At Candlemas, as you know, Your Holiness, our forces took two great and holy trophies: the standard of the Roman Empire and the blessed icon of the Virgin which bears with it the luck of Constantinople. Shortly thereafter we received word that the usurping Doukas had disposed of his rivals, the young Emperor strangled in his prison cell, his father slain soon after by age, sickness, and grief.
No bond of honor or treaty now compels us to keep peace. As Lent draws to its end in fasting and abstinence no less devout for that our circumstances force it upon us, we advance inexorably toward the conclusion of this conflict. Count Baudouin has sworn to celebrate Easter in Hagia Sophia. That, he will do, by God’s will and the will of our army.
Jehan set down his pen and flexed his fingers. A few sentences more, and that would be the end of His Excellency the Cardinal Legate’s latest epistle to the Pope; and His Excellency’s secretary would be free for an hour to do as he pleased. The sun was gloriously warm, as if the past bitter winter had never been; he gazed longingly at it from the stifling prison of the Cardinal’s tent, and swallowed a sigh.
Soon, he promised himself. Grimly he took up the pen again. Its tip was beginning to splay already after only a line.
He needed a new quill. And none in his writing case; he had been meaning to replenish his supply and had kept forgetting.
A shadow blocked the sunlight in the tent’s opening. That would be Brother Willibrord returning most opportunely from one of his endless Benedictine Offices. He had little love to spare for a sword-bearing Jeromite priest with pretensions to scholarship, but he carried an exceedingly well-stocked writing case.
“Good day, Brother,” Jehan said, squinting at the robed shadow against the sun. “Could you spare a new quill for God’s charity, or at least for the Pope’s letter?”
Brother Willibrord said nothing. That was one of his few virtues: silence. Even as Jehan turned back to his letter, the monk set the pen in his hand, a fresh one, well and newly sharpened.
“Deo gratias,” Jehan said sincerely but rather absently, eyes on the parchment. Now, where was he? …The will of our army. Yes. After much deliberation, the captains have determined to assault the City with all the forces they can muster. The attack will commence before—
He stopped. Brother Willibrord stood over him still, a silent and hopeless distraction. He looked up, barely concealing his irritation. “Yes, Brother?”
Alf smiled down at him, a smile that turned to laughter as Jehan’s jaw dropped. “Indeed, Brother! Has all your labor made you blind?”
“Alf,” Jehan said. He leaped up, scattering pen and parchment. “Alf! What are you doing here?”
“Fetching my hat,” Alf answered. “Didn’t I say I would?”
“That was months ago. Months! With every rumor imaginable coming out of the City, and some of them declaring you dead.”
“You knew I wasn’t.”
“I did,” Jehan admitted grudgingly. He pulled Alf into a tight embrace. “By all the saints! Next time you commit imaginary suicide, mind that you do it where I can get at you.”
“If I can,” said Alf, “I will.”
“That’s no promise.” Jehan held him at arm’s length and inspected him critically. “You look magnificent. A little tired, maybe. But magnificent.”
Alf returned his scrutiny with a keen eye, running a hand down his side. Under the brown habit there were ribs to count. “You, on the other hand, could use a month or two of good feeding.”
“It’s Lent. I’m fasting.” Jehan dismissed himself with a shrug. “All’s well in the City?”
“As well as it may be,” Alf answered soberly. And after a pause: “Bardas died just after Candlemas.”
Jehan’s jaw tightened. “I…couldn’t have known. He was a good man. His family—are they—”
“The Akestas refuse to be daunted by so feeble a power as death. I’m the weak one. Do you know what Bardas did, keeping it secret even from me? Adopted me as his son and made me the guardian of his estate, to hold it in trust for his lady and his children. Not,” Alf added, “that Sophia needs my help. She has a better head for business than I’ll ever have.”
Jehan stared, and laughed amazed. “You’re a rich man. You. If only the Brothers could see you now!”
“Thank God they can’t, I’m written down in the City as Theophilos Akestas, Greek, doctor, and adopted heir of a minor noble house.” Alf shook his head, torn between pain and mirth. “There’s irony in heaven and high amusement here below. It serves me right, says Thea, for being such an insufferable saint.”
“Bishop Aylmer will laugh till his sides ache.”
“He always has been certain that I’m one of God’s better jests.”
“He thinks the world of you.” Jehan looked down at the unfinished letter and grimaced. “If you’ll give me a moment to finish this, we can talk for an hour after.”
“Finish it then by all means,” Alf said.
Jehan bent to his task. The attack will commence before the Ides of April. He paused to dip his pen in the inkpot. With regard to the quarrel between Father Hincbald and the Abbot of Marmoutier…
Slowly Alf walked around the tent. Before the Ides of April. And March already at its end.
He stopped in front of an ornate crucifix and crossed himself without thinking. The tent walls seemed to close about him. Too many men had dwelt in this place for too long with too little care for cleanliness. And war, war everywhere, a great surge of power and purpose bent upon destruction.
“Alf. Alf, are you all right?”
Jehan was shaking him, peering anxiously into his eyes. “I left the City to get away from this,” he said irritably: “fates, prophecies, and the firm conviction that the walls are about to fall on me.”
His friend said no word, but led him out into the free air. He drank it in great gulps, turning his face to the sun that now seemed less an enemy than a long-sought refuge.
Little by little his mind steadied. He smiled at Jehan a little wanly. “Someday, my friend, I’ll manage to get through a day without scaring you out of your wits.”
“I’m not scared. I’m used to you.”
“I hope I gave you time to finish your letter.”
“It’s done.” Jehan held up a worn and shabby hat adorned with a palm of Jericho. “Here’s what you came for.”
Alf took it and set it on his head. Arm in arm they walked through the camp, down to the shore of the Horn.
Men swarmed there, repairing and refurbishing the fleet: Saint Mark’s mariners, with scarcely a glance to spare for a Frankish priest and his companion. They found a place of quiet amid the tumult, a curve of sand around a pool but little larger than the basin Alf bathed in.
Jehan slipped off his sandal and tested the water. “God’s feet! It’s cold!”
“It’s still winter in the sea.” Alf lay on his cloak, hands laced behind his head, hat shading his eyes. “In the City the earth is waking to spring. The almond tree is blooming in our garden; the children are making me teach them spring songs.”
“Love songs?”
Alf glanced at Jehan, half smiling. “Irene asks for them. Anna groans and endures them. They’re pretty enough, she admits.”
“Especially if you sing them.”
Alf’s only response was a smile. Jehan sat and watched him, asking no more of him than his presence. The Horn stretched beyond him, aglitter in the sunlight, dividing the Latin shore from the walled might of the City.
“You know,” Jehan said slowly, “you’re an Akestas now. A Greek. An enemy.”
“No, Jehan,” Alf said, “not an enemy.”
“That’s not what anyone here would say.” Jehan leaned toward him, intent. “Alf. Don’t go back there. You don’t have to fight, just to be here with your own kind.”
“And what of the Akestas?”
“They can leave the City. Don’t they have kin in Nicaea?”
Alf shook his head. “They won’t go. Nor will I.”
“You’re all mad. There’s war coming, can’t you see? War! If we win you’ll be condemned as a traitor. If we lose, the Greeks will turn on you, a Latin in Greek clothing. Either way, the Akestas will suffer for harboring you. Do you want that?”
“They won’t leave their city. I won’t abandon them. They’re my family now, Jehan. I’m bound to protect them.”
Jehan stared at him. He was Alf still, but he had changed. Jehan remembered how he had felt in Saint Ruan’s when he learned that Alf was gone and that Thea had gone with him. Angry at first, and jealous, and stricken to the heart.
One did not keep a friend by clutching at him. King Richard had said that, without even Jehan’s assurance that one day he would see Alf again.
And yet. “There’s no safety for you in Constantinople. Won’t you see sense just this once, and escape while you still can?”
“I can’t,” Alf said.
“You don’t want to.”
“Maybe not.” Alf rose and began to walk aimlessly. The other scrambled to follow him. He did not pause or glance aside. “Jehan,” he said after a time, “Brother Alfred is dead. He can’t rise again. It’s not fair even to ask him to.”
“I’m not. I only want you to be safe.”
Alf gripped his arm and shook him lightly. “I love you, too, brother. But I don’t need a keeper.”
“You need a good whipping,” Jehan muttered.
Alf passed him, mounting a low hill. From that vantage he could see all the ordered sprawl of the camp, seething within and without, arming itself for battle. Ten thousand men, swelled with the Latin allies whom the Greeks had driven out of Constantinople: they were a strong army in the reckoning of the West. Yet they faced the greatest city in the world.
He turned toward it. Burned and battered though he knew it to be, riddled with dissension and cowardice, it stood firm around the curve of the Horn, held up with the pride of a thousand years of empire.
“She is old,” he said. “She wavers and begins to fall. But no power of the West will long prevail against her.”
“You’ve fallen in love.”
“I’ve fallen into prophecy.” Alf shook himself. “This was the wrong place to come to escape from it.”
“How did you come here?”
“Witchery, of course,” Alf replied.
Jehan nodded, unperturbed. “I thought so. That’s what’s different about you. You’re freer with it. Freer all over. Almost like... well... Thea.”
“She’s labored long and hard over me.” Alf kept his eyes on the City. “The end was a battle royal. She tried to make a man; the monk fought to remain as he was. She won.”
There was a small pause, a bare concession to Jehan’s priestly vows. The young knight broke through with a whoop. “Eia! I’ve won my wager.”
As Alf stared, Jehan laughed aloud. “I knew you’d come to it sooner or later. Henry swore you never would; you’re too saintly. That shows how well Henry knows you. He never heard you when you were still a pious monk, coming out with ‘Lovely Flora’ in place of an Ave Maria. And he’s never had a proper look at Thea. How ever did you manage to resist her for as long as you did?”
“Ironclad idiocy,” Alf answered. “You’re a wretched excuse for a priest. Not only condoning sorcery but aiding and abetting it, and now rejoicing in a confession of open and thoroughly shameless fornication. “
“Why not? I’ve just won Henry’s best sword. And you look as close to happy as I’ve ever seen you. Unwanted wealth, forebodings of doom, and all.”
“Everything has its price.”
“Are you asking me for absolution?” Jehan asked, suddenly grave.
“No,” Alf said. “If you gave it I’d refuse it. The Church frowns on everything I am and do.”
“Not everything, and not all of us. Maybe I’m lapsing into heresy, but I don’t think there’s any sin in you.”
“Thea would laugh. A theologian, she declares, can reason his way out of anything.”
“That’s the beauty of our art. How else can the Pope both deplore this war and make the best of it?”
“The same way a renegade Latin monk can throw in his lot with a family of schismatic Greeks.” Alf drew Jehan into a brief embrace. “Our paths won’t cross again until the war is over. Promise me something, Jehan.”
“If I can,” Jehan said warily, fighting down an urge to clutch at him and never let him go.
“You can,” said Alf. “Whatever happens, victory or defeat, promise me this, that you’ll do all you may to protect the women and children. I know in my bones that it’s going to go ill for them. Very, very ill.”
“I promise.” Jehan caught Alf’s hand. Once he had it, he could not say what he had meant to say. Only, “God be with you.”
“And you,” Alf responded.
And he was gone. Vanished like a flame in a sudden wind, and in Jehan’s hand only empty air.