The Dagger and the Cross (38 page)

“The seneschal will give in,” Joanna said. The children were
fed and put fretfully to bed, even Akiva, who clearly reckoned himself more
than a child.

“Not until Rosh Hashonah,” his father told him, and that
ended that.

The three of them sat on the roof: the two women and the
Rhiyanan king’s friend. They could not see the enemy’s army even if they had
been minded to; there was a church tower between. They looked seaward instead.
The harbor had been emptying since word came from Hattin. Tonight there were
almost no ships left in the outer harbor, and most of those in the inner
readied for a swift departure in the morning. Some would go to Cyprus. Many
meant to take refuge in Tyre, a short sail up the coast. The harbor there was
less secure in a storm, but the city was strongly defended against attack by
land; more strongly than Acre.

“The rats leave the ship,” Joanna said. It was hard in
lamplight to read her face. Her voice was flat. “My lord Joscelin will
surrender. What else can he do? He can’t put up anything resembling a decent
fight. He’s not mad like our noble king. He’ll get what concessions he can, and
hand over the city.”

“I wish I could call that cowardice.” Elen’s head ached. She
leaned it against her cup, letting the coolness give what comfort it could. “I’ve
never been on the losing side of a war.”

“None of us has.” Joanna was a shadow in the gloom, massive
and immobile. “We don’t know how to act.”

“With dignity,” said Simeon. “That is how one acts.”

They looked at him. The lamplight caught his coat, and the
raven sheen of his beard, and half of his face: flat cheek, deep eye, broad
uncompromising nose. His voice was as dry as the plain of Hattin.

He met their stares calmly, with a glint that might have
been irony. “One acts with dignity,” he said, “as much as one may. One
compromises only as much as one must, and still remain oneself. And one keeps
one’s pride, even if one must keep it in secret, where only God can see.”

“One doesn’t fight?” Elen asked.

The narrow shoulders lifted in a shrug. “What good does it
do?”

“It makes one feel better.”

“And maybe one dies, and the enemy is still the victor.”
Simeon sat back in his chair, stroking his beard, more at ease than she had ever
seen him outside of Gwydion’s company. This, the edge of disaster, seemed to be
his element. “What will you do, my ladies? Will you fight?”

Elen shook her head but did not answer. Joanna said, “I will
do what I will do.” She heaved herself up. “Which is, now, to get what sleep I
can.”

They watched her go. Elen was disinclined to move. She did
not like the taste that was in her mouth. It was defeat; it saw no escape.

“There is a way out of this, you know,” Simeon said, as if
like his son he could know what she thought.

“Death?” she asked.

Simeon’s eyes glittered. “Of course not. That is final, and
God forbids it. What He will allow... Who is to say that He wouldn’t be as
pleased to be addressed as Allah by a new-made Muslim?”

“Is that what you will do?”

He laughed, which both dismayed and comforted her. “I, no. I
lacked the sense to turn Christian when the Anglian king’s dogs hunted me out
of the isles. What makes you think I’d turn Muslim now, with the Syrian sultan’s
dogs yapping at the gates?”

“Why didn’t you?” she asked. “Turn Christian, that is.”

“Why don’t you turn Muslim?”

That was answer enough, if she thought about it. “Does God
even care what name we call Him by?”

“He may not. We, being human and imperfect, do. And I have
generations of pride to protect. We kept our faith when the whole world turned
against it. How can I forsake it now?”

“What would your son say to that?”

“My son is as stubborn as I am.” Simeon was proud of that
and of him.

“It must be strange,” Elen mused, “to know that one’s child is
of that blood. And he will carry it on through years out of count. Our Church
is appalled. What do your people think of it?”

“My people accept what is. Maybe he is something out of the
Enemy’s kingdom: golem or dybbuk, or creature of a darker persuasion. I, and
such of my people as know him, prefer to think him a new face of God’s
creation. He says that he is mine, and he was incontestably Rachel’s. I know
that I have no such blood as your family claims; Rachel saw farther and deeper
than most women do, but she was human enough for all of that. So: God gave us a
gift, and let Rachel live long enough to know it for what it was. She seemed
glad. I know she loved him. What could I do but love him enough for both of us,
once she was gone? And now he sleeps on the edge of war.” The dark eyes closed;
the face withdrew out of the light. “I would have spared him that if I could.
Or,” said Simeon, “no. He has to know what the world is. It will betray him
twice over, once for his faith and once for what he is, unless he knows how to
live in it.”

“Then pray God the Saracen doesn’t kill him.”

“I am praying,” said Simeon. “Every moment, I pray. This
country has suffered enough from rashness and folly. It’s time someone showed
sense.”

o0o

Joscelin, seneschal of Acre under the captive king, seemed
to have come to the same conclusion. In the cool of morning, but with the sun
threatening already to scorch that little coolness out of the air, he sent his
envoy to the sultan. His terms were simple. As the Muslims had done fourscore
years before when the Franks took the city from them, he offered surrender. In
return he asked that the sultan spare the lives and the goods of the city’s
people.

Saladin had had enough of summary justice after Hattin. He
accepted the terms.

But the city would not accept him. Some of the wealthier
merchants and one or two young sprigs of the nobility and a remarkable number
of plainer citizens saw in surrender only shame. They rose in revolt.

Joanna barricaded her family in the house and would not let
any of them out. Even through the walls they could hear sounds that were more
like riot than proper battle. Trumpets marked the seneschal’s response. It was
swift, it was firm, and it was exactly as brutal as it needed to be. Word of it
came through the barred gate from a crier who traversed the streets, relaying
the seneschal’s command for citizens to keep to their houses, master their
tempers, and forbear from assaults on the new masters of Acre. Merchants, the
crier added, were beseeched to remain; the sultan was well disposed toward
them, and would welcome their presence and their commerce.

Those merchants who still lingered responded by departing in
a caravan. As hastily as they did it, they had no time to gather their stores.
When toward evening the sultan rode into the city he would find the warehouses
filled to bursting with the wealth of an empire: silks and satins, gold and
silver and copper, jewels and weapons and a myriad lesser riches. More than one
trading enterprise would founder for its owners’ cowardice.

Joanna, behind her walls, settled in to wait. Saladin was a
clement conqueror: he did not set his troops free to sack and burn unless he
was provoked. As here he seemed not to be, rebellion notwithstanding.

Her household could not understand what she meant by
refusing to leave. Those who could think of it at all, thought that she was
about to deliver herself of her baby. So she was, but she had more in mind than
that. Which was why, when the hour drew near to sunset, she called for her
litter.

Elen, God be thanked, did not seem to mark the signs; she
simply insisted on being part of the deputation. So did the witch-children.
What they knew, they were not telling, but they stayed closer even than they
had been doing. Simeon she left to look after the house. He was not happy, but
he was a practical man. He could see that one of them should stay, in case
there should be looting after all. One wing of Saladin’s army had escaped his
vigilance, mercifully outside the walls, and plundered the sugar mill; God knew
what the sultan’s own troops might take it into their heads to do.

The city was full of them. Most quartered in merchants’
abandoned houses. Some established themselves by the harbor, though they did
not try to stop ships from leaving. A goodly number took the citadel and the
surrender of its defenders, and set themselves on guard.

A lady’s litter, with a second lady walking haughtily beside
it and a pair of children flanking it and a pair of guards with swords
carefully in sheaths, was startling enough that it passed unhindered even where
the conquerors were thickest. No one offered them insult. Elen, wisely, had
drawn her veil across her face. Joanna was borne in curtained propriety like a
Muslim
khatun.

Like a Muslim lady, she had learned the art of seeing the
world from behind the veil. She saw what the infidel had made of the city: a
shocked, silent place, with here and there a remnant of the rebellion. A stain
of blood on a wall; a broken door. A dead man awaiting his turn for burial.

Then, as the shadows lengthened, it came: the sound that
above all marked the triumph of Islam. From the summit of a tower, perhaps a
church, perhaps a crumbling minaret, the muezzin’s wail called the faithful to
prayer.
God is great! God is great! There is no god but God, and Muhammad is
the Prophet of God. Come to prayer, O ye Muslims, come to prayer...

Joanna shivered on the too-soft cushions, in the stifling
confinement of the litter. Her throat was locked shut. She refused fiercely to
burst into tears.

The wailing died away. The city’s masters bowed down in
prayer. Joanna’s litter made its way through the silent, all-but-empty streets
to the citadel and its turbaned guardians.

They were taken aback as their fellows had been in the city,
by a Frankish lady who wished to speak with their sultan. Who expressed that
wish, further, in Arabic somewhat purer than their own, with an accent that
bespoke Aleppo, and noble Aleppo at that. That they were turning petitioners
away, she could see for herself: a man with the look of a merchant left even as
she arrived, clearly unsatisfied, and muttering what sounded like curses. What
he had hoped to do, she could imagine. Make a profit from the invading army,
then abscond with it. Clearly Saladin was having none of that.

She was not asking for profit, and she was anomalous enough
to gain at least a promise that her message would be passed to the proper
authorities. “To your sultan,” she said firmly.

The captain of guards, who had come to his underlings’ call,
bowed and sent a guardsman inward. He promised nothing, she noticed, but she
was prepared to wait, and if she must, to insist.

In good enough time, considering that they were kept waiting
at the gate, the guard returned and spoke to his commander. His voice was too
low for Joanna to catch. She was admittedly somewhat distracted. Her belly had
tightened in a way she knew too well. Not painfully, not quite, not yet, but
its message was plain.

She would not need after all to test her willingness to give
birth on the sultan’s doorstep. Saladin would speak with her. She was to
understand that propriety could hardly be observed here in what was in essence
a camp of war. Would she be content with the presence of the seneschal?

She would. She would not, mercifully, be forced to walk up
from the gate. As far as the litter could go, it was allowed: only into the
courtyard, but even that was something. She extricated herself from it,
stiffly, struggling not to double up as the first honest pain lanced through
her center. The support she clung to resolved itself into Akiva. Growing like a
weed, the boy was: he was as high as her shoulder already, and slender-strong
as all his people were.

The sultan’s men were appalled to discover that not only was
she big with child, she was perilously close to giving birth. She drew herself
up under their darting, half-frightened glances, and mustered strength to walk.

It was easier once she had begun. A woman should walk when
she was at her time; it made the baby come more easily. She climbed the last flight
of stairs almost lightly, and entered the lamplit hall.

It was full. The seneschal clearly was an honored captive;
he sat near the sultan, and his men were not far from him, though they carried
no weapons. They seemed to have decided to accept what they could not alter.
There was no open rebellion to be seen, and of sullenness no more than there
should be.

The sultan’s men were jubilant, though they stilled for
Joanna’s entrance. She must have been impressive. She was taller than most of
them, and she was dressed as a Frank, scorning the veils and the modesty of
Muslim women. The boy who was her prop, so evidently a Jew, and the lady and
the maidchild behind her, made a most peculiar procession.

Saladin could not know Joanna’s face, but she knew his well
enough. She had been in Damascus once, when Ysabel was conceived, and she had
known his Turkish wife, the Lady Ismat; from the sultan’s harem, through secret
lattices, she had been privileged to observe the sultan at his diwan, his time
of open audience. Saladin was older, inevitably, but he had still the same
fine, close-bearded, pleasing face, and the same air almost of diffidence, as
if he could not believe that he of all men was the lord of both Egypt and
Syria, a king of kings in Islam. His rank sat more easily on him now; he wore
simple black as she remembered, but it was somewhat less threadbare than it had
been, and his weapons were beautiful. The sword in its damascened sheath
reminded her of Aidan, who had a blade very like it: straight, slender, with a
silver hilt. There was a ruby in Aidan’s pommel. Saladin’s was plain, and
lovely in its plainness.

She offered him such obeisance as her bulk and her rank
would allow. He did not stare, she noticed, though the boy who sat at his right
hand was all eyes and arrogance. That would be his son, no doubt. Al-Afdal,
whose first battle had been Hattin.