Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  One of the other maids, with remarkable presence of mind, clapped a hand over the idiot’s mouth before she had quite managed to rouse the dead. In the blessed almost-quiet, one of the Hospitallers halted his horse beside Lady Elfleda’s litter. “Raiders?” she asked him with the calm of one who has traveled far and seen much.

  He nodded. “Alas, lady, yes. They’re but Bedouin; they’ll give us little trouble. But they are a nuisance.”

  “And we should be quiet and not interfere,” Elfleda said. “We understand, Brother.”

  The Hospitaller bowed in the saddle, wheeled his horse and returned to the front of the line.

  The lady’s caravan, it was evident, had dealt with such nuisances before. The servants drove mules and baggage to the center and set themselves on guard about it, producing a gratifying array of weaponry: knives, bows, spears, even a sword or two. The women were set – trapped, in Richildis’ mind – within the circle of the baggage.

  They were not to wait to be attacked. They would continue, it was clear, if more slowly than before, and in stricter order. The Hospitaller knights had mounted the destriers that were kept fresh and only for fighting, put on their great helms, stepped their lances that had been borne on sumpter mules, made themselves into moving towers of flesh and steel. They were held in great terror, Richildis had heard, among the Saracens.

  Yet this was a rich prize, and raiders could not help but know it: Lady Elfleda was not one to travel even on pilgrimage without proper ostentation. The knights were not numerous and were thinly spread round the limits of the caravan. The rest were lighter armed on lighter horses, squires and sergeants who must defend where the knights could not be.

  Richildis found that she was not afraid. She was exhilarated. Was this what young knights felt when they waited for a battle? The only one who had ever been honest with her was Bertrand, and he had told her that he was stiff with terror. “Everything is fear,” he had said. “Every thought, every breath, every move that anyone makes. And when the enemy strikes, the fear grows so great that it’s beyond comprehending. That’s when you can move. When there’s nothing for it but to fight, and fight well, because if you fail, the fear will be your death.”

  Maybe Bertrand was a coward. And if so, then so was every knight and hero, because even in his youth Bertrand had been known for his reckless courage.

  Richildis had the recklessness, it seemed, but not the leavening of fear. It was a startling thing to discover when one had been crediting oneself with a fair excess of good sense. She resented the necessity that compelled her to cower among the women and the baggage, that prevented her from gaining a clear view of the fight. She did the best that she could do, which was to establish herself near the edge of the innermost ring of baggage, mounted on her unwontedly still and watchful mare.

  From that vantage she saw how the road passed between a pair of hills, how sweetly shaped the place was for an ambush; and how the first raiders appeared as if from the earth.

  They were a little disappointing. These were not the emirs and princes of nobler battles, clad in silks and mounted on fine horses. They were tribesmen from the desert, ragged and filthy, clinging singly and in pairs to the backs of scraggy ponies or motheaten camels. Their weapons were as unprepossessing as themselves: worn and tarnished knives and swords, battered spears, bows that had seen better days.

  And yet their poverty and the pilgrims’ evident riches made them desperate; and desperate, they were dangerous. They were many and they were determined, and they descended from every side, shrieking, yowling, calling to one another like wolves, or like jackals of the desert.

  Word came down from the front, shouted from man to man of the Hospitallers: “Press on! Get out of the valley!”

  The women and the baggage were driven like cattle, and lowing like them, too. Richildis, by design or by accident, found herself slipping away from them, her mare pressing ahead as if she had understood the command. The Hospitallers’ own baggage, much less in quantity than Lady Elfleda’s, was possibly richer: they were conveying chests of Frankish gold and silver to one of their castles in the north, for aid in fighting against the infidel.

  Near those chests and the mules that carried them, Richildis persuaded her mare to slow a little. She had no weapon, nothing to fight with but the little dagger she carried at her belt, that was barely sharp enough for cutting meat at dinner. A bow might have served her well, if she could remember the way of it: such a bow as she had seen the Turks wield.

  All that ran swift through her head while she held her mare to a dancing, crabbing walk, and raiders fell on the caravan like crows on carrion. Darting, yelling, striking, whirling away – evading the heavy armored knights and their ponderous horses, seeking gaps and weaknesses, thrusting as deep as they dared before the line closed against them. They struck to wound, not it seemed to kill; to drive the defenders from their treasure, to seize and carry away the prize.

  A knot of raiders plunged straight at Richildis; at her and at the mules beyond her, weighed down with their burden of gold and silver. Of its own accord her hand dropped to her belt and drew her little dagger. Her mare snorted and lashed her tail and pawed impatiently.

  Shrieking voices, no more human than the yipping of jackals. Dark faces, black pits of mouths, yellow gleam of teeth. Glitter of whirling steel. The song of it hummed in her bones.

  She saw, or some saint guided her to see, in the hand of the foremost a strung bow. In the other an arrow, but not yet nocked to string. Without thinking about it at all, she clapped heels to the mare’s sides. The mare leaped as if on wings.

  As easy, as light, as calm as if she plucked a blossom from a passing bough, Richildis won bow and – O marvelous – the arrow that had been meant, no doubt, for her heart. And she was past the raiders, wheeling behind them, and there was steel near and about her, Hospitaller steel, but none was close enough to stop her.

  Memory was set in the bone. Nock arrow, lift bow, draw, find it not quite too much for her strength; and loose – careful, careful of the horse’s movement, the swing and sway and sudden veer. In a hunt one aimed. In a battle one had no time. One simply loosed and prayed.

  She had only the one arrow. But God’s grace showed her a quiver hung from a raider’s saddlebow – for laziness, convenience, stupidity, she never knew. A swoop, a wheel, and it was hers.

  Oh, it was easy, this thing called battle. If one had a swift horse and a keen eye – if one were a woman and therefore, in every man’s mind, helpless – one could have one’s way with such raiders as these. Poor baffled underfed infidels, taken from behind by a woman with a bow, and shot with their own arrows, too.

  When one of them fell with an arrow in the eye – pure luck and a waft of wind, and even in her fit of exultation she could not call it more – they retreated as they had come, headlong and yelling, seeking simpler prey.

  And there she was, all alone, with her arms aching from the unaccustomed effort of bending a bow, a still-full quiver slung behind her. The raiders, she saw with numb surprise, had withdrawn from the whole of the caravan. They would not come back, she did not think.

  As unthinkingly as she had done everything else since that battle began, she unstrung the bow and coiled the string and, for lack of a better thought, slipped it into the purse at her belt. The bow she held in her hand, till she could find a place to put it.

  The caravan did not stop, barely paused to gather the wounded and to dispatch a mule that had been gutted by a raider’s knife. Luckily it had carried nothing of consequence: a tent and its poles, that went simply enough atop other mules’ burdens.

  Richildis wondered if she should go back to Lady Elfleda. The Hospitallers who had come back from fighting along the caravan’s edges, seemed certainly to think so. “And where were you,” she demanded of them, “when the Saracens came to steal your Grand Master’s gold?”

  Being men, they had an answer for that, and it was pure bluster. She ignored it. They could hardly get rid o
f her without removing her bodily. If any thought of that, he did not act on it. She was suffered to stay where she was, as alone as ever, even with Hospitallers all about her.

  Of course they would not admire her for protecting their treasure. She was a woman. Her competence was an insult.

  Time was when she might have been troubled to think such a thing. Now, with the heat of battle gone and a chill clarity in its place, she was, if anything, amused. Imagine: all her life long she had thought herself a right and proper woman, gentle and rather weak. And the first time anyone brought a killing fight to her, the first raid that by a peculiarity of fortune she had ever been a part of, she had discovered that she thrived on it.

  It was dreadful, of course. Horrible. Against nature. But that was the way of it.

  God’s irony, she thought. And men’s considerable distress. They would never understand why she smiled; would only edge away, keeping a careful distance, as if she carried some contagion.

  Sixteen

  Lady Elfleda was much less dismayed by Richildis’ accomplishment than the Hospitallers were. Yet even she could not entirely approve of it. She was glad, Richildis thought, to bid farewell to her oddity of a traveling companion. She remained with the caravan as Richildis turned aside from it to ride through the village at the foot of a steep hill that like the castle above it was given the name of Beausoleil.

  It had been called something else before the Franks came to Outremer, Richildis was sure. The people were natives of this land, slight dark people, the men bearded and in turbans, the women swathed and veiled in black. They were not Christian, that she could discern: there were no crosses in evidence. The structure that might have been a church, with a cracked and weathered dome, was crowned with the thin spire of a minaret.

  The castle itself had a look both new and old. The walls were well made, and recently repaired from the signs. The gate was new, bound with black iron. The tower above it was worn somewhat with weather, and there were marks on it that might have been dealt by the hurled stones of a catapult; but it had neither crumbled nor fallen.

  It was a larger castle than she had expected, larger than most in France. Within its curtain wall was a broad and spacious court and a handsome keep.

  Her escort left her at the gate, the Hospitaller sergeant and his handful of men, bowing and handing her over in silence to the men who stood guard. There were two at the outer gate, two at the inner. Each pair was half Frank – or German, or perhaps Flemish: the big white-fair man at the inner gate spoke a guttural patois that resembled only faintly the langue d’oeil. They were well equipped and clean, and kept good discipline.

  So too the people she saw in the courtyard. They were all men. She had seen women enough in the village, but here there seemed to be none. The person who took charge of her horse was pretty enough to have been a girl, but his voice was well and distinctly broken, and as he bowed she saw the sheen of the first beard on his cheek.

  The stableboy was an easterner, like most of the others she saw. Except for the burly Frank at the outer gate and the German at the inner, she saw no other western face until she was brought into the great hall.

  There as elsewhere was a kind of elegance that would have been unusual in the house of a great prince in France, but seemed ordinary enough to mark a simple baron’s castle in Outremer. The floor was covered in carpets rather than rushes, and the walls were rich with hangings. The march of columns, the delicacy of pointed arches, marked an eastern builder; even in their strongholds, it seemed, the infidels had cultivated a certain grace.

  There in a shaft of light from a high pierced window, two men sat over a chessboard.

  One was a big fair man, a Frankish knight. The other was a – Saracen? A dark and bearded man in a silken robe, frowning and stroking the rich curls of that beard as he pondered the array of pieces on the board.

  No, he was not a Saracen. A golden cross glinted on his breast beneath the beard. Nor was his face of quite the same quality as Saracen faces that she had seen. It was handsome enough, but blunter, with a long straight nose and large, very dark eyes.

  By the eyes she knew him. She had seen just such eyes in the icons of eastern churches. When he spoke she was sure of it. His Frankish was excellent, but his accent was pure Byzantine Greek – and noble, too, as she had heard it in the court of Jerusalem.

  “Your king is mine,” he said to the Frank, who was of course her brother.

  Bertrand did not look well. Someone was looking after him: he was clean, shaved, well dressed. But his cheeks were hollow, his eyes dark-circled. He glowered at the board, nor would he look up, even at the stir of Richildis’ presence. “There is a way out of this,” he muttered. “There must be.”

  He did not seem to be speaking entirely of the game. There was too much intensity in it.

  His companion had turned to see what had the hangers-on in the hall staring and murmuring among themselves. His eyes were even more vivid, seen direct, than when they had been bent on the board. For all their resemblance to the black mute stare of an icon, they were alive and lively, with an air of wicked humor. She found herself smiling as she met them, bold as a well-brought-up woman should never be; but what was well brought up about a woman in dusty traveling clothes, with a bow and quiver slung behind her?

  She must have looked frightful; should have let herself be taken away to a bath, food and drink, proper clothes. But she had been too eager to see her brother.

  Now that she saw him, she knew that he must know. He did not see her at all. And this stranger, this Greek with his extraordinary beard and his even more extraordinary eyes, made her want to grin like a fool.

  Probably she was a little off her head. Outremer could do that to a pilgrim, what with sun and heat and holiness. And she had killed an infidel yesterday, shot him dead. It was a just battle and therefore it was not murder, but her confessor would hear of it when she came again to Jerusalem.

  The Greek rose as if he had just then remembered courtesy, and bowed in the fashion of his people. “Lady,” he said. “On behalf of its lord, I welcome you to Beausoleil.”

  Beausoleil’s lord started, and woke as from sleep. He blinked at Richildis. For a moment she doubted that he knew her.

  Then he said, “You knew. You knew.”

  Richildis could pretend incomprehension, but she had never played that game well. “Yes, I knew about Helena. She made me swear to keep silent.”

  “She made you swear.” Bertrand said the words dully. “Damn her. Damn you.”

  “You sound,” she said, “precisely like a lover in a story.”

  He glared at her, his eyes red-rimmed, with the look of a man who has not slept in far too long. “What do you know of love and lovers?”

  “Why, little,” said Richildis. She gripped his shoulders and pulled at the heavy resistant weight of him. “Get up. Here, get up. Sir!” she called to the Greek. “Help me.”

  He seemed pleased to oblige. He was a big man for a Greek, though not as big as Bertrand; he was strong, and easy in his strength, heaving Bertrand to his feet. “There, my friend,” he said. “Indulge a lady.”

  Bertrand swayed but held himself erect, with both of the others braced to stop him if he sank down again. “And how do you think I came to this?” he demanded. “For indulging a lady.”

  “For indulging yourself.” Richildis tugged him forward. “First you eat. Then you sleep. Sir,” she said to the Greek, “do you know his servants? If, of your courtesy…”

  He grinned through his black beard and bowed with an edge of extravagance that he had not had before. “To so fair a lady,” he said, “I can deny nothing.”

  Richildis laughed, not to mock him, but because he managed somehow, by the look in his eye and the turn of his head, to delight her. And he a Byzantine, too: one of that endlessly devious people. Who would have thought it?

  He went to fetch Bertrand’s servants. Richildis stayed with her brother, who once compelled to stand seemed disinclined to
sit again. He might be ill, she thought, with a kind of fever born of too much brooding and too little sleep.

  Anger could do it, too: the anger that is a deadly sin. Bertrand had always had a temper. It rose swift and endured long. Had it not brought him into Outremer, and kept him even from sending a message to his sister that he lived?

  Now, it seemed, he had turned it against Helena.

  “And that,” she said, “is a great pity.”

  He turned his reddened eyes on her.

  “So you followed Kutub,” she said. “And you found Helena. And you’re too furious to think.”

  “She lied to me,” he said.

  “She kept a secret from you,” said Richildis. “That was not wisely done, but it’s hardly worth this grand passion.”

  “You know nothing of it,” Bertrand said, thick in his throat.

  “I know that children sulk so when their toys are taken from them. What do you think it must have done to Helena for you to depart from her in anger? She’s just had a baby. Your baby. Your son.”

  “I have no son,” Bertrand said.

  “Kutub says he bears a considerable resemblance to you,” said Richildis. “Particularly when he howls for his dinner.”

  Bertrand was not to be distracted by absurdity. “She wanted me to know nothing. When was she going to tell me? When he was grown to manhood, when she could send him to demand a share of his inheritance? I’m surprised she didn’t drown him like an unwanted puppy. Isn’t that what harlots do?”

  “No,” said Richildis, tight and cold. “They rid themselves of such inconveniences long before they can be born.” While he gaped at her, astonished that she should know such a thing, she said, “She wanted this child. She loves him as she loves you.”

  “Then why,” Bertrand demanded, “did she refuse to tell me that he existed?”

  Richildis drew a breath. There was a question that Helena had never answered, not to anyone’s satisfaction. But Richildis tried as best she could. “She was afraid. She loves you, trusts you – but she was raised to put no trust in men. Men, she was told, love women only as long as nothing interferes with that love. And the worst interference of all is the natural consequence of what they do together. Never let it happen, her masters taught her. If it must happen, be rid of it soon. And if you cannot bear to do that – conceal it, bear it in secret, raise it away from the eyes of its father. No man loves a bastard, they said, over and over until she was like to weep. No man wants to be the father of one.”