Lionheart Read Online Free PDF Page A

Alicia was impressed by the limestone houses that gleamed in the sun like white doves, by the number of public baths, the orchards of exotic fruit that she’d never tasted: oranges, lemons, limes, and pomegranates. But it was the royal palaces that utterly dazzled her, ringing the city like a necklace of opulent, shining pearls.
    Joanna and William’s primary residence was set in a precinct known as the Galca, which held palaces, churches, chapels, gardens, fountains, a menagerie of exotic animals, and the ruins of an ancient Roman amphitheater. The royal apartments were situated in a section of the main palace called the Joharia, flanked by two sturdy towers. A red marble staircase led to the first floor, with an entrance to the king’s chapel, where Alicia came often to pray for her brother’s soul and to marvel at its magnificence. The nave was covered with brilliant mosaic stones dramatizing scenes from the Old and New Testaments, the floor inlaid with circles of green serpentine and red porphyry encased in white marble, and the ceiling honeycombed; one of the walls even contained a water clock, a device quite unknown in France.
    The palace itself was splendidly decorated with vivid mosaic depictions of hunters, leopards, lions, centaurs, and peacocks. Alicia’s father had once taken her to the Troyes residence of the Count of Champagne, and she’d come away convinced that no one in Christendom lived as well as Lord Henri. She now knew better. Joanna’s coffers were filled with the finest silks, her chambers lit by lamps of brass and crystal and scented by silver incense burners, her jewelry kept in ivory boxes as well crafted as the treasures they held. She bathed in a copper bathtub, read books whose covers were studded with gemstones, played with her dogs in gardens fragrant with late-blooming flowers, shaded by citrus trees, and adorned with elegant marble fountains. She even had a table of solid gold, set with silver plate and delicacies like sugar-coated almonds, dates, hazelnuts, melons, figs, pomegranates, oranges, shrimp, and marzipan tortes. Alicia could not envision a more luxurious world than the one Joanna had married into; nor could she imagine a woman more deserving of it than the Sicilian queen, her “angel with a crown.”
    But if she embraced Joanna and her handsome husband wholeheartedly, some of her initial enthusiasm for their lush, green kingdom soon dimmed. While there was much to admire, there were aspects of Sicilian life that she found startling and others that profoundly shocked her. Palermo seemed like the biblical Babel, for not only were there three official languages—Latin, Greek, and Arabic—people also spoke Norman-French and the Italian dialect of Lombardy. Even the realm’s religious life was complex and confusing, for the Latin Catholic Church vied with the Greek Orthodox Church for supremacy, and Palermo was home, too, to mosques and synagogues.
    There had been Jews in Champagne, of course, but they were only allowed to earn their living as moneylenders. The Jewish community in Palermo was numerous, prosperous, and engaged in occupations forbidden to them in France; they were craftsmen, doctors, merchants, and dominated the textile industry. Alicia found it disconcerting to see them mingling so freely with the other citizens of the city, for her brother had told her that the French king, Philippe, had banished the Jews from Paris and he’d spoken of their exile with obvious approval.
    She was uncomfortable in the city markets, for while they offered a vast variety of enticing goods, they offered slaves for sale, too. They were Saracens, not Christians, and Alicia took comfort in that. But she still found the sight of those manacled men and women to be unsettling, for slavery was not known in France.
    There was so much in Sicily that was foreign to her. It was easy to appreciate the island’s beauty and affluence, the mild climate, the prosperity of its people. Although its