Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  They rode through the fields and the orchards, the rich country about the city, striking toward the wilder land beyond. The young men whooped and shouted, racing one another as they went, swirling dust about the more sedate line of courtiers.

  Bright sun and early morning and unwonted freedom made them all a little dizzy. Arslan would have loved to join the races, but he was still only a page, and was required to ride close in the queen’s train. Next year, when he was a squire, he would enjoy much greater liberty.

  His mount was as restive as he was: a foal of Lady Richildis’ cantankerous mare, gifted with its Frankish father’s common sense but its mother’s endurance and blinding speed. He thought more than once of letting slip the firm rein he was keeping, but he was too proud of his horsemanship. Better if far duller to stay where he was, close behind the queen and her ladies, with the bay colt fretting and tossing foam from the bit. He could let Barak dance a little for the ladies who rode by, and did, pretending not to notice when they stared and giggled.

  Girls were terribly silly things, but of late they had become suddenly fascinating. Embarrassing, too, when he had other things on his mind: the queen’s service, the imminence of the hunt, and the thing that had kept him awake all night dreading and yearning for the morning.

  The object of that yearning rode ahead, one of the barons who was privileged to ride close by the king. He was still the queen’s knight, strictly speaking, but she never thought ill of him for that he enjoyed the king’s favor. He had greeted her when they came out of the palace, kissed her hand and told her she was beautiful, which had made her blush like one of the girls. Arslan did not quite understand that. People were always telling the queen how lovely she was. She should be used to it.

  Now Lord Bertrand was among the men where a lord and knight belonged, not the tallest but by no means the shortest either, riding easily on the young dapple grey that he had ridden since old Malik was retired to stud. He was a fine horseman, as fine as Arslan wanted to be, better than most Franks who sat like wooden men on the backs of their big heavy horses – so few like the Turks and the Saracens, who rode as if they and their horses were one creature.

  There, at last: the field beyond the farthest tilled field, a hollow in a circle of hills, kept green by a spring that flowed out of a rock. A grove grew there, so ancient that it could remember the old gods, the gods who had been here even before the God of Israel. It was a beautiful place, sheltered from the wind, cool with shade in summer, warm in winter; in this season, neither summer nor yet winter, pleasant in its greenery, sweet with warmth and the scent of wet cool earth.

  There the ladies would settle to wait for the hunt to finish, and there they would all gather later to take their dinner. Already there were tents pitched, bright pavilions with the sides rolled up to let in the morning air. Cooks and servants had set up their kitchens, dug a pit to roast an ox whole. Bread was baking, and cakes fragrant with spices and sweetness.

  It was all very pretty and very tempting; but Arslan wanted to be where the men were, gathering on the hillside for the hunt. To his great relief and no little delight, the queen showed no sign of stopping as everyone had expected. For a fact they should have understood what it meant that she wore clothes fit to ride and not to hold court in, simple gown and divided skirt, plain mantle and her hair in tight plaits under a veil wound like a turban. One of the servants brought her bow and filled quiver.

  And there was Lady Richildis with her bow that she had, people whispered, won from a Saracen in a fight, and one or two other ladies of bold heart and restless nature, all ready to ride a-hunting with the king. Arslan swallowed a whoop. Prince Baldwin had already galloped off to join his father – taking as his right that he could do it. Prince Amaury on his pony was not even asking if he could come: he was keeping quiet and trusting that no one would notice him, to stop him.

  They were all moving now, riding toward the king and his barons. Arslan let Barak have his head, not long, just long enough to pull in front, to mingle with the king’s party. He heard Melisende call out and Fulk answer: more amicable than they usually were, a little wild maybe with sun and wind and the prospect of the hunt.

  “My lord!” Melisende cried. “I’ll wager you a pearl that I bring down quarry before you.”

  “And I’ll wager you a falcon that you do not!” he called back. He was seldom so exuberant – old man that he was, more grey than red, he sounded as light as a boy. He laughed and clapped heels to his horse’s sides. “Avant!”

  * * *

  They rode headlong over the rough and stony hills, driving toward the line of beaters that had gone out long before them. Well out of sight of the green place they met the first wave of animals running before the shouts and cries and the smiting of earth and covert. Gazelle in a herd, tossing horns and leaping bodies; a knot of wild asses braying protest; a startlement of birds, too many and too swift to count.

  A shrill yell, a gazelle-leap collapsed into gracelessness: someone had made the first kill. The king of course, or someone very near the king. Arslan had a little Turkish bow, and he had strung it, but had not moved yet to shoot. He was watching Lady Richildis instead. There she was in front of him with arrow to string, riding like a Turkish archer, so effortless that one forgot how very difficult that was. Arslan had never noticed that she could ride this way – never stopped to think that she might be able to.

  While he hung suspended in amazement, Barak carried him past her, past the queen, into the king’s escort. It had stretched thin as the lesser horses flagged and fell back. The king’s own mount, Arab-bred, could gallop most of the day if it pleased, and the king was not holding it back.

  Roughness of ground and sudden darts and dodgings of quarry divided the hunt into twos and threes and fours. Arslan lost the king in a sudden copse and a near-collision with a heap of stones that might have been a ruined tower. Barak veered, bucked as the ground fell away, surged up a slight but steep rise.

  The hunt had vanished, all but one or two riders struggling likewise with the obstacle. And one behind them, slowing prudently or with foresight, pausing to judge the ground before he rode his horse over it.

  Arslan’s heart, already in his throat from the suddenness of the check, throbbed painfully and then seemed to stop. Lord Bertrand, here, as if God had sent him; and the others had ridden away already, cursing their ill fortune on losing both king and quarry.

  Arslan rode toward him almost without volition. Barak had whickered, glad to see another horse when all the rest had gone away. Bertrand’s stallion pawed and snorted, impatient to be going.

  Arslan could think of nothing better to do than call out, “Sir!”

  Bertrand fixed on him the same look as always, recognizing him but not as anyone who mattered. “I saw the prince with his father,” he said, assuming no doubt that Arslan would want to know that first.

  “So did I,” Arslan said, and blushed at his own ungraciousness. “I know where he went. I was ahead of you.” And that was worse.

  Lord Bertrand must be inured to blushing and barely coherent pages. He offered no rebuke, simply said, “We’d best go after them. They’d have gone east, I think.”

  “East and possibly north,” Arslan said, hoping devoutly that he sounded sane and ordinary. “The king had his eye on a boar up there. Or so I heard.”

  “You heard rightly,” Bertrand said.

  They fell into silence as their horses went on side by side, Bertrand’s at a sensible walk, Arslan’s at a walk interspersed with eruptions of prancing and head-tossing. Bertrand seemed in no haste in spite of his words; or else, like an old soldier, he knew when to let the land compel a more restful pace.

  Past the copse and the scattered stones, he kept to a walk. The land was more open here; Arslan saw a rush of movement that must be more of the hunt, hot in pursuit of something low and dark. Boar? No, too fast. Gazelle? Jackal, even, startled from its lair?

  Nothing ran past them. A bird flew overhead. Arslan
made no move to shoot it, nor did Bertrand seem inclined to string the bow that rode in its case on his saddle.

  “Sir,” said Arslan in silence that suddenly was too much to bear, “do you like to hunt?”

  Stupid, stupid question, but Bertrand did not sneer at it. “I like it well enough,” he said.

  “I would like it better,” said Arslan, “if I could do it the way the desert people do it: one by one and with skill, and no beaters.”

  “The sheikhs and the emirs use beaters and all the rest of it,” Bertrand said.

  “But I’m neither,” said Arslan. “I could hunt alone, to live; not in great crowds and armies, for little more than the sport.”

  “Most young things would like to run away and be free,” Bertrand said. He could have sounded insulting, but somehow he did not.

  Arslan remembered that Lady Richildis had told him of how and why Bertrand had come to Outremer. He bit his tongue before he asked another foolish question, said instead, “I am glad to be out of the city. Sometimes I think I should run away with the Turks, be a tribesman on the steppe, and forget that I was ever a creature of cities.”

  Lord Bertrand was staring at him. He could not imagine why. He had said nothing too shocking, though enough to be rebuked for silliness. This was a look of striking intensity, piercing him deep.

  Then it went away. Arslan nearly lost his grip on the reins, so strongly had those eyes held him and so suddenly did they stop. “Are you not,” Bertrand asked, “after all, a Frank? You look like one.”

  The hot blood rushed to Arslan’s face – staining it, he knew from times before, a rather ugly crimson. “No, I am not King Baldwin’s bastard, though you are far from the first to wonder. And yes, I know who my father is.”

  He kept his eyes on Bertrand, but saw no flinching in that face, no shock in the eyes. How that could be – God, was the man blind? Or had he willed not to care, and done it so long ago that he could not change it even if he wished to?

  At least, said Arslan with no little bitterness, “I know who my mother says he is. And I do look like him.”

  Bertrand flinched a little at that. Maybe. Minutely. Barely to be seen.

  Then he said, “I… had a son. His mother assured me of that, and took him away, and never begged me to acknowledge him. He’s where you want to be now, I suppose. Running wild among the Turks, or studying to be an emir in Damascus.”

  For a moment Arslan’s head was empty of words. When they came, they were weak to his own ears, and faintly petulant. “You don’t know?”

  “I could never ask,” Bertrand said. “It… isn’t something she allows.”

  Arslan, who knew his mother, could well believe it.

  What he could not believe was that he was riding here, picking his way down a steep and rather stony slope, being told such things by Lord Bertrand as he did not think anyone still less a page attached to the prince – had ever been told before. No, not even Lady Richildis, and certainly not Helena. Was it the blood that did it, calling even through ignorance? Or was it a game Lord Bertrand played, a cruel sport with his never-acknowledged son?

  It did not sound like a game. He was talking as if to himself, or perhaps to his horse’s ears. “He would be – Lord God, would he be as old as you are now? Where do the years go? And I saw him once, but I never looked at him. I was too preoccupied with berating his mother for the secret that she kept, the fact that she was pregnant at all. In reply she kept the secret deeper still, took him away, never told me where he had gone or what she had done with him. Sometimes I dreamed that she had had him killed, or smothered him in his cradle – but not she. Not milady Helena. She can be coldhearted, but she’s no murderer of children.”

  How strange, Arslan was thinking as he listened. How utterly peculiar. Helena had hidden her son in plain sight – and this idiot of a man had never guessed. Surely he had only to look at Arslan’s face and then find a mirror, and see how like they were.

  But King Baldwin had been a fair-haired, strong-boned Frank, too, and there were a dozen more in the High Court of similar shape and likeness. Prince Baldwin himself could have been Arslan’s brother, give or take a hand or two of height. Arslan was nothing remarkable at all in this land of Outremer.

  Lady Richildis would have said, acidly, that a man saw what he wanted to see. She had said it more than once, and often of her brother. Where better to conceal an unwanted bastard than under his father’s very nose, attached like a shadow to the prince?

  Arslan had known it all his life. Had borne it, lived with it, suffered in silence. But he had had enough. Lady Richildis and his mother would have called him mad. Maybe he was; yet he had to say it. “She never murdered me. She never even sent me away.”

  For a long while he did not think that Bertrand had heard. There was no response, not even the flicker of a glance. He did not stiffen and set his horse to dancing. He made no move at all.

  Until he said, “Say it again.”

  Arslan did, word by word, clear and distinct. “My mother never murdered me. She never sent me away.”

  “You are a fortunate child,” Bertrand said. He could not be thinking when he said it. Or else he was so deep in oblivion that he had not understood; no, not at all.

  “Do you even know what my name is?” Arslan demanded in some temper.

  “Actually,” Bertrand said, “no. Should I? He calls you something, doesn’t he? Lion? Eagle?”

  “Arslan,” said Arslan. “I’ve been called that since I was small. Ayyub gave me the name, because I roared so fiercely when I was hungry. My given name is Olivier.”

  No response still. Had Helena ever told her lover what his own son’s name was? “Olivier,” Bertrand said. “Olivier-Arslan. How like this country.”

  “My mother’s name,” said Arslan, and he could not keep the anger out of it, “is Helena. My father’s name is Bertrand. Bertrand de La Forêt, Lord of Beausoleil near Nablus.”

  “Is that what she told you?” Bertrand asked.

  Oh, he was a madman, or an idiot. Arslan wanted to hit him. But a page did not hit a belted knight, not if he wanted to come home without a broken head.

  Bertrand’s horse halted. It might have done so of its own accord: they had climbed a hill and found a patch of thorny scrub, on which it began to graze. Bertrand did not move to prevent it. Arslan’s own Barak was less hungry than eager to go on, but he snapped grudgingly at dusty branches. He understood, maybe, that if he indulged in temper now, Arslan would have no patience with it.

  Bertrand had turned his face to the sky, to the sun that rode halfway to noon, with a cloud meandering across it, and a winged thing circling – vulture, from the shape and soar of it. Arslan heard the sigh as he drew it. “How logical,” he said in a light, calm voice. “How typical of her. Right in front of my nose. I don’t suppose she laughs at me?”

  “Not often,” Arslan said.

  “Why?” Bertrand turned suddenly, so suddenly that Arslan’s horse shied. “Why now?”

  “Because I couldn’t stand it any longer.”

  “She didn’t put you up to it?”

  Arslan wanted to shriek – with laughter, rage, he did not know nor much care which. This was not at all the way he had imagined it would go. Bertrand would either cast him off in outrage or clasp him to a sobbing breast; not this preposterous calm that was almost acceptance.

  “My mother,” said Arslan, “would be furious if she knew. So would my aunt. They are of the opinion that if you have no desire to ask what became of your own son, then you won’t be troubled with an answer. They think that it’s enough for me to be where I am and what I am. And mostly it is. Except that you come and go, and I know and you don’t, and that I can’t bear it one moment longer. You can beat me now and drive me out. I don’t care. Just as long as you know who it is you’re doing it to.”

  “Why in the world,” Bertrand asked as if he expected an answer, “would I want to beat you?”

  “For being alive,” Arslan said
.

  “That’s hardly your fault,” said Bertrand.

  “Don’t beat my mother! It’s not her fault, either.”

  “Oh, isn’t it?” Bertrand shook his head before Arslan could burst out with another indiscretion. “No, don’t. It’s mine, too. Both of us. And maybe God’s.”

  Arslan had thought the same thing, and reckoned himself a terrible sinner for it. To hear it from this man – to know that they thought so much alike – was more disturbing than he might have expected. Other people were not supposed to think like that. It was blasphemous.

  “So then,” said Bertrand, cutting through Arslan’s musings with a briskly practical air. “What are you asking of me?”

  Arslan could not answer. Not for lack of one – for an excess of them.

  “Surely there’s something,” Bertrand said after the silence had stretched. “Acknowledgement, I suppose. Fosterage you have. An inheritance? A settlement?”

  “No,” said Arslan. “Just… to know that you know.”

  Bertrand stared at him. He stared back. “You do mean it,” Bertrand said.

  Arslan nodded.

  “And what am I to do with the knowledge?”

  “Whatever you like,” Arslan said.

  “You are a strange child,” Bertrand said. “More like your mother than I would have guessed.”

  Arslan did not know what to say to that. He did not look anything like Helena. If he thought like her, he did not know it. She was herself. He was someone else. Who he was, he did not know yet.