Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  Bertrand saw all of that in a soldier’s glance, recording and setting it aside. The center of it, the thing that focused the whole of him, sat in a tall stiff chair beside the bed, wrapped in a dark mantle. She cradled something small, that began suddenly and powerfully to howl.

  Truth had a force like a lance in the vitals. Helena, rocking the swaddled and crimson-faced baby, crooning to it, cajoling it to be silent, did not trouble to be oblivious to Bertrand’s presence. She raised her eyes to his face.

  They were as dark and calm as ever, no hint of either fear or defiance. Yet she must have known both. Else why hide this from him – this of all secrets that she could have kept?

  “Is it not mine?” Bertrand demanded abruptly. “Is that why?”

  “It is yours,” she said: her sweet voice, lovely as always, unshakably serene.

  “How do you know?”

  She did not flinch from the blow, nor lower her eyes. “I know,” she said.

  “Then why?”

  She did not answer that. She folded back the swaddlings from the face and the small flailing arms. The baby, having rested sufficiently, began again to howl. Helena’s voice carried through it, pitched low and very calm. “This is your son,” she said. “I named him Olivier, for the Mount of Olives. He is very beautiful, they tell me. I’d not know; I’m no connoisseur of babies. I think that he is very strong, and will grow up as big as his father.”

  All the while she spoke, she rocked him. His wailing went on unabated. The nun, whom Bertrand had all but forgotten, rose suddenly and took him from his mother’s arms. At once and completely he fell silent. She took him back to her stool and sat cradling him, never raising her eyes to Bertrand’s face, never even admitting to his existence.

  “I have too little milk for him,” Helena said. “There is a woman coming in the morning, a villager from nearby here, who is said to have milk enough for three – and she lost her own just yesterday. Sister, you are sure that he’ll be well until she comes?”

  The nun nodded. She would look into Helena’s face, showing a pair of large and very beautiful eyes in the shrouding veil. Perhaps her body was lovely, too: more slender than the others he had seen, graceful even in rest, with white long-fingered hands.

  He called himself to order. Now was no time in the world to distract himself with the guesswork of finding a woman inside a nun’s habit.

  And yet he could not help it. He was angry. So angry that he did not trust himself; not unless he found refuge in something other than the truth of what Helena had done.

  She had borne him a son. She had hidden it from him. She had lied to him while she was in Jerusalem. When she could not have lied any longer, she had gone away – had run from him as if from an enemy.

  How a man could love a woman so much and be so blindly, relentlessly angry, he could not imagine. He wanted to crush her to him and never let her go. He wanted to cast her away and never look on her face again. Both at once. Both with all his heart.

  She sat mute, with those great eyes resting still on his face, as blank as the icon’s, as empty of human feeling. If they had looked away, if she had spoken, he might not have said what he said then. But she did neither, and his tongue was its own master.

  “If you had been as truthful with me,” it said, “as I always was with you; if you had told me when first you knew, I would have raised and cherished that child as tenderly as father ever did. Because you lied, because you ran from me, I cannot do that. Not now. Not ever. That is no child of mine. I will not acknowledge him. I will not give him my name or my countenance or any of my worldly substance. You conceived and bore him without a father. Let him live without one: bastard, fatherless, without name or honor or nation.”

  Still he could not move her, could not shift the calm in those eyes. It might be a mask, such as courtesans learned. Yet if it was not…

  “Why did you do it?” he asked her again, though it weakened the power of his curse.

  Again she did not answer.

  He turned from her as he had from his sister, in rage that was like a sickness. He had to escape from this place – even in the dark, even with his horse taken away he knew not where, even with the road as treacherous as he knew it to be.

  There would be a moon tonight. Enough to see by, with anger to sharpen his eyes.

  Already in spirit he was on that road, even while he stood in front of Helena. She must have seen it: for the first time her calm cracked; her eyes lost their look of endless distances. He heard the intake of her breath, swallowed in the sharper one that marked another of the baby’s wails. Hunger, temper, blank insensate rage – oh, yes. He knew them all.

  “You have sown,” he said to Helena. “Now reap.”

  He left her to think on that, if she deigned to. Who knew what she thought? She was a woman, and worse: a courtesan.

  * * *

  Some dark angel must have protected him. He found his horse in a stable not a dozen paces from the guesthouse door, found saddle and bridle and gear all tidy beside the stall, and the stallion picking at stray bits of fodder on the bottom of his manger. He had eaten well from the look of it. Good: he would travel the better for that.

  Gates that were barred from without were easy of access from within. Bertrand could do nothing to secure them behind him, but no one came to stop or assist him. He said a prayer for the convent’s safety, and could only hope that that would suffice till the nuns rose for the Night Office.

  The moon was up indeed, waxing to the full. It lit his way well enough, and Malik was both sharp-eyed and surefooted. He never slipped nor stumbled, nor misstepped though the road was steep. And when they had come down off the hill and out through the valley and back to the pilgrims’ road, empty and open in the moonlight, Bertrand had no need of spurs. Malik was glad to stretch his stride, to make haste toward Jerusalem.

  Fifteen

  Bertrand was in Jerusalem only long enough to gather his belongings and his servants and to return to Beausoleil. Richildis knew that he had vanished out of the stable court just before he was to have ridden on a hunt, but not that he had come back and gone away yet again – not till somewhat after the fact. Melisende had been brought to bed at too long last in her own estimation, and set about producing a prince-heir to the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

  It was not a terrible labor, as labor went. It was women’s battle as combat at arms was men’s. Melisende fought it as well as her father had ever fought on the battlefield, fought and won and emerged alive, with a fine strong son bellowing his objections to the cruelties of the world.

  He took after his mother, fortunately: big and fair, but his midwives judged that his eyes would not be dark as hers were; they would be blue, or grey perhaps. The more doting of the women called him handsome. Melisende, and Richildis in the privacy of her thoughts, reckoned that he was much as any other newborn manchild, red and wrinkled and rather hideous.

  “He’ll grow,” said one of the elder ladies.

  “And thank God for it,” said Melisende, cradling him competently enough but without particular affection. That she left to the nurse who had delivered herself of a mere and weakling daughter a few days before, and who had more than milk enough for both.

  While the plump and placid woman cooed over the baby, Melisende refused to rest until she had spoken to her husband and her father. “They are Jerusalem,” she said, “or would be. Let them see together what they most longed for.”

  No one dared to protest that it was deep night, midway between the monks’ Night Office and the dawn. Melisende in triumph was as irresistible as any horde of Saracens.

  Neither man had been sleeping. They had, the messenger told Richildis later, been getting very drunk together in a corner of the great hall. The scent of wine came in with them, but they were clear-eyed enough. Baldwin entered first, of Fulk’s courtesy, but Fulk was hard on his heels.

  They were as eager as boys, crowding the great bed on which Melisende lay. The nurse had consented reluctan
tly to return the child to his mother’s arms. They were a pretty picture in the clean and sweet-scented bedclothes, Melisende in a fresh new shift with her hair in a plait, the baby swaddled in her arms.

  Baldwin bent to kiss his daughter on the brow. Fulk lifted the child from his wrappings, cradling the newborn body with the ease of a man who has done so more than once before. There was no mistaking that here was a son, or that he had a strong pair of lungs. He bellowed lustily as his father raised him.

  Fulk laughed, a low sound of pure pleasure. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, this is an heir for Jerusalem, if God wills that he live.”

  “He will live,” Melisende said from the bed. Her voice betrayed none of the exhaustion that must be dragging at her. “Does he please you, my lords?”

  “He pleases us immensely,” Baldwin said. “And you, daughter? Are you well?”

  “Very well indeed,” she said, “now that it’s over.”

  She did not add that she had no intention of entering that battle again. Richildis wondered if Fulk thought she had forgotten. If so he was a fool. Melisende closed her eyes: honest weariness, but there was calculation in it, too.

  The nurse took the baby from Fulk’s hands, cradling him again, giving him the plump brown breast. His bellowing muted to gurgles and then to the sounds of vigorous sucking.

  “My lady,” Fulk said to his wife, “I do believe you – that he will live and grow strong.”

  But Melisende was asleep, or feigning it. For all that she would admit to knowing, her husband had barely acknowledged her existence, still less her part in the birthing of his son.

  That was, of course, if she wished to quarrel. Richildis did not know that she did. She had labored for a night and a day to produce this child, this prince whom his father, with a hand on his soft downy head, named Baldwin.

  He had not asked her what she would name her son. Still it was well chosen. It was a good name, a royal name, a name of honor and precedence in this kingdom. This prince would wear it well, as his grandfather had before him.

  Fulk kissed his wife as her father had, on the brow. She must truly be asleep: she never stirred. He smiled and brushed her cheek with a finger, the first tenderness that he had shown her where anyone could see. It struck at Richildis strangely, with a poignancy that she had not expected.

  * * *

  She was still a little raw with it, come morning, when the city woke to the ringing of bells and the crying of the word from the old minarets: A prince! A prince for Jerusalem! While the city burst forth in jubilation, Richildis found herself possessed of an odd and restless mood, and no joy to be found in it, even on Melisende’s behalf.

  It was then that she learned of Bertrand’s brief return and swift departure. No one knew why he had done it.

  But she remembered that Kutub had come with a message, the second since Helena’s son was born; and that he had left her not long before Bertrand was said to have ridden headlong out of the stable court. It might be folly, it might be nonsense, but if Bertrand had caught sight of Helena’s Turk – and if he had done, and had followed the man, and discovered what Helena would not have him know…

  Richildis might be seeing consequence where was only coincidence. But God did not, in her experience, rule the world so.

  On impulse that she found herself regretting even as she acted on it, she asked and received leave to depart from her lady’s service for a few days’ span. Melisende had a surfeit of attendants just then, though most of them hovered about the infant prince. “Go,” she said to Richildis. “Take as long as you like. Only be sure to come back.”

  Richildis bowed lower than she was wont to do, which raised Melisende’s brows; but the princess did not say anything.

  If she had, Richildis might have reconsidered. But she had been given leave, and with it, she could presume, some degree of authority – enough to secure a horse, provisions, and escort with a company of Hospitallers on its way to one of the castles in the north.

  They had another lady with them, a widow on pilgrimage, traveling with a gaggle of maids, a veritable caravan of baggage, and servants enough to look after a small army. Her name was Lady Elfleda. She came, she said, from England, where her family had held lands since long before the Normans came in with their great trampling feet.

  “Of course,” she said, “we made sure we had a Norman to speak for us, and married into the family, too, though it wouldn’t have done for one to have inherited the lot – oh, no. It wouldn’t have done at all.”

  “And the Normans let it happen?” Richildis asked.

  Lady Elfleda smiled. She was a fat, fair, comfortable woman, yet her smile had somewhat of the curve of an axeblade. “Why, of course,” she said. “How not, when the loveliest of the earl’s daughters had set her heart on the overlord’s favorite son? So determined was she to have him, that she had her brothers invite him to hunt the red deer with them, and when the hunt was done and they feasted on the spoils, she filled his cup of mead with her own white hand.

  “Imagine his expression,” said Lady Elfleda, “come morning when he woke naked beside her, and her maiden blood on the sheet, and she crying to all who would hear, that he had taken her by force. Her brothers were in a fair taking, and would have taken the offending parts of him, had she not invoked their mercy – and beseeched the one of them who was a priest to bless her with the name of wife.”

  “And so a Norman married into your family,” Richildis said. “How very clever.”

  “How fortunate,” said Lady Elfleda, “that after he had finished snarling at them all for base traitors, he found in himself a great and insatiable passion for the lady who had tricked him. He wasn’t a bad man, for a Norman – and not bad-looking, either, as I remember him when I was young: and he was getting on a bit then. They say he was quite the pretty boy when Aunt Frideswide plied him with the good white mead.”

  “And would he have known the good from the bad?” Richildis wanted to know. And added, lest her companion be puzzled, “We’re in the way of vintners ourselves, away in Anjou. Mead’s not a thing any Frank knows a great deal of.”

  “Of course not,” Lady Elfleda said. “And maybe it wasn’t the best that was in the casks, but it served the purpose well enough. He never could abide mead after that, could milord Jehan.”

  “And yet he could abide your aunt of the difficult name?”

  “How odd,” Lady Elfleda said. “He said the same of her, and insisted on calling her Willa. Oh yes, he endured her very well, and esteemed her too, once he’d been brought to see the sense in her stratagem. It kept our holdings safe, let his father claim to be their overlord, but let us go on much as we always had, though we had to speak a different tongue in court thereafter.”

  “That was more than threescore years ago,” Richildis said. “Surely, you yourself couldn’t be—”

  Lady Elfleda laughed. “Oh, no! But everyone remembers. Because it’s the family, you know.”

  Richildis did know that. She reflected on it as they rode among the Hospitallers in their grey mail and their white habits, the warrior monks taciturn in the presence of women, but not ungracious. Nights they spent in Hospitaller holdings, honored guests, set apart and protected. Days they passed in the saddle, Elfleda on her soft-paced white mule, Richildis on her crossgrained Saracen mare.

  Part of one day and a night they spent in Nablus, that ancient city in its girdle of gardens and orchards – like, said Lady Elfleda who knew all of these places, a little Damascus. Its beauty was the more blessed after the bleakness of the lands about, the bare and dusty hills and waterless plains. And yet Richildis was not soothed into peace.

  It had been nigh on a year since she came to Outremer. So long, and passed to so little purpose. Bertrand was not one step closer to removing himself from this country than he had been on the day Richildis found him in Acre.

  She had written of this to Lady Agnes, and more than once. As slow as letters were, still she had had answers, written in slightly sti
lted Latin in the hand taught by the nuns at Ste-Mathilde. Be patient, Lady Agnes said. Endure. Be at ease for La Forêt. All is well here; everyone prospers; no one is sick or has died. The demesne waits in comfort for the return of its lord.

  Richildis did not wish to be either patient or comfortable, but there was little else that she could do – not, at least, till now.

  Bertrand had retreated to Beausoleil north of Nablus. From Helena there had been no word – no messenger, nothing. If Richildis had erred—

  Well: and if she had erred, then her brother would be delighted to see her, and she would be a guest at last in his castle.

  * * *

  Richildis left Nablus with few regrets, even for its cool springs and its green orchards. She was almost glad to be on the road again, to be choking on the dust and battling the stinging flies. She was doing something. That was all, at the moment, that she cared for.

  The road outside of the city grew swiftly wilder. Passers were few and heavily armed. They bore rumor of robbers, of reivers farther on. The Hospitallers, hearing this, put on their armor and hung their helms from their saddlebows, and kept bow and sword and lance to hand.

  They traveled so for all that day and into the next, in vigilance that did not abate, the farther they traveled. Past noon of their second day out of Nablus, one of the Hospitallers’ scouts came in at the gallop. He pounded to a halt, already calling out to the knights in the van. One of those set horn to lips and blew. At the signal, all of the knights and the sergeants hastened to the van, gathering into council, leaving only the men-at-arms and a sergeant or two to guard the rear and the ladies.

  The caravan slowed to a halt. Lady Elfleda’s maids were most of them reasonable women, but the silly one, whose name was even more difficult than that of Elfleda’s aunt, began to shriek and carry on. “Raiders! Murderers! Infidels!”