The Dagger and the Cross (58 page)

He did not say much. Only, “That’s brave of you, Mother. To
hand her over to the one who sired her, and forget that she was ever born.”

There was a sneer on his face. He wanted to strike and hurt,
the way Joanna had hurt him.

“I will never forget,” said Joanna, who was stronger than he
was, though he lacked the wits to see it. “Nor will I beg anyone’s pardon,
short of God Himself.”

“Not even the man you cuckolded?”

“That’s an ill word for your father,” she said.

“You gave it to him.”

“He never knew it, nor did any other man. Will you be the
one to do it, Aimery? Will you brand your father a cuckold and your mother a
whore? Will that make you feel one whit better than you feel now?”

Aimery’s eyes were the exact color of hers; the exact,
thunderous blue, now almost black with pain. “I hate you,” he said.

“Of course you do,” she said. “Sometimes I hate myself. I
can do two things about it. I can let it eat me alive, or I can go on past it.”

He stared at her. His mouth worked. He started to say
something, let it die unsaid.

“I am not asking for your forgiveness,” she said. “All I ask
is that you think, and that you try to understand. This war is going to need us
both. If we cannot be friends, at least we should be allies.”

“You could go,” he said. “Turn infidel. Live in the House of
Ibrahim and be safe from all the fighting.”

“I thought of it,” she said, “long and hard. I may still
send the younger girls to Aleppo, where they will be safe and well looked
after, and taught all that they need to know. But you and I, Aimery, we belong
to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. We stand or fall with it. We can turn our private
quarrel to a feud that divides half the kingdom. Or we can master it and swear
a truce, and fight our war together.”

He stood stiff. He was not ready to be that sensible. He
wanted to scream at her and call her ugly names, and hear her scream back, and
make her cry. He wanted to throw all his anger on her, and all his grief and
loss and plain dull disappointment. His mother was human and mortal, and could
make mistakes, and some of them were monstrous. She was not the shining saint
that he had thought her.

Aidan spoke behind them. “Before you make your choice,
Aimery, consider what you have to choose. The lands that you hold by right are
lost until you can win them back, although you hardly lack for means, with your
share in the House of Ibrahim. I had in mind to offer you more. I had my fief
of Millefleurs from King Baldwin. I never submitted to King Guy, nor called him
my liege lord; my fief is still my own though I abandon it for my own country.
Will you hold it for me?”

“Is that a bribe to keep me quiet?”

Aidan did not lose his temper, though Ysabel would hardly
have blamed him if he had. “You wrong us both in that, messire. That I would
buy silence; that you could be bought. I have lands and a castle which have
become very dear to me; my oath and my honor compel me to forsake them. Should
I be faulted for finding them a master who can look after them and cherish them
and hold them as they should be held?”

Aimery could not speak. It was too much for him all at once:
all that they were asking him to understand.

“If you do accept the charge,” Aidan said, “you can’t do it
alone. You’ll need your mother. To be lady and chatelaine until you have a wife
to do it for you; to be regent until you grow into a man. And she needs you,
messire. You are her firstborn, the one she fought the hardest for. She loves
you.”

“Yes,” said Aimery bitterly. “She loves me so much that she
threw me away and got herself Ysabel to take my place.”

“I see that you are her son,” Aidan said, cool, almost cold.
“She never forgot a slight in her life, either. Or forgave it. If you cannot
practice Christian charity, will you consider Christian politics? You need her,
messire. You need what she knows of trade and of the House of Ibrahim; of court
and kingdom and the games of kings. You need a teacher. You will never have one
better than she.”

“You,” said Aimery.
“You
say that. You are the one
who seduced her!”

There, thought Ysabel. He had got to that. Blaming the one
he had, for hero-worship, been refusing to blame. It had taken him long enough.

It was his mother who said, “He seduced me. I seduced him.
What has that to do with whether you and I can hold Millefleurs?”

“Everything!” Aimery cried.

“Only if you let it,” she said.

“Go,” Aidan said, so gently that they all stared. “Think on
it. Before I go, tell me what you choose.”

“What will you do if I say no?”

Aidan raised a brow. “Will that be any affair of yours?”

“But,” said Aimery. “If I don’t take Millefleurs, or Mother
doesn’t, the enemy will get it. Or someone else, maybe worse. What if they don’t
know about the way the spring goes dry in August, but there’s another and
smaller one in the hill, that carries the castle through till the rains come?
What if they knock holes in the door with the flowers carved on it, or tear up
the mosaics in the chapel? What if they don’t know how to be good to the people
in the village?”

“Do you care?”

“Yes, I care!” Aimery stopped, breathing hard. “You’re
working on me. The way you do in councils.”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“Yes,” said Aimery angrily. “Yes, I’11 take what you offer.
I’m honored. I’m grateful.”

“You’ll swear a truce with your mother?”

That stopped him. He shot a glance at his mother. She stood
still. She would not help him, one way or the other. She looked the way she
always looked. He tried to see her as a whore the way he had seen them in the
cities or hanging about the army: raddled, painted, with her hair done up in
elaborate curls. He shied from seeing her in a dress so tight it strained at
the seams, with her breasts bursting out of it and her ankles showing, and no
modesty in her at all.

He could not do it. He could not forgive her, either. That
would take more time by far than anyone was giving him.

“I’ll swear a truce,” he said. “I won’t promise any more
than that.”

“It is enough,” said Aidan. “For a beginning.”

Beginnings.

That was what Joanna thought of, perversely, standing on the
quay, watching the five blue-sailed ships as they took on their passengers and
cargo. She did not want to think of endings. Of what was going away; of who
would never come back.

Never, while she was alive to see him. She did not pretend
to prescience. She simply knew.

It was all very orderly, as such things went. Inevitably the
desperate or the frightened pressed forward now that it was too late, and tried
to beg or borrow or steal a place on one of the ships. There would have been a
fight, or more than one, but for the brothers, king and prince. It was
unmistakable which was which, the one in royal blue, the other in Saracen
black, but when they were so minded they had exactly the same voice. Soft,
clear, and very firm. The contentious were encouraged to take their leave. The
fearful were reminded, with apologies, that a ship could only hold so many.

Those who had won passage were remarkably quiet. The
pilgrims huddled together and prayed. Some of the women wept. The children
stared big-eyed from behind skirts or from enveloping arms.

The pope’s legate came without fanfare and boarded under
cover of Archbishop William’s arrival. His entourage was somewhat less than it
had been when he came. One had remained behind to do penance for a certain
great sin. That one had a new novice to attend him, Joanna had heard: the
merchant’s son from Genoa. The merchant himself sailed on the smallest of the
ships, as far from the king and his brother as the fleet would allow. Guillermo
Seco was somewhat of a broken man since he gambled on Aidan’s enmity and lost
his son.

Abbot Leo looked as if he could not decide whether to be
happy or sad: happy to be sailing home; sad to leave the Holy Land in such
straits. The archbishop knew much less ambivalence. He was going to preach the
Crusade. He spoke a few fiery words from the rail, promises of a return with
the whole of Christendom at his back. A cheer went up even from those who had
failed to win passage.

“That one will do well,” Aidan said.

He was standing beside her. She could have sworn that he was
over by the last of the ships, seeing to the loading of the horses. No one near
her seemed to see him, except Dura, who lowered her eyes and backed away. Dura
had great respect for the afarit, but she did not traffic with them unless she
must.

Joanna could not breathe very well. They had all said their
farewells in the caravanserai before they came out into the public eye. Aidan
had offered her nothing but what he offered the others. Less in truth than he
gave Aimery, or Lady Margaret. Joanna had been reckoning him wise, and trying
not to hate him for it. Best to part so, watching him embrace each and every
one of the others, engrossing herself in struggling not to cry and spoil her
daughter’s new cotte. People would not have thought it odd that he offered her
no more than a formal word, with Ysabel clinging to her and the baby crying
and, suddenly, too many goodbyes to say, too little time to say them.

He stood beside her now, not looking at her. The last of the
horses, Raihan’s best-beloved mare, was giving trouble. A slight figure slipped
out of the press and caught her bridle. She calmed with uncanny swiftness.

Joanna caught herself smiling. “Rather an unlikely
horsetamer, that one,” she said.

Aidan answered smile with smile. “It does go oddly with his
Torah and his Talmud.” A finger of wind waxed playful, tangling in his hair.
Joanna’s fists ached with clenching. He tossed his hair out of his face and
slanted a glance at her. “When Ysabel is grown, she will come back. I promise
you that. I won’t let her forget you.”

“Maybe you should.”

“When did I ever succumb to plain good sense?”

“I won’t be faithful to your memory,” she said. “I’ll do
what I must for Aimery and the rest of my children. If I have to marry again,
then I shall do so. If I am minded to take a lover, than I shall do that. You
are not the beginning and the ending of my delight in this world.”

“I never wished to be,” he said.

He did not say what he could have said. That it was not his
memory to which she should be faithful. Ranulf was another part of her, another
wound that would, God willing, teach itself to heal.

“I have remarkably little guilt,” she said, “when it comes
down to it. Will I burn in hell, do you think?”

“I’m hardly an authority,” he said. Light, almost. Accepting
it.

She turned and looked at him. Looked, only, for a long while.
Committing every line of him to memory. His eyes, unveiled, were hard to meet.
She met them at last, to remember. Grey steel, grey stone. Grief, yes, and the
bitterness of parting, but beneath them, deep and singing gladness. This had
never been his country, well though he prospered in it. No more had he been her
possession. “What we had,” she said. “What, for a little while, we shared...I’ll
remember. Be good to our daughter, my lord.”

“Yes,” he said, answering both parts of it. For an instant
she thought that he would touch her. Perhaps he meant to. But he did not. He
bowed low and low, as to a queen. “Prosper you well, my lady. May God keep you.”

He was gone. A shadow and a light; then, all at once,
solidity, running lightly up the gangway. Morgiana was waiting for him. Ysabel
was close by her, silent for once and subdued, attending Lady Elen. As Joanna
watched, Aidan came up beside his daughter. Her hand slid into his; she leaned
against him, seeking comfort. Morgiana set her hand on the child’s shoulder.
They looked well, standing so. They belonged together.

Joanna held her head high and thought of beginnings. There
went the first cry of the Crusade, on the flagship with the seabird on its
sail. Here remained the war, and a new demesne for herself and her eldest son,
and perhaps, with time, more than an armed truce between them.

Someone touched her. She started slightly. Where Aidan had
been stood her mother, offering a rare gift: an arm about her waist, a warm
human presence. Margaret said nothing, did nothing but teach Joanna how to be
strong. Joanna let her own arm come to rest about the plump shoulders, and
stood with her, watching the fleet.

The gate of the horses’ hold boomed shut. Gangways slid
rattling over rails. Sails ran up. Captains bellowed orders in Rhiyanan, odd
mingling of harshness and music, like the sea on their own cold stones. The
ships slid one by one out into the harbor, coming about in a stately dance,
making for the needle’s eye that was the sea-gate of Tyre.

Joanna’s sight blurred. The ships, the men on them, dimmed
to shadows. But on the flagship as it pulled ahead of the others, a great light
went up. The sun on Gwydion’s crown, she told herself, though it blazed
fivefold.
Blue fire and green, and two that were smaller, silver and ruddy gold; and a
splendid, leaping flame, the color of a ruby’s heart. There was a vision in it.
Lions on a field of lilies, and an eagle soaring over them, and in the sky
above them a blood-red cross.

Anglia, Francia, the Emperor of the Romans. Christendom
would come and take vengeance for Hattin. Whether that vengeance would be
complete...

“That will be as God wills,” she said.

She closed her eyes, opened them on plain earth and simple
sunlight. The world went on, unheeding of one lone woman, and the lover she had
never truly had, and the child they had shared for a little while.

There were six who were all her own, waiting for her, and
the baby would be hungry. She straightened her back and set her chin. The
Crusade would come when it came. It would find her ready for it.