Fourteen
JAFFA
On the next full moon Edythe took blood from
Richard’s arm; the blood was warm and looked wholesome, thickened
properly, separated out properly into the other humors. The
rebuilding of Jaffa went on, the walls rose higher, and the King
himself went around every day to see it. A messenger came from
Saladin, but Richard would not receive him, because of the
bleeding. Two galleys brought in the first shipments from Acre of
furnishings for Johanna’s room and the hall. The hall especially
was suddenly more comfortable, with long cushioned divans and
hangings on the walls, and the raised chair Johanna set out for a
throne.
At last, after three days had passed, the King
allowed in the Saracen messenger. It was the Sultan’s brother
again, Safadin, tall and lean and watchful of everything, with a
small guard of swordsmen whom he left in the courtyard. The King
sat on his new throne to receive him; a Byzantine silk shawl
covered it, magnificent with gold and stones. Humphrey de Toron
stood by his side, to translate, so that he and Safadin were each
talking in their own language. Rouquin stood behind the throne on
the other side.
Safadin walked calmly up before the King; he
inclined his head an inch. He spoke in a bold voice.
Humphrey said, “My lord Saif ad-Din, in the name of
the Sultan of Egypt and Syria, Yusuf ibn Ayyub, Salah ad-Din. He
congratulates the great King Richard the Lionheart. They have not
lied who spoke of you with awe before you ever came here. Rather,
they said not enough. You are the Alexander of the Franks.”
Rouquin lifted his head; he felt the praises of
this enemy as he would never feel them from a friend. Richard
himself got to his feet, walked down from the throne, and stood
face-to-face with Safadin, equal to him. He said, “God has sent us
worthy adversaries,” which pleased Rouquin also.
Safadin talked, not gesturing, his smooth dark
hands clasped at his waist. Humphrey said, “The Sultan finds el
Malik Rik as excellent in words as on the battlefields. He wishes
to discuss a truce, so the Lords of East and West can see if words
may solve this issue. You must know, my lord, that their faith does
not allow them to make peace with the Dar al Harb”—he bowed to
Safadin as he said this—“that is, the House of War, which is all
that of the world which does not submit to Allah. But they can make
a truce, to recover from a loss.”
Richard said nothing for a moment. Humphrey said a
few words in Arabic to Safadin, who shut his eyes and opened them.
Rouquin thought, The House of War. That fit, everything else
than that a figment of words.
At last, Richard said, “My terms for peace have not
changed. I want Jerusalem, the restoration of the kingdom of the
Franks here, and the return of the True Cross.”
Humphrey spoke, and Safadin spoke.
Humphrey said, “He says thus: Jerusalem is as holy
to us as it is to you. Holier, in fact, since it is there our
people will come on the day of the last trumpet, to hear the
judgment of the One True God. He has a letter from his brother.”
Humphrey held out one hand, and Safadin put a scroll into it.
Richard made no move for the letter. He said, “I
shall read it and reply as I see necessary. In the meantime, my
lord Safadin, permit my cousin to escort you back to your own
house.” His smile flashed at that. He said, “My cousin is to me as
you are to the Sultan, so this is very apt.”
Safadin took three steps backward, bowed again more
with his eyes than anything else, and turned. Rouquin went after
him and caught up with him at the door. He wondered what the letter
said and doubted it was much. He thought Humphrey had put this
truce idea in exactly the right way. In the courtyard, with a
gesture he summoned Mercadier and three other men, who brought
horses, and they met Safadin and his guard at the gate.
They rode out of Jaffa and turned inland. Dark was
coming. Rouquin was almost stirrup to stirrup with Safadin, but he
said nothing; he felt the war between them like a sword. He liked
the Saracen’s horse, a dark bay mare with white socks all around,
who moved as prettily as a swallow. She was too light for a man in
armor, more a fine palfrey. He thought of Edythe riding her. Bred
to a brawny stallion like his roan warhorse, she might throw bigger
colts that still kept her fine lines. Then, where the road went
down through a dry streambed, the Saracen reined in and turned to
him and said in perfect French, “From here I can make my own
way.”
Rouquin wanted to see his camp, which he knew was
also Richard’s design. He said, “The King bade me ride with you to
the door of your tent.”
“Ah,” said the dark, expressive face, taking some
amusement from this. His eyes held Rouquin’s. “But I could not
promise you that you would then get all the way back to
Jaffa.”
Rouquin felt his blood heat; he said, “Nothing you
have can stop me.”
The Saracen said, “I myself faced your charge at
Arsuf. I hope never to do so again. But I would for the sake of the
True Faith. I think also you have felt the bite of our arrows, and
an arrow can kill as well as a lance.”
Rouquin said, “I have taken your arrows. I am still
here.”
The quick white smile parted the Saracen’s dark
beard. “Yes. You are here. Far from home, and we are home. We can
drive you away, and you have somewhere to go. We have only
here.”
Rouquin said nothing. Against his will, he saw the
reason in this. The Saracen lifted his hand, almost a salute, and
moved off into the falling darkness with his men. Rouquin went back
to Jaffa.
Edythe had been looking throughout the city for
Jews but found none. Then, while she was inhaling the cool
fragrance of peppermint in an apothecary, the shopkeeper told her
he had gotten it from the village at the mouth of the river.
“They’re Jews, you know,” he said. “They can’t even live here. But,
you know, every herb gathered by a Jew has a special power, every
bark and every berry, and they have a doctor there.”
As soon as she could, she went down along the
shallow river that cut through the sandy low ground north of the
wall of Jaffa. Ahead of her a cluster of small white houses
appeared under some palm trees where the water ran into the sea.
Closer to the real city, Syrian women washed their clothes in the
river, wading in with their skirts tucked up between their legs.
Screaming naked children ran along the shallows. She ambled by as
if she were only walking and crossed the empty space between Jaffa
and the little village.
The cluster of buildings seemed no different from
any other houses in Jaffa, stretching their clay roofs wide beyond
the walls to fight off the blaze of the sun. Many of them had a low
freestanding stone screen around the outside, as if to protect them
from all eyes. In front of the biggest house three women in dark
shawls were sitting on a bench; one was picking through lentils,
and another nursing a baby, and the third sewing.
Edythe’s heart was hammering. She could not
remember the words. She hoped they knew some French. She went up
and bowed to them, very nicely, to put them on her side.
The woman with the baby got up and went in through
the gate behind her. The woman sorting the lentils spoke in a
tongue she did not recognize, and then said, in French, “You
want?”
The two women stared at her, unsmiling. They did
not seem on her side. She said, “Doctor. Iatros.
Medicus.”
They looked at each other, and then the woman with
the lentils said, “Yeshua. You want. Yeshua ben Yafo.” She pointed
across the way, to a smaller house.
“Thank you,” she said, and bowed again.
Their faces were blank as the walls, unfriendly as
the walls. A chill went over her. She turned and went to the house
opposite.
This was small, the white plaster chipped, part of
the roof patched with palm fronds. No one was outside. Hesitantly
she went in the opening through the screening wall, onto a narrow
walk. Little trees grew along the side of the house, their leaves
mostly fallen at their feet, the bare branches spangled with yellow
apples.
A door in the house opened, and someone called, not
in French.
“Please,” she said. “I am—I have heard there is a
doctor here— Please—” She took another step forward, farther into
the narrow orchard. All her hair was stirring; her stomach was
clamped to her backbone.
An old woman appeared, also swathed in black, and
stone-faced. Edythe said, “Please—” The woman backed up and slammed
the door.
She staggered, as if the door had struck her. But
then the door opened, and an old man came out. He was tall, even if
old, and his face jutted out in a wedge, a sharp nose, a long jaw
below sparse white hair and a scalp spotted brown.
“You want a doctor,” he said. “Are you sick?” His
French was slow but exact.
She took her first deep breath in moments. “Yeshua
ben Yafo,” she said.
He bowed. “I am he.”
“My name is Edythe,” she said. “I am a doctor
with—with the Crusade.”
“Ah,” he said, and nodded at her. “You are the
woman from the Latin hospital, in the city.”
Her jaw dropped. He stood aside and waved his hand
at the doorway. “Please come in.”
She went past him into a room filled with scrolls
and bound books, stacked one on the other, wads of paper thrust
between them, heaps of books and paper on the floor, on the table,
on a chair to one side of the table. The old man went by her to the
only other chair.
He said, “You are young, you can sit on the floor.”
He sat in the chair.
She sank down cross-legged on the floor and tucked
her skirts around her. “You know who I am?” she said.
“Everyone knows of you, yes,” he said. “You are not
a woman of the people, but you serve everybody. What do you need of
me?”
She said, “I have a patient with a recurring
fever.”
“How have you dealt with it?”
She told him—the oxymel, the bergamot she had
gotten in Acre, the bleeding, cooling him through the fevers and
warming him through the chills, rubbing him down, the lemon potions
and zingiber. He listened, his head to one side. His eyes were
wide, the irises large even for this dim room, and she wondered if
he was going blind.
He said, “None of this will hurt. Often a kind
touch will do more than a potion. You should give him a tincture of
artemisia when he first shows signs of falling sick. It is not easy
to find. I hope your patient is rich, and has a strong
stomach.”
She blurted, suddenly, “I want to be a Jew again.”
Tears rose in her eyes. “Tell me how to be a Jew again.”
Silence met this. He sat still, his wide eyes
unblinking. He was blind, she thought, despairing; he could not
even see her.
He said, “What happened to you?”
She said, “We lived in France. In Troyes. The
French King made a decree that we all had to go. All the Jews had
to go. My mother was near her time with child, and my father would
not leave her.” The tears rolled down her cheeks. It didn’t matter,
since he could not see them. “They set a mob on any who stayed. The
mob burned—burned—I wasn’t there, my aunt had taken me to Rouen. I
was thirteen. They sent me off to England, from house to house. To
the Queen, who took me in.”
“Blessed for that,” he said.
“And told me henceforth to be a Christian.”
He coughed, or chuckled. “Not that. Troyes, yes,
all know of the martyrs of Troyes, of the terrible purge of Philip
Augustus. Who was your father?”
“His name was—was Mordecai ben Micah.”
He lifted his head. The huge eyes fixed on her. She
had been wrong. He saw everything. He said, “Mordecai ben Micah of
Troyes.”
“Yes.”
He rose and went behind the table, digging through
the piles of books. His hands caressed them. He picked them up and
set them down as gently as babies. At last he turned, one little
book in his hand.
He held it out to her, and sat down again when she
had taken it. She laid it on her knees. It was plain, bound on the
left in a scuffed leather cover, some of the pages ripped at the
edges. He was smiling at her.
He said, “That is your father’s book.”
She gasped. She raised the book in her hands,
amazed. It was written in Hebrew characters, which she could not
read. The leather cover had faded gilt lettering on it; she knew
the character that began her father’s name and traced it with her
finger.
“It is a copy, of course, not the true book,” he
said. “It is—as you see—a commentary on the Canon of Ibn Sina. Your
father was known all over the world. He had some interesting
notions about disease, what it meant, how it moved from person to
person.”
She drew his initial over and over with her
fingertip. Yeshua was being generous; she could read nothing of the
book, not even the title. Her father, here, under her hands. “He
said the only wealth was knowledge.”
“He was right,” said Yeshua ben Yafo.
She cradled the book against her and lifted her
face to him.
“Why do they hate us?”
He said, “Have you never known a son who hated his
father?”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes,” she said. “Who are the
Hagarites?”
“You call them Saracens. Another son who hates his
father. They were Jews first, just as the Christians were Jews
first. Now they all want Jerusalem, to prove they are not Jews
anymore. They hate us, because we remind them they are, really,
still Jews.”
She felt herself stiffen against this. She thought
the Christians and the Muslims she had seen were much different
from her and from this man, although she didn’t know why exactly.
Maybe only that they claimed it so insistently. She said, “You must
tell me what to believe. How to pray.”
He said, “What do you believe now?”
“I believe nothing.” It felt bitter to say this,
acid on the tongue.
“Nothing.”
“You believe that.”
She frowned at him, bewildered. “You play games
with me.”
“No, woman. You play a game with yourself, you make
up this problem, to hide from who you are, and what you really
think. God made you. You are this woman, God’s child, complete in
yourself. Anything you try to change or hide is false and will
fail. Be who you are. Take the book. Give your patient a tincture
of artemisia, very softly heated, in a dilute dose, perhaps one
drop to two hundred, as soon as you know he is sick. Come back and
tell me, if you wish, how he does with that.” He straightened.
“Now, go, so I can get back to my work.” She rose and went.
She walked back up into Jaffa and wandered through
the narrow crooked streets, past men raising new walls and hauling
big chunks of rock, and through markets and squares. She saw
nothing. Her mind was a seething uncertainty. She held the book
under her cloak, tight against her breast. She could not fathom
what the old man had said to her. The words tumbled in her memory,
huge and small, clear and vague. Sometimes it seemed to her like
the wisdom of the world and the next moment a rare stupidity. Of
course she was who she was. But who was she? She had come all this
way for nothing. And yet when she thought of the way she had
followed, she was astonished and glad. Surely the old man had
understood. But she could not really say what he had told her, or
what the words had really meant. In her hands, her father’s book,
which she could not read. At last, exhausted, she went back to the
palace by the sea.
Johanna said, “Where were you? I sent people all
over looking for you. Besac has been asking for you. Richard is
leaving. He has announced it; he will march on Jerusalem in three
days.”
“Three days,” Edythe said, excited. Everything
seemed to be happening at once. In Jerusalem, maybe, she would find
the real answers.
Johanna had work for her, and a lot of gossip;
Berengaria and she were on the outs again, the little Queen taking
all her meals in her own chamber, and the two never even seeing
each other except in church. Johanna said, “She’s a fool. She wants
to go back to Acre, to her garden, and she cares nothing for
Richard.”
Edythe agreed with that. She had seen Berengaria
that morning, because she had a headache, and Berengaria had spoken
longingly of the garden and never mentioned her husband. Now Edythe
sat with Johanna in the great hall, sewing a fringe onto a great
rug to cast over Richard’s throne. Johanna chatted amiably about
the throne of Sicily, which had been very majestic, and that led
her to the fabled throne of Byzantium, which was supposed to speak,
float up into the air, and change colors. They were to dine the
next afternoon and she wanted some musicians, and a train of luters
and tambour players was waiting to be rehearsed. She expected
Edythe’s opinion on them and kept her for every one. Edythe
listened only enough to agree with her. In her mind, over and over,
she thought, Jerusalem. At last, Jerusalem. She worked her
needle through the thick stuff of the fringe and slipped it down
into the rug.
She went the next morning to the hospital; she had
to hide the book, anyway, and she could put it there on the shelf
with her herbal. The hospital always pleased her; she could always
find work there. A woman had come in with dropsy, and Besac was
withdrawing the excess humor from her belly with a long silver
tube. When he was done with that and they had laid the patient
down, Edythe said, “Do you know anything of tincture of
artemisia?”
He said, “Artemisia, artemisia,” tapping his
fingers on his chin. She knew this for a sign he had only the
vaguest notion of what he was about to say. He said, “You want a
tincture? I believe it has some action on the choleric
humor.”
This made sense, since it was treatment for a
fever. She said, “I need to find some.”
“I am sending later for some things from Tyre. I
shall write it down.”
She started after him, toward the little corner
where he made his desk, but then a page came in the hospital’s
front door, stepped to one side, and said, “The King!”
She wheeled to face him and fell into a proper
curtsy. Besac went almost to his knees. Richard came in, trailing
attendants like a comet.
“Well,” he said, “I see the rumors are not idle,
then; you have made good use of this.”
Besac hurried forward, bending and stooping. “My
lord, my lord—”
He showed Richard around the hospital. Edythe hung
back, pleased, thinking Besac a little fevered himself over this.
Rouquin was not there, only pages and some yawning squires. She
thought of Jerusalem again—she wanted to have the artemisia to take
on the trek, in case the King fell sick; waiting for Tyre was too
long.
Richard came back up the long narrow building.
“Excellently done,” he said, at which Besac almost rolled over,
puppylike, his butt wiggling. Richard’s gaze slipped past Edythe as
if she were not there. He said, “Master Besac, I want you shriven.
You will go with us to Jerusalem on the morrow.”
She startled, cold. For the first time she realized
she might not go. Besac was actually now kissing the King’s sleeve.
Above his bobbing head, Richard’s gaze finally met hers. But he
said nothing, and turned and went.
Later, on the pretext of having some medicine for
him, she managed to get into his chamber and maneuver a moment
alone with him. She said, “My lord, I want to go to
Jerusalem.”
He was sitting on a divan, trying to tune an old
lute. Humphrey de Toron had just gone out. The cup with the oxymel
was on the floor by his feet. He said, “You can’t. And you know
why.” His voice was reasonable, as if surely she saw this the same
way he did. “From Acre to Jaffa was one thing. This time we are
going to the Holy City. We must all be confessed and shriven pure.
I am taking no woman.”
She said, frozen, “And certainly not a Jew.”
“We must be pure.”
She turned away, stiff with rage, her body seeming
made of wood and slightly disjointed. He said, “When I have the
city, and the gate is open, then you can come in and no one will
notice.”
At that moment, she hated him; if she had found a
knife to hand she would have plunged it into him. Instead, she
crept out of the room, went down onto the balcony, and there wept
into the salt sea.
She plotted to leave, to go by herself, but she
knew that was impossible. The hills were full of Saracens, and even
the Christians now were her enemies. She wept again. Johanna saw
her and put an arm around her.
“What is it, now?” The Queen laid a cheek to her
hair. “This terrible war.”
She muttered, not comforted. She helped Johanna
rearrange the Queen’s chamber, with new hangings on the
walls.
At the dinner Richard was lively, calling back and
forth to the men around him, and eating very well. Johanna sat
beside him and he kissed her often.
He asked Rouquin about some fighting recently, and
Rouquin said, “It’s like at home. They set an ambush, I set a
counterambush, they try to circle around behind me, I circle around
behind them. Little raids, nobody really hurt.” He had brought in a
flock of sheep from his last ride out, which had made excellent
mutton pies.
Johanna nudged her brother. “You have not told me
of this big battle you had. The trouvère is making many verses. Are
they true?”
Richard made a sound in his throat. “Don’t ask me.
I was in it. I don’t remember much but the noise.” He stabbed
another kiss at her cheek. “All you need to know is that by
Christmas you will be sleeping in the Tower of David. On Christmas
Eve you will hear High Mass in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.”
He turned to shout across the room, exuberant.
The excitement ranged around the room in waves.
Edythe, by the wall, felt cold, alone. After all she had done, he
had cast her aside. Serving Jesus, serving a Plantagenet, had
gotten her nowhere. She left as soon as she could, going around the
side of the room to the porch, toward the stairs.
Behind her, a voice called. “ Edythe. Wait.”
She stopped, in the dark above the steps, and
Rouquin came toward her.
She flushed, sure he knew now; she said, desperate,
“ I served—I did everything he asked—”
“He is asking again, that’s all. He needs you to be
here. Johanna is in some kind of trouble. He thinks you can keep
her in line.”
The breath went out of her. She lowered her head.
Richard, after all, had kept her secret. Explained not taking her
with this false trail. She had no way with Johanna, who would do as
she pleased. The mere fact that Richard was leaving her behind
would make Johanna suspicious of her. But he had kept the true
reason to himself. Finally, she looked up.
“ But you are taking de Sablé. To Jerusalem.”
“Of course.”
“Then there is no worry—it is de Sablé at the root
of this.” She was glad to say it. Let Richard deal with it. She
hated Richard now anyway.
“Maybe the root, but some of the branches have gone
elsewhere.” He said, “I am going to Jerusalem. I will take
something of yours, if you want.”
Her lips parted. This was why he had come out here,
to say this. She stood on her toes and kissed him.
“That,” she said. “ Take that. And come back.” She
kissed him again, and went up the stairs, lighter.
Two days later the army marched out of Jaffa, all
trumpets blaring, and the horses tossing bright colored plumes in
their manes, and the knights waving to the women in the crowds and
the men-at-arms tossing their quarrels up and catching them in
fancy ways.
She watched them a long time, from the wall. Their
dust moved up the long brown road toward the hills, Jerusalem at
the end, the heart of the world.
There was no army between them and the David Gate.
They would ride straight into the Holy City. Then she would
go.
She thought about Yeshua ben Yafo; surely he was
wrong, surely there was a right way to be, one right way, that
would warrant everything. In Jerusalem she would find at last what
to believe, how to pray, whom to love. Who she really was. She
yearned after them, up that long brown road into the hills, as if
toward the gate of heaven.
That afternoon, while they sat on the breezy
balcony, a messenger brought in a letter from Tyre.
Johanna laid it on the table, and her gaze flicked
toward Edythe, across from her. Edythe kept her eyes away. As she
had thought, Johanna suspected her of spying for Richard, but the
Queen had no one else she trusted even that much, and finally, she
said, “ Well, look at it.”
“My lady, it is for you.”
Johanna grunted. Impatiently she ripped off the
seal and unfolded the heavy sheet of paper, and in a singsong voice
read the formal greetings of the Queen of Jerusalem. Edythe looked
off to sea. The day was cloudy; she wondered if it rained, inland.
Maybe God showed a distemper to the Crusaders.
Johanna was prying apart the two halves of the
letter, and she read the inside one. “Hunh.” She put it on the
table. “ What do you make of this?”
Edythe picked it up. “ It’s on the wrong side
again,” she said.
“ What?”
“When she wrote calling off the escape, remember,
the secret letter was written on the back of the front page. Always
before she had written on the front of the back page.”
Johanna took the letter from her, turned it over,
and turned it again. She said, “ Well, that’s very clever of you.
But does it mean anything?”
Edythe shrugged. Johanna arched her eyebrows at
her. “ Well?”
“My lady, maybe she is trying to warn us. Maybe she
had to write this; maybe someone was forcing her to do it.”
Johanna’s gaze was steady, but the letter in her
hand quivered. “Conrad.”
“My lady.”
“The lying snake.” Johanna crumpled the letter
swiftly in her hands and flung it over the rail of the balcony. “
Well, I shall send her an answer, but very off the point.”
“My lady—”
“ What, not to Richard’s taste?” Johanna gave a
nasty laugh. “ But I cannot simply ignore her, can I?” She whisked
her hand at Edythe. “Go, make whatever report you care to.”
“My lady,” she said, “ I report to no one.”
“Yes, yes,” Johanna said, but would not look her in
the eyes. She said, “ I could not sleep last night—make me another
potion, will you? A strong one.” Edythe, dismissed, got up and went
away.
Days went by. In the hospital, with the army gone,
there were few patients: a drunken man who had been hit by a wagon;
another man, not drunk, who had fallen from a new building and
broken his skull and now could not move. She was keeping him clean
and moving him around in the bed, but she knew he would die soon.
His family came around the hospital and prayed by him. When she
came they kissed her hand, but she had done nothing.
She comforted herself that Besac could have done
nothing, either. As the beggar had said, everybody lost eventually.
She went up on the wall and watched, straining her eyes, to see the
messenger coming from the east with news of the triumph of the
King.
A pouch came from Tyre, with many new medicines in
jars and envelopes. One envelope was full of leaves and flowers and
labeled in Greek letters. She struggled through the first few
letters and realized it was the artemisia. He had said to make a
tincture, but not with what. Softly heated. She ground the leaves
and flowers together in a mortar jar and mixed them with a
sulfurous oil, good for the stomach and easy to boil, and set the
jar on a shelf, covered.
After the army had been gone more than a week, one
of the French knights came back.
Richard had not sent him to announce a victory, to
call Johanna to Jerusalem. Nobody had sent him; he had deserted. He
limped in wearily on foot at nightfall, when Edythe was getting
ready to leave, and showed her an evil wound in his arm, a deep
knife cut, full of pus and rot.
She worked all night to clean it, feeding him
strengthening potions and watching for signs that the infection had
traveled elsewhere, and over the course of the night when it hurt
too much to sleep, he told her of the march and why he had given
up. There was no Saracen army, but there were Saracens by the
hundred. They assailed the Crusaders from hiding, unseen,
unpredictable, a flurry of arrows in the dark, a sudden rockslide,
a waterhole full of horseshit. Everybody was on edge, but there was
nobody to fight.
And King Lionheart was moving too fast. It was hard
to keep up. Even the local men were grumbling: King Guy, the
Templars. The wounded man, lying down now, his arm dressed, said,
“Then my horse was killed, and I just came back.” He shut his eyes
and slept.
It was daybreak, and no use going home, she
thought. She slept a few hours in the back. By midmorning she was
up again, at Besac’s desk writing down the medicines that had come
from Tyre. She stowed them away in the big chest and locked it. The
man with the cracked skull had died, and the hospital was empty now
but for the man from the army. She fed him broth and raw garlic and
oxymel and changed the dressing on his wound.
She meant to go back to the palace when this was
done, but then two more men came in the door, one with a slash in
the leg, the other with a broken forearm.
They too were from Richard’s army. They were
hungry, and as they bolted down bowls of porridge they too cursed
the hard march, the Saracens who shot at them from ambush, hurled
rocks down on them, and threw dead horses into the streams.
“ Why keep going?” the man with the broken arm told
her. “They were just killing us.”
When she had their wounds dressed, she went out to
the city wall again, and looked east. The road was empty, except
for an old woman hobbling along on a stick.
Surely these wounded were cowards, weaklings, who
fell out of the war. Surely in the east now the Crusaders had cut
their way through to Jerusalem. Only the brave deserved to win it.
God would winnow out the unfit. A horrible feeling seethed in her
belly. She felt her soul yearn out of her body, stretch out along
the road after them, until she caught herself standing on tiptoe,
straining to fly over the top of the wall. She hated him for
leaving her behind, but she wanted with all her heart for him to
succeed.
There was nothing to do but wait. She went back to
the hospital and tended the wounded men.
“ We’ ll all go to Jerusalem,” she said, “when the
King takes it.”
The young man with the gashed leg groaned and flung
his arm over his eyes. His wound was festering and she cleaned it,
flushed it with vinegar, and left it open to the air.
Then in the afternoon more men appeared.
They had bumps and arrow wounds and broken bones,
more than she could manage, but fortunately Besac was there among
them. Unfortunately he had bad news.
“The Crusade has failed.” He stripped off his cloak
and muddy boots, looking around the hospital. He flapped his arms
up and down, his gaze expansive, glad to be back. He said, “Missed
me, have you?”
“ What happened?” she said. “ Didn’t you reach
Jerusalem?”
“ I told you, the Crusade is over. Richard has
broken his vow. We turned back. We all failed.”
She felt her legs go soft. “ Where is the
King?”
“He’s gone south, to Ascalon.” Besac laughed. “He
will not dare face us now. His vow a turd in his mouth.”
She needed to sit down, and she did, on one of the
empty beds. In a rush of fury she hoped Richard swallowed it whole.
His pure, shriven, Christian vow. She felt shrunken, as if his
failure had dried her like a leaf.
Still stunned, she went up to the palace; the Queen
was nowhere. Edythe went out onto the balcony, hearing this, over
and over, in her mind: We all failed. Somehow they had
turned back. She could not fathom it. Jerusalem was so close and
yet they could not reach it. Enspelled, it floated in another
world, just beyond their grasp.
Johanna came out behind her. Her face was a blaze
of high feeling. “ Have you heard? They deserted him. There was
trouble, certainly, but they would not keep up. Even Guy wanted to
turn back, the little lapdog. It wasn’t Richard’s fault they
failed. But they will all blame him.” She put her hands to her face
and wept. Edythe went to her, and put an arm around her, and they
stood bound together, wretched.
Johanna called in a priest and harangued him for an
hour, until he agreed to deliver a sermon the next day on the
Crusade, saying that the failure wasn’t Richard’s fault, that the
evil men around him were to blame. At the church, when he started
in saying this, half the people listening turned and walked out,
and a mob of boys stormed around Jaffa, throwing mud at the palace
and cursing Richard’s name and beating old people with
sticks.
Much of the Pisan fleet left for their home port.
They took half the Poitevins with them, who had used up their
feudal dues. Richard was behind on his payments to them
anyway.
Edythe went to the hospital, now overflowing again
with wounded men. They whined and complained, and sneered at
Richard, and damned the Saracens, and many of them died in spite of
all she and Besac could do. But Richard kept to himself in Ascalon,
and Rouquin with him.