The Dagger and the Cross (16 page)

“Not here,” she said, sure of it. Her temper was gone as
quickly as it had come. “The young ones are always a little crazy. They go
after Jews and Muslims, sometimes.”

“They always go after Jews,” he said.

“The older ones don’t,” she said. “Or most of them. They’ve
learned to live here.”

He shrugged. He did not believe her.

“The Wailing Wall is on the outside,” she said, “down by the
tanners. If you can stand the stink, you can do anything you like there.”

He could stand the stink. She went because she was curious,
and because she was tired of her own company. She had seen the Jews in their
shawls and their beards, let in sometimes in spite of the ban on their living
in the city, rocking and mourning in front of that single bit of wall, but
never a Jew whose name she knew.

Akiva did not rock and mourn. He did stop and stand for a
long moment. Then he covered his head with the shawl and walked forward slowly.
He set his hand on the pale stone where one great block gave way to another.
His mind was a white silence. He was emptied of everything but prayer, and in
the prayer, grief, and in the grief, hope. The Temple was fallen. His people
were driven into exile. They could not even dwell in their own city; the
pilgrims who came, came only on sufferance. But someday—someday—

Tears were running down her face. Again. A thought pricked
at her. Someone was thinking that she was a Jew, because she was wrapped in the
dark cloak and standing by the wall, crying.

The tears stopped when they were ready. She felt almost as
empty as Akiva, aching but clean. When he came back into himself, she was
calmer than she had been since morning. He looked at her and knew; she did not
even mind.

They went in by the Beautiful Gate, which was as pretty to
look at as the air was rank. The guards there, like the people outside, took
Ysabel for a Jew, since Akiva was so obviously one, but they did not say
anything. One even smiled, the way big rough men could when they looked at
children.

The great, empty, sunlit space, and the mosque with its
golden dome and its golden cross and its jewel-bright tiles, and the little
mosque by the Wailing Wall with its silver dome, where the king sometimes lived
and the Templars had a barracks, struck Akiva dumb with awe. Ysabel could not
entirely see why. He could see most of it from Aidan’s house, if he took the
time to look. She supposed that it was different to be inside; and the Dome of
the Rock could take even her breath away as she stood outside its door and
looked up.

Inside was the most beautiful place in the world. It had
eight sides around the circle of the dome, and then three rings of walls and pillars.
The pillars looked like trees turned to stone: they were made of marble, and
the walls around them and the arches above them were covered in mosaics and
paintings of Christ, made since the Christians took Jerusalem, and the dome
that floated over them all was carried up on arabesques of blue and gold. It
was like an explosion of flame, except that no flame ever kindled would twine
itself into such intricate perfection of curves and windings and circles: red
and gold and black and silver.

Under the dome was one of the holiest of the Muslim holy
places: the Rock itself, as rough as all the rest was perfect, a plain
pale-golden outcropping with what Morgiana said was the footprint that Muhammad
made when the angel took him up to heaven. Christians and Jews said that it was
a piece of the Temple, and that there had been an altar there, where the
priests offered sacrifices, because that was where Abraham had gone to give
Isaac to God; which made it as holy as any place in the world, except the Holy
Sepulcher. The Templars had put an iron wall about it and carved steps in it
and paved it over with marble, and set an altar on it, which made Morgiana hiss
and spit; but they had only done all of that to keep people from chipping the
rock away and selling it to pilgrims.

Akiva thought it very beautiful, but he did not like it. “Too
many religions on top of one another,” he said, “and mine on the bottom, all
crushed and trampled.”

She was glad enough to go outside. She kept forgetting to
breathe in the splendor of the dome; and they were being stared at a little too
steadily. Someone would come soon and want to know where their parents were,
and why they were out by themselves.

They went out the north way, past Bethesda Pool to
Jehoshaphat’s Gate. The sun was sinking and the shadows were growing long, but
Ysabel did not want to go home. All those people crowding and squabbling and
simply being alive, and all being human, and mind-blind, and kin but not kin.
None of them understood her. Not one. Not even her mother.

She was going to cry again. Akiva reached out and took her
hand. He did not say anything, and he did not think at her. She swallowed hard
and made the tears go away.

They went through the gate, up from the valley to the Mount
of Olives, turning toward Gethsemane. The stream of pilgrims was thinning with
the evening, and most were coming instead of going. They all looked solemn and
sanctified, or tried to. On another day she might have burst out laughing, just
to shock them, but now she had no heart for it.

She stopped beyond the garden and sat down under an olive
tree, setting her back to the gnarled trunk, staring at the sky through the
silvery leaves.

“The sun’s going to go down soon,” Akiva said, “and then
they’ll close the gate. Are you planning to stay the night here?”

She had not thought about it. Now that he had said it, she
thought, why not? She could hardly get a worse beating than she had coming
already.

“You might be surprised,” said Akiva. He sat beside her and
fished under his shawl. He came out with a leather bag like a pilgrim’s scrip,
and a skin of what turned out to be water. There was bread in the scrip, and
cheese, and a napkinful of dates. He divided it carefully in quarters and gave
her a share and kept one, and put the rest away. “For the morning,” he said.

She scowled. “Who told you you had to play nursemaid?”

“Nobody. I want to stay out here. I hate cities. Even this
one. Especially this one. It chokes the breath out of me.”

“It does that to all of us. We get used to it after a while.
It never gets easy.”

“I noticed.” He took a bite of cheese and chewed it slowly.
His eyes were on the city’s walls, and on the Dome of the Rock. “My father says
he can feel it, too. All the years and all the wars and all the holiness. If
this were our city again, he says, it wouldn’t hurt us to be here. It would be
ours; it would embrace us like a mother.”

“My people hold it, and I don’t feel that it’s glad of us.”

“That’s because you conquered it. You didn’t build it; you
haven’t made yourselves one with it. It’s your captive, not your mother.”

“It’s ours.” The cheese was good. The bread could have been
fresher, but she was hungry enough not to care too much. “Tonight I think I
hate it. It hurt my—my father.” He barely twitched, though she had never said
it aloud before. “There’s war in it now. All anyone can think about is killing
Saracens.”

“Or being killed by them.”

“My father—” It was a little easier to say, the second time.
“My father will go to the war. I can feel him thinking about it. Thinking maybe
someone will kill him and put an end to all this nonsense.” She shuddered. “He
hurts too much. Even from here.”

Akiva put his arm around her, and his shawl with it, making
a tent out of them both. “Can’t you stop reading him?”

“I can’t help it. He’s been part of me since before I was
born. When his feelings are too strong or his walls are down, I find him
everywhere I turn. He says—he says it will get better as I get older. I’ll
learn to shield better, and I’ll be stronger. He says it’s because he trained
me. That’s half a lie. It’s the blood that does it. He’s
in
me. He made
me.”

“Didn’t your mother help?”

Temper could be useful. It made a wall, and Aidan was on the
other side of it, away from her. “My mother is human.”

“So she is,” Akiva said.

“I
don’t
despise her!” Ysabel said sharply, though he
had not said it aloud or, for all she knew, in his mind. “She’s always at me to
be ordinary. To behave myself. To be human. But I’m not. I can’t be.”

“One has to pretend,” he said. “To stay alive.”

“I’m sick of pretending.”

“So am I.” He sighed and moved a little closer. The sun was
sitting on the horizon; the day’s heat was fading as fast as the daylight.
Jerusalem looked washed in gold. He said something to it. Something foreign.
Hebrew. A bit of a psalm. “‘How beautiful are thy dwelling places, O Lord.’”

She gave that a moment’s silence. Then she asked, “Are you
studying to be a priest?”

“We don’t have priests the way you do.”

“Well. Whatever, then.”

“A rabbi. A scholar. Yes, I want to be that. After Rosh
Hashonah I shall be a man and be called to the Torah; then I’ll begin to study
in earnest.”

“A man? You? Your voice hasn’t even broken yet.”

He was annoyed, but not enough to move away from her. “It
will when it’s ready. That’s not what a man is, after all. A man is what he
knows, and what he does with it.”

“I know a little about what Jews study. Torah and Talmud and
a great deal of bickering. The Ramban, and the Rambam, and one says this and
another says that, but someone else says no, it can’t be either, but if it is,
it has to be thus and so, because—”

Akiva choked. Half of it was fury. The other half was
laughter. “You are blasphemous!”

“Well, isn’t it like that?”

“Yes,” he admitted after a while. “But you make it sound
silly. It’s not. It’s the most important thing in the world.”

“Chopping logic into mincemeat?”

He cuffed her, not too hard, and still trying not to laugh. “Finding
out exactly what God said, and what He meant by it.”

“Oh,” she said. “Theology. I’m not supposed to know anything
about it, being too young, and a girl. But I listen to the chaplain when he
reads, and sometimes when he finds someone interesting to talk to. He was
talking to the king the other day. He was so happy afterwards, he was dizzy.”

“The king has a very subtle mind,” Akiva said. “He can set
my father’s head to spinning, and my father is as good a student of the Law as
any I know of. They argue by the hour, sometimes, sounding as if they’re about
to murder one another, and loving every minute of it.”

“The chaplain wasn’t arguing. Not really. Not once he’d got
going. They were picking apart how Anselm proved that God is. Then they got on
to Aristotle. The king says the Church will go his way in the end, though it’s
been trying to ban him in the schools. Father Stephen ended up agreeing with
him, though he was shocked at first. He didn’t expect someone who looks like
that, to be as wise as that, or as good at talking people round.”

“He should have known better. He knows Prince Aidan, after
all.”

“Prince Aidan is always doing his best to seem less than he
is. And he’s not interested in theology.”

“No,” said Akiva. “He isn’t, is he? He’d rather make a song
than a syllogism.”

She laughed, startling herself. It was growing dark. There
were still people on the Mount, beggars and pilgrims who had, or wanted, no
other place to sleep. If she had been alone, she would have been afraid. But
there were two of them, and they both had power, and they were warm and fed and
surprisingly comfortable. “Father Stephen thinks my father is a bit—well,
light-minded. My father never does or says anything to change his mind for him.”
She shifted to peer into Akiva’s face. “Do you think he’s frivolous, too?”

“No,” said Akiva. “Just worldly. Why shouldn’t he be? He’s a
knight and a prince.”

“That’s what he says. We can’t all be scholars. Someone has
to do the ruling and the fighting.”

“He does it better than anyone, except the king.”

She nodded. She did not hurt inside anymore, or not enough
to matter. The black roil in her middle was gone.

It was the quiet. And the stars coming out. And Akiva. He
was warm next to her; he felt right, sitting there, with his shawl around her
and his mind flowing gently beside hers, sometimes touching it, sometimes
curving away. She liked the way his thoughts ran. They were very clear, like
water running, but they went down and down like a deep pure spring. She was
more like light on the water, darting-quick, with sudden shadows in it.

She felt the tug of sleep. Akiva was wide awake as far as
she could see, but his mind was on Jerusalem again, thinking in Hebrew, half
praying, half running over his lessons. He was thinking that if he died here he
would be spared a great deal of trouble, since this was where all his people
were supposed to come on Judgment Day. She almost laughed at the picture in his
mind, everybody tunneling like busy rabbits, hurrying to come to Olivet before
the Trump stopped sounding.

He spared a little thought for what would happen much nearer
to home when they came up missing; but not too much. No more than she did. That
would happen when it happened.
Inshallah,
as Morgiana would say. Ysabel
could be that much a Muslim.

Brother Thomas was not pleased to discover that he had
guests. Brother Richard he might have expected, since the man was one of the
Patriarch’s following, and always about, whether by accident or design. The
Constable of the Kingdom was no surprise, under the circumstances. But the
other—

Guillermo Seco looked about at the meticulous order of the
scriptorium. It was empty at this hour, with the monks at recreation, and none
minded to linger over his work. The desks stood in their rows with the tall
stools drawn up to them and the array of inks and paints, brushes and pens,
rulers and scrapers, set as each man preferred to have them. The desk nearest had
the makings of a mass-book on it, half a yard high, the letters inked in, each
large enough even for dim old eyes to read. The task which the limner had left
was an initial woven with vines and flowers and fantastical creatures, sketched
in delicately in black ink, with the first touches of color: blue, a speck or
two of scarlet.