Work Text:
The souk near the Jaffa Gate is crowded. A dozen languages twist together: shouts from the market traders, conversations whispered behind veils, laughter from men stooped over cups of thick, syrupy coffee. The colours of three races intermingle—African, Arab, European—and cloth of every cut and hue flutters and drapes, demanding or deflecting attention. The dry air is permeated with the mingled stink of humanity and commerce: mint, cumin, a whiff of fish, the dusty scent of grain, sweat, and perfume.
Balian remembers a day like this a year, two years before, when first he arrived in Jerusalem with nothing more than his father's sword strapped to his back and his father's baronial ring on his finger, and a lifetime of anguish in his past. He is no closer to understanding this city now than he was then, but now he has accepted his state of ignorance, and tries to be humble with it.
Tiberius laughs and calls him a 'perfect knight', and Balian thinks it's only partially in jest. He has no desire to be perfect—the Moslems he encounters every day in the souk, on the street, within the palace or on his lands at Ibelin all tell him that no man is perfect, no object is perfect, nothing on earth is perfect. Only God is perfect.
Balian struggled with this notion for months before realising its truth. At home, in his other life, the concept of perfection was tied to God's grace and the nature of sin. His wife was perfect to him, but her suicide moved her beyond God's touch. Her head was severed from her body before she was buried, lest she become a revenant to haunt the living. Thus mutilated, she would remain in her grave forever, unable to rise even on the Day of Judgement. His wife's perfection was flawed, and sometimes he blames himself for making her into something she was not.
In Jerusalem, he seeks the company of those who are flawed. There are those, like Reynald of Châtillon and Guy of Lusignan, who are flawed beyond measure yet perceive themselves as perfect and above the law. Then there are those who acknowledge their imperfections, who work around their flaws, who embrace their shortcomings. Men like Tiberius, who cannot quite hide his frustrations and favouritisms. Men like the King, whose illness is a creeping horror, whose face is a mystery.
Balian has seen lepers in Jerusalem. They haunt a part of the city beyond the walls and are cared for by monks. Many of the lepers were crusaders, once. They came to the Holy Land in search of forgiveness, as he did, and instead were punished by disease. Balian wonders if their crimes were worse than his. Leprosy makes a mockery of everything he understood. If it is truly God's punishment, then how can a leper be King of Jerusalem? Kings are chosen and anointed by God. Does God laugh at the crusaders in His Holy Land, in this place where mourning lasts only a week and where a bastard son may rise to become the lover of a princess?
These are questions for the Patriarch, but Balian knows the answers would be swift and insincere, delivered without thought. The Patriarch of Jerusalem is not a holy man, but then neither is the Pope. Men of God should put their own houses in order before they covet the houses of others. Balian has had enough of religion and long since turned his back on faith, for all that he still clings to it like an old, imperfect memory.
"Stop here," says a voice behind him, and he halts. The voice is low, gritted with texture—a voice that is visual, for its owner has no face and only his voice can convey emotion and nuance.
Balian turns to the curtained litter carried by two large, impassive men. Dressed as slaves, they are members of the royal bodyguard, and within the gaudy litter lies not the pampered wife of a wealthy merchant but Baldwin IV, King of Jerusalem. The litter is an inconvenient mode of transport for a king, as it cannot pass through the narrow warren of streets into the heart of the souk, but it suffices for these expeditions to the outskirts of the market, where the streets are still wide enough for four men to pass abreast.
"What would you like to see?" Balian asks, keeping his tone respectful but omitting all terms of address that would enable the citizens nearby to know that their king was amongst them.
The curtain of gauze and damask twitches. "The spices."
Balian nods and approaches the trestle tables laid out at the front of the shop. A number of customers are gathered over the neat rows of shallow copper bowls heaped high with spices, each bowl labelled in fluid Arab script with a more laboriously printed translation in Frankish beneath. The merchant and his boy alternately flick their gaze over the goods and barter with their customers, all the while weighing and wrapping and handling money.
The spices are a palette of colours. Balian knows nothing of cooking but appreciates the taste of food in the Holy Land. It is deeper, richer, than the food he ate back home. The spices are the hues of the land in which they grow—red, gold, dust-brown, the cream of bleached stone—and their smell intoxicates.
The merchant's boy hands him a square of paper. Balian watches what the other customers are buying, then squints at the Arabic and tries to use his imperfect knowledge of the script to identify the spice rather than rely on the translation. He has no idea what the king wants from this shop. On these expeditions, Baldwin never specifically asks for anything, leaving the decision to Balian. As a young man trapped by the double burden of kingship and leprosy, perhaps he is content to let others take such a small fragment of responsibility once in a while.
Tiberius thinks these secret outings are foolhardy. Balian thinks he understands what drives the king to take the risk. In a way, it's the same thing that drove him to abandon his old life and seek renewal in the Holy Land. Both of them, in different ways, have lost everything, and when a man has nothing more to lose, he begins to appreciate the smallest, most humble of things.
Balian smiles. His hand hovers over the heap of deep orange-red saffron threads, then moves on to the sumac, to the soft-powdered turmeric and thence to the cinnamon bark and the spurs of cloves, across to the peppercorns of green and white and black, to the fennel seeds and the sesame seeds. All these he rejects, and his smile grows as he scoops up a small amount from a bowl that needs no explanatory label.
He twists the paper and hands it to the boy, who weighs it on a pair of scales and names a price. Balian pays, thanks the boy, and carries the twist of paper over to the litter. They move away from the shop, leave the souk, and pause in a quieter part of David Street, in the shade.
"What did you buy?" the king asks, and his voice is eager.
"See for yourself." Balian offers the paper through the curtains and does not flinch when he feels the brush of a gauze-bandaged hand against his own. He hears the rustle of paper and the in-draw of breath, and then he hears laughter, soft and husky.
The curtains of the litter part very slightly, enough for him to see the glint of the king's silver mask beneath the linen cowl, enough that he can see the amused expression in the king's blue eyes. "Of all the spices on display at that stall, you chose this?"
Balian knows the question is rhetorical, but he answers anyway. "What I bought is the most humble, the most precious, the cruellest, and the most necessary of anything else sold there."
Another chuckle, and the king holds out the square of crumpled paper, its contents white and glimmering. "Salt," he says, his gaze fixed on Balian. "Like you, like me, like this city, it is everything and nothing. You chose well, Balian of Ibelin."
Balian smiles and inclines his head.
The curtain falls, hiding the perfect mask of an imperfect king, and together they continue into the streets of Jerusalem.