The King's Witch (30 page)

At last, after three days had passed, the King allowed in the Saracen messenger. It was the Sultan’s brother again, Safadin, tall and lean and watchful of everything, with a small guard of swordsmen whom he left in the courtyard. The King sat on his new throne to receive him; a Byzantine silk shawl covered it, magnificent with gold and stones. Humphrey de Toron stood by his side, to translate, so that he and Safadin were each talking in their own language. Rouquin stood behind the throne on the other side.

Safadin walked calmly up before the King; he inclined his head an inch. He spoke in a bold voice.

Humphrey said, “My lord Saif ad-Din, in the name of the Sultan of Egypt and Syria, Yusuf ibn Ayyub, Salah ad-Din. He congratulates the great King Richard the Lionheart. They have not lied who spoke of you with awe before you ever came here. Rather, they said not enough. You are the Alexander of the Franks.”

Rouquin lifted his head; he felt the praises of this enemy as he would never feel them from a friend. Richard himself got to his feet, walked down from the throne, and stood face-to-face with Safadin, equal to him. He said, “God has sent us worthy adversaries,” which pleased Rouquin also.

Safadin talked, not gesturing, his smooth dark hands clasped at his waist. Humphrey said, “The Sultan finds el Malik Rik as excellent in words as on the battlefields. He wishes to discuss a truce, so the Lords of East and West can see if words may solve this issue. You must know, my lord, that their faith does not allow them to make peace with the Dar al Harb”—he bowed to Safadin as he said this—“that is, the House of War, which is all that of the world which does not submit to Allah. But they can make a truce, to recover from a loss.”

Richard said nothing for a moment. Humphrey said a few words in Arabic to Safadin, who shut his eyes and opened them. Rouquin thought,
The House of War
. That fit, everything else than that a figment of words.

At last, Richard said, “My terms for peace have not changed. I want Jerusalem, the restoration of the kingdom of the Franks here, and the return of the True Cross.”

Humphrey spoke, and Safadin spoke.

Humphrey said, “He says thus: Jerusalem is as holy to us as it is to you. Holier, in fact, since it is there our people will come on the day of the last trumpet, to hear the judgment of the One True God. He has a letter from his brother.” Humphrey held out one hand, and Safadin put a scroll into it.

Richard made no move for the letter. He said, “I shall read it and reply as I see necessary. In the meantime, my lord Safadin, permit my cousin to escort you back to your own house.” His smile flashed at that. He said, “My cousin is to me as you are to the Sultan, so this is very apt.”

Safadin took three steps backward, bowed again more with his eyes than anything else, and turned. Rouquin went after him and caught up with him at the door. He wondered what the letter said and doubted it was much. He thought Humphrey had put this truce idea in exactly the right way. In the courtyard, with a gesture he summoned Mercadier and three other men, who brought horses, and they met Safadin and his guard at the gate.

They rode out of Jaffa and turned inland. Dark was coming. Rouquin was almost stirrup to stirrup with Safadin, but he said nothing; he felt the war between them like a sword. He liked the Saracen’s horse, a dark bay mare with white socks all around, who moved as prettily as a swallow. She was too light for a man in armor, more a fine palfrey. He thought of Edythe riding her. Bred to a brawny stallion like his roan warhorse, she might throw bigger colts that still kept her fine lines. Then, where the road went down through a dry streambed, the Saracen reined in and turned to him and said in perfect French, “From here I can make my own way.”

Rouquin wanted to see his camp, which he knew was also Richard’s design. He said, “The King bade me ride with you to the door of your tent.”

“Ah,” said the dark, expressive face, taking some amusement from this. His eyes held Rouquin’s. “But I could not promise you that you would then get all the way back to Jaffa.”

Rouquin felt his blood heat; he said, “Nothing you have can stop me.”

The Saracen said, “I myself faced your charge at Arsuf. I hope never to do so again. But I would for the sake of the True Faith. I think also you have felt the bite of our arrows, and an arrow can kill as well as a lance.”

Rouquin said, “I have taken your arrows. I am still here.”

The quick white smile parted the Saracen’s dark beard. “Yes. You are here. Far from home, and we are home. We can drive you away, and you have somewhere to go. We have only here.”

Rouquin said nothing. Against his will, he saw the reason in this. The Saracen lifted his hand, almost a salute, and moved off into the falling darkness with his men. Rouquin went back to Jaffa.

Edythe had been looking throughout the city for Jews but found none. Then, while she was inhaling the cool fragrance of peppermint in an apothecary, the shopkeeper told her he had gotten it from the village at the mouth of the river. “They’re Jews, you know,” he said. “They can’t even live here. But, you know, every herb gathered by a Jew has a special power, every bark and every berry, and they have a doctor there.”

As soon as she could, she went down along the shallow river that cut through the sandy low ground north of the wall of Jaffa. Ahead of her a cluster of small white houses appeared under some palm trees where the water ran into the sea. Closer to the real city, Syrian women washed their clothes in the river, wading in with their skirts tucked up between their legs. Screaming naked children ran along the shallows. She ambled by as if she were only walking and crossed the empty space between Jaffa and the little village.

The cluster of buildings seemed no different from any other houses in Jaffa, stretching their clay roofs wide beyond the walls to fight off the blaze of the sun. Many of them had a low freestanding stone screen around the outside, as if to protect them from all eyes. In front of the biggest house three women in dark shawls were sitting on a bench; one was picking through lentils, and another nursing a baby, and the third sewing.

Edythe’s heart was hammering. She could not remember the words. She hoped they knew some French. She went up and bowed to them, very nicely, to put them on her side.

The woman with the baby got up and went in through the gate behind her. The woman sorting the lentils spoke in a tongue she did not recognize, and then said, in French, “You want?”

The two women stared at her, unsmiling. They did not seem on her side. She said, “Doctor.
Iatros. Medicus.
”

They looked at each other, and then the woman with the lentils said, “Yeshua. You want. Yeshua ben Yafo.” She pointed across the way, to a smaller house.

“Thank you,” she said, and bowed again.

Their faces were blank as the walls, unfriendly as the walls. A chill went over her. She turned and went to the house opposite.

This was small, the white plaster chipped, part of the roof patched with palm fronds. No one was outside. Hesitantly she went in the opening through the screening wall, onto a narrow walk. Little trees grew along the side of the house, their leaves mostly fallen at their feet, the bare branches spangled with yellow apples.

A door in the house opened, and someone called, not in French.

“Please,” she said. “I am—I have heard there is a doctor here— Please—” She took another step forward, farther into the narrow orchard. All her hair was stirring; her stomach was clamped to her backbone.

An old woman appeared, also swathed in black, and stone-faced. Edythe said, “Please—” The woman backed up and slammed the door.

She staggered, as if the door had struck her. But then the door opened, and an old man came out. He was tall, even if old, and his face jutted out in a wedge, a sharp nose, a long jaw below sparse white hair and a scalp spotted brown.

“You want a doctor,” he said. “Are you sick?” His French was slow but exact.

She took her first deep breath in moments. “Yeshua ben Yafo,” she said.

He bowed. “I am he.”

“My name is Edythe,” she said. “I am a doctor with—with the Crusade.”

“Ah,” he said, and nodded at her. “You are the woman from the Latin hospital, in the city.”

Her jaw dropped. He stood aside and waved his hand at the doorway. “Please come in.”

She went past him into a room filled with scrolls and bound books, stacked one on the other, wads of paper thrust between them, heaps of books and paper on the floor, on the table, on a chair to one side of the table. The old man went by her to the only other chair.

He said, “You are young, you can sit on the floor.” He sat in the chair.

She sank down cross-legged on the floor and tucked her skirts around her. “You know who I am?” she said.

“Everyone knows of you, yes,” he said. “You are not a woman of the people, but you serve everybody. What do you need of me?”

She said, “I have a patient with a recurring fever.”

“How have you dealt with it?”

She told him—the oxymel, the bergamot she had gotten in Acre, the bleeding, cooling him through the fevers and warming him through the chills, rubbing him down, the lemon potions and zingiber. He listened, his head to one side. His eyes were wide, the irises large even for this dim room, and she wondered if he was going blind.

He said, “None of this will hurt. Often a kind touch will do more than a potion. You should give him a tincture of artemisia when he first shows signs of falling sick. It is not easy to find. I hope your patient is rich, and has a strong stomach.”

She blurted, suddenly, “I want to be a Jew again.” Tears rose in her eyes. “Tell me how to be a Jew again.”

Silence met this. He sat still, his wide eyes unblinking. He was blind, she thought, despairing; he could not even see her.

He said, “What happened to you?”

She said, “We lived in France. In Troyes. The French King made a decree that we all had to go. All the Jews had to go. My mother was near her time with child, and my father would not leave her.” The tears rolled down her cheeks. It didn’t matter, since he could not see them. “They set a mob on any who stayed. The mob burned—burned—I wasn’t there, my aunt had taken me to Rouen. I was thirteen. They sent me off to England, from house to house. To the Queen, who took me in.”

“Blessed for that,” he said.

“And told me henceforth to be a Christian.”

He coughed, or chuckled. “Not that. Troyes, yes, all know of the martyrs of Troyes, of the terrible purge of Philip Augustus. Who was your father?”

“His name was—was Mordecai ben Micah.”

He lifted his head. The huge eyes fixed on her. She had been wrong. He saw everything. He said, “Mordecai ben Micah of Troyes.”

“Yes.”

He rose and went behind the table, digging through the piles of books. His hands caressed them. He picked them up and set them down as gently as babies. At last he turned, one little book in his hand.

He held it out to her, and sat down again when she had taken it. She laid it on her knees. It was plain, bound on the left in a scuffed leather cover, some of the pages ripped at the edges. He was smiling at her.

He said, “That is your father’s book.”

She gasped. She raised the book in her hands, amazed. It was written in Hebrew characters, which she could not read. The leather cover had faded gilt lettering on it; she knew the character that began her father’s name and traced it with her finger.

“It is a copy, of course, not the true book,” he said. “It is—as you see—a commentary on the Canon of Ibn Sina. Your father was known all over the world. He had some interesting notions about disease, what it meant, how it moved from person to person.”

She drew his initial over and over with her fingertip. Yeshua was being generous; she could read nothing of the book, not even the title. Her father, here, under her hands. “He said the only wealth was knowledge.”

“He was right,” said Yeshua ben Yafo.

She cradled the book against her and lifted her face to him.

“Why do they hate us?”

He said, “Have you never known a son who hated his father?”

“Oh,” she said. “Yes,” she said. “Who are the Hagarites?”

“You call them Saracens. Another son who hates his father. They were Jews first, just as the Christians were Jews first. Now they all want Jerusalem, to prove they are not Jews anymore. They hate us, because we remind them they are, really, still Jews.”

She felt herself stiffen against this. She thought the Christians and the Muslims she had seen were much different from her and from this man, although she didn’t know why exactly. Maybe only that they claimed it so insistently. She said, “You must tell me what to believe. How to pray.”

He said, “What do you believe now?”

“I believe nothing.” It felt bitter to say this, acid on the tongue.