Chapter Text
The first time Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn Al Kaysani, called al-Tayyib came back to life, he didn’t clearly remember what had happened to him. Weeks would go by before memories would start to reveal themselves. As the days passed, his dreams would slowly become peppered with visions. A bolt from a crossbow piercing his left shoulder. A Frank invader fast approaching. Two women swimming. Swinging his sabre at the foreign man, who stayed the blow with his shield. One of the women laughing while the other splashed her. The Frank sitting with his head bowed in his hands. The women sharing a meal. Lunging toward the man with his sabre while the man did the same with a dagger. There was pain. The Frank stands in an expanse of bodies, with a blank expression. There was blood. The Frank stares lifelessly back at him as wakefulness slowly faded away. A dagger was piercing his heart. The Frank lifts his dampened, green eyes to the starry sky.
No, he didn’t remember any of that when he’d first come to. It all came later. That first time, he was spared the bewilderment for the most part. He simply opened his eyes in the dead of night and found himself surrounded by bodies. Mostly Fatimid soldiers, but some European crusaders. And some women… some children.
He sat up slowly in the darkness. A small group of invaders were gathering bodies one by one and dragging them to a massive bonfire some two hundred meters off. He was outside the walls of Jerusalem. The invader army had managed to seize it. There had been a battle. It didn’t go well. The Fatimid garrison, however many had survived, was gone. He was alone, and he was in danger of being found very soon. While the invaders made their way back toward his location, he had few seconds to map out how to move forward.
He was on the south wall. The city had been attacked from both sides, but he was caught up in the action to the south. He looked to the east, where the fire raged. He looked to the west, into nothingness. He couldn’t stay where he was, that much was certain. As quietly as he could, he crawled though the bodies, trying not to look directly into any of the faces, nor react to the overwhelming stench of death. When he was sure he was in the cover of darkness, he brought himself to his feet and walked, hoping without much reason that he could somehow catch up to what was left of the garrison if he just continued to do so. As the light of the July morning sun crept up from behind him, he came across a horse, who seemed to have abandoned its Christian master and escaped the battle unscathed. He gently entreated the beast, who allowed him to mount, and he continued to ride west until the Fatimids were indeed found in Ascalon.
It was when he’d finally had time to rest, that was when the memories began. Were they even memories? Some seemed to be. Visions of what happened in the battle. The duel. The injury. But the rest? He didn’t know what much of it meant. He didn’t know who the women were. The man was clear. It was the infidel who had tried to kill him, tried his best and failed.
How though?
Over the coming weeks, the memories, those visions he was sure were just that, would grow clearer and clearer, and it became harder to deny he’d been mortally wounded. And he’d survived, somehow. Not just that, but he didn’t seem to have any residual injury at all. How can a man clearly remember being driven through the heart with a blade, and have no scar to speak of?
No scar? How is the heart still pumping at all?
He kept very much to himself those next few weeks, as the dreams increased in lucidity, and he began to wonder that he was slowly but surely losing his mind.
For Nicolò di Genova, the panic of what happened was much more instantaneous. And much more persistent. And much more menacing.
He’d come to and immediately clutched at his neck, gasping for air. The vision of the Saracen man he’d battled was seared in his brain. He had stared into the man’s cold, dark eyes while his own body was bleeding out. An arm reached around his own and dragged him towards the wall. He didn’t remember much more after that, but he knew well enough what happened. He had died. He had recited in his mind during those last few seconds the prayer to the Holy Mother. Had privately asked one more final forgiveness from the Father and prepared himself for judgement.
Instead of pearly gates, nor the more likely fire and brimstone he had reasonably feared, he’d woken up laid out on a cot under a tented canopy inside the walls of Jerusalem. He was not alone. Many other crusader bodies were lined up nearby, and they weren’t waking like he was. These men were dead. He felt a lump growing in his throat at the idea that it was no mistake he was placed here among these unfortunate men. He quickly stood and distanced himself from the makeshift morgue. As he walked towards the city center his eyes looked out over the sea of bodies, women and children, Muslim and Jewish. But they registered only the vision he was remembering, the eyes of his enemy. That soulless, abyss of black. At least he’d killed his would-be slayer. No, that wasn’t completely true. He’d killed the man who killed him too. Nicolò just… somehow returned.
As he walked through the city, he cautiously gazed down upon the carnage at his feet. Unspeakable horrors had taken place here. He’d watched. He’d participated. He’d helped. He looked up to his left at the synagogue, the place he’d ushered countless women and children and elderly. He was so naïve. Or was he? Had he really thought they were herding them here to protect them?Was he truly shocked to find the building burned to the ground?
He absentmindedly rubbed the spot where his neck had been struck. The memory of the duel flashed in his mind, but there was no wound to support it.
It was not as though there wasn’t a precedent for this in his Faith. The Christ had risen after three days. Was it possible this was some kind of miracle from God? His eyes arrested on a young girl… no more than six, laid out on the ground, holding a small doll. She could have been sleeping except for the pallor of her skin and the large pool of crimson pillowing her head.
No. He could not fathom that any man who marched with an army capable of such malevolence could ever be measured up to the Son of God. This was no miracle. This was Hell.
“Nicolò.”
He was roused from his stupor by a fellow crusader. Nicolò knew the man’s name. They had trained together, had gone through seminary together. But no name was coming just then. His mind was too clouded.
“You’re alive!” The man exclaimed, “but I saw you wounded. You were an instant from death.”
Pieces were coming together. This was the man who had dragged him into the city, no doubt to give him a proper funeral, anointing and all.
“No, the blood was not mine,” he found himself lying immediately, not quite sure where the impulse nor ingenuity were coming from. He was a creature of pure instinct in that moment.
“The wind was knocked out of me; it was difficult to breathe. But the blood you saw belonged to my foe.”
The crusader looked dubious, as if questioning his own memory. This man had watched the blood empty from Nicolò’s body, and Nicolò was sure of it. But nothing seemed more imperative in that moment than somehow convincing him his eyes had played tricks on him.
After a long, uncomfortable pause, the man seemed to decide this explanation would ultimately cause them both less discomfort, nodded and walked away.
It was the first outright lie Nicolò could remember telling since boyhood. He hadn’t been very good at it back then, and quit when he joined the clergy. It wasn’t as hard as he remembered, and that fact brought him no comfort.
Sleep wasn’t easy to come by that night. Or rather, it wasn’t easy to keep hold of. He had found an empty alcove in the city to be alone with his thoughts. He would drift off only to be woken suddenly by the feeling of hot metal slicing through his neck, and the vision of those cold black eyes.
He had not survived at all. This was surely Hell. And Nicolò feared he had come face to face with the Devil himself.