The Dagger and the Cross

by Judith Tarr

  Saladin watched them in silence. The rest of the hall had gone back to its own concerns, whether brooding on defeat or celebrating victory. She wondered if any of them had laid wagers on her dropping the baby where she sat.

  The sultan was not watching her, after all, or even the beautiful Elen. His eyes kept seeking the children, now narrowing and growing keen, now dragging themselves away, now flicking back as if they could not help themselves.

  Ysabel spoke before Joanna could stop her, clearly enough for him to hear, but too soft to be understood at any distance. “Yes, we are. How is it that you can see?”

  Saladin sat very still. He did not look frightened. Fascinated, more like, and even a little elated. “Would there happen to be more of you?”

  “Three in Damascus,” she answered boldly, “and the two of us. Aren’t we enough?”

  “Quite ample for the purpose,” he said. Yes, he was pleased. He reckoned Aidan a friend, as much as any Frank could be; that had not changed, as Joanna had been able to tell when he spoke of the two in Damascus. He regarded Ysabel in honest delight, and said, “Your princely kinsman tells me that I have a keener eye than most.”

  “He told me. I remember now.” Ysabel was clearly as fascinated by him as he was by her, if somewhat more defiant than delighted. “He likes you. He’s sorry you couldn’t have been on his side of the war.”

  “As am I,” said Saladin. “But God wills as He wills, and He has been kind to your kinsmen. When they have had time to rest and restore themselves, I shall send them back to you.”

  “Why not now?”

  “It was a hard battle,” he said, “and they fought more bravely than any. They took no more than a scratch or two, but they are very tired.”

  “You killed my father,” she said. “I saw him die.”

  Her voice was rising. Joanna raised her hand to clamp it over the young imp’s mouth, but paused. Saladin was speaking. He was calm, but there was steel in it. “Your father, madam?”

  Joanna went cold.

  “My mother’s husband,” said Ysabel. “His name was Ranulf de Mortmain.”

  Saladin frowned. It was not a comforting thing to see, though Joanna could detect no anger in him. “I did not kill him, my lady. He died of his wounds before we could save him.”

  “Your battle killed him. Your people cut him down.”

  “That is the way of wars and warriors, my lady.”

  Joanna could not move, let alone speak. Saladin addressed Ysabel no longer as a child; he gave her the respect, and the honesty, due a grown woman.

  She gave him implacable will. “You owe us reparation.”

  Saladin’s brows went up. “Yes, my lady? On what do you base that contention?”

  “He died by your fault. You kept him waiting too long when he should have had water and tending. He might still be alive to be ransomed, if you hadn’t left him dying in the sun. You owe us his blood-price.”

  “You know that for a certainty?”

  “I saw it,” she said.

  He knew how she saw. He sat back, running his finger along his jaw, tracing an old scar that ran into his beard. Joanna did not think that he would drive them out and refuse them what he had promised them: he was much too honorable for that. But Ysabel had gone far beyond what was allowable for a child who owed her life to his clemency. When Joanna got her wits back, she would tan the imp’s hide.

  Saladin lowered the lids over his fine dark eyes. Ysabel stood with her chin up, glaring as formidably as ever. He looked her up and down calmly. “You are a very forward child,” he said.

  “I loved my father.”

  She did not put any charm into it, and she certainly did not choke with maidenly tears.

  He nodded. “That is evident. Suppose that I were willing to pay your price. Have you considered that everyone who lost a kinsman in the battle might ask the same of me? How then would I pay my army?”

  “No one else is forward enough,” she said. “No one else saw her father die.”

  “Still,” he said. “Is it fair?”

  “War isn’t fair.”

  Saladin stared at her. Suddenly he began to laugh. He was not laughing at her, not exactly. “My lady, you should be a qadi! You argue as irresistibly as one, and rather more cogently.” He sobered; he leaned forward. “So then, you have your blood-price. But let it be understood that that removes all obligations between us, except insofar as they touch on my compact with your mother.”

  “I don’t ask any more,” she said.

  “You might ask your mother to spare you the rod,” said Saladin. “Out of the generosity of my heart, and because I reckon you a worthy opponent, I add my plea to yours. For this time, at least,” he added cannily. “Future transgressions, I cannot speak for.”

  Ysabel’s face was stony, but Joanna could sense her admiration. It was not often that Ysabel met her match; and never, up to now, had that been a human man. She curtsied, going down rather deeper than anyone might have expected. Admiration indeed, and unwilling respect. “Thank you, my lord,” she said.

  27.

  Ysabel would have to be punished. But, like Augustine and sanctity, not yet. The baby, having obliged its mother by holding off until she was out of the sultan’s presence, now wanted to come all at once. The pains were coming sharp and close even before the litter rocked and swayed its way under Joanna’s own blessed roof. She walked away from it; she insisted on that.

  Zoe was there, that small dark woman with her astonishing gift for healing. Her assistant was new, and young. “Demetrios went back to the City,” she said, meaning by that what every Byzantine did, Constantinople on the Golden Horn. “It was well past time, I told him. As if he would ever listen. He insisted that I still had more to teach. Even when he left he dragged his feet, for fear he might have missed one last, tiny secret.”

  Joanna smiled, though a new pain turned it to a grimace. She was sorry not to see the young eunuch with his great dreaming eyes, but glad that he had spread his wings at last. The new apprentice looked a little scared. “Your first birth?” Joanna asked her.

  The child shook her head, dumb with shyness.

  “Her first noblewoman,” Zoe said. She crooked a finger. The apprentice ducked her head and scampered, transparently glad to have a signal to answer and an errand to run off to.

  The bedchamber was ready. Dura knew, as she always did; though mute, she could command the servants well when she chose. The birthing-stool stood in its accustomed place. There were heaps of clean cloths, fresh sheets on the bed and fresh sheets waiting, swaddling for the baby and a cradle to lay it in, and water, and wine laced with poppy if Joanna should need it. She was not too proud to confess that she well might. William had come feet first, and nearly torn her in two.

  This one was facing as it ought. She could feel it, and never mind who might call it nonsense. Zoe, searching, confirmed it with a smile. “All in good order,” she said.

  Much of birthing was waiting. The rest was sheer hard work, and pain, and pain ten times over. Joanna thought in the ever-shortening pauses of cattle, how easy by comparison it was to birth a calf. If man was wrought in God’s image, then God was a preposterous, big-headed, totter-balanced, furless comedy of a creature.

  She caught the blasphemy before it ran away. Father, she prayed, forgive.

  There were eyes in the shadows beyond the bed. Joanna took them for a delusion born of pain, but they did not go away when she bade them. Eyes. Two pairs of them. One gleamed beast-green; the other, beast-red.

  “Ysabel,” said Joanna, low in her throat. “Come out of there.”

  They both came, humble enough to look at, but there was no contrition in them. Joanna must have been a sight to remember. Her hair straggled out of its braid; her shift was sodden with sweat; her belly was vast beneath it, rippling with the birth-spasms. A woman need never have shame of this that she was born for, but it was not an easy thing for a child to understand.

  “We aren’t children.
” It was Akiva who said it in his sweet, unbroken voice. He reached out half boldly, half shyly, and laid his hand on the summit of her belly. His touch was warm and cool at once. It made her think, somehow, of the way sunlight felt on her face, when it was still winter but spring was almost come.

  She heard Zoe’s brief, well-chosen words. “Children or no, you have no place here. Go.”

  Neither child deigned to hear her. Ysabel took her mother’s hand and held it. Akiva seemed rapt in his own hand where it lay on Joanna’s middle. “I can see it,” he said. “How it all goes together. Why it does what it does. Why it has to hurt.”

  “If you can tell me that,” Joanna gritted, “then you’re even more than I took you for.”

  “It’s to make you push hard enough. Pushing helps it; and when you push, the baby comes.” He paused. Wonder dawned in his face. “I can make the hurt stop.”

  He could; he did. She breathed a great sigh; then she knotted with fear. “But if I have to hurt—Bring it back! For the baby’s sake, bring it back.”

  “It’s not the hurt that’s necessary,” Akiva said. His voice was dry, dispassionate, scholarly. “If your body does what is required of it, whether it hurts or not is unimportant. Therefore, why hurt?”

  She could feel the muscles clench, but that clenching was without pain. It frightened her. “It has to hurt. God made it so.”

  “God made fever, too. Does that mean you have to die of it?”

  Damn the boy. She wanted him out. She wanted him there, with his hand on her, taking away the pain. What would it do to her baby to be brought into the world without anguish, without taking its mother down to the borderlands of death? It was against Scripture. It was blessedly, blissfully easy.

  It was still work. She had to push. There was no taking that away from her.

  Akiva stayed, and Ysabel, for once subdued and silent. Ysabel did not look frightened, even at the blood. Someday it would be she who labored to bear a child, just as her mother did now.

  It was not so ill to have her there. Zoe was not pleased, but Zoe, like Saladin, had a clearer eye than most. And she knew whose child Ysabel was. She had been there the night Joanna almost died, long ago in Aleppo, when Aidan—and, more deadly by far, Morgiana—learned that he had begotten a child. Joanna was alive because Aidan, who had no power to heal, still had known what human healers knew of how to remove a dagger from a woman’s heart, and how not to kill her while he did it; but when that was done, it was for Zoe to see that she did not die of shock or wound-fever, or lose her baby.

  When Ysabel was born, Aidan was there. Zoe had not liked that, either; it went sorely against her grain to share a birthing with a man. But Aidan was not to be quarreled with. “Our children are different,” he had said to Joanna, somewhat before she came to childbed. “For your safety as much as for her own, I must be with her when she is born.”

  That had been a long birth. Longer by far than this one. Ysabel had fought it, her father said. Witch-children did. They had will for that, and consciousness. He had been talking to her as his kind did, in thoughts without words, since she began to move in the womb; he told Joanna that, well after Ysabel was born, when she could not recoil or grow afraid. But she had suspected something like it. She had been more aware of Ysabel within her than of Aimery before her, or than she would be of any of her children after. She was not shocked when the small, yelling, furious body was laid on her belly, and its howling stopped, and it opened eyes that, though stunned by the light, saw her with perfect and wondering clarity. Joanna saw that those eyes were not human. They accepted this world and her mother as Joanna accepted her daughter, warily but with growing gladness.

  Ysabel-then and Ysabel-now blurred and came together. “Akiva has the gift,” Ysabel said, envious. “The way the king does. I wish I wasn’t so young. I wish I had my gifts.”

  “But,” said Joanna, gasping it between contractions, “you have. As your f—your uncle has. He told me so.”

  Ysabel did not leap on the slip. Joanna prayed that she had not noticed it at all; had taken it for a breath drawn awry. Now was no time to tell her daughter that she had been lied to all her life.

  Joanna focused herself narrowly on getting Ranulf’s last child born alive. Akiva was tiring, or his power was not strong enough yet to take away the great pains that heralded birth. Each in succession made itself more strongly felt, though never as strong as if there had been no witch-child standing by her with sweat running down his face, every atom of his being fixed on making this birth go as it should. She could not persuade him to give over. After a while she stopped trying.

  “Now,” one of them said. “Once more. Once—Now!”

  o0o

  Silence. A prick of fear. Then, blessedly loud, the baby’s cry.

  Zoe lifted it. Her. Clotted with birth-blood, purple-red, flailing, howling like a banshee: beautiful. Five fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot, arms and legs as they ought to be, down of damp dark hair, eyes and nose and mouth, small big-bellied body with the discreet fold of its sex. She stopped crying soon enough and settled into this new art of breathing.

  Joanna let herself sink into the bed and opened her arms. Zoe laid the child in them, all wet as she was, still bound to her mother by the cord. “Salima,” Joanna said. The name came out of its own accord; it was not the one she had chosen some while since. A Muslim name for a child born under the Muslim sultan. It was a kind of defiance. It meant, not defeat, but peace. And in peace, hope.

  PART FIVE

  TYRE

  August 1187

  28.

  Damascus was ancient and beautiful, a green city in the endless dun expanse of the desert, a vision of paradise: towers and minarets above the green of fields and orchards, watered by the myriad streams of Barada. There was no city older, and few more fair to see.

  It was a prison.

  Aidan was not, they all kept telling him, a prisoner. He was ransomed, he was an honored guest, when it was safe he would be permitted to depart.

  “Safe,” he said, spitting it. “For whom? I gave my word. Has Saladin forgotten all that I am?”

  “He remembers,” Morgiana said.

  It was not her house in which the brothers and their companions were kept. This belonged to an emir who rode now with Saladin. His wives kept apart in the harem, but his servants were assiduous in seeing to the guests’ comfort. They all knew Morgiana: the emir, whose name was Ishak ibn Farouk, had inherited her by way of his father, whom she reckoned the best swordsmith in Syria and perhaps in the world. Farouk, and his father and grandfather before him, had always forged her blades. Ishak had none of their gift; he was born not to forge blades but to wield them. His sister’s husband pursued the family’s calling, and his sister’s sons showed signs of taking after their father. The succession, as Ishak liked to say, was secure. He could settle with a clear conscience to the life of a knight of Islam.

  Ishak was with Saladin. He had been at the capture of Acre. He was part of the vast locust-swarm that swept over Outremer, devouring all before it.

  Aidan prowled the tiled halls and the fountained courtyards as if they had been a cage. Each castle that fell, each city that surrendered, stabbed his heart to fresh pain. And he could do nothing. His word was given. He could not escape, he could not arm himself, he could not fight.

  Morgiana gave him no comfort. He could not help but know what it meant that she was here and not with her sultan. She too had made choices.

  But she kept him here. She tried to distract him. She walked or rode with him through the city; she took him hunting among the orchards; she took him with honest joy to her bed.

  He cherished every moment of her presence, but it was driving him mad. Even Aimery was a better prisoner than Aidan. And why not? Aimery was biding his time. When he was freed, he would go back to war against the infidel.

  Gwydion sank into deepening quiet. He too waited, not to be freed to fight, but to return to his own kingdom. Aidan’s prow
ling and snarling barely ruffled his calm.

  His calm ruffled Aidan more than enough. “O serenity! Who would guess that you turn madman in a battle?”

  “I do not,” said Gwydion. “I lose my temper. No more than that.”

  “So does the sea lose its temper when it swallows the fleet. Why do you bottle yourself up now? Why aren’t you acting like a reasonable being, instead of making sure it will all come out again when you least want it to? When there’s a sword in your hand and an enemy in front of you, and you go blood-mad.”

  “I,” said Gwydion with the barest hint of tightness, “am a reasonable being.”

  “Now you are.” Aidan turned away in disgust. Gwydion would never give him a decent fight. This was the best one he could ever get out of him: a suggestion of displeasure, a hint of ripple in his calm.

  Morgiana would not fight, either. “Last time was enough,” she said.

  “Then let me out,” he said. “Let me out of this trap.” She would not. No more than she would fight.

  o0o

  There were other knightly prisoners in Damascus, and some had been there unransomed far longer than Aidan. The king and the Grand Master of the Templars, once they had recovered fully from the ravages of the battle, were taken out of the city and compelled to ride with Saladin, living trophies of his victory. Humphrey of Toron rode with them to serve as their interpreter.

  The king’s brother remained under guard in the citadel. Aidan was permitted to call on him, and did, for charity; but Aidan had never been overfond of Messire Amalric de Lusignan. As a fellow in suffering, he left somewhat to be desired.

  Most bitter of all was what had become of the lesser folk of the army. Twenty-five thousand lived and were taken prisoner. Those who did not die of wounds or ill-treatment were sold in the slave market of Damascus.

  Aidan could not buy them all. Morgiana would not let him buy even one. “No,” she said in front of one of many blocks with Franks chained to it, sullen or snarling or numb with shock. “What Allah has written, Allah has written. You have your mamluks who are left. Be content with them.”