Lord Aimery had already gone to bed when John returned, and only grunted something about it taking “rather long to look after the horses.” John apologized, admitted he’d stopped for something to eat, and offered to fetch something for his lord. Lord Aimery said he wasn’t hungry and turned his back on John.
John undressed himself and got into the other side of bed, but he couldn’t sleep. As the rain grew heavy and splattered against the shutters of the rented room, he pictured the man in the alley clutching at his wet dog for warmth. Why had he run away? The man was obviously harmless. Indeed, the very loyalty of the dog suggested he was kind to it. John shuddered at the thought of sleeping in the alley on a night like this. But why did the old man do it? Why didn’t he seek out the hospice of St. John?
John’s guilt was increasing. His father had sacrificed his entire inheritance, including the lovely and rich barony of Ibelin, to secure the release of twenty thousand Christians from Saracen slavery. His father said they had no right to a barony when so many Christians did not own even their bodies. Yet there were so many of them, and none of them had money, land, or jobs. John was certain that the man in the alley was a returned captive. Unable to sleep, he resolved to return the following morning to bring the man a loaf of bread and a round of cheese—unless the winds died down and they could sail, of course.
The next morning, the wind was stronger than ever and laced with showers. John bought a loaf of bread and cheese and returned to the alley beside the harbor-side tavern. When he came around the corner (half hoping there would be no one there), he found the man rolled against the wall, completely covered by his filthy and ragged blanket.
At the sight of John, the dog sprang to his feet and started howling piteously. It wasn’t the defensive barking of the day before, but a mournful wailing that made the hair stand up on the back of John’s neck. The man beside him didn’t move.
“Hello!” John called out, instinctively keeping his distance. “Hello! I’ve brought you bread and cheese, but you really ought to go to the brothers of St. John.”
The man under the blanket didn’t stir.
“Christ!” John muttered to himself. His instincts were screaming, “Run away,” but that would be cowardly, and Ibelins were not cowards. “Hello! Wake up!” he called louder still, with the same response: none at all.
Swallowing down his revulsion, John took a step nearer, and with the toe of his boot he nudged the man in the back. The slight jostling made him roll away from the wall and sprawl out at John’s feet. The hand that had been clutching the blanket flopped down, opening the blanket to reveal the man more clearly. John gasped in horror. The man was a leper! And he was very clearly dead.
Crossing himself fervently, John said a prayer for the dead man’s soul, and turned to flee. He should have told the brothers of St. John about the man yesterday, he admonished himself. They would have taken him to the brothers of St. Lazarus. Maybe if he’d spent the night in the leprosarium he could have survived. “Forgive me, Father,” he muttered to himself in guilt. “Forgive me, Father, I didn’t know. . . .” But he could have looked harder, or asked, or just gone to the good brothers, his conscience said.
John fled from his crime of negligence—only to be stopped in his tracks by the howling of the dog. Poor thing. He’d just lost his master, John registered, and he stopped and looked back. The dog stopped howling and looked at him with big, mournful eyes. “Do you want to come with me, boy?” he asked the dog.
The dog looked back sadly.
“Here.” John held out the loaf of bread. “It’s all for you, now,” he told the dog.
The dog looked at the bread, up at his face, back at the bread, up at his face. But he didn’t move.
“You’ll have to come and get it. I won’t bring it to you,” John told him.
The dog took a step forward, then stopped to look back at the corpse. His chest was heaving as if the parting hurt him physically. John broke down. He crossed the distance to the dog, went down on one knee beside him and, stroking his head, gave him the loaf of bread. The dog took it in his teeth, only to drop it on the ground. Again he looked over his shoulder at his dead master, and then up at John again.
“If you come with me, boy, I’ll take care of you.” If Lord Aimery lets me, John added under his breath. “But first we’ll go to the brothers of St. Lazarus, and pay them to bury your master and say a Mass for him.” The thought made John feel better, and getting back to his feet he set off in the direction of the leprosarium—with frequent checks to be sure the dog was trailing him.
At the leprosarium John rang the bell, and informed the lay brother who answered that he had seen the corpse of a leper lying in an alley by the quay. The man, himself a leper, nodded, “That’ll be old Oliver! We warned him he’d end like this—but, no, he was too good to live with the likes of us! Old ornery bastard! Don’t worry about him, boy. We’ll collect his rotten bones and see they get underground.” Then he held out the palm of his fingerless hand for alms.
John dutifully pulled out his purse and dropped a dinar into the leper’s palm with a sense of relief for having done his Christian duty. But as he went to put the purse away again he also noticed how much lighter it felt than the day before. Had he really gone through most of his coins already?
The chiming of the church bells ringing terce made him realize he was long overdue at his lodgings. He’d told Lord Aimery he was just nipping out for breakfast. As he hastened across town with the dog still trailing him, he started to prepare his arguments for keeping the dog. When he reached their lodgings, rather than plunging inside, he stopped and patted the side of his leg. “Come here, boy.”
The dog hesitantly came nearer, then stopped with wary looks at his surroundings.
John returned the half-dozen steps to the dog and went down on one knee to scratch him behind his ears. The dog closed his eyes in contentment. John explained, “I’m going to ask Lord Aimery if I can keep you, but you’ll have to wait for me here.”
The dog gazed at him solemnly.
John got back to his feet, but before turning to go inside he bent to pet the dog one more time. “One way or the other, I’ll be back and see that you get a decent meal. I promise.”
The dog finally wagged his tail a couple of times, as if hope of some kind was returning.
“John!” The voice of Lord Aimery from the window overhead made John jump. Aimery had opened the shutter and was looking down into the street. “Just bring the cur in with you!”
“My lord?”
“Bring the shaggy mutt inside so we can wash the fleas out of his hair before we go aboard ship.”
“You mean I can keep him?” John asked hopefully.
“Why not? He reminds me of the flea-bitten mongrel I had at your age.”
The smile that broke out on John’s face brightened the day for Aimery. It was going to be just the two of them for an indefinite period to come, and Aimery was determined to ensure John had no reason to regret his decision to come to Cyprus. Besides, John was his best means of ensuring Ibelin’s support in the future.
Lord Aimery insisted on calling the dog “Barry” in honor of his father-in-law and John’s uncle, the Baron of Ramla and Mirabel. John wasn’t entirely sure that was a compliment to either of them—but then, Lord Aimery’s relationship with his wife’s father had often been strained. John’s own memories of his uncle were few, and were overshadowed by his uncle’s dramatic decision to go into self-imposed exile rather than take an oath of fealty to Guy de Lusignan. The entire Kingdom had been amazed by such a dramatic gesture of contempt for the usurper, and John’s father stressed the nobility of putting one’s principles ahead of one’s interests. John’s mother, on the other hand, noted that compromise was the essence of politics, and suggested that the good of the Kingdom sometimes had to come ahead of one’s personal feelings. Either way, John could not remember his uncle ever smiling, so the name in some ways fit the melancholy dog. Still, John couldn’t he
lp but wonder if it wasn’t the idea of giving commands to “Barry” that made Lord Aimery name the dog after his father-in-law.
Of course, it didn’t matter to John as long as Barry was accepted into their little traveling party of two humans, four horses (two for Lord Aimery, Centurion, and their packhorse) and, now, a dog. The galley captain made no objection to Barry, simply confining him below deck with the horses, and they set sail shortly after sunrise on Palm Sunday.
John and Lord Aimery stood on the stern watching the land recede until there was nothing to see, not even the spires of the churches. John was acutely conscious that he had left his homeland for the first time in his life, and it frightened him a little. Some evil voice was whispering, “You might never see it again, or your father or mother or brother and sisters. . . .”
For Lord Aimery, on the other hand, the severing of ties seemed to have a liberating effect. He took a deep breath of sea air, then looked down at John with a slight smile on his face and declared: “Well, lad, we’re committed now. Let’s go up to the bow and look forward rather than back.”
Together they made their way across the waist of the ship, which was increasingly pitching and rolling as they headed into more open waters, and pulled themselves up by the ladders onto the forepeak. Here spume from the waves breaking on the bow made the planking wet, and now and again a wave broke in greater force, splattering water, but Lord Aimery just laughed and took a firm hold on the railing.
“Cyprus,” he told John, “is the closest thing to Paradise on earth. It’s fertile, gets plenty of rain, and has massive forests full of game. You can grow anything on Cyprus—olives, wine, wheat and barley, citrus trees and sugar cane.” That sounded no different than home to John, but he just nodded, happy to see Lord Aimery’s spirits picking up.
As the wind got colder, however, they retreated to the shelter of the main deck and accepted an invitation from the captain to join him for the midday meal. The captain of this vessel was Venetian. He was a wiry, darkly tanned man with a neatly trimmed beard already flecked with grey. His eyes sat deep in their sockets and seemed almost permanently focused on the horizon, shunning eye contact with humans. He was taciturn, which had suited Aimery well enough up to now, because he was traveling incognito and had not wanted any questions asked. Now he was in the mood for talking, and he sought to draw the man out more.
“Tell us of affairs on Cyprus,” he urged.
The Captain raised his eyebrows. “I thought you knew.”
“I have not been there for about a year.”
The Venetian remarked rather grimly, “Much has happened since.”
“Are you from Cyprus?” Lord Aimery asked next.
“Me? I was born in Constantinople. My brothers and I were one of the few crews that managed to escape impoundment by the Emperor Manuel when he treacherously imprisoned the entire Venetian commune and confiscated our property! My father was not so lucky. He was arrested on his way down to the harbor, and is still in a dungeon in Constantinople—for nothing! For simply being a Latin!” the Venetian spat out furiously, and Aimery thought he was beginning to understand his dour temperament. The man was being eaten from the inside by hate and guilt.
“But the Emperor Manuel was friendly to the Kingdom of Jerusalem,” John burst out, forgetting his place in his eagerness to defend his mother’s great-uncle.
“Friendly? When he wanted to be!” the Venetian snarled back.
“He sent his nieces to marry our kings, and he married his only son to the Princess of Antioch,” John reminded him, with a glance at Lord Aimery requesting both forgiveness and permission for speaking up. The latter gave both with a shrug.
“A lot of good that did!” the Venetian retorted. “She only made the mob hate us Latins more. When they turned on the Genoans and Pisans, they didn’t just arrest them as Manuel did us: they tortured and slaughtered them.” There was, Aimery thought, almost satisfaction in the Venetian’s voice as he reported the fate of the men from rival city-states who had sought to profit from Venetian misfortune.
“You can’t trust the Greeks,” the Venetian added. “They lie and cheat and stab you in the back at the first opportunity. They do that even with their own—look how Andronicus killed his nephew Alexius, and then the mob tore him to pieces, and put Isaac Angelus in his place—a nobody and a coward.”
John had heard this from his mother, too, and nodded.
“But they’ll do it first and foremost to any Latin. Take my word for it, they hate us all, and they will cheat us any way they can. Richard of England did Christendom a favor when he seized Cyprus from the Greeks.” The captain continued, “But then the Templars took over,” the captain complained, adding viperously: “A covetous and bigoted Order!”
John had been raised to respect the Knights Templar. His father had frequently praised their discipline on the battlefield and their piety. “What do you mean?” he challenged the captain, with a quick look at his lord to be sure he was still going to be allowed to speak up.
“The Templars are bankers first and knights second, believe me! They are more interested in amassing wealth than in fighting for the Holy Land!”
Worlds were clashing—the mercantile world of the Venetians with the chivalric world of Aimery and John—and both the latter looked shocked. This time John did not need to speak, because Aimery himself hastened to defend the Templars. “You speak out of place, Captain. I have seen how selflessly the Templars fight—at Hattin and Arsuf. More: I saw the survivors of Hattin cruelly and brutally executed by Muslim Sufis after the Battle. They were brave and pious men!”
“Oh, the sheep for the slaughter may be brave and selfless enough, but their leaders are more grasping than the Pope himself!” His passengers only looked more offended at this remark, so the Captain dismissed them as naive and stupid, remarking disdainfully, “Well, don’t take my word for it; but if you plan to spend any time on Cyprus, you’ll have the pleasure of reaping the consequences of Templar greed. They tried to tax too many and too much, and the people rose up in rebellion. You’ll see. Taxation and the persecution of the Orthodox Church have turned all Cypriots into our enemies. Never meddle with a man’s faith, if you want to live at peace with him,” the captain advised; he downed the rest of his wine standing before pounding up the ladder and back on deck.
Their ship put in at the small fishing port of Famagusta.** Lord Aimery would have preferred to land at Limassol. As the main port on the south coast of the island, Limassol had a cathedral and a royal castle, where they could have requested hospitality. Their captain, however, flatly refused to sail on, pointing out, “You paid for passage to Cyprus and didn’t quibble about which port when we struck the price.” Aimery now was beginning to suspect the captain of smuggling, and that he wanted to avoid ports at which customs officials could be expected—but Aimery was in no position to challenge the Venetian, so they disembarked at Famagusta.
The town appeared poor and rundown. There were no more than a half-dozen churches, all Greek Orthodox, a small marketplace surrounded by shops under an arcade, and a collection of narrow whitewashed houses with flat roofs. There were only two inns offering rooms, neither of which looked free of fleas—but it was rapidly getting dark by the time Aimery and John offloaded their goods and horses, and they could not ride in the dark on unfamiliar roads to a place they had never been.
They agreed on the least disreputable-looking of the two inns, put the horses in the pathetic shed that was identified as the “stables,” and then settled into the tavern for wine and a meal, with Barry clinging unhappily to their heels. There were only four tables in the entire tavern, and none were taken when they first sat down.
Before their meal was dumped in front of them by a slovenly and resentful landlord, all the other tables had been occupied—and served. That they were kept waiting so long while the others were served first was obviously intentional and insulting, but the alternative was not to eat, so Aimery kept his temper in check. He did,
however, feel bad that John’s first impression of Cyprus was so poor.
John, on the other hand, was far less disappointed than Aimery suspected. The very rundown, seedy character of the town suggested “adventure” to John, who shared his lord’s suspicions about their captain. John had convinced himself the Venetian was really a former pirate now engaged in smuggling. Which meant he was now in a smugglers’ den, John reasoned. Furthermore, being surrounded by people speaking Greek underlined the fact that they had left the familiar behind.
John had learned Greek in the schoolroom from a Greek priest who had accompanied his mother as a bride to the Court of Jerusalem. Father Angelus had been one of John’s two tutors and responsible for both the language and the history of the Greeks, as well as mathematics and geometry. John had practiced Greek with his mother now and again because it pleased her, but he had never been terribly enthusiastic about the language. Now, as his ears began to separate words from the flood of sounds, he found himself straining to understand more.
“Please” and “thank you,” “another,” “more,” “wine,” “good,” and the like were easily understood, but while Lord Aimery slipped again into his thoughts, John started to pick up whole phrases. “Who do you think they are?”
“Franks; that’s enough for me.”
John caught his breath and tried to look over at the men talking about them without being obvious about it. Pretending to look for the proprietor, he let his eyes slide over the men at the table to the right. They looked like farmers to him, except for a young Orthodox monk with a thick black beard under a wide nose. John didn’t dare let his eyes linger. Finding the proprietor, he signaled and called for more wine—in French. Instinctively he shied away from using Greek, both because he didn’t trust his knowledge of the language entirely and because some part of his brain suggested it might be better if the others didn’t know he understood them.
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