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Part IX - The Road to Awe and Wonder
-*-
Arriving in Jerusalem was not like Alona had pictured it in her mind as she had done so many times over the long course of the trip. She did not feel the rise of spiritual ecstasy as they trod the earth packed by countless generations, sanctified by the presence of so many saints and by the Son of God himself. Rather, sensations of the purely physical kind overwhelmed her: the sight of the warren of squat brown buildings, the city walls broken in places, repaired clumsily in others, the arches and towers and chapels, synagogues and mosques, the stalls of vendors interspersed with beggars holding their cups and old women clinging to the arms of their granddaughters. Sad-eyed donkeys and bleating goats and gobbling hens added to the clamor. Over all of this the oppressive, burning heat, hot breezes churning about the stewing mass of people. The rising din of voices and the sounds of daily activity hung like a pall over the city.
Here, in this place, could be found the hill where Christ was crucified, Golgotha, the stations of the cross that chronicled his journey along the Via Dolorosa to his death, the famed Garden of Gethsemane where he spent the night before. All this was here, and more, yet all she could think about was Jensen, a man who she had no right to hold in such affection. But, oh, such a precious man, who had fought for her honor and her desires, and who even now lay weak and insensible on a travois, head jostling with every bump and dip in the road. Jensen, whose body was pierced in the side even as Christ, too, was pierced in the side as he hung on the cross. Blasphemy, she knew, to think such a thing, though now, as ever, she could not seem to halt the contrary path of her thoughts.
It had taken them three days of slow travel to get here, hampered by Jensen’s travois and the wounds of several of the others, and in that time, just as the old field surgeon had warned, Jensen had taken ill with a fever.
“We must needs get him to the hospital in Jerusalem,” the surgeon declared. “A thousand beds and the best doctors. I can do little more for him, but there he has a chance.”
The hospital itself was large, and its interior cool and dark after the blazing sun outside, but the moans of the sick and the smell of piss, vomit, and infection in the common ward were unacceptable to Alona.
The negotiations took a while, passed as they were through a translator and sweetened by a gold necklace that Alona’s servants had sewn in the hem of her dress for safekeeping, but soon enough they placed Jensen’s wasted form on cool sheets in a private room. The room had a window which looked out on a courtyard with potted plants and a great tiled pool, and sparrows chirped and hopped in the branches of a citrus tree. Alona thought it was a salutary environment for recovery.
The monk who ran the hospital, a portly man with a broad face and a tentative smile, found the most comfortable chair he could and set it beside Jensen’s bed for her. Alona settled into it and took Jensen’s limp hand in hers. She was fatigued by the long journey, sticky and uncomfortable and hungry besides, but she couldn’t seem to rouse herself to remedy any of these conditions.
When she was just seven years old she had fallen desperately ill with some nameless fever. Weakened, she had been plagued by dreams, hallucinations, and visions of angels. It had been a terrible time: lonely and frightening and filled with wretched misery. Her mother had forsaken her household duties for many hours each day to sit with her and hold her hand. The comfort of that simple gesture – the warm compassion of it – had made the misery fade into the background, and Alona had credited it with helping her to recover. That it might have the same effect on Jensen was her greatest wish.
Physicians came and went over the course of the next day, checking Jensen’s wound, measuring his four bodily humors and administering healing potions and poultices at regular intervals. Throughout all this he did not awaken, but occasionally shifted in his sleep and murmured the names of unfamiliar people, or snatches of bard’s songs or church Latin. Once, his eyes flew open and he sat straight up. He looked at her.
“The horses!” he said, breathless and panicked. “Father needs them groomed before market day.”
“All is well,” she assured him. “I will care for them.”
He shook his head, and made to swing his legs over the side of the bed. It was a mark of how weak and helpless he was that she urged him back into the bed with little effort. He looked up into her face, his eyes so bright and green against the frightful paleness of his skin, his gaze rapt.
“I do not deserve the care of an angel like yourself. Still, I will ask. Will you intercede with the heavenly host for one such as I, whose sins are black and terrible?”
She threaded her fingers through his damp hair, carding it tenderly, as she might have done to comfort a child. “You are a brave and honorable man, Jensen of Ackerley. What sins can you have wrought?”
His gaze shifted to some phantom sight beyond her, his expression going still and quiet in a way she had not seen from him before.
“I am alone. There is no one left to light the candles at my ancestral shrine, or to sprinkle my ashes across the wide dark sea at midnight. All the world has gone to ruin and I alone have survived to see it.” His voice rang with such desolation that her throat squeezed and tears sprang into her eyes.
“The world survives. It is a glorious place, filled with wonders and miracles and salvation for all who seek it. Fear not.”
His eyes shifted back to hers, then, and held her gaze for a long and silent moment, a seeming lucidity in them that encouraged her. He said nothing more, though, and presently he gave a sigh as though he had finished some long labor and closed his eyes again, falling once more into a thin and restless sleep. She kept her fingers in his hair for a long while, marveling at the softness of it, and at the perfect curve of his skull and the delicate fringe of his eyelashes. Wonders, all.
Tristan came at dawn the next day, when the streets outside were just beginning to stir with life and activity. He entered the room hesitantly, his shoulders hunched about his ears and his hair curling boyishly on his forehead.
“Tristan,” she greeted him, smiling as cheerfully as she could manage. “Well met. It is good that you have come. He draws strength from visitors, I believe.”
Tristan looked a little skeptical at that, but nodded nevertheless, coming to look down at Jensen with an inscrutable expression. When he had looked his fill, he turned his face to Alona.
“Your ladies worry for you. They say you have not slept or eaten since we came here.”
“Nonsense,” she said, gesturing to the chair beside Jensen’s bed. “I have only just now awakened from the night’s sleep. As for eating, Cora brought me some dates and cheese just last night and as you can see, they are gone.”
He glanced around. “So it would seem. Still, it is a worrisome vigil that you hold, and one that is my duty as his sworn man.”
His words held gentle censure the likes of which would have inflamed her anger at another time, coming as they did from a lowly servant. Now, though, she seemed to have no strength for outrage. She felt hollowed out and worn thin, her limbs aching from too many hours in the chair and too little restorative sleep, despite what she had told him.
She sighed, smoothing her skirt fretfully. She had not changed clothes in far too long. “Very well. I will allow you to see to his needs for a while.”
“Cora will take you to our lodgings.”
Cora waited outside the door to Jensen’s room, looking puffy eyed and half asleep. Alona followed her, and allowed her to fuss over her appearance for a while.
Thus it was a few hours later when she emerged from their inn freshly bathed, with her hair washed and clothes changed and even a light breakfast of bread and tea in her belly. She found her way to a chapel not closed off by the Muslims occupying the city, and knelt in the quiet darkness there, praying softly until her knees ached with a fiery pain. It was well into the afternoon when she returned to the hospital, her head at last cleared after what seemed like days in a fog.
When she opened the door to Jensen’s room, she expected to be greeted with the sight of his still sleeping form. Instead, his eyes were open and he was smiling wanly. She exclaimed in joy and rushed to his side.
“He’s just awakened,” Tristan told her.
She put her hand on Jensen’s cheek and gazed down at him in wonder, smiling and trying to keep grateful tears from her eyes.
“It is the will of the Most High that you recover completely. I know that it is so,” she told him.
He tried to speak, chapped lips forming words in vain until he cleared his throat and tried again, with a small wry grin on his face he nodded and said, “As you wish, my lady.”
-*-
The days that followed found Jensen frighteningly weak, wasted and wan. Tristan spent a portion of every day with him, fetching his meals and helping him to the chamber pot, keeping him company and playing games of chess with him, watching him sleep and listening to the sounds of the city all around them as he did, the bustling merchants and hard-working laborers, the neighs of donkeys and squawking of chickens. The more days they passed in Jerusalem, the more Tristan found himself liking it.
When he was not with Jensen he ran errands, lazed around in the inn, or explored the dark corners of the city, those places that held the wineshops and gambling rooms, the opium dens and houses of ill repute. He felt at home there, with the shifty-eyed patrons and the whispering brothel keepers, but he resisted the impulse to search them out. He was a knight’s man now, respectable and honorable, and he had no business in such places.
He was returning from an afternoon spent watching a jewelry maker incise designs on copper bracelets when he heard voices, low and intent, from Jensen’s room. He recognized them – Jensen and Alona – but something about the tone made him pause in the doorway instead of entering straightway. And so it was that he heard the choked sound of Alona’s tears.
“…it’s a grand place – filled with altars and relics. The very stones radiate with holy power. I have been there day after day, just as the bishop told me, but still nothing has changed.”
Alona was speaking about visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, he knew. He had gone with her once upon her insistence. She had showed him the gilded dome in the center of the rotunda, the rising columns of finest marble, the mosaics and gold-plated icons, the tiled floor underneath which lay the tomb of Christ himself. Here was the place where he was crucified, buried, and resurrected, according to the church. It was the holiest place of all. He had seen the priests in their black robes worshipping there, the nuns and the postulants, all so clearly touched by the significance of the place. He, on the other hand, had felt nothing out of the ordinary. It was a church like any other. A grand church, to be sure, but just a building. Alona had been nearly glowing with excitement over being in the place, but now it seemed she had lost this enthusiasm.
“I have whispered the prayers, sought out the advice of the clergy, prostrated myself on that holy floor. I expected that I would be healed of my barrenness, but nothing has happened!” Her voice rose in dismay, and she breathed jerkily and sniffled, clearly crying.
“How can you be sure? Perhaps the healing has happened without your knowledge,” Jensen said, low and conciliatory.
“I would know if it had happened. I would have felt the touch of the Holy Spirit, the quickening of the power – I am certain of it!”
Tristan stepped back, knowing that he was eavesdropping on a private moment, but somehow unable to keep himself from listening. He could see through the crack in the door to the tableau the two of them created – Jensen sitting on the edge of the bed, gazing at Alona who stood very close to him, her slender form swathed in a royal purple gown, light and airy and newly made for her by her ladies from the fine cloth in the marketplace.
Jensen looked troubled by Alona’s distress, his handsome face somber and his eyes sympathetic. He put a hand on her shoulder. She wiped at her nose with her handkerchief, then looked at him. Tristan saw a clear tear sliding over the curve of her cheekbone.
“What if I have dragged all of us out here, caused the deaths of the guardsmen, and your own near death – what if all of this I have done for nothing?” She spoke with a tone of rising horror. “The many trials we have faced, the expense – I was certain it was all for good. What if I was wrong?”
Jensen took her by the shoulders and stood up so that their bodies were very close together. “No,” he said fiercely. “Do not allow yourself to lose faith. Truly, God has guided all of us to this place, to this very moment. Yes, we have faced trials and tribulations. Yes, it has been hard going and dangerous and filled with unexpected miseries. But remember the glories as well – the sights we have seen – the fallen temples in Rome and the vivid blue of the Mediterranean, the scents of the marketplace, the cool breezes in the garden at Jaffa. All these are beauties that you will carry with you for all of your days. Just as I will carry with me the exertion of the trail, the burden of leadership, but also the sight of your face, beloved as I find it.”
Alona froze in place, her lips parted and her gaze rapt. “Beloved,” she repeated, and swayed forward, tipping her head further back.
Jensen dipped his head and kissed her, light and tender.
Tristan reeled backward, so surprised he was by the sight before him. His heart slammed into his ribs and the air seemed sucked from his lungs as though by huge, powerful bellows. Jensen kissed her. He wandered down the hallway a half dozen steps, reeling from the blow. Jensen was a knight, pure and good and honorable. Skilled and strong and bequeathed by God and the power of the oath he had sworn to see to Alona’s health and safety, to make sure that she could complete her journey – not to kiss her himself, to put his hands on her as a husband would, or as a man might to a prostitute in the alleyway in the dark of night.
Alona swept by him with a breathless little cry, her hand to her mouth, too lost in emotion to pay his presence there any mind.
Before he knew what he was doing, Tristan found himself moving back toward Jensen’s room. The door stood wide open now, and he looked in to see Jensen leaning against the bed, his head down and his face troubled.
Tristan withdrew from the hospital, out into the slanting afternoon sunlight, moving like a sleepwalker. His mind flashed backward to the looks he had seen Jensen giving Alona, to that night when she appeared stricken and wild at their door, when Jensen was packing to leave. He thought of a dozen other instances, gazes and the simple brush of hands together or a guiding hand on her back and he could not fathom, of a sudden, why he had not seen it earlier. The two of them were cuckolding Morden.
He did not question why the knowledge was so devastating to him. He simply retreated to the inn, and sat for a while on the cold stone floor thinking about his own sworn oath to Jensen and about what he wanted from life. He had thought he would stay with Jensen, be his sworn man, follow him back and forth across the world, but Jensen seemed unworthy now – just a diminished, debauched man like any other, not a shining example of what he himself could be.
A while later he gathered together the coins Jensen had given him over the course of their time together and headed out. This time, he did not keep himself from the dark and fetid quarter of the city. He immersed himself in it.
-*-
They had been in Jerusalem for an entire month when Alona came to Jensen and told him, in a quiet, but firm voice, that it was time to leave. She monitored their funds closely, and they were running low. The trip back would be long and arduous, and the sooner they took it on, the better. She scarcely looked at him, and her lips were drawn in a thin, flat line. There was something heartbreakingly fragile about her now, a sort of disappointment that laid heavy on her. She was upset about her experience at the shrine, he knew, and castigated himself for kissing her when she had admitted her disappointment to him. Since then she was wary around him, frightened and uncertain and maybe a bit unsure of her own reaction to him.
For himself, he was anxious to be free of this place, with its stifling summer heat and strange Muslim residents, who knelt and prayed where they were five times a day, when the call to prayer came, a warbling and yearning song that seemed so alien from what he was used to in the church. He was still weak, still sleeping more than he ever had in his adult life, and battling a recalcitrant appetite. The wound in his side burned at times, and felt hot and distended, a throbbing reminder of the impermanence of life.
He did not like the turn his thoughts took with all this inactivity, the way his heart ached and twisted whenever he thought of Alona, forbidden and yet so desired. He longed to touch her, to kiss and taste her, to bury himself in her, inhaling her sweet scent, her very breath. And then he thought of Morden, an upright and trusting man who he had sworn himself to. A man who was pledged to Alona by the sacred obligation of marriage, blessed and sanctified by God himself through his agency the church. So many oaths, binding one to another, each cutting more deeply than the last into his sore and battered heart. This was temptation, sent by the demons of the deep who preyed on the weakness and immorality of the human soul.
But oh, the thought of it was so very, very sweet!
And such were the thoughts that assaulted him as he recovered.
In an effort to free himself from the awful tendrils of such thoughts, he made himself take long wandering walks around the city, learning its ins and outs, the district where cloth was spun and dyed and sewn, the warehouses filled with grain from Iberia and wine from Marseilles and pottery from Egyptian workshops, and the wells where the women, in their concealing black robes, gathered to gossip and laugh as they scrubbed the dirt and sweat from laundry. With Alona’s words still fresh in his mind, he headed toward the seedier side of town, where the prostitutes and drunks loitered, and the more respectable citizens came to game away their afternoons. Tristan had been spending more and more time there lately, no longer spending most of his day watching over Jensen and beating him at chess, but now coming back late in the evening smelling of opium smoke. Jensen did not like this behavior much, but he figured that the confinement in Jerusalem was wearing on Tristan as well, or perhaps he had met a girl who worked in one of the opium dens.
He found Tristan in the back of a soup vendor’s shop, lounging half-lidded and relaxed next to a boy wearing a turban and dozing where he sat, head nodding.
Tristan cocked an eyebrow, lazy and vaguely hostile, when Jensen took a seat opposite him, sitting with a groan as the action aggravated his wound.
“Who is your friend?” Jensen asked, indicating the boy, who was evidently even more high than Tristan.
Tristan shrugged, then reached out and nudged the boy in the shoulder. This action caused him to slump to the table top, his forehead hitting it with a distinct thump.
“We will be returning home tomorrow morning,” he informed Tristan. “I’ve already been to the stables to rent horses and mules, and Wyclef has taken care of the provisions and arrangements with the authorities.” Jensen hated that he had needed to delegate some of his duties to the other guardsmen, but he weakened so quickly these days that it had been a necessary evil.
Tristan nodded slowly, but he didn’t say anything for such a long moment that Jensen was compelled to fill the silence.
“Come back to the inn early tonight so that you can rest for the morrow, will you?”
Tristan’s mouth tightened and his eyes, slanted and catlike and drowsy, seemed to deaden somehow. “I’m not going. I’m staying here.”
“You … what? You’re staying in Jerusalem?” Jensen could not conceal his surprise.
Tristan lifted a shoulder negligently. “If I wish. I haven’t decided yet. I just know that I am tired of the trail.”
He seemed so uncharacteristically uncaring and antagonistic. Jensen tried to take it in for a moment, and blurted out instead, “What brought this on?”
“You don’t need me around anymore. I’ll just get in the way of you and Alona fucking.”
A red haze of anger blotted out Jensen’s vision. Before he knew it he was lunging across the table, his fist knotted in Tristan’s tunic, dragging him upright. “Certainly I did not hear you right, servant.”
Tristan’s eyes narrowed and he looked an instant away from some angry retort. He stopped himself, though, and just stared sullenly at Jensen. Jensen released him slowly, and stepped away from the table, trying to think. This attitude was so unlike Tristan, yet there was a kernel of truth to it. He thought of little else than his shameful lust for his lord’s wife. He swallowed, turned back to Tristan with effort.
Stiffly, he said, “Very well, then. If you no longer wish to serve me than I will not make you. Come to the inn tonight and I will pay you what I owe you.”
Tristan showed up hours later, looking more sober but no more welcoming, a narrow-eyed hostility in his gaze. He accepted the coins that Jensen handed over, and left without saying a word.
Jensen watched him slink off into the darkened streets, his throat tight.
Part X
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Alona and Jensen's relationship isn't exactly unexpected or shocking by any modern standard. Of course, it's not a modern story. Again, I do wish I understood a little more of Alona's thoughts on her marriage during her POVs. But hope that is forthcoming. I figured woman married for many reasons but love was not necessarily one of them. This is my assumption, that Alona cares for Geoffrey and had she not met anyone else it might have sufficed. But she has met someone else. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Ja-Tristan (I should give myself a nickel for each time I goof on his name) is still so young and his reactions very true to his age and level of understanding. That teenage black and white, dramatic view of the world. Still true today :)