Christ came to earth for? I kept asking myself that. And the thought of the little boy in his tomb waiting for his sword was beginning to trouble my sleep. Even so…”
He drank the last of his ale, then shook his head, tired. “Even so, the guilt when I said good-bye…I felt a traitor. I swear to you, I’d never have left with the war unwon if it hadn’t fallen to me to see Guiscard home.”
He had begun organizing the journey back. “I knew it wouldn’t be easy,” he said. “We were deep in the White Desert at a place called Baharia, a biggish settlement for an oasis, but if God has ever heard of it, I’ll be surprised. I intended to head back west to strike the Nile and sail up to Alexandria -it was still in friendly hands then-and take passage to Italy from there. But apart from the Scythian cavalry, assassins behind every bloody bush, wells poisoned, there were our own dear Christian outlaws looking for booty-and over the years, Guiscard had acquired so many relics and jewels and samite that we were going to be traveling with a pack train two hundred yards long, just asking to be raided.”
So he’d taken hostages.
Adelia’s tankard jerked in her hand. “You took hostages?”
“Of course I did.” He was irritated. “It’s the accepted thing out there. Not for ransom as we do in the West, you understand. In Outremer, hostages are security.”
They were a guarantee, he said, a contract, a living form of good faith, a promise that an agreement would be kept, part and parcel of the diplomacy and cultural exchange between different races. Frankish princesses as young as four years old were handed over to ensure an alliance between their Christian fathers and Moorish captors. The sons of great sultans lived in Frankish households, sometimes for years, as warranty for their family’s good behavior.
“Hostages save bloodshed,” he said. “They’re a fine idea. Say you’re besieged in a city and want to make terms with the besiegers. Very well, you demand hostages to ensure that the bastards don’t come in raping and killing and that the surrender takes place without reprisals. Then again, suppose you have to pay a ransom but can’t raise all the cash immediately, ergo you offer hostages as collateral for the rest. Hostages are used for just about anything. When Emperor Nicepheros wanted to borrow the services of an Arab poet for his court, he gave hostages to the poet’s caliph, Harun al-Rashid, as surety that the man would be returned in good order. They’re like pawnbrokers’ pledges.”
She shook her head in wonder. “Does it work?”
“To perfection.” He thought about it. “Well, nearly always. I never heard of a hostage paying the penalty while I was there, though I gather the early crusaders could be somewhat hasty.”
He was eager to reassure her. “It’s an excellent thing, you see. Keeps the peace, helps both sides understand each other. Those Moorish baths now-we men of the West would never have known about them if some high-born hostage hadn’t demanded that one be installed.”
Adelia wondered how the system worked in reverse. What did the European knights, of whose cleanliness she had no great opinion, teach their captors in return?
But she knew this was wandering from the point. The narrative was slowing.
“So I took hostages,” he said.
She watched his fingers crease the tunic on his knees.
He had sent an emissary to Al-Hakim Biamrallah at Farafra, a man who ruled over most of the route he would have to take.
“Hakim was of the Fatimid persuasion, you see, a Shia, and the Fatimids were taking our side against Nur-ad-Din, who wasn’t.” He cocked an eye at her. “I told you it was complicated.”
With the emissary had gone gifts and a request for hostages to ensure the safe passage of Guiscard, his men, and pack animals to the Nile.
“That’s where we were going to leave them. The hostages. Hakim’s men would pick them up from there.”
“I see,” she said very gently.
“Cunning old fox, Hakim,” Rowley said in tribute, one cunning fox to another. “White beard down to here but more wives than you could shake a stick at. He and I had already met several times on the march; we’d gone hunting together. I liked him.”
Adelia, still watching Rowley’s hands, nice hands, grip and grip again like a raptor’s on a wrist. “And he agreed?”
“Oh, yes, he agreed.”
The emissary had returned minus the gifts and plus hostages, two of them, both boys: Ubayd, Hakim’s nephew, and Jaafar, one of his sons. “Ubayd was nearly twelve, I think; Jaafar…Jaafar was eight, his father’s favorite.”
There was a pause, and the tax collector’s voice became remote. “Pleasant boys, well-mannered, like all Saracen children. Excited to be hostages for their uncle and father. It gave them status. They regarded it as an adventure.”
The large hands curved, showing bone beneath the knuckles. “An adventure,” he said again.
The gate to the sheriff’s garden creaked and two men came in carrying spades, and walked past Sir Rowley and Adelia with a tug of their caps and on down the path to the cherry tree. They began digging.
Without comment, the man and woman on the turf bench turned their heads to watch as if observing shapes across a distance, nothing to do with them, something happening in another place entirely.
Rowley was relieved that Hakim had sent not only mule and camel drivers to help with Guiscard’s goods but also a couple of warriors as guards. “By this time, our own party of knights was diminished. James Selkirk and D’Aix had been killed at Antioch; Gerard De Nantes died in a tavern brawl. The only ones left of the original group were Guiscard and Conrad De Vries and myself.”
Guiscard, too weak to mount a horse, rode in a palanquin that could go only at the pace of the slaves who carried it, so it was a long, slow train that began the journey across the parched countryside-and Guiscard’s condition worsened to the point where they couldn’t go on.
“We were midway, as far to go back as to continue, but one of Hakim’s men knew of an oasis a mile or so off the track, so we took Guiscard there and pitched our pavilions. Tiny place it was, empty, a few date palms, but, by a miracle, its spring was sweet. And that’s where he died.”
“I am sorry,” Adelia said. The dreariness descending on the man beside her was almost palpable.
“So was I, very.” He lifted his head. “No time to sit and weep, though. You of all people know what happens to bodies, and in that heat it happens fast. By the time we reached the Nile, the corpse would have been…well.”
On the other hand, Guiscard had been a lord of Anjou, uncle to Henry Plantagenet, not some vagabond to be buried in a nameless hole scratched out of Egyptian grit. His people would need something of him returned over which to perform the funeral rites. “Besides, I’d promised him to take him home.”
It was then, Rowley said, that he made the mistake that would pursue him to the grave. “May God forgive me, I split our forces.”
For the sake of speed, he decided to leave the two young hostages where they were while he and De Vries with a couple of servants made a dash back to Baharia, carrying the corpse with them in the hope of finding an embalmer.
“We were in Egypt, after all, and Herodotus goes into quite disgusting detail on how the Egyptians preserve their dead.”
“You read Herodotus?”
“His Egyptian stuff, very informative about Egypt is Herodotus.”
He went on. “They were content with the situation, the boys, quite happy. They had Hakim’s two warriors to guard them, plenty of servants, slaves. I gave them Guiscard’s splendid bird to fly while we were away-they were keen falconers, both. Food, water, pavilions, shelter at night. And I did everything I could; I sent one of the Arab servants to Hakim to tell him what had occurred and where the boys were, just in case anything happened to me.”
A list of excuses to himself; he must have gone over it a thousand times. “I thought we were the ones taking the risk, De Vries and I, being just the two of us. The boys should have been safe enough.” He turned to her as if he would shake her.
“Yes,” Adelia said.
From the bottom of the garden where the men were digging Simon’s grave came the regular scrape and scatter, scrape and scatter, of earth being lifted and discarded. They might have been three thousand miles away from the crucible of hot sand in which, by now, she could barely breathe.
A harness had been constructed to carry the palanquin containing Guiscard’s corpse between a couple of pack animals and, with only two mule drivers as accompaniment, Sir Rowley Picot and his fellow knight had ridden with it as fast as they could.
“It turned out there wasn’t an embalmer in Baharia, but I found some old shaman who cut the heart out for me and put it in pickle while the rest was boiled down to the skeleton.”
That had proved a lengthier process than Rowley was expecting, but at last, with Guiscard’s bones in a satchel and the heart in a stoppered jar, he and De Vries had set off back to the oasis, approaching it eight days after they’d left it.
“We saw the vultures while we were still three miles off. The camp had been raided. All the servants were dead. Hakim’s warriors had given a good account of themselves before they were hacked to pieces, and there were three bodies belonging to the raiders. The pavilions had gone, the slaves, the goods, the animals.”
In the terrible desert silence, the two knights heard a whimper coming from the top of one of the date palms. It was Ubayd, the older boy, alive and physically unhurt. “The attack had been at night, you see, and in the darkness he and one of the slaves had managed to shin up a tree and hide in the fronds. The boy had been there a day and two nights. De Vries had to climb up and unhook his hands to get him down. He’d seen everything; he couldn’t move.”
The one they couldn’t find was eight-year-old Jaafar.
“We were still scouring the place for him when Hakim and his men arrived. He’d received news that there was a raiding party loose in the land just about the same time that he’d gotten my message. He’d immediately ridden like a wind from hell for the oasis.”
Rowley’s great head went down as if to receive coals of fire. “He didn’t blame me. Hakim. Not a word, not even later when we found…what we found. Ubayd explained, told the old man it wasn’t my fault, but these last years I’ve known whose fault it was. I should never have left them; I should have taken the boys with me. They were my responsibility, you see. My hostages.”
Adelia’s fingers covered the gripping hands for a moment. He didn’t notice.
When, eventually, Ubayd had been able to speak of it, he’d told them that the raiding party had been twenty to twenty-five strong. He’d heard different languages spoken as the slaughter below him went on. “Frankish mainly,” he’d said. He’d heard his little cousin cry to Allah for help.
“We tracked them. They had a lead of thirty-six hours, but we reckoned that they’d be slowed by all the loot. On the second day we saw the hoofprints of a lone horse that had broken away from the rest and turned south.”
Hakim sent some of his men after the raiders’ main party while he and Rowley followed the tracks of the single horseman.
“Looking back, I don’t know why we did that; the man could have veered off for a dozen reasons. But I think we knew.”
They knew when they saw the vultures circling over a single object behind one of the dunes. The naked little body was curled in the sand like a question mark.
Rowley had his eyes shut. “He’d done such things to that little boy as no human being should look on or describe.”
“We’d played chess together,” Rowley said, “the boy and I. On the journey. He was a clever child, he used to beat me eight times out of ten.”
