Sorrow Without End Read Online Free PDF Page B

survived another day’s slaughter brought greater pleasure than any woman’s body ever could. Those evenings, he and the other warriors still living had drunk deeply, singing with joy.
    Then God had abandoned him. His lips twitched as his mouth filled with a sour taste. His company of soldiers had been ambushed, and he was gravely wounded. Was it an imp of Satan who brought the Saracen woman to him? At the time he thought she was the instrument of God. She had saved him, dragging him from the bloody earth into her hut and caring for him with kindness and skill. Her faith demanded mercy, she told him once. When the fever left him and his manhood returned, he had taken her with gentleness into his bed, and they had loved each other most tenderly.
    Later, when his Christian brethren retook the land, he had saved her honor and life, claiming her as his property and swearing that she had begged for baptism. He did so love her, as she had him, and, in the sweet darkness of their nights together, he had begged her to convert so they could marry. She would be safe, he promised, as a Christian and his wife. In the bright sunlight of the day after she had done so, he did indeed marry her—in secret.
    He ran his hands down his face, the tips of his bent fingers snagging in the deep furrows of his forehead. How could he have done otherwise? If he had openly taken her to his bed as his lawful wife, his fellow soldiers might well have killed them both as they lay in each other’s arms. Or so he had believed.
    Bed the Saracen if you must, they’d have shouted at him. Breed bantlings on her. But
marriage
to an enemy woman, one whose kin has killed ours? That is treason!
    Never again would they have trusted him in battle, a man who had taken an infidel to his heart. Thus he had left her with the other Saracen women captured by the Christians. It would be safer, he told her, and she would be happier with others who spoke her language. Soon they could reveal their secret union. Soon.
    What a madman he had been, dreaming that he could someday bring her home to England and that any son of theirs would inherit the manor lands despite his eastern hue. If he could not admit the marriage to his soldiers, why had he imagined his family would have greeted her with any joy?
Fool
echoed through his head like the chant from a choir of demons.
    He shuddered. An ominous chill had wrenched him back to the present, and he turned to stare at the courtyard entrance. In the shadows, he could see the figure of a monk, behind him a man with a horse. He recognized neither of the men, but the horse bore a burden he did know well and hated even more.
    Hate? Did he still? He remembered how he had quivered with a small joy as he pressed the knife into the soldier’s soft lower belly, then ripped it upward. And had he not felt a twinge of pleasure when he saw the soldier’s eyes widen and his hands flutter to catch his own steaming guts as they tumbled out just before Death snatched his soul?
    With a vague sadness, he remembered a time when he had not hated that soldier. They had both come to Outremer from the same village, and, although different in rank, were kin as all men are in battle. So would this man have purposely chosen his wife to rape and butcher, or were the acts some random whim of the Devil? Would he ever know? Did he even care?
    Unable to turn his eyes from the corpse in the shadows, he closed them, but now his dead wife stared back at him against the backdrop of his lids, her mouth stretched wide with the howl of the burning damned. God had not blessed her for denying the faith of her fathers, he heard her scream. Hadn’t he promised that baptism would protect her from harm? Why had he lied?
    “I did not lie,” he whispered. “I believed what I promised was true.”
    He put his fingers against his lids and forced them open. Now his wife’s ghost faded and her voice was silenced, but he could still smell the smoke she had brought with her from