The Gates of Shaizar
Fortress of Shaizar, western Syria
August A.D. 1160
When the order to halt came, Blaise al-Mastoub reined his destrier before the guards at the eastern gate of Shaizar. Behind him the queue of merchants with ox carts and camels, woodcutters leading laden donkeys, concubines in curtained palanquins, flocks of bleating sheep and goats, and the slaves, pilgrims, and riff-raff of the province backed up outside the iron-studded gate.
The gaze of the guards’ lieutenant traveled over Blaise’s cast-off clothing and the stained bandage on his left forearm, the tall bay warhorse and the sword stolen from the Varangian Leofric’s stiffening hand. A good horse and weapon but only a leather cap and quilted jerkin for armor. The lieutenant’s suspicions reflected on his face as if in a glass.
“I have a passport,” Blaise said, “from the magistrate of al-Shara.”
He held the now-tattered safe conduct he’d forged like a shield, its elaborate calligraphy almost indecipherable. Blaise knew — he’d added every flourish possible to discourage more than cursory glances at his credentials. But the lieutenant clamped his hand on the passport.
“No one enters until I’ve examined this man’s papers. Thoroughly.”
The guards stationed themselves before the crowd shoving to enter. The sun rose high over the town’s walls in the hazy sky. The clamor behind Blaise grew as the lieutenant read the passport, muttering every word aloud.
Blaise loosened the fidgeting bay’s reins and fumbled in the pouch under his tunic for his small hoard of treasure – his manumission papers, Leofric’s medusa-headed ring, the last handful of stolen dinars.
The lieutenant’s eye caught the movement. “You! Keep your hands in sight.”
“It’s a hot day, sir. Perhaps you’d like something to slake your thirst?”
“In sight!”
Blaise shrugged. He’d had enough of men who couldn’t be bought. At least if the passport failed he had a sword, almost too long to wield one-handed, but he hadn’t dared steal another. Roaming through Syria with a forged passport was enough to get him beheaded.
The lieutenant looked up at last. “This mentions companions.”
“They were taken prisoner.” Blaise shifted his hands from the saddlebow. “I’m here to ransom them.”
The lieutenant flung the passport at him in disgust. “Then do so. And leave quickly.”
Blaise joined the flood of travelers surging toward the marketplace and stopped at the slave dealer’s to scan the merchandise. At the point in the line where Jehan and Robert had been chained, there now stood only gawky Sibylla. He lifted an eyebrow in question but she replied with only a curt, almost-imperceptible nod before the old slave trader, Abu al-Darda, hailed him, walking around the tall bay.
“Ain’t you come up in the world? If I knew you was this good a horse thief, I’d have charged more.”
“I had two friends in this caravan,” Blaise said. He pulled a gold piece out of his pouch and flipped it idly. “I’m able to redeem them now. Or if you remember where you sold them. . .”
Abu al-Darda moved closer. Blaise folded his fist around the coin.
The slave trader glanced to the corner where his guards hunched, absorbed in their dice. With elaborate unconcern, he pulled out a dagger to pick the few teeth remaining to him.
“Two friends?” he said. “You mean that pair of village idiots? Yeah, I remember them — always bragging about the day their friend would come back and rescue them. What took you so long?”
“I was detained.”
“I guess you was, hiding out from that Varangian.”
Blaise scowled. He rubbed the scabbed, itching scar Leofric’s sword had carved through his beard, the scar that had given him his nickname -– al-Mastoub, the slashed one.
“Too bad about your friends,” Abu al-Darda said. “If I’d thought I could have got a dirham for either of them, I might could oblige you now.”
“Where are they?”
“They took sick -– them and one or two others. I tipped their carcasses off the side of the road a ways back.”
The slave trader’s lips stretched in a mirthless grin.
Blaise vaulted from the saddle, his sword hissing halfway from its scabbard.
Abu al-Darda spat at his feet. “Lay hands on me, I dare you! There’s law and order in this town. I’ll have yourhead for bounty and your fine horse and sword, too.”
Blaise’s glare swept the marketplace. He’d seen, out of the tail of his eye, half a squad from the garrison follow him as he left the east gate. He mounted the stallion again and swung on the reins. The big bay lashed out with a rear hoof, grazing the slave trader’s head.
“Stop! In the name of the sultan!” Two guardsmen scrambled to reach Blaise across the crowded square. The rest lashed their horses toward the four gates of the town to block his escape.
The bay wheeled and charged.
The trader shrieked as Blaise’s sword whistled past his head, shaving off an ear. The horse’s rush carried Blaise across the market, slamming through a dozen awnings of small merchants.
A bird seller struggled from under the collapsed canvas of his booth as a pursuing guardsman’s mount stumbled, its rider flung headlong into a display of caged poultry. The remaining cavalry horse shied from the squawking, fluttering birds.
Blaise plunged from the square into the surrounding town as the downed trooper regained his mount. The meandering streets, balconies on each side meeting overhead, befuddled his sense of direction, cut off the sky and turned midday to twilight. An alleyway opened — toward the west, as best he could tell. He shifted his weight and the bay dashed into a passageway so narrow its stirrups brushed the walls of the houses.
They tore through lines of washing drooping across the alley. Blaise pulled a woman’s damp, much-darned pink undershift from his face. Trailing a string of shabby garments, he swept around a corner, to see too late a boy driving a donkey whose burden of firewood spanned the passage. The bay’s muscles bunched under the saddle. The horse gathered itself, leaped over the wide-eyed wood carrier, and pounded on.
The curses of the pursuing guardsmen followed him as the donkey bucked off its load, scattering kindling across the alleyway.
The street straightened.
And dead-ended onto the tiny, ruined courtyard of an ancient house. The bay reared and wheeled.
“God’s blood!” Blaise swore.
He scrambled onto the saddle pommel and leaped for the lattice of a balcony, crashing feet first through the opening, to tumble onto a young maid crouched within. Blaise crushed her mouth against his to stop her scream.
“How do I get to the roof?” he whispered, his arm snug around her waist.
Her eyes, the whites visible all around the irises like those of a frightened horse, flickered toward a ladder-like stairway at the back of the room.
“Good lass.” Still holding her, Blaise reached into his pouch and pulled out a dinar. “Take this to remember me by.”
He kissed her again as he tucked the coin into the jasmine-scented bodice of her dress. Then he fled up the stair and onto the roof, crouching behind its parapet as the guardsmen rounded the corner to confront his riderless destrier.
The guardsmen’s horses whickered and sidled in the narrow space. The men glanced from courtyard to alley. Both were as empty as if they had been swept. The half-naked urchins who had followed the soldiers, shouting and jeering, had vanished. No gray-bearded porters dozed at their posts. Not so much as a dog scratched itself in the dust. Every door stood closed, every window shuttered.
As the foremost guard gestured to his fellow to fall back, Blaise dropped from the low roof onto the back of the second horse, grappling its rider from behind. The horse reared. The men plunged, struggling, over the saddle cantle to the ground.
Blaise leaped on the downed guard and slashed. With a yell, the guard shoved his wrist, spurting blood from its severed hand, into his face. Blaise struck again. The guardsman crumpled into the dust.
As Blaise drew a gasping breath and wiped the blood from his face, he felt the other guard’s scimitar at his throat. He dropped his weapon and raised his hands.
“You son of a whore,” the guardsman said, pushing the body of his fallen comrade aside with his foot. “You dog. You think you can kill Kasim here, throw down your sword. . .”
Blaise whistled.
“. . .save your hide. Just like that.”
The big bay shouldered the guard’s smaller horse against the wall. The guard looked over his shoulder, panic spreading over his face as the warhorse charged. Ducking beneath the scimitar blade, Blaise drew the dagger concealed in his sash and plunged it into his enemy’s belly.
A motion at the courtyard’s window caught his eye. Within seconds, the alley’s denizens would swarm out, seeking plunder.
As he stripped helmet and coat of mail from the smaller guard and wrapped himself in the armor, an odor of jasmine wafted over the earthy tang of blood and dust. The girl leaned from the broken lattice and a blossom dropped, star-like, from her bosom into the stagnant water of the courtyard fountain.
Blaise severed the guard’s head and battered it with the flat of his weapon. The girl at the window screamed, with no rough kiss to silence her. Blaise leaped into the bay’s saddle, swinging the guard’s head by its hair, and cantered back the way he had come.
#
“Halt!” the lieutenant of the guard barked from where he sat on his mare amid the havoc Blaise had made of the marketplace.
To Blaise’s relief, Abu al-Darda was nowhere in sight. He saluted, lowering his chin to let the helmet’s cheek guards swing across his face, and held out the head.
The lieutenant grunted. “Nail it to the gate.”
Blaise trotted across the marketplace toward the western gate.
“Not that gate! The front one!”
Blaise feigned not to hear as he stuffed the head in his saddlebag.
At the western gate, looking toward the no-man’s land of the border, the young guard in the postern presented his lance and demanded the password.
“The password, the password,” Blaise muttered, reaching into his wet saddlebag. “You’d better ask Kasim here.”
Flinging the head at the guard, he set spurs against his horse’s sides. They were out of the gate before the alarm sounded.
Among the hillocks that marched with the border, he hid and watched, hesitating whether to flee further into the Frankish lands. But no one emerged from the town. At last, he wolfed the last of the bread and onions in his pack and dozed through the night, restless with the pain of the unhealed wounds from his duel with the Varangian. The terrain stirred a memory.
#
Village of al-Shara, northeastern Syria
Two months earlier
A goatskin of water made its way down the line as Blaise and the slaves chained behind him stumbled to a halt in the dusty little town. A month -– maybe more, he lost track of time -— had passed since their capture outside Aleppo.
He took a gulp, then another, and handed the water skin on to Jehan.
The big Norman turned to the boy chained on his other side. “Easy, Robin, a mouthful’s enough now. You’ll make yourself sick.”
The boy whimpered, struggling with Jehan as a dribble of precious water trickled from his mouth.
“Give me the water,” Sibylla said. She dampened the hem of her tattered dress and dabbed Robin’s face until the light of reason returned to his eyes.
Blaise followed the rise of the skirt that bared the young woman’s legs. Sibylla caught the direction of Blaise’s glance and smoothed her skirt down, without embarrassment.
Not that I meant anything, Blaise thought. He wasn’t far enough gone to find the big-footed girl attractive. Her habitual sullenness made her look too stupid for work and too homely for anything else. But no other woman in the slave caravan was tall and strong enough to keep up chained to men. And she was, he admitted grudgingly, good with the boy.
The English boy Robin had clung to Jehan and Blaise like a puppy since he joined the caravan. The slave trader must have hoped Robin’s good looks would find a ready market, but after a disgruntled buyer returned him, the truth of the boy’s simple mindedness became all too clear.
“Did I ever tell you,” Jehan said to Robin, “how I met our friend here?”
He had, many times, but familiarity was food and drink to Robin in this chaotic world. The boy’s face brightened.
“I was lost in the darkest alley in Antioch one night, getting the shit kicked out of me — ”
“Shit,” Robin giggled. “Shit, shit, shit.”
It was one of the small store of English words Jehan had gleaned from service in his duke’s levies. Repeated in his Norman accent, it never failed to make Robin smile.
“I thought I was a dead man, for sure,” the old soldier continued. “And then this scruffy poulain came out of nowhere, swinging a dagger. He scattered those bastards faster than you can spit. Why he took my side, I’ll never know.”
“You were the one looked like he had more balls than the twelve apostles together, and less sense than any of them,” Blaise said.
Jehan grinned. “It was a great fight, Robin. You should have been there.”
“I wish my uncle was there,” Robin said. “He fights a lot. He’s really big, and he has a big sword, and a big ring with snakes on it.”
“Give us your uncle’s name and we’ll send him an invitation the next time we fight,” Blaise said.
“Uncle, uncle . . .” Robin’s brow furrowed. “Uncle Leofric.” His face changed, as if he stirred from sleep.
“Leofric! Of course!” Blaise struck his forehead with the heels of his shackled hands. “A peer of the king of England, no doubt! Or tell us where he lives and we’ll just take you to him. He’ll give us a reward and we’ll all be rich.”
“Rich,” Robin chanted, “rich, rich, RICH!”
Jehan and Blaise exchanged a look over the boy’s head. With hands as smooth as a lady’s, Robin must be from a family well able to ransom him. But until now, the boy’s mind had seemed blank as wind-drifted sand. If they could get word to his uncle, surely, he’d be so glad to get Robin back that he wouldn’t mind ransoming those who’d looked after the boy as well.
The arrival of horsemen in the marketplace interrupted these thoughts.
“Who’s the amir?” Blaise asked.
“The one looks like he’s got a spear up his arse?” Jehan asked. “Who cares?”
“I just got a feeling about him, that our luck’s about to change.”
“Can’t get any worse.” Jehan’s eyelids drooped. “Don’t bother waking me when he leaves.”
Blaise stared as the tall man and his black slave dismounted and left their animals in the care of a young page.
The newcomer scanned the bedraggled line of slaves. The man’s gaze flicked from the group of filthy children at the end of the line back to Blaise and Jehan, the only grown men in the group. His eyes lingered on Jehan’s height and broad shoulders.
“Are there any swordsmen among them?” he asked the slave trader.
“How about it, lads?” the trader addressed his merchandise. “Here’s a gentleman – a judge, in fact, so you know his word’s good — looking for a swordsman. All he wants is someone willing to fight a giant. You’ll win your freedom — if you live.”
The judge’s shoulders sagged in the silence that followed. “Are there no men here? No one with honor?”
“They’re mostly Franks, sir,” the trader said. “They don’t have any honor.”
The judge turned to reclaim his mounts.
“I’m a swordsman,” Blaise shouted, leaping to his feet.
The judge spun around and scanned the line.
“Here, master!” Blaise called again.
His heart thudding, he knelt to dust his hands as the tall man remonstrated with his black slave over a choice of weapon. The rajab looked at Blaise in disdain and tossed a scimitar end over end. Blaise caught it in an up flung hand and was, at the same instant, at the judge’s throat.
Blaise squinted along the gleaming edge of the sword at the other, who stood shocked into stillness. He moved the point across the throbbing vein on the side of the neck, hearing the steel scratch in the judge’s beard. He leaped back as his opponent’s sword sprang from its sheath.
In his backward rush, Blaise fell. The judge leaped over Sibylla, who grabbed his foot as he landed. He stumbled. His sword sweep missed by a hair. Blaise threw a fistful of dust in his opponent’s face and scrambled to his feet.
Jehan awakened with a soldier’s instinct at the sounds of combat. Tucking Robin under one arm, he broke into a shuffling run, dragging Sibylla, chained to them, as he forced his way across the square.
Blaise slashed and a swift line of red ran down the judge’s arm. Blaise turned to Jehan and struck, his scimitar grating against the slave chains. Jehan wedged a knee against the loosened links and yanked at them in desperation.
“The clubs, damn you, not the bows!” the slave trader shouted. His guards had drawn crossbows as likely in this close space to hit a bystander as the troublemaker.
The young page looked up as the commotion neared the edge of the square. In the choking dust raised by the combatants, Jehan sprang, still dragging his shackles. The page uttered a strangled gurgle as the chain looped over his neck.
Jehan flung Robin over the back of the mare whose reins trailed in the dust.
“Stop!” Robin cried. “You’re hurting Sibylla!”
“The girl can keep up. I’ll cut her loose when we’re out of this hellhole!”
As Jehan leaped for the saddle a guard’s club slammed against his jaw. The mare whinnied in terror and reared, throwing man and boy.
“Pig!” Bloody spittle and fragments of yellowed teeth spattered the guard as Jehan struggled to his feet. “I spit on you and the sow that farrowed you!”
Blaise charged toward the Norman. And fell, as the huge rajab leaped onto his back, toppling him in the dust.
“Down, dog!” The black slave jammed a knee into Blaise’s back while the guard kicked the scimitar out of reach and lashed his hands.
Chained once more, Jehan wriggled a loosened tooth with his tongue. “If this is the change of luck you had in mind, it don’t look good.”
“At last,” Sibylla mocked, “you’ve said something sensible.”
“But we needed their horses,” Jehan said. “I guess you could have done it better?”
“Yes, Sibylla,” Blaise said, “tell us how you would have escaped – with no weapons, no food, no mounts.”
“He’s got weapons.” The girl nodded toward the slave trader. “And mules and supplies. There was a place I noticed a couple of towns back, where the road narrows to single file between hills. The end of the line couldn’t see the front. We could pick them off one by one.”
“Not that we’ll see that again,” Blaise said. “But whatever happens, if I live, I swear I’ll ransom you.”
He looked anxiously at his friends. Jehan’s fair hair had faded nearly white in the few months Blaise had known him.
“What about me?” Robin whimpered, rubbing his bruises.
#
Outside Shaizar
When the gates of Shaizar opened the morning after Blaise’s escape, the slave trader’s caravan straggled down the road — the trader on mule back with his head bandaged, two guards on foot, some pack mules, and a few slaves who hadn’t sold at the market. The highway narrowed to a track the width of a camel’s load to squeeze through a huddle of small hills the caravan passed each month.
“I know your dice are loaded,” the taller guard grumbled to his mate.
“I’m lucky, that’s all.”
“It’s not luck! Master,” the first guard turned to the slave trader, “you saw what he did while I was busy clearing up yesterday.”
“Quiet!” Abu al-Darda touched his bandage gingerly. “Oh, my head! I’m sick of your whining! Earn your keep for a change and watch the road.”
The guard’s voice sank to an angry mutter. “Just the same, if he doesn’t pay what he owes — ”
His words ended in a thud and a gasp.
Abu al-Darda and the other guard stopped short as the man fell to his knees, staring open-mouthed at the fletched quarrel quivering in his chest.
#
Blaise knew his still-healing left arm wouldn’t let him recock the crossbow before the survivors scattered. He sprang clumsily into the bay’s saddle and burst from his ambush among the rocks. The remaining guard fumbled with his bow, dropped it, and ran at the sight of the armed horseman closing on him. He dodged toward a rocky crevice as the long Varangian sword split him from collarbone to ribs.
In the precious seconds Blaise lost wrenching his weapon from the guard’s body, the slave trader’s terrified mule fled a quarter mile down the road, racing under the trader’s lash for the safety of the fortress walls. Not until the last define that blocked the view from the guard tower did the stallion overtake the smaller animal. The bay slammed against the knocked the mule, sending it and the slave trader tumbling. The sweep of a sword blade cut short Abu al-Darda’s scream.
#
Blaise surveyed the captured slaves, sheathed his reddened sword and dismounted, wincing at the jolt to his broken rib. He wiped his face. The blood smear on his hand and sting of sweat on his cheek told him the wound on his face had reopened.
The only slave Blaise recognized from his time in the caravan was Sibylla.
She stood her ground as he approached. “You remembered me.”
“I remembered what you said,” Blaise replied, pulling off his cloak and wrapping it over her scanty rags. He walked back to the slave trader’s crumpled body -– with the pounding ache in his side, he doubted he’d be able to mount his horse again unaided -– riffled through the blood-drenched garments for the keys, and unchained Sibylla.
”You heard me in the marketplace,” he said to the girl. “Is there any chance Jehan and Robin still live?”
“They didn’t die from sickness, at least,” she said. “Jehan tried to carry the boy. When he got too weak to walk, the trader took his head for bounty and threw the bodies off the road. But he didn’t take the boy’s head — the governor wouldn’t have paid bounty for a child. Robin was still alive, I’d swear.”
Blaise unchained the other slaves, dragged the corpses of the slave trader and his guards off the road and stripped them. The leather jerkin of the man who had fallen to his sword came away in two pieces. He regretted the waste.
“It’s not far,” Sibylla said. “If we skirt that last town, we can find the spot before dark.”
By now the pain in Blaise’s side had grown so great he could hardly follow her words.
“Do one more thing for me.” He seized her wrist. “Get my shirt off.”
Her mouth twisted. “Not in front of the others. You owe me that much, at least.”
“Damn it, woman, I don’t have time for your foolery. I need a bandage retied.”
A strange look crept over Sibylla’s face. Her hand slid inside his tunic, found the moneybag over his heart, and inched downward, gentle over his wounds, to his sash, fingering the dagger thrust through its folds.
“I guess there’ll be time for foolery later,” she said.
“I’m too ugly for any woman to want,” he said, searching for some words that wouldn’t offend her. She wasn’t that bad looking, after all.
“As long as a man’s brave and strong, women can stand the rest. And this,” she said, caressing the bag of dinars under his clothes, “this, doesn’t hurt either.”
As the freed slaves scattered, Sibylla led Blaise to a gully where vultures perched on a headless body. With lazy wing flaps, the birds backed out of reach, then settled on the ground, waiting.
Wisps of fair hair still clung to the corpse. Blaise knelt, lifting what remained of Jehan off the smaller body wedged beneath.
He wiped Robin’s face with the damp rag Sibylla passed to him. The boy moaned.
Blaise squeezed a dribble of water between Robin’s lips. He carried the boy to the scanty shade of the road overhang, bathed his face, and chafed his hands and arms.
The vultures returned to Jehan’s body.
Robin eyes fluttered open. He stared up at Blaise uncomprehendingly.
Sibylla touched Blaise’s shoulder. “We’ve got to leave, find that Leofric the boy talked about.”
Blaise turned his face away from her as he lifted Robin onto a mule and took the lead rope and the bay’s reins.
“You shouldn’t have let the others go,” Sibylla said. “We could have sold them. But the reward will make up for it.”
Sibylla leaned against him, molding her body to his in a way that half aroused, half repulsed him.
He’d tell her some day, he thought, some place where he wouldn’t need to fear her hands on his dagger as he slept. Tell her there would be no reward, that Leofric was dead, the giant Varangian the judge in that small dusty town had bought him to fight. His pulse leaped as she laid her face against his chest, kissing him, her lips lingering.
“You smell like jasmine,” she said. “How did you manage that?”
Comments: 2 Comments »
Genres: Adventure, Fiction. Authors: Melissa Embry. Form: Short Story. Length: 4500 words. Editor who accepted this story: K.E. Abel. Reprint History: Pulp Empire, 2010
Author Bio
Melissa Embry is a former journalist living in Dallas, Texas. When not writing, she works as a volunteer at a stable that provides therapy through horsemanship to disabled children and adults.
Abandoned Towers Content: The Gates of Shaizar
Is this you? Is the information on this page correct? Let us know if it isn't!
February 19th, 2012 at 9:03 am
Ha! A good swashbuckling tale Melissa, Thanks.
February 27th, 2012 at 4:48 pm
Thanks, Rob. While writing it, I asked my sister, a former ER nurse, if arterial spray from a severed hand really could hit an opponent in the eye. She said, oh, yeah.