And while I’m quite sure that old Mohamed was wrong, and probably some hot-eyed desperado in the desert, still I have to wonder, after fighting against and alongside Moslems half my life, whether they, who follow most if not all of the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount as well as any Christian, or better, are such bad men. We say they are deluded, and they say the same of us, and I wonder about what Father Pierre Thomas would have said about the pirates on the dock; that to Jesus, all of our sins might appear about the same.
But I am a soldier and not a priest. No one pays me to speak on these matters, and I suspect I’m a sad heretic at times.
Regardless, Sister Marie feigned a demure reserve that she seldom practised with us. But the Turks pressed her, and said, in effect, that they never got to speak to any kind of Christian holy person, and they were most respectful, but insistent. And when one of the young men referred to the inviolate virginity of the Queen of Heaven as ‘a stupid myth’, Sister Marie flushed so hot that I could see it through a white linen veil.
She rose to her feet.
The Turks clapped their approval. They were not mocking her. They wanted to see her fight.
Emile was worried, and she motioned to me and I went to her. Let me add that we were seated on pillows, whose tops were magnificent with silk, or brocade, and whose bases were leather; beneath them were layers and layers of Rumi carpets, which in England now you call Turkey work. In that one fine hall there were perhaps three or four hundred carpets, four deep all along the floors and more hanging on the walls, where in England, John of Gaunt might have five.
Which is to say we were very comfortable indeed. And rising to go to my lady’s side was harder than you might imagine after a few days of wearing harness.
I think she was afraid for Sister Marie. But I could see they wanted to see Sister Marie in disputation with Hafiz-i Abun, and they wanted him to win. And this is natural enough.
When she rose, they clapped, because they were going to have some sport.
‘You need to stop this,’ Emile said.
‘Sister Marie can handle herself,’ I said.
Emile raised her veil slightly. ‘And how well do you think Hafiz-i Abun will deal with being bested by a woman?’ she asked quietly.
That was an excellent point which I had not considered, but by then, Sister Marie had gathered her thoughts, and raised her head and spoke.
‘Master Hafiz-i Abun,’ she said. ‘May I beg for you to translate my words?’
He was not best pleased, but he nodded. ‘I will,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘I would do the same for you,’ she said.
He managed a smile. ‘I may hold you to that, Good Sister. Now speak of your Virgin Mother, and I will hold my revulsion in the back of my head and be your advocate.’
She swept back her veils. It was a bold gesture, and some of the younger men looked away. Interesting.
Sister Marie was a strong-faced woman of perhaps forty years. She was not pretty, and yet I liked her face; it had so much written on it, and it had a beauty of its own. Not an ascetic beauty, either; the face of a woman who had managed a farm for twenty years would have the same character and the same power.
She smiled at all of them. ‘I must, to defend the Virgin, first speak of Our Saviour Jesus Christ. I recognise that you see him as a prophet, and not as the Son of God – as a form of the godhead himself. But to understand why we speak of the virginity of Mary, you must also accept that for us, Jesus was not a prophet but the Messiah, and God, incarnate, which is a Latin word that implies—’
‘Stop, stop!’ cried Hafiz-i Abun. ‘So much heresy and so many words!’ But he smiled. ‘Truly, most of these men will never have heard any of this. Let me explain.’
Sixty Turks sat, spellbound, as a doctor of Sharia law expounded to them the basic tenets of Christian doctrine. I loved him for it – not because he was one of us, but because he was not one of us and he was, as far as I could see, doing an honest job for Sister Marie.
Several of them asked questions, and he answered them.
‘Go on,’ he said at last.
‘What did they ask?’ she said.
‘Foolish things. Ignorant things. Honestly, I wonder at their religious instruction if they ask these things.’ He shrugged.
She went on to explain, in the simplest terms, the Trinity; I was delighted, as I will admit, to my own embarrassment, that the Trinity has often puzzled me.
At one point, Hafiz-i Abun interrupted her to say, ‘But this is marvellous. I had never heard this so succinctly put.’ he smiled. ‘Full of error, but internally consistent.’
She finished her allegory of the Trinity as inter-nested globes of glass, which caused some of the younger Turks to clap their hands in delight.
She drew breath. ‘So, if you will accept that this is what we believe …’ she said.
Hafiz-i Abun raised a hand. ‘A moment,’ he said, and spoke rapidly. I could not follow him, but many of the Turks nodded. A sherbet was served, and some wonderful nuts in honey, and bowls of rosewater for us to wash off the honey.
Jean-François looked at me and raised an eyebrow. Not the most pious, I think he found the disputation interminable.
‘Let’s ask them about their beliefs,’ he said. ‘Every man likes to talk about himself.’
That might have been a good notion, but we were in their hall, eating their marvellous iced sherbet, and they were still asking the questions.
But Hafiz-i Abun glanced at me. ‘What does our companion say?’ he asked.
‘He wishes that you would speak of your own beliefs,’ I said.
Hafiz-i Abun nodded. ‘Let Sister Marie answer concerning the virginity of the mother, a point that has always puzzled me. And then I will refute her point by point. Not, let me add, because I mean any harm to your belief, but so that these young men of my faith may not fall into error.’
Listen, you are all Christians. Here we sit in Calais, and I doubt you give your faith a thought, but in the Holy Land, sitting in a hall surrounded by Saracens … I was becoming afraid, and I could not tell you why. Sister Marie was making them uneasy; I was fairly certain that Hafiz-i Abun was making an honest job of it, but at the same time, he was not one of us.
I wondered if we could all be murdered for being different.
And I suppose I was ill at ease at the notion that he was going to refute my religion, point by point.
Sister Marie began her explanation of the life and role of the Virgin. She talked about the Virgin’s early life, and that she was a handmaiden of the Temple, and many of the Turks nodded. And then she reached the Annunciation.
I knew where she was going; I’d heard Father Pierre Thomas give the sermon on the Virgin’s perfect obedience to God’s will fifty times if I’d heard it once. But when she reached the point of the Annunciation itself; when the Holy Spirit came to Mary as a dove, one of the Turks stood up and shouted.
Every head turned.
He spoke rapidly in Turkish, very excited. And another of the Turks agreed, and raised his arms, and he rose and bowed deeply to Sister Marie.
Hafiz-i Abun frowned. His face darkened.
He was angry.
He was also our only interpreter. And now he was being bombarded with questions; it seemed that every man at the table had one. He began to answer one and another would be asked, and finally, he shot to his feet, and bowed stiffly to Sister Marie.
‘This disputation is at an end,’ he said. ‘I would like to go.’
I took his sleeve. ‘Have we offended you?’ I asked.
He looked at me for a moment and his eyes narrowed. He was considering an angry retort, but he was a thoughtful man, when he didn’t have his armour on. ‘I am offended,’ he said slowly. ‘I would like to go.’
I didn’t know what was happening, but I didn’t need to know. He
was unhappy, and he was our interpreter.
One of the Turks was shouting, now. He seemed happy, elevated, and it occurred to me that he was drunk.
He was seated next to Bernard, and Bernard was drinking from a pitcher, laughing.
‘They have wine,’ I said to Emile. ‘Hafiz-i Abun is angry and wants to leave.’
‘Let us not offend our hosts,’ my wife said. She stood.
That brought instant silence, as she was ‘Emira’ and sat in the place of power.
She nodded to Hafiz-i Abun. ‘I would like you to translate for me,’ she said.
He nodded.
She parted her veils. I have seen Moslem women do this, and she did it very fetchingly, offering the men a glimpse of her face without leaving her veils open. There is a complex language to veils, and she appeared only to adjust them, but she also sent a message about power, and she had the attention of every man.
She proceeded to thank them for their hospitality and the wonder of their food and the comfort of their hall, and she wished them every felicity, and begged their forgiveness that she, a poor, weak woman, was overcome with fatigue.
And the shoemaker, who had first invited us, rose and thanked her in terms of abject servitude.
I rose to my feet, and all our people rose; a few were unsteady, but for the most part, we were sober enough. And twenty young men gathered with torches of resin and wood, very sweet smelling, and they lit them at braziers and escorted us out and into the streets. They sang a sort of hymn as they walked us back to the inn, and I began to see how silly my fears had been. But I walked by Hafiz-i Abun, because he was very angry. Not, I thought, at me.
The shoemaker came with us. He took me by the hand – an important gesture, as I have said. ‘I had hoped you would sit with us longer, and perhaps make smoke together,’ he said.
I was unsure what he meant by the last. When in doubt, smile.
‘Why is the Hajj so angry? We only told him what we believe.’ He was very earnest. I was probably only a year or two older than he, and I tried to imagine his life. He was an infidel cobbler from an alien world; his people had only just conquered the local Greeks; his father had probably been a nomad on the steppes. Yet there was something familiar about him. The Turks look just as we do, maybe that’s all there is. He had blue eyes and a red-brown beard, and he could have been from Kent or Surrey.
I just grinned at him. ‘Thanks for a fine evening,’ I said. ‘In England, where I’m from, we have a saying: never discuss the king or religion at meals.’
He nodded, his face serious in the flickering light of the torch.
‘Perhaps this is true,’ he said, as if I’d quoted a verse of the Bible or his Koran. ‘But we talk always of religion.’
They sang for us at the gate to the inn’s courtyard, and we sang them a hymn to the Virgin; it only seemed fair. Sister Marie’s voice was very fine.
They cheered us and went off into the night.
Hafiz-i Abun stood in the main room of the inn, pulling at his beard. ‘Guluww,’ he said.
I didn’t know the word.
He shrugged. ‘Heretics,’ he said. ‘Many of the Turks are … very strange.’
It wasn’t my place to tell him that all Islam seemed strange to me.
The next day, the local governor, himself an emir, sent for Hafiz-i Abun, and for me. We went together, and thus I got the next chapter in the story. Hafiz-i Abun lodged a complaint about the young men and their beliefs, and translated it for me.
The emir was amused.
Hafiz-i Abun kept using a phrase I didn’t know, and finally the emir laughed.
‘You know this word?’ he asked, and repeated it.
I admitted my Turkish was rudimentary or worse.
‘He wants one of these young fools flayed alive,’ he said.
It turned out that when Sister Marie discussed the Annunciation, the Turks all cheered her because they believed that one of their Khans, Chingiz, had been born of a woman who was impregnated by a beam of light.
The emir grinned. ‘I have heard this all my life,’ he said. ‘Many of the Saints are so born pure, from God.’
Hafiz-i Abun spluttered. ‘Detestable heresy!’ he spat.
I thanked the emir for his hospitality, and he beamed at me. ‘You are a knight of the Hospital?’ he asked.
I explained, through Hafiz-i Abun, that I was a volunteer with the Order and not an avowed knight.
‘You serve the Order,’ he said. ‘And you are a mamluk.’ He waved his hand dismissively. ‘We have the same enemies, your masters and mine.’
‘We do?’ I asked, or something equally inane. I am not always at my best in the morning.
He went on to tell me a story that I wish I’d understood better. But I got the gist: that his master was at war with Orthman, or Ortan: that Othman had been the ally of the Emperor of Byzantium but was now dead, and was replaced by Ortan who in turn died and was replaced by his son Murad, who was now at war with the emperor who had been his grandfather’s friend. It sounded to me like life on the Scottish Border, except with infidels. At any rate, the emperor was trying to find allies against the sons of Othman – the Ottomanids, I guess I’ll call them.
‘The emperor in Constantinople has gone to Hungary to beg for help against Murad,’ he said. ‘And because he is tired of being a puppet where his father was master.’ The emir shrugged and waved for us to be served more sherbet. ‘My master would be happy to ally with the knights and the emperor against Murad,’ he said in the end.
‘But you are at war with the Armenians,’ I said.
He shrugged.
I suppose that when I was young, I imagined that war was simple – the English fought the Scots, the English fought the French, and it all made a sort of sense. But in Anatolia, the Karamanids could fight the Armenians for territory and at the same time try to ally themselves with the knights and the emperor against the Ottomanids. But both Ottomanids and Karamanids were in a state of open war with the Mamluks of Egypt and with King Peter of Cyprus. Concepts of ‘infidel’ and ‘heretic’ became blurry.
Italy seemed simple by comparison.
I promised to bring his words to my ‘masters’ in the Order, and he dismissed me with two magnificent gifts: a fine kaftan and a superb Arab stallion. The horse was very fine, and my eyes practically watered at the gift.
But to Hafiz-i Abun he gave a female slave – a Greek Christian – as well as a silk kaftan and another fine horse, as good or better than mine.
He pointed at the Greek girl. ‘You are of the knights and have no use for woman,’ he said with a smile.
Now, I knew in that moment that he was perfectly aware that I was married; that my wife was an ‘emira’, and that the slave girl and I were of a common religion. It was an insult nested in the gifts.
I bowed. ‘Do you know Uthman Bey?’ I asked.
‘That rascal,’ he said. He laughed. ‘A son of Satan if ever there was one. What do you know of him?’
‘We had a little tangle,’ I said in Italian, and Hafiz-i Abun laughed and translated.
The emir slapped his thighs. ‘You are a fine man for a Frank,’ he said. ‘You killed Tête de Mal – why did you not kill my brother Uthman?’ He laughed.
And that was Adalia.
Our consort rejoined us the day before we sailed, and Sabraham had a long conversation with Hafiz-i Abun. And John reappeared, and I was invited to dine with his friends. And again, Emile dressed as a man – this time with John’s full knowledge. We went to another caravanserai, outside the walls, and there we sat with Turks. But these were another kind of Turks altogether; smaller, and all the colours of the rainbow, but most had deeply creased faces, windblown to a fine red-brown like John, with Asian eyes and high cheekbones, although what could look squat and fearsome on a man with long moustaches and a scraggly beard cou
ld be hauntingly beautiful on a woman, and there were a dozen women in trousers and kaftans, sitting on rugs and smoking hasheesh with the men.
I had been warned against hasheesh by both Sabraham and Hafiz-i Abun; but Emile tried it, and Fiore tried it, and Nerio. They had tried it in Jerusalem, too, or so I heard.
But there was laughter, and wine. It was quite a good party, even though I understood little of what was said. Men rose and danced, and then women. The dancing was very fluid, very fast, acrobatic; any of the dancers of either sex could have made a living in Italy, I promise you, and yet, according to John, these were nomads, mercenaries. In fact, they were routiers; just as hard, very different.
And there, in the smoky, incense-filled caravanserai, I heard why my Persian friend had to be angry at the local Turks; it was because the steppe peoples believed so many different things, and smoked hasheesh and drank wine, and all of it had angered him. I had to smile, because what I learned from his anger was that he and Sister Marie probably had more in common than they thought.
Sabraham was on one side of me, and Emile on the other. Sabraham was chuckling as John explained.
‘I’m sorry I missed Sister Marie defending the Queen of Heaven,’ he said. ‘But no doubt most of these people believe that the greatest of the Khans are themselves descended from God, just like Jesus. It’s very hard on Islamic theologians.’
Later, when my eyes were trying to close from lack of sleep and someone else’s hasheesh, a line of men and woman began to dance, and Emile rose and joined them and I had, perforce, to do so too. And we snaked through the wooden columns of the place, and no doubt I made a fool of myself, but then, so did everyone else, and John danced, his boots seeming to fly through the air, and many men clapped.
And then Emile vanished. I was with her one moment, and then she was gone, and Sabraham laughed and told me not to worry, so I didn’t. She came back, and she had changed. She had kohl on her eyes, and wore the clothes of one of the Turkish women, who now wore her European men’s clothes. But Emile, who was tall, looked magnificent as a Turk, with all her hair in two long braids.
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