Jerusalem

by Cecelia Holland

  “The King,” said the Countess roughly. “Why does he keep on trying? He should yield the throne. He should go into a monastery. How can he lead anybody? God’s teeth, he looks like death in a white shroud.” Her gaze drifted away, toward her daughter out under the trees, ordering the gardeners around. “Some people think of nothing but themselves.”

  Her favorite leaned across her chair, still talking fervently to Joscelin. “My lord, we need not wait on the King to lead us. We can mount our own raid.” Amalric’s tawny head turned, looking for de Ridford. “My lord Marshall, will you join us? How stands the Temple on such an issue?”

  De Ridford laughed. “Such an issue as an assault on Damascus, or Aleppo, or Edessa? Try to be sure which, before you leave home. Talk to the Hospital. I suppose they have some extra men.” In fact, in the tail of his eye, he saw the Master of the Knights of the Hospital coming into the garden. He bowed to the Countess. “By your leave, lady.” He took himself out of the common air before he had to bow to anyone else he knew to be beneath him.

  Baudouin d’Ibelin bent and whispered into Sibylla’s ear. “Let’s go, while they’re not looking.”

  She raised her head, and he kissed her. She laughed. He was forever grabbing her and kissing her. Now she eeled out of the closing circle of his arm and walked off a few strides, still watching the court. She loved being wanted; she disliked being held. “What? You want to go play with your hawks?”

  He came up behind her; his hand stroked around her waist. “I want to go play with you.” He was drawing her again into his confining embrace. Across the garden, among the silk skirts and coifs, her mother watched them like a sphinx.

  Sibylla shrugged him off, uncomfortable under her mother’s gaze. She put her hand on his arm. “What think you of my Uncle Joscelin?”

  He lifted his head, looking at Joscelin as if he had just noticed him. “As of a good and true knight,” he said, cautiously.

  “As of a craven,” she said.

  “Oh, now, Sib.” He laughed. He tweaked a long lock of her hair. “Prudent, that’s the word.” He laughed again. “You’ll never die following Joscelin de Courtenay.”

  She wrinkled up her nose. “Craven,” she said. He was her uncle, head of her family; if she was to be Queen she would need his support, and yet his support was worthless.

  To be Queen. All her life, that had lain before her; and yet it had seemed always far before her, never to become real. Her brother was so obviously, so totally the King. She had thought, somehow, he would stop being sick. A miracle would happen. He was good, he was a hero, surely God would save him, one day, one day soon, they would walk into his court and find him clean again, as he had been, handsome and virile.

  He was not getting well. Her fist clenched, thinking that, how unfair that was. How cruel it was. And someday soon she really would be Queen of Jerusalem. And that made everything different.

  She looked at the other people in the garden, judging their usefulness to her.

  There was her mother, of course, and all her mother’s clients, holding every office in the Kingdom. Agnes was still staring at her across the bare brown grass of the garden. Sibylla smiled at her, and lifted up her lover’s hand and kissed it; her mother’s face flattened like a snake’s.

  Her mother was on her side. Of course the Countess thought it was Agnes de Courtenay’s side.

  Then, as she was weighing these matters, the chamberlain came in and brayed out an announcement, and through the door from the gallery walked the Count of Tripoli.

  Not on her side. The greatest baron in the Kingdom, he had served as regent, when her brother was a child, and she remembered still how Tripoli had struggled to keep control, when her brother at fourteen became of major age—how Baudouin had needed every threat and plea and law to force Tripoli out of power. The Count came into the garden in the middle of a swarm of his attendants, enlarging him, so that he passed through the court like a great disturbance. His brown velvet coat was threadbare. He wore no jewels. It was said he never spent money, only loaned it. He went toward her mother, to give her greeting.

  Beside Sibylla, Baudouin d’Ibelin said, “What has you so gripped? I just asked you if you wanted some wine. You see, they are bringing out something fresh.”

  She said, “I’m watching Cousin Tripoli. I’m wondering how to deal with him.”

  “Oh, Sibylla, now, don’t worry about such things.” He put his mouth to her ear, his arm around her waist again. “When we are married, I’ll handle all that. You can leave Tripoli to me.”

  “Go bring me a cup of wine,” she said.

  She watched him go, tall, fair, handsome, boring. She knew already she would never marry him. But he was useful in goading her mother. The Countess was deep in talk with Tripoli; Sibylla looked around the garden again, measuring people. Then, at the far end of the pavement, away from everybody else, she saw Gerard de Ridford.

  The Templar Marshall was staring across the garden at Tripoli, his face a rictus of malice; he looked as if he wanted his teeth locked in Tripoli’s neck.

  She lowered her eyes, masking a sudden surge of interest. Her Ibelin was back, with a cup in each hand. A page trailed after him with a tray of sweetmeats. She said, “I have forgotten why this Flemish Templar de Ridford so hates my Cousin Tripoli.”

  Baudouin laughed. “The de Botrun wedding, remember?”

  “Oh, yes.” She wanted to look at de Ridford again but she did not; she looked into the cup, full of the strong dark wine. She remembered the story now: Tripoli had promised de Ridford an heiress, and then had given her to someone else. “He was no monk, then. When did he become a Templar?”

  “After that. Come on, now, Sib, let’s not talk about these things, let’s get away from here. Your mother is needling me with her eyes.”

  “I’m waiting for my brother,” she said. But she knew he wasn’t coming; it was too late in the afternoon now. Which meant he was sick. She wrenched her hand from the Ibelin’s grasp and went off a few steps. She gave a harsh look at Tripoli, who had the gall to be healthy. Then, feeling the pressure of another’s gaze on her, she turned her head, and briefly her eyes met Gerard de Ridford’s.

  He turned his head away. Yet clearly he had been watching her. She stared steadily at him, the prerogative of a Queen. Judging his value. He led two hundred knights, the best fighters in Outremer. He hated Tripoli, which put him on her side. She turned away from him, and faced Baudouin d’Ibelin scowling at her.

  “Are you listening to me at all? I said: if you want to see the King, let’s go there.” He jerked up one hand in exasperation.

  “Very good idea,” she said. She had to think about all this anyway. “Send a page for my cloak, and command us some horses.”

  Chapter VII

  The Temple lived by the monastic Rule; they slept and woke, prayed and ate, did their chores and rode their patrols, according to the ringing of church bells. Now the bells were ringing for Tierce, and like everybody else Stephen de l’Aigle went up to the refectory and got in line to go in for dinner, one of two hundred men, all alike.

  All alike, and yet he was alone among them; they were all strangers to him. He had been in Jerusalem for more than a month, and still, even the men he had arrived here with were only names and faces to him. He felt unnecessary here, unknown and unconnected.

  So he was glad when German de Montoya came up to him, smiling, and joined him in the line, although German’s interest also put him on his guard.

  “Well met, Stephen,” the Preceptor said. “Have you been assigned to a patrol yet?”

  “Not yet, sir,” Stephen said. “I’ve just been working with my horses, and getting my gear in order.”

  German pulled on his moustache. He had shrewd pale eyes, and a constant smile. “Well, let me see what I can do about getting you some orders,” he said, and then another knight tramped up to them.

  This knight ignored Stephen, and spoke without preliminary to German. “I just got a message from the
Under City. There’s a caravan in from Cairo. Come down there with me.”

  Stephen drew back, affronted. It was the black-haired knight who had gotten himself hauled up in front of the chapter meeting. Stephen had forgotten his name. He understood why so many men hated him; he was dirty and coarse, and Norman besides. German said, “I can’t go anywhere, I have the Lord’s work with my novices. Take Bear, or Felx.”

  “They are on patrol,” the black-haired knight said. “You’ll give me up to sin. I need somebody to go with me; who else is there?”

  German looked regretful, and paused a moment; then the bell inside the refectory began to ring. They were serving the dinner. He said, “No, I’m hungry. Here. Take Stephen.”

  “What?” the black-haired knight said. Stephen jerked his head up, startled. The line began to move past them, into the hall.

  German blocked the way, smiled from one to the other of them, and spoke to the black-haired knight. “Take him. He is new to Jerusalem. You can show him her many wonders.”

  Stephen said, “My lord, I have not eaten yet today.” He looked with alarm at the black-haired knight, who was watching him glumly.

  “He’ll teach you to forage,” German said to Stephen. “Go. I order it. I promise you, you will find much to think on.”

  “I don’t like to think,” Stephen said. The black-haired knight had turned and walked away, long-striding, as if he would happily leave Stephen behind him. “Thinking’s too much trouble.” He broke into a trot for a few steps to catch up.

  The Norman said nothing, but took him across the haram, going back down to the stable.

  This was in an old quarry, lying under one corner of the pavement; the knights went up and down by a flight of steps carved into the raw stone. At their foot the stairs curved around a corner, and the rock wall of the pavement opened up in a vast irregular space, stretching back far beneath the Temple Mount itself. This great space had begun as a natural cave, but the walls had been mined for limestone blocks like those of which the Temple Mount itself was built, and as they cut out the rock the quarrymen had propped the ceiling up with great vaults and columns and pushed the space far back into the hillside. The knights called this the Stables of Solomon, and kept their horses here, tethered in fours to the forest of the columns. The whole vast shadowy cavern rustled with their stamping and champing and nickering.

  The knights saddled their horses and rode out to the city. In the street the sun was bright enough to dazzle Stephen, and he put his hand up to shade his eyes. Above them rose the Temple Mount. The domed top of the refectory cast its curved shadow halfway across the street. They turned left along the foot of the western edge of the pavement, a tremendous facing of dressed stone blocks, sprouting tufts of wild greens like hair.

  Stephen said, suddenly, “I always thought the streets of Jerusalem were paved with gold. When I first got here I was very disappointed.”

  The Norman laughed. He gave Stephen a quick look. They turned down into the narrow street. On either side were the walls of gardens. Along the top of the wall on the right side a string of arches ran like stone lace. They went along through a steady stream of people, mostly on foot, porters with loads on their backs, merchants, and vendors. Coming up the street some pilgrims passed them. The pilgrims wore sackcloth; as they went along they sobbed and prayed and pounded themselves with their fists like madmen. In the narrow street, Stephen let his horse drop back a little, behind the other knight, and rode along gawking, his rein slack, watching everything. They passed through the arch of a gate, and the sound of their horses’ hoofs changed, hollow in the dark.

  Beyond was a broad marketplace, one end covered with a high arched roof, and the other open to the sky. The shops were in arcades along the sides, and among the crowds of people there were the litters of noblewomen, and many splendid riding horses. Beyond it, on the corner, loomed up the first head-heavy tower of the citadel of Jerusalem, where the King lived.

  Beyond that, the two Templars came to David’s Gate, the main way through the city wall, which was a double portal with its iron portcullis cranked up like a set trap. The sentry sitting on the stairs waved them through, past the rows of people waiting to pay the tolls.

  Outside the gate, the sunbleached hillside tipped steeply downward. Stephen caught up and rode side by side with the other knight along the narrow white gash of the road. They skirted a wedge-shaped pit, its walls straight and unnaturally even; rubble half-filled it. Another quarry. The ground was littered with bits of blue tile. Stephen twisted in his saddle to look around him.

  On the spur of the ridge above them the city stood honey-colored against the blue glare of the sky. Beyond the rooftops he could see the domes of the Temple, and off to the left the open-topped dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. There were other spires and domes he did not recognize, all tucked inside the yellow wall.

  Below the wall, the steep hillside, veined with footpaths, fell away like a skirt. Graves covered it, flat stones in the earth, stone boxes, fancy little corpse-houses with pointed roofs. Between the graves, he saw other buried things. A doorway, its jambs buckled, its lintel crushed down to its threshold. A solitary wall. A column sticking halfway out of the ground. Five steps of a staircase that went nowhere.

  He blurted out, “There are cities under this one.”

  The black-haired knight glanced at him. “This is the oldest place in the world,” he said. He sounded proud of it as if he had built it himself. “Some of it has fallen down so many times nobody can get it to stand up anymore.”

  The road had flattened out again, and ahead the houses piled against each other like driftwood. Not the palaces and great houses of the city, couched in gardens behind their walls; these were hovels and shacks, set shoulder to shoulder, their stained faces overgrown with weeds and grass. In the windows, in the doorways, everywhere in the street, were the people, women at the well, men on a corner, a shoemaker with his hammer tapping, a tinker with his hammer tapping, crowds of little boys, a woman at a loom in a small courtyard, a stray goat eating flowers off a window sill. Someone shrieked, “Al-Wali!” Ahead, the street opened out into a wide dusty marketplace.

  This place was longer than it was wide, and wider at one end than at the other, where there was a cistern and a fountain. All along the edge were little tents and awnings, patched and striped, gaudy under their dirt, that shaded the wooden stalls of a bazaar. Here there were no litters, and very few riding horses. Crowds of people four and five deep pushed toward the arrays of vegetables and drawn chickens. On either corner, as the street entered the marketplace, filthy beggars clustered, their hands out, their voices singsong.

  The Norman knight rode into this place as if he belonged here. From all around people screamed and yelled and waved at him; he paid no heed to any of it. He led Stephen across the suk to the fountain, and there drew rein and swung down out of his saddle, and little naked boys swarmed in from all sides, fighting to hold his horse.

  Stephen squawked. “You’re handing your horse over to a dirty brown brat who can’t even speak French?”

  The black-haired knight gave him a sideways glance. While the boys fought over his reins he took a leather purse out of the front of his jerkin, fished out a copper and tossed it to the boy who had won control of the reins.

  The sight of the money caught Stephen with another scathing question halfway out of his throat; he blinked, dazed, trapped between outrages. The Norman tucked the pouch inside his jerkin again.

  “Get down, Mouse, what are you, afraid of the streets?” He started off across the marketplace. Stephen sat a moment longer on his horse, looking around him, and the black-haired knight frowned back over his shoulder, and walked into the crowd.

  Stephen bounded down from his horse. The boy grabbed his reins, and he went after the black-haired knight at a run, through the crowd.

  “What is this?” he asked, when he caught him.

  The other man shrugged. “Jerusalem.”

  St
ephen jostled his arm. “Then what’s that up there?” He pointed up behind him; on the steep slope above them the wall of the city notched the sky.

  “Also Jerusalem.” The black-haired knight swung to face him. “Everybody has his own Jerusalem. There’s the High City, where only Christian people live. And this, the Under City, where everybody else lives.”

  “Then these people are Saracens.”

  “Some Saracens. Some Jews. Maronites. Jacobites.”

  “Why do we let them live here?”

  The black-haired knight shrugged. “Because it’s easier than trying to drive them out. They always come back, and they have their value. Come on, now, and be quiet.”

  He went off through the crowded suk. Behind the camels a row of stalls sold nuts in baskets, dates on trays, figs hung in strings from the uprights. Green heaps of limes, red pomegranates. The black-haired knight strolled along the row of counters, stopped, picked up a handful of dates, and spoke to the vendor, in a language not French, like a mixture of plainsong and spitting. The vendor bobbed up and down, smiling, and padded off into the back of the stall, which let into a tent.

  Stephen said, “You talk their jabber.”

  The black-haired knight stuffed fruit into his mouth. “They don’t speak French here, much.” He spat out a date stone.

  “Well, then, they should learn it. We are their lords.”

  The knight looked him over, cold. He spat again. “You’re disappointing me, Mouse. This is not our Jerusalem.” A short slender man in a cap was coming up to the stall. “Stay here, and keep your mouth shut.” He went away down the lane between this stall and the next.

  Stephen looked around uncertainly. All these people were staring at him, the vendors behind the counters, the crowd of shoppers. He felt too visible, as if he gave off colors. He was hungry. He remembered how the other knight had taken what he wanted from the stall. There was a large pile of pomegranates next to him; he had learned to eat pomegranates on Cyprus, on his way here. He reached out and took one and began to peel it.