Beloved Pilgrim (41 page)

Elisabeth thought she ought to get away from
here quickly, but she ventured, "Where did they go?"

The man leered with savage delight.
"Herakleia." The knife-edge sharpness of his words chilled her to
the core.

Astonished that she had made it out of even a
deserted town alive, the animosity toward pilgrims understandably
great, she pressed on. Soon she discovered that every well the road
passed was blocked. The villages were deserted and emptied of
anything she or Gauner could eat. She was sorry she had been so
generous with Hans. She pressed on.

Forced to camp without a fire, she rode on.
Finally she saw before her some hills rising about the plain. The
road, it appeared, wound its way between them. A presentiment made
a chill go down her perspiring back even before she saw the
swirling black shapes in the sky. She knew as she rode closer that
the birds were carrion birds as she had feared. There was an untold
number. She urged the already dehydrated Gauner to a faster pace.
She kept her eyes dead ahead, waiting to see the first body, not
remembering to protect herself from ambush.

As she rode into the defile she started to
see them. First a score, then a hundred, then innumerable corpses,
most already picked at by the carrion birds. She scanned the bodies
as the tears ran down her cheeks, making the stifling heat under
her helm humid and even more unbearable. Men, all men. No women.
She saw a long narrow pool of water ahead alongside the road in a
small widening of the track between the hills. There were so many
bodies next to it she almost could not see the water. But Gauner
saw it and pulled forward. She dragged back the reins to keep him
in check.

Elisabeth scanned the space before her. She
saw it rising above the barrier of the bodies. Some sort of box.
Wood with cloth of some sort. A litter! She leapt from Gauner's
back and ran to the litter. "Ida, Ida!" she called. "Where are
you?" She dashed about the litter looking at the bodies. She caught
sight of what looked like a woman's cloak. The woman was mostly
hidden under other bodies, but she managed to pull her out and turn
her over. It was one of Ida's serving-women, Elisabeth saw. And she
was quite dead, though how she had died Elisabeth could not tell.
She was bloody enough that if there was a wound, it would require a
search to find it. She abandoned the woman's corpse and continued
her search.

She had the impression that Gauner, no longer
restrained, had found his way through and over the bodies to the
pool and was undoubtedly drinking his fill. Her own throat was
parched, but she would not leave off her search.

She heard a small noise from the direction of
the overturned litter. It came again, a faint moan. She dashed to
the litter and lifted it to look under. There indeed was a body, a
woman's body. The woman's clothing was soaked with blood and caked
with dirt, nevertheless were clearly of rich quality. Her face was
. . . it hardly looked like a face. She knelt by the woman and
lifted her upper body in her arms. "Your Grace?"

The moaning stopped. "Who ith that?" she
lisped. The voice was Ida's, recognizable in spite of its
hoarseness.

"It's Elias, your Grace. You met me in Mölk.
Remember, we talked about my late sister."

One sunburned arm lifted so that the woman
could shade the one eye that could open. Half of her face was
crushed, the ridge around that eye, her cheekbone and the jaw on
that side bloody and disfigured. It was a miracle she could talk at
all. It was a miracle she was alive at all. "I remember. The knight
who wath tho thmitten with me."

Elisabeth laughed. "That's the one. What
happened to you?"

The woman sighed. "A horthe'th hoof happened
to me." She had fallen from the litter when her bearers dropped it,
rolled out of it and under one of the Turk's horses. Had it been a
destrier like Gauner she would not be alive.

The Margravina was struggling to rise. "Wait,
your Grace. Let me get my horse. I'll get you on it somehow and
then we can ride back for help." She looked about. "Is everyone
dead? What about the Nivenais?"

"I don't know. We got here and the men went
mad. They thaw the pool. But it wath poithoned."

Elisabeth looked down at her. "Poisoned? Oh
sweet Jesu!"

She leapt to her feet and ran toward the
pool, jumping over and sidestepping corpses of both pilgrims and
Turks. She rounded the tallest pile of bodies and found Gauner. He
was unsteady on his feet. Foam spewed from his muzzle. His legs
seemed to be buckling. He collapsed and fell, landing hard in the
water, making it splash up away from where Elisabeth approached.
The horse lay with his head half in the water, breathing heavily,
erratically. Being careful not to touch the water, she knelt by him
and leaned out to stroke his neck. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
She sobbed. "Oh Gauner!" The horse rolled its eye at her. Its
confusion and pain were evident. Wiping her sweaty forehead on her
arm, where the mail was blistering hot, she reached for her dagger.
In one quick movement she put her destrier out of his misery.
"Goodbye, old friend. Tell Elias I am so sorry when you see
him."

She knelt, still sobbing, until she
remembered Ida. She got to her feet and gave the horse one last
look, realizing with regret that her saddlebag was underneath him.
She ran back unsteadily to the overturned litter. Ida's eyes were
closed and she hardly seemed to breathe. "Oh no," Elisabeth moaned,
kneeling by the woman. She put her ear to the Margravina's breast
over her heart. She remembered bitterly longing to rest her cheek
there, what was it, centuries ago? The heart was still beating.

Elisabeth stood and looked around again. For
the first time she noticed the stench. Carrion birds eyed her
hostilely. She saw the poles that lifted the litter and went to one
and pulled it out. It was slow work, and she thought she might pass
out from the heat and the effort. Somehow she got both poles free.
She reached for the wineskin at her belt and remembered Ida's
parched lips. She dashed back to the woman, who now lay under some
cloth Elisabeth had torn from the litter curtains. She knelt and
lifted the woman's head. She tried to trickle some water in her
mouth, but it just ran over her teeth and lips and off her jaw into
the dirt. There was almost none left. She left the skin by Ida and
went back to her task.

Stripping the tunics off two bodies, the
chain mail already stripped from all of the knights and soldiers,
she went back to the poles. She slipped the ends into the sleeves
of the first shirt, then the other ends into the sleeves of the
other. She used the laces that held up britches or chain mail
leggings to tie the two together at their hems. It was a stretcher
of sorts, but what else was there to be done?

She returned to Ida and gently lifted her in
her arms. She was so light! Ida was a petite woman, but Elisabeth
realized that much of the impression was due to her own developed
muscles. Life as a knight, in fact if not by right of chivalry, had
made her immensely strong. She would need that strength now, if she
was to walk back to Byzantine territory dragging the stretcher with
the Margravina behind her. She settled the woman on the stretcher,
then went to retrieve her wineskin. As she did she scanned the
bodies for the garb of noblemen. She saw knights, but no one was
more richly dressed. Had these men, nobleman and commanders,
deserted their armies like Raymond, Conrad, the Lombard noblemen,
the two Stephens and Odo had? Leaving Ida to suffer and die or be
taken and forced into slavery? Her anger was so intense, her head
throbbed so painfully, she was forced to lean forward and retch out
what little was in her stomach. No one looked like a high churchman
either. So Ida's own elected Archbishop had abandoned her too.

When she got back to the makeshift stretcher,
she saw that Ida was moving under the cloths that shaded her. She
parted them to see the blue, uninjured eye peering out at her.
"Where'th you horth?"

"Dead. Poisoned. But I made this stretcher. I
will pull it behind me. We will get back to safety." She pulled out
the wineskin, propped up the woman's head and poured the last few
sips of the water in her mouth. Ida sputtered but swallowed it
all.

"God bleth you, my champion," Ida
croaked.

In spite of the horror of their situation,
Elisabeth's heart thrilled at the words.

Elisabeth wrapped a length of cloth around
her head to shade it from the sun. She strode forth into the hills
with one pole of the stretcher in each hand. Her elbows were bent
so she could press her arms in to help take the weight. It was
negligible now, but she knew it would soon seem heavier. Her helm
was back at the scene of the massacre with the rest of her armor.
She could not carry it or wear it. All she had now was her sword
belt, sword and dagger. And the Margravina of Austria.

Elisabeth had always had an instinctual sense
of direction. Glancing at the path of the sun as she walked, she
made her way west by northwest, hoping to intersect the road she
had traveled before. She knew the chances of survival were
minuscule, but all she could do was persevere. She realized soon
enough that trying this in the heat of the sun was insane, so she
found a place where a rocky outcrop created shade and dragged the
stretcher toward it. "We'll continue when it gets dark. It's
October now, I think, so it should not be long."

"I am tho thirthty," the woman, with half her
face crushed, moaned.

Elisabeth felt her own heart sink. "I know,
your Grace. I am so sorry. There is no water."

She sat next to the woman's shuddering body
and waited for dark. She longed to see Maliha's soft honey-colored
eyes again, to tousle Tacetin's dark curls, to smile and laugh with
Albrecht. She said aloud, "Oh, Elias, I am so sorry I have failed
so utterly. But if I must die like this, I am glad at least you
were spared that. If I did nothing else right, I tried. I saved
Albrecht, Elias. He is happy again now. You would like Andronikos.
He dotes on him. You would approve."

A sound came from under the cloth that veiled
the Margravina. Elisabeth reached and pulled the cloth away from
Ida's face. "Eliath," the woman croaked.

"Your Grace?"

"Pleathe hold me," Ida pleaded.

Elisabeth stretched out alongside her. She
took the woman in her arms and gently moved her head so its left
side rested on her shoulder. Ida was silent, what little strength
she had she used to hold her knight close. Elisabeth remembered
that when she had first seen this woman, this lovely woman, she had
told Albrecht she wanted to die in her arms. The woman who was now
dying in hers.

She could feel the life in that once
beautiful body become weaker and weaker. At last Ida shuddered and
was still. The most beautiful woman in Europe, the Dowager
Margravina of Austria, was dead. And Elisabeth knew she would soon
be dead herself, and Ida's son, the Margrave Leopold, would never
know what had happened to his mother.

She sat and wept, though there were no tears.
She had so little moisture in her body she could make none. As the
sun went down, she tried her best to lay out Ida's body, to cover
it suitably with the curtains from the litter, and to scrape a
trench to lay her in. She knew the animals would get at the body if
she did not cover it with stones. She only had the strength to drag
a few over. She knelt and prayed for the repose of the Margravina's
soul. Then she pulled herself to her feet, and now, with no burden
but her thirst, exhaustion and heatstroke, she set out again on her
journey. The half moon showed her the way.

She had no idea how much time had passed, how
far she had walked, when she fell and moved no more.

She felt herself tumbled from side to side.
It felt as if she lay in a cart rumbling painfully up a road. A
wineskin spout touched her lips and she drank the water, cool,
clear, fresh water that spilled onto her lips. A cool hand stroked
her forehead. "Maliha," she tried to say, but her throat was closed
and her lips too parched.

"Hush, my love. You are saved. You will be
all right." Maliha exchanged glances with someone else in the
cart.

Elisabeth craned her neck to see who it was.
The movement made her head reel, and she almost passed out. A
familiar voice said humorously, "It's Hans. Your friends came and I
told them where you had gone. We found the bodies and guessed what
you had done, from the drag marks of the poles. No wind down in
that defile, you see. The eunuch sent men to follow you, since the
cart could not. They found you lying face down on a hillside. They
thought your were dead, but obviously you were not. This one has
been taking care of you."

She knew he meant Maliha. She looked up into
Maliha's wonderful eyes, so full of love. She tried to form the
words, "I love you."

"I love you too," Maliha said. "Now let's get
home to Tacetin and Albrecht. We will have our whole lives to
talk."

The corners of Elisabeth's dust-dry lips
lifted as far as they could. She closed her eyes, felt the woman's
breasts against her cheek.

Maliha murmured, "Rest, my beloved
pilgrim."

Elisabeth sighed and slept.

The End

The fact that anyone can put together a true
account of the devastating Crusade of 1101 is remarkable. Besides
Anna Komnena’s sparse references in her Alexiad, quoted in the
final chapter of this novel, only two more or less contemporary
records of the expedition exist. One, by Ekkhardt of Aura, was
written by a man who arrived in Constantinople with other pilgrims
and then set sail for Syria before any news had come from the
pilgrims led, or misled, by Raymond de Saint Gilles, Count of
Toulouse. The second was a narrative written ten years after these
events by Albert of Aachen (Aix). Sir Stephen Runciman* based his
scholarly account on these and similar works, and even there I
found some poor reasoning, specifically that the conditions he
describes, going for days with no water in the summer heat would,
according to an expert, have killed the entire pilgrim force.