by Jane Johnson
Soon there were men choosing the sea over the doomed ship. I saw that those who dived off in order to swim beneath the burning surface and come up farther out survived. But I knew I could not do it.
Hammer had no such hesitation. Without a word he clambered up onto the side and leapt off, vanishing from sight beneath the inky waves below.
Quickfinger turned a long, lugubrious face towards me, and with his good arm reached for my hand. “You saved my life, John. For about ten minutes.” He gave me his lopsided grin. Then he reached into the treasure sack, selected a likely piece and stuffed it down inside his tunic. “Come on, lad. Time for another unlikely escape.”
“I can’t swim.”
“Hold on to me. Reckon I can swim well enough for two, even wi’ only one arm.”
I shook my head. “I’ll drown us both.” I mustered a wobbly smile. “You go.”
He regarded me sadly. “Aye, well, I’ll see thee in Paradise, John. It’s been … interesting.”
And then he was gone with a great splash. The dandelion head showed for a moment amid the roiling water and smoke, and then sank without trace. I strained my eyes to watch for his re-emergence somewhere beyond the chaos but saw nothing.
The hills of the far land stretched hazy and serene beneath a blue sky indifferent to the fates of men. Somewhere up there was the Moor. My heart yearned towards him with such force I almost cried out. Had I been able to fly, I would have made my way up there as fast as an arrow, calling his name. Except that I did not know his name. The absurdity of that almost made me laugh, even as I raked those distant hills with my helpless gaze. But at that moment a great cloud of choking black smoke came billowing up from the lower decks and engulfed me, obscuring my view like a personal message: I would never see him again, not in this life.
Why had I not followed him that day in Rye? I should have gone with him, wherever he went, told him my feelings could not be denied, that I would travel to the ends of the earth just to be by his side. I had not understood my heart then, fool that I was. But I understood it now. It was love—pure and simple—and I had been too weak to see it, too much of a coward to embrace the truth.
Tears burned. My life had been a lie from start to finish. I masqueraded as a man, but really I was just a wild creature taken off the moors. I walked in clothes and spoke the words men used, but I was no more than a shaved beast. I had lied and faked and led my troupe to an evil war and then to their deaths, one by one, and for what? A dream of treasure and misplaced glory: lies, both. I had let myself be pushed and pulled by the tides of men and had failed simply to turn and say “no” before it was too late. I would never see any of them again—Saw or Ned or Will, Mary, Quicksilver, Hammer and Ezra. Savaric and Reginald. And finally, always, the one to whom my thoughts turned last thing at night and first in the morning: the Moor. And I had no one but myself to blame.
Well, there was no time for regrets now. Now I would give my lying corpse up to the tides not of men but of the great sea itself. And in my arms, the greatest lie of all: a portion of Christendom’s greatest fake.
I clambered awkwardly overboard, clutching the relic close—at least its weight would carry my soul straight to the bottom—and reminded myself that drowning was said to be a fair death if you didn’t fight it. Certainly it had to be better than burning alive. I fixed my mind on the memory of a pair of laughing, half-moon eyes and jumped.
The sea hit me like a cold wall, driving all the breath out of me. Then the water closed over my head and tried to press itself in through my mouth and nose. Burning above; burning within. I took one last look upwards in that strange, cold, dark green world.
Overhead, the hull of the ship was a great black whale, and the fiery waves a flare of orange like the promise of Heaven.
31
Zohra brushed a hand across Nathanael’s curly black hair. Such a thrill to touch him again, a private heaven to feel him warm and breathing, when she had thought him dead.
She closed her eyes, remembering the icy blast that had gone through her when Sorgan had come back from the barracks babbling about an attack: a doctor fatally injured by hashshashin trying to kill the emir. How could she have known he meant Nathanael when he did not even know himself? She could not say, she just knew. Or maybe all lovers at once leapt to the conclusion that it was their own beloved to whom Fate had dealt the cruel blow. It did not matter: she had run all the way to the citadel with no other thought in her head, had had to plead with the guards to let her through, had used both Malek’s name and that of her despised dead husband in order to be admitted.
Seeing Nathanael lying there, pale as paper, had almost stopped her heart. All pretence fled at that sight. This was the person she loved most in the world, more than her father, her brothers, her cousins; more than her own life. How could she ever have thought otherwise? How could she have denied those feelings? She knew a strange, conflicting shame that she had done so out of fear of what others might think and say. Out of the fear of being cast out, condemned. It seemed absurd in the face of monstrous loss to have allowed such pointless conventions to make her turn away from the truth in her heart. Such a calmness had come over her then as she accepted the truth that it was as if she stood in the still point of a storm.
“I will take him,” she had told them, the fussing women, the grave-faced men.
And so an unconscious Nathanael had been brought to the Najib house to occupy Zohra’s own room. Without Nat to take care of them Sara and little Nima had been persuaded to come, too: they were in her mother’s old sickroom. Downstairs, Baltasar and Sorgan shared the salon. The old man said little about this sudden influx of residents. Since the last of his pigeons had perished—lost to an arrow, to starvation or weakness, to the sea or stray air currents, no one knew—he had hardly said a word, but had lain rolled in a blanket on the divan in the half-dark most of the time, like an animal in its lair, stirring only to take whatever poor food was to be had, or to sit in the courtyard telling his prayer beads with his crippled hands.
But the arrival of Nathanael and his mother had wrought a great change in Baltasar. On the next day, he had got himself up and, commandeering Sorgan, taken himself off to the hammam for a steam. There was never any lack of wood in the city. So many houses were empty now; their doors and broken furniture lay stacked outside the bathhouses as firewood to heat the water. He had sat down to dinner with them that night in a clean robe and turban. He had been polite to Sara—more than polite, courtly, Zohra had thought at the time, passing her the best scraps from the poor dinner they shared, filling her cup with water, as if she could do nothing for herself with only one arm. Never once had he complained that there were strangers in his house, and one of them a young Jewish man, lying wounded in his daughter’s room.
This very morning Zohra had seen Sara join him out in the courtyard garden, and these two bereaved, frail people had sat in companionable, accepting silence until inevitably it was broken by the chatter of the child with some new discovery to show them. They had turned to her as one and exclaimed over the pebble or the leaf she had brought them, and for a few minutes it was as if she had turned a sun upon them, a golden light that banished pain and memories and deep-graven lines.
Zohra had found herself welling up. This was how it should be. This was what mattered, even though all around them the world was falling apart. What did it matter that they each came from a different family, from a different culture? Jewish, Muslim and in Nima’s case who-knew-what? This was how the world should be—people brought together by love.
Except that a small voice reminded her it was not only love that had brought this motley gathering together, but violence, hatred and death.
She allowed herself the luxury of cupping Nathanael’s cheek tenderly. When he stirred, she almost cried out.
His eyelids fluttered, then sprang open. “How long have I been here?” he whispered.
“Three days, my love. Three long days.”
“Where’s
Nima?” He tried to struggle upright, subsided.
“Nima is down in the courtyard with your mother. They are sitting in the sun playing some game with black and white stones.” As she peeled the bandages away to change the dressing, she explained what had happened, as best she knew it, and Nathanael lay there quietly, taking it all in.
At last the stab-wound was bared. Zohra winced, though the patient did not. He was so thin: the comparison with the young man who had charmed her at the perfume stall more so long ago struck her every time she saw his body, every time she touched him. When she had attended to his wound, she had almost wept at the thinness of his once-sleek torso, before forcing herself to the task of closing the bloody gash. The stitches she had sewn in her lover’s flesh seemed outrageous. I did that with a needle, she thought again now, with a sort of horrified fascination. Was she really the same woman who had retched each time she cleared her mother’s bedpan, who had balked at even looking at a naked body as she washed it? It had been a long journey between then and now. A long journey for all of them.
Nathanael raised himself with effort, craning his neck. “You made a good job of that.” He sounded surprised.
“I didn’t know what to do. The healers up at the citadel were hopeless, just left you bleeding.”
“Healers,” he scoffed, sounding more like himself. “They aren’t healers.” He lay down again with a sigh. “You’ll need to make a salve to go over the stitches or it will heal too tight. Bring my doctor’s bag and the herbs and liniments from the cupboard in my room.”
This was more like the Nathanael she knew: ebullient, peremptory. Zohra smiled to herself, then picked something up from beside the bed, removed the stopper and held it under his nose. “What, like this?” She grinned at his expression of amazement. “Your mother helped me. She told me where to find everything, and Nima helped me mix it.” She laughed. “Well, Nima dripped honey on the floor and broke a dish, but she wanted to be involved. She loves you, you know.” She took his hand in her own and raised it to her lips, feeling his bones beneath an inadequate layering, like an old man’s, and added softly, “As do I.”
Nathanael squeezed his eyes shut, but still tears escaped. Silence bound them for several minutes until Nat said suddenly, as if remembering something too late, “Karakush!”
“He’s well, well enough to surrender the city, or at least that’s what everyone is saying. I don’t know, I haven’t really been paying attention to anything beyond this room. It hasn’t happened yet. Perhaps it won’t.” Zohra bit her lip. “They said there was an assassin, just a boy …?”
Black eyes, narrow face.
With a sudden realization that made him go cold all over, Nat remembered where he had seen that face before. Running past them, blood-covered, on the day Zohra’s mother had died. The younger brother, the one who had smothered her with a pillow …
Should he say anything? If the boy had lived, Zohra would soon know from others, and if he had died … well, the body would already have been buried. What was the point of adding to the woes of this unlucky family if his identity was not known?
Making his decision, he reached up and pulled Zohra down to him and kissed her till they both ran out of breath.
In the old tea house, Nathanael was sorely missed. But now they had a newcomer to talk to about him, which was almost better than having the quiet, polite doctor’s lad with them.
“So how is he today?”
Baltasar Najib put down his cup and coughed, the eruption racking his thin frame. “Are you sure this stuff is made from roasted date pits? It tastes more like roasted rat droppings to me.”
Driss laughed. “How I’ve missed your cheery presence, my friend.”
“He’s not doing badly. My girl’s taking care of him.” If Baltasar noticed the swift glances exchanged around the table, he did not remark on them but drew himself up. “He took the assassin’s blade and saved the life of the governor. Didn’t he, eh, Sorgan? Sorgan was the one came running home with the news.”
Beside him, Sorgan eyed the last piece of stale bread with avaricious eyes, too hungry to say anything at all.
Driss snorted. “Just in time for him to receive the English devil’s demands.”
“I still don’t understand why the Old Man would send his hashshashin to kill Karakush.” Younes the barber shook his head. “Surely it would have been better to kill Malik al-Inkitar?” He used the Arabic name for the English king.
“The Old Man is a mad dog. He bites at random.” Hamsa Nasri, the grocer, drained his tea and made a face. “May as well drink hot water.”
Driss stared into the bottom of his cup as if it held the answer to all questions. “I reckon,” he said, “the Old Man wants Akka for himself.”
“What, and he’s done a deal with the Franj?” Younes sounded skeptical.
“It’s not beyond him. Think about it: he takes control of the port trade, taxes the goods in and out, gets back some of his lost revenue. It’s one in Salah ad-Din’s eye, too—he wouldn’t mind that. Remember how I got my wound,” Driss said.
There was a general groan. “Not again,” Hamsa said.
“Show more respect to an old soldier,” Baltasar growled. “Some of us were fighting for your freedom before you were born.”
“Freedom.” Younes shook his head. “The freedom to sit here and starve.” His gaze shifted to the table in search of the remnant of bread, but it was gone. Sorgan’s jaw moved ruminatively, his eyes glazed with a certain private pleasure. Younes opened his mouth to complain but was distracted by the arrival of a man coming through the door.
“The Franj have offered us safe passage and the right to remove all our property!” He grinned broadly, as if at some sort of joke.
There was hubbub at this. “For the surrender of the city?” someone asked.
The man wiped a sheen of grey dust off his face. “For the surrender of the whole Latin Kingdom!” He took a seat at a table close to where Baltasar and the others sat. “That’s what I just heard.”
“The entire Latin Kingdom?” Hassan asked, disbelieving. “They must be joking!”
“That’s what he said, Malik al-Inkitar. He demanded all the cities of the Kingdom of Jerusalem as it was in the time of the French King Louis. And all the Christian prisoners taken by the emirs, and by the sultan’s army, too. Oh, and that relic we captured at Hattin, the one they venerate as the cross the prophet Isa Christ was crucified on.”
“Well, they can have that!” someone shouted, and everyone laughed. Then they sobered.
“Salah ad-Din will never agree to such outrageous terms,” Driss said fiercely.
“I heard Al-Mashtub lost his temper and swore we’d all die fighting before we ceded the city. ‘We will not yield while there is breath in our bodies,’ that’s what he said,” declared the newcomer. He wore a battered garrison uniform.
Must have been one of the first to volunteer, Baltasar thought approvingly. “Aye, well, he’s a warrior to his core, that one,” he said.
“And then the English king said, ‘The ransom of your bodies shall be your heads’!” the soldier went on.
“I’d rather have my head, to be honest,” said Younes, running a hand over his bald patch.
“You would not give up the city so easily?” Driss rumbled.
“Easily? It’s been two years. We’ve nothing left,” said the barber. Loose skin had gathered beneath his eyes, on his neck; he looked twenty years older.
“But if we surrender now it will all have been for nothing, all the death, all the hardship.” Driss’s eyes were suddenly wet.
Baltasar clasped his old friend’s shoulder, and felt the bones there, as fragile as a pigeon’s. That was alarming, for he remembered Driss as a big man, bound with muscle, tough as an old boot, until, like himself, he’d been invalided out of the army. And like him, Driss had lost his wife. Baltasar had found out only yesterday that Habiba had died weeks back, while he had been struggling with his own demons. It was clea
r the veteran was not doing well on his own. They had joked together as young men that they planned to die before their wives; it was the best way, since neither man could imagine life without them. But now he was living that life, and it was harder than he had ever thought. He knew what Driss must be going through; it brought his own pain back to him twofold. Feeling his own eyes prick, he said hoarsely, “There’s a time for all things: a time to resist and a time to give way.”
“The outer wall is down. The only thing holding the infidel out now is sheer force of will, and we’ve got less of that every day,” the soldier said.
“But what if reinforcements come?”
The soldier shrugged. “Reinforcements have come and gone. But the caliph doesn’t care about us. It’s a long way from here to Baghdad.”
“There are some who say he’d like to see Salah ad-Din taken down a peg or two,” said Driss, lowering his voice.
“Yes, well, he’s not the one been camped up there through the summer sickness and the winter snows, sick as a dog and hundreds of leagues away from his wives and all the comforts of home,” said the soldier.
“Easy to ignore the plight of your subjects when everywhere you look there’s peace and plenty and perfumed flesh,” Younes said sourly.
