The Dagger and the Cross (37 page)

“They couldn’t just abandon Tiberias, could they?”

“If they had the wits of a gnat, they would. Sweet saints,”
said Joanna. “There’s going to be a battle, and Saladin will choose the ground.”

“I knew I shouldn’t have told you,” Elen said.

Joanna raised her clenched fists, but lowered them again,
breathing deep, calming herself by effort of will. “If Saladin has Tiberias,
and Guy is trying to fight on ground of Saladin’s choosing, then the whole
kingdom is in jeopardy. Has the marshal done anything about the defenses here?”

“As much as he can do, with almost no troops to man them.”

“Then we had better pray,” said Joanna, “that the army holds
off the Saracen; because if it fails, every one of us is ripe for the plucking.”

Elen’s hands were cold. She knotted them at her sides and
lifted her chin. “I’ll pray. And I’ll hope. They have my lord king, after all,
and his brother beside him.”

“They do,” Joanna said. Elen could not tell from the tone of
it whether it was agreement or irony.

o0o

By evening the whole city knew what the city’s marshal had
heard from the east; and that the king had, the night before, been forced to
camp well short of Tiberias, without water, harried mercilessly by the enemy.
The messenger who had broken through had been arrowshot for his insolence. He
was expected to live, unless the wound went bad.

The churches were full of people praying for the army’s
victory. Elen went to the cathedral, where the pious and the frightened kept
vigil—more of the latter, she would have wagered, than the former—but came back
at dusk to give Joanna what news there was. The house, like the city, was
unwontedly subdued. Today would have been the battle. The signals that had come
from the long line of castles along the marches of Syria told only of Tiberias’
burning, the enemy’s massing about it, the army’s halting to fight between the
hills called the Horns of Hattin.

Joanna was not in the solar. Elen found her in the nursery,
from which her younger children had been banished with loud and echoing
protests, sitting by the bed on which lay her eldest daughter. Ysabel was
coiled in a knot, as rigid as a stone and nearly as cold.

“Dear God,” Elen said.

“She’s alive.”

Elen had not even seen the boy until he spoke. It was Simeon’s
son. He looked like a ghost in the lamp’s shadow.

Clearly Joanna had not seen him, either: she jumped like a
cat. She got hold of his coat and pulled him into the light. “What’s wrong with
her? Why is she like this?”

Joanna, it was evident, knew what Akiva was. He did not seem
surprised. He looked down at Ysabel. His face was deathly white, his eyes huge
in it, like holes in a skull. “She wore herself out,” he said. “I didn’t know
until it was too late. I don’t think she’ll die. She may sleep for days, that’s
all.”

“That’s all?” Joanna’s voice cracked with incredulity. “That’s
all?
For God’s sake, what was she doing?”

“Watching the battle.”

Elen did not disbelieve it. That was the worst of it. She
was kin to these people. This one, too. Now she understood much that she had
not, of Joanna’s troublesome eldest daughter; and of Aidan’s patent preference
for her over her siblings. She was of his own kind.

“The battle,” Joanna prompted Akiva with conspicuous
patience.

Before he spoke, they read it in his face. “Lost,” he said,
almost too faint to be heard. “All lost.”

“No,” Joanna said.

“All.” He swayed as he stood, but he would not let them
touch him. “The Saracen surrounded them on the field of Hattin and broke them
with fire and no water and the summer’s heat. The footsoldiers rebelled and
would not fight. The knights fought as long as they could, but there were too
few of them. They are all dead or taken.”

Joanna’s face was as bloodless now as his, but she stood
erect, motionless. What came from her was not the name Elen had expected. “Prince
Aidan?”

“Alive. And my king. And your son.”

Her eyes closed briefly. She opened them. “My husband?”

He would not answer. Perhaps could not. All at once and all
of a piece, he crumpled.

Elen caught him. He was not rigid as Ysabel was; he was as
limp as a rag.

“Ranulf is dead,” Joanna said. She said it quite calmly, as
if it were nothing to her. “The kingdom is lost. The sultan will be wanting a
sizeable ransom, I suspect; particularly for a king and a prince.”

Elen’s arms began to tremble. She laid Akiva on the bed
beside Ysabel. Now that Elen knew, she could see the alienness in Ysabel’s
face, the whiteness that was not natural for this country, the awkwardness that
would bloom into piercing, inhuman beauty.

Joanna laid her hand on the tousled curls. “Now he’ll never
know,” she said.

Elen would not ask what she meant; did not want to know. “He
may still be alive.”

Joanna shook her head. “I’m none of their kind, but I can
see the truth when it stares me in the face.” She straightened painfully. “I
could have done with a little more false hope.”

So could they all. Elen looked down at the ones who had told
them what the rest of the city would not hear for hours yet, and reflected on
human envy, and unhuman power, and what it must be to be a child and to know
that one’s father was dead. To know it as only witchkind could, as one who had
been at his side, and gone down with him into the dark.

There was little that they could do for either of them
except make them comfortable and try to keep them warm, and watch over them.
Joanna would not leave the room. Nor, when he had been sent for, would Simeon.
Elen took on herself the ordering of the household. She did not tell the others
what she knew. Let them discover it as the rest of the city did. Let them have
this last glimmer of hope.

Not that she despaired. Not yet. She had no word that Raihan
was dead. Would Saladin punish him for fighting against his own people? Or
would he have made his choice before it was too late, and gone back to the
sultan’s service? That he could have been cut down in the battle, she would not
think of. He could not have died. She would not allow it.

She watched with distant interest as the news reached the
city. Saladin was the victor of Hattin. The king and his high lords were sent
to prison in Damascus. The lesser knights, the Hospitallers, all the Templars
but their Grand Master, were dead. The citadel of Tiberias had fallen; the
Countess Eschiva was permitted to depart with her children and her possessions,
and set free to join her husband where he nursed his shame in Tripoli. The
Saracen was marching on Acre.

When Joanna was told, she laughed. She had not lost her
wits, it was not in her, but grief made her angry, and when she was angry, she
was dangerous.

Acre could have used that anger. For lack of a proper
defending force—all that they had had, had gone to the defeat at Hattin—they
could do nothing but seal the gates and wait. Someone had the wits to put all
the men they did have, armed, on the walls, and to eke out the numbers with
boys and old men and, here and there, a woman large enough to look daunting in
a helmet. All together they seemed numerous enough; in war, where seeming could
be everything, they might succeed in persuading the Saracen to draw off and
choose another target.

It was down to that. Every city for itself, each castle to
its own devices. “This isn’t a kingdom anymore,” Joanna said. “It’s a henhouse
full of foxes.”

o0o

The witch-children slept for a night and a day, and woke
ravenous and, to all appearances, healed of the blow that had felled them. But
Akiva did not go back to his books. He stayed close to Ysabel, who would not
leave her mother. Joanna tolerated them both. She used them as pages and
errand-runners. She did not ask them to be messengers as only they could be.

Nor did she talk with her daughter of Ranulf’s death. The
household would know when it was humanly possible, when the full tally of the
dead and captive came from Damascus. Joanna nursed her grief alone, and brooded
on the child that would never know its father.

On the second night after the battle, Joanna sat up long
after the others were asleep, with a book in front of her. She did not even
remember which book it was. Her eyes on the page saw not the close, crabbed
lines, but faces. Ranulf’s. Aidan’s. Her daughter’s.

“I sinned once,” she said. “The worse for that I never could
repent it. But except for that one sin, I was all the wife a man could ask for.
I learned to love him. Better than that: I liked him. We were friends.”

There were no tears in her. Her grief was too deep for that.
Aidan was alive and unwedded, and Ranulf was dead. Time was when she would have
been glad of that; when she would have made something of it.

So she had. It slept in her bed, curled about one of the
cats. Ranulf would never know, now, that Ysabel was not his daughter.

Joanna despised herself for being glad. She had meant to
tell him, someday, when he would be able to understand, if not to forgive. Now
she never would. God and the infidel had taken that burden from her; and with
it any hope of absolution.

There were eyes on her. She turned slowly, willing herself
to be calm. Ysabel came as she almost never had, even when she was small, and
climbed into Joanna’s lap, what there was of it with her soon-to-be-born
brother or sister between. She laid her head on her mother’s breast, careful as
no ordinary child would know how to be, not to rouse the ache of the milk that
had begun in it.

Joanna hesitated. Ysabel was silent. Joanna’s arms closed
about her daughter, uncertainly at first, unsure of their welcome. Ysabel was
always a prickly creature, as fierce in her independence as a young cat. She
was more like Morgiana, that way, than like her father. Aidan, twinborn, raised
human, knew what it was to need the nearness of his kin.

A child was a wonderful, terrible thing. Born of one’s blood
and bone, but grown apart from them. This one, who should have been three parts
human, was all strange. Her body that was warmer than a human child’s, warm
enough to be a constant source of alarm in nurses and servants; her heart that
beat on the right side of her body; her skin that was clean even of
child-scents, giving the nose only what was set on it from without. Soap from
the evening’s bath, scented with rosewater. New-washed linen. A suggestion of
cat, from her erstwhile sleeping companion.

Joanna stroked the softness of her hair. She was not a human
child, and yet she was Joanna’s. Knowing that her mother grieved, grieving
herself, she came to give and to receive what comfort she could. It was not,
that Joanna could perceive, anything to do with witchery.

They never resorted to that if human means would suffice. It
was a courtesy, and an economy, and perhaps a sacrifice, too; as saints gave up
things of the flesh to make themselves more worthy of heaven. Odd as some might
reckon it to think of these uncanny people in connection with saints. The
Church would not even give them the courtesy of souls.

Her arms tightened on the thin child-body. No. That, she
would not believe: that her daughter was flesh without spirit. That lie was for
the barren meditations of priests. Priests were men, after all. What did men
know of the truth that was conceived and carried under a woman’s heart?

Ysabel sighed against her. Asleep, and at peace. That should
comfort her, surely; for if there was anything to fear, Ysabel would know.

At the gate of a fallen kingdom, with war coming as
inexorably as tides in the sea, Joanna cradled her eldest daughter and, however
late, however fleetingly, let herself rest.

On the fourth day after the battle of Hattin, as the sun
descended to the hills of Carmel, what had seemed to be a storm of dust and
wind revealed itself for what it was: the army of the infidel, marching swiftly
on Acre. They came in all their ranks with their banners flying, to the beating
of the kettledrums, chanting the praises of Allah. Victory rode on them; they
laughed as they came.

When they had a clear sight of the city, they slowed. The
walls were lined with armed figures, a flame of sunlight on helmet and
spearpoint, a manifold glitter of eyes. Acre, which they had thought bereft of
defenders, was guarded after all, and by a fair army.

Almost, the ruse succeeded. Elen, up on the wall in helmet
and mail, with a sword at her side, watched the enemy come to a halt. There
were not as many of them as rumor had promised. But enough; and they were
visibly deadly on their light Arab horses, with their lances and their swords,
their bows and their maces and their fierce foreign eyes. Soldiers of Allah. It
was more than a word now. It was thousands strong.

She saw the sultan in the center behind a wall of steel: a
doll-figure at this distance, splendid in his golden corselet, mounted on a
white horse. There was a canopy over him, a guard about him in sun-colored coats.
His mamluks, his soldier-slaves who would die for him.

As Raihan would die for his prince. As Raihan might well
have done on the field of Hattin.

The wings of the army halted just out of arrow range. Some
of them seemed to have come forward because of their keen sight; they peered
under shading hands. One lowered his hand suddenly and wheeled his horse about.
It was a handsome display of horsemanship. Elen watched him gallop headlong
through the army, toward the sultan.

Well before the laughter began, it was evident that the
enemy was undeceived. He had taken count of the faces under the helmets, and
marked how many wore grey beards or none at all, nor could grow any. Acre had
no defense that could match the army of Islam.

The enemy camped on the field outside the walls,
conspicuously at their ease, laughing and singing. From within it sounded as if
they were all drunk on wine, but Elen did not think that many of them were.
Saladin was too devout, and too strong a commander. All that intoxicated them was
victory won, and victory soon to be won. They had no doubt at all of it.