“Oh yes, there, that is delicious.” She sighed deeply while Elias’s lips and tongue explored her neck and ear.
Maliha moaned and twisted in the tub so she lay on her side in Elias’s arms. She presented her lips for more kisses. Their tongues reached into each other’s mouths to play together.
After making love in the bath, they fell deeply asleep in each other’s arms in the curtained bed, and the sounds of servants quietly removing the bath and cleaning up the water that had splashed everywhere did not register with them at all.
BEFORE THEY went out the door, Elias strapped on his sword belt. He put a palm on the small of Maliha’s back and guided her to Andronikos’s rooms.
Ushered all the way into Andronikos’s private bedchamber, the two saw that Albrecht was installed in the master’s bed, a physician putting the final touches on a bandage on his leg. The aroma of salves and poultices tinged the air already redolent with the spices used in food. Albrecht smiled sheepishly from where he sat propped up on silken pillows. Andronikos sat on the bed, holding his hand.
He looked up as his guests entered. “My lord and lady, welcome! I thank you for agreeing to have dinner with us.”
Elias, with a fond glance at his squire, bowed graciously. “It is generous of you, my lord. It seems I have much to be grateful to you for.” He glanced at Maliha. “You have taken good care of my family.”
Maliha’s face shot to his, her lips forming a tiny O. Tears sprang to her eyes. “Oh, Elias,” she sighed.
Andronikos beamed at them both. He looked over at Albrecht, whose loving face turned between him and the others.
Elias took Maliha’s hand. “Come meet Albrecht more formally,” he invited. He led Maliha to the bed, where he sat on the edge and drew his beloved to sit on his other side. “Albrecht, my friend, this is my darling Maliha. We have a son, Tacetin.”
The squire laughed. “I’ve met Tacetin. He came to show me his kitten.”
Maliha laughed delightedly. “Papaki?”
“Yes, that means duckling, though why he named a kitten after a duck, I don’t know.”
Andronikos sat on the other side of the bed and held Albrecht’s hand, massaging its back with his thumb. “I can tell you that.” He smiled. “Tacetin remembered your shield with the upside-down duck. He noticed how the kitten liked to lie on its back and play with his fingers.”
After he stopped laughing, Elias asked, “How is your wound?”
Andronikos replied for him, “Now that he had the loving care he needs, it will be well. I shall see to that myself.” He leaned in and shared a light kiss with Albrecht.
The servants brought in low tables and placed them near the bed. “I do not want my Albertos to feel left out, so if you do not mind, we shall sup at his bedside,” he explained. Albrecht smiled at the use of one of Andronikos’s nicknames for him.
Over their supper, Andronikos brought Elias up on what had transpired while the pilgrims were gone. “You had hardly left Nicomedia when another party of pilgrims arrived from Nevers.”
“Count William?” he asked, looking up from picking a delicacy from a polished teak tray.
Andronikos nodded. “Just as we were clearing up the mess in the city from your lot.” He winked at Albrecht, whom he fed from his own fingers. “When the Nivenais came in such spectacular order, the city wished they had arrived first. They did not linger, anxious to join your Burgundy and the rest of you, and set out immediately for Ancyra.”
“So the news had reached you of our conquest?”
Andronikos hid a wry smile behind his hand. “Of an unguarded stronghold?”
Elias frowned. “There was battle. I was in it.”
Maliha gave a small cry and touched his arm. Elias patted it and murmured reassurances.
Andronikos smiled at Albrecht as he said to the others, “My dearest one has told me a little about what you endured. The waves of bowmen. The daily attacks. How you finally came to the Plain of Merzifon. You came away unwounded, my lord?” he asked Elias.
Elias uneasily replied, “No, not unwounded.”
Maliha broke in, “No indeed. He has many bruises and almost as many cuts. I had lotions and salves to ease the pain.”
Elias thought, But not to my pride or sense of honor. Aloud he added, “I am sorry that I cannot remain here long.”
Maliha squeezed his arm. “Why? Can you not stay here?”
“I made a pledge. For my father’s sake. To pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And to free the Holy Land from the paynim.”
Andronikos looked from Elias’s to Maliha’s face. “I should think you would have had enough of fighting for pilgrims like Toulouse, Blois, and the others, all such true Christians.”
Elias’s brows furrowed with the pain of sudden biting memories. “I still have to go to Jerusalem. I have to learn what happened to my father. Then I have… nowhere to go.”
Andronikos cleared his throat. “I was hoping you would stay and be the captain of my personal guard.”
Elias looked up sharply. “You have no guard, my lord.”
“I think it is high time I got one.
“Master says we will go to Jerusalem later, when all this fighting has died down. On his ship,” Maliha urged hopefully.
Elias looked at Andronikos, then back at Maliha. He put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed. “What about Albrecht? Will he still be my squire?” He looked up at Albrecht’s face.
Before Albrecht could answer, Andronikos said, “Albertos need never fight or wield a sword again. He will be my beloved companion for as long as he wants to be. He may do whatever he wishes in the world. I shall see to that.”
The two men locked eyes. Albrecht’s were full of wonder. “You love me that much?” he said hoarsely.
Andronikos gazed back. “With all my heart and soul.” They continued to gaze.
“Oh, Andronikos, ich liebe dich,” Albrecht breathed in German. “I did not know I could love again, but I do.”
The Greek eunuch did not need a translation.
Maliha spoke up. “My love, I meant to tell you. A strange little man came with the last party. A fellow named… what was it, Hans? He said he knew you.”
Andronikos interrupted. “Clearly he was mistaken, for he asked for the Lady Elisabeth.”
“Hans!” Elias and Albrecht said together.
“He was my guest here, as squire to one of the lords traveling with Welf. That is your king, is it not? Or duke?”
Blood draining from his face, Elias asked, “That lord was not named Reinhardt, by any chance, was he?”
Andronikos shook his head. “No, it was another Conrad. But the visitor mentioned this Reinhardt, though, who he said was a scoundrel who married your sister. This fellow said that the scoundrel dismissed him so he came with others to Constantinople. He said nothing about whether his former lord came as well. And he did not mention you at all.”
Albrecht and Elias stared at each other until the former breathed, “Can Hans hurt us?”
Andronikos, his expression shifting to anger, said, “If he tried to hurt my papaki, he would be sorry. But you need not vex yourself. He is gone. He was with Welf, as I said, as well as a most charming man, a troubadour of some renown, Duke William of Aquitaine. What a talented lot the nobles of that land are. And a most extraordinary woman, Ida, the dowager margravina of Austria.”
Elias sat up so quickly he knocked his goblet of wine from its perch on his knee. “Ida? She was here?”
Maliha looked concerned and leaned to mop at the dark-red liquid soaking into the covers of the bed. “Do you know her?”
“An extraordinarily beautiful woman.” Andronikos added, “If you go in for that sort of thing.” He winked at Albrecht. But as quickly, he shot his attention to Elias. He had stood and was stepping around the low table. “What is amiss?”
Elias cried as he darted out of the chamber, “Ida. She and her party are almost certainly headed into disaster! I have to stop them!”
/>
“Elias, wait!”
In the corridor he reluctantly slowed, then turned to see Maliha racing after him.
“What are you doing? Where are you going? We just had one night together.” Maliha rushed into the arms he held out for her. Elias could feel her trembling, but was shocked at the combination of fear and fury in her face.
“Ida and her party…. I have to warn them,” he said frantically.
He watched her face. He could feel the intensity of her examination of his own. She seemed to search every line to divine his motives. “You are leaving me?” she demanded.
He realized he did not know what his plans were. Just as he had told Albrecht as they approached the city walls, he was struggling to make peace with his vow. More than one vow. He still held the vow from his brother, to follow their father to the Holy Land and either find and join him or, if he was dead, to pray at the Holy Sepulchre for not only their parents’ souls but his brother’s as well. He realized the pilgrim’s oath he took in Austria was the lesser to the prior and more heartfelt promise he had made before he even left Winterkirche.
Elias dropped his arms from around Maliha. He stared miserably at the floor. “No. I mean, yes. I mean, I don’t want to….”
When he looked up at Maliha, she was standing rigid, her arms clasped around her and her face ruddy with anger. “Just like my father,” she spat. “No care for your family. You just want to go fight with your comrades. Those who love and need you be damned.”
She started to turn away, but Elias reached out and grasped her arm. One word had made it into his mind: “family.” He had owed it to his family to continue his quest. But they were all dead. I have a new family now. All of them are living.
“Maliha, I love you. I will try to come back. But I have to warn them. I cannot be responsible for their deaths if I can stop it. If I can, I will come back. I owe you and Tacetin that.” I owe myself that.
“Can I believe you?” she replied.
Elias took her hands in his and lowered himself to one knee. “I will come back to you if God wills it. I cannot be foresworn. I love you. You and our son are my life. You are the only life I have ever had. If I am not killed in the attempt, I will be at your side.”
Maliha frowned down into his face. “You are not going to that woman, Ida.” She stated it as a fact.
“Ida? No. Not just Ida. All those people. Not so much the leaders, but all the ones who tag along with an army, full of those false promises. I have seen it for myself now. The princes, whether those of the world or of the Church, will leave the followers in the dust and to their deaths. They don’t care what happens to them. Just like your father, dropping your mother and you without a second thought. I… I can’t be like that. You mean too much to me.”
Maliha gazed into his eyes. “You are telling the truth.”
Elias gazed back. He slowly stood and took her into his arms again. Glancing up, he saw Andronikos standing at the door to his chamber, watching them. Meeting Elias’s eye, Andronikos held up one hand as if in blessing. “Go with God, young lord, but come back to us.”
IT FELT strange riding alone along the roads to Ancyra he had traversed months ago with the entire pilgrim force. It chilled him to think that only a handful—no more than six score of the men, women, and children who had marched, laughed, argued, sung, complained, and breathed—would ever see their homelands again.
At his first stop to beg water and fodder for Gauner, he learned from wary villagers that not only had the Nivenais force passed through, taking what little food the natives of the region had left, but they had passed through again, heading back in the same direction. The peasants did not know why or where they had gone. Elias knew he must retrace his steps and learn where they had turned off. The only thing he was confident about was that they had not returned to Constantinople or even Nicomedia. He would have intercepted them if they had.
He quizzed the peasants and the people further and learned that no second group had passed through the village. So Ida’s party clearly had learned what he had not and followed the Nivenais along the same course. If Elias had stopped sooner for provender, he would not have wasted time in his pursuit.
Retracing his steps back through what was now well within Byzantine territory, he finally learned the Nivenais had taken the road south to Dorylaeum. The later party had followed. Turning his own mount in the same direction, he worried that the two parties, almost six weeks separated, would make easy targets for the strengthening armies of Kilij Arslan and his now staunch ally, Malik Ghazi. He could only pray the two groups of pilgrims had met somewhere along the way, at Dorylaeum or Konya, and combined forces.
He thought about what Andronikos had told him. The body of pilgrims, which included the margravina, had arrived in Constantinople not long after the Nivenais left to overtake his own force. The last group had not hurried after them. Petty jealousies played a part in this decision, as they had with Raymond, Blois, and the others. William hated Count Raymond of Toulouse, for the duchess was the daughter of Raymond’s older brother and should have inherited the county. Duke Welf was a bitter rival of the Holy Roman emperor and had no wish to ally himself with the constable of the emperor, Conrad. So while the count of Nevers made haste on the journey, hoping to combine forces with Raymond and his pilgrims, the Aquitainians and Bavarians had rested in the area across the Bosporus from Constantinople, and, when they left, headed to Dorylaeum to make their way south to Syria and Palestine. One party, including a man named Eckhardt, who was chronicling the pilgrimage, took ship directly to Palestine.
So, Elias realized, the Nivenais must have arrived at Ancyra, expecting to be directed to Raymond’s location, but no one there knew anything about his whereabouts. Elias thought it was suspicious that Count William did not even learn the direction they had taken only a few weeks before. The Nivenais must have assumed the first group of pilgrims pursued their original course, south to Konya, so they headed in that direction as well, taking a roundabout path. He could only hope their backtracking allowed the latter group to catch up and combine forces. They were well equipped, much better than the Nivenais, but neither group could face what Elias had seen. The Seljuk Turk and Danishmend armies were greater still.
ELIAS ARRIVED at Konya to find it all but deserted. From a mullah in a nearby village, he learned that indeed Count William of Nevers had tried to take the city but had failed and moved on. The mullah’s eyes burned with pride as he recounted that tale, but they grew dismal when he went on. “Then we saw the bigger army. Most of us fled. But we took all the food with us. And everything else we could carry. When they got here, the place was of no use to them, the infidels. They got a taste of what Allah, may he be praised, has in store for them. For you as well, dog of a Christian.”
Elias thought he ought to get away from there quickly, but he ventured, “Where did they go?”
The man leered with savage delight. “Herakleia.” The knife-edge sharpness of his words chilled Elias to the core.
Astonished that he had made it out of even a deserted town alive, the animosity toward pilgrims was so understandably great, Elias pressed on. Soon he discovered that every well the road passed was blocked. The villages were deserted and emptied of anything he or Gauner could eat. After being forced to camp without a fire, he rode on the next day.
Finally, he saw before him some hills rising about the plain. The road, it appeared, wound its way between them. A presentiment made a chill go down his perspiring back even before he saw the swirling black shapes in the sky. He knew as he rode closer that they were carrion birds, as he had feared. There was an untold number. He urged the already dehydrated Gauner to a faster pace. He kept his eyes dead ahead, waiting to see the first body, not remembering to protect himself from ambush.
As he rode into the defile, he started to see them. First a score, then a hundred, then innumerable corpses, most already picked at by the carrion birds. He scanned the bodies as tears ran down his cheeks, making
the stifling heat under his helm humid and even more unbearable. Men, all men. No women. He saw a long, narrow pool of water ahead alongside the road in a small widening of the track between the hills. There were so many bodies next to it he almost could not see the water. But Gauner saw it and pulled forward. Elias dragged back the reins to keep him in check.
Elias scanned the space before him and saw something rising above the barrier of the bodies. Some sort of large box. Wood with cloth of some sort. A litter! He leapt from Gauner’s back and ran to the litter.
“Ida, Ida!” he called. “Where are you?” He dashed about the litter, looking at the bodies. He caught sight of what looked like a woman’s cloak. The woman was mostly hidden under other bodies, but he managed to pull her out and turn her over. It was one of Ida’s serving women, Elias saw. And she was quite dead, though how she had died, Elias could not tell. She was bloody enough that if there was a wound, it would require a search to find it. He abandoned the woman’s corpse.
Gauner, no longer restrained, had found his way through and over the bodies to the pool and was undoubtedly drinking his fill. Elias’s own throat was parched, but he would not leave off his search.
He heard a small noise from the direction of the overturned litter. It came again, a faint moan. He dashed to the litter and lifted it to look underneath. There indeed was a body, a woman’s body. The clothing was soaked with blood and caked with dirt, but nevertheless clearly of rich quality. Her face was… it hardly looked like a face. Elias knelt by the woman and lifted her upper body in his arms.
“Your Grace?”
The moaning stopped. “Who ith that?” she lisped. The voice was Ida’s, recognizable in spite of its hoarseness.
“It’s Elias, your Grace. You met me in Mölk. Remember, we talked about my late sister.”
Beloved Pilgrim Page 30
