“Hell,” said Jehan, “must be somewhat cooler than this.”
Even in the depths of House Akestas, in high ceiled dimness, the heat was like a living thing, bearing down with all its weight upon the gasping City, felling the old and the weak and rousing the minds of the strong to bitter rancor.
Anna and Irene had already been sent away for quarreling; Nikki, forbidden to play with Jehan’s sword, sulked in solitude.
Alf himself was pale and silent and alarmingly abstracted. He had held Jehan’s surcoat for him after the other had shown off his panoply; he held it still, crumpled in his lap, entirely forgotten.
“Hell is cooler,” Sophia said, watching as Jehan knelt on the tiles wrapping his mail-shirt carefully in oiled leather. It made a massive bundle with the chausses and the padded gambeson and the great flat-topped helm. “Especially,” she went on, “since no one in Hades is condemned to wear armor. How do you stand it?”
He shrugged. “You get used to it. Though it’s never pleasant, damnably heavy as it is, like to rust at a word.” He sat on his heels, his task done. “Every time I set my squire to work cleaning any of it, he mutters about entering a cloister. Never mind, I tell him; a few more years and he can win his own spurs, and find some other poor victim to keep his hauberk clean.”
“Is that why knighthood perpetuates itself?”
Jehan laughed. “Why else?”
Alf rose, trailing the surcoat, and wandered to the window. The others watched him in sudden stillness. He looked like a wild thing caged.
Sophia’s glance crossed Jehan’s. His lightness of mood had vanished; he frowned. “How long has he been like this?” he asked softly, though not too softly for Alf to hear if he chose.
She sighed a little. “He’s been very quiet for a day or two. Since the rising in the Latin Quarter.”
Jehan’s frown deepened. “If you’ll pardon my saying it, my lady, that was an ill thing.”
“You need no pardon,” she said. “It was worse than an ill thing. It was a mad thing. For our people to march on the merchants in their own places, burn their shops and houses to the ground, and kill any Latin they found…it was despicable.”
“Could they help it, when it comes to that? It’s hot; it’s miserable; there’s an invading army camped outside the walls. And no chance of relief from any of it.”
“That doesn’t excuse murder. Half the people killed were Pisans—Latins, to be sure, but they fought for us; if it hadn’t been for them and for the Varangians, the City would have fallen long before it did.”
“True,” Jehan conceded. “But they were Latins, and they were a target when your people needed one. No; the ill I see is that all your loyal Latins have come over to us. You’ve lost one of the mainstays of your army.”
“A fine strong empire this is,” she said bitterly. “You must feel nothing but contempt for us.”
“I?” Jehan shook his head. “I’m not that much of a fool. But I am afraid for you. There’ve been rumblings in the camp. People are talking about revenge and about making the City pay for what it did to the Pisans.”
“And well we ought to,” she said. But she had gone cold beneath her veneer of courage.
Alf turned back to the room. Before Jehan could frame a response, he said, “The wind is blowing from the north.”
“Ah, good!” she said with more enthusiasm than she felt. “That will cool us splendidly, and blow away any chance of plague.”
He shook his head. “No. It’s the worst thing anyone could wish for.”
Sophia glanced at Jehan. He watched Alf with peculiar fixity; in his eyes was something very close to fear. “What is it?” he demanded. “What do you see?”
Alf shivered convulsively. Jehan’s surcoat slipped from his hands to the floor. He stared at it as if he had never seen it before, and bent, lifting it, folding it with exaggerated care.
When it was arranged to his satisfaction, he laid it gently down upon a table, tracing with his finger the lion rampant that was for Sevigny, and the Chi-Rho which Bishop Aylmer had placed in its claws for the young knight who was also a priest. His eyes were enormous, all pupil; by some trick of the light it seemed to Sophia that they flared red.
He spoke to her and not to Jehan, with quiet intensity. “My lady, if you love your family, keep the children and the servants in the house. Let none of them go out for anything. And send for Bardas. Tell him a lie if you need to. But get him here and keep him here.”
“What—” she began.
He cut her off. “See that you have water. All the water you can draw, in every vessel you can find. And food enough for a week at least. Get it now. Get it quickly.”
It was madness, surely. Yet it made Sophia tremble. Jehan had risen, death-white under his tan; his sword was naked in his hand.
“No,” Alf said to him, “no weapons. Go back to the camp, Jehan. Stay there. Promise me.”
“Why? What’s going to happen?”
“What you foresaw. But worse. Far worse.” Alf looked from one to the other. “Why are you wasting time? Go on!”
He himself was at the door, moving with speed that startled Sophia. Even before Jehan could spring after him, he was gone.
She caught the priest’s arm as he passed her. “Wait! Where are you going?”
Jehan stared down at her, eyes wild. “After him. My lady,” he added after a moment.
“Is he mad?”
Obviously Jehan was burning to be gone; equally obviously he could think of no courteous way to escape her. “Mad?” he echoed her. “Alf?” He laughed with an edge of hysteria. “I suppose he is. Have you ever seen his back?”
She nodded, wincing involuntarily as she remembered it.
“He was supposed to be burned for a witch. They flogged him instead, as a penance. Then the people canonized him. He has his legend now in the north of Anglia, and even his feast-day.”
“What does that have to do with—”
“Nothing. But if he’s mad, then so are half the saints on the calendar. And all the prophets.”
Sophia could find no words at all. Even as she hunted for a response, the door flew open. It was not Alf returning to sanity, but her maid, breathless, disheveled, and scarlet-faced with heat and exertion. “My lady!” she gasped. “My lady! The City’s on fire!”
There was something inevitable in it, like the climax of a tragedy. It surprised Sophia that she could think so clearly. She set the woman in a chair, fanned her and refreshed her with a sip or two of wine, and extracted the news from her bit by bit.
It was as Jehan had said. The Latins, incensed by the injury done to their countrymen in the City, had roused to revenge. A troop of them had come armed from the camp, their target the quarter given over to the Arab scholars and merchants. They had sworn to kill Saracens; Saracens, then, they would kill.
The battle had its center in the mosque, the heart of the abomination, a colony of Infidels suffered to live and worship as they pleased within a Christian city. Someone, whether Latin or Moslem or Greek—for Greeks had come to aid their neighbors against the invaders—had brought fire into the battle. By then the breeze that had come to break the terrible heat had grown to a brisk north wind; it fanned the flames despite all efforts to quench them.
“You know how narrow the streets are, my lady,” said Katya, almost calm now. “And all the houses are of wood and half of them are falling down. They’re burning like logs on a hearth.”
Suddenly Sophia was very tired. The servants would be in an uproar; the children would be terrified. And Bardas—if he was in his chamber in the Prefecture, she could lure him home; if not…
The hiss of metal on metal brought her eyes to Jehan. He had sheathed his sword; his brows were knit. His face, pleasant and rather foolish in repose, was suddenly hard and Stern. “My lady,” he said, “you’d best do as Alf told you, and soon. I’m going after him.”
“He told you to go back to camp.”
“He should have known better, and he should never have left like that before he’d packed me off.”
“You know where he’s gone?”
“To the fire.” Jehan took up the hooded mantle with which he had concealed his foreignness, and threw it on. “I’ll come back for my things. Leading Alf, or carrying him.”