Archive of Our Own

Yusuf has seen this man before. Most of the invaders look half if not three-quarters starved, filthy and sickly and dressed in rags - the ones who came by land, who laid one siege after another over months and years on their way here. This man isn’t one of those, he’s surely of the smaller group, those who came by sea only a few weeks ago; his skin has a healthy tan rather than the others’ scorched pallor, the growth of his beard could be measured in weeks instead of months, he wears clothes still with some semblance of shape and colour beneath the spattered gore. He has a rather distinctive nose too, and the eyes –

Yusuf has seen these eyes before. These eyes, pale and huge and frantic, had met his when – when –

Hours ago. When Yusuf thought he killed him. When Yusuf was sure he was about to die himself. When Yusuf’s weapon – some farming implement, he didn’t even know what it was called, he’s no more a farmer than he is a soldier – gouged deep into the man’s belly, an accidental strike as Yusuf tried to duck away from someone else’s attack. When the man’s own weapon – not a proper weapon either, just a hunk of wood with a huge nail sticking out of it – failed to block Yusuf’s unintended blow and smashed into his body instead. Their eyes met, in a frozen moment of shared agony and terror, and then – and then –

Yusuf half-remembers more pain, falling, hard ground hitting his back and someone else’s body smashing the breath from his lungs and then – nothing. He thought he was dying. He thought they were both dying, he and the pale-eyed man, and felt no satisfaction in it.

But then Yusuf woke up, sometime later, half-buried in a heap of other dead and dying men. As he was crawling out, he thought he caught a glimpse of someone else stirring in that same heap. A familiar nose. But before he could consider either the man or the impossibility of how everything seemed to hurt less instead of more as he moved, someone else was coming at him, and there was no time for anything but trying to defend himself with the first thing he could grab.

And then, later, he saw those eyes again, he’s sure they were the same eyes, on another Frank he killed somewhere in the chaos, and then again –

He could swear that he came across this same man a dozen more times since the first, as though some unseen force were drawing them together again and again through the disarray. At least three of those times, he is sure he killed the man; without a doubt he harmed him too badly for him to be as whole as he appeared the next time. At least three of those times, he is sure the man could have said the same of him. He felt each wound as it came, felt the darkness claim him, yet each time…

Yusuf was never even supposed to be here. Their ship was headed to Ascalon from Cyprus, but a storm caught them, and though they did not go down immediately, the damage was severe enough to make it obvious that sinking was imminent. They were forced to retreat to the ship’s boat and seek the first safe harbour. At Jaffa. What they thought was safe harbour; no one on the ship knew then that the Fatimid army had evacuated the town and razed much of it to prevent it becoming a stronghold for the invaders. There was no passage home to be found in the ruins of Jaffa in the midst of war. Worse still, lookouts left to keep watch over the harbour reported that, instead of the Fatimid fleet that was expected, there was a group of Frankish ships in their wake, whose passengers were unlikely to care that Yusuf and his companions were civilians from the Maghreb with no particular interest in who controlled Jerusalem. By luck – they thought it luck, then – a company of patrolling Fatimid soldiers arrived before the Franks did, and offered to escort them to the supposed safety of Jerusalem’s walls. 

Safety, hah. From a sinking ship to a city under siege. Yusuf can swim better than he can fight, he should have taken his chances in the sea. Too late now. Yusuf is no soldier, but he is no coward either; when it became apparent that the real soldiers might no longer be able to hold the walls, he joined the other able-bodied men and took up whatever makeshift weapon was handed to him. And so he met the man with the pale eyes.

And so he meets him again. The fighting is well beyond the walls and into the city streets now, and Yusuf slipped into this alley that he thought might be a momentary refuge, only to find the Frank with the eyes already here. He’s lost his hunk of wood with the nail in it; there’s half a sword in his hand now, the hilt and maybe two hand-spans’ worth of blade remaining, the rest broken off. Yusuf’s farm implement is long gone too; he has half a spear instead, blade intact but much of the haft gone.

Yusuf doesn’t know how to fight with a spear. The man doesn’t look any more comfortable with his sword. He recognizes Yusuf, too, Yusuf can see it in the widening of those big eyes as he stares. Only stares. He doesn’t move to attack, and Yusuf doesn’t either. Everyone Yusuf killed or injured today was either trying to kill him or got in the way of his efforts to defend himself from someone else. Everyone he killed today. He killed people today. Hysteria scratches at his throat; he stamps it down viciously, there is no time for it now.

Yusuf notices movement out of the corner of his eye and chances looking; a woman, local, pulling a crying child with her. The Frank ignores them both, gaze fixed on Yusuf, until she says something to the child about being safe when they reach the mosque. Then, he turns abruptly to her and says,

“No! The mosque – not safe. They already burn the – the holy place of the Jews, with all inside. Not safe.”

The woman stops, pulls the child closer to her. “No, it cannot be – they wouldn’t-”

“I’m sorry. Please. Not safe.”

The woman does not say anything else, just picks up the child and runs off.

“You speak Arabic?” Yusuf asks the man. A bit of a stupid question, given that he was just speaking it now, and clearly understood the woman’s words, but Yusuf thinks he can be forgiven for not being the most brilliant conversationalist under the circumstances.

“A little,” the man says.

Yusuf feels he should say something else, but he doesn’t know what. He feels, too, that he should think of this man as his enemy, but it is impossible to summon anything but a bizarre sense of rapport. The man regards him in silence for a beat, expressionless, and then looks pointedly first at Yusuf’s spear, then at his own sword.

“Will we kill … us again?” he asks, grimacing a little like he knows the phrasing is not quite right. Like the grammar is the most troubling thing about that question.

Yusuf assumes he means ‘kill each other’. Apparently he is unafraid to speak the truth that Yusuf has struggled to utter even in his own head so far. They did kill each other. More than once. And yet here they stand, alive. Only the two of them; there is no one else that Yusuf has seen fall and then seen standing again and again.

“I was not trying to kill you the first time,” Yusuf says; he is unsure why but that feels important, somehow. “You were just…”

The man nods. “I was not trying to kill you either,” he says. “I am not a soldier, I did not come here to fight, but in battle…”

“Yes,” Yusuf agrees. “I’m not a soldier either. Just trying to survive.”

“Well,” the man says, and makes a show of looking him over again. “You do that better than many.”

Yusuf can’t stop the laugh that escapes him at the absurd understatement there, and then he freezes, but then – no, the look in the man’s eyes and the tiny twist at the corner of his mouth confirm that that was a joke.  

“As do you,” Yusuf says. “Do you have any idea… what, why, how?”

“No,” the man says. His eyes lose their mirth, and he looks as lost as Yusuf feels.  

Before either of them can say anything else, more people pour into the alley. Men this time, soldiers, Fatimid, running, weapons raised. One of them, a man Yusuf met earlier, calls something to him about following them; another sees the scrap of cloth tied around the Frank’s arm, marking his side in the fight, and attacks him. The soldier easily evades the Frank’s clumsy attempt to parry with his half of a sword, and slashes the Frank’s throat. Yusuf watches him crumple to the ground, and underneath the cloak of protective numbness he has been clinging to all day, feels a profound pang of loss.

Another soldier shouts at Yusuf to get moving, and without any reasonable explanation for why he needs to stay and see if this dead Frank will wake up, he does.

The day, and the night that follows, do not improve. Yusuf does not see his Frank again, and it eats at him far more than it should. He cannot let himself think too much about what it may mean. Is he still on the ground in that alley? Did their speaking to each other break the strange spell that kept bringing them back and pushing them together? Did someone see him come back to life, and…? Yusuf is not sure what anyone would do, were they to see it, but he cannot imagine that it would go well for the resurrected. Or is it just that his Frank is busy with something other than the killing of anyone who is not an invader?

Yusuf cannot let himself think too much about it, and he cannot make himself stop.

He cannot make any of it stop.

There is more fighting, more blood. More and more broken bodies without a weapon or a hint of military garb. It must be close to dawn when Yusuf dies, again, along with a half-dozen soldiers and too many unarmed civilians, near a gate they had hoped – in vain – that the Franks did not yet control.

Yusuf gasps back to life, coughing up blood, only for an annoyed-looking Frank to turn around and run him through again before he can so much as sit upright.

The next time, Yusuf wakes with something on top of him. Another body, unmoving. Leaking blood – hopefully, it is only blood – onto his cheek. The urge to push it off and get away is nearly unbearable, but there are voices nearby and they are not speaking Arabic. If they realise he is alive, again… He forces himself to hold as still as he can manage, to keep his breathing shallow and swallow down the horror and despair clawing their way up from his gut. He forces himself to hold still and play dead when the body on his is removed, and when his own body is lifted and tossed somewhere else, and when something – another body, most likely – is thrown on top of him again, and when the ground beneath him begins to move. Not the ground. He must be on a cart. They must be moving the bodies. The bodies of all those people – he cannot think of it, he cannot weep, or vomit, or scream. Not now. He forces himself to keep playing dead while the cart rumbles, and stops, and when they move him again, throw him on another heap of bodies, throw someone else’s body over him to bleed on his face. He forces himself to keep still until the voices move away.

Just when Yusuf thinks it might be safe to open his eyes, he hears footsteps again. The footsteps come closer, and he feels movement above him, the body on top of him shifting. Looting? Will he be able to keep still if they start rifling through what remains of his clothes, prying off his rings? Will he be able to keep still enough much longer with someone else’s blood – hopefully, it is only blood – oozing nearer and nearer to his nostrils?

The body over his is pushed off. There is a hand on his shoulder, curiously gentle, nudging as though trying to wake him from sleep. And then, a voice.

“No, no, no. Please. Please, wake up.”

Arabic. Accented. Familiar. Yusuf dares to look, and the hand on his shoulder twitches, grips tighter, and the man with the pale eyes, leaning over him, sags with a relief that Yusuf cannot help but share.

“I looked for you, I saw them put you on the wagon, I thought… We must go,” the man says. “Soon they come again. We must go.”

“Go where?” Yusuf asks. Croaks, more like, and wipes at his face, trying not to think about what it is that he is wiping. “Where are we now?”

“Outside the walls. I do not know. I only know that we must go. If you stay, they kill you again. Maybe worse, if they see you wake up.”

“Right. I can’t stay,” Yusuf agrees. No question of that; the city is clearly long beyond hope, he has to take this opportunity to get away. But his companion in deathlessness… “But you – your people won. You would be safe here, now.”

The man flinches and shakes his head.

“I cannot stay. War is war. This is… something else. They kill people in the holy places. They kill children in the streets. I do not want to be safe here. Please. If you want – not with me-”

“No, I didn’t mean – no. You’re right. Let’s go.”

The man stands and offers his hand, and Yusuf takes it.

Yusuf stands too, and looks around, and wishes he had not. There are bodies everywhere, men and women and children, covered in blood. Yusuf is covered in blood, his own and theirs. So much blood. So many bodies. So many people slaughtered. He chokes on grief and bile, head spinning, and – the man squeezes his hand. Yusuf looks at him, focusses on his big, haunted eyes like a distant steady point beyond a churning sea.

“Please,” the man says. It sounds more like an apology than an entreaty, but his voice and his touch ground Yusuf enough to allow him to pull himself together.

“Right. We have to go,” Yusuf says. The man nods.

He starts walking, and Yusuf follows. The man does not let go of Yusuf’s hand. Yusuf does not let go either.

They walk, and they walk, and they only part after they descend into a valley out of sight of the walls and bodies both. There, the man stops and reaches into the bag slung over his shoulder. He pulls out a water skin, and offers it to Yusuf.

“Water,” he says. “I have some water, and some food. The water is not enough to bathe, but…”

“Thank you,” Yusuf says.

He drinks, less than he would like but it will do for now, given that he doesn’t know how long they will have to make it last. He heard enough in the last weeks to know that water is scarce here. He hands it back to the man, who returns it to his bag without partaking. The realization strikes Yusuf then: their first peaceable meeting in the alley may have been random chance (never mind that nothing about any of their meetings feels like random chance), but the second one outside the walls certainly was not. The man did not have that bag in the alley, he clearly made some preparations for leaving the city in the hours when they did not see each other, and he could easily have gone off without coming to find Yusuf in a heap of bodies first. But he did not.

“You looked for me,” Yusuf says. The man nods. “Why?”

The man seems almost surprised by the question, and considers it for a moment before speaking.

“I died, and I woke up,” he says. “You died, and you woke up. I saw you, and I saw you, and I saw you, so many times, and…” He trails off, shaking his head, but Yusuf nods, sure that he is speaking of the same unnameable thing that Yusuf has felt himself.

“You, and I, and no one else,” the man continues. “I cannot help anyone else, I…” He falters, squeezing his eyes shut, and a moment later Yusuf sees tears rolling down his cheeks. He doesn’t wipe them away, but he does look at Yusuf again, and goes on, his voice unsteady.

“They said, we take the city for God, and I thought, it is an excuse. The church tells us, hate the non-believer, but the lords trade with Muslims in Cairo and Damascus, and make war on Christians in Pisa. They said, we take the city for pride and politics and trade routes, and I thought, yes, now I understand. But you do not kill children for trade routes. And the dead do not wake up. I do not understand. I do not understand anything, and I cannot help anyone else, but you…”

‘Pride and politics and trade routes’ pretty succinctly sums up Yusuf’s own assumptions about why the invaders came; those, along with revenge and natural resources, are more or less the same reasons any invaders go anywhere. And as the Frank says, the Christians fight amongst themselves as much as they fight Muslims. But some kind of religious fanaticism would certainly better explain the amount of bloodshed that was still going on long after it was obvious to everyone that the city had fallen. All those people, all those bodies…

Tears are coursing freely down the Frank’s cheeks, and his hands are shaking, and for a broad-shouldered, sturdily-built man of roughly Yusuf’s own height, he looks terribly small and scared and alone. Yusuf reaches for him, meaning to steady him as he steadied Yusuf earlier, but as soon as their hands touch and their eyes meet, Yusuf’s own composure shatters. A sob tears from his throat, and his vision swims, and his thoughts collapse into nothing but pain and fear and grief. For the last day he has been forcing down unbearable terror, confusion, and despair over everything that has happened, to him and to everyone else in the city; now, away from the chaos and faced with the other man’s distress, they finally overwhelm him utterly.

He is aware, distantly, of his knees buckling, his body hitting the ground, the Frank sinking down with him. Without conscious thought, he clutches at the Frank, and the Frank grasps at him in return. In a way, it is like more than one of the times they killed one another, falling together in pain; in a way, it is nothing like that at all.

Embracing like children blindly seeking any semblance of comfort, they both weep, ugly and shameless and desperate, until there are no tears left and a hollow sort of calm settles over them.

Yusuf gradually comes back to himself, recognizes the sensations of rough ground against his legs, the man’s arms around him, his ragged breath hot against Yusuf’s neck. His shoulder against Yusuf’s face, and his back under Yusuf’s hands. The thud of a heartbeat that could belong to either or both of them.  

They eventually separate enough to look at each other, though their legs remain tangled on the ground and their hands remain on one another’s arms.

The end of their mutual outburst seems, somehow, like the turning of a page. The crossing of a threshold. Everything that comes after this feels as though it will be different, in some way Yusuf cannot name yet, from everything that came before. The look in the Frank’s large, pale eyes seems to say that he feels the same.

“My name is Yusuf,” Yusuf says, finally.

“Nicolò,” the man tells him.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Nicolò,” Yusuf says, very formal and polite as though they’ve just been introduced on some refined social occasion. Nicolò blinks, and then his eyes light up and his mouth twists in a little smile.

“It is a pleasure to meet you also, Yusuf,” he says, equally formal, and Yusuf feels absurdly pleased that after everything, they can share this little joke.

They shift around a bit, into slightly less awkward positions, but Nicolò makes no move to get up and Yusuf does not either; as the adrenaline dissipates, exhaustion is there at the ready to take its place. Soon, they will have to figure out what comes next, go somewhere other than this barren scrap of land that barely qualifies as a refuge. Soon, but not yet. They stay close, too, still facing one another, knees brushing.

“Do you know this area?” Nicolò asks after a while. “Where is best to go, when we go?”

“No, not really,” Yusuf admits. “I’ve been to some of the ports, Acre a couple of times and Ascalon once, but never to Jerusalem before all this.”

“Ah! You are of the west, yes?”

Yusuf blinks, surprised and oddly touched by the unexpected recognition. “Yes, how did you know?”

Nicolò gives another little smile. “I do not speak Arabic well, but I listen better. I thought, you sound like the people of Tunis, not Acre, or Alexandria.”

“You have a good ear! I’m from Tunis. Well, originally a little village nearby, but Tunis is the closest place anyone has heard of, and I’ve lived in the city for years now. I’m a merchant,” Yusuf says, and then scoffs at himself. “Well, no. That’s what I tell people when I want to sound more important than I am. I work for a merchant. Mostly I carry things, and argue on his behalf with the people he doesn’t care to deal with himself. Occasionally he allows me to express an opinion about the design or quality of the pottery, but…”

Faced with Nicolò’s alarmed look, Yusuf realises that in his eagerness he has slipped from the more literary Arabic he had been using with the locals in Jaffa and Jerusalem into the vernacular of home, and rambled much too quickly on top of it.

“I’m sorry,” Yusuf amends, and speaks more slowly and carefully again, to Nicolò’s clear relief. “Most of that was not important. You’re right, I’m from Tunis, and I work – worked – for a pottery merchant. I was never even supposed to be here.”

“No?” Nicolò asks.

“No,” Yusuf confirms, and recounts the story of his unintended arrival in Jaffa. When he gets to the part about the Frankish ships appearing on the horizon instead of the Fatimid ones, Nicolò nods.

“Our ships, I think.”

“I think so,” Yusuf says. “Some Fatimid soldiers came and took us to the city, where we thought we would be safe. Instead…”

“Instead,” Nicolò agrees grimly. They both sit in silence for a moment before Nicolò picks up the story.

“We landed, and started to unload our cargo, and then they saw those Fatimid ships that you expected,” he says. “I thought, we unload and we leave, but the lords decide no, they want that we break the ships. Use the wood for towers to take the city. The Fatimid ships come, and now there is no way to leave. I thought, this is not my business, but everyone goes to the camp, and I do not know what else to do. In the camp, everyone builds the towers. They said, we build the towers and take the city, and God is happy, and we go home rich. Now I think, God is happy if we do not come.”

“Why did you come? I mean, why did you come on the ship in the first place, if you weren’t planning to join the fight?”

“I am a sailor. Usually, I sail a merchant’s ship. But the merchant, he… he makes a bad deal, he loses too much money. His ship cannot sail until he makes a new deal. We are in Genoa, and I am born in Genoa, but I have no family, I have no house where to live. When I have no more money for lodging, I cannot wait more while he tries to make a new deal. So, I look for the next ship that wants crew. And the next ship that wants crew…”

“Was coming here,” Yusuf supplies. Nicolò nods.

In a way, it all makes the improbable inevitability of their meeting even more pronounced. If Yusuf’s ship had weathered the storm well enough to make it to Ascalon instead of Jaffa, or they had left Cyprus a day earlier or later and missed the storm entirely; if Nicolò’s money had run out a week later or earlier, or another ship had departed first, or any number of other little things had gone just a little differently, neither of them would be here. But then, maybe if any of those little things had gone just a little differently, they would instead have met somewhere else. In the port in Ascalon, in the market in Tunis, some other market in some other port city…

“Is that why you know Arabic?” Yusuf asks him. “Sailing to Tunis and Acre?”

Nicolò makes an equivocating gesture.

“In the ports, usually Sabir or some Greek and a few local words is enough. But one year, I spend the winter in Alexandria, and I want to speak with people who are not only sailors, traders, dock workers. So I learn more. I know many words for food, weather, the sea. Words to complain about mosquitoes and call the neighbour’s cat. But making…” he frowns, clearly at a loss for the term or phrase he wants, and gestures again. “Making good speech, no.”

It’s true that he is not exactly the most eloquent or fluent of Arabic speakers, but in fact the more he talks, the more Yusuf finds his accent and the quirks of his limited grammar and vocabulary charming. Yusuf likes his voice, too, rich and low and sweet. And there is something alluring about his big pale eyes… Strange thoughts, to be having about the person he killed and was killed by just yesterday, but they feel no less right than joking with him or clinging to him for comfort did.

“It’s good enough, don’t worry. Definitely much better than my Genoese,” Yusuf tells him. He briefly considers offering to switch to Sabir or Greek, but honestly Nicolò’s Arabic is considerably better than Yusuf’s Greek too; he always vaguely intended to learn it properly, but never spent enough time in a Greek-speaking place for it to be worth the effort. And though he is capable enough in Sabir, it is a tool for doing business, not for having conversations such as these.

Instead, Yusuf focuses on Genoese, and manages to dredge up and recite a greeting which may or may not be appropriate to the time of day, ‘thank you’, and a request for a sort of large chickpea pancake that he remembers from his handful of visits to Genoa. He stops there, not at all confident that anything else he can think of is actually Genoese and not Sabir, or Pisan or Venetian or something else entirely. Still, it’s enough to make Nicolò smile.

“Mm, fainâ,” he says, with a longing hum. He studies Yusuf for a moment, and then asks, “Do you know the story of fainâ?”

Yusuf shakes his head, immediately intrigued.

“Very old food,” Nicolò says. “They say, it is a clever Greek warrior who makes it first, in the ancient times. He mixes the chickpea flour, and the olive oil, and the water. But he does not have a pot to cook in. So, he puts his… I do not know the word. A warrior, he holds his sword like this, and the other thing like this?” Nicolò mimes brandishing a sword in one hand, then raises the other arm in front of his body, bent at the elbow, and ducks behind it, as though holding…

“Oh! His shield?” Yusuf guesses. “The big thing you hold like that to protect yourself in battle?”

“Yes! Thank you. His shield. The warrior does not have a pot, so instead he puts his shield over the fire, like a big shallow dish, and cooks his mixture like this. And so, the first fainâ. But not the last,” he finishes.

“Clever indeed. If only we had a shield,” Yusuf says. “And olive oil. And chickpeas. It’s funny, I know they do use them, but somehow I’ve never thought of chickpeas as Greek food.”

“No,” Nicolò agrees. “I think of them as home, and your lands. Many good dishes with chickpeas there. Tharīd! It is very good, tharīd as they make in Tunis, with chickpeas and… is it lemon?”

“Yes,” Yusuf confirms, delighted by Nicolò’s enthusiasm. And very hungry. Apart from a handful of fava beans that one of the soldiers found somewhere and shared during the night, he has not eaten since yesterday’s breakfast, and all this talk of food has made him all too conscious of his empty stomach.

“Nicolò… you said you have some food?” Yusuf asks. “I know we should probably save it, but…”

“No, no, you eat now, yes,” Nicolò says immediately, reaching into his bag. “I eat when I find things for us, you do not eat for a long time, yes? You eat now,” he repeats. He suddenly sounds so much like Yusuf’s grandmother that Yusuf has to bite his cheek to keep from smiling.

“There is bread,” Nicolò says, “and some olives, dates, carrots. I find some stew also but I have nothing to carry it, I am sorry. Oh! There is also za’atar manāqīsh, do you like za’atar? I always look for it in Acre, very good here…”

“I do like za’atar,” Yusuf says, no longer able to contain his smile as he watches Nicolò pull things from his bag, loose raw carrots and dried dates, plain pieces of bread, a waxed cloth pouch that presumably holds the olives. Yusuf wonders, briefly, if Nicolò will be offended by the comparison he wants to make, but somehow he does not think so.

“You know, where I come from, we don’t just speak Arabic,” Yusuf begins. “It’s Arabic in the cities along the coast, but in many of the villages – like my family’s – we speak Tamazight. Some of us speak only Tamazight.”

Nicolò finds and passes over the seasoned bread, and watches Yusuf, his gaze open and curious, encouraging Yusuf to continue.

“My grandmother spoke only Tamazight for most of her life. Until this man from the village who had gone to Tunis to work came home for a visit, and brought his Egyptian friend with him. And the friend and my grandmother’s daughter – my aunt – fell in love. Then, my grandmother started learning some Arabic to talk to her son-in-law. You sound just like her whenever my aunt and uncle were with us, talking about the food we had and telling us to eat.”

Nicolò gives a small smile, and Yusuf eats a bite of the manāqīsh, and then adds,

“And you know what else? She was never very impressed with most of the things I brought from the city or my travels when I visited, but she loved the za’atar from Acre.”

Nicolò’s little smile cracks open, suddenly big and bright across his whole face, and it satisfies something in Yusuf as much as the food does his hunger.

Yusuf eats the bread, and then a few olives. The second or third time he puckers his lips to spit out a stone, he catches Nicolò staring at his mouth. His first thought is that Nicolò thinks the spitting rude, but – no, Nicolò swallows heavily, and then drags his eyes back to meet Yusuf’s, without any hint of reproach in their (pretty) depths. Something warm stirs in Yusuf’s gut.

They trade idle stories a while longer, and then, both too tired to do anything else, agree to take turns at sleeping a bit. Nicolò insists that Yusuf go first, and Yusuf lacks the energy to argue. He lays down, and has only a moment to consider the discomforts of the hard ground and his filthy, bloody clothes before he falls into a deep, dreamless slumber.

When he wakes, it can’t have been more than a few hours judging by the light, but from the moment his eyes open he knows they won’t stay closed again for a while, so he gets up and changes places with Nicolò. Nicolò, too, seems to drop off almost instantly. And then Yusuf is awake, and alone with his thoughts.

His thoughts are poor company. Without careful herding, they wander inevitably towards blood and bodies and the screams of the dying. The memory of the pain of his own temporary deaths can be pushed aside, too incomprehensible to dwell on; memories of the horror of all those who would not wake, and the ordeal of pretending to be one of them while their corpses overwhelmed him, are considerably more stubborn. To deter them, he counts stones on the ground, the threads in his sleeve, Nicolò’s breaths.

He counts Nicolò’s breaths in Arabic, and in Tamazight. Then he counts them in Sabir; he could not tell that story about his grandmother and the za’atar in Sabir, does not have the words for such things in the language of commerce, but he certainly has the words for quantities and prices. Then he counts Nicolò’s breaths in Greek, because that at least he can do in Greek, more or less, and it takes more concentration than the others, so he counts and counts and counts.

Yusuf does not know how to count Nicolò’s breaths in Genoese. He wonders if Nicolò counted his breaths, when he was sleeping. He wonders how high Nicolò can count in Greek; perhaps it is not such an important thing, for a sailor. Perhaps he knows how to speak of the wind and the tides instead. Perhaps he knows how to judge the seas and skies around Cyprus better than the sailors on Yusuf’s ship did, perhaps if he had been on their ship instead of his own…

If they had taken Nicolò on as an extra pair of hands in Cyprus, and he had been with them when they landed in Jaffa and learned of the invaders, would he have stayed there to greet his Christian countrymen, or would he have followed Yusuf and his companions to Jerusalem? Would he have fought against the invaders, instead of fighting alongside them? Would he and Yusuf have stood together from the start, or would they always have killed each other first? They killed each other. Yusuf killed Nicolò, and Nicolò killed Yusuf, and – no. He cannot think of that. The enormity of it is bearable, somehow, when Nicolò is awake and talking with him, but it is too much to face alone. Yusuf goes back to counting.

Though it feels like a small eternity to Yusuf, he knows Nicolò does not sleep more than a few hours either. He wakes quietly, and seems confused by his surroundings for a moment, but his eyes and mouth soften as soon as he notices Yusuf. Yusuf smiles at him, unreasonably relieved to have his company again, and Nicolò smiles back at him.

They decide that they might as well get moving, and start walking. They aim roughly westwards and a little to the south, because making for the coast seems like a better idea than wandering aimlessly further inland but neither of them wants to stumble across the road back to Jaffa. There is bound to be another road to Ascalon and the other coastal cities to the south, Yusuf reasons, and Nicolò agrees, and so they go.

They make little progress, doubling back every time something that seemed like a promising trail disappears into the hills or ends in an abandoned village or burnt out orchard instead of joining up to a larger path. Eventually, with evening drawing in, they reluctantly head back towards the smoke rising from the city in the hope of identifying a proper route leaving it. When they crest a ridge and see not just the smoke but the city walls, Yusuf stumbles, caught off guard by a loose stone or the clear reminder of exactly what they are trying to get away from or both. Nicolò immediately takes Yusuf’s arm, steadying him.

A sudden anger seizes Yusuf, an abrupt and impotent fury at the senseless destruction before him. There is dried blood in his beard and a city in ruins and countless people slaughtered, and for what? So Nicolò’s lords could make some money and earn some clout? So some deluded fanatics could believe themselves righteous? And the man standing beside him helped, not because he believed in any of it but because he did not know what else to do but follow the tide of those who did. Yusuf turns, ready to rip his arm from Nicolò’s grasp and call him a killer, a coward, spit any number of colloquial insults that the Frank will probably not even understand –

And then he looks at Nicolò. Yusuf looks at his face, gone stony and pale under the grime, the wet sheen of his big unblinking eyes, the miserable hunch of his broad frame. He looks at the hand that Nicolò laid on his arm when he faltered, to keep him from falling. He looks at the bag hanging from Nicolò’s shoulder, with the water and food that he offered to Yusuf so readily. And his anger at Nicolò drains away as quickly as it came. His anger at the others does not disappear entirely, but it settles down into a quiet banked smoulder, raked over with grief, in place of the roaring blaze that had briefly flared.

Yusuf sets his hand over Nicolò’s, pressing gently at his fingers. Almost imperceptibly, Nicolò startles, as though he had forgotten Yusuf’s presence for a moment. He meets Yusuf’s gaze, and when he does, Yusuf suspects that any vitriol he might have spilt in his short flash of rancour would not have been half of what Nicolò is thinking for himself. Yusuf feels he should say something, but no words come, so he only squeezes Nicolò’s hand again. This time, Nicolò gives him a tiny nod, and squeezes back.

The retreat, emotionally tumultuous though it was, proves worth it; shortly after they return their attention to the reason they came back this way, Nicolò spots a road.

As they come nearer to it, though the light is fading, they are both fairly confident that it is not the same one they each followed from Jaffa. With their strength fading too, they find a passably hospitable furrow to settle in for the night. The spot is within sight of the road when they look over the top of the slope, but well out of view when they shift lower.

 “You want to sleep?” Nicolò asks, after they have drunk and eaten a little.

“Not yet,” Yusuf says. “It’s good to be off my feet, but my head…” He gestures vaguely, unsure how to articulate the disquiet that has been clinging to him since they saw the city again. “Do you…?”

“No, not yet,” Nicolò says. He is silent for a moment, then huffs softly to himself. “When I am young and want always to eat, my mother said always, ‘Se a-a sèia ti mangi comme 'n treuggio, a-a neutte no ti strenzi l'euggio.’ It means, ‘If in the evening you eat like… like the pig at the place where it is fed, then at night you do not close the eye.’ I do not say my mother was wrong. But tonight I do not want to close my eyes, and I do not think that is the reason.”

Yusuf huffs too, amused, and shakes his head. “I don’t think so either. But of course we do not say your mother was wrong! There’s a saying among my people,” he begins, and gives the proverb in Tamazight, then translates to Arabic: “‘Except for my father and my mother, everybody lies.’”

“‘Se i disonesti foissan nuvie, ghe saieiva de longo o diluvio.’ ‘If the dishonest were clouds, always there was the downpour’,” Nicolò says.

“Ha!” Yusuf chuckles, and then adds, “We also say, ‘How lovely is the sun after rain, and how lovely is laughter after sorrow.’”

Nicolò’s lips twitch in a hint of a smile, for the first time since he woke up hours ago, and it is a curious thing that that should already feel to Yusuf so much like the sun after the rain.

Maybe an hour or so later, when they are still sitting awake in the darkness, they notice new noises that are not their own. The sounds seem unlikely to be caused by animals or the wind either, more like something human. Yusuf and Nicolò edge up the slope on their stomachs and peek over the top of the furrow to investigate.

There are people coming down the road, illuminated by the weak moonlight and the torches that some of them carry. It looks to be a battered group of Fatimid soldiers, followed by a slightly larger number of civilians, and a few more soldiers bringing up the rear. Some of the civilians are clutching bags or makeshift bundles, and a few of the soldiers have their supply kits, but there are no weapons to be seen.

“They don’t look like they fought their way out,” Yusuf says under his breath.

“I heard this morning, the fighting is over, except in the Tower of David,” Nicolò whispers. “They said the governor is there. Maybe they make some deal?”

“Maybe,” Yusuf agrees.

“Maybe…” Nicolò starts, then falls silent long enough for Yusuf to turn to him, and wonder at the strange look on his face.

“Maybe, it is better to go with them,” Nicolò says. He sounds oddly reluctant about his own suggestion.

“You want to join them?” Yusuf asks. It might not be a bad idea; there is safety in numbers and this group at least appears to have some supplies and some idea of where they are going. But…

“Not me,” Nicolò says. “Better for you.”

Yes. That. Though the combination of Nicolò’s pale eyes and his particular accent in Arabic would always suggest that his homeland is unlikely to be found at this end of the Mediterranean, in regular times that would scarcely warrant a second glance in a city or anywhere near a trade route. But here and now... If Yusuf had survived in the normal way with this group, and come across a bloodied man who might be one of the invaders after escaping that massacre, he doubts he would be amenable to sharing the man’s company long enough to find out why he is out here instead of celebrating with his countrymen.

But Yusuf did not survive in the normal way. And everything in him recoils at the idea of leaving Nicolò behind. It feels as wrong as cutting his own arm off.

“No,” Yusuf says. “Not without you.”

“You are sure?”

“Yes. You and me, we’ll make our own way. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Nicolò says, so quickly that he looks a little embarrassed at himself and averts his gaze, but Yusuf is pleased – his eagerness dispels any possibility of doubt that he made the proposal because he wanted to part ways, rather than because he thought it might be better for Yusuf.

Yusuf leans over, so that their shoulders bump, and gives him a little smile when he looks at Yusuf again. The corner of Nicolò’s mouth ticks up, very faintly, and the tension in his posture loosens ever so slightly. On a whim, Yusuf bumps his shoulder again, harder, putting on a bigger grin with an edge of challenge to it.

Nicolò goes still for a moment, and then raises an eyebrow as if to say ‘Oh, it’s like that is it?’, and the next thing Yusuf knows, Nicolò has grabbed him and they’re rolling back down the slope in a playful tussle. Nicolò is strong, but Yusuf is quick, and it would – Yusuf tells himself – probably be a fairly even matchup if only Yusuf didn’t get distracted by the way the effort to keep quiet and the feel of all that firm muscle against his body is entirely too reminiscent of another activity he might be doing in the dark with an attractive man. As it is, Yusuf winds up on his back, Nicolò straddling him and holding his arms above his head, peering down at him with those big eyes bright with exertion and mirth.

He starts to say something Yusuf doesn’t immediately recognize, probably in Genoese, then shakes his head and says in Arabic, “Peace?”

“Peace,” Yusuf concurs, and immediately Nicolò relaxes the grip of his hands and his thighs on Yusuf’s body, though Yusuf is gratified to note that he is not nearly so quick to remove himself entirely.

It feels as though their little scuffle has broken the uneasy spell that was keeping them up, and they settle in to sleep not long after. Both of them, this time, because they conclude that it is probably unlikely that anyone will disturb them here in the night, and because Nicolò seems to share Yusuf’s reluctance at the prospect of sitting up alone again. The ground is still hard, Yusuf’s clothes and skin are just as filthy with dried blood and even sweatier than they were before, but there is a sort of comfort in laying down with Nicolò at his side. Yusuf sleeps.

This time, Yusuf dreams of women he does not know in a place he does not recognize. Then he dreams of being in the pile of bodies again, with something dripping on his face. He is so profoundly alone and afraid as more and more bodies are heaped on top of him, crushing the air from his lungs, so many they block out the sun, choking him in darkness as he fights to get free – and then he opens his eyes, gasping. For a bewildering moment between the dream and wakefulness, he thinks the moon has suddenly appeared before him, the moon is touching him with gentle hands – no. Not the moon. As it was yesterday, when he really was in that pile of bodies, it is Nicolò before him. That is Nicolò’s face, washed pale by the grey predawn light. Those are, again, Nicolò’s gentle hands drawing him out of the nightmare. Nicolò’s voice, entreating Yusuf to come back to him. Yusuf wants nothing more than to grant that request.

“Yusuf, Yusuf, wake up,” Nicolò is saying, “it is a dream, you are – you-” He falters then, seeing Yusuf awake, and releases Yusuf’s shoulder. The loss of his touch is unbearable; Yusuf grabs his hands, clutches them to his chest while he catches his breath. Nicolò does not try to pull away. He stays where he is, warm along Yusuf’s body, watching Yusuf intently with his lovely big eyes.

“You killed me,” Yusuf says, the opposite of an accusation, pressing Nicolò’s hand against the place on his chest where that first fatal blow landed. Nicolò inhales deeply, and nods. The slide of his fingers over Yusuf’s unbroken flesh feels like a caress.

“I killed you,” Yusuf says, reaching out to touch Nicolò’s equally unmarred belly. The muscle jumps under his palm. There is a tiny twitch at the corner of Nicolò’s mouth as he nods again.  

“We killed each other, we died together and alone, and yet here we are,” Yusuf says, the words pouring out of him, at once a statement of the impossible obvious and a startling revelation. He knew all this before, somewhere deep inside of himself, but he could not give voice to it until now.

“You looked for me, among all those bodies,” Yusuf says, “and you found me, Nicolò-”

“Yusuf,” Nicolò says, his rough voice the sweetest sound Yusuf thinks he has ever heard. Nicolò leans in even closer, his hands on Yusuf’s hands, his eyes dark and hungry, the space between them reduced to almost nothing.

Later – be it a thousand years or a dozen heartbeats later – neither of them will be able to say who it was that first moved to close that last remaining gap. In one breath they are two men, still and staring at each other, and in the next they are a single, frenzied knot of limbs and lips. Everything, Yusuf’s entire existence, is in Nicolò’s kiss, his tongue, the urgent grasp of his arms, the furious tenderness of his mouth.

They kiss and kiss and tangle ever closer and it is not enough. In a moment Nicolò gets his thigh between Yusuf’s legs, a firm stretch of muscle for him to rock against; in a moment Yusuf finds Nicolò’s hardness with his hand. Three days ago Yusuf would have considered this sort of frantic coupling, with no preamble of romantic gestures or even the basic niceties of recent bathing and removal of clothing, to be vaguely distasteful, the purview of untried youths and crass men. Now, there is no purer necessity than the immediate joining of his body with Nicolò’s in mutual pleasure.

They rut and rub and groan, and when it is done they stay twined together, panting against one another’s cheeks. Nicolò strokes Yusuf’s neck with the softest of calloused fingers, his touch so careful and intimate that it makes Yusuf shiver. Yusuf cannot help but kiss him again, this time as delicate as any wooing lover. Nicolò makes a quiet sound and returns the gesture in kind, and Yusuf feels tears in his eyes, and boundless joy in his heart.

In the morning, they set off side by side down the road. Yusuf is hungry, and thirsty, and in dire need of a bath and clean clothes, and yet he feels content, even happy. Even more so when he glances over and finds Nicolò regarding him with open wonder.

“It is strange,” Nicolò says. “I do not know where this road takes us. I do not know where we find water, or food, or clothes, or money. I do not know how we can live after so much death. These things should make me afraid. Before I found you yesterday, they did. But now, I look at you, and I am not afraid.”

“I’m not afraid either,” Yusuf tells him.

Yusuf stops, and holds out his hand. Nicolò takes it immediately. Yusuf brings their joined hands to his mouth and kisses Nicolò’s knuckles.

“We have another saying, in Tunis,” Yusuf says. “‘If the full moon loves you, why worry about the stars?’”

“Stars are very important, for navigation,” Nicolò says, and his tone is serious but his gaze is immeasurably fond.

“I don’t know any proverbs about navigation,” Yusuf admits.

“I do.”

“I think we’ll manage, then,” Yusuf says.

“I think so also,” Nicolò says, and he smiles, and Yusuf smiles too, and they walk on.