“But Papa!” Words failed her for a moment and she had to steady herself before saying what was in her mind, keeping her voice reasonable despite the angry tenor of her words. “The man might be a simpering clown!”
Baldwin raised a peremptory hand even as his lips twisted in a half smile. “No, Daughter. Grant me at least the wit and fatherly good sense to think of such concerns. The prince is well thought of and well spoken of. I have had him under close observation for several years now, for I have been acting for him, during his minority, as regent of Antioch, governing from here and through an intermediary. I have never met him, obviously, but he is very tall, I am told, head and shoulders taller than most of his companions, and he is apparently comely enough to have women fighting over him—although that should concern you not at all. He has long, fair, curling hair, as you can see, almost golden blond, with fine white, even teeth and large blue eyes. He is said to be responsible in all things, including his spending habits, and is reputedly kind to his servants and gentle with his animals. In addition to that, I am told, the men he commands admire and respect him and would do anything he asked of them. He is a warrior of promise and some renown already, despite his youth, and he dreams of doing great things here in Outremer for the glory of God and His Holy Church.”
Alice sat silent after that, not thinking about Bohemond at all but still nonplussed by her father’s comment about her having no need for concern over the prince’s attractiveness to other women. She never quite knew how to respond to such comments from him, and he had been making them with something approaching frequency in recent months. His facial expressions were always inscrutable at such times and his tone of voice invariably left room for doubt about his true meaning, as it did about the depth of his understanding, or even his misunderstanding, of her sexual affairs and proclivities, so that now she found herself wondering, as she had so many times before, what her father really thought of her, beneath the mask of his fatherly concern. Was he saying that, faced with a husband’s infidelity, she would find it easy to console herself with others? Or did he mean that her own beauty was sufficient in itself to safeguard her against the predatory efforts of other women? She could not tell which of the two meanings might be closer to the mark, and she wondered, for the briefest of moments, if her mother might have said something. She dismissed the thought, however, for she and her mother had finally arrived at a truce of kinds, after years of squabbling. It was not complete, and at times it was decidedly uneasy, but it had been in effect now for more than a year, and Alice doubted that Morfia would want to endanger it by saying anything inflammatory to her husband.
Morfia had found out about her daughter’s dalliances around the time of Alice’s seventeenth birthday—Alice had no idea how, or from whom—and had attacked forthwith, threatening to tell the King unless Alice promised her, on the spot, that she would mend her ways and behave as a Princess of Jerusalem might be expected to behave, with modesty, graciousness, and decorum.
“Pray tell, how might a Countess be expected to behave, or a Queen of Jerusalem?” Alice had flung the question back at her and then swept onward, naming the names of men she knew, beginning with old Bishop Grosbec. Her mother had been stunned at first, then furious, stating what Alice knew from her own observations to be true: that she had never touched or been touched by any man, other than her husband. Alice had been ready for that, however, and she had raised the specter of appearances. What would the Count have said or done, she asked, had he known or suspected that his wife, while ostensibly doing nothing, had obtained favors and compliance through willingly lending herself to an elderly bishop’s lustful fantasies, so that he spilt himself frequently, even daily, watching her?
The discussion had been lengthy and fiery, filled with mutual condemnation, yet strangely quiet because of the need to be discreet, to avoid being overheard, and by the end of it this tense and sharp-edged truce had evolved, with each of the two women developing a new respect and wariness of the other. They had not discussed terms of behavior, or how they might deal with each other afterwards, but they had not had another confrontation of any kind from that day forth, and when they met nowadays, which they did more often and more openly than ever before, they were civil to, and tolerant of, each other.
Alice became aware that she and her father were sharing a long silence, and that the King might be awaiting a response from her, to something he had said or asked. She inhaled sharply, smiled brightly at him and shook her head, as if dismissing an amusing thought. He pursed his lips, his face grave.
“Very well, Daughter. I will leave you with this thought, but be warned that it is not open to change, or even to discussion with an eye to that end, so inure yourself to accepting the duties of a King’s daughter. You will wed the Prince of Antioch, and as soon as it may be arranged. That is your destiny, so embrace it willingly and be aware that you could fare far worse. The young man has everything to recommend him: born of the noblest bloodlines in Christendom, he is rich, highly regarded by all who know him, in excellent health, and filled with eagerness to be your husband. He has no desire to hold the Crown of Jerusalem, knowing your sister Melisende is my firstborn and betrothed to Fulk of Anjou, who will one day rule here when I am gone. He is content to have his own Principality of Antioch, the richest seat in Outremer save only Jerusalem itself. Antioch is large and wealthy as it stands today, but Bohemond has plans to extend its borders to the south and east, far into Seljuk Syria, to Aleppo and perhaps even as far south as Damascus. You and he will build a kingdom of your own, to rival this of mine and perhaps even to outshine it someday.”
Alice stared down at the portrait in her hand and thought about what her father had said, her mind automatically selecting those attributes she most wished to consider: handsome, well disposed, golden haired, dashing, adventurous, and brave above all else. And even as she thought those things, she was aware of her own lip curling in a sneer. She had come to know many men in a very brief time and she had never yet met any single one of them who possessed more than one or two of those attributes.
“Well? Have you heard what I have told you?”
Alice widened her eyes innocently. “Of course I have, Papa. I am slightly overwhelmed, perhaps, but I have no wish to displease you. I have it in mind now, and I will give it all my attention from this time on, and in the meantime I will await further word from you on how the matter is progressing.” She hesitated, knowing she was being daring. “Does Mama know of this?”
“Of course she does. She was present when the matter was arranged, while you were but a child in arms, but she and I had not spoken of the matter in years, until two years ago. It was arranged, but you two were a world apart, and so I decided that the less said of it the better it might be for all concerned. Thus, if anything untoward occurred to the young man while he was growing up, you would not feel deprived or disconsolate.”
“So you forbade Mama to tell me of it?”
“No, not at all. We decided together, your mother and I, that the betrothal was the best arrangement we could make for you at the time, but that nothing would be gained by having you aware of it while you were yet too young to understand what it might mean to you. I have never regretted that decision, nor has your mother, and the wisdom of it was brought home to us several years ago, when another young man was killed in a hunting accident, his neck broken when thrown from a horse. He had been similarly betrothed to your sister Melisende. His name would mean nothing to her today, but had she known herself to be betrothed to him, she would have grieved. So, best not to have known, do you not agree?”
On the point of saying something more, Alice caught herself and bowed her head submissively, the picture of an obedient daughter, then curtsied deeply and asked, “May I, then, speak to Mama about this matter now?”
“You may, but the dinner hour is upon us and we have many guests this night—eight envoys from France and six from the court of Italy, so perhaps it might be better were you to wait until
tomorrow. Go now and prepare to act the Princess of Jerusalem and Antioch.”
Alice bowed again and left her father alone, her head spinning, and a tight, tense appreciation in the center of her chest told her she might be on the threshold of something profoundly exciting, completely unlike anything she had ever experienced. She was to be Princess of Antioch, wed to a golden prince of great beauty and prowess, and that might work to her advantage. Fulk of Anjou was her father’s official successor. There was no getting around that, unless Fulk died … and if that happened, he would be replaced. Alice had no doubt that her father already had a list of potential replacements drawn up. But Fulk, if anything, was suitable; he was stern, somewhat forbidding in his personality, and utterly humorless, the sort of man who alienates others, an opponent, she thought, who could feasibly be dealt with, and most particularly so by a golden-haired champion with the ability to win the hearts of men, a prince with dreams and ambitions of expanding his principality beyond recognition.
It crossed Alice’s mind then that her current crop of lovers were likely to be most unhappy about this new development, particularly since she would be moving to her new husband’s home in Antioch, hundreds of miles to the north. Bishop Odo would probably be the most vocal of those, and probably the most carping, because although she kept him on a short leash, in the matter of permitting him access to her favors, he was yet accustomed to having his own way and could be snappish and almost womanly in his nastiness when he was crossed. Fortunately for Alice, however, Odo was also the most vulnerable of her lovers and the one who would be easiest to control, for several reasons, all of which she intended to look after assiduously in the time ahead.
As Alice prepared for bed that night she was still deep in thought about her father’s tidings and the changes they would necessitate in her life, and long before she ever fell asleep, she had completely forgotten Hassan the horse trader and the errand on which she had dispatched him.
THREE
St. Clair heard the crackling of fierce-burning flames and felt their searing heat on his face, and then the bright agony of having a burning ember land on the web of his hand brought him fully awake, shouting wordlessly in pain, cursing and writhing with tightly bound limbs as he tried to escape the torture. Above him, leering down with mindless malice, the halfwit he called the Torturer was still holding the smoking twist of burning reeds that he had used to burn St. Clair’s hand. The knight quickly looked around for any of the others, hoping for rescue, but the two of them were alone and St. Clair’s heart sank, knowing that his tormentor must have dragged him bodily to the edge of the fire, although neither reason nor logic could inform him why the sullen brute had stopped short of throwing him onto the fire itself. He might easily have done so, for there was no capacity to reason in whatever passed for the creature’s mind.
The others in the small band who were the knight’s captors, knowing their dim-witted companion’s love of inflicting pain on others, had thus far discouraged him from going too far, clearly hoping to win a ransom for their prisoner, and aware that he would be useless to them if they allowed the simpleton to kill him. None of them spoke any form of intelligible language that St. Clair understood. Their conversation was gibberish to him, lightning-fast and sibilant, rather than throaty and guttural like most of the Arab tongues with which he was familiar. And so he had been unable to disabuse them of the notion that he was a Frankish knight and therefore must be wealthy and worthy of ransom, valuable to someone.
He had lost awareness of how long they had been holding him, but he knew he must have been close to death when they found him, raving with thirst and unable to defend himself. The fact that he was here at all attested to the utter helplessness that must have bound him at the time of his capture, but he had no knowledge of how much time had elapsed since then. He knew only that he had returned to consciousness one day, weak but clear headed, to discover that he was a captive, wearing only the soiled remnants of the tunic he had been wearing the night he left the stables in Jerusalem. He had no way of knowing whether days, weeks, or months had passed in the interim, although his reason, and his observations of his captors, told him that it was probably a matter of days. They would have made no effort to prolong his life, other than giving him water, and had he not improved noticeably in a short time, they would have killed him or left him to die.
He had no recollection of what had happened to his horse, or to his mail armor and weapons, but he had seen no signs of them since regaining his awareness, and so he assumed that he had rid himself of them before being found by these people. He remembered that he had ridden for days in the desert, looking for death, but had seen no single person with whom he might fight, and eventually he had arrived at a water hole that no longer contained water. Only slightly dismayed, he remembered, he had set out for the next water hole along the desert route. He had traveled it many times before and knew all the watering places, but on this occasion, long before he drew near the deep, ancient sump that sustained all the life for an enormous distance around it, he had seen vultures circling above the site and had arrived to find the place defiled, its water fouled and rendered undrinkable by bloated, stinking corpses so long dead that they were indistinguishable by sex and barely recognizable as human.
Appalled, he had fallen to his knees and cursed the abject folly and criminal irresponsibility of his fellow Franks, for he knew beyond question that no Muslim would have committed such a crime. It required all the posturing self-righteousness and unbridled stupidity of an arrogant, hatred-flushed Christian to murder defenseless nomads such as these—for the emaciated and pathetic condition of their slaughtered livestock left St. Clair in no doubt as to the status of the people who had died—and then to throw their bodies into the only sweet water source for hundreds of miles around, condemning to death not only the people of the surrounding land but all the desert creatures who depended on the water hole for life. Unable to pray to a God who would condone such iniquity, he had saddled up and ridden onward, dangerously low on water now and fully aware that he would be hard-driven to reach the next hole he knew of before thirst drove him mad.
He had obviously failed to make the trek. He remembered riding through a series of wind storms that first confused and then confounded him, and the next time he became aware of himself or his surroundings, he was a prisoner.
Soon after regaining consciousness that first time, he had his first encounter with the mindless Torturer, who simply loved to cause pain, not merely to St. Clair but to any living creature that fell into his power and could not retaliate. He would push a sharpened sliver of bone into St. Clair’s flesh—he carried the thing tucked into his belt and St. Clair knew he was far from being the first person on whom it had been used—for the sheer pleasure of watching the way St. Clair reacted, and all the while he would grin that empty, evil grin, the stumps of his rotted teeth glistening wetly in the cavern of his drooling mouth.
Now the Torturer squatted, still grinning, and thrust his twist of reeds at St. Clair’s face, but the flames had already died out and what was left of the reeds was no more than warm. The charred ends broke off against St. Clair’s skin, and he felt dribbles of powdery soot roll down towards his chin. As the Torturer sat back and began to fumble for the bone sliver at his belt, there came the sound of raised voices as the others in the band returned, and the halfwit lurched to his feet and shambled off to greet them.
Moments later, one of the others appeared, bent forward under the weight of a large goat that was slung across his shoulders. He dumped the eviscerated carcass on the ground by the fire, then looked at St. Clair, his eyes moving to the fire and seeing that the prisoner lay far too close to it. He muttered a curse and shuffled forward, calling for help as he began to pull the knight away from the heat. A second man joined him, and between them, none too gently, they picked the Frank up and carried him back to where he had previously been sitting. St. Clair clacked his mouth open and shut noisily, making the sound they recognize
d as a request for water, and one of them returned with a small clay cup, which he held to the bound knight’s mouth.
St. Clair drank thirstily, rinsing his mouth thoroughly with the last drops before swallowing them, and as he did so he heard a curious but familiar sound that ended with a solid, jarring thump. It was the hissing strike of a hard-shot arrow. The missile struck the man kneeling over him, taking him somewhere high in the back and hurling him violently sideways, leaving St. Clair stiffening in shock. The sound was repeated four times after that, clearly audible each time above the rising clamor of frightened voices, and each time, the babble of voices lessened, punctuated by the noise of a body falling. And then the arrows stopped.
St. Clair knew there had been eight men in the band that had captured him. Five of them, he now suspected, were dead. It occurred to him, inanely, that they might simply have been severely wounded, but he doubted that even as the thought came to him. But where, then, were the other three?
He heard a sharp, sibilant whisper, answered promptly by two others. All three men were there, close by, crouching unseen for the time being, presumably safe from the arrows of the lurking enemy beyond the firelight. He turned his head as far as he could to his left, hoping to see where his remaining captors were, but all he could see was a single corpse, his erstwhile nemesis the Torturer, belly down in a lifeless sprawl, his eyes staring emptily at St. Clair, his ever-open mouth finally closed by the ground beneath his chin. A single arrow protruded from his back, its feathers daintily fletched and cunningly fashioned. St. Clair had seen many such missiles, all of them made in Syria by the Seljuk Turks. He was, he decided ruefully, about to exchange one batch of captors for another. The burn in the web of his hand began to throb again.
He sensed movement behind his right shoulder and turned back quickly to look beyond the fire, where he saw an apparition walk into the light. The newcomer was tall and slim, hawk faced and bearded, wearing a tall, conical helmet of shining steel from which hung a net, almost an open veil, of delicate, finely made chain mail. The fellow shimmered as he moved, covered from neck to ankles in a long coat of the same supple mail. His right hand held a long, glittering scimitar and his left a curved dagger, while a small round Saracen shield was mounted on his left forearm, covering it from biceps to wrist when the elbow was bent. There came a cry and a scuffle from the three remaining men behind St. Clair’s shoulder, and then he heard running feet approaching him and a smashing blow hammered him into oblivion.