Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  Alys had been insufferable since she had married first, and such a splendid youth, no less than Bohemond, son and namesake of that great Norman reiver and bandit, Bohemond of Sicily. Melisende, she had been heard to observe, was marrying a mere count, and not a particularly young one, either – a middle-aged man from France, who had buried one wife already, and married off a grown son to the heiress of England, and come to marry himself to the heiress of Jerusalem.

  Alys had married a prince, but the man who married Melisende would be king when Baldwin was gone. It did no one good to forget that.

  Bertrand slipped in among the company of men, young and not so young, who had sworn themselves to the princess’ service. Young Hugh, whose father was lord of Jaffa, shot him a glance and a grin. Bertrand grinned back. The boy was disastrously young, and reckless with it: he reminded Bertrand pointedly of himself.

  Melisende stood in the ring of her attendants. Her maids were fussing about her, twitching at her robe, her mantle, her hair. She seemed oblivious to them. She had a look about her that made Bertrand frown. Alys had been at her again, he could tell, harping on how beautiful, how young, how perfectly wonderful her Bohemond was. The other half, the half that she did not trouble to say, was that Melisende’s husband-to-be was none of those things. The messengers had been lavish in their praise of his intelligence, his good sense, his prowess in war; but none of them had been able to conceal the fact that he was rising forty, neither tall nor well-favored, and red as a fox.

  “I hate redheaded men,” Melisende had said in Bertrand’s hearing. “Their eyebrows are invisible. And they burn in the sun. And peel.”

  Someone had remonstrated with her, rebuked her for caring so much about a man’s face when the kingdom needed his strength.

  “And how much of that does he have?” Melisende had demanded. “He’s a fox, not a lion.”

  Since Bohemond was a great golden lion of a man, some of her attendants had concluded that she was besotted with her own sister’s husband. But Bertrand did not think that that was her trouble. She had more sense than that. She was disappointed, that was all. She had hoped for something younger and more to her taste. A princess might do that, he thought, even knowing that she must marry for the kingdom and not for her own pleasure.

  She was putting on a brave enough face, now that the ships had entered the harbor. They were proud to see, with their purple sails, and banners flying: white crosses and gold of Jerusalem, golden lilies of France, stalking lions of Anjou.

  Bertrand strained to pick out the count from among the many faces, men crowding the decks and thronging the rails, even a few women close-veiled against the sun. They blurred together, drab brown and grey and black, pilgrim’s garb or grey chainmail, and on each shoulder the blood-red cross of Crusade.

  But there were flashes of brightness amid the colors of winter and the west. Prelates in their splendor, lords in what must pass for the latest fashion in Paris or in Poitiers, and – ah; at last – one man in a garment Bertrand recognized, the robe of honor that Melisende had sewn with her own hands, silk the color of blood, brocaded with dragons. It had come all the way down the Silk Road, all the way from Ch’in.

  Fulk of Anjou was indeed a red man, fox-red, with the high color and freckled skin that went with it. Scarlet, Helena would have observed with delicate acidity, was not his color. And although the robe had clearly been cut and fitted to him, it was still a shade too large. He was a little wiry man, smaller than Bertrand had been led to expect: smaller than Melisende herself, who had the height and the robust breadth of her father’s line.

  Bertrand glanced at her. Her expression had not changed in the slightest. If her eyes had found her husband-to-be, they had wandered away again, back to contemplation of infinite space. He was reminded of nothing so much as a mare that he had seen bred to a stallion not of her choosing, hobbled and close-held, enduring what she must, because she must, unable to escape it.

  “Well!” The voice was bright, penetrating, and incontestably that of the Princess Alys. Beauty is as beauty does. Maybe,” she said with the air of one seeking for the best of a bad bargain, “he can carry on a lively conversation. Or maybe he can sing.”

  Melisende said no word. Not one. Alys made a face, a little moue of displeasure, and turned back to the gaggle of her ladies.

  Two

  Sun struck the water and shattered it into shards of light as keenly edged as a new-made sword. Light in this place was fierce, like an enemy. Colors that in France had seemed bright, here were blinding. Even through a heavy veil Richildis blinked, eyes streaming with tears of pain, struggling to see where sight itself was struck to nothing by the sun’s intensity.

  And the heat…

  She had known it well enough on the voyage, and suffered from it, and, she thought, overcome it. Until she sailed into the port of Acre, that sun-dazzled, dung-reeking, crowd-roaring westward gate of Outremer. Even from out in the harbor she smelled and heard it, as distinct as if she stood in the middle of it.

  “Not long now,” one of her traveling companions said with every evidence of eagerness. He had come with the embassy from Outremer, and had himself been born here, a dark slender man who looked more Saracen than Frank. He was, he insisted, as Christian as any Angevin. His name was Frankish enough, to be sure; Guibert he was called, and he came from one of the castles that ran the length of the kingdom, warding it against the infidel. He had dressed like a Frank on the voyage, but now that they had come to Acre he had put on robes and headdress like a Saracen. He looked much cooler in them than Richildis felt in her best silk gown with its sleeves lined with fur, and her woolen mantle that would have been no less than adequate in Paris at this time of year.

  Hard training in court and convent allowed her to stand immobile in the sodden weight of it, though her body was dissolved in heat. Her face must be scarlet, and certainly was dripping wet; but the veil hid that, at least. She devoted much of her strength to keeping herself on her feet, standing among the few other women who had come with Fulk to Outremer, sheltered somewhat by a canopy. They were all dressed in their best, all sweltering, shocked by such heat as France seldom saw at the height of its summer – and this was only May. She did not want to think of what it would be like in full summer.

  Guibert patted her hand, a familiarity that she would have rebuked if she had had the will to speak. “There now,” he said. “Once we’re in the city we’ll see that you’re dressed more suitably for this climate. Silks, my lady. Linen, cotton, fabric of Mosul – ah, lady, you’ll take such joy in your splendor!”

  Richildis set her lips together. Guibert was one of those men who fancy themselves irresistible to women; and he seemed to have decided that he was particularly irresistible to her. There was no space to move away from him, no help for it but to endure his chatter while the ship crawled closer to the shore and the sun beat down. The crowd’s roar mounted till at last, mercifully, it drowned him out.

  Blinded, deafened, and close to fainting from the heat and the tumult, Richildis kept enough of herself to be aware that they had come to land. The glitter on the quay under the banner of Jerusalem, could not but be the king and his court and, somewhere amid them, the Princess Melisende. Richildis peered through her veil, finding them a blur of faces, all much darker than faces in France, burnished by the sun.

  The women, she took note, were veiled, and wore such fabrics as Guibert had babbled of, robes cut loose and full, colors vivid to the point of pain, or white as dazzling as the sun itself. So many of them, so splendid, so strange-familiar, Frankish height and bones commingled with eastern grace. Many indeed must be half easterners, as the princesses themselves were.

  She swayed, but caught herself. She would stand while she must stand, then walk as she must walk, following the rest from the ship to the land. It rose up to meet her, no more solid than the sea.

  * * *

  “I do not faint,” said Richildis. “I do… not… faint.”

  With wor
ds for a chain, she pulled herself up out of the dark. Pity: it would have been cool, and comfortable. But there was only shame in it. She struggled free of hands that caught at her, steadied herself on her feet, set herself to glare at the ever-presumptuous Guibert.

  But it was not that gentleman who had kept her from falling on her face on the harborside of Acre. It was someone else altogether, a big ruddy man deep-bronzed by the sun, eyes startling in the dark face, pale grey, almost silver. They were eyes that she knew very well. She saw them in her own mirror. And the hair too, fair brown shot with gold – that gold bleached to white, the brown turned almost yellow-fair, but darker near the roots, where one could see the color that nature had made it.

  She was not surprised. She supposed she should be, but God had always been incalculable. “Bertrand,” she said. “What in the world are you doing here?”

  His astonishment served more than well for both of them. He opened his mouth, shut it again. He looked a perfect fool.

  Nonetheless he was her brother, and he had wits enough once he remembered how to use them. He peered at her, struggling to see through the veil. “Who…? Richildis? You’ve grown up!”

  “People do,” she said dryly. “And here I was thinking you lost in the wilds of Outremer, or dead for all anyone knew – and all the while you were waiting on the quay for me.”

  “I was waiting for the Count of Anjou,” Bertrand said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Accompanying the Count of Anjou,” she said. She drew a breath. The heat was no less, and she would have paid dearly for a cup of water, but Bertrand’s presence was like a wall against the sun.

  Ten years, and she a child when he left; but she had not forgotten how safe she always felt when he was there. All of that came back as she stood in his shadow, looking up at him, how tall he was, how broad he had grown. He was no more handsome than he had ever been, nor did a deep scar on his cheek help to make him prettier, but his was a pleasant face, a comfortable face, well lived in and apparently at ease with itself.

  And how that could be when he had gone away without a word, nor sent a message, not even that he was alive, she would be pleased to know. But not quite yet. Richildis had come to herself, and Fulk of Anjou had come face to face with the Princess Melisende.

  Melisende was the taller and by far the younger, and lovely as she folded back her veil: robust and sturdy and strong like the king who held her hand, reaching to lay it in Fulk’s. Fulk, who had never yielded his pride to any man, seemed unperturbed to look up into the eyes of his bride. They, dark and flat and faintly sullen, looked once, hard, as if to set his face in memory, then veiled themselves in long lashes.

  The princess was not greatly pleased with the bargain that had been found for her. Fulk however seemed delighted. He took her hands and raised them to his lips. “Lady,” he said. That was all. No charming words, no flattery. That he was capable of them, Richildis knew well: she had been the recipient thereof, and glad of it too; for Fulk had the art as Guibert the fool did not, nor ever would. But with this princess, this Melisende, he seemed to sense that such blandishments would fail of their mark.

  “My lord count,” King Baldwin said. He was as tall for a man as was Melisende for a woman, big and fair-bearded, very like her and yet much warmer in face and manner. He greeted Fulk with every evidence of gladness, embraced him and shared the kiss of peace. “Welcome, my lord! Welcome to the kingdom beyond the sea.”

  “And very fair it is,” said Fulk, whom people called the Affable. They linked arms, the count and the king, and walked together in amity no less genuine for that it was so carefully calculated.

  Melisende, left to fall in behind them, seemed briefly, profoundly startled. And indeed, thought Richildis, most properly the count should have taken her on his arm and walked beside her. Instead she had to follow, seething visibly, with her ladies in a flurry about her.

  “That was badly done,” Bertrand observed.

  Richildis raised a brow at him. “Truly? I think he knew exactly what he did. He came for the kingdom, and not for the woman.”

  “But the woman will be his queen,” said Bertrand. “He’d do well to woo her. She’s not happy to be given to an old man, and a foreigner besides.”

  “Old! He’s barely forty. That’s young enough for anything she needs.”

  “Sister,” said Bertrand, “you’ve grown hard. Has it been so difficult, away at home?”

  “You could say that,” Richildis said, flat and rather cold. “I married, but he died. He was older at the wedding than Fulk is now, and I was younger than that child. We did well enough together.”

  Bertrand drew in a breath: she heard it even through the clamor of people. But he did not speak. He took her arm, much as Fulk should have done with Melisende, and guided her gently but firmly along the way that king and count and princess had taken.

  She let him do it. There was little else that she could do. Her belongings were on the ship, but would be moved to the palace with everyone else’s. Then, she supposed, she would be given a place to keep herself, like all the rest of Count Fulk’s hangers-on; unless she asked to be taken to a convent. Some of the women had done so, and must be on their way: she could see none of them. There were only strangers about her, and her brother who had grown so different and yet was so familiar.

  A convent might be wise. It would be quiet and austere and – God willing – cool. But if Bertrand was here and she had no need to seek him out, then all her plans and fears were set at nothing. She could tell him what she must tell him, find a ship that was going back to France, set them both on it and be all done with her errand before it had well begun.

  That was not disappointment, no. Of course not. She had expected a lengthy search, a pilgrimage, and at the end of it perhaps another grief, another grave with a man of hers laid in it. Why else had they heard nothing, ever, not once, not even a rumor?

  And here was Bertrand, alive and well and clearly prospering. Not dead at all, not lost, standing right on the shore as she sailed in, as if he had known that she would come.

  She was angry suddenly, a white anger, painful as the light that struck the paving-stones beneath her feet. It stopped her short, and Bertrand perforce, caught in her grip. Behind them someone cursed. She took no notice. “Why?” she demanded of him. “Why did you never send word? Not even one short word?”

  “I might ask the same of you,” he said. His calm enraged her. “You could have written me a letter. I do read, you know. Or sent a message. Pilgrims come and go. One might have been pleased to find a knight among the knights of Outremer, and tell him that his kin remembered him.”

  “Of course we remembered! How could we forget?”

  “Indeed,” said Bertrand. “How could you? Easily, I should think. Considering that I was sent away in disgrace, exiled for a sin that any fool of a boy might commit, ordered never to come back, never to think of it, not though I died—”

  Richildis clapped a hand over his mouth. If he had done such a thing to her, she would have bitten him, but he was a gentle creature for all his size; he always had been. He broke off his hot speech and glared at her over her fingers, standing stiff and still.

  “Father was angry,” she said. “He said things he never meant. You wanted him to mean them – you wanted to go away. You were wild to try your sword against the infidels.”

  She lowered her hand. He did not speak for a while. His eyes were pale in his dark face. “Oh, he meant what he said. He never loved me. It was always Giraut – Giraut this, Giraut that. Giraut the brilliant, Giraut the saintly, Giraut who should have been a prelate and not a simple worldly lord. I was the fool and mooncalf, the sinner who tumbled one girl too many and swelled her belly for her, and paid for it with the whole of his inheritance.

  “I have a new one now,” he said. “I’m a Baron of the High Court of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. I have a castle out past Banias. I have men-at-arms, and I pay knight’s fee, and I give homage to the king as any
lord and vassal must do. Can Giraut claim as much? Is he still moping about La Forêt, pining for the cloister?”

  “Giraut is dead,” said Richildis.

  Bertrand, headlong on his tide of old grievances, seemed at first not to hear her. She saw him stop; she saw the words sink in. “…dead? Giraut is dead?”

  “Dead and buried,” said Richildis.

  “Father must be prostrated,” said Bertrand. It was light; it sounded cold. But Richildis, who knew him, heard the rip of pain beneath.

  “Father is dead,” Richildis said. “And not of grief, though he grieved enough. God took him for reasons of His own. I’m not one to ask what they were.”

  Bertrand had been standing still, and yet he stumbled. She found it in herself to pity him. She had had months to grow accustomed to the shock, first of Giraut’s death, then of her father’s. He had it all at once.

  It said much for his fortitude that he kept his feet, that though he went pale under the sun’s stain he did not topple like a felled tree. “Tell me,” he said with fierce urgency. “Tell me – No.” He looked about, distracted. “Not here. Come. There is a place – Just come.”

  Three

  Bertrand led his sister – his sister whom he had thought, God help him, never to see again – by the hand through a city grown suddenly strange. Its streets in which he had walked so often since he came to Outremer, its sounds and sights and smells, blurred into namelessness. His feet carried him where he had willed to go, heedless of anything but the hand cold and thin in his, and the face in its swathing of veils, white shapeless thing, pale glitter of eyes.