by Judith Tarr
“About an hour,” said Alf, propping him with pillows. This, he realized, was Alf’s own bed.
They settled around him, Alf at his side, an arm about his shoulders. The support was somewhat more welcome than he had thought it would be. You’re all but healed, Alf’s soft voice said in his mind, but the shock to your body was severe. You’ll need to sleep, and sleep deep.
Jehan yawned, thinking of it, and clenched his jaw. He would not sleep like a baby while the others talked. And none of your sorcery! he thought at Alf.
His friend smiled, perhaps at him, perhaps at Henry. “Well, my lord, how is it that we see you here of all places?”
One of the servants entered with wine. Henry accepted a cup with a murmured courtesy, all the Greek he knew. As he spoke, Thea whispered in Sophia’s ear, the Greek of his langue d’oeil.
“I came back from Thrace a week and more ago with the rest of our forces and the young Emperor. Life in camp can be stifling after one’s been on the march. When my priestly friend told me he was going to dare the City—which is more than anyone else will do—I invited myself.”
Alf’s smile faded. Henry met his level stare for a moment, then looked away.
“I am no one’s prophet,” Alf said very softly.
“I do not ask,” Henry responded more softly still.
“You,” said Alf, “no.” His voice changed; a hint of his smile returned, then flickered away. “You were foolhardy, both of you, to venture here in so poor a set of disguises. Next time you should have the sense to dress as Greeks, and you, Jehan, to wear a hat. If anything maddens the City more than a Latin knight, it’s a Latin priest.”
“It is bad,” Henry agreed soberly. “I hadn’t known precisely how bad. Out in Thrace we were victors; here we’re monsters. Pierre de Bracieux and his men quit the palace this morning in terror of their lives, though milord is howling for revenge.”
“He’s too brave for his own good.” Jehan caught Alf’s eye and flushed. “I know what I am, damn it! and he’s a fighting fool. He had plenty of tales to tell. People are strengthening the City’s walls, do you know that? Quietly, without fanfare, and without asking anyone’s leave.”
“Neither Emperor seems to be objecting,” Henry said. “Isaac’s mind is at least half gone, and Alexios has immured himself in his palace where neither we nor his own people can come near him. If my lady will pardon my saying it, this city is not well ruled.”
Sophia’s eyes sparked. “I know it,” she said through Thea, “and I deplore it. But not all of us are cowards. Some of the nobles are beginning to take matters into their own hands.”
“You among them, my lady?”
Her lips met in a thin line. “I’m only a woman, and my husband is a bureaucrat, not a prince. I have no power. Only anger.”
Henry bowed to her in sincere respect. “I regret that we’ve come to this, my lady. If I had my wish, we would be in Jerusalem and your city would stand intact.”
“Regret!” she snapped. “You should have thought of regret when you sailed up the Horn. Admit it, sir Frank; your holy war has turned into a merchants’ quarrel, and this is the richest city in the world. Now you’ve seen how rich it is, you’ll not be bought off except with all we have.”
He did not deny it. But he said, “We’ve done as we contracted to do. His Majesty has not. He owes his throne to us; and we need food and money, and winter is coming. What little he’s given us is far from enough. Already many of us are urging that we put aside our patience and take what we need.”
“And in the City,” Thea said on her own account, “they say that enough is enough. They never chose the Emperor you’ve set over them, and the one of their own choosing is beneath contempt. They’ve endured for nigh a thousand years by discarding rulers who can’t rule and setting up those who can. One morning, my lord, you’ll wake and find that there’s a new head under the crown.”
“Will it be any better than the ones before it?”
“Who can tell?” She glanced at Alf, who listened without expression, offering nothing. “The walls aren’t repairing themselves. There’s a man commanding it, one of the Doukas; people call him Mourtzouphlos, Beetle-brows, an alarming man to meet in a dark corridor. He married a daughter of the Emperor you so valiantly cut down in Thrace, and he hasn’t forgotten it; and he’s far enough into the new emperors’ confidence that they’ve made him Protovestiarios. That, my lord, is more than a noble valet and esquire or even a steward; he controls the Private Treasury, and through it the imperial favor. You’d do well to watch him.”
“So we do,” Henry said. “Why do you think we took Alexios off to Thrace?”
“You’re giving away state secrets,” Sophia murmured.
“No, Lady. I’m saying what everyone knows. Before I left we were more allies than enemies. Now the balance has shifted. I’d like to see it change again.”
Alf stirred beside Jehan. “It was the fire. Whichever side kindled it, no one has forgotten that the Latins struck first that day. No one will forget. The hate is too strong and runs too deep.”
“On both sides,” said Thea. Her face twisted in sudden, fierce anger. “By God and all His angels! Can’t a one of you think of anything but hating?”
Alf reached out to touch her clenched fist. Face to face, they looked startlingly alike. Gently he said, “The root of it isn’t hate. It’s fear. Every stranger is an enemy, and every friend could turn traitor. Yet each side shares the same thoughts, all unknowing.”
Light dawned in her eyes. “If they could know—if their minds could be opened—”
He shook his head. “No, Thea. No. They’re not made for it. It would drive them mad.”
“They’re sane now?”
“Perfectly sane. Only blind and afraid. Yet there are some who see.” His eye caught Sophia, who had just begun to understand through Jehan’s translation, and Henry, whose face displayed a mingling of confusion and fascination. “We can pray that they may rule.”
“When has good sense ever had the upper hand?” She pulled away from him. “We women aren’t pleasant to listen to, are we? A pity there isn’t a lady or two of sense and breeding in the camp. We’d put an end to all this idiocy, and quickly, too.”
“What can a woman do that a man can’t?” All demanded of her.
“Make a peace we can all live with. And we’d have done it long since, too. Held off the Fleet, talked them around, and saved more lives and property than anyone can count. Unfortunately,” she added bitterly, “there was neither woman nor wise man at the head of either side that day.”
“There was Dandolo,” said Henry, “who knows what he wants; and Marquis Boniface, who wants what he can get; and my brother, who won’t settle for the leavings. And for the Greeks, a mindless mob and a coward. The usurper died of wounds taken in battle, and every one was in his back.”
She faced him. “Why don’t you rule?”
“I?” He seemed truly shocked. “My lady, I’m my brother’s loyal vassal. Whatever he commands me to do, I do, for honor of my oath.” .
“Regardless of the dishonor of the command?”
Jehan sighed heavily. “Yes, there’s the rub. Thea, if you can persuade the people to elect you Emperor, I’ll be your most avid supporter. But at the moment I have a splitting headache, and it must be past time for us to go back.”
“Yes,” she said tartly, “go back and try to open some eyes. If the sight of your bandages doesn’t rouse the whole army.”
“No fear of that. More likely they’ll cheer the marksman who brought down the Pope’s varlet.”
“Go to the Doge,” Alf said, cutting short her sharpness and Jehan’s bitter levity. “Tell him what we’ve said here. Tell him too that he can win this war, but it will bring him no joy. And if he loses, his death will most cruelly hard.”
Jehan paused with his cotte half on. Before he could speak, Henry said, “Those are perilous words to say to the Master of Saint Mark.”
“He as
ked for them. Did he not?”
Henry was silent. Slowly, with Alf’s help, Jehan finished dressing. His headache, feigned when he spoke of it, had begun to approach agony. “We’ll tell him though it kills us.”
Alf’s fingers brushed his brow. They were warm and cool at once, drawing away the pain, lending him strength. “Dear friend,” Alf said, “I’d never send you to your death. Nor do I ask you to come back here. It’s too much danger for too little cause.”
“I hardly saw you at all.” Even to himself Jehan sounded faint and fretful, like a tired child.
“But you did see me.” Alf eased something over Jehan’s bandage: a hat, broad-brimmed and much worn.
Jehan’s groping hand found the braided band and froze. “I can’t take this away from you!”
“You can keep it till I come for it. Now, your cloak. You’d best be quick; it will be dark soon, and you won’t be able to find a boat to take you across the Horn.”
Jehan grasped at the little that mattered. “You’ll come for it?”
“Or you’ll bring it. When it’s safe, and only when.” Alf embraced him briefly, tightly. “Take care of yourself, Jehan.”
14.
Nikki pulled at Alf’s hair. White, he wrote on his tablet. And at Alf’s coat: Blue. And his own: Red.
Alf swallowed laughter, for Nikki’s eyes were mischievous.
No, he said in his mind; scored through the last and waited, pen poised.
Green! Nikki cried, snatching the pen and writing it in a jubilant scrawl.
Alf’s mirth won free. Yes, green, he said, and well you knew it. Now what is it?
Coat, Nikki answered with his pen. I wear—him?
It, Alf corrected him.
He nodded, brows knit, forcing himself to remember. Words were a wonder and a delight, but they were hard to keep hold of, shifting and changing as quickly and inexplicably as people’s faces. He thought tiredness at Alf, and the other nodded. Enough now. Go and rest.
Not rest. The picture in his mind was of the stable and the three kittens there. He clasped Alf’s neck in a quick embrace and left him, skipping as Anna had taught him to do.
Alf tidied the nursery that did duty as a schoolroom, thinking of the one in Saint Ruan’s with its grey walls and its hard benches and its rows of novices in their brown robes.
Brother Osric, who had been master there when he left, was Abbot now; young Richard had taken the mastership. Though he would not be so young after all—thirty-five? forty? He had been a very hellion when he entered the abbey, fifth son of a poor baron, determined in his contempt for the monks with their pious mumblings. But under the contempt there had been a brain, and a reluctant fascination for the words which the monks had mumbled.
They had sent him a gift through Bishop Aylmer in Rome: his own Gloria Dei, copied and illuminated by the best hands in Saint Ruan’s, with a commentary over which both Osric and Richard had labored for long years. It lay now in his clothes chest, its beauty hidden in the plain cover that Brother Edgar had made for it to turn aside thieves, nor had he opened it since it came to him.
His will reached, so, and it lay in his hands. He sat at the worktable and opened it. His fingers trembled a little. It was even more wonderful than he had remembered.
There folded within was the letter that had come with it, written in Osric’s minute precise hand. News of the abbey, small things, this Brother ill and that Brother recovered, a splendid apple harvest and enough mead to make everyone tipsy on Saint Ruan’s Day; Duke Robert had given a magnificent bequest, and Lord Morfan was maintaining that the southwest corner of the oak forest had belonged to his family since King William’s day. And among all of this, the lines that with the release from his vows had sent Alf from Jerusalem: “Already the younger ones make a legend of what you did, and tell the tale of the Archangel Michael who came to be Our Lady’s champion and slew the Abbot’s slayer in her Chapel; and there is the sword hung over the altar as proof of it. You yourself we’ve let them forget, all of us old dodderers, because you asked it, nay demanded it, in the letter the King of Rhiyana sent to us; and because, the world being what it is, maybe it was wisest. We put it in the Necrology: ‘Dead on the winter solstice in the tenth year of the reign of His Majesty, Richard called Coeur-de-Lion: Alfred, foundling, novice, monk and priest of Saint Ruan’s upon Ynys Witrin; master of the school, author of the Gloria Dei, Doctor misteriosus. May the peace of the Lord rest upon him.’”
He smoothed the parchment, staring at it, not seeing it. The pain was piercing, as he had known it would be. But not as it had been before. This he could bear. It was pain, not agony. And half of it he had had to force with a flood of memory.
In spite of himself, he was healing. He looked at the book that he had written, and he saw not the cloister but the schoolroom of House Akestas. The words of the monk from Anglia seemed strangely distant. Someone else had written them long years ago, someone he no longer knew. Even the person who had wept when the letter came, only a year past, was not the one who read it now. This new Alfred had no tears to spare for a man five years dead, or for an abbey whose walls could only be a cage.
Carefully he closed the book. He could not read it. Not yet. That pain was real, and deep enough to make him gasp.
He turned. Sophia stood in the doorway, her face reflecting his own, white and shocked. For an instant she had seen in him the full count of his years.
“My lady,” he said.
“I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” she said more sharply than she had meant. In a gentler voice she added, “Are you feeling well? You look ill.”
“I’m well.” He straightened, brushing his hair out of his eyes, and smiled as best he could.
“Corinna said you were in here at dawn.”
That was when Nikki liked to be taught and he to teach, while everyone else slept. It was their secret, theirs and Thea’s, for sometimes she came to sit with them, bringing them booty from the kitchen, most of which Nikki ate. Honey cakes this morning, and a bowl of raisins. “I’m well,” he repeated.
“But won’t you have any—” she began.
He was already gone, his book under his arm.
o0o
Alf woke to a timid shaking and a voice calling his name. Sophia’s maid bent over him, her hair down, a nightrobe clutched to her ample bosom. Her grief and fear, mingled with embarrassment, shocked him into full consciousness.
“Master,” she said, “Master, I’m sorry, but my lady wouldn’t let me send Diogenes.” She was very careful not to look at him save in quick glances. “It’s Master Bardas. He’s—”
Alf was up, pulling a tunic over his head, striding forward even before it was settled around him.
He heard Bardas’ coughing in the passage, stilled as he opened the door. “Damn it, woman!” Bardas said hoarsely. “You didn’t have to wake the whole household.”
Sophia moved aside as Alf came to the bed. By lamplight her face was death-white. But Bardas’ was grey, clay-colored, filmed with sweat. The hands that tried to thrust Alf away had no strength. “What did you get up for? You don’t sleep enough as it is.” His voice cracked into a cough; he groped for a cloth, snatched it from his wife’s hand.
As the spasm passed, Alf reached for the napkin. Bardas gripped it tightly, but the strong slender fingers pried it away and smoothed it. The stains upon it were scarlet.
Alf met Sophia’s eyes. They were brave and steady, but beneath lay terror. She had seen the death in her husband’s face.
Alf folded the cloth and laid it beside Bardas’ hand. “This isn’t the first time,” he said.
“It’s a touch of lung fever, that’s all. I’m getting better. No need to drag you out of your bed.”
Alf knelt by Bardas’ side. Fear was thick in the room, Katya’s, Sophia’s; and Bardas’, a deep well of it overlaid with anger. Dying, I know it, damn this body; dying, and what will they all do? War’s coming, Sophia’s as good as a man but who’ll believe it, little as
she is, no bigger than a child. Sophia, the girls, poor half-made Nikephoros who was all the son I could manage; some bull of a Frank will trample them all and leave them for dead.
Alf examined him with the light sure touch which so comforted the people who came to Saint Basil’s. In spite of himself Bardas sighed under it. Pain stabbed his lungs; his eyes darkened as he fought back the spasm. But the hands were there, deft and gentle, and the face like a lamp in the gloom. There was nothing boyish in it, nothing even youthful.
No, it seemed to say to him without moving its lips. No one will harm you or yours. Nor will you die. Not yet. Sleep, my friend. Sleep deep.
Bardas fought to hold to the light. But he had no strength against that gentle, implacable will. His eyes closed; his breathing eased and deepened.
“He’ll sleep now,” Alf said, “and be better when he wakes.”
He straightened, drawing a long breath. His face was drawn, his eyes staring blindly into the dark. But the grey pallor had left Bardas’ skin; he slept easily, without that terrible rattling of breath which had frightened Sophia even before the coughing began.
Alf was turning away, wavering a little. She caught his cold hand, though once she had it she could think of nothing to say.
He swayed visibly. She pushed him into a chair and held him there while Katya ran to fetch wine. A sip or two seemed to strengthen him; his eyes lost their blind look, and a ghost of color tinged his cheeks.
Relief made Sophia’s voice sharp. “Don’t you go, too,” she snapped at him.
“I can’t,” he said faintly, or perhaps she imagined it. A moment later he spoke in a different, stronger voice. “Bardas is very ill. I won’t hide that from you. But if he rests and refrains from fretting, he can recover somewhat. Enough to see this war to its end.”
She had known it, but the blow brought her to her knees. Alf reached for her; she shook him off. If her knees had given way, her mind had not. “You’re not well yourself. Go to bed now and give me one less thing to worry about.”
