The Dagger and the Cross

by Judith Tarr

  “May I address her, at least, sire?”

  “Have you not already done so?”

  Amalric failed to see the wit in that. “Your majesty was generous to allow me to speak to her on the road to Acre. But we never spoke of marriage. It wasn’t time; and there was the war. Now, if we’re to sail together—”

  “That has not been settled,” Gwydion said.

  “If we should,” said Amalric, “there will be time to talk of gentler things. If your majesty will grant his approval.”

  “The Lady Elen is a grown woman. She has been wed before; our custom in our country, from the old times, is to leave a widow free to choose whether she will wed again or remain faithful to her husband who is gone.”

  “Yet if she does choose to marry, surely her kinsmen have a say in it.”

  “The final word is hers,” Gwydion said.

  “Would she marry against your wishes?”

  “That is for her to say,” said Gwydion.

  Amalric paused. Gwydion tasted his frustration: sour, with a tang of iron. It was not Christian and hardly kingly, but Gwydion knew a moment’s pleasure.

  “I may speak with her, then?” Amalric asked. He did not quite succeed in keeping the roughness from his voice.

  Gwydion met the man’s eyes. Amalric stiffened but held his ground. For that, Gwydion said, “I will speak with her. If she consents, then you may address her. If she refuses, you will abide by her wishes.”

  “I’ll trust you to be persuasive, my lord,” said Amalric.

  “Indeed,” said Gwydion. He rose. Amalric stepped back. Aidan, whom the monks had never managed to tame, would have smiled. Gwydion promised his God a penance. Later. When he was well away from this thorn in his side.

  It was a king’s privilege to dispense with greetings and farewells if it suited his pleasure. Gwydion did not often indulge it. He left Amalric standing there and turned his face toward the caravanserai.

  o0o

  Gwydion’s mood had altered for the worse. He turned Urien loose; the boy, meeting his glance, swallowed argument and went. Alone but not content, Gwydion slowed little by little until he hardly moved at all.

  It was neither kingly nor charitable, but he did not want Messire Amalric on any ship that was his. He knew nothing truly ill of the man; he had seen nothing to condemn, except an excess of ambition. But he could not like him.

  Elen was safe enough from Amalric. Unless she judged, as dispassionately as royalty could, that what he offered would profit her family; and she could do that. Fourteen years old and betrothed to the man whom her father chose for her, thinking him old and less than pleasant to look at, she had gone to her wedding with her head high, like a warrior into battle. She had won what she fought for. It had never been a love match, but as marriages went it had been better than most. Riquier had cherished her even when she failed to give him the heir he longed for. She had grieved when he died.

  This pilgrimage showed every sign of having healed her as Gwydion had hoped. When she returned to Rhiyana the suitors would gather; for she was the fairest prize in his kingdom. Yet to vex her now, when her joy was all so new...

  “I should give her to Urien,” he said aloud.

  He had only meant to jest, however bitterly, but once he had said it he saw the logic in it. They liked one another. They were cousins, but what of that? Rome had dispensed before, and would again, for a king’s asking. And it would rid them of Amalric.

  Urien was younger than she, but that might be to the good. He was no monk nor virgin; he had a pair of sons by women whom he did not love, but who had had all honor from him, and ample provision for their children, and husbands who were kind to them. His family was well thought of, his wealth considerable, his prospects excellent. They would do well together, they two.

  Gwydion allowed himself a smile as he threaded through the crowd. Elen would consider the match carefully if he proposed it, and very likely take it, wise child that she was. Yet it might be a greater pleasure and a sweeter victory to broach it subtly. To encourage them to come together; to set them in the way of one another; to let them think that they had chosen it for themselves.

  Aidan would laugh at him. Aidan was certain that, left to himself, Gwydion would happily set himself up as a matchmaker, and make a new order of marriage. Love matches, such as he himself had made. Little as Aidan could afford to mock, who had chosen even more unsuitably than Gwydion himself.

  Witchfolk were not as humans were. The Church did its best, but humans—human men, at least—were not made to mate for life. Witchfolk could do no other.

  Gwydion reached down to the core of him where that other was, a cool soft presence, a hint of sweetness. She was in her garden with a wolf-cub in her lap. She smiled as she felt his awareness on her. Beloved, she said.

  Soon, he said. Soon I come back.

  She had never doubted it; nor ever could.

  Tyre was harsh and strident after the green silences within, areek with human bodies, ababble with human voices. Gwydion passed by the public door of the caravanserai, the great gate that faced the harbor, and sought the postern, the small narrow door hidden in a fold of the wall, that opened on the garden. It was no such garden as his queen had made, being human and mortal and imbued with no more than earthly magic, but it was green, and it would be quiet. He needed both, for a little while. Then he would go. He would approach Elen and tell her that she had a suitor.

  o0o

  Green and quiet indeed, and the song of falling water, and a woman’s laughter.

  Gwydion, walking unwarily, lost in himself, paused in startlement. Deeper laughter echoed the woman’s, and a murmur of words, endearments in a mingling of Arabic and langue d’oeil.

  The garden’s maze was deceptive: what seemed distant could be very near, and what seemed near could be impossible to reach. Even Gwydion’s senses were of little use. He could only go on and hope that he did not stumble on the lovers. One of Aidan’s Saracens, it had to be, with one of the flock of wives. Shy, veiled creatures, those, soft-voiced as doves where strangers could hear, but lively enough away from infidel eyes. They had all been given the choice to remain in Millefleurs and not be torn away from home and land and family. Not one had taken it. They had packed up their belongings and their children and ridden with their husbands, and refused to call it bravery. Bravery was for men, they said. Women did what they had to do.

  The path bent round a hedge, opening on a bit of sun-seared grass and an arbor laden with roses, and a vision out of one of Morgiana’s more interesting books: a cloak spread on the ground, greener than the grass it covered, and on it the two lovers. The Saracen with his turban laid carefully aside, his coat folded under it, but decorous enough else, though that was like to alter swiftly. His lady, even more modestly clad than he, with her veil over her hair and her gown demurely laced, teased his shirt out of his trousers, and laughed when he blushed. He swept in for a kiss. They tumbled together on their makeshift bed. Her fillet slipped from her brow; her veil fell, baring her head. Her hair was free. It cloaked them both, to his manifest delight.

  Gwydion stood stock-still. He could not move to advance; he could not will himself to retreat.

  The man was a Saracen surely, incontrovertibly. The woman, as surely, was not.

  Gwydion was not angry. He was too old for that; too much a king. He would have preferred to have been less blind, or perhaps less trusting.

  The man saw him first. Blue eyes; they were always startling in that face. They went utterly, perfectly still.

  Elen, who had her back to him, perceived her lover’s stillness. In human wise, and in the heat of her blood, she sought to stir him with kisses. He laid a finger on her lips, gently. She kissed it, but she stilled as he had. She turned to see what he saw.

  It said somewhat for their perception, that neither took Gwydion for his brother. The blood drained from Elen’s face.

  They rose together, hand in hand. It was not meant to be defiance. They let g
o when they were up, but did not move apart. The mamluk was a handsome man. Gwydion could see that, dispassionately; as he had always seen the man’s courage and his quality. A good man, a knight and a gentleman, a notable warrior, a trainer of horses.

  None of it entitled him to a princess.

  Elen raised her chin. She had never been more beautiful. Love did that, even to a woman whose beauty was not already worthy of a song. “My lord,” she said, cool and proud.

  The mamluk bowed as a Frank and not as a Saracen; as a knight to a king. He had grace, and pride enough.

  “You could,” said Gwydion, “have been more circumspect.”

  Raihan blushed like a boy. Elen’s pallor never altered. “We ask your majesty’s pardon,” she said.

  Gwydion drew a breath. “You may ask. You may not receive it.”

  “That is your majesty’s right,” said Gwenllian’s daughter’s daughter.

  “Did you think,” Gwydion said, “that I would accept an accomplished fact, when I would never otherwise consent?”

  “I would not so insult your majesty’s intelligence.”

  “And this?”

  Her eyes were level, her voice unwavering. “This, I could not help. I love him, my lord. I know that I should not. I cannot bring myself to repent of it.”

  The mamluk said nothing. Wise, he was, for a mortal and a man. He loved her. It was written in his every line.

  “Do you fancy yourself worthy of her?” Gwydion asked him.

  “Insofar as any man may be, sire,” said Raihan, “yes.”

  Gwydion closed his eyes. When he opened them, neither had moved.

  A grown woman, Gwydion had said to the man who would have courted her for his own ambition. Hers to speak; hers to choose.

  And while he said it, she had spoken; she had made her choice.

  “I do not know,” he said to her, “that I can forgive you.”

  She inclined her head. He was her king; she was his vassal.

  He could command her. She would obey. It was bred in her.

  It would not undo what she had done, nor alter what was unalterable. There would be no love match for her now, not with any Christian. Not, certainly, with Urien, whom she thought of as a brother: young and callow and very dear to her, but never as this other was. This freed slave, this infidel, this half blood Syrian who could not even name his father.

  “You are a breeder of horses,” Gwydion said. “What would you do to a common drayhorse, a stallion of no lineage, who broke in upon the finest of your mares?”

  Raihan’s nostrils flared. He looked indeed like one of his own horses, and no common one, either. “I would wait, my lord, and judge the quality of the foal.”

  Gwydion stilled. But she was not with child. That grace at least God had granted them. “And if there was no foal?”

  “Then I would remove him, and see that he did not approach her again.”

  “Yes,” Gwydion said.

  “And what of the mare?” Elen asked. “Has she no say in it?”

  “Do you think that she should?”

  Elen’s lips tightened. Her hands were fists. She had begun to tremble. “May I have your majesty’s leave to go?”

  What Gwydion gave her, perhaps, was mercy. “Go,” he said.

  She went. The mamluk took the command to himself also, but waited until she was gone before departing in another direction altogether. Gwydion stood alone and still, like an image of a king.

  35.

  Marco knew what his father thought of him. It was one of his less successful exercises in charity, to understand it. To Guillermo Seco, a man with a vocation was no man at all. Manhood was greed and venality and grubbing for gold.

  When Marco thought of what his father wanted him to be, he had an irresistible urge to wipe his hands on his cotte. His too-clean, too-rich, too-elaborate cotte, which his father had chosen for him and bidden him wear. There was no hairshirt under it. His father had got wind of that and had it burned in front of him, with a lecture on conduct becoming a citizen of the commune of Genoa.

  Honor thy father and thy mother, the Commandment said. But Scripture also said, Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.

  Marco was God’s. The call was clear in him. Every day it came clearer. The more his father strove to make him a proper son of Mammon, the more his soul strained toward the purity that was God.

  Now he wrestled with an angel, or maybe it was a devil. His father had left him behind: a gift, it should have been, and rare. But something in Seco’s eyes made Marco restless. He was commanded to stay. His heart wanted to go. It had to do with Brother Thomas, this errand of his father’s. He knew it without knowing how he knew.

  Brother Thomas was more of God than Marco could ever hope to be. He was a saint; a child of heaven. And Seco loathed him.

  If Seco went to him without Marco’s knowledge, what would they say to one another? What battle would there be?

  Marco did not flatter himself that he could do anything about it. Except witness it, and maybe prevent something dreadful.

  The angel tumbled down with Marco’s foot on his throat. Marco snatched his cap and pulled it on, and ran after his father.

  He was not much good at shadowing and lurking, but Seco was not looking for pursuit. Marco kept his head down and his cap over his eyes, and let the swirl of Tyre’s crowds obscure him. God was with him. No one jostled him too badly; nothing held him back or got in his way, or separated him from his quarry.

  He began to wonder if after all his heart had played him false. Seco did not turn toward the cathedral and the archbishop’s palace, where Marco knew Brother Thomas to be, waiting humbly on the pope’s legate. He turned, in fact, in almost the opposite direction, toward the harbor. He was only going to see to something worldly.

  But Marco kept following him. Spineless his father might think him, but he could be stubborn when he needed to.

  Seco did not go all the way to the harbor. He stopped at a great tall building, one of the city’s larger caravanserais. He spoke to a porter in a turban. Marco, shielded behind a gaggle of pilgrims, heard the name he asked for.

  It was not a shock. Marco was no more stupid than he was spineless, and he knew his father rather better than his father knew him. He remembered what Seco had wanted to do, back at the beginning, before Brother Richard came into it, and brought Brother Thomas, and turned plain rancorous conniving into something much higher and stronger. Seco wanted simply to discredit the witch-prince and gain somewhat of the prince’s wealth. Brother Thomas wanted to cast the witches down and condemn them with the power of holy Church.

  Seco knew it, and despised it. He had been saying so for days now. “What use is this? What have we accomplished but a few moments’ discomfiture, and their hounds on our trail?”

  Not that he honestly believed in them. He laughed at Marco when Marco told him that the Jew’s whelp was one of them. He thought that human guile was enough, and human treachery.

  Now he went to the prince. Just as Judas had gone to the high priest, and for much the same reason. He wanted more than he thought he was being given. He reckoned to get it from his enemy, with no one else to share it or to keep him from it.

  Marco came within a breath’s span of running to his father and dragging him away. But Seco would never go. He was as stubborn as Marco, and much more obvious about it.

  Marco dithered from foot to foot. He had to do something. His father was about to go into the lion’s mouth. He would betray them all. And once the witches knew what they had done, and who they were...

  He was running before he had time to think, as hard and as fast as he could, away from the caravanserai, into the thick of the city. He did not even think of it as a choice. He did what he had to do, that was all.

  o0o

  Brother Thomas was not difficult to get at. One only needed determination, and a measure of gall. Marco’s cotte was good for something after all: it made the archbishop’s guards
salute him instead of stepping to bar his way. The well-to-do were always coming and going around the cathedral, especially now, with Tyre full of nobles and their servants. One guard even told Marco where to find the legate’s secretary. “I saw him not an hour past,” the man said, as affable as if there had never been a war outside the walls. “He and his friend, the monk from Ascalon, were talking about a bit of prayer, and then a turn around the cloister.”

  It was in the cloister that Marco found them, and a third with them, King Guy’s brother as rough-hewn and opaque-eyed as ever, but looking remarkably pleased with himself. He did not seem to have suffered from his captivity among the Saracens. As Marco paused to take stock, Messire Amalric said, “I don’t know that we need to do anything further. We did what we set out to do. The kingdom is safe from all of them. They’ll be gone before the month is out, sailing back where they came from.”

  “Is that all you care for?” Brother Thomas demanded of him. “That they be cast out of your garden, even if it be into another’s?”

  Messire Amalric refused to be offended. “That’s all I ever pretended to want. I saw this kingdom threatened by an unholy alliance. We broke it; it turned to our advantage and freed us from them all. Now let them mate if they will. They’re no danger to Jerusalem.”

  “You would surrender the dispensation, then?” Brother Richard inquired. “Leave it under a stone, perhaps, and send a bird to guide them to it? Messer Seco may not like that. He had his heart set on a fat ransom.”

  What Messer Seco could do, in Amalric’s opinion, was not for sanctified ears to hear. Brother Richard merely smiled. Brother Thomas suffered in silence.

  “We might still reap a little advantage,” Amalric said when the air had cleared again. “One of us can pretend to lead them to it, and accept what reward they may choose to offer. A princely one, I don’t doubt. Whatever their faults, they’ve never failed of generosity.”

  “That one of us, of course, being you.” Brother Richard was amused. He usually was. A good man, Brother Richard, but rather more a cynic than he ought to be. “Have you won the princess yet, my lord?”