Alamut by Judith Tarr

wind is free. I don’t... do well in cities. This...” His brow was damp. Damn it.
    â€œDo you want to go home?”
    â€œNo!”
    She barely flinched. His weakness seemed to make her stronger. She did not presume to take his hand, but she said, “You must have found Acre appalling.”
    â€œAnd Saint Mark. And Rome. And Marseilles. And Paris.” Naming them exorcised them, a little. “Acre was worse. After the sea; and so large. Jaffa I could almost bear. This is merely uncomfortable.” If she reckoned that a lie, she did not say so. “Are you hungry?”
    He had caught her off guard. She recovered quickly, which he could admire. He had discovered a passion for the fruits of the east: oranges, lemons, yellow apples of paradise. With those, and cheese from the market beyond, and wine from a tavern in the shadow of Holy Sepulcher, they made a feast. Joanna forgot, or at least chose not to remember, that her legend was a coward within the walls of a city.
    Some of his acquaintance might have confined that to this city: to the holiness that lay on it like its mantle of dust. He might almost have been fool enough to credit it, restive as he was, trapped in the center of so much humanity.
    He looked up at the dome as they approached it. It had no such blazing beauty as that other in the Temple’s heart, the Dome of the Rock that rose like a sun out of the east of Jerusalem. This was a blunter grandeur; the center of every vow of every man who had taken the cross. From it the Kind of Jerusalem took his title, and every knight who rode under his banner: Defender of the Holy Sepulcher.
    Here.
    Mortal stone, first. A simple tomb, bare and unadorned, empty. Three days it had held a body, and then that body was gone.
    Piety had built the shrine over it. Zeal had raised up the basilica in all its splendor, with its satellites about it: the lesser churches, the palace of the Patriarch, the cloister, the priory, the house of monks and pilgrims and defenders. Chanting echoed out of it, and prayer, and the cries of the vendors who even here could ply their trade without heed to the holiness of the place.
    They ascended the steep hill and passed the gate with its columns from Byzantium, all three pressed together in the flood of pilgrims. Aidan perceived anew Joanna’s height, a bare hand-width less than his own, and a solidity that astonished him. Her limbs were long, but her shoulders were wide, and her hips; her breast was deep and full.
    She was not aware of him, except as a presence at her side. With an impatient mutter she broke free of the press, pausing in the court. Her veil had slipped. Even severely bound, her hair had a fancy to curl, to meet the sun with red lights and gold, and the rich red brown of cherrywood.
    The maid covered it with laudable, and annoying, alacrity. Joanna hardly noticed. “See,” she said. “There.”
    Two portals; and a third, rightward, that led to the chapel of Calvary. Leftward, high and square, the bell tower, silent now, domed as everything seemed to be where Islam or Byzantium had been. Behind it, the high strange roof of the Sepulcher, and the dome that was new and holy, and a little farther from them all, the lantern and the little dome of St. Helena’s chapel. There was a glitter on it all, and not all of it was holiness. They had made it rich, all they who worshipped here at the Navel of the World.
    For all the crush of people, the weight of sun and sanctity, the city-sickness that had beset him since he entered David’s Gate, he was steadier here than anywhere but under open sky. He would have liked to shout it aloud. See! Is there any holier place than this? See how it welcomes me!
    Joanna did not ask him what he wanted. She took a place in the line of pilgrims, and he took his own behind her. She was barely tiring, seeing all this familiarity with eyes made new because he was new to it. The pavement under their feet. The