The Constable walked across the room to where his knee-high boots were standing, the soft upper parts flopped over on their sides. He took the suede boots, sat on the nearest chest, and pulled them on one at a time. Then he stood and surveyed the room briefly; whether he was looking for a chance to escape or simply taking a last leave was unclear. The king’s men blocked the door, their swords drawn. They not only ensured he was trapped, they also kept his wife out. He could hear her anxious voice in the hall demanding an explanation. His squire was still pinned against the far wall, his eyes wide with shock and disbelief.
“John, get word to your father of what has happened,” the Constable ordered the youth before walking briskly toward the men sent to arrest him. He allowed them to close around him as he passed out of the door. They clattered down the stairs and out into the street, leaving John and Lady Eschiva standing on the upstairs landing in horrified paralysis.
“Treason?” Lady Eschiva asked the squire. “Did I hear correctly? Champagne has arrested my lord husband for treason? But that’s not possible!” she protested.
“I’ve got to get word to my father at once!” John answered, his voice breaking with tension as the situation threatened to overwhelm him: he would not turn fourteen for another month.
“Mommy! Mommy! What are they going to do with Daddy?” It was the high-pitched voice of eight-year-old Burgundia. Ten-year-old Guy pushed past her, protesting, “They can’t arrest, Daddy! He’s the Constable!”
Eschiva turned toward her children, but then stopped to look over her shoulder to her husband’s squire. “Yes, John, go to your father at once! If Isabella let this happen, he’s the only one who might be able to help us now!”
The stables behind the house were cramped and dark. The four horses stirred uneasily, and one of them nickered at the unexpected intrusion. John was in such a hurry to get the terrible news of what had happened to his father that he hadn’t thought to bring a light. He fumbled around in the dark, knocking things over, and nearly took the wrong saddle pad. He didn’t bother with brushing his aging gray stallion, nor even picking out his hooves. In his mind, dark images of Lord Aimery chained to a dungeon wall spurred him to greater haste.
He tacked up the big gray in his stall, and then led him out into the narrow street. It was marginally lighter here because a three-quarter moon reflected off the pale limestone of the buildings. The big horse was fussing and nervous as he started to wake up and sensed John’s agitation. John made for the eastern gate of the city. The hoof-falls of the shod stallion echoed through the silent streets. Everywhere the windows were firmly shuttered against the night; there was no sign of life until John reached the city gate itself.
The watchmen in the guardhouse were startled by a demand to open the gate in the middle of the night. One of the men came out and stood silhouetted against the warm orange light of the lamps inside. “Who goes? And what do you want at this time of night?”
Gambling that news of the Constable’s abrupt arrest had not yet reached the watch, John answered as firmly as his nearly-fourteen years allowed, “I’m John d’Ibelin, the Lord Constable’s squire. He has entrusted me with an urgent message for my father, the Lord of Caymont. Let me out at once!”
The sergeant stepped closer to get a better look at John, and quickly verified he was who he said he was. The Constable’s squire was not a nobody. He was a baron’s son, an Ibelin—and half-brother to the ruling Queen. So the sergeant called to one of his men to open the gate, and saluted John. “Give your father my blessings, young man! I wouldn’t have lived to make old bones but for him.”
John nodded absently. Men said things like that to him all the time. His father was Balian d’Ibelin, the man who had led a breakout at Hattin, enabling some three thousand infantry to escape the Saracen encirclement. They were the only infantry to escape that day. His father had also negotiated the surrender of Jerusalem, enabling as many as sixty thousand more people to escape slaughter or slavery. Last but not least, he’d negotiated the Treaty of Ramla, which enabled tens of thousands of Christians who had been enslaved after Hattin to return to what was left of the Kingdom. In short, there were a lot of people who owed his father their freedom, if not their life.
As John emerged on the far side of the heavy barbican, he gently nudged the big horse with his un-spurred heels, and the stallion willingly took up a canter. He was on the main road south, and it was paved from Acre all the way to Haifa. Centurion, as the horse was called, was not particularly swift, but he was tough and trustworthy. He had served John’s father as his warhorse for nearly fifteen years. He had carried the Lord of Ibelin at the Battle on the Litani, at Le Forbelet, to the relief of Kerak twice, and as recently as the Battle of Arsuf—but most important, he had carried the elder Ibelin off the murderous field of Hattin.
John was immensely proud that his father had given him Centurion along with a new hauberk, his first helmet, and a proper sword three months ago. The gifts marked his elevation in status from child to youth as he assumed the duties of squire to Lord Aimery. Lord Aimery was his cousin Eschiva’s husband, the man she had married at the age of eight, when he was already nearing thirty. As a result, John had known him all his life, but John still respected Lord Aimery as a squire should. In his eyes, Lord Aimery was a paragon of chivalry: valorous on the battlefield, courteous to ladies, generous to the poor, pious and sober in word and deed. It was unthinkable that he had committed high treason. John was sure he was innocent, and the need to rescue him from injustice drove him to keep up the fastest pace possible in the dark.
After almost two hours, John reached a fork in the road. Here the right fork bent west to skirt Mount Carmel on the shore, leading to Haifa, while the left fork bent less sharply southeast to follow the valley on the backside of Mount Carmel. John was very fortunate to still have the light of the moon, because he had to take the left fork.
This road had once been the high road to Jerusalem, one of the most heavily traveled routes in the Kingdom. But when the armies of Saladin overran the Kingdom after Hattin, all peaceful travel had come to an abrupt halt. For the following five years, the only people to use the road had been the Saracens, and they had done nothing to maintain it. The Truce of Ramla signed this past August left both the Holy City and Nablus in Saracen hands, so the former highway ended abruptly at the new frontier just beyond Caymont.
The remnants of this once important highway were now nothing but a sad reminder of what had once been. The road was in poor repair, uneven and pocked with potholes. The farther John rode, the worse the surface became. The winter rains washing off the steep slopes of Mount Carmel to his right had deposited stones, rubble, and mud in some places and had broken down the road itself in others. There were whole stretches where the road had sunk and stood awash in muddy water. Centurion had to test his way forward cautiously. John gave him a long rein, trusting the old warhorse to find the best possible footing, but it was impossible to go faster than a slow walk.
While letting the horse find their way forward, John had more time to reflect on what had happened and what an absurd situation he was in. While Lord Aimery was John’s cousin by marriage, the man who had ordered his arrest, the King of Jerusalem, was his brother-in-law, the husband of his half-sister Isabella, his mother’s daughter by her first husband King Amalric of Jerusalem. Although Isabella was seven years older than John and an early marriage had taken her out of her mother’s household, she had always been part of the family circle. John was close to her—at least he’d thought he’d been until now!
The problem, John suspected, was that Lord Aimery was the younger brother of the former King of Jerusalem, Guy de Lusignan. Guy had been married to Isabella’s older half-sister Sibylla. Guy continued to claim the crown for himself, even though he’d usurped the crown in the first place and his royal wife was dead. Things had seemed settled when the English King conquered the island of Cyprus and then sold it to Guy de Lusignan. Guy had sailed away to claim his new pos
session last fall, but John was sure Lord Aimery’s arrest had something to do with him nevertheless.
Dawn was coming. It turned the sky a murky gray, and the contours of the landscape began to emerge more distinctly. The valley had widened substantially, and along the banks of the river there were plowed fields marking where settlers had returned after the truce was concluded. On the far side of the river the hills rose up again, dark against the lightening sky, and there somewhere in the distance lay Nazareth. John could remember the town and the impressive Church of the Annunciation, but it remained in Saracen hands.
The sleepless night was catching up with him. John stopped beside a roadside well that had once belonged to a caravansary. The caravansary itself was abandoned and collecting old leaves and cobwebs, but the well was still functional. John dismounted, and threw a bucket down to draw water. The drum squeaked as it unwound, irritating Centurion, but the bucket splashed into water before it had gone too far. The rains had been good this winter.
John hauled the bucket up, removed it from the hook, and set it down for Centurion to drink. Since he was a small boy, John’s father had taught him the importance of watering the horses first, but the lesson had become anchored in his brain by the knowledge that Hattin had been lost in part because many of the horses had been too dehydrated to withstand the rigors of battle. His father’s younger stallion had refused to drink the night before the battle, and had collapsed under him; his father would have died if Centurion hadn’t been in reserve. The older warhorse had drunk his fill the night before . . .
Now, too, Centurion sucked up the water greedily, so John hauled up a second bucket of water, but this time Centurion sniffed at it, drank a little, and then wandered off, more interested in grass. At last John dunked his tin cup into the water and drank himself.
His thirst quenched, John found he could hardly keep his eyes open. He convinced himself that there was no point arriving too early and waking everyone up. He was, he calculated, only five or six miles from Caymont. He could be there in less than an hour once Centurion was rested. So he unsaddled the big horse, lay down on the saddle blanket, and fell almost instantly into a deep sleep.
A bee woke him, and with a rush of guilt John jumped to his feet. The sun was halfway up the sky. He must have slept for three hours or more, he guessed. Meanwhile, Centurion had wandered a long way off. He grabbed the saddle and blanket and went after him, calling his name. When he was remounted, he set off at a fast pace to make up for his nap.
He had not ridden very far when, coming around a curve in the road, he abruptly came upon a large party of men and an oxcart that completely blocked the road. John drew up, annoyed, as he tried to figure out who they were and what they were doing. They were a mixture of Franks and Syrians, judging from their different head coverings: Syrians in turbans and Franks in fitted linen caps or bareheaded. The Syrians had hitched their kaftans up, while the Franks were wearing nothing but shirts and braies, with the sleeves rolled up over their elbows. They were all barefoot with their feet covered in mud, and they were armed with picks and shovels.
As John took in the little scene, he realized they were trying to clear the debris of a small landslide out of a relatively wide stone-lined irrigation ditch that ran beside the road. The ditch led from a spring farther up the hill to the fields on the upper slope to the right of the road. As they cleared the stones out of the ditch, they lugged them over to the ox-cart to dump them in the back, apparently for use in building or repairing walls elsewhere.
John was about to ride around the party when one of the men who had been wielding a pick to loosen a stone stood to wipe the sweat from his brow, and John recognized his father. “Papa!” John called out in shock and astonishment, before correcting himself to say, “My lord!” It was not at all right for a Baron of Jerusalem to be working with a pick in the mud, John thought.
Just last fall John had personally seen his father treated almost like an equal by King Richard of England. Only a month later al-Adil, the brother of Saladin, had visited the Ibelin stud at Tyre, and again John had seen the elaborate courtesies the Sultan’s brother had shown his father. And now his father was clearing irrigation ditches with his tenant farmers?
Ibelin handed the pick to one of his companions and stepped across the ditch to approach his son, grinning. “John! What an unexpected surprise! What are you doing here?”
“I rode all night to bring you the news! They arrested Uncle Aimery for high treason—in the middle of the night—and the last thing he said to me was to get word to you straightway. But it can’t be true. I’m sure of it. After all, I’ve been with him every minute for the last three months, and he’s done nothing but his duties! He’s completely innocent! You’ve got to do something! You’ve got to—”
“Calm down,” Ibelin interrupted his excited son. “Give me a lift back to the manor, and we’ll talk to your mother.” As he spoke, he went around to Centurion’s left side, put his foot on John’s, and swung himself up into the saddle behind his son. Then he clicked to the faithful warhorse.
John didn’t mind his father riding pillion with him; his best memories of early childhood were riding like this at the front of his father’s saddle. He was distressed, however, by his father’s calm. “You don’t understand! They hauled Lord Aimery out of bed in the middle of the night and have taken him to the royal dungeon! He’s probably chained up, and—”
“John, Aimery is Constable of Jerusalem, and he can only be tried for treason—or any other crime, for that matter—before the High Court of Jerusalem. I’m not the least bit worried that he will be able to defend himself there to the satisfaction of the majority. So don’t worry. For the moment, you need some breakfast, and I certainly need a bath and a change of clothes.”
The “manor” was the seat of his father’s new barony of Caymont. The Truce of Ramla, signed the previous summer, entailed recognition of a new border between Frankish and Saracen territory based on the gains of the campaign led by King Richard of England. In the truce the Saracens recognized Frankish control of the coastal plain from Tyre to Jaffa. But the castle and town of Ibelin, the barony from which John’s family drew its name, had not been included in the truce: it remained in Saracen hands. Likewise, the cities of Ramla and Mirabel, which had been held by John’s uncle, and Nablus, his mother’s dower lands, remained lost to the Saracens. Instead of his rich inheritance, John’s father had been given the small but vacant barony of Caymont, a comparatively small wedge of fertile land southeast of Haifa and a good twelve miles from the sea. Caymont had never owed more than six knights to the feudal levee, and it had never been the seat of a castle, because it lay in a lush but indefensible valley.
Instead of a proper castle with strong exterior walls strengthened by towers, gatehouses, and barbicans like Ibelin, the manor at Caymont was a collection of farm buildings clustered around two courtyards. On one side of the road single-storied, barrel-vaulted storerooms of stone enclosed a square courtyard, with stables backed up against one long side of the square. On the other side of the road a stone arch led to a cobbled courtyard flanked by a mixture of two-storied and one-storied buildings. A second-floor chapel with a crypt under it took up one of the narrow sides of the courtyard. Opposite was the single-storied courthouse. Between these were on one side a well, cisterns, kitchen, brewery, bakery, and wine press, and on the other side a two-storied tract of accommodations. Over the arched entrances to the rooms on the ground floor stretched an open terrace reached by a flight of exterior stairs.
They turned Centurion over to a groom at the stable, crossed the road, and passed through the arch to enter the domestic courtyard. Together father and son climbed the exterior steps to the terrace, where large amphorae sprouted small palms. “Mother’s already started her garden,” John remarked in surprise.
Ibelin laughed. “She’s got her work cut out for her! There was once a walled garden on the back side of this building, but we’ve found over a dozen human skeleton
s there—along with the bones of pigs and dogs that the Saracens evidently slaughtered and then threw down on top of the Christian dead. We’ve tried to give the human remains a proper burial, but I can’t spare the men to clean out the rest of the bones, repair the walls, and clean out the fountain just yet. We need to get the irrigation ditch cleared first, so we’ll have a harvest next year. We also need to fix the vandalized oil presses and repair the damaged stable roof.”
John nodded earnestly. He didn’t like it here at Caymont. It wasn’t home, and it was, he felt certain, haunted. The old Lord of Caymont and his son had both died during the Hattin campaign, and his wife, daughter, and daughter-in-law had failed to recognize the threat until it was too late. They had put up a futile defense against marauding Saracen cavalry and had been slaughtered (or had flung themselves out of the windows rather than submit to slavery) along with their household servants. Because they did not know exactly who had been at Caymont when it was overrun, they did not know if anyone had survived to be enslaved; they only knew they had found dozens of skeletons on their arrival here in early January. They thought they’d buried them all, but this latest story reminded John that there might be more in other unexpected places . . .
“We’re making progress,” Ibelin told his son, reading his distress from his open face, and clapping him on the shoulder.
John glanced up at his father and tried to smile, but as they passed from the bright sunshine of the terrace into the darkness of the hall, his spirits fell again. His mother, a daughter of the Greek imperial family, had been raised in the palaces of Constantinople. As a child she had never walked on floors of anything but marble or mosaic, but here there were nothing but rough flagstones and packed mud on the lower levels. It was more like a barn than a palace, John thought resentfully, glancing at the naked walls and the unglazed windows. How could his mother stand it here?
The Last Crusader Kingdom Page 3
