Work Text:
☩
Jerusalem’s light, see, is so particular…
The sun of the Levant makes gold even of the dust of the Judean hills there. The city turns like a jewel in the palm of God, and it matters not what time of the day or night it is witnessed, but shows its fairest cheek just when the morning rises.
The sun comes slanting in the early hours, and it is hesitant and naive, a young bride impossible to look upon, leaning on everything on her way to the marriage bed. She is rose-gold and tremulous, and her ruched skirts catch upon the limestone walls of the city, and the higher they are pulled, the brighter she makes them glowing.
Then, the domes and towers of the city emerge.
The Dome of the Rock catches the very first breath of any dawn, blazing suddenly into brilliance while the streets below lay still in shadow. The yellow of the light only intensifies in the coming hours. The walls of the city drink it in and become entirely saturated with it.
Against this sight, the sky stretches an infinite stride above: the blue, that of Jerusalem.
Men have written of it. No words adequate to its depth. And the shadows are blue also. Whether one believes in the Prophet or the Christ or the older God of the Israelites who had chosen this place for His dwelling, one could not stand in the streets of Jerusalem at the hour when the afternoon light lay thickest upon the stones and deny that something dwells here and is not quite of the mortal world.
It is into this light that he walks, through the Jaffa Gate on the 23rd day of June, in the Year of Our Lord 1178, leading his horse by the bridle. The dust of the Judean hills lay upon him thickly. His surcoat, which once was blue—the blue, that of Jerusalem!—is now the color of the desert.
Edouard comes to Jerusalem as a pilgrim, and armed, as all pilgrims of noble blood. He intends to pray at the Holy Sepulchre and to touch with his own hands the places where Christ had walked, and then offer his sword to one of the great orders, the Temple or the Hospital, and spend what years God granted him in defence of the Holy Land. Edouard has ridden from Champagne with sixteen men, of whom all had survived the passage. But two turned back at Jaffa, and Edouard let them go without any rebuke, for he understood that not all souls were made for the East.
☩
It must be known what manner of court this is, and what manner of king presides over it.
The court is chimeric, Eastern and Western. The lords of Outremer wear the fashions of Paris, speak d’oïl among themselves, Arabic to their servants, Latin to God. And their fair wives take gladly the veils of Saracen women against the heat and wear them over Norman wimples.
The Kingdom of Jerusalem in the summer of 1178 is still ripe with Montgisard. But the king who delivered this miracle is not permitted to enjoy it in the manner of other conquerors, for he is a leper.
Baldwin, by the Grace of God King of Jerusalem, is seventeen years of age, anointed in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre by the Patriarch. Edouard heard it spoken of at Jaffa. The Franks of Outremer spoke of him with much reverence, comparing him to a candle that burns with extraordinary brilliance and must therefore be consumed the sooner.
At Montgisard, Edouard heard, the king had dismounted and prostrated himself in the dirt while the Saracen cavalry bore down upon them, and prayed aloud, and then rose, mounted his horse and led the charge himself. Ninety percent of Saladin’s army was destroyed.
It is the greatest Christian victory in the East since the First Crusade.
☩
The palace, which certain snide Byzantines claim inferior to their golden halls, is where shadows and sunlight wring one another in eternal contest. The walls are hung with many tapestries that have been brought across the sea at great cost, and between them are arched windows that let in the so-particular light of Jerusalem.
They are cedar, the doors to the throne room, inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl in patterns of vine and leaf, and they swing inward without sound. A servant in very fine silks bows and murmurs that “the King of Jerusalem would receive you”.
The throne room is not large but achieves through craft what it perhaps lacks in scale. The walls are hung with damask in the colors of the kingdom—gold, and gold, and gold again…
Edouard is announced, though he did not expect to be summoned. His letter is read quickly, at the very least, in which it is said that a knight of some small estate has come to Jerusalem alone and poor, has asked for nothing, and wants nothing to do with anyone…
And thus he wonders how he has come to the attention of a king. Edouard wonders, also, where the king is… As he does not understand, at first, what he is looking at.
There is a figure upon the throne, which is slight and slender, and robed in white samite. Its face in silver. This figure, there, is completely unmoving. The knight imagines that it is some interesting manner of a placeholder, to appear the young king Baldwin as present, when he himself is not on the throne. The mask catches the light and throws it back to the seer. It is serene and ageless, with dark slits for the eyes, and does not move… But Edouard has the most peculiar sensation that it is looking at him.
He remembers, thought belatedly, as no person appears to be beneath this mask, to kneel.
“Rise.” Thus speaks the voice of a boy on the nearer shore of manhood, clear, completely unhesitant.
Does this order…? Does it come from the statue of the king…? It must. It comes from behind the silver, but Edouard cannot see this mouth moving… He can only hear it.
So he rises. A shaft of afternoon light falls slanting through one of the arched windows and lays a bar of gold across the floor between the knight and the throne.
The king asks, with a tilt of the silver head: “You are the knight? From Champagne?”
Edouard inclines his head. “Sire.”
“Your letter was read to me by the Archbishop.” The king shifts, very slightly, upon the throne. One hand, gloved in white kidskin, rests upon the arm of the chair, and the other lays in his lap, also gloved. “The Archbishop remarked upon it. You have come a very great distance to ask for nothing.”
There is, behind the mask, a comely amusement. It lives not in the silver-wrought and beaten fine features, for those can not move, but this tilt of the head, and the play of light upon that blank surface.
“Be not afraid. I am not suspicious of you, knight,” adds the king.
Edouard is aware, then, again, of others in the room. He did not properly see them upon his entrance, for the mask drew his gaze entirely. But there are lords and clerks and attendants standing in the alcoves and along the walls, and among them a tall churchman in the vestments of an archbishop. This must be William, Archbishop of Tyre, who has been the king’s tutor from boyhood and now Chancellor of the Kingdom.
The knight breathes in to think. “I have come to marvel at your kingdom, Sire.”
“So you rode from Champagne, for Jerusalem. Tell me something of it.”
“Sire, there is little to tell. My men and I departed from Troyes, in the month of—”
“No, no…” The king’s gloved hand lifts from the arm of the throne. “We have read of the fairs at Troyes and Provins. Anything; tell me anything else.”
“Well, Sire… In Champagne,” Edouard musters a memory, “the wintry rain feels like being struck with very small stones.”
“Very small stones…” Baldwin says, softly. “Yes. I should like to be struck by very small stones.”
The king then asks about all of Champagne, of the roads, of the vineyards, of the forests. He asks what manner of birds sing in the orchards of Troyes. And Edouard answers as well as he is able, though he is a soldier and not a poet, and feels keenly the poverty of his descriptions against the striking precision of the king’s questions.
“What did you leave there?”
Edouard has to think of all the lot he had. “My father’s estate passed to my brother on his death.”
“You have come, then,” says Baldwin, “with nothing behind you also.”
“Yes, Sire.”
At last the Archbishop steps forward and murmurs at the king’s ear, and the mask turns toward him, then back to Edouard.
“Yes…” Baldwin nods. “Yes. Very well.” And then, to Edouard: “I am told I tire you,” says the king. “You will be given quarters. You wished to join one of the Orders?”
“The Temple, Sire, or the Hospital.”
“I will consider,” says the king, “whether there is not another use for you.”
Edouard is dismissed, after that. The king thanks him for coming and says he hopes that the knight’s pilgrimage is to be fruitful. He makes the knight pray for Jerusalem, and for those who keep her.
☩
He is given a chamber in the lower portion of the palace, near the stables. The window is narrow, but it faces east, and the light of Jerusalem comes through it in the morning in visitation. His remaining men are quartered nearby. They are relieved, Edouard can see, to have walls around them after so many months upon the road. He knows they came here for a different purpose, much greater than his.
The knight eats the strange sweet fruits of this country and finds impossible delight in them. Their textures, even seeds which lodge between his teeth, peels which sometimes do not part evenly if the fruit is not enough ripe, stains from their juices on his light clothes.
He knew of the king’s affliction before he came. All of Christendom knew, and the Pope had been informed. The king took the governance of the kingdom into his own hands at fifteen, when the regency of Raymond of Tripoli ended.
So it is.
☩
The days which follow are strange and formless. Edouard finds himself in a suspension. He is not being summoned, not being dismissed, not given a duty, not told to seek one. But he is fed and allowed to live just as is.
He attends Mass each morning at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, walking the short distance through the narrow streets of the Christian Quarter in the early light. He explores the city, walks the streets of the four quarters: the Christian, the Armenian, the Jewish, the Muslim. Edouard marvels at the life. Saracen merchants sell silks and spices alongside Frankish traders hawking Venetian glass, and everywhere the clamour of Arabic and French and Greek.
A week passes. Then ten days. Edouard begins to think he is forgotten.
It is on the twelfth day that a young boy, wearing the livery of the royal household, comes to his chamber and informs him that the king desires his company.
“When?” Edouard asks.
“Now, my lord.”
“…now?” It is past the hour of Compline. The palace is dim.
“Yes.” The boy bows. “Now, my lord.”
☩
The page leads Edouard through corridors he has not seen, deeper into the palace, until a door which is opened for him. The boy then bows and withdraws.
The room beyond is smaller than the throne room, filled only with candlelight. With more books than Edouard has ever seen in a single chamber outside a monastery. They are stacked upon a long table and piled on a chest also, and arranged with evident care upon wooden shelves that have been built expressly for this purpose. And, there, atop one, a half-eaten pomegranate on a dish. And a cat, asleep.
And the king, also.
Baldwin is sitting cross-legged on a low divan near the window with a book open on his lap and his shoes off. The mask gleams, but his hair—which Edouard sees now for the first time, for it was covered by a coif in the throne room—is light, curling outward from the nape of the king’s neck.
The room is empty of courtiers, of guards; they are alone in it.
At this closer distance, Edouard can see the fine tooling of the silver mask. It is shaped into the likeness of a young man’s face, belies high cheekbones and one mouth that, in life, must have been very expressive. A candle nearest him trembles in the draft from a window, and its light moves across the metal in a long caress. But the eyes, very much alive, move over Edouard.
“Sir Edouard.” Baldwin closes the book, keeping his place with one gloved finger. “Forgive the hour. Do you sleep badly, or well, in this climate?”
“Well enough, Sire.” He bows.
“Ah. I do not.” This is said so simply. “Would you sit with me?”
There is a low chair near the divan. Edouard takes it, if ever so stiffly.
“You looked at me so strangely, in the throne room,” says the king.
“Well, I—” Edouard stutters and quickly bows his head. “I could not properly understand whether it was a body in truth, Sire.”
Baldwin’s head tilts, in turn. “How do you mean?”
“I believed it a statue.”
“You did, truly?” The king seems amused. “Was I so still? Hm… I suppose…” He puts the book away entirely. “This mask, when it was made, was brought to me and shown only my hands. My mother wept a great deal when she first saw it, but I think it is rather fine.” Baldwin says this last very drily. He draws one knee up and rests an arm across it. “Do you have a mother living?”
“No, Sire. Not these three years.”
“And your father, you said, has passed as well?”
“Yes.”
The mask is level, and the eyes within it are level, too, and entirely without pity, which Edouard finds he prefers.
“Yes, I understand, then, that you come with nothing to ask. Nothing of your wishes I can grant to you. We are well matched: I also cannot be granted what I wish.” Baldwin reaches over to the low table where the dish of pomegranate is, laid in quarters, old garnet seeds exposed to the light. He takes up a small silver stylet, no longer than one finger, and with it lifts a single seed. “Had you eaten one of these, before you came to Jerusalem?”
“No, Sire.”
“What did you think, the first time?”
Edouard smiles a bit. “I thought it was a great deal of work.”
Baldwin hums a laugh. “Mm. Indeed, I agree. Everything worth eating here is a great deal of work.”
“The fruits are extraordinary,” Edouard adds, not to sound ungrateful. He does mean it sincerely. “I ate a fig on the road from Jaffa. I had eaten figs before, only dried, the way they come to Champagne. But I could not believe this flavor…”
“Yes," says Baldwin, immediately, and nods. "When did you eat it? The time of day.”
“At midday. In the shade of a wall.”
“That is the time for a fig. And place, as well. I believe most foods have an hour.” The king tilts his head. “Bread in the morning, very early, when it is just made… And apricots in July, from the trees near the Damascene road. They are very small and not handsome, those ones. Nothing to look at. But they leverage with great taste, especially if warm from the sun. Everything that matters must be taken at the right moment. Hot from the pot. Warm from the sun. Early on the road before the heat, or ripened with it. Food,” says Baldwin, “is one of the few pleasures I have yet. William is the longest-suffering man in Christendom, and he knows it. But he was also, I should say, the one who taught me to taste. He has a great knowledge of food, for a churchman.”
Then, Baldwin lifts the impaled pomegranate seed. The light passes through it. It is, for a moment, a small, dark ruby, and then it is just a seed again.
“Come,” says the king. “Sit closer. The floor will do. I find I am often on the floor also.”
Edouard looks at the tiles, which are cool-blue and painted, and then back at the divan, and then—for the king has indicated, very simply, the space beside his feet—he descends from the chair and settles himself on the ground there, which is rather undignified, and his legs have no good place to go.
“Now…” The king extends the stylet toward him. “Try it this way. When someone else has done the great deal of work.” Edouard can hear him smiling, there, behind the mask; he can hear it in the clicks of spit atop the king’s teeth…
There is nothing to do but take it, or look a fool. Edouard sucks the seed from the point of the stylet with his teeth and sets it back down on the plate.
It is just so small. And the seed, inside, tastes dry and a bit bitter.
Baldwin uncoils, very slightly, from his cross-legged posture. “So? Is another’s labor of better taste?”
“Well,” says Edouard, “it is no grand sustenance, one seed. But I believe the fruit of one’s own labor is sweeter.”
The king nods idly. “My physician tells me I eat too little. And William, that I eat too fast. But I eat exactly as much as I wish, and I pay absolute attention while I do it.” He pauses. “It is one of the things I can still do well with my hands gloved.”
Edouard does not know if he should speak toward this, or away from it… So he asks: “What else?”
Baldwin’s head tilts. “Hm?”
“What else can you do?”
A silence ticks past them.
“Interesting that you ask,” says Baldwin slowly; his voice has come alert. He draws one finger along the spine of the nearest book. “Most would wish to ask me what I cannot.” He tilts his head the other way, which gives him the look of some bright-eyed creature.
But he does not sound displeased. He sounds, if Edouard reads a masked face well, rather pleased instead.
“I can ride still,” says the king at last, quietly. “And I can read—you see I do—and I can tell, if I taste carefully, where my food and drink comes from in the land. I notice much. I have had very little else to do, these past years, but watch this kingdom.”
“That seems to me,” notes Edouard, “a great deal.”
“You know, I think I will have you come again,” Baldwin says. “If you are willing. You will not join the knights. I find I want you here awhile, in my keeping.”
Edouard only inclines his head.
Baldwin then uncurls from the divan, and Edouard rises also. The king stands, slight, as Edouard had seen upon the throne.
“You came to ask for nothing.” Again that quality of amusement, dry, young and quite self-possessed. “Jerusalem is an excellent place for that, Sir Edouard. Now… have you played chess?”
☩
Edouard played an honest game and lost to someone better, which is an ordinary outcome and no wound to him.
After, the knight is escorted back. He had not thought about this, walking behind the page earlier, that he might need to remember his way back also.
His chamber is as he left it. His belt over the chair. His boots beside the door, knocked together at the ankle the way he always leaves them. These are his things and they are where he put them.
He goes to the window, which faces east, and looks out at what can be seen, which is a wall, and then some way of rooftop, and then the sky again, that sky of Jerusalem. Beyond the walls of the city the darkness is perfect. He knows there is desert in that darkness and he thinks he can feel it, the sheer mass of it, the weight of all that open land pressing against these stones.
Edouard knows Baldwin is still awake. He did not seem tired.
What does the King of Jerusalem want with a knight of no estate, no prospects and nothing to ask for? A king who cannot be touched and cannot be looked at directly, who will be dead before Edouard is old…
Edouard has known men to collect other men. He has served a lord who kept his best soldiers close, who fed them well and called them by name, made overall of them a loyalty between retainer and friend. Great men need other men around them to rely on.
He himself is one people look at rather than through, in the ordinary run of life. He is the second son of a minor estate, he is well remarkable to look at, he fights well and keeps his word and speaks honestly; these are decent qualities. He has lived for twenty-two years in a condition of general adequacy that has never truly troubled him until this evening.
He had not thought, riding from Champagne, that he was riding toward anything particular. The commandery at Payns seen from horseback at age twelve, the walls of it in the morning. He had carried this for ten years as a northern star bearing, a direction more than a destination, and arrived in Jerusalem… but the star no longer points at the Temple.
And he knows, surely, that he does not want to go home.
A pomegranate is on the table beside his bed, left there from earlier in the day. The fruit has been half-peeled by Edouard himself, then halved and laid upon the plate, with its chambers open. The stylet is there also.
He sits up, after a while, and reaches for the plate and draws it across his lap. He lifts the stylet and impales a single seed.
It gives up its sweetness slowly, at the back of the mouth, and underneath the sweetness strikes the dry of the inner pip.
A king he cannot look at directly…
This is not dissimilar, Edouard thinks, to looking at the sun.
He thinks about the hair. How shameful, that what the mind seizes upon, out of all the extraordinary things the mind was given this evening to seize upon, is the curl at the nape of a man’s neck. And so light, too. Turning outward in a perfect half-circle, slight and unruly from beneath the edge of a coif that covered it in the throne room; freed, then, in privacy.
What a waste. What a great waste… This was said to Edouard about the young king over wine, in warm rooms far from the light of Jerusalem.
Edouard takes another seed from the plate and holds it for a moment before he eats it, feeling its small shape between the instrument and his thumb, this secondary tool, this civilized remove.
The mask does not conceal a thing, except the flesh. Everything else of the king it delivers with full clarity. Does it not? The great and overflowing intelligence in the movement of the silver head, and in the words spoken, the quality of listening, the play of that cold and lively wit across features that cannot carry it and so it comes more to life, somehow, in the absence, and disembodied, and even purer. The king can blush behind it and can pale, unseen. But he can be heard smiling…
Edouard takes another seed, and another, working through the quarter of the fruit with a patience he does not habitually possess. The king has inspired him about the small and the immediate, about the after. He is attempting, privately, with some embarrassment, to practice it better.
The candle is very low by the time he sleeps. He does not dream, or does not remember it. But in the morning the light of Jerusalem comes through his narrow eastward window and lies across the bed in a bar of early gold, and it finds him already awake, already watching the ceiling, already thinking of the king’s silver, and not the kingdom’s gold.
☩
From that night onward, Baldwin summons Edouard when he wishes, at whatever hour suits him, which is often late, and often sudden. The king indeed sleeps very little.
The king will talk for hours about the kingdom: its roads, its fractional loyalties, its supply lines, the intransigencies of the barons, the port revenues, the next campaign, Saladin’s movements in the east, the situation in Constantinople, the situation in Rome. He talks about all of this with fluency and it is no display: this is a mind that knows all its work entirely, perhaps, more than most.
But there are rooms in the king that Edouard has found are papered over. Such as when asked about Montgisard:
“Yes. The army was very frightened. I was frightened. And I knew that I was supposed not to be. I thought: God has given me this soul, and this body, and this country to hold. If He wants the country held He will have to be more forthcoming than usual. So I asked Him, on my knees in the dirt, which seemed appropriate, given the circumstance.”
The king, then, speaks no more on it.
Of Edouard’s life, Baldwin wants to know everything and asks questions genuinely, not to display his own breadth of interest. He wants to know about the roads of the Île-de-France, the state of the bridges. He wants to know whether Edouard prefers the Frankish cross-hilt or the wheel pommel. He wants to know about the Second Crusade, about the disaster of Damascus, which Edouard’s father rode on as a young man. He wants to know about the troubadours, whether they are as in the songs, which Edouard is honest enough to say he is not the target of their attentions.
Baldwin finds this amusing. He says: “Ah. William believes troubadours to of spiritual pestilence, and says so at intervals. It is one of the great pleasures of a small court, that you discover these things.”
Edouard asks: “What does William say of me?”
The king is quiet a stretch. “That you are a sound man and that he is grateful for your presence here. That is very nearly the highest thing he says about anyone.”
☩
July.
Edouard thought he had felt the worst of this heat, from June. But the city presses together in it and the shadows are fought over and the wells draw slow, and the pilgrims who arrive in the high summer from the ports have a dazed and flattened look. Edouard learns to sleep in the early afternoon and wake again at dusk. The days arrange themselves differently this way; there is more of the tolerable in them.
☩
Their conversations are extraordinary. The king’s mind moves like water! It finds every available channel, tries everything, and remembers its way back from any of them…
In August, one of the barons comes to the king with a problem that requires, for a time, all of Baldwin’s attention and most of Edouard’s days.
The baron is Gautier, lord of a small estate to the north, whose lands border those of another lord and who has a grievance that he is expressing with an intransigence that Baldwin says, privately, is characteristic of him specifically and of a particular kind of Norman-blooded Frankish lord in general; men who absorbed the idea of crusade as a personal covenant with God and have since conflated this with an absolute right to do whatever they like on their own property.
“I would send someone of higher rank,” Baldwin says, “but someone of higher rank would have alliances with one side or the other, and I may not get an honest report. You have no alliances with anyone but me, and, therefore, all of true Jerusalem. In this particular case, it is of great quality.” He tilts his head. “Can you ride north in three days?”
This is the first the king has ever asked of Edouard. So, eagerly, he fulfills this one task, if only to sooner return to their conversations.
☩
The sky is white at the zenith and only at the edges, where it meets the Judean hills, does it remember that it is blue.
On two occasions Edouard has managed to conduct an entire transaction in the market without recourse to French, and returned to his chamber with the satisfaction of this entirely disproportionate to the achievement.
“Yes, they are always surprised,” notes Baldwin. “It pleases them more than you know to be spoken to in their own tongue. It is one of the failures of the lords of Outremer, that they hold these lands and do not bother to speak to the people in them. The merchants and farmers and craftsmen who have been here since before any of us arrived.”
The langue d’oïl has words for the love of a knight for his lady, which are fin’amor, joi, mezura, and the Latin has words for the love of man for God, which are caritas, agape, amor Dei, and the Arabic, which Edouard is learning haltingly from the servants, has words for every conceivable shade of longing.
Just not this one.
He knows it is not returnable, cannot be met, cannot be answered; cannot even be called for.
☩
The summer recedes in increments, the way it came. Finally, the air gives back at night again.
It rains in October.
Edouard is so glad. For the rain. For Jerusalem receiving it. For the city, which endures so much and takes what comes, the heat and the blood and the pilgrims and the sieges and the light, the extraordinary and indiscriminate light—
He thinks of his king, wherever he is in the palace, and whether he is watching the rain also.
☩
November then comes, and the light changes again. Edouard had not thought it could; he had thought Jerusalem had exhausted all her varieties on him. Shadows of extraordinary length come in the early morning and again at dusk.
He is walking across a courtyard when this occurs to him, and he stops and looks back at his own shadow, and the shadow is longer than he has ever been.
☩
The king has a bad month. Edouard is told rather plainly that Baldwin will not be receiving anyone for a time.
He does not know, quite, what he does with himself in these days. He attends Mass and walks the city. Nothing else to do; nothing else of interest, to him.
There is a Venetian merchant in the city who has brought, among other things, glass: small vessels of extraordinary delicacy, green and blue, threaded finely with gold. Edouard does not buy anything, as he has very little, but he stands before the merchant’s display for rather a long time.
Well, he buys one thing, in the end. It costs him more than he ought to spend.
When the king is well enough to receive him again, he seems, as he sometimes does after these intervals, to have traveled somewhere and returned.
Edouard gives this gift to the king without ceremony, setting it on the table between them one of their evenings. It is a small glass phial, the length of a finger, the color of deep and clear water.
Baldwin picks it up. He turns it in the candlelight. The color moves through it and shifts, and, for only a moment, held in one certain angle, the phial throws a scatter of blue across the white samite of his sleeve.
“It is the color,” Edouard says, “of the sky of Jerusalem. It seemed to me it was the nearest thing to it that could be held.”
The king is quiet for a long time, looking at the phial.
“Thank you,” he says at last.
Baldwin sets the phial on the sill of the window, where it will catch the morning light.
☩
January, and then February.
☩
In the spring of his second year in Jerusalem, Edouard is standing at the window of the king’s private study, watching the evening come in over the rooftops. The king is behind him, reading. Edouard can hear every soft sound of a turned page.
He is thinking about what the Archbishop said to him, two days ago, after Mass, stepping alongside him in the narrow way.
“You are of great service to him,” William said, looking ahead, not at Edouard. “I tell you this as a man who knows his nature very well. He is not easy to know. But he looks for you, when you are not in the room.”
They parted at the corner where the lane forked.
It could not not be noticed. The court of Jerusalem is a small and watchful place. The servants who bring wine and figs and pomegranates to the study report to the seneschal, who reports to Joscelin of Edessa, who reports to Agnes de Courtenay, that a knight from Champagne, alone and poor, with no connections and no faction, is spending his evenings in the king’s private study.
This is not, in itself, unprecedented: kings have favorites. The customs of the Frankish lords of Outremer permit a king to choose his companions with some freedom, and Baldwin’s father was also known to take certain knights into his private confidence. Though his favorites had been lords, vassals, men with standing, whose companionship served a visible political purpose… Edouard serves no visible purpose at all.
Outside, now, a bird is trilling in the last of the light.
“What do you see?” Baldwin asks, from behind him.
“The city.” This is like an old game between them; the king has always asked to be told what Edouard sees, and Edouard has slowly learned to speak of the world around him better. “The light is going.”
He hears the soft close of the book.
“Yes,” Baldwin says. He has risen; Edouard can hear this, also, through the sounds of the king crossing the room toward the window. He comes to stand at Edouard’s shoulder, and they are both looking out now.
The ember light is on the Dome.
“Everything is so ordinary,” mutters the king, “until you have the measure of it.”
And the light goes, as they watch it. Incrementally. The Dome holds it longest, as it always does: to be the last bright thing. And then it too releases, for the sky to deepen.
“I think about this,” Baldwin’s voice is, for a moment, very, very young. “Frequently, this.”
The king lives in the present as others do not. He knows well the kingdom can be lost. His body is already being lost, incrementally, just as the Dome releases the light incrementally, the same slow giving-over…
“And, I have been thinking,” Baldwin says, after a while, “about what comes after me. And so I find I have been thinking about you.”
Edouard turns and looks at the king, who is already looking at him.
Behind the mask, he can look at Edouard as long as he wishes, and no one can know where his eyes rest, or for how long, or with what quality of attention. The dark slits of the mask give nothing away. This is, in the public sphere, a political advantage of immense value.
In the private sphere…
Baldwin looks at Edouard. He looks at him constantly, with unashamed voracity.
“I find myself in need of a knight without purpose. Stay. Stay in Jerusalem.” A pause comes, and in the pause, the whole long weight of the year. “I have need of a companion like you.”
Edouard thinks of this light of Jerusalem, which falls upon them both, the very last of it out of the day; a mere handful remaining, being offered to them, making their bodies conjoined in shadow.
“So I shall stay, then,” he says, “as long as you desire. Long as the light does not die out.”
“The light of Jerusalem does not die,” says the king. He can be heard smiling.
☩
Edouard feels it when he wakes in the morning to the eastward sun; he feels it in the evenings; he feels it when he takes his place at the king’s table and the king turns to him.
He feels it everywhere. Everywhere…
☩
Summer again, its white zenith and its long shadows, its fought-over shade, and the pomegranates are in season once more.
Edouard puts his hand to the stone wall of the corridor. It is warm from the sun. He presses his palm flat against it and feels the heat of it travel through his skin and into his blood. He stands there for a long time, feeling something that he can and that his king can not, and the grief of this is vast.
☩
Baldwin is having a good week.
On good days Baldwin is incandescent. The pain recedes, his fatigue lifts, and the mind that burns behind the mask is gloriously unencumbered; it spills in every direction at once. On good days he wants Edouard near him all day. Baldwin’s need for Edouard’s company loses its discretion then.
It is the fourth good day in a row, which is unprecedented. Baldwin is full with it. Edouard sits in his usual place, which, now, is on the divan, and watches his king move.
Baldwin’s body, in motion, is a contradiction… The left side is graceful, good hand gesturing, good leg stepping in the circles of a trained swordsman, for the king, fairly, is one. But the right side is compensated, and its weaker arm is held dearly close, and the right foot placed so that suggests, to those who know, that the disease is going there too.
But he belies an animal vitality of the mind, which loudly refuses to be extinguished. Baldwin inhabits his failing body with such ferocious presence that the failure becomes secondary, almost; irrelevant.
“Edouard— I want to show you something,” the king says, interrupting himself, and leaves the room.
When Baldwin returns, he is a wrap of dark cloth. The king holds it against his chest, as an object of great fragility, or great significance. He closes the door behind him with his shoulder.
“The silversmith who made this—” The king lifts his free hand to indicate the mask he wears, “—he made many. It is customary, for all occasions. This is one that has never been worn, as I am to be buried with it.”
When revealed, it is the twin of the one Baldwin wears.
“I must ask you to put it on,” Baldwin says. “Become of me a mirror.”
Edouard picks up the mask and lifts it to his face, to see how it sits, feels. The world narrows. He is looking at the room through two slivers of darkness, and the room is transformed entirely by this reduction.
The king stands by the window, one hand at his side, and the mask he wears catches the last of the afternoon light, and the mask Edouard wears catches it too. For a moment the room is full of their silver, full of reflected light bouncing between two identical faces that belong to neither of them.
Edouard sits very still. The mask is on his face and he can feel the shape of it pressed against his own features, which are scarcely different. But the mask does not fit him.
“Stand up. Please. And walk… To the window and back,” the king says.
The knight stands. He is taller than his king by a head. Baldwin is nearly always sitting when they are together in the study, but the difference in their height is absorbed by the grand furniture and their positions in this society.
The mask changes much Edouard had not considered. The narrowed vision forces him to turn his whole head to see, rather than moving his eyes, and this gives his movement a quality of deliberateness, of considered grace, that is not natural to him. He walks to the window, as told. Then he turns and walks back.
He is aware of his own body, of the fall of his feet, the swing of his arms; more now, that he cannot see them. He is performing his own body, and the mask hides his face and therefore hides his discomfort, his confusion.
“And how does it feel, Sir Edouard,” Baldwin asks, “to wear a face that is not yours?”
“Strange,” Edouard says. His voice sounds different inside the mask… “I cannot see properly. I find I am turned toward you more than I would otherwise be, now that I speak to you.”
The king stands with the window behind him. The last thread of evening light lies along his shoulder. He is looking at Edouard through his own narrow slits for eyes, and Edouard is looking back at him through the twin of them.
“The light is behind you, Sire,” Edouard whispers. “So I cannot see your face. I do not know what you are thinking, now, looking at me.”
“But you never can.”
“Your eyes are your entire face, to me, Sire.”
“Take it off, now,” Baldwin quickly says. “Please.”
Edouard lifts the mask from his face. The room rushes back at full width.
“I had not cared, before, what laid upon my face in the ground…” The king looks down. “But this, now, is the only thing in the world that has touched your face and will also touch mine in my eternal rest.”
And what word is there for this, in any language?
Edouard gazes at his king, who is then looking out the window again, turned toward his Jerusalem. And that is perhaps the most beautiful sight he has ever seen in his life. More than Jerusalem in the morning; more than the Dome catching the first light.
“I would ask you something,” he says, at last.
Baldwin turns from the window, only halfway.
“Is there anything you would have wanted in life, Sire? That you have not had.” He looks at the king. “That was possible.”
Baldwin looks at him for a long time, unashamed and thorough, through the dark slits of the mask. Edouard stands inside this gaze stilled.
“Yes,” the king says quietly. Then, he turns back to the window. “I find that I must rest now.”
His voice is perfectly even. It is the voice of the throne room, called up from wherever it is kept; it is courteous, and it is final, and Edouard has heard it dismiss barons and papal legates, but he has never, in this time, had it turned on him.
“Of course. I will take my leave,” Edouard says. He inclines his head. “Sire.”
He is a knight of some small estate, in the presence of his king, at the end of an evening, and this is how he must act: he inclines his head, and goes.
He looks at his king once, and then he goes.
☩
Three days pass, and Edouard is not summoned within them.
He has not been summoned before for stretches longer than this; the early months in Jerusalem were made entirely of such stretches, so he sets to the city in the absence of anything else to do.
Edouard is going to his chamber, or to the church, or to the stables, or to the market, or back again. Around and around, in the absence of the only direction that now makes sense to him.
He is aware that he is a knight of no particular significance and that a king’s attention is not to be leaned upon, that it was never his to depend on, that he has made of an extraordinary and unearned generosity a kind of north and has been navigating by it.
So Edouard imagines instead, in broad outline, what occupies the king.
The matter of the Lady Sibylla has reached a certain crisis. She is Baldwin’s sister, the heir to the kingdom if Baldwin dies without issue, which he will, and she has formed an attachment to a young Poitevin lord named Guy de Lusignan, newly arrived in the East and possessed of a face that, by all accounts, God had assembled with unusual care and then neglected to put anything behind. The barons of the High Court are alarmed, and only Agnes de Courtenay, the king’s mother, who has been managing her daughter’s marital prospects, appears to regard the situation with equanimity, which is itself, perhaps, also cause for decent alarm.
Baldwin is in his throne room, day after day, because of this.
Edouard does not attend but imagines it all very clearly. The gold and the gold and the gold. The slight white on the throne, and the silver face receiving each anxious lord with all they have to say.
☩
Edouard goes again to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at the hour he knows it is quiet, which is the early afternoon when the heat has emptied the streets, and he sits in it for a long time.
This all seems to Edouard, in the oldest church in Christendom, an act of extraordinary grace. That he is here at all.
He prays for King Baldwin. He prays for more good days. Four in a row, unprecedented. He would like five. Oh, he would like a thousand.
He knows what his king will get, but a prayer never runs missing.
☩
And then, the page comes finally: “The king desires your company, my lord.”
Edouard stands. He is aware of the degree of relief that moves through him.
☩
Baldwin is on the divan, reading. He does not look up immediately when Edouard enters. In fact, he is still looking down when he says:
“William tells my mother that you are in love with me.”
Edouard can hear his own blood in his ears. There seems still time, yet, to turn around and leave.
“Sire,” he says, and his voice is awful steady, which is a grand miracle, “if my presence brings dishonor to—”
Baldwin’s good hand lifts, palm out. Edouard’s mouth closes on the word. The king leans back in his seat.
“Do not offer to remove yourself. Is he speaking the truth?”
Everything in the world is very still, and waiting.
“…yes,” Edouard says.
Baldwin is now looking at his knight. “William,” he says, “in my eyes, is the most perceptive man in this kingdom.” A pause. “He told my mother, and not me. I believe he wanted to take it out of this room, and I find that I will not have it.”
“Sire—”
“I will not have it,” the king says again. “William may tell my mother whatever he likes. I am her king as well as her son. I am a king. Has he spoken to you?”
“Only briefly. And it seemed not with ill intent. If anything, he encouraged me.”
“Yes.” Baldwin unfolds from the divan and stands. “He has spoken to me also, as it happens. At considerable length, this morning, in the corridor outside the chapter house, which he chose because he knew I could not walk away quickly and maintain any appearance of dignity.”
“And what did he say?” Then, Edouard bows his head down. “If I may inquire, Sire.”
“Several things. The first was about Sibylla, which I will spare you. The second was about my mother, which I will spare you also, and myself as well. The third was about you. He asked me, ‘When did you last see the knight?’”
The king walks slowly towards Edouard, then.
“Edouard,” he says, and it is just the name, and no title, “I have a great deal of time to think, you understand. It is one of the great and terrible gifts of a body failing.”
“But you mentioned your arrangement once before,” Edouard says, “with God. Have you not come to any agreement, then?”
Baldwin laughs airily. “Edouard…!”
“You asked me, Sire, if William was speaking the truth. I told you he was. I do not know what else there is to say.” Edouard looks at him. “I ask nothing of you in turn.”
“No… You never do. You never ask for anything. And I cannot… give you anything,” Baldwin says. “My body is not mine anymore. It is being taken from me. God asked me for this kingdom, and for this body, and I gave them. And so I have no body to give you. And I have no future to give you beside me. But I believe that God who made this light, who made this city, did not put you in this room by accident. I believe it is a grace. The same grace as the light. Not given to be held, nor kept.”
Baldwin’s good hand lifts, open, palm upward, as though he is demonstrating.
“Given,” he says, “only to… illuminate.”
Oh, Edouard feels his chest splitting open… He feels it keenly.
“We are for each other as Jerusalem belongs to all those who love her, and with no recourse if she is taken away,” Baldwin adds, quietly.
Edouard’s knees find the floor in no knight’s obeisance. There is nothing left in him that is capable of holding him upright. The body knows, before the mind does, that there is only one answer to it.
He crawls the space between them on his knees, and he puts his face against the white samite of the king’s robe, at his side, just below the hip, where a sword may lay… Edouard breathes in, and so deeply, because he is this close for the first time and the body, in its yearning, is ungovernable.
He smells the thick waft of medicine: camphor, sulphur, thickly herbal bath water, oil of roses, and aloe, and clean linen for bandaging, and metallic ointments that coat the skin, those that are applied each morning and each evening by the hands of the king’s physicians; all that a smell of a body being preserved past the point of its own willingness…
The gloved hands come to rest on Edouard’s head, faint, as if made of light themselves.
Edouard grieves, quietly and completely, into the white, over these very hands he may never hold, face he will never see grow old, the body being taken in tithes by God. Oh, but he would not leave. He would not ever leave, long as the light does not die out…
Above him, very quietly, Baldwin says his name.
Edouard lifts his face. He looks up at his king, who is looking down at him. Alive. Alive, still. Alive, yet.
“And there you are…” says Baldwin, softly. As though he has been waiting. As though Edouard has come from a very long way away and has, at last, arrived; a child returned from hiding; a friend found in a crowd; a soul long searched for in prayer.
A knight should not remain crouched like an animal at a king’s feet… But the world gives Edouard so little of Baldwin and always at a remove. So he is well aware of his own height the moment he rises, and ashamed of it. He has always been larger than Baldwin, but Baldwin is large by meaning, by how the light seems to choose and prefer him so greatly. Edouard does not know what to do with the fact of his own body and the inconvenience of its great size and health, its unasked-for abundance.
“No… Come down,” the king whispers, “will you? Come down, here, with me.”
He is already descending as he says it, white pooling around him as he goes first to one knee and then, with some evident care for a bad leg, to the floor.
Edouard folds himself down to the tile beside. They are level, now, very nearly. Edouard draws one knee up, the way he has seen the king sit a hundred evenings. The painted tile is cool through his clothes.
“I have considered what I said to you,” Baldwin quietly goes on, “all that I have said to you, in all this time.” He lifts his hands to the side of the mask, to where, Edouard knows, there are fine catches of worked silver, which the servants undo each evening. He has never seen them undone…
“You may look away,” Baldwin adds. “If you would prefer.”
Then, the catches come free, and the mask is lifted. Baldwin holds it for a moment in his better hand, and then sets it on the floor behind them.
Edouard has spent one year and some months constructing in his imagination what might lie behind the silver.
The bandaging winds from below the jaw and up across the right side, and the linen is very clean, very white, and where it parts at the eye—the right eye—the lid droops at its outer corner, thickened and reddened. Along the jaw, the fraying edge of a bandage has ridden up, and the skin it uncovers is faintly mottled. His left eye is entirely its own still. The lips are uneven, the lower left fuller than it once was or the right drawn away from it; something in the muscle of the cheek that makes it so…
“It is your face,” Edouard whispers. “It is only your face.”
Baldwin looks at Edouard directly and without the mediation of the silver. Edouard finds he must compose himself against being looked at by the eyes of the King of Jerusalem without anything between them. It is, as he once thought, not unlike looking at the sun.
When the king undoes his coif, a smell comes, of a great deal of care, with thanks given to hands that have tended him, morning and evening, with attention. His hair is fairer than the eyebrow, and it comes sparsely through and between the windings of the bandage at the crown and at the temple, in wisps and in one or two true curls where the nape is unbandaged. There is not… much of it, altogether. But that what there is catches the light of every candle in the room.
The king’s uneven mouth moves, and it is, unmistakably, a smile. This is the first time Edouard has seen him smile. He had heard it, all these months, in the voice and click of teeth, and the play of breath behind the Persian silver…
“I did have better hair,” Baldwin says, smiling still. The smile holds, and holds. The left eye creases with it. This is, Edouard understands, a sight granted to very few people in the world.
“You are fair to me. Beyond any measure.”
“The physicians hold that it is carried in the air, in the breath, in the blood.”
“Yes.” Edouard rushes to say: “I do not fear it.”
“The Church holds that it is a bodily death, given as penance, which may redeem the soul before it departs.” The king’s voice is so different, now, when it does not come through a layer of silver. “I will not take a wife. I will not get children. I would not give this to a child of my body. This I swore before God, that the sickness would end with me and I to be its last sovereign. God made me a king and gave me this sickness together, as one bequest. I believe He meant them thus. I have thought much on the lepers of Scripture. Naaman in the Jordan… The ten on the road, of whom only one returned to give thanks. The Lord touched them, and they were made whole. I have wondered, in the longer hours, why He has not done so for me. William holds that it is because I am not in need of the miracle He gives to ordinary men. That Jerusalem herself is the miracle and I am the instrument of her keeping. That my body, this, is the price of her.”
A breath moves through the window, cool and very faint, carrying jasmine, which grows against the south wall of the courtyard and which Edouard has noticed the king always pauses near, when they cross it.
“But Jerusalem…” Baldwin says, and his voice has gone inward, “She belongs to God and she belongs to all those who love her.” He looks at his hands again. “So I am not to be possessed any more than she is. I am not to be inherited, not to be continued. I have given myself to God and to this city. Body and soul, entire, I have given it. I have lain these many years in pain, and I shall lie in more, and at the last I shall lie in the ground.”
He is quiet for a long time after that. Then:
“I have held my body at the disposal of God and of Jerusalem since I was a child.” He pauses. “I have never once asked for my body back. I have not asked God for it, nor railed at Him for the taking of it. And I find that I can bear all of it. I am not afraid of it. But I also find… that there is one thing I cannot bear to lose without having had it. One thing that the sickness will take, in its time, as it takes all else, and which, when it is gone, will be gone entire and unrecoverable.” The king, then, looks up at Edouard, with eyes bright. “I cannot pass life into the world, and thanks be to God for that mercy, that I cannot do this and so am not tempted by it. I shall not take a woman for this reason and no other argument need be made. But… you…”
Edouard has been struck before, by a mace at the shoulder and by a lance glancing off his helm, by a sword flat across the back of his hand, by grief, by beauty, the first time he crested the hill and Jerusalem lay below him in the morning. He knows well what it is to be struck.
He presses the hand flat against his own chest, where he has, now, been struck, and never before. He can feel his heart through the cloth. It is outrageous, what his heart is performing, and for whom.
“What is between men leaves no issue,” Baldwin quietly continues. “The Church names it grave sin and I do not quarrel with her. I have made my accounting with God on many matters and I will make it on this one also, standing before Him in my time and answering for it. I have given Him everything. I have kept back nothing, not one thing, of all He asked. So I would ask in return that I be permitted to lie in the arms of one who loves me, while I yet have hands enough to feel it. While I yet have this much left to me. Now. It must be now, if ever it is to be. I am still enough myself. I am still, just, myself.”
A candle, the nearest, goes out, spent at last, and the room shifts around its absence, shadows redistributing themselves, so that the remaining light draws closer and warmer and the world contracts to them only.
She has seen this before, this city. She has seen all manner of love and all manner of loss. She was here, also, before the Christ was laid in his tomb in her keeping. She was here before the Prophet. She was here before the God of the Israelites looked upon her. She has held greater loves than this and lesser ones with which she holds everything: the pilgrim and the conqueror, the penitent and the apostate, the blood of crusade drying brown in her streets and the jasmine coming up through the cracks in her stones the following spring regardless. She has been fought over by men who believed her worth any price and she has remained, simply, herself: white and gold in the morning, blue in the shadows, the Dome catching the last light as she has always caught the last light… She was given to everyone who loves her, and so she belongs to no one.
And she is outside the window, right now, this very moment, in the dark.
The king and his knight, they are Jerusalem’s now, given to her keeping, as everything that passes in her is given to her keeping.
“There has never been one hour in which you were otherwise. And there has never been one hour in which I have not been yours,” says Edouard. “I have felt you, my light of Jerusalem, since the road from Jaffa. I have loved you as I have loved nothing else that God has set before me. I would stay beside you every day that remains to you, and ask nothing of you, and count it the greatest honor of my life, and die content with only that. I am a knight and I have sworn myself to God and to His causes, and I have kept that oath as well as a man of my quality may keep it. All that I have made of myself in my years upon this earth, I lay before you. Take all of it. Take what use you can of it, for you are my king. You are my liege before God. I am sworn to your service and to your keeping. You have made of me something greater than I came here.”
The king tilts his head, the old way. “But I found you already made.”
☩
The morning comes through the window of the king’s study. It finds, first, the phial on the sill, and passes through it, and throws a scatter of blue across the floor.
The king, who has not slept well since boyhood, is asleep. His knight does not move for a long time so as not to disturb the extraordinary fact of it.
He is, in this narrow morning light, the most beautiful thing Edouard has ever seen. He was already, before tonight; he is now additionally, by other measures.
What a waste, he had been told, over wine, in warm rooms far from here.
Edouard thinks the men who said this never understood what it was not to waste. What it was to spend with absolute attention, every good thing, at its right moment, hot from the pot, warm from the sun… No, nothing of this king has been wasted. Every year of him has burned. God knew what He was doing when He built him so bright; He would not waste that kind of fuel on easy purposes.
☩
Baldwin is a good king for only a few more years.
He is a good king even at Kerak, when Saladin lays siege to the castle in which, of all the insolent and untimely customs, a wedding is underway; and Baldwin, already half blind and carried in a litter, commands the relief force himself, and Saladin withdraws.
He is also a good king at the end of that same year, when his hands have gone and his sight largely is also.
Still. Still.
He is a good king until the last possible day that goodness and kingship can coexist in a body being taken by God in tithes.
He is not, after that, a king much longer.
☩
It is March.
Edouard stands at the window of his narrow eastward room for the last time before he is called. The light is on the wall, in her early gold. He knows every variation of it now.
The page does not come. So Edouard goes, instead, himself.
☩
The king is in his own room. His knight goes to the side of the bed.
One of Baldwin’s eyes opens. The other can no longer. There are not many sights in the world that precede and outlast everything. Jerusalem in the morning is one, yes; and the Dome catching the last light is another.
This eye, even just one, looking at him, is a third. Edouard has looked at this face for six years, through silver and without it. He knows this face well, now.
“And there you are,” says Baldwin. The voice he says this in is small and very weak.
Edouard cannot find the words to speak, none at all. So he only takes the hand which may still feel him, or may not, and holds it. The king’s fingers, all what remains of their ability, press so, so slightly back against his.
A long time passes, like this. And the light of Jerusalem comes through the window without deference to the occasion.
“Tell me something,” Baldwin manages, at last. “Of Champagne.”
Edouard has to think. He has been so long away.
“Well, Sire…” he begins, holding back tears, “in Champagne, the wintry rain feels like being struck with very small stones…”
The king huffs the lightest of laughs, and his one good eye closes again.
☩
Baldwin IV, by the Grace of God King of Jerusalem, dies on the sixteenth day of March in the Year of Our Lord 1185. He is four-and-twenty years of age.
He is buried in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in his white samite and in his silver mask. And the mask that touched Edouard’s face will now touch Baldwin’s, in the ground, for all of time. This was the king’s own foretelling of it. He knew, even then. He was always, always knowing.
He was learned beyond his years and bore his affliction with great courage.
☩
Edouard stays in Jerusalem. He is given better quarters now, higher in the palace, with a window that faces east.
He is asked, by various parties, whether he intends to return to Champagne. That he does not. Until…
Jerusalem falls to Saladin two years hence, on the second day of October, in the Year of Our Lord 1187. Edouard is among those who surrender the city. He watches the Saracen banners go up over the walls where the crosses were, and he thinks of his king, who saw this coming from the distance of a decade and held it off with his body.
Edouard leaves through the Jaffa Gate, as he entered, leading his horse. His surcoat is the color of the desert, and the dust of the Judean hills is upon him again. And only once, he looks back.
The city turns, as it has always turned, like a jewel in the palm of God. The Dome catches the morning light, as it has always caught it, as it will always catch it, long after every man now living has been laid in the ground.
Yes; the light of Jerusalem does not die… He was told so by his king.
☩