Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  The inner courts of the king’s residence were full of elegant personages, silk-clad and musk-scented gallants trailing clouds of hangers-on. Among them like lions among deer strode men in mail, armored as if for battle, with the cross of Crusade on the shoulder. Their faces were deeply seared by the sun, and often scarred; their eyes were hooded under heavy brows. They bade Richildis remember that this was no soft and effeminate country, however great its comforts. It was a nation born in war, sustained in battle, the eastern bastion of Christendom against the hordes of the infidel.

  Warrior and elegant alike greeted Bertrand with respect. Here he could not move so quickly. He had to stop, if only for a moment, to speak to this man or that. Names blurred in Richildis’ memory. Faces she remembered more clearly: alert, keenly aware of her as a stranger. The men of war were mostly warrior monks, Templars and Hospitallers. The men in silks were lords of the High Court or their heirs; but some of those, she saw when she was closer, wore mail under their handsome robes.

  One or two she did remember. Joscelin, who was lord in Edessa: she had heard of him even in La Forêt, for his name was sung among the great ones of the first Crusade. He was aging now, his shock of hair tonsured by time, the remnants of it gone iron grey; and his face was grey, too, under the sun’s bronze, as if he had been ill. But he greeted her with courtly grace, kissed her hand and said, “You’re most welcome in Outremer, my lady. And how do you find it, now that you’ve seen a little of it?”

  “It’s… strange,” Richildis said, feeling like a fool and wondering where all her wits had gone. People were staring. Too many people, too many strangers.

  She had never been shy; she had been raised to be stared at, as all noble ladies were. But there had always been familiar faces, people whom she had known since she was small, who had seen her grow from child into woman. These, except for Bertrand, were all unknown to her.

  Lord Joscelin seemed not to mind the inanity of her response. “Oh, indeed,” he said. “It’s uncommonly strange when one first comes here. But in time it grows familiar. I’ve nigh forgotten what France is like – the sun’s burned it all away, and left me with memory of nothing but this most holy country. You will be visiting the sacred places, yes? If you have need of escort, only ask, and I would be more than pleased to oblige.”

  Richildis murmured something, she hardly knew what. Lord Joscelin excused himself to greet a man in armor, a Templar by his habit. Bertrand touched her hand, drawing her away.

  “That was well done,” he said when they had gone a little distance, through that particular hall and up a stair and a passage and past another pair of guards. “Milord Joscelin is a great power in this country, and a strong friend. If he’s taken a fancy to you, most of the greater lords will follow.”

  “What is it about me that he fancies?” she asked with some asperity. “Is he in want of a wife?”

  “Not at the moment,” said Bertrand, refusing to be baited. “Don’t tell me you never learned to cultivate friends in high places. Or were you in the convent so long, they all but made a nun of you?”

  “I left Ste-Mathilde when I was twelve years old,” Richildis said, “to marry Thierry de Beaumanoir.”

  “You married Thierry?” Bertrand sounded honestly appalled. “God’s bones! What was our father thinking?”

  “Our father was thinking that it was time I made a suitable marriage, and Beaumanoir would match well with La Forêt.”

  “But Thierry was a lout,” said Bertrand. “An idiot. A miserable excuse for a knight, and not much of a man, either.”

  Richildis stopped in the passage, which happened to be empty. She rounded on her brother. “Father made for me the best marriage that he could find. If you had been there, no doubt he would have heard your objections. But you were not, and he did as he judged wise. I was not unhappy. I only regret that I gave him no son. One of his bastards is lord in Beaumanoir now: I gave it up when he died, to go back to La Forêt.”

  “Gave it up? Or fled?”

  “I left,” said Richildis with all the serenity she could command. “I never learned to love Beaumanoir. My heart called me back to La Forêt; and Father said nothing, nor cast me out. My dowry came back with me, and a consideration from my husband: as it happens, enough to pay my passage here. I did well enough, though not as well as Father had hoped.”

  Bertrand, alack, was no fool, and he knew her better than he had a right to. “He beat you. His bastard tried to. Did he rape you, too?”

  “Which? William Bastard?” Richildis could not prevent her lip from curling. “Of course not. He called me a cold and milkfaced excuse for a saint, but he lacked the force of will to keep me prisoner. I took what I pleased and left when it suited me.”

  “As you left La Forêt to come to Outremer?”

  “You know why I came here.”

  “So I do,” Bertrand said. “I wonder: do you?”

  She could hardly turn on her heel and stalk away from him. She did not know the way ahead, and the way behind was full of strangers. She settled for walking swiftly forward. He followed as she had hoped he would, then in a long stride set himself ahead, guiding her onward.

  * * *

  The ladies of Jerusalem had their bower in a high turret, looking out over the city and the blue brilliance of the sea. Their assembly was like a garden of flowers: bright gowns, bright jewels, bright glitter of eyes at the stranger who had been brought among them. But for the guards at the door and the singer with a lute, there were no men in their company. Richildis was a little surprised at that. She had expected that Melisende’s knights would flock about her, but there was none here, except Bertrand.

  He bowed with grace that he could only have learned in this country. The princess, seated in the center of her ladies, seemed less sullen a creature than she had been on the quay of Acre. Her smile at sight of Bertrand was vivid; Richildis saw no affectation in it. She held out her hand. He took it and kissed it. “Highness,” he said, “I have the gift I promised.”

  Melisende’s glance left his face to settle on Richildis. Vivid indeed, Richildis thought. Alive, alert, and much too intelligent for its own good. She was a woman grown by any reckoning, well past her first courses, old enough that a sister who had been born after her was a full year a wife; and yet she struck Richildis as a brilliant and thoroughly spoiled child.

  She spoke charmingly enough, with an accent that spoke to Richildis half of the north of France and half of the east. Her mother had been Armenian: Richildis saw it in her dark eyes and in the faint golden cast of her skin, though the rest of her was as straightforwardly Frankish as King Baldwin himself. “A handsome gift,” she said, “and one well given. Milady… Richildis, yes?”

  Richildis inclined her head.

  “Richildis,” said Melisende. “Come, sit by me. Do you sing?”

  “Not with any great facility, highness,” Richildis said.

  “Your brother told me otherwise,” said Melisende.

  “My brother remembers the child I was,” Richildis said, “and not the woman I am now.”

  “Brothers will do that,” said Melisende, “or so I am told.” She beckoned, graceful and imperious. “Come! Sit. Will you take wine? Or have you acquired a taste for sherbet?”

  “Wine will do,” Richildis said, “highness.” She sat where she was commanded, taking note of the ladies who shifted to make room. Their mouths smiled but their eyes were dark and flat, as if they weighed her and found her wanting. They all seemed to be of eastern blood, in part or in whole. Of them all, only Richildis seemed to be pure Frank.

  She could not feel excessively tall or pale: Melisende was tall and fair. But she felt as much an outlander as she had yet felt in this country.

  She veiled her discomfort well, or no one cared to notice. Melisende dismissed Bertrand with another of her blazing-bright smiles. “Go, greet the sky, defend the Holy Sepulcher. I’ll guard your sister well, you have my word on it.”

  Bertrand bowed low. As easi
ly as he had abandoned his sister to Helena, he left her with the Princess of Jerusalem. And there was not a word she could say against him. That was the lot of women in this world: to be disposed of as men saw fit, however little they themselves might wish it.

  Six

  Helena was better company, but Melisende was infinitely more respectable. Stranger she might be, surrounded by strangers, in a strange country, but she was still a Frankish lady. Her manners had the silken softness of the east, but her speech and her expressions were of the west, learned as it must be from her father.

  As idle as she seemed to be, in fact she was doing a great deal, in the inimitable fashion of princesses. While the singer sang his songs, some of Provence and some wailing oddities of the east, Richildis saw how Melisende had set each lady to a task: sewing on bits that would become a robe of state, or making lists that must pertain to the court’s moving to Jerusalem for the wedding, or running on errands. She herself, seated in comfort, listening to sweet music, kept pace with all of them. The woman next to her, who was reading from a book, read not tales of old knights or lives of the saints, but the accounts of a great demesne.

  Indeed, thought Richildis. Melisende would be chatelaine of her father’s holdings, since her mother was dead. Strange to see with how much pleasure she seemed to regard her duties, and yet she so clearly was not pleased with the husband who had been chosen for her.

  Gossip was the same here as everywhere. The names were strange but the scandals were the same. And there were many of those, if these ladies’ chatter was any guide; but none of them named Fulk, or told tales of him.

  Richildis could well remember when she prepared for her wedding, how the talk had never failed to come round to the man whom she would marry. There had been a certain delicacy in it, in that no one had dwelt too long on his sins of the flesh and the spirit, but still they had had much to say of him, of his bastards, of the wives he had had before her. She had come to know him very well, as she fancied, by the time her hand was laid in his before the church door, and she spoke the words that made her his wife.

  Here, no one spoke of Count Fulk. That seemed rather a pity: by every account that Richildis knew, he was a better man by far than Thierry de Beaumanoir. Instead they chattered of everyone else, names that she had heard in legends of Crusade, still other names that were strange to her, and not a few words of her brother.

  She was not, it seemed, expected to mind their speculations as to his prowess in the bedchamber, still less their lighthearted wagers as to when, and if, he would take a bride. She sat beside the princess, alone of them all in having nothing to do, and nothing to say, either, since she was a stranger.

  It might have been an hour that she sat there, saved from boredom by the singer’s excellence and her own growing fascination with the Princess Melisende. The spoiled and sulky child of the quay was little in evidence here. This was a lady who performed her duties well and skillfully. She was managing the wedding herself, or nearly; the errand-runners went several times to the king’s seneschal and more than once to the king himself, but the word they brought back was always It is well; do as you see fit. Melisende did not seem disconcerted; indeed, from her conduct, she had expected to be given a free hand.

  It seemed that this odd mingling of pleasure and duty would go on all day. But when an hour had passed, as close as Richildis could tell, Melisende rose abruptly. What moved her, Richildis could not see. No bell had rung, no messenger come to summon her. Perhaps she had merely grown tired of sitting in one place.

  Richildis, who had thought herself forgotten, now felt the full force of the princess’ eyes on her. “Come with me,” said Melisende. As others of the ladies stirred and some rose, Melisende lifted her hand. “No; stay. That robe must be done by morning. Anna, take Marie and Cecilia and investigate the cellars. I’m in some doubt as to whether there’s wine enough in Jerusalem for the wedding feast. We’ll take what’s here, if it’s of sufficient quality. Martine, there’s an oddity here in the accounts for the month of March. See if you can discover why the sugar-mill produced so much for the first half, and then nothing for the second. Brother Robert should know; that’s his writing in the ledger.”

  The various ladies returned to their places, or bowed and went to do as they were bidden. Richildis found herself swept in Melisende’s wake, out of that room and down the stair and out of the tower. The abruptness of it made her dizzy, and put her in mind, oddly, of battles. Armies did such things, she thought. Waited for days – months, sometimes. Then leaped into action.

  The place to which Melisende took her was hardly deserted. There were women there as well, but only a handful: older ladies than had gathered in the tower, sitting in a circle, sewing on a splendor of gold and jewels and silk that must be the princess’ wedding robes. They looked up as the princess entered, bowed their heads and smiled, but did not either rise or offer greater reverence.

  This Melisende must have expected. There was an alcove in the chamber, a rounded niche with a window too high to look out of, and a bench built into the wall, curving round it from edge to edge. It made Richildis think of the chapter house in Ste-Mathilde where she had spent her childhood. It had the same air of stony quiet.

  From the niche she could see the waiting-women laboring over the princess’ gown, and no doubt they could hear if she spoke; yet she felt set apart, alone with this stranger, this Princess of Jerusalem.

  Melisende must have brought her here for a purpose, and one urgent enough to sweep her abruptly out of the tower, but she seemed in no haste to come to the point. She sat under the window, arranging her skirts and her veil. “Sit,” she said.

  Richildis obeyed as she had before, sitting near the edge of the niche. Melisende’s eyes glinted. “France is a warrior country, too, I see,” she said.

  “Is there any that is not?” Richildis asked her. It might have been courteous to address her by one of her titles, but this place somehow did not encourage it. Therefore she left the question bare, as if they were equals.

  The princess did not rebuke her for it, nor seem to notice the lack. “I had heard that Provence is a soft and pleasant country,” she said, “where even the barons live in peace with one another, and no one does battle unless he must. They are all poets there, I’m told, and singers of songs.”

  “Provence is rather less full of ravening beasts than most places in the world,” Richildis conceded, “but even it has its wars and its quarrels.”

  “None as great as here, surely,” said Melisende. “We live eternally on the edge of death. Which, the priests will tell you, is the lot of mankind; but it’s most perceptible in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, where every house is a fortress, and none is safe from the maraudings of the infidel. France is free of that at least.”

  “There are the Norsemen,” Richildis said, “and Saracens, sometimes, in the south. But the heart of France has nothing to fear but its own contentious nobility.”

  “They say that in Byzantium there are whole cities that have not known war in generations, and men who have never raised a weapon in battle. Can you believe that?”

  “I admit I find it difficult to credit,” said Richildis. And added, at last, “Highness.”

  “Lady,” said Melisende, “we’ll not stand on ceremony. Nor did I bring you here to contemplate the universality of war. I had wanted to ask you…” She paused. Richildis did not believe that she was shy. She hunted for the words, that was all, so as to give the least offense. “I wished to ask you if your brother told me true. You came to fetch him back to France.”

  Richildis nodded. “Yes. Yes, I did. He’s heir to a barony in Anjou.”

  “He is the Lord of Beausoleil, that my father gave him for his feats against the Saracen. It’s a small holding, but rich enough, with an olive press and a sugar-mill, and two knights in fee to the king. Is your Angevin barony as well endowed as that?”

  “I have to admit,” said Richildis, “that it is not. It has only one knight in fee. B
ut it has a vineyard, and its wine is well thought of, though it’s said to travel ill. I brought a cask of it to Outremer. I’ll make you a gift of it, once I know what’s become of my belongings.”

  “They are here,” Melisende said. “You’ll be housed among my ladies in the chamber just outside of my own. I’ll have you taken there when we’re done here, if you’ve a mind to see for yourself.”

  “I believe you,” Richildis said. “You want to keep him here, then.”

  “Of course I do,” said Melisende. “We have women enough and more than enough, but strong fighting men are much too rare for comfort. Did you think we’d give up even one, even to take a barony with a vineyard, away in Anjou?”

  “One might consider honor,” murmured Richildis, “and obligation.” But before Melisende could respond to that, she went on, “Yes, I do understand. He has honor and duty here, and both are of great moment to him. He refuses to go home to Anjou.”

  “His home is here,” Melisende said. “He’s made it so, by his own merits and the strength of his arm.”

  “So I can see,” said Richildis. She paused. Melisende made no effort to fill the silence. “And so you have taken me in hand, to keep me from vexing my brother.”

  “Hardly that,” Melisende said. “He asked me to honor his sister with a place among my ladies. I was glad to oblige him. It’s a coup of sorts, to have a proper Angevin in my train, and she a lady of both presence and probity.”

  “You may find me stiff and ill-suited to the lighter amusements,” Richildis said. “I have little patience for frivolity, even of the most royal sort.”