by Judith Tarr
“Maybe we’ll ride together,” said Elen.
Joanna’s glance was sharp. “You’ve been keeping yourself mewed up like a nun. Why? Do you think the sacrifice will keep the army safe?”
“No.” Elen tried to keep her voice light, to keep her temper out of it. “I haven’t wanted to go out, that’s all. There’s always enough to do in the house or round about the market.”
“The day’s heat comes up fast, this time of year.”
Joanna seemed almost to be thinking aloud. She shrugged. “It’s your folly. If I were young and thin, I’d ride in the mornings and bring back meat for the pot.”
“Do you want me to?”
Elen’s sharpness ruffled Joanna not at all. “No. I’m just feeling sorry for myself. This is going to be the last, you know. Ranulf and I, we agreed. I’ve done my duty by him, and he’s pleased with me. He won’t ask me to go through this again.”
Elen lowered her eyes, abashed. She had been too caught up in her troubles to notice that Joanna had troubles of her own. Elen did not think Joanna old, nor did she look it, even swollen with pregnancy; she had all her teeth, her hair was nigh as fine and fully as thick as Ysabel’s, and the lines that marked her face were lines of laughter. But she was close to thirty; she had borne nine children. Even her husband could hardly fault her for wanting to end it.
“I’m sorry,” Elen said, “that you have to—give up-”
“He’s not the greatest lover in the world,” Joanna said.
Elen blushed. It was like Joanna to go straight to the point.
“He won’t suffer,” said Joanna. “No more than he has when I’ve been pregnant and not wanting him. What we’ve had together, what’s been most real, we’ll still have that. The children. The lands and the people on them. The two of us working side by side. It took me a while and cost me a bit, but I’ve learned to understand him. We do well together.”
“But,” Elen said. “How can you let him go to another woman’s bed?”
For a moment Joanna looked like another woman altogether: a woman of no age at all, wearing no expression. “How can I stop him? He takes pleasure where he pleases, but I’m the one he comes back to. I’m the one he calls lady and wife.”
“Have you ever wondered,” Elen said, “what it would be like if a woman were as free to choose her dalliance as a man is?”
Joanna’s face did not change. “I’ve wondered. I’ve seen what comes of it.” She spread her hands on the dome of her belly. “It’s how I know that God is male. He would never have given His own sex so much of the burden.”
“You mind so much?”
Joanna laughed, and suddenly she was herself again. “Of course I mind! I’m ready to kick this monster out the door. When I’m in my right mind, I’m more sensible. I wouldn’t want to be a man. Poor half-baked things, they’re terrified of us; of the power that’s in us.”
“Is that why they tell us we’re so much less than they?”
“Why, aren’t you feeling your feminine fragility these days?”
Elen’s laughter was rusty with disuse. “I’m feeling ready to snatch up a sword and gallop off to join the army. That’s the worst of being a woman. Having to sit at home and wait.”
“And hold the world together while the men do their best to tear it apart. War,” said Joanna, “is pure idiocy.” She heaved herself up as if she could not bear to sit still. “Come out to the garden with me.”
Elen went with her, offering an arm for her to take. She ignored it. Her gait was ungainly but oddly graceful. Without the weight of the child, she would walk like a lioness, in long powerful strides. Yet for all her size and evident strength, there was nothing masculine about her; she was strong and a woman and—yes—glad to be that, even at the worst of it.
They did not walk long in the garden. Even in the shade it was hot.
As they turned back to the house, Elen could not hold in any longer what she had heard in the market. “Tiberias has fallen,” she said. “The army has left its camp at Cresson. They’re going to try to win back the city.”
Joanna stopped short. Her hands locked on Elen’s arm. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I didn’t want to upset you.” Even as she said it, Elen hardly believed it. She did not want to face it herself. She had been a coward; she had let herself be distracted, away from fear, toward the little matters of women.
Carefully Joanna unlocked her fingers. Drew a breath. Made an effort to compose her face. “People always seem to think I’ll drop the baby at a word. What else have you been keeping from me?”
“Nothing,” said Elen. “That’s the news that just came in. I had it from one of the Lord Marshal’s servants, who heard it as he went out on his errand. Saladin has Tiberias; the countess is barricaded in the citadel; the army is going to win her free.”
“From Cresson to Tiberias? At this time of year? Have they gone stark mad?”
Elen could not understand why she was so appalled. “It’s only a few leagues, isn’t it?”
“Five,” said Joanna. “As the vulture flies. In July. In this heat. With no water for an army, anywhere on the plain. Why didn’t they stay at Cresson like sane human beings, and wait for the sultan to come to them?”
“They couldn’t just abandon Tiberias, could they?”
“If they had the wits of a gnat, they would. Sweet saints,” said Joanna. “There’s going to be a battle, and Saladin will choose the ground.”
“I knew I shouldn’t have told you,” Elen said.
Joanna raised her clenched fists, but lowered them again, breathing deep, calming herself by effort of will. “If Saladin has Tiberias, and Guy is trying to fight on ground of Saladin’s choosing, then the whole kingdom is in jeopardy. Has the marshal done anything about the defenses here?”
“As much as he can do, with almost no troops to man them.”
“Then we had better pray,” said Joanna, “that the army holds off the Saracen; because if it fails, every one of us is ripe for the plucking.”
Elen’s hands were cold. She knotted them at her sides and lifted her chin. “I’ll pray. And I’ll hope. They have my lord king, after all, and his brother beside him.”
“They do,” Joanna said. Elen could not tell from the tone of it whether it was agreement or irony.
o0o
By evening the whole city knew what the city’s marshal had heard from the east; and that the king had, the night before, been forced to camp well short of Tiberias, without water, harried mercilessly by the enemy. The messenger who had broken through had been arrowshot for his insolence. He was expected to live, unless the wound went bad.
The churches were full of people praying for the army’s victory. Elen went to the cathedral, where the pious and the frightened kept vigil—more of the latter, she would have wagered, than the former—but came back at dusk to give Joanna what news there was. The house, like the city, was unwontedly subdued. Today would have been the battle. The signals that had come from the long line of castles along the marches of Syria told only of Tiberias’ burning, the enemy’s massing about it, the army’s halting to fight between the hills called the Horns of Hattin.
Joanna was not in the solar. Elen found her in the nursery, from which her younger children had been banished with loud and echoing protests, sitting by the bed on which lay her eldest daughter. Ysabel was coiled in a knot, as rigid as a stone and nearly as cold.
“Dear God,” Elen said.
“She’s alive.”
Elen had not even seen the boy until he spoke. It was Simeon’s son. He looked like a ghost in the lamp’s shadow.
Clearly Joanna had not seen him, either: she jumped like a cat. She got hold of his coat and pulled him into the light. “What’s wrong with her? Why is she like this?”
Joanna, it was evident, knew what Akiva was. He did not seem surprised. He looked down at Ysabel. His face was deathly white, his eyes huge in it, like holes in a skull. “She wore herself out,” he
said. “I didn’t know until it was too late. I don’t think she’ll die. She may sleep for days, that’s all.”
“That’s all?” Joanna’s voice cracked with incredulity. “That’s all? For God’s sake, what was she doing?”
“Watching the battle.”
Elen did not disbelieve it. That was the worst of it. She was kin to these people. This one, too. Now she understood much that she had not, of Joanna’s troublesome eldest daughter; and of Aidan’s patent preference for her over her siblings. She was of his own kind.
“The battle,” Joanna prompted Akiva with conspicuous patience.
Before he spoke, they read it in his face. “Lost,” he said, almost too faint to be heard. “All lost.”
“No,” Joanna said.
“All.” He swayed as he stood, but he would not let them touch him. “The Saracen surrounded them on the field of Hattin and broke them with fire and no water and the summer’s heat. The footsoldiers rebelled and would not fight. The knights fought as long as they could, but there were too few of them. They are all dead or taken.”
Joanna’s face was as bloodless now as his, but she stood erect, motionless. What came from her was not the name Elen had expected. “Prince Aidan?”
“Alive. And my king. And your son.”
Her eyes closed briefly. She opened them. “My husband?”
He would not answer. Perhaps could not. All at once and all of a piece, he crumpled.
Elen caught him. He was not rigid as Ysabel was; he was as limp as a rag.
“Ranulf is dead,” Joanna said. She said it quite calmly, as if it were nothing to her. “The kingdom is lost. The sultan will be wanting a sizeable ransom, I suspect; particularly for a king and a prince.”
Elen’s arms began to tremble. She laid Akiva on the bed beside Ysabel. Now that Elen knew, she could see the alienness in Ysabel’s face, the whiteness that was not natural for this country, the awkwardness that would bloom into piercing, inhuman beauty.
Joanna laid her hand on the tousled curls. “Now he’ll never know,” she said.
Elen would not ask what she meant; did not want to know. “He may still be alive.”
Joanna shook her head. “I’m none of their kind, but I can see the truth when it stares me in the face.” She straightened painfully. “I could have done with a little more false hope.”
So could they all. Elen looked down at the ones who had told them what the rest of the city would not hear for hours yet, and reflected on human envy, and unhuman power, and what it must be to be a child and to know that one’s father was dead. To know it as only witchkind could, as one who had been at his side, and gone down with him into the dark.
There was little that they could do for either of them except make them comfortable and try to keep them warm, and watch over them. Joanna would not leave the room. Nor, when he had been sent for, would Simeon. Elen took on herself the ordering of the household. She did not tell the others what she knew. Let them discover it as the rest of the city did. Let them have this last glimmer of hope.
Not that she despaired. Not yet. She had no word that Raihan was dead. Would Saladin punish him for fighting against his own people? Or would he have made his choice before it was too late, and gone back to the sultan’s service? That he could have been cut down in the battle, she would not think of. He could not have died. She would not allow it.
She watched with distant interest as the news reached the city. Saladin was the victor of Hattin. The king and his high lords were sent to prison in Damascus. The lesser knights, the Hospitallers, all the Templars but their Grand Master, were dead. The citadel of Tiberias had fallen; the Countess Eschiva was permitted to depart with her children and her possessions, and set free to join her husband where he nursed his shame in Tripoli. The Saracen was marching on Acre.
When Joanna was told, she laughed. She had not lost her wits, it was not in her, but grief made her angry, and when she was angry, she was dangerous.
Acre could have used that anger. For lack of a proper defending force—all that they had had, had gone to the defeat at Hattin—they could do nothing but seal the gates and wait. Someone had the wits to put all the men they did have, armed, on the walls, and to eke out the numbers with boys and old men and, here and there, a woman large enough to look daunting in a helmet. All together they seemed numerous enough; in war, where seeming could be everything, they might succeed in persuading the Saracen to draw off and choose another target.
It was down to that. Every city for itself, each castle to its own devices. “This isn’t a kingdom anymore,” Joanna said. “It’s a henhouse full of foxes.”
o0o
The witch-children slept for a night and a day, and woke ravenous and, to all appearances, healed of the blow that had felled them. But Akiva did not go back to his books. He stayed close to Ysabel, who would not leave her mother. Joanna tolerated them both. She used them as pages and errand-runners. She did not ask them to be messengers as only they could be.
Nor did she talk with her daughter of Ranulf’s death. The household would know when it was humanly possible, when the full tally of the dead and captive came from Damascus. Joanna nursed her grief alone, and brooded on the child that would never know its father.
On the second night after the battle, Joanna sat up long after the others were asleep, with a book in front of her. She did not even remember which book it was. Her eyes on the page saw not the close, crabbed lines, but faces. Ranulf’s. Aidan’s. Her daughter’s.
“I sinned once,” she said. “The worse for that I never could repent it. But except for that one sin, I was all the wife a man could ask for. I learned to love him. Better than that: I liked him. We were friends.”
There were no tears in her. Her grief was too deep for that. Aidan was alive and unwedded, and Ranulf was dead. Time was when she would have been glad of that; when she would have made something of it.
So she had. It slept in her bed, curled about one of the cats. Ranulf would never know, now, that Ysabel was not his daughter.
Joanna despised herself for being glad. She had meant to tell him, someday, when he would be able to understand, if not to forgive. Now she never would. God and the infidel had taken that burden from her; and with it any hope of absolution.
There were eyes on her. She turned slowly, willing herself to be calm. Ysabel came as she almost never had, even when she was small, and climbed into Joanna’s lap, what there was of it with her soon-to-be-born brother or sister between. She laid her head on her mother’s breast, careful as no ordinary child would know how to be, not to rouse the ache of the milk that had begun in it.
Joanna hesitated. Ysabel was silent. Joanna’s arms closed about her daughter, uncertainly at first, unsure of their welcome. Ysabel was always a prickly creature, as fierce in her independence as a young cat. She was more like Morgiana, that way, than like her father. Aidan, twinborn, raised human, knew what it was to need the nearness of his kin.
A child was a wonderful, terrible thing. Born of one’s blood and bone, but grown apart from them. This one, who should have been three parts human, was all strange. Her body that was warmer than a human child’s, warm enough to be a constant source of alarm in nurses and servants; her heart that beat on the right side of her body; her skin that was clean even of child-scents, giving the nose only what was set on it from without. Soap from the evening’s bath, scented with rosewater. New-washed linen. A suggestion of cat, from her erstwhile sleeping companion.
Joanna stroked the softness of her hair. She was not a human child, and yet she was Joanna’s. Knowing that her mother grieved, grieving herself, she came to give and to receive what comfort she could. It was not, that Joanna could perceive, anything to do with witchery.
They never resorted to that if human means would suffice. It was a courtesy, and an economy, and perhaps a sacrifice, too; as saints gave up things of the flesh to make themselves more worthy of heaven. Odd as some might reckon it to think of these uncanny peo
ple in connection with saints. The Church would not even give them the courtesy of souls.
Her arms tightened on the thin child-body. No. That, she would not believe: that her daughter was flesh without spirit. That lie was for the barren meditations of priests. Priests were men, after all. What did men know of the truth that was conceived and carried under a woman’s heart?
Ysabel sighed against her. Asleep, and at peace. That should comfort her, surely; for if there was anything to fear, Ysabel would know.
At the gate of a fallen kingdom, with war coming as inexorably as tides in the sea, Joanna cradled her eldest daughter and, however late, however fleetingly, let herself rest.
26.
On the fourth day after the battle of Hattin, as the sun descended to the hills of Carmel, what had seemed to be a storm of dust and wind revealed itself for what it was: the army of the infidel, marching swiftly on Acre. They came in all their ranks with their banners flying, to the beating of the kettledrums, chanting the praises of Allah. Victory rode on them; they laughed as they came.
When they had a clear sight of the city, they slowed. The walls were lined with armed figures, a flame of sunlight on helmet and spearpoint, a manifold glitter of eyes. Acre, which they had thought bereft of defenders, was guarded after all, and by a fair army.
Almost, the ruse succeeded. Elen, up on the wall in helmet and mail, with a sword at her side, watched the enemy come to a halt. There were not as many of them as rumor had promised. But enough; and they were visibly deadly on their light Arab horses, with their lances and their swords, their bows and their maces and their fierce foreign eyes. Soldiers of Allah. It was more than a word now. It was thousands strong.
She saw the sultan in the center behind a wall of steel: a doll-figure at this distance, splendid in his golden corselet, mounted on a white horse. There was a canopy over him, a guard about him in sun-colored coats. His mamluks, his soldier-slaves who would die for him.
As Raihan would die for his prince. As Raihan might well have done on the field of Hattin.
The wings of the army halted just out of arrow range. Some of them seemed to have come forward because of their keen sight; they peered under shading hands. One lowered his hand suddenly and wheeled his horse about. It was a handsome display of horsemanship. Elen watched him gallop headlong through the army, toward the sultan.
