Antichrist

by Cecelia Holland

  The stone rolled onto the net, and the men who had pushed it bent to hook the net’s corners to the pulley rope. On the wall three more men took hold of the end of the rope. Frederick climbed back onto the wall and looked over the other side. “We can get a mule in there to draw the rope. Why waste men?”

  From the top of the wall he could see into the rooms behind them, already swept clean to their tile floors, and on ahead, to the rooms still to be cleaned out. It reminded him of the Augean stables, and he laughed. They’d swayed the chunk of stone up onto the sledge with the pulley, and the mule was drawing it away, out through a door into the street. He went over to supervise the bracing of the crane arm.

  I’m glad I have this to do so I haven’t got time to worry about . . . Hurriedly he made himself study the angle between the brace and the arm. One of the men went for water and brought him back a cupful, and he drank it. The sun was burning his back, even through what was left of the tan he’d gotten during the sail to Cyprus. I could put a little pressure on him—raid somewhere. While knights cleared away the rubble around the door into the next room, he thought about that. The trouble was that al-Kamil had a gigantic army at Nablus and if he decided to take a raid seriously, refortifying Jaffa wouldn’t make any difference at all. Just a friendly raid?

  Behind him someone screamed, “Sail—there’s a sail in the harbor—” He spun around, all his muscles clenching in surprise, heard what the man had said, and relaxed, grinning. He couldn’t see the ship yet, but the others could; they turned and shouted, waving their arms. “There’s two—three—it’s the fleet!”

  Frederick did a little dance on the top of the wall. That meant one less thing to sweat over. He heard the captains of the work crews shouting to their men not to leave the work—“You’ll all get a good meal tonight, when we’ve got this dirt out of here.” And now even Frederick could see the galleys moving up toward the shore, the front ranks already lowering their sails and putting out oars. He jumped down from the wall and started through the maze of roofless rooms into the street.

  His Saracens fell in around him, joking about the knights working at such menial labor: “After all, they’re swine, they belong in dirt.” Frederick turned and glared at Ayub, who straightened his face and elbowed the Assassin beside him. Hasan would never have done that; Hasan would have remembered that most of these knights spoke Arabic. Hasan would have used Italian. He grinned and crossed the street and went down another, already cleared and even partially mended. All around them crews lugged baskets of dirt and rocks out into the street, and mule-drawn sledges bumped along picking them up. At this rate the whole section around the palace would be clear by sundown. He took his shirt from Yusuf and draped it around his shoulders, smiling.

  Ahead of them an old arch crossed the street, and beyond it he could see the blue of the sea. The stink of wet mortar reached his nose. The arch looked Roman—he couldn’t remember whether Jaffa had existed in Roman times. Undoubtedly—some of the architecture looked older than the fancy ruins in Rome. Walking into the shadow of the arch was like stepping into a fall of cold water. He stopped to put his shirt on and wandered over to the wall to look at the way the stones fitted together.

  Just the other side of the arch a work crew was sweeping up the street. A man among them straightened up and stared at Frederick—a pilgrim, yellow-haired. Frederick glanced at him and ran one hand over the wall, admiring the closeness of the stone. Suddenly Ayub snapped, “Where do you think—” and he turned and saw the Assassin running straight for the pilgrim ahead of them.

  Frederick opened his mouth to yell, the pilgrim whirled and ran, and the other three Saracens charged after him. With a curse Frederick moved out into the sunlight, peering after them. He couldn’t figure out what the Assassin was doing—maybe he’d eaten too much hashish. The pilgrim tripped over a line of rubble and the Assassin left the ground completely in a long dive and landed squarely on top of him. The rest of the work crew was shouting and staring from Frederick to the Saracens and back again. Frederick ran down the street toward the fight.

  The Assassin had both arms around the pilgrim; they were rolling around in the dirt, arms and legs thrashing awkwardly, while the other Saracens circled them, unsure what to do. Ayub looked up, saw Frederick coming and bellowed an order. Yusuf jumped in, and, grabbed the pilgrim, who was nearly out, and Ayub and Masuf wrestled the Assassin up onto his feet and held him.

  “He’s a Templar,” the Assassin screamed. “He’s a Templar, don’t let him go.”

  Frederick skidded to a stop. Twisting around, he saw the mob of men behind him—the rest of the work crew and a few others within earshot. Christians on pilgrimage—he jerked around again and shouted, “Ayub, knock him out and drop him,” and hoped none of the men behind him spoke Italian. He glanced back and saw that they’d stopped, but their eyes looked angry, and they spoke to each other in quick, harsh voices, their eyes on the Saracens. He ran up and knelt beside the pilgrim, lying in the street.

  “Are you sure?” he said softly to the Assassin.

  “I know all the Templars in Syria,” the Assassin murmured. “That’s why I’m here.”

  Frederick looked down at the face of the pilgrim. He was stirring, and his eyes opened, looked into the bright sun, and shut again. Frederick put his hand out to shade the man’s face.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, in German. “Can you get up?”

  “Yes. Just—groggy.” The pilgrim rolled onto his side, lifted his head up and shook it. Frederick shifted his weight and got one foot under him. The pilgrim’s head swayed; he reached down to help the man rise.

  Lurching up and toward him, his lips curled, the pilgrim jerked out a dagger. Frederick leaped back, both hands on the pilgrim’s shoulders, dragged him forward, and smashed his knee into the man’s face. The pilgrim gave a choked yelp and fell into the dirt, blood spurting from his nose and mouth. Frederick walked away a little and turned to look at him again.

  “Complete idiots. A good street fighter can beat them every time.” He jabbed a thumb at Ayub. “Take him someplace. I want to talk to him later.” He looked at the pack of spectators, whose mouths hung open, whose eyes bulged—one called, “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Frederick said. “The poor soul must have gotten too much sun. Go back to work, you’ll have a banquet tonight.” He walked down toward the harbor; the Assassin and Yusuf followed him, while the others took the Templar to a prison. Suddenly he remembered why the Templar had been here, why the Assassin was here, and his mouth dried up. They want to kill me. He looked over at the Assassin.

  “Thank you, Feisal.”

  “My Lord.” Feisal smiled; he brushed at the dirt on, his robes.

  “He killed himself,” Frederick said. “They put him in chains and he wrapped the chains around his neck and choked himself to death.” He stared at the wall and tried to imagine doing that. How could anybody do that?

  “He wouldn’t have told you anyway,” Fakhr-ad-Din said. “Or at least, nothing you don’t already know—for instance, what your pet Assassin told you.”

  Frederick leaned back and watched Theophano cut him slices of meat. Enrico had sent three ships to Acre to buy furniture for his new palace, which they would roof tomorrow. “How did you find out about that?”

  “That he’s an Assassin?”

  “Are you angry?” He studied Fakhr-ad-Din’s face.

  “Not particularly angry.” Fakhr-ad-Din frowned, chewed thoughtfully on a piece of bread, and wiped his hands on a napkin. “Not angry at all, in fact. I knew what he was when I saw his face, he’s well known, a sort of local hero to most of the small towns in Syria. It’s just that Assassins make me . . . uneasy. How would you feel if you suddenly detected a Milanese in my retinue?”

  “I guess I know. Keeping you two separate was a chore anyhow, like that man with the wolf and the cabbage and the goat. I’m glad—”

  “The what?”

  “The wolf, the cabbage, and the
goat. It’s a riddle from the time of Carolus Magnus. Haven’t you ever heard it?”

  “No. Tell me,” Theophano said. She handed him some slices of meat. To Fakhr-ad-Din she said. “His riddles keep me awake at night.”

  Frederick grinned. “That’s not called a riddle, sweetheart.”

  Fakhr-ad-Din laughed, choked it off abruptly, embarrassed, and cleared his throat. “Tell us the riddle, Frederick.”

  “Well. It seems a man came to a river that he could cross only by a small boat. He had with him a wolf, a cabbage, and a goat. The boat was so small he could transport only one object to the far bank at a time. The problem is; How does he get everything to the far side, when if he leaves the wolf alone with the goat, the wolf will eat the goat, and if he leaves the goat alone with the cabbage—”

  “I see,” Fakhr-ad-Din said. “Strange travelers you have in your country. What the devil did he want a wolf for?”

  “You have to take the goat first, obviously,” Theophano said. “If you take the goat over and go back and . . . no, that won’t work.”

  “Of course it will, child,” Fakhr-ad-Din said. “You take the goat across, leave it on the far bank, and go back and pick up the cabbage. When you get to the far bank you deposit the cabbage and pick up the goat again. On the near bank you leave off the goat and pick up the wolf, who proceeds to devour you in midstream.”

  “Oh. Why didn’t I think of that?” She slapped her fist on the table. “And you leave the wolf on the far bank, go back, take the goat across—”

  “And wind up wolf-bitten with a moldy cabbage and a seasick goat?” Fakhr-ad-Din clapped his hands. “It is solved.”

  Frederick laughed.

  Fakhr-ad-Din said, “We have something similar in Cairo, dealing with three newly married couples who arrive at a similar river under similar circumstances and none of the husbands will leave their wives alone with the other men.”

  “That’s slightly more difficult.” Frederick ate a bite of meat. The air smelled faintly of dust, and the torches wavered in the light breeze. “Do I have to go through the whole thing or can I give you the number of trips necessary?”

  “Make him do the whole thing,” Theophano said, “or he’ll cheat and figure it out mathematically.”

  Fakhr-ad-Din, laughing, patted her hand. “Eleven,” Frederick said.

  “Good. Now, east of Khwaresm but south of the Mongols are a tribe very well versed in algebra and geometry. They have a holy city called Benares, in which is a temple, in which are three diamond needles, around one of which God at the Creation, for reasons best known to Himself, placed sixty-four gold disks graduated in size, with the largest on the bottom and the smallest on the top, arranged so that no disk rests on one smaller than itself.”

  “You sound like a book I read when I was a child.”

  “I’m a natural pedagogue. The priests in Benares spend all day transferring the disks from one needle to another, one disk at a time, so that no disk ever rests on one smaller than itself. When the priests have succeeded in moving all sixty-four gold disks from the original diamond needle to another, the world will end.”

  “How hard do they work at it?” Theophano said.

  “We’ve got a long time to wait,” Frederick said. “Don’t worry. A million million million years or something on that order.”

  “Slightly more.”

  “Where do you learn these things?” Theophano said. “I seem to have missed a whole level of my education.”

  “We both think too much,” Fakhr-ad-Din said, leaning back against a chest covered with a carpet. “Mathematics gives one something to think about that isn’t injurious.”

  “It’s a good way to think too,” Frederick said. “Everything is reducible to mathematical terms, and if you cut out all the prejudices and personality in figuring something out—” That’s why when I make a mistake it’s a big one and has to do with personality and prejudice.

  “Well,” Fakhr-ad-Din said, “when people say you’re cold-blooded, that’s what they mean.”

  “Me? Who says I’m cold-blooded?” He started upright.

  Theophano grinned. “Very nearly everybody. Guy Embriaco told his wife, whose maids told my maids, who told me that you have serpent’s eyes.”

  “Guy Embriaco has eyes like mud puddles.”

  “Not everything is reducible to mathematical terms,” Fakhr-ad-Din said. “Statecraft is, of course, which is why you’re so successful at it, but—”

  “The only thing that can’t be considered in mathematical terms is God, and I suspect that’s simply because we haven’t got enough information about God.”

  Theophano looked up at the sky. “God or Allah?” She used the Greek word for God.

  Fakhr-ad-Din laughed and reached for the tray of cookies. “Child, don’t start us off on that. We spent weeks in Sicily debating the nature of the perception of God by different tribes.”

  “When you know the name of something, you control it,” Frederick said, “which is the whole point of witchcraft; isn’t it? So we quarrel over the name of God.” He stretched out his legs; the comfort of the room, the easy flow of talk soothed and calmed him, and he half shut his eyes.

  Theophano’s fingers grazed his. “Tell me about statecraft and mathematics.”

  Fakhr-ad-Din said, “Let me. After all, we shouldn’t want to offend his modesty.”

  Frederick laughed. “Absolutely elemental. If Mohammed refuses to go to the mountain, the mountain, eventually, will be brought to Mohammed.”

  “That’s what I mean. Modesty is not one of the virtues of singularly successful men, I imagine.” Fakhr-ad-Din’s teeth crunched on a cookie. “When no solution to a problem presents itself, Theo, one can sometimes work the problem backward—start with a solution and reconstruct the problem to fit the answer. In a case of complete anarchy and a king without power, one simply states that the king has all the power in the kingdom, and no one else has any at all, which is of course the desirable solution. One then proceeds to rule as if that were in fact so, although it’s true only in theory.”

  “How?”

  “Well,” Frederick said, “it’s geometrical, you see. If I have all the legal power, and nobody else has any, not even the nobility, everybody else is legally equal. So I apply the same laws to everybody. That makes it true that I have all the power. Since the Normans set up the laws in Sicily and the Normans were wild for law, any law I might need already exists in the charters, so obviously I had the power all the time. I never passed a new law in the first three years I ruled in Sicily after I came back from Germany.”

  “And everybody simply falls into line?” she said slowly.

  “Well, they have to, you see. Because if one baron doesn’t, all the others will help me punish him for breaking the law.” He looked over at her, grinning. “It’s quite simple.”

  “I still don’t see why they didn’t all band together and—”

  “Oh. Oh, well. That’s easy—why do you break the law?”

  “So I can do what I want.”

  “Quite. But most of the things barons want to do that are against the law infringe on the other barons—you see? As for the people who weren’t barons, they were so surprised that I intended to take responsibility for them at all, they had no time to complain.”

  She shook her head. “It’s too simple.”

  “Possibly. It only works in cases where the law is completely unworkable, so that nobody can really obey it—if you obey one law you break another. In a case like Cyprus, where everybody is actually obeying the law, I couldn’t do much. I’m going to try, but I doubt I’ll get anywhere.”

  “Try to do what?” Fakhr-ad-Din said.

  “Make it orderly. It’s a mess, it’s impossible to get anything done.”

  “All Frankish law is like that. I’ve come to the conclusion after some study of the problem that Frankish law is designed to keep anybody from doing anything efficiently.”

  “That’s because it’s all
customary law. Made for barons by barons.” He reached for Theophano’s hand, and their fingers intertwined. “They’ve gotten along perfectly well with it, though—it’s a nice balance between terror and boredom.”

  Fakhr-ad-Din’s brows arched. Pages came in to take away the dishes and bring them sherbet and wine. “This is a new theory; I haven’t heard this one, have I?”

  “I figured it out on the trip to Acre from Cyprus.” Frederick grinned and sat up straight. “It’s one of my best, I’m really fond of it. Can I tell it?”

  “In Sicily he had some other mad theory about people’s motives,” Fakhr-ad-Din said to Theophano. “He develops them like cloud castles, and the wind blows them away.”

  “It’s a game. This one is nice, though. Life is terrible, after all; you have nothing to look forward to except dying, and you can die at any time, it’s all uncertain. Or you can be thrown into prison by a tyrant—”

  “Like you,” Theophano said.

  “I’m a good tyrant. Yes. Or you can starve or thirst—everything is unsure, and that’s terrifying. On the other hand, what’s sure and safe is boring, and people will do anything to escape boredom. Absolutely anything.”

  “It was a boring trip, from Cyprus to Acre,” Fakhr-ad-Din told Theophano.

  “It was. He was soaring on hashish for most of it.”

  “Anyhow, all the things we do are an attempt either to alleviate the pressure of terror or to escape boredom.”

  “Well. A sweeping generalization of that cosmic order deserves contemplation.” Fakhr-ad-Din drank sherbet. “Examples?”

  “The Crusades. Consider a distant relation of mine—Fulk Nerra, the Comte d’Anjou. He went on crusade three times to expiate his sins. In Anjou he was a walking terror, he fought incessantly. Or Pope Urban’s Crusade, in which others of my relatives figured so prominently. The Truce of God wasn’t working, and the knights were devastating the countryside, fighting wars to escape the boredom of home, so he redirected their fighting into an area where if it did no good it could at least do no harm.”