Lights up on Saladin and Reginald on their sides of the stage.
Lights up on Alia in the center of the stage. Alia is wearing a traditional Muslim woman’s clothing (not a burka but rather a headscarf, a handkerchief to cover her face except for her eyes, and a light robe).
SALADIN: I will be praised for my chivalry in poems and epics for hundreds of years. It won’t only be my people who speak of my valor as a soldier and a king.
REGINALD: I will be a footnote of a footnote. In that footnote of a footnote, I will be called a pirate.
(Alia takes off her face covering and places it onstage.)
ALIA: No one will think it worthwhile to write down my name.
SALADIN: The descendants of people who considered me their enemy will praise me too. Dante, Sir Walter Scott, the list goes on.
REGINALD: However, I prefer to think of myself as the Official Royal Plunderer of God’s Greatest Gifts in His Holiest of Holy Lands.
ALIA (As she takes off her headscarf): I will be known only as one man’s sister and another man’s captive.
SALADIN: I negotiated a peace treaty with Richard the Lionhearted.
REGINALD: The battle I lost is the reason Richard the Lionhearted had to come.
ALIA: And I am the reason why the battle was fought in the first place, though the chroniclers of our time refer to me as such, not one ever wrote down my name.
SALADIN: When I died soon after putting an end to the Crusades, my men opened my treasury. They found there wasn’t enough money to bury me. I had given everything I had to the poor.
ALIA: Fool!
SALADIN: But, my people built me a glorious tomb in Damascus anyway.
ALIA: A tomb with no prayer written anywhere on the walls that mentions my name. A tomb which a French general named Henri Gouraud will enter in 1920.
REGINALD: I love it that he was French like me.
ALIA: Over eight hundred years after we are all dead, Brother, this French general will kick the entrance of your tomb that lies near the Grand Mosque. He will say:
REGINALD: “Awake, Saladin, we have returned. My presence here consecrates the victory of the Cross over the Crescent.”
ALIA: And I will know that I was right to do what I did. I, who was just a nameless, faceless woman to everyone except for . . .
SALADIN: Me. |
REGINALD: Me. |