Chapter 9 #2
Jean gazed first at me, then at the horizon, and back again.
“You still don’t believe I’m from another time,” I said.
I wouldn’t have believed it either, but I remembered his shocked face when I was sucked into the spring last time.
“But you saw, right? How I was sucked in back then?” Jean cleared his throat and moved to where his horse was standing, chained to the wall of the building by a large iron ring.
“I saw,” he said curtly. He stroked the horse’s mane and turned to me.
“After you disappeared, I thought perhaps I had lost my wits. Or that you were some kind of a sorceress, sent to confound innocent Christians,” he said, furrowing his brow.
He seemed serious and distrustful. I pursed my lips in order not to smile.
A sorceress. “And where’s your friend, the king? ” I asked.
“Thibaut?” Jean asked, his eyes still fixed on me warily. “He tarries in the city.”
“And where might that be?” I ventured.
“Acre,” Jean replied, as if I’d asked the dumbest question ever. His eyes expressed increasing suspicion. He pronounced the name of the city differently from the way it’s pronounced in Hebrew.
“Ah, right, Acco,” I said with forced lightness.
We fell silent. Jean examined one of the horse’s hooves with great attention. Brunette came up to me and licked my hand. I scratched her behind the ears and took deep breaths. “I dreamed about you afterward,” I told Jean. He continued tinkering with the hoof.
“I dreamed you owned a brewery, and you were pleased I liked the drink you offered me.”
He turned to me abruptly. The horse whinnied with resentment. Jean’s eyes opened in terror, and he placed a hand on his heart.
“This is too much …” he stammered.
“What’s too much?” I asked.
“I …” His eyes wandered. “I dreamed of you too. That we were sitting at a trestle table by a very strange-looking building. You wept and drank from my ale.”
The clarity of the day was obscured by a passing cloud, and all at once the atmosphere turned ominous. A raven hovered above, screeching hoarsely, its wings flapping with evil intent. My hand tightened around the ten-agorot coin.
“You are pale, my lady,” Jean noted apprehensively.
“I don’t know what to make of all this,” I replied, barely managing to form the words. “Perhaps I should go home.” I knelt beside the spring, too weak to stand any longer, and removed the necklace with the Ibelin coin from my neck.
“Wait!” Jean cried out. I looked up at him. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I know not what is happening. Wicked sorcery or utter insanity … but here you are.” He paused, and I flashed him a crooked smile.
Suddenly, he was smiling too. He patted his horse distractedly and said, “In truth, why should I be so alarmed? I thought of you and dreamed of you, and here you are, like the fairy Thibaut keeps claiming you are. Let us make the most of it.”
I enjoyed listening to him talk, with his rolling Old French r. I didn’t know whether to attribute the fact that I understood him to the passage afforded me by the spring or to my gift for language.
I moved toward him. I wanted to hug him, but it seemed inappropriate. I patted the horse instead, and it gave a loud snort.
The sun reappeared, and the plain appeared green and full of life. Birds chirped all around, and the deep blue sea twinkled in front of us. The last time we met, I wasted the opportunity by stressing out. I’ve got to chill, I told myself.
“Do you know what the time is?” I asked, fishing my cell phone out of my bag and noting, once again, that it wasn’t working.
“What do you mean?” Jean asked. He removed two small ceramic cups from his satchel and opened a cloth sack containing nuts and dates. I noticed that he was doing everything in his power to ignore the instrument in my hand.
“The hour today? Twelve? One?” Jean lifted his head and frowned, perplexed, as if I’d asked another ridiculous question.
I looked up at the sky. The sun inclined slightly westward, beyond the zenith, and the shadows were short.
It was probably about one in the afternoon.
For a moment I was bothered by the idea that Halimi might be worried about me. And then I turned to Jean.
“So, have you been waiting for me the whole morning?” I inclined my head in his direction. I wanted him to be that same youthful, mellow person he had been the first time we met.
He looked at me and smiled broadly. “In fact, yes,” he admitted.
My own smile broadened too. “Truth be told, my lady, I knew not what to expect,” Jean confessed.
“But I could not stop myself from returning here, as soon as time allowed.” I bowed my head in gratitude, and he responded with a chivalrous nod.
“Perhaps we can ride to the sea together?” I asked. The beach looked wild and utterly empty. I wanted to gallop down there right away, but I continued, “And on the way, you can tell me how you’ve been these past few days.”
“How I’ve been?” Jean asked, scratching his forehead. “What do you mean?”
I sighed, exasperated.
“I mean, what did you do over the past few days, how did you feel?”
Jean raised his eyebrows in mock surprise, but all he said was, “Very well then, do you have a horse for riding nearby?”
I chuckled. A horse for riding.
“In truth,” Jean began, narrowing his eyes at me but still smiling, “there are stables here, a little to the south. There are horses there, not exactly for riding, but pack horses for the quarry carts. Yet they are amenable and well-disciplined, and surely the knights will consent if we ask them.”
“I … ah …” I spluttered uncomfortably, “I’ve never ridden a horse in my life.”
Jean turned to me, shocked. “You jest, my lady?”
“In my time … I mean, where I come from, we don’t ride horses.
We have vehicles that move along by themselves.
” Jean’s eyebrows shot up again. I later realized he may not have understood the word vehicle, but at the time I added uselessly, “You just have to drive them.” I became flustered, anxious he might ask me how things move by themselves, and of course I didn’t really know.
But Jean seemed preoccupied with other thoughts.
“Come, my lady,” he said, patting the horse affectionately on its backside.
He went and sat down on the folded mat under the tree.
“We shall partake of hashish and talk awhile … about … how we’ve been,” he said.
Our eyes met, and we burst out laughing.
“If you do not ride, why do you ask about it?” Jean asked in a teasing way.
“I thought that …” I was a little embarrassed. Jean’s eyebrows rose. “I thought maybe … I don’t know if it’s done around here … I thought we might ride together on your horse.” Jean threw his head back and laughed out loud. I breathed a sigh of relief.
“You are most daring, Lady édith,” he said, and I detected a note of admiration in his voice. “You remind me of my sister, Isabelle.” He settled down comfortably under the tree, his back supported by the trunk, his legs straight in front of him. I sat down beside him.
“What’s so funny?” I answered. “And what’s so daring about it? Was it not you who suggested last time that we ride together to the fortress? Would we not have ridden together on the same horse?” I adopted not only the flowery style of his speech but also his peculiar accent.
Jean pondered for a moment.
“There is truth in your words,” he reflected.
“But it is one thing when a knight offers a lady in distress the use of his horse in her hour of need, and another when that same lady offers the knight an opportunity to ride with her on his horse for the sheer pleasure of it,” he concluded with a wink, and I nodded in response.
“And why do you presume I am a lady?” I asked, teasing him back, stretching my legs out in front of me. Jean gaped at my bare shins, peeking out between sneakers and sweatpants.
Jean looked at me blankly for a moment and then said, “It is clear you lack any modesty or reverence for someone in authority, which gives testimony to your superior lineage. This is further manifest in the Frankish dialect you speak. Despite your peculiar accent, the eloquence of your tongue testifies to a superior education. The same is true of your appearance—the color of your skin, the daintiness of your fingers, the perfection of your teeth. Though your bare head and cascading hair is deemed a sign of wantonness in these parts, you clearly take great care of it.” His hand rose up for a moment, as if he were about to stroke my hair, but instead he lowered it to run his fingers through Brunette’s fur.
“In addition to this,” he continued, “at our previous rendezvous, you presented yourself as Countess of … I believe you gave a variation on a Saracen name.”
“Right …” I admitted, blushing. “In my time … where I come from, there are no counts or countesses. Everyone is the same.” As I spoke, I knew I was being imprecise.
Jean’s curiosity was aroused. I tried to explain the modern system of government, telling him how it resembled the democratic system of the ancient Greek polis.
Jean was deeply impressed, less by the miraculous glimpse into the future, or so it seemed to me, and more by the very fact I had knowledge of the Greek polis and its system of government.
“Countess or not,” he said, “a woman who knows early Greek sources is surely a lady. No other woman has either the education or the leisure to study such subjects.” After a moment, he added, “Nor man, in truth.” I nodded my head slowly.
We smoked. I looked around, enchanted by the nonchalant dexterity with which he lit a flame—striking a small piece of metal against something dark and stony and feeding the spark with a handful of weeds. “What do you call this?” I asked Jean.
He raised his eyes to me, bending down. “A fire striker,” he said, after a brief delay. “And what do you call this?”