Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  Their coronation was a splendid thing. Ill prepared the kingdom might have been to crown a new king, but with Melisende to drive it, it wrought miracles of magnificence. Every great lord and prince and prelate who could be in Jerusalem for the Christmas feast, who could come there from countries as far as Italy and Byzantium – they all came to celebrate the birth of Lord Christ and to see Baldwin crowned beside his mother Melisende, young king and queen regent.

  The streets were hung with silk and cloth of gold, banners that had been made for Fulk’s crowning brought out and cleaned and others made new. A feast was spread in the city every day within the octave of Christmas, laid out in the square before the Patriarch’s palace: fine wheaten bread and oxen roasted whole and sweets over which holy pilgrims squabbled like children. For the great ones there was a high feast in the Tower of David, day after day of it, and the queen sitting above it like an image of joy.

  So quickly one forgot the dead, when the dead was king and a king was crowned thereafter. Baldwin remembered his father – probably one of the few who did, by the time he came to his crowning – but even he was caught up in the glory of it. Fear had died or was buried deep. He stood up when it was his time, lifted his head as the choir sang the antiphon, remembered only as the crown descended that he should bow beneath it.

  It was his father’s crown. It had needed no alteration but a rim of padding, to fit his head. The weight startled him: Arslan, standing as his squire, saw how his eyes widened. But when he stood up, lifted by the roar of the people, it seemed as light as living air.

  Arslan had his own wings of exultation to carry him aloft. He who had thought to endure another year as a page, who had expected no preference for that he was Baldwin’s foster-brother, had been roused before dawn on this day of coronation, sent to bathe, and dressed in clothes that he had never seen before. Then the king’s servants – Baldwin’s now, as the king’s old chambers would be his when this day was over – told him that he would take the squire’s place, carry the sword of state. “And by God,” the king’s bodyservant said, “if you love him or your own new rank, have a care that you don’t drop it.”

  Arslan bit his tongue rather than gratify the man with a declaration that he could hold a sword, by God’s bones – was he an infant, to be so weak? It was as well he restrained himself. The sword when he was given it was enormous, a heavy weight for a man grown. He carried it, and with pride, too: all the way in procession from the Tower of David, through the city with excruciatingly dignified slowness, into the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and up to the altar, there to stand through the splendid tedium of a high mass and a coronation after.

  At least he could set the sword between his feet and rest his hands on the hilt for the mass – and fight the shaking that ran through his arms and shoulders from holding the thing upright for so ghastly long. Come the coronation he must grit his teeth and lift it again, so that it gleamed behind the king, sign and symbol of the power that God had given him.

  Pride sustained Arslan – pride and a kind of desperation. He must not fail Baldwin. He was the king’s squire, the bearer of his sword. In battle he would carry the royal arms. In the palace, he supposed, he would look after them and do what needed doing with them, and lock away this ruddy great sword that would be no earthly use in a fight.

  The new Constable of the Kingdom, Manasses, a man new to Arslan but not to the queen – he had married her father’s sister – was carrying a sword nearly as large, with much less apparent effort. He was a big man, as big as Arslan expected to be, with a kind of leonine grace that Arslan envied. Arslan was fast on his feet, but not particularly dignified. Mostly he scrambled, except when he stopped thinking about it; then he was deft enough.

  The two of them stood side by side, swords held upright, as king and queen were crowned. Queen first – which was not the wonted order. But she had commanded it. She could not rule alone – that was the law and custom of the kingdom. But she could and would insist that she be first in each of the rites; that her son follow her as befit a child whose mother had ruled in this kingdom since before he was born.

  If he resented it, he was not showing it. He was king – king under regency, but king nonetheless. He was full of it, singing with it. He wore the crown as one born to it. He had been studying his mother, and his father, too: he was gracious, royal but not haughty, with a bright edge that made people smile.

  They loved him. They were delighted with their new young king, and with the queen who had won their hearts long since. If anyone muttered against them, he did not do it where Arslan could hear. Everyone was glad. The whole kingdom sang, celebrating the new king and the new year.

  * * *

  Richildis was too tired to sing. She had been laboring without rest since the morning after King Fulk died, to set all this in train, to hand it to those who would carry it on, to serve her lady as she best might. The dances, the feasting, the trappings of festival, all slipped past her in a blur of crowding duties.

  She was aware amid the rest that there were embassies to be accommodated. The Saracens had sent ambassadors, so that both Damascus and Egypt saw the king crowned with his mother the queen; and Baghdad had sent a grave turbaned scholar and a caravan of gifts, including a brace of hunting cheetahs that enthralled the king. There were emissaries from the princes of Armenia, from the cities of the coast, from Italy and France and even distant England whose queen was wife to Baldwin’s brother, Fulk’s son by that earlier marriage from which, widowed, he had come to Melisende.

  Baldwin’s much elder and suitably noble brother, whose name was Geoffrey, had taken his father’s place as Count of Anjou. He could not of course have known that their father was dead; not so soon. His embassy had come out of goodwill, that was all, bearing greeting to his father and his kin across the sea. But his envoy’s presence spoke well for him, and gave him a voice in the affairs of the new king’s court.

  Byzantium had sent an embassy of suitable pomp and splendor, led by one of the emperor’s own cousins. She noted them only insofar as the ambassador insisted that he be accommodated more nobly than the ambassadors from Cairo and Damascus – which, since he had come later than they, was not simple to accomplish. She had cursed, she had maneuvered, she had housed them all in a house precisely like those in which the others were lodged, but slightly closer to the Tower of David. That had appeared to satisfy them; there had been no further complaints.

  The day after the coronation, between feast and feast, she paused a moment perforce. She had been running an errand in the city, a triviality that was of mighty importance to the baroness for whom she ran it, and had sent that lady’s page back to her with the packet of spices that she must, simply must have for her husband’s nightly hippocras. And what Richildis, a lady of rank and standing, was doing running at the beck of an imperious but not excessively lofty lady, she could not have said. Running away, perhaps. Indulging herself in something simple, in preference to the complexities that waited for her in the queen’s workroom.

  In fairness to Lady Emily, she had not expected Richildis to run the errand; she had asked her to find a maid who knew the markets, who could do it quickly. People did not presume with Richildis, unless she chose to let them.

  She took her time walking back to the palace. Her perpetual shadow, the Turk Kutub – not Helena’s Turk any longer, really, since he had attached himself to Richildis – was comfortably quiet and comfortingly there. He guided her gently past throngs of drunken revelers, round the square in which the public feast was spread, through quieter ways that, if crowded, were crowded with the reasonably sane and sober. She was content to be so guided, to let her mind rest for a little while.

  Since Fulk died, Richildis had felt oddly old. She who had been as good as ageless for so long, with the passing of that man who had meant surprisingly little in the end to her or to her lady, now felt the sudden weight of years. It was like an autumn of the spirit. One moment bright summer, sun and warmth and burgeoning yo
uth. The next, grey chill rain and fallen leaves, sere grass and the breath of winter.

  She shaped the image in her head, to write down later. Often she wrote such things in letters: to Lady Agnes away in Anjou, yes, but to another more often than that, a memory of presence nigh a dozen years gone. Michael Bryennius had never come back to Jerusalem, nor indicated that he would. He wrote on occasion, letters brief but as warm as his smile. Small bits of gossip, wishes for her health and the health of her kin, a line or two that had to do with him: busy always, keeping a large and obstreperous family in order, managing its affairs, seeing to this estate or that, selling one amid mighty uproar till he reaped the profit; then he was the delight of all his kin.

  In reply she wrote volumes, and sent them too – shyly at first, half determined to burn them instead, but after a while, though his replies were short, they seemed clear enough in their desire to hear more of her. So she wrote whatever came to her head, daily doings, this escapade or that of the prince and his headstrong foster-brother, snippets of court gossip; but mostly inner things, things that she told no one else, not even Helena who was her heart’s friend. She knew that people thought her cold, and even Helena reckoned her reserved, not easily persuaded to open her heart; but in ink on parchment she was peculiarly free.

  She had told him of her suitors, how they still kept coming though she was no longer particularly young; how none of them appealed to her sufficiently to merit the marriage vows. She told him of Arslan, in no great fear of breaking confidence – Michael Bryennius of all people would never betray her. She would tell him now of this odd new light on the world, this sense of years running away, when before they had seemed to stand still.

  I wonder, she would write, how much of it is the fact of a king’s death, and how much of it is my own encroaching mortality. I’m hardly an old woman – I’ve half my natural span still to live – but the fact that half is gone… it matters. It didn’t matter when I was twenty years old and a new widow to an old and rather unpleasant man; but that was fifteen years ago.

  I look at the men who approach me – three yesterday, can you believe it? Three bold brawny knights of God, three noblemen in search of a fine dowry – for surely the queen would endow me richly – and a handsome wife. I am handsome, aren’t I? After all. I always denied it, but age brings clarity of eye, too, and a greater willingness to admit the truth.

  So I look at them, dear friend, and I can only wonder what they want with such a juiceless stick as I am. Saints know there’s no lack of buxom maids in this woman-heavy kingdom, and most with dowries, too. What makes them come to me? Do they fancy that a widow of as much longevity as I, must be excessively eager to renew the pleasures of the marriage bed? Or do they imagine just the opposite, that I’m so desiccated as to be undismayed by a husband who seeks his comforts elsewhere?

  Dark thoughts, those, and rather silly – maybe she would not write them after all. He would want to know of the coronation, surely, and all the festivals attendant on it. If at the end she noted that she was feeling rather older than she had before, she would not make a great issue of it. Why vex him? He was older than she, and feeling it too, no doubt, with the family that he had.

  But no wife. More than one letter had remarked wryly on his mother’s efforts to unite him with this lady or that. There was never one who quite suited him, never one with whom he would go to the trouble of a wedding. When his mother lamented his perfidy, he reminded her of his brothers and their wives and their numerous progeny, any dozen of whom would have done perfectly well to supply that branch of the family with an heir.

  Richildis was not so richly endowed with kin, but there was Arslan; and she had not given up hope that Bertrand would find himself a suitable lady and sire a legitimate heir or three. Foolish hope to be sure, as long as Helena lived, but Richildis had not stopped hoping, either, that in the end he would go back to La Forêt.

  “All things are possible,” she said aloud, pausing as a procession of notables filled up the narrow street. She recognized the Byzantine delegation by the silks and the long beards and the air of self-importance; took note that the house she had chosen for them was nearby, that in fact she was about to pass it. They must be going to the Patriarch’s palace for an entertainment in honor of the young king and his queenly mother.

  Richildis should be there herself, if she was strictly dutiful. But she was not dressed for it. By the time she could come to the Tower of David, put on a gown of suitable state, and summon a litter to take her to the fête, it would likely be over.

  She indulged a moment’s guilt by way of tribute, and flattened herself in the niche of a gateway while the procession strutted and jostled past. They were all in grand panoply, robes and tall hats and a sweep of fur-lined mantles, perfumed so strongly that her eyes watered. One of them had a monkey on a chain, riding his silken shoulder; the little wizened creature was dressed in silk, too, proud in its finery.

  Most of them were mounted. The few who walked afoot must be servants. Several were beardless but too old to be boys: eunuchs of the court. Richildis shivered a little. Eunuchs made her uneasy.

  Near the end of the line, one sat a fine bay horse, riding with more ease than most, and more apparent pleasure. Richildis’ eye caught on him and lingered. He was a handsome man, not young but not old, either, dressed in crimson silk with a mantle of rich dark fur – marten, she thought; beautiful and sleek, as he himself was.

  Her heart knew him before her wits did. He could not be here, of course. He was hopelessly tangled in a broil of affairs that had taken him all the way to Nicaea and kept him there through the summer. She had had a letter from him just the other day – or was it last month, before the king died? He could not be in Jerusalem, riding in the train of the emperor’s ambassador, turning his horse from the track of the procession and halting in front of her, and smiling, the smile exactly as she remembered, as warm as a hearthfire in the chill chamber of her heart.

  “My lady,” he said, the same deep voice, the same accented Frankish, charming and familiarly foreign.

  She looked up at him and considered anger. It was foolish, of course. A letter might have gone astray, or still be on the road and he had traveled ahead of it.

  He slipped his foot from the stirrup and held out his hand. Anger could easily have become outrage – what, make a spectacle of herself in the public street? She forbore to indulge herself, clasped his hand and set foot in stirrup and let him draw her up behind him. His horse was amenable: a solid, broad-beamed creature, spirited but sensible, and not at all dismayed to carry two.

  She could easily enough have held to the saddle’s high cantle, but his waist was more comfortable, and more secure. She did not know why it felt familiar: she had never ridden behind him before. It was as if she had dreamed it, and the dream had been as real as life.

  The procession of his countrymen had gone on its way while they lingered here – staring and muttering, no doubt, and wondering what brazen female that was who had captivated Michael Bryennius. He looked over his shoulder, a slant of bright dark eye, and said, “We could ride in state to the Patriarch’s entertainment, or we could be dreadfully undutiful and run away like children.”

  “You wouldn’t,” said Richildis.

  “Wouldn’t I?” His smile gleamed like a sword, then flashed away. The bay’s haunches bunched under her. She clung to Michael Bryennius’ waist as the beast cantered down the nearly empty street.

  Thirty-One

  It was absurd, outrageous, ungodly to run away like this.

  It was wonderful.

  She could not do it. Kutub – she strained, twisting against the horse’s movement, looking in vain for sight of his lovely villainous face. There was no sign of it.

  “Kutub,” she said to the fine woolen mantle in front of her face. “Where—”

  She felt the laughter through her hands, though there was nothing for the ears to hear. “Ah, Kutub. That pearl of Turks, that bright banner of Islam. I t
rust he’s taking a well-earned holiday.”

  She went stiff as it all came clear. “That wasn’t an accident. You bribed him to bring me to that particular place at that particular time.”

  “There now,” said Michael Bryennius with no evidence of contrition, “I’d hardly say I bribed him. Consulted with him, rather. Agreed that we should meet again, you and I.”

  “You could,” she said acidly, “have submitted yourself to the palace and applied for admission to my presence. It would have been granted.”

  “Surely,” he said. “And I would have found you at your most prim and proper, being the perfect servant to the queen.” His tone softened. “Isn’t this better? Won’t you admit it? There’s no constraint on either of us, and no eyes to watch and pry and spread rumors of our impropriety.”

  “No,” she said. “Only the whole city of Jerusalem that sees me carried on the crupper behind a man not of my kin or household or even of my nation, riding away who knows where, for who knows what purpose. You will,” she said, “let me down. Now.”

  For answer he quickened his horse’s pace a fraction, just enough to make it unwise to leap free. She would have done it regardless, except that her arms would not unlock from about his middle. It could not be fear, surely. It was prudence. Not – of course not – a deep unwillingness to let him go. She could not be wanting to go wherever he took her, wherever in the world he chose.

  Whither thou goest… The words had never meant much to her: old words and holy, woven into the substance of her faith, but of no greater weight than many another. Now all at once they meant the world.

  She should leap from this horse’s back, run as fast as she could, as far as she might – away from this temptation.