Servant of Birds

by A. A. Attanasio

  "This is the last time we will speak," Ailena said when Rachel appeared beside her bed in the gaunt house that the baroness had rented behind Saint Elye's. For days, Ailena had been too enfeebled to walk, and she had to complete the final arrangements of her vengeful plan through Karm Abu Selim. "All is in place, dear Rachel. All is in place."

  Rachel clutched the shriveled woman's bony hand, her eyes lustrous with tears. "Everything will be as you have foreseen, my lady."

  The old woman nodded, and closed her eyes. For a long while she lay perfectly still, sipping thin air through parched lips, unable to draw a full breath for the pain that shackled her.

  Rachel looked to Karm Abu Selim, who sat at the corner of her bed. He shook his head at her appeal.

  "Remember," the baroness rasped. "My wealth here belongs to the Templars. I have already drafted them a will, which they will receive tonight. There is nothing for you here. You must return to Wales, to Gilbert's vault. That is yours." Her eyes hardened in her shriveled face. "Remember what is required of you. Unseat my son, as I have instructed! That alone will satisfy my ghost. Unseat him!" She gasped and held up a finger to indicate she was not done. "One more task before you flee Wales with the gems you have earned—one more task you must accomplish to ease my ghost. My daughter Clare writes me that her son Thomas fancies becoming a priest. Stop him. No grandson of mine will serve the Church. God will get his sycophants elsewhere, not from my blood. Do you understand?"

  Rachel squeezed her hand. "Fear not, Servant of Birds," she said in Welsh. "All that you have planned will be fulfilled."

  Ailena smiled wanly. She raised her free hand and painfully opened it, revealing in her clutch a green and gold signet ring. "At the last moment, take the ring. My soul will come with it."

  -/

  Rachel shivered in the dark of the narrow rock corridor. Ahead, in the glaucous light of a wax taper, she discerned the furtive shadows of the Mesopotamian magicians Karm Abu Selim had hired. Their whispers sounded like trickling sands.

  She pressed her back against the hard rock wall, needing its solidity to calm herself. Only a few strides away stood the ladder that led up from this tunnel to the Holy Sepulcher, where the gentiles believed that their Messiah had risen from the dead.

  She wished that David could be here with her, but he had to wait for her in his house on Jehosaphat Street. She waited entirely on her own now—alone with a lifetime of living memories that the baroness and the magician had bequeathed her.

  Though the tunnel's heat stifled, clammy cold dewed her body. She felt afraid that when the moment came for her to climb the ladder and take her place as the baroness she would make a mistake. The grotto above her teemed with Hospitalers, fanatical warrior-priests who would cut her to pieces if they suspected her of blaspheming their sacred shrine. She could hear their droning prayers as they administered the last rites to Ailena and the irreversible act drew nearer.

  The shadows in the tunnel’s dark recesses stirred, and black figures appeared, men in sable robes and headcloths, their faces charcoaled. They carried unlit torches, pouches, and vials, and brushed past without looking at her.

  One shadow stopped in front of her and held up a chalice that glistered in the dull light. "The Sangreal," the shadow whispered, and she recognized Karm Abu Selim's voice. "This is the image of your new life. See it in the dark behind your eyes whenever you must drink of the memories I have given you. This is your new life."

  He turned the golden chalice before her, and its mirror finish reflected her frightened face.

  "When you stand in the crypt above," the magician continued, "and this comes to you out of the smoke, drink from it. The potion is sweet and harmless. When you are done, let it go. And if any one of the knights approaches, let it go quickly. Do you understand?"

  Rachel nodded, and the magician touched his finger to her brow. "You are serene. You are strong. You are the brow of a lioness." A warm radiance dispelled the clamminess on her flesh, and a sigh she had locked in her chest escaped through her nostrils.

  Karm Abu Selim took Rachel's hand and guided her to the foot of the ladder, where wax tapers tainted the air with papery light and a purple scent of incense. "Wait here. When I call, you will rise like a bubble from the bottom of the sea." He ascended the ladder, a waft of black smoke.

  Rachel clutched the smooth wood of the rung before her and gazed up at the dark hole where she would go. A sharp flash of silver light drove needles into her brain, and she nearly collapsed. Amazed shouts sounded above her, and through her aching sight she beheld billows of luminous smoke.

  "Rachel, come now," Karm Abu Selim’s voice called.

  Rachel's heart quailed, and she craved a moment of reprieve to clear her sight and gather her wits.

  "Quickly!" the magician hissed.

  With an ache of effort, Rachel climbed the ladder and found herself inside a cloud. Men in ebony robes dashed about touching torches to trivets that held pans of yellow powder. The powder ignited into brilliant coiling fumes that scorched her breath with their spicy pungency. Mutilated music jangled through the curtains of smoke, eerie pipings and echoey chimes floating above the mightiness of a deep roar.

  Karm Abu Selim took Rachel by her shoulders and turned her about so that she faced the grotto. Illuminated by torches set in iron sconces, a dozen men in white robes, some hooded, huddled against the back wall and the rock steps, their faces gaping like fish. From where she stood within a rock alcove, she could see them without being seen. They stared in terror and exaltation at the smoke-coiled space three paces from Rachel, where the baroness had lifted herself to her knees to reach for a gold chalice floating in the air before her.

  From her vantage point in the dark nook, Rachel observed the black silk threads suspending the chalice. Then, the black-robed men in the alcove across from her touched their torches to the throats of vials they had set in wall niches. Flames gushed from the vials and dissolved into bright blowing motes that wafted over Ailena.

  Rachel gasped, not for the holocaust of sparkling vapors but for the bone-wracking pain Ailena endured to lift herself to her knees. Blinding flashes gouged sight, forcing Rachel to look aside.

  In a wincing blur, she glimpsed a black shadow snatch Ailena and whisk her away from her litter—toward her. As the old woman hurtled by in the arms of the shadow, Rachel glanced at her, noticed the bulging lifeless eyes and the sagging mouth with a black thread of ink drooling from it.

  Not ink—but poison Rachel realized as she herself was seized and thrust forward. She felt something hard pressed into her hand. The ring. She slipped it on, obeying the hours of rehearsal she had enacted with Ailena in a trance. And then, the golden chalice filled her hands. She brought it to her lips—afraid to drink, fearing the poison.

  The dense smoke parted. From the corner of her eye, she beheld the knights on their knees reduced to stupefaction. She drank from the chalice, and cool sharbat soothed her parched throat. As she released the chalice, it sprang from her fingertips so swiftly it appeared to vanish in front of her eyes.

  The bizarre music stopped abruptly. Rachel looked to the alcove for Karm Abu Selim—but he and all the shadows had disappeared. The trivets, pans of incense, torches and vials all were gone, vanished in an instant, as though she had only imagined them there. Even the hole from where she had climbed up had somehow sealed over. She stood alone.

  Heart banging so furiously it hurt her chest, Rachel turned to face the knights, the last fumes of magic vanishing around her.

  -/

  Rachel fell to her knees and intoned aloud the Christian prayers the baroness had taught her. A small shadow slinked across the grotto and leaped onto the litter beside her. Her breath failed, her prayer faltering, as she realized it was a monkey dressed as a squire, with a tiny brown tunic cinched by a yellow sash.

  A resentful shout came from the crowd, many of whom had begun to pray aloud in fervent voices with her. A dwarf with the face of a goblin, his head flat and
triangular as a serpent's, wobbled over to the litter, and the monkey bounded onto his shoulder and clutched at his curly black hair with one hand while making signs of the cross in the air with the other.

  The knights clambered forward, moaning protests, as the dwarf scurried around, looking under the litter, peering into the alcoves, tasting the air with his long purple tongue, obviously suspicious. Then, one of the Hospitalers grabbed him by his belt and carried him back across the grotto like baggage, depositing him on the stone steps.

  A tall, blond-bearded man in white headcloth with a curved saber at his hip—the only armed man in the tomb— put a curved-toed shoe on the dwarf’s shoulder and forced him to sit.

  The other Hospitalers had prostrated themselves before her. She finished her prayer and lifted her face to the writhing torch-shadows on the ceiling. "Gods will be done!" she intoned in Latin.

  The Hospitalers stared intently at her, their faces streaked with tears. Two jabbered at her in Latin, touching the hem of her dress and shaking violently with sobs.

  "I do not understand," Rachel said, her voice splintering at the edge of meaning with thirst from the vapors, whose effluvium still reeked in the air. "I speak only langue d'oc and Welsh. Please—" She removed the knights' callused hands from her robe. "Do not worship me."

  A man in black with an odd-shaped crimson cross over his heart knelt close beside her, his tousled hair in his eyes, tears running down his shaven cheeks and glittering like dew in his precisely trimmed beard. "I speak langue d'oc," he gasped. His face was so extravagantly handsome it looked evil. "I am Gianni Rieti. Do you remember me?"

  Panic flared in Rachel, for she had never seen him before and could not recollect the baroness ever mentioning him.

  "It was I who administered the viaticum."

  Viaticum—traveling money. Rachel recalled that this was what the Christians called the holy bread they fed the dying. This priest had administered Ailena's last rites.

  "I stood with you at the threshold of death," Gianni Rieti said. "The light drove me back and blinded me. Even now, my eyes ache from the glare of heaven’s glory. Blessed woman, tell us— what did you behold in the light?"

  Rachel sighed in gratitude for that cue and spoke the words she had memorized: "I saw our Lord Jesus Christ." At the mention of that name, all heads bowed. "He restored my youth—but not as a saint, as a sinner. I have been rejuvenated to undo my sins. I am not to be worshiped. I am not worthy. And no one—" She emphasized this by gazing into each of the impassioned faces regarding her, just as she had been instructed to do. "No one is to speak of this miracle, which you have been chosen by God to witness."

  There—her seared throat had said it exactly as the baroness had insisted.

  "But the bishop and the king," Gianni Rieti said after translating her message to the other knights. "Surely, they must know! This is too glorious an event to keep secret. The whole world must share our joy. You are living proof of God's love and power."

  Rachel shook her head, put her hand on the crimson cross of the priest's black robe. "That living proof is here or it is nowhere," she improvised. "Now, please, take me to Solomon's Tower, to the Templars' Grand Master. He is the executor of my last will. He should know there have been some changes."

  -/

  David Tibbon waited at the window in his tiered house at the corner of Jehosaphat and Spanish streets. This, he knew, would be his last day in the Holy City, the city of drunken walls. The walls tilted over the shrieks and clangs of waterbearers in the dun mud streets, the honks of camels, the shining voice of the muezzin, and the cries of human joy and misery swarming from shuttered balconies. He breathed deeply the aromas of spice and fish, brick dust and sandalwood and gazed down at children dashing by, some with pockmarked faces, all, he knew, with hair full of blood-ticks.

  Once, three or four years ago, from this window he had watched an aged donkey collapse in the street from exhaustion. Too heavy to drag to the slaughterhouse, the donkey thrashed as men in headcloths came with axes and cut it into pieces right there while it was still alive. Its brays rang out, and it stared with squirming, startled eyes as the axes hacked off its legs, its haunches torn away like limbs from a tree. David had watched with such grim fascination that he had not noticed Rachel standing behind him, transfixed.

  For days afterward, for as long as the street remained dark with the donkey’s blood, Rachel would not eat or speak. Even the panther-faced magician could not bring her around. When she did speak again, she told David, "I die with everything that is dying. I go with them."

  Now the baroness was dead. Would Rachel go with her? No—that cannot happen. Her training with the old woman and the magician had been so thorough and had endured for so many more years than David would have guessed that he felt sure she would stay for him. The plan would go forward. They would not even have to think for a long time. The plan would think for them.

  With the tempera of early morning washing the sky in colors of lemon and watermelon, Rachel completed her nightlong vigil with the astonished Grand Master. The baroness had already transferred ownership of all her extensive holdings in the Holy Land, leaving Rachel and David as penniless as when Ailena had plucked them from the black mud of the graveyard in Arles. The treasure she had promised them awaited in a cache of jewels in some crypt deep in the wild hills of Wales.

  David shook his head ruefully, thinking of the long journey and frightful dangers ahead. Below, a small creature screamed from the butcher’s stall as a knife disemboweled it. Black beads of flies hovered over the scream like smoke. He watched a flight of doves climb above the minarets into the day’s first rays, and he heard the muezzin sing from the Ebed: "I praise the perfection of God, the Forever existing."

  -/

  Falan Askersund had come to the Holy Land fifteen years earlier as a squire to a Swedish knight who had refused to destroy the old sanctuary of idols on his land and had been exiled in penance to Jerusalem. Falan had been only twelve when he arrived, eleven when he had left Bjorko, the Isle of Birches, where his own family had been forced at swordpoint to worship the cross.

  He had been captured in battle two years later and carried off to Damascus, the city the Arabs called "The Bride of the Earth—the Garden of the World." Even that first day that he beheld the city from the chattel cart, with fear chafing his heart as chains rubbed his ankles raw, he loved her: She appeared as beautiful as he had always imagined Paradise to be, the immense level plain of the Ghuta emerald with gardens and orchards of orange and citron and jessamine. And rising from the midst of these fragrant groves in a Babel of gurgling brooks the Roman gates of polished red sandstone, the yellow sea of clay houses, the forest of minarets, and the great golden dome of the Omayyad Mosque.

  For two years, Falan lived as a harem boy to one of the Sultan’s viziers, pomading his buttocks, pleasuring him with his hands and mouth. For his compliance, he had been treated kindly and dwelled in shaded courts and exquisitely carved and painted rooms in the vizier’s palace. He learned Arabic, he read the Qur'an, deeply moved by its simple yet profound wisdom as accessible to all as the clear water of the Golden Stream that flowed through a carefully planned network of channels to every street, even to the poorest homes.

  At sixteen, he had grown too old for the harem, and the vizier offered him his freedom. Falan did not want to return to the mongrel society of Christians who trampled their poor, forced people to worship their three gods and endless icons, and mocked the teachings of their own prophet by slaughtering each other. Falan's love for Islam glowed like a lantern in his chest, dispelling all the darkness of doubt about life and death that had haunted him since he had left Bjorko.

  Falan begged the vizier to test his faith by the sword that had brought him to this land, and the vizier turned him over to the generals. In 1187, when Saladin sounded the tocsin for the jihad, a holy war of extermination on the whole Christian plague, Falan learned the skills of a warrior.

  His loyalty as an outs
ider battle-tested in the front ranks, he threw himself against Christian knights and footmen. He fought valiantly at Hattin, where thirty thousand Christians fell under the Muslim sword on the very Mount of Beatitudes where the Messiah had taught the people the blessedness of peace. At the walls of Jerusalem, he cried, "There is no god but God!" and wept to see the thousands of Muslim slaves liberated from the rapacity and tyranny of their Christian masters. He fought at Toron, Beyrut, and Ascalon and wept again at the clemency and even-handed justice Saladin administered to the Christian warriors who killed so many of the faithful.

  After the Peace of Ramala in September 1192, the Holy War ended, and all of Palestine west of the Jordan that had been Christian five years before returned to Muslim hands except for a narrow strip of coast from Tyre to Jaffa.

  When Saladin died of fever six months later, Falan returned to Damascus and mourned for a year. Afterward, he pilgrimaged to Mecca and on his return immersed himself in the noble simplicity and austere self-sacrifice of Islam.

  He married and had children, and Allah took them in the fevers that swept Damascus in the summer of 1196. From that time, he no longer had the heart to reside in the Garden of the World. He went to Jerusalem to study in the House of God.

  Falan served the emir of Jerusalem as an emissary with the German and Danish Christians, whose languages he spoke. The emir assigned him to help keep Saladin's promise of protection to the Christian pilgrims who flocked to Jerusalem to see the place where their Lord died.

  Occasionally, he had to fend off rough Saracen soldiers, hungry for vengeance. Some in his own ranks doubted his faithfulness, because he defended the polytheists, and though the emir himself commended him, Falan determined to prove to all that he served only Allah.

  When the emir sought a warrior to help fulfill a jape that a Christian baroness had determined to work on her own kindred, Falan volunteered. He would escort the sham baroness back to her kingdom in the very heart of Christendom and, after installing her among the faithless, he would return, his devotion to Islam unscathed.