Jean turned to me, shocked. “You jest, my lady?”
“In my time … I mean, where I come from, we don’t ride horses. We have vehicles that move along by themselves.” Jean’s eyebrows shot up again. I later realized he may not have understood the wordvehicle, but at the time I added uselessly, “You just have to drive them.” I became flustered, anxious he might ask me how things move by themselves, and of course I didn’t really know. But Jean seemed preoccupied with other thoughts.
“Come, my lady,” he said, patting the horse affectionately on its backside. He went and sat down on the folded mat under the tree. “We shall partake of hashish and talk awhile … about … how we’ve been,” he said. Our eyes met, and we burst out laughing. “If you do not ride, why do you ask about it?” Jean asked in a teasing way.
“I thought that …” I was a little embarrassed. Jean’s eyebrows rose. “I thought maybe … I don’t know if it’s done around here … I thought we might ride together on your horse.” Jean threw his head back and laughed out loud. I breathed a sigh of relief.
“You are most daring, Lady Édith,” he said, and I detected a note of admiration in his voice. “You remind me of my sister, Isabelle.” Hesettled down comfortably under the tree, his back supported by the trunk, his legs straight in front of him. I sat down beside him.
“What’s so funny?” I answered. “And what’s so daring about it? Was it not you who suggested last time that we ride together to the fortress? Would we not have ridden together on the same horse?” I adopted not only the flowery style of his speech but also his peculiar accent.
Jean pondered for a moment.
“There is truth in your words,” he reflected. “But it is one thing when a knight offers a lady in distress the use of his horse in her hour of need, and another when that same lady offers the knight an opportunity to ride with her on his horse for the sheer pleasure of it,” he concluded with a wink, and I nodded in response.
“And why do you presume I am a lady?” I asked, teasing him back, stretching my legs out in front of me. Jean gaped at my bare shins, peeking out between sneakers and sweatpants.
Jean looked at me blankly for a moment and then said, “It is clear you lack any modesty or reverence for someone in authority, which gives testimony to your superior lineage. This is further manifest in the Frankish dialect you speak. Despite your peculiar accent, the eloquence of your tongue testifies to a superior education. The same is true of your appearance—the color of your skin, the daintiness of your fingers, the perfection of your teeth. Though your bare head and cascading hair is deemed a sign of wantonness in these parts, you clearly take great care of it.” His hand rose up for a moment, as if he were about to stroke my hair, but instead he lowered it to run his fingers through Brunette’s fur. “In addition to this,” he continued, “at our previous rendezvous, you presented yourself as Countess of … I believe you gave a variation on a Saracen name.”
“Right …” I admitted, blushing. “In my time … where I come from, there are no counts or countesses. Everyone is the same.” As Ispoke, I knew I was being imprecise. Jean’s curiosity was aroused. I tried to explain the modern system of government, telling him how it resembled the democratic system of the ancient Greek polis. Jean was deeply impressed, less by the miraculous glimpse into the future, or so it seemed to me, and more by the very fact I had knowledge of the Greek polis and its system of government.
“Countess or not,” he said, “a woman who knows early Greek sources is surely a lady. No other woman has either the education or the leisure to study such subjects.” After a moment, he added, “Nor man, in truth.” I nodded my head slowly. We smoked. I looked around, enchanted by the nonchalant dexterity with which he lit a flame—striking a small piece of metal against something dark and stony and feeding the spark with a handful of weeds. “What do you call this?” I asked Jean.
He raised his eyes to me, bending down. “A fire striker,” he said, after a brief delay. “And what do you call this?”
I giggled. “We have lighters. It’s the same principle, more or less. I think so. But everything is simpler. You just press a button or flick a … kind of spark wheel.” God forbid he asked me how it actually worked.
“Do you also use flint stone and steel?” Jean inquired.
“Yes! Exactly! I think so,” I said. “It just doesn’t look so nice,” I added as he held out the hookah to me. While I smoked, he created a small bonfire from the pile of weeds.
We then drank wine out of the little ceramic cups. When Jean noticed I was a little lightheaded, he took out a piece of bread wrapped in a handkerchief from the same satchel. The bread was slightly hard, but my dizziness passed after I ate it.
“When I rode away from the spring after your mysterious disappearance, I was stupefied,” Jean began. He replaced his cowl and leaned back against the tree trunk. I leaned back as well. Our arms grazed eachother as we reached out to take a walnut or a date from the wooden bowl that Jean had placed between us. Brunette sniffed the bowl, withdrew politely, stretched out at our feet, and rested her head on Jean’s shins and her tail on mine.
“When I arrived at the fortress, it was already time for the evening meal. I wanted to eat quietly with the other knights in the great hall, but one of the brothers told me to go directly to Périgord’s chambers and to dine there with him and Thibaut …”
Jean intended to go on, but I interrupted him. “Who’s Périgord? Isn’t that the truffle district in France?” I asked, taking another sip from the wine. Jean guffawed. “Armand de Périgord, Grand Master of the Order of Solomon’s Temple,” he said in a vaguely condescending tone.
“Okay. Go on,” I told him.
“What is this word that you say so often … ‘okay’ … what does it mean?” He tapped me three times on my arm with the date he was holding.
“It means ‘fine’ or ‘very well’ in English,” I said, amused by this little gesture of his.
“Do you mean the Normans or the Saxons?”
“Forget it,” I said. “I’ll try to use ‘okay’ less, okay?”
“Okay,” Jean replied. We exchanged sideways looks and inclined our heads a little closer together.
“And so,” Jean went back to his story, “I reached Périgord’s private chambers, where I was received with much fanfare. ‘Where is the fairy you promised, Thibaut?’ Périgord shouted. He already reeked of wine. He and Thibaut continued their banter, and it occurred to me that Thibaut, in his depictions, had already transformed you into some imaginary creature. I, however, was still trapped within the web of your very real disappearance, and I did not appreciate their revelry. I said that in all probability, you were some insanepoulainor a pilgrim who had lost her mind, since it happened that as soon as I looked away, you disappeared,and all I wanted to do was escape the pitch black and return to the safety of the fortress.”
“What’s apoulain?” I asked, praying it wasn’t “whore” or something similar. “I heard Thibaut use that word as well.”
Jean’s face distorted in disgust. “It is an abhorrent word, and I try not to use it,” he began, and once again I felt my face grow hot.
“The Frankish descendants of this land and those who mixed with the locals—Greeks, Armenians, Copts, and so on. It could be said that I myself am apoulain, since my ancestors arrived here about one hundred and fifty years ago, with our first king, His Holiness Godfrey of Bouillon, whereas my grandmother, Queen Maria Komnene, had been a Greek princess.”
