Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  Just in back of her was the center of the world. She might not have known it, but someone in the palace had told her. When the new choir was all built, that one had said, it would be marked in the pavement for pilgrims to marvel at. Now it was as simply there as she was.

  Here was the heart of Christendom. Here was its soul, the empty tomb, the place so holy that it had needed might of arms to protect it from the infidel. Here: an empty tomb, an absence in which resided every article of faith, a three days’ resting place for the Son of God made man.

  It was too much to bear. Either she must go happily mad, or she must turn her mind to the mass that was sung before and about her. The choir of eunuchs and children had followed them in, and the choir of monks and canons joined it, clear high voices lifted up to heaven, deep voices solid as stone underfoot.

  And what, Richildis wondered, was Melisende thinking as she knelt with her new husband before the altar? Her back told Richildis nothing, not even in its rigidity. Her voice in the responses was inaudible. She had slipped her hand from Fulk’s where her father had placed it, and claimed it for herself. The ring that Fulk had given her gleamed softly in the dimness. It looked strange on her finger, as if it had yet to find comfort there, or to be settled in its place.

  One learned to live with strangeness. This mass Richildis knew, these words in which it was sung, even the secret mutter of the Canon that made flesh and blood of earthly bread and sweet eastern wine. Here where the heart of Christendom beat close and terribly strong, it was still the same; still the old rite, the rite that she had loved since she was a child. She clung to it. She let it enfold her, and suffered it to comfort her. It softened the blow of sanctity a little. It lightened the weight of the world.

  Eleven

  Once Melisende was safely married to the Count of Anjou, the kingdom settled to wait in a kind of joyful anxiety. And to be sure, by the middle of what would have been autumn in France, Melisende was incontestably with child.

  She announced it with neither the joy nor the trembling of the usual young bride. Her marriage did not sit ill on her, but neither had she bloomed in it. Fulk had done his duty as often as the needs of war and kingdom permitted, and, it was evident, as capably as a man of his years and experience might be expected to do. She had not appeared to suffer from his attentions, had not come from the bridal chamber bruised and quenched as some few virgin brides did. Nor did she look as if she yearned to be there. Outside of the marriage bed she was much as she had always been. When he had gone away with her father for the summer’s round of skirmishes with the infidel, she did not appear to pine for him. She greeted him warmly enough on his return, but no more warmly than she greeted such of her knights as were her friends.

  Pregnancy did not suit her at all. Long before the kingdom knew that the princess carried an heir, her women could not mistake it. Greensickness that began in the morning and lasted much of the day; storms of tears or rage alternating with an oxlike placidity; a sudden and flat refusal to entertain her husband in the evenings – the older women nodded wisely. The younger ones bit their tongues lest they say something indiscreet.

  The men were happily oblivious. All but Fulk. He was not a remarkably perceptive man when it came to women’s foibles, but, as he said to Melisende the third time she made to slam the door on his face, “Lady, I was married before, and long enough to learn a little sense. How long till the baby’s born?”

  She would have slammed the door regardless of his presence in it, if he had not somehow managed to set himself on the inside of it. The few maids whom she suffered of late in her presence, Richildis among them, had perforce to see and hear it all, since it was the ladies’ solar he had entered, and the only escape was inward, toward the bedchamber.

  Melisende stood just out of his reach. She did not press hands to her belly as women did to protect their unborn children. Clearly, precisely, and without expression she said, “He will be born in the spring.”

  “He?” Fulk asked. “You think you know?”

  “It is a son,” Melisende said. “Just as my father and the kingdom wanted. Once he is born, and if God wills that he lives, Jerusalem has its heir. And I have my freedom.”

  Fulk’s brows went up. “Freedom, my lady? From what? One son alone is hardly enough to build a dynasty.”

  “He will have to be,” she said. “I won’t go through this more than once unless I must. And no, I’m not going to demand that you put me aside. You can be king when the time comes. You’ll be good at it. But no more of this childmaking.”

  Truly, thought Richildis, Fulk looked astonished. She was mildly surprised herself. She had not known Melisende felt so strongly about it. It was good Christian asceticism, of course, but Melisende had said nothing of that – no word of piety.

  Fulk, it seemed, thought much the same. “Would you make yourself a nun?” he asked her.

  Melisende shook her head sharply. “This is not religion. This is what I wish. One son, my lord. That should be enough. If he dies I’ll give you another.”

  “As easy as that?”

  “You seemed to have no great difficulty in getting this thing that roils my stomach and slows my wits.”

  “Lady,” said Fulk, drawing out the word, as if he needed the time to think. “Lady, do you hate me so much?”

  “I don’t hate you at all,” said Melisende. “I resent this state I find myself in. When it’s done, I don’t want to do it over again.”

  Fulk seemed at a loss – which in him was a rarity. Clearly he thought of saying something further; equally clearly he thought better of it. He bowed. “Lady,” he said. “As you will.”

  * * *

  After he was gone, Melisende said composedly to the air where he had been, “I would sleep now.”

  Her ladies mustered wits to rise, to assist her. She did not speak to them. She allowed herself to be undressed, her hair combed and plaited for the night, her bed turned down and herself settled in it.

  Richildis was the last to bow and retreat. Melisende held out a hand. “No,” she said. “Stay.”

  Richildis turned back toward Melisende, folded her hands in front of her and waited.

  “You look like a nun in chapter,” Melisende said. She had no great air of distress, now that she was alone. She was preoccupied, that was all. “Do you severely disapprove?” she asked Richildis.

  Richildis did not see that her opinion was of any great moment. But Melisende, for whatever reason, seemed to value it. She answered honestly, “No. I can’t say I approve, either. The duties of a wife and a princess—”

  “I am doing them,” Melisende said. “Or as much as I can, with this to make me stupid. That’s what I hate, you see. Not being able to think. And when I try, it’s all milky sweetness. It’s disgusting.”

  “I don’t think,” said Richildis after a moment, “that I’ve ever heard a woman object on quite those grounds before.”

  “Most women don’t care if they can’t think. They’re happy enough to let their men think for them.”

  “Isn’t that the way of the world?”

  “If it is,” demanded Melisende, “then why did God give me the capacity to think at all? Cows don’t think. Sheep don’t think. Why should a woman? And why should she care, if she wasn’t meant to in the first place?”

  “You never ask the easy questions,” Richildis said, half to herself.

  Melisende sat up in her great white-canopied bed, with her face flushed and her hair slipping out of its plait. She looked like a child. “Fulk is going to fight this, you know,” she said. “He’d like to keep me pregnant and ox-witted so that he can rule without interference. He’s not pleased that Father lets me sit in court and in council – lets, he says, as if there were any question of my right to sit there. I am the eldest and the heir, though I lack certain vital parts that would make it possible for me to be king. Parts that, mind you, my son will have.”

  “Fulk’s son, too,” Richildis said mildly.

 
“My son,” said Melisende. “Men may claim them, but women have the bearing and the raising of them. And the shaping, too, if they’re wise. As I plan to be.”

  “Then,” said Richildis, “you had best not say such things to Fulk as you’ve said to me.”

  “Not a word,” said Melisende. “Not one. God’s witness to it.”

  It seemed to Richildis that Melisende had already said more than enough to alarm Fulk. Or perhaps not. Melisende was young, she was beautiful. As strong-willed as she was, she was still a woman. Fulk might well convince himself that her pronouncements were but the vaporings of new pregnancy. It was a frightening thing, after all, to bear a child. Each child that was born took its mother to the gates of death. A young and innocent woman might well transform that fear into resistance – resistance that would be easy enough to break, he might think, once the child was born.

  * * *

  For the moment he allowed his lady her fancies. He was gentle with her. He brought her dainties. He sent her a player on the harp whom he had captured on campaign, who could sing even more sweetly than her luteplayer. When she wished to be left alone, he obliged her; but when she was in need of company he was there, or if he was occupied, he sent someone charming to entertain her. It was usually one of her own knights, sometimes one of his.

  More than once it was Bertrand. Richildis had found it easy enough to maintain a chilly distance through the summer while he rode on campaign with the count and the king. But in this season that began in dusty heat and ended in the startling chill of winter, men tired of war. They returned to their own domains, but for high feasts and saints’ days they came to High Court in Jerusalem.

  Bertrand seemed to divide his days equally between his castle and a house in the Holy City. She had not seen his demesne, nor had she been invited to see it. When she went with the crowd of pilgrims round the holy places and down to Jordan, she thought of going on till she found her brother. But she could nurse a grudge most excellent well – and he had given no indication that she was welcome there.

  He was affable enough when he came to entertain his princess. He might have forgotten their quarrel; except that he never asked to see Richildis outside of her lady’s presence.

  * * *

  Richildis brooded on this, one day in winter. It was the sort of day she had dreamed of while she sweltered in the heat of summer: grey, dim, and chill, with rain in the air. It had snowed in the night on Mount Hebron, someone said, and the mountains of the Lebanon were white, the great cedars weighed down with snow. The feast of the Lord Christ’s birth was nearly upon them. The king would celebrate it in Bethlehem, as every pilgrim then in Outremer strove to do. Melisende wanted to go, but her pregnancy was not going as well as it might. If her father and her husband had their way, she would stay safe in Jerusalem, sheltered and warm, while they braved the rains and snows and the throngs of pilgrims on the road.

  She was in a great temper over it. Richildis had escaped into the bazaar, using as pretext the need for an oddment or two. She had not begun alone, but the maids who went with her had strayed in the crowd.

  Richildis was not unduly perturbed. She had come to know the city well, had walked in it often on errands for her lady or herself, or simply because she was free to go where she would. Women of the infidels did not have that freedom, she had heard; nor indeed did the unmarried daughters of the Franks. But she was a widow and her own woman, and she could choose to walk abroad.

  Today she did not mean to go far. A thin rain had begun to fall, little enough in the covered arcades of the city, but it brought with it a penetrating cold. Summer’s sellers of sherbet had given way to sellers of wine warmed over braziers and enriched with spices.

  She paused to buy a cup of it, strong and sweetly pungent. As she drew in the scent, someone else slipped past her into the wineseller’s booth. She drew back, to be courteous, but the crowd in the street swelled suddenly, jostling them into one another.

  Richildis looked into a face she knew, even veiled in silk. Helena’s smile was swift, artless, and transparently glad. Richildis could not match it.

  She could at least be civil. “Madam,” she said.

  “Lady!” said Helena. “It’s been ages since I saw you. Have you a moment? My house is near here – it’s warm and out of the rain, and cook has been baking. Won’t you come?”

  Richildis opened her mouth to refuse, but she had already been swept up in a cloud of silk and perfume, borne away she knew not how, and taken out of the chill and the rain into a warm and fragrant house.

  The house in Acre had been borrowed only. This was Helena’s own. Richildis knew enough now of the city to recognize that it was as old as Rome but made new under the Saracen. Its grace was infidel grace, its warmth a Roman thing, a memory so old that one would have thought it long forgotten.

  “Yes, there is a hypocaust,” Helena said. “They’re gone, most of them, but I was fortunate: this house has been well kept up since Rome went away. There is one old man whose family has served the people here for all that time, who knows how to keep the furnaces running and the channels clear.”

  It was a marvel. Richildis had been coaxed out of her rain-dampened clothes and into soft warm robes and slippers that let the warmth from the floor seep into her feet. She was tempted to drop down from the chair in which she was sitting, to lay her hands flat on the floor, to feel the worn tiles of its mosaic and the heat that resided in them.

  But this was not a friend’s house, not a floor on which she could lie like a child or a basking cat. She sat rather stiffly and drank warm spiced wine and tasted cakes that seemed made of every spice and sweetness that was known in the east of the world.

  It was difficult. She had not seen Helena since the spring – not since Acre. And they had not parted in amity. Helena had said things that were not easily forgiven. Things that not even kin had a right to say.

  Helena seemed to have forgotten them, or to have willed them away. Perhaps it was a courtesan’s skill; perhaps an easterner’s. She made a virtue of Richildis’ silence. She broke it not to chatter aimlessly but to speak of things that might be of interest: the spices that flavored the cakes, the summer’s wars, the princess’ pregnancy. Richildis answered in nods or in monosyllables.

  After a while Helena fell as silent as Richildis, but with greater comfort in it. She nibbled cakes, drank wine. A servant came in once, bowing, apologetic, with somewhat that must be decided quickly. She dealt with it where she sat, and sent the servant away.

  Then she sat watching Richildis, though Richildis was doing nothing but sit with her hands folded tightly in her lap. “You could have left,” Helena said. “And yet you stay.”

  “I can think of no polite way to leave,” Richildis said. It felt as if she blurted it out, but she sounded quiet enough to herself.

  “You can excuse yourself and go,” said Helena.

  “Do you want me to?”

  “I don’t think you want to,” Helena said. “It distresses you, doesn’t it? That you find me interesting.”

  “To a saint no doubt any sin is interesting,” said Richildis. “I’m no saint, mind you. But—”

  “But I must be an egregious sinner.” Helena sighed and shook her head. “Oh, I am probably as vile as you imagine. I’m steeped in sins of the flesh.”

  “With… many men,” Richildis said, not wanting to, but it slipped out of her.

  “Actually,” Helena said, “there have been six. Your brother is the sixth. And, in the past year and more, the only one whom I haven’t sent away.”

  “Then how do you—”

  “How do I live?” Helena seemed neither amused nor offended. “I was left well provided for. And my… patrons have been generous.”

  “Including my brother?”

  “I take nothing from your brother,” Helena said, “but love.”

  “And love-gifts?”

  Helena flushed and then paled. Richildis was surprised. She had always been so serene; so imposs
ible to move.

  Richildis resolved not to ask. But something – some sign in the way she sat, in the way she looked, even the sheen of her hair in the light of the lamps – sharpened Richildis’ eyes. And after all she had been looking at Melisende day after day, all through the summer and the autumn.

  Just as Fulk had asked of Melisende, Richildis asked of Helena: “When?”

  And just as Melisende had, Helena answered, “In the spring. At Easter, or near enough.” She laughed, breathless, too painful for mirth. “I was always so careful. Always so meticulous, to make sure – that—” She broke off. “Now you know me for a mortal sinner.”

  Richildis bit her tongue before she pointed out that she knew it already. She was not cruel, not if she could help it.

  Helena’s serenity had well and truly cracked. She twisted a fold of her robe between her fingers, over and over. “There isn’t anyone I can tell. The servants know, of course. Servants always know. But everyone else—”

  “Not my brother?”

  “He last of all.”

  “I doubt he’ll be angry,” Richildis said. “He might be glad.”

  “Lady,” said Helena with an air of tight-strung patience, “a man does not come to a courtesan to find himself father of a bastard. I know why he left France.”

  “He left France because the girl was married to someone else, and that one was not pleased to admit that he needed another man to swell his wife’s belly for him. I heard how my brother wept, how he mourned that he would never see the child.”

  “No,” said Helena. “Men never care. And as for those on whom they get the bastards—”

  “I think you misjudge him,” Richildis said.

  Helena shook her head. She had lowered it, looking for once as young as she must actually be: not greatly older than Richildis. She was no slender delicate creature, but just then she looked fragile and hollow-boned like a bird.