The Dagger and the Cross

by Judith Tarr

Ysabel sat on the bed she shared with her sisters. They were out doing whatever children did when they did not understand why all the grownfolk were so grim. She, who understood, who had been part of it until her mother dragged her away, had gone so far as to shout at her mother for doing it. This was her punishment: a behind still smarting from the spanking, and confinement to bed without supper. The dull ache of hunger was nothing to the great black knot that was her middle.

  It had all been so beautiful. Aidan had looked like a prince out of a story, and Morgiana had been his princess, and both of them so happy that the whole world seemed to sing. Then the monk read the horrible letter, the one full of lies instead of the pope’s blessing, and the brightness broke like a lamp flung on the floor.

  Her throat ached. She had been crying, but she was tired of that. There were hours yet till dark, and then Nurse would come with Mariam and Lisabet, and she would have to pretend to sleep or be plagued endlessly with questions and frettings and nonsense. Nurse would want to dose her. She hated Nurse’s doses. The other children loathed the taste, but never seemed to take any harm from them. They did odd things to her; sometimes they made her sick. It was because she was different, Morgiana said.

  She hugged her knees, sniffling. Morgiana was different, too. And Aidan. They were proud of it; glad of it. Even with all the lies about witchcraft and sorcery and heresy.

  She made a mirror out of air, which was her art and her secret, and even Aidan did not know about it. It was easy to do. She made a circle with her hands, and told the air to gather there, and brought in a little fire and a whisper of earth. It hung where she put it, just in front of her face. She passed her palm over it, and it quivered and glimmered and flowed, and there was a circle, all silver and perfectly smooth, with her face in it. She was even less pretty than usual, with her nose red and her eyes swollen with crying. Aidan said she would be beautiful when she grew up, the way Morgiana was, and Gwydion, and himself. None of them had looked like anything when he was a child; they were all eyes and knees and elbows, and much too pale for comfort. Just as she was. Even if he was not simply telling her that to make her feel better, she had a long way to go yet.

  She glowered at her reflection. Nurse said her skin was something to be proud of, so perfectly white, and never a splotch or a freckle, no matter how much time she spent in the sun. Nurse did not know how Aidan had taught her to make a second skin out of power, when she was old enough to know how to do it for herself, as he had done for her since she was born; or how he had shown her what the sun could do to her. They were moonlight-and-darkness people. The sun was their enemy. It would flay them alive if they let down their guard.

  She narrowed her too-big eyes and called light, to make them do what they always did; go all blue, with only slits for pupils. Cat-eyes. That was another thing she had had to learn when she was old enough to do it for herself: not to let people see what the light did to her eyes. She dimmed it, and watched her pupils go wide and round and eat up all the blue; but that was not safe, either, because when the blue was gone, the red came out. It was green in the others. She was different even from them. But they all had night-eyes, like animals. She could see perfectly well in the dark, when other people stumbled and cursed and groped blindly at nothing.

  She made a fierce cat-face. It would have been more impressive if she had not been in between her milk teeth and her grown teeth. The best ones were just growing in, or were half there or not there at all. When they did come in, they would be very white and very sharp—”Don’t bite your tongue too often for a while,” Aidan said, laughing but meaning it—and some of them would be longer and more pointed than human teeth. Aidan knew how to horrify troublesome people simply by smiling at them, and giving them time to notice that there was something odd about the smile.

  She swept her hand through the mirror, scattering it into nothing. “It’s not fair to make him so unhappy!”

  Suddenly she could not bear to be shut up in walls, not for one more instant. She pulled a cotte on over her shift, barely noticing which one it was, and called her shoes. They ran from under the bed and onto her feet. She snatched a cloak; by good luck it was the one with the hood sewn on it, one of her mother’s more useful oddities.

  It was never hard to slip out when one was determined, and had power to hide behind. She could have walked boldly out the front gate, and no one would have noticed. But there was no bravado in her now. She went out the back way, through the garden and over the wall. By the time she came out of the alley onto a wider street, she had begun to cry again. She pulled the hood over her head and went where her feet took her.

  In a while which she did not measure, she found herself near the Temple. Aidan’s house was not far from there, but he was not in it. She thought of finding one of her hiding places there, almost decided to do it, then stopped. It was no good without Aidan. Nothing in the world was better than to climb into his lap and feel his arms close about her, warm and strong, and know that he was there and that he loved her and that he would never let her come to harm. But he was in her grandmother’s house because he could not bear to be in his own, and he was even more miserable than she was. He would have no comfort to offer her.

  There was a gate in the wall, not far from where she was. A Templar stood guard in it in his mail and his surcoat with the red cross on his breast. He was young: his beard was thin and wispy and hardly longer than his jaw, and he gangled in all directions. He also stank to heaven. Templars always did.

  “Do they think it’s holy to be filthy?”

  Ysabel jumped like a cat, a good yard high, and came down spitting. Akiva backed away to a prudent distance, but he could not keep the grin off his face. “Where did you come from?” she snapped at him.

  “I wanted to see the Temple,” he said. “Or what’s left of it.”

  “And pray at the wall?”

  “And pray at the wall.” He paused. “Do you think they’ll let me in?”

  “Not here,” she said, sure of it. Her temper was gone as quickly as it had come. “The young ones are always a little crazy. They go after Jews and Muslims, sometimes.”

  “They always go after Jews,” he said.

  “The older ones don’t,” she said. “Or most of them. They’ve learned to live here.”

  He shrugged. He did not believe her.

  “The Wailing Wall is on the outside,” she said, “down by the tanners. If you can stand the stink, you can do anything you like there.”

  He could stand the stink. She went because she was curious, and because she was tired of her own company. She had seen the Jews in their shawls and their beards, let in sometimes in spite of the ban on their living in the city, rocking and mourning in front of that single bit of wall, but never a Jew whose name she knew.

  Akiva did not rock and mourn. He did stop and stand for a long moment. Then he covered his head with the shawl and walked forward slowly. He set his hand on the pale stone where one great block gave way to another. His mind was a white silence. He was emptied of everything but prayer, and in the prayer, grief, and in the grief, hope. The Temple was fallen. His people were driven into exile. They could not even dwell in their own city; the pilgrims who came, came only on sufferance. But someday—someday—

  Tears were running down her face. Again. A thought pricked at her. Someone was thinking that she was a Jew, because she was wrapped in the dark cloak and standing by the wall, crying.

  The tears stopped when they were ready. She felt almost as empty as Akiva, aching but clean. When he came back into himself, she was calmer than she had been since morning. He looked at her and knew; she did not even mind.

  They went in by the Beautiful Gate, which was as pretty to look at as the air was rank. The guards there, like the people outside, took Ysabel for a Jew, since Akiva was so obviously one, but they did not say anything. One even smiled, the way big rough men could when they looked at children.

  The great, empty, sunlit space, and the mosque with its go
lden dome and its golden cross and its jewel-bright tiles, and the little mosque by the Wailing Wall with its silver dome, where the king sometimes lived and the Templars had a barracks, struck Akiva dumb with awe. Ysabel could not entirely see why. He could see most of it from Aidan’s house, if he took the time to look. She supposed that it was different to be inside; and the Dome of the Rock could take even her breath away as she stood outside its door and looked up.

  Inside was the most beautiful place in the world. It had eight sides around the circle of the dome, and then three rings of walls and pillars. The pillars looked like trees turned to stone: they were made of marble, and the walls around them and the arches above them were covered in mosaics and paintings of Christ, made since the Christians took Jerusalem, and the dome that floated over them all was carried up on arabesques of blue and gold. It was like an explosion of flame, except that no flame ever kindled would twine itself into such intricate perfection of curves and windings and circles: red and gold and black and silver.

  Under the dome was one of the holiest of the Muslim holy places: the Rock itself, as rough as all the rest was perfect, a plain pale-golden outcropping with what Morgiana said was the footprint that Muhammad made when the angel took him up to heaven. Christians and Jews said that it was a piece of the Temple, and that there had been an altar there, where the priests offered sacrifices, because that was where Abraham had gone to give Isaac to God; which made it as holy as any place in the world, except the Holy Sepulcher. The Templars had put an iron wall about it and carved steps in it and paved it over with marble, and set an altar on it, which made Morgiana hiss and spit; but they had only done all of that to keep people from chipping the rock away and selling it to pilgrims.

  Akiva thought it very beautiful, but he did not like it. “Too many religions on top of one another,” he said, “and mine on the bottom, all crushed and trampled.”

  She was glad enough to go outside. She kept forgetting to breathe in the splendor of the dome; and they were being stared at a little too steadily. Someone would come soon and want to know where their parents were, and why they were out by themselves.

  They went out the north way, past Bethesda Pool to Jehoshaphat’s Gate. The sun was sinking and the shadows were growing long, but Ysabel did not want to go home. All those people crowding and squabbling and simply being alive, and all being human, and mind-blind, and kin but not kin. None of them understood her. Not one. Not even her mother.

  She was going to cry again. Akiva reached out and took her hand. He did not say anything, and he did not think at her. She swallowed hard and made the tears go away.

  They went through the gate, up from the valley to the Mount of Olives, turning toward Gethsemane. The stream of pilgrims was thinning with the evening, and most were coming instead of going. They all looked solemn and sanctified, or tried to. On another day she might have burst out laughing, just to shock them, but now she had no heart for it.

  She stopped beyond the garden and sat down under an olive tree, setting her back to the gnarled trunk, staring at the sky through the silvery leaves.

  “The sun’s going to go down soon,” Akiva said, “and then they’ll close the gate. Are you planning to stay the night here?”

  She had not thought about it. Now that he had said it, she thought, why not? She could hardly get a worse beating than she had coming already.

  “You might be surprised,” said Akiva. He sat beside her and fished under his shawl. He came out with a leather bag like a pilgrim’s scrip, and a skin of what turned out to be water. There was bread in the scrip, and cheese, and a napkinful of dates. He divided it carefully in quarters and gave her a share and kept one, and put the rest away. “For the morning,” he said.

  She scowled. “Who told you you had to play nursemaid?”

  “Nobody. I want to stay out here. I hate cities. Even this one. Especially this one. It chokes the breath out of me.”

  “It does that to all of us. We get used to it after a while. It never gets easy.”

  “I noticed.” He took a bite of cheese and chewed it slowly. His eyes were on the city’s walls, and on the Dome of the Rock. “My father says he can feel it, too. All the years and all the wars and all the holiness. If this were our city again, he says, it wouldn’t hurt us to be here. It would be ours; it would embrace us like a mother.”

  “My people hold it, and I don’t feel that it’s glad of us.”

  “That’s because you conquered it. You didn’t build it; you haven’t made yourselves one with it. It’s your captive, not your mother.”

  “It’s ours.” The cheese was good. The bread could have been fresher, but she was hungry enough not to care too much. “Tonight I think I hate it. It hurt my—my father.” He barely twitched, though she had never said it aloud before. “There’s war in it now. All anyone can think about is killing Saracens.”

  “Or being killed by them.”

  “My father—” It was a little easier to say, the second time. “My father will go to the war. I can feel him thinking about it. Thinking maybe someone will kill him and put an end to all this nonsense.” She shuddered. “He hurts too much. Even from here.”

  Akiva put his arm around her, and his shawl with it, making a tent out of them both. “Can’t you stop reading him?”

  “I can’t help it. He’s been part of me since before I was born. When his feelings are too strong or his walls are down, I find him everywhere I turn. He says—he says it will get better as I get older. I’ll learn to shield better, and I’ll be stronger. He says it’s because he trained me. That’s half a lie. It’s the blood that does it. He’s in me. He made me.”

  “Didn’t your mother help?”

  Temper could be useful. It made a wall, and Aidan was on the other side of it, away from her. “My mother is human.”

  “So she is,” Akiva said.

  “I don’t despise her!” Ysabel said sharply, though he had not said it aloud or, for all she knew, in his mind. “She’s always at me to be ordinary. To behave myself. To be human. But I’m not. I can’t be.”

  “One has to pretend,” he said. “To stay alive.”

  “I’m sick of pretending.”

  “So am I.” He sighed and moved a little closer. The sun was sitting on the horizon; the day’s heat was fading as fast as the daylight. Jerusalem looked washed in gold. He said something to it. Something foreign. Hebrew. A bit of a psalm. “‘How beautiful are thy dwelling places, O Lord.’”

  She gave that a moment’s silence. Then she asked, “Are you studying to be a priest?”

  “We don’t have priests the way you do.”

  “Well. Whatever, then.”

  “A rabbi. A scholar. Yes, I want to be that. After Rosh Hashonah I shall be a man and be called to the Torah; then I’ll begin to study in earnest.”

  “A man? You? Your voice hasn’t even broken yet.”

  He was annoyed, but not enough to move away from her. “It will when it’s ready. That’s not what a man is, after all. A man is what he knows, and what he does with it.”

  “I know a little about what Jews study. Torah and Talmud and a great deal of bickering. The Ramban, and the Rambam, and one says this and another says that, but someone else says no, it can’t be either, but if it is, it has to be thus and so, because—”

  Akiva choked. Half of it was fury. The other half was laughter. “You are blasphemous!”

  “Well, isn’t it like that?”

  “Yes,” he admitted after a while. “But you make it sound silly. It’s not. It’s the most important thing in the world.”

  “Chopping logic into mincemeat?”

  He cuffed her, not too hard, and still trying not to laugh. “Finding out exactly what God said, and what He meant by it.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Theology. I’m not supposed to know anything about it, being too young, and a girl. But I listen to the chaplain when he reads, and sometimes when he finds someone interesting to talk to. He was talking to the
king the other day. He was so happy afterwards, he was dizzy.”

  “The king has a very subtle mind,” Akiva said. “He can set my father’s head to spinning, and my father is as good a student of the Law as any I know of. They argue by the hour, sometimes, sounding as if they’re about to murder one another, and loving every minute of it.”

  “The chaplain wasn’t arguing. Not really. Not once he’d got going. They were picking apart how Anselm proved that God is. Then they got on to Aristotle. The king says the Church will go his way in the end, though it’s been trying to ban him in the schools. Father Stephen ended up agreeing with him, though he was shocked at first. He didn’t expect someone who looks like that, to be as wise as that, or as good at talking people round.”

  “He should have known better. He knows Prince Aidan, after all.”

  “Prince Aidan is always doing his best to seem less than he is. And he’s not interested in theology.”

  “No,” said Akiva. “He isn’t, is he? He’d rather make a song than a syllogism.”

  She laughed, startling herself. It was growing dark. There were still people on the Mount, beggars and pilgrims who had, or wanted, no other place to sleep. If she had been alone, she would have been afraid. But there were two of them, and they both had power, and they were warm and fed and surprisingly comfortable. “Father Stephen thinks my father is a bit—well, light-minded. My father never does or says anything to change his mind for him.” She shifted to peer into Akiva’s face. “Do you think he’s frivolous, too?”

  “No,” said Akiva. “Just worldly. Why shouldn’t he be? He’s a knight and a prince.”

  “That’s what he says. We can’t all be scholars. Someone has to do the ruling and the fighting.”

  “He does it better than anyone, except the king.”

  She nodded. She did not hurt inside anymore, or not enough to matter. The black roil in her middle was gone.

  It was the quiet. And the stars coming out. And Akiva. He was warm next to her; he felt right, sitting there, with his shawl around her and his mind flowing gently beside hers, sometimes touching it, sometimes curving away. She liked the way his thoughts ran. They were very clear, like water running, but they went down and down like a deep pure spring. She was more like light on the water, darting-quick, with sudden shadows in it.