The Prince and the Pilgrim (5 page)

The little girl lay on her stomach, flat in the dust, watching a pair of lizards. They were fighting – or mating; she did not know which. The two occupations were, she thought, much the same. The lizards writhed and wrestled, hissing with wide, melon-coloured mouths, as they darted in and out of the shade of the tamarisk tree. Then they flashed up the rough stones of the garden wall, and disappeared.

“Alice! Alice!”

It was a man’s voice, high and rather toneless.

“Alice!”

The child made a face at the crevice where the lizards had vanished, and did not reply, but she rolled reluctantly over in the dust, ready to rise. From somewhere above and beyond the feathery branches of the tamarisk, a bell began a sweet, cracked chiming.

“Alice?” The voice was anxious now, and nearer.

“I’m coming, Father.” She got to her feet, unkilting the long gown which she had worn hitched up to the knee, and shaking the dust out of its folds. Then she picked up her sandals from among the roots of the tree where they had been thrown,
and
slipped them on over bare, grubby feet. The long gown, trailing, hid them. She smoothed the long, lovely mane of tawny-gold hair, folded her arms so that the loose sleeves hid her dirty hands, then, with downcast eyes, decorous, composed, beautiful, the Lady Alice followed her father the duke into the chapel of St Jerome at Jerusalem.

Duke Ansirus was a tall man of some forty years. He had been a notable fighter in his youth, and also a notable lover, fair and handsome and discreet. This last he needed to be, since his fancy took him invariably towards married ladies who, for a variety of reasons, found a change desirable, and Ansirus very desirable indeed. He had received a bad chest wound fighting alongside the young King Arthur at the battle of Caledon, and for some time his life had been despaired of. His eventual recovery, so said the doctors (and of course the local priest agreed with them), was nothing short of miraculous, so when he had regained his strength the duke undertook a pilgrimage of thanksgiving to the Holy Land. He did not, it is true, do it the hard way; his breathing still troubled him sometimes, and the incessant fighting between the Franks and their neighbours, as King Clovis struggled to bring all Gaul under Frankish rule, made overland travelling dangerous; but he went by ship to Italy, and then to Greece, where he stayed for a month or so before undertaking the final stage to Acre and Jerusalem. And in Athens, at the house of a friend, he met a girl who – though she was unmarried and, indeed, a virgin – so captivated him that he married her out of hand and took her with him to the Holy
Land
. Her name was Alice, and her disposition was as discreet in its own way as his: she was a silent girl, who, having been reared as a penniless dependant, had learned very early not to let her beauty – which was undoubted – throw that of her cousins into the shade. To her, my lord Ansirus was an escape, an establishment, a fortune: if he was more, only Ansirus knew. She was a quiet and dutiful wife, who managed her domestic affairs with careful efficiency, and kneeled meekly beside her lord as he thanked God at some length daily for his restored health and now for his happiness.

She did not have long to enjoy the wealth and comfort of Ansirus’ castle, back in the rich heartlands of Rheged. A year after the couple’s return to Britain, Alice died in childbed, and the baby girl was handed to nurse.

It might have been supposed that the grief-stricken widower would blame the child for her mother’s loss, and thrust her from him, but the past year’s happiness had been intense, and his repentance of the sins of his youth was genuine. He transferred all he had of love to the baby. He had vowed himself, at his wife’s deathbed, to chastity, and this vow he kept. He had vowed, too, to make another pilgrimage, and undertook this within the year. He would have taken the child with him, but the women who looked after the nursery were so horrified that he, remembering the discomforts of the journey, and the dirt and disease of the Holy Land, let himself be persuaded to go alone. But by the time the little Alice, at five years old, was growing impatient with her
nurses
, and running freely about the castle gardens, she was so like her mother that the bereaved father could hardly bear to let her out of his sight, and when he planned his next pilgrimage he insisted – and this time Alice insisted, too, and she had a habit of getting her own way – that his daughter should go with him. So here they were at last, kneeling side by side in front of the picture of St Jerome with his scarlet robe and his pet lion, Ansirus with closed eyes and moving lips, his mind fixed on prayer, and the child Alice, her young face sweet as an angel’s, the grey eyes lifted towards God.

I wonder, she was thinking, when the figs come ripe on that tree outside the window? Those lizards were funny, weren’t they, the way they jumped and twisted together? I wonder if they have babies the ordinary way, or if they lay eggs like the newts in the pond at home? Eggs must be so much easier. Why do people have to do it the other way? Oh, and do you think we might go back in the same ship, with the captain who wore the gold earring, and used all those strange words to the sailors, and had that bird that talked, but Father wouldn’t buy it for me? Perhaps – if
you
spoke to him? I know you often do. And I’d love to have that bird, I really would.

Odd as it may seem, the Lady Alice, too, was talking to God.

For the more important days – saints’ days and Sundays – the duke and his daughter attended
the
great church of the Resurrection, but for their daily prayers they used the chapel of St Jerome, a small oratory set in one of the aisles of the church of St Mary, which had been built two centuries before by the Roman Emperor Constantine. This church, built of vast stones, was richly decorated, being the repository of the wealth of the thousands of pilgrims who nowadays flocked to the Holy City. It was set on the Haram, the vast plateau where originally, so men said, the temple of Solomon had stood, and where Jesus Himself had listened to the rabbis, and had overthrown the moneychangers. And from one of those tall towered corners the devil himself had shown Him all the kingdoms of the world.

Now all that had vanished, and the chiselled stones of the temples and law courts, evidences of the Roman rule of Herod’s time, had been pillaged for use elsewhere. But at night, with the new buildings bulking tall and black, and moonlight sifting down through pines and olive-trees into the narrow streets, it was easy to imagine all those stories that were told, ceaselessly told, to the pilgrims as they followed their Lord’s footsteps up the Way of the Cross, to the Pool of Bethesda under the temple gateway, to the Garden of Gethsemane, or even to the rock of the Tomb itself, hidden though this now was in the foundations of a church.

“And lucky to be there still for us to see,” said Ansirus, who himself took his daughter around to show her the holy places. “If they hadn’t stopped people bringing hammers in to get a piece of the sacred rock to take home with them, there’d be
very
little of the place left by this time. There are twice as many pilgrims now as when I last came here.”

The city was, indeed, packed to its limits, and these were very busy extending each year. The whole district round the Haram abounded in inns, hospices and monasteries where the pilgrims were lodged in varying degrees of comfort or austerity. Alice and her father were more fortunate than most: Ansirus had, on his first visit to Jerusalem with his wife, stayed with friends, Romans who had had in the past some distant connection with her family. When Rome itself had fallen to the swords of the Goths a century earlier, many Romans had been forced to flee with their families, and some of these had stayed and settled in Jerusalem. Most had prospered, building or buying houses among the wooded hills at the edge of the city. It was in one of these, near the foot of the Mount of Olives, that Alice and her father were staying.

Lentulus, their host, was a banker and man of affairs; he was making, it was said, a fortune out of property, buying rubble-strewn land and clearing it to sell for building. He was involved, it was also said, in the purchase of sacred items – not, of course, to attract the faithful to the city, but, once they had come, to satisfy their souls. Splinters of the True Cross, pieces of the reed that had held the sponge of vinegar, a thorn from the Crown, a drop of the vinegar itself in a vial – these marvellous relics were still available, at a price. Alice, being shown some of these items, viewed them with simple awe, but even at five years old was
moved
to wonder at the ever-renewed supply of nails and thorns that were on offer. A miracle, surely? Her father put her questions aside rather uneasily, with talk of faith and symbols which, not understanding, she promptly forgot. And there was no need for him to caution her, as he did, not to ask anyone else about such matters; she had no one else to talk to. Lentulus’ two sons, grown men and married, were away from home, one in business in Acre, the other back in Massilia. Lentulus’ wife, Matilda, was crippled with arthritis, and kept to her own chamber, leaving the running of the house to an elderly Jewish couple who kept very much to themselves. Alice had no companion of her own age. And since she spent all day visiting the sites of pilgrimage, and making the necessary round of service and intercession, and was sent to her bed soon after supper, it did not occur to Ansirus that she might need anything else to fill her time, or, if he had considered it (which of course, since Alice was a girl, he did not), her mind. When he did think about her – and he was a devoted father – he assumed that the child was having the best possible preparation for the life she would have to live. For a girl like Alice, life held two alternatives: she must marry some suitable man of her father’s choosing, and bear his children, or she must take her vows and retire to a convent, a chaste and holy Bride of Christ.

Devout though he was, the duke inclined towards the first alternative for his daughter. His beautiful little estate in Rheged, with the rose-coloured castle –
Arx Rosea
on the old maps – set
in
a deep curve of the Eden River, would need another master one day, and an heir; and of course a granddaughter or two would be welcome as well. Would, in fact, be delightful. So sometimes, watching that flower-like young face in church beside him lifted, rapt, towards God, he wondered if, by keeping her here with him through the whole ritual of pilgrimage, he was not driving her, headlong and far too early, into the arms of the Church.

He need not have troubled himself. With a child less intelligent, or less imaginative, it might have been true. But Alice, while of course believing all the stories, had acquired a faith that worked at the simplest – and most profound – level. She was easily able to accept the holy apostles, the saints, and the Lord Jesus Himself, as people who had walked here and done their wonders – magic or miracles, what was the difference? – and who might very well be met again one day. Of course there had been the Crucifixion, but for the pilgrims the strongest emphasis was on the Resurrection, the happy ending, as in the stories that Alice liked best.

Meanwhile life in Jerusalem surrounded her, pressed on her, excited and interested her. There was so much happening, so much to see; the carefully irrigated gardens (think of the rain at home!); the towers where storks nested and swallows darted and twittered all day; the lizards and tiny scorpions, the coloured birds (five for two farthings?); the baby camels trotting after their dams along the narrow
souks
, the goods for sale in the stalls, the streets of the coppersmiths, rug-makers,
linen-sellers
; the children playing in the dirt, the robed riders with their beautiful horses.

And Jesus, who had loved Jerusalem too? Some day He would be back here again, walking these streets, looking at all the new buildings, talking to the people and stopping to speak to the children; she only hoped that it would be when she and her father were here on pilgrimage. There would be plenty of chances; the duke had vowed, she knew, to make a pilgrimage every third year or so for his soul’s sake …

And some three years later, when she was eight years old, and back in Jerusalem with her father, it happened.