Bladesong

by Jean Gill

  Estela no longer had a companion to share news with but that didn’t stop her gleaning all the information she could, and coming to her own conclusions about what might be the consequences. As Dia’s troubadour, she had a duty to spice her songs with the latest gossip, to amuse her audience with satirical references and sly allusions to the leaders in current events. To work, she told herself.

  Chapter 10

  ‘You sent your daughter,’ Dragonetz stated.

  Bar Philipos paused for a second, his hand holding the lowly baidak that had gained the furthest square on the board and that was about to be exchanged for a fers, the only option possible in shatranj.

  ‘I wasn’t responsible for her death.’ Dragonetz pressed the point. The baidak was smoothly sidelined and the fers took its place, threatening Dragonetz’ horseman with its diagonal attack.

  ‘Ah, that daughter,’ was Bar Philipos’ instinctive response, quickly suppressed. ‘You play a good game, my Lord, but you have yet to fully appreciate that an oblique move is preferable. That’s why the fers is promotion for the baidak, even though each of them can move but one square.’

  Dragonetz studied the board but saw no trap. His rukh swept along the baseline and took the new fers, returning the piece to the sideline. ‘Sometimes a head-on charge gets results.’ Then he held his breath. A flurry of moves later allowed him to smile. ‘Your shah is bare’, he observed, taking the other man’s last piece.

  ‘A win,’ Bar Philipos acknowledged. ‘If lacking in elegance.’

  ‘You won’t answer me.’

  ‘No. I told you. She was a slut. She never existed.’ His eyes were always on the board, inscrutable. ‘You are starting to see my moves before I make them.’

  ‘I’m starting to see the pattern of past moves,’ Dragonetz corrected.

  ‘It is the same thing, my inimical friend. It is the same thing. I think we are ready to go to market.’

  ‘To sell a fat pig?’

  Bar Philipos was not amused. ‘Your humour is ill-placed Oltra mar. You offend citizens of two religions whenever you open your thoughtless mouth. But we will go to market and find out what you and the book are worth, and to whom.’

  ‘I am intrigued,’ drawled Dragonetz. ‘I’m afraid you’ll find the book better behaved than I promise to be.’

  ‘And you really think that will reduce your price in the market-place? My buyers want a warrior, a leader, not a lap-dog.’

  ‘Woof,woof.’

  ‘You are not tired of inactivity? Of behaving like a woman, talking to shopkeepers and peasants while kings change the world? When you could be a world-changer? Are you really so content to plan your little games with two mediocre guards, when you could have a thousand trained men under your command? I am not selling you, my Lord. You will sell yourself while I watch.’

  The Syrian reached for his cup and swirled the dark contents before swallowing. Reflexively, Dragonetz picked up his own exquisite lacquerware vessel and drained its contents.

  The black knight of the waterfall knew no other name, knew of no time before the waterfall and no duty other than to fight all those who came thirsting for his lady’s water. His own thirst grew daily. When he drank from the pool he guarded, the relief flooded him but, increasingly quickly, his thirst returned, black and bitter in his throat.

  He no longer remembered his lady’s face but he knew himself to be her true knight. Only sleep and fighting relieved his endless thirst, so it was with relief that he spied a wanderer coming towards him from the forest. He donned his helm, mounted a horse whose name he could no longer remember, and prepared to do combat.

  The wanderer was not only on foot, he was barefoot. Dark-skinned and dark-eyed, hook-nosed, his head swathed in a scarf that left one end trailing, his body cased in loose cream linen, this was no Christian. Although a sabre hung at his side, he was not dressed for battle and would have no chance in combat, yet he walked without fear, his gaze steady. The black knight shivered. He felt as if he should know this man but no memory came. Perhaps they had been enemies in some past life. Still the intruder walked towards him, his pace measured, as if his feet felt no thorns.

  When he was close enough for the black knight to see the travel stains in the cream linen, the man spoke. ‘Sadeek,’ he murmured, his voice like sand shifting and resettling. The word magicked into ‘True friend’ inside the black knight’s head and he crossed himself. The black horse whinnied and pricked its ears forward, responding to the heathen’s sorcery. Shaken by the strange wrongness, the black knight opened the ritual for battle.

  ‘What do you seek?’ he asked. Never, in his eternity defending the waterfall had he been give any response other than ‘Water’ but he followed the formula, dutifully. He had already dismounted, ready to fight a man on foot in all chivalry, to use sword and battle-axe to dispatch one more life. He would stop his ears against all words and carry out his duty to the lady and the waterfall. No-one should say that he broke oath. All he needed was the usual answer to his question.

  The reply came in the harsh tone of one who was dying of thirst. The black knight had heard the rasping desperation too often to mark it but this time the words themselves defied possibility.

  ‘I seek Dragonetz, my true friend. You have his horse. Sadeek.’ At his name, the horse broke free of the black knight and galloped round the two men in a crazy circle, skipping sideways, shaking his carapace and his mane, finally stopping behind the Moor, nuzzling his neck.

  Then the black knight fell to his knees, the poisoned water leaving his head, and the memories flooding back. Dragonetz was who he was. He remembered all that he had done wrong and he was ashamed. The man in front of him put out a hand, tilted his chin till eyes met eyes, and the shame was stopped before it let the poison work again. Dragonetz was who he was. And he recognized the man who sought him.

  ‘Al-Hisba,’ he said aloud, then tested the Moor’s real name for its strangeness on his tongue. ‘Malik.’ The Moor who’d spent a summer teaching him engineering, constructing a paper mill with him, building a friendship on cogs and cogitation. The Moor who’d razed the mill to the ground to save Dragonetz from enemies who would stop at nothing to protect the Church’s monopoly on parchment and literacy. The Moor who’d left a letter of explanation, with his real name and Sadeek as a present, a horse from al-Andalus breeding, worth a fortune. Sadeek, true friend. ‘Why are you here?’ Dragonetz asked.

  ‘A feeling. I had a feeling that you needed a friend to walk beside you in dark places so I am here.’

  ‘I killed Arnaut.’ The words came without pain, just a fact to share with an old friend.

  ‘No more than I did. But we all three would have given our lives for each other. It is not for the living to waste the sacrifice of the dead.’

  ‘I have a quest.’ Another fact. ‘But I cannot leave this cursed spot. I gave my oath. It is my doom to defend the waterfall for the lady.’

  ‘Your oath allows you to leave should another take your place.’

  ‘There is no other. No-one can defeat me. If my match does come, he will kill me and my quest will be dead with me. There is no way out.’ Malik’s silence seemed assent. ‘I love Estela.’ The third irrefutable fact.

  ‘I too,’ Malik responded softly, ‘like a daughter. To open the cage of such a songbird and teach her to fly, was as teaching the calculations of al-Khwarizmi to a man learning to make paper. The fruits of our summer together will ripen all our lives.’

  ‘I too,’ breathed a third voice, clear and cold. ‘I love Estela. And you.’ From the dappled shadows of the wood came a form that was more shadow itself than it was the armoured knight flickering in shape around it. Where the shadow knight walked, another world walked with him, one of strange colours, purple grass instead of green, crystal flowers that tinkled in the breeze instead of silken petals. Yet Dragonetz was not afraid, not as he had been before he recognized al-Hisba. From the shadow knight emanated serenity beyond this world. His voice was sparkling ice t
hat turned the word ‘love’ into a mountain at dusk, looming above mere mortals, a beauty forever present.

  Even before the helm was removed, Dragonetz knew the face beneath it, impossibly smooth and forever young, grey eyes once more alight, but with the same strange flickering blue light that made his whole person seem a human firefly. Tears had no place here where the dead walked.

  ‘I will take your place,’ Arnaut told Dragonetz. ‘I am here so I must have defeated you. You may leave without breaking oath. I will serve the lady we both love. The water cannot hurt me. Nothing can hurt me and I am fittest for this service while you have work still to do. But you must lay this service on me, as my leader and as my friend, or I may not take your place.’ He knelt at Dragonetz’ feet, offering his sword to his Commander.

  When he placed both hands on the mail-covered shoulders, Dragonetz could no longer feel them. He saw the blue fire playing around his own hands and the young knight’s shimmering body. He willed his hands to grasp the elusive creature and make him rise but he felt only absence where his hands should be, like pins-and-needles. Arnaut stood, holding out his sword, which Dragonetz took, lightly dubbing the young knight in reminder of their past vows.

  ‘So be it. Take my place, if you please.’

  ‘Willingly,’ Arnaut replied. The blue fires burned fiercely and lightning cracked the sky into sudden storm, a jagged flash striking the ground between the three men and the waterfall, raising a fine, dense mist. Then such song as Dragonetz had never heard filled the air, a multitude in strange harmonies, a melody that filled his heart with peace beyond understanding.

  Through the mist he saw a gleaming goblet the size of a man, silver trace patterns on shiny brown and his forgotten thirst returned in tenfold force. He knew that this vision was the Grail, knew that if he could but sip from the cup his thirst would be quenched. ‘What do I seek?’ ran the question in his head. ‘The Grail,’ he shouted, ‘the Grail, the Grail!’ But even as he cried aloud, the mist blackened and an arm came down before the holy cup, accusing him, pointing, snaking words into his head that coiled and uncoiled through his veins. ‘Not for such as you,’ the venom told him, ‘not for such as you,’ and the vision changed again.

  The music became one lone voice, a sweet one that he knew well, and the mist became a transparent silk veil, accentuating the beautiful body of a young woman, one Dragonetz knew intimately. ‘Your heaven,’ the venom told him, ‘ for which you are blind and deaf to all else.’ And the desire to hold Estela in his arms filled Dragonetz to forgetting his thirst so that when the question came one last time, ‘What do you seek?’ he whispered, ‘Estela,’ and the vision vanished with no trace, leaving behind only emptiness and longing.

  When the birdsong filled the silence again, pale imitation of the music still thrumming through Dragonetz’ head, he asked Arnaut, ‘What did you see and hear?’ The blissful face answered before the unearthly voice. ‘What I have sought all my life. You may call it the Grail. It is with me for always now.’

  Dragonetz hardly knew what to ask Malik. What business had a Muslim in quest of Christianity’s most sacred relic? But he needed to know. ‘What did you see and hear?’ he asked.

  ‘A vision. And such music!’ the Moor replied.

  ‘What vision?’ persisted Dragonetz.

  Malik stared at him, puzzled that he should need to ask. ‘What you saw too. The holy book, of course. We are all people of the book, are we not?’ He whistled and into the clearing galloped Sadeek’s twin, stamping and tossing his mane, raising dust as he stopped beside Malik, who jumped into the saddle and gentled the stallion in soft Arabic.

  Dragonetz picked up Sadeek’s trailing reins and followed suit. He looked back and raised his hand in a last salute to Arnaut, whose face still glowed in a fulfilment Dragonetz knew was not his lot. One glimpse only had been his, and he should be grateful. He knew his real quest. ‘Let’s find Estela,’ he said to the Moor at his side, who merely nodded and, barefoot and spur-less, urged his horse forward.

  It took time for Dragonetz to emerge from dream-sogged attempts to recapture a heavenly melody. Seven voices for the main themes would come close he thought, with a choir of angels to create the mood. He had a thirst from hell and downed three cups of water, then dunked his head in the basin for good measure. That cleared a little mental space to prepare his day.

  Bar Philipos’ words had hit home. Of course Dragonetz was tired of inactivity! But his daily sorties with the ‘two mediocre guards’ had toned his muscles and forged his partnership with Sadeek beyond any Frankish training. If his body missed Yalda’s attentions, then there would be that much more energy for the ‘little games’ that day, in which a Frankish knight intended to give two Moors a spectacular return on their investment, even if the audience consisted only of a few of their friends watching.

  As it turned out, the ‘mediocre guards’ apparently had rather more ‘friends’ than Dragonetz expected. When the three men reached the dusty terrain south of the city, demarcated for their display, they found silken pavilions erected all round and men crowding in the shelter offered. The vivid stripes shimmered in sun and wind, spooking the horses, which were already tense with anticipation. Trained for war, Sadeek knew better than to bolt, but unlike his predecessor Seda, he had faced only practice, and he trembled with the effort of self-control.

  ‘Friends, you said!’ Dragonetz called to Aakif and Shunnar, riding with him, even their sturdy mares rolling wide eyes and skittering sideways at the sudden movements and excited shouting which greeted the star performers.

  ‘We’ll take a slow turn in front of the tents,’ suggested Aakif, his body easy in the position that Dragonetz no longer considered odd, knees high and bent, stirrups short, back straight and the low saddle allowing the movement they would need in the events to follow. ‘Settle the horses and make obeisance.’

  Dragonetz allowed Sadeek the concession of following the two mares and the stallion seemed reassured by their reaction, losing his fear of the flock of giant birds glimpsed in the corner of his eyes, which turned into mere men and strange extensions of their clothing as he neared the tents. Feeling his mount settle, Dragonetz also took the opportunity to observe his audience more closely.

  There were no girls or women, only boys and men, some of the boys with painted faces, laying their thin arms on or round the older men as they fetched cups and sweetmeats. In his homeland, a tournay would have attracted as many ladies as lords, as many common women as men, and he would have worn his lady’s favour on his helm, as would all the other knights taking part. Dragonetz suddenly felt a long way from home, a long way from his lady, any lady. Jerusalem might have a Queen but there was no sign anywhere here of a woman’s power.

  There were however signs of power aplenty and no question as to where to find its centre. One open-fronted tent was larger than the others, its silks richer, more colourful, demanding attention and getting it, as a trail of men clustered round the makeshift thrones within. Men knelt and moved on, replaced by others.

  It was to this tent that the guards were leading him, and when they bowed before the men inside, their horses an excuse for not prostrating themselves, Dragonetz did likewise, musing briefly that such a bow from his old saddle would have blinded him, as he respectfully dipped towards his horse’s mane. Risking a glance towards the interior he recognized Bar Philipos, in a lesser seat, attended by a pretty, painted youth.

  The two fancy, carved seats were raised in carefully equal degree and Dragonetz guessed that one occupant was the ruler of Damascus, Mujir ad-Din, slight of body, haggard, his eyes darting everywhere but settling on nothing and no-one. It would take more than identical chairs to convince people that Mujir ad-Din was the equal of the man beside him, whose huge physical presence made everyone around him shrink to insignificance. Everything about him was bigger, his body, his laugh, his impact on those around him, while he himself had the same ease on his throne as Shunnar in his saddle. Although the man’s torso was
hidden under a robe, in the manner of his people, Dragonetz would have bet on a fighter’s body under the swathes of linen. You could always tell by the way a man moved. The Damascene scimitar flashed at his side and no onlooker would think it was worn as an ornament.

  With a glance of token query at Mujir ad-Din, the other man gestured the guards to begin the show, without looking once at Dragonetz.

  ‘Who?’ he asked Aakif, as they walked the horses back to the starting point they’d agreed.

  ‘Nur ad-Din,’ was the short, grim-faced reply. So the man known as the Guardian of Allah’s country was here, and probably not because he wanted to watch Dragonetz play the fool on horseback.

  It was no secret that Nur ad-Din wanted Damascus. Dragonetz remembered the threat to the Crusaders that if they didn’t take Damascus quickly, they’d be caught between Unur’s forces and those of Nur ad-Din, sweeping down from the north ‘to help their Damascan brothers.’ Unur had known well enough that such help came with a price and had kept Damascus independent. But Unur was dead. Dragonetz looked again at Mujir ad-Din, nodding and smiling, the ruler of Damascus - for now - and wondered how close Nur ad-Din was to his goal. And what else did he want? Why was he here?

  ‘Dragonetz!’ yelled Shunnar, formalities forgotten in the knowledge that weeks of practice were to be tested, and in front of such an audience! ‘We begin.’ Then there was no time for thinking of politics.

  The wind had died down, the sun was behind them and the crowds watching had become mere landscape for the horses as the three riders started their planned routine. From weaving in and out the upright stakes, flourishing bright scarves that arced between them, they increased the levels of difficulty, each striving to out-do the performance of the man before him. They were now outside the parameters of their planning, improvising and competing, daring each other further. Aakif walked his horse backwards in and out the stakes and Shunnar repeated this while sitting backwards on his horse.