Mistress of the Art of Death

that. She concentrated. “He told me once that he was analogous to a doctor of the incorporeal, a mender of broken situations.”

“A fixer. ‘Don’t worry, Simon of Naples will see to it.’”

“Yes. I suppose that is what he was.”

The man beside her nodded, and because she was now furiously interested in who he was, in everything about him, she understood that he, too, was a fixer and that the King of England had said in his Angevin French, “Ne vous en faites pas, Picot va tout arranger.”

“Strange, isn’t it,” the fixer said now, “that the story begins with a dead child.”

A royal child, heir to the throne of England and the empire his father had built for him. William Plantagenet, born to King Henry II and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1153. Died 1156.

Rowley: “Henry doesn’t believe in crusade. Turn your back, he says, and while you’re away, some bastard’ll steal your throne.” He smiled. “Eleanor does, however; she went on one with her first husband.”

And had created a legend still sung throughout Christendom-though not in churches-and brought to Adelia’s mind images of a bare-breasted Amazon blazing her naughty progress across desert sands, trailing Louis, the poor, pious king of France, in her wake.

“Young as he was, the child William was forward and had vowed he would go on crusade when he grew up. They even had a little sword made for him, Eleanor and Henry, and after the boy died, Eleanor wanted it taken to the Holy Land.”

Yes, Adelia thought, touched. She had seen many such pass through Salerno, a father carrying his son’s sword, a son his father’s, on their way to Jerusalem on vicarious crusade as a result of a penance or in response to a vow, sometimes their own, sometimes that of their dead, which had been left unfulfilled.

Perhaps a day or so ago she would not have been so moved, but it was as if Simon’s death and this new, unsuspected passion had opened her to the painful loving of all the world. How pitiable it was.

Rowley said, “For a long time the king refused to spare anybody; he held that God would not refuse Paradise to a three-year-old child because he hadn’t fulfilled a vow. But the queen wouldn’t let it rest and so, what was it, nearly seven years ago now, I suppose, he chose Guiscard de Saumur, one of his Angevin uncles, to take the sword to Jerusalem.”

Again, Rowley grinned. “Henry always has more than one reason for what he does. Lord Guiscard was an admirable choice to take the sword: strong, enterprising, and acquainted with the East, but hot-tempered like all Angevins. A dispute with one of his vassals was threatening peace in the Anjou, and the king felt that Guiscard’s absence for a while would allow the matter to calm down. A mounted guard was to go with him. Henry also felt that he should send a man of his own with Guiscard, a wily fellow with diplomatic skills, or, as he put it, ‘Someone strong enough to keep the bugger out of trouble.’”

“You?” Adelia asked.

“Me,” Rowley said smugly. “Henry knighted me at the same time because I was to be the sword carrier. Eleanor herself strapped it to my back, and from that day until I returned it to young William’s tomb, it never left me. At night, when I took it off, I slept with it. And so we all set off for Jerusalem.”

The place’s name overcame the garden and the two people in it, filling the air with the adoration and agony of three inimical faiths, like planets humming their own lovely chords as they hurtled to collide.

“ Jerusalem,” Rowley said again, and his words were those of the Queen of Sheba: “Behold, the half was not told me.”

As a man entranced, he had trodden the stones made sacred by his Savior, shuffled on his knees along the Via Dolorosa, prostrated himself, weeping, at the Holy Sepulchre. It had seemed good to him, then, that this navel of all virtue should have been cleansed of heathen tyranny by the men of the First Crusade so that Christian pilgrims should once more be able to worship it as he worshipped. He had floundered in admiration for them.

“Even now I don’t know how they did it.” He was shaking his head, still wondering. “Flies, scorpions, thirst, the heat-your horse dies under you, just touching your damned armor blisters your hands. And they were outnumbered, ravaged by disease. No, God the Father was with those early crusaders, else they could never have recaptured His Son’s home. Or that’s what I thought then.”

There were other, profane pleasures. The descendants of the original crusaders had come to terms with the land they called Outremer; indeed, it was difficult to distinguish between them and the Arabs whose style of living they now imitated.

The tax collector described their marble palaces, courtyards with fountains and fig trees, their baths-“I swear to you, great Moorish baths sunk into the floor”-and the rich, pungent scent of seduction drenched the little garden.

Rowley, particularly, of all his group of knights, had been bewitched, not just by the outlandish, exotic holiness of the place but by its diffusion and complexity. “That’s what you don’t expect-how tangled it all is. It’s not plain Christian against plain Saracen, nothing as straightforward as that. You think, God bless, that man’s an enemy because he worships Allah. And, God bless, that fellow kneeling to a cross, he’s a Christian, he must be on our side-and he is a Christian, but he isn’t necessarily on your side, he’s just as likely to be in alliance with a Moslem prince.”

That much Adelia knew. Italian merchant-venturers had traded happily with their Moslem counterparts in Syria and Alexandria long before Pope Urban called for the deliverance of the Holy Places from Mohammedan rule in 1096, and they had cursed the crusade to hell then and cursed again in 1147, when men of the Second Crusade went into the Holy Land once more with no more understanding than their predecessors had had of the human mosaic they were invading, thus disrupting a profitable cooperation that had existed for generations between differing faiths.

As Rowley described a melange that had delighted him, Adelia was alarmed at how the last of her defenses against him crumbled. Always one to categorize, quick to condemn, she was finding in this man a breadth of perception rare in crusaders. Don’t, don’t. This infatuation must be dispelled; it is necessary for me not to admire you. I do not wish to fall in love.

Unaware, Rowley went on. “At first I was amazed that Jew and Moslem were as ardent in their attachment to the Holy Temple as I was, that it was equally holy to them.” While he did not allow the realization to put a creep of doubt into his mind about the rightness of the crusading cause-“that came later”-he nevertheless began to find distasteful the loud, bullying intolerance of most of the other newcomers. He preferred the company and way of life of crusaders who were descendants of crusaders and who had accommodated themselves to its melting pot. Thanks to their hospitality, the aristocratic Guiscard and his entourage were able to enjoy it.

No question of returning home, not yet. They learned Arabic, they bathed in unguent-scented water, joining their hosts in hunting with ferocious little Barbary falcons, enjoying loose robes and the company of compliant women, sherbet, soft cushions, black servants, spiced food. When they went to war, they covered their armor with burnooses against the sun, indistinguishable from the Saracen enemy apart from the crosses on their shields.

For go to war Guiscard and his little band did, so completely had they turned from pilgrims into crusaders. King Amalric had issued an urgent call to arms to all the Franks in order to prevent the Arab general Nur-ad-Din, who had marched into Egypt, from uniting the Moslem world against Christians.

“A great warrior, Nur-ad-Din, and a great bastard. It seemed to us, then, you see, that in joining the King of Jerusalem’s army, we were also joining the King of Heaven’s.”

They marched south.

Until now, Adelia noticed, the man next to her had spoken in detail, building for her white and golden domes, great hospitals, teeming streets, the vastness of the desert. But the account of his crusade itself was sparse. “Sacred madness” was all he had to say, though he added, “There was chivalry on both sides, even so. When Amalric fell ill, Nur-ad-Din ceased fighting until he was better.”

But the Christian army was followed by the dross of Europe. The Pope’s pardon to sinners and criminals as long as they took the cross had released into Outremer men who killed indiscriminately-certain that, whatever they did, they would be welcomed into Jesus’ arms.

“Cattle,” Rowley said of them, “still stinking of the farmyards they came from. They’d escaped servitude; now they wanted land and they wanted riches.”

They’d slaughtered Greeks, Armenians, and Copts of an older Christianity than their own because they thought they were heathens. Jews, Arabs, who were versed in Greek and Roman philosophy and advanced in the mathematics and medicine and astronomy that the Semitic races had given to the West, went down before men who could neither read nor write and saw no reason to.

“Amalric tried to keep them in check,” Rowley said, “but they were always there, like the vultures. You’d come back to your lines to find that they’d slit open the bellies of the captives because they thought Moslems kept their jewels safe by swallowing them. Women, children, it didn’t matter to them. Some of them didn’t join the army at all; they roamed the trade routes in bands, looking for loot. They burned and blinded, and when they were caught, they said they were doing it for their immortal souls. They probably still are.”

He was quiet for a moment. “And our killer was one of them,” he said.

Adelia turned her head quickly to look up at him. “You know him? He was there?”

“I never set eyes on him. But he was there, yes.”

The robin had come back. It fluttered up onto a lavender bush and peered at the two silent people in its territory for a moment before flying off to chase a dunnock out of the garden.

Rowley said, “Do you know what our great crusades are achieving?”

Adelia shook her head. Disenchantment did not belong on his face, but it was there now, making him look older, and she thought that perhaps bitterness had been beneath the jollity all along, like underlying rock.

“I’ll tell you what they’re achieving,” he was saying. “They’re inspiring such a hatred amongst Arabs who used to hate each other that they’re combining the greatest force against Christianity the world has ever seen. It’s called Islam.”

He turned away from her to go into the house. She watched him all the way. Not chubby now-how could she have thought that? Massive.

She heard him calling for ale.

When he came back, he had a tankard in each hand. He held one out to her. “Thirsty work, confession,” he said.

Was that what it was? She took the pot and sipped at it, unable to move her eyes away from him, knowing with a dreadful clarity that whatever sin it was he had to confess, she would absolve him of it.

He stood looking down at her. “I had William Plantagenet’s little sword on my back for four years,” he said. “I wore it under my mail so that it should not be damaged when I fought. I took it into battle, out of it. It scarred my skin so deep that I’m marked with a cross, like the ass that carried Jesus into Jerusalem. The only scar I’m proud of.” He squinted. “Do you want to see it?”

She smiled back at him. “Perhaps not now.”

You are a drab, she told herself, seduced into infatuation by a soldier’s tale. Outremer, bravery, crusade, it is illusory romance. Pull yourself together, woman.

“Later, then,” he said. He sipped his ale and sat down. “Where was I? Oh, yes. By this time we were on our way to Alexandria. We had to prevent Nur-ad-Din from building his ships in the ports along the Egyptian coast; not, mind you, that the Saracens have taken to sea warfare yet-there’s an Arab proverb that it is better to hear the flatulence of camels than the prayers of fishes-but they will one day. So there we were, fighting our way through the Sinai.”

Sand, heat, the wind the Moslems called khamsin scouring the eyeballs. Attacks coming out of nowhere by Scythian mounted archers-“Like damned centaurs they were, loosing arrows at us thick as a locust swarm so that men and horses ended up looking like hedgehogs.” Thirst.

And in the middle of it, Guiscard falling sick, very sick.

“He’d rarely been ill in his life, and he was all at once frightened by his own mortality-he didn’t want to die in a foreign land. ‘Carry me home, Rowley,’ he said, ‘Promise to take me to Anjou.’ So I promised him.”

On behalf of his sick lord, Rowley had knelt to the King of Jerusalem to beg for and be granted leave to return to France. “Truth to tell, I was glad. I was tired of the killing. Is this what the Lord