Love Without Commas

THE SARACEN BLADE (406 pp.)—Frank Yerby—Dial ($3.50).

During the siege of St. Marcel in the year 1212, says Frank Yerby in The Saracen Blade, a dead horse was mounted on a trenchbut. This instrument, a huge catapult, flung the horse clear over the city's parapets and dropped it in the public cistern.

Novelist Yerby has done some catapulting himself. Beginning with The Foxes of Harrow, and repeating the performance with five successive novels, Yerby has mounted a vast, turgid body of prose on his publisher's publicity engines. Each time it has made a bull's-eye on the bestseller lists.

This time Yerby's missile is dressed in full medieval caparison. The Saracen Blade tells the life story of a peasant who was born at the same time, same place as a prince. Pietro di Donati is therefore presumably controlled by the same stars as Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor. Author Yerby says, but hardly bothers to show, that their careers run as parallel as the two sides of a coin. Yet certainly Pietro must have had more girls; they fell for him in domino-rows..

First there was lolanthe, an Italian baron's daughter, who "clung to him grinding her mouth against his so that he felt bruised, her mouth, and the whole warm length of her, silken clad, so that he was scalded breast and thigh, shaken terrified kindled deathlost uncaring thinking for this I will be killed and at the same time that it was worth the dying, and boldly he freed his hands from about her waist and pushing aside her one garment caressed her bare flesh roughly almost brutally as though she were a peasant girl."

Though love without commas was tiring, it was better than love with a permanent question mark. Toinette, the French girl who gave Pietro her hand (and nothing more), shuddered every time he came near her; and so he rolled in the midnight grasses with Yvette, who roused "hammers in his temples. Drums."

With Elaine, back in Italy, "the drums . . . rolled into one prolonged gigantic thunder." Perhaps partly to get away from all this racket, Pietro goes on the fifth Crusade, where he is captured by the Saracens and meets Zenobia. "To such a one, he thought . . . every thousand years the ribald gods give such a form in order to drive men mad."

Whoever says that all this doesn't have anything to do with Emperor Frederick and the astrological theme—they are dragged out from time to time, like grandfather's diaries, to amuse the intellectual visitors—is quite right, and doesn't understand the first thing about contemporary historical novels.