The Codex Lacrimae: The Book of Tears

Chapter 4: Mercedier and a Huntsman

After Jacob and Nicholas departed, Mercedier felt sleepier than after his previous dose of the potion.His thoughts began to fragment, and a flush came to his face. He tried to focus on military matters and the daily operations of the Krak des Chevaliers. Those thoughts and routines had governed his life for the last four decades here, and he couldn't imagine another way of life.

I'm getting to old to fight, but what do I do without battle?

The flushed feeling seemed to be spreading through his body, and he found that he couldn't speak. Thinking that it must, of course, be an effect of the potion, he again closed his eyes and tried to relax. Was it getting warmer in the chamber? He tried to say something to Damian, but his head wouldn't move the way he commanded it, and the words he thought were far from reaching his lips.

Too old for these kinds of battles.

Oui, he knew himself, and as much of a nonchalant façade as he tried to show around friends such as Damian and Ríg, Mercedier knew that he no longer was as resigned to the thought of perishing as he had been only five years earlier. Indeed, of late, he'd been thinking that when he commended his soul to God, his entry into the Afterlife might not be as immediate as he would prefer. How Ríg would laugh at the knowledge that he was finally giving notice to the "serious issues" in life.

For all his youth, Aurelius ... no, Ríg. Ríg... had been so wise during the hundreds of conversations they'd had in the loggia by the upper ward, watching the distant sea and Syrian landscape during all times of day. Those conversations were wide-ranging and surprisingly stimulating to the veteran soldier who was forty years the youth's elder. Together they spanned the breadth of human existence as time passed and the boy slowly recovered from the trauma of Mecina. What a warrior! No one in the fortress had ever seen Ríg's like, and only a few of the elders who'd rescued him and Marcus from the fires of Mecina knew the full truth. At times when he was training the lad, Mercedier had laughed at the roles. Servius Aurelius Santini was such a natural fighter that he could have been training all two thousand soldiers in the castle and still keep years of skill and knowledge in reserve!.

It seemed a poor jest to Mercedier that the boy had to make the pretense of serving as a squire to one such as Bernard Perdieu, but Ibn-Khaldun had once explained the need for the duplicity to him, Arcadian, and Damian.Mercedier never forgot his words:

"Aurelius was thirteen years' old when he took command of Mecina," the elderly scholar had said to the group during one of their weekly meetings in Arcadian's chambers."He's fifteen now, and although he looks twenty, in many ways he's still a frightened child inside."

Mercedier had laughed. "Child — hah! You'll have to come to the yards the next time we have a practice session. Today that child injured two of the senior sergeants who'd been itching to take him down; they were unconscious before half a minute had passed!"

"No, Mercedier, I don't mean the fighting.I mean what's happening up here." Ibn-Khaldun had tapped his forehead. "There's something more to his story than just going on a pilgrimage and getting caught at Mecina. Something to do with his family, which he'll never discuss. Even in the moment I first met him, he told me that his name would be Ríg, as if someone had told him to do that."

"Well, that's not too difficult to figure out," Mercedier had replied. "That's his uncle's doing, the namesake who sacrificed himself to Saladin so he could live. Hell of a man, I'd say."

"I don't think that man had anything to do with defending Mecina," Ibn-Khaldun had said. "He's also not the relative I'm thinking of. Aurelius has a whole family back in Sicily that he never talks about."