Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  So protected, they walked where Melisende willed, which seemed to be nowhere in particular. The streets closed in about them, ancient and twisting, some covered over against the sun of summer, others open to the sky. Pilgrims and people of the city did not know their princess in a dark mantle and with small attendance, striding out as much as one could in crowds, walking with clear purpose, though that was simply to walk as far and as fast as she could.

  By the Dome of the Rock she paused. Its gates were open, Templar knights on guard. She passed between them into the vast court and garden, wide as a city in France, with its golden dome to the east and the silver dome of the lesser mosque, the Father Mosque, to the west. There were people within, but surprisingly few: Templars most of them, and none minded to interfere with a pair of women and their guardsmen coming quietly to look on the holy place.

  They passed into the shrine of the Rock, the raw undressed stone from which, the infidels believed, their Prophet had been taken up to heaven. All about that rough stone was wide and shimmering space under a dome like a dream of heaven. If one looked up too suddenly, one reeled, dizzy with splendor.

  Richildis, who had learned that lesson the first time she came here, kept her eyes carefully on the pavement till she had followed Melisende into the high hall. It had been a mosque before the Crusade won it, built atop the ruins of Solomon’s Temple. The Templars had taken it and made it their stronghold, set a cross atop the dome, stabled horses in its sacred spaces. They had made it a proper Christian and Frankish place, and yet she could not help a moment’s regret, perhaps even a flush of anger, for the people who had made it so vast and so beautiful and so deeply holy.

  That holiness lingered, though trampled under Templar feet. Pilgrims came here in hordes as to every other place in the city, had stolen slivers of the Rock till it must be barricaded against them, but on this day, by some whim of the world, there were no gawkers at the shrine.

  Melisende genuflected to the altar that had been set atop the Rock. Richildis followed suit. The princess, having paid due tribute, began to walk slowly round the circle of the holy place. She could walk so for hours if need be, her restlessness concentrated in this soaring, singing space.

  Richildis could wait, endure the long and circular pilgrimage, follow her lady back to the palace at last and wait the proper moment. Or she could say as they strode out together past walls of figured marble, pillars crowned with gold, arches marching in an endless round, holding up the golden vault: “I visited my nephew today.”

  Melisende shot her a glance. Richildis had not made a secret to her of Arslan’s existence. It had seemed from the first like a thing that the princess should know.

  “And how was he?” Melisende inquired.

  “Very well,” answered Richildis. “Growing. He looks like the prince.”

  “Most babies look alike,” Melisende said rather indifferently. She did not dote on her child, no more now that he was walking than she had when he was an infant at the breast. When he learned to speak intelligently, she often said, she would begin to find him interesting. Until then she left him to his nurses.

  “I had thought,” Richildis said, “that since he and the prince are so close to the same age—”

  Melisende shot her a glance that was not indifferent at all. “Do you expect me to foster your brother’s bastard?”

  Richildis paused, drew a breath to steady herself, remembered perhaps too late that her lady was far from the slowest-witted of women. With strangers and in court she kept her impatience at bay, let the rest of the world stumble its slow way to conclusions that she had reached at the first fall of a glance. But with Richildis she did not trouble with pretense.

  “Lady,” Richildis said, “he is my nephew and my blood kin. I had no thought of fosterage. I had considered that perhaps, for an hour every day, your son might welcome a playmate.”

  “Playmates become treasured friends,” Melisende said. “Treasured friends become indispensable. How long were you going to wait before you spoke of fosterage? Till he was five years old? Six?”

  “Seven, I had thought,” Richildis said. “But until then, why should they not be allowed to play together?”

  “Why?” Melisende curled her lip a little. “It might be pointed out that a courtesan’s offspring is hardly proper company for the heir to the Kingdom of Jerusalem.”

  “It might also be pointed out,” Richildis said swiftly, “that a courtesan’s son will learn to be unimpeachably loyal to the prince whose indulgence gave him honor and standing in the world. He has no inheritance to protect, no family to contend for his allegiance—”

  “And yet,” said Melisende, “he is your nephew.”

  “Do you doubt my loyalty?”

  Melisende paused, turned to face her. “No. But you are a woman. He will be a man. And what of his father?”

  “His father is your faithful servant – so faithful that he’s bound me here these three long years, and will not go back to Anjou to take the lands that are rightfully his. Would you not bind the son as you bound the father?”

  “The father will not acknowledge the son.”

  “My brother is stubborn,” Richildis said. “So am I. I think they would do well together, those two children.”

  “The bastard’s presence will be a taunt to his father. How will my baron’s loyalty endure that?”

  “Rather well, I think,” said Richildis. “And by the time the boy is old enough to be a page, my brother’s mind may well have changed.”

  “Miracles do happen,” Melisende conceded. She turned, began to walk again. “Bring the boy to me tomorrow. Let me see what he is – and his mother, too. Her I’ve never met. I want to know if she is as rumor makes her.”

  “She is a lady,” Richildis said, “my lady. Whatever fools may say of her.”

  “Let me see,” said Melisende. “Let me judge for myself.”

  Twenty

  Helena preserved her composure, even faced with a summons to the palace and the princess. She would not let Richildis come to fetch her; she came herself at the time appointed, with her Turks for escort and her son in the arms of one – for he had refused to be carried by any personage as lowly as his nurse. Richildis was suffered to meet her at the gate and lead her inward, guards and all.

  They would have made a fine stir if they had gone through the public courts. But Melisende had commanded and Richildis agreed that it would be best to be circumspect. They went by quieter ways, round corners and down passages that were not so well frequented as most.

  Melisende received her guests in one of the private chambers, one that abutted on her bedchamber. It had the virtue of quiet, and of being apart from the ladies’ solar. It was dark and somewhat close, but the servants’ ingenuity had brightened it with a bowl of roses, red and white, that had been set to catch the light from the one narrow window. Those and a bank of lamps that burned sweet oil made the room seem brighter and airier than it was.

  She sat there with only one attendant, one of her sensible older ladies, who happened to be both discreet and rather deaf. Such care might not be necessary, but Richildis appreciated the taking of it. These matters could be delicate, this being a court, and courts being what they were.

  Helena made obeisance with both grace and correctness, and the Turks behind her, the turbaned heads lowered, the proud knees bent. Only Arslan kept his head up. His eyes were wide, staring at the splendid stranger.

  Melisende regarded him with interest. “He does look like Baldwin,” she said to Richildis.

  Richildis nodded. Helena, who had not been invited to rise or to sit, sat comfortably enough on her heels, with her Turks again mirroring her. Their calm was an eastern thing, the calm of people who expected nothing more of their rulers, and nothing less.

  It might be that Melisende understood. Her lips quirked slightly. She beckoned to Helena. “Come, there is a chair. Sit.”

  Helena inclined her head and did as she was bidden. She had the manne
rs of a great lady, but with more graciousness than many a noblewoman could claim.

  Richildis watched Melisende study her, swift sweeping scrutiny that judged and decided all at once, without a word spoken.

  “You are not what I expected,” Melisende said.

  “And what did you expect, your highness?” Helena asked her.

  “Less than you are,” Melisende answered.

  “Younger? Prettier? More common?”

  Melisende sat back in her chair. The sudden smile bloomed, startling Helena into widened eyes and a flash of expression: astonishment, pleasure, dawning amusement. “I do see,” said Melisende, “what my lord Bertrand saw in you.” She sobered suddenly, and that too was startling, like a cloud over the sun. “Do you honestly think that your child is worthy to be fostered with my son?”

  “I think that it would serve him well, highness,” Helena said.

  “So it would. But how would it serve me?”

  “I believe,” said Helena, “that you have already had this argument with his lady aunt.”

  “So I have,” said Melisende. “She tells me that I can expect a loyal friend for my son, one whose ambition will never exceed his grasp. Can the same be said of his mother?”

  “This was not my doing,” Helena said.

  “Yet you allowed it.”

  “My lady Richildis is persuasive.”

  Melisende glanced at Richildis, a touch like the passing of a steel blade. “Convince me that I should believe you.”

  Richildis drew breath to protest, but Helena spoke before her. “I will do whatever I must for my son. If not here, then in Islam; if not in Islam, then in Byzantium. Somewhere in the world is a place for him.”

  “There is no better place than here,” Richildis said with more heat than perhaps was strictly prudent. She rounded on Melisende. “Lady, do you mean to insult us? Look at the child! Does he look unworthy?”

  “He looks like a child,” Melisende said. “Too young to speak for himself, too small to contest whatever we choose for him. Suppose that I told you to give him up, to surrender him into my care and that of my son’s nurses. Would you do it?”

  “Not yet, highness,” Helena said levelly. “Not till he’s older.”

  Melisende paused. Was that approval in her glance? “The answer is no?”

  “The answer is yes,” said Helena. “Later. When he is older. When he is ready to leave my care.”

  “Then so be it,” Melisende said. “Up, now. Come with me.”

  Swiftness of decision was a commander’s virtue – or a king’s. Melisende had chosen to exercise it now. She took Helena to the nursery, and Helena’s son with her.

  Young Baldwin had been driving his nurses to distraction with demands for this or that – some in words, some in wails that waxed in strength, the slower they were to gratify him. One such was just rising to a crescendo as the strangers entered his domain.

  He stopped as abruptly as a child can who has been well and wisely distracted. Arslan in the arms of Ayyub the Turk captivated him wholly. Richildis wondered if he had ever seen a Turk before.

  The nursery was scattered with toys and diversions such as would delight a child of Baldwin’s age. Arslan caught sight of something – an army of wooden Saracens, Richildis saw, with wooden swords, mounted on painted horses. He yearned out of Ayyub’s grip, slithered to the floor, made for the wooden army at a purposeful trot.

  Baldwin, not yet so adept on his feet, squawked once, escaped his nurse’s clutches, crawled rapidly after the interloper. When Baldwin reached him he had dropped to his rump and won for himself a fiercely mustachioed Saracen with a silver-painted sword, astride a dapple-grey horse of remarkable fire and ferocity.

  Baldwin snatched the prize from Arslan’s hands. Arslan, nothing deterred, snatched it back. Baldwin regarded him in flat incredulity. Never in his life had anyone contested his will.

  They all braced for war. Only Arslan seemed unperturbed. He looked at the wooden Saracen, then at Baldwin. His eye shifted toward the rest of the army. There was one golden-turbaned emir on a foaming and head-tossing black stallion. He surrendered the soldier on the grey with as much grace as his mother had shown the princess, and took for himself the emir on the black.

  Baldwin was perhaps not deceived by apparent generosity. And yet he accepted it, settling contentedly enough to play at soldiers with this stranger-child. He had won in short order most of the Saracen army, all but the emir, who remained in Arslan’s possession.

  “There,” said Melisende of her son, “is a king.”

  “And there,” said Helena of hers, “is a man who will serve a king well – and keep a portion for himself.”

  “But no more perhaps than he is due.” Melisende turned away from the children. What they were now was of little interest to her, or what they did once they had proved that they could endure one another’s company.

  Richildis indulged herself in a moment’s satisfaction. Now let Bertrand do what he would. Fatherless or no, Arslan would prosper.

  * * *

  King Baldwin was not so fortunate. As the warmth of spring passed into the heat of summer, Richildis’ third in this country and, it seemed, far from her last, the king began perceptibly to fade. A day came when he could not leave his bed to go to his throne; when he lay breathing lightly in a flurry of vassals and servants, making no move to rise or to walk.

  But he had voice left still, and strength of will to command that he be carried to the house of the Patriarch beside the Holy Sepulcher that he had fought for and won, and had defended for so long. No one presumed to contest him. They took him up as he bade them and carried him in procession from the palace.

  It passed slowly, like a funeral cortege, in a wailing of eastern grief. Those whom the king’s guard caught were silenced, but they could not silence a whole city, still less a kingdom that knew the truth beyond a doubt: that their king, their lord and commander, the Defender of the Holy Sepulcher, was dying.

  * * *

  Fulk had gone alone that summer on such campaigns as there were: small battles, defenses of the borders, shows of strength lest the infidel think the kingdom weak in the absence of its king. But when Baldwin was laid in the Patriarch’s own bed under a golden canopy, banked and raised in cushions so that he could look out upon the dome of Holy Sepulcher, Fulk came back in haste to Jerusalem.

  Melisende attended her father as often and as long as she could. Tenderness was not her way, no more now than ever, but he seemed to take comfort from her brisk manner and her refusal to permit an excess of weeping and mourning in his presence.

  Still someone must attend the matters of the kingdom, and she as the heir was best fit to do it. On the day that Fulk returned to Jerusalem, she was holding audience in the king’s stead. Her chair was set beside and below the throne, on which rested the crown and the scepter of the kingdom. Richildis had not seen her glance at them, nor marked that she was aware of them. And yet she must be. Her husband would take them up once Baldwin was dead, and hold them until their son, their Baldwin the younger, was grown to manhood.

  Fulk came to her there, straight from the road by the look of him, though he must have paused to wash off the stains of travel: his armor was clean, his surcoat unblemished. He who had never been precipitous, put an end summarily to the rambling petition of a rais from a village in the hinterlands of Nablus, and dismissed the court.

  Melisende had not moved since he burst into the hall. The day was searing hot without, but here it was cool, with a scent of stone and lamp-oil and the heavy, mingled perfumes of courtiers. He stood in front of her in a tang of blood and iron. She, sweet-scented with roses, met his glance with the ring of steel on steel. “My lord,” she said, soft, almost gentle, “you are not yet king.”

  Fulk took no heed of the warning. “He’s still alive, then?”

  “Do you wish he were not?”

  He shook his head, sharp as if with impatience. “We had a messenger on the road. Come quickly,
he said. Come before the day is out. The king will take the vows of a monk and lay down the life of this world.”

  Melisende retained her composure, though Richildis, standing with the maids behind her, saw how her shoulders tightened. “Word has not come here,” she said, “that his condition has changed. Go, sir; take off your armor. Make yourself fit to visit a king on his deathbed.”

  “We’ll go together,” Fulk said. “And the boy, too. That was the summons I was given.”

  “As you wish,” said Melisende, but it was not capitulation. Richildis wondered if Fulk even understood what she was doing. By the laws of God and man, a woman must be obedient to her husband. But Melisende was royal born and far above this man who had been born a mere count. She would yield because it was expedient; never because she intended to make a habit of it.

  * * *

  They went in processional to the Patriarch’s palace, count and princess together, and their son between them. The city watched them go. No one could fail to know what it meant that Count Fulk had returned to Jerusalem, or that he came with his wife and son to the king.

  The sun was fierce even so close to its setting, the heat like a hammer on Richildis’ skull. It seemed somehow in keeping with this solemn passage. They went in silence, without music or singing, and for once no one chattered among the ranks of attendants. As brilliant as the light was, still there was a darkness on them. Almost she could fancy that the Angel of Death walked with them, mute and strangely companionable.

  In the Patriarch’s residence was a hush beyond the stillness of a holy place. People moved softly, spoke seldom. The Patriarch himself sat by the king’s bed in the high chamber with its curtains of silk and its bed of gold.

  Baldwin did not lie in the high bed, at ease on its soft cushions. He had had a pallet spread beneath the window, no more than a mat on the floor. On that he lay in the plain black habit of a monk. His gaunt face, his wasted hands, were white against the dark rough wool. He had the air of one who has been shriven for the last time, an air of exhausted peace.