The Enchanter General 03 - Merlin Redux

by Dave Duncan

  I had failed him.

  The stalemate dragged on. Richard announced that he would go with the army to Jerusalem if it went, and would fight with it, but he would not lead it there, for he was certain the assault would be a disaster. The French took him at his word and saddled up for the journey. No other contingent joined them, and by the end of the day they had returned to quarters.

  That effectively ended the Third Crusade. On July 4th, that fateful anniversary of the disastrous Battle of the Horns of Hattin, an unhappy and sulky army pulled up stakes and began its move back to the coast.

  In Jaffa, Lars and I were assigned a very pleasant room— cramped for two, but with a fine view of the citadel and the harbor. The city had surrendered to Richard immediately after the battle of Arsuf, almost a year ago by then, so it had suffered none of the siege damage that had wrecked Acre. We inspected the hospitals and chanted healing spells for anyone who wanted them. We also performed as troubadours a few times, and after one concert, I recognized the hall and realized that we had just fulfilled the long-ago vision that told me we were going to go on crusade.

  All too soon the king went north again to Acre. Lars and I followed, and there I was presented to the two queens— Berengaria, queen of England, and Joan, Richard’s sister and widow of King William of Sicily. They were both very gracious and regal, although neither seemed a fabulous beauty to me, who so yearned to be reunited with Lovise.

  Acre was still recovering from its long siege, much of it still in ruins. I was assigned a room because I was a baron; Lovise would have called it a closet. Lars had to make do with a blanket on the floor, which was narrowly better than sharing a tent with a gang of men-at-arms.

  Richard allowed his negotiations with Saladin’s brother to become public knowledge, because agreement seemed very close. The Christians would keep the coastal strip and the Saracens Jerusalem. The Holy Sepulcher itself would be a Christian church again, which pilgrims would have the right to visit. One indigestible problem was that otherwise insignificant town of Ascalon, south of Jaffa. Richard had invested many months in fortifying it again, because it was the throat between the two halves of Saladin’s empire, Egypt and Syria. He insisted that it remain fortified. Saladin would not agree. Neither side would yield on this. Needless to say, Richard’s enemies continued to spread more rumors of treachery and bribery.

  Timing was becoming critical. The shipping season in the Middle Sea ends at the end of September, and many ports forbade departures much after that date. Richard had previously announced that he would stay in Outremer until Easter, but now he seemed so frantic to be off homeward that twice he summoned me and demanded a prophecy of when he would have a signed treaty in hand and could leave. Twice I had to confess that I had been sent no vision.

  He scowled at this admission, as he did whenever his Merlin failed him. “Then you had better do what the rest of us do, Baron Durwin. Go away and pray for a miracle, because we surely need one.”

  I took that as a dismissal, and departed. I did remember to put a smile on my face as I limped across the crowded anteroom. It wouldn’t do for the king’s prophet to be seen delivering bad news.

  A few days later, on 29th July, King Richard received his miracle. It was sent by Saladin.

  I was no longer kept informed of the daily passwords, because Richard’s Merlin was so well known that no one would deny me access to him. He had already retired to bed when I came hopping and skipping, banging my cane, in a fevered rush to tell him my news. This was the palace of Acre, not an army camp, and the king slept with the queen. There was a slight delay before Richard emerged from his bedchamber with a sheet wrapped around his nudity and a glare that would have panicked Hannibal’s elephants.

  “Well?” His roar might have been heard all the way to Jerusalem.

  I did not flinch. “Lord King, the Saracens are attacking Jaffa.”

  His reaction was a surprise. His glare faded into a blank, faraway stare, and then into a delighted grin. Everyone else exchanged astonished glances.

  Then the Lionheart said, “Well, that cunning old rogue!” It was exactly the response an expert chess player might make when his opponent makes an unexpected, but clever, move.

  Again, I glanced around at the surrounding guards’ faces, and saw that they were still as much at a loss as I was. The king barked one question at me: “When?”

  “Now, sire.” I knew that because the foreseeing could not have been clearer had I been standing on the Jaffa town wall.

  Nobody got much sleep in the rest of that night. By dawn the king was aboard ship and ready to sail, with a band of about fifty knights and a couple of thousand archers. A small army under Henry of Champagne was preparing for a long march south to Jaffa. Lars and I were in that land party, and it gave us our only real experience of warfare. Of course, Saladin had foreseen this expedition, and had posted troops all along the way to harass and impede us.

  As Richard had seen immediately, Saladin’s attack was a masterstroke. If he could retake Jaffa, the port closest to Jerusalem, then the crusaders would be right back where they had been a year earlier, and the Third Crusade would have been an even greater failure than the Second. He very nearly did succeed.

  Of course, I can only report what I learned later. Lars and I were busy riding southward while trying to stay alive under the Saracens’ blizzard of arrows. On the second day Saladin’s siege engines brought down a section of the Jaffa town wall and his troops swarmed in to begin the looting and other horrors that always follow such an event. Saladin ordered an immediate attack on the citadel, but was unable to stop the violence in the streets and houses. Thus the citadel was still holding out when Richard’s flotilla arrived. Faced with enemy flags flying in the town and a noisy army lined up on the beach, he assumed that the whole city had fallen until a young priest leaped down from the citadel wall into the sea and swam out to explain.

  The king ordered an assault. A storm of bolts from his archers cleared the beach for him, sending the Saracens fleeing to the shelter of the town. As soon as the ships were in shallow water, Richard tore off some of his armor, jumped overboard, and waded ashore. His knights followed, and one of the fiercest struggles of the entire crusade followed on the beach. The giant Richard fought like a legend—Achilles, or Arthur—but so did the man beside him, Baron William of Weldon. Screaming, “For Absolon, for Baudouin, for César . . .” he even out-fought the king himself. That triviality may seem unimportant, but it had a strange influence on later events.

  The citadel forces sallied to help. Despite their enormous advantage in manpower, the Saracens were driven off. A couple of days later Saladin ordered a counterattack and there was more ferocious fighting, in which Richard again fought like a one-man army. His utter disregard for his own safety was legendary and the source of his nickname. It was also madness in a king, especially one who ruled such a jumble of territories and had yet to sire an heir. Even Saladin himself is said to have criticized him for this. But again he triumphed. The Christians prevailed, and the Saracens withdrew with their proverbial tails between their legs. Henry of Champagne’s relief force arrived just after that. Lars, Blondel and I set to work repairing the wounded.

  William Legier had received an arrow in his left shoulder, which can be a very dangerous wound, but we managed to extract the head and it healed cleanly. He was a happy man at last.

  “So, how many Saracens did you kill?” I asked him as I bandaged him.

  “Lost count,” he admitted. “Either seven or eleven, but I finished with César, so I need one more for Dominique, to make them all equal.”

  “No, you don’t. I am quite certain that Dominique, wherever he may be, is quite satisfied with his memorial, and would be happiest if you just went home now to be a father to his surviving brothers. Won’t that satisfy you?”

  He thought for a moment and then shook his head sadly. “You’d never make a warrior, Ironfoot. You never understand.”

  The Battle of Jaffa w
as the end of the crusade. King Richard and Sultan Saladin had fought each other to a standstill. All that remained was to agree on a truce, and then the crusaders could all go home. For the Lionheart, going home was to be much easier said than done.

  Jaffa before the battle had been far from a paradise. After the battle it was much less like one, and Richard chose to keep the army outside the city, in tents. This was little improvement, for there were hundreds or even thousands of dead Saracens and dead horses lying everywhere. No one was prepared to bury them, and the stench became indescribable in the August heat. Inevitably, it brought fever. One man badly smitten was the king of England.

  As I well knew, this was far from the first time he had been sick since he arrived in the Holy Land, but it was the first time since we enchanters had been allowed to use our art to treat diseases. Alas, Richard was a stubborn man, and he refused to accept our help in his own case. Possibly he feared more accusations of devilry. He grew steadily sicker.

  Meanwhile efforts to end the war continued. Saladin’s brother, Safadin, was the main go-between, accompanied by various emirs, their equivalents of our barons. The sticking point was still the fortification of Ascalon, and eventually it was Richard who yielded—the walls would come down. On September 2nd the Treaty of Jaffa was signed, although the Lionheart was reputedly too weak to do more than offer a handshake.

  My information on this came from his aide, Sir Fulk Gourand, who often came to visit Lars and me when we all happened to be off-duty. The three of us would drink wine in the dark, because lights brought such hordes of insects—not that we didn’t get well bitten anyway. Poor Fulk was a fifth son, whose gift for languages had won him his post at the king’s side. With the crusade ending, there would be plenty of able young knights wandering around Christendom looking for employment, and he had no prospects for a living if Richard died. He was appalled that the king was throwing his life away by refusing the healing that conjuration could bring. How could any healing possibly be evil? Had not Jesus healed the sick?

  But one night soon after the signing, Fulk seemed more cheerful. “He’s going back to Acre,” he announced after his first swallow of wine. “Says he’ll go in a litter, and he’ll feel better when he gets there.”

  “Cleaner air will certainly help,” I said. “Is he strong enough to bear the journey?”

  Fulk groaned and said, “I hope so.”

  “Lars and I will tag along, just in case he changes his mind on the way.” I could leave the rest of the army in the hands of all the other healers who were now free to serve.

  Even with the war ended, a king must not travel without guards, and it was a large procession that wound its way back northward. Lars and I had no trouble attaching ourselves to it. By the middle of the month we had reached Haifa, a small settlement across the bay from Acre itself. The original crusader fort there had been destroyed by Saladin, but some pleasant buildings were still standing, and here Richard called a halt. I feared that he now felt too sick to travel and was preparing to die.

  “This is ridiculous!” I told Lars. “I am going to heal him whether he wants it or not. Bring the whole bag. We may need all of them by now!”

  In practice we both knew almost every healing chant by heart, but it never hurts to prepare for the worst, so Lars grabbed up the sack of enchantments, and we set off to beard the Lionheart in his den. I stooped out of our tent and almost butted into Fulk, who was puffing as if he had been running. It was, as usual, a very hot day.

  “Lord Durwin! The queen wants you!”

  “She’s here?” Silly question, because Fulk couldn’t have run all the way from Acre in that heat. “We are just on our way to see the king.”

  “I think you’d better hurry if you want to catch him alive.”

  We were ushered quickly into the presence of not one, but both queens. Joan, Richard’s sister, was tall and fair-colored. Berengaria, his wife, was tall and dark. They were seated under an awning on the flat roof of a house, and a lady-in-waiting was standing by to interpret, for Berengaria’s Latin was poor and her southern French baffled me completely. Translation is always an awkward arrangement, but that fact might come in handy if either of us ever had to plead that we had been misunderstood. The patient lay under another awning, distant enough that the sea breeze would carry away sounds, and prevent him hearing whatever we said.

  “Baron Durwin,” the attendant said, “Queen Berengaria wants to know if you can heal her husband’s fever, as you have healed so many others.”

  Wasting no time, Lars had hurried straight from the top of the stairs, over to the dying man. He came back to me to report: “Maybe. Worth a try.”

  “Lady Queen,” I said, “your royal husband, our liege, forbade us to chant over him. If we disobey him, he might cut off our heads. Only if you assure us that he has since changed his mind, and that he asked you to send for us, will we dare to do this now.”

  Before the attendant could even translate what I said, Joan said, “Yes, he did. I was here and I heard him.” Her reactions were faster than the Spaniard’s, although the language problem might have had a lot to do with that. I didn’t believe what she said, and she did not expect me to, but now we had all the excuse we needed.

  I bowed. “Then, by your leave, we will begin at once.” And so we did.

  As we strode over to the patient, I heard Lars mutter, “Pray God we are in time.”

  The king’s breathing was a heartrending sound, even for me, who was hardened to that choking rattle.

  I said, “Amen. Let’s start with the Vene.” We had no need for texts. I gave Lars a pitch and we began a long and desperate battle against the king’s sickness. For the first hour or so, I thought we had come too late, and I would probably have given up had our patient been anyone else. At last he began to breathe more easily, and after that we progressed rapidly. His fever dropped, his pulse steadied, and eventually his eyelids flickered.

  I raised his head and let him have some sips of wine.

  When he had drunk, he whispered, “By what right?”

  “Her Grace, our queen, passed on your orders, sire, saying that you wished us to treat you.”

  He frowned, then smiled faintly, and his beard moved in a nod. I was relieved to see that he understood. Patients who have sunk so close to death often recover their physical health but not their wits.

  “It is wonderful to see you back, Lord King. The land will rejoice. Now I will send for fresh bedding, and a sponge bath for you. Drink as much as you can, and eat a little when you feel able. You have a lot of recovering to do.”

  So we left, spreading the good news to the queen and a whole crowd of courtiers waiting in suspense downstairs. Church bells were rung in Acre.

  Three days later, when I paid my usual evening visit to see how the patient fared, I found him already sitting up, sipping broth. I inquired after his bowels and so on. He was still very weak, but I had done all I could for his flesh. His spirit, I judged, now needed help much more. His crusade—for it was his, more than anyone’s—had failed. At best he could claim a draw, but the Holy City remained in the heathens’ hands, and he must see that as a loss. He still had to find a way home, time was running out, and we did not know what John and Philip might be up to behind his back. I feared that his will to live was faltering, and I needed to boost it. I knew exactly how to do this.

  “I was granted a vision, Lord King. It was very brief, but quite clear. Saladin is dying, sire! Not right away, but I have seen his death, and there were spring flowers and herbs beside his couch.”

  The king took his eyes off me and stared into the distance for a long minute, while I waited for an answer. When it came he spoke it to the scenery. “So all I have to do is stay here until Easter, as I promised, and when the Sultan dies, all his emirs will start scrapping like raunchy cats, and I can pick up Jerusalem like a fresh-laid goose egg?”

  “I can only report what I have foreseen, Lord King,” I said uneasily, wondering why he was
not more pleased by my news. The fighting season was almost over. The chances that King Philip would attack Touraine or Normandy before next Easter must be very slight. What was wrong?

  His eyes, no longer bright with fever, turned to me again. “You swear this is the truth, Enchanter?”

  “Aye, sire. Have I ever lied to you?”

  “If you haven’t, then you are the only one who hasn’t.” He smiled. “You had better spread the news. Tell my brother.”

  “Better to go home and show him,” I retorted, which was extremely improper of me.

  He raised an eyebrow, but did not comment, just waved away the two nurses. They scurried off, no doubt to whisper the exciting prophecy they had just overheard. I realized that he had some more personal matter on his mind.

  “Bring that stool close,” he commanded, and when I had done so, he continued quietly, not looking at me. “I am very grateful to you, Lord Enchanter, and I no longer doubt that your gifts are from God. I have another matter that troubles me. Can you cure . . .” He drew a deep breath. “Sterility?”

  This was a king talking! All men want heirs, but kings especially need them.

  “We are not talking about impotence, sire? You can perform the act itself? It is the lack of results that distresses you?”

  He nodded, reluctant to put the problem in words. He had been married to Berengaria for a year and a half. Of course they had been far apart for much of that time, but even so, two strong and healthy lovers should have become a threesome by now. The most likely prevention was a curse, and for a moment I thought about Bran of Tara. It did not seem wholly out of character for Lord John to have a sterility curse laid on his brother.

  “I have heard rumors to the contrary,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I have acknowledged two by-blows. It doesn’t matter, because they cannot inherit, and kings are expected to keep mistresses. Just between us two . . . I doubt that the timing made it possible in either case.”