The Dagger and the Cross Read online

  The Dagger and the Cross

  A Novel of the Crusades

  Judith Tarr

  Book View Café

  August 2011

  ISBN: 978 1 61138 073 6

  Copyright © 1991, 2011 Judith Tarr

  Dedication

  To

  Sandra Miesel

  Who, in the early hours of the morning at a

  Boskone not too long ago and not too far away,

  presented me with an “angle” and a plot, and gave me the beginnings of this novel.

  The good parts are yours. The errors and infelicities, of course, are entirely my own.

  PART ONE

  ACRE

  April 1187

  1.

  If there was an inch of breathing space anywhere within the walls of Acre, there was a pilgrim in it: gaping at the sights, battling the crowds, or giving thanks to God that he had come at last to this land across the sea, this gateway to Jerusalem. Byzantium might be greater, Damascus might be older, Jerusalem infinitely more holy, but Acre was the port to which every pilgrim in Europe was best advised to come, if he would salve his soul with the greatest of all pilgrimages.

  Acre was the gate, and this was the season. Fine sailing weather, the furnace heat of summer some weeks off, and Easter just past: most holy of feasts in the most holy of places. The outer harbor seemed all ships and scarce a glimmer of water. The inner harbor, safe in its walls and its chain, warded the thronging fleets of the city’s own. Even the landing of the Ordemer, the unsheltered shore that faced the westward sea, had all the traffic it could bear.

  In that press, even a king might find himself compelled to wait his turn. And a prince, to pace a vanishingly narrow strip of quay, even that much won for him by determined guards and the exercise of his justly notorious temper. The fleet was there, crawling past the Tower of Flies—such a city: its harbor warded by a tower named for Beelzebub, and its land wall anchored by a tower called Accursed. Five slender graceful ships sailing under the devil’s tower, each with a seabird carved on the prow, and on the foremost a crown; and he was here, landbound, walled in noise and stench and thrusting, thronging humanity. He could not even prowl properly. There was no room.

  Something blocked what space he had, halting him. He glared down. The obstacle glared up, magnificently fearless. All at once he laughed. He caught her in his arms, swung her high, held her level with his eyes. Her glare more than matched the one he had forsaken. “Put me down,” she said, each word icily distinct.

  “Not without a ransom,” he said.

  Her jaw jutted. It was a most determined jaw, although she had not even ten summers to put behind it. “I am too old for children’s games.”

  He raised a brow. “Are you, now? And when did you come to that decision?”

  “This morning,” she said. “When you told everyone else to wait at home. I decided to be grown up, and decide for myself.”

  His brow rose a fraction higher. “Is that logic, milady? The others are quite sufficiently grown up, and they obey me.”

  “They choose to.” She wriggled, to little effect. “My lord uncle, will you put me down? If it pleases you?”

  He obliged her then, for courtesy. She settled her skirts and pushed her tousled hair out of her face. She was not a pretty child: too pale, too thin, all eyes and angles. What she would be when she was grown, not many had the eyes to see.

  Which was, he reflected, a mercy. She had her mother’s coloring: storm-blue eyes, brown curling hair with lights of red and gold. She seemed to have her mother’s face, if not that lady’s robust Norman bones. The rest of it would come clear later. Much later, God willing.

  Once she had won back her dignity, she made her way to the end of the pier, and poised there. The guard nearest maintained an impressive calm, but his eye was keen, even as he spared his lord a smile.

  Prince Aidan smiled back a little wryly, and went to stand beside her. After a sufficient while, her hand crept into his. A little longer and she leaned against him. The ease of it, the perfection of trust, caught at his heart.

  He shook his head. She had distracted him admirably; and he had not even threatened to tan her hide for disobedience. The fleet was a whole shiplength closer. That would be the pilot on the flagship’s deck, the lean whipcord man in the turban of a Muslim. The mariners about him seemed strange after so long in this alien country: two breeds of them, they seemed to be, tall and narrow or short and solid, pale under the weathering of sea and sun or nut-brown from head to foot, hawk-keen or stone-blunt, but all black-haired, sea-eyed, blue or grey or misty green. Home faces, faces bred under another sky, on grey stone and grey sea and mist-grey moors and headlands. Rhiyana, Rhiyanon, Rhiannon. Armorica once, Less Britain after, but the magic that was in it, and the line of kings that ruled it, had changed its name and given it another patron; and even the Christians could not deny or destroy her. For a moment he seemed to breathe that air, cold and clean, and taste the edge of strangeness that made it wonderful.

  He gasped, coughed. Ysabel regarded him in concern. He smiled at her. She was dubious, but she let him be. He took a shallow breath of the fetor that was Acre, and raised his eyes again to the ship. There was one face of them all, one that his heart cried for a sight of; one that was not there. Some he might have known, a dozen years agone, and some of those sadly aged in human fashion, and one, a woman’s, made him gasp. But it could not—she could not—

  Gwenllian was an old woman. He knew it; as he knew that she had not come. Elen, this had to be, just past twenty, and the image of her grandmother when she was young, slender and tall, hair as black and eyes as grey and skin almost as white as his own. She had grown up willful and proud enough for a queen, standing under the canopy in what seemed to be full mail.

  Cloth of silver, cunningly cut and sewn. The sun caught her briefly, dazzling him.

  Then he saw the one who had come up beside her. No matter what they were, no matter how close minds and hearts might be, they whose bodies had slept twined in the womb could never be wholly content save in each other’s living presence. He met his brother’s eyes across the narrowing expanse of harbor. A long sigh left them both.

  “Allah!” came a mutter behind him in the accent of a Kipchak Tartar. “As like as two hairs on the same dog.”

  “That is not,” said a voice almost exactly like it, “how I would put it. One being a prince, after all. And the other a king.”

  Aidan kept his back to the two of them. They would know better than to think that he had not heard; though they might cherish a glimmer of hope. Their captain’s hiss was considerably more distinct, and the muted clatter of two armed men snapping to attention. Aidan swallowed a smile. Timur and Ilkhan had never quite believed that any pair of brothers could be more alike than they themselves were. Now they were learning the error of their ways.

  o0o

  As long as it had taken the fleet to make its way through the harbor, the last moments seemed to pass in a blur of speed. Shouts from the ships; shouts from the shore; space cleared, lines flung, sailors clambering up masts and over sides. The passengers waited in tight-leashed patience.

  Aidan had no such virtue. He damned prudence, damned dignity, damned his own princely finery, and leaped the long stretch over and upward, onto the deck. His brother was there. Who reached first, who caught whom, neither ever knew or cared.

  Gwydion was the quiet one, the water-twin, the merest shade taller, the merest whisper more slender. A smile from him was like a shout of laughter. He was smiling now, holding Aidan at arm’s length, drinking him in. His hand brushed Aidan’s face, half cuff, half-caress, ruffling the close-cut beard. “Gone Saracen, have you, brother?”

  Aidan ey
ed Gwydion’s own beard—new since they parted, and most becoming. “What is this, then? A new fashion?”

  “A bow to kingly dignity,” said Gwydion.

  “And besides, how else can we drive people mad trying to guess which of us is which?”

  “That’s easy,” someone said behind Aidan.

  Aidan spun. Ysabel perched coolly on the rail, looking from one to the other with a narrow eye.

  “We are,” said Aidan with taut-strung patience, “indistinguishable.”

  “You are wearing your black coat, the one the sultan gave you, and he is wearing a blue cotte,” she said, “with silver birds all over it. You do have the same face. That’s amazing. But you’re two different people.”

  “We are that,” Gwydion granted her. “Is it so obvious, then?”

  She nodded. Then, as if she had remembered at last who he was, she slid down to the deck and curtsied. “My lord king.”

  The King of Rhiyana bowed, all gracious, and hardly laughing at all. “My lady. You would be Ysabel?”

  “Ysabel de Mortmain,” she said.

  Gwydion inclined his head. “You honor us.”

  There were grins here and there at the spectacle of a crowned king offering full courtesy to a small tousled girlchild. Not an excessively clean one, either. Aidan judged that she had come up one of the hawsers. Her cotte would never be the same for it.

  She, having paid tribute to courtly manners, returned to herself with a snap, and cast a curious eye over the ship. “Is this yours? Do you sail it yourself? Are you the captain, or do you have someone who does it for you?”

  Gwydion came as close to laughter as he ever came. “Yes, it is mine, and I have ample help to sail it, but yes I am the captain, and the admiral, too, since this is a fleet and I command it. When time is not so pressing, would it please my lady to examine it?”

  “That means,” Aidan said, “that his majesty has duties, and you are keeping him from them. Here, milady. Since you are so determined to go where you are expressly forbidden to go, you may atone for it by practicing patience.”

  Her glare was eloquent regarding his own failings in that quarter, but she knew better than to say it aloud. He bowed to her wisdom and took her by the hand, turning toward the high ones who waited still, in just such patience as he preached, under the awning. The lady who led them seemed much amused, even as she came to his embrace.

  “Elen,” he said. “Elen, I’d never have known you.”

  “I would always know you, uncle,” she said. Her voice was silver-sweet, and the lilt of their people was strong in it. So too, now, a ripple of mirth. “Even without your lord brother to remind me. You don’t change.”

  “No,” Aidan said, very still. “No. We never do.”

  Her eyes, so like her grandmother’s, looked levelly into his. She was not bitter. No more than Gwenllian had ever been; or Gereint her mother’s brother, who died in a castle near Jerusalem, the night before Aidan came to share his Crusade. Now Gwenllian grew old, as Elen knew that she herself would. But Aidan who was Gwenllian’s brother, Aidan would not, no more than Gwydion who was called the Elvenking. A mortal king had loved an immortal woman under the boughs of Broceliande, and his sons had inherited her magic, but his daughter had inherited his humanity.

  Human eyes met eyes that were not human at all, and smiled. “Did you think that I would grow up ugly?”

  “I knew that you would grow up beautiful.” Aidan kissed her lightly on the brow. “You are most welcome in Outremer.”

  “I am most happy to be here.”

  She was: it sang in her. He caught her, to her startlement and sudden delight, and spun her about, and set her down as lightly as if she had still been a child. “Come, catling! See what a kingdom we have for you to shine in.”

  o0o

  Ysabel did not know if she liked these strangers who had come to claim her prince. The king—he was bearable; he was like the other half of Aidan, the half that was quiet, and knew all the uses of patience. He needed them, in the customs house of Acre. Where Aidan would have lost his temper and done something regrettable, Gwydion spoke softly, leveled his calm grey eyes, and got what he wanted. Ysabel decided that she could approve of him.

  The others, the knights and nobles from Rhiyana, were nobodies. Some had handsome faces; some had pleasant voices. They were not as rough as the usual lot of newcomers. They were a little shocked by Aidan’s guards, but never as shocked as the raw recruits who came in with every ship from Normandy or Anjou or Anglia. Those were always appalled, and always trying to a pick a fight over the presence of turbaned infidels in good Christian company. They were even more outraged when they were told that those infidels had been mamluks of the Syrian sultan: soldier-slaves of Saladin himself, and now of a Christian prince, who never made the least effort to convert them to the one true faith. Aidan was always defending his honor in passages of arms, and always winning. He was the best knight in Outremer; Ysabel knew that he was the best knight in the world.

  The Rhiyanans were not exactly comfortable in front of so many turbans. But they had practice in accepting the unacceptable. Their king was something even worse, in some minds, than a Saracen, and he kept odd company. The man who was closest to his right hand, backing him in everything he said to the king’s officers, was no more a Christian than Arslan or Raihan, though he was no Muslim, either. Simeon bar-Daniel could not be his majesty’s chancellor—that was not allowed a Jew—but he could be his majesty’s advisor, and his privy secretary. Ysabel could see that the king was his friend; they were easy with one another, even preserving appearances in front of strangers.

  No; they were all pleasant enough. It was Elen whom Ysabel could not warm to. Aidan called her catling; and that was Ysabel’s name, never mind that she flew into a rage whenever he called her by it. And he talked to her the way he talked to Ysabel, as if he had known her from a baby, and loved her, and thought of her as his favorite niece.

  “She is his favorite niece,” said the boy who had been standing next to Ysabel for rather longer than she had deigned to notice.

  He was hard to ignore, once he had spoken. He was some inches taller than herself, and some few years older, and the cap on his head and the riot of curly hair under it, with the striped gown, marked him another Jew. And—

  “You weren’t supposed to hear that!”

  He did not even have the sense to blush. “You were shouting it for the deaf to hear.”

  “You aren’t—” She stopped. Stared. Peered close. He stared back. His eyes were as big and liquid-dark as a fawn’s, but never as gentle. There was a spark in them; it kindled green. “Who are you?”

  He swept a bow. “Akiva bar-Simeon, at my lady’s service.”

  She was bursting with questions; she could tell that he would be all too pleased to answer. Therefore, she asked none of them. “Do you mean that?”

  “I always mean what I say.”

  She snorted, not delicately. “So, then. Promise you won’t do it again.”

  “What if you want me to?”

  “Then I’ll tell you.”

  “That’s fair,” said Akiva. He must have been studying the king, to be so flawlessly calm. “Elen is his favorite niece. Also his only one.”

  “Not here, she isn’t,” Ysabel said darkly.

  Akiva started to say something, thought better of it. Which was very wise of him.

  “He is my uncle,” said Ysabel. “He loves me best. He belongs to me.”

  “Have you asked him what he thinks of that?”

  “He knows,” she said, as loftily as she could.

  Akiva had sense. He did not argue with her.

  o0o

  The house was, as always, in an uproar. Joanna had, as always, made a valiant effort to settle it, then given in to it. It always managed to find its own peace, whatever she did. Even today, at the height of the pilgrim season, with the King of Rhiyana expected at any moment.

  Ranulf had fled, pleading business that
could not wait. Lucky man. He would come back in his own good time, and expect to find everything in perfect order.

  As, she vowed grimly, it would be. The kitchen was well employed in preparing the banquet. The hall would be ready as soon as the steward finished howling dirges over the cloth for the high table, which had been abducted to serve as a pavilion when the children played at Franks and Saracens. It was hardly their fault that Ranulf’s wolfhound had chosen to pursue the kitchen cat straight through the makeshift tent, right after the dog had had a long and thorough roll in the midden. But now they were one cloth short, and Aimery had been sent to the market for another, and knowing that lad, he would be most of the morning about it.

  The younger children, at least, were safe in the nursery, with ample occupation. She could hear them now and then, when one of them struck a high note in the chorus. Once she heard a crash and a bellow. That would be Conrad, in his office of concertmaster. Sour notes appalled him; an excess thereof induced him to throw tilings, preferably at the offender’s head. Since he was a mamluk when he was not a music master, he seldom missed.

  She caught a page flying doorward, and deflected him hallward. “My lord’s best cups,” she said. “Fetch. Polish. Now!”

  The imp vanished. He would do as he was told, or his backside would remember it.

  She continued her march on the solar. Her back was aching already. She set her fist against the pain and willed it away. Six children living, two more dead in infancy, a ninth big enough now to kick: one should expect to pay a price for such singular good fortune. One did not have to be happy with it.

  There was someone waiting in the wide cool chamber with its tiles from Isfahan. Joanna forgot the aches in back and head, and remembered only joy. “Mother!”

  Lady Margaret de Hautecourt rose for her daughter’s embrace. Joanna laughed as always to find her so small and herself so large, a little round dumpling of a woman beside her great Norman tower of a daughter. Margaret was half a Saracen. Joanna was all of her father’s kin, as tall as a man and broad to match, broader now with the baby in her belly. She kissed her mother soundly on both cheeks, and embraced her again for good measure. “Oh, Mother! I’m so glad you’ve come.”