Beloved Pilgrim
Page 31
One sunburned arm lifted to shade the eye that could open. Half of her face was crushed, the ridge around that eye, her cheekbone, and the jaw on that side bloody and disfigured. It was a miracle she could talk at all. It was a miracle she was alive at all. “I remember. The knight who wath tho thmitten with me.”
Elias laughed. “That’s the one. What happened to you?”
Ida sighed. “A horthe’th hoof happened to me.” Haltingly, she explained that she had fallen from the litter when her bearers dropped it, rolled out of it, and under one of the Turk’s horses. Elias realized that had it been a destrier like Gauner, she would not be alive.
The margravina was struggling to rise. “Wait, Your Grace. Let me get my horse. I’ll get you on it somehow, and then we can ride back for help.” Elias looked about. “Is everyone dead? What about the Nivenais?”
“I don’t know. We got here and the men went mad. They thaw the pool. But it wath poithoned.”
Elias looked down at her. “Poisoned? Oh sweet Jesu!”
He leapt to his feet and ran toward the pool, jumping over and sidestepping corpses of both pilgrims and Turks. He rounded the tallest pile of bodies and found Gauner. He was unsteady on his feet. Foam spewed from his muzzle. His legs seemed to be buckling. He collapsed and fell, landing hard in the water, making it splash up away from where Elias approached. The horse lay with his head half in the water, breathing heavily, erratically.
Being careful not to touch the water, Elias knelt and leaned out to stroke his neck. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He sobbed. “Oh, Gauner!” The horse rolled his eye at him. His confusion and pain were evident. Wiping his sweaty forehead on his arm, where the mail was blistering hot, Elias reached for his dagger. In one quick movement, he put his destrier out of his misery. “Good-bye, old friend. Tell Elias I am so sorry when you see him.”
He knelt, still sobbing, until he remembered Ida. He got to his feet and gave the horse one last look, realizing with regret that his saddlebag was underneath him. He ran back unsteadily to the overturned litter. Ida’s eyes were closed and she hardly seemed to breathe.
“Oh no,” Elias moaned, kneeling by the woman. He put his ear to the margravina’s breast, over her heart. He remembered bitterly longing to rest his cheek there, what was it, centuries ago? The heart was still beating.
Elias stood and looked around again. For the first time, he noticed the stench. Carrion birds eyed him. He saw the poles that lifted the litter, went to one, and pulled it out. It was slow work, and he thought he might pass out from the heat and the effort. Somehow, he got both poles free. He reached for the wineskin at his belt and remembered Ida’s parched lips.
He dashed back to the margravina, who now lay under some cloth Elias had torn from the litter curtains. He knelt and lifted the woman’s head. He tried to trickle some water into her mouth, but it just ran over her teeth and lips and off her jaw into the dirt. There was almost none left. He left the skin by Ida and went back to his task.
Stripping the tunics off two bodies—the chain mail had already been stripped from all the knights and soldiers—he went back to the poles. He slipped the ends into the sleeves of the first shirt, then the other ends into the sleeves of the other. He used the laces that held up britches or chain mail leggings to tie the two together at their hems. It was a crude sort of stretcher, but what else was there to be done?
He returned to Ida and gently lifted her in his arms. She was so light! Ida was a petite woman, but Elias realized that much of the impression was due to his own developed muscles. Life as a knight, in fact if not by right of chivalry, had made him immensely strong. He would need that strength now, if he were to walk back to Byzantine territory dragging the stretcher with the margravina behind him.
He settled Ida on the stretcher, then went to retrieve his wineskin. As he did, he scanned the bodies for the garb of noblemen. He saw knights, but no one was more richly dressed. Had these men, noblemen and commanders, deserted their armies like Raymond, Conrad, the Lombard noblemen, and Stephen of Burgundy had? Leaving Ida to suffer and die or be taken and forced into slavery? His anger was so intense, his head throbbed so painfully, he was forced to lean forward and retch out what little was in his stomach. No one looked like a high churchman either. So Ida’s own elected archbishop had abandoned her too.
When he got back to the makeshift stretcher, he saw that Ida was moving under the cloths that shaded her. Elias parted them to see the blue, uninjured eye peering out at him. “Where’th you horth?”
“Dead. Poisoned. But I made this stretcher. I will pull it behind me. We will get back to safety.” Elias pulled out the wineskin, propped up the margravina’s head, and poured the last few sips of the water in her mouth. Ida sputtered but swallowed it all.
“God bleth you, my champion,” Ida croaked.
In spite of the horror of their situation, Elias’s heart thrilled at the words.
Elias wrapped a length of cloth around his head to shade it from the sun. He strode forth into the hills with one pole of the stretcher in each hand. His elbows were bent so he could press his arms in to help take the weight. It was negligible now, but he knew it would soon seem heavier. His helm was back at the scene of the massacre with the rest of his armor. He could not carry it or wear it. All he had now was his sword belt, sword, and dagger. And the margravina of Austria.
Elias had always had an instinctual sense of direction. Glancing at the path of the sun as he walked, he made his way west by northwest, hoping to intersect the road he had traveled before. He knew the chances of survival were minuscule, but all he could do was persevere. He realized soon enough that trying this in the heat of the sun was insane, so he found a place where a rocky outcrop created shade and dragged the stretcher toward it. “We’ll continue when it gets dark. It’s October now, I think, so it should not be long.”
“I am tho thirthty,” Ida, with half her face crushed, moaned.
Elias felt his own heart sink. “I know, Your Grace. I am so sorry. There is no water.”
He sat next to the woman’s shuddering body and waited for dark. He longed to see Maliha’s soft honey-colored eyes again, to tousle Tacetin’s dark curls, to smile and laugh with Albrecht. He said aloud, “Oh, Elias, I am so sorry I have failed so utterly. But if I must die like this, I am glad at least you were spared that. If I did nothing else right, I tried. I saved Albrecht, my brother. He is happy again now. You would like Andronikos. He dotes on him. You would approve.”
A sound came from under the cloth that veiled the margravina. Elias reached out and pulled the cloth away from Ida’s face. “Eliath,” the woman croaked.
“Your Grace?”
“Pleathe hold me,” Ida pleaded.
Elias stretched out alongside her. He took the margravina in his arms and gently moved her head so its left side rested on his shoulder. Ida was silent, and what little strength she had she used to hold her knight close. Elias remembered that when he had first seen this woman, this lovely woman, he had thought how he wanted to die in her arms. The woman was now dying in his.
He could feel the life in that once beautiful body become weaker and weaker. At last Ida shuddered and was still. The most beautiful woman in Europe, the dowager margravina of Austria, was dead. And Elias knew he would soon be dead himself, and Ida’s son, the Margrave Leopold, would never know what had happened to his mother.
He sat and wept, though there were no tears. He had so little moisture in his body, he could make none. As the sun went down, he tried his best to lay out Ida’s body, to cover it suitably with the curtains from the litter and to scrape a trench to lay her in. He knew the animals would get at the body if he did not cover it with stones. He only had the strength to drag a few over. He knelt and prayed for the repose of the margravina’s soul. Then he pulled himself to his feet, with no burden but his thirst, exhaustion, and heatstroke, and set out again on his journey. The half moon showed him the way.
He had no idea how much time had passed, how
far he had walked, when he fell and moved no more. In his stupor, the ragged ends of his thoughts as he had trudged through the deadly dry land continued to swirl in ever-narrowing paths in his mind. He could no longer articulate the reason he had left Bavaria. It seemed somehow that he had come to rejoin Maliha, though whether and where they had met before was nebulous. Was there something left undone? He thought there must be. Perhaps it was to liberate the Holy Land, but no, the first crusaders had already done that, hadn’t they? So what was left for him to do? He felt a light wind ruffle the cloth he had tried to cover himself with to block the sun. There was something, a decision to make, but all he could fashion in his mind now was a resolution to go back to Maliha. To be with her, to stay with her, and to say to hell with whatever anyone else said was his duty.
As he could no longer frame coherent thought, the only image that lingered was the faces of a dark-skinned woman and a little boy.
ELIAS FELT himself tumbled from side to side. It felt as if he lay in a cart rumbling painfully up a road. A wineskin spout touched his lips and he drank the water, cool, clear, fresh water, that spilled onto his lips. A cool hand stroked his forehead. “Maliha,” he tried to say, but his throat was closed and his lips too parched.
“Hush, my love. You are saved. You will be all right,” Maliha said.
Elias craned his neck to see who it was. The movement made his head reel, and he almost passed out.
He realized he was in a cart. He could hear voices. One was, he knew, Maliha’s. The other’s appeared to be… a man who spoke to her in Greek. Andronikos? Someone else? His mind cleared enough to understand the lovely woman’s words.
“We are taking you home to Constantinople, my love, to Tacetin. To Albrecht.”
Elias croaked, “And Papaki?”
Maliha laughed. “Yes, to Papaki. And Andronikos.”
“And never to leave you again….” Elias’s voice trailed off. He looked up into Maliha’s wonderful eyes, so full of love. He tried to form the words “I love you.”
“I love you too,” Maliha said. “Now be quiet and rest. We will have our whole lives to talk.” She wiped a tear from her eye. “You are the bravest, most noble man I have ever known.”
The corners of Elias’s dust-dry lips lifted as far as they could. He closed his eyes and felt Maliha’s breasts against his cheek.
Maliha murmured, “Rest, my beloved pilgrim.”
Elias sighed and slept.
About the Author
CHRISTOPHER HAWTHORNE MOSS wrote his first short story when he was seven and has spent some of the happiest hours of his life fully involved with his colorful, passionate, and often humorous, characters. Moss spent some time away from fiction, writing content for websites before his first book came out under the name Nan Hawthorne in 1991. He has since become a novelist and is a prolific and popular blogger; he is the historical fiction editor for the GLBT Bookshelf, where you can find his short stories and thoughtful and expert book reviews. Moss is transgender, having been born with a female body but a male heart and mind. He lives full time as a gay man in the Pacific Northwest with his partner of over thirty years and their doted upon cats. He owns Shield-wall Productions at http://www.shield-wall.com/. He welcomes comment from readers sent to christopherhmoss@gmail.com and can be found on Facebook and Twitter.
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