The Saracen: Land of the Infidel by Robert Shea (best fiction books to read .TXT) 📗

the back of his neck under his hair, sending thrills down his spine. He could not move away from her.

"Stop," he whispered. "Please stop."

"Are you afraid of me?" she asked softly.

"I am afraid for both of us. You do not know what a raging fire a lovely woman like you can kindle in a man like me."

She withdrew her hand from his neck and let it rest on his thigh. That, he thought, made it even more difficult for him.

"I must tell you something," she said. "I am not—wholly innocent."

His heart felt a sudden chill. How could this dear creature be anything but innocent?

Now her hands were in her lap and her eyes were cast down. "As you surely know, most women past twenty, unless they are nuns, have been married for years. You must have wondered what I am doing in Orvieto, unmarried, living with my uncle."

"I never thought about it."

"Then you are very innocent."

Simon felt himself wilt inwardly. How could he have been so blind as not to wonder why Sophia was not married? She had seemed timeless to him and attached to no one. Even her relation to the cardinal, except that it put her in the enemy camp, seemed unimportant.

"You have a husband?" His voice was heavy with sorrow. Foolish as it was, he had dreamed that she might be virginal. But that made no sense, now that he considered it. The rule in courtly love was to fall in love with a lady who was married to someone else. His Parisian courtly lovers had been married women. If Sophia were already married, that should make it better.

Then why did he feel so disappointed?

"I was married at fourteen. His name was Alessandro. He died two years later of the damned fever that takes so many of our good Sicilian people. He was very kind to me, and I was inconsolable."

"Ah. You are still in mourning for him?"

She turned her hands over, showing empty palms. "I loved him so much that I could not think of marrying another man in Siracusa. At length my mother and father decided to send me to live with my uncle in the hope that I could forget Alessandro enough to consider marrying again."

"Do you wish to marry again?"[354]

"I have met no one I am drawn to but you, Simon, and marriage between you and me would be unthinkable. My family's station is so far beneath yours."

His heart leapt happily. She was free, yet, as she said, not wholly innocent. He need not feel quite so guilty about the passionate thoughts he had been having about her. And as for marriage between them being unthinkable, she did not know that none of the great houses of France would consider a daughter of theirs taking the name de Gobignon. Her nonclerical family might be of low station, just as the pope's father had been a shoemaker, but Sophia was the niece of a cardinal, a prince of the Church.

It was love, not thoughts of marriage, that had brought him here tonight. Still, he must respect her honorable widowhood. Since she had loved her husband, she might be more susceptible to him, and he must guard her virtue all the more steadfastly. Perhaps she thought that he respected her less as a widow. He must reassure her.

She was not holding him any longer. He could stand up without tearing himself away from her. He sprang to his feet and strode to the center of the room.

"Believe me, I think you just as pure as if you had never been married at all."

She looked up at him, surprised, her hands still folded in her lap, her dark eyes wide.

"I am delighted to hear that. But"—she cast her eyes down and smiled faintly—"does that mean there is to be nothing at all between us?"

"I love you!" Simon declared. "I will always love you. I think of you night and day. I beg you to love me in return."

"Oh, Simon. How beautiful." She held out her arms to him. But he stayed where he was and raised his hands warningly.

"I mean to love you according to the commandments of l'amour courtois. With every fiber of my being I yearn to be altogether yours, but you must restrain me."

"I must?"

"You must be what the poets of old Languedoc called 'mi dons'—my lord. You must rule me. One day we will join together in body, but only after I have been tested and found worthy."

"Is that what courtly love means?"

"Yes, and that is why it is more beautiful than marriage. Husband and wife may embrace carnally the moment the priest says[355] the words over them. No, they are required to. Courtly lovers know each other only when love has fully prepared the way, so that their coming together may be a moment of perfect beauty."

Sophia looked at him silently. Her face was suddenly unreadable.

"Do you understand?" he asked after he had stood awhile gazing into her lustrous brown eyes. "These ideas are perhaps new to you."

"The woman is ruler of the man?"

"Yes."

The corners of her mouth quirked. "Then what if I were to command you to get into this bed with me?"

He was certain from her sly smile that she was joking. But he could think of no clever answer. He considered what he had read, what he had been told, what he had done with other women. None of it helped. The women who fell into bed with him on the first tryst had not been serious about love, nor had he been. In all the lore of l'amour courtois the woman made the man wait—sometimes for years, sometimes for his entire life—and the man was happy to wait, and that was all there was to it.

Then he remembered something his mother had said, a secret so precious he would never tell anyone, not even Sophia. Not even Friar Mathieu needed to know it. But it guided Simon now.

The first time your father and I were alone together I wanted him then and there. But he was strong enough for both of us. It was a whole year before we possessed each other in body. And you came of that union.

"You will not command me so," he said with cheerful confidence.

Her eyebrows rose—they were strong and dark, like a raven's wings. "Indeed?"

"Because you know how much better it would be to wait. We both want each other now. But if we restrain that hunger, it will grow. It will be not just a desire of the flesh, but a longing of the spirit. It is said that the souls in paradise know no greater happiness than two lovers do, who are united in soul as well as body."

"Prodigioso," she said. "But I am just a Sicilian girl, and I do not perhaps have the refined spiritual appetite of a French nobleman. What if I cannot wait?"

"It is natural," Simon said, thinking again of what his mother had confided to him. "Then I must be strong enough for both of us."[356]

The thought of her powerful passions, which she restrained with such difficulty, excited him. Holding himself back from her was going to be painful, but delightfully so. And think of the ecstasy when at last they were united.

Sophia released a long sigh and brought the palms of her hands down on her knees with a slap of finality. "So be it, Simon. You will teach me the ways of courtly love, and I will do my best to be your—what did you call it?"

"Mi dons. My lord."

Her teeth flashed white in the candlelight, and her lips glistened. Simon's own lips burned to taste hers.

"How strange. As if I were the man. Ah, but you are very much a man, Simon, and you make me feel very much a maiden."

Simon turned and went to the window. The night air blew through the gauze curtains, and he felt a wonderful aliveness all over his body. He wondered whether Alain, out there in the dark somewhere, could see him here in the window. He pushed the curtain aside so Alain, if he was there, could get a good look and know that his seigneur was safe and happy.

Dawn must still be hours away. What would he tell Alain about what transpired this night? The truth, assuredly. But would Alain believe him? And if he did, would he mock Simon for not bedding Sophia?

No, Alain would understand. He respected the good in men and women as much as Simon did. Which was why they were friends as well as lord and vassal.

Sophia stood beside him and put her hand on his shoulder.

"You cannot stand there all night, Simon. Come back and sit down."

He bowed. "As mi dons commands." He let her take his hand and draw him away from the window.

There was one chair in the room, and he took it. Foolish to expose himself to temptation by sitting beside her on the bed again. The chair was straight, with a tall back and no arms. The only touch of comfort in its rectilinear shape was a cushion laid upon its seat. Sophia smiled and shrugged and sat again on her bed.

Would she let him spend the night? Whenever he had been all night with a woman, they had made love. Should he sing to her again? Would she want to sleep? He pictured himself watching over her while she slept, perhaps kneeling by her bedside, and the beauty of it thrilled him.[357]

Now he remembered something she had said earlier, that he had accused her of kissing him only to further my uncle's plots against the Tartars. She was aware, then, of what Ugolini was doing.

She has no idea how much she revealed to me.

He sang another troubadour song, "White Hands." She let him draw off her red silk slippers, and he almost cast away all his promises to himself as she curled her toes against the palm of his hand. He forced himself to stand up and pace the room while she lounged back on her bed, her head propped up on her elbow, watching him with that delicious smile of hers.

She questioned him about his life, and he offered her a simple version of it, telling her nothing about his secret illegitimacy and the dishonor of the man whose name he bore. It struck him while talking to her that perhaps these two sins that had shaped his life—Amalric de Gobignon's treason and Nicolette de Gobignon's adultery—had given him the strength to resist the temptation to assail Sophia's virtue. He told her how he had spent much of his youth in the household of the King of France and how this had led to Count Charles d'Anjou's giving him the task of protecting the Tartar ambassadors.

And thus, inevitably, their talk got around to the Tartars.

"Why did you accept this task from the Count of Anjou?" she asked. "You have a lofty title, huge estates, everything you could want. Why trouble yourself with all this intrigue?"

Having decided not to tell her the truth about his past, Simon now could not answer her question both honestly and fully. He could not say that he had committed himself to this mission to clear the stain of treason from the name of de Gobignon and to prove that he had a right to the title.

So he told her of another reason, equally true.

"I am in part an orphan, and the king was like a second father to me. It is his wish that Christians and Tartars join together to liberate the Holy Land. And I would do anything for him."

Sophia frowned. "I find that hard to understand. As for me, I hate the Tartars."

Simon's mind pounced on that. Could she be more involved in Ugolini's scheming than she had admitted?

"Why do you hate the Tartars? You know so little about them."

"I know that they almost made enemies of us because you thought I was kissing you just to help my uncle."

Walk carefully, Simon.[358]

Again she was hinting at her uncle's involvement in all that had gone wrong for the alliance. But if he asked her about it outright, she might think—as he had thought of her—that he was courting her only to further his cause.

"Well, I am sure your uncle is following his conscience, as we all are," said Simon. Actually, he believed nothing of the kind. But he did not want to offend Sophia, and perhaps l'amour courtois would permit a small lapse in one bound to be truthful to his lady.

"And your conscience tells you to guard those savages?"

"I want to see Jerusalem liberated and the Saracens conquered," Simon said. "Every good Christian does."

She sat up in bed, looking at him earnestly. "Do you not fear that