Chapter 18 #2
“What can I say? I like to collect extraordinary things.” Falco regarded me over his cup. “Though I will confess I was not
sure what to believe from the stories. Some say you are a heinous sea witch, others a siren who uses her beauty to lure honorable
men into sin. You certainly don’t look like what I expected of a woman of your creed, hidden behind walls and veils and sharing
a husband with a dozen others.”
“I must admit I find myself equally surprised. I assumed most Franks covered in their own body filth and tattered animal hides.”
I smiled. “I can trade caricatures too.”
He bowed his head. “Point made, nakhudha. I must admit I am glad to find you what you obviously are.”
“And what’s that?”
“A warrior. Warriors of your creed I know very, very well.”
Considering his background, I wasn’t sure that was more promising than if he thought me a harlot. “I’ve heard,” I replied
carefully. “Was killing people in Palestine and Syria not engrossing enough for you anymore?”
“Now who is trading caricatures? Do you imagine I left my natal home merely to murder Muslims?”
“No. I imagine Muslim plunder was more likely a draw.”
He chuckled. “The riches of these lands are appealing. The first time I gazed upon the walls of Constantinople, saw the fountains
in Jerusalem, and the ways people irrigate the fields in Egypt...” Genuine wistfulness entered his tone. “There is a great
deal to admire.”
“You have traveled more widely than I would have expected,” I noted, attempting a conciliatory response. I was supposed to
be drawing this man in, and he was clearly the type who liked to talk about himself. “So you came to admire us?”
“Oh, no. I came to kill you,” he said conversationally. “Our bishops said we needed to. They claimed Saracens and heathens
had sullied the ground our Savior walked, torn down our churches, and robbed and raped our pilgrims. They said it was our
duty as Christian men to put a stop to it all; that to fail to answer the call would damn our souls.” Falco met my gaze, and
for the first time, I would swear his mask briefly shifted, revealing a flash of true anger. “So my father sold off our possessions,
bankrupted our family, and mortgaged our lands to the very Church that ordered us to fight, in order to pay for the horses,
weapons, and means to do so.”
I took all that in. “And then?”
“Why then, we conquered Jerusalem.” Falco drank from his cup again. “And nothing changed.”
Every appalling tale I’d heard of the carnage in the north played across my memory. “ Nothing? ”
Falco wiped his mouth. “Oh, I’m aware of the masses who died. Then again, by now I’ve seen so many different cities fall—at
everyone’s hands, mind you—that the massacres are starting to blend together.
But have we built a new city for Christendom?
Hastened the arrival of a more just world?
Hardly. We no sooner took Jerusalem than the bickering started again, the princes and nobles of the Latin West dividing up the spoils and warring over territory.
My father, the man who sold my birthright because he believed it was what God desired, died in a drunken brawl over a stolen gold tabernacle. ”
I looked Falco over again. “You would have been very young.” But I didn’t pity him. He hadn’t been young when he’d tortured
and murdered the Socotrans.
“I was. Tried to go home too, only to learn that my homeland had also been ripped apart and sold. By Normans in my case. Foreign barbarians,” he added, with a knowing lift of his brow. “Leave
your land to invade another and what do you know...”
“A shame,” I said dryly. “And yet you came back.”
“I did. I tried to stay away. Tried to find something ...” Falco loosened the neck of his shirt, pulling free a dark sash heavy with dozens of glittering ornaments. Small decorated
buttons and pins in a variety of materials: copper, brass, tin, and bone. Flaming hearts and dragons, swords and unfamiliar
symbols.
“What are those?” I asked.
“Pilgrim badges,” he explained. “Took me most of my life to earn these. Decades spent fighting for whoever would have me and
spending those profits seeking out the places and objects people said God once visited. I prayed that in some tucked-away
shrine heavy with the gilded relics of saints, I would finally see Him. Hear Him. Feel something that would give what happened in Jerusalem meaning.”
By now, I was past the point of politeness. There were a lot of badges. “Did you never stop to think, after the first dozen failures, that maybe God was less than pleased with your murdering
innocents?”
“A somewhat hypocritical response from a pirate, no?”
“I take what is my due as a denizen of these shores,” I said flatly. “I do not kill unless my hand is forced, and I’ve yet
to participate in the slaughter of tens of thousands.”
“To be fair... I did try and leave.” He drank back the rest of his wine.
“Holy missions and plunder, they are such pretty distractions. Truth be told, the Frankish kings in your lands are there as much to compete politically as they are for riches. God just provides an awfully tempting cover, does He not?”
“I have never been arrogant enough to assume God would approve of my actions.”
Falco leaned closer. “And what if you stopped concerning yourself with what God thought altogether?”
I paused, uncertain whether it was the wine or his own bizarre inclinations speaking. “That sounds like a strange prospect
for a supposed holy warrior to entertain.”
“If I am a warrior anymore, it is for myself. For knowledge.” Falco dropped his sash, the pilgrim badges tinkling together.
“These wars have become such corrupt conflicts. Fought for mortal treasures, patches of dirt, and fleeting promises of salvation—and
fought so crudely. By your people as well as mine. Surely you are not so ignorant as to believe Muslim kings and generals any better? Most are more
concerned with using the wars to conquer their neighbors, settle petty feuds, and get rich off Christian trade.” Falco gave
me a pointed look. “I would imagine a woman pressured into piracy is all too familiar with the hypocrisy and cruelties of
the ruling class?”
I doubted the Frank genuinely cared about those being crushed by the ruling class, but I could not otherwise find much fault
in his words. For I had lost kin in those petty wars, the uncle I would never meet killed in the service of a greedy prince. I lived in a world where
one could never forget their place, where everyone I knew had been scarred and shaped by poverty—in some of the wealthiest
cities around. Indeed, I was only sitting here now because a rich woman was forcing me to save the child she loved if I did not wish mine to pay the ultimate price.
But I refused to let the barb land. “You assume I was forced into banditry. Maybe I like being a pirate.”
“Do you? For you certainly do not speak like a self-serving criminal, defending the dead of a distant land. A true pirate might be trying to strike a deal with me.”
I met his gaze. “You do not know me.”
“No, but I would like to. I would like that very much.” Falco tilted his head. “I met a man who claimed to know you, and he said you were an adventurer, an explorer—the most extraordinary person he had met in a very long time. And I wonder, nakhudha,
if you might like to embark on something extraordinary with me.”
I genuinely could not tell if Falco wanted to seduce me, hire me, or cut my throat and hang me in the cave to perform nefarious
magic with my blood. “And what is that?” I asked, hoping it wasn’t the first option almost as much as I hoped it wasn’t the
last.
“Help me end these wars forever and set things right in a new world. Or rather... an older one.”
“An older one?”
Falco waved a hand around. “Surely you have seen the treasures of this cave? The tombs and remnants of grand palisades and
arenas and citadels? Grown up listening to legends of Hercules and Jupiter, Alexander and Pharaoh, King Solomon and his consort,
the queen your people call Bilqis?”
The inclusion of Bilqis struck a bit too closely to the reason he had supposedly traveled here. Did Falco suspect I knew about
Dunya? He seemed bizarrely uninterested in what had brought me here—how I had ended up in the cave but hadn’t come through
the entrance—as though he simply assumed the world orbited around his needs.
“I have seen and know of such places and people,” I said cautiously.
“Then do you not wonder why they had access to powers beyond ours? Why they could perform miracles of strength and speak with
the Divine?” He shook his sash of badges more fiercely. “Why do these exist ? What made these people so special that they could fly across the world and raise the dead? Command legions with magical talismans?”
I hesitated. As I’ve told you, I boasted an active imagination as a child. It was easy to believe such fantastic tales, growing
up on fables and in places where ancient legends did linger, relics and stories with roots we modern believers had yet to
shed entirely.
“My people say such an age is over,” I finally replied. “Though a great many would be happy to sell you items and texts promising
otherwise.”
“Ah, but they are mostly charlatans. And I would know, for I have spent a lifetime searching for such items to little avail.
But in your part of the world...” Falco’s eyes gleamed. “You have so much more. More of everything . You have the texts and knowledge of the ancients. Your scholars read and translate their work, preserving and expanding
upon their thoughts. But they dare not go further when there are things in this world that, if mastered, could give you powers
to rival God.”
Aye, no wonder Raksh had been drawn to this monster; his ambitions were beyond delusional.
“You truly believe that in the handful of years you’ve spent in my world, you have stumbled upon powers and secrets our greatest