Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  “We don’t think so,” Helena said, direct as always, though she looked as if she wanted to weep. “He saw the children buried, but no one since has seen him. Or, for that matter, you. We thought he might be here.”

  “No,” Richildis said. “He went home, maybe. I don’t know. I know so little now.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” said Helena. “Here, come with me. You’ve been too much in the dark. You need the light in your face.”

  “I don’t want light,” Richildis said.

  “Nonetheless,” said Helena, “you shall have it.”

  Nor would she rest till Richildis was settled in the garden, in sunlight a little muted by a canopy of leaves, with a bowl of oranges – for the brightness, Helena said, and for the taste – and a cup of the strong sweet hot stuff that the infidels called kaffé. Helena called it medicine and made her drink it. It was notably less vile than many another potion she had had forced on her, and it did what Helena wanted: it began to rouse her.

  Helena sipped at a cup herself. Her hands trembled a little but her gaze was steady. “How long have you been ill?” she asked.

  Richildis blinked. “Ill? I haven’t been ill.”

  Helena shook her head. “Don’t lie to yourself. You haven’t been well in spirit since you lost the baby in the winter. And now this. Do you know where your husband might be?”

  “No,” said Richildis. “Unless he went back to Byzantium.”

  “I don’t think so,” Helena said. “Nor is he in Mount Ghazal. He must still be in Jerusalem.”

  “I don’t see why,” said Richildis. “There’s nothing to keep him here.”

  Helena reached out and grasped her shoulders and shook her once, hard. “Stop that! He has you – he loves you. What did you do to him? How did you drive him away?”

  “I did nothing,” Richildis said. “I said nothing.”

  Helena hissed in exasperation. “Nothing is a great deal. It’s a sin, you know. The sin of despair.”

  “I don’t know,” said Richildis, “why I should succumb to such a thing. People die. Children in particular. The world goes on. No one cares, except for a moment.”

  “So you would kill the love your husband has for you, and the children who would be born of that love, because God chose to take those you had and reclaim them for Himself?”

  Richildis curled her lip, “Oh, please! That is not God. Or if it is, then God is no better than the Evil One.”

  Helena did not shrink from what was, after all, blasphemy. If anything she looked glad of it. “Yes,” she said. “Be angry. Feel something.”

  Richildis shivered. “I don’t want to,” she said. But it had begun. Only embers yet, but they were color in a grey world, heat in the empty cold. When they flared into fire she would be alive again – and she wanted that not at all.

  “There are times,” Helena said as if to herself, “when the spirit ebbs. When the soul has had enough. There may be no cause, or none that makes itself apparent, until the world is grey and nothing seems to matter. If the soul gives in, it dies. If it’s to live, it has to find the light again.”

  Richildis laughed painfully. “Light? Where? Have you ever been as alone as I am now?”

  “By my own choice,” Helena said, “once, yes.”

  Richildis shut her mouth with a snap.

  “I think you should find your husband,” said Helena.

  Damn her for wisdom. Damn her for laying open the empty places and lancing the wounds beneath them. It was as rough a surgery as any on a battlefield, and well might kill Richildis, too.

  * * *

  Richildis went hunting. She did not know precisely where she was going. She dressed for the city, veiled for modesty, with Kutub her shadow as he had always been. It was no lonelier than sitting in the dark, no more futile than waiting for the stillness to swallow her. He was on his way to Byzantium, most likely; she was a fool to seek him here. But seek him she did, because if she stayed one moment longer in that house she would lose her soul altogether. She might welcome that, but Bertrand and Helena would never allow it.

  To escape them she went hunting a man who could be anywhere. But there were places where he had been known to go. The house of the Byzantine ambassador. The street of the jewelers and the street of the silk merchants, where he conducted certain transactions in his family’s name. A place where men of means gathered, too elegant to be called a tavern. Even one of the churches, one in which the Greek rite was sung, the priest of which was some distant connection of his family, and in the cloister of which he sometimes sat and disputed philosophy with a scholar or two.

  He was in none of those places. Nor was he in Holy Sepulcher amid the flocking pilgrims, nor gaping at the Dome of the Rock, nor wailing at the Jews’ Wall where even under the Crusade a few veiled and mantled men rocked and lamented the fall of their temple. They should not be there, but when the guards were lenient they crept in, disguised sometimes as pilgrims and often as merchants, to say their prayers and weep their tears.

  There were no tears in Richildis. She was weary of walking, of fighting currents in the city, of finding nothing wherever she went. Yet instead of turning her steps homeward where grief and darkness were, she let the road lead her out of the city, through the gate that led to the Mount of Olives, up the hill and into the grove that was more ancient and holy even than the city that rose beyond it.

  Whatever guided her, God or His angel or something darker altogether, there she found him. He was not among the pilgrims kneeling and praying and being exalted in the Garden of Gethsemane. He had set himself alone under the ancient trees, seated on a stump that must have sprouted when Joshua was an infant. So many pilgrims of so many nations, and not a few of his own, and yet she knew him, that strong yet elegant man in black with his rich black beard.

  No miracle healed her then. No light blinded her with revelation. She went to him, that was all, and sat on the ground beside him, and waited till he became aware of her. That seemed a very long time. The stillness into which she sank was different from the one that had possessed her till now. It was a stronger thing somehow, a presence rather than an absence.

  After a while a thought came to her. She reached out a hand and found his, and clasped it. His fingers were cold. She warmed them with her breath. He did not move, did not return her grip. Nor did she slacken it.

  When he spoke, she had stopped expecting it. “I thought you would die,” he said.

  “Everyone dies,” said Richildis.

  “I meant,” he said, “now.” He paused. “I had them buried in St. Alexios.”

  And she had been there, and she had neither known nor looked. She tightened her grip a little. Tears were still alien to her. Her grief was too shallow, or far too deep.

  “I thought that I would bury you, too,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I’m not that close to death.”

  For the first time he looked at her, dark eyes, white face, burning intensity. “You were.”

  Maybe she had been. “Not now,” she said.

  “What woke you?”

  “The horde of my kin.”

  He snorted. It was laughter: unwilling, unlooked for, but laughter nonetheless. “Let me imagine. Bertrand, then Olivier-Arslan, and when they had swept through with fire and sword, the Lady Helena with her devastating good sense.”

  “How well you know them,” Richildis said. “They’ve made order of chaos, and sent me out to hunt you down.”

  “Of course,” Michael Bryennius said. “Anyone else would have kept you close and under guard lest you do harm to yourself. They sent you out all but alone, on a hunt that might take you clear to the City.”

  “They said you were in Jerusalem,” Richildis said. “Why didn’t you leave?”

  “You were here,” he said.

  As simple as that, and yet not simple at all. “You left the house,” she said. “You left me alone.”

  His brow went up. “Are we quarreling?”

  �
�No,” said Richildis.

  “Good,” he said.

  “Will you leave Jerusalem now?”

  “Only if you come with me.”

  “No,” she said again.

  “Then I stay,” he said.

  Richildis drew a breath. Her throat hurt. It had been too tight for too long. “You needn’t stay for me.”

  “Need I not?”

  “I don’t want to bind you,” she said.

  “I remember,” he said, “what the priest said on the day we were wed. ‘What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.’”

  “But if—” She stopped. “I don’t want to go home,” she said. “Where else can we go?”

  “Mount Ghazal,” he said.

  “No,” said Richildis. “Not even there.”

  “Then,” he said, “if you can go anywhere in the world, where will you go? Anjou, perhaps?”

  She shook her head. “Not there.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Old vows. Old chains. And yet you said to me when we married, that you were free of the world, all but Anjou. Would you run away with me? Would you travel into my own country, even to my City?”

  Her heart quivered. It was waking, perhaps to fear, perhaps to something else. “May we go on a caravan? May we go to such places as I’ve never seen?”

  “All the way to the silk countries, if it pleases you.”

  “I don’t think,” said Richildis, “that we need to go so far. But to go away… yes. Yes, it pleases me.”

  “Then we shall go,” said Michael Bryennius. “Today, tomorrow, whenever you like.”

  Practicality possessed her, sudden and not unwelcome. “In a week. That’s brief enough – the servants will have fits. If we can find a caravan—”

  “There is one,” he said, “traveling to Nicaea nine days from now, if we are minded to be part of it.”

  “Let us be,” said Richildis.

  “Then we shall be,” he said.

  Forty

  Lady Richildis and her husband had gone away. It was not running away, Arslan’s mother said, though to him it sounded very like it. They had taken a caravan to Nicaea, and beyond that they did not know – perhaps to Constantinople, perhaps into Asia. It was a strange thing to do, but people did it; except that mostly they called it pilgrimage and came to Jerusalem, or went to Rome or Compostela.

  Someday Arslan would see Rome. Paris, too, and Anjou where his father was born. He was too young yet, and too busy learning to be a squire and then a knight. When he had learned it all, when he had fought in the Crusade that everyone said was coming, and grown into a man, then he would go. He had made a vow to himself. Not even Baldwin knew of it. It was too strong a thing to tell anyone but God.

  Now Lady Richildis was gone away, and Michael Bryennius too; and there was an empty place where they had been. Arslan tried to fill it with duties and pleasures, hours with Nahar and hours in the hunt or on the practice-field. And in the summer and autumn there were campaigns, little wars in which the knights of the kingdom honed their skills. Sometimes the king was permitted to join in them; and when he did, Arslan went with him. When he did not, Arslan expected to stay in Jerusalem or Acre; but that summer, when a company of lords and barons went to put down a rising of bandits near Banias, Bertrand took Arslan with him.

  This was the proving ground. These little wars, these marches and encampments, these rough skirmishes with Turks or desert tribesmen, had little enough of the pageantry that the king brought to his greater battles. Here one learned thirst and privation, heat, dust, flies on the bloodied faces of the dead. Here one became a man, or one died. There was no room for children or for cowards.

  Arslan took a wound in one of the small battles. They had been scouring raiders near the eastern border, out past Lake Tiberias. Things were stirring among the infidels. Zengi was dead, murdered near Damascus; Islam was in uproar, princes quarreling like dogs over the unburied carcass. The tribes ran wild as they always did when they had the scent of death, and some ran into the Frankish country.

  It was a bloody, yelling skirmish like any other, in among the rocks and scree of that bleak country. Arslan, spurring in his father’s wake, took a bolt in the side, straight through his mail: one of the raiders had got hold of a Genoese crossbow and learned how to use it, damn his devilish wits. Luckily for the next unwitting target, he was far slower to wind and reload than he was to shoot. Bertrand wheeled his horse in time to see Arslan fall, and clove the bowman in two with one great furious sweep of his sword.

  He carried Arslan out himself, and cut the bolt from the flesh, and tended it with rough mercy. Rough to rouse pain, and merciful because pain grew till it cast Arslan into the dark.

  When he woke the fight was over. The pain was not much worse than he had taken in buffets on the practice field, but it clawed deeper, and he was much weaker. “You lost blood,” Bertrand said when he tried to struggle up. It was night, there was a fire, there were stars, and somewhere someone was weeping.

  “Who—” Arslan tried to ask.

  The weeping stopped. Bertrand’s face betrayed nothing. “Rogier got it in the belly. He wouldn’t take the mercy-stroke.”

  “Nor would I, it seems,” Arslan said. He had managed to sit up, though he nearly gagged with the pain of it.

  “You weren’t gut-shot,” Bertrand said, “or you wouldn’t be thrashing around like that. You’re not bad hurt, unless it festers. It’s more a graze than anything else.”

  Arslan did not want to think about wounds that festered. He was alive – his body screamed the truth of that. “I’m thirsty,” he said.

  One of the squires brought him a cup with water in it, tasting of leather and a ghost of wine. It could have come from the pure springs of heaven, as welcome as it was. Arslan drank it down, and had a little bread after, though the bit of roast gazelle was more than his stomach could bear.

  All the while he drank and tried to eat, Bertrand sat by him, asleep perhaps, or near to it. The firelight caught the scar on his cheek, the one that ran from temple to jaw – knife-slash, Arslan had heard. Someone had stitched and tended it well: it was barely visible in most lights.

  It must have hurt like fury when it was new.

  One grew accustomed to bruises and buffets. Maybe one could grow accustomed to wounds, too. Arslan was in no comfort, nor could he sleep now that he was awake. In the morning he must ride, or be carried in the wagon with the provisions and the few others of the wounded.

  He would ride. Whatever it cost him, he would sit up on his horse like a man.

  * * *

  It was not so easy to cling to his pride in the black dawn. His whole body had stiffened while he lay in an uneasy doze. He creaked like an old man, getting up. When he stood erect his stomach revolted.

  There was little in it, which was a blessing; and no blood, which was a relief. When it was empty he could walk, though the stabbing in his side made him dizzy if he moved too quickly.

  His horse was waiting for him, saddled, and Bertrand’s too though Arslan as his squire should have seen to that himself. He pulled himself into the saddle, paused for breath. Through the dark that crowded the world, he did not think he could see anyone staring. They were all preoccupied with breaking camp and riding out.

  He rode because he must, and because he was too stubborn to stop. When he could think, which was seldom, he wondered why he was doing this – what possible good was in it. If he died of a wound taken in a skirmish that proved nothing, that drove back a tribe of bandits who would only raid again in another season, what would he gain, or anyone else either?

  He was feverish. He clung to the saddle, letting his body ride while his mind drifted. Pain anchored it, tugging whenever he floated too far, pulling him back to remembrance.

  Saints fasted and prayed and tormented themselves in search of revelation. Arslan found it in a wound that was not even particularly serious; in pain and its endurance, and in the beating of the sun upon his head. Until now he had been a c
hild, though a great and hulking one to be sure. He had thought little on what he did or why, nor sworn oaths that were his own, out of his heart. They were always someone else’s: Baldwin’s mostly, since Baldwin was king and Arslan was the king’s squire.

  On that ride from pain to pain, Arslan made no vows to himself. But something deeper than a vow – that, he came to. He was bound by birth to the Crusade. When he had given it whatever he had to give, he would find a world for himself. It might be this world and this country. It might be another altogether. But he would find it.

  * * *

  Baldwin was jealous of Arslan. “You took a wound in battle,” he said, “while I sat here wrapped in wool, with servants leaping if I so much as stumbled over a crack in the floor.”

  “You’re the king,” Arslan said. “You have to stay alive and well.”

  “Why?” Baldwin asked with bitterness that had grown more frequent of late. “I don’t do anything. If it’s not the Constable or the barons, it’s my mother doing it all.”

  “That will change,” Arslan said.

  “Not fast enough,” Baldwin muttered. “Maybe not at all. They like the feel of the reins in their hands. They’ll not let them go, least of all to me.”

  “All the more reason for you to watch yourself,” Arslan said. “You’ll have to be ready when your time comes – ready and strong.”

  “If that time ever comes,” said Baldwin.

  * * *

  To the queen Baldwin said nothing. He would never admit to fear of her, but respect he most certainly had; and she never asked his leave to rule as she saw fit.

  She ruled like a man, with a man’s sure hand. Except, Arslan reflected, that she did not lead armies to war. She left that to the men under her command – and to Baldwin, who for all his complaining was never forced to sit at home when there was a war to be fought. Skirmishes and raids, no; but wars he led, as befit the king.