offered a direction, a sense of purpose to
his journey after he left Acre. A brother—if the boy was alive and remembered him as well—might be something...might be a place he could start again. If he had the strength to do so. His life had changed so often he did not know if he could survive another beginning.

  He climbed the ladder one-legged, pulling himself up by his muscular arms and letting the wooden leg hang useless. He balanced his weight on the one good leg while he pushed the hatch open, and pulled himself out onto the ship’s deck, breathing in great gulps of the fresh salty air. He had planned to stay with the ship all the way to Genoa, but now he decided to leave at Messina, find a way across to the mainland and make his way north, following the coast. It would be slower, more dangerous, but he had had enough of the sea. He would buy a horse with his pay instead of drinking and whoring it away in some dirty portside inn like the other sailors. He wanted land that did not move underfoot and to sleep in the open air beneath a tree. Maybe then the nightmares would end.

  “You! We need another man on the ropes! Get moving!”

  He rose unsteadily and stood a moment, getting his balance as the voice wound down in a series of curses, including the shipmaster’s opinion about hiring a cripple. Isaac/Jean joined the two men straining to turn the mainsail against the changing wind. He took another moment to brace his wooden leg against a post then grabbed the rope and pulled mightily. The shipmaster’s cursing stopped as the sail began to swing across the deck. Isaac noted the movement with satisfaction and gripped the rope more tightly, ducking under the boom and bracing himself against the sudden wrench of the sail when it reached half-way across the deck and the wind hit it from the opposite direction. He let the rope out slowly, controlling the powerful pull of the wind-filled sail. The strength he had lost in his leg had flowed into his arms and shoulders; no man was a match for him in arm-wrestling or any other work that needed strong, steady arms rather than speed or agility.

  In the afternoon the wind turned into a squall but they passed through it with nothing worse than a good soaking. It filled their rain-barrels and left behind balmy sailing. The next few days passed uneventfully: work, sleep, eat, work. When he disembarked for his two days’ leave at Messina the solid land still rolled beneath him sickeningly. He followed the others to a dirty bar near the port where the food and wine were cheap and the women cheaper. He filled his stomach with fish stew and fell onto a wooden bed with a straw mattress, his pay wrapped tightly in the bundle he had bound under his tunic, tight against his skin.

  On his second night ashore he hired a woman. He hated to waste coins he would need, but there was no other way he could escape the shipmaster’s watchful eyes. He had to pay her extra to stay in the room all night, or the man would come looking for him and drag him back to the ship and lock him in the hold until they left port. She overcharged him, guessing at what he intended.

  “If you leave this room before dawn,” he whispered into her ear before he left, “I will come back on the next ship and kill you.” It frightened him that he could even say such a thing; he watched her anxiously.

  She did not speak French, but many of the words were close enough to her native Sicilian, and she was accustomed to talk of killing. He could see in her face that she understood his meaning and would keep her side of the bargain.

  He left an extra coin and took her cloak. He had been a tall man, but the loss of his leg had diminished him. If he walked bent over he could pass for a woman, and the whore was tall, her cloak long enough to hide his wooden peg.

  He made his way to the edge of town and slipped between the trees, keeping to their shadows. He had arranged earlier with a boatman to row him across to the mainland. This was the dangerous part, for the man would make extra money turning him in. Once again he had had to pay more than the trip was worth, but he needed the man to keep his silence. He had promised the boatman half when he stepped into the boat and half when they reached the mainland. It would leave him short. He would have to walk until he could find work and earn enough to buy a horse. He squinted into the dark trying to make out the rocky shore. There. That shadow—a man standing beside his boat at the edge of the water? Isaac pulled the hood over his head and became a stooped old woman walking by the sea.

  He waited against a large boulder, watching the figure. The shore was quiet but for the slapping of the waves against the rocks. Finally he stepped out and made his way over the rocks toward the sea. It was slow going, climbing over and around boulders with a wooden leg. Anyone could tell there was something wrong with his movements. He had bought a strong walking staff at market the day before, but kept it hidden beneath the cloak; it and the knife were his only weapons if this was a trap. As he got closer the figure turned. Isaac recognized the boatman who had promised him passage and relaxed. He quickened his pace as much as possible on the dark, rocky shore.

  He was ten feet away when a second figure rose from the boat and clambered out. The shipmaster bared his teeth in a horrible grin. “You would jump ship on me, would you?” he roared, leaping toward Isaac.

  Isaac turned to run but his leg slowed him; he would not escape that way. He turned back, bringing his staff out from the folds of the cape, and swung at the shipmaster. The man ducked back avoiding the staff and came at him again, but he misjudged Isaac, thought him slow and clumsy because of his lameness and the slur in his speech. Isaac whipped the staff back, landing a hard thump against the man’s shoulders which threw him sideways onto the rocks. The boatman joined the attack, leaping onto Isaac’s back, but he shook him off before he could get a firm hold. Isaac slid sideways, regaining his footing as the shipmaster came at him again. He landed a solid punch at Isaac’s stomach which would have doubled over another man, but Isaac’s upper body muscles were hardened from compensating for his lost leg. He grabbed the shipmaster by the shoulder.

  It was two against one. They had forgotten the strength of his arms, but soon they would remember his leg and dance around him till he fell, exhausted. Already his right leg ached from the strain of bearing most of his weight and the stump of his left leg burned with pain. He had to end this quickly.

  He dropped the staff, lifted the shipmaster off his feet and flung him back against the rocks. He landed hard and stayed down. Isaac’s left leg slipped. He fell to his knees, but grabbed up the staff again and swung it in a wide semi-circle, knocking the boatman’s legs out from under him with a sharp crack! They were both down now. Isaac stood and limped to the boat. He tossed his pack inside and pushed the rowboat out to deeper water. Behind him he heard the men groaning, stones rolling as one of them pulled himself back to his feet. Isaac pushed the boat further out and jumped, lying across the side, scrambling to pull himself in. The boat dipped low in the water but he was over the side now, falling into the middle, the boat rolling back, steady in the water. The boat’s owner reached him and grabbed the side of the boat, trying to pull himself in, but Isaac lashed at the man’s hands with his knife, drawing blood. With a scream the man let go and fell back into the water. Isaac grabbed the oars and started rowing. The boat shot into deeper water, toward the far shore of the mainland.

  They could not follow him now. The shipmaster would not delay his ship’s departure to chase down a single runaway. He need only cross the channel and buy himself a horse. He laughed under his breath. He had enough money now that he had saved what he would have paid the boatman. He would leave the boat on the far shore and walk away from the port; buy the horse in the next town or the one after that, somewhere where no one would wonder if he was a sailor jumping ship. He would say he had been robbed, his horse stolen.

  He did not recognize this man making such plans. This man so quick to lie, who spoke so easily of killing. He was still surprised by the sensation of wind tousling his hair where his turban should be, still found himself reaching for the tallit he no longer wore when he stood facing east to pray, but each day the habits lessened. He pulled on the oars and banished such thoughts from his mind. He was what he was. In searching for the brother he
remembered he might learn things he would rather not know about himself, but that was another day’s problem. And he still had Reb David’s prayer shawl. That, too, was part of who he was now.

  As he came closer to the mainland he turned his attention to watching for rocks. The boat was small and shallow-bottomed, able to come close to shore, but the wind and waves had picked up; a single swell could dash it against a rock and tear it in two.

  Twenty feet from shore he jumped over the side. He trembled with exhaustion after the fight and the long, hard row, but he dragged himself through the waves, pulling the boat in behind him, and tied it to a jutting rock in case its owner came looking for it. It would have been better to let it float back out into the channel where he might be presumed to have fallen overboard and drowned, but with the ship due to leave in the morning it was unlikely the shipmaster would try to find him, and no one else would care to. He staggered up onto the shore and fell exhausted on the dirt just beyond a ridge of rocks.

  ***

  It was dark. Something had wakened him, some sound too low to register, or a quiet movement in the still air. Perhaps the very stillness had wakened him. Even the sea was quiet, waves whispering against the shore. He lay barely breathing, his senses straining. Nothing. His eyes closed, tired, he drifted back toward sleep...

  Horses coming rapidly toward him, wheeling around their houses, snorting and stamping their hooves. Suddenly the night was alive with the shouts of the riders, their white tunics and blood-red crosses visible even by starlight and the screams of terror and wailing all around him.

  “Wake up!” Rabbi David shook him awake on his pallet, his hand on Isaac’s shoulder, the other fumbling at Isaac’s side, where his wound had reopened and was damp with blood again...

  Hands fumbling at his side! Isaac came out of his nightmare with a cry and struggled to sit up—only to be knocked back down. He heard a knife slitting through cloth, a pressure lightened at his side. He grabbed an ankle, dropping it again as a boot kicked him in the face. He covered his face with his arms against a rain of kicks to his head, his back, his stomach...