“You need not fear for your soul,” Father Umbertus intoned a little maliciously. “Papas Theodoros can hear your confession in my absence and also read Mass.” He smiled cynically as he spoke, suggesting he knew perfectly well that she already confessed more to the Greek Papas than to him anyway.

  “Yes, of course,” Eschiva answered readily, refusing to be drawn into that discussion, “but can you tell me more about what is going on?”

  “I’m afraid not, Madam, but I’m sure you’ll be safe here.”

  He left later that same day, and as darkness fell Eschiva was left with an uneasy sense of lurking danger. It was inchoate yet so tangible that Pedrino was squalling and fidgeting more than ever. Nana Flora, although pleased by the departure of the priest with a promise to tell Gerard everything, was still enough on edge to take her temper out on the kitchen staff. Eschiva fled to the Drakakis household in their house by the sea. Instead of the warm reception she had expected, she found the family in an agitated uproar.

  “Fire!” Costas called out to her, seeing her first.

  “What? Where?”

  “We saw it from the boat. Fire on the mountains!”

  Yiota joined them, looking more worried than Eschiva had ever seen her. “We’ve had plenty of rain this winter, and no storms. The fire couldn’t have started on its own, it must have been set.”

  Eschiva felt a chill run down her spine even as she protested. “Perhaps a stove was left untended or a goat knocked over an oil lamp.”

  “A fire could have started like that, but not spread so far,” Yiota insisted.

  “Where is it?” Eschiva asked.

  “We think it’s the sugar plantation of the Lord of Karpas, Sir Anceau de Brie.”

  Eschiva shuddered and wondered if Yvonne was safe. At least she had the castle of Kantara to retreat to.

  Eschiva had only just managed to fall asleep when she was torn from her sleep by a violent knocking on the door. “Madame! Madame! Come quick!” Yiota shouted.

  Eschiva fumbled to put her feet into shoes and drag a robe over her nightdress. She wound a veil around her head and pulled open the door. “What is it?”

  “Hurry! Hurry!” Yiota gestured toward the courtyard, and Eschiva realized that it was lit up. For a heartbeat, she thought it had been set on fire, but then she realized it was just torches and lanterns. Agitated voices were carried on the evening breeze.

  The steward intercepted her at the bottom of the stairs. He too was in his nightshirt, his greying hair in disarray. His legs were bare, but he had girted a sword around his hips. “My lady! The Lady Alys, Lord Philip’s widow, and her two children just arrived. They only barely escaped the Emperor’s men.”

  Before he could say more, Eschiva caught sight of her Aunt Alys with her daughter Maria clinging to her fiercely. She called out. “Tante Alys! What has happened?”

  Aunt Alys turned toward her niece, and Eschiva was stunned by the look on her face. She seemed aged and haggard. “They slaughtered my men!” she announced without preamble. “Just burst in and started slaughtering them! We barely escaped by a back door and ran through the woods to the next village. Behind us, they set Levkara on fire. We could hear the horses screaming and the cattle bellowing. The peasants hid us in a goat shed and then got us to Agios Mamas by night. The monks loaned us donkeys to get to the Temple at Limassol, but the brothers said we were not safe there! Can you imagine that? They said they feared an attack at any moment. The Knights Templar said they were themselves under attack from the Emperor! All they were willing to do was lend us horses. We’ve been traveling for four days now, and you are our last hope.”

  Her daughter was crying, and young Jacques stood beside his mother trying to look brave but only managing to look shaken and tense at twelve years of age.

  Eschiva moved forward to put her arms around her aunt, enclosing the little girl at the same time. “Of course you are welcome, Tante Alys!” Eschiva assured her aunt. “Come in. Let me find you some clean clothes.” She smelled very strongly of goat. “When was the last time you had anything to eat?”

  “Thank you, thank you. Come, Maria.” Aunt Alys shooed her daughter ahead of her toward the front door of the manor house, but even as she did so she told Eschiva bluntly. “We are not safe here. This is no more a castle than Levkara was. Nor is there a castle we can make for. The Emperor has control of all the castles—including Kantara! Poor Yvonne is trapped inside the Lady Tower while Italian mercenaries plunder the castle around her! At least that’s what the Templars said, and they should know. They say the Emperor controls all the royal castles, but it’s the men at Kantara that endanger us most! They are sure to come here sooner or later. We need to leave Cyprus altogether.”

  “But what’s going on? What does the Emperor have against us?”

  “Are you blind and deaf?” Alys de Montbéliard was too exhausted and had gone through too much to mince words. “The Emperor declared war on the Ibelins at the banquet in Limassol. Lord John managed to checkmate him by seizing the castles, and then word arrived that Sicily had been attacked by the Pope’s troops forcing the Emperor’s hand. He made peace with John to get him out of the castles, but he never intended to keep his word. I don’t know why John fell for it! Indeed, I don’t understand why men are so blind when they think ‘honor’ is involved. What does the ‘Wonder of the World’ care about honor? His word? His sworn signature? He’s still Holy Roman Emperor! A man who breaks his oath to the Pope isn’t going to honor his oath to a mere Lord of Beirut! Wouldn’t you think that after what the Emperor did to his sons, John would have known better than to ever trust him again?” Eschiva realized that Alys was pouring out her anger on the Lord of Beirut for his lack of foresight when in fact she hadn’t seen this coming either. None of them were prepared for this. They had all thought the “incident” was over.

  “Sit down, Tante Alys,” Eschiva urged, pulling out a chair and stroking her aunt’s shoulder to try to calm her down.

  Alys was in no mood to calm down. “The Templars say the Emperor has tried to seize Castle Pilgrim from the Templars. They claim the Emperor planned to turn it over to the Teutonic Knights. He acts as if he had built it, defended it, and manned it. As if it were his to give to whomever he liked. You can imagine the Templar reaction!”

  Eschiva nodded, but at the moment she was not terribly interested in the Templar’s fight with the Holy Roman Emperor. “The Emperor is grasping. I tried to tell everyone that. But I don’t much care about the Templar—”

  “Don’t you understand anything, child?” Aunt Alys interrupted in exasperation. “Pedro de Montaigu, the Templar Master, is your husband’s uncle! Apparently, he has nearly come to blows with the German Emperor! Gerard, I understand, backed his uncle most vociferously, leaving the Emperor in no doubt about where your husband stands in this power struggle. There is only one place we will be safe.” She told Eschiva bluntly. “We must get to Beirut.”

  The word immediately conjured up images of the powerful castle on the hill over the harbor—and the splendid gardens, the fountains, the marble steps and halls. Bella was there, and—“But we need a ship,” Eschiva protested, fighting away thoughts of the man who had offered her protection and refuge the last time she had been forced to flee from the Emperor of the Romans.

  “You took a ship from here to Limassol,” Aunt Alys pointed out.

  “A fishing boat,” Eschiva corrected. “I’m not sure it’s large enough or seaworthy enough to take us all the way to Beirut.”

  Her Aunt grasped her wrist and looked her straight in the eye. “Eschiva. This is a matter of life or death. The Emperor—or at any rate his Sicilian bloodhounds—is making war on women and children. He knows damn well our fighting men aren’t here to protect us because they are in front of his nose! He sent his Sicilian troops to terrorize us because he knows we are defenseless. We don’t have any choice. At least I don’t. I don’t intend to let my children fall into his hands. I will get my children to safety in Beirut, whether you choose to come with me or not.”

  Eschiva looked at her own household that hovered in a circle around her. The steward shook his head in agreement, muttering, “I fear Lady Alys is right, my lady. We cannot defend you with the few men we have. None of us are fighting men. If the Hospitallers will not take us in….” His voice faded away.

  “You must get Gerard’s son to safety!” Nana Flora ordered, her eyes ablaze and her lips a thin line of anger as if she expected resistance. No one else had anything to say.

  Eschiva sent one of the grooms to fetch Yiota’s father and brother. They must have been waiting nearby because they appeared almost at once, and Eschiva put the proposal to them. Could they take her aunt with her two children, herself, Nana Flora, and little Pedrino to Beirut in the boat?

  “Beirut?” Costas asked in shock, looking to his father. He shook his head.

  “Impossible, my lady.”

  Aunt Alys took over, explaining the situation in a flood of angry Greek, but the fishermen stood their ground. Their boat was not seaworthy enough to get them across the open sea to Beirut.

  Yiota spoke up, “What about Vasili’s new boat?” she asked.

  Her father frowned but weighted his head from side to side before deciding. “Maybe. It’s ten feet longer and built to go farther offshore.”

  “Tell him he will be well-rewarded,” Aunt Alys told the fisherman firmly. “Tell him the Lord of Beirut will give him ten bezants in gold if he brings us safety in Beirut.”

  The Mediterranean is treacherous. It smiles even in winter, blue and glistening in a light breeze—until a storm blows up out of apparently nowhere. The winter storms are notorious and have swallowed many a ship whole, leaving not a trace much less a living soul behind. Or they leave the carcass of the lifeless ship broken on some rocky shore like the beautiful Genoese Rose of Acre.

  They were more than two-thirds of their way to their destination when the storm struck. Vasili sent the women and children into the forepeak, cramped as it was, and he handed all sails except a tiny triangle. Thereafter, he tried to keep the little vessel headed into the wind with the strength of his own and his sons’ arms on the tiller.

  The little boat was tossed about like a cork. It bounced, pitched, rolled and yawed on the waves so violently and unpredictably that none of the passengers could keep food in their stomachs. Pedrino wailed and Lady Alys’ children clung to her, tears of terror streaming down their faces. Water broke over the bows, splashed down from the collisions with the waves on all sides, and soon nothing on board was dry much less warm.

  Eschiva was generally a good sailor and she had withstood several storms on her outward journey to Brindisi, but that had been in a proper three-masted ship, not a fishing boat. From this perspective, the waves towered so high over them that they blocked out the rest of the world. Yet even when the boat rose onto the crests there was no comfort. The sea stretched to infinity in all directions under a low, grey sky. Soon the boat was rushing down the slope of the swells again. The waves came crashing into the boat, frothing and raging as before.

  Vasili and his sons looked grim. Eschiva saw one of the boys clutch the cross on his breast more than once. Behind her, Nana Flora was praying in a monotone too, but Aunt Alys was grimly silent. Although she was shivering and her teeth chattered, Eschiva focused on Vasili and his sons fighting the tiller.

  At some point, Pedrino cried himself to sleep. Eventually, Aunt Alys’ children also nodded off, while Nana Flora continued chanting prayers. Eschiva looked to Aunt Alys. “Yes,” came the answer to the unasked question. “It is better to drown here by the Grace of God than to fall into the hands of Frederick Hohenstaufen.”

  But although the storm blew itself out by the next morning, it became clear that they were still not out of danger. The little fishing vessel had survived, but not the provisions or the barrel of water that had been made fast aft.

  Pedrino was thankfully still asleep in Nana Flora’s arms. She held him to her breast and whispered to him, stroking his face with great tenderness as tears of concern ran down her face. Aunt Alys’ children were less restrained. Maria kept whining that she was hungry and thirsty, provoking her brother into hitting her and telling her to shut up. Aunt Alys told them both to stop fussing and pray for assistance instead.

  At about noon, Vasili called her in a raw voice and announced that he and his sons needed to rest. No one argued with that, but it meant they were adrift God-knew-where with nothing to eat and no water.

  As the afternoon wore on, Eschiva began to think it would have been better to be drowned than to suffer this slow and increasingly unbearable agony of thirst. She was stiff in every muscle, bruised in multiple places, her face and hands were encrusted with salt. Her body was wrapped in cold, wet clothes that ensured she could not warm up. Her head was splitting, whether from thirst or some injury, she no longer knew.

  She looked around at the endless, unsettled sea and saw only the depths of hell waiting below the surface. She looked up toward the heavens, but rather than light there were only low, grey clouds. They became a mirror reflecting her life back at her.

  She did not like what she saw. While she might tell herself that her mother and Yolanda had loved her, they were dead. Her brother and husband, her closest surviving kin, clearly did not. When death finally came, she thought, no one would mourn her except, maybe, the Drakakis family, Papas Theodoros—and Bella. She did not flatter herself that Balian would mourn her. He might say something nice to Bella, but his thoughts would move on, his eye would focus on the next pretty face.

  That had to be a reflection on her own worth. The Emperor had summarized her: cold, boring and plain.

  All she had ever done in life was run away from it—unless she counted going to King Henry about Sirs Balian and Baldwin. Yes, she reflected. That had been a good deed, but against that deed was this evil one: dragging Vasili and his sons to their death in a futile attempt to reach Beirut.

  So on balance, what justified her survival? Why should God save her from her own folly?

  For her paintings? Self-indulgent sketching while other women were mothers or looked after children like Nana Flora did. If God thought her work was of any value, he would not have brought her here.

  Jacques woke up and wanted to know why they didn’t set sail. His mother told him it was still too dangerous. He didn’t want to believe it. “We can’t just drift!” he protested. “We might never reach land, or—worse—end up the hands of the Saracens! We’ll be sold as slaves!”

  No one had an answer for him.

  By nightfall, the wind had settled enough for Vasili to risk setting sail. This at first lifted everyone’s spirits—until they discovered that they were taking on water. The fisherman and his sons took turns at the tiller, while the other two bailed with the instruments left to them: a couple of pottery mugs. When one of these broke, Vasili exploded with so much rage that he dashed the second mug as well. The women jumped in terror as the shards sprang at them.

  “Why did you do that?” Aunt Alys shouted furiously, wiping blood from Jacques’ face, where a piece of broken pottery had grazed him.

  “Because we are all going to die!” The fisherman answered her furiously. “Because we are sinking and will all drown before we can possibly reach land! Me and my greed! I knew this would happen! I knew it! At this time of year, the sea is never calm for long! I knew this was madness! God has punished me for my greed!” Then he collapsed into the bottom of the boat and started weeping helplessly. His sons stared at him for several minutes, and then, without a word, they got up to hand sail so that they would sink more slowly.

  When day broke again the boat was barely afloat. They had abandoned the forepeak altogether. Within it, now waterlogged beyond rescue, were all Eschiva’s paintings, the work of nine months. They didn’t matter anymore. As they huddled together near the stern, Eschiva felt as if she were already dead. The others too appeared far too miserable to speak or cry. Nana Flora clutched Pedrino in her arms with a fierce, almost mad, protectiveness, turning her back on the others, but the rest were gripped by the listlessness of despair.

  The combination of hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and hopelessness dulled their ears and eyes. The galley was almost upon them before they noticed it.

  It was one of Vasili’s sons who saw it first. He half jumped up, lost his balance and crashed down on his father. The latter yelped in pain and reproach, but his brother started shouting and waving furiously. Aunt Alys and Jacques joined in frantically. Eschiva just watched.

  The galley ignored them and continued on its way at a purposeful pace, all forty oars thrashing the water in near perfect unison. More from habit than interest, Eschiva noted that it was flying the banner of Venice.

  A shout reached them very faintly them from across the water. The oars of the galley lifted simultaneously out of the water and hung motionless in the air dripping water. The galley continued to glide forward, silently moving farther away. Yet there was a commotion on the afterdeck and then, with a great flourish, the oars along the far side started moving while the near side oars sank into the water to help pivot the ship about. Their stroke as the galley approached the wreck was slow. Men ran to the foredeck and lined the rail, waving and jabbering to one another.

  There were no questions asked. The Law of Sea recognized them as “sailors in distress.” At the sight of women and three children, however, the Venetian sailors erupted into a flurry of alarm and concern. Blankets were soon handed down, and large water skins were lowered along with mugs and sweets for the children to suck on. A bosun’s chair was rigged on the foot of the boom and swung out over the wreck. The sailor in it signaled for Nana Flora to give him Pedrino, but she shook her head and clung to him more fiercely.

  Aunt Alys had no nerves or patience for this nonsense. “Stop being a fool. Hand the boy over!”

  When Nana Flora still refused, Eschiva urged. “Come! The sooner he gets some water and warm clothes, the better it will be for him.” As she spoke, she reached out and her hand touched the infant.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57