“Not at once,” Jean smiled. “Thibaut is still getting organized. I can sit with you for a while longer.”
“And I thought that we would be able to spend more time together than usual,” I said in a soft voice, trying very hard not to sound like a spoiled child. “I am on my own for the next four days, free to do as I please.”
“What do you mean?” Jean asked in surprise. He patted the sheet of fabric beside the tree, and both of us sat down on it, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. “Maybe I should put the head scarf on first?” I asked bashfully. “Just in case one of the guards should come.”
Jean reached out and stroked my hair and then wrapped my head with the cotton strip and the two cloths with his gentle, skilled hands. While he was doing this, I told him that my husband had traveled to another country and that my daughter was with my parents in Jerusalem. Jean hummed in response and went on carefully arranging the complicated head covering.
When I was ready, he produced his ceramic hookah and, with a wink, took out the lighter I had given him previously. To my amazement, he had clearly succeeded in putting it back together, and it even worked. He lit the coal. The lighter’s flame was smaller than before. “Don’t use it carelessly,” I warned. “I think it’s about to run out.” I regretted the absence ofthe elegant show of friction with the flint rock and the pile of dry herbs.
Jean took a long inhale from the hookah and handed it to me. Then, he examined the lighter’s small flame.
“Indeed,” he said. “I recall you saying that it is a temporary magic, but you did not tell me the exact duration of the sorcery.”
“It’s not sorcery, it’s technology,” I said and took a hit from the hookah. “But it doesn’t matter, I’ll bring you ten more, if you want. A hundred more,” I said smugly.
Jean smiled at me through eyes preoccupied by passing thoughts. He took out what looked like stuffed pastries and a few dirt-encrusted carrots with their leafy tops still attached. “Forgive me, my lady,” he said and began to eat the pastry. “I did not yet get around to breaking my fast, and I did not want to start without you for fear of devouring it all by myself.” He gestured with his hand to the pastries, and I took one too. It was stuffed with minced meat and maybe raisins, salty and sweet and delicious.
“Well,” he said, after taking a sip of wine from a clay bottle. “Four days? In that case, perhaps you might like to accompany Thibaut, myself, and our party on our journey to Acre? I can make sure that you return here in time.”
“To Acre with you?” I repeated after him, somewhat confused. “Let me think about that.”
Jean smiled and took a carrot, washed the clods of dirt off in the spring, and bit into it. Brunette came over and sat before Jean expectantly.
“Go find yourself a little bird,” Jean said to her. Brunette tilted her head and skittered out from under the canopy of the tree. Only now did I notice that beneath his yellowish tunic and his reddish cloak, Jean wore a chain-mail shirt, with a hood of the same material. On the ground beside the lute were leather gloves.
I very much wanted to see Acre in its prime, as the cosmopolitan capital of the Crusader kingdom and an important trading post on the Mediterranean—but the thought that I would have to travel far awayfrom the spring alarmed me. My mind was racing. I was not ready to disappear back to my reality.
“Are there sacred springs in Acre or its surroundings?” I asked.
Jean gave me an inquisitive look and answered with a frown, “I do not know for sure.”
“It frightens me to think I will put such distance between me and my passage,” I said honestly and felt the disappointment spreading through me.
“I can understand that, Lady Édith. It is wise of you to wish to remain close to the opening to your world,” Jean said softly.
We sat in melancholy silence for some time longer.
“You cannot make the trip four days from now?” I asked, heavy-hearted. “Say you are sick, or you have urgent matters to attend to or something …”
Jean smiled broadly. “For that, I would have to break every oath that I have ever sworn,” he said, in a fatherly tone that I found slightly irritating and that at the same time aroused in me a desire to press my chest against his. “I must act quickly. One of the Hospitaller knights has just returned bearing sensational news that may tip the scales in our struggle. I must meet him urgently, and if he has good news for me, we will sail to Tripoli.” I nodded as if I understood something of what he was saying.
I suddenly recalled the Renault diagrams. “Say … what about those Renault plans that I brought you? The sketches of the horseless chariot?”
The corners of Jean’s mouth drooped, and the excessive smugness fell away. Now, his eyes wandered in embarrassment, eventually coming back to observe me.
“I presume that they have some power and knowledge that I can only dream of,” he said longingly. “But I can hardly touch those pages, and looking at them demands extraordinary effort from me. As for understanding their meaning—utterly beyond my grasp.”
Maybe I created a tear in the time-space continuum after all, I worried suddenly. Sketches of a Renault car in 1240—what was I thinking? I dipped my hand into the spring and let the fast stream envelop it. I felt better at once. My cell phone doesn’t work here, not even my wristwatch, so the spring knows what it’s doing. The currents swirling around my fingers produced bubbles that tickled.Okay, so be it.I dunked my face into the spring too. At once, I felt the all-embracing knowledge that lay within its eddies and pleased all the senses. I pulled my head out.
“All right,” I said to Jean as I wiped my face on the edge of my scarf. “I will ride with you to Acre.”
CHAPTER 21
For a while after Halimi called the police on me, we hardly spoke to each other. We were obliged to exchange a few words here and there regarding Lily or the household, but no more than that. He left early in the mornings, taking Lily to daycare on his way to work, and would come home very late, usually after I had gone to sleep.
When the winter rain eventually began, I tried to get used to life as a single mother. I prepared myself for my upcoming divorce proceedings.All in all, I told myself,it’s amazing we made it as long as we did. When Lily asked me where Daddy was, I would tell her, with a lump in my throat, that he was at work. She didn’t notice a thing—at least, so it seemed. Not the sadness that enveloped me, or the fact that Halimi was gone from morning to night for days at a time, or that I was cuddling her more than usual. I gave in to her every request—from walking to the park in the gloomy, drizzling afternoon, when no other living soul could be found among the soaking wet slides and jungle gym, to baking every kind of cake or cookie that she could think of, to repeated viewings ofRobin Hood,The Jungle Book, andWinnie the Pooh.
I stopped obsessively stalking Nina. I did not check her socials anymore. During the daytime hours while Lily was at daycare, I took care ofwhatever household tasks needed attention and worked on my translation project in a state of numbness. In bed at night, Halimi and I slept without touching each other. He usually got into bed smelling of arak, with its licorice scent that I particularly loathed. If I was awake, I pretended to be asleep.
