The Dagger and the Cross Read online

  She shifted above him, poising. He knew better than to snatch. She took him joyfully, fierce as a cat and fully as wanton.

  Just before she fell asleep, she said, “It would not be so ill at all, if Allah had Jerusalem.”

  6.

  Courtesy commanded that a king, in another king’s city, should pay his respects to that monarch. Gwydion was nothing if not courteous.

  Aidan loved to look splendid, but he had little patience with the madder extravagances of court dress. Gwydion had both patience and, when he chose, the flair to carry it off. Blue and silver were his colors, eastern silk and western silver, and a great cloak like a field of stars, lined with ermine, and belt and chain of silver set with sapphires, and a sword in a damascened scabbard—almost plain, that, wrought for use, its blade forged by the prince of smiths who had made Aidan’s own—with a sapphire in the pommel, carved with the seabird crowned. His crown was on his head, the great state crown of his father, silver and sapphire, with a glimmer of moonstone and diamond.

  Aidan, in the black coat which Saladin had given him, and all the rest scarlet, and a golden coronet, for once was almost pleased to efface himself. “You look,” he told his brother, “like the night in full flower.”

  Gwydion was amused, though he tried not to be. The monks who had failed signally with Aidan had triumphed with him. He was modest. It was not vanity of his beauty but pride of his kingship that kept his head so high under the cruel weight of the crown. If he wearied of it on the slow ride from the Dome of the Rock to the Tower of David, even Aidan was not to know. He dismounted with a panther’s grace despite all his encumbering splendor, and waited serenely for the pages to straighten his cloak, smooth his robes, ready him for the stares and whispers of the court. Both were Joanna’s pups, the younger hardly less composed than the elder. Aidan would praise them later, when it would not throw them off their stride.

  His eyes flicked over the escort. It was all Rhiyanan today: another of Gwydion’s courtesies. It would not do to flaunt Aidan’s infidels, or Aidan’s refusal to swear fealty to the upstart king. One or two of the mamluks were there, it was true, but Raihan and Conrad looked perfectly at ease in Frankish dress, like the knights of Outremer which after all they were.

  The rest were as they should be. Ysabel was nowhere in sight, though Aidan did not quite trust her to stay at home where she belonged. Her mother and her mother’s husband were within at court, as a baron and his lady ought to be if they were in Jerusalem.

  The King of Jerusalem did not come out, which was somewhat less than proper, but his servants admitted Gwydion with every show of courtesy. The court, such of it as was not scattered in the castles and strongholds of the kingdom, awaited him in the great hall and bowed low as he entered it. There were knights enough, and more barons than Aidan might have expected outside of a formal court, with their ladies and their kin and their hangers-on. They made a brave show for the honor of Jerusalem.

  The king sat with his queen under the gilded canopy, he in white and gold, she in imperial purple, which suited her wheat-gold beauty. She at least had the look of a woman well content with herself and her world: queen as she was born to be, bereaved of a son but consoled in the daughter who had not, please God, ruined her figure, and certainly she would be vouchsafed another son. And meanwhile she had her beloved husband.

  Guy de Lusignan, King of Jerusalem, Defender of the Holy Sepulcher, was the very image of a king: tall, broad-shouldered, ruddily handsome, with corn-gold hair falling in curls over those splendid shoulders, and a beautiful golden beard, and eyes as blue as flax-flowers. He was not, for all of that, a pretty lad. There was a manly light in those clear blue eyes and a virile grace in that tall body, and his voice when he spoke was deep and firm, the voice of a man among men.

  It was unfortunate that all that virile beauty had no more wits than Queen Sybilla’s lapdog.

  Peace, brother. Gwydion’s voice in Aidan’s mind, gently reproving. Where is your charity?

  Where it belonged: and not on the throne of this embattled kingdom. Aidan set his teeth and kept his thoughts more scrupulously to himself.

  The reality of a king and the image of a king came face to face before the throne. Winter’s king in stars and darkness, summer’s king in light and splendor; the pale king and the bronze king, grey eyes meeting blue with a shock like two blades clashing.

  Guy blinked and looked away. “Your majesty is welcome in our kingdom,” he said as if he meant it. At the moment he did. He rose and came down, smiling widely, opening his arms for an embrace. Gwydion returned it, and the kiss of peace that followed it.

  Guy stood back, still smiling. “I see that my brother brings new swords for the defense of the Holy Sepulcher.”

  Gwydion inclined his head, turning it into a greeting of the queen as well. She bloomed under his regard.

  He was not half cool enough, to Aidan’s way of thinking. When Guy linked arms with him, drawing him into the gathering of courtiers, he went with all apparent willingness. He did not look meek; he looked as a king does when he is being gracious.

  That, when it came to it, was why Gwydion was king and Aidan was not. Gwydion had a knack for suffering fools.

  o0o

  Hardly as much a fool as that, Gwydion thought. Aidan had a propensity for swift and damning judgments; and he had loved the one whom Guy thought of, when he could stand to think of him at all, as that stinking leper. As indeed King Baldwin had been when Guy knew him: a handless, faceless, shrouded monstrosity, blind and ravaged with his sickness. Beauty meant much to Guy, perhaps too much; ugliness revolted him, and sickness horrified him. That most hideous of sicknesses, in one who was a king, shocked him out of all charity. He could not see what was in the rotting body. The brilliance; the bravery; the strength in the face of afflictions that would have broken another man. Baldwin was hardly more than a boy when he died; king at thirteen, warrior and general from his crowning, victor at seventeen over the wily Saladin, leader of his people even when he must lead them, dying, from a litter, dead at four-and-twenty with as much of life and suffering and kingship behind him as if he had attained his full and natural span. Guy only knew that he was a leper, and that he deplored the love match which his sister had made. Had Baldwin lived, Guy would never have come close to kingship. He knew it, and he did not forgive it. No more than Aidan forgave him for winning the crown at last and in despite of them all.

  Gwydion forbore to judge. Guy was no marvel of intellect, but he had charm enough, and a full repertoire of the courtier’s arts. He presented Gwydion to each of his great lords who were present, and to their ladies as well.

  The latter were quite enchanted with him, even when their husbands were not. He knew the virtue of a white smile and a limpid stare and a word uttered sweetly, with fetching sincerity. Every woman was beautiful if Guy decreed that she was, and every man his loyal servant.

  And Gwydion was his dear and loyal brother. “Your strength will turn the tide,” he said. “Because there will be war, and soon. The Saracen is readying to march. We’ll give him a surprise, you and I. Two kings where he looked for one; two armies on the field against him.”

  “Hardly that,” Gwydion said. “I came for a wedding, not a war.”

  “Ah,” said Guy, not pleased to be reminded. “Yes. But still, you have how many knights? Thirty? And men-at-arms enough, and the power of your name. That’s worth an army in itself.” He paused, struck with a ghastly thought. “You are going to fight with us, aren’t you?”

  “If needs must, yes.”

  That was enough for Guy. He clapped Gwydion on the shoulder. “Of course you are! What was I thinking? Here, you have to meet Lord Balian, he has a cousin in Rhiyana—yes, Balian?”

  No; but the tough old soldier was too polite to say so. His eyes met Gwydion’s levelly, matching him to the tales and to his brother’s face, reckoning the years in which he had kept Rhiyana at peace. Looking for softness. He seemed to find none. He smiled slightly,
and bowed. “Sire,” he said. From him, that was tribute.

  o0o

  “Remarkable,” said the young lord who stood beside Aidan. He was not pullani, not a halfblood Syrian, but he was dark and slender and silken enough to be one.

  “What a picture they make! Someone should write a song about it.”

  “What, ‘The Hawk and the Peacock’?”

  The young lord winced. “I was thinking of something a little less...satirical.”

  Milord Humphrey of Toron was a poet and a scholar, a fluent speaker of Arabic, and already, young though he was, a skilled master of diplomacy. He was not, in this nation of warriors, even a passable fighter; which was the more galling for that he was the grandson and namesake of a Constable of the kingdom, who had been a warrior of note in his day. Newcomers from the west, and veterans who had won their titles on the field, despised him. Older men, high in the counsels of the kingdom, envied him his youth and his intelligence. Younger ones, with a way to make in the world, objected to his presence in it. Women admired his smooth dark face but scorned his ineptitude in a fight.

  Aidan liked him. He knew and understood Islam, and he was always exquisitely courteous to Morgiana.

  “They’re a handsome pair, our two kings,” Aidan said to him. “May I be pardoned if I’m partial to my brother?”

  “Surely,” said the man who had married the queen’s sister. Who could have been king himself instead of Guy, but who, unlike the knight from Lusignan, knew his own shortcomings. When the crown was offered him, he had given his oath of fealty to his sister’s husband. “Guy may be no general,” he had said, “and not much of a king after Baldwin, but he can hold his own in a battle. Which is more than I can do.”

  He smiled now and looked about. “Where are your mamluks, my lord? Did you actually leave them at home?”

  “I actually did.”

  “That couldn’t have been easy.”

  Aidan bared his teeth. “Easy enough, once I’d knocked a few heads together. And,” he confessed, “picked out a pair to play at being Franks.”

  “So that is Conrad,” Humphrey said. “And is that Raihan? He looks hardly pullani at all, outside of a turban. You’d almost think he was Rhiyanan.”

  “Wouldn’t you? Until he opens his mouth. His accent is still ripe Damascene, even in the langue d’oeil. I told him to play mute if he can.”

  Humphrey laughed. “Someday, my lord, the world is going to wake and find you devious.”

  “What, I? I’m as honest as the day.”

  “Simple, too, and as harmless as a leopard in a deer run.”

  “We’re all predators here,” Aidan said.

  “Predators at bay. There’s peace in the House of Islam. You know what that means.”

  “Even his majesty can guess. Saladin has risen to rule two sultanates, in Egypt and in Syria, for no other cause than this: to drive the Franks into the sea. Now that his realm is secure, he’ll raise the jihad.”

  Humphrey was calm, but he was white about the lips. “This year, do you think?”

  “God grant!” That was a knight from Poitou, a new one, raw and blistered by the sun and bursting with zeal. “I came for a war. Poor recompense for my passage if I don’t get one.”

  “You will,” Aidan said.

  The Poitevin stared at him. “Aren’t you the one with the paynim wife?”

  Aidan smiled sweetly. “Within the week, I shall be.”

  “Don’t say it, Gauthier,” said a man who had been a year or two in Outremer.

  Aidan kept his smile till it cloyed.

  Gauthier said it. “Which side will you be fighting on?”

  “Don’t be a fool, Gauthier,” said the veteran. “He’s one of us. Ten years’ worth, and then some. He got his castle after Montgisard, for his bravery in the battle.”

  “Ten years?” The Poitevin was hard put to believe it. But there was Gwydion, whose name and tale were known in Francia, and there was no mistaking the likeness, even at the hall’s length. Gauthier’s eyes went wild.

  It was sorely disappointing how quickly he mumbled an apology and fled. Gwydion’s presence was going to lose the veterans a few wagers. Tyros could always be relied on for a challenge or six before one of them caught on to the jest. They never expected the champion of many battles to look all of three-and-twenty, with never a mark or a scar, and skin as white as a maid’s.

  “Your reputation goes before you,” said Humphrey, not without regret. He liked a good wager as much as the next man. He shrugged, sighed. “Ah well. We’ll all have fighting enough, if the year goes as I forebode it will.”

  “Deus lo volt,” someone said, softly enough, but clear as a war-cry: “God wills it.”

  o0o

  While the king played host to Gwydion, it was left to Queen Sybilla to make the king’s kinswoman welcome. She was gracious about it, conducting Elen in the kings’ wake but departing from it soon enough to settle in an alcove. There was a cushioned divan for their comfort, and a servant with wine, and a remarkable degree of quiet. The ladies who arrayed themselves about were as decorative as they were discreet. Sybilla, like her husband, had a predilection for beauty in her companions.

  Intelligence, Elen reflected somewhat uncharitably, seemed to be no part of it. “Such a lovely gown,” Sybilla said. “Surely that’s Ch’in silk?”

  Elen smoothed the gleaming skirt. It was silver grey, embroidered with blossoms, white and fragile pink. “It is a gift,” she said, “from my uncle and his bride.”

  Sybilla’s eyes chilled slightly. “Ah. Yes.” Just like her husband. They were much of a mind, it seemed, when it came to Aidan and his Assassin.

  The queen recovered herself quickly and smiled. “I understand that you are yourself recently widowed. How unfortunate. Have you given thought to a new marriage?”

  “My husband died scarcely a year ago,” said Elen, carefully and rigidly controlled. “It would hardly have been proper.”

  “Ah,” said Sybilla, not a whit dismayed, “but grief is seldom a luxury permitted us who are royal. My first dear lord was hardly cold in his grave before the hunt began for his successor.”

  “How unfortunate,” Elen murmured.

  Sybilla sighed profoundly and tilted her head at what, no doubt, was reckoned a fetching angle. “It was necessary. Our kingdom needed a man who could be its king.”

  “You found him yourself, I understand.”

  The queen smiled. Her eye sought her husband where he stood amid a circle of barons, with Gwydion tall and shadowed at his side. “Yes, indeed, I found him and I chose him; but I took care to choose a man who would look well upon the throne.”

  “He does look well,” said Elen with no particular emphasis.

  Sybilla took Elen’s hand with a great air of sharing confidences. “We have splendid men here. Not all as handsome as your Rhiyanan lords—they are beautiful, do you breed them for it?—but the sun and the air and the fighting make them strong, and the court teaches them the gentler arts. We can hardly spare time from the wars for a proper, courtly court, but we do our best with what we have. Maybe one will catch your eye. Or two, or three.” Her glance was wicked. “You see how rare a jewel a woman is here, and a woman of pure western blood, and beauty with it—there’s no doubt of it. You’ll have your pick of our fairest knights.”

  “I had thought,” said Elen, “to be a proper pilgrim.”

  Sybilla laughed, high and consciously sweet. The others took up the note like a chorus of birds. “Oh, but your grace! Our knights will be desolate. Surely it’s a Christian’s duty to console them.”

  “Did you have any in mind?”

  Elen meant it for irony, but Sybilla took her at her word. “I knew you were a woman after my own heart. Come, I know just where to begin.”

  Elen would have given much to be as heedless of royal wrath as Aidan was, and as ready to speak bluntly; or simply to walk away. But she was too well trained, for too long, under Gwydion’s firm hand.

&nb
sp; She was also, and somewhat guiltily, curious. Now that she had been both wife and widow, she realized that she much preferred the former. Unless there was a way to have them both. A widow’s freedom and power to rule her own possessions; a wife’s pleasures of bed and body.

  Shocking thoughts for a lady of breeding as she walked hand in hand with the Queen of Jerusalem, making a gracious circuit of the court. They paused often, wherever there was a man who might be the better for the company of a wife.

  Elen could not recall exactly when King Guy’s brother appeared. He had not been in the hall when she began; she was sure of that. He took shape on the edge of her attention, obtrusive in his very unobtrusiveness. He was at her elbow, watching as a baron of a certain age and considerable girth, and a handsome fief near Banias, labored to be captivating.

  In remarkably little time the baron was gone, and his lumbering courtesies with him. The queen had withdrawn on the arm of someone young, handsome, and betrothed. Elen was alone but for Messire Amalric.

  “It’s a pleasure,” he said, bowing over her hand, “to greet you again.”

  She murmured a word or two and resisted an inexplicable urge to wipe her hand on her skirt. It was not that Amalric was ill to look at, or that she had any care for the shape of a man’s face: God knew, Riquier had been no beauty. Amalric was a plain man, plain-spoken, with none of his brother’s conspicuous charm. She should have found him easier to like. If he reckoned her wealth and her lineage and saw in her a chance to gain a throne, as his brother had before him—why not? It was an honest ambition.

  He spoke in her silence, words which, with a start, she struggled to recall. “You’re brave to have come so far on such a pilgrimage, with war in the air.”

  “Isn’t it always?”

  “More now,” he said, “though we’re never completely at peace. This is no country for the weak.”

  “I hardly reckon myself strong. I wished to see my kinsman wed, that is all; since I had some small part in it.”

  He did not choke as the others did at the mention of Aidan’s wedding. He smiled with every appearance of ease and said, “A joyous occasion, and long in the making. Was it you, then, who worked the wonder in the papal curia?”