Chapter 8
Dar al-Rumman
For three weeks the Brotherhood had made their home at Dar al-Rumman, the House of Pomegranates.
It stood outside the walls of Fez, where the road bent down toward the river, behind a cedar gate that opened only for men with heavy purses.
By day it passed for a lodging house for foreign traders, with storerooms below and sleeping rooms above.
By night the storerooms were forgotten. Wine came up from the cellars, women came down from the upper rooms, and the man who owned the place, a soft-spoken Andalusi named Mansur, asked no questions of anyone who paid in gold.
The Brotherhood paid in gold.
Inside, pierced brass lamps scattered light across walls of green and white tile. Musk and orange blossom hung thick in the air. Somewhere beyond a carved screen, a woman sang to the oud, her voice low and slow, meant for men who had drunk too much to care what the words were.
Géraud de Vire lay back against a heap of silk cushions with a cup of dark Andalusian wine in his hand. A young woman with kohl-rimmed eyes and hennaed fingers knelt at his side, filling his cup each time it grew light. He had not asked her name. He did not intend to.
Across from him, Brother Thibault sat upright on a low bench by the lattice. He wore the cloak of the Brotherhood even here, and no woman had come near him all evening.
The curtain at the doorway parted. Three men came in. One held a bloodied cloth to his cheek. One limped, his thigh bound tight with a strip of linen already stained through. The third had a split lip and a bruise across his forehead in the shape of a stone wall.
Géraud did not rise. When he spoke, it was in the French of Normandy, so that none of the women would understand.
"Where is she?"
Oger lowered the cloth from his cheek. "We lost her."
"What do you mean you lost her?"
"She had help." Oger's jaw tightened. "A Norseman."
The singer behind the screen held a long note. Nobody in the room moved.
"A Norseman?" Géraud repeated. "In Fez."
"Big as an ox and quiet as a cat. He came out of nowhere and put Aubert into the wall before any of us saw him."
Aubert touched the bruise on his forehead and said nothing.
Thibault spoke from the lattice. "What Norseman?"
"I saw only the one. But a man like that does not sail this far alone."
Géraud set his cup down so hard that the wine leapt over the rim and ran across the girl's fingers. She did not flinch. She only wiped her hand and waited.
"Norsemen do not come to Fez to buy leather," Géraud said.
"No." Thibault's face had gone hard. "They come because they have been sent. This is that interfering Abbess's doing."
"You cannot know that."
"I know she has had her sisters watching us since Normandy. I know she would not trust this errand to a priest." Thibault leaned forward. "If her Norsemen are here, then they are after the same thing we are. And if they find it first, we are in grave danger."
Rainaud eased himself down onto a cushion, his teeth gritted against the pain in his leg. "The woman is no easier. She has been trained to fight, and to fight well. I have seen soldiers who could not move the way she moves."
"She is a merchant's daughter," Géraud said.
"She is not like any merchant's daughter I have ever seen."
Géraud turned the thought over. "Then we try the front door. Men offer for merchants' daughters every day. A Norman lord with gold and fine manners might be let into the house."
"Her father has turned away every man who has come asking," Thibault said. "He will not hand her to us. And a courtship takes months. We do not have months."
Oger looked up. "And what of the others? The women we took on the road?"
Thibault's mouth thinned. "None of them proved useful."
"None?"
"The fisherman's wife at Asilah had the mark on her shoulder, a crescent turned on its back, just as FitzOsbern described it.
But it was a scar from a cooking pot, nothing more.
The widow near Sala had a birthmark beneath her eye, shaped like a falling tear.
She wept the whole way to Fez and could not tell us one thing we did not already know.
And the girl from the Berber camp who was said to have the sight.
" He shrugged. "She saw nothing. Not even us coming. "
"Where are they now?"
"Where they will not be found," Thibault said, and did not say more.
Rainaud frowned. "I still do not understand it. Why go to such trouble over women? Take the pendant and be done."
Thibault turned his head slowly to look at him. "Because the pendant alone is worthless."
"Worthless?"
"In your hand it is a carved stone and nothing more. In mine, the same. It sleeps for anyone who does not carry the blood." Thibault's voice dropped. "But in the hands of one who does, it shows what is hidden."
The room had gone very quiet.
"FitzOsbern learned that lesson once already," Thibault went on. "He held a treasure in his hands and could not make it work, because the blood was not his. He will not make that mistake again. He wants the stone, and he wants the one who can wake it."
Géraud swirled the wine in his cup. "Think what that would mean in the duke's hall. Every whisper, every secret, every man who smiles at William and plots behind his back. The one who holds that stone would hold them all."
"Which is why the marks matter," Thibault said. "The crescent. The tear. The sight. They are the signs of the blood. Three times we followed them and three times we were wrong. Every sign points back to this city now, and to the house of Dawud ibn Yusuf al-Idrissi."
"The daughter," Oger said.
"She is guarding something. She would not fight like that for nothing." Géraud drank. "Or she is the thing being guarded."
"Then how do we take her?" Rainaud asked. "She will not be caught in an alley twice."
"No more blades in alleys." Géraud held out his cup without looking, and the girl filled it. "If she cannot be beaten, she must be made slow. A little poppy in her cup, a pinch in her water at the well or the bathhouse. A slow woman can be followed. A sleeping woman can be carried."
"And if she leads us nowhere?"
"Then we learn every door she walks through. Every house, every friend, every old woman she visits. Somewhere behind one of those doors is what we came for."
Thibault shook his head. "This is not straightforward."
"Nothing FitzOsbern asks of us ever is."
The name settled over the room. Oger looked at the floor. Aubert found something of great interest in the tiles.
"FitzOsbern will not care how hard it was," Thibault said quietly. "He will only care that we crossed half the world and came home with empty hands."
Géraud did not answer at once. He had seen what became of the last man who returned to Normandy with excuses. He had stood at that man's graveside.
"Then we do not go home empty-handed. And we do not go home late.
" He set the cup down. "The autumn storms will close the sea within weeks.
If we are not aboard ship before then, we winter here with the Norsemen breathing down our necks, and FitzOsbern waits until spring. He will not wait until spring."
He turned to Aubert.
"You will find these Norsemen. Learn where they sleep, who they meet, and why they have come. Stay out of sight. If one of them so much as buys bread, I want to know which baker."
Aubert nodded, wincing as the movement pulled at his split lip.
"And the rest of you will watch the merchant's house, day and night. The moment another chance comes, we find the pendant, and it goes back to Normandy with us." He looked at each of them in turn. "And this time, so does the woman."
Behind the screen, the song ended. In the silence that followed, the young woman at his side rose, took up the empty jug and went to fill it, and none of them watched her go.
***
Funduq al-Zaytun
THE FUNDUQ AL-ZAYTUN stood in the Andalusian quarter of Fez, a short walk from the river. It was named for the old olive tree that grew in the middle of its courtyard, older than the building and some said older than the city.
It was an honest place, as such places went.
The ground floor was given over to storerooms and stabling, so that the courtyard smelled always of mules, straw and spice sacks.
Above it rose two stories of plain rooms opening onto a carved wooden gallery, where travelers could lean on the rail and watch the comings and goings below.
Traders from al-Andalus lodged there, and salt men from the south, and cloth merchants.
The keeper was a stout, cheerful man named Yahya who had decided within a day that the northerners were good for business, since they paid on time and ate like three men apiece.
That evening they ate like four.
Yahya's cook had outdone herself. Low tables were set out beneath the olive tree and the dishes kept coming.
There was flat bread still warm from the oven, and bowls of green olives glistening with oil.
A whole lamb had been roasted slowly with cumin and coriander until the meat fell from the bone.
A stew of chicken came fragrant with saffron and sweet with honey and almonds, and a great mound of steamed couscous was heaped with vegetables and broth.
Then came dates from the southern oases, fresh figs split open, and small pastries of almond and honey that Mathias claimed for himself before anyone else could reach them.
They had been adjusting slowly. Brother Aiden had drilled the customs into them during those long evenings in Orkney, and the lessons had mostly held.
They washed their hands at the ewer before sitting.
They ate from the shared dishes with their right hands only, tearing the bread to scoop the stew.
There was no ale. That had been the hardest lesson of all. Instead they drank cold water drawn from the courtyard well and a sweet sharbat made from pomegranate syrup, which Mathias drank by the jug and declared finer than any mead in Orkney.
"Ye said that about the figs yesterday," Njal said.
"And I was right about the figs."