Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  Baldwin would have fallen on his brother, right there in front of the gate, if Arslan had not pulled them apart. “Stop that!” Arslan commanded them in his new deep voice, which betrayed him halfway through by breaking into a squeak.

  The squeak saved him. Baldwin, instead of leaping on him, fell down laughing. Even Amaury smiled. Arslan swept them with him, one on each arm, away toward the city and the market.

  * * *

  “I never should have given in,” Melisende said. She had roused for mass long before the boys were sent out in the name of an hour’s peace. Now mass was sung and her soul well purified; it was a little while before she must hold the morning’s audience. She had paused to be dressed for it, to have her hair plaited, the better to wear the crown.

  That was done, all but the placing of the crown. Most of her ladies had gone to array themselves for court. Richildis, who had dressed already, paused in taking the crown from its chest. “A husband should do his duty by his wife. Occasionally. Once every seven years.”

  “So he said,” said Melisende sourly. “I told him no. Two are enough. One should have been – but he had to master me. He had to demand his rights – and win them by sheer force of persistence.”

  “Persistence,” Richildis said, remembering, “and a cask of wine from France.”

  “It had traveled badly, too,” said Melisende. “I had the most hideous headache after.”

  “And another son coming, and a husband who was most pleased with himself and his wife.”

  Melisende made a sound of disgust. “Drunkenness is a sin in the face of the Lord. I paid high for it, and have done penance.”

  “But do think,” Richildis said. “Two living sons, and none lost or died aborning – God blesses you.”

  “So he does,” said Melisende. “I’ll not vex him a third time. No matter how my lord may press me.”

  Richildis shrugged slightly. She had never seen the profit in that old war. Christian marriage and Christian chastity warred unreasonably, and when a husband desired his wife, it was expected that she oblige him. Melisende was extraordinary in her resistance, that had failed only once in twice seven years – and then, Richildis sometimes suspected, she had allowed it, whether for weariness or because she did indeed see the sense in getting more than the one son. Baldwin had had a spate of fevers that year, enough to warn any mother that her child was not immortal.

  Now Baldwin was approaching man’s years, and Amaury was old enough to be a page in his father’s household. Fulk would be thinking that a third son might be well considered, or even, it might be, a daughter. Fathers did want daughters, once they had had a son or two.

  Melisende had had no greater interest in the younger son than in the elder, nor did she express any desire to bear a daughter. Children were not a thing she had much care for. Beyond bearing them and handing them to nurses and waiting till they were, as she put it, old enough for decent conversation, she took as little notice of them as she might. And since to her decent conversation meant something close to the art of dialectic, even Baldwin was barely of age yet, and Amaury, studious as he was, was still too much a child.

  Richildis sighed faintly. Twice seven years in Melisende’s service had taught her much of the manners and mores of queens. They were not as other women, not even as other noblewomen. Power was meat and drink to them. Richildis had heard the same of empresses of the Byzantines, and she had read of the queens of the old time, of Rome and Greece and Egypt. They were all the same. It was as if, to be a queen, a woman needed to be something other than woman; to be not a little like a man.

  Such wisdom, she thought as she took Melisende’s crown from its coffer and laid it on the woven crown of braids. There was no thread of grey therein, no suggestion of advancing age. Melisende was still a great beauty, richer and fuller of body than she had been when she awaited her affianced husband by the harbor of Acre, but lovely as ever, with her ivory skin and her dark eyes and her hair like a wheatfield in the sun.

  Richildis herself felt no older than she had been when she first came to Outremer. And yet she must be. Had she not been here for fourteen years? Bertrand was still lord of Beausoleil, still intransigent in his refusal to return to Anjou; and still married to no lady of this kingdom or any other, although the common rumor made Helena his wife. Certainly he had no other woman that was known of, nor was Helena called a courtesan now except by force of habit. She had long since ceased to take any client but Bertrand; and from him she took nothing but his love and such gifts as he was pleased to bestow.

  Time ran swift, here in the country beyond the sea. Richildis herself, unwedded, unbedded, still sought after but still unminded to take any husband, had grown thinner perhaps, more severe of face, but no older in her heart than the young woman who had sailed with Fulk. It was strange to think that she might stay here her life long, bound by her vow and by her own obstinacy, while La Forêt slipped farther and farther away down the stream of years.

  She shook herself hard, willed herself to rouse. Melisende was ready. The court was waiting, as it had waited every morning for time out of mind. She was watching Richildis, brow lifted slightly, as if she had followed the track of Richildis’ thoughts.

  “Do you know,” Melisende said, “we haven’t done anything interesting, short of traveling from Jerusalem to Acre, since I don’t remember when.”

  “There was the great dance and festival,” Richildis said, “and the tournament at Pentecost.”

  “Ah,” said Melisende with a flick of the hand. “Pentecost. That was whole seasons ago. And nothing to do, really, till the Christmas feast. Not even a war to send the men off to, to keep them occupied. They’ll be fomenting conspiracies next, or challenging one another to duels.”

  Richildis held her tongue. Melisende refused to maintain silence on a subject that to any other woman would have been painful. Hugh of Jaffa was ten years dead. He had come living to Italy, but died there of his wounds and, perhaps, a broken heart. Melisende had mourned him fiercely but briefly, then put him resolutely out of mind.

  It was true enough that knights and barons, when suitably bored, were given to duels and conspiracies. Richildis raised a brow. “And have you a cure for knightly ennui?”

  “I might,” said Melisende. “Tomorrow if the weather’s fair, I’ll conceive a yearning to ride out. Those who wish can hunt; those who love idleness can dine in the field. We’ll shake the dust and gloom out of our spirits, and let the men out for a run.”

  “Boys, too,” Richildis said, thinking of Baldwin and his brothers – both the foster-brother and the brother of the blood. “They’re always the better for fresh air and the opportunity to kill something.”

  Melisende clapped her hands. “Yes! And I’ll award a prize for the finest gazelle. And if someone kills a boar or a lion, I’ll make him the king of the feast.”

  “That would do,” Richildis agreed. “That would do very well.”

  “Go,” Melisende said with eagerness that recalled the quick-tempered young woman she had been. “See to the beginning of it. I’ll come when I’m done with audience; we’ll muster such a hunt as they’ll be talking of till Yuletide.”

  Richildis dipped in a curtsey, not at all dismayed to be granted reprieve from the tedium of the court. She was already ordering in her head the servants who would be needed, the masters of hunt and hounds, the falconers, the beaters, the cooks to prepare the feast in the field. Melisende was gone before she noticed; then she was on her way herself, going about her lady’s business.

  * * *

  No matter how fast Baldwin and Arslan ran or how twisty they made their path, Amaury managed doggedly to keep up. He was as tenacious as a Bedu bandit after a caravan, and so they pretended he was. After the second time they ambushed him, he vanished.

  Baldwin first heaved a sigh of relief, then went white. “Mary Mother! She’ll kill me if we lose him.”

  She was Queen Melisende, as always. There was only one she in their world, only o
ne woman worthy of honest terror – though Lady Richildis had her moments. The queen was a figure of perpetual awe, a tall and terrible shape on the borders of childhood dreams, a woman crowned and mantled in gold, to whom one bowed low and offered one’s deepest respects. Children were beneath her. Boys who were almost men were almost worthy of her notice. It was Arslan’s tenderest ambition to be worthy not only of notice but of a smile.

  She had smiled at him once. He did not delude himself that she had noticed who he was, or cared; but he had done her service, brought her hot spiced wine on a day of winter when the hall of audience was achingly cold, and she had smiled and murmured thanks as she curled blue-tinged fingers around the cup.

  He suppressed a sigh. Of course he was in love with the queen. All the pages were. So was the king – though he had to be stern about it or be thought a weakling. It was difficult for Baldwin: one should not be in love with one’s mother, but awe alone was never enough. He had to settle for alternately worshipping and defying her.

  And now he had lost Amaury. They had gone all the way to the Royal Market, and the press of people was so tight that they could barely breathe. There would be no finding one small boy in a crowd so innumerable. The game that they had been playing on the quieter side street was folly here; but a child would not know what was foolish and what was not.

  Arslan could see nothing for it but to keep going in the direction they had been going in. Turning back would only confuse Amaury if he had laid an ambush ahead. He tried to tell Baldwin as much, but Baldwin was too distraught to listen. Arslan only avoided losing him by getting a grip on his belt and bracing his own superior weight, and refusing to budge until Baldwin stopped trying to run in circles. Then he pulled the prince after him, pushing through the crowd. He was already as tall as a man, and though nowhere near as broad as he was going to be, he was broad enough. He could cut a respectable swath when he put his mind to it.

  They had been going to look at daggers. Amaury would know it. He had been coveting one for days now, a damascened blade that was, even Baldwin admitted, rather exceptionally fine. Of course a child just old enough to be a page could not muster the price of such a thing, nor could he ask and be granted the wherewithal; not so young.

  He was not there, yearning after the dagger. Arslan was not worried, not yet, but he would be in a little while. He kept Baldwin busy admiring a strange broad-bladed sword with a hilt that was, the merchant said, the actual horn of a unicorn – and truly it was strange, twisting and spiral-grained, but the sword was a dull thing without sheen or temper. Foolish to set so much value on a hilt when it was the blade that made a sword a sword.

  Still it was a marvelous thing, and Baldwin could not stop tracing the twisting shape of the hilt. While he was so engrossed, Arslan searched with eyes and ears for sign of a lone small boy in a blue tunic. No such creature appeared, nor hid under a table, nor leaped from a shadow like a bandit from his lair.

  God, Arslan thought, would not allow the king’s second son to be snatched away by slavers, not from the heart of the king’s own market in the king’s own city while the king was resident therein. And yet, for all his milk-and-water manners, Amaury was an attractive child – and with his white-fair hair and his clear grey eyes, more than attractive to the black-haired, black-eyed people of the east.

  Arslan should not panic. Amaury could take care of himself. So for that matter could Baldwin; and Baldwin in a panic was likely to do something drastic. Best to be calm. To keep eyes and ears keen. To pray as he could, if any saint or angel was listening, that at the very worst Amaury had gone back to the palace in distress because his brother did not welcome his company.

  Eventually even the unicorn-sword failed to hold Baldwin’s interest. He had wherewithal to buy a knife for cutting meat, and did, choosing a plain one but sharp and well willing to hold an edge; he bargained well, too, almost as well as Arslan’s mother, and that was saying something. But when he had done that, he looked about, and Arslan knew what he would say before he said it. “I don’t see him. Where is he?”

  Arslan opened his mouth to say something, though exactly what, he was not sure. Before he could manage a word, a tall man appeared as if from air, looming above the knife-seller’s display. A much shorter figure hung back a little, as if seeking safety in his shadow.

  All words fled from Arslan’s head. Arslan was tall – as tall as many men. This was a tall man indeed, though he was not reckoned a giant: big and fair and somewhat battered by weather and fighting, as a good knight and baron of the Franks should be. No one had ever called him a beauty, but women liked him and men respected him, and they all said that he was easy enough to look at.

  Arslan found it difficult to keep his eyes on that face. He knew it, of course. Everybody did. There was no one who did not know Lord Bertrand.

  Least of all Arslan’s mother.

  Lady Richildis told him he was too young to be bitter; but he could not stop his heart from going tight and small whenever he saw that one of all the men in the world. The one who was, or so his mother said, his father.

  Bastardy was not such a stigma that men could die of it. There were bastards enough in the court: by-blows of this lord or that, sons born out of wedlock to noblemen in the west, offspring of unions that for one reason or another were not sanctioned by holy Church. A bastard could not be a priest, but he could be a knight and even a lord, and by his merits and the force of his arm become a great man in the world. Had not William Bastard of Normandy become King of England?

  That was nothing to make Arslan bitter. Legitimacy was a little enough thing, he liked to reflect, in the eyes of God if not of the Church. But other bastards had something that he had not. They had fathers.

  Fathers who acknowledged them. Fathers who admitted to the sin of begetting them, and showed no shame of it. Fathers who would look their sons in the face and speak to them as kin to kin, and not coldly, brusquely, as to any stranger not of their blood.

  Not that Lord Bertrand was particularly brusque or cold. He was affable mostly, but distant, as a man is with a stranger. Arslan did not believe that he did not know who Prince Baldwin’s foster-brother was.

  True, few people did. It was even said that he might be a late by-blow of old King Baldwin himself. But that Bertrand should not know – how could he fail to? Arslan was his own son.

  And here he was, bringing Amaury back to his brother, and not troubling to rebuke either of them for losing him. He barely acknowledged Arslan, which was probably proper but which hurt nonetheless. He spoke to Baldwin, and jostled the prince right out of his sulks and into laughter that, to be honest, much better became him. It was not even anything in particular that he said: only the way he said it.

  He and Baldwin bent over the merchant’s display. “Now that is a fine blade,” Bertrand said, indicating one that was rather well made, though the one next to it, Arslan thought, was better. Baldwin did not say so, if he knew to. He was still yearning over the unicorn’s horn.

  Arslan’s eye caught Amaury just as the boy showed signs of slipping away again. His hand shot out, snared an arm before its owner could escape. “Where did he find you?” Arslan demanded. “We could have been in miserable trouble if you’d been taken away by slavers.”

  Amaury snorted. “Slavers! That’s silly. I was laying an ambush for you by the sweetseller’s stall, the one with all the cakes with cinnamon in them. You were supposed to go there first.”

  “We always come here first,” Arslan said. “You know that.”

  Amaury thrust out his lower lip. “You always buy cakes with cinnamon in. So I had three. I was going to have another, but he came and said I’d get sick. I never get sick to my stomach. So I had a honey sweet instead, and then he said I should go look for you, so we did. I don’t know why people think you’re my uncle really. You look just like him. Sound like him, too, when you get all growly.”

  Arslan discovered that his mouth was open. Amaury was given to flights of the tongue, but
this was remarkable even for him. Arslan retrieved his jawbone and clapped it back where it belonged. “I do not look like him! I hate him.”

  “You don’t either,” said Amaury. “Hate him, I mean. You do look like him. Nurse says that’s because—”

  Arslan clapped a hand over his mouth. “Don’t say it. Don’t you… dare… say it.”

  It was not the hand that stopped Amaury – such things had never troubled him overmuch. But Arslan’s expression must have been horrifying: the grey eyes went wide over Arslan’s hand, and when Arslan took it away, he was suitably and appropriately mute.

  Bertrand had heard not a word of it, nor Baldwin. They were debating the merits of a pair of daggers. One was prettier, one more fit for use but not as well suited to Baldwin’s hand. As Arslan watched, Bertrand proposed a third, which the prince at first declined, then considered with greater attention.

  They looked a little alike: both fair-haired and light-eyed. It was no surprise that people thought Arslan kin to the prince, if he was as like Bertrand as Baldwin was. But Arslan could never have bent his head to Bertrand’s as Baldwin was doing, never have been so much at ease with him, never have claimed the friendship that Baldwin claimed as his simple right.

  It had never hurt so much before. There was no reason that it should. But the heart never had reasons: that was a maxim of his mother’s.

  His heart was coming to a decision. But it wanted to take its time; and it could do nothing in front of the princes and the knife-seller and the pack of squires that came roistering in, looking, the loudest of them professed, for a sword “as long as Jeannot’s yard.”

  He would wait. But not too long. Then he would say what he must say – and let God grant that it was wise.

  Twenty-Eight

  The morning of the queen’s hunt dawned clear and golden-splendid: not always a certainty in this season. Most of the court that was in Acre had chosen to accept the invitation; as Melisende had hoped, the young men were delighted by the diversion, and the women pleased with the choice: to hunt with the men or to take their ease among the women and the elderly. It was a grand processional, riding out of Acre in the morning. Horses and hawks and hunting hounds, bows and lances and the heavy spears that alone would suffice for boar or lion. Ladies rode if they were bold, reclined in horse-litters if they were proper, attended by their maids and their servants. Not all wore hunting gear; some went out in silk and cloth of gold, bright as peacocks in the royal garden.