The Last Crusader Kingdom

by Helena P. Schrader

  “That’s today’s first job!” the mason announced smugly. “Offload the quarry stones from those wagons and load them onto the barges down there.” He pointed to four barges tied up in the moat. While it made sense to transport the heavy stones by barge to the seaward side of the city where the work was to begin, the task of carrying the massive stones down the steep slope of the moat to the barges was daunting. It didn’t help that a stiff southerly breeze had whipped up the surface of the moat, making the barges bob and sway. The mason warned, “And watch what you’re doing. Any cracked or chipped blocks will be deducted from your pay.”

  Ayyub thought that far worse than paying for cracked or chipped stone was the prospect of a broken foot or fingers. A man could be crippled for life if he mishandled stones like these. But a fellow laborer was more concerned about compensation and shouted out, “Just what are you paying?”

  “Should have asked that earlier,” the mason answered with a shrug.

  “I’m asking now,” the workman answered, crossing his arms over his chest in a defiant stance.

  Ayyub frowned. He didn’t want a troublemaker on his team. Employers didn’t always distinguish between individuals and might just fire the whole team. To express his opinion of the other man’s obstinacy, he started in the direction of the cart.

  “There are plenty of men willing to work, if you fancy yourself too good for it,” the mason articulated Ayyub’s gesture.

  “I didn’t say that; I just asked what the wages are,” the first man prevaricated, uncrossing his arms and taking a more cooperative stance.

  “Two dinars a day,” the mason answered.

  “With or without lunch?” a third man asked. By the looks of him, he hadn’t had a square meal in several weeks and probably would have worked for the meal alone.

  “Lunch is included,” the mason answered, and that clearly satisfied the man who had asked about lunch, but not the man who had asked about wages. Although he joined the others at the cart and started to lend a hand, he grumbled. “Slave wages, that’s what they’re paying, the fat bastards! Slave wages!”

  “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” Ayyub snapped at him bitterly.

  “The hell I don’t!” the troublemaker bristled. “I’ve worked construction sites from Paris to Marseilles, and the going rate is two and half! The Archbishop of Sens was paying three for the work on his cathedral.”

  “And I’ve worked construction sites from Aleppo to Cairo, and slave wages are f***ing zero—nothing—shit, spit, and kicks in the ass!” Ayyub snarled bitterly.

  The others looked at him with varying degrees of sympathy. The troublemaker just looked baffled. “Huh?”

  “Stop jawboning and get to work!” The mason put an end to the exchange, and they all put their backs into it.

  It was hard work. They took turns standing on the bed of the cart and lowering a stone onto the back of a comrade, who then staggered down the steep slope to two men aboard the barge. There, one took the stone from the man carrying it and handed it off to the last man, who stacked it on the barge to keep the weight as evenly distributed as possible.

  By terce they felt as if their backs were nearly broken, and all had stripped down to loincloths as they worked in the fierce summer heat. There was still a cart waiting to be unloaded when a wagon arrived laden with water, a cauldron of steaming stew, and loaves of bread. The construction team quit work, too hungry to obey the mason’s orders to finish offloading the last cart first.

  Ayyub grasped for water first and helped himself to two ladles full, pouring it down his parched throat so fast that some of it spilled down the side of his chin. It was lukewarm and tasted stale, but he hardly minded. He then grabbed a loaf of bread and tore several chunks off with his teeth. He’d had nothing to eat since yesterday noon, and had been having dizzy spells in the noonday heat by the time the food arrived. Only after he’d gobbled down half the loaf did he line up for the stew, which smelled strongly of onions and looked greasy. Ayyub wasn’t fussy. He took the bowl offered and started soaking up the soup with what was left of his bread.

  With two dinars, he calculated mentally, he’d be able to afford a bath, a shave, and a decent meal tonight. Furthermore, if he’d been hired for the whole job, not just the day, he had the prospect of earning two dinars per day, or sixty dinars a month, for the next six, eight, maybe even twelve months. Maybe he could start to look for real lodgings, rather than sleeping under an improvised shelter in an alley. It wasn’t that bad now, in the height of summer, but he knew that when the rains and cold set in this fall, sleeping under a leaking roof would be miserable. He didn’t want to have to do that again.

  “Get up! Get up!” the mason started yelling at them. “The master’s coming! Get back to work!” The journeyman sounded rather frightened, Ayyub thought, but he was no more willing than the others to drop his meal just to make their young overseer look good to his master.

  Unable to motivate the workers, the journeyman mason ran forward to meet the master builder with a flood of excuses. The master builder, still flanked by his clerk, frowned, but did not voice any audible reproaches. Instead he ordered (in a sarcastic voice), “When you do get finished, bring your team back to the quay.”

  “Yes, sir!” the young mason promised. “We’ll be there in an hour, sir! You can rely on me, sir!”

  The master builder ignored his subordinate and turned his horse around to return into the city. He found the drawbridge blocked by a party of horsemen riding out of the city. These men wore armor and surcoats, and longswords hung at their hips, spurs glinting on heels: knights.

  “Aren’t those the crosses of Ibelin?” one of Ayyub’s companions asked, pointing to the trapper of the nearest horse. “It must be Balian d’Ibelin! I heard he was passing through on his way back from Sidon to Acre.”

  “No, the rider’s too young,” one of the others retorted.

  Ayyub eagerly turned his attention to the party of knights. He’d been born and raised in Nablus, a city held by the Dowager Queen of Jerusalem. He could still vividly remember the siege of Nablus in 1184, when all the citizens had to take refuge in the citadel while Saladin’s troops sacked the town. The citadel had been awash in frightened humanity, and it was soon obvious that there weren’t enough supplies to feed so many people for more than a day or two. But the Baron of Ibelin had ridden through the night to their relief, and Saladin’s men had fled before him. Ayyub would never forget the moment when the frantic howling of horns announced the baron’s approach and he’d scrambled to the top of a stairway to get a better look.

  Now, a decade later, he could still recognize Ibelin from his memory of that day. Pointing excitedly, he declared, “Beyond the youth, on the chestnut! That’s the Baron of Ibelin!”

  The master builder, too, had recognized the leader of the party blocking his way, and bowed deeply from the waist. Ibelin’s voice, speaking Arabic, carried on the breeze to the curious workers.

  “… on Cyprus . . . aqueducts and drains . . . recommend . . . ”

  The master builder was shaking his head vigorously, but because he faced the opposite direction they could not catch his words.

  Ibelin spoke again, but he leaned forward on his pommel to speak more personally with the builder and lowered his voice. None of the workers could hear what he said, but they saw the master builder respond by shaking his head and gesturing vaguely.

  Ibelin nodded, sat upright again, and signaled his men to turn around. Ayyub got a look at his face: he looked discouraged, Ayyub thought.

  The distraction over, the journeyman turned his attention back to his charges and complained, “What are you gawking at? We need to unload the last cart.”

  “What did my lord of Ibelin want?” Ayyub asked, as he brushed the last crumbs of bread from his hands and stood up to show his readiness to get back to work.

  “Oh, he’s looking for a master builder willing to go with him to Cyprus. He says there are major buildin
g projects that need to be undertaken, but no skilled labor on the island. He’d heard about the master from someone and came here to try to recruit him, but the master’s got more than enough work here.” The journeyman was proud of the fact. “Come on! We need to get this job done.”

  Ayyub dutifully left his chipped bowl back on the stack beside the cauldron, and climbed aboard the last wagon to get the process started again. All the while, his mind was racing. Major building projects. He’d heard the words “aqueducts” and “drains.” Those were things that took real skills: mathematics, geometry, proper plans, and detailed, properly scaled sketches. Not that this project didn’t, but he was as far away from the plans as the earth was from heaven. But once upon a time, when he’d been apprenticed almost a decade ago, he had dreamed of building aqueducts. That was why he’d asked his father to get him a contract with Moses ibn Sa’id. Master Moses was the man who’d built the third aqueduct at Caesarea. He’d come to Nablus to carry out construction of an even more ambitious aqueduct project. They’d only just started work on the aqueduct when Saladin invaded. The army had been called up, and Moses ibn Sa’id had followed the call, joining the feudal host armed with a spiked mace. As a man who’d learned his trade from the ground up and was adept with chisel and hammer, Master Moses was a formidable fighter. But the catastrophe of Hattin had swallowed both of them.

  Ayyub found himself in Nablus when it was overrun by the Saracens just two weeks after Hattin. He’d made the mistake of not fleeing to Jerusalem when the Dowager Queen left with her household, foolishly thinking he’d be fine and still hoping that Master Moses would miraculously turn up. Instead, Ayyub had been picked up in a Saracen dragnet, and despite his fluent command of Arabic and his ambivalent name, was identified as Christian by his inability to produce the right answers about the Koran. Clamped into chains, he’d been sent back to the slave market in Damascus and a nightmare that lasted five years. Slavery had shattered not only the world he had known, but his future as well. When he was finally released by the Treaty of Ramla, he was nineteen years old and trained in nothing but how to endure humiliation, starvation rations, blows, flogging, and endless labor. In five years, Ayyub swore, he had never had a kind word, a gesture of sympathy, or a day of rest.

  The cart was empty at last, and the journeyman released the barges to their respective crews and led his troop of laborers back through the city to the inside quay. Here they found that two cranes had been assembled and mortar was being mixed. As the barges came alongside the outside of the quay, the stones had to be offloaded again and lined up ready for use. Having worked all morning on the eastern edge of the city in the full heat of the rising sun, they now had the pleasure of working on the western edge of the city as the sun sank. The temperature had risen steadily throughout the day, but the breeze had died down. As they worked, the sun glinting off the water was almost blinding, and the heat stewed them in their own sweat.

  The ringing of vespers marked the end of the twelve-hour day at last, and the men dropped whatever they were doing and lined up for their pay. The clerk, protected by two burly sergeants, placed himself behind a crude table, and each man made a mark beside his name on a scroll to confirm receipt.

  Ayyub nodded his thanks to the clerk as he took the two dinars, and stashed them inside a purse tied to a cord inside his kaftan. He then hastened around the corner and up the street to a small square with a public fountain. Here he removed his kaftan again, knelt with one knee on the rim, and reached as deeply as he could into the basin to wash his arms. Then he cupped water so he could wash his face, and poured it with his hands over his head and splashed at the back of his neck. Finally, he splashed his upper body and armpits liberally with water to remove the worst of the sweat and grime. As clean as he could get himself in this manner, he pulled his kaftan back over his head, combed out his wet hair, and retied it behind his head.

  Feeling somewhat restored, although sore all over, he started up the street to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. He had a plan, but it all depended on Master Moses.

  His former master had suffered even more than he had himself. Taken captive on the field of Hattin, his very prowess with the mace had attracted the attention of his enemy. He had killed one man too many, or maybe just the wrong man. In any case, his captors were so full of rage that, once they had disarmed him, they made him lie face down on the bloody field and hacked off his right hand halfway to the elbow. A cripple, he had gone into captivity, and there found himself the property of a bathhouse owner, who used the former master builder to clean out the latrines.

  On his release after the Treaty of Ramla, Master Moses—like thousands of other former slaves—had washed up in Tyre. In a city overrun with released captives, he was nothing special, just another ex-slave—and a crippled one at that. No one cared what he’d been before Hattin, and a man of forty-something with just one hand could not compete with hordes of healthier, younger men like Ayyub himself. He had ended up a beggar, and it was in this capacity that Ayyub and Moses had met again roughly a year earlier.

  Since then Ayyub had made a point of sharing some of his earnings whenever he was lucky. That was rare enough, and Master Moses was visibly failing. He was permanently bent, skeletally thin, and increasingly mentally absent as well. Ayyub was terrified the former master might be too far gone to help him now.

  At least he was sitting in his usual spot, nestled into one of the niches formed by the receding arches of the main portal. He had a dirty rag spread out before him for people to drop coins into as they entered or departed. His unkempt mane of graying hair hung about his shoulders, but it had thinned so much that his scabby scalp showed through in many places. His wrinkled face was dirty and blank. He sat with his knees bent before him and his stump propped on them for all to see: a silent plea for alms.

  “Master Moses!” Ayyub called as he reached the foot of the stairs up to the portal and started up them.

  His former master’s head swung slowly and stared at Ayyub as he approached. He did not smile in pleasure; he just stared.

  “Master Moses.” Ayyub went down on his heels in front of the beggar. “What would you say to working as a master builder again? To building aqueducts?”

  “I’d say you’ve gone mad,” came the bitter answer.

  “But could you do it? Could you design and build an aqueduct? Like we were going to do together?”

  “Have you been drinking or chewing khat?” the master builder asked, narrowing his eyes and eyeing Ayyub suspiciously.

  “Neither! I can’t afford such luxuries. The Baron of Ibelin is looking for a master builder to build aqueducts and sewage drains on Cyprus.”

  “I’ve seen more sewage drains than I ever want to see the rest of my life!” the ex-slave growled. “Go away!”

  “This isn’t about cleaning them out,” Ayyub protested frantically, his dreams collapsing around his ears. “It’s about designing them and watching other people build them.”

  The beggar snorted skeptically and snarled, “What’s in it for you?”

  “Just that you take me on as your apprentice, like before: that you take me with you.”

  “Where?”

  “To Cyprus! Didn’t I already say that? Ibelin wants a master builder willing to go with him to Cyprus.”

  “That’s what you say!” Moses scoffed. “Sounds like a drunkard’s dream to me.”

  “I’m not drunk. I’m stone-cold sober, and I heard the exchange myself. What’s the harm in trying?”

  “Trying what?”

  “Going to find the Baron of Ibelin and presenting yourself.”

  Moses ibn Sa’id made a rude noise.

  “Come with me!” Ayyub insisted, reaching out to pull Moses to his feet by his forearm.

  Moses tried to shake him off, but Ayyub was stronger. “You’re coming with me,” Ayyub insisted.

  Moses was too weak to effectively resist, and so he found himself being dragged through the streets to a small and rather dis
reputable bathhouse run by a fellow Syrian Christian. Ayyub handed the bathhouse owner twelve obols and pulled Moses inside with him. The bath boy made a face at the sight and stink of the beggar, but his employer cuffed him and told him to get to work. The two guests stripped out of their filthy rags, and each lay face down on a bench. At once they began to soak in a sense of luxury and relaxation as their bodies sweated away the accumulated filth of weeks (or months, in Moses’ case). They were washed down by the attendant, lathered in soap, washed again, oiled, and washed a third time.

  Ayyub’s stomach was growling long before they were finished, and it cost him considerable discipline to pay for a barber, gutting his food money, but the transformation in Moses was significant. Except for their clothes, they both looked quite respectable by the time they showed up at the Archbishop’s palace and requested an audience with the Baron of Ibelin.

  “Beggars go to the back. You can get leftovers from the kitchen there,” the Turcopole guard dismissed them.

  “That’s a good idea,” Moses agreed, turning away at once. Ayyub stopped him. “First we talk to the baron,” he told his companion.

  “Didn’t you hear the young man? He’s not going to see us.”

  “Yes, he will,” Ayyub insisted, turning back to the Turcopole. “Sir,” he addressed the Turcopole, “listen to us. We’re not here to beg. We’re here to offer our services to the Baron of Ibelin.”

  “Don’t make me laugh,” the Turcopole answered. “Move along.”

  “Not until you’ve at least sent word to the Baron of Ibelin that the master builder who built the aqueduct at Caesarea, the man who was building the aqueduct at Nablus, is here requesting an audience.”

  The Turcopole narrowed his eyes and looked from Ayyub to Moses and back again. “If this is a hoax, I’ll have you both in the stocks for a week,” he threatened.

  “And we’d deserve it,” Ayyub answered steadily, meeting his eye, “but I’m not lying. The Baron of Ibelin is looking for my friend. He’ll be angry if he finds out we were here and you turned us away.”