by Judith Tarr
“I am a fool and a coward, but I know what is fitting. Do you even put on armor and take up an axe? Or…is it…”
Anger flashed through her mockery. “Why not just say it, little Brother?”
It caught in his throat. But it was in his mind, clear to read.
She said it for him. “You think I’ve found a cure for my five years’ sickness. A great tall Varangian with braids to his waist and arms I can hardly circle with my two hands, and a huge besom of a beard. Someone who’ll tumble a yellow-eyed witch with no qualms at-all, and laugh with her at the pallid little priest she’s been breaking her heart over. A bull to make me forget my white cat from Anglia.”
She was standing in front of him. Half of her was laughing; half of her trembled with anger. “You won’t be rid of me so easily, Brother Alfred. Nor is my virtue as easy as that, whatever you may think. I can be a man’s friend without leaping into his bed.”
He flushed, but his voice by some miracle was steady. “You are beautiful. Any man would desire you. Even I, armored in my vows, have never been immune to you. Is it wise, Thea, to walk among men of war who can take by force whatever they wish for?”
She laughed aloud. “I should like to see them try!”
“And then they come to House Akestas and dispose of the witch’s familiars.”
She sobered abruptly. “No, Alf. That, they will never do. I’m wild and I’m wicked and maybe I’m a harlot, but I am not a traitor.”
“Then you’ll stop seeing the Varangians?”
“I never said that.” She rose and tossed the book to him; he caught it without thinking. “You’ve done your duty, Father Confessor. I’ll do as my conscience bids me. If that is to visit my friends and to look and listen and to catch what rumors I can, what right or power have you to prevent me?”
“I, none. Your conscience—”
“My conscience is my own, and I am my own woman. Whatever you may say.”
“I never said otherwise.”
“Didn’t you?”
She had reached the door. It closed upon her before he could speak; her mind barriered against him with calm finality.
9.
“Hell,” said Jehan, “must be somewhat cooler than this.”
Even in the depths of House Akestas, in high ceiled dimness, the heat was like a living thing, bearing down with all its weight upon the gasping City, felling the old and the weak and rousing the minds of the strong to bitter rancor.
Anna and Irene had already been sent away for quarreling; Nikki, forbidden to play with Jehan’s sword, sulked in solitude.
Alf himself was pale and silent and alarmingly abstracted. He had held Jehan’s surcoat for him after the other had shown off his panoply; he held it still, crumpled in his lap, entirely forgotten.
“Hell is cooler,” Sophia said, watching as Jehan knelt on the tiles wrapping his mail-shirt carefully in oiled leather. It made a massive bundle with the chausses and the padded gambeson and the great flat-topped helm. “Especially,” she went on, “since no one in Hades is condemned to wear armor. How do you stand it?”
He shrugged. “You get used to it. Though it’s never pleasant, damnably heavy as it is, like to rust at a word.” He sat on his heels, his task done. “Every time I set my squire to work cleaning any of it, he mutters about entering a cloister. Never mind, I tell him; a few more years and he can win his own spurs, and find some other poor victim to keep his hauberk clean.”
“Is that why knighthood perpetuates itself?”
Jehan laughed. “Why else?”
Alf rose, trailing the surcoat, and wandered to the window. The others watched him in sudden stillness. He looked like a wild thing caged.
Sophia’s glance crossed Jehan’s. His lightness of mood had vanished; he frowned. “How long has he been like this?” he asked softly, though not too softly for Alf to hear if he chose.
She sighed a little. “He’s been very quiet for a day or two. Since the rising in the Latin Quarter.”
Jehan’s frown deepened. “If you’ll pardon my saying it, my lady, that was an ill thing.”
“You need no pardon,” she said. “It was worse than an ill thing. It was a mad thing. For our people to march on the merchants in their own places, burn their shops and houses to the ground, and kill any Latin they found…it was despicable.”
“Could they help it, when it comes to that? It’s hot; it’s miserable; there’s an invading army camped outside the walls. And no chance of relief from any of it.”
“That doesn’t excuse murder. Half the people killed were Pisans—Latins, to be sure, but they fought for us; if it hadn’t been for them and for the Varangians, the City would have fallen long before it did.”
“True,” Jehan conceded. “But they were Latins, and they were a target when your people needed one. No; the ill I see is that all your loyal Latins have come over to us. You’ve lost one of the mainstays of your army.”
“A fine strong empire this is,” she said bitterly. “You must feel nothing but contempt for us.”
“I?” Jehan shook his head. “I’m not that much of a fool. But I am afraid for you. There’ve been rumblings in the camp. People are talking about revenge and about making the City pay for what it did to the Pisans.”
“And well we ought to,” she said. But she had gone cold beneath her veneer of courage.
Alf turned back to the room. Before Jehan could frame a response, he said, “The wind is blowing from the north.”
“Ah, good!” she said with more enthusiasm than she felt. “That will cool us splendidly, and blow away any chance of plague.”
He shook his head. “No. It’s the worst thing anyone could wish for.”
Sophia glanced at Jehan. He watched Alf with peculiar fixity; in his eyes was something very close to fear. “What is it?” he demanded. “What do you see?”
Alf shivered convulsively. Jehan’s surcoat slipped from his hands to the floor. He stared at it as if he had never seen it before, and bent, lifting it, folding it with exaggerated care.
When it was arranged to his satisfaction, he laid it gently down upon a table, tracing with his finger the lion rampant that was for Sevigny, and the Chi-Rho which Bishop Aylmer had placed in its claws for the young knight who was also a priest. His eyes were enormous, all pupil; by some trick of the light it seemed to Sophia that they flared red.
He spoke to her and not to Jehan, with quiet intensity. “My lady, if you love your family, keep the children and the servants in the house. Let none of them go out for anything. And send for Bardas. Tell him a lie if you need to. But get him here and keep him here.”
“What—” she began.
He cut her off. “See that you have water. All the water you can draw, in every vessel you can find. And food enough for a week at least. Get it now. Get it quickly.”
It was madness, surely. Yet it made Sophia tremble. Jehan had risen, death-white under his tan; his sword was naked in his hand.
“No,” Alf said to him, “no weapons. Go back to the camp, Jehan. Stay there. Promise me.”
“Why? What’s going to happen?”
“What you foresaw. But worse. Far worse.” Alf looked from one to the other. “Why are you wasting time? Go on!”
He himself was at the door, moving with speed that startled Sophia. Even before Jehan could spring after him, he was gone.
She caught the priest’s arm as he passed her. “Wait! Where are you going?”
Jehan stared down at her, eyes wild. “After him. My lady,” he added after a moment.
“Is he mad?”
Obviously Jehan was burning to be gone; equally obviously he could think of no courteous way to escape her. “Mad?” he echoed her. “Alf?” He laughed with an edge of hysteria. “I suppose he is. Have you ever seen his back?”
She nodded, wincing involuntarily as she remembered it.
“He was supposed to be burned for a witch. They flogged him instead, as a penance. Then the people canonized h
im. He has his legend now in the north of Anglia, and even his feast-day.”
“What does that have to do with—”
“Nothing. But if he’s mad, then so are half the saints on the calendar. And all the prophets.”
Sophia could find no words at all. Even as she hunted for a response, the door flew open. It was not Alf returning to sanity, but her maid, breathless, disheveled, and scarlet-faced with heat and exertion. “My lady!” she gasped. “My lady! The City’s on fire!”
There was something inevitable in it, like the climax of a tragedy. It surprised Sophia that she could think so clearly. She set the woman in a chair, fanned her and refreshed her with a sip or two of wine, and extracted the news from her bit by bit.
It was as Jehan had said. The Latins, incensed by the injury done to their countrymen in the City, had roused to revenge. A troop of them had come armed from the camp, their target the quarter given over to the Arab scholars and merchants. They had sworn to kill Saracens; Saracens, then, they would kill.
The battle had its center in the mosque, the heart of the abomination, a colony of Infidels suffered to live and worship as they pleased within a Christian city. Someone, whether Latin or Moslem or Greek—for Greeks had come to aid their neighbors against the invaders—had brought fire into the battle. By then the breeze that had come to break the terrible heat had grown to a brisk north wind; it fanned the flames despite all efforts to quench them.
“You know how narrow the streets are, my lady,” said Katya, almost calm now. “And all the houses are of wood and half of them are falling down. They’re burning like logs on a hearth.”
Suddenly Sophia was very tired. The servants would be in an uproar; the children would be terrified. And Bardas—if he was in his chamber in the Prefecture, she could lure him home; if not…
The hiss of metal on metal brought her eyes to Jehan. He had sheathed his sword; his brows were knit. His face, pleasant and rather foolish in repose, was suddenly hard and Stern. “My lady,” he said, “you’d best do as Alf told you, and soon. I’m going after him.”
“He told you to go back to camp.”
“He should have known better, and he should never have left like that before he’d packed me off.”
“You know where he’s gone?”
“To the fire.” Jehan took up the hooded mantle with which he had concealed his foreignness, and threw it on. “I’ll come back for my things. Leading Alf, or carrying him.”
10.
The City was deceptively quiet, basking in the respite from the relentless heat. But beneath the surface, terror had begun to stir. Jehan won passage through the midday crowds with his size and his determination, searching with desperate hope for a familiar white-fair head.
He had hoped for it, but he did not credit his eyes when he saw it under the arch of a portico. For an instant he feared some calamity, illness or violence or perhaps true madness. But Alf met Jehan with clear eyes and a forbidding frown. “Why are you following me?”
“Why are you waiting for me?” Jehan countered.
Alf’s frown darkened. “You’re an utter fool.” He gripped Jehan’s arm with that startling strength of his and drew him forward. “Stay with me and keep your head covered.”
They heard and scented it before they saw it, screams and cries and an acrid tang of smoke that caught at the throat. As they rounded a corner, fierce heat struck them like a blow. Flames leaped to the sky, dimmed and thinned by the sun’s brightness.
All the strong current of the crowd rushed away from the fire, carrying everything in its wake. Alf breasted it like a swimmer, battling it, borne backward one for every two steps he advanced. Once he stopped; Jehan braced himself, expecting them both to be hurled down and trampled. Yet, although the panic-scrambling was as wild as ever, Alf made his way forward again all but unimpeded.
The roaring in their ears, Jehan realized, was not simply the clamor of many voices raised in terror, but the fire itself as it devoured everything in its path. He saw it leap from roof to roof across the narrow street, take hold on dry timbers and flare upward like a torch. Black demon-figures leaped and danced within it, casting themselves forth, shrieking as they fell.
Here and there amid the inferno were islands: lines of people struggling to hold back the flames, beating at them with cloaks and blankets and rugs, running from the cisterns with basins and buckets and jars; winning small victories, but losing ground steadily as wind and fire conspired to overrun them.
Alf passed them. The air shimmered in the fire-heat; as if by a miracle the crowd had thinned to nothing. Figures staggered about: a man bent under a heavy chest; a small child clutching at one still smaller and crying; a charred scarecrow with a terrible seared face, that wheeled about even as Jehan stared, and plunged into the flames.
Alf halted so suddenly that Jehan collided with him. “God in heaven,” he said softly but distinctly in Latin. Jehan, peering at his face through eyes smarting with smoke, saw there neither fear nor pity but a white, terrible anger. He swept the children into his arms, murmuring words of comfort, and passed them to Jehan. “Take them to safety,” he said.
The children were limp, passive, worn out with terror. Jehan settled them one on each arm, with the absent ease of one who had had numerous small siblings. “And you?”
“I’ll come back to you,” Alf answered.
Jehan hesitated. But the children whimpered, and Alf’s eyes were terrible. He retreated slowly at first, then more swiftly.
Left alone, Alf stood for a moment, his face to the fire. It tore at him, buffeted him, strangled him with smoke. He reached inward to the heart of his strangeness, gathered the power that coiled there, hurled it with all his strength against the inferno. The flames quailed before it. He laughed, the sound of steel on steel, with no mirth in it.
Yet the fire, having no mind, knew no master. It surged forward into the gap it had left, and reached with long fingers, enfolding the slim erect figure. Enfolding, but not touching. That much power he had still.
He laughed again briefly, but his laughter died, and with it his anger. Pain tore at his sharpened senses, mingled with terror. There were people in the heart of that hell, alive and in agony or trapped and mad with panic. He set his mind upon a single thread of consciousness, and followed where it led.
Jehan, setting the children down within the safety of the fire lines, saw Alf cloaked in flames. He cried out and bolted forward; a stream of fire like a shooting star drove him back.
He would have advanced again, but hands caught him and held him, in spite of his struggles.
“Will you show some sense?”
The voice was sharp and familiar. He stared blankly at Thea, who glared back. She was dressed as a boy, her hair caught up under a cap.
“You kept him from being burned,” he said. “Now he’s gone and done it, and where were you?”
“Don’t be an idiot.” She let him go. “He’s perfectly safe. The last thing he needs is to have you blundering after him and getting killed before he can stop you. Here, see if you can talk these people into getting upwind and staying upwind, and keeping the fire back.”
Already she was drawing away from him. “Where are you going?” he called after her.
“To be an idiot.” She vanished as Alf had, into a wall of fire.
o0o
The sun crawled across the sky. Beneath it, steadily, inexorably, the flames advanced. Not only wood but fired brick and even stone fell before them. With the sun’s sinking, the City wore a girdle of fire from the Sea of Marmora to the Golden Horn.
Jehan lowered his burden to the ground and coughed. Pain lanced through his scorched throat. The woman he had carried from her smoldering house moaned and twisted, overcome more by hysteria than by the smoke. She could heal herself, he thought with callousness born of a long day’s horrors. He coughed again, more weakly, and nerved himself for another foray.
A shape grew out of fire and darkness. Its face seemed vaguely f
amiliar, but he saw only the cup it held out, brimming with blessed water. He snatched eagerly at it, caught himself with a wrenching effort, dropped stiffly to his knees. The woman gulped the water greedily. and cursed him when he took the cup away half full to give the rest to the boy who lay beside her.
Gentle hands retrieved the cup, returned it filled. “That is for you,” Alf said firmly.
He drank slowly in long sips. With each he felt his strength rise a little higher.
When no more remained in the cup, he surrendered it. Alf hung it from his belt and set his hands on Jehan’s shoulders. They were warm and strong, pouring strength into him, soothing his hurts.
“Where—” Jehan croaked. “Where—”
“We’ve opened Saint Basil’s as a field hospital. Thea is there, and Bardas—Sophia had no luck in fetching him to safety.”
“But you—the fire—”
“We’ve been bringing all the worst wounded to Saint Basil’s. Come with us and help us.” Carefully, without waiting for an answer, Alf raised the boy who had drunk the half of Jehan’s first cup. The woman he ignored, though she tugged at him, whining.
Saint Basil’s lay on the very edge of the inferno yet separated from it by a circle of garden. Streamers of fire, wind-driven, seemed to pass over it or else to fall short of it. The air felt cooler there, and cleaner; even amid the cries of agony and the bodies crowded into every space, there remained a sense of order and of peace.
After Alf had seen the wounded boy settled, he brought Jehan to a tall hard-faced man in blue who surveyed them with a grim eye. Jehan knew how unpromising he must seem to a master surgeon of Constantinople: filthy, stumbling with weariness, his mantle long lost, the rest of his garb charred, tattered, and all too obviously that of a Latin priest.
Alf laid an arm about his friend’s shoulders and said, “I’ve found the man I spoke of, Master. He’s trained as well as I am, if not better, and he speaks excellent Greek.”
