Free Lion Heart by Justin Cartwright Page B

Tyre or Antioch. It’s even possible that the Templars took charge of them, or that your father’s beloved Richard the Lionheart found them.’
    Now her mood changes: as the last traces of dusk fade, she becomes anxious.
    ‘You should go now. My driver is waiting.’
    She doesn’t come down to see me off. At the door a servant is standing with a gift of dates, hummus in a small brown bowl, covered with cling film, pistachios, almonds and beautiful peaches, grown somewhere on the ancestral lands, which are fed from a Roman aqueduct. The driver looks around once before opening the door of the Mercedes. I can’t make up my mind whether Haneen is a figure to be admired in her grandeur or to be pitied in her isolation, stranded on a barren hillside of half-built houses and uncleared rubbish, of cats with three legs and gummy eyes and a slinking, wary demeanour. They lurk near some randomly placed drainage pipes. I look up and Haneen is standing on the balcony. I wave, and she turns away.
    The driver is silent. He has some beads hanging from the rear-view mirror. The lights of Jerusalem have a particular brightness, a kind of chemical intensity like some fireworks. The walls of the Old City are floodlit; they are glowing warmly below the Ottoman crenellations. I try a date. As dates go, they are luscious and sweet, but at the same time powdery as though the dust of the Negev has infiltrated them.
    I think that these gifts have symbolic content: Haneen wants to demonstrate that she is generous, and perhaps also that I am part of the family. Gifts have always been big in this part of the world. When Saladin heard from the Byzantine Emperor, Isaac Angelus, that Richard the Lionheart, the German Emperor Frederick, and the King of France were all making their way to the Holy Land, he wanted to forge an alliance with the Emperor in double quick time; he gave him twenty Latin chargers, boxes of gems and balsam, three hundred strings of jewels, a chest filled with aloes, one hundred musk sacs, twenty thousand bezants, a baby elephant, a musk deer, an ostrich, five leopards (surely cheetahs?), a silver jar of poisoned wine and large amounts of poisoned flour, presumably for Isaac to give to Richard and the German Emperor and their knights when they passed through Constantinople.
    Despite all these gifts, Isaac could not halt the Crusaders’ progress. Richard travelled by ship via Cyprus, which he conquered, and Frederick never arrived in Constantinople; he died trying to cross a river in Seeucia. He was bored with the slowness of the crossing and decided to swim across, but drowned. Some say he had a heart attack in midstream. His flesh was boiled, stripped off the bones and buried in Tyre right next to the lance which Longinus, the Roman soldier, used to pierce Christ’s body on the cross. Sadly, Frederick’s remains never made it to Jerusalem. To be buried in Jerusalem was a guarantee of eternal rest.
    As we drive down the Nablus Road, I am thinking now of what Haneen said: she was warning me about Noor’s naivety but her words were also applied to me. She was saying that this world that we know so little about isn’t going to change. What the fundamentalists say now about facing death is more or less what the Crusaders said then: Dieu lo vult – God wills it. Caelem denique – Heaven at last . I think of the Hospitallers offering their necks willingly to Saladin’s Sufis, guaranteeing themselves eternal rest.
    My father, of course, also believed that life had many sacred mysteries to be discovered. He wasn’t one of the plodders. Haneen told me that he quoted Shakespeare to her:
     
    Dear Kate, you and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country’s fashion: we are the makers of manners, Kate, and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouth of all find-faults . . .
    My father was going to show the way to a better life; he was a follower of Timothy Leary who imagined a paradise, peopled, of course, by