The Passionate Princess Read online

  THE CRUSADER

  BOOK II:

  THE PASSIONATE PRINCESS

  John Cleve

  © John Cleve 1974

  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 1974 by Dell Publishing

  This edition published in 2018 by Lume Books.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One – The Night Watcher

  Chapter Two – The Willing Slave

  Chapter Three – The Crusader

  Chapter Four – The King

  Chapter Five – The General

  Chapter Six – The Fugitive

  Chapter Seven – The Battle

  Chapter Eight – The Cousins

  Chapter Nine – The Contests

  Chapter Ten – The Lady

  Chapter Eleven – The Bargain

  Chapter Twelve – The Princess!

  Chapter Thirteen – Impasse

  Chapter Fourteen – The Storm

  Chapter Fifteen – Two Turks . . . and a Virgin

  Chapter Sixteen – Butcher and Crusader

  Chapter Seventeen – The Assassin

  “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 Watcher

  The moon hung round and white as a buxom maiden’s breast over Palestine. Its silvery rays picked out the thick, high walls of the port of Acre, and the tumbled stones of what had been its impregnable fortification, the Accursed Tower. A gentle breeze off the Mediterranean rustled through gnarly, twisted olive trees standing near the sleeping city like dark, gnomelike sentinels.

  That same brilliant moon picked out the olive grove less than a mile from the city. The trees themselves shadowed and concealed the two forms there: a man and a maid, come here separately to be together, to play the ancient game of love.

  He was tall, rising five feet and nine, a beardless, unmustached man whose skin was not nearly so dark as hers, despite the ever-angry sun of this inhospitable land. She was barely five feet in height, a well fleshed girl. Her great mass of flowing hair was the color of the substance called kohl she used to darken the lids of her eyes, thus making them appear larger and more lustrous.

  His name was James, the English form of Jacques, for he was of England, the domain of Acre’s conqueror. And she was Fareshah, a daughter of Islam, a daughter of this land her people the Turks called Falastin.

  The people of James and Fareshah were enemies, to a great extent because they called their god by different names. But James and Fareshah were not enemies.

  Neither of them had any business so far from his city or her people’s camp. But now four weeks had passed since his people had taken this important seacoast city, and love and lust have ever persuaded people to take risks—and soldiers have ever found it easy to bed the women of the vanquished.

  This was the fifth such meeting of James of Lincolnshire and Fareshah, daughter of Ferhat ibn Ghalib, and perhaps love was creeping into their sexual relationship. Each of them even understood a little of the other’s language, now.

  The light sea breeze rustled the gnarly trees about and above them, but he did not notice. His ears were not functioning as he concentrated on the visual. He watched in excited fascination as she drew off her clothing. Her eyes were on him as she proudly, teasingly unveiled and displayed her vibrant young body for him.

  Without thinking about it, he too began undressing. He unbuckled his broad sword belt and dropped it with a creak of leather and a clinking clatter. All his attention was focused on her, on the shimmering ebony hair that cascaded over her soft shoulders like dark waters rushing down mountain slopes. The slopes were there, too, magnificent dusky melons that thrust boldly forth as if beseeching him to touch and fondle them. They quivered with her movements, their out-yearning shapes casting deep shadows over the rounded dome of her belly, between the plump curves of her hips. It was deeply, darkly cratered by her navel.

  And then there was the lush fur of her sable-pelted venus mound, and he had, without being aware of it, stripped off his leggings and underpants. He had worn neither coat nor leggings of mail this night, and his quilted hauberk lay beside his swordbelt. Erupting from a forest of light brown hair, his thick and shining lance of maleness saluted her. It stood almost straight out before him in semi-erection.

  Their eyes drank in the sight of each other’s nakedness. Then their teeth flashed in smiles, and they came together beneath the olive trees.

  His mouth found hers, opened around it, sought to devour its sweetness. Her large shapely breasts crammed against his chest, losing very little of their swollen firmness. She moved her shoulders deliberately as they embraced, tracing out caressing designs on his chest with stiff brown nipples.

  In moments they were stretched on the grassy, loamy ground. Her anxious hand was encircling his staff, pink and ripe and long and thick. She tugged it forward, to ensheath his fleshy knight’s lance within herself.

  Her throat sent forth a long sighing moan as he slipped into her. The glowing, throbbing crown parted the curly little beard at the base of her belly and slipped between the dainty folds wreathing her sexual cavern. With a swift jerk of his hips, he thrust into her and planted it all the way.

  Their bodies began to move together, united inwardly and outwardly.

  Neither of them, as they began that ancient horizontal dance of lust, was aware of the presence of a third person, the watcher.

  In blackest shadows he sat astride his wiry Arabian horse, a slender but muscular man whose silky black beard was arranged in twin points. And he watched. His veined, dark hand lay on the pommel of his sickle-curved sword, but casually. A very small smile pulled at his thin lips as he watched the pale Frankish arse rise and fall between the dusky thighs of the errant daughter of Allah.

  The brilliant Levantine moon did not flash off his pointed helmet; it was veiled in black, the same cloth that fell down his neck in back and was drawn around and clasped under his chin. Black, too, was his scale-link armor. So were his hands, for he wore gloves of lovingly worked, silky-thin black leather. His horse, too, was black. And his shield. And his iron-tipped lance. And his eyes, which were flat and expressionless, betrayed no sign of arousal at the scene of concupiscence he witnessed. Those slittered eyes showed absolutely nothing as he sat his horse, motionless and invisible, and watched the lovers.

  Well trained, his horse stood like a basalt statue. Not even its long tail twitched.

  The foreigner was tupping her in a growing delirium, stirring up her lovenest until it was all juicy and trickly. Continually, she moaned out delighted, gurgling sounds as he probed the hot and humid interior of her body. Her pelvis writhed as a swift tide of passion rose in her. He slid over her quaking form, riding the firm thrusting bulge of her pubic mound and piercing it deep.

  She met his every stroke with madly churning pelvis, jerking in a convulsive white heat of need as he drove so deeply into her lush loveliness.

  The night watcher could hear their grunting and panting, hear the scrabbling shift of their bodies, see their straining as the naked man grasped her until she grimaced and rooted fiercely into her. With each jerk of his thighs and clamping buttocks he drove his swollen organ far into her liquid vitals. Her face a contorted mask of carnal desire, she humped back to gain more of that filling, beloved cock inside her.

  Then he was groaning, stif
fening, grasping her almost brutally, starting to pump his hot juices into her ever-receptive body and its sucking well . . .

  . . . and the night watcher twitched his heel and paced his horse from among the shadowing trees, and he laughed. It was a sound neither of pleasure nor of mirth.

  Four eyes flashed, wide and fearful as they sought out the source of the rasping sound; two mouths tightened in instant apprehension. Still spurting liquid seed, the lover rolled swiftly off his dark-skinned inamorata. His eyes whipped over the night watcher—and saw that he was dark of visage under a helm rising to a pointed peak.

  Splashing and darkening the loamy soil with his jetting semen, James of Lincolnshire pounced nakedly for his discarded belt and scabbard.

  Instantly the newcomer moved his heels. His perfectly trained Arabian horse lunged forward, a beautiful beast darker than the moonlit night. Unshod hooves dug in as the animal launched himself from absolute motionlessness into a warhorse gallop. He hurtled forward as if bow-shot, his dark-clad rider’s lance couched, dipping, extending out past the rolling muscles of the animal’s right shoulder. The lance was whipped by a suddenly streaming black mane.

  The naked girl did not scream but stared with enormously wide eyes and gaping mouth.

  An instant after her lover’s long English sword scraped from its sheath and he turned, naked, to meet the charge, the broad iron head of a Turkish lance smashed his chest and drove through him with the tremendous impact of a charging horse and a powerful and experienced arm. James’s feet left the ground and he was carried backward. Flesh sundered and spurted its red fluid; bones shattered and tore into internal organs. Blood burst forth from his wide-writhing mouth.

  The sword flew from nerveless fingers as the lance tore through the naked man’s very pale body and hurled him several feet backward. The horseman was already reining in, but his spear was nevertheless torn from his grip. It stood quivering above the fallen man like a slender tombstone. The scarlet juice of life bubbled up around it to spread like a dark shadow over his chest and belly.

  The night watcher, mere watcher no longer but prime actor now, swung his mount. His curved sword rasped out as he spurred after the girl. She was up and, despite her breast-swinging nakedness, was starting to flee.

  “STOP!” he commanded, in Turkish, and she did.

  She stood, still but trembling, watching his approach with eyes dilated in horror and fear. Her fleshy thighs were pressed together; her small hands pressed into her cheeks.

  “Who—” she began. Her voice quavered.

  His wiry black horse loomed over her; his eyes seemed to slash like knives as they stared down at her. “Yarok ibn Ammar,” he told her in his throaty, almost toneless voice.

  She gasped. “Al-Jazzar!”

  He chuckled, but his eyes neither laughed nor smiled. “Aye, girl, so they call me. ‘The Butcher.’ ”

  And he swung lithely down from his horse. On foot and with his curved sword naked in his hand, he strode to her. The teeth of his smiling face flashed in the moonlight, for he cared no longer about being unseen.

  The girl dropped to her knees with a great jounce and jiggle of her bare, large breasts. “O, my lord . . . please,” she begged in a tiny, plaintive voice. “I am of your people; we share God and Sultan.”

  “Aye,” he said gutturally, “Allah and Salah ad-Din whom the unbelievers call Saladin. But we share no love for the accursed Frankish knights who come to spoil our lands and wallow with our women—whores like yourself, girl!”

  Her voice rose. “In the name of Allah the merciful—”

  “Aye,” he rasped, and echoed her: “Bismillaher, and his holy prophet, and for his honor and that of our people!” And he moved, swiftly and expertly.

  His sword swept up, flashed like sudden lightning-fire in the moonglow. It rushed down, and not even her mass of long black hair turned the moon-curved blade of the scymitar.

  The head of her who had been called Fareshah, butterfly, leapt from her body and struck the ground with a falling melon sound. It rolled, staring eyes seeing nothing. Her blood-spurting trunk jerked and twitched, weirdly remaining in the kneeling position several seconds before it lurched forward and stretched full length. The grass darkened still more as her severed neck pumped scarlet.

  “Not an unseemly trade,” the man muttered in his throat, carefully wiping his sword in the lush hair of the severed head. “One worthless slut, for a Frankish knight and a horse!”

  First making sure the blade was perfectly clean and shiny again, he put it up in its sheath, without glancing down; it was an action he had performed countless times. Then he turned to his horse. Fetching a curved Turkish bow and single arrow from his saddle, he paced slowly to the body of his first victim.

  Standing over the naked dead man, Yarok ibn Ammar bent his bow, sighted down the shaft only an instant, and drove the shaft down through one open, staring, blue eye. Then he tore his lance from the stiffening corpse, remounted, and reined his horse about to ride away to the camp of his lord, Saladin. He led the Englander’s horse.

  Behind him lay two dead bodies, one without a head, and one whose head was impaled by an arrow with two red bands circling its shaft near the nock end.

  Chapter Two – The Willing Slave

  The signally tall man with the red-orange hair and beard turned the slender wooden shaft over in his hand. The head had been snapped off, obviously within the victim. The arrow was blood-splashed. But the two red stripes were not blood.

  “Al-Jazzar!” he snarled, and slapped the shaft against his thick leg. “DAMN him! He’s stolen ANOTHER good knight from me!” With another curse, he hurled the red-banded arrow from him. “Send me Guy Kingsaver!”

  “Aye, lord king,” the chief squire said, and hurried from the room on high, silent shoes of crimson felt, the same color as his tunic.

  The king paced, muttering. At first he had been stunned by the beauty of the palace of Acre, with its ornately woven carpets and wall hangings, its filigreed arches and table bases, its cool white hallways and well-planted courtyards in which crystal fountains fed the greenery. Now, pacing the finest room in the sprawling structure, he accepted it without thinking. He was perhaps more at home in the saddle than any man in the world.

  “Four weeks since we took this accursed city,” he snarled, “and still Saladin and his army sit out there, less than two miles off, watching us like vultures, whilst this damned whoreson butcher of his murders our knights one at a time—and three days ago, by God’s balls, two at once! And what do WE do,” he growled, reaching a tapestried wall and wheeling to pace back, “we, the noble liberators of the Holy Land, the finest collection of knights in the world? We wait for the ransom . . . and we WRANGLE! France’s pissant king is angry because I took the palace. Austria’s arrogant archduke is angry because I had his pennons taken down from the walls MY men took! I took Acre, I took this palace—it is MINE! God’s balls, King Philip and Archduke Leopold and the others couldn’t get within bow-shot of this city’s WALLS until I came and took it FOR them!”

  The equally red-tressed woman seated nearby set aside her embroidery and turned her blue eyes on her brother. “Richard, Richard, calm yourself! When you are standing inside conquered Jerusalem, my lord brother, all these troubles will seem as nothing! Once again there will be but one name on the lips of all in Christendom: yours, lord brother: King Richard the Lion-heart.”

  King Richard wheeled on his sister, and his eyes still flashed like those of a swift-descending hawk. “Conquer Jerusalem? God save us, Joanna, there may be no one LEFT to lead against the Holy City! That pissant king of France is LEAVING, Jo, claiming he fears death of the Syrian fever. Ill luck for us it hasn’t carried him off already, as it has killed thousands of BETTER men! He insists that Conrad of Montferrat must be made king here, now we’ve taken Acre and its Accursed Tower at last—”

  “Conrad be a better man than poor Guy of Lusignan, my dear,” Joanna interrupted after a sigh. “Lusignan is rising f
ive and sixty, and it was he, after all, who lost Jerusalem to Saladin in the first place.”

  Richard the king kicked at a silk-covered Turkish ottoman. “But he has claim to the throne, while Conrad has none! Marquis Conrad was forced out of Constantinople a year ago, managed to sail down the coast in time to take over Tyre’s defense and save the city, and ‘assumed’ it. Where be his claim to TYRE, much less to the Kingdom of Jerusalem?” He kicked the ottoman again, watching it roll about the blue and green carpet. “Besides, Conrad is Philip’s kinsman!”

  Joanna smiled indulgently. How her brother the Lion-heart and King Philip of the French hated each other! “The lion and the lamb,” some smilingly called them—but when had lamb ever given such anguish to lion? No; ugly little Philip merely wore the mantle of a lamb; he was a fox. Though King of the English, Richard held his favorite lands of Normandy, Aquitaine, and Poitou on the European main-land, bordering France, and Philip wanted those lands to be a part of his kingly domain. Too, there was their old quarrel about Richard’s refusal to marry Philip’s sister, despite their long betrothal.

  But after all, Joanna thought, she had borne a child to Richard’s now dead father!

  Again she sighed, watching her brother’s lionish anger. She heard the ottoman’s covering tear as he gave it another vicious boot. This third great Crusade to regain Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre was marked and marred by the hostility and constant plotting and quarreling of its jealous leaders. And . . . despite his love of battle, Richard was certainly also adept at plotting and swordless in-fighting!

  “While King Guy,” Joanna said, “is from your own lands . . .”

  Richard gave her a dark look, but failed otherwise to respond. “And then there is Leopold,” he said, twisting his lips around the name. “Archduke of Austria, indeed! Arch-ass of Arrogancia, morelike!”

  This time Joanna held her silence. She knew her brother was called arrogant nearly as often as valiant and brilliant. The big, athletic near-giant with the red-orange hair was all three. Richard the Lion-heart, King of the English and Duke of Normandy, Poitou, and Aquitaine, across the Channel, was without doubt the finest knight in the world. Too, he was a brilliant and indefatigable general. Unfortunately, he knew all that; he’d bested seasoned knights while still in his early teens, and had challenged even his own father.