The Blessing Stone (52 page)

Katharina pledged the same oath, and knew that no matter what lay in their future, she and Adriano would be bound together always.

They spent a week of love, as husband and wife, both wondering what they had done to deserve such happiness, each promising to God to do good works and favors in payment for this joy, until one dawn, they crept from their tent to go to the river to bathe. Adriano wrapped his knight’s cloak about himself, Katharina joined the other women and children at another part of the river, playing with Bulbul in the water and telling him, as she did everyday, that he was soon going to be with his grandfather and all his cousins. When he asked, as he always did, if his mama was going to be there, Katharina answered, “I do not know, perhaps,” which at least was somewhat truthful, adding, “But she wants you to be with your grandfather, who will teach you to ride a horse.” For the first time, however, she regretted having to give the boy to his family, for in the weeks since leaving Constantinople she had grown to love him.

She was wrapping him in a towel when she heard the first scream. Turning, she saw men on horseback, wielding massive swords, galloping through the encampment.

Katharina picked up the child and ran. She reached the part of the river where the men of the caravan had been bathing and she saw that they had already been taken by surprise. In the confusion she saw Adriano, distinguished by his cloak of knighthood, blazing white in the morning sun, and she called to him just as a sword was thrust into his back, directly in the center of the blue eight-pointed cross. She looked in horror as he flung his arms wide and then dropped to his knees, and then fell onto his face, a ribbon of blood flowing from his back. She saw the sword raised high and come down on his neck. She turned and shielded Bulbul’s eyes as she heard the sickening sound of a head being severed from its body.

Katharina turned and ran, but she was caught by raiders. The boy was snatched from her arms. She watched in horror as little Bulbul flew up into the air as if he were a weightless bird, and then land headfirst on a boulder, his child’s skull splitting open like a melon.

And then a sharp pain filled her own head, and blackness enfolded her like a sudden night.

When Katharina regained consciousness, she found herself in a compound with other females, some of them weeping, some angry, a few dejected and desolate. She didn’t remember anything. Her head hurt and she was nauseated.

Where was she? She rubbed her eyes and looked around. From what she could see, she and the others were in a makeshift pen with walls made of goat hides. There was no shelter beneath the punishing sun, except for a leafless tree that spread dry, brittle branches. Beyond the goatskin walls there appeared to be crude tents, and the smoke of campfires. She could hear shouts and arguments and the galloping of horses.

When her head began to clear and the nausea subsided, but all of her memory not yet returned, she saw men come into the compound and begin roughly to inspect the girls, stripping them and examining them. As they appeared to have no interest in using the women sexually, it occurred to Katharina that they must be slavers.

The Greek caravel! The sultan’s palace!
Not again.

Katharina backed away until she stumbled and fell against the trunk of the old dead tree. Putting her hand to her chest, she felt something beneath her dress. She pulled it out and was surprised to find a small leather pouch on a thong. It was vaguely familiar and she suspected it must be important, so she hastily removed it from her neck and tucked the pouch into a knothole in the tree trunk, making sure she had not been seen.

By then the men had reached her, and began remarking excitedly about her hair. Although she could not understand their language, some gestures were universal, and she knew she had some value to them. They stripped her and looked her over, and finally, when they were done with all the captive women, gathered up all garments and possessions and distributed rough robes of cheap wool. When the captives were left alone, and the sun began to set, and the other women sat in groups to wail or weep, Katharina crept back to the tree and secretly removed the hidden pouch, restoring it to its safe place around her neck.

It was during the night that it all came back to her, for she dreamed of Adriano and Bulbul, and she woke screaming, and when full realization of what had happened, and her new situation, hit her with brutal force, she began to weep so bitterly and inconsolably that the others left her alone.

Katharina lived in a daze after that, ignoring the advances of the other women, unresponsive to questions, drinking water only when it was put to her lips, but refusing food as she sat and stared at the distant horizon.

Adriano, lying dead with a sword between his shoulder blades.

Bulbul, his brains splattered on a boulder.

Yet she was alive, and once again a slave.

When one of the tribal women came to wash Katharina’s hair, she neither questioned it nor protested. The woman’s job was vigorous and thorough, and when it was dry she combed the golden tresses through and brought others into the pen to look upon and remark at the beautiful sun-colored curls.

The next day the woman returned with soap and a sharp knife, and this time she carefully shaved Katharina’s head, collecting the hair in a basket. Once again Katharina did not protest, but stared out at the desert that stretched away into infinity.

But a week later Katharina saw a woman, who, judging by the many coins she wore, was the chief’s head wife, proudly modeling a crudely made blond wig. In her numb state, Katharina vaguely wondered why these women would bother with wigs when they kept their heads covered. And then that night she heard moans of sexual ecstasy coming from the chief’s tent, and she remembered with a pain how Adriano had loved to run his hands through her hair.

The next morning a man strode into the pen, furious. He grabbed Katharina’s head and examined it as if it were a melon. Then he began shouting at the woman who had shaved her. Not understanding their language, Katharina could not guess what the argument was about, but the word “Zhandu” kept coming up, and the man gestured angrily over and over toward the east.

She learned from her fellow captives that these people were the Kosh, famous slave traders of the region, a proud, arrogant people who believed they were the first to be created by the gods and that all other races were afterthoughts and therefore created to serve the Kosh. A warrior-nomad society that didn’t mingle with other races because they were believed to be inferior, the Kosh had round flat faces and slanting eyes, and the reddest hair Katharina had ever seen. They rode fierce horses that had woolly hides and shaggy manes.

When the camp broke up and they began an eastward trek, Katharina once again did not protest nor question her fate. But as they covered many miles, stopping briefly at settlements to sell their human goods, with herself always being kept apart, she began to realize the Kosh were keeping her while her hair grew out, and that they were taking her to a place called Zhandu.

As she walked alongside their horses and double-humped camels, Katharina was oblivious to the burning sands beneath her bare feet, to the weariness in her bones, the hunger in her stomach. She thought only of Adriano: where was his soul? Had it flown back to Spain and was now in his beloved Aragon? Or had it gone to Jerusalem and was now one of the shadows in a small church dedicated to the Blessed Mother? Or did it hover over the heads of his comrades in the brotherhood on Crete, silently urging them on in their fight against the infidels? At times, late at night when the wind blew mournfully and Katharina looked up at the stars, she almost felt Adriano at her side, a consoling phantom longing to take her into corporeal arms.

And then one night a man came to look her over and he haggled in a most animated fashion with the woman who had become her caretaker. Katharina had heard enough Kosh to grasp some rudimentary words, and realized that the woman was asking an exorbitantly high price for her. When the man demanded to know why, the woman poked Katharina’s rounded belly and said, “There is a child there.”

And Katharina was instantly brought out of her numb state.

She looked down in wonder and realized that what the woman had said was true, for in her trance she had not realized that her monthly trouble had not visited her, nor had she noticed that though she ate little, her stomach grew.

Adriano’s child.

At last she was able to bring Friar Pastorius’s leather pouch from beneath her grimy robe and look at its contents, and when she saw the little cameo of Badendorf and the miniature of St. Amelia with the blue crystal, she wept anew. But mixed in with her grief was the spark of new hope—a part of Adriano still lived.

Eastward moved the massive caravan of the Kosh, pausing only long enough to sell slaves and pick up supplies, continuing deeper into unknown regions and farther from the world Katharina knew. Although her captors fed her, it was only barely enough to keep her alive, and now Katharina wanted very much to live. So she took to fighting for extra scraps of food, and stealing from others, in order to feed the new life that was growing within her. Katharina thought the Kosh a godless, savage race, brutal beyond comprehension. When a criminal was decapitated, the tribe played polo with his head. Weddings were primitive: the prospective bride jumped on a horse and galloped away with suitors in pursuit. The man who caught her and wrestled her to the ground became her husband. The Kosh worked their slaves to death and left the bodies behind, unburied. Yet they laughed and danced and sang a lot, drinking a brew so potent that just being near the fumes made Katharina dizzy.

And during the whole time, while she watched and listened, she learned their foreign tongue, as she had once learned Latin and Arabic, for it could mean her survival and the survival of her unborn child.

Finally, while the Kosh were wintering on a plateau among ancient crumbling walls built by a forgotten race, Katharina’s child was born, a pale-haired daughter that with one mewling cry chipped a fracture in the stone wall around Katharina’s heart. She named the girl Adriana, for her father, and as the days and weeks passed, as she fed the child at her breast and held it and crooned to it, Katharina experienced a melting of her sorrow and the beginning of an unexpected new joy. Adriano’s child, with hair like fleece. But the baby had been born underweight and was struggling to thrive. Katharina’s milk dried up too soon and she had to fight once again for food.

When the chief and head woman came to inspect, they saw the infant’s golden hair and nodded in satisfaction, and once again Katharina heard them say the word, “Zhandu,” and she knew she and her child were being kept for something special.

While traversing the Greater Headache Mountains, the Kosh camped in a high pass surrounded by tall snowbound peaks and one night heard a sound like thunder that alarmed Katharina but only excited her captors. At dawn they swarmed ahead on foot, clambering farther up the pass until they came to the place of the recent avalanche. They dug frantically into the snow, a massive undertaking calling upon the work of everyone, captives as well, until their efforts were rewarded. As the slavers gave out yelps of joy, they uncovered the bodies and cargo of the hapless caravan that had gotten caught under the avalanche. Katharina had at first thought they were looking for survivors, but when a victim still living was uncovered, he was clubbed to death, for the Kosh were interested only in booty. As she watched the obscene plunder and heard the muffled cries for help, her captors stripped the dead and the dying of their clothing and jewelry, and carried off much wealth that day, for it had been a caravan from China, bearing gold and silk. When the Kosh caravan resumed its journey it was to take an alternate route for the pass would not be clear until spring, when the snow melted and the bodies of men and beasts were washed away.