Julanar the Lioness Read online

  THE CRUSADER

  BOOK III:

  JULANAR THE LIONESS

  John Cleve

  © John Cleve 1975

  John Cleve has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1975 by Grove Press.

  This edition published in 2018 by Lume Books.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  “God does not care. That is what life means, and that’s what death is. Death is something that just happens. I shall live! I shall live every day, all my life, and if it is short, then . . . I shall have been here!”

  —Guy Kingsaver of Messaria,

  The Crusader

  Chapter One

  The Night Slayer

  Round and white as a buxom maiden’s breast the moon hung over Palestine. Its silvery rays picked out the pennons and gonfalons rising above the sprawling encampment of the crusading host of Richard the Lion-heart. A gentle breeze rustled among the tents and great towering pavilions, pitched to stand like sentinels over the camp.

  That same brilliant moon picked out the silvery steel in the hand of a bent, skulking man.

  Step by slow, gliding step he moved through the night whose silence was broken only by the occasional low whicker of a horse—or the snore of a sleeping soldier. Slowly and quietly, his feet making only the faintest whispering sounds, the night stalker moved forward.

  His dark eyes were fixed on the back of a helmeted sentinel.

  The sentinel was not alert; this the stalker could see even from behind, and a smile twitched his black mustache and biforked beard as it twisted his thin lips. His eyes, though, did not smile. He took another slow gliding step, foot planted carefully.

  Now he was but two paces behind the yawning guard. One hand of the skulker was empty, powerful warrior’s fingers curling restlessly. The other hand was fisted, and the moon struck a quicksilver glint from the long dagger that projected from the enwrapping fingers.

  The moon of Syria watched, uncaring. The wind sighed and tickled at the leaves of the gnarled and twisted olive trees that stood in the oasis like dark, silent gnomes. The stalker drew a long, slow and very quiet breath. Slowly his fisted hand rose, measuring, upper arm held well out from his body, forearm curved in from the elbow, the red-stained blade held horizontally. His other hand was similarly poised, slim fingers spread and slightly curled, like claws.

  He drew in a long, quiet breath.

  Then, in one swift movement, his left hand leapt around the sentinel, grasped and whipped up and back his beardless Norman chin. Even as the man’s bulging eyes were forced to stare skyward, even as he strove to get his mouth open to cry out an alarm, he felt the icy line of the swiftly-traced dagger draw across his throat.

  Spurting scarlet fountained from his neck, splashed and spread over the sleeveless white coat he wore over his long shirt of steel mail, until the crimson cross sewn there was obliterated by the new splotch of liquid crimson.

  The night slayer gripped his victim firmly until the man’s body had emptied itself of most of its blood. Only then did the killer lower it quietly to the ground, careful that there be no thud of slumping body, no clank or jingle of armor or arms against the reddened earth. Aside from spasmodic little twitches of his limbs, the sentinel was still.

  Wiping his knife in the clothing of its second victim, the slayer drew the body swiftly into the shadow of one of the great overgrown tents called pavilions.

  The camp was still. Somewhere a man muttered in his sleep, and a horse whinnied, low-voiced. There was a faint tinkling rattle of linked chainmail. The moon, measured against an extended finger, moved but a centimeter.

  Then from the pavilion’s shadow stepped the sentinel again, miraculously resurrected, wearing helmet over cap of mail, leggings and sleeved coat of steel links, belt and scabbard of dull shagreen leather. But now he was without tabard, or surcoat of the coarse cloth called fustian—and had another looked closely he’d have seen a darker face than that of the Norman, bearded and mustached in black.

  Disguised and not quite so stealthy now, the night slayer moved on through the camp. He’d been given directions and he had not forgot; soon his keen eyes spotted the warrior’s tent striped in white and blue. Beside it, he glanced about, then tugged back a corner of its flap to peer within.

  Again his beard and mustache writhed, but not, this time, in a smile.

  Within the tent were a man and a maid, playing the ancient game of love—though between them the term was lust, not love. He was big, a brawny near-giant with brown hair, on whose muscular body there was no trace of fat. That big warrior’s body covered her darker one fully. She was writhing in pleasure, a raven-haired daughter of this land, of Islam, whose clutching hands were dark against his broad and naked back.

  The night slayer watched them with narrowed eyes.

  Her mouth releasing delighted and delightful little gurgles of pleasure, she snapped her hips up to meet her lover’s long, fast, rough strokes. He watched the almost berserk light blaze in her wide-flaring eyes, and he loved it. He pounded into the nest of her spread crotch, fucking her way up the belly.

  The night slayer clamped his thin lips, and he watched.

  The writhing temptress held her lover between deeply tan thighs and met his slow, methodical strokes with grinding circular motions of her sweaty buttocks. She was writhing and twitching in the grip of extreme sexual agitation and excitement. All around his driving, rutting organ he could feel her channel clenching and rapidly unclenching, then clasping him again.

  He began moving faster and faster. Their breathing was loud in the night stalker’s ears, and he smelled their lustful sweat. Beneath the man, she writhed and jerked violently, in an utter surrender to sexuality. Panting with an uncontrollable urge to climax, he jammed his rigid penis as deeply into her petal-soft slash as he could. His powerful body hammered hers, skewered hers, shook and rocked her.

  Locked in a sudden frenzy of twisting, shuddering release, she was shaken by mingled ecstasy and relief. A sensuous woman, she was forced to bite her lips against her throaty cries.

  Then he too was jerking, groaning, sending his seed gushing into her in a flood, emptying himself into the channel of her slippery sex oval.

  So the Christian slime waits for his “lady” to reach her release before he unleashes his, the night slayer thought, and his lips twitched in a sneer.

  Even as the big man—little more than a youth—spent his lusts, the disguised night slayer swiftly entered the tent, using the singularly long, wire-wrapped bow just inside the flap, rapped the spent lover sharply at the base of his skull.

  The only sound was the chunk of the descending blow, followed by the victim’s grunt. He went instantly limp atop the woman.

  Dropping the bow, the stalker tumbled the powerful young body off the far slimmer one of the young woman. She lay tense, naked and shiny with perspiration, staring up at the newcomer with wide eyes, sprawled there on her back with her legs apart and her black pubic fleece glossy with wetness.

  Then, “Yarok!” she said, her lips pulling into a smile. She stretched up her arms to him.

  He drew her sinuously to her feet without a word.

  Still smiling,
she said softly, “I see that my true lord has made good use of the dagger I slipped him under the eyes of his whoreson jailers!”

  “Aye—and I see ye’ve made good use of the body of this infidel swine!”

  He spoke in a snarl, and even as her smile started to vanish he smashed it from her lips with a hard backhand. Her head was swept to one side by his blow, her mass of black hair flying, rustling. A little throaty squeak escaped her lips, which his harsh slap had crushed back against her teeth. Blood curled out over the full lower lip, glistened on her chin.

  “My lord! I did but play the part of his captive and his woman, I swear in Allah’s name, that you might easily escape their foul imprisonment. Yarok ibn-Ammar has no cause to doubt his Johara!”

  “Clothe your sluttish nakedness,” he said, “and help me clothe and then bind this Christian cur!”

  Clothing herself was simple; not so simple was the matter of attiring the unconscious man whose great frame could bend that wire-bound bow no other man could so much as string. But Yarok and Johara at last succeeded in covering the unconscious man’s body, and then they bound him. Yarok stuffed a great wad of rough wool into the fellow’s mouth, then secured it there with a length of cord. He drew it cruelly tight.

  “Lead me to their horse compound,” Yarok ibn-Ammar ordered. The girl nodded and, as he gruntingly shouldered their captive, she left the tent. Her ballooning trousers, sarawil in her tongue, swished as she moved, graceful as the dancer she was.

  Minutes later she was swaying up to a sentry, a man with a red-brown mustache curling on his English face.

  “Guy of Messaria says ye be his friend,” she cooed, moving closer to the man before the low palisade. His eyes widened beneath his helmet.

  “G—aye, oh aye,” he said, reaching for her sinuous slimness as her own arms rose to his mailed shoulders.

  Happily he accepted her advance and her embrace, then claimed her soft, parting lips, recognizing the lovely woman captured shortly after her former lord, the devil Yarok ibn-Ammar, who had been the most valuable—and most vicious—warrior of their enemy, Sultan Salah-Din: Saladin. Why she had come here, why Guy of Messaria had sent her—if indeed he had—the sentry could not imagine. Nor did he care.

  He enclosed her lips with his, sipped her honeyed kiss, ran his hands greedily over her tight-skinned softness. She had been a dancer, he knew—what a woman! Supple as a serpent.

  And just as dangerous, for of a sudden her arms tightened about the delighted English man-at-arms and she gripped him with all her strength.

  In that instant the sword of Yarok ibn-Ammar plunged into his back in a spine-smashing, scarlet-spurting deathblow.

  First bracing herself to keep her footing, Johara stepped back quickly; the guard slid dead to the ground.

  Yarok swiftly wiped his bloody blade on the man’s surcoat. Then he slipped into the temporary enclosure among the horses. The surcoat he had appropriated from their captive’s tent, Johar noticed, was very long on him. She glanced at the captive and her scarle-tbloused bosom rose and fell in a sigh. He was a man, he had four times met Yarok the Butcher in battle and at last, in single combat, had made him captive. Later, seeking vengeance, she had tried to slay the captor of her lord, even as he sat with his lion-heart king and Saladin’s own brother, watching her dance. But he had been too clever, too swift, too strong, and she’d been ignominiously punished by the flat of a sword across her backside—and then by his fleshy staff entering her while he rode those same sword-whipped fulsomely rounded curves.

  “And what now, my lord unbeliever?” she murmured, her mouth losing its prettiness in a sneer.

  But the sighing feeling remained. For happy as Johara was to be the woman of Yarok ibn-Ammar al-Jazzar, the unbeliever had personally bested and captured him . . . and her as well . . . and besides . . . he was the better lover.

  Yarok’s return interrupted her ambivalent thoughts. Having added three more Christian lives this night to his toll of many, he now brought an equal number of their valuable horses. Johara aided him in the swift bridling and saddling of them. They hoisted their prisoner so that he lay face down across the back of the third animal, and they lashed his wrists to his ankles with a strap that ran beneath the beast’s belly.

  Then they set about making good their escape from the camp of the invading men of the hated Cross, with their unconscious prisoner.

  The year was the one thousand, one hundred, ninety-first since the coming of him the Christians called Son of God; the place was near ibn-Abrak, near the midpoint between the Mediterranean and city the Muslims called al-Quds, the Holy, and that the Christians called Jerusalem. The month was November; soon the winter of the Holy Land would begin with its incessant rains, and there had been only minor skirmishes of late between squadrons of the two hosts, Richard and Saladin. Security, as a consequence, was lax.

  First Johara had been able to smuggle the dagger in to her man, and then Al-Jazzar—the Butcher—had slain three men in making his escape. Now, with so little difficulty that he knew the King of the English, “Malek Ric” the Lion-heart, would fly into a red rage on the morrow, Yarok al-Jazzar succeeded in riding out of the sleep-bound camp with his woman and his prisoner.

  The three horses, one with its rider tied in place across its back, paced out into the Levantine night. Yarok and Johara set their faces southward. For a long while they rode in silence, wincing when their mounts’ hooves struck sound from the rocky terrain, for they must make certain they had escaped both the encampment and its outlying pickets.

  Then Yarok spoke, without glancing at the cloaked woman who rode beside him. “Ye have the drug to keep him kitten-placid?”

  She glanced at him and nodded, though he stared straight ahead into the moon-splashed night. “Aye. He will be no trouble to us, my beloved lord.”

  Her beloved lord chuckled, though as ever, his eyes did not enter into that smile but remained cold and serpent-steady.

  The three horses paced on into the night, drawing steadily farther from the sprawling camp of the invading host of the third great Crusade of Christendom against the Saracen who held Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulcher.

  Having taken prisoner the finest of Saladin’s knights and conquered and bedded his woman, Guy Kingsaver of Messaria, the Crusader, was now a prisoner of them both—a prisoner of his deadliest enemy.

  Chapter Two

  The Butcher

  The Crusader awoke to awareness of a buzzing throb in his head, a steady hum in his ears. His belly felt both empty and troubled. He could hear it gurgling. He started to lift his head; found that the movement heightened the throbbing. He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth against it.

  What had happened? He’d been tupping with al-Jazzar’s woman, Johara. Yes, he was sure of that—and he had finished, spent his juices up her Muslim tunnel. And after that?

  He was unable to remember anything else. He had dreamed, he was sure. What? What had he dreamed?

  Memory, pictures tickled at the edge of his mind, but he could not quite catch them, could not make them coalesce into full pictures. With a sigh, he started to move his arm. Only then did The Crusader learn that he was bound, and lying on his back on what felt like a wooden floor. His eyes snapped open. He stared up at the rough-beamed ceiling of a small room. Slowly, because of his headache, he turned his head sideways. He faced a blank wall, plastered in the Muslim style, and one of the small, strangely-shaped windows of this land of the enemy. Beyond, he saw only sky and clouds. There was no furniture.

  Wary of the throbbing in his head, ever ready to leap into a harsh pounding, Guy moved his head to look on his other side. He saw a low couch with a rumpled spread of several colors, an equally low table on which were some crumbs, a piece of bread bearing toothmarks, a smaller piece of dark meat, and two mugs of pottery or earthenware.

  Beside them, on the sleeping couch, sat a man. One loosely legginged leg was doubled under him; the other stretched out with his soft-shod foot on the floor. Th
e Arabic pantaloons were scarlet; the long waist-nipped, side-slit shirt was black with red trim. Guy of Messaria raised his eyes along the strong, wiry body to gaze into the man’s face.

  He stared at his gaoler.

  Eyes flat and expressionless, like a pair of dusty onyxes set into his chiseled face, eyes that never showed rage or mirth or hate. A slender, muscular man with a silky black beard arranged in twin points. Dark he was, and falcate of nose, and thin of lip; it was a cruel mouth, a mouth capable of sneering at the living or the recently dead. Slayer of many, this man, many among the crusading host. Indeed, this man who always wore black armor and bestrode a superb black warhorse could lay claim to being the finest of Saladin’s knights, just as Guy Kingsaver of Messaria was one of the finest of the fighting men under the Cross of Jesus and the leopard banners of Richard. Guy stared at him.

  Yarok ibn-Ammar, called al-Jazzar—the Butcher—stared back.

  Acting on the orders of his king months ago, Guy had “returned” one of al-Jazzar’s red-banded arrows—plucked from the corpse of an English knight—by driving it an impossible distance into one of the Butcher’s Turkish cohorts. After that introduction, the two men had met again and again, though ever fleetingly—until that last time. During a battle, another arrow from the outsize bow of the man called the Human Crossbow had carried away the black cloth with which al-Jazzar covered his helmet. Still later, during that long march of the Crusaders down the coast of the Holy Land from fallen Acre, the two had faced one another again in the melee of battle. This time the result was that the Butcher lost a second black helmet-cloth, and his horse galloped away wearing an arrow from Guy’s bow.

  Their fates sent them against each other again. It was in that bloody battle near ibn-Abrak that the two, now rivals, determined each to end the other’s heroic career, had met still again. This time, in personal combat and then corps-a-corps on the ground, the Crusader defeated his Turkish opposite and forced him to mouth the two words most abhorrent to any knight, be he Saracen or Christian: “I yield.”