The White Cross (38 page)
That’s when Khadija told me that we each had our own star, and taught me Syrian songs and told me tales of foolishness and wisdom from Damascus and Bagdad. I taught her new French words.
And yes of course, we spent time practicing those movements and positions which in Damascus have been taught for centuries. They say that the third heaven of Islam is coloured pink, the seventh is pure light.
We found them both.
On our third day in Acre, when John strolled in from his close study of the ships in harbour, reeking of Venetian perfume and whistling softly to himself – I’d sent him off to Bishop Walter’s camp outside the walls to fetch the rest of our possessions and learn the latest news. He came back wearing his gambeson and kettle hat, despite the heat, and bent beneath the burden of my pot helm and link-hauberk in a sack across his shoulders.
Our orders for the present were to stay at ease within the city confines, he told us, setting down his burden on Khadija’s flags and ruffling Alia’s mop of curls. Troops drawn from those camped on the plain were working hard to clear the city moat and mend the breaches in the walls. But the main news in camp, John said, was that the King of France was bent on leaving Palestine now that the siege was won. Duke Leopold, who led the Christian armies before the kings arrived, had left already with his German troops.
‘They’re layin’ bets out there that once the ransom’s in, King Dickard’ll be off an’ all, to make an end of things.’
Then, seeing that he had our full attention, John told us all the rest. ‘They’re thinkin’ that old Sallydin ’ud have to empty half the galleys on the Middle Sea to find prisoners enough for the exchange, which isn’t goin’ to happen overnight. They’re thinkin’ Michaelmas is like to come and go before the city’s set to rights, an’ askin’ where we’d find the food to bait an army half the size through even one more winter.
‘We en’t a monkey’s chance of takin’ back Jerusalem. Not this year or the next, or anywhen this side of kingdom come,’ John added with a shrug. ‘That’s what they’re sayin’ in the camp.’
‘Sanctum Sepulchrum adjuva!
Holy Sepulchre assist us!’ That’s what we’d chorused outside Sainte Madelaine’s basilica in Vézelay at the start of the croisade. ‘Sanctum Sepulchrum adjuva!’ the old archbishop shouted from the poop-deck of the tarida when under oars we’d left the harbour of Marseille.
‘But if we end the campaign here,’ I reasoned slowly. ‘Who is to save the Sepulchre?’
To see our God and Allah as the same was very well, I thought. But to abandon the desecrated shrine that Popes and kings and all of Christendom had made the very centre of our quest, was to turn victory into defeat – with my poor Jos and Bertram and so many other Christian lives lost for nothing!
‘You hear the Sultan ties his horses in Church of Isa’s Tomb, yes?’ Khadija, in the act of helping John out of his padded gambeson, regarded me with upraised brows.
‘If Isa’s Tomb is our Church of the Sepulchre,’ I answered. ‘The Archbishop who recruited me said it was made into a stable. He told us it was fouled with dung and with the blood of its defenders. He said that Christian men were slain before its altar, and women raped and children put to the sword.’
‘All is untruth.’ Again the negatively lifted chin.
‘One hundred years past, Christians killed all our Faithful to take al-Quds, is your Jerusalem. But when our Sultan took it back he set your Christians free – gave them its treasure, left altars to be tended.’
‘You’re telling us we’ve travelled all this way for something that’s a lie?’ I felt like some poor bastard who’d stepped on a rake to meet the handle hard between the eyes.
‘Son of Ayyub would not spoil a shrine to Isa, Son of Mary. Have we not kept a place for Him in Holy Prophet’s tomb?’
‘A place for Christ at Mecca?’
‘Is true.’
She left John’s side to place a gentle kiss, not on my lips this time, but on the brow where the rake handle struck. ‘Thou hast come far, muhibb. But the way is further to the truth.’
It was another kind of way – another journey I suppose which from its start in Acre would lead me down into the very pit of hell, and out of it to take the steep path that’s brought me to this place.
But not yet. Not for just a little longer…
I can spend a little longer, surely, with Khadija and the child?
We stayed on in Acre for the hottest part of summer, through Lammas to the local feast day of St Timothy in August, collecting our wage each Friday from the bishop’s paymaster and duty clerks, at tables set against the gates of the royal palace; waiting for an order to embark for home, or else march on Jerusalem – an order that took six full weeks to come.
As Khadija had foretold, no other soldiers came to knock upon her door, and we were left to come and go just as we pleased. I paid for John to visit women when he chose, and share my own discovery that pleasure could be taken without guilt. But in the main he stayed to sleep in the vestibule and act as Jos had done, to keep my armour oiled and shield my left side when I limped abroad. Inside the house he helped to feed the stove and water the rose garden. He showed Alia how to play at huckle bones and make cat-cradles out of twine, and after patiently enduring several days of wet and windy puffing, taught her finally to whistle.
The little house became a playground. Shuttlecocks shot through the branches of the fig, and cloth balls splashed into the pool. We found Alia fast asleep one night with one that John had made her grasped tightly in her hand. And at the sight of it, Khadija smiled.
When John and I climbed on the battlements behind King Richard’s palace, to view the reconstruction of the city walls, Alia stood between us, watching with round eyes the labourers and masons who climbed the wooden scaffolding like sailors in the rigging. Or perched with mortar boards. Or worked with rope and tackle, to haul the blocks back in place. She came with us on expeditions to the harbour and the souks, her small hand held in John’s, attempting with pursed lips and an almighty frown to match his jaunty whistle.
One day she led the way herself, dancing ahead through vaulted passageways to show us where the women fetched their water from a reservoir beneath the city streets. Lit by an opening high in its rock-cut ceiling, it took the form of a huge drum-shaped cistern with stairs built wide enough to take two women with their buckets passing. In contrast to the heat above, the air down there was wonderfully cool. The water in the reservoir was clear and pure. It was the means, Khadija told us later, by which the city had survived not only for three years of siege, but on this site since ancient times. Supplied by springs fed underground through conduits from the mountains, ass-driven wheels and networks of lead pipes conveyed its water all about the city. Even to our garden pool. ‘And they told us Saracens were barbarous,’ I said to John in wonder, ‘when all the time they have been capable of this.’
By then I’d come to see that even after a destructive siege, the life of Acre was superior in every way to anything we had at home. In the city’s roofed bazaars and open markets, women with dark flashing eyes and all their wealth of besant coins looped through their veils, sold silver jewellery from Cairo and Aleppo, perfume jars of ivory and alabaster, quails, marmosets and nightingales in cages. From laden stalls there drifted through the press the smells of spices, pepper, cinnamon and cloves. Silk merchants rolled out bolts of fabric unlike anything we’d ever seen – gold-brocaded, striped and spangled, bordered with embroidery and dyed in brilliant colours. Vases and ceramics caught rainbows in the surface of their glazes.
And in Khadija’s house and garden, riches of another kind. She was a woman of Islam with a wealth of knowledge and experience which it seemed to me exceeded anything our English monks and bishops had to offer. Among so many things, she taught me to see beauty in the commonplace – in the shape of a single leaf, the pattern on a lizard’s back, the colour of a petal floating in the pool. I learned to feel it in the evening breeze. To smell it in fresh linen, hear it in the chirrup of a sparrow. To pause and smile, not at another’s folly, but at my own good fortune. I discovered beauty – in Acre, in myself and in Khadija.
Discovered it and lost it.
Have I? Have I lost it? Or have I brought it with me? Has it become a part of who I am?
One afternoon, while I sat in the shady refuge of her chamber watching her spin out the wool she’d carded from the Quartermaster’s sheep, I told Khadija that I had a wife at home, whom I’d served ill and left without support or comfort.
‘It may be,’ I said, ‘that I have left her with a child. I have no way of knowing – and God only knows what will become of her while I’m abroad.’
‘Muhibb, thou sayest right. Allah knows all and guides her feet.’ With the distaff under her left arm, she twisted the carded wool onto the wheel she spun with her free hand.
‘If He wills to protect, then she can take no harm. Is thy wish to return, yes?’ Her eyes glowed briefly as she raised them to take in my nod.
‘Be sure then when you meet that thou wilt bring her joy.’
CHAPTER THREE
There are times when any of us could be forgiven for thinking men were put on earth for the sole purpose of bringing grief to women. Yet still when they abuse us we seem to want to take a share of blame upon ourselves.
I did it after that man raped me – told myself I’d smiled too much, had led him on. (Recalling it, I’m doing it again. Does that make sense?)
I woke just now in a state of confusion – saw light through the bed-curtains, and thought that it was morning. But then I saw the outline of the cradle, understood the light was moonlight, knew I was in bed, at home. At Haddertun.
What time of night? I’ve no idea how long I slept – can’t tell if he’s asleep as well? Or is awake like me?
I’d always thought I knew myself, and what I was, and what I wanted. But what that man did in the wood changed everything. I felt as if I shared his sin and was forever branded as a sinner!
I’d always managed somehow to convince myself that I was equal to any hand that life could deal me – found something ludicrous to smile at in almost any situation. But in the wood life ceased to be a game, and I became a different person.
I crept back down the cattle path that summer afternoon, when I was certain he had gone – trod through a drift of campion flowers spattered with drops of red like blood – to see no sign of him when I peered from the cover of the trees. No sign the harvesters saw anything amiss. The reapers all backturned, intent on holding their line straight. The women and the children shocking sheaves. The child Edmay was at the far end of the field, scarce taller than a sheaf herself, with Hod beside her, working with a will.
She straightened while I watched, to brace her back and shade her eyes against the sun. But before she looked in my direction, I’d already stepped back to the shadows. No one must see me bruised and bloodied, starting-eyed like something taken from a trap. That’s all that I could think.
I left the forest further down and out of sight, to cut across the common pasture and avoid the village. Swallows flashed about me catching the insects I disturbed.
Somewhere I’d lost my hat, and as I stumbled through the grass, I twisted my loose hair into a knot. I knew I had to fight the heavy, hopeless feeling pressing on me like a weight. But for the present all I wanted was to reach my chamber and to bolt the door. Saving my worst thoughts for later when I was alone.
With but a single gate into the manor, I had no choice but to march through it, with one hand gripping the torn bodice of my gown. Head down to hide my swollen face. I heard a sudden hush in conversation and felt the grooms’ eyes on my back. A woman tentatively called out my name. But by then I’d passed the guardroom and the wicket to my little garden. Reached the outer stair and bolted up it, three steps at a time. Ran into my chamber, slammed the door and shot the bolt – then I positively howled!
I would have thrown myself onto the bed, but couldn’t bear to pollute the quilt or sheets with the rank smell, the leavings of that man. Or any part of me he’d touched. I was tainted! Ruined! Fit for nothing but the floor!
That was where I was, still crouching with my back against the door, when Agnès knocked the other side to ask if she could serve me – and when I could trust myself to speak, I begged her send someone to the harvest field, to fetch Hoddie to me.
‘And tell her to make haste.’
I wanted to scream it at her, but somehow managed not to – although when she tried the lock, I yelled for her to leave me on my own.
Then after what seemed like a long eternity of ages – before she’d even climbed the stair, Hod’s jangling complaints left none in doubt of how far she’d been made to tramp in the hot sun. Or at what cost to her blamed feet.
‘But as I live, I’d never think of comfort when my lamb is calling,’ she assured me when I closed the door behind her. ‘By Saint Jim, I’d cross a field o’ starks barefoot an’ gladly if…
‘God a’mercy! Will ye look at the state o’ your pore face!’
She stared at me aghast as I turned back into the light.
‘He caught me in the wood while you were all out harvesting,’ I told her shakily.
‘My eyes an’ limbs, ye’re never serious?’
She didn’t need to ask the name. But I needed to say it, give it substance. I took a ragged breath and then another.